Can a character escape his past? Can a game series?

God of War started as a series based on the ideas of what is cool from “a teenager’s notebook”. Now, it wants to do better. It’s great to have all the new progressive titles, but I have to admit that it’s also valuable for an old and popular franchise to pull something like this off.

Does it? Norse era games – God of War and God of War Ragnarök – are far from ideal, but they’ve come a long way from their questionable roots. They would have been extremely progressive if released 20 years ago. Today? Even without spoilers, I can point out a couple of things where someone should have raised their hand and asked, “are we sure we want to do this?”

Overall, I enjoyed playing them, despite some minor gripes. I mostly didn’t care about combat, which might be my issue. I liked the combat in Doom: The Dark Ages quite a lot, but I haven’t liked the combat in any game since then. For me, running around in a not-so-open world, solving puzzles, and listening to NPCs was way more enjoyable. Thank goodness for a modern approach to difficulty that lets you breeze through encounters and most boss fights if you so desire.

Speaking of combat I didn’t care about… South of Midnight is a great game! It’s a dark fairy tale. Emphasis on dark: expect serious subjects to be brought up. It’s also going to get political, for sure! But it also has plenty of whimsy, have interesting characters and stories, looks great, and is an outright musical, with lyrics that help tell the story.

Speaking of musicals… Mayor May Knott is a horror-themed game in which you rebuild a small town, and has a lot of original parody songs. To be fair, most of the game consists of busywork and light puzzles, and its performance is dreadful on any machine I have. However, the theme, quirky characters, and overall feel-good-ness, that I liked since I played the demo, pulled me through. You’re giving people homes, c’mon! No regrets!

In Shadow Man: Remastered, the world itself is the main hero. It is hellishly confusing, but extremely satisfying to figure out. Even with the addition of higher-resolution textures, it remains vague, which works in its favour: your imagination does the work. It’s colourful, yet dark and moody. While not wholly unique – we’ve seen similar examples of the combination of natural and mechanical elements in the depiction of otherworldly places – it still has its own style. It’s great!

Mechanically, the game is a 3D Metroid-like, which, given how rare those are, deserves some attention in its own right. And it’s a good one, provided you can tolerate its very hands-off approach. By that, I mean that it doesn’t provide any guidance beyond the bare minimum. The remastered version rectifies this to some extent by providing a lot more information than the original. I think not knowing where to go is one of the worst feelings in a video game. So why am I tolerating it here? Honestly, I have no idea.

I tried a non-remastered version, but I didn’t get very far. I think it’s fine, but there’s no reason to play it at this point. You won’t miss anything by playing the remastered version, and the quality-of-life improvements and restored content are very nice.

Right, the elephant in the room. It’s a character created by white people. It’s a game created by white people. One of the two black characters is voiced by a white actor. The culture they depict is clearly not their own. Problematic? Of course! More than that? It’s not for me to judge, but personally, I didn’t find it egregious.

Doom: The Dark Ages is basically a fantasy game now. Starting with Doom (2016), this iteration of the series has been playing with the fantasy/sci-fi duality established by the original Doom (1993) and has gradually leaned more towards fantasy. In fact, I can’t help but think of it as a fast-paced, first-person spell-slinging game rather than a shooter. It still abbreviates to FPS :)

I also can’t help but think how this series in a conversation with Metroid Prime games. They start on different sides. The Prime games are open world, and the Doom games are linear. But they meet somewhere in the middle, where exploring the world is tremendously satisfying.

The fact that the latest games in both series have more story, cutscenes, and NPCs is also very funny.

Froggy Hates Snow has a very satisfying snow-clearing mechanic, and sometimes, that’s all you need.

I was somewhat disappointed with Keeper. It’s a neat looking puzzle game with a number of turns, so to speak, but ultimately, I didn’t care about its story. That story also felt stuck between being very vague (there isn’t a single word spoken throughout) and a fully-fledged one. Not bad, just not for me.

Drakan: The Ancients’ Gates is a proper sequel, so there isn’t much to discuss unless you want to delve into the details of the game mechanics, which I don’t.

Some things have improved. Others just changed. The game now has even more open levels. I bet that if there were a third game, they would have tried to make it a full-on open world.

Kingdom: New Lands is also a proper sequel. Or maybe a better description would be an expansion pack. It adds a significant number of new features to the original game and splits the progression into multiple islands that you need to escape.

I was dreading playing Bullet Witch, but it turns out it’s not bad. First, aside from the outfit (which you can change, but the others are not better), the game is not sleazy at all. The camera doesn’t ogle Alicia’s body, no one questions her ability to fight, nothing like that.

Second, it’s just a mediocre game. I mean that in the most neutral way possible. You play it and go, “huh, that was a thing, ” and move on with your life. There are cool set pieces and some spectacle, but they’re overshadowed by dull visuals. There’s no reason to explore the pretty big levels. The combination of guns and magic is neat, but doesn’t feel that great. The story is fine, but it’s pretty shallow and short. We don’t even know who Alicia’s companion is. Perhaps they intended to write a sequel.

I realized is that demos are a great way for me to get my FOMO fix. Since they are short and free, I can figure out what people are up to these days and then go back to playing the game I was playing before, which is probably from years, if not decades, ago.

Gravebound is a short, free arena shooter. And if you’re curious, a companion is your fire spell friend.

There are plenty of games that try to distill a particular genre into something minimalist. Too often, they throw out something important and break the whole thing. Kingdom nails it. It’s as minimal as possible, yet it still allows for strategy. It looks great, is simple to control (three buttons, really), and can be pretty short if you just want to win or last you dozens of hours if you’re going for achievements.

I don’t have any excuses, not even a joke-y one. But I replayed Alba: A Wildlife Adventure. It’s a neat little game, that’s it.

Against my better judgment, I decided to continue playing horror/dark games. I found so much cool stuff last year that it seems like there’s enough left for another one. However, I will continue a subtheme from last month, modifying it to include games with companions. In fact, this theme extends beyond games to my other media consumption.

Predator: Badlands is a pretty enjoyable action flick. It won’t surprise you — you’ll know how it ends almost from the start, though there are a couple of interesting twists — but it will entertain you all the way through.

I don’t want to be on the defensive, but you have to if you want to compare Decay of Logos to other soulslikes. So, let me just call it a pretty good action RPG inspired by Dark Souls and co.

It put its own spin on almost every element of the genre, and most of them are at least interesting. Some are clearly not. Your elk steed in the game, for example, is one of those mechanics that looks good on paper but is more cumbersome than fun. It has the art style you’ve seen a million times, but it knows how to use it. There are cool locations and a pretty good atmosphere. The variety of enemies and equipment is not bad for a relatively short game. The combat is serviceable. And, hey, it’s free!

I maybe accidentally got, replayed, and 100%-ed The Last Campfire. In my defense, it’s not only the best game by Hello Games, but it’s also clearly a soulslike. You play as a lost ember (undead). You travel from campfire to campfire (bonefire), lighting them up. The world is interconnected as you constantly open new shortcuts. There are also NPCs with cryptic lines. You solve puzzles. The themes and atmosphere are similar.

And it’s also a delight!

(!) I can’t vouch for it anymore!

Update from May 2026: The receiver died in about, what, three months. That’s not good! You can pair the mouse with a new receiver in the G Hub settings, but still. The rest of the post remains the same.

I hate to be crawling back to Logitech, but it seems like they still make decent mice at a good price-to-feature ratio, especially if you lower your expectations. My minimal requirements are a wireless mouse with programmable buttons that work without software.

The Logitech G304 is that mouse. It’s wireless only with a dongle, there’s no multi-device or Bluetooth capability. It runs on one double-A battery that cannot be charged inside the device. You can set up one on-board profile with DPI settings and custom shortcuts, including G-Shift, which allows you to hold one button and use the others for different functions.

The benefit of going with a popular brand is that someone, somewhere, will do something about it. For example, a battery percentage could be shown as a tray icon on Windows without official software installed.

Another mouse that I’ve had for a while that almost fits the bill is the Razer Orochi V2. Here are the main differences, according to me:

It’s slightly smaller, but not in an uncomfortable way. You can pair it to two devices and quickly switch between them if you don’t mind the Bluetooth connection. You can make it even lighter by using a triple-A battery. But I chose to designate it as my secondary mouse for non-main PCs because of the shortcuts.

On G304, you can assign keyboard shortcuts, such as Ctrl + Shift + T or Super + Shift + →, as macros. These macros live in the device itself, you don’t need software running. While you can customize Orochi V2 in the same way, including the DPI, Hypershift (the G-Shift equivalent), and even slightly more (the up and down scroll wheel functions are assignable), for some bizarre reason, you can’t assign some shortcuts as, well, shortcuts, only as macros. And all macros require software. So, you can have Ctrl + Shift + T but not Super + Shift + →. It’s not a huge deal since you can change the shortcuts in the operating system, but it’s still somewhat annoying.