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.

The controls are tight, and the graphics are crisp. And early puzzles show that its "floor is lava with deadly shadows" premise is more nuanced than it sounds.

But the puzzle designs also turned me off a bit, with poorly-telegraphed obstacle timings leading to instant death -- granted the checkpointing is generous, but it still feels cheap. And "Virgil," the voice-in-your-ear Cave Johnson-alike, comes across as a shallow imitation.

Lightmatter doesn't seem that bad, but it also doesn't have enough personality to stand out from its clear inspirations. Why not add some ancient cosmic evils, or non-Euclidean space?

Progress: Solved some light-throwing puzzles, gave up about 30 minutes into the free trial.

Cosmic Star Heroine starts out promisingly enough, with an opening that gets straight to the action (reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII's reactor raid) and a practical sci-fi aesthetic that feels like a comfortable resurrection of Phantasy Star or Star Ocean.

It sets up an adventure with diverse characters spanning multiple worlds, a unique combat system with frequent surprises, and some modern sensibilities to smooth over common JRPG rough spots. But over the course of its campaign, Cosmic Star Heroine gradually neglects and ultimately discards most of that promise.

Perhaps its biggest shortcoming is the cast: despite being relatively large - there are 11 potential party members - I couldn't pick out any characters who were especially interesting or memorable. Everyone gets a cool little intro cutscene, and they all take turns being personally involved in the story, but... their backstories are flat and overly simple, all the dialog is excessively impersonal, and no events in the story challenge them in a way that would suggest character growth.

There are some story events that probably should have caused character reactions and showed more insight into their personalities, but simply didn't. The game's dialog is too straightforward and sterile, almost always a pure description of the scenario, with no personal or emotional perspective.

This lack of personality carries over into the world-building as well. There are three planets you can visit, each with multiple towns filled with NPCs, and in retrospect all I can really recall is that one planet was heavily urbanized; and another had a wild-west casino. It's a shame, because there is a lot of map space - and a lot of environment art - that could have been made more compelling with some thoughtful prose. Instead, there are "lab where an experiment went wrong" and "mines that were evacuated because monsters." Standard RPG stuff.

Between the un-memorable characters and the un-memorable environments, I actually had a tough time remembering what I was doing each time I reloaded my save file. Definitely not a sign of an engaging story. (Hilariously, although the game's menus provide an "Insight" option for the protagonist to remind you of the current story goal, this hint is often useless.)

The combat, in spite of a terrible tutorial - read several pages of text out in the field and hope that you remember them once you get into battle - does have a satisfyingly unique flavor to it. Most abilities become disabled after selecting them, until using a recharge ability; a "style" stat is built up by most abilities, and can then be unleashed by others; a "hyper" mode triggers every few turns, amplifying the power of your selected move. These mechanics combine to make battles feel like strategic choreography, as you plan several turns in advance when to use the right moves to the best effect.

It's also pretty cool that each character has a distinctive style and set of abilities, but doesn't fall into a trope like "healer" or "glass cannon." (Even though one character has songs, so he's clearly a bard.) Every character has healing moves, high-damage attacks, elemental magic, area-of-effect abilities... and configuring their available abilities to complement each other is a fun little out-of-combat exercise.

But, not all characters are created equally: magic for example is based on the "Sparke" stat, and some characters don't have much Sparke, so their magic abilities just aren't that good. There are some opportunities to boost stats with equipment, but not consistently. It's a lot easier to pick characters with obvious strengths, and just keep rolling with them.

Additionally, a lot of abilities are so situationally-specific that it feels wasteful to use a combat slot on them; and some abilities seem borderline useless. I particularly avoided any abilities that relied on "desperation mode," which only occurs when a character is out of HP and about to die.

I would also add that combat almost universally felt way too easy; but after beating the game, I noticed that I had actually picked an easy ("Agent") difficulty mode. So that one's on me.

As for its modern sensibilities? Cosmic Star Heroine brings a few welcome changes to JRPG traditions, like the ability to save anywhere, a "retry" option if you fall in battle, and fully healing your party after every encounter. But it doesn't go far enough -- I really would have appreciated some auto-saving, because if your party dies and retries don't work, you still have to go back to the last time you remembered to save.

The movement controls are a little buggy; the game would frequently lose track of my button presses because I was changing directions too fast. And the menu controls are especially buggy, reliably displaying the wrong thing when I'm shopping for or equipping new items. Like, showing character X's current weapon when I'm buying a weapon for character Y. This happened pretty consistently.

And while the lackluster writing suggests Cosmic Star Heroine might be a little unfinished, the many combat abilities with missing sound effects strongly suggest that the game is not complete.

All in all, though, Cosmic Star Heroine still isn't what I would call a "bad" game. It's more mild, more neutral; it falls short on many of its ambitions, but is perfectly playable. The story is throwaway, but rarely tedious (although the ending definitely is). And the combat system, while imperfect, is admirably unique.

It's a shame though, because its premise and structure show so much potential for more.

Better than: Final Fantasy II (SNES, Wii), Lunar Legend, Secret of Evermore
Not as good as: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Mass Effect
Less frustrating than, but not as interesting as: CrossCode

Progress: Finished on Agent difficulty.

I'm not positive that Why Am I Dead At Sea is an RPG Maker game - it's got some UI bits that I don't exactly recognize - but it certainly has the half-baked implementation quirks that I've come to associate with the engine.

First, the good news: this game tells a compellingly dark mystery story. What initially appears to be a possession-puzzle game like Geist or Ghost Trick turns out to, in fact, be a dialog-based text-adventure thriller. Its characters are satisfyingly deep, and the interactions that you force them into weave a genuinely interesting and memorable tale.

Unfortunately the tools employed to tell that story are clunky at their best, and sometimes are outright broken.

As your ghost possesses characters aboard the ship and tries to reveal the next story beat, you'll sometimes need to search for a key item; but most often, you have to interrogate (talk to) other characters. All of these conversations have branches and sub-branches and so on, where your list of dialog choices shows options from the current branch, and a "go back" option which ... usually ends the whole conversation. That means there's a whole lot of restarting a conversation from scratch just to try another option.

If you've already heard the response to some option, it'll show as gray, instead of white. Except when it doesn't! in what I assume is a UI bug. And sometimes the reverse happens, i.e. a choice you haven't selected yet - and hence, information you haven't read yet - is incorrectly, misleadingly gray.

There are several passengers on the ship who you can take possession of, and it's a cool point of character depth that their unique personalities can elicit different responses from other characters. But this also means that some plot details are hidden deep within the matrix of specific combinations of possession-host and dialog-target, requiring you to talk to the same character and hear mostly-the-same things multiple times until hitting the right combo.

Depending on how much you learn about a passenger, your ghost can partially or fully possess them, and each possession mode has different dialog options. So, go ahead and square that combination-matrix problem.

Some of the plot's hints are so obtuse, and the work involved in its dialog gets so tiresome, that I felt no shame at all when referencing a guide. Ain't nobody got time to talk to everyone 15 times just to find the right piece of evidence to move forward.

The story is great, and I'm glad that I saw the game through to experience it. But my recommendation to others will be to find a well-edited gameplay video instead -- one that doesn't waste its time on all the pointless re-clicking and re-reading that the game essentially forces upon you.

Better than: Murdered: Soul Suspect, Red Spider: Vengeance
Not as good as: Last Word
Also not as good as: To the Moon, if only because those dialog trees - the whole point of the game - are such a pain.

Take Hotline Miami, remove the acid trip, then add a "blink"-style teleport and you might end up with something like Mr. Shifty.

The premise is simple: teleport around to avoid getting shot, while punching henchmen to death. One hit will kill you, so skillful evasion is important, as is using the environment to block enemies' line of sight. And you don't have your own gun, which means you'll need to balance that one-hit-kill risk against the exhilirating reward of teleporting your fist directly into a bad guy's face.

Why are you beating all these people up? Well you see, this uh, nefarious businessman ... stole some ... Mega Plutonium. And then he took your blood? You know what, nevermind! Just keep climbing the tower so you can confront the cartoonishly evil boss. In terms of story, character depth, and world complexity, Mr. Shifty is pretty dumb; but it's exactly as smart as it needs to be.

Most of Mr. Shifty's 18 stages are only 5-10 minutes long (depending on how much you die), giving the campaign that addictive "just one more level" quality. And for the most part, it does great in checkpointing each stage so that death doesn't feel like a penalty.

The last couple stages have some lengthy, punishing gauntlets; but I guess that comes with the territory.

Every once in a while, you'll have a special objective like activating a switch, or be in a special circumstance like "restricted teleports" or "room full of lasers." But for the most part, Mr. Shifty is about beating dudes up; and the level design excels at keeping that goal fun. Punch a door so hard that it knocks a guy down! Punch a goon out of a skyscraper window! Pick up a mop and swing it at three dudes at once!

Mr. Shifty isn't an incredibly ambitious game, but it really does its premise justice. Occasionally-frustrating gauntlets aside, it's pure, dumb, explosive fun.

Better than: Hotline Miami
Not as good as: Dishonored
If it's sequelized: please add a stationary-aiming control.

A Metroidvania-style game doesn't need to be action-packed to be good; a chill, ponderous exploration game could do just fine. Unfortunately, Forma.8 doesn't pull it off.

For one thing, the controls are awkward and frustrating -- your little flying robot is surprisingly heavy, and has a lot of momentum to correct when you want to slow down or make a sharp turn. It's more than just a design quirk to get accustomed to; it feels like it gets in the way of going where you want to go, especially when trying to target or evade enemies.

But the bigger problem with Forma.8 is that it's incredibly dull. An effective game in this vein would drop frequent hints about its backstory, in the designs of its environments or puzzles or enemies; here, the hints are way too infrequent, and so subtle that I'm not sure they're hints at all. The world feels bland and nothing in it seems meaningful. (And the combat is too simplistic to be compelling on its own.)

The framework of the game would be perfect for ambient storytelling, but it doesn't seem to care to tell a story. Forma.8 is too chill; I got bored and walked away.

Better than: Cubots: The Origins
Not as good as: Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Unmechanical
Reminds me a bit of: Luminesca, but even that unfinished proto-game was more interesting and less frustrating.

Progress: 19.6%

There is a certain amount of... I guess, existential angst which comes from knowing that an excellent game like VVVVVV is powered by a switch statement with case 4099.

In his decennial musings on VVVVVV, Terry Cavanagh observes:

"I've gained better habits over the past decade, and I'm definitely a better programmer now -- but it does seem to take me longer to do things."

And having been a professional programmer over that same time period, I can relate. In software engineering, or maybe in any profession, drawing the rest of the owl necessarily means working more steadily and more slowly; which is at odds with a common game industry objective of being first to market, damn the consequences.

And, it's not necessarily safe to assume that those consequences will be profoundly negative. VVVVVV is still fun today, after ten years' worth of indie platformers competing in its wake. VVVVVV's straightforward, almost puritanical design is as engaging and exhilirating now as it was ten years ago.

The killer soundtrack helps. Ten years ago, it was in my local music library; now, I'm adding it to my streaming favorites.

Progress: Rescued the crew; 12 trinkets, 991 deaths.