Maybe the worst thing about VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action is its title. I really don't want to type out that whole mess again. ... that's my glib way of saying that Valhalla is not a bad game, though I did find it extremely tepid.

At first, its bartending mechanics are more than a little bewildering - the ingredients don't map to real ones at all, and the controls for "aging" and "blending" a drink are pretty counterintuitive - so it takes a few rounds to get the hang of. But, before you know it, you'll be slinging Brandtinis and Grizzly Temples with the best of them.

And for the rest of the game, which is to say the vast majority of it, the gameplay doesn't evolve any further. That's it.

You'll shortly come to find that the bartending mechanics aren't really Valhalla's focus -- they're just an engagement tool, a way to make sure you're awake, as you click through screen after screen of dialog with your virtual bar patrons. It'd be a misrepresentation to call Valhalla anything other than a Visual Novel.

And in that regard, Valhalla isn't bad. Its characters have well-written personalities, and some of their stories are kinda interesting. But... it doesn't feel like quite enough.

Despite the "cyberpunk" adjective in its title, Valhalla rarely delves into its techno-futuristic setting. Other than the fact that some patrons are AI androids called Lilim, and characters will occasionally muse about Lilims' social and sexual interactions with humans, the story is very much about the day-to-day lives of its bartenders and patrons -- which aren't that far removed from present-day routines.

On the one hand, Valhalla's writing does a good job of bridging that gap, of making its events relatable despite being set decades in the future. But on the other hand, by so frequently glossing over the technological and cultural aspects of the cyberpunk theme, those events ultimately don't feel very distinctive from the stories that any other visual novel (or any other work of fiction) could tell.

For all the times I was curious to hear more about a character's backstory, actually reading that story was invariably dull. Even during the "let's talk about boob sizes" conversation that seems to be an inevitable thing in visual novels.

Valhalla's got a great sense of personality, but no real gameplay and no central plot. (The protagonist does have a character-defining story toward the end; but it doesn't feel much more impactful than any other character's story.) I don't want to say that Valhalla is all style and no substance -- because there is quite a lot of substance, in its reams of written dialog. It just ... isn't very interesting substance.

Better than: Hate Plus
Not as good as: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (NDS)
Perhaps slightly not-as-good-as: Analogue: A Hate Story, which at least had a core mystery to solve.

I went into the Voxelgram demo expecting it to be exactly like Picross 3D, and it is extremely similar. But, thanks to PCs generally having larger displays than a Nintendo DS, Voxelgram is able to pull off some much larger puzzles. Just in its first 10 or 20 puzzles, I think they've already exceeded Picross 3D's peak size and complexity.

The controls have a bit of a learning curve: at first, I was really frustrated trying to find hints by rotating the puzzle around. But the game made a lot more sense once I caught on to the layer-walking mechanics, and solving each layer as a 2D portion of the larger puzzle. The camera rotation still isn't perfect, like sometimes my clicks hit an empty puzzle space when I wanted to grab outside the puzzle, but the "undo" button resolves such problems easily enough.

Anyway, despite initially thinking that Voxelgram was a shitty version of a game I played ten years ago, I'm now looking forward to chipping away at huge blocks and solving even more puzzles in the full version of the game.

(This game also doesn't have any bullshit time limits, so it's got that going for it.)

Progress: Played enough of the demo to know that I'm hooked.

The Pedestrian has a very cool aesthetic: its 3D backdrops make the simple platforming levels seem a lot more interesting than they actually are.

But, yeah. The platforming is pretty remedial. Controls feel a bit slippery, too; considering the 2D platform levels are all about sharp lines, it's surprising how squishy the hit detection is.

Toward the end of the demo, the game's "puzzle" aspects started to heat up -- figuring out how to properly connect rooms such that you can hit switches, reach platforms, and pick up keys in the necessary sequence.

More of those puzzles could be cool, but I dunno if it's worth sleepwalking through the dull platforming segments inbetween them.

Progress: Finished the demo.

Stories: The Path of Destinies is (aside from a shockingly bland title) a distinctive mixture of Diablo-like hack-and-slash, and choice-based narrative adventure. Stories isn't perfect at either of these things, but it is pretty good at one of them. The second one.

Its action gameplay is competent, but not much else -- there's a dash move, and there's a hookshot/grapple move, but most of the time you'll just be mashing the attack button. In the style of Batman, enemies will telegraph when they're about to attack, and you'll need to counter them to avoid heavy damage.

Except when multiple enemies attack at the same instant and you need to dash out to avoid them, unless you don't have the upgrade to dash through surrounding enemies, in which case you just die. That's a rarity, though.

Generally, the combat of Stories is a little about prioritizing dangerous targets, and a lot about hitting things with a sword until their health is gone. You gain experience, level up, get talent points, and invest points into new abilities, some of which make combat easier and others of which seem kinda useless. Generous checkpointing means that even if you fall, you won't have to re-tread any significant ground, which is nice.

The real meat of Stories is in its, uh, stories. Not the "story," mind you: that is to say, its anthropomorphic rebels-versus-empire plot is kind of a yawn. The characters are a bit tropey, the writing has a dull sense of humor, and the branching story choices don't feel very impactful. But...

If you can get through an hour or so of this uninspired world and its middling combat, you'll discover the game's real "trick." You die and it ends.

Then the story rewinds, but not completely -- you keep experience and other unlocks, and you learn something. The choices you make on where to go and who to talk to are impactful, in that they'll reveal an important truth about the world; and as you explore more branches of the decision tree, you'll gradually uncover more of the decisions that you need to make it out of the story alive.

(Not all endings lead to a unique truth, i.e. several paths through the decision tree will end with the same reveal. But your first redundant ending unlocks an option that will show, explicitly, which decisions will lead to something new. So the time-wasting is pretty minimal.)

This meta-narrative is the real story, and real hook, of Stories. The mystery of the ideal path is a compelling one, and each level is short enough that overlaps are mostly inoffensive.

The game can feel fairly repetitive as it goes on, because of the lack of enemy diversity in combat, and because of those overlaps -- especially in the final level, which is the same for every path. At its worst, Stories can feel like it uses button-mashing to fill the gap between story beats.

But the payoff is worth it. Again, not because of the quality of the underlying story, which is barely creative enough to get by. But the meta-story concept, using time travel to resolve a sprawling mystery of destiny!, is satisfying to explore.

The game's imperfections - its lackluster humor, its unexciting combat, its sometimes-redundant paths, the way its narrator laboriously adds "he said" to each line of dialog - really get balanced out by the cool factor of going back in time to correct your decisions.

A lot like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, I guess. Just with worse narration and no platforming.

Better than: Bastion, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Not as good as: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, The Sexy Brutale
And way better than: those shitty choose-your-own-adventure books I grew up with.

Progress: Got the good ending, and like 5 of the 24 other endings.

I try not to throw around the "Awful" rating lightly; hell, I got through 2019 without using it at all. There are few games that I outright hate enough to earn the label, and I tend to avoid games with obviously-shoddy production values. But sometimes such a game sneaks into a bundle ... like Spooky Cats did.

Minimal, repetitive art and audio? Check. A bare-bones main menu that was clearly an afterthought? Check. Poor sense of aesthetic design that makes levels visually confusing? Checkarooney.

Spooky Cats demonstrates the creator's ability to program a modicum of game logic. It isn't something that anyone should be expected to exchange money for.

Better than: Miner Ultra Adventures
Not as good as: Cubots: The Origins
The collectibles are pennies?: Why not cat toys, or cat food, or ... something that has anything to do with cats?

Progress: Finished a few levels, who cares how many.

Furi is a bastard of a game.

It isn't without merit: the fundamentals of combat are satisfyingly tight, the boss encounters are creatively designed, and the pulse-pounding soundtrack is great at building up each fight.

But the manner in which Furi strings those components together is outrageously punishing. It's "hard" in the way that classic arcade games are hard; borderline merciless, and utterly disrespectful of your time.

In a boss fight, both you and the enemy have a stack of health bars. When you damage the enemy enough to deplete a bar, the fight will move into a new phase. And as a reward for your progress, your current health bar will be refilled! Great ... except the inverse applies, too. If your health bar is depleted, the enemy's current bar will be refilled -- restarting the current phase.

In other words, if you're not "good enough" to finish a boss phase in a single life bar, the game will continue to torture you with that phase until you die.

And I would dispute that this game's measure of "good enough" is reflective of general skill: Furi's bosses aren't afraid to break out unprecedented attacks, which you couldn't possibly know how to avoid until you've been damaged by them at least once. A surprise heat-seeking bullet, or an unexpected chain of melee attacks, increases the likelihood of you having to start a phase over from scratch.

So, in the process of learning one phase of a boss fight, you'll probably die a few times. Now consider that in the default "Furi" difficulty, the first boss has seven phases. And you have three health bars. Like... do the math on that one.

Even on the easy-peasy "Promenade" difficulty, where you deal more damage and have more health bars while the enemy has fewer, the die-and-retry loop becomes un-fun fairly quickly.

And what is your reward for defeating each boss? It sure isn't the story, which is slowly teased with indecipherable hints, or the ponderously boring path that you're made to walk to the next boss. The only thing you have to look forward to is the next boss.

Furi is a game for people who want to fight bosses and do nothing else. And at a totally different scale from Shadow of the Colossus; Furi is more demanding of your agility, more exhausting in fight complexity, and more punishing in its retry-loop. Figuring out each encounter is largely a function of throwing your corpse at it over, and over, and over again.

Furi's good ideas are made intolerable by how much it clearly wants you to suffer instead of having fun.

Better than: most other Awful games; at least Furi shows signs of competence, and has a cool soundtrack.
Not as good as: Shadow of the Colossus (2018)
I watched the ending online: and it sure doesn't seem worth the effort. The story teasers remain obtusely teasy all the way until the very end, which is basically a shitty twist.

Progress: Beat the first boss on Furi difficulty, second and third bosses on Promenade difficulty.

Age of Wonders III is a feature-rich and fairly sophisticated take on fantasy-themed 4X, but it just didn't quite "do it" for me.

Like Warlock: Master of the Arcane, Age of Wonders is largely comparable to a fantasy-themed Civ V/VI, but with two significant differences: story campaigns! and tactical combat!

The combat was pretty fun at first, taking direct control of units in the battlefield for optimal positioning and ability usage. It can be a bit hard to predict the strength (or attack range) of enemy units, but this becomes clearer with more encounters and more practice.

Unfortunately, as a mission proceeds and army sizes grow, it becomes evident that this combat system doesn't scale well. Not just because of lengthy battle animations (which can be sped up), but also because of the number of micro-decisions and mouse-clicks involved in controlling each unit; encounters with large numbers of units get really, really dull.

This problem is probably at its worst when you're sieging an enemy town: you need big numbers to overcome the enemy's defenses, and you'll spend multiple turns just moving each unit, one by one, a few steps closer to those defenses.

The minutiae of tactical combat makes it feel less like a "strategy" game and more like chess. (I don't like chess.) So, much as I still like the spirit of the combat system, I eventually resorted to the auto-battle option just to keep things moving along.

Even then, though... well, I'm personally a big fan of the turtling strategy, and Age of Wonders doesn't seem super-cool with that. It worked great at first! because there are a ton of city upgrades to invest in, for boosting production and income and et cetera; and the tech tree, or rather spellbook, also has a nice handful of empire-upgrading options.

But there are no infrastructural defenses that can repel invaders -- you need to have units on a city to realistically keep it. And that, again, doesn't scale well: founding more cities leads to leaving even more units on the payroll, which makes it hard to afford standing defenders everywhere. Age of Wonders seems to lean more into the "best defense is a good offense" line of thinking.

At least in the campaign missions I was playing, there are no Civ-style peaceful victory conditions: no United Nations of Wizards, no magic space rockets. Just war.

Structurally, I'm really impressed by Age of Wonders III, and in a way it's the follow-up I've always wanted to Heroes of Might and Magic III (a childhood favorite). I think it could be a real treat for someone who's super-into turn-based combat strategy.

But my preferred playstyle doesn't seem compatible with the campaign, and I don't find the tactical combat interesting enough to keep working at it.

Progress: Gave up in The Elven Court: Promised Lands campaign mission.

Five: Guardians of David is a Diablo-alike. It's an action RPG from an overhead view, it's got a skill-bar and ability cooldowns, you collect equipment and money from fallen enemies -- and, like Diablo, it tells a story about the Bible.

I'll admit it: that joke was the only reason I made this post.

Guardians of David isn't a story about blood-drenched demons and angelic wrath; it's an interactive interpretation of Bible stories around King David. It's actually a competent-enough game, and not what I'd call "preachy," but if you aren't already interested in the mythos of the Old Testament ... then the game's world and characters and events are pretty damned boring.

And just as in other Diablo-alikes (see: Titan Quest) this game's mechanics aren't strong enough to stand out from its forebears.

Progress: Defeated Goliath

As far as programming-puzzle games go, Algo Bot is over-polished tripe.

The puzzles are just too easy. Algo Bot is like a gamified version of Logo, with one path to follow; your job is to lay out a sequence of movement commands that will get the little 'bot to its destination. That's it.

The only challenging aspect of these puzzles is fitting that sequence of commands into a program of limited length. Occasionally, the solution will be to find a creatively optimal route, but most often - almost always - it is to "optimize" the program's use of functions. And the term function feels like a misnomer, because they don't allow for parameterization, and there are no flow-control commands for looping or breaking; these are more like flat macros.

In other words, with a size limit of 16 commands, if you need 20 steps to get through the puzzle... you just need to move 5 of those steps into a function. Pretty dumb, huh?

Its lack of complexity is Algo Bot's primary sin, but the obnoxious UI doesn't do the game any favors. Command sequences are arranged by drag-and-drop - ugh - and by far, the most time-consuming part of the game is the program's animated execution. Even at max speed, watching the robot float around and trigger widgets is so boring.

There's no redemption to be found in the game's story, either, which is a very straightforward series of excuses to move from one puzzle to the next. The pseudo-narrator "PAL" robot has a mildly sarcastic attitude; far too mild to be entertaining.

Algo Bot is too simple, and has no interesting payoff -- playing it feels like a waste of time.

Better than: Glyphs Apprentice, since at least this game is tutorialized well.
Not as good as: Prelogate, Prime Mover
Compared to the developer's last game: Epistory: Typing Chronicles, it's surprising how low Algo Bot's narrative ambitions are.

Progress: Level 4-2

For a while, Prime Mover seemed too easy. Wire this to that, put this piece over here... its first 13 puzzles were very straightforward. It turns out, that was the tutorial.

After those puzzles, the game takes the gloves off and becomes really, dastardly frustrating. You see, the problem with Prime Mover is that it isn't just a game about logical problem solving, like Silicon Zeroes; nor is it just a game about solving problems with limited resources, like TIS-100.

It's a game about solving problems with broken resources. We're well past "there's no multiply, so you need to keep adding" territory here -- I'm talking about circuitry components that work contrary to how you need them to work: routing switches that switch themselves, triggers that need to be placed directly next to the component they actuate.

The puzzle I got up to, Nil Cleaner, would be easy if I could use the positive/negative/zero component to route its input in three directions based on those values. But the fourth, empty side of this component can't be wired! So when its inputs might be positive, negative, or zero, using this component necessarily means that its input line will also be an output line, and thus it'll require some bullshit like this to handle.

Puzzles aside, Prime Mover's UI is also fairly unfriendly: if you want to connect a component to some wiring, you need to clear the wiring from a spot first, then drop the component, then re-apply the wiring. And although you "can" effectively move existing designs around by copying the field, deleting everything, then pasting down somewhere else; obviously this isn't as convenient as drag-and-drop would have been.

There's also some kind of story being hinted at in between-chapter cutscenes. But the subtitles are artifacted, unreadable gibberish. I guess they become clarified after making more progress in the puzzle campaign -- in the meantime, the story is just tantalizingly confusing.

Prime Mover isn't a bad puzzle game, but its internal logic is outwardly hostile; its challenge comes from how its tools make a simple-looking puzzle into a surprisingly byzantine problem. And while I can kind-of respect that in concept, actually doing it isn't very fun.

Better than: Great Permutator
Not as good as: Silicon Zeroes
Maybe comparable with: Prelogate, but I don't have the patience to suffer through another game like that.

Progress: Finished 16 puzzles.