Anodyne is creepy. Magrunner: Dark Pulse is horrific. Oxenfree is surreal. Jazzpunk is absurd. Killer Is Dead is eccentric. Wuppo is inscrutable.

All of these words are synonyms for "weird." And Kentucky Route Zero is all of those. It's weird.

"Weird" isn't necessarily a bad thing, in fact I would more often call it a good thing -- it can be the difference between a rote reiteration and a memorable innovator. But in the case of Kentucky Route Zero, a "weird" mysterious plot is tempered by "weird" hard-to-follow story structure; and seriously impeded by "weird" UI, with visually-ambiguous navigation and cumbersome point-and-click prompts.

I'm not sure if I'd call Kentucky Route Zero too weird, but I would at least call it weird in a bad way. Tantalizing curiosity I can sign up for; disorienting smash cuts and off-puttingly clunky controls, not so much.

Progress: Finished Act II.

Super Time Force Ultra - as its tongue-barely-in-cheek name suggests - takes a fun and flippant approach to sci-fi storytelling. Not unlike No Time to Explain, its absurdist attitude toward time-travel-induced chaos is a great hook.

The problem with STFU is that ... well, while I admire its unique twists on time-rewinding mechanics, the resulting gameplay tends to be more confusing and frustrating than it is fun.

If you die, you can rewind time to before your death, and drop in as another character -- or as another copy of the same character. You can even prevent your first death by shielding that character or pre-emptively taking out your killer. Neat, right?

It's also really hard to pull off, in terms of avoiding and pre-empting whatever killed you before. Most often, the best I could do was to jump out of the way and leave my previous self to die again.

Alternatively, if you rewind time without dying, you can drop in another character to combine forces. This is especially useful in boss fights, so you can unload lots of bullets, or hit multiple weak spots, at the same time; but coordinating these characters while simultaneously avoiding a boss's attacks is pretty difficult.

This "combine forces with yourself" mechanic is incentivized by having a time limit on each level -- forcing you to stack characters up instead of having just one character plink away at an obstacle. But a nasty side-effect of these time limits is that the farther you get in a level, the greater chance you have of getting "stuck" and not having enough time left to finish.

And what's the solution to that? Why, rewinding time some more, of course; in effect, replaying the level, but faster. Which is more than a little tedious.

Again, while I admire STFU's attempts to be more sophisticated than dumb-chaos run-and-guns like Broforce, I don't think those attempts really paid off. Making good use of time-rewinding is hard, and most often just feels repetitive.

Progress: Finished the intro level, almost(?) finished the Year 673 level.

I never outright said that Trine 2 demonstrated an ignorance of the original game's design shortcomings, and an inordinate focus on shiny graphical effects; I just thought it, very loudly. Catching up to Trine 3, though, I don't think it even needs to be said -- the game gives itself away.

The sky is shiny, the water is shiny, the foliage is shiny, ... everything is shiny. But in moving from 2D side-scrolling levels to a fixed-camera 3D format, with depth, one wonders if Frozenbyte learned anything from 1990s beat-em-ups: when the camera is fixed to the side, z-axis movement doesn't make the game more interesting; just more difficult to understand.

User reviews further indicate that this iteration of Trine loses character progression, i.e. developing advanced skills in later levels, and that the level count overall is shockingly low.

The promise of a new The Lost Vikings I saw in the first Trine feels like a mirage, now. Even the developers' self-reflection and the now-released sequel don't dissuade me from the conviction that these guys, great as they may be at making a super-shiny physics-based engine, aren't really interested in making a puzzle-platform game.

Progress: Finished the first level.

My Steam backlog can feel indomitable, at times. So when I find an opportunity to rapidly discard a game by reveling in its technical shortcomings...

... I do so.

Progress: Finished the first level.

Technically, I've played a bit of Deadly Premonition before; back on the Xbox 360, the game was both "too weird" and "too boring" to keep me interested for long.

Since then, the game's weirdness has become more well-known, cultivating a status like ... The Room of video games. One I looked forward to trying again, in its enhanced PC release. (Despite the utter idiocy of follow-up D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die.)

But Deadly Premonition's "Director's Cut" feels more like a meta-joke than a real attempt to enhance, or even to re-iterate, a game. I have trouble believing that anyone involved in this release seriously expected it to be played.

There are some, eh, "par for the course" PC port issues like its 720p resolution lock and other graphical shortcomings -- for which fan patches pick up the slack. And there are some gnarly, and bizarre compatibility problems such that the community recommends steps like running in Windows 7 mode. You might note that Windows 8 was released a year before this game.

None of that mattered to my Deadly Premonition attempt, though. After the inscrutable introductory cutscenes, once the game finally gave me control, I ... couldn't move. I could only rotate in place, use an invisible flashlight, and flail around while the lobby-style opening level taunted me with interactive-looking elements.

Is it a problem with the game's recognition of an Xbox One gamepad? Are the game's movement physics broken on modern CPUs? Did my GPU load the level's terrain into an impossible state? I'll never know for sure.

Community warnings like "make occasional backup copies of the save file" give me no hope for Deadly Premonition's technical integrity going forward.

Not since Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed have I been so completely blocked from attempting to play a game.

Narratively speaking, Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a direct attack on my grievances toward Dragonfall, and it's a critical hit.

The main story is more personal and grounded, even when it's revealing grand fantastical portents; story events are impactful because they're related by, and reflected in, believable NPC dialog. Compared to the Kreuzbasar's ambient but mostly-inconsequential conversations -- the "flavor" text in Heoi is much more filling.

Party-member backstories, too, feel more significant and fascinating than those in the last campaign. Everyone has tons of dialog to read, and everyone's got at least one mission with fairly-personal stakes. Not all the character arcs are great: Duncan doesn't develop much, and Is0bel's story leaves some loose ends. But Racter... man, that guy is memorable.

The scripted events of each mission are as engaging as ever, and alternate route options (especially using Charisma instead of a gun) have continued to improve. I will however confess that I often played with a guide next to me, to make sure I chose the "right" option for interesting gameplay results; unfortunately, Shadowrun has a long way to go before its "bad" choices feel as satisfying as Geralt's.

There is also a somewhat dramatic balance issue in Hong Kong's open-ended missions: while the difficulty of a mission scales with your progress, the rewards don't, and it's definitely not obvious when a mission might give you no money. I had to retry a lot of difficult fights (even on Easy mode!) early in Act 2 because I hadn't earned enough money to upgrade my main character's equipment.

That aside, Hong Kong's combat gameplay is still good enough to be generally satisfying. Despite that scaling hurdle, and despite the inconceivable number of times I missed an 80%-to-hit shot, combat is just as fun (or at least tolerable) as before.

That being said -- while Hong Kong's real-world combat is familiar, its virtual-world Decking has been significantly remodeled. And much as I admire that The Matrix is now more lively, and includes some brand-new puzzle mechanics... in practice, the overabundance of "Watcher" enemies turns virtual-world traversal into an annoying stealth game, and the hacking minigame becomes repetitive almost immediately. Bit of a swing and a miss.

But even though I occasionally lamented having to access The Matrix - just as I occasionally lamented having to fight an obnoxious number of bad dudes - I did it, eagerly, to uncover more of Hong Kong's and my party's fascinating lore.

I do still miss the tightly-paced drama (and, honestly, the impossible-to-screw-up combat) of Dead Man's Switch; even so, I'd count Hong Kong's blend of narrative focus and non-linear progression as Shadowrun's strongest campaign yet.

Better than: Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut, Shadowrun Returns (for the most part)
Not as good as: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Where's my next sci-fi fantasy fix?: hmm... how're those Cyberpunk 2077 patches coming?

Progress: Finished the campaign on Easy, including the Shadows of Hong Kong epilogue.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought that Shadowrun Returns could have used some player agency in its mission schedule. The next campaign, Dragonfall, makes moves toward non-linear and optional content ... with mixed results.

Dragonfall still has a main story with scripted beats, but of that story's three acts, only the first and third are on rails. The second act mostly consists of side-story missions, fleshing out NPC backgrounds and other aspects of the Shadowrun world, which you can tackle in any order. The Director's Cut even includes a few Mass Effect 2-style "character loyalty" missions, which delve deeper into a party member's backstory.

Unlike the Dead Man's Switch campaign, where you had to hire out-of-story mercenaries (or sometimes Coyote) for every mission, Dragonfall comes with a built-in party of NPC runners. You can still hire other runners, but Eiger, Glory, Dietrich, and Blitz cover all the necessary archetypes; are free; and are - narratively speaking - "your crew," so it hardly makes sense to replace them with outside help.

As with the hireable runners, your party members scale up in power as the campaign proceeds. Mercifully, the game doesn't make you micro-manage their character sheets or equipment, but it does let you choose a handful of ability upgrades and tailor them to your preferred playstyle.

Your party members' stories are pretty interesting, as are the other non-linear side-stories -- Shadowrun still excels at delivering engaging dialog and fascinating lore. But none of them are substantial enough to replace the campaign's main story, which is unfortunate, because that main story isn't very substantial either.

Compared to Dead Man's Switch, Dragonfall's premise is less personal to the player character, less grounded in relatable themes, and less full of attention-grabbing twists and turns. Its focus on the fringes of conspiracy-fantasy, and its near-total silence during Act Two, make the climactic events of Act Three feel detached and underwhelming.

So while I appreciate that Dragonfall puts meaningful effort into secondary storytelling, its reduced attention to the primary story turns it into a net loss.

That said, each "run" is still a delight to play through and unravel. No mission is ever as straightforward as its pitch, and it's pretty consistently awesome to discover a hidden key, a hackable trap, or an exploitable NPC. Dragonfall's missions even feel a little more Deus Ex-ey than its predecessor, in terms of allowing multiple approaches to a mission objective.

And while combat is considerably more difficult than it was in Returns - unlike that game, which I breezed through in Normal mode, even Dragonfall's Easy mode routinely kicked my ass - some judicious UI improvements have made different options and tactics much clearer than before. I still tend to favor the point-and-shoot options, but other ones are easier to discover, now.

On that note, though... in Returns I wondered if the "not Rifles and not Decking" skills were really worth trying, and my limited experiment with Rigging in Dragonfall wasn't positive. It takes so many karma points to both equip high-powered drones and give them good stats, and they're still significantly less powerful than a non-drone combatant would be.

Meanwhile, under-investing in Decking meant that I was reliant on a party member (Blitz) to take care of any hacking obstacles. And that mostly worked, but my point is: it didn't feel like the game rewarded me for Rigging as much as it would have for Decking, or if I'd had more Charisma for some persuasion and etiquette checks.

As much as I personally like ranged weapons and Decking, I get the impression that other skill choices may be objectively worse.

Then again, Shadowrun doesn't shy away from XCOM-like aiming problems, and anecdotally I'd say Dragonfall gave me a lot more high-hit-percent missed-shot bullshit than Returns did. But maybe I'm just bitter.

In the end, the worst I can really say about Shadowrun: Dragonfall is that its main story wasn't as compelling as Dead Man's Switch. The combat is harder to win, but easier to control; the side-missions are a nice change of pace, although their stories are short. The Kreuzbasar hub isn't much more than a larger Seamstresses Union, but that's fine.

Dragonfall didn't make all of its shots, either -- that didn't stop me from chasing its stories, devouring its lore, and immediately moving on to Hong Kong for more.

Better than: Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition
Not as good as: Mass Effect 2, Shadowrun Returns
I'm still sore about: Dietrich immediately un-friending me because I didn't take him on a mission. Real-life time passed and I legit forgot that he asked to be on it. He gave me the silent treatment for the rest of the game. I thought we were friends!

Progress: Finished the campaign on Easy.

Outland's pitch of combining platform-action and bullet-hell mechanics - with color switching, ala Ikaruga - sounds pretty promising. Until you remember that bullet-hell games necessarily enforce a specific pace to their action, and that waiting around for obstacles to move is one of the most boring parts of a platform game.

The result feels like an avoid-em-up with only occasional bursts of wall-jumping or sword-swinging. "Combat," while it does involve learning and adapting to attack patterns, tends to be less about defeating an enemy and more about dodging it. The pattern-handling can get especially tricky when an enemy is near environmental obstacles, or other enemy types ... or both.

Then there's the strangely counter-intuitive behavior of Outland's platforming mechanics. Platforms are slippery, but you latch onto walls in an instant -- even when you didn't intend to. You can fall off the bottom of a ladder, but can't climb off the top of one. You can move horizontally while mid-air, but the fall speed is way too fast to reasonably re-calculate your landing point.

Like Ori and the Blind Forest, Outland isn't "just" hard because of challenging scenario design, but also because it demands more precision that the game's controls really support.

There is a story in Outland, for some reason; a weak, trope-y justification for the Light and Dark color dynamic. The plot definitely isn't intriguing enough to push the game forward. Nor is the world's aesthetic, which despite the high-visibility Light and Dark elements, is mostly very bland.

I don't like pure bullet-hell games, and Outland is basically ... that, with an awkward platforming implementation bolted onto it.

Progress: Somewhere in the Underworld.

Sure, a website with some form fields is a bit of a loose fit for this video game blog. But Regex Crossword is an interactive experience that entertained me for most of the weekend ... and it compares favorably to Copy Editor.

Following a co-worker tip to this harrowing puzzle, I saw the same link posted to /r/programming and followed that trail to the Regex Crossword site. Of course I did that standalone puzzle, too; but the Regex Crossword site is much more noteworthy.

The puzzles with bi-directional hints could get pretty annoying, and I swear that some puzzles could have had multiple solutions (more than one character fitting the row and column hints). Especially in the Hamlet section, I got the feeling that quotation-based solutions weren't deterministically verified quite as thoroughly.

But those quibbles aside, Regex Crossword gave me a damned impressive amount of the very kind of logic puzzles I'm hungry for.

I didn't even get to the user-submitted puzzles, for fear of how deep that rabbit hole might go.

Better than: Copy Editor, Prime Mover, Puppy Cross
Not as good as: Human Resource Machine, Murder by Numbers
And it's hard to argue with: free!

Progress: Finished all the built-in puzzles.

An earnest attempt at Divinity: Original Sin last year finally convinced me that I'm not "into" traditional CRPGs. Surprisingly, and thankfully, my experience with Shadowrun Returns felt less like a deeply-technical party-management and -tactics game than it did like a sci-fi visual novel punctuated with simple turn-based combat.

After a relatively simple character creator, Shadowrun Returns dives right into its narrative, which is compelling by virtue of both a distinctive techno-elves setting as well as high-quality written dialog. Its aesthetics and character attitudes nail the "cyberpunk" feeling, and its mystery plot is rife with genuine intrigue.

(Also compelling, for me, are the story's frequent references to Seattle and east-side environs. No doubt due to the developer's geographical proximity, mission text continuously name-drops cities, neighborhoods, even streets which literally hit close to home.)

The story is unabashedly linear, which is mostly to the game's benefit. I almost never felt like the game was rail-roading me in a direction I didn't want: charming NPC personalities and tantalizing mission events kept this ride exciting from one beat to the next. Only occasionally did I wish for more control over the pace of that ride, for example to do some "hacking" instead of starting another combat mission.

Compared to a choose-your-own-solution architecture like Deus Ex, Shadowrun Returns doesn't really allow character-based approaches to obstacles -- you can't charm, or hack, or fight your way through "X" problem; rather, high Charisma allows you to charm "Y" and high Intelligence allows you to hack "Z" but you won't necessarily be able to do both Y and Z. And the fight with "X" is generally not avoidable; everybody fights.

That's fine for telling the game's (again, linear) story, but it does make character progression feel more puzzling than empowering. I can't skip some Strength challenges, buff up my Strength, then backtrack and revisit them; all I can do is invest skill points in the things that sound fun, and hope that the next mission caters to my investment.

Unfortunately a fear-of-missing-out on "appropriate" skills is amplified by how Shadowrun's character sheet works: not only because skill levels require increasing point-dumps to progress - six points for level six, then seven more points for level seven! - but also because of how some sub-skills are structured.

The Rifles skill is capped by the Ranged Combat skill, which itself is capped by the Quickness attribute. Therefore, if I'm at 6 in Rifles, getting to 7 could mean spending as much as 21 points, since Quickness and Ranged Combat must also be at least 7.

But here's the good news: combat tends to be pretty easy. At least on the Normal difficulty level, I never felt like missed opportunities kept me from affording adequately-powerful (or even over-powered) equipment, and I also never felt like enemies were too strong for my somewhat-haphazard skill choices.

If you were expecting deep combat tactics from Shadowrun Returns, well -- I can't say that you won't find them, just that it's not gonna happen in Normal mode. By the game's end I'd barely scratched the surface of any combat mechanic other than "shoot gun."

That may make fights sound dull, but to me this simplicity was pleasantly satisfying. Especially because the game does a poor job of tutorializing itself: an NPC skipped teaching me about Decking (hacking) because my stats were too high, I didn't know it had overwatch until an enemy hit me with it, I didn't even know you could reload until I saw a skill to reduce its action point cost, and I still don't really know what a "ley line" is.

Granted, I glazed over the game's single "Show Help" UI tutorial screen, because it was an unreadable wall of text. Maybe some valuable information was hidden somewhere in there.

Anyway, my point is that while Shadowrun Returns didn't do well at teaching me how to play, I was able to succeed and have fun regardless. And my main interest wasn't in its combat dynamics, anyway; fights were more like an active approach to storytelling.

That story - a noir-styled murder mystery, strongly-written NPC personalities, megacorp conspiracies, and a spicy twist of magical fantasy - kept me interested in following its threads all the way through.

So long as the Dragonfall and Hong Kong expansion-sequels keep up this narrative quality, I'm not too worried about whether I do or don't become "better" at Shadowrun.

Better than: Dex, Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition
Not as good as: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Basically as good as: Masquerada: Songs and Shadows

Progress: Finished the Dead Man's Switch campaign on Normal.