Molek-Syntez is to SpaceChem as TIS-100 is to Shenzhen I/O. If you've played Zachtronics games before, this analogy should be a fairly complete description.

Like TIS, it has a pretty simple base instruction set: synthesizer lasers can add and remove hydrogen atoms, move and rotate molecules, and perform a couple of other miscellaneous functions. Goal molecules must be synthesized from input molecules by executing these instructions in the right sequence.

Unlike TIS, your resources (instruction memory and playfield space) aren't dramatically limited. This leads to a much "freer" feel in Molek-Syntez's puzzles; without resource constraints, there's more room for unoptimized or experimental solutions.

Of course my ultimate goal is still to run those lasers in parallel and get the job done in as few cycles as possible, but I love having the option to brute-force my way through and optimize later.

There is a flip-side to that openness, though -- later puzzles ramp up in difficulty not necessarily by requiring more cleverness, but by requiring more work. Complex molecule transformations take more hydrogen fiddling, more surgery to remove extra atoms, more shifting molecules around to position their numerous atoms for lasering...

It's certainly not to the absurd scale of Infinifactory's end-game bonus levels (where you had to build a whole damn space station out of single blocks), but the chemistry puzzles have already become intimidating enough that I'm ready to move on.

It doesn't help my motivation that, like TIS, this game drip-feeds a barely-there story.

I feel kinda bad for bailing on a Zachtronics game without finishing its main puzzles, and especially bad that I still haven't caught up to one of my Steam friends in the optimization leaderboards. That may haunt me enough that I need to return to the synthesizer someday. But for now, I'm satisfied with what I got out of Molek-Syntez.

Better than: Opus Magnum
Not as good as: SpaceChem
I would say, equitable to: TIS-100

Progress: Completed 17 puzzles.

A.N.N.E. is one of only two! remaining crowdfunded/early-access games that I've bought but am still waiting for. (Ref.: Early Access, Late Release)

And as of last month, the developer's plan was to hit feature-complete on May 20th. So it should come as no surprise that on May 20th the release plan was updated to "maybe never" (paraphrasing).

Considering the initial release estimate was in 2014, the shocking part is really that it took this long for him to give up. Like, I don't want to sound discouraging -- the dedication and persistence he's shown up until now is genuinely awesome. After years of waiting already, I never expected A.N.N.E. to come this close.

And it does exist in a playable form; which, given this dev update, is likely to be its final form. But "the creator still considers it unfinished" is a pretty big caveat to start a game with.

Back in March, after bouncing off of Baldur's Gate, I naturally gave a shot to its close friend Planescape: Torment. And I was pleasantly surprised -- while the former showed how far RPGs have come in the past two decades, the latter didn't feel nearly as dated.

Probably because it seems to be using the Infinity Engine as a storytelling vehicle - focusing on dialog and storytelling rather than on antiquated combat mechanics (and corresponding tutorials/ramp-up) - and because the writing quality of said story is actually pretty good! Torment did a better job of keeping my attention in its opening hour. But it was still kinda slow-moving, so I got distracted by Fallout 4 and upgraded my PC and took my sweet time circling back...

Which is how I've now discovered that, while Planescape: Torment EE "supports" Steam Cloud Saves, they're turned off by default. So, my hour of progress is gone forever.

This is just enough discouragement to prevent me from diving back in. Sure it would only take me an hour to get back to where I was, but if I'm only into it for the story anyway, I may as well read or watch it online.

On one hand, Pocket Kingdom is a welcome entry in the under-served "puzzlevania" sub-genre. It combines exploration-based storytelling and platform-puzzle mechanics in a semi-open world -- a rare pairing which I'd love to see more of.

On the other hand, this implementation leaves a lot to be desired. The story it tells is just a flimsy justification for some fantastical environments and mechanics - a threadbare example of a magical world trope - and its conversation-based exposition is more annoying than it is fascinating.

The open-world aspect of the game is hardly even worth mentioning, since the way forward is almost always a straight line. And if you do attempt to roam the map - like, if you mistakenly believe that there might be an alternate route to the next objective - attempting to backtrack through previously-solved puzzles is often a pain.

Meanwhile, although Pocket Kingdom's puzzles can get quite difficult, they aren't really satisfying to solve. Almost every puzzle is fundamentally about pushing and pulling blocks, to press buttons or stop lasers or create platforms; these mechanics don't significantly evolve over the course of the game. Even the scant few tools that you find later - a grappling hook, a rocket launcher - are still primarily about block-manipulation. (Also... you can't carry both of them at once!)

And despite Pocket Kingdom's relatively small scale, it frequently shows a distinct lack of polish -- like inconsistent menu controls, frustrating map navigation, overly repetitive background music, eye-crossing aesthetic choices...

... and at least one puzzle whose solution says a reward will come in a future patch. (It doesn't look like the game has been updated in a few years, so maybe don't hold your breath.)

Pocket Kingdom is generally playable, and definitely worth trying for fans of puzzles and interconnected world maps. But its world-building and puzzle variety, as well as its production values overall, are bluntly mediocre.

Better than: Qora
Not as good as: Toki Tori 2+
Definitely not as good as: Fez, The Witness (2016)

Progress: Got all the achievements, though I think there are still some items left.

Finally, a game from that charity bundle which I don't have to dismiss as "for a good cause."

The Turing Test is a Portal-alike, complete with first-person puzzles, a robot narrator, and a relatively-brief running length. What sets it apart from sub-genre peers like Q.U.B.E. and Quantum Conundrum - which felt a little like one-trick ponies falling into a rut - is that Turing continues to introduce new and exciting mechanics, and reveal interesting story twists, throughout that length.

Pacing is hard to get right, but it feels like The Turing Test pretty much nailed it. The game is split into seven chapters of ten puzzles each, with a significant story beat at the end of every chapter; while the game's plot is obviously building up to something, it has some twists up its sleeve up to the very end, and the dialog between protagonist Ava and AI overseer Tom invites some metaphysical curiosity inbetween those twists.

The puzzles, too, are well-paced within each chapter. Later puzzles are more complex than earlier ones but not dramatically so -- most chapters, rather than dialing up a pre-existing puzzle mechanic, introduce a new mechanic to build their puzzles around. Even the final chapter has a few "dunker" puzzles in it. No one chapter feels like a brain-bending slog, and puzzle designs are uniquely fresh all the way through.

My praise for The Turing Test isn't universal: one or two of its puzzles require some annoyingly-specific physics (the barely-perceptible "jump" shouldn't be a puzzle mechanic), one special puzzle requires outright prescience, and some of Tom's philosophical digressions feel awkwardly unprompted.

The biggest disappointment for me was that the game's supporting cast, and their background storytelling in written notes and audio recordings, are really under-polished: their voice acting is flat, the audio quality sucks, and some of the notes' fonts are unreadably blurry. It's to The Turing Test's credit that this category of narrative polish - not overall playability or core storytelling - was my primary issue.

It's a good puzzle game with engaging storytelling. It's no Cave Johnson, but it'll do!

Better than: Magrunner: Dark Pulse
Not as good as: Portal 2
Hard to say against the first Portal: Valve's humor and puzzles got more intricate, while Turing's story and mechanics showed more variety.

Six years later, thanks to that same charity bundle that's been getting me in such trouble recently, I finally bit the bullet on the Thief reboot. And it's roughly what I expected, more-or-less.

The "more" is Thief's overall aesthetic, which is satisfyingly moody and foreboding. I'll just assume that this team took extensive notes from Dishonored because Thief's art style nails that same "feel" of quasi-Victorian English malaise. (No small thanks to its embrace of literal darkness and shadows.) This does an admirable job of visually reinforcing the game's downtrodden-peasants and privileged-elite setting.

The "less" is the story, and the sense of freedom. Both of which I'd consider ... pretty important.

Thief's introduction expends significant time and effort setting up its plot, which is an unfortunately awkward mismatch of gritty realism and dark fantasy. Erin goes on and on about how being a thief is cool, and stealing is great, and the only thing that matters is theft, while Garrett just stands there and broods. The writing sometimes feels like a fan-fiction accompaniment to the 1998 original: so desperate to expand an existing franchise that it discards the very idea of subtlety.

And while Thief's city map might resemble an open-world sandbox, that resemblance is more lie than truth. For one thing, there are loading screens inbetween map sections, so -- it runs somewhat contrary to the spirit of "open world." And even within those sections, there's a disappointing lack of options or activity: only some surfaces allow you to clamber over debris, or climb a wall, or use a rope arrow. For all the traversal tools at Garrett's disposal, his opportunities to use them are depressingly few.

The rest of the game is exactly what I suspected it would be, back in 2014. You sneak, and you steal things, and that's it. The sneaking is less Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell, and more classic Hitman: while Thief indicates when you're in shadow versus light, and shows an alert level over the enemy's head, the difference between "maybe they see me" and "time to reload my save file" is borderline imperceptible.

As for the stealing, well... the lock-picking mechanic is annoying with a mouse, but otherwise theft is a straightforward loot-the-drawers affair. It's kind-of a funny follow-up to my recent experience in Fallout 4: while I'm all in for meticulously exploring a room and liberating its valuables, I still need some high-level motivation. Thief doesn't even unlock its equipment and ability upgrades until the second mission, and even then... really? So the cash value of a stolen item is a direct analog to experience points? This feels like a lazy justification for Erin's "stealing is great" attitude.

Thief is impressively well-polished in some areas, but utterly unsubstantial where it counts. I think there is some simple fun in here if you turn off your brain and don't mind Hitman-level amounts of stealth bullshit. But I really feel like, for everything this game tried to do, another game has already done it better.

Better than: Deus Ex: The Fall
Not as good as: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dishonored, Mark of the Ninja, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
And as far as thief-simulators go: Skyrim's Thieves Guild is easily more immersive and satisfying than this.

Progress: Met the Queen of Beggars.

Deus Ex: The Fall is exactly what I would expect from asking a mobile game studio to re-make Deus Ex: Human Revolution in the Unity engine with a minimal budget.

Everything about this game is "cheap." The animations and models are low-effort. The camera often clips into the environment. The UI art is flat and under-detailed. The writing is poorly-edited schlock, the voice acting is rote and dull. The inventory controls are a wreck, due to having crammed too many options into a touch-screen interface, and then haphazardly translating them back onto a keyboard. (Movement controls, at least, mostly work by simply duplicating the control scheme from Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.)

I didn't even get far enough in the game to see its Detroit- or Prague-equivalent hub area, but the internet tells me that I'm not missing much.

The game really set itself up for failure by attempting to imitate the full scope and complexity of a big-budget, high-resolution Deus Ex title. Not only because some of those mechanics map poorly to a mobile device - the aim-then-shoot control is ... yikes - but more because it was an obviously over-ambitious plan for such an under-funded project. This Unity-praising press piece, despite its promotional spin, shows off how many corners the team had to cut to crank this game out quickly and cheaply.

Some of Human Revolution's features should map perfectly to a mobile device, and even those - like the hacking minigame, or reading pocket secretaries - feel like low-rent knock-offs here.

This small-screen spin-off is clunky for a mobile game, and just plain bad for a PC game. Its resemblance to Human Revolution and Mankind Divided invites some intensely unfortunate comparisons to triple-A productions; The Fall is just like them, but, worse.

Better than: Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate
Not as good as: Cat Quest, Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link (or even Alpha Protocol)
As with Just Cause 3: I didn't expect much, but at least it was for a good cause.

Progress: Gave up after I fell through the map in the first mission.

Rise & Shine makes its purpose, arcade action, clear from the beginning: its throwaway, self-parodying story about video game tropes is dumb and meaningless filler between shooting (and ... some puzzling).

The problem with its action (and ... puzzle) sequences is that I hate the aiming controls. It's a twin-stick shooter with too much zoom distance and not enough aim sighting -- that is to say, I end up spamming the trigger button because it's so unclear where my shots will land.

And the worst part is that combat (... and puzzles!) often relies on a fly-by-wire mechanic which just sucks. Controlling the flying bullet is like a runner, or a dodge-em-up, plus you have to start over if the bullet leaves a special area, plus you're being shot at and really can't dodge while aiming.

This is on top of classic arcade punishment like one-hit kills (why do I even have a health bar?) and phased boss encounters where death puts you back at phase one.

If the story was even remotely interesting, I might put up with dying-and-retrying my way through it. But it isn't, so I won't.

Progress: Died and gave up at the intro boss.

"Isn't good enough" is how I most recently summarized Just Cause 2, and I really can't come up with a better overview for Just Cause 3.

The traversal mechanics are kind-of neat, grapple-pulling and parachuting around; but neutered, in comparison to similar grappling concepts from Batman: Arkham City or Marvel's Spider-Man -- due to this game's lack of tall buildings. Its proclivity for explosiveness is cool, but not as dense, or strategic, as The Saboteur's. The variety of guns is somewhat impressive, but well short of the armory in Red Faction: Guerrilla (and the controls still aren't responsive or intuitive enough). The story is flippantly nonsense, but not in the fun way that Saints Row embraces so well.

The "point," to me, is demonstrated in its liberation system: blow up all the items of interest in an enemy stronghold, so that the rebels can overtake it. But some of these items are bizarrely small, effectively hidden; and until you find and destroy them all, enemies will continue swarming the area. Then, once you've finally destroyed the last widget, a switch immediately flips and the enemies are replaced by allies. This is a primary - maybe the primary - gameplay loop, yet it plays like a hidden-object game and completing it has no dramatic or satisfying payoff.

Just Cause 3's checklist of content and features is impressive, and its execution has improved since the preceding game, but it still doesn't measure up to its sandbox competitors; even ones that were released 5 or more years earlier.

Better than: Just Cause 2
Not as good as: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, or any of the other games I name-checked.
It's not like I expected anything different: but, hey, it's for charity right?

Progress: Unlocked fast travel.

Making a "walking simulator" is an inherently risky proposition. I mean, sure, you can save a lot of development time by forcing the player down a specific path and not having to design or implement gameplay -- but those savings can come back to bite you if the game's remaining components, its story and presentation, aren't strong enough on their own.

So it is with Last Day of June, which not only has a total lack of narration and an underwhelming art style - its characters' child-like proportions, and empty eye sockets, are more haunting than charming - but lazily trots out an overused "tragic car accident" plot. (Like Dear Esther, but in third-person!)

At least, that's what it seemed like in the first 20 minutes. The game moves so slowly and is so melancholically boring that I just didn't care to continue with it.