Hugin & Munin Publishing

Like many Paradox titles, Stellaris lives and evolves through an extensive DLC model. This is hardly unique within Paradox’s catalogue, but Stellaris handles DLC somewhat differently than, for example, Europa Universalis IV , and those differences matter more than they first appear. In EU IV , DLCs traditionally focused on specific regions, nations, or political systems. Even without owning a particular expansion, you could still benefit indirectly from most new mechanics; you simply did not get the full experience when playing the nations or areas explicitly enhanced by that DLC. Over time, many once-essential mechanics—such as those introduced in Art of War or Res Publica —have been folded into the base game, making the barrier to entry much lower today. Stellaris , by contrast, divides its DLCs into several distinct categories, each with a very different impact. Species Packs—such as Plantoids , Lithoids , Necroids , Aquatics , Toxoids , and more recent addition...

When Torment: Tides of Numenera was first announced, I was immediately drawn in. Billed as a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment , it promised the same deeply philosophical storytelling, complex moral choices, and richly imagined companions that made the original such a landmark. I backed the Kickstarter early on, joining a record-breaking campaign that reflected the sheer excitement surrounding the project. Even now, years after its release, Torment remains a remarkable experience. While some critics and players note that it didn’t fully deliver on every promise made during the Kickstarter, the game excels in areas that matter most: story, dialogue, worldbuilding, and the sense that every choice carries weight. Companions feel alive, each with their own agendas, quirks, and perspectives, and the game’s visual design—while more grounded than the abstract planes of Planescape —is polished, evocative, and frequently stunning. One of the game’s standout systems ...

As reported by both Polygon and Reactor , Brandon Sanderson is once again talking openly about screen adaptations of his work—and, perhaps more importantly, about the degree of control he intends to retain over them. That detail alone makes this worth paying attention to. Hollywood adaptations of popular fantasy and science fiction have a long and uneven history, and optimism rarely comes without caveats. Still, the idea of a Cosmere adaptation—handled with care, budget, and authorial involvement—is difficult not to find at least somewhat intriguing. One of the more reassuring points in the reporting is Sanderson’s insistence on creative control. This is not a minor detail. Even the strongest source material can be mangled beyond recognition in the wrong hands. The Rings of Power is a good recent example: lavishly produced, technically impressive, and yet—at least to my mind—fundamentally hollow. Beautiful, highly polished crap is still crap. Sanderson’s position ...

When Darkest Dungeon was released, it didn’t just add another entry to the long tradition of dungeon-crawling games—it fundamentally changed how failure, trauma, and psychological pressure were represented. Instead of focusing solely on hit points and loot, the game introduced stress as a central mechanic, forcing you to deal with the mental consequences of repeatedly sending people into horrifying places. It’s a small shift on paper, but one that gives the entire game a very different tone. A Bleak Setting The game is set around a ruined ancestral estate, long abandoned and corrupted by unspeakable forces. As the heir, you return to reclaim the land and purge the darkness festering beneath it. From this estate—known simply as the Hamlet—you recruit heroes, manage resources, and plan expeditions into nearby dungeons. The narrative framing is minimal, but effective, reinforced by the narrator’s grim delivery and the oppressive art style. The Hamlet: Your Only Safe H...

At first glance, How to Invent Everything looks like it might be a prepper’s dream—or perhaps a post-apocalyptic one. Not a guide to surviving disaster as much as a handbook for restarting civilization after it has already collapsed. That distinction matters. This is less about stockpiling and bunkers, and more about rebuilding knowledge from the ground up. And no, reading it did not turn me into a prepper. The book presents itself as an official manual meant to accompany a time machine, written by someone from the future—or at least an alternate timeline. Its purpose is simple: if a time traveler gets stranded in the past, this is the book meant to help them rebuild civilization and eventually make their way home. Ryan North, in this framing, is not the author of the manual itself, but the person who recovered it and added the introduction and editorial framing. The tone is relentlessly humorous. The manual is filled with jokes, footnotes, puns, and playful asides a...

Across the Obelisk is a roguelite deck-building RPG published by Paradox Interactive in 2021, and one that has quietly grown into one of my favorite examples of the genre. At first glance it may look like yet another Slay the Spire descendant, but it quickly becomes clear that it is doing several things differently—and in many cases, better. One of the most unusual features for a roguelite is that Across the Obelisk supports full co-op play. I haven’t explored this aspect extensively, but it is easy to imagine how appealing it is to share the planning, builds, and inevitable disasters with other players. It feels like a natural extension of the party-based design. As with many Paradox titles, the game follows a long-term DLC strategy. New content is released gradually through paid expansions, often accompanied by free updates. While this model isn’t universally loved, Paradox has shown with games like Europa Universalis IV , Stellaris , and Cities: Skylines that i...

This reflection is based solely on reading the first book in the series, Harm None , which often serves as the entry point and tone-setter for M.R. Sellars’ Rowan Gant Investigation novels. The series frequently appears on recommendation lists for urban fantasy, paranormal crime, and supernatural mystery, and after seeing it mentioned often enough, I decided to give it a try. The premise centers on Rowan Gant, who works as a consultant on occult and supernatural matters for the St. Louis Police Department. Although mentioned only in passing, Rowan is also trained as an electrical engineer, a detail that remains largely unexplored in the narrative. In practice, the focus is firmly on his role as an investigator with specialist knowledge of magic and Wiccan belief rather than on any technical or scientific background. Harm None follows a fairly traditional crime-novel structure: a series of violent and often gruesome murders, a methodical police investigation, and a g...

I don’t remember exactly when I first read Neuromancer . It must have been in Swedish translation, sometime in the early to mid-1990s, before I started reading almost exclusively in English. I later reread it in English perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, and most recently returned to it in early 2025 after finally reading the rest of the Sprawl trilogy. Despite the book’s enormous influence on me, I was surprised by how little of the actual plot I remembered. In many ways, it felt like reading it again for the first time. What lingered from those earlier readings were fragments and iconic moments rather than a coherent narrative: the heist against the Sense/Net headquarters to steal the ROM construct of McCoy “Dixie Flatline” Pauley, using a fabricated terrorist threat as a diversion; the tense encounters with and incursions through black ice; the strange, dreamlike quality of cyberspace itself. Even if the details had faded, it was immediately clear on rereading that Ne...

Rewatching True Detective takes me back to a time when streaming still felt special and HBO was the undisputed standard-bearer for prestige television. This was an era when ambitious, slow-burn storytelling was allowed to breathe, and when the promise of a limited series actually meant something. The Wire still stands, in my mind, as the finest television series ever produced, and it is no small thing to even be mentioned in the same sentence. Yet True Detective has earned that comparison, alongside shows like Mindhunter , as one of the defining crime series of its generation. So what is left to say about True Detective that hasn’t already been said? Perhaps not much in terms of analysis—but revisiting it years later offers a chance to see it through slightly different eyes. A Brief, Spoiler-Free Recap The first season of True Detective is set in Louisiana and follows two homicide detectives, Martin Hart and Rust Cohle, over many years. The story begins with the...

I have been playing 4X games since first or second grade, when a friend introduced me to the original Civilization . Not long after, I had my own copy, and between Civilization and Civilization II I must have sunk hundreds of hours into conquering, optimizing, and reshaping the world. One of my favorite parts was always the science victory: launching a spaceship to Alpha Centauri. But there was always a lingering disappointment—the journey ended just as it felt like it should begin. When Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (SMAC) was released in 1999, it finally scratched that itch. Unlike Civilization: Call to Power , which came out the same year and largely stuck to the classic Civ formula, Alpha Centauri fully commits to the idea of what happens after humanity leaves Earth. While Call to Power experimented with concepts like public works, it never quite clicked for me. I enjoyed micromanaging settlers and engineers, terraforming every last tile, and turning the entire ...

Benjamin Wallace’s The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto promises an investigation into one of the great modern enigmas: the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Having finished the book, I cannot honestly say that I am any closer to knowing who Nakamoto really was—or is. But perhaps that is the point. The mystery itself may be as essential to Bitcoin’s mythology as the technology that underpins it. Rather than delivering a definitive answer, Wallace offers something more diffuse but still compelling: a guided tour through the early history of Bitcoin and the many people who orbited its creation. The book introduces a wide cast of characters—developers, cryptographers, entrepreneurs, ideologues—many of whom are fascinating figures in their own right. Along the way, it also provides a vivid look at the cypherpunk movement, whose blend of idealism, paranoia, technical brilliance, and political ra...

In Solium Infernum you take on the role of a scheming archfiend in Hell, vying to become its next ruler. Originally released in an earlier incarnation many years ago, the 2024 release finally gave me an excuse to dive in, and it is a game I have been curious about for quite some time. At its core, Solium Infernum sits somewhere between a 4X game and grand strategy, mixing warfare, sorcery, and political intrigue as the main tools for advancement. It is not a game about rapid expansion or overwhelming force, but about positioning, timing, and outmaneuvering your rivals. In that sense it immediately sets itself apart from most of the genre. The game is wonderfully atmospheric, with a very distinct visual style and art direction that fits its infernal setting perfectly. It does a solid job of onboarding new players: the tutorial is competent, the in-game Codex is excellent and explains every system in detail, and there is also a healthy supply of community-made guides ...

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer is an easy book to misread before even opening it. One could be tempted to dismiss it as the wishful thinking of an aging technologist doubling down on ideas he has championed for decades. Yet that would be unfair. Whatever one thinks of Kurzweil’s conclusions, his arguments are not built on vague optimism but on long-running trends in technology, economics, and human development. At the heart of Kurzweil’s worldview lies what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns : the idea that technological progress does not advance linearly, but exponentially. Each generation of technology provides the tools to develop the next one faster, leading to a compounding effect. This is not a fringe idea. Variations of it have been articulated by others, such as Lars Tvede in Supertrends , and it has historical support across multiple industrial revolutions. Moore’s Law is the most familiar expression of this phenomenon. While transistor densi...

Sam Kean’s The Icepick Surgeon is a collection of loosely connected stories from the history of science, focusing on figures whose work sits somewhere between ambition, moral blindness, and outright harm. In tone and structure it is reminiscent of books like John Gribbin’s Science: A History or Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything , though Kean’s approach is far more narrative-driven and character-focused. Like those books, it broadly moves forward in time, but with a much narrower scope. Kean frames the book around twelve themes, each anchored by a “mad scientist” or morally questionable figure. That framing immediately invites certain expectations. Who doesn’t enjoy the mad scientist trope—megalomaniacal brilliance, dangerous ideas, intellect unrestrained by ethics? What the bo...

As the year draws to a close, it feels like a good moment to look back at what I’ve been reading. As usual, the list is a mix of fiction and non-fiction, comfort rereads and long-overdue titles finally crossed off the list. Nothing this year was truly life-changing, but several books were quietly excellent—and a few were notable for less flattering reasons. In total, I read 39 books in 2025 , split almost evenly between fiction and non-fiction: Fiction: 19 Non-fiction: 20 The balance felt right, even if the non-fiction titles ended up leaving the strongest overall impression. Highlights and Lowlights Best Non-Fiction Andy Greenberg – Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers This was the standout book of the year. Sandworm is both gripping and unsettling, and it genuinely made me rethink how fragile modern society is. Reading it in the aftermath of events like the 2024 CrowdStrike outage—and the Cloudflare outage in...