Video Game Thoughts

In 2016, Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, creators of the Fallout franchise, headed development of The Outer Worlds at Obsidian Entertainment. Drawing inspiration from Firefly, Futurama, and Deadwood, the game depicts a future in which a distant star system is colonized by megacorporations. The player assumes the role of a cyrogenically frozen passenger from a lost colony ship, rescued by mad scientist Phineas Vernon Welles, with the goal of helping to save the colony. After be

In 2018, Obsidian Entertainment began working on what would eventually become Avowed, though the early iteration of the game was vastly different. Originally planned as an online multiplayer game, leadership at the company, looking to sell, pitched it to potential buyers as a mix between Skyrim and Destiny. Microsoft bought Obsidian that year, but by 2020, had cut the multiplayer aspects from the game entirely, focusing on a single player narrative experience. It wasn't until

This is yet another game that I had actually played before, but given its low stakes gameplay and shorter run time, I decided it'd make for a nice palette cleanser. The fact that it was available on Game Pass was an added bonus, as I'd previously played it on PC, and experiencing it on console, while nice, would have been hard to justify spending money on. It represents a somewhat newer genre, the walking sim, that can be a bit of a hard to pitch to those unfamiliar with it.

Released in 2010 as the debut game by studio Airtight Games, Dark Void is a third-person shooter set in the lead up to World War II. This is a game that I don't remember hearing much about when it released, and vaguely recall seeing its boxart as I browsed for other games. Still, something about this game called to me, so given the mission statement of my self-imposed challenge, I decided, what the Hell, and gave it a shot. I had no idea what to expect going into this experi

Released in 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade (back when that was still a thing), Faery: Legends of Avalon is a game that always caught my attention, but never quite enough so for me to take the plunge. Coming back to it now, I can say that it is a fun, albeit short, turn-based RPG from the relatively small French studio, Spiders. It almost seems like a time capsule, in that a game such as this would either not be made today, or would be an enormously different experience. The story,

Taking place ten years after the events of Inquisition, The Veilguard will likely go down as the most controversial game in the Dragon Age franchise, if not the last. When production began in 2015, the game was originally a live-service game, because EA. After the success of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019, the game was re-envisioned as a single player experience. After lengthy delays and changes to staff, the game was first announced as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf in 2022, be

Originally conceived as the follow-up to Origins, the team sought to correct many of the perceived wrongs of both the franchise and of Bioware as a whole. Where the team felt that their games had been getting smaller, Inquisition sets out to have huge, sprawling open areas. And where Dragon Age II and Mass Effect 3 saw a minimization of player choice and agency, Inquisition uses choice as one of its primary tent poles for the experience. The team set out to create a game that

Development on this game began in 2017. Billed as a "reverse horror" game, the player takes on the role of an amorphous blob that escapes from containment in a government facility and proceeds to wreak havoc as you try to escape. The gameplay is similar to a typical Metroidvania, with a bigger emphasis on puzzle solving than combat. In keeping with the theme, combat can barely be called that, as you either completely obliterate the people in your way, or use the environment a

The first official game that I started and completed in 2025 is both a sequel to a previous game I've covered, as well as a game that I have played through multiple times. I swear this is not going to be a running trend, though you can probably guess a future entry or two by now. After the unexpected success of Dragon Age: Origins, EA, true to form, gave the team at Bioware 16 months to produce a sequel. This obviously led to a lot of crunch time, which, much like the candy b

It seems only fitting that the last game I played in 2024 would also be among the first I played of the year. After putting well over 80 hours into it upon release, the game called to me, like a Siren on the rocks, begging me to play it once again. In this case, I was all too happy to oblige. Originally conceived in 2014, Unicorn Overlord was intended to emulate the classical tactical RPG's of the 90s without drawing inspiration from any one of them specifically. In doing so

To start the year, there were two games that I began playing in 2024 and finished in 2025, with Dragon Age: Origins being the first of the two. Neither of these games were new to me, as I had already played them before, thus they do not count toward my grand total of 52 games. Since I did finish them both in 2025 and have thoughts pertaining to them, I thought I may as well include them. Consider these bonus entries. Dragon Age: Origins began development at Bioware in 2002 a