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.

Pinstripe is more tedious and boring than you'd expect for a game that's only two or three hours long.

It's got platforming, but it isn't very well-architected; the jumping works fine, but movement on bouncy elements is too hard to predict, platforms aren't always visually clear, and its scant enemies are consistently dull.

It's got puzzles, but they aren't very puzzling; many of its challenges are reminiscent of obtuse point-and-click adventure riddles, and its most engaging puzzles are Highlights-style spot the difference interludes.

It's got exploration, but it isn't very compelling; revisiting map screens I'd seen before always felt more like a chore than a surprise, especially considering how many screen transitions I had to go through again and again.

Pinstripe's mechanical shortcomings give it the earmarks of a story-driven arthouse game, except... while it's got a story to tell, it doesn't come together in a satisfying, or even coherent way. Its story beats have some subtle and some not subtle at all indications of a metaphorical connection to a deeper plot, but it never fully explains the truth or its intended message.

Imagine if you saw the beginning and end of The Usual Suspects without any of the storytelling inbetween. That's kinda what this story feels like.

This game has some admirable production values, in terms of its art style and moody soundtrack. Even the voice acting is pretty good, considering the source material its actors had to read. But that speaks to Pinstripe's core problem: the source material isn't any good. Despite its aesthetic trappings, this is a mechanically-stilted, tiresome, repetitive, unsatisfying adventure.

Better than: Toren
Not as good as: Broken Age
Did I really prefer: RiME over this? Yeah, if just barely.

Progress: Finished the story, didn't bother with any extras.

There are games that have bad controls, and then there are games that are about hard controls, like QWOP or ... Drunken Fist.

Snake Pass is the latter; actually, quite a bit friendlier than its peers, as it eases you into the game's slithering and climbing mechanics with a cute cartoony snake, bright colorful collectibles, and a friendly hummingbird who ... narrates.

But make no mistake: this is a game about overcoming awkward controls. I had some fun learning how to move and maneuver the snake, but at a certain point that learning turned into foolishly throwing my body at obstacles over and over.

It isn't just the movement controls - which make it infuriatingly easy to try coiling in one direction, only to end up un-coiling in the opposite direction - but also the camera, which is manually controlled except when it isn't. And since Snake Pass builds a lot of verticality into its levels, chances are very good that the camera will rotate behind a tree or other obstacle, spontaneously blocking your view.

I appreciate what Snake Pass tried to do, and I even enjoyed playing its first few, easier levels. But after that, it became clear that the game's challenge would come from retrying, retrying, and frustratingly retrying an obstacle until the stars had very precisely aligned, and that's when I lost patience for it.

Progress: Made it to level 6, I think?

2019 was a stressful year, and my gaming activity - a relative decline from 2017 and 2018 - reflects that.

Especialy when considering how many of my 2019 posts were about demos: in 2017, demos accounted for 13% (10/78) of the games I played; in 2018, 8% (5/59); and in 2019, 22% (9/41).

I mean, maybe it's cool that I played more post-worthy demos last year, but less non-demos is a worrying trend.

My replay count was relatively stable, including both remasters and booting up older games.

• Returning to Breath of the Wild was a blast -- its overall immersion and scope still impressed me, despite its flaws becoming clearer in retrospect.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy felt like a long-overdue return to Phoenix's original court stories, and has me hankering for even more high-definition Ace Attorney remasters.
• Mark of the Ninja Remastered is still a solid title, but didn't "wow" me like the original did, back in 2012-2013.
• I hold many fond memories of The Saboteur, but, like Red Faction: Guerrilla, the game itself hasn't aged quite so well.
• And Chrono Trigger is, ... well. Forget the throwaway gimmick endings, the jarring animated cutscenes, and the meaningless new dungeons; the original SNES game's core story is still precious.

Expansions and DLC were almost a non-issue in 2019:

• I'm glad that I got around to Breath of the Wild's DLCs, or at least The Champions' Ballad chapter; The Master Trials I could have done without.
• Hacknet: Labyrinths was an excellent follow-up to the surprisingly-good Hacknet.
• Meanwhile, Borderlands 2: Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary just felt ... unnecessary.

The platforms I played on in 2019 were mostly unremarkable, with PC - like always - occupying the lion's share of my time. As for the rest:

My historic Xbox One usage has been staggeringly low, since its library overlaps so much with PC; last year's Crackdown 3 is in rare company. The game was overall competent and fun, but not very compelling and definitely not innovative. (With apologies to Terry Crews, who is undoubtedly the game's best new feature.)

My PS4 saw a bit more activity in 2019, but only just, with a disappointing stab at The Last Guardian and a fun-but-samey run through Marvel's Spider-Man. Like, it certainly wasn't bad, but came across too much like a re-skinned attempt to replace the Batman Arkham games.

Of course, I came back to the Switch for Zelda, and for Smash Bros. - which ... maybe I shouldn't have - plus some scattered Mario Party-ing. Again, Breath of the Wild is great, but that's not exactly news.

What's interesting on that chart isn't the sparse wasteland that is my non-PC gaming, but the spontaneous appearance of Netflix. And even though Black Mirror: Bandersnatch wasn't much more than a choose-your-own-adventure story, it was well-implemented! and maybe more importantly, a good story. I would love to see more games from this talent pool. (Can you imagine a Black Mirror episode in the style of an Ace Attorney game?)

Unfortunately, the total number of games that really knocked my socks off in 2019 was pretty low.

Of the year's five "Awesome" games, three were games I'd already played! (Breath of the Wild, the Phoenix Wright trilogy, and Chrono Trigger.)

The other two were ... huh, would you look at that:

• Hacknet: Labyrinths built on the foundation of its base game to deliver a thrilling computer-hacking adventure.
• And Exapunks built on the foundations of previous Zachtronics games to deliver a thrilling computer-hacking adventure.

I definitely didn't plan that trend. And I'd dispute that hacking/cyberpunk is a guarantee for "Awesome" given my distaste for NITE Team 4. (Nevertheless, Cyberpunk 2077 is a promising contender for the coming year.)

While I didn't play nearly as many "Awesome" games in 2019 as in previous years, there were still plenty of "Good" ones that provided fresh and entertaining experiences:

• Hacknet, per above, did a great job of making a hacking game fun instead of getting lost in leaky abstractions.
• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night shared a few too many flaws with previous Igavanias, but was also a reminder of how much they got right.
• Battle Chef Brigade used some low-quality ingredients, and its combat was undercooked, but the final dish was a surprisingly-satisfying mixture.
• Hollow Knight was too hard for me, which is usually a big turn-off... but its aesthetic charm is difficult to resist. (I'll attempt it again in 2020! Promise!)
• Open World Game: The Open World Game is legitimately one of the best open-world games I've played, in spite of being a joke about the genre.
• Indivisible had some rough spots that got in its way, but impressed the hell out of me with its unique narrative, memorable environments, challenging platforming, and fun action gameplay.
• The Sexy Brutale was a really satisfying and engaging mystery game, even if it could have used some more polish and complexity.

It's notable that two of these games (Bloodstained and Indivisible) were from the crop of crowdfunding-backed titles that I've been complaining about for years. Of that original list of eight games, four got released in 2018, and now two more in 2019.

That just leaves A.N.N.E., which plans to release this year -- of course, they've been saying that since 2014; and Factorio, which has also finally set a date, so. I guess we'll see what happens in 2020.

What else might the new year hold? I still don't know what to expect from Final Fantasy VII Remake, nor do I know how long I might have to wait for Cyberpunk 2077 to iron out its release-day bugs.

Meanwhile my backlog just keeps on growing, and I've got plenty to catch up on, even relatively recent hits like Dishonored 2, Red Dead Redemption 2, and ... Wolfenstein II.

So it would be awfully silly of me to drop another 150+ hours into a replay of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. But I'll be damned if Dandelion Jaskier isn't making me consider it. Toss a coin to your witcher...

After my somewhat-disappointing trip through RiME, I glanced at Tequila Works's resume and was like... oh, yeah, The Sexy Brutale! Yet another game that looked good, I bought, then got lost in my backlog.

The Sexy Brutale has a really compelling hook: murder mystery party! Also ... time travel! Imagine if the time-warping in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was applied to Clue, and you've pretty much got it.

Crucially, one of this party's rules is that you shouldn't be seen by other guests -- so there's no interviewing and no direct intervention. Instead, you'll observe guests' movements by peeping through keyholes, and learn their "loop" through the course of the day, to figure out how they die. Then you rewind time and manipulate the environment to, hopefully, prevent their grisly deaths.

This time-detective mechanic is at its best when tracking a guest spirals out into tertiary tasks, like overhearing a password to unlock a door, or watching someone open a secret passage. Unfortunately the puzzles never get more complex than two or three steps; but as it is, figuring out each guest's death puzzle is still enough detective-work to feel pretty cool.

As you track the guests, you'll pick up hints about what's going on in this murder-mansion, and each guest's relationship with its mysterious Marquis. The Sexy Brutale does a great job of ambient storytelling, as the conversations you overhear start to stitch together into a bigger overall story.

That story goes in some unexpected directions, but it's internally consistent, making sense within its established world. Many games with this kind of storytelling ambition end up tripping over themselves, but The Sexy Brutale concludes with a satisfying explanation for everything.

It mostly nails its aesthetics, too, with a distinctive chibi art style that highlights the guests' masks, and UI flourishes that fit right into the theme of a casino party mansion. The soundtrack is ... great, sometimes, if not all the time; some tracks are moody and thrilling, but at least one became really grating over the course of multiple time loops.

The Sexy Brutale is fun and engaging, though its puzzles are pretty simple and make me wish for more layers (and non-linearity) in a future iteration. Also for some better controls and system design, as I frequently had to mash the door-open button a few times before it "took," then watched the game stutter through loading in the next room.

Nevertheless, it's a really cool experience that unravels a uniquely interesting story, and I'd definitely look forward to another game in this format.

Better than: Her Story, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Not as good as: The Witness (2016)
Maybe this needs comparison to: Return of the Obra Dinn?

Progress: 100%