Ori and the Will of the Wisps is slow. But not in the same way as Afterparty; Ori can run across screens just fine, and the plot is no mystery. The problem is that I'm not at all interested in that plot -- and Ori's gameplay, developing my abilities and exploring the map, is what moves at a snail's pace.

The first 10 minutes are all barely-interactive character setup, introducing the owl child you're supposed to go rescue. Seriously, ten minutes of running left and running right to portray some formative moments. Could've been a 30-second animation.

Then when the rescue mission starts, your first equipment upgrade is ... a torch, which is wielded so awkwardly (and whose flame is doused so regularly) that it's obviously a temporary placeholder. The next 20 minutes lead to a fight with a giant wolf, who posts up a big fat health bar but abruptly flees after a few hits. It's only afterward that Ori gets the "real" attack move.

And then it's still a good half-hour before the double-jump appears, and another half-hour (time check: 90 minutes of "gameplay") until the dash and mid-air Bash move show up. Why couldn't the game just start, like, here?

Meanwhile, NPC animals are giving you navigation breadcrumbs and sidequests - and the camera will occasionally cut over to that poor lost owlet - in events that feel more like interruptions than storytelling.

And the "dangerous obstacles can blend in with innocuous surfaces ... art in the foreground will cover up the action" frustrations I had in 2017 are, if anything, even more frequent in the sequel. Can this branch be jumped through, or not? Is this glowing thing destructible, or purely decorative? Will my attack interrupt this enemy, or is it gonna hit me anyway?

By the time Will of the Wisps gave me enough tools to feel like a videogame, I became convinced that it was really more interested in being a Miyazaki film. When given the choice between visually-clear platforms or a shiny piece of art, it'll choose eye candy every time. And it just won't stop wasting screentime trying to make me care about that little owl.

I'll at least credit it for learning something good from Blind Forest: it does, as previously noted, replace those insane consumable saves with normal location-based save points. Shit, it even has automatic checkpoints at meaningful map transitions like Batman: Arkham Asylum. How generous!

And I mean, it's not that Will of the Wisp's platforming mechanics are "bad," certainly no worse than Blind Forest's. I was just falling asleep on my way to them.

Progress: 7%, killed a Horn Beetle, talked to Kwolok the giant toad.

Afterparty isn't the Oxenfree successor I was hoping for.

For a sophomore effort, Afterparty's controls and interactivity are surprisingly amateurish. Not only does it still have the ambiguous dialog-choice timings and interruptions of its predecessor, it adds seemingly-at-random swaps between which of the two lead characters you're controlling. Its sidescrolling scenes make inconsistent use of depth, sometimes as background and foreground décor but sometimes as a continuation of the walking path. Characters waltz through doors as they're closing; the zoomed-out view obscures relevant scene details; message pop-ups from Twitter "Bicker" appear partially off-screen, such that reading them would require walking away from an ongoing conversation.

The game feels so unpolished that I'm tempted to call it unfinished. But all these issues could be forgiven for the sake of a compelling narrative -- and there lies Afterparty's gravest sin. It's boring.

Walking from point to point is slow, even when you know the right way to go (which you often don't). And while you're meandering back and forth over the map, opportunities to interact are rare; it's like the game just expects you to stare at environment art while holding a directional button.

At the four-level walkway up to Satan's house, for example, each level has two to three horizontal screens of space but only one (other than the elevators) prompt for conversation. Then in the house itself, an office room filled with thematic art and furnishings has a single prompt for conversation ... about a barely-visible fiddle, deep in the background. That's it.

The conversations themselves - not just those, I mean, all throughout Afterparty - are pretty dull. An occasional witty quip lands well, kudos to the voice cast, but characters' scripts seem to be half about reiterating worn-on-their-sleeves personalities and half about describing the current objective. Neither the protagonists nor the plot's mysterious backstory seem to develop at any pace. Two hours after teeing up the the question of how Milo and Lola died, the game has still told me absolutely nothing about it.

The drink-based dialog mechanic sounds promising - cocktails with different effects such as "Liquid Courage" or "Flirty Floozy" add unique options to a conversation - but the option occurs so infrequently I'd struggle to consider it a key game feature. (Though it's worth noting that I bailed before reaching the game's promised drinking-contest climax.)

I remember Oxenfree motivating me to unravel its mysteries, keeping me engaged and attentive, through thrilling environmental tension; and the cast's conversations reinforced that tension, as they handled the spookiness around them. Afterparty, despite its visually-striking setting, doesn't maintain any narrative tension of its own -- nor character intrigue, gameplay depth, or any other reason to hold my interest.

Better than: Kentucky Route Zero
Not as good as: Broken Age, Oxenfree
For a more interesting afterlife, see: Hades (2020), or Spiritfarer: Farewell Edition

Progress: Met Satan.

Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story is better at establishing its setting than Convergence was, at least. Though its writing is still soaked in Runeterra references I don't get; this time, I could clearly read character personalities and story scope directly from the game's own dialog.

Nunu's gameplay, meanwhile, does feel like a shallow reference to other games -- immediately to Uncharted 4, in particular that level with the hexagon-rock Scottish caverns. And like so many other 3D Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider and Uncharted imitators, this game's controls and map traversal just feel awkwardly loose, and prone to clumsy falls.

As the game shows off more "teamwork" between Nunu and his yeti friend Willump, I unexpectedly remembered - deep cut alert - Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom. Importantly, though, Willump doesn't take orders like Majin did; he works at his own irritatingly unpredictable pace.

Can I make this jump alone, or do I need to wait for Willump to come help me? Is Willump going to clobber that obstacle, or is he waiting for me to do something first? These moments aren't consistently signposted, and there's also no way to explicitly trigger them. Likewise for the moments in which Willump grabs Nunu, switching you to yeti controls, as well as the inverse return-to-Nunu moments.

It feels weird when these things just up and happen without warning, and it's slightly frustrating that Song of Nunu's otherwise-simple puzzles can be ambiguous about which parts of the solution you're actually responsible for.

While I appreciate Song of Nunu's (relatively) focused storytelling, its interactive walking and jumping and wall-climbing and switch-pulling can't help but remind me of other, better games.

Progress: Met Braum.

This is it! The one that worked: Hades truly feels like the culmination of lessons learned from Supergiant's previous games, combined into an experience that's compelling, exciting, and an audiovisual delight.

Like Bastion, Hades brings a variety of weapons into real-time action combat; but this time, each one really feels unique and meaningful. Like Transistor, Hades has a ludicrous amount of progression and upgrade options; but without confusing equip/upgrade modality, and with run-based resets justifying experimentation. And like Pyre, Hades deliberately separates story and action moments, building its narrative through conversational dialog inbetween fights; but now with full voice acting that seriously enhances its characters' personalities.

Unlike its predecessors, Hades had no trouble at all convincing me to repeat its "loop" -- maybe because the loop itself wasn't a surprise, as in, the fact that failing to escape Hades will respawn you ... back in Hades is coherent and clearly telegraphed. Or maybe because its fast-paced combat is legitimately fun, and stays fresh run after run thanks to randomized upgrades and encounter variety. Or! maybe because of the charming characters drawing me into its larger story, motivating me to go farther and unlock more of that story.

While Supergiant's earlier games felt like beautiful, incomplete experiments, Hades succeeds at bringing everything together: its plot and its cast, its action and its progression, all work and work well together. It's a good loop.

Key to that success is the amount - and consistently high quality - of written and voiced dialog. It continues to blow my mind that after dozens and dozens of runs, I never heard the same line twice! (Well, one time, I'm pretty sure that I got a repeat out of Lord Hades himself. Still!) This seemingly-endless supply of unique writing was critical in helping every repeating event feel new.

I can't commend Hades enough for making me like some rogue-like mechanics. I've enjoyed time-loop stories (Deathloop, Elsinore, Outer Wilds), and I've enjoyed some run-based games despite being rogue-likes (God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla, Middle-earth: Shadow of War - Desolation of Mordor) but -- Hades got me to sincerely appreciate the random encounters, upgrade combinations, and conversations I saw in each run. For the first time, I'm seriously reconsidering my c. 2014 declaration that I "hate this shit."

All that said, I do wish Hades didn't require quite so many runs to complete its story. Earning enough darkness to buy powerful upgrades took some grinding; completing enough runs to unlock the "ending" felt a bit silly; and then having to do more runs to incrementally progress character dialogs toward a "real ending" epilogue was a little annoying. The game's structural decision to restrict an NPC's dialog to one topic per run - requiring another run before they'll talk about something else - was especially frustrating when some characters acted like a bottleneck to multiple Prophecy side-quests.

(I'd also be remiss not to bring up the God Mode setting - a difficulty reduction which I absolutely needed - and how it must itself be upgraded by dying repeatedly.)

But despite wanting less-stingy story progress, I was happy to keep jumping into another run over, and over, and over again. Not just because the gorgeous art, incredible music, engaging characters, and compelling story felt worth the effort. Also because it's fun!

Better than: Deathloop, God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla, Transistor
Not as good as: well, until I play the sequel, Hades is kinda undisputed.
And, yes: you can pet the dog!

I may not be into League of Legends, but I was into the worldbuilding in Arcane -- and so a Metroidvania set in that world, with Sands of Time-style rewinds!, seemed right up my alley. Convergence: A League of Legends Story didn't ... go down that alley, though.

For one thing, Convergence doesn't line up much with Arcane's story threads or key settings, nor does it "build" a coherent world of its own. Its opening chapter is overflowing with casual references to people and places and concepts that I don't know or care about; I can only guess that the references will mean something to a League diehard, but as an outsider I didn't get anything out of all the lore-babble.

I did get something out of Convergence's parkour-ey traversal, which (at least in the early game) includes a pleasant variety of Prince of Persia-esque acrobatics, pole-jumping and wall-running and et cetera. Although I don't know if more gameplay hours might change that opinion, since I've read that there's no fast-travel.

But what really put me off Convergence was the combat, which simply has too many enemies. Even when turning the Battle Compositions difficulty down to "Light" - and, I do have to give the game kudos for discrete difficulty settings - the amount of fodder thugs and annoying fliers that keep showing up just feels like a chore.

Enemy volume also works frustratingly against Ekko's battle tactics, as dodge- and parry-able tells become impossible to see when two guys are visually overlapping, and then rewinding to undo one of their attacks will frequently result in another enemy hitting you anyway.

I gave up on Convergence fairly early, but with the distinct impression that it was made for LoL devotees who don't mind repetitive combat, and for whom Metroidvania and PoP influences could be neat surprises. As a fan of those latter ideas, but not the former, this game doesn't seem like it's for me.

Please don't misunderstand when I say: Viewfinder is more than a tech demo, but not much more.

Its perspective-twisting mechanics are impressive, making for some pretty neat puzzles! And a few levels add compelling twists, like electric circuits (which must stay complete in snapshots) and abstract art-style switch-ups (which affect level geometry!). But the vast majority of its puzzles are shallow. Viewfinder never builds the complexity to compare to, say, Antichamber.

It has a storyline, framing and explaining its physically-impossible world, as well as audio recordings from a cast of background characters. But the narrative isn't convincingly connected to what you're doing in-game; it feels very bolted-on. And those characters aren't ... interesting. Viewfinder doesn't have the personality or the drama of a Portal, or even a Magrunner: Dark Pulse.

And outside of the puzzles, the game isn't all that well-polished. Voiceovers play over one another. Music is moody, but dull and repetitive. Menus look like they were slapped together last-minute.

You can pet a cat, though.

Viewfinder has some pretty awesome technology powering its core mechanics, and a basically functional game surrounding them. There are plenty of worse first-person puzzlers. There are plenty of better ones, too.

Better than: Qbeh-1: The Atlas Cube
Not as good as: Q.U.B.E.
Comparable to: Quantum Conundrum

Blast Corps is a truly fond memory for me: using creative and wacky vehicles, like a side-swiping dump truck and a giant one-armed mecha, to demolish buildings in the name of safety. Sadly, 1997-era Rare quickly moved on to new business (GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, et al) and never looked back; after three decades of no sequels or remasters or reboots, I thought I might be the only one who remembers Blast Corps. But it turns out I'm not alone after all.

Instruments of Destruction succeeds brilliantly at fulfilling my nostalgia for Rare's N64 explosion-fest. Given a flimsy premise of knocking down unsafe structures, you pilot scores of wacky, experimental demolition vehicles through a series of destruction, racing, and move-boxes-to-places missions. And when I say "wacky" and "experimental" I mean...

• The Hiker: a tractor with a flipping platform, like a dang battlebot!
• The Puck: a helicopter that magnetically drops, then retrieves, a super-heavy wrecking puck!
• Goliath Grappler: a tank that shoots and retracts a giant harpoon!
• SuperRoller: a rolling sphere which magnetically collects debris! (yes, it's Katamari Damacy)

... are just a few of this game's wild and crazy Instruments. Nearly every mission, including "challenge" variants, introduces a new weapon-laden truck or cannon-turreted tank or laser-spitting helicopter or et cetera.

Some vehicles are difficult to control - particularly a handful of hovering craft whose radial symmetry obscures which direction is "forward" - but the game's immense arsenal means that there's always something new and inventive just around the corner. (Plus, awkwardly stumbling into stuff by accident is still pretty fun.)

And that's key to how Instruments of Destruction doesn't simply re-iterate Blast Corps, whose scope is relatively quaint by today's standards. Instruments re-envisions Rare's idea, and recaptures the feeling of its arcade-ey sandbox-ey demolition at a larger, modern scale.

The soundtrack is fucking rad, too.

What more could you ask for? Well, maybe a few quality-of-life improvements, like an easier way to navigate the level-select menu/map; and a mission radar to help find objectives, which are hard to see in some levels' terrain.

I guess I "could" ask for a cohesive open world inbetween the game's missions, and a compelling narrative told by interactive NPCs. A more-engaging world might've motivated me to check off more optional-challenge boxes, and dive deeper into its "Build & Destroy" vehicle-construction mode. That's really not something I'd expect from a solo developer, though. (Even one whose resume includes Red Faction: Guerrilla.)

As an explosive destruction sandbox with arcade challenges, and as a modern love letter to Blast Corps, Instruments of Destruction is more than good enough.

Better than: attempting to replay Blast Corps, for sure.
Not as good as: "a cohesive open world" with destruction, e.g. Red Faction: Guerrilla or The Saboteur
Pro-tip: turn off controller rumble, unless you want full-strength non-stop force feedback.

There are lots of different approaches to Early Access. Some games enter it really early, like a tech demo or engine proof, while some other games enter it nearly-complete but for compatibility bugs. Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core may look almost finished, but in truth it's still got a long way to go; and the developers know it, especially following early feedback.

In an ebonut-shell, Rogue Core's design goal is to take the progression- and resource-based upgrade paths from DRG Classic and replace them with temporary, randomized (roguelike) equipment each run. ... but also to have permanent upgrades earned through post-run (roguelite) progression. And, impressively, Rogue Core strikes a good balance between those two ideas: weapon options in each run feel fresh and exciting, while I'm also continuously earning and customizing loadout power-ups.

Several options in both of those paths feel lacking, currently. There are a bunch of loadout upgrades that don't "upgrade" very much, like unlocking them is a waste, and some randomized weapons don't carry enough ammo to last through real combat. I'm hoping the game's iterations in Early Access will improve these options.

But my biggest gripe with Rogue Core isn't its progression mechanics, especially since a failed run is still pretty rewarding. It's how a run fails that feels unreasonably punishing.

Run timeouts are really frustrating, for a couple reasons: the on-screen timer itself isn't obvious, so it's easy to forget that the clock is always ticking; and when time does run out, the immediate consequence is a swarm of monsters just like a mid-mission swarm (or like swarms in DRG). A swarm which the game has trained you to shoot and smash your way through -- except in the timeout case, this isn't possible! The swarm never ends.

It's a jarring, kind-of sadistic twist on gameplay assumptions you've built pre-timeout. I think this mechanic really needs to change into something that's more clearly different from "normal" swarms, and - if Rogue Core wants the timeout to force you toward hurrying along, or giving up - something that can end the mission more quickly, rather than wasting your time with a hopeless battle.

"Death spirals" are also more likely in Rogue Core than in vanilla Deep Rock, due to two particular gameplay changes:

• Where miner-dwarves had a recharging shield bar, reclaimer-dwarves have a non-recharging armor bar. If you die, then get resurrected, there's no shield buffer; at low health and with no armor, you'll probably die again soon.

• In mining missions, ammo resupplies could be timed (and placed) at will, through the mine-able supply of Nitra. But in reclamations, resupplies are in static and limited positions on the map; if you're low on ammo, and if there are enemies inbetween you and a resupply, fighting your way to it might leave you in an even worse spot.

I'd really like something to change on both of those fronts, so that resurrection feels less fragile, and ammo supply is less perilous.

Then there's the boss fight, at the end of a run. A friend and I - both extremely experienced in Deep Rock - managed to beat it, but only by the skin of our teeth (and with no ammo to spare). Its combination of huge health, tricky weak-point-management, and intense area-of-effect attacks was absurdly tough for our low-level reclaimer dwarves.

Hard bosses aren't necessarily a bad thing, but this being the first boss is just demotivating. I'm hoping that a slightly tamer boss will get implemented and take its place in the game's early missions.

Despite all the ranting above, there are parts of - and ideas in - Rogue Core that I do really like. The general feel of combat is really fun, the optional mid-mission activities (for bonus Expenite) are cool, and I'm excited to see new randomly-modified weapons in future runs.

In the game's present form, there's more pain and suffering than I'd like inbetween its fun parts. But they're still working on it!

When Spiritfarer first showed up back in 2019, my interest was piqued by "exploring, building, [and] cat". Now, finally playing it - with post-release updates in a "Farewell Edition" - the exploring and building didn't turn out quite like I expected. But what I got instead was mostly good.

As for the cat, Daffodil, he's fluffy and squeaky and playful and you can hug him. So adorable.

In fact, hugging is one of the game's key mechanics. As you sail the purgatory-like sea, you find lost souls and ferry them to the afterlife -- every spirit's journey showing off a unique personality, and revealing a tragic-or-otherwise life story. But what's really special about Spiritfarer is the emotional connections it builds as you talk to, run errands for, feed, and hug each spirit.

Spiritfarer makes its cast feel real and memorable through incredibly high-quality animations, writing that's chock-full of character, and a moving soundtrack, especially the heartstring-pulling swell when passing through the Everdoor. I cared about each spirit, and truly felt like I needed to help them move on.

Even the forgetful and frustrating dementia cases. I felt bad about wanting them to pass.

There's also an overarching story about the protagonist, Stella, teased by spirits that happened to know her in life. I don't think this story is told very well, though; it stays vague for most of the game, then kinda dumps out all at once. Unlike the spirits, whose incremental requests and interactions built into sincere attachment, Stella herself isn't characterized very well.

Then there's the buildings-on-your-boat gameplay. It's more farming-sim than I expected, as you use collected resources to construct gardens, and orchards, and ... looms and sawmills and metal foundries ... and, in order to house (and feed) the spirits, you'll have to continuously keep up on gardening and milling and foundry-ing et cetera.

The variety of resource-collecting microgames is neat, at first, and I admire how they set a slow and "cozy" pace while you're ferrying around. But over time, the tiered chores needed to fulfill spirit requests become a tedious grind. Planting linen seeds to harvest fibers to spin thread to sew sheets, chopping trees to collect logs to saw planks, mining ore to smelt ingots to smith plates -- toward the game's end, coziness gives way to repetitive boredom.

I kept wishing for some kind of automation infrastructure, like Factorio's or Satisfactory's machines and conveyor belts to just run these chores for me. Alas.

But the crux of Spiritfarer - its spirits - makes up for that grindiness, more often than not. The distinct personalities fleshed out by its writing and art, the stories they tell as you travel with them, build attachments strong enough to feel for these wayward souls.

Being by their side in their final moments felt... touching. Meaningful.

Better than: Animal Crossing: Wild World
Not as good as: Dave the Diver (not narratively or aesthetically, but in gameplay variety)
Presentationally comparable to: Battle Chef Brigade

I'm on record - back in 2022 - calling Transistor "like ... a proof-of-concept for Hades". I can't help but describe Pyre in the same way: another step in Supergiant's journey to a land-of-the-dead roguelike, but not much of a destination on its own.

It starts, as ever, with great-looking art and great-sounding music which set a wildly imaginative scene; but like Transistor and Bastion before it, the novelty of Pyre's aesthetics fades quickly. In dialog scenes and in its highly stylized overworld "map," as characters describe their flat personalities in terse lines, and as flavor text dumps buzzword-filled irrelvant lore babble, Pyre comes off as a shallow visual novel. The surface-level style has very little narrative substance beneath it.

I have to particularly critique the game's dialog-keyword-hover-detail mechanic, which tantalizingly highlights words in a dialog box that you can hover over for more background text, background which is never meaningful.

As for the gameplay inbetween those story scenes, to its credit, Pyre experiments more boldly than its predecessors -- its "rites" resemble basketball more than typical videogame combat. And, though the full set of controls is bewilderingly complex at first, it's easy enough for a beginner to run around and learn the mechanics one step at a time.

Unfortunately Pyre's rites don't evolve much strategically, as the simplest tactics of "run fast to the goal" and "attack until the field is clear" remain the best regardless of what's happening with your opponents or the playfield. (At least in my apparently-limited experience; I'll come back to that.) Since you're only able to move one of your three characters at a time - the other two will just sit and wait for an enemy to attack them - bigger plays involving teammate positions and timed passes aren't practically feasible.

Lacking motivations (or opportunities) to try different techniques, the experimental gameplay ultimately doesn't feel like a success. And as both the rites and the storytelling become fairly tedious, I wasn't compelled to keep playing past Pyre's surprise-not-ending.

The "surprise" is that, although Pyre sets up a clear sequence of events with a specific end-point - and its between-rite progression choices seem like a foundation for multiple "runs" through that sequence - a late narrative twist reveals that the final rite doesn't complete OR reset the campaign. Instead of freeing you and the party from your exile in Pyre's world, one party member is freed, and the "real" campaign becomes the completion of yet more rites! to free more characters, one at a time.

It vividly reminds me of Final Fantasy IV's narrative bait-and-switch around collecting the all-powerful magic crystals, then discovering there are more crystals, then still more crystals after that. A frustrating memory that I'm now recalling Bastion had dug up, too.

So yeah, I stopped playing Pyre after the "final" rite turned out to be a fraction of the way through its story. I may not have seen everything in Pyre, but I feel like I saw enough to imagine the rest, and I just wasn't interested enough to keep going.

Better than: Bastion
Not as good as: Transistor
Again, as a story which requires loop-like repetition toward an out-of-loop story: I keep thinking that Hades is the game they'd wanted to make all along.

Progress: Liberated one exile.