I really wanted to like Divinity: Original Sin. I really did. But this relatively-recent, highly-rated CRPG ended up losing my interest for qualities it shares with decades-old genre ancestors like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment.

At first I was into the writing and voice acting -- colorful characterization, a compelling murder-mystery hook, and a healthy amount of humor. But it didn't take very long for me to get tired of the game's over-verbosity, and then the plot took a hard turn into some deeply dry and hard-to-care-about fantasy mythology tropes. After the first couple hours, I was speed-reading the dialog and clicking through speeches just to get to the point.

The turn-based combat was ... fine, for starters, and I kinda liked being able to roll-over Action Points for a future turn. But then combat started to become difficult, and not so much due to stat boosts or new tactics. More due to the skeleton archer with poison bolts and fire bolts, who enveloped my party in a gas cloud and then made it explode! Or the enemy priest who I had no way of seeing all the way in the back, until he suddenly healed his friends and summoned more of them in the same turn.

What I mean is that combat became rife with abrupt and often deadly turns which couldn't really be recovered from -- I'd need to have approached from a certain direction, or brought certain specialized equipment, before the fight started. And the game didn't exactly warn when one or another of these situations was coming up; it seemed to assume that I'd die and retry, fleeing or reloading before preparing for another attempt.

(Also, before I turned down the difficulty setting, the game's chance-to-hit calculations felt like a cruel lie. I swear that I missed more than half of my "80%" shots. What kind of XCOM shit is that?)

Out-of-combat gameplay wasn't exactly a walk in the park, either. Character prep in this game is work. There were so many ability types to research, so many situational pros or cons to each weapon, so many magic scrolls and grenades and other items to stock up on; oh, and of course, each party member has their own separate inventory so I needed to manage each character's items one by one.

Some of my favorite modern RPGs, like Skyrim or Witcher 3, are clear mechanical simplifications of their predecessors -- fewer skill and ability nuances, smaller lists of character options, even blunter storytelling. And while it's charmingly cynical to say that these games are "dumbed down," they nevertheless delivered the content I wanted in accessible and convenient packages.

Divinity: Original Sin definitely had some content I wanted: the list of side-quests looked huge! and there were so many map areas I'd yet to reveal. There was just too much "filler" in the way, the pages and pages of pace-breaking exposition and reference material, the meticulous inventory management and lengthy die-and-retry loops... I guess some folks are into those aspects of classic PC RPGs, but they're not for me.

Better than: Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, Planescape: Torment - Enhanced Edition
Not as good as: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
This game gives me low hopes: for other recent-ish CRPGs like Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland 2.

Progress: Solved the murder mystery, I guess.

Super Daryl Deluxe is ambitious in its attempt to combine action-platforming adventure, action-RPG combat, and cynical-teenager fantasy storytelling. It's too ambitious. It doesn't pull off any of these things.

The opening scene shows off Daryl's combat, in an obvious dream-sequence scenario where your fighting skills are already significantly upgraded. Which would be a good "hook," except that it's overwhelming and confusing -- there are five combat skills to use! and wave after wave of enemies keep spawning in just to supply more punching bags for you. This thrown-into-the-deep-end intro gives the unfortunate impression that combat is a mindless button-mashing affair.

Then comes a minutes-long, excruciatingly-slow, cringe-filled expository cutscene. The dialog is ... not the worst I've seen, but not very good. And so much of it is unnecessary filler, not to mention the bafflingly-long pauses between lines. "Brevity is the Soul of Wit" was noted four hundred years ago, but no one here seems to have gotten that memo.

Finally the "real" game is introduced, wandering the halls of a high school and doing wacky quests to further along the (admittedly, genuinely mysterious) plot. And as it lacks those pre-upgraded abilities from the intro, this mostly takes the form of a side-scrolling point-and-click adventure: go to this room, talk to this person, go to that room, pick up that thing, go back to the first room...

Mixed into this room-wandering are some platforming controls that are really quite bad. When you hold the jump button, after landing on the ground, Daryl jumps again. And the distance between platforms requires more precision than the game's art style can accurately convey.

I admire the concept, I guess. But while Super Daryl Deluxe introduced many mechanical and narrative ideas in its first hour, none of them were executed well-enough to keep me interested.

Progress: Gave up at the Gorilla Tim fight.

It's not that I don't "get" Undertale. Its off-beat sense of humor can be pretty good, and I appreciate the effort it puts into subverting RPG tropes.

But those elements are overshadowed by plodding field gameplay and sometimes-infuriating avoid-em-up combat. (Which, to be fair, is a personal distaste.) And its quirkiness and subversiveness also manifests as unpredictability, which pairs poorly with the distance between save points.

I would feel more comfortable trying all the wacky dialog options if death-by-bullet-hell was less likely or less punishing. But even setting that aside -- most of the moment-to-moment gameplay, walking through the world and solving simple riddles, is just dull.

I don't "hate" Undertale, but I do hate playing it.

Progress: Got to the waterfall.

The Deadly Tower of Monsters isn't a parody of schlocky low-budget games, at least it's not only that. It's more a parody of schlocky low-budget films, reveling in poorly-written dialog, lazy scene-setting, and low-quality special effects.

As such, it might not be as painfully anti-fun as Matt Hazard's intentionally-bad gameplay, but Deadly Tower still represents an epic self-petard-hoisting. It's a send-up of shitty content, and all of its content... is shitty.

This isn't to say that the game's problems are limited to flat characters and trope-y enemy designs. Button-mashy combat is dull even when it works, and it frequently doesn't work due to loose-feeling input and janky-ass camera movement. But mechanical shortcomings like those could have been "part of the joke" if the game's sense of humor was a strong-enough enticement to keep moving forward.

Unfortunately in-game events aren't absurd enough, or winking-at-the-camera enough, to be genuinely funny. They're just bad.

It's a shame, because in theory the game's "DVD commentary" narration is a great gimmick: an elegant way for a voice-over to explain your current objectives while simultaneously providing colorful jabs and musings. In practice, though, those jabs are woefully uninspired (like a remark about animal actors flinging their feces) and the musings are too few and far between.

Progress: Got "to" the tower, I think?

I should be clear that, when I complimented 3030 Deathwar Redux for having a good start, that wasn't faint praise; it's sadly typical for the opening minutes of a space simulator to turn players away with impenetrable complexity and a stark lack of direction. Like Starpoint Gemini 2, for example.

I'm assuming that this game - and likely the franchise in general - is directed more toward fans of slow and methodical simulations than those who want an action or storytelling fix, because the story is impossibly bland (despite its introductory cutscene droning on for what feels like forever) and there is an intimidating volume of tutorial text. Starpoint Gemini 2's in-game UI and control documentation is comprehensive, and it asks you to read page after page of this before embarking on even the most basic gameplay task.

Which is to fly to a planet, directly in front of you. Simple, sure, but also agonizingly slow. At full speed there are literal minutes of absolutely nothing happening on your way to planetfall.

But then, oh, a pirate ship! Ready your guns and ... hold down the fire key for a minute or so, until it dies. Not exactly the fast and tense action of a Rebel Galaxy encounter, here.

Finally you reach the planet and are greeted by another several pages of tutorial pop-ups, for shipyard options and news tips; but none of it's necessary, as your only objective is to immediately leave the planet again. And then a guy on the radio says to set course for-- oh, christ, how long is this voyage through the void going to take?

Deathwar fell apart after the first star system, but it showed some impressive design chops by making docking stations feel "alive," and by walking you through its various mechanics in highly-scripted intro missions. Starpoint Gemini 2 does pretty much the opposite: gives you a book to read and tells you to keep flying until something happens.

Progress: Like, none.

Granted, it's been nearly a decade since I played Limbo, but I've got no reservations against saying that Inside is basically the same game.

Inside is prettier, sure, with a polychromatic palette; fully three-dimensional environments; and rich lighting and water effects. (Occasionally, its 3D-ness is a detriment, as there's a slight learning curve to interacting with objects versus walking "around" them.)

The goal is the same though: walk to the right while avoiding capture and/or gruesome death, solving basic environmental puzzles to open doors or otherwise un-block your way. Some scenes require precise timing to pass, but convenient checkpoints keep the frustration factor down. And ambient storytelling in the background is intriguing, but the full plot is never really explained.

Inside's chase sequences are tempered by requirements for well-timed interaction - stop and hide in cover, turn back to misdirect, hit a button to seal a door - so gameplay consistently feels more like a puzzle than like fast-paced action. However, the puzzles also never get very complex; they're less about figuring out how a system works, and more about placing objects or timing button-presses correctly to execute said system.

And while I admire the game's commitment against a visually-intrusive user interface, I would have appreciated some tutorial prompts -- the early game forces you to guess that an object can be pushed, and that the X button is how pushing works. Frankly, I think this strict anti-UI stance makes the game hostile to newcomers, in spite of its mechanical simplicity.

I don't regret the three hours I spent with Inside, since it did show off some cool environments, and its puzzles were just enough to keep me engaged. But it's a little disappointing that, narratively and mechanically, it feels so "simple" and similar to its predecessor. (Are all of Playdead's games going to be about brain-control slugs?)

Better than: Limbo, I guess.
Not as good as: Headlander
Longer than, but similar to: Burning Daylight, a free game in the same vein that was so brief I didn't bother glogging about it.

Progress: Got the "normal" ending.

It's definitely a more-enjoyable game than Dig, but SteamWorld Heist likewise comes across as though most of its polish was applied in the wrong places.

SteamWorld Heist takes the turn-based tactics of something like XCOM, flattens them into a side-scroller, and adds aiming controls. This feels like a meaningful improvement over "X percent to hit" dice-roll combat, since hits and misses aren't really random: the game is visually clear on how weapon-type, range, and cover affect your hit chance; and timing your shot with the swaying of a character's gun-hand is a learnable skill.

The mission-based campaign wrapped around this turn-based shooting is ... more mixed.

On the plus side, Heist's randomly-generated level layouts usually work, although I would accuse the tile palettes of feeling a bit same-y and repetitive. Weapon progression is pretty satisfying - at least up until attack strength plateaus, several missions before the game's end - and it's interesting to see each character's unique abilities as they level-up.

But antiquated and baffling design decisions get in the way of what the game does right. Those character-unique abilities, for example, end up mostly overlooked because characters outside your party don't gain any experience; therefore, the most-capable party is always the same one you took on the last mission, and the one before. (Which can get awkward when some missions suddenly ask you to include a fourth, inevitably under-leveled, party member.)

SteamWorld Heist is gracious enough to skip the "permadeath" bullshit, but still punishes a loss severely -- a dead party member doesn't get any experience points (sorry, Mr. Under-leveled) and a party wipe or abandoned mission incurs a currency penalty depending on the difficulty mode. Consequently, if you were saving up currency for better equipment, but then lose a fight due to having shitty equipment, you're now even farther away from the upgrade you need to improve.

This risk to your banked currency is a bizarre incentive to keep "savings" in inventory items, except there's also a relatively low limit on inventory size, leading to a tedious and stupid-feeling meta-game around inventory and cash management.

(Or, if you're like me and don't have the patience for this shit, you can just lower the game's difficulty and reduce the risk of dying as well as the penalty amount.)

As for the narrative theme, it's a fairly rote iteration of Firefly-style space outlaw tropes, except the people are robots (who drop bad puns about gears and circuits). The game barely has any backstory or characterization, and what little it offers is hidden in optional flavor text between missions. Ultimately I don't think Ivanski's ballet story was worth the effort it took to keep talking to him.

The UI is workable but inconvenient, the music gets grating over time, and the inordinate amount of shop space occupied by (and in-game physics for) cosmetic hats is ... well, like I said, it feels like SteamWorld Heist has applied effort and polish to inconsequential bullshit while neglecting persistent issues of difficulty balance and content variety.

I had fun with the core tactical gameplay, and I can't deny that overall I enjoyed playing through each mission -- after lowering the default difficulty to avoid death-spirals. But that fun was just enough to get me through an un-captivating campaign.

Better than: Frozen Synapse, SteamWorld Dig
Not as good as: Mega Man Battle Network, I guess? Wow, I really haven't played many tactical games recently.
Maybe you'll be more stoked about SteamWorld Heist: if you fucking love cosmetic hats.

Progress: Finished on Normal difficulty, all stars including the Outsider missions.

I recently plugged in a new graphics card (no, not this one) and needed some way to try out a few extra GBs of VRAM. A little ironic that the 2015 version of a 2013 game was the best I could do to exercise some 2019 hardware; but what started as a simple benchmark led me to a more-or-less full replay of Grand Theft Auto V.

Unlike my recent re-attempt at GTA IV - and more like The Ballad of Gay Tony - GTA V remains engaging, enjoyable, and not inconvenient. Only one or two missions felt like tedious bullshit, and this game's tow-truck and stevedore diversions were much less aggravating than IV's bowling or Red Dead Redemption's cattle-herding nonsense.

While a few awkward story moments (like Trevor and Michael's abrupt reunion) and ultimately unsatisfying character arcs keep GTA V from narrative greatness, its storytelling is still "good," and its snide silliness is still genuinely entertaining.

And while Los Santos isn't as dense with activities as some more modern sandbox games - nor are its side-objectives as easy to find - there's still no shortage of stuff to do, and the driving gameplay (and occasional random or emergent action) between points A and B is just fun.

I don't know if it'll last another five years; as with my old favorites Red Faction: Guerrilla and The Saboteur, I expect the industry will eventually make this game feel pretty obsolete. But for now, it's still one of the best open worlds we've got.

Better than: Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
Not as good as: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Ehh, let's say, on-balance equitable to: Batman: Arkham Knight

Progress: Picked option "C," did most of the map-icon missions.

There are specific tastes, there are guilty pleasures, and then there are games like 3030 Deathwar Redux that - despite tapping into some of my most primal video game interests - I just can't recommend.

3030 Deathwar Redux is a top-down space-trading simulator, where you pick up missions at a spaceport, buy and sell space cargo, hunt space pirate bounties, buy ship upgrades, buy a bigger ship... et cetera. It's a familiar formula but a difficult one to get right. And while some of Deathwar's gameplay loops are total write-offs (asteroid mining is pointless, as is the barely-playable salvaging mechanic), enough of it does work to make space-truckin' around this galaxy feel pretty great.

At first.

Deathwar's main story is pretty stupid from the beginning, and its dialog is poorly-written, but it does the job of tutorializing and guiding you through the game's core concepts. Optional side-missions picked up from spaceport NPCs offer some opportunities to explore at your own pace, too. And then, once you upgrade to a "split drive" (hyperspace-capable) ship and leave the starter system... scripted side-missions are over.

Story missions steadily degrade in quality as the game marches on, and by the end it's clear that the developers really wanted to wrap it up: dialog cutscenes get replaced with text pop-ups, mission objectives fail to explain their relevancy, some story questions even resolve themselves with no player action. And some later missions make unfortunate use of a very-poorly-implemented on-foot mechanic, which is barely interactive and takes forever because the walking speed is so damn slow.

Meanwhile, you still need to make money for ship upgrades, by grinding through randomly-generated jobs like delivering packages or passengers; there isn't much variety to these job types, and many of them just aren't worth the trouble (requiring you to go to a distant system, then another, before you get paid... ugh).

There is a baffling limit on how many jobs you can accept at once (four), and even more bafflingly, you can't save the game while jobs are in-progress. Which, if you're playing this kind of game correctly, is almost all the time! That one smells more like a save-state bug than a design decision.

Inter-system travel is more frustrating than it needs to be due to dense nebulas, which zap your fuel and can even damage your ship. Initially I thought nebulas were going to be a progress gate, and I'd eventually find an upgrade to power through them - or at least some maps to show the secret routes between dense clouds - but... nope.

And the injury added to that space-travel insult is the in-game radio, which has some legitimately cool music, but shuffles multiple conflicting genres into one playlist and starts a new track every time you dock or un-dock. Like, one moment you'll be listening to a Japanese cover of Take On Me, and then that'll get interrupted by low-fi chiptunes, only for that to get interrupted by classical opera.

It ultimately feels like a mercy that there's no substantial endgame -- I guess you could keep grinding missions to get the money for a capital ship, but... why? Medium-sized ships have more than enough capacity and speed to keep up with late-game missions, and the most expensive weapons are no better than alternatives at a fraction of the price. And other than bigger ships, there aren't any new goals to aim for once the story is over.

I'm not even going to get into the game's control and UI bugs, except to note that they make the already-unhelpful autopilot upgrade pretty damn broken.

3030 Deathwar Redux starts strong, with a promising variety of activities and some fresh new ideas for the genre; props to the early game for giving me a good dose of space-trading action. But by the time the credits rolled, all I could see in Deathwar was disappointment.

Better than: Space Run
Not as good as: Rebel Galaxy
And...: I don't know that they're even playable, anymore, but also not as good as Escape Velocity or Escape Velocity Nova

Progress: Finished the story in a heavily-upgraded Lochu.

Iconoclasts feels like a significant leap forward from the developer's previous game, Noitu Love 2. This is way more than a Mega Man homage -- Iconoclasts tells an epic story using multiple protagonists as they explore an interconnected, Metroidvania-style world.

Well, the world isn't that interconnected; more like the separate-but-adjacent map regions of Dust: An Elysian Tail. (And like Indivisible, Iconoclasts frustratingly refuses to show you more than the current region's map.) The "multiple" protagonists point is also kind of a stretch; main character Robin is frequently rolling with a party of companions, but those characters are only playable for a few minutes of the game's running length. And that "epic" story ... is hard to understand.

The first half of Iconoclasts' campaign is pretty light on storytelling, and yet is still difficult to follow due to a crazy amount of factional jargon. The One Concern is an army fighting for the defense of City One which is ruled by Mother, and there are Agents with super-human abilities granted by Ivory which is also the planet's primary fuel source, while the One Concern General hates the Agents (and also... is one?) and they all enforce Penance upon religious criminals, especially the Pirates which are really a tribe called the Isi who also get Ivory from plants? but not upon the ChemiCo science group which works for the One Concern but also helps the Pirates and Settlers under the table by crafting your weapon upgrades.

In the second half, this narrative stew starts to come together in a meaningful way, and the game fleshes out its pseudo-religious backstory with cool sci-fi elements. ... but the story never completely makes sense, and ultimately I can only speculate regarding the true nature of Ivory and Planet Spines.

Iconoclasts spends more of its narrative focus on characters than on world-building, with uneven results. NPCs gush about Robin, and how strong and helpful you are, but Robin herself only communicates in emotes. Mina is a two-dimensional character whose down-to-earth plights are sympathetic, but she talks too much and her scenes drag on a bit long. And most other characters are just bad people. Especially Robin's brother Elro, who is set up like a stoic ally but is really just an abrasive, antagonistic asshole.

Alright. So how about the gameplay? Well, it's pretty good I guess.

Robin's got a wrench, which can be used as a close-range weapon, as well as a gun which acquires a few different modes over the course of the game. Most enemies have immunity to some forms of attack - like, wrench hits and stun gun shots may just bounce off - so combat tactics are shaped around learning and using the proper ability for each enemy. This gets more interesting in boss fights, where each phase or each weak point requires a new tactic.

That puzzle-like complexity is balanced, and arguably a little dulled, by how easy the fighting is (at least on Standard difficulty). Most enemy attacks don't do a whole lot of damage, and only a couple of boss fights really challenged my dodging or parrying abilities. This definitely kept the game at a low level of tension, but I'd rather that, than have to repeat those fights over and over again.

There are also non-combat puzzles, which can become rather devious as you accumulate more tools and techniques. And a few that are devious due to hidden bullshit, like I literally couldn't see the platform I was supposed to jump on, so inevitably I started popping open a walkthrough every time I got stuck. While most of the game's puzzles are just fine, plenty of them could have used a little more design polish.

The action and puzzle gameplay in Iconoclasts may not be mind-blowing, but it works, and the game's rich visuals and catchy soundtrack help make up for its confusing world map.

It's a shame that the story is so messy, but overall Iconoclasts is fun enough to be worthwhile from start to finish.

Better than: Pocket Kingdom
Not as good as: Indivisible
More exciting, but less puzzling, than: Toki Tori 2+

Progress: 100% on Standard mode.