Dealing with backlog: Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning

It took me way too long to play this game because of mixed reviews. But I finally did and I loved this game! It gave me strong Dragon Age: Origins vibes and as a whole I feel it's a mix between Origins and Oblivion, which is extremely high praise!

The only thing I feel like this game is missing is the opportunity to have deeper relationships with NPCs. I miss having friends and companions. Basically I just want a gang. Romance is secondary, but that would've been great too.

The fighting style is odd for an RPG, but it changes as you improve. I played as a rogue-like character and to begin with my character just did jabs with her daggers/faeblades, but as she progressed and got better at wielding her weapons it turned into launching enemies in the air and ferociously attacking them to ending with amazing jumping finishes.

Unfortunately the game was on the easy side, even for me. I believe it's all due to the fateshifting mechanic. I learned early on that if I save my fateshifting (which is basically an ult in MMO speech) then I can defeat almost any boss in less than a minute or even 30 seconds, which kind of undid the whole "omg it's boss battle time" feeling. The most obvious exceptions being Balor and Tirnoch, who did require something more than just bashing them while fateshifting.

The whole world is fascinating. Instead of having the obvious rifts between humans/dwarves/elves, there's a rift between the old race (the Fae) and the younger races (humans, elves and gnomes). The younger races are mostly scared of the Fae who are eternal beings that can't die, while the Fae mostly find the younger races fascinating - especially the concept of death. The Fae also look down on the younger races for being young, reckless and dumb. Having a much shorter and limited lifespan the younger races don't know and don't learn as much as the Fae.

The game has a wide array of creatures. I adore the cute little Brownies and Boggarts, and Niskaru were always fun to fight. But I hated coming against Banashae and Crudoks, they weren't difficult just annoying. Bolgan, Ettin and Jottun were interesting to begin with but soon just became a hurdle to get past, and Webwood made me permanently sick of spiders.

 Troll, Banashae and Jottun

The story begins with you dying and being brought back to life which causes amnesia. This somehow gives you the ability to fateshift and you're the only person in existence who doesn't have a destiny, which the game's Fateweavers are more than happy to point out. You're recruited to go to war against the Tuatha, a corrupt section of Fae that the younger races have been warring against for a decade. The main reason that the war has been ongoing for ten years is that the Tuatha are Fae and thus won't stay dead when killed. But you can change fate, the only person in existence with this ability, and the hope is that with your power to change fate you can change the tide of the war and actually permanently kill the Tuatha. Along the way you meet up with Alyn Shir, who knows your past from before you were brought back to life but she's reluctant to tell you. As you progress you find out bits and pieces about your past and towards the end you find yourself back where it all began. The game ends with a frickin badass boss battle that's totally epic.

 
The two DLCs were great. I especially loved The Legend of Dead Kel. Give me pirates and I'm happy! But the Teeth of Naros with all of its references to Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire was amazing too.

Kingdoms of Amalur proved one of the most underrated games I've ever played. If you haven't played it, do it.

Dealing with backlog: Three short games

The Silent Age: A classic point-and-click game with a classic sci-fi story. You play as Joe, a janitor from the 1970s, who gets a visit from a dying old man claiming to be from the future. He asks you to get a message to his current self and Joe sets about doing just that, and what unravels is a big plot about time travel, cryogenics, pandemics and the apocalypse, and while you play you slowly start to get the nagging sense that somehow Joe might actually be the cause of the apocalypse he's trying to prevent.

The game was short and straight-forward, but the story more than made up for that. I also really enjoyed the simplicity of the graphics.

A Story About My Uncle: When I first saw this game my thoughts went like this:
"Ooooh this game is pretty."
"But it's a platformer. A first-person platformer. I'm going to hate myself playing this."
"But it's so pretty."
"But I suck at platformers and this is first-person, it's going to be even worse!"
"But it's pretty."
So I bought it. Because it was pretty. And I was right, I did hate myself for putting myself through this game. I didn't finish it. I got too sick of bouncing off the same floating rock several dozen times. But the game is incredibly pretty, and flying over the long distances felt amazing those few times I timed it right.

The story is very sweet. It's about a father telling a bedtime story to his child, and he tells the story of his explorer uncle Fred, and how he (the dad) one time went looking for uncle Fred after he had been gone for a long time, and how he ended up in a mystical land inhabited by frog people and getting on a quest to help them while searching for his uncle.

The gameplay is amazing when timed right, but it never looked as beautiful when I did it as it does in the trailer.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter: This is a walking simulator with a clever story and beautiful graphics. You play as a private investigator of the supernatural. You're hired via a letter from a boy named Ethan Carter to come and find out what's wrong in a small town. The story takes you down some decidedly Lovecraftian roads (but there's also one part that seems to be taken from 2001: Space Odyssey, and one puzzle that seems almost taken from Amnesia: The Dark Descent). The end of the story was a major wtf moment and I'm not going to say anymore about it. The game is short and it's great. It's worth 3 hours of your life.