Hades (2020), despite taking place in Hell, told a somewhat light story about family drama. Hades II wastes no time establishing more dire stakes.

Chronos has returned, and he's not especially happy with his children. The underworld's been overthrown and Hades, Persephone, and Zagreus have all been taken captive -- but Melinoë, newborn daughter of Hades, was smuggled away. And after being raised and trained by the witch Hecate, she's ready to enact her own revenge plan. Death to Chronos.

So where Zagreus fought his way through hordes of the dead, from the Hall of Hades up to the surface, Mel essentially does the reverse: fights through Chronos's hordes on her way down to the Hall, to face the Titan of Time. And, like her brother, she wields a variety of mythical weapons with distinct techniques and tactics; collects helpful boons from the gods of Olympus; and when overwhelmed, retreats to her home base to recuperate and power up.

Yeah, it is the same formula as last time. Hades II isn't interested in changing what worked, or up-ending the successful balance of action and storytelling that Supergiant found before; other than Melinoë's omega-moves and mana bar (effectively replacing Zagreus's bloodstones), jumping into Hades II felt just like I was playing more Hades. Which I was already happy with!

But what's remarkable about Hades II is how much more it does with that formula. More combat abilities, more progression mechanics and collectibles, more between-run activities, more characters to chat up... even more levels to run through!

(In addition to the underworld path - the journey downward to Chronos - Mel can take a surface-world path to defend Mount Olympus! And can unlock partially-scripted "Chaos Trial" challenges! And "Dream Dive" runs which randomly re-order the map regions every run!)

Hades II expertly combines old and new content, so that even when Melinoë sees a familiar face, it never feels too familiar.

And it's the same with her mid-run powerups: returning boon-givers have exciting new bonuses, plus all-new blessings like sun-powered stuns from Apollo! and Hestia's blazing flames! (and more!) There are new ways to build strength through complementary boons, including Infusions which become more powerful with boons of appropriate elements. And then there's Selene, whose Path of Stars boon is an entire damn upgrade tree itself.

My one gripe with Hades was that unlocking NPC conversations, and finally seeing the epilogue, took more and more runs -- I thought the dialog blocks could've been more streamlined. But Hades II solved that problem in a surprisingly different way: by giving me so much to do - so many upgrades and prophecies and character bonds to fulfill, so many choices of what to do for my next run, there are fucking farm plots to plant seeds and grow spellcasting ingredients - that I had no problem sustaining the motivation to keep playing.

This is of course on top of the same incredible art, music, writing, and voice acting that Supergiant has become known for.

"I Am Gonna Claw" is a particular highlight of Hades II's soundtrack, along with several other catchy tunes from Scylla and the Sirens.

I got so into Hades II that I even tried some of its more-difficult post-game content, using the Oath of the Unseen and unveiling statues of Night's Champion. ... not all of them, 'cause I'm still not that "good" at the game's fast and tactical combat, and continued relying on God Mode's damage reduction like last time. But I legitimately enjoyed getting to see each boss's alternate Vow of Rivals form.

Not since Portal 2 have I been so thoroughly impressed by a sequel that doesn't change the original. Like, it's not trying to appeal to a new audience or invent a new style of play or re-visit how the first game works -- it's just more. So much more. And I can scarcely imagine what could possibly follow it.

Better than: Hades (2020)
Not as good as: really, I can't think of what could be better at what Hades is doing.
I'm serious about those catchy siren songs: and almost felt bad when defeating Scylla interrupted them.

I wish that U.V.S. Nirmana's store page was clearer about what "kind" of game it is -- especially what it isn't. Nirmana is not a story told with puzzles, like Kaizen: A Factory Story or Exapunks or even SpaceChem. It's more like Molek-Syntez or the sub-games within Last Call BBS: puzzles, with a theme.

The puzzle mechanics aren't bad, though they are definitely non-straightforward. And I'd say the lack of narrative justification, an absence of context for its core conceit, makes Nirmana feel more confusing than it has to be.

That core conceit being digital metaphysical signal processing. ... I think.

Even setting aside its sense of mechanical strangeness, though, I'm simply not interested in solving the puzzles for their own sake. A single line of flavor text preceding each challenge is not enough to keep me engaged.

Not to downplay the effort it takes to invent puzzle mechanics, and implement challenges around them. But "just puzzles" isn't sufficient motivation for me.

When Steam Machine reviews enlightened me about its hardware details, I wondered how my home theater PC - which was a gaming desktop, before my last upgrade - compared to those specifications. (I'm imagining that future Steam games might be benchmarked with them.) And when the specs turned out to be fairly similar, then I wondered: what's up with this SteamOS thing?

Now, after a few weeks of using SteamOS for living room gaming - Hades II is going great, by the way - as well as casual video streaming, I'm overall happy with it.

• Installation wasn't completely painless, but very close; the first-launch setup wizard needed some CLI help finding my network adapter. After that, everything wizard-ed just fine.

• For my personal use-case, I wanted to default to "Desktop Mode" at startup, since web browsing and video streaming works better there than in Valve's "Game Mode." A single steamosctl command made that happen.

• I did struggle for some time with audio output. There seem to be some common issues in the current SteamOS stable release (3.8) with surround sound, even on Steam Decks -- though I found a working hackaround, the built-in sound configuration definitely needs some attention.

That latter part is where some of SteamOS's cracks started becoming more visible to me. As it's a Linux build and ecosystem curated specifically for Valve's own devices, any use-case other than those devices - and the features Valve tests on them - is liable to rot, unsupported.

And while I'm personally willing (happy, even) to be my own tech support and sysadmin this, the other thing about SteamOS is that it treats almost all system configuration as sacred: making large swaths of it read-only by default, and overwriting customizations in updates. Which, hey, is a nice safeguard for rolling updates. But an annoyance for personal customizations.

Hopefully, features like built-in surround-sound support will become more of a priority as the Steam Machine itself lands in more homes.

I'll say though, that despite its warts, and despite those administrative hurdles, SteamOS in my living room is already a more-than-satisfying replacement for Windows. I was genuinely impressed by gamescope's runtime performance; Proton compatibility is practically a given these days, as is Linux support for USB and/or Bluetooth gamepads; and the desktop mode's KDE Plasma environment does everything I need in a home theater context.

Between Microsoft's continuous pressure to force online accounts and cloud storage, Windows updates pushing in unwanted AI features while simultaneously breaking existing systems - really making a habit of it - and, fuckin' ads in the menus, I don't miss the old Windows install at all.

As for my main desktop, a dual use-case of software development plus gaming, SteamOS doesn't fit; it's just not flexible enough. But now I'm wondering how easily I might squeeze the same juice from gamescope and proton in a more generic Linux distro...

After Opus Magnum: De Re Metallica's tiresome complexity and lackluster writing, Kaizen: A Factory Story is just what I needed.

It opens strong, with a bright, cute aesthetic and a keenly focused story. Set in the 1980s, midwestern business whiz David moves to Japan for a sales job, and immediately experiences the culture shock of Matsuzawa's onboarding process: putting him to work designing factory lines. David's mentor Ohyama-san encourages him to keep an open mind and shows him the ropes, as David tours - and helps build factories in - diverse segments of Matsuzawa manufacturing, from toys and home electronics to clothing and plastic display food.

Kaizen's dialog-driven story (including voice-acted interludes!) weaves in themes of traditional Japanese office culture, like strict managerial hierarchy, wa, and the salaryman stereotype; the economic boom and changing social norms of '80s Japan; American discomfort, and fascination, with that rising world power; the business value in a holistic understanding of production; even the virtue of trying new things outside one's comfort zone.

David's fish-out-of-water journey through each products' factories, meeting distinct and memorable personalities along the way, is an excellent narrative device for demonstrating those ideas through different perspectives.

... well, for a while, anyway. I was a little let down that Kaizen runs out of new characters about halfway through, and neglects to follow up on most of the plot threads it had established earlier. Its culture and history themes aren't used so much as they are referenced or touched upon. The setting is still really charming, though, and a great stage for David's personal story.

Oh and there are puzzles!

Kaizen's automated-part-assembly puzzles have a similar spirit to Shenzhen I/O's device-making, but play a bit more like Opus Magnum's mechanical challenges. Each puzzle's goal is to assemble a product from existing parts: using arms to move and rotate them into place, welding and riveting them together, cutting off excess material (or cutting through templates) when necessary.

The tools are simple but, like the best Zachtronics games, they're just a foundation -- progressively-harder scenarios will teach you to combine them for novel and practical functions, like flipping a part onto a cutter to remove interior pieces. Programming is simple too, by dragging and dropping instructions onto a program timeline; it even supports step-by-step backward and forward scrubbing, which is a relief compared to De Re Metallica's painful debugging.

Every puzzle has some fresh new twist to it, and most of them strike a pleasant balance between figuring out how to manipulate parts correctly, and how to avoid collisions in the implementation. Although later puzzles can - like Opus Magnum's - feel frustratingly fiddly due to how many components are in play at once. And the visual timeline becomes annoying to navigate in lengthy programs.

So I'm not super-interested in attempting the post-game bonus puzzles, which get even more complex. But I overall enjoyed the main story's automation challenges.

Kaizen's puzzles are fun, its dialog is fun, and its presentation is fun. It's ... fun!

Better than: Last Call BBS, Shenzhen I/O
Not as good as: Exapunks
I actually enjoyed: the first Pachi-Sol (pachinko solitaire) level, but later variants with hidden cards that only appear temporarily can fuck right off.

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.