Everyone says "nostalgia", but unlike other (lower effort) Definitive Editions that released in 2025 (*cough* Dawn of War *cough), Battle Realms: Zen Edition isn't carried by memberberries alone.

The remake offers all the QoL changes you could hope for as someone who played the original. Most importantly, you no longer have to keep the unit resistance table on the side as its information is built into the interface. And the gameplay balance changes addressed all the problems of the original. None of my boomer strategies (read: cheesing with ranged unit death-balls) work anymore. I bet the multiplayer experience is completely different as a result. I wouldn't know because I still get felted by the AI, I could barely finish the campaign on Hard.

A 2D pixel-art "Gothic-like" in the same way that Fallout 3 is a "Fallout-like".

>Handing out water to farmers in Gothic
:)
>Sharing my sausage with every monk in Gothic 2
:)
>Any stepin fetchit quest in Drova
:(

This is the power of having an immersive world and the writing to sell it. Every water bottle handed out in Gothic comes with a promise that one day I will stand up to my bully and beat him up and have my revenge. In Drova, I can beat up some farmer's wife and he just watches because he knows all the NPCs in the game are invincible & they don't have enough of a personality for you to hold a grudge against them in the first place.

I'd even rather try to finish Risen than give Drova another chance.

The moral lesson RimWorld taught me over the years is that there's nothing wrong with putting man meat in my mouth, mm mm mmm.

Age of Decadence in space. Better combat, more quality of life changes & better balance. Companions are a nice new addition (for me, since I haven't played Dungeon Rats). Personally, I still like Decadence more because it felt bigger or more varied, but mainly because I preferred its setting. The endings could use a bit more variation but I liked the "plot twists".

Jack Orlando: A Cinematic Adventure is The Room of video games.

One would expect no less from yet another masterful Swede game (that was actually made in Poland, apparently). And Romans worked on it too.
The sheer brilliance of this game's writing cannot simply be understood by the common man.
You need to leave your mind, body & soul behind and put yourself in the shoes of Jarosław Parchański (the Swedish writer of this gem). It takes a lot of courage to make a video game about prohibition era America when you've personally never been to America and basically all your understanding comes from TV shows you got to see in late Soviet era Poland. And to also include brutally realistic & accurate representation of minorities (black people, but especially The Chinese - you get to see one of each). But that's not all. The man would go on to take a tour-de-France deep dive into sociopolitical topics such as the consequences of women's suffrage, corruption within the police departments, conflicts, economic stratification and homelessness.
Sure, some of the lines in the English translation sound weird, but you have to understand that in Jarosław's mother tongue (uh, Swedish?) it hit differently. In fact, one of the most intellectually fulfilling and amusing things about the game is using inductive reasoning to figure out what the author meant to say. I don't speak his tongue yet just like the great detective Jack Orlando, I could understand what they actually meant to say in the mistranslated lines. I can only thank Jack Orlando for letting me master these skills.
From a gameplay perspective, Jack Orlando breaks down barriers like no other point and click adventure game did before. You get to clean the streets both figuratively and literally. The amount of garbage that you can pick up is simply astonishing. Actual, literal garbage. On top of many items that serve no purpose but to confuse dimwitted players. This is story and gameplay intertwined. Peak realism - the story & just like in real life, not every object you put in your oversized trenchcoat (which also functions as a bag of holding; within your coat you can contain entire galaxies) is there to hint at a solution to a puzzle. And there is still more! You can threaten to fight or shoot every woman and minority you come across. God, I wish that was me! Unfortunately, Jack is a recovering alcoholic, so the one time he does shoot to kill (aim at the heads of) a group of street thugs, he misses every single shot.
I don't think I need to touch on the game's soundtrack. Even the filtered plebs agree that the soundtrack is out of league for 99.99% of adventure games at the time. What's more important in the sound department is the voice acting. Every single line in this game is fully voiced by the best of the best. If we lived in a just society, Jack's voice actor would have won every award out there for Outstanding Voice Performances. Sometimes he sweeps women off their feet so hard that he even sweeps their voice lines (directed towards Jack) for himself. Just brilliant. The rest of the cast is amazing as well. It's only a shame that many of them remain unnamed within the game and the manual, but their acting performances will be forever memorised in my mind. Especially the Irish cop, the Nightcrawler, Three Dollar Donna, Don Scaletti's right hand man, the wolfman, and of course... The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Jack Orlando is a detective like no other. Jack Orlando (the game) is an adventure game like no other. My playtime is absolutely minuscule compared to the hundreds of hours I've spent watching scholarly analyses of the game made by the vibrant and well alive Jack Orlando connoisseurs community. Not only do I highly recommend that you buy and play this game - you should also make sure to do it when it's at full price. The original developers will most likely not see a single cent, but think of it as a sign of respect. Alternatively, if you are already a fan of point and click video games, and you already own some on Steam, you should Help/Support in your Steam client, look up every other adventure game you own and press the "I want to permanently remove this game from my account" button. That way they will remain hidden, as they should be, for no other adventure can live in the presence of Jack Orlando. You will forget them all anyway. Jack is the only one you need, Jack.

A point and click adventure game / visual novel with RPG elements (à la Disco Elysium). Your "Choices Matter" in the same way they do in the Telltale Walking Dead games, but you get a lot more of them, some require specific backgrounds and some are playthrough-exclusive if you're a completionist. Well, "exclusive" in the sense that the game has an annoying auto-save system and only one save per playthrough. Normally, I appreciate an ironman mode but in this game it's plain annoying. There are no real bad ends, no ways to die, and all the puzzles are easy enough that that even someone like me (who never finished a proper point'n'click adventure game without reading a guide at least once) could solve them easily. Basically, the save system serves just to arbitrarily increase your playtime, so that you're forced to go through the same dialogues again and again. No fast forward text / skip until new options available. Personally, I went through the first act 3 times, second act 2 times and the third/final act just once. Some backgrounds/traits are significantly more useful than others and you only get minimal opportunities to act in a counter productive manner / consequences for failing checks. I'm mentioning that specifically because that's one of the things Obsidian's Alpha Protocol did right (unpolished as it was), and you could get unique content when you went out of your way to mess things up. I was pleasantly surprised that the game was quite "historically accurate" - compared to my pessimistic expectations. I'm no historian, and I'm sure there are plenty of inaccuracies but by Hollywood standards this is basically a documentary. Sure, they shoehorned in all the possible medieval archetypal characters they could, but nothing that would ruin the suspension of disbelief.

TL;DR
Play it twice it's quite nice; on run number three, nothing new you'll see.