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[Cleaning the Backlog] Alien: Isolation
![[Cleaning the Backlog] Alien: Isolation](https://bezdarbor.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/aisolation.png?w=1024)
It’s entirely possible that I like Alien: Isolation for the wrong reasons—I like this game in its more action-filled and dynamic moments. But it made me eventually appreciate the moments of hiding, and crawling, and holding my breath—sometimes just before bursting into laughter, but still! I remember that right after I finished it, I decided to make up for all those years of not playing horror games and installed Penumbra. Anyway, Alien: Isolation remains the only proper survival horror game I’ve ever finished.
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Let’s Celebrate Some Demos!
Today’s the third day of the recent Steam Next Fest, and I’m having a blast sorting through delicious demos of highly promising (and not-so-promising) games. Here are six titles that deserve to keep an eye on in the future. I’m sure that at least one of them is destined to become the next indie darling, but time will tell. My focus is primarily on strategy-adjacent genres. Although I’ve played some action games, they didn’t make the cut yet.
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Little Big Adventure: Return to the Planet Twinsun
Earlier this year, I noticed something had changed in my GOG collection. Actually, it changed over a year ago, and I missed it completely. Little Big Adventure games received a “Classic version” addendum to their title, along with several technical modernizations, like controller support. Fate was calling me back to the planet Twinsun, and I was eager to answer this call. Spoiler alert—albeit not entirely painless, it was worth it in the end.
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Bezdar Weekly #3: The Holy Man
One of my New Year Resolutions (apart from boring real-life stuff like normalizing habitat conditions) was to play through campaigns of RTS games that I’ve never finished in the past. I started playing Age of Empires: Definitive Edition a couple of weeks ago, so it became my first candidate. Everything went smoothly until the first mission of the Babylon campaign, where I got my ass kicked so hard that it made me wish to reconsider my gaming choices.
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Bezdar Weekly #2
My last blogpost in 2022 will touch on just two games—the game I started this year with and the one I’m playing now. The former is Dark Souls II, and the latter is Fate. There’s no better metaphor for summing up the passing year.
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The Magic of Cartography
Maps are awesome. They are useful, informative, and often gorgeous. Maps in computer games are especially useful, informative, and almost always gorgeous. No matter which genre of computer games we pick, maps take an inherent part in the design.
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Bezdar Weekly #1
As a means to flex my blogging muscles, I started a weekly wrap-up of various things that came to my mind, games I’ve been playing, and random rambling on arbitrary topics. I’ll let the thing flow freely and see if some format will emerge eventually.
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Why I Love Strategy Games. But Not All Strategy Games.
My dad loved Dune 2, Civilization, and Heroes of Might & Magic, while I preferred point-and-click adventures. It was not enough story for me in strategy games of the time, and I fell in love with the genre only a bit later, when Warcraft 2 found its way to my hard drive—rather, its map editor. It was a game changer.
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Dawn of War: Not That One.
It’s the second half of the 1990s. Everybody wants to jump on the RTS train, put in motion by the success of Command & Conquer and Warcraft. While the talks about genre oversaturation begin to surface, there’s still a chance: unusual setting, innovative mechanic, or exceptionally wholesome implementation of existing ideas—and you win the ticket […]
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Souls
It took years for Dark Souls trilogy to finally click with me. I have been enamored with its setting and aesthetic since the very release of Prepare to Die Edition on PC. The port was poor, though, and it scared me away. By the time when modders fixed it, the ‘difficulty discourse’ caught up on […]
Boris Bezdar
Videogame writing and critique. Retrospectives, reviews, ramblings.
Boris Bezdar 