It looks like something in the vein of Factorio or Infinifactory, but my experience with Mindustry wasn't as engaging as either of those games.

Mechanically it's fine: build drills to mine ore, transport it to your base with conveyor belts, place and power gun turrets to defend against nameless aliens, invest in upgrades to reach more difficult areas and build more powerful stuff... it all makes sense, and satisfies the requirement of a gameplay loop.

But the pace of making progress couldn't keep me interested. Even in the first level, waiting for the opportunity to "launch" (finish the level) felt tedious. Things probably spice up in later levels, but I got the distinct sense that there's a huge grind to go through on my way there.

And as much as I appreciate the moxie of a PC and Android cross-platform release, for a game like this, touch controls just suck. Like, really, I think it's cool that I can load this on my phone. I just hate playing it on there.

Progress: Mined a bunch of copper and lead, then got bored.

Being a cab driver (well, rideshare driver) in a cyberpunk setting sounded like a really cool narrative hook -- listening to people describe the petty human problems endemic in a Blade Runner-esque world. But Neo Cab's demo lost me pretty quickly.

For one thing, the main character would not shut up about her best friend Savy. Like, this girl has almost nothing more to her personality or motivation than her interest in said friend. It makes the protagonist come across as a shallow and degrading caricature of a person.

That single-mindedness kind of leads into my other problem, which was that the "gameplay" of Neo Cab didn't really seem interested in my input. Many games with dialog choices (like Mass Effect) frustrate me because the response I want to pick isn't an option; but Neo Cab takes it a step further, by sometimes presenting an option that I can't select based on the main character's "emotional state" which I might or might not have any control over.

I don't think it's a bad thing for a game to tell a character's pre-determined story, infused with a deliberate personality -- and it's also not a bad thing to give the player options for pointing a character in a personalized direction. But the "you can't choose that" mechanic in Neo Cab feels like the game trying to have it both ways, and that just ain't gonna work.

What I played of the demo barely hinted at intriguing subplots with an auto-pilot company named Capra, and with Savy's backstory (which some rudimentary web searching reveals is a central plot point). But based on how much the first 20 minutes had already rubbed me the wrong way, I don't anticipate the rest of Neo Cab being any good for me.

Progress: Didn't finish the demo.

I've revisited many of my "old favorite" games, and sometimes observed age getting the better of them. But I just can't look at Chrono Trigger through that same lens. I may never be able to objectively measure it against contemporary games.

Chrono Trigger is a cornerstone of my gaming life; I don't know if I can fully describe this game because of how integral it is to the way I think about games.

I'm not blind to its imperfections -- I know that it's too easy to get lost if you don't remember the plot by heart, and battles start to feel like a grind even before New Game +. But I'm way too overwhelmed by the nostalgic art and music to get hung up on those problems.

And even though I'll never get to experience Chrono Trigger "for the first time" again, I think I'll always have the same grin on my face when I meet Robo, or storm Magus's castle, or retrieve the Epoch.

... it's a bit of a shame that the PC port didn't receive the love this game clearly deserves. And while it's gotten better, the current state of this version still isn't ideal. (Button responsiveness on the end-of-battle text still feels very fuzzy, and the rendering quality on pop-up damage numbers is surprisingly bad.) But it's good enough to enjoy the game again, and again, and again.

I could really only add that this is my first time playing a version of the game with the animated cutscenes, and they feel pretty damned superfluous. The game flows better without them.

Progress: Working on a second ending.

I've been "playing" Hollow Knight for about three months now. In truth I was only actively playing it for a few weeks back in July -- and while those few weeks were quite good, since then I've lacked the courage to come back to it.

Hollow Knight is both difficult and frustrating, but not in the same way as Ori and the Blind Forest. Ori was frustrating to play due to slippery controls and poor checkpointing (... often a consequence of manually placing those checkpoints), and those frustrating fundamentals made it difficult to progress in the game.

Hollow Knight, on the other hand, has difficult action gameplay - a pure challenge of defeating enemies while avoiding their attacks - and as that difficulty ramps up, I start to get frustrated at my lack of progress.

Does that make sense? The difference is subtle, but important: in Ori, the (I would say) flaws in its gameplay made it hard for me to truly enjoy the bigger picture; while in Hollow Knight, my lack of skill results in me being unable to see the bigger picture.

For the most part, my failings in Hollow Knight are my own fault. (Though I will levy some criticism at the long distances between save points and a few boss fights.) While the Knight does gather stronger equipment and more powerful abilities through map exploration, this game places a much heavier emphasis on skill building than, say, Bloodstained. Just having more health isn't enough to withstand later enemies' attacks; I need to get better at dodging and blocking them.

And what I'm afraid of is that I may already have hit the ceiling of my skills. The amount of deaths I'm racking up in The Hive, not just in its boss fight but on my way to the boss, is intimidatingly large. These giant angry bees are no joke.

Yet I still "want" to try again, because the world of Hollow Knight is gorgeous and awe-inspiring to explore. I'm not all that motivated by the story - I think it's a little too cryptic, in that I haven't found a reason to care about the dreamers or whatever - but to me, the reward for getting better at this game is being able to discover more of its crazy-stylish map and uncover more of its slyly-hidden secrets.

I just hope I can git gud enough to see the rest of it.

Progress: stuck in the Hive.

CD Projekt has a good track record for fixing up the "good old games" it sells on GOG, so when I saw The Saboteur released there, I got excited that maybe they'd fixed the mixed-resolution map issue I whined about back in 2012. As it turns out, they ... kind-of fixed it ... by locking the setting at 720p.

The game's overall technical (in-)fidelity is pretty much how I remember it, cutscene-warping and crashing and all. To be fair, I've played plenty worse - and to The Saboteur's credit, it performs pretty smoothly in highly explosive scenarios - it's just a little disappointing that no one's yet been able to polish this rough gem of a game.

Killing Nazis is still fun. Dynamiting Nazis is still way fun. And while Sean Devlin's story isn't about to win any awards, it holds up better after ten years than I would have expected. Compared to Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered, The Saboteur's characters are downright relatable.

What probably hurts the game the most, today, is its lack of fast travel. I'd completely forgotten that "no fast travel" was even a thing -- and somehow had a false memory that I would unlock fast travel after some story mission or another. Nope. Not only is it impossible to get from one end of the map to the other without driving there; your ability to call a car doesn't work out in the French countryside.

The game's rushed ending and lack of post-game story had already made the remaining freeplay targets (remaining Nazis to blow up) a weak proposition; without fast travel, I'm definitely not going to bother.

But while the main story lasts, and while Sean is discovering new city districts to explode Nazis in, it's an exciting ride that still feels worthwhile today.

Better than: Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered
Not as good as: Middle-earth: Shadow of War
I'd argue, on balance, about as good as: Marvel's Spider-Man

Progress: Killed Dierker yet again.

Mark of the Ninja Remastered taught me that I've been spoiled by the last 5-6 years of video games.

What I remembered from my original Ninja-ing was all awesome -- largely because of how great the game was at clearly telegraphing enemy line of sight, hearing ranges, alert status, light cones... et cetera. It was such a breath of fresh air from Hitman-style stealth games, where if you don't know what path to take through a level, you have to try, die, and try again until you find it.

What I hadn't remembered was that Mark of the Ninja's mechanical sophistication takes a little while to develop. Your ninja doesn't gain access to gadgets like smoke bombs, or abilities like the trap-sensing Farsight, until several missions in. And in the meantime, I felt like I was underequipped.

I was kind-of down on the game in those early missions. It's not like they took very long to get through, and sneaking up behind dudes to slit their throats was still fun, but the whole time I was thinking: why can't I distract my enemies with noisemakers, or dangle their corpses from lampposts? (Because I hadn't unlocked those abilities yet.)

Maybe it wasn't the past several years of video games that spoiled me -- maybe it was just Mark of the Ninja's later missions. Huh.

Better than: Shank, Shank 2
Not as good as: when I played it the first time.
And the Special Edition bonus level: even remastered, is still pretty "Meh."

It would be easy to dismiss Marvel's Spider-Man as the Marvel version of Batman: Arkham City, but that's a little reductive. After all: Spider-Man has more costumes.

I'm being a bit facetious, but really, much of what Spider-Man succeeds at feels directly aped from the open-world Arkham games: you fly through the city bounding between (or over) rooftops, side-missions explore the backgrounds of various allies and villains from the comics, and although Spidey can be upgraded to take more bullets than the Dark Knight could, the overall flow of combat is pretty similar.

And then there are the definitively not subtle imitations. Fighting Rhino felt a whole lot like fighting Bane. The third-act prison break is a thematic copy of Arkham City's first-act prison break. Screwball's insipid challenges and psychotic banter are almost verbatim from the Riddler. And Scorpion's hallucinatory sequences are a dead ringer for Batman's Scarecrow segments.

This isn't necessarily bad. Sometimes it feels ... uninspired, but if you're going to copy mechanics and themes from another game, you may as well copy from one of the best. Spider-Man's strongest gameplay is almost as fun as Batman's was.

Unfortunately, Spider-Man takes way too long getting to those parts. Until that third-act prison break, there's virtually no excitement or tension either in following the main story or in prowling the open world. The game's first two acts haplessly plod from one shallow reference to another, while waiting for the Mister Negative story to slowly progress. And until that story progress occurs, the activities available in the open world are relatively scant (and dull).

The first two thirds of the game serve little purpose other than making the player wonder how long it is until Doctor Octavius "turns," and forcing the player to watch Peter's cringey attempts at making up with Mary Jane.

To be fair, those moments aren't very numerous, and the early and middle game isn't "bad" per se -- it just tends to be pretty boring. Things don't get really interesting until the Sinister Six show up in Act 3, which thankfully is much more action-packed and engaging than everything before it.

Spider-Man is a well-polished and, ultimately, fun enough game; but it doesn't exceed its forebears, and takes its sweet time working up to them.

... as an aside, one thing that could really have helped Spider-Man stand out more is art style. This game doesn't really have one; it looks too realistic. The unlockable Comic Book Suit made me wish that the whole game had looked that cool.

Better than: Transformers: Devastation
Not as good as: Batman: Arkham Asylum
Also not as good as: Spider-Man: Homecoming or Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Prismata is half visual-novel, and half turn-based strategy game -- except the strategy game is really a card game, and the card game feels a lot like a puzzle ... well, let's slow down a bit.

Prismata starts out pretty strong, with a cool sci-fi future setting and a sardonic smartass protagonist. The main character's apathy is a convenient vehicle for the game's tutorial missions; other characters rib him for not keeping his skills up, and then teach you, the player, how to control swarms of battling robots.

You see, he's a "swarmwielder," which is like an army commander except the army is made of robots. And when some worker robots start to turn hostile, it's your job to click a bunch of buttons and deploy security 'bots to quell a viral uprising.

(Each unit appears on-screen in the form of a card, and the battlefield is organized into front, middle, and rear lines of these cards. That's where the "card game" comes in.)

The combat itself is turn-based, and involves distinct phases of gathering various energy currencies; consuming those currencies to deploy new units; ordering those units to attack; absorbing enemy attacks; and repeating, so on, until you've obliterated the enemy's forces or vice-versa. The campaign's early missions introduce the rules of these phases pretty well, while simultaneously bringing in new unit types that help each mission feel fresh.

And I was really enjoying it until the end of the first episode, when a mission introduced the "seed" resource and limited the total available amount of each robot.

Up to that point, I'd employed the turtling strategy - as is my wont - of investing heavily in defense and infrastructure before ultimately rolling out an offensive force of shock and awe. But the "seed" limits meant that I couldn't keep deploying shield units forever; I would run out of them before getting to my offense, and inevitably succumb to enemy attacks.

This was when the game became more like a puzzle, in that I would have to figure out a precisely-correct balance of simultaneous defense and offense, to avoid dying while also beating back the enemy. A single wrong move would lead to an unwinnable scenario in later turns. (Granted, the game has a very retry-friendly "undo turn" system.)

I probably would have been fine with that puzzle game, except that I'd just finished learning how to play something totally different. So when this mission went back on all that I'd learned, I just bounced right off. Completely changing the play style that I'd just become comfortable with was not an attractive proposition.

There is some pretty cool stuff in Prismata, but the tutorial pulled a fast one on me, and I just didn't feel like re-examining all of my tactics in order to get to Episode 2.

Better than: Card City Nights
Not as good as: Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales
The visual-novel part: isn't bad! The writing and ambience are good on their own, but not good enough that I want to re-learn the game.

Progress: Didn't quite finish Episode 1 of the campaign.

Qora is a side-scroller entry in the "Walking Simulator" genre. Which I guess makes it a "Go Left or Right Simulator."

It's not without some charm: the story hooks are intriguing, the NPC dialog has a sense of humor, and the simple art style is adequately evocative. Running through its screens and uncovering its strange, fantastical plot makes for a good 20 minutes of fun.

The problem is that Qora is actually an hour long. It moves so slow -- and I mean that very literally. The movement speed is absurdly slow, and occasional button-mashing obstacles don't help.

Qora would be a "Meh" if its milquetoast story elements moved along at a reasonable pace. But the pervasive slowness of the game make it feel like a chore. Despite how ultimately short it is; Qora should be much shorter.

Better than: Zoo Rampage
Not as good as: Cube Escape: Paradox
There are multiple endings?: but I can't imagine plodding through Qora a second time.

Depixtion looks like it's just doing three nonograms to blend red, green, and blue tiles together -- but it's actually more than that. It changes the fundamental rules of picross-style puzzles, in a way that I'm not sure I really like.

In each of the red or green or blue puzzles, there are two "marked" states: a light version of the color, and a dark version of the color. (You click twice to color in darker, which isn't a great UX but whatever.) And when light- and dark- colored sections are next to each other, there isn't necessarily a blank space inbetween them.

So the first new lesson to learn is that row and column hints must be counted differently. A dark 2 followed by a light 2 doesn't mean a minimum of five cells; it means a minimum of four. Then there are new logical scenarios to look out for, e.g. the row hints may say a cell is either light or empty, while the column hints say the cell is either dark or empty.

Normally I would be excited about new puzzle rules, but in Depixtion's case they seem awkwardly shoe-horned into an existing game. I felt like I had to switch contexts and recalculate my approach in circumstances that weren't really that complicated.

It seemed like the game had to recalculate a lot, too; the way that row and column hint numbers got deactivated based on my puzzle progress didn't always track with what I'd filled in.

Maybe I'm just not "getting it," maybe I'm too set in my puzzling ways. But in any event, I think I got all the Depixtion that I'd care to out of the demo.

Progress: Finished the demo puzzles.