Dishonored: Death of the Outsider feels strangely like a direct response to some of my criticisms of Dishonored 2, even though those criticisms didn't exist until yesterday.

Stealth tactics work much better here than they did in Emily's story. Billie's abilities are just more inherently stealthy: Foresight, alone, makes the game more about "planning" than "reacting." Tips about secret routes are more readily available and discoverable, thanks to ... rat-speak. There are no more mana elixirs - Billie's "Void Energy" fully recharges - so there's no risk of depleting your sneak-powering magic.

And many encounters, especially early on, are simply designed more for sneaking than for fighting. This game isn't afraid to put a ton of enemies together in one place; these crowded situations are clear and delightful opportunities to look around for alternate solutions. Sometimes they include the limited-but-fascinating Semblance ability, which is a really awesome trick to pull on unaware targets.

The levels themselves are richer, and bigger (at least they seem bigger), than Dishonored 2's. And, Death of the Outsider is more inviting in how it handles optional objectives: like the first game, it presents "Contract" side-missions up front (or after visiting the Black Market), rather than hiding them in a nook or cranny somewhere.

The result is that, while I'd still love a Prey-style fully-interconnected map, each of Death of the Outsider's levels presents a substantial, rewarding world of its own. Even though this game has roughly half as many missions as Dishonored 2, it doesn't feel short at all.

Its revised gameplay formula isn't perfect -- in fact, one significant flub is ability progression. Rather than finding runes and picking upgrade options, this game just unlocks active abilities after each mission, and replaces passive buffs with bonecharms. Which isn't a bad idea, necessarily, but the implementation isn't paced very well: you don't have any magic in the first mission, and most really-good bonecharm buffs don't appear until the game is practically over.

I appreciate how this design simplifies Billie's ability loadout, and I honestly don't miss the power-unlock screen. But I really wanted some magic in the first mission, to distinguish my experience from less-magical games like Thief.

I haven't even talked about the story yet, which is a step up from Dishonored 2's political vengeance boilerplate. It's in the title: Death of the Outsider dives deep into the mythos of the Outsider and the Void, and some of the dark magic it shows off is pretty damn freaky. There's not much in the way of character growth or empathy, but this side-story has higher stakes than Emily had with Delilah. (I'm also stoked that Michael Madsen came back.)

In spite of its smaller level count and running length, and even accounting for its awkward ability pacing, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider easily out-classes Dishonored 2 in my book. This installment strikes a much better balance between stealth and combat, and more-consistently fulfills the franchise's commitment to intricate, curiosity-piquing level designs.

Better than: Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches, Dishonored 2 (yes, better than the full-length game)
Not as good as: Dishonored (purely due to mission/locale count), Prey (2017)
Better gameplay than, but not as good of a story as: BioShock Infinite

Progress: Finished with high chaos.

The first Dishonored impressed me with its ambitious variety of gameplay options, in spite of an awkwardly-linear world and unsatisfying narrative "choice." Arkane Austin followed this up with Prey (2017), which felt like a great (if still-imperfect) evolution of gameplay freedom and narrative integration. So it's funny that, in parallel, Arkane Lyon's attempt to iterate in Dishonored 2 ignored those evolutionary opportunities and instead made the existing formula a little more bland.

Dishonored 2 is structured just like its predecessor: a linear series of semi-open levels, each of which has optional missions, collectibles, and hidden secrets to uncover. And as before, missions are designed to provide you with several options of varying "chaos:" brutal combat, stealth assassination, non-lethal takedowns, even environmental sabotage. That's the theory, anyway.

In practice, the sequel's new abilities and difficulty curve feel much more welcoming of the high-chaos, outright violence route. Stealth mechanics like monitoring enemy positions, or managing your visibility and noise, haven't improved; being sneaky is impossible without some upgrades, and trying to run from danger almost never works. Meanwhile, charging head-first into danger and spamming the sword attack tends to work just fine.

I actually enjoyed playing the game as an unstoppable angel of death: combining swordplay and gunplay mid-melee is pretty fun, and the kill animations are very visually satisfying. But I'm a little bummed that Dishonored 2 didn't incentivize or encourage its stealth options as much. (Actually, according to this abstract guide, stealth players are discouraged from trying new things as the game punishes killing with more enemies that make hiding more difficult.)

One caveat to my recounting of this imbalance is the - surprising - impact that character choice had on it. I chose to play as Emily because I figured her story would be more interesting (more on this in a bit), and didn't discover until mid-game that there are a couple of crucial differences between her and Corvo:

• Corvo's Blink ability keeps you hidden; Emily's Far Reach doesn't.
• Corvo's Possession allows you to sneak around un-seen; Emily's Shadow Walk is "less" visible than normal, but can still be seen.

If character choice was supposed to have an impact on playstyle, then the game wasn't up-front about this when I made that choice. And that, combined with the aforementioned "more kills more enemies" mechanic (also undocumented as far as I recall) and the linear level structure which prevents you from revisiting missed areas, feels like a disappointingly antiquated approach to player freedom: if you want to try something different, you're going to have to play the whole game over again.

Emily's story, by the way, did not turn out to be as interesting as I expected. Both the first and second games are essentially revenge plots with some political and supernatural dressing, but Dishonored at least had an unexpected twist or two up its sleeves. The sequel's storytelling is more by-the-numbers, each mission merely filling in some details of an overall picture that you already know.

Its premise is also shockingly ... lazy. Delilah, the game's main villain, is the same villain from Dishonored's Brigmore Witches DLC. (And to hammer home how un-memorable her story was, I didn't even recognize her until several missions into Dishonored 2. "Oh, it's that lady again!")

That said, while its big picture may be a let-down, the small details of Dishonored 2's world-building are impressively engrossing and evocative. It's always fun to find a written note planning a heist of some hidden treasure cache, or to see a cursed bonecharm surrounded by the corpses of those who tried to use it. This intricate environmental storytelling rivals the audio logs of a BioShock -- if not the rich email-hacking of a Deus Ex.

Ultimately, Dishonored 2 comes across as more of the same Dishonored, but with some smaller risks that didn't pay off. I still had a blast assassinating traitorous goons, but the protagonist-selector was more of an obstacle than a feature, and even the game's few attempts at impressively unique levels - Kirin Jindosh's mechanically-shifting laboratory, and Aramis Stilton's Link to the Past-style mansion - were more gimmicky than they were fun to play.

Prey (2017), with its liberating openness and thrilling plot, was a step forward for Dishonored's supernatural combat mechanics. But Dishonored 2 is more of a step to the side, and a slight stumble backwards.

Better than: BioShock 2 Remastered, Thief
Not as good as: BioShock Remastered, Dishonored (as I remember it), Prey (2017)
I really hope that there's some new story to uncover in: Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Progress: Finished as Emily with high chaos.

"That's it?"

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus achieves the same bombastic narrative heights as its predecessor, The New Order. Eventually. And briefly.

In its first half, The New Colossus is ... depressing. Our dear friend B.J. Blazkowicz was gravely injured at the end of TNO, and the sequel's intro doesn't let up: B.J. is stuck in a wheelchair, resistance headquarters is attacked by Frau Engel, Caroline gets her fuckin' head cut off -- it's dark. The game's opening mission lays the pathos on thick, well beyond what's necessary to establish some Nazi-killin' motivation.

But this call to action doesn't actually turn into action until several missions later. The next handful of hours are filled with not just forgettable objectives and locales, but also with the protagonist feeling sorry for himself, as conveyed by frequent mid-mission sad-sack soliloquies. What could have been a poignant plot revelation about B.J. acknowledging his mortality goes on for far too long, and instead becomes a quagmire of melancholy melodrama.

Fortunately, a ladder out of this rut appears once you meet up with the Manhattan resistance leaders, who join B.J.'s crew and immediately turn this self-flaggelating bullshit around into killin' fuckin' Nazis. From here you'll nuke an enemy stronghold, assault a prison camp to rescue more sympathizers, infiltrate a damn Venusian base, and plan an attack on the propaganda machine to rouse the Americans against their oppressors.

These absurd plot events finally feel like a worthy follow-up to The New Order, setting the stage for an epic, ridiculous guerrilla war to liberate America. And then... the game is over.

Its last mission feels like the set-up to a final third of the campaign - hell, the artifact that Set is obsessing over is a clear macguffin for something - but this never comes. There are optional side-missions (which are bafflingly inaccessible until the very end), and you can revisit earlier levels to recover missed collectibles, but, why? The game's "big bad" is dead. The named characters are done developing. All the narrative stakes are gone.

And it doesn't take long to get there, either. HowLongToBeat may say 10-11 hours, but I rounded out this lackluster story in 7, and I am no speed-runner.

Granted, I did play most of the game on a very easy difficulty level. In part, this was because The New Colossus's underwhelming early chapters were simply insufficient motivation for me to keep going through die-and-retry combat loops. But that's just one part.

A much bigger part was that all of my deaths came by surprise. I don't remember The New Order having such minimal visual feedback for taking damage, but here it's seriously like I had no idea my HP was even "low" until B.J. suddenly keeled over. Way too easy for a laser drone to zap away my health without me even noticing, let alone how easy it is for enemies to hide and ambush in these maps.

The map design just seems ... bad. So many arenas are laid out like mazes, and multi-level mazes at that, while the game's map system has a surprisingly hard time marking objectives above or below you. I got lost a lot, especially in the between-missions headquarters map, even when an NPC told me exactly where to go. I could really have used a navigation HUD.

My opinions on the shooting gameplay should, of course, be taken with the grain of salt that I don't really like arcade shooters to begin with. No bones about it, I'm in this game for its story. But The New Order got me into its shooting despite that; The New Colossus really, really didn't.

Its back half succeeds in delivering a thrilling high-action campaign narrative, but is cut short before The New Colossus can really redeem itself. Overall, this sequel failed to live up to the expectations its predecessor so expertly set.

Better than: Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
Not as good as: Wolfenstein: The New Order
Maybe my glasses are rose-tinted, but also not as good as?: Bulletstorm

Progress: Finished on "Can I play, Daddy?" difficulty, did almost no side missions.

The past several months of quarantine have seen my local nerd gang turn to online multiplayer (largely, Steam Remote Play Together) as a substitute for in-person banter. And though we've tried a ton of different co-op and counter-op games, I think the one that's impressed me most is Moving Out.

At a glance, it resembles a chaotic move-fast-and-throw-things party game, like Overcooked!. But where those games tend to rely on awkward mechanics or random events to keep things unpredictable -- Moving Out has lasting appeal due to its very un-awkward, un-random level design chops.

The game's simple controls and straightforward carry-these-objects goal clear the way for later levels to devise truly awe-inspiring arrangements of obstacles - elevators, conveyor belts, flamethrowers, lava - without feeling unfair or punishing. (Except for the ghosts, which can fuck right off.) Solid fundamentals and well-crafted level layouts make these absurd challenges innately achievable.

Don't get me wrong: there is still plenty of chaos to revel in, especially in initial levels which provide generous opportunities to screw around with mechanical twists like fragile boxes, or ... chickens. But I feel like Moving Out is distinctive among party games for not using the "party" atmosphere as a crutch, instead delivering a legitimately well-built and fun furniture-carrying simulation, level after level.

The game's overall sense of humor is also an undeniable appeal, as are its many pop culture references. I'll put it this way: the "Frogger" level isn't even my favorite. (That honor might go to the Ferris Bueller house, which allows you to re-enact this memorable scene.)

Progress: We just got to ... outer space!

Dyo is a take on the two-player-puzzle genre that I haven't seen before: with one minotaur on the left half of the screen, and the other on the right, you can lock the viewports and walk into the other half. So, for example:

• A platform is too high to jump to. Nuts.
• But you can jump on the other character, and leapfrog up to it!
• Except now the other character is stranded below. Until...
• You lock the screen, and the lower character can walk over to where the higher character is.

It's a neat, mind-bending trick, and the game shows off additional twists and mechanics in each level -- like staggered platforms which require adjusting the screen-locks as you climb, or a pushable block which acts as both an obstacle and a platform.

The problem is... Dyo is terrible at teaching you how to play. There are no hints toward how its mechanics work (the pushable block can float!?), and there's no guidance on how you should approach a puzzle. A good puzzle-game design - really, a good design for any game - is gradually introducing new mechanics on top of old ones, so the player can learn incrementally; but every level in Dyo feels totally different, a whole new set of challenges that previous levels haven't prepared you for.

The result is that figuring out each level involves a lot of staring, and a lot of trial-and-error testing if your character can make a certain-length leap or fit through a certain-size gap. Learning the unique ins and outs of a level is tedious, and boring.

I'm impressed by Dyo's cleverness (and I love the Sands of Time-style rewind/undo feature), but actually playing the game isn't very fun.

Better than: Kalimba
Not as good as: Dyadic
What the fuck: is the point of this guide? "Press Ctrl + F2 to instantly win a level." Brilliant solution, genius. (Asshole.)

Progress: Got to the crossroads, and a few puzzles after that.

Murder by Numbers is a murder-mystery visual novel with investigation elements inspired by Phoenix Wright, and punctuated by nonogram puzzles. It even shares some of Ace Attorney's musical pedigree. This... should really be a slam dunk for me. And while I ultimately still liked this detective-story-and-puzzles game, I can't help but obsess over how I might have liked it even more.

Let's start with the good. Murder by Numbers has a slightly-absurd premise - protagonist Honor is an actress playing a detective, assistant SCOUT is a floating robot who really shouldn't exist in the game's 1990s setting - and yet, not unlike the Fey family's insane spiritual powers, strong characterization and scene-setting make it all totally believable. Detective-story tropes are both honored and subverted, Honor's friends have some genuinely interesting qualities, and characters react to each case's tragedies in poignant but believable and sympathetic dialog.

The case stories are engaging and well-structured, for the most part -- a notable exception being the final case, which feels a lot like it should have been two separate cases (especially since the Kino case really deserved a better resolution of its own). But otherwise, the written story of each case is plenty immersive and compelling.

And like some of the best Ace Attorney tales, Murder by Numbers does a good job of blending humor into its narrative.

Unfortunately, the way in which puzzles are blended in leaves something to be desired. What could have been a gameplay mechanic which supports narrative immersion is instead a distraction from the story, and ultimately detracts from it.

An example of how this combination "should" work is in one of the game's first puzzles. You're in a locked room and looking for a way to escape: you go into robot-assisted investigation mode (neat!); the flashing reticle and beeping noises draw you toward a ventilation grate (good so far!); and you complete a nonogram puzzle of the grate to uncover the exit. Pretty slick, right?

Well, this ludonarrative harmony is the exception, not the norm. From there onward, the investigation target is almost never related to the puzzle -- the reticle will converge on a bathroom mirror, and you'll pull out a fire extinguisher; or it'll focus on a featureless section of floor, and a gun will magically appear.

At first these inconsistencies between environment art and puzzle pictures feel like missed opportunities. But as the game goes on, and this discordance continues unabated, it hardens an immersion-breaking wall between story scenes and puzzles. Turning key items into low-resolution puzzle grids is one thing, but when that item doesn't appear in the investigation screen at all, ... what, exactly, is the point of investigating?

It doesn't help that these puzzles become increasingly tiresome in the final case. There are simply too many of them inbetween the later story scenes, and the puzzles themselves start to blend together, as almost all of them are 15x15 grids. (There are one or two 20x15 puzzles at the very end, but otherwise the game gets "stuck" at 15x15 for most of its running length.)

There is one other venue for puzzles in the game's story, in a few instances where SCOUT needs to "hack" something and you must complete a series of small, randomized 5x5 puzzles with a time limit. These segments are a welcome departure from the normal puzzles, and their hectic presentation, along with the time limit, makes completing them actually feel thrilling. But they don't occur very often.

Outside of the story, there's also the Memories section, where - without narrative accompaniment - you can complete puzzles to "repair SCOUT's database." These puzzles are unlocked based on your progress through the story, which works fine for the most part, with one irritating exception: some of the third case's puzzles are missable, consequently limiting the number of Memory unlocks.

The backstory rewards you get for completing these Memory puzzles are also thoroughly underwhelming, but, hey -- more puzzles.

Finally, I'd be remiss - given my recent complaints about Puppy Cross - if I didn't mention that Murder by Numbers has somewhat mediocre input handling of its own. It's nothing so bad as having to wait for irrelevant animations, but click-and-drag doesn't lock to a row or column at all; and there's no undo button, so it's awkwardly easy to drift into marks you've already made and overwrite them by accident.

I don't want to make it sound like I merely tolerated the game's shortcomings. I mean... I kinda did, in the Memory puzzles. But it isn't as if the game's story mode was "bad," hell, the storytelling was actually pretty good! The art is great, the music is catchy, and the puzzles are as functional as they need to be.

The whole package could have been even better, though, with just a bit more attention paid to the narrative-puzzle bridge.

Better than: Professor Layton and the Curious Village, Puppy Cross
Not as good as: Nonogram - The Greatest Painter, Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Not as good as most Ace Attorney games: except for that Edgeworth spin-off and those godawful "Asinine Attorney" DLCs.

Progress: Finished all cases and all memory puzzles.

Mugsters has some slick and action-packed trailers (as seen on its Steam page). Sadly, the game itself is ... fairly different.

There's no introduction, cinematic or otherwise. There's no in-game storytelling except what's implied by the existence of teleporters and loud machines. There isn't even any background music!

Although the game doesn't tutorialize its controls at all, there's not much to learn: jump, run, pick-up, punch/throw. The lack of available player actions is apparent from the very first level -- a human is trapped in a glass tube, so, how do you free it? There are no interactive elements, and punches don't work... guess you'll need to pick up and throw something at it.

Its physics sandbox is pretty much all that Mugsters has going for it, and gameplay leans hard on this: throw explosive barrels at this thing, jump a car over a ramp, et cetera. And yet, there isn't much to do in the game's sandbox, other than lower barriers and destroy walls until you reach the end of the level.

As nice as the tilt-shift perspective and "clean" un-textured art style look, these become liabilities during actual gameplay: obstacles frequently obscure your immediate surroundings (prepare for lots of camera rotation) and ground elevation changes are difficult to read.

And although Mugsters can be played co-operatively, the appeal of a multiplayer sandbox is brought low by the auto-zooming shared camera. Your player avatar is already tiny when flying solo; a second player just zooms out even further, and can make the level quite inscrutable.

If you really, really want to play around in a fairly-sparse physics sandbox with vehicles, then Mugsters offers several levels' worth of that. But the game is otherwise outstandingly barren.

Better than: Cubots: The Origins
Not as good as: Zoo Rampage
For a better vehicle sandbox, consider revisiting: Blast Corps

Progress: got to island 7

Puppy Cross has a cute premise - completing nonograms of dogs (and cats!) to let them frolic around a garden - and a hefty amount of puzzles backing it up. Even if the customization aspect of the garden is kinda shallow, finishing all the puzzles feels like its own reward.

It even has one of the best quality-of-life improvements I've seen in a nonogram game: once you've marked all the right cells in a row or column, the "X" cells are filled in automatically. This is a pretty great time-saving convenience that streamlines the flow to the next row or column.

Unfortunately, Puppy Cross's strengths are dulled by some unpolished fundamentals. Like disorienting puzzle progression: you need to complete a "world" before moving on to the next, but each world's first puzzles are an order of magnitude easier than the preceding world's last puzzles!

Even though there's barely any text in the game, it suffers from a clear and frequent localization/grammar error. Every completed puzzle unlocks a new item, but they accidentally a word in this messaging:

... and then there are the input problems.

• Click-and-drag can select multiple cells in a row or column, but if you drag past the edge of the puzzle, the input is lost. So filling to the end of a row/column requires more precision than it should.
• Meanwhile, click-and-drag can "X" cells outside of the current row and column, but can only un-"X" one cell at a time. It's easy to "X" more cells than you meant to, and hard to remove those marks afterward.
• Maybe worst of all, mouse-clicks are ignored until animations have stopped playing. Every time you return to the puzzle menu, you can't select a new puzzle - or even get any visual feedback on your input - until the go-to-garden button has finished fading-in, several annoying seconds later.

Much as I appreciate the game's amount of content and its thorough hinting system, the input issues are fairly critical. Puppy Cross is certainly playable, but hard to recommend over more basically-functional nonogram games.

Better than: Pokémon Picross
Not as good as: Nonogram - The Greatest Painter
Dog and cat puns not as good as: Cat Quest

Progress: 100%

Wuppo isn't a "bad" game, exactly, but it's weird in ways that I found more off-putting than charming.

Not just because you jump with the left-bumper, or because you spend currency by equipping it like an item, or because the map is forced to share screen real estate with a pause menu. More because the game's story is told with cartoonish nonsense - it introduces the world through a history of races with names like "Blusser" and "Splenkhakker" - and because, although the game clearly displays your objective, what that objective means is often elusive.

Like, my mission for most of the game thus far was to get back to the "Wumhouse" that I started in. But how? Well, I guess by scouring the accessible map and looking for un-followed routes, or using items with interactive elements until something new opens up. Wuppo doesn't just obscure the path forward with a lack of bright-and-shining objective markers, but also with shades of adventure game (il)logic.

And my problem with Wuppo isn't necessarily that it asks me to understand and execute on its weirdness; it's that I don't know why I should. Mechanically, it's a platform-y exploration game that's pretty unremarkable outside of those weird design choices. And narratively, the premise is that you were kicked out of a hotel for making a mess. What, uh ... what is the point of this game?

I feel like I could "get" Wuppo if I kept trying, but it's not giving me a very good reason to do so.

Better than: Forma.8
Not as good as: Headlander
Very distinct from, but ultimately as uncompelling as: Strider (2014)

Progress: Got back to the hotel, then got lost and gave up.

Ibb & Obb is an adorable co-op puzzle-platformer with cute little characters who will be taunting you in your nightmares before you reach the end.

Its primary puzzle mechanic is a, uh... gravity line? Imagine that the ground is a mostly-horizontal line, and a character above it will be drawn downward, while a character below it will be drawn upward. Portals on the surface (or in walls) can be used to swap from one side of the line to the other, and you and your co-op partner will need to manage "who's on which side" to defeat enemies and overcome hurdles as you travel from left to right.

Gradually but surely, the game adds elements and complications which make for more brain-melting puzzles -- like character-specific portals (only one player can pass between them) and trampoline pads (jumping on them transfers your momentum to a character on the other side). Gravity management remains the core "thing" of the game, but additional foibles keep the overall design feeling fresh.

And then there are the twitchy, time-sensitive challenges, including: tandem-jumping over moving enemies, using gravity-inverting bubbles which can float out of your reach, and - what ultimately made my partner and I give up - using the other character as a platform while they're mid-jump.

Ibb & Obb does a great job of building up its puzzles' strategic complexity, and figuring those puzzles out was great motivation for most of the game's duration. Sitting and staring at the screen for minutes at a time, trading solution theories with your compatriot, is surprisingly satisfying.

The late game just cranked up its bar for precision platforming and reaction times too much, testing my appetite for masochism until it finally broke.

Good fun up until that point, though. Sincerely: this is the best co-op puzzler we've tackled in a while, despite its eventual, unreasonable difficulty.

Better than: Dyadic, Kalimba
Not as good as: Pitfall Planet
Unlike some other "relationship ruiner" games: here, you can commiserate against a shared enemy (the game).

Progress: Got part-way through level 13 of 15.