I was doing some "longer test runs" of Malcolm's Revenge - mainly because the game was giving me trouble on my machine, and all of a sudden felt like having real fun. After abandoning Hand of Fate in Volcania, I am finding the first chapter of Malcom's Revenge incredibly engaging for a quest-type game where I still remember most of the puzzles, and the sandbox feeling it has is just great.

Right now trying to see if nocd is an answer to the crashes I am getting once in a while, and how many points I can scrore before leaving the first island.

ELEX

Making steady progress in this game. I did a ton of quests in the Berserker settlement and eventually joined them. Which is kinda funny considering who the protagonist used to be, but it still felt right, given his current situation. I like the quest design here, since it's very reminiscent of Gothic/Risen. As in those games, there are multiple ways to solve certain tasks, and your choices can have interesting consequences further down the road.

I also like the joinable NPCs and their personal quest lines, especially Caja and Falk. You get to learn more about the world of ELEX while doing those, and some unexpected things can be revealed. From what I gather, only one NPC can follow you around at any time, while the others wait at the camp. Unsure if that changes later or not. I will say, their pathfinding is surprisingly decent, and they make good use of their jetpacks to keep up with the protagonist while moving over rough terrain.

On the less positive side, I feel that the gameworld of ELEX is unnecessarily big, and filled with mostly empty locations outside of the faction hubs and their immediate surroundings. As mentioned elsewhere, the Gothic 2 world size is ideal for me personally. Anything bigger than that starts feeling tedious to traverse. Though I will give ELEX credit for providing a nice fast-travel mode, which makes sense considering the protagonist's background.

Another thing that I'm not particularly keen on is the leveling system. Unlike in the Gothic games, you don't get a lot of XP from fighting monsters here. So you need to do a bunch of quests to level up. This would be fine, if ascending the ranks within your chosen faction didn't have a hard level requirement, in addition to the usual quest progression. For example, becoming a Warrior requires you to gain the approval of several people in the Berserker settlement (fine) and be level 15 (not fine). This took a lot of grinding, and when I finally made it, the next rank had a level requirement of 25, which was disappointing.

Overall, I do like ELEX, and I'm still having fun playing it. But it's not quite as good as Gothic 2 and Risen 1, which are my favorite PB games to this day. Nonetheless, I'll keep at it and see how things go.