STG's

My Time at Portia is an open world game, with crafting at its core, as you are a builder who just came to Portia, an island where you inherited a workshop. I have to say that I never would have gotten this myself, but it came in a bundle, and was so well recommended that I decided to try it. I love it. I don't know exactly why, maybe because of the sense of progression and because there are so many choices in what to do. Graphics are good, in a silly way, as you can see from screenshots (not mine, just in general). Even the monsters are adorable, which I find kind of offputting. Gameplay is really where this shines. It's easily one of my favorite games in a couple of years, in terms of time spent. Tutorials are pretty good, although I think could be better. Luckily the wikis for this game are great, because you will probably want to keep them ready for checks. It would be nice if the game UI could show those, because crafting has a lot of requirements (like tools, mat...

State of Decay: Year One is a re-do of State of Decay with better graphics. It was kind of a rip-off because the first game was relatively new when it was released, and soon the original version stopped working altogether, never to be fixed. Now they gave gift copies to all owners of the first, which I guess is kind of nice, but 4 years after, so not great. It is a zombie survival game, with a nice community/base building angle. I mostly liked the original version, although it had some problems with my computer at the time. I decided to try this one. It aged very poorly. Graphics look acceptable, but old. Worse, no support for QHD. Alt-tab switching makes the game go windowed, and you have to set it to full screen when you go back. Interface is pretty poor, even for the age. No interaction overlays, for example. And stupid stuff like if you want to switch to a bigger bag, you need space on your existing one to take then equip them. Car handling is awful. Fights/search a...

The Quantum Garden, by  Derek Künsken , is the sequel to the Quantum Magician . It follows the consequences of Belisarius' heist in the first book, and what he needs to do to avoid them. I really liked this, although less than the first volume. There is another heist, time travel, and an alien species is introduced. I would have liked an reintroduction to the world (even though it hasn't been so long since I read it, I forgot many of the details already). Without that, I really recommend reading the first book before this one. One interesting thing is how set the characters are in preventing paradoxes. I didn't see any evidence that they know what it'd cause, though... Possibilities for the sequence are certainly interesting, I really want to see where this goes.