Last Call BBS was "the last game from Zachtronics." Zach declared his intent to disband the dev team and strictly "keep the [existing] games running." That team, Zach included, went on to form Coincidence and make multiple new games. Yet somehow Palpatine Zachtronics returned ... for an Opus Magnum DLC. Huh.

I found the relatively-simple backstory behind De Re Metallica buried in a Steam discussion: an Opus Magnum fan campaign led to a collaboration with the original developers. (And I presume the resulting DLC was released "by Zachtronics" due to publishing-rights ownership.) Still, it's unusual for a studio to meaningfully update a nine-year-old game - and far from their most recent one - let alone to do so years after closing down.

Anyway. Despite a lack of re-tutorial-ization, it didn't take me very long to remember how these alchemy-programming puzzles work -- and to its credit, De Re Metallica meaningfully builds on the original game's mechanics in its new campaign.

Unfortunately it also didn't take me long to remember why I was "Meh" about those mechanics back in 2018. As puzzles ramp up in difficulty, they don't become more interesting at a high level, but rather more complicated and error-prone in low-level positioning and timing intricacies.

The constraints of Opus Magnum's tools don't really allow modular approaches to solving them; like I'd posted before, the fusion of "runtime instructions [...] with resource contention" means that it isn't feasible to split problems up into more-manageable components. Each moving part needs to mesh with some other part, and avoid colliding with every other part.

So complex puzzles take a whole lot of tedious fiddling, even before optimization, just to get working at all. Architecting and debugging large machinery takes considerable focus, yet when it's finally functioning as intended ... the result doesn't feel very satisfying.

And the story certainly didn't motivate me to power through that tedium. De Re Metallica's plot is fine enough, but its characters' personalities are flat -- I felt like I knew everything about them from one conversation, and I'm not interested in seeing what they get up to later.

De Re Metallica is more Opus Magnum. If you really liked the original, then you'll like this expansion too. Likewise if you didn't.

Better than: Last Call BBS's programming-puzzle sub-games
Not as good as: Shenzhen I/O
I probably should've expected more of the same: I guess I was just excited to see the "Zachtronics" name again.

Progress: Finished the first chapter.

Modulus: Factory Automation pitches itself as a chill and relaxing take on factory-building games like Factorio or Satisfactory, and I think that's a solid summary.

There are no enemies to fight, no weapons or defenses to build; and most buildings don't need upkeep resources like electricity or fuel. (Some late-game structures do have such requirements, but they're really the exception.) Modulus presents a very light plot - assemble robots and deliver them to a human colony - with a slight but still-straightforward twist of "monument" building instructions sent by a mysterious signal.

The factory components you work with in Modulus are all abstract shapes -- not like Factorio's iron gears made from iron plates, or like Satisfactory's rotors made from iron rods and screws, or even like Infinifactory's missiles made from a warhead and rockets and chassis sections. Here your manufacturing goals are three-dimensional arrangements of voxel-like cubes, in simple primary colors.

So there's not much in the way of immersive motivation or narrative stakes. Modulus is a game about plugging pieces together to fit a target output image; and as you move forward in the tech tree, those outputs become inputs to something else, often making you re-examine and refactor old machinery for higher throughput.

It's a relatively pure flow-control and optimization game. Which is great, if you're into that kind of thing. And I am! Although I miss the incidental sense of world-building that comes from assembling gears or rotors or rockets ... optimizing block factories is still fun.

Modulus does a mostly-good job of gradually increasing in complexity, though there were a few unexpected spikes that disrupted my flow state. Like the sudden increase in intermediate steps needed to make yellow paint (and hence yellow cubes). And like the stunted utility of freighters to transport components across the map; they become available relatively early, but a freighter-count limit forces you to keep fiddling with unwieldy conveyor belts for some time.

And especially the endgame-stage "GNN Gate" structure's resource requirements. By this time in the game, I'd already delivered the maximum amount of Bots and Androids and et cetera, so I demolished those factories and built other stuff over them ... and then the Gate revealed its input requirements. Blurgh.

But hey, I rolled up my sleeves and built new robot assembly lines anyway. I couldn't let Modulus defeat me so close to the end.

I do want to note a handful of quality-of-life issues, especially when managing freighter logistics: renaming freight hubs doesn't update the hub list in real-time, and that list isn't sorted in any coherent way. Modulus is still pretty new, though, so it's entirely possible that future patches will fix these things up.

Imperfections aside, Modulus did a great job of scratching my itch for a new automation game. And after putting in ... shit, nearly 100 hours!? Yeah, I'd say that it was worthwhile.

Better than: I dunno, No Man's Sky? Not many other factory-builders in my resume, yet.
Not as good as: Satisfactory
Roughly comparable, kinda, to: Factorio, which was more immersive but also - in retrospect - more annoying to work in.

Sixteen years ago, the Arab Spring was about to bloom; Super PACs had just been invented; Marvel's cinematic universe only had an Iron Man and a Hulk; Android and iOS were yet to depose BlackBerry; and I was absolutely loving the ultraviolence and over-the-top attitude of No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. Today, well, the world has changed -- but it's strangely comforting, playing No More Heroes III, to see that Goichi Suda hasn't.

The game's opening minutes are completely bonkers: Travis narrates some faux-Youtube videos describing a fictional 8-bit beat-em-up called "Deathman," then a short anime film shows a kid named Damon rescuing a fuzzy alien from its crash site, then you gain control of Travis Touchdown for a gameplay tutorial - after that fuzzy alien has grown up, returned to Earth, and launched a campaign of destruction - which keeps tutorializing through the first boss battle, and then once you defeat him and reach number 10 on the Galactic Assassin Superhero Rankings chart, in-engine cutscenes show Lord Fu a.k.a Jess-Baptiste VI (the grown-up fuzzy alien!) murdering the president and finally describing what this game is about.

Which, in case it wasn't clear already, is an excuse to copy the rank-climbing structure of No More Heroes and NMH2. Do side-jobs to collect cash, fight in designated matches to qualify for the next ranking, challenge the next-highest assassin in a bombastic battle, then do it all over again until you reach the top.

Sometimes, when your Beam Katana lands a killing blow, a slot machine will trigger invincibility or infinite battery power or a missile-launching armor suit. Sometimes your opponent will be a giant space monster, and you'll fly the suit up into orbit to meet it. Sometimes a rogue assassin will appear out of nowhere, take out your target, and become your new target. Sometimes the encounter will turn into a rhythm game, or a turn-based RPG! Just like its predecessors, NMH3 makes prodigious use of richly-varied mechanics and absurd twists to keep feeling fresh.

It also brings back the first game's open world, as a repository of optional activities and collectibles. Ride Travis's super-bike from downtown to the suburbs, from the barren salt flats to the, uh, mortar-scarred Normandy-esque beach. Mow lawns, pick up litter, wrestle alligators, rescue lost kittens. Unclog public toilets to turn them into save points!

And the music! As much as I miss how the previous games would riff on Masafumi Takada's iconic title theme, Nobuaki Kaneko's new compositions here are as energizing and pulse-pounding as ever.

When No More Heroes III is firing on all cylinders, it's like nothing else out there. ... Well, other than the first and second games. It's just like those! Which, so many years later, is extremely refreshing.

But, it misfires, too. In some ways just like its predecessors: the open world is relatively empty, like NMH1's that I wrote about in 2008, "The actual overworld ... is fairly dull, especially in the early game. ... about as exciting as untoasted bread." Graphical quality is a let-down, disappointingly similar to my musings on NMH2 in 2010, "The visual style is amazing. At a higher resolution, I imagine it would be absolutely incredible."

(NMH3 is "high def," sure, but its textures are - for a game released in 2021 - shockingly low-detail.)

And then there are storytelling misfires, which feel a little like, if you'll pardon my language, Suda-san smelling his own farts. It's been so long since NMH2 that I really could've used some recapping -- instead, NMH3 jumps right in with Shinobu and Bad Girl (who's ... alive, now?), Dr. Naomi (who's ... a tree, now?), Henry, and other characters I have virtually no memory of.

I'll cop to having skipped the Travis Strikes Again spinoff, but it's jarring how a resurrected Bad Girl - and her dad, who's also Travis's friend now? - are just here, without context. There's even a non-sequitur appearance from a character named Kamui who, I guess, is from The Silver Case. Suda's text adventure series. Huh.

This series has always been fond of referencing Takashi Miike (whom I know as the director of the live action Ace Attorney film); this time Travis and Bishop's chats about their favorite Miike works are too frequent. And long. On and on for minutes. Repeatedly.

I should temper my gripes about NMH3's reference-heaviness by pointing out how I love its reverence to other pop-nerd culture. When Travis and Sylvia encountered some alien eggs that looked exactly like Alien's facehugger eggs, when battle events beamed Travis up to a spaceship while playing an X-Files-like jingle, and when he came back to Earth crouching in a teleportation sphere like Terminator, I just couldn't stop grinning.

That qualified enjoyment is emblematic of my overall experience with No More Heroes III. Its vibe is definitely not for everyone, and its overall craftsmanship doesn't measure up against modern masterpieces -- what might've been negligible quirks in the late 2000s are harder to ignore, now. But it's not afraid of making mistakes, it wears its heart (and influences) on its sleeve, and as a games nerd myself I appreciate the fuck out of it.

Almost 20 years after proclaiming "punk's not dead", Suda is still proving it.

And yes, you can pet the cat!

Better than: Killer Is Dead, No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle
Not as good as: more ...modern? open-world action games like God of War Ragnarök
I have mixed feelings about: the Damon character being, apparently, inspired by Suda's feud with John Riccitiello over Shadows of the Damned. 'Cause while I'm certainly no fan of the guy either, I'm actually looking forward to that remaster.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps is slow. But not in the same way as Afterparty; Ori can run across screens just fine, and the plot is no mystery. The problem is that I'm not at all interested in that plot -- and Ori's gameplay, developing my abilities and exploring the map, is what moves at a snail's pace.

The first 10 minutes are all barely-interactive character setup, introducing the owl child you're supposed to go rescue. Seriously, ten minutes of running left and running right to portray some formative moments. Could've been a 30-second animation.

Then when the rescue mission starts, your first equipment upgrade is ... a torch, which is wielded so awkwardly (and whose flame is doused so regularly) that it's obviously a temporary placeholder. The next 20 minutes lead to a fight with a giant wolf, who posts up a big fat health bar but abruptly flees after a few hits. It's only afterward that Ori gets the "real" attack move.

And then it's still a good half-hour before the double-jump appears, and another half-hour (time check: 90 minutes of "gameplay") until the dash and mid-air Bash move show up. Why couldn't the game just start, like, here?

Meanwhile, NPC animals are giving you navigation breadcrumbs and sidequests - and the camera will occasionally cut over to that poor lost owlet - in events that feel more like interruptions than storytelling.

And the "dangerous obstacles can blend in with innocuous surfaces ... art in the foreground will cover up the action" frustrations I had in 2017 are, if anything, even more frequent in the sequel. Can this branch be jumped through, or not? Is this glowing thing destructible, or purely decorative? Will my attack interrupt this enemy, or is it gonna hit me anyway?

By the time Will of the Wisps gave me enough tools to feel like a videogame, I became convinced that it was really more interested in being a Miyazaki film. When given the choice between visually-clear platforms or a shiny piece of art, it'll choose eye candy every time. And it just won't stop wasting screentime trying to make me care about that little owl.

I'll at least credit it for learning something good from Blind Forest: it does, as previously noted, replace those insane consumable saves with normal location-based save points. Shit, it even has automatic checkpoints at meaningful map transitions like Batman: Arkham Asylum. How generous!

And I mean, it's not that Will of the Wisp's platforming mechanics are "bad," certainly no worse than Blind Forest's. I was just falling asleep on my way to them.

Progress: 7%, killed a Horn Beetle, talked to Kwolok the giant toad.

Afterparty isn't the Oxenfree successor I was hoping for.

For a sophomore effort, Afterparty's controls and interactivity are surprisingly amateurish. Not only does it still have the ambiguous dialog-choice timings and interruptions of its predecessor, it adds seemingly-at-random swaps between which of the two lead characters you're controlling. Its sidescrolling scenes make inconsistent use of depth, sometimes as background and foreground décor but sometimes as a continuation of the walking path. Characters waltz through doors as they're closing; the zoomed-out view obscures relevant scene details; message pop-ups from Twitter "Bicker" appear partially off-screen, such that reading them would require walking away from an ongoing conversation.

The game feels so unpolished that I'm tempted to call it unfinished. But all these issues could be forgiven for the sake of a compelling narrative -- and there lies Afterparty's gravest sin. It's boring.

Walking from point to point is slow, even when you know the right way to go (which you often don't). And while you're meandering back and forth over the map, opportunities to interact are rare; it's like the game just expects you to stare at environment art while holding a directional button.

At the four-level walkway up to Satan's house, for example, each level has two to three horizontal screens of space but only one (other than the elevators) prompt for conversation. Then in the house itself, an office room filled with thematic art and furnishings has a single prompt for conversation ... about a barely-visible fiddle, deep in the background. That's it.

The conversations themselves - not just those, I mean, all throughout Afterparty - are pretty dull. An occasional witty quip lands well, kudos to the voice cast, but characters' scripts seem to be half about reiterating worn-on-their-sleeves personalities and half about describing the current objective. Neither the protagonists nor the plot's mysterious backstory seem to develop at any pace. Two hours after teeing up the the question of how Milo and Lola died, the game has still told me absolutely nothing about it.

The drink-based dialog mechanic sounds promising - cocktails with different effects such as "Liquid Courage" or "Flirty Floozy" add unique options to a conversation - but the option occurs so infrequently I'd struggle to consider it a key game feature. (Though it's worth noting that I bailed before reaching the game's promised drinking-contest climax.)

I remember Oxenfree motivating me to unravel its mysteries, keeping me engaged and attentive, through thrilling environmental tension; and the cast's conversations reinforced that tension, as they handled the spookiness around them. Afterparty, despite its visually-striking setting, doesn't maintain any narrative tension of its own -- nor character intrigue, gameplay depth, or any other reason to hold my interest.

Better than: Kentucky Route Zero
Not as good as: Broken Age, Oxenfree
For a more interesting afterlife, see: Hades (2020), or Spiritfarer: Farewell Edition

Progress: Met Satan.

Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story is better at establishing its setting than Convergence was, at least. Though its writing is still soaked in Runeterra references I don't get; this time, I could clearly read character personalities and story scope directly from the game's own dialog.

Nunu's gameplay, meanwhile, does feel like a shallow reference to other games -- immediately to Uncharted 4, in particular that level with the hexagon-rock Scottish caverns. And like so many other 3D Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider and Uncharted imitators, this game's controls and map traversal just feel awkwardly loose, and prone to clumsy falls.

As the game shows off more "teamwork" between Nunu and his yeti friend Willump, I unexpectedly remembered - deep cut alert - Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom. Importantly, though, Willump doesn't take orders like Majin did; he works at his own irritatingly unpredictable pace.

Can I make this jump alone, or do I need to wait for Willump to come help me? Is Willump going to clobber that obstacle, or is he waiting for me to do something first? These moments aren't consistently signposted, and there's also no way to explicitly trigger them. Likewise for the moments in which Willump grabs Nunu, switching you to yeti controls, as well as the inverse return-to-Nunu moments.

It feels weird when these things just up and happen without warning, and it's slightly frustrating that Song of Nunu's otherwise-simple puzzles can be ambiguous about which parts of the solution you're actually responsible for.

While I appreciate Song of Nunu's (relatively) focused storytelling, its interactive walking and jumping and wall-climbing and switch-pulling can't help but remind me of other, better games.

Progress: Met Braum.

This is it! The one that worked: Hades truly feels like the culmination of lessons learned from Supergiant's previous games, combined into an experience that's compelling, exciting, and an audiovisual delight.

Like Bastion, Hades brings a variety of weapons into real-time action combat; but this time, each one really feels unique and meaningful. Like Transistor, Hades has a ludicrous amount of progression and upgrade options; but without confusing equip/upgrade modality, and with run-based resets justifying experimentation. And like Pyre, Hades deliberately separates story and action moments, building its narrative through conversational dialog inbetween fights; but now with full voice acting that seriously enhances its characters' personalities.

Unlike its predecessors, Hades had no trouble at all convincing me to repeat its "loop" -- maybe because the loop itself wasn't a surprise, as in, the fact that failing to escape Hades will respawn you ... back in Hades is coherent and clearly telegraphed. Or maybe because its fast-paced combat is legitimately fun, and stays fresh run after run thanks to randomized upgrades and encounter variety. Or! maybe because of the charming characters drawing me into its larger story, motivating me to go farther and unlock more of that story.

While Supergiant's earlier games felt like beautiful, incomplete experiments, Hades succeeds at bringing everything together: its plot and its cast, its action and its progression, all work and work well together. It's a good loop.

Key to that success is the amount - and consistently high quality - of written and voiced dialog. It continues to blow my mind that after dozens and dozens of runs, I never heard the same line twice! (Well, one time, I'm pretty sure that I got a repeat out of Lord Hades himself. Still!) This seemingly-endless supply of unique writing was critical in helping every repeating event feel new.

I can't commend Hades enough for making me like some rogue-like mechanics. I've enjoyed time-loop stories (Deathloop, Elsinore, Outer Wilds), and I've enjoyed some run-based games despite being rogue-likes (God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla, Middle-earth: Shadow of War - Desolation of Mordor) but -- Hades got me to sincerely appreciate the random encounters, upgrade combinations, and conversations I saw in each run. For the first time, I'm seriously reconsidering my c. 2014 declaration that I "hate this shit."

All that said, I do wish Hades didn't require quite so many runs to complete its story. Earning enough darkness to buy powerful upgrades took some grinding; completing enough runs to unlock the "ending" felt a bit silly; and then having to do more runs to incrementally progress character dialogs toward a "real ending" epilogue was a little annoying. The game's structural decision to restrict an NPC's dialog to one topic per run - requiring another run before they'll talk about something else - was especially frustrating when some characters acted like a bottleneck to multiple Prophecy side-quests.

(I'd also be remiss not to bring up the God Mode setting - a difficulty reduction which I absolutely needed - and how it must itself be upgraded by dying repeatedly.)

But despite wanting less-stingy story progress, I was happy to keep jumping into another run over, and over, and over again. Not just because the gorgeous art, incredible music, engaging characters, and compelling story felt worth the effort. Also because it's fun!

Better than: Deathloop, God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla, Transistor
Not as good as: well, until I play the sequel, Hades is kinda undisputed.
And, yes: you can pet the dog!

I may not be into League of Legends, but I was into the worldbuilding in Arcane -- and so a Metroidvania set in that world, with Sands of Time-style rewinds!, seemed right up my alley. Convergence: A League of Legends Story didn't ... go down that alley, though.

For one thing, Convergence doesn't line up much with Arcane's story threads or key settings, nor does it "build" a coherent world of its own. Its opening chapter is overflowing with casual references to people and places and concepts that I don't know or care about; I can only guess that the references will mean something to a League diehard, but as an outsider I didn't get anything out of all the lore-babble.

I did get something out of Convergence's parkour-ey traversal, which (at least in the early game) includes a pleasant variety of Prince of Persia-esque acrobatics, pole-jumping and wall-running and et cetera. Although I don't know if more gameplay hours might change that opinion, since I've read that there's no fast-travel.

But what really put me off Convergence was the combat, which simply has too many enemies. Even when turning the Battle Compositions difficulty down to "Light" - and, I do have to give the game kudos for discrete difficulty settings - the amount of fodder thugs and annoying fliers that keep showing up just feels like a chore.

Enemy volume also works frustratingly against Ekko's battle tactics, as dodge- and parry-able tells become impossible to see when two guys are visually overlapping, and then rewinding to undo one of their attacks will frequently result in another enemy hitting you anyway.

I gave up on Convergence fairly early, but with the distinct impression that it was made for LoL devotees who don't mind repetitive combat, and for whom Metroidvania and PoP influences could be neat surprises. As a fan of those latter ideas, but not the former, this game doesn't seem like it's for me.

Please don't misunderstand when I say: Viewfinder is more than a tech demo, but not much more.

Its perspective-twisting mechanics are impressive, making for some pretty neat puzzles! And a few levels add compelling twists, like electric circuits (which must stay complete in snapshots) and abstract art-style switch-ups (which affect level geometry!). But the vast majority of its puzzles are shallow. Viewfinder never builds the complexity to compare to, say, Antichamber.

It has a storyline, framing and explaining its physically-impossible world, as well as audio recordings from a cast of background characters. But the narrative isn't convincingly connected to what you're doing in-game; it feels very bolted-on. And those characters aren't ... interesting. Viewfinder doesn't have the personality or the drama of a Portal, or even a Magrunner: Dark Pulse.

And outside of the puzzles, the game isn't all that well-polished. Voiceovers play over one another. Music is moody, but dull and repetitive. Menus look like they were slapped together last-minute.

You can pet a cat, though.

Viewfinder has some pretty awesome technology powering its core mechanics, and a basically functional game surrounding them. There are plenty of worse first-person puzzlers. There are plenty of better ones, too.

Better than: Qbeh-1: The Atlas Cube
Not as good as: Q.U.B.E.
Comparable to: Quantum Conundrum

Blast Corps is a truly fond memory for me: using creative and wacky vehicles, like a side-swiping dump truck and a giant one-armed mecha, to demolish buildings in the name of safety. Sadly, 1997-era Rare quickly moved on to new business (GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, et al) and never looked back; after three decades of no sequels or remasters or reboots, I thought I might be the only one who remembers Blast Corps. But it turns out I'm not alone after all.

Instruments of Destruction succeeds brilliantly at fulfilling my nostalgia for Rare's N64 explosion-fest. Given a flimsy premise of knocking down unsafe structures, you pilot scores of wacky, experimental demolition vehicles through a series of destruction, racing, and move-boxes-to-places missions. And when I say "wacky" and "experimental" I mean...

• The Hiker: a tractor with a flipping platform, like a dang battlebot!
• The Puck: a helicopter that magnetically drops, then retrieves, a super-heavy wrecking puck!
• Goliath Grappler: a tank that shoots and retracts a giant harpoon!
• SuperRoller: a rolling sphere which magnetically collects debris! (yes, it's Katamari Damacy)

... are just a few of this game's wild and crazy Instruments. Nearly every mission, including "challenge" variants, introduces a new weapon-laden truck or cannon-turreted tank or laser-spitting helicopter or et cetera.

Some vehicles are difficult to control - particularly a handful of hovering craft whose radial symmetry obscures which direction is "forward" - but the game's immense arsenal means that there's always something new and inventive just around the corner. (Plus, awkwardly stumbling into stuff by accident is still pretty fun.)

And that's key to how Instruments of Destruction doesn't simply re-iterate Blast Corps, whose scope is relatively quaint by today's standards. Instruments re-envisions Rare's idea, and recaptures the feeling of its arcade-ey sandbox-ey demolition at a larger, modern scale.

The soundtrack is fucking rad, too.

What more could you ask for? Well, maybe a few quality-of-life improvements, like an easier way to navigate the level-select menu/map; and a mission radar to help find objectives, which are hard to see in some levels' terrain.

I guess I "could" ask for a cohesive open world inbetween the game's missions, and a compelling narrative told by interactive NPCs. A more-engaging world might've motivated me to check off more optional-challenge boxes, and dive deeper into its "Build & Destroy" vehicle-construction mode. That's really not something I'd expect from a solo developer, though. (Even one whose resume includes Red Faction: Guerrilla.)

As an explosive destruction sandbox with arcade challenges, and as a modern love letter to Blast Corps, Instruments of Destruction is more than good enough.

Better than: attempting to replay Blast Corps, for sure.
Not as good as: "a cohesive open world" with destruction, e.g. Red Faction: Guerrilla or The Saboteur
Pro-tip: turn off controller rumble, unless you want full-strength non-stop force feedback.