You and I have the same opinion and status with respect to TWD. :D Machinarium is great.

Regarding Borges, every one of his short stories is great, and I envy you getting to read them all for the first time. They're bundled in two collections (Ficciones and El Aleph). Both are amazing.

If I had to recommend just a few... Gah!

I guess Funes the Memorious; The Garden of Forking Paths; The Library of Babel; Tlon, Uqbar, Orbiis Tertius. Impossible. I'll end up listing all of them. The Theme of the Hero and the Traitor.

I mean, Borges is just amazing. He's like Michael Chabon: passionately in love with speculative fiction (Verne, Lovecraft, Poe, etc.) and popular entertainment, but still a Serious Artist in terms of craftsmanship. But he doesn't have the Serious Fiction Writer’s need to be depressing like Chabon sometimes does. A somewhat more literary PKD, but not drug-induced: you can enjoy his stories as spec fic stories while also feeling like you're reading important literature.

Riven does date me a bit. Ive heard Walking Dead first season is excellent and I have a lot of respect for Telltale games, but the Walking Dead universe is a bit too fatalistic for my taste and I consider it an interactive rich story walking simulator so its disqualified from the point and click genre. ;) *cough* I might actually own Walking Dead season one, and never played it... don't judge.

I completly forgot about Machinarium, which I absolutly love. So thats something newer than Riven, but Machinarium while I consider a near perfect point and click game, to be what it is, heart warming and endearing, it can't use a dark pallet to tell its story. So its kind of a limited spectrum narrative, that and you can only get so deep with a none verbal game...

Regarding Borges, I'll check him out, any works of his you would consider a seminal piece?

The artist and co-project-lead, Victor Pflug, is a huge Blade Runner fan (both the movie and the game), so I'm sure it was an influence on him. I love PKD's writing, but I'm somewhat less wild about the movie and (I'm embarassed to admit) I've never played the game. His short stories definitely were an influence though -- questions about identity and memory and the fluid boundaries between reality/fantasy and man/machine. Jorge Luis Borges, who dealt with similar(ish) themes in his work was another literary influence.

Anyway, so glad to hear that you enjoyed the game -- especially knowing that you're an old schooler for who uses "since Riven" as opposed to "since first season of The Walking Dead" as a measure of time. :D

Hi Mark, thanks for an awsome game. Your posts elsewhere in the forum helping people complete achievents helped me through getting 100% achievements in Primordia. Especially the "Know it All achievement" ;) Primordia is probably my favorite point and clicks since Riven. Was Blade Runner an inspiration for Primordia? It has a very simular dark and rusty sci-fi feel.

Thanks!