A Criminal Past is both longer and more story-driven than System Rift was. But the execution of this DLC turns those could-be-positives into some slightly-negatives.

A Criminal Past is narratively framed as a story that Adam Jensen is telling to an Interpol psychologist, who is definitely a character from Mankind Divided that I've totally forgotten about. (A mark against the main game, for how un-memorable she was.) A "present-day" conversation between her and Adam introduces the mission as a flashback; and at some plot moments during this mission, the two will provide narrative voiceovers to recap the story so far.

While I admire the ambition of this storytelling technique, its implementation just isn't that good. The dialog between Delara and Jensen is generally dry and un-engaging. And, if Adam dies during the mission, Delara will cut in with a "That's not what happened, try to remember" line -- much like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time did, but in the serious and professional context of A Criminal Past's story, it sounds very out of place.

Writing for the mission's characters is similarly ambitious, but insufficient. Key characters tend to lean on a single defining personality trait: Flossy is a dealmaker, the Fixer is neurotic. Stenger, at least, shows some signs of character complexity as the story moves forward. But other characters are too one-note to be believable or interesting.

Partially as a result of these flat characters, the back half of A Criminal Past comes across as stretched-out.

The first half is pretty exciting: Jensen is dropped into a fortress-style prison, and must figure out how to move around freely without being shot at. Sure, it bears some resemblance to System Rift's bank vault, but the presence of other prisoners - especially when you're doing favors for them - and the architecture of the cell blocks and the outdoor "yard" area, have a very different feel. I liked developing a familiarity with the cell blocks' maps as I snuck between them to carry out errands.

Remember how I said that System Rift streamlined itself by giving you a bunch of Praxis Points to start? Well, A Criminal Past doesn't; you're reset back to a baseline Adam Jensen. But I actually liked that restriction, here, because it helps encourage mechanics that are thematically appropriate for a prison break. Like hiding from guard patrols, rather than always taking them out; and tracking down keycodes and computer passwords, instead of hacking them.

Unfortunately, the second half of A Criminal Past reverts to more familiar, rote scenarios. Largely, getting past guards in otherwise-empty office floors, with no objectives other than navigating from one end to the other. These later areas felt inappropriately sprawling, and while I typically like to methodically search a floor and collect everything in it, I skipped a few areas because I was ready for the game to be over.

At its worst, though, A Criminal Past is still "more Deus Ex." And at its best, in the initial prison-break scenario, it ticks all the same boxes that I enjoyed in System Rift.

Despite its pacing problem, this is another worthy excuse to dive back into Deus Ex.

Better than: Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link, at least as far as I can remember it.
Not as good as: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - System Rift, mostly because of the pacing.
Here's hoping that Deus Ex: can come out of "hiatus" in one piece.

Two years after I said that resetting talent points was "an instant turn-off" for DXMD's System Rift DLC, I've gotten over it. ... Well, I've also forgotten what most of those talents were, anyway.

Unlike the previous game's The Missing Link DLC, though, this one gives you a bunch of initial Praxis Points; so instead of starting out as a hobbled newbie, you get to build a moderately-powerful Adam Jenson from the beginning. I definitely appreciate how this streamlined the introduction.

And I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was for me to get back into my Deus Ex "groove" -- before I knew it, I was sneaking into the map's nooks and crannies, finding hidden paths around security checkpoints, incapacitating hostile guards, and obsessively hacking every terminal and laptop I could find. I guess it's a credit to the main game that my instincts came back so quickly.

After a few errands that set up the plot, the primary activity in System Rift is infiltrating a Palisade Blade installation (datacenter bank vault) for some cyber-espionage. And this stealth op ticked most of my favorite boxes from Mankind Divided itself: the aforementioned sneaking, hacking, et cetera. I had a lot of fun finding my way around the bank's defenses, and reading all of their employees' email.

On the flip side, this DLC is kinda short, and - though there are a couple optional objectives inside the bank - doesn't have any side missions or other significant secrets to uncover. While it does pack a meaningful amount of detail and choice into its single mission, it's still just a single mission. I found myself missing the open-ness of Mankind Divided's world map, a bit.

But, as a side-story to the main game, System Rift is pretty engaging and satisfying.

Better than: Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link
Not as good as: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Hearts of Stone
As big as Deus Ex is on player choice: I have to assume that going into the bank guns blazing wouldn't have turned out very well.

Last time, I praised Cypher's ability to make me feel like an idiot. Now that I've looked up some of the solutions online, I feel like adding an important clarification.

When I fail to solve a puzzle due to outlandish leaps of logic - like collating binary bits into groups of five?, or arranging planetary symbols by the lengths of their days - that doesn't make me feel dumb. It makes me feel ... nothing. Or at worst, like I'm playing Monkey Island 2.

Granted, there were some puzzles that I just hadn't applied myself hard enough to. But most of the ones I "missed" had solutions that I'd never, in a million years, have figured out on my own. And while I can respect the kind of "way outside the box" thinking that these puzzles were asking, that isn't something I look for in a solo game.

But I don't want to dwell on those puzzles too much. The first 45-50% of the game was a blast to solve using only in-game guidance -- and, in the case of the Vigenere ciphers, a web-app for automating the rotations. I felt really satisfied with this part of the game, and with Cypher's museum-like ambience along the way.

I'm still overall impressed, and excited for more from Matthew Brown. ... like Alchemia, I suppose.

Better than: Sethian
Not as good as: given I can't think of a great comparison, Human Resource Machine
Actually: I think the leaps-of-logic would have been more fun if this was a co-operative multiplayer activity. I wonder if a Jackbox-style mobile UI for note-sharing collaboration would work for this kind of game...

Progress: 064%, including some internet hints.

I'll confess that I didn't come into Paper Mario: Sticker Star with a very open mind. It's the last 3DS game in my backlog, and I really wanted to pack the system up before the end of the year.

That being said, the 30 minutes I spent with Sticker Star were enough for me. While I might not call it an outright "bad" game, it certainly didn't offer anything I'd call "good," either.

An interesting story? Nope. This narrative setup is less complicated than many of Mario's platform games. That is to say, in Sticker Star, an opening cinematic establishes - almost wordlessly - that Bowser interrupted a Mushroom Kingdom event, a magic macguffin split into six pieces, and Peach got herself kidnapped. So ... I guess it's time for Mario to do that thing, you know, the thing he always does. With the princess saving.

His only traveling companion is an annoying talking crown, who provides some gameplay tips a'la Navi the fairy. And since Mario himself remains mute (as is tradition), there isn't much in the way of dialog. NPCs have some light-hearted throwaway lines, but the humor feels underwhelmingly mild.

As far as I remember, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door had a surprisingly complicated plot. And while the story of Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story wasn't very good, I respect that it at least existed. Sticker Star, in spite of its predecessors, clearly never intended to tell a story at all.

So does it make up for that with some thrilling combat mechanics? Eh... no. Its sticker-based combat is based on, well, your inventory of stickers. Mario doesn't have any default attacks, or abilities that he can learn by leveling up -- because there is no leveling up. Nor are there equipment slots, stat upgrades, or ... even character stats, really.

There are just the stickers, which you find in the world, or buy with coins; and which are consumed when you use them.

Your mileage may vary, but I found this combat system to be particularly shitty. That the stickers are consumable makes me worried about using them incorrectly, or running out of "good" ones; and the lack of permanent character upgrades makes me concerned that battles won't change very much as the game goes on.

Sticker Star does, at least, retain the Mario RPG mechanic of real-time button presses bolstering your offensive and defensive moves. (Even though the annoying talking crown didn't explain this. I guess it's a good thing I've played the previous games.)

But it's otherwise thrown out a significant portion - the storytelling, the combat depth, the character growth - of what made the Paper Mario games, and the Mario & Luigi games, compelling. What it replaces those elements with feels hollow and insubstantial.

The message I got from Sticker Star, loud and clear, is that it doesn't want to be an RPG. It would rather be an adventure game in the Mario universe, that happens to share a paper-cutout aesthetic with some other games that were RPGs. And that doesn't sound interesting to me.

As a tangent: what made me shut the game off, and formally retire my 3DS, was when I filled my sticker book by accident. I didn't even know it had a size limit - let alone one I could reach so quickly - and the sticker I tried to pick up just ... disappeared. (A precious, expendable sticker, gone forever, because I didn't realize that I'd be unable to carry it. Tragic.)

Progress: Just left Decalberg.

God of War (2018) is a triumph of modern game design, while remaining faithful to its decade-old tenets. It's a lively and rip-roaring adventure, while also telling a somber and sometimes touching story. It fills a huge, beautiful world with a wealth of compelling content. And it lets you beat the absolute shit out of Norse gods.

Considering the series is best known for grisly, rage-fueled deicide, it may be hard to believe that this installment features heartfelt narrative moments. But it does! This isn't just another mythological revenge tale, nor is the father-and-son dynamic merely an excuse for a companion character. God of War crafts a truly impactful story, largely on the back of real, believable character interactions and complexities.

Old man Kratos has layers.

The game's introduction clearly establishes a core conflict: the gruff, hardened, and world-weary Kratos has suddenly become a single father -- and has a tough time relating to the naive young Atreus, who's clearly more into "book learning" than physical combat. Kratos wants his boy to grow strong and self-reliant, and tries to teach Atreus hard lessons about the bleak, unforgiving nature of the outside world. And though Atreus wants to make his father proud, he struggles to get any positive responses out of him.

Kratos hopes that his son won't repeat his same mistakes, that Atreus will become a better man than himself. But violence is all that he knows; and he's afraid of doing it wrong, of failing his son in the same way that he feels Zeus failed him.

Ironically, given Kratos's story arc, his struggle in this game is much more human than any of his previous labors. Watching both Kratos and Atreus mature as men, throughout the course of their journey, really made me feel some things.

But the genius of God of War's storytelling is that it's more than just that. Emotional moments are punctuated, and tempered, by light-hearted comic relief; jokesters Brok, Sindri, and Mimir all jumped quickly up my list of memorable video game characters. (Mimir's "what really happened" stories about Odin and Thor are easily some of my favorite moments from any game.)

And, building on one of the stronger points of the first God of War, this one really delivers on the epic feeling of coming face-to-face with mythological entities and artifacts. I mean, you meet the world serpent pretty early on, and it only gets more awe-inspiring in the dozens of hours that follow.

Meanwhile, the fact that Kratos isn't from 'round here is a convenient excuse for other characters to teach him - and thus teach you, the player - about the nine realms, the history of the Vanir, and so on. And it's kinda adorable seeing Atreus beam at the chance to explain to his father what runes mean.

So while all of this exposition is going on, what is the "game" actually about? Well, it's roughly the same stuff that Kratos has done before - exploration, puzzles, and murderin' - but in more pleasant proportions, and to more impressive effect.

The exploration part is my favorite. Not only is the game's Midgard gorgeously realized and breathtaking to behold, but a significant chunk of the game is open-world -- or at least feels like it. After talking to Jormungandr, the Lake of Nine opens up a whole bunch of side-quests, for shoring up your armor and weapons. There's an impressive quantity of content, albeit far from an "Ubisoft Game" amount; rather, almost all of God of War's optional objectives feel worth doing, for the sake of seeing more of its world.

The opneness isn't quite perfect, though. A fast-travel mechanism doesn't open up until fairly late in the game, and Metroidvania-style obstacles make some objectives hard to track; it's unclear if you've been to a place before, but didn't have the upgrade necessary to fully explore it. And though most of the side-quests were a pleasure to experience, some of the end-game ones feel like a grind. (I have no interest in that Niflheim garbage.)

Nevertheless, just boating around the lake and looking for self-directed stuff to do is a joy, as well as a great way to wind down inbetween tense story segments.

The puzzling is pretty good, too. I don't remember puzzles featuring so prominently in the first God of War, but they're prolific, here. It's amazing how much mileage they got out of mechanics based around "throw an axe at this thing" -- sincerely, the breadth of puzzle types is much bigger than I would have expected.

The combat is okay. I mean, it's fun, but I'm glad that there wasn't too much of it. What I remember from bouncing off of God of War II was the amount of combat feeling repetitive, dulling its own dramatic effect; the 2018 formula really benefits from a "less is more" approach.

Fighting can still feel a little simplistic, as opposed to a game like Horizon Zero Dawn which asks you to target weak points and manage elemental vulnerabilities. Tactically, God of War doesn't go much further than knowing when to dodge versus when to attack. But it's fun, and swinging a big axe around feels especially visceral and satisfying.

Progression in God of War is a little weird, and not quite like any other game I've played, but it mostly works. There are "levels," and there are experience points, but these two things aren't related -- XP is used to unlock combat abilities, while your level is determined by the power of your equipment. And that equipment is crafted, and upgraded, using raw materials you find throughout the journey.

Higher-level equipment will give greater bonuses to individual stats, like Strength and Defense; and better stats will increase your overall level rating. Hence, Kratos's level is effectively an abstraction of your overall combat power. It's a loose connection, but the character level nevertheless serves as a good gauge of your combat odds. I.e. if you're level 4 and an enemy is level 7 then you're probably about to die.

The dark side of this sytem is that the long-term consequences of your crafting options aren't clearly telegraphed, and are tough to compare. Several times throughout the game, as new equipment recipes become available, you must choose what to invest in: buy some new equipment, given that its initial strength may be less than your current, upgraded equipment? Or continue upgrading your existing equipment, given that it may hit a cap on its strength more quickly?

Not to mention, since some resources exist in limited quantity - e.g. there are only three Dragon Tears in the game - there are some equipment choices that are mutually exclusive. Which just seems unnecessarily obtuse. I'd have preferred less opportunities to pick the "wrong" equipment, and more emphasis on linear upgrades.

So I hope that they work a little bit on that system for the sequel. ... I know there'll be a sequel, because the ending is little more than a teaser for it. (Hopefully the next game has some more closure in its own ending, too.)

But, yeah. After this, I definitely want to see more of Kratos and Atreus's journey.

Better than: Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the original God of War
Not as good as: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Hard to call either way versus: Horizon Zero Dawn or Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Progress: Finished on normal/balanced, defeated 6 valkyries.

I waited too long to try Dragon Age: Origins.

To its credit, some aspects of Dragon Age still shine brightly -- chiefly, the writing quality and voice acting. Just a few minutes with this game reminded me of BioWare's aptitude for building interesting, entertaining characters; and how compelling their games become through that characterization, in making me curious about how their lovable miscreants will develop.

Also -- the real-time-with-pause combat, wrapped in hybrid RPG-RTS camera controls, has a slight learning curve but ends up working quite well. I was pleasantly surprised by how expertly it marries the control strengths of Baldur's Gate and Warcraft. As weird a combo as it seems, they pull it off very competently.

But while some parts of Dragon Age are easy to appreciate even today, others have aged pretty poorly. Game design and technology have made great strides since 2009, and things like enemies being visually unremarkable against the environment; or the terrain's collision not really matching up with the visuals; or UI elements and fonts being under-scaled at modern resolutions, are all "old" problems to have.

By default, the game asks you to manage the character sheets for all of your party members, a mechanical complexity that's kinda dated by now. You can opt into letting the AI manage level-ups and skill points, but not into keeping their armor and weapons up-to-date, which remains a manual process. I respect that this was more typical a decade ago, and some folks would probably still prefer it -- but today, to me, it's tedious minutiae.

Meanwhile, the gameplay that comes out of those character sheets is bit underwhelming. I mean, it's not like I expected to be able to vault ogres or pickpocket ninjas from the start; but even after several hours and levels, my character's lack of distinctive and disruptive skills felt dull. I'm sure this would have gotten better over time, but ... how much time?

The mute protagonist is a more debatable "problem," but one that I'd argue still feels antiquated. On the one hand, since Dragon Age lets you choose a gender and race, and has a shitton of dialog options, recording voice-overs for everything the protagonist might say would be a significant undertaking (even by modern standards). On the other hand, without a voice, the protagonist comes off as out-of-place among the vocal party members and NPCs.

Mass Effect, which BioWare made earlier, sacrificed racial choices and thus had a fully-voiced protagonist. And Witcher 3, par exemple, with no gender or race choices, made Geralt sound really at-home in its game world. Personally, I lean more toward voicing the protagonist, even at the cost of customizability.

Finally, while those things made me somewhat blasé on Dragon Age, what actually made me give up on it was the lazy autosave. Sure, for its time, it wasn't that surprising that a game would expect you to make heavy and regular use of the quicksave hot-key; two years later, Skyrim was still reliant on manual saving as insurance against game crashes.

But Dragon Age's autosaves are extraordinarily rare. On a few occasions, the game will trigger a checkpoint before a battle, but this is more the exception than the rule. And in Dragon Age, when your party dies - which happened many times to me, due to tactical miscalculations - you have to reload a save file.

In other words, you can spend a bunch of time talking to NPCs in town, organizing your inventory, and exploring the map, and then on your way out if some enemies ambush and wipe your party ... welcome to 35 minutes ago. That's what happened to me in my last session.

Near as I can tell, I would have loved Dragon Age for its storytelling prowess and RPG intricacy, had I played it when it was new. But by today's standards, the payoff it offers for testing my patience doesn't feel worth it.

Progress: didn't quite get out of Lothering.

CrossCode gets a lot "right," and achieves a lot in terms of mechanical and world design. But I hated playing it, just as much as I enjoyed it.

The game's prologue and opening chapter tease a cyberpunk thriller story, in the vein of Ready Player One or Snow Crash's "metaverse." You control an avatar in a game called CrossWorlds, similar to a present-day MMORPG, but -- this game isn't merely virtual. Set in a distant future with terraformed planets, instantaneous data transmission, and a lightweight but versatile "instant matter" which can be printed and reconfigured remotely: CrossWorlds is a physical place, populated with what are essentially 3D-printed players, NPCs, enemies, wildlife, houses...

It's a really cool sci-fi explanation for how you can die and respawn in-game, since avatars are just dolls being controlled remotely by off-world players. And how otherwise-impractical gameplay mechanics are made "real," like using combat techniques to create massive (augmented reality) explosions, or shooting (again, AR) laser pulses out of your avatar's hand to activate a switch.

It's clear from the introduction that something mysterious, even sinister, is going on in this world; particularly since your involvement in it isn't normal. The character behind your avatar has amnesia, and you join CrossWorlds with the help of a crew of people who are definitely up to something. Yet you must blend in as a CrossWorlds player, exploring the in-game world and making on-line friends as any other newbie would.

That "blending in" - joining a party with a random acquaintance, becoming part of their guild, and walking the content treadmill of the CrossWorlds game - then goes on, practically uninterrupted, for 15-20 hours. The external story, about your amnesia and the crew you're with, is nowhere to be found. So you take quests from NPCs, you forge through the wilderness to find ancient temples, you solve puzzles and defeat mighty bosses, level-up, invest in character attributes, buy equipment upgrades ...

Lacking development in that real-world thriller story, you're stuck playing the game within the game. Complete with other "players" who you'll often overhear conversing about their daily lives, or complaining about how long it's taking the CrossWorlds dev team to release an expansion pack.

To put it another way, imagine if Secret of Mana had a bunch of background characters who, at the end of every dungeon, threw out flavor text about their experience with the same boss fight you'd just finished. As an accurate simulation of real-world MMO experience, it deflates and devalues any narrative strength you might be tempted to attach to the meta-game world of CrossWorlds.

And that would be fine, if the "real" game of CrossCode would continue developing its cyberpunk thriller narrative. But it doesn't. This story goes totally dark for the first half of its running length.

CrossCode does include a lot of well-written dialog, from convincing characterization of its fake players to some videogame-reference humor. But the world it built within CrossWorlds wasn't interesting -- just mundane filler inbetween the "real" story.

The first half of CrossCode could have been cut down substantially, and the absence of its main story is the biggest reason. But not the only reason.

Probably the biggest and meatiest of CrossCode's gameplay mechanics is real-time combat: your avatar can hit enemies with both melee and ranged attacks, and as the game goes on, you'll unlock new abilities as well as elemental specializations. For example, when you see a red enemy coming at you, you should switch to your ice spec to inflict massive damage.

The combat controls responsively and fluidly, and develops a rich complexity as you level-up and face tougher foes. CrossCode progressively asks for more and more tactical intelligence from you, in figuring out an enemy's weaknesses on the fly, and swiftly avoiding their damaging attacks.

It's fast, exciting, and rewarding when you learn how to effectively defeat a new enemy. The problem I had with CrossCode's combat is that there's so much of it -- when you're traversing a new area, there are dozens upon dozens of encounters with the same few enemies, over and over again. The first few fights can be fun, but the countless more after that gradually become dull, and repetitive.

Now, to be clear: I wasn't forced to fight these enemies. A really smart facet of CrossCode's encounter design is that, except in specific scripted events, all enemies are non-hostile until you attack them. Meaning, you could just walk through an area without fighting anything. And if you're tired of combat, you can stop at any time.

... except that, by skipping combat in a new area, you'll inevitably be under-leveled for any upcoming scripted combat (like a dungeon boss). And you'll also be under-equipped, since you won't have the item or money drops necessary for new weapons and armor.

When you don't maintain pace with the game's suggested character level and equipment level, you're simply unable to keep up with scripted encounters. And that pace often feels like a real grind.

Another big mechanic in CrossCode is puzzle-solving. Your avatar can push blocks and hit switches - so, Zelda-style puzzles - and your ranged attack can also reflect against some surfaces, supporting light and mirror puzzle mechanics.

When these combine, i.e. push the blocks to the right positions for reflecting a shot to an ultimate destination, and then you throw in elemental specializations - like the ice shot freezing water into a reflective surface, or the lightning shot triggering a magnet that attracts a block! - CrossCode's puzzles get really satisfyingly complex. I legit enjoyed figuring a bunch of these out.

Unfortunately, like the combat, the problem with CrossCode's puzzles is that it forces too many of them upon you. All of the dungeon puzzles are mandatory - as they unlock doors that you need to go through - and there are just so damn many of them. The game's first dungeon was easily twice as large, and hence twice as lengthy, as I felt it should have been; same for the second dungeon.

Consequently, like combat: the dungeons are fun initially, but their puzzles become dull and boring as they wear on.

In its first half, CrossCode presents a lot of mechanics that work well individually, but are paced much too slowly. I'm impressed, in a way, that the game has so much content stuffed into it; particularly the puzzles -- I mean, someone designed all of these and they're all good! But I didn't want to do all of them in a row for three hours. And I was especially disappointed when my reward for finishing the dungeon didn't include anything about the main story.

There is, finally, a turning point around Chapter 7, where the real story comes back. The narrative pacing after this ... still isn't great, but is much better than before. It's a shame that I'd already become disenchanted with the combat and puzzle mechanics by then.

(It doesn't help that, just after this turning point, there is the biggest pre-dungeon area in the game, and then three immediately-consecutive dungeons.)

But in the back half, I found a new problem with CrossCode.

CrossCode's combat was always tactically demanding, even in the early game; but around the end of Chapter 8, that demand became intensely disrespectful of my time. I'm talking about encounters - both bosses and otherwise - with multiple phases over several minutes, that you have to restart from scratch if you die at the end. Encounters where a single slip-up may mean death, and the game will ask you to flawlessly repeat the last five minutes all over again.

For people who really like character-action games, this might not be a problem; like a DMC or Bayonetta, CrossCode continues to challenge you to perfect your techniques, all the way to the end. These techniques include not only finely honing your attack, evade, and block timings, but also exploiting "buffs" from consumable items, and gathering rare materials for equipment crafting (to surpass the gear you can buy).

But because of the frustrating die-and-retry repetition of these late-game encounters - and, perhaps, because I had become exhausted by the game already - I didn't rise to those challenges. I hit a wall, I think it was a fight with multiple Blue Rays?, and had just had enough; so I turned the game's difficulty sliders all the way down.

Said sliders reduce enemy attack damage and attack frequency; yet even with those dramatic reductions, I encountered enemies who barely gave me time to fight back -- and if they had been doing their full damage, I would have needed to evade or block damn near everything to survive.

I also turned down the slider for puzzle speed. Yeah: puzzle "speed." See, one aspect that puzzles come to rely on is real-time interaction with your wall-bouncing projectile -- for example, after your shot reflects off a block, then you hit a switch that moves the block somewhere else, so the shot can reflect off the same block again.

As the dungeon puzzles become more and more complex, the stakes they place on your time grow, just like the multi-phase combat encounters. If you screw up an eight-step puzzle on step 8, enjoy resetting the whole thing and trying again from 1! And, as with late-game enemies who can end you in an instant, the timing requirements on these puzzles leave no room for error. (Or, they did, until I tweaked the difficulty slider.)

I saw CrossCode through to the end, but was mostly just going through the motions. I enjoyed parts of it; slowed-down puzzles were still good brain-exercise, and scrounging up sidequests and exploring the world map continued to be mildly interesting.

But after being worn down by an onslaught of combat, eye-rollingly huge chunks of puzzles, and the game's surprising negligence toward its main story -- progressing through the rest of the game no longer felt exciting or fresh. It just felt like an obligation.

So when the game's ending wrapped up some plot threads, but not all of them; and a text prompt said that post-game epilogue content would be coming in the future; I couldn't even laugh.

All I could do was sigh, at this game I enjoyed a playable demo of three years ago, this game that rivals AAA productions with its amount of content - and often, the quality of its content - but somehow still didn't finish its story.

I fell in love with CrossCode's provocative introduction, but fell out of love with the MMO milieu that substituted for its story, and with its seemingly endless "practice makes perfect" approach to combat and puzzles.

If you're a big fan of those things, maybe CrossCode will be better, for you.

Better than: Final Fantasy XII, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
Not as good as: Child of Light, Timespinner
For better virtual-world meta-storytelling, see: Assassin's Creed and Saints Row IV

Of the games I've crowdfunded - and which actually got released - Timespinner holds the honor of being the best so far. (Granted, that bar is pretty low.)

Aesthetically and thematically, Timespinner pulls a lot from 16-bit classics like Chrono Trigger; but foremost, and overwhelmingly so, from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and its many handheld sequels. It's exceptionally clear that Timespinner's creator was a big fan of those games.

Not just because it's got an interconnected world map that you backtrack through as the game proceeds, and not just because you gain experience points and level-up, as do your weapons and your familiar sidekick. The movement of the whip-like orbs, the layout of the UI, the boss-kill effects, and even the soundtrack all feel practically copied from an Igavania.

It's sometimes unnerving, when the castle music suddenly immerses me in the memory of a game I played a decade ago. But, aside from those jarring moments, the inspiration serves Timespinner well; I was a big fan of those games, too. The source material was great, and so is this interpretation.

The story is ... good enough.

The plot of the "Past" era is a mystery at first, and its gradual, well-paced reveal is satisfying to work through; though by the halfway point of the game, everything's been explained or adequately telegraphed. In its back half, Timespinner's narrative mostly, wisely, stays out of the way.

Except for the plot thread leading to the "Dream" ending, which comes across as half-baked. It's clear that the game's creator wanted this part of the story to feel profound and rewarding, but to me it felt more like a deus ex machina time paradox escape-hatch.

That aside, the plot is adequately engaging -- and does a good job of supporting the game's structure, particularly in a few moments that join the "Past" and "Present" world maps.

Timespinner's dialog tries to make its characters feel real and relatable, with mixed results. The protagonist Lunais is a sassy broad, and the game lets her play into this role fairly well. A few of the NPCs have strong personalities too, notably the duty-bound Haristel, who even goes through a character arc (if you do the side-quests for it).

But for several NPCs, the game's only attempt at characterization is by talking about their sex lives. A ton of the cast is gay or bisexual. There's nothing wrong with that!, but "is gay" isn't a defining character trait. And, the fact that everyone talks so freely about who they've banged - regardless of affiliation - can feel kinda awkward.

Thankfully, that awkward dialog isn't an important-enough part of the game to drag it down. I wasn't as concerned about that as I was about the slightly-broken weapon upgrading system. (I never even tried half the weapons, because the one I was using had gained so much experience already!)

Ultimately, Timespinner is a success at replicating the best parts of a 2D map-based Castlevania game. Its combat is simple and fun, and its map and collectibles were interesting enough to drive me to 100%. It's a little shorter than its forebears, but I enjoyed my time with it just the same.

Better than: Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Metroid: Zero Mission, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight
Not as good as: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, Dust: An Elysian Tail
For the record, my mostly-disappointing crowdfunding history so far: Ouya, Bear Simulator, Hyper Light Drifter (which I dropped but should revisit), Yooka-Laylee, Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn, Chasm, and finally... this!

Progress: Beat the Nightmare on Normal, 100% map completion.

I received Miner Ultra Adventures as a gift, from a friend. At least I think we're friends. This gift has made me wonder.

The "adventure" began immediately, on the baffling title screen. Baffling, not because the title image was baked with Portuguese text -- a damning marketing failure, for sure, but easy enough to figure out. But what I struggle to figure out is how the developer managed to make the main menu. Arrow keys move a cursor up and down, not from one option to another, but one pixel at a time. What?

So I floated the cursor down to the Controls ("Controles") option, to see if there were any-- nope, no settings to change. Okay. Hit ESC to go back to the main menu, I guess? No, that terminates the game application. Doing great so far.

I'd already seen enough of the game at this point, but for the sake of morbid curiosity, went in once more to try to "play" it. Uh... the player is moving by himself? It looks like the ground isn't flat, and gravity is causing him to slide around, constantly. Including at the game's starting position.

As if the ice-rink physics alone aren't bad enough, add an automatic camera that you can't control, and it's like... is this a joke? I have to fight this hard just to avoid falling into a pit? I may as well turn my monitor off, for how little the visuals help in playing this game.

I have no compunctions in calling Miner Ultra Adventures unplayably bad.

If nothing else, it's proof of the Steam platform's successful democratization. When poorly-tested disasters like Brainfuck, hobbyist garbage like Cubots, and utter shit like this can be sold for any amount of money; there are clearly no barriers to entry. Truly, anyone can sell a game.

As for my friend, well, in the future I'll be a bit more suspicious of his gifts.

I was really hoping that The Warlock of Firetop Mountain would be a more dragon-flavored Thronebreaker. Not really.

Complain as I did about Thronebreaker's lack of compelling characters, at least its story was engaging and well-told. Warlock is more like, well, reading a game book. No voice acting, no free-form exploration, limited animations - made to resemble a tabletop game, rather than a fantasy world - and random, bullshit events that would feel right at home in a hackneyed choose-your-own-adventure book.

The combat system includes some tactical quirks that might be interesting, if I really cared about the outcome. That is, hypothetically, trying to predict enemy movements and evading or attacking tactically; these would be exciting if I felt any attachment to the story, or if it seemed like I was actually building up my character. (Are there experience points? It doesn't seem like there are.)

I reached the end of my rope when I fought some monsters, survived, then got whisked away to a scripted event that killed me and put me back to a checkpoint before the monsters. Ugh.

In terms of content and mechanics, I think there's some worthwhile stuff here (aside from the punishing checkpoint system). But the production values, from the chintzy-looking character minis to the boring storytelling, leave me uninterested in delving further into Firetop Mountain.

To be fair, ordering my character to certain death in an orc den could be a ton of fun if I was doing it while drinking with my friends.

Progress: Like 20 minutes in.