Last year, alongside family time, professional development and traveling, I also played some games. 2019 Gaming in Review is my way of sharing what I played, liked and strongly disliked. Some of what I played, I even finished, and added them to my list of perfect games on Steam:
- Fist of Awesome
- Trüberbrook
- Eventide: Slavic Fable
- Armored Kitten
- Poly Bridge
- Tales from the Borderlands
The year started with still a lot of Civilization, but I didn’t come around to finishing the blog posts yet.
For example I played a lot of Fall of Rome on Deity difficulty with various factions. Some nice insights will follow later this year. I also played the Into the Renaissance scenario with Sweden and won. But unlike with other civilizations I didn’t stop there: I played several hundred rounds more and defeated every other faction and conquered all of Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa.

When we moved house, gaming stagnated, and when I picked it up again, I played mostly casual games:

Fist of Awesome for example is a really nice little beat’em’up. Funny story to play (once) and funny characters and opponents. Unfortunately the achievements would take years to complete without changing some game configurations, so achievement-hunters beware!
Support your local game development scene: Trüberbrook is an adventure game made in Germany and is well worth playing. The story is cool, the puzzles are of medium difficulty and it’s just a few hours of solid adventure fun. A nice walk down memory lane if you played games in the 80s and 90s. Only with better graphics.
Eventide was the first hidden object game I ever played. I kind of missed that trend both in my childhood and then in the 2010s when they became popular on Facebook and mobile devices. I had purchased the game on Steam Sale a while ago. Good fun, but nothing I would engage in more often.

(Otherwise you’ll have to replay the game)
Armored Kitten – hands off! I’ve played this game, but it’s a pain. Nothing more. 20 minutes of fun, hours of grinding to complete it. Just don’t even spend 50 cents on this.
Polybridge is just a great game! I’ve played it on and off over the course of 1.5 years and finally finished it end of 2019. 105 levels of great bridge building fun deserve a separate blog post that will follow here.

December 2019 I concluded with yet another masterpiece from Telltale Games: Tales from the Borderlands! And what shall I say: An amazing story, your decisions matter, as always in Telltale games, great characters you start caring about and surprising twists. I finished this one just on the 31st of December.
So much for 2019 Gaming in Review.
Let’s see what 2020 brings!