LOTR Vol. I
I played and finished J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I. I must confess I had to use a guide, because the game a) has an archaic UI with commands and text inputs and b) contains quite a few bugs and game-over triggers (some of them not immediate), so I went the "safe enjoyment" route.
It's been so long since I read the books, and I've watched so many times the movies, that I feel I must read the original materials again to see if the game departs a bit in certain areas, or if it is correct and were Peter Jackson's movies the ones reordering certain events. But in general it felt an interesting adventure, with lots of text (thankfully!) and attempts to provide multiple choices and some kind of open-world mechanics, although sometimes it also meant that you do things wrong and don't know until later that you've effectively screwed up the game and should start over. In any case, I will soon play Vol. II, The Two Towers and see how much did it improved (if anything).
Final Fantasy VII Remake
I recently finished Final Fantasy VII Remake, and my general feeling is of sadness. The graphics are amazing, the music is amazing, the new combat system is action-packed and probably the best in the series, the bosses look incredible, some fragments of the game are really good... But despite really trying to, I couldn't get to love this "remake". It contains so much filler content, so many dull conversations, boring and repetitive secondary quests and all kinds of tricks to increase the length of a playthrough, that I really wish they instead just rebuilt the engine and left everything like in the original FFVII but with new Graphics and sound (and if anything, the new battles). There are also story changes, some of them extensions (way more secondary characters lore and interactions and conversations), some of them not bad (Shinra is more evil, or the whispers of fate are two good examples), but some... make me be aware of the next title.
I put the nostalgia glasses on (as a friend of me says), but precisely because of that I enjoyed it even less, because I had began playing the original last year and stopped at the precise same moment this title ends, and comparisons are bad, but sometimes inevitable. Or maybe I've also grown and are no longer a hyped teenager experiencing his first Final Fantasy title on a quite decent PC port (2x the PSX resolution and enhanced 3D effects!). I'm not sure exactly what the combination is, but what I really think is that this title is an attempt to move the fans into a new game, instead of representing a tribute to the old one. We'll see with the second title.
Elden Ring
I tried to avoid the hype, but it caught me. I am not a fan of the Dark Souls games mostly because I don't have enough spare time to endure the slow training the games require, so I cannot say that my time so far with Elden Ring has been amazing. But it hasn't been bad either, I clearly see that it is a really good game, just quite punishing and forcing you to learn the hard way (by dying a lot). I get the feeling that the story is half open to your imagination half "We didn't care much about it" (no matter who they say collaborated in the lore and/or script), and similarly it is an open world "without borders" but also sometimes feeling chaotic or at least far from being as polished as Zelda: Breath of the Wild's world.
I am around 30 hours in, still exploring mostly on my own, but I began taking small hints from a guide (for now just a map marking a recommended order of exploring the various game areas), because sometimes frustrates to be exploring for hours and then you realize you are in a high level zone and simply trying to escape you die, and then have to decide between spending +1h on recovering the gold runes versus doing anything else (in the game or in real life). I appreciate the openness but it is often too much for my taste, I would have loved some extra guidance, again as Zelda or a GTA or an Assassin's Creed do.
I will finish the game but I am surely not going to go hunt all the secrets, of which there seem to be many. I'll focus my knight on levelling enough to kill the bosses and do all main quests, while exploring from time to time but keeping in check the limits. Time is lately my most valuable and scarce asset.