Vahan Arsenyan

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sandfall’s debut leans on the reactive parry/dodge trick to keep turn-based combat tense without abandoning the genre’s bones. The art direction does a lot of heavy lifting — Belle Époque painting brought to life — and the soundtrack earns its reputation.

Story sticks the landing in a way most JRPGs only attempt.

Cowboy Bebop

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Shinichirō Watanabe and Yoko Kanno built a show out of moods. Every episode is its own short film — genre-hopping, tonally precise, anchored by a crew that never overstays its welcome. The finale is one of the landing-the-plane moments other shows still chase.

See you, space cowboy.

Dishonored

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Arkane at their best. The Chaos system gives weight to how you play, and Dunwall is one of the most fully realised cities in the genre. Blink alone changed what I expect from movement in stealth games.

Dishonored 2

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Clockwork Mansion and A Crack in the Slab are the level-design high water marks of the decade. Emily’s powers feel mechanically distinct enough that a second run as her plays like a new game.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Billie Lurk’s toolkit trades some of the freedom of the previous games for a sharper, more curated experience. The Bank Heist mission is one of Arkane’s finest standalone sandboxes. A fitting send-off to the trilogy.

Divinity: Original Sin 2

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Larian’s combat sandbox is the rare turn-based system that begs to be broken. Elemental surfaces, teleport chains, polymorph nonsense — every encounter has a “wait, can I…” solution that almost always works.

The writing punches above its weight too. Fane is one of the best companions in the genre.

Dredge

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The genius is in how comfortably the mundane loop — cast, sell, upgrade — sits next to the dread that creeps in once the sun drops. Sanity, panic mechanics, and a map that slowly reveals what’s actually underneath you. Short, tight, and beautifully paced.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The benchmark long-running shōnen. Brotherhood is the adaptation that finally follows the manga end-to-end, and it shows: every faction, foreshadow, and side character lands by the finale. Hiromu Arakawa wrote one of the tightest ensembles in the genre, and Bones gave it the production it needed.

Hughes. That’s it. That’s the post.

Half-Life

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Black Mesa cold-opens on a tram ride and never breaks the camera until the credits. In 1998 that was revolutionary; it still works now. Scripted set-pieces, environmental storytelling, an arsenal that earns every weapon — every modern FPS owes this game something.

Half-Life 2

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

City 17 still holds up as one of the great game settings — oppressive, specific, lived-in. The gravity gun is a thesis statement about player agency, and Ravenholm is the most committed tonal pivot in the medium.

Half-Life 2: Episode One

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Smaller in scope but designed around a single brilliant idea: trap the player in the dark with one ally and one flashlight. The whole episode is a character study disguised as a shooter.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Trades City 17’s corridors for forests and back roads. The car-and- silo segment is one of Valve’s best set-pieces, and the final ten minutes are the most quoted cliffhanger in PC gaming for a reason.

Half-Life: Alyx

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Valve’s return to Half-Life and to VR. Saving it for when I can give it the headset time it deserves.

Inscryption

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Going in blind is the entire point, so I’ll keep this vague: Daniel Mullins built three games inside one shell, and the seams between them are the best part. Act 1 alone would be a tight little roguelike; what’s around it makes it a thing I won’t forget.

Path of Exile

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

GGG keeps adding mechanics faster than I can learn them, and somehow it mostly works. The build depth is unmatched in the genre — a passive tree, gem links, ascendancies, and cluster jewels mean two characters of the same class can play nothing alike.

Currency-based trade is still rough, but the league treadmill keeps pulling me back every few resets.

Portal

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Valve took one idea and built a perfectly paced game around it. GLaDOS’s deadpan menace, the cake, the dawning realisation that the chambers have walls you can break — it’s hard to think of a game that respects the player’s time more.

Portal 2

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cave Johnson alone makes this a top-tier writing achievement. Gels, funnels, and the co-op campaign expand the toolkit without diluting the ruthless puzzle design. One of the few games I’ve replayed straight through more than once.

SAND: Raiders of Sophie

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Customisable Tramplers stomping across a post-apocalyptic Austro- Hungarian desert is one of the more singular pitches in the genre. Waiting for the Early Access dust to settle before committing.

Sid Meier's Civilization VI

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Districts and unstacked cities push you into actually planning a map instead of optimising one tile. The expansions paper over most of the base game’s rough edges; with Gathering Storm on, late-game diplomacy finally has teeth.

Still the easiest “I’ll just play an hour” trap I’ve ever fallen into.

Slay the Spire 2

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mega Crit gave the formula another pass: new characters, new cards, and co-op for up to four. Early Access, but the runs already feel distinct from the first game.

Subnautica

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The way the map teaches you fear is masterful — every biome edge is a soft threat, every depth meter is a question. Building a base in the Grand Reef the first time is one of those gaming memories that sticks.

Played without any spoilers, which I’d recommend to anyone.

Subnautica 2

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Co-op was the one missing piece in the original. Waiting for Early Access to settle before diving in.

Subnautica: Below Zero

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Smaller in scope than the original, and it shows both ways. The map is denser and more curated, but the wide-open dread of the first game’s deep biomes is mostly gone. Still a beautifully made follow-up; the above-ice sections are a genuinely new vibe for the series.

Contextual Causal Bayesian Optimisation

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ICLR 2026

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

NeurIPS 2025

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Assessing the Quality of Denoising Diffusion Models in Wasserstein Distance: Noisy Score and Optimal Bounds

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Baldur's Gate 3

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Larian let reactivity off the leash. Every encounter has three or four answers the designers actually thought about, and the party banter keeps pulling me back in. Act 3 wobbles in places, but the highs are high enough that I forgive it.

Simulation and Monte Carlo Methods (TA)

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Teaching assistant for Simulation and Monte Carlo Methods, taught by Prof. Nicolas Chopin at ENSAE, Institut Polytechnique de Paris (Sep 2024 – 2026). The course covers:

Random variable generation and Monte Carlo simulation
Estimation error control and variance reduction
Importance sampling, stratification, and Latin hypercube sampling
Quasi-Monte Carlo, low-discrepancy sequences, and numerical integration

Large Language Models for Biomedical Knowledge Graph Construction: Information Extraction from EMR Notes

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Starts where most fantasy stories end — the demon king is dead, the party disperses. What follows is a quiet, devastating meditation on how humans live shorter lives than elves care to notice. Madhouse’s direction and Evan Call’s score do a lot of the heavy lifting.

The Mimic episode alone is better comedy than most shows manage in a full season.

Machine Learning II

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Graduate-level Machine Learning II at Yerevan State University, delivered over two consecutive spring semesters. The course builds on a first ML course and covers:

Probabilistic modeling and Bayesian inference
Gaussian processes and Bayesian optimization
Modern deep learning (architectures, optimization, generalization)
Causal inference foundations
Research reading and project work

Alongside the lectures I supervised student research groups on applied probabilistic modeling and related topics.

Large Language Models for Biomedical Causal Graph Construction

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Oxford Machine Learning Summer School

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Machine Learning Curriculum (ACA)

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Designed and delivered the Machine Learning curriculum at the Armenian Code Academy (ACA) across two summer cohorts. Target audience: industry-bound practitioners with a software background. Topics:

Foundations of classical ML (linear models, trees, ensembles)
Feature engineering, model evaluation, and experiment design
Deep learning essentials (CNNs, RNNs, Transformers)
Capstone project track where students shipped end-to-end models

The program emphasizes reproducible, production-ready ML practice.

Skoltech / MIPT Machine Learning Summer School

Mon, 26 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Picsart's Six-Month Course

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000