Come what may

The weather was crappy as hell for may over here. So plenty of time to do some backlogging/finishing stuff I bought in bundles.

Backlogging

X3: Albion Prelude

8/10

221.2 hours

21 of 33 achievements

Lore / Story : Relatively classic sci-fi setting with gates that connect parts of space together. There isn't much story (it's mostly a sandbox), but what exists can be summed up as: humans fighting against humans while a human created sentient AI want to kill humans.
Game mechanics : It's a space simulator. With some combat and plenty of commerce.
It's really sandboxxy in the sense that you can do whatever you want. Fighting against pirates, that'll work. Fighting against a specific race. Can do. Build a merchant empire with automated delivery freighter. Possible.
The story isn't really important, but some quests rewards are really really nice to help you out (most notable one being a sector that allow you to link different part of space together).
Length : You can finish the story (in about 50 to 60h mb?). But that's not the goal of the game, so you can sink a lot more time into it.
Difficulty : The story can be difficult if you try to do only that. If you do it from time to time while doing other stuff, it's not that hard. And it can really encourage you to develop your commerce (need a resource for the story -> build a complex to produce it).
Comparison with Elite: There was a free elite:dangerous on EGS. Tried it for a few hours. The two games a really different as space simulator go.
- For elite, you'll feel that space really is empty. Whereas in X3, because the game is cut in sectors, everything interesting is concentrated in each sector. There are some big sectors, but they are not the majority
- The interface in X3 felt way easier to use. There are shortcuts, but you can do about anything with the mouse. In Elite, it's a chore to swap between menu. Yeah you're in the cockpit and it's more realist, but realism is not where it needs to be for menus.
- Playing with mouse + keyboard, the flying felt way easier to handle in X3. You can autopilot easily, you get to your destination quickly with the jump.
- It's nice to have big station and to dock inside in Elite. But damn does it take a long ass time to autodock/leave a station. And I thought it was already long in X3, it's even worse in elite
Conclusion : If you like building commercial empire, commanding fleet of destroyer, hunting people to scavenge there ship, X3 might be a good game for you. You're gonna need a lot of time though.

Tokyo 42

8/10

13.7 hours

14 of 19 achievements

Lore / Story : The game takes place in a futuristic Tokyo (as the name implies). A big corpo has developed a pill that makes you come back to life whenever you die (but not everybody for some reason).
Plot wise, you're framed for an assassination, you escape the cops and become an assassin.
Game mechanics : It's a 3D isometric shouter with some parkour/stealth element included. Some features include:
- You can move the camera in one of 8 preset position and your character movement is always related to the camera, which is pretty nice
- For some reason though, this doesn't apply when you drive a bike (doesn't happen often tho), who will go forward with z/w whatever the angle is.
- Stealth is a bit OP if you unlock some weapons and way-point before advancing. You can do a lot of missions without alerting any one easily because guards are dumb as fuck. They don't care about seeing a dead guard body.
- Weapons variety is pretty nice, you can play in a lot of different ways.
- Parkour elements can be tricky when timed (for some missions) because you have to manage the camera and your jumps at the same time.
- Most collectibles are indicated on the map, so you can search for yourself how to get there (although some are really tricky)
- You can't save whenever you want, but the game is very generous with the checkpoints that allow for a save during the missions
Character progression : There isn't much progression outside of new weapons/two mostly useless features (tho one of them is a cat)
Length : The duration (14 hours to do all the main missions and some optional) feels right. You're not bored, but if the game lasted way longer, you might be.
Difficulty : Playing in normal, the game is of average difficulty. Although the ending missions are a bit harder because while the rest of the game encourages you to play stealthily (there are achievements for that), those are mostly all out fights with no other way to address them. And there is no checkpoint, so you have to start anew every time you fail.
Conclusion : Didn't expect much of the game, and was quite surprised to find it was in fact really good. The design really helped (and might not be to everyone's taste), but the game-play in itself played a solid part as well.

Shadwen

6/10

7.3 hours

31 of 48 achievements

Lore / Story : You're playing as an assassin going for the king of a small realm. You're accompanied by an orphan that you save at the beginning of the game.
Game mechanics : It's a stealth game. The goal is always to make you + the orphan go from scene to scene. The orphan goes from one hiding spot to another when ordered or when she feels like it.
You control yourself. You have a grapple that can be used to interact with some stuff. A pretty neat thing is that time only flows when you move. So for example you can stop mid swing to aim your grapple somewhere else.
If you check the achievements, there are two ways to plays the game. It's either full stealth (no kill and just distract the guards to have the orphan advance). Or stealthy killer where you go out of your way to kill everyone.
Character progression : There isn't much in term of progression. You find some components that can be used to craft consumables. But I used none of them during all my play-through.
Length : It's about 7 hours for one play-through, but more of that would start to feel really repetitive.
Difficulty / Length : The game is fairly easy. I only experienced some difficulty at times because of janky controls/physics, but not really because of the level design.
Conclusion : It's a neat stealth game. Not going to revolutionize the genre, but if you like them, I'd advise to get it on sale.

Late Shift

8/10

5.6 hours

20 of 20 achievements

This one is a bit peculiar, because it's more of a movie than a game. You watch the movie and make some decisions during the movie that impact the story.

Pro: the story and acting are good. Some decisions really impact what happens in the movie (you can get whole different scene following some decisions).

Cons: Most decisions have little impact outside of the immediate follow up scenes. Like the overall plot is not going to change except the ending. But you can get a lot of endings just by playing around with some decisions in the last acts regardless of what you did before.

Consequence from that and the fact that there is no fast forward mechanism : it's a bit boring to explore everything cause you're going to have to rewatch some scenes a lot.

Conclusion : Overall pretty good if you like this kind of stuff.

Bundling

Thea: The Awakening

6/10

33.3 hours

19 of 31 achievements

Lore / Story : Very classical medieval fantastic setting. The world was plunged into darkness for plot reasons and is slowly waking up, you have to manage and make survive your village in this period.
You'll end up doing some quests related to that darkness thing, but it's not the main part of the game.
Game mechanics : You start off by choosing a god. That has little bearing on the game. Then there are three main aspect to the game-play.
- Managing your town: You get only one town. It has some citizens. You have to defend it and you can use it to construct building, craft advanced food/equipment, gather the resources around it.
  One big consequence of having only one and not being able to move it is that your starting point is very important for the game. So start scumming can be a thing when playing with some difficulty.
- Moving expeditions on the map: Be it for quests or to find specific resources, you have a world map in which you can move your expeditions. They consist of a bunch of villager with stuff.
  Important point is that they need food to survive. And if they have more type of food they can do more (hence the importance of crafting food in town).
  There are also a bunch of monster roaming the map (you can see their level above them), monster lairs to explore, ruins to explore and random events to complete.
  All that to find more resources/stuff and to get some xp.
  The monsters act in between your turn (so they can attack you on their own). And there is a day/night cycle that affect the visibility on the map.
- Challenges: This is a little card game that handles every type of interaction with the outer world, be it fight or other aspects. Depending on the type of challenge you take on, different stats will act as your hp/offense/special capacities/shield. The goal is always to have your card survive and to kill the opponent cards.
  You can skip the challenge and have the AI auto resolve it for you if you think there is no risk.
Character progression : The main evolution is done by changing the stuff equipped on your villagers. They gain a level every now and then, but it's a stat boost and you have no choice in that matter. You can either craft some stuff or find it during the world map encounters.
There is also some tech tree, where you unlock the right to gather some resources/craft some type of object/unlock new buildings. The main way to advance in it is to either craft/construct stuff or to do events on the map.
Difficulty / Length : Using the basic difficulty settings, the game is super easy. If you start using some more advanced difficulty (it's entirely customizable and the score will reflect that) it can start to get tricky at the start. Although it will be easy at the end. In my "difficult play-through", in the mid and late game, I did only one challenge, the final boss. All the rest was auto battled.
A bit of difficulty can be faced against certain early events, because if you don't know them, you have no idea what difficulty you're going against and you might end up against a challenge that's not doable with your current party.
Length : A complete game will take about 15hours. The start seems to always be a bit exciting/challenging, but it gets very repetitive by the end.
Conclusion : I didn't expect much, but it was a really good experience. It lacks some polish here and there (most notably the starting place of your village and the weird save system), but it was very good at giving me that "one more turn" feeling.
One weird thing was that you can unlock gods by doing a lot of play-through (it's supposed to be a rogue-like), but I don't see the value in doing more than 2 or 3 play-through. Especially when the play-through is 15+ hours.
I'll see if they managed to improve in the second installment

Thea 2: The Shattering

7/10

24.7 hours

5 of 26 achievements

Lore / Story : Story wise it's a bit later. Gods / opponents are different
Game mechanics : The start of the game is a bit different. You have a god to chose that'll give you a special trait + plenty of traits to chose from to complete the slot you have. Most traits are locked though.
Town management is about the same. Big difference is that you can chose to not have one or you could have multiple and you can plant them wherever.
Now you can research/craft outside of town. It's better, but it makes the whole camping thing way more tedious to use (every time you camp you gotta put back whatever cooking you want to do and such)
World map is the same kind of stuff. They added some way to move over water and a faction system, but the difference is minimal.
Challenges are different. This one has more strategy/depth to it (for me) it's a turn based battle where you can chose matchups/the kind of attack you're going to use and require a bit mor thinking.
Stat wise it's also a bit easier to understand compared to the 1.
The auto resolve is also way better. You can launch it, and if the result doesn't suits you, you're free to do it manually.
Character progression : Equipment evolution is the same kind of stuff. Level up are actually better! Every level alternate between you picking one skill to upgrade (among 2) or 1 stat (among 3)
Difficulty / Length : I'd say it's about the same experience for difficulty and a little bit longer.
Conclusion : It's an improvement over the 1 (most notably for the challenges/village placement). But I still feel like it really lacks any sort of replay value despite having plenty of unlocks. (same as the 1, 15+ hours rogue-like is a weird idea).
Choosing a different god/starting traits is going to make the early game a bit different. But you'll still end up with the same challenges / resources gathering loop

NEOVERSE

6/10

10.3 hours

17 of 37 achievements

Lore / Story : It's somewhere in the future. Not sure there is a lot more than that. No story to speak of
Game mechanics/Character progression : You see slay the spire? Well same thing, but in the future and the combat scene is 3d instead of 2d.There are some differences:
Only 3 characters (all fairly different play-style wise)
There is no map. At the end of each combat, you can shop/upgrade. And you chose one of the three next combat.
Each combat gives you a mission that you can complete in this combat or one of the followings. Each mission gives some reward.
There are skill to buy with skill points. You get an assortment of skills at the start of the run. They are arranged in a 4+1 by 4+1 table. Getting 4 in a row/column unlocks the possibility to buy the 5th in that line.
Length : A full run last between 1 and 2 hours.
Difficulty : I found it easier compared to slay the spire (or maybe I was better at it?).
Conclusion : It's an alright card battler. Not much more to say about it