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[Cleaning the Backlog] The Banner Saga Trilogy
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…
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[Cleaning the Backlog] Alien: Isolation
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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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Mass Alienation and Social Atomization in Bloober Team’s Observer
There are several ways you can summarize the plot of the Bloober Team’s Observer. For example, you can say that this is a game about a futuristic cop, played by Rutger Hauer, who chases after a murderous monster in the cyberpunk dystopian setting. This way, Observer reminds us of Split Second—a 1992 sci-fi action flick—not explicitly smart or insightful…
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RTS Galore! Episode 3: Mega-Lo-Mania & Populous II
After trying its design philosophy in an entirely atheistic setting, Bullfrog returned to its god-game roots with a sequel to Populous, making the gamification of the ‘holy war’ concept more fun and ideologically safe. A couple of months earlier, another British developer, Sensible Software, also released a game about gods and their bloody conflicts. But Mega-Lo-Mania’s focus was more…
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RTS Galore! Episode 2: PowerMonger
In the previous episode of RTS Galore! I’ve talked about Populous and its gamification of the conflict between two selfish and cruel deities. In the second episode, I’m going to talk about another game developed by Bullfrog—PowerMonger (1990). This time, we’ll witness the conflict devoid of any divine presence.
Baking Potatoes On the Ashes of Society
