The Expanse: A Telltale Series by TelltaleTelltale (The Expanse: A Telltale Series – Telltale Games)
Experience the exciting universe of The Expanse like never before in Telltale’s latest adventure, The Expanse: A Telltale Series. Follow Cara Gee, who reprises her role as Camina Drummer, and explore the dangerous and uncharted edges of The Belt aboard the The Artemis. From scavenging wrecked ships in a zero-g environment, to surviving a mutiny, to combating fearsome pirates, you make the difficult choices and reveal Camina Drummer’s resolve in this latest Telltale adventure.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

There are rumours that I “just checked” if this game works at all and finished it 6.5h later in one sitting. I can neither confirm nor deny that. I’m also very sleepy today.

I got this Telltale-game to my birthday and decided to give it a go yesterday. Didn’t expect much and was already kinda annoyed when the starter suggested it requires a gamepad controller (turns out it doesn’t – it can be played with a mouse too). So I got my good old sturdy Steam Controller from next room, jacked it in and… watched it crash. To be fair: I was starting it on Linux, and this game is not made for this. So I checked briefly with the ProtonDB and switched the version from Experimental back to Proton 8.0.

Smooth sailing from here. Game started without a hitch, the controller was recognized, the provided Steam layout worked perfectly fine and it did not crash once until I finished the game hours later. It would also seamless switch to mouse input when this was touched but I decided to keep playing with the controller.

The graphics are nothing to write home about. Sound and music feel immediately like home though, as my wife put it (we’re both fans of the books and show). There are some puzzles but nothing too complicated and – thankfully – sparse. Same for some quick actions that require to hammer a certain button in time (without penalizing hitting a wrong button too). The Zero-G walks are amazing and gave my brain something to chew on when the ceiling suddenly became the new floor.

I won’t talk about the story itself, but I did like that it shows percentages of how other players decided in key situations after each chapter. Kinda interesting to know that there are other outcomes and that also makes me want to play it again. There are plot twists, backstories that may be uncovered, drama, tension, violence, love and death (yes yes, it is a telltale game :D).

Can recommend. Get it and don’t forget to change the air filters 🤓

SpaceBourne 2 by DBK GamesDBK Games (SpaceBourne 2)
The official website of indie game studio DBK Games, the developer of SpaceBourne series and Mesel.

So this was recommended to me by Patola and while I usually do not buy into an early access game I made an exception. I’ve only seen one hour of the game so far but this promises a lot of fun. It’s still very rough, that I can tell – and often inputs do not register or register double. Nonetheless I felt right at home and after a lot of fiddling with the inputs I was happy enough to give it a spin with my X52 Pro (that was indeed detected just fine after the initial tutorial).

So after learning the basic ship navigation and shooting up some drones during the first quest I got ordered to investigate some asteroids.

There were of course some pirates hanging around and the shoot-out did take more time than I’d like to admit. For some reasons I could not for my life get any target lock so all the shooting had to be done with the good old Mk 1 eyeball without having an idea about reach (or even arcs?) of the weapons. Probably a bug. Or user error. The jury is still out on that.

Next was a surprise. After parking the ship in stealth I was ordered to exit and do a little space walk to clear a hidden platform of hostiles. Space diving was not on the things I expected 🤯

Anyway, after some more shooting, and some more explosions, I was back with the contractor and the reward was for reasons yet unknown a freakin robot head. That kicks off a quest to reassemble that poor thing. For some reasons this unfolded into an epic space battle where two different fractions slugged it out in the middle of an old battlefield with me, the contractor helping with the parts and the robot head in the middle – also somehow attacked by scavengers as a 4th faction. What a chaos!

After surviving this I got recommended to someone else to get the robot assembled again. The person that would be able to do this resides on a station in another system though, which means travelling through a… stargate. Awesome! After filing a flight plan and requesting passage I had to line up my entry and found myself in another system – surrounded by illuminated advertisement of all things, of course.

An in-system jump later I docked at a station and found the contact that would help me with the robot. For a price, of course.

This was where I decided to stop for today. So much stuff happened during the first 60 minutes of this and judging by the in-game menus there is a lot more to come. There are skill trees, load-outs, factions and many systems to explore. Yes, it’s not as beautiful as StarCitizens but it’s perfectly playable already and I’m getting Wing Commander vibes from that and this feels rather good.

Deliver Us The Moon by KeokeN InteractiveKeokeN Interactive (Deliver Us the Moon)
Deliver Us The Moon is a Sci-Fi thriller set in an apocalyptic near future where Earth's natural resources are depleted. In an effort to solve the energy crisis, global powers created the World Space Agency and secured a promising new source of energy on the moon.

Played Deliver Us The Moon on Linux PC. What a ride. Took me 6h 21m to complete and I only left the keyboard twice briefly. The story had me hooked from the very beginning 🤓

Got it on GoG, installed it with Lutris and played it without a hitch or single crash [of the game *cough].

Can recommend. Thrilling, casual puzzles, some sneaking around and very thick atmosphere (without much oxygen at times).

Fly Dangerous on Steam by Jay FaulknerJay Faulkner (store.steampowered.com)
Extremely high skill-ceiling 6dof flight racing in a variety of environments with leaderboards, multiplayer and VR support

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1781750/Fly_Dangerous/ released today as early access. It’s free, fast, opensource and has . The flight model is inspired by games like (Newtonian flight model). Oh and it has . o7

Daedalic Entertainment (Daedalic Entertainment)
In Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes, players return to the world of adventure game hit Edna & Harvey: The Breakout. Be prepared to meet many old friends and discover many new hand-made cartoon locations, realized in full HD glory!

Lilli holding hands with all the Harveys each representing a certain prohibition from the grownups

Finished Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes. That was a fun sequel! No idea about the English version but the voice acting for the German version is superb. It may be a little bit short. Steam claims I spent 7.5h in it but I’m pretty sure that I left it running at some point to deal with real-life stuff.

Anyway, good point and click fun. Can recommend.

Elite Dangerous (elitedangerous.com)
Elite Dangerous brings gaming’s original open world adventure to the modern generation with a stunning recreation of the entire Milky Way galaxy.

Elite Dangerous screenshot showing badly damaged ship systems

That went well. Hey, 4% on life support is not to shabby for almost flying into a sun while poking around in the menus 😀 And I even managed to land after finally finding the right button for the landing gear 🤣

X4 Foundations (Egosoft)

Couldn’t pass on this offer. It’s a 2nd hand Perseus Sentinel. Engines purrs like a kitten.

Perseus Sentinel with decent paintjob

I can see me using this ship for a good while from now. It’s fast and responsive. I’ve trouble keeping it under control on occasion. Wonder how it would do in a Kessel Run 😛

X4 Foundations (Egosoft)

What are the odds to stumble over an abandoned Cerberus Vanguard in perfect condition within Argon Prime?

It has my name on it. It’s mine now.

It’s legitimate salvage now.

Alex Kamal, The Expanse

Must be my lucky day. First the Minotaur Raider that fell into my lap earlier – that pirate scum decided to flee – and later this beauty 😀