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[Cleaning the Backlog] The Banner Saga Trilogy
![[Cleaning the Backlog] The Banner Saga Trilogy](https://bezdarbor.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/bannersaga.png?w=1024)
I doubt my screenwriting teacher ever played The Banner Saga, but he would definitely like it. He always said that the best scripts don’t pity their heroes—the best drama happens when you put characters in horrible need and then make it even worse. The Banner Saga agrees with this wholeheartedly—initially grimdark setting gets darker with every new numerable next to the word Saga in the title. Get ready to feel the burdensome tiredness of keeping the last hope alive during the constant survival in harsh circumstances. It works, and it works marvelously.
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[Cleaning the Backlog] Ascendancy
![[Cleaning the Backlog] Ascendancy](https://bezdarbor.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/ascendancy.png?w=1024)
Ascendancy is not a turn-based strategy game but a real-time one with an active pause. The genre’s usual production-science-food triangle helps build, research, and grow faster. You colonize planets, build ships, meet other races, wage colonization wars, and eventually stop playing. Nothing is pretty much out of the ordinary at first glance. But in contrast to most of the 4X strategies, it’s far easier to stop playing Ascendancy by actually winning.
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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.
Boris Bezdar
Videogame writing and critique. Retrospectives, reviews, ramblings.
Boris Bezdar 