Summer’s always been my productive gaming season. While normal people head outdoors to get a dose of vitamin D and a healthy glow, I prefer the cool luminescent embrace of my monitors. Sunshine gives me a rash; frame rates don’t.
Our annual family holiday to Spain was the usual bliss of heat, tapas, and mild Wi-Fi anxiety. I used the downtime to catch up on some long-neglected reading - mainly gamer back issues that have been gathering dust ever since my wife instituted the “no reading on the toilet” ban.
Somewhere between the campsite coffee and the cicadas, I compiled a list of games I’d like to finish before the year’s out. When we finally arrived home, I had a proper backlog hitlist… and somehow, I actually stuck to it. Four games down in just a few weeks: Quantum Break, The Forgotten City, Mafia: Definitive Edition, and Robocop: Rogue City.
Not bad for a man allergic to daylight.
Quantum Break
Felt like Remedy’s awkward middle child. Stuck somewhere between Alan Wake’s mood lighting and Control’s psychedelic office décor, it’s still worth a play-through. The TV-show-meets-game approach shouldn’t work, but somehow does (even if the episodes ran a bit long... cue me asking ChatGPT to fill in the scenes I skipped). The time powers are cool, you can feel this is a prototype for what they later perfected with Control. The story’s engaging too, but it suffers from the plague of that era... where every game with a story was just setting up a sequel that never happened. Left me with time travel blue balls.
The Forgotten City
This was a game I couldn’t stop playing. The time loop mechanic really works here. This title started life as a Skyrim mod and is genuinely clever, with writing and voice acting far better than they had any right to be. It scratched my Outer Wilds itch without the existential dread... more of a Groundhog Day with togas and moral dilemmas. By the end, I’d somehow become the nicest time god in Rome - not by choice, but because I couldn’t bring myself to be a jerk, even when the game clearly wanted to see what would happen if I did.
Mafia: Definitive Edition
A remake done right. It remembers what made the original special and didn't drown you with side quests or collectible fluff. The story’s tight, the pacing’s sharp, and every car handles like it’s made of cast iron... but somehow that just works. It’s a proper old-school mob drama - stylish, self-contained, and refreshingly free of filler. Sometimes less crime really is more fun!
Robocop: Rogue City
I was expecting a cheap nostalgia trip and came out grinning like a GenX idiot. This game is clunky in all the right ways... The devs clearly grew up wearing out the same VHS I watched over and over. Every line delivery, every thud of Robo's metal footsteps, every hidden directive lands perfectly. The writing nails Verhoeven's corporate cynicism, and the side missions have a weirdly touching mix of ultraviolence and empathy. It’s the first FPS in years that made me grin every time I reloaded... like feeding a fax machine bullets. Easily one of my most satisfying shooters of the year.
