Game 15 of 2024 - The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

Developer: Cloak and Dagger Games
Publisher: Wadjet Eye Games
Platform: PC
Genre: Adventure, Horror

Difficulty: Easy
Hours: 6

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8.6/10

Check out this fuckin' guy.

Give us a kiss love, eh?

That's Arthur. He's a bit of a dipshit. We first meet him as he stumbles, drunk, out of The Plough and Furrow, and accosts our heroine for a kiss. Despite this borderline sexual assault, Arthur actually becomes one of your closest allies in your quest.

Thomasina Bateman arrives in the fictional town of Bewlay to excavate Hob's Barrow. She's an antiquarian like her father, who lies comatose after a mysterious accident years before.

I'm a sucker for this art style.

Players will notice immediately that this bucolic little hamlet has sinister undercurrents. Thomasina, a highly educated and rational individual, soon has the limits of her rationality tested as the tale unfolds, transforming from a historical adventure into a folk horror tale with it's origins in the Bronze Age.

Sweet, sweet, rest.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow plays like a pretty standard point-and-click adventure games. The puzzles all make sense for the most part, and there aren't any irritating pixel hunts like in lesser games. What really elevates it is the story and the performance of the voice actors. There were times I felt like I was taking part in a period drama rather than playing a game. I'm a big fan of the genre, and this is probably one of the best examples in recent memory.

Kudos.

Book 9 of 2024 - Four Lost Cities

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

Author: Annalee Newitz

Genre: History

Pages: 320

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8.3/10

Four Lost Cities examines the urban culture of four ancient cities: Çatalhöyük in modern day Türkiye, Pompeii, Angkor Wat, and Cahokia.

Annalee Newitz, a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, has clearly put in the work. She visits each site and accompanies archaeological teams on digs, where she deftly conjures an image of what it might have been like to live in each city during it's heyday and it's twilight.

A very digestible book about one of my favorite topics. Really dug it.

Game 14 of 2024: Skald: Against the Black Priory

Skald: Against the Black Priory

Developer: High North Studios AS
Publisher: Raw Fury
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG

Difficulty: Medium
Hours: 18

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 9.2/10

Hell yeah.

I've been waiting for this one. As a card-carrying old guy, I cut my teeth on CRPGs like Ultima, Baldur's Gate, and the Gold Box games. I checked out the Skald demo a year or two ago and was hooked.

And I'm happy to say I was not disappointed!

Everything from the crisp pixel art, the soundtrack composed on a Yamaha YM2413 sound chip, and the sword-and-sorcery cosmic horror story comes together beautifully to create an end product that is a worthy homage to the classics while being mindful of a modern audience.

You can pet the dog! And also cats.

Skald starts off the old fantasy classic: a shipwreck leaves you and your crew stranded on The Outer Isles, an Imperial backwater that has been experiencing strange events lately. You're tasked by Lord Berryn, a friend of your father's, to find Embra, his daughter. Embra's gone missing, and Lord Berryn thinks she was headed to the Outer Isles.

That one-eyed guy in your party is Roland. He carried me through this game.

Your custom player character has to explore the Outer Isles looking for clues to Embla's disappearance while helping the locals and putting together a ragtag crew. 

Hell yeah, Ibn! Let's, uh, shit on that!

Combat is turn based and tactical. You get the chance to deploy your party when you get jumped which helps to get your melee guys into range and your tanks to protect your casters. You get a variety of weapons, armor, and spells, but honestly, I didn't use magic other than healing all that much. The sword was mightier than the pen in my playthrough at least, as some combat spells just seemed a little underwhelming. When you do need magic users, though, make sure you have plenty of attunement potions to keep up their magic points; they can barely make it through one fight let alone many.

I ran into a few minor bugs, nothing I really cared about. Sometimes while shopping I would accidentally click on a character's portrait twice, which would immediately take me out of the shopping window and into the inventory screen. Not really a big deal.

The story is pretty standard sword-and-sorcery fare, and for the most part I really liked it. I could have used a little more background on the side characters, but for the most part it was enough that we faced supernatural horrors together to make me attached to them.

My playthrough came in at just under 20 hours, and I felt that was about right. I did all (I think) of the side quests and thoroughly explored the Outer Isles.

RPG fans, buy this game! It's pretty great!

Game 13 of 2024: Ghost of Tsushima

Ghost of Tsushima

Developer: Sucker Punch Productions
Publisher: Playstation Publishing
Platform: PC
Genre: Action/Adventure

Difficulty: Medium
Hours: 36

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 9/10

Sure, I could write about all the things I liked about Ghost of Tsushima; or I could just post a bunch of screenshots and let the one bot that reads this decide for themselves:

One of the most beautiful games I've ever played

here have another one:

Seriously

and another:

You can pet the fox!

Sure, Ghost of Tsushima might be a romanticized, Western telling of a samurai story, but it's compelling with great characters and a gut punch of an ending. Combat is excellent, and Jin, our protagonist, is truly a killing machine. Seriously, I guess if I had one complaint, it's that too many of the missions (and there are a lot) involve you facing wave after wave of Mongol warriors. But hey, when you get tired of murdering, you can just wander the forests in search of flowers and crafting materials.

Book 8 of 2024: Batman: The Killing Joke

 Batman: The Killing Joke

Author: Alan Moore (words), Brian Bolland (pencils)

Genre: Graphic Novel, Noir, Detective

Pages: Not that many, can't be bothered to check

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 7.5/10

I've never been a huge Batman fan outside of the animated series in the 90s, so in order to change that, I figured I would give one of his seminal stories a whirl and see what happened.

This is really more of a Joker story than a Batman story, and I guess it's one of the better ones. Brian Bolland's art is fantastic, and not just on a technical level (although it shines there, too). His visual storytelling is on a completely different level and is something that I think can only accomplished in a comic book.

The story is decent, I just wish there was a little more of it. It centers around the Joker, who escapes from Arkham and holes up in an abandoned amusement park. After attacking Barbara Gordon and uh, doing unsavory things to her (this really didn't sit well with me) he kidnaps Commissioner Gordon with the ultimate goal of driving him insane. Of course, Batman must come to the rescue.

In between plot points, we get flashbacks to the Joker's previous life where he was a struggling stand-up comedian with a beautiful girl and a baby on the way. In an effort to try and earn a bit more money, he ends up taking a job with the local organized crime outfit which goes horribly wrong. I believe you know the rest.

One bad day turned a good man into the Joker, and one bad day turned a kid into the Batman.

And then the story kind of just... ends. It's weird.

Book 7 of 2024 - Cosmic Detective

Cosmic Detective

Author: Jeff Lemire, Matt Kindt, David Rubin (Art)

Genre: Graphic Novel, Sci-Fi, Noir

Pages: 208

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8.4/10

Cosmic Detective is a gritty, hardboiled graphic novel about a detective trying to solve the murder of what could be called a god. In true noir fashion, the more he discovers the shittier his life gets. 

The art really drives home what a cross between cosmic horror and sci-fi detective work might look like. Strange allies, mysterious technology, and a backstory that's really only hinted at serve to draw in the reader even more.

I read this in a single sitting, and I would recommend it to fans of the genre. Give it a shot.

Book 6 of 2024 - Counterweight

Counterweight

Author: Djuna

Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: 176

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8/10

Counterweight is a slick techo-noir thriller set in the near future, on the fictional island of Patusa. Our narrator, Mac, LK's Chief of Internal Affairs, gets caught up in a truly Byzantine plot of corporate intrigue and transhumanism that would make William Gibson proud.

Counterweight is a tight sub-200 page novel with plenty of cool ideas and action, complete with red herrings, twists, turns, pirouettes, twirls, etc, etc you get the idea. The plot involves the world's first space elevator, with a secret hidden inside the counterweight that uh, anchors the elevators cable in space I guess. The counterweight is more than a collection of space junk though, as it holds a potentially dangerous secret.

Djuna is a pseudonymous South Korean author that I had never heard of before reading Counterweight. I believe this is the first and only novel of theirs that has been translated into English. According to Google, the novel was originally conceived as a short film.(which I'm sure would have been awesome). Counterweight really whet my appetite for more of Djuna's work, so I hope more of it is translated in the future.