New year, new push to reduce the backlog. Once again, I had a mix of new and old games since my last update:

Before Your Eyes - short, unusual, good. Some incredible sequences about pain.
A Mortician’s Tale - Caitlin Doughty Simulator? I got this on a whim, and it gave me exactly what I expected from it.
The Big Con - odd little game that captured a certain 1990s feel really well.
Chants of Sennaar - I absolutely loved all the language puzzles, and would have liked a no-auto-translations mode (which I later realised someone has made as a mod.) Not so much the stealth (I hate stealth!) and the main point-and-click segments in between, but the language elements were great.
Producer 2021 - Wow, I loved this unusual little game. It had the feel of weird video games from my Spectrum days, mixed with darkly humorous and characterful writing.
The Room 2 - didn’t enjoy it, as I found the game too dark on my system no matter how I adjusted it. Also ran into a few bugs that were only solved by raising and lowering the graphics. I felt like the puzzles would have worked better as real life escape rooms, where you have multiple people moving freely around the room, so maybe what I actually want is The Room: multiplayer mode.
The Norwood Suite - another game I really enjoyed. The graphics look like something out of Second Life, and it’s unashamedly a bit janky, but the whole exploration of this weird hotel and the various characters was immense fun. Never really got into a dead end, just enjoyed the whole weird unravelling of the story.
CARRION - yet another really excellent short game about being a deadly tentacled monster. The controls are really satisfying, and I felt like a graceful, beautiful mass of murder tentacles as I grappled my way around the base munching on scientists. A good start to 2024!
De-Void - oh man… good voice acting and interesting story idea/worldbuilding, spoiled by painfully slow traversal of huge areas combined by a character who walks as though she’s shuffling in slippers. Slow walking and difficult vision conditions drag the game out, and I gave up for months after a crash mid-section lost a huge amount of progress. Finished today with mixed feelings, as there was much to like there.

I really want to get half my games to beaten or completed status. We shall see!