I never expected to be more critical of a game than both Dunkey and Yahtzee, but, here we are.

Maybe they have a pre-existing attachment to the Yakuza franchise that I don't? At any rate, where they found Yakuza 0 charming in spite of its flaws, all I found was a bunch of slow, dull bullshit.

It's not quite the same situation that I recently lamented regarding Grand Theft Auto IV -- although Yakuza does have more than its fair share of uninteresting bowling-style minigames. Yakuza's dullness is more an artifact of its agonizing dialog pacing and verbosity.

Characters reiterate themselves in dialog, often multiple times, for seemingly no reason. They digress into unrelated tangential backstories way more often than is appropriate. And their speech is melodramatically slow and halting, which just compounds the issue of dialog scenes taking forever.

And the game doesn't use these slow storytelling tactics lightly -- of the game's opening 100 minutes, I would say 90+ of them are non-interactive, or barely-interactive (i.e. press A to continue). The overwhelming majority of Chapter 1 is in underwhelming cutscenes.

The inexplicable transitions that Yakuza 0 will make between low-, mid-, and high-detail cutscene rendering - often in the same scene - are just bizarre icing on this cake. Yeah, I get that the game is trying to tell a hard-boiled Japanese gangland thriller; but it's so slow and so poorly-told that I cannot stay interested in where it might go.

There are other things I could complain about in my relatively-brief time with Yakuza 0, but even the clunky controls or losing 40 minutes of progress (because I assumed there was an auto-save, before the game introduced its save-point phone booths) aren't as big of a deal as how sluggish and boring the storytelling is.

Other reviews seem to forgive Yakuza's extracurricular shortcomings because they dig the story. So for me, when I can't muster interest in that story... this game doesn't really stand a chance.

Progress: Got to Chapter 2

Windward is one of those long-since-backlogged titles where I can't even remember when I got it. I can imagine why, though: sailing the open seas, completing sidequests, and trading up for bigger and more powerful pirate ships should scratch the same itches as Rebel Galaxy or Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag did. What could go wrong?

Unfortunately, it seems I neglected to notice the "Procedural Generation" tag on this game -- and thus the implication that it has no cohesive plot or narrative. There are quests, and there are even "factions," but... there isn't an over-arching motive for why I should hoard enough money to buy more cannon portholes. Who am I and what am I doing here? ... just ferrying things from place to place, I guess?

Without a compelling introductory hook, and with no written characters (let alone character development), Windward feels less like a swashbuckling simulator and more like a port-trading simulator. Personally, I can't get engaged in such a world; if I don't have compatriots to impress, or villains to crush, the power fantasy is just too shallow.

Progress: Almost none.

Niko's story starts cinematically and moves very slowly; Luis's doesn't hesitate to throw you into firefights (or off of a building). Niko has difficulty accessing high-powered cars and guns; Luis has no problem picking up a supercar, or explosive shotgun shells. Niko's missions pissed me off with their infrequent and unforgiving checkpoints; Luis's missions have plenty of checkpoints and are a trivial inconvenience to retry.

(I still hate the shit out of losing my weapons when I'm arrested, but, whatevs. Being able to call up a Gun Van helps, too.)

The Ballad of Gay Tony is a bit on the short side, and it doesn't have the gravitas of Niko's personal tale of redemption and vengeance. But it still has some of the best action, storytelling, and sandbox mechanics of the GTA franchise, or really of any game.

I'm sure that graphical expecations will leave it behind eventually... but for its breakneck pacing and generous checkpointing, TBOGT holds up really well, ten years later.

Better than: Grand Theft Auto IV
Not as good as: eh... The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt?
It'd be a real shame: if the upcoming re-launch loses the rights to Vladivostok FM's club music.

Progress: Finished the main missions, none of the side missions.

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.