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.

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.