Here's some thoughts on things I've finished and felt like I wanted to capture for my future reference.
⭐: actively disliked this
⭐⭐: meh
⭐⭐⭐: enjoyable but not notable
⭐⭐⭐⭐: really great; would recommend
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: utterly brilliant!
Books read this year
1
Games played this year
1
📖 Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott
Finished: 5th Jan 2025
This book contains a lot of world building. It starts with some maps, which were actually helpful as a visual aid later on, but it immediately chucks you into a world of extensive back story, different planets, races, and characters, along with some quite formal and fancy pants words being thrown around the courts that made it a little bit hard to connect with. In hindsight it made me think of the Ninefox Gambit series, which I ended up loving, and to this book's credit it became a lot more understandable a lot faster. I've just finished the book, and will be starting the second one immediately, partly because I really enjoyed it all, but also partly because I'm scared of leaving it too long between reads as I know I'll start forgetting who people are or the detail of what's gone on again.
In short, this centres around Princess Sun and her Companions, who are wrapped up in some political shenanigans with the different core Houses, as well as bigger picture complications between different races/factions in the wider planetary systems. Everyone seems to have complex parent issues, there's a load of spying and assassination attempts, and lots of action. Good fun, good action, lots to like.
🎮 Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Finished: 4th January 2025
Coming off the back of Dragon Age – a game where the polish really impressed me – some clunkiness in this one made the experience a bit less than I'd hoped. The story was pretty good and I enjoyed it, as well as watching the extended cutscenes to move between the various settings. However some of the gameplay got tedious, particularly my hours lost to the terrible maps and trying to work out just how to get back to several bits in underground systems that you can't do in the same way as you first came in, or can't remember very well.
The lack of polish and contrasts I mention was in little things, like the way that potentially interesting dialogue got cut off abruptly rather than dealt with elegantly and resuming in a nice way in DA. Dialogue, that in some cases then continued to trigger annoyingly repeatedly and inelegantly even when I wasn't near the item of discussion (I was underground at that point). My husband was impressed by the animation, and whilst it was pretty good generally, I wasn't impressed by the faces... again there was a fair bit of clunkiness there. I'm mentioning these things because for such a cinematic game, they broke me out a bit.
I did like the range of the puzzles, from the bastard final "secret ending" one, through to the cogwheels, the spinny disk ones, and all the other more general ones. On the whole they weren't taxing, and could maybe have been a bit more complex and less on rails in some cases, but they were a nice extra dimension.
My final and most personal issue is about the absolutely stressful giant REDACTED sequences in the third main game area. Nononono thank you!