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
5
Games played this year
4
🎮 A Plague Tale: Requiem
Finished: 18th February 2025
This review is complicated and is going to have to be a bit spoiler-ful, so for anyone else reading this please bear that in mind.
I've had this in my play later list for absolutely ages. I think it may actually have switched over from the first game (APT: Innocence) at some point, but that said it wasn't until chapter 2 or so that I realised there was a previous game. I just thought the explanations were slow in coming 🙄
I'd originally been attracted because something about the art made me think this was a Dishonored spin-off (which it very much isn't), and then later put off because I thought it was a Dishonored rip off (which it also isn't).
Despite that, and not being gripped by it for a while, this ended up as a really moving, weirdly captivating story that left me actually emotional. It was extra surprising considering I didn't enjoy the voice acting for Amicia at all, but I actually came to care for the central characters a lot. However, I'm actually glad I hadn't played the first game, because I would be even more pissed at how it all ends up.
This is not a happy game. It's bleak as hell, in both the story and the vast numbers of dead bodies and all round disgustingness. It gives hope, then takes it away, then repeats, and part way through I considered stopping just because I could see where it was all going and didn't want that.
This is also the hardest game I've ever played on story mode. I switched over at one point after getting frustrated with a set piece that restarted with a cut scene, and yet I died a lot. I'm not generally a fan of stealth games and forced fleeing-from-stressful-things sequences and slow walking times, and there's plenty of all. So gameplay wise I didn't absolutely love it, story wise I respected but didn't enjoy the ending, but it was a powerful game that will really stay with me. And at some point if I want to torture myself I may get the first one. I settled on 3.5, but it was between that and 4.
📖 Off to Be the Wizard by Scott Meyer
Finished: 16th February 2025
This was lent to me by a colleague, and was a fun but fluffy read. Coming off the back of Artemis, it actually reminded me of a similar kind of writing style with wise-cracking, snipey banter and spelled out explanations. It was a very easy read, had some nicely thought out rules for the world, and the premise was interesting. That said, on getting to the end I wasn't grabbed to read more in the series. It's the kind of thing I may pick up again for a long plane journey in the future.
📖 Artemis by Andy Weir
Finished: 3rd February 2025
This is Weir's second book, but the third to me, and it's just too much. I actually really enjoyed Project Hail Mary, but this felt like just another book which reads exactly the same, which explains every detail and adds commentary even when not strictly necessary, and generally feels cut and paste with a different plot in space.
The characters are all unremarkable, a bit one dimensional, and actually pretty unlikeable (although some of that is the dialogue rather than the design). It's all bants bants bants smart ass snarky exchanges, which gets tiring. That said, I knew what I was getting into, and I wasn't surprised to be proved right about it being more of the same. It's an extremely easy read, not in the least bit mentally challenging, and easy to pick up and put down. I probably would have enjoyed it much more as a fluffy book on a plane, and I expect at some point I'll end up watching the film adaptation in that way.
📖 Blind Ambition by Patricia Walsh
Finished: 27th January 2025
First things first, this is not a 0 star book! I've decided to record my reading for completion's sake, but not to do a review. I'll soon have the pleasure of working with Patricia, was fascinated to read her story, and enjoyed this book, but it feels weird to put a score on something for someone I'll be managing. So it's my site, and I'll abstain :)
🎮 Maquette
Finished: 26th January 2025
GamePass has suckered me in again with their "leaving soon" tactic. As with Figment, this one had been sat in my list for ages, but I just hadn't prioritised it. When I saw it was leaving I again thought I'd try to get through it in the last few days (very doable), and I'm very glad I did. It's a lovely game with a very interesting mechanic revolving around sizes of objects. You interact with the 'maquette', a miniture replica of the environment you're in, and things soon get very interesting as you play around with the scale of objects and eventually yourself. The story is cute and very relatable, some of the puzzles actually need some brain power, and it's all very pretty. My main issue with it was that the placement of objects was very clunky, which was particularly frustrating in a couple of instances where I knew exactly what I wanted to do but couldn't. It's also interesting that the designers chose to tie a lot of achievements to speed running the levels. I kind of get this, but after doing the most simple level again I decided I wasn't interested in going through them all in that way. You have to skip the cutscenes and completely run past the dialogue that appears on-screen (I really like that style, floating like in Deathloop), and it all just felt like a waste to skirt though focusing only on efficiency and not delighting in the details. Overall this is lovely though, but I'd recommend you take your time and don't worry about speed.
📖 Furious Heaven (Sun chronicles 2) by Kate Elliott
Finished: 23rd January 2025
At 723 pages of pretty small text this was a massive chonk of a book. My plan to immediately follow on from the previous book worked, and everything was indeed a lot easier to follow and more familiar than before. However, as you'd expect from a book of this length, there were even more new people in the mix, new concepts to understand, and a hell of a lot of threads of the story going on to keep track of. I really enjoyed this book, by the end I loved many of the characters, and I'm fully invested. But it was a lot. I couldn't tell you everything that happened in the book. There are quite a few chapters labelled as an interlude, and whilst they're interesting and give a different perspective and change of pace, some of them probably could have been cut. Some bits were clunky, some things just weren't explained, and at one point there was an off-screen murder that I only actually clocked right at the end because it was so glossed over. Did I enjoy it all? Yes. Would it have been a bit more effective and possibly a bit easier to follow at points if it'd been edited down or split up into two? Also probably yes.
As I got towards the last quarter, I turned to the back cover where there's a picture of book 1 and book 3. I went to buy book 3, intending to carry on with my binge, again partly so I don't forget so many of the complex worldbuilding details and plot nuances. However it doesn't come out until 2026. I'll definitely plan to read it, but I'm certain that the gap in time will have an impact and I hope there's enough reminders!
This again follows Sun and her companions, across an even wider amount of time and space. There's some big, headline events that fundamentally change the setting, but otherwise it's the same setting of Phene vs Chaonia. You find out a lot more about some of the companions and their family dynamics, including more about the Phene ways of life, Riders, banner soldiers, and others. Tied to what I said above though, there's still some characters that were added (new companions and Cee-Cees who I still have no idea about really; they're just dropped in kind of by name only). Big battles (so many), friendships, love and romance, betrayals and politics. Some mysteries are solved, others will hopefully be built on in the future (mild spoilers: looking forward to seeing Kas come more into play, finding out more about the Campaspe influence, Vogue Academy, and seeing what happens to Apama and TeeGee).
🎮 Figment
Finished: 13th January 2025
I'd finished Indy, had a bit of a break, and then happened to see this was leaving GamePass. It'd been on my play later list for a while, so I thought I'd give it a go in the last few days it was available. It's a kind of puzzler-not-quite-platformer with some collectable story memories that I didn't bother getting all of. I finished the main bit of the game, but even though I had a bit of time it wasn't worth mopping up the achievements or the collectables purely because it was so much of a slog to get round.
It's a bit of a clunky game in more ways than one. Maybe it's meant to be jarring, but the visual style and fart jokes seemed very at odds with the setup of "you've just been in a car accident". The lack of a map to help you remember how to get back to somewhere you needed to take something, even though there was a non-functional map on the loading screen between areas, felt like a gap. But maybe intentional. Some of the inconsistencies in being able to pick up some of one thing but not others... the puzzle mechanics requiring you to walk a lot but it being infuriatingly slow... combat being included but feeling clunky... getting all the way through the level to pick up a collectable only to have to tediously backtrack to other levels because the exit (prev boss fight) is inaccessible... again maybe all intentional? There were some ok puzzles once the complexity ramped up a bit, outside of the mechanic problems it wasn't bad, and given it was short I was happy to continue on and finish it. But all in all not very strong.
📖 Unconquerable Sun (Sun chronicles 1) by Kate Elliott
Finished: 5th January 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!