The gameplay is ... okay. But storytelling has been my biggest concern with Final Fantasy VII Remake, and the demo's take on FF7's seminal reactor mission offered no solace.

Converting a turn-based RPG into a real-time action RPG may sound absurd, but when you come at it from the direction of Kingdom Hearts - or perhaps more recently, Final Fantasy XV - it actually kinda works. Basic attacks map to button-mashing, magic and items are in quick-access menus, cooldowns and power meters act as throttles on super-moves, lock-on targeting keeps the action moving except when it auto-selects the wrong thing...

Blocking and dodging is terrible. Or, if I'm being very generous, I may not have gotten the hang of this game's defensive moves. Learning anything "advanced" in this demo was pretty tough, since most enemies were a total pushover and the scorpion-tank boss was such a visual mess of distracting explosions.

But even if I did assume that all these game mechanics will work harmoniously in the final product, it's the quality of FF7 Remake's narrative that's got me nervous. And to be clear, I know that the 23-year-old PlayStation game's storytelling doesn't hold up well today; actually, that's part of my worry.

Back in the heady days of tinny music and pre-rendered background art, a great deal of FF7's story came from the player's imagination. And the game did a fantastic job of stoking that imagination, with minimally-explained environments, sudden scene changes, and lore that didn't really come together until you read a message board. Inspiring wonder was one of the game's great strengths.

Now, in high-definition, we have to watch as the game tries to sensibly articulate its plot -- and it does so with no subtlety or sophistication. In 1997, we could scoff along with Cloud when AVALANCHE described Mako as the planet's "life force," and dismiss that hippie nonsense until Aeris Aerith came along. But in 2020, Barret's conviction in the mission is embarrassingly melodramatic and over-the-top; while every aspect of Cloud's mannerisms and outfit screams "brooding" as if the game is afraid we won't notice that he's a loner.

Really, the voice acting (and/or dialog writing) might be the worst part. The only thing more distracting than Barret's bluntly-stereotyped banter is the frequent and out-of-place "oh" and "uh" exclamations from the cast. This is peak JRPG bullshit, and it feels ... silly, in a game whose character models and setting are otherwise darkly realistic. It's the narrative equivalent of the uncanny valley.

Maybe I'm overreacting? Maybe the released product won't be so self-parodying after all, or maybe the action gameplay will be good enough to make up for it. But I'm not getting my hopes up.

My interest in replaying Grand Theft Auto IV piqued even before the news that it would be re-launched on Steam in a few weeks. (That said, the fact that this re-launch will likely be missing big chunks of the radio soundtrack was a strong motivation to get going.)

What I remembered of the game was that driving felt heavy and satisfying, and that the tale of Niko Bellic attempting to integrate into western society - via the sordid gangs of Liberty City - was more impactful than the sequel's story. What I failed to remember was... that this game is more than a decade old.

Tutorial moments, vestiges of GTA 3's in-game instructions on safehouses and Pay 'n' Sprays, are conspicuously dated. The glacial pace of new game mechanics - like, how long it takes just to get a handgun - is hard to defend against present-day open-world games. And the bowling mini-game is just ... well, at least it's not as bad as RDR's cattle-herding and horse-breaking.

But the real reason I'm typing this post up is to whine about mission checkpoints, and GTA 4's lack of them.

A year later, Batman: Arkham Asylum felt revelatory for its inclusion of auto-saving checkpoints at every room transition. The most you would ever have to repeat, if your caped crusader got shot to death, was a handful of takedowns in a stealth segment. This style of automatic and convenient checkpointing - highly respectful of the player's time - has become a base expectation for me.

So it's a bit irritating to go back to the lengthy missions of GTA 4 with minimal, if any, mid-mission checkpoints -- having to repeat a lengthy car chase to get to a convoluted shoot-out, or vice-versa. Especially when a mission is interrupted by being arrested, so the cops take all your guns away when you respawn. (I forgot this was even a thing, then restarted the mission, got to the shoot-out, and was gobsmacked at my lack of armaments.)

It shouldn't be particularly surprising that this blockbuster title's approach to incremental progress has become antiquated in ten years; I could say the same about Metroid compared to many N64 games. And, I don't want to over-emphasize this shortcoming too much: it's merely the stand-out wrinkle among the game's other signs of aging. In many other ways, GTA 4 does still hold up well today.

This bugbear, of making the player repeat gameplay purely to get back to where they were, just happens to be a particular pet peeve of mine. (It's why I have no patience for rogue-likes.)

And it feels pointless to tolerate for the limited payoff of said "glacial pace," when I could move on to the more-bombastic The Ballad of Gay Tony instead.

The Witness did a really fantastic job of building a mysterious world around its seemingly-incongruous puzzles. Dreamo appears to have the same goal -- unfortunately its demo doesn't show much of that world; instead, it focuses on the puzzle mechanics.

And while you could argue that The Witness's puzzles were sometimes simple - at least to start - they were very rarely "stupid" in the sense of being fiddly or frustrating. Dreamo's demo, on the other hand, took only a few minutes to show me a really ambiguous and aggravating mechanic that quickly turned me off.

Some gear shafts will toggle-up and -down based on clicking other gear shafts, almost like a Lights Out game. And if you have gears attached to such shafts while toggling them, even on another plane of the cube, those gears will pop off and effectively reset your progress. Not necessarily because they were placed wrong, but because some unrelated shafts weren't in the right position.

I'm kinda curious about Dreamo's world, but based on the puzzling I saw in the demo, ... nah.

Progress: Didn't finish the demo.

I've put significantly more time - 75 hours - into Pictopix than any other nonogram game. So, yeah, it's pretty good.

The game's "Classic" mode includes 195 puzzles, plus several hidden bonus puzzles; three huge puzzle mosaics; an endless generated-puzzle mode; and Steam Workshop user-made puzzles. In terms of quantity, Pictopix rivals the absurd puzzle count of Pepper's Puzzles, and without leaning on arguable copyright infringement.

Then there's size: 45 of Pictopix's puzzles have sides of 30 or more cells -- 15 of them have sides of 40 cells. Its handful of 40x40 puzzles are bigger than Paint it Back's biggest, although not as big as Nonogram - The Greatest Painter could get.

In other words, Pictopix has a ton of puzzles and some of them are really big. The amount and complexity of puzzle content is definitely a "win."

The feature-set is ... fine. You can Suspend a puzzle to save progress and come back later; puzzles must be unlocked gradually, but the number of unlocks is generous; it penalizes mistakes, but allows a comfortable number of them for free. One quality-of-life bit I really liked is that the game automatically pauses if it loses focus -- like if you alt-tab out, or if an annoying OS pop-up interrupts your game.

The zoom function is limited and kinda glitchy - all it does is abbreviate the hint displays, and the way those hints slide back into view is wonky and confusing - but fortunately, the interface is concise enough that I rarely needed to zoom in.

Pictopix also has segment-based hints, i.e. graying out hint numbers as you make progress in a row or column, but having that feature turned on prevents you from getting some achievements. So, I can't say how well it really worked, because I didn't use it.

Really the only complaint I have about Pictopix is that I had to re-attempt some of its biggest puzzles due to mistakes I'd made that would have been prevented by those automatic segment hints. But since turning that off was my own (achievement-addiction) choice, it's hard to blame the game for that.

While Pictopix isn't quite as feature-rich as Nonogram - The Greatest Painter, it also doesn't embarrass itself by crashing all the time. And otherwise its puzzle quantity and quality are competitive with the best I've seen.

Better than: Nonogram - The Greatest Painter, Paint it Back, Pepper's Puzzles
Not as good as: ... well, I guess that makes it the best nonogram game I've played so far.
Though I do wish it had some personality, or theme: like My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess

Progress: Finished all non-workshop puzzles, got all achievements. Phew!

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.