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.

It's got top-tier writing and voice acting in an immersive sandbox, filled with intriguing characters and world-building sidequests, which are all unfortunately marred by game-breaking physics, scripting, and even design bugs. Yes, of course I'm talking about 2004's Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

Note that I played with the VTMB Unofficial Patch which, as far as I know, is responsible for the game being at all playable on modern PCs.

In some ways, Bloodlines holds up way better than a 15-year-old game should. From the start its written dialog and voice direction show impressive amounts of personality and polish -- acclimating to the game's mythos-babble about vampire clans and factions is a delight, thanks to Jack's anarcho-hedonistic punk attitude. Almost all of Bloodlines's characters feel distinctive and engaging, in stark contrast to, say, generic nords or generic Bostonians.

As a product of its time (two years pre-Oblivion), it's not hugely surprising that this game's Los Angeles isn't quite the scale of a modern-day open world. The overworld isn't even fully connected; you can only roam freely within a handful of small, city-block-sized sections, and move between those sections using a fast-travel map.

There's no real-time GPS mini-map to show nearby points of interest, either: you need to periodically check in-game map postings with "You Are Here" markers to get your bearings. (Luckily, each area is small enough that it doesn't take long to learn where landmarks are.) These areas also make heavy use of loading screens between exterior, interior, and tangential segments -- it's a good thing that modern hardware trivializes loading times, because there are a lot of them.

But those small, loading-screen-filled maps are nevertheless dense with interactivity, and they feel alive and full of intriguing mysteries to uncover. ... Well, except for several cases when a room is conspicuously empty, obviously waiting for mission progress to trigger a scripted event. But generally the amount and spread of side-quest content succeeds in making this world feel truly engaging.

The sandbox-style gameplay helps, too. Although character-creator choices may restrict some options - my Nosferatu build, for example, could never charm an NPC due to outright ugliness - Bloodlines channels that Deus Ex sensation of letting you decide whether to talk, sneak, or kill your way through many encounters.

This freedom is most evident in the game's character sheet, which despite a fair amount of complexity, does an excellent job of explaining exactly how level-up choices will affect your gameplay options. Want to pick high-difficulty locks? Invest in Dexterity and Security. Want to beat the shit out of somebody? Look at Strength and Melee.

That said, not all of those gameplay options are balanced equally. Guns are hard to use effectively - I should say, they're hilariously inaccurate - until you've fully pumped up the Firearms skill. Melee combat is frustrating against certain enemies who jump around like maniacs. Stealth is hard to pull off in scenarios where you need to interact with anything, like a computer, or a door.

Stealth can also be made difficult due to janky physics, like, getting stuck on level geometry or nudging an object by accident can lead to being detected. That jank can affect combat, too, though usually for the better -- when an enemy is suddenly immobilized.

And then there are the moments where a quest NPC, or key object, gets stuck in an inconvenient spot. In one instance I had to bust out the command console and forcibly delete a character because he just wouldn't move out of the way.

UI problems seem trivial in comparison, ... but they are still hard to ignore. Particularly when inconsistent interface rules mean that 'Esc' sometimes opens the pause menu, sometimes un-focuses from an interactive object, and sometimes does both.

And yet even with its jankiness, its archaicness, and an unbalanced and anticlimactic ending that eschews self-directed content for shoving you down a linear series of ridiculously unbalanced combat encounters -- in spite of all that, Bloodlines is still fun for most of its running length, and impactful due to the quality of its storytelling.

I have no idea what to expect from the still-being-delayed Bloodlines 2, but I'm glad I got caught up with this franchise.

Better than: Fallout 4
Not as good as: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition
Arguably as good as: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Pid lives in a space between heavily-atmospheric walk-to-the-right games like Inside (2016) and tactical run-and-jump platform games like Mario side-scrollers. It's "more game-y" than the former category, as in, its imaginative environments are usually overshadowed by platforms to traverse and enemies to avoid or destroy.

But it's also not as well-polished as a Mario-tier game: the physics don't quite feel intuitive or predictable, and there is an awkward economy of collecting stars to buy ... consumable equipment? which rarely seems useful or relevant.

While it tries to set itself apart with some surreal backgrounds and that peculiar inventory system, Pid ultimately spends too much time feeling like just another platform game that doesn't measure up to the genre's standard-bearers.

Progress: Somewhere in the dining room, restaurant, missile-robot gauntlet? area.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is a solid attempt at combining a story-driven campaign, RPG progression, and puzzle gameplay. Certainly better than the likes of Puzzle Quest or PictoQuest.

The match-three mechanics are fun to learn and experiment with -- well, the horizontal-matching "wall" effect is kinda bullshit, since it eats away from your army count while the walls just sit around. But aside from that annoying quirk, the learning curve of Clash of Heroes' combat tactics feels like a really rewarding balance of "solving" the puzzle to win battles and progressively adding twists like elite units and linked attacks.

And the story is fine - a little trope-y, but it gets the job done - serving as a vehicle for the gradual introduction of new enemies, new friendly units, and new environments.

However... there are a couple of high-level design issues that work against the game's otherwise-satisfying progression and combat. One, there's effectively a finite supply of experience points (random encounters are rare and, failure rewards no XP) so your choice of units to consume those experience points is practically irreversible. And two, the effects of random unit placement are disproportionately influential in combat.

The randomness issue isn't worrisome in general, but becomes very poignant when facing enemies at a higher level (your chances dwindle from "fair" to "impossible" pretty immediately), and especially in special encounters, like - and here's where I gave up on the game - the one where a friendly unit randomly moves through the enemy battlefield, and accidentally attacking that unit is a game over.

How can I work around that? Well, one option would be to swap out all of my "attacks take two turns" units with an "attacks take one turn" unit, ... which is under-leveled and has no realistic option for catching up on experience points. So. I kind-of can't.

Clash of Heroes has some good fundamentals going for it, but also enough bad fundamentals that I've no interest in suffering through them for the good parts.

Progress: Almost(?) finished the Sylvan chapter.

Cthulhu Saves the World is not without charm. It wastes no time breaking - really, demolishing - its own fourth wall, and its writing and art shows how much fun the game must've been to make.

But inbetween its silly dialogs is an RPG that's not only basic, but archaic. "Basic" isn't necessarily bad, especially since it means combat flows fairly quickly, but it also means lots of throwaway random encounters with low-effort monsters, and barren, bland environments between points of interest.

And by "archaic" I mean stuff like... there's no inventory screen, so when you pick up weapons or armor, you need to know (or guess) which party member can equip it, then go into the equipment sub-sub-menu for that character to see said weapon or armor.

I may have lamented that Cosmic Star Heroine was "unfinished", but at least what it did finish was more user-friendly than Cthulhu's head-scratching menus, and more satisfying than Cthulhu's makework combat and map traversal.

I was a fan of Overlord's and Raising Hell's sense of humor, in spite of some underwhelming gameplay. Coming back to Overlord II a decade later is a stark reminder of those "in spite of" problems: uninspired level design, uneven objective clarity, and confounding controls -- multiplexing minion direction with camera movement is a clear design flaw.

And the franchise's cartoony anti-hero humor doesn't really cut it anymore. I mean, to put a point on it, in a post-Saints Row IV marketplace Overlord's tone just isn't very impactful.

Progress: Finished the intro level.

Iron Brigade (née Trenched) isn't a bad game, exactly, for its time. It combines the simplest and most visceral part of a mech-piloting game (putting huge gun turrets on metal legs) with a Tower Defense turret-placement game, picking up a "commander in-combat" feeling along the way. The thin-but-flashy presentation and light-but-thrilling gameplay makes it reasonably competitive with contemporaries like Toy Soldiers.

But even from very early in the campaign, it's clear that Iron Brigade isn't thoroughly exploring the space between the normally-appealing sub-genres it's combined. Your "trench" mech plods along slowly, with satisfying heft ... which makes battlefield obstacles as burdensome to you as they are to enemies. Turret placements are controlled from your mech suit, in close proximity ... which restricts your ability to manage the larger battlefield. Mech suit upgrades are customized inbetween missions ... which limits your weapon choices in the mission itself.

And, as much as the Double Fine level of audio-visual polish tries to conceal it, each mission is still just a wave-after-wave series of brainless enemies that you need to unload bullets into. The narrative backdrop is transparent and disposable.

And so, like Brütal Legend before it, Iron Brigade comes across like a riveting high-concept that was blessed with high production values and enough micro-level design to be playable, but not enough macro-level design to be cohesively engaging.

Progress: Finished the first non-tutorial mission (Europe, Beach).

For a one-person indie game (ignoring the "+" for the moment), Cave Story+ is pretty impressive. It's got a healthy amount of content, its environments and abilities show some well-tuned variety, even the story feels unique, albeit simple. But - even with a studio's worth of "+" polish on top - it is still a one-person indie game.

Platforming is challenging, and not always for good reasons (slippery movement). Save points are often too far apart, which makes surprise sudden deaths (like hidden spikes!) too punishing. Some "quests" lazily ask you to go re-tread the same ground and re-fight the same enemies you just dispatched a moment ago. The game's first half sets up a hub area and interconnected routes, but the second half is a non-stop train ride that you can't really get off of.

That "surprise sudden deaths" issue comes to a head with the game's final boss, which is a phase-after-phase gauntlet of boss fights that I didn't see coming, and had no interest in re-trying when I died on (what I think is) the last part.

There were things I liked about Cave Story, punctuated by things I didn't like. The ability upgrades are pretty cool, and the shooting action is mostly fun, despite how confounding it can be to lose weapon experience. But those positives are canceled out by how poorly-connected the world map is, and by how disrespectful to my time the surprise sudden deaths are.

Better than: Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition
Not as good as: Hollow Knight, Ittle Dew 2+
I appreciate the temporary holiday theme: even if Santa hats do distract a bit from the story drama.

Progress: Gave up on the last boss phase ... in Easy difficulty.

Hollow Knight recently left me itching for "more Metroidvania," and Valdis Story: Abyssal City ... did not help.

Its awkward screen size and poorly-written story are both off-putting, though not deal-breakers. Input-handling feels a little loose, but Valdis Story's bigger problem is that the controls don't make sense, due to both poor tutorialization (I had to read the online manual to figure out what Focus is) and counter-intuitive button mapping.

In the air, pressing Down performs a stomp move. On the ground, Down is an animation cancel and also a necessary precursor to dodging -- like, to dodge left, you press Down and then Left. There are so many unused buttons, and so many other games have the sense to implement a dodge button; why, why would you do it this way?

The game's also got a style ranking system, which might be a "plus" to action/fighting folks, but to me is just a punishment for not adapting to those bizarre controls.

What little of Valdis Story I saw was somewhat promising re: other 'vania qualities, like a sprawling world map with just-out-of-reach alternate routes, and character progression through level-ups and equipment crafting. But learning how to play the game looks like more work than I'm willing to put into it.

Progress: Got to the second boss.