Let's pull this band-aid off quickly: LEGO The Hobbit doesn't tell the entire The Hobbit story. After the dwarves re-invade Erebor, and Smaug prepares to attack Lake-town, the game just sort of... ends.

This mark against the game is tempered by the fact that, like LEGO The Lord of the Rings, LEGO The Hobbit is practically a parody of the story anyway -- injecting pratfalls and cartoon humor (like Bombur spontaneously pulling out a turkey leg) into LEGO-styled cutscenes, backed by the movies' recorded dialog.

The story's truncation is also tempered by the fact that - let's be real - the Hobbit movie trilogy was hardly compelling on its own. None of the events of this story measure up to the gravitas of The Lord of the Rings.

What makes LEGO The Hobbit compelling, then, is - again, like LEGO LotR - an open-world Middle-earth to play around in. Granted Bilbo's map doesn't cover as much as Frodo's, but even without Mordor, the scale of this game is impressive; as is its amount of optional side-quest and platform-puzzle activities.

Its gameplay mechanics and core loops are familiar if you've played a LEGO game before: collect studs to unlock items to collect more studs to unlock characters to ... collect everything. And aside from character-specific abilities, these mechanics don't have a hell of a lot to do with Tolkien's world -- the dwarves have axes, Legolas has a bow, and Gandalf can fire magic missiles, so you'll need to switch to the proper character to take out particular obstacles. It's not exactly rocket science.

But like I wrote not long ago about another LEGO title, my enjoyment of these games has a lot to do with my attachment to the source material. And even if this game doesn't add much to what worked about LEGO LotR, ... well, as with The Hobbit movies, I'll take any excuse to get lost in Middle-earth again.

Better than: The LEGO Movie Videogame
Not as good as: LEGO The Lord of the Rings (Android, iOS, Mac, PC, PS3, Wii, X360), Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Unusually, includes original voice acting: by the late Christopher Lee, who narrates the introduction of each story mission. RIP, white wizard.

Progress: 100%

Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 takes some admirable risks in re-mixing the formula from part 3 -- with uneven, but undeniably interesting, results.

The most immediately-apparent change is that we're Pokémon, now. Part 4 replaces its predecessors' class-customization system with "monstorb" monsters, such that your party is made up of little dudes like "Brodent" or "Philosofly" who each have their own advantages and skills (as well as abilities imparted by their assigned Trainer).

There are more than a dozen of these monsters in Rain-Slick 4, so the total spread of unique abilities is rather large; and while it's great to see comic references like Twisp and Catsby in this format, many of the monsters feel significantly less creative.

Despite an embarrassment of options for active monsters, assigned Trainers, and equipped weapon types, most of those options don't feel powerful or poignant. Rain-Slick 3 already had quite a few "dud" classes and abilities, and it definitely feels like the fourth game's monster inventory has tipped that quantity-over-quality balance even farther.

However! On the other side of combat, the enemy monster side, Rain-Slick 4 re-balances in a much more positive direction. I don't have any numbers in front of me, but compared to last time - when I complained about "too much combat" - I felt like these encounters were generally fewer, and more distinctively varied. Fights shifted frequently between small and large numbers, slow and fast opponents, healers and debuffers and one-hit-killers ... (With the notable exception of Chapter 9, which had me fight the same handful of robots way, way too many times.)

Even though I still followed a basic buff-and-summon routine when starting up most battles, this installment's variety of encounters had me thinking on my toes much more than the last one did. This time around, combat is finally satisying for more than just flavor text.

Unfortunately there is another aspect of Rain-Slick 4's "variety" that felt much less satisfying: it split the party, and for almost all of the game's running length, story progression swaps you between one half and the other.

That means you'll spend hours at a time leveling up one set of monsters, and learning how to use their abilities effectively, before the game suddenly shoves you into another set of monsters at a much lower level and with totally different abilities. And then in the game's final chapter, you'll need to merge those two parties into one, discarding some of each and figuring out an entirely new combat dynamic.

Given that the story is still completely linear, this hours-long forced separation of monsters and level-ups feels like a misfire.

Ultimately, though, I would have gotten over that awkward pacing - as well as the proliferation of dull "monstorb" monsters - for the sake of more Penny Arcade wit and flippancy. This game's biggest mistake is that it doesn't take adequate advantage of the franchise's core appeal: writing.

There are still fun bits of text, mind you, but fewer than last time. It seems kinda like the game wrote itself into a corner; constraining the story to "Underhell" limited its variety of environments, and splitting the party limited the amount of possible character interactions. There just aren't as many opportunities for this game's characters to react to new surprises, or to riff on one another while doing so.

So, even though I'd call Rain-Slick 4's design changes a net gameplay win - despite missteps in character progression and game-world pacing - at the end of the day, its most critical failure is reducing the amount of written dialog. Kudos for iterating on the "game" part of this game, but it just didn't play enough to Penny Arcade's writing strength.

Better than: Cosmic Star Heroine
Not as good as: Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3
But at least there's still: you know, the comic.

Progress: Finished on Normal.

Back in 2013 I struggled to follow through on Darksiders II: "I've yet to encounter an item, dungeon puzzle, or narrative element that really wows me," I wrote. This time around, I saw more in the game - and played through more of the game - but still lost interest well before the finish line.

The first installment felt a lot like an amalgam of God of War and The Legend of Zelda, and the sequel builds on that concept in some insightful, promising directions. The map is more open and expansive than it used to be; there's optional content to explore at your own pace; you can even upgrade your character with equipment and a skill tree.

Revisiting Darksiders II years later, it's fascinating to see how it nudged in some of the same directions that God of War (2018) and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild took their respective franchises. (Hell, this game's even got a World Tree connecting its realms.)

That being said, while I admire Darksiders II's innovative efforts, their payoffs were definitely mixed. As large as its world looks, it feels quite small, with very few secrets to discover and not much to do other than "more dungeons." And managing randomly-generated loot is more often busy-work than an investment in your character: there are too many item slots to scroll through, too many stats to fiddle with, and too many worthless drops that just waste your time.

At its core, Darksiders II is still mostly about going to a dungeon, doing some fighting and block-pushing and wall-running to get to a boss, obtaining a quest artifact and/or item upgrade, and gradually moving the story along. The story itself isn't interesting enough to push this process forward, but the gameplay is its own reward ... to a point.

To its credit, Darksiders II strikes a pretty fair balance between its varied mechanics; War's adventure was exhaustingly combat-heavy, while Death lets plenty of non-combat take the spotlight. So even though many of those mechanics aren't fully-baked - combat is still tedious, the loot doesn't change much, and puzzles are generally remedial - their sum total is good enough to keep the formula compelling.

The issues that get in the way of that formula tend to be more technical. Like, the combat camera: it swings around at exactly the wrong time, whether you're holding the target-lock button or not. Or button overloading: your gun and the hookshot Death Grip are on the same button, but the latter automatically overrides the former if a grab point is nearby -- well, sometimes it does that, and sometimes it doesn't, causing you to fall in lava.

The aiming controls for throwing and shooting are calibrated like an idiot, panning slowly for a microsecond and then accelerating so much that you're facing an entirely different direction. Advanced combat moves, that is, more advanced than mashing fast attacks and slow attacks, require holding the left bumper while target-lockon requires simultaneously holding the left trigger. (This is just poor use of the gamepad.)

Side-quests don't advertise their expected experience level, making some of them surprisingly trivial, and others shockingly impossible. The world map is baffling to navigate, as are all the other menu screens: you can't track multiple quest objectives at once, new items show whether they're "better" or "worse" than your current item but not how much better or worse, selecting an ability in the skill tree is ... unexpectedly difficult, and moving from one screen to another almost never uses the button I'd expect.

All of these issues are small by themselves, but they chip away at the gameplay experience bit by bit. To wit: there is a boss fight in the first third of the game, an epic-scale battle against a building-sized "Guardian," which involves step-by-step moves to counterattack and dismantle the big lug. It's an awesome and enthralling idea that's ruined by the camera leaving you unaware of impending fireballs and ground-pounds; by contextual controls not co-operating as you climb up the beast; and finally by the encounter design admitting its own shortcomings and turning the killing blow into a cutscene.

(At least I finally got to see the "Shadow of the Colossus with a chaingun" concept that Vigil first teased back in 2008.)

That huge disappointment of an encounter exemplified the whole game, to me. It could have been pretty good! It certainly had some great ideas, and adequate mechanics for executing on those ideas, despite a frequent sense of blandness. But those "highs" were weighed down by cascading failures in technical and usability design.

The game could have been pretty good, except for all the parts that weren't.

So wait, I've been talking about unpolished edges in Darksiders II, but how about its Deathinitive Edition? Well, I wouldn't know. I didn't buy the original game in the specific, correct way to get an automatic upgrade, and frankly asking me to re-purchase the game only three years later felt too much like a bait-and-switch.

That's why I've still got the version of the game whose servers were shut down years ago. Because of spite.

Better than: Darksiders: Warmastered Edition
Not as good as: well, unfair comparison, but God of War (2018) and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I appreciate Darksiders III establishing a narrower, clearer focus: but since that focus is combat, I feel just fine skipping it.

Progress: Got to the Kingdom of the Dead.

It's one thing when Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit's protagonist mocks his own game over having a spindash move. It's another when the level is filled with pinball bumpers and self-propelling cannons.

(Spoiler alert: watch me revisit the "borrows from others, with questionable results" theme once I finally write-up Darksiders II.)

Hell Yeah isn't totally without a personality of its own, and in fact its flippant plot and nonsensical environments clear the way for some pretty clever level and enemy designs. At least, clever visual designs.

But its mechanics are confusingly assembled from a variety of inspirations, usually without the contexts that made those inspirations meaningful; like a Frankenstein's monster of gameplay ideas that can grunt but hasn't figured out how to use its thumbs.

Take the saw-drill's ability to break through some materials -- you need new upgrades or abilities to get through new obstacles, kind-of like Metroid's progression-blocking doors. Except Hell Yeah is a linear game with discrete levels, so there's barely any point to having these obstacles in the first place.

Or jumping, which is, you know, a pretty core part of a side-scrolling platform game; Hell Yeah's jumping physics are crazy floaty, and take a while to get used to. Which makes it seem like a troll move when an early level takes the saw-drill away and completely changes the jumping physics out from under you.

Or the weapons that you can switch between - oh yeah, because this side-scrolling platformer is also a twin-stick shooter - of which almost all are a waste of a button-press. Some weapons have consumable ammo, and you can even buy more weapons from the item shop!, but I've yet to see anything that out-performs the standard, infinite-ammo gatling gun.

And then there are the WarioWare-styled micro-games that cap each boss fight -- which have satisfyingly-funny animations, but whose directions are often unclear; and since failing the micro-game damages you, it might even kill you and send you back to a pre-boss checkpoint, prompting you to re-think the decisions that have led to this moment in your life.

Oh, and I almost forgot about the "Island," a mobile-style idle minigame where you can assign jobs to the bosses you've defeated so far. I almost forgot about it because, after the game introduced it, I never saw it again and it had no effect on the real game.

Hell Yeah isn't a bad game, not exactly, even if parts of it are certainly bad. Overall it's not-intolerable, and there is some entertainment value in discovering more of the game's wild, wacky bosses.

Just, not enough value to merit the alternating-slog-and-sleepwalk that is Hell Yeah's hodge-podge gameplay.

Progress: Finished the Mount Olympus Casino (?) level.

Regular expressions get a bad rap -- a regex is a powerful tool, good for some jobs and terrible for others.

I would be pretty interested in a puzzle game with gradually-escalating regex complexity (especially using the search text for storytelling). But Copy Editor takes an early turn in ... another direction.

In this level, the search text has gendered pronouns that need to be gender-swapped. So how do you change "His" to "Her" and "Her" to "His" without undoing yourself? The real-life answer is don't use regex. It's the wrong tool for this job, and this problem shouldn't be in a regex game at all.

Copy Editor teaches you to look for specific instances, instead of general patterns, which is the wrong way to use regular expressions.

Like, at this point, why not re-type the text?

I know I'm digressing into computer science philosophy here, and these guys are just trying to make a game. Okay. I only hope that I don't have to work with a junior programmer who learns to abuse regexes from Copy Editor.

Progress: I think this is in the demo's second level.

Nerts reminded me that there was a recent Zachtronics game I hadn't caught up with yet; and while it may not have any programming puzzles, Eliza (2019) is still definitely a Zachtronics game.

Not because its art style and soundtrack are so highly reminiscent of Exapunks - though they are - or because it has another infuriating solitaire minigame. But because its story is so innately and thoroughly a programmer's story. From the grandiose ambitions and all-night crunch sessions to the slimy venture capitalists and ultimately transparent products, Eliza is just as good as HBO's Silicon Valley at capturing the often-uncomfortable realities of the software industry.

Eliza leverages those realities to tell a pretty compelling story in a truly believable context. On its surface this may look like a cautionary tale about the power of artificial intelligence, but I'd argue the "real" story is more about its human characters: the wide-eyed junior engineers getting taken advantage of by purse-string-holders, the industry veterans burning out and losing their passion, and the users who naively think this technology will improve their lives.

The game is far from perfect, even in terms of a pure storytelling experience -- character art quality is inconsistent, voice-overs are conspicuously absent from inner-voice thoughts, and choices don't seem to matter at all until the very end of the game. And, though I assume there are many ending alternatives, the one I chose was pretty anti-climactic.

But Eliza nails its characterizations, putting its cast in just the right situations to showcase their relatable quirks and compelling foibles. And its voice work is on-point, reinforcing those characterizations with believable, emotive acting.

Eliza's story isn't the best I've played, visual novel or otherwise. But its writing and voice-acting make it feel substantial, and worthwhile.

Better than: Analogue: A Hate Story, Gone Home
Not as good as: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (NDS)
Now I really hope: That the next Zachtronics puzzle game has this level of narrative commitment.

It's been almost ten years since I played Episode Two. Let's see if I can remember the plot... oh, steampunk-ey Gabe and Tycho are fighting eldritch gods. Yeah, got it.

(Deep breath) Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 looks like a significant departure from its predecessors, and not only because the words "Adventures" and "Episode" were dropped from the title -- part 3 is from a totally different developer, has a much lower-fidelity presentation, and is mechanically quite distinct.

But elaborating on those mechanical distinctions, there isn't much more to say than "Final Fantasy VI-style class uniqueness" (very cool) and "Cosmic Star Heroine-style useless filler abilities" (very meh). Rain-Slick 3's approach to combat customization is initially intriguing, but falls flat before long, and ultimately the game feels like it has too much combat in it.

And while its basic playability is better than that of Zeboyd's prior game, Cthulhu Saves the World, Rain-Slick 3's fundamentals are still surprisingly unpolished. Early-game tutorial prompts provide obscure directions like "Here's how MP works" and then disappear forever. Customizable classes don't explain, anywhere, their effects on character statistics. The menu for quitting the game is different from the menu for everything else, and I don't know if I was ever told that the "Q" key was how to open it; I just guessed.

What makes this game fun, that is, what motivated me to keep playing even after the combat became tedious and dull, is the same thing that made the previous games fun: Penny Arcade writing. Every narrative moment is punctuated with irreverent wit, every in-game concept has an entertaining etymology (like the "Crabomancer" class), and every bit of flavor text is worth reading for its delightful flippancy.

So I tolerated Rain-Slick 3's unpolished edges, and its gradually-tiresome combat, for the sake of the writing. Not because of an enthrallingly dramatic plot, mind you - I have no particular interest in Dr. Blood's motives - but because its prose is pure fun. And I look forward to more of that in the final chapter.

Better than: Cosmic Star Heroine, Cthulhu Saves the World
Not as good as: Final Fantasy VI
Arguably as good as: Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - Episode Two

Progress: Finished on Normal, got the ... good? ending.

What surprised me the most about Nerts!: Online wasn't that Zachtronics made a new cards-only game, nor that they made a multiplayer game -- it's that, I didn't think anyone else knew about "multiplayer solitaire." I always thought that was a weird thing my family did.

The rules of Nerts are a little different from the game I grew up with, but the objective is roughly the same: play cards from your personal solitaire deck into the suit-specific piles shared among all players. It's a race to deplete your own deck (or at least, some part of your deck) as quickly as possible, and when one of your friends snipes a pile position from you, you yell expletives at them in voice chat.

Aside from some odd audio choices - each round starts with a forced pause for fanfare, yet there's no background music during the game? - Nerts!: Online is surprisingly well-polished. Basic gameplay works flawlessly, even showing other players' card and cursor movements in real-time. And the interface is elegantly simple and easy to understand.

Ongoing updates may make it look like this game is far from finished, but aside from rule-customization options (and maybe some music!), this feels like a pretty complete experience to me. It's a simple and straightforward excuse to curse at my friends online.

Space Pirates and Zombies is an unambiguous attempt to rekindle the system-hopping, Newtonian-physics, do-missions-to-earn-cash-to-upgrade-ships charm of older games like Escape Velocity. More so than modern reinterpretations like Rebel Galaxy, this is essentially the same game, hewing even closer to decades-old interfaces and mechanics than 3030 Deathwar Redux did.

... but unfortunately, combat - which Space Pirates embraces as its central form of gameplay - is painfully un-fun. The controls are just as clunky as this game's now-archaic ancestors: selecting enemy targets is awkward, and aiming line-of-sight weapons at them is an annoying pain. That aiming frustration is amplified by the fact that enemy AI loves to run away, often leading to tedious cat-and-mouse chases.

Steam reviews make frequent mention of the fact that grinding through combat missions (including randomly-generated ones) makes up a majority of the game's running length.

It's a shame, because I like a lot of what Space Pirates has assembled around its combat, especially the early introduction of fleet management -- I love the idea of upgrading not only my own ship, but an entourage of ships with which to storm into a system and wreck up the place. If only that "wrecking up" was any fun to do.

Progress: Finished the tutorial missions.

The demo sold me, and Voxelgram's full game did not disappoint.

It's got a significant amount of built-in content, even without its user-generated Steam Workshop puzzles. Its later puzzles build up to a considerable size and feel really satisfying to complete. It's overall well-polished, with clear hints, convenient controls, and the good sense to highlight your errors while not penalizing you for them.

And it's got at least one quality-of-life feature that I've never seen before: "Load valid state," an effective and forgiving escape hatch for those times when you know you've made a mistake ... somewhere. Instead of restarting the whole damn puzzle, you can use the sands of time to rewind your error and get back to puzzling.

Voxelgram is a solidly-built, content-full, easy-to-play puzzle game that also happens to have 50% more spatial dimensions than most nonogram games. That's an easy "win" for me.

Better than: Paint it Back, Picross 3D
Not as good as: Pictopix
But what it really needs is: some RPG elements! Or maybe a visual novel storyline ... do I play too many nonogram games? Nahhhh.

Progress: Finished all 196 diorama puzzles.