LaserCat is a fairly basic, fairly short platform-based Metroidvania-ish with a fun sense of humor, and a surprising amount of Mystery Science Theater 3000 references.

There's no combat, just avoiding enemies and environmental hazards (lava); and there are no puzzles, aside from a couple of rooms where you need to approach from the right direction. No upgrades, no experience points, no cinematic cutscenes. The story is only told in some introductory text, then an ending.

There really isn't much to LaserCat except jumping and exploring the map. But that exploration is pretty engaging; not just for its own sake, but also for the sake of discovering joke-y room names and signposts.

LaserCat is simple, but has enough substance to more than justify its 90-minute running length.

Better than: 1000 Amps, albeit significantly shorter.
Not as good as: VVVVVV
Better trivia questions than: Yooka-Laylee

Progress: 100%

Refunct is a neat little experiment in first-person parkour gaming. It does a cool job of organically introducing core mechanics - how do I climb this tower? better jump around randomly until I discover the wall-jump - and it has a clean, simple aesthetic.

And it's easy to complete in half an hour or less. (There's an achievement for completing the game in under 4 minutes.)

Neat, but hard to recommend for purchase, at any price.

Better than: Cubots: The Origins
Not as good as: AER: Memories of Old
But, kudos to the developer: for making a pretty good portfolio piece.

Nearly a decade later, the PC re-release of Vanquish is a little more underwhelming (less whelming?) than I expected.

I remembered the story being throwaway and stupid, and that memory was spot-on. Although it's a surprise how recent geopolitical players are reflected in the plot -- kudos to the writer who said "Vanquish is based on an extension of our current world into the future." Surprisingly insightful! At any rate, the story wasn't a good reason to play Vanquish in 2010, and it's even less of one now.

The action holds up okay, but doesn't feel as fresh or exciting as it used to. That's pretty much what I expected; a victory, in a way, that the controls hold up as well as they do. The speed of Vanquish, the "hectic rocket-sliding" that I remember, is no longer impressive in the current era of high-framerate action games.

The level design hasn't held up well, as it ping-pongs between rote shoot-outs, recycled boss encounters, and low-action sections of just walking down a corridor. Excluding the final boss fight, the end of the game feels like they really ran out of ideas for enemies.

I'm more upset by Vanquish's weapon-upgrade system than I was before. It's just illogical; if you have weapon X equipped, and it's at full ammo, then picking up another copy of weapon X will upgrade it. Meaning that if you use weapon X, then you'll just refill its ammo instead of upgrading it. Meaning that to upgrade a weapon, you have to not use it. Considering that later battles essentially require upgraded weapons (or else you'd run out of bullets!), the system is just dumb and broken.

But all of that is in-line with my expectations of a seven-years-later re-release. What I was disappointed by was the graphical fidelity. Although the PC version is higher-resolution than the original, and its art has been updated somewhat, it still doesn't look as good as a current-day 1080p game should; more upscaled than remastered. The UI, in particular, looks unnecessarily blocky and interlaced.

Vanquish was a visual spectacle back in 2010, so it's a bit of a shame that the re-release doesn't look awesome.

Stripped of that previously-bombastic graphical prowess, Vanquish is just a score-chasing action game with some slightly-crufty design and writing baggage. Which is fine, I guess.

Better than: MadWorld
Not as good as: Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered
Oh yeah... Vanquish reminds me: that I still need to get back to Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

Progress: Finished on Normal.

The trailer for Cubots looked so clean and polished, I was kinda surprised at how inexpensive the game is. Well... you get what you pay for.

Specifically, what I paid for here turned out to be pretty much garbage. Setting aside the lack of controller support, the slapdash UI (you can elect to jump to a boss fight?), the broken English in tutorial text, and the assets that look like they came out of a free art pack...

This is a puzzle game, where you're a block, and you push other blocks around. Yet movement is not grid-aligned! Physics is the last thing I'd expect to worry about in a block-pushing puzzle, but here we are, in a world where terrain collision and laser avoidance have to be pixel-perfect for no good reason.

I also somehow broke the UI when I tried exiting the game. The sequence of buttons I clicked resulted in the game being soft-locked. Yikes.

For a hobby project, Cubots isn't bad -- but for a product, it's just trash.

Better than: Legends of Persia
Not as good as: Finding Teddy
I really had to go looking: to find past games I rated "Awful" that are comparable.

Progress: Finished a few puzzles.

For how ambitious it tries to be, AER sure is simple.

It's got a fairly smooth and intuitive control system for flying, which is kinda remarkable in itself. But all you really use it for is hopping from one island to another. (One puzzle requires flying through three rings, but no other part of the game makes use of aerial maneuvers.)

Its story is couched in environmental metaphysics ... or maybe it's a post-apocalypse fantasy? For all the cryptic world-building it hints at, there's no narrative payoff.

It's got an open world to explore, but there's very little "stuff" in it. Most of the world is, literally, empty space; like Wind Waker, but with air instead of water.

The puzzles leading up to, and inside, its dungeons are mechanically fascinating but never a challenge. At worst, you might have to manipulate a device once to learn how it works, then a second time to finish the puzzle correctly.

Its visual style is clean and high-contrast. But it's so visually simple, that it fails to stand out from so many other Unity3D games.

I sound pretty harsh on AER, when in fact the time I spent with it was quite pleasant. Didn't blow me away, nor did it offend or wrong me.

But it's two hours long.

AER comes across as a well-polished prototype. I appreciate the polish, but it's impossible to ignore the lack of substance.

Better than: A Story About My Uncle
Not as good as: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
On balance, maybe slightly better than: Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas

Progress: Finished the story.

Hey look, it's a free-to-play picross game, yeah I'm up for th-- oh... this is exactly the same game as Nonogram - The Greatest Painter.

On the one hand, Nonogram: Master's Legacy presents a neat puzzle-delivery model. After an introductory Starter Pack, collections of puzzles can be purchased separately (a la carte!). Meanwhile, access to a puzzle editor - and puzzles built by the community, using said editor - remains free.

On the other hand: the free Starter Pack only has 15 puzzles, and the largest one is only 9x9; most are 5x5 or smaller. Hell, it starts with a few 2x2 puzzles! This is a pretty lacking introduction to picross for a new user. And for someone who's already played The Greatest Painter... well, as far as I can tell, the DLC for this game is just the same puzzles. Why would I buy them again?

Meanwhile, from browsing both games' update histories, the developer doesn't appear to have addressed the technical issues I ran into with large, meaty puzzles.

Master's Legacy is a cool idea for building Nonograms As A Service, but this execution of it is unconvincing. Engine technology aside, they simply need more puzzles - both in the free base game, and in additional DLC packs - to prove that they're capable of more than re-releasing the same game over again.

Thronebreaker ends up feeling like a pretty impressive card-based adventure game, but a missed opportunity to teach advanced Gwent mechanics; and a well-told story on its own, but a failure to live up to The Witcher's narrative pedigree.

Queen Meve's story is an interesting tale of betrayal and conquest, but -- that's just it: the story isn't really about Queen Meve. It's about the betrayal, and the conquest. Thronebreaker's tale has a satisfying plot arc, crossing diverse environs and factions, and introducing the Lyrians to some exotic characters. But all of those characters have one-note personalities. Only Meve herself, and her attachés Reynard and Gascon, ever show more than one dimension of themselves; and even them, only barely.

Meve's army takes on a few special characters throughout their adventure, and while these recruits are well-integrated into the story, they're not really interesting as characters. Rayla's a racist. Isbel's a pacifist. Barnabas is a crazy tinkerer. Each of them can be described in 1-2 words, has exactly one interesting piece of backstory, and will very rarely throw out a short quote during a card battle.

It's because of these flat characterizations that the story choices in Thronebreaker rarely feel difficult, or personal. They'll test your practicality, and occasionally your morals, as when you weigh the lives of humans and non-humans in a struggling village. But who are those humans and non-humans? Who are the other villagers? The individual persons in Thronebreaker's story are almost never named, let alone described, and so these choices have no emotional stakes or consequences.

Even choices regarding the special characters end up feeling less about "them," and more about the practical effects of their Gwent cards, or the moral effects of Rayla being a racist.

So it's disappointing that Thronebreaker's character building isn't as strong as Wild Hunt's was. That aside, though: the plot is good, and the story is well-written. There's a ton of voice acting, and it's universally excellent; Meve sounds like a strong commander, Gascon sounds like a sly rascal, the nameless peasants sound hapless, and the Nilfgaardians sound like determined yet incomprehensible invaders.

The presentation of Thronebreaker's story is pretty consistently great, except for a handful of shortcomings in text editing (mostly toward the end).

But the game's story is only half of the game's "story." When it isn't a text adventure with light resource management, Thronebreaker is Gwent, the card game! And like I wrote before, that game is further subdivided into "regular" matches, and puzzles.

Contrary to my earlier assumption, the puzzles aren't generally about trying to teach you "how to Gwent." Some of them are brain-teasing, often hard challenges that ask you to exploit the intricacies of card rules against one another. And some of them use custom rules to be clever and inventive, like a Hearthstone parody, or a card-based stealth maze (avoid patrolling guard cards!). They all feel pretty novel, and I was consistently impressed with the puzzles' creativity.

Then there's the regular game of Gwent: a game of deck-building and card-playing. Compared with the Gwent mechanics in Witcher 3, this version has a lot more card effects and possibilities for interaction; there's a lot of potential ground to cover, in terms of strategies and counter-strategies.

In its regular matches, Thronebreaker teaches some good lessons on the card-playing part -- like how to optimally pick enemy targets, or when to unleash a card's Order ability. As for deck-building... well, it's instructive in picking cards that complement the ones you started with. It isn't so instructive in how to build a deck around an alternate strategy.

At least on Normal difficulty, the strategy that comes with those starter cards - largely offensive, plus some point accumulation - is good enough to take out just about anything. I didn't have a reason to try other tactics until the final boss battle, which was a complete shock to my system. I had no idea what to do against an enemy that continually replenished its losses, and which effectively had an endless hand!

(It took a few retries for me to identify what cards I needed for countering this: strategically leaving weak enemy cards alone, so as to exhaust his plays -- while extending my own hand, and refilling my deck, to ensure that I could match those plays.)

Up until that battle, I had plenty of fun with the regular matches; but in retrospect, it's clear that I could have learned more about how to play, if the game had pushed me to.

At the end of the day, Thronebreaker is an exciting adventure with substantial content, and a fun card game in the middle. I wish that it built more engaging characters, and that its card combat was better at teaching deck-building.

But I don't regret the 40-some hours I spent with Queen Meve. Despite its shortcomings, Thronebreaker was still a fun journey.

Better than: Card City Nights
Not as good as: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
I might've kept trying to murder my way out of the final boss: if not for an unexpected bug that made my killer strategy unworkable.

Progress: Finished on Normal.

There are a lot of things that surprised me about Thronebreaker. Overall, I think those surprises were positive.

For one thing, the story is less personal than I'd expect from The Witcher folks. And maybe that's just because I haven't gotten far enough, yet. While Thronebreaker's storytelling is rooted in the same shades-of-gray, everything-kinda-sucks world that Geralt played in, its story so far is about a queen and her kingdom; there are other people in it, but just barely. I'm eager to see some new characters with intriguing quirks or relateable struggles.

For another, its idea of Gwent isn't what I'm familiar with at all. The topmost rule is similar - cards are worth points, they have effects on the playfield, most points in two out of three rounds wins - but there are dramatic differences that I'm still getting the hang of. Like the Order mechanic, which lets a card use its special effect after being played, and can only be used once -- except that another card can sometimes restore it!

Crucially, the combinatorial effects of different cards seem way more difficult to track, and predict, than they were in Witcher 3's rules. The game is still primarily decided by building a good deck; but I don't totally know what "good" means, yet.

In addition to "normal" games of Gwent, Thronebreaker presents a lot of "puzzle" challenges. In these match-ups, your goal isn't to get more points than the opponent, but to satisfy some match-specific challenge. One puzzle asked me to kill a rabid cow, without killing any healthy cows; another puzzle asked to bring some rotfiends to exactly 1 HP, without killing them. These matches give you a pre-determined hand, which needs to be played in precisely the right way to solve the puzzle.

I really like these puzzles. (Actually, I like them more than the regular game.) Though, while I suspect that they're trying to teach me more about how specific card interactions can work, to bring those lessons back into normal Gwent...

In practice, the puzzles play out so differently from the regular game, that I still feel fairly lost when a "normal" match comes up. Especially since I've encountered way more puzzles than normal matches, so far.

Another surprise is the user interface. Well, sort-of; its mobile-friendliness is very apparent, and I assume that phone and tablet versions of Thronebreaker aren't far behind. But the UI still works pretty great on a desktop PC. So that's a pleasant surprise.

What isn't a surprise, and is even paradoxically soothing, is Thronebreaker's soundtrack. Having become pretty accustomed to the Gwent songs in Wild Hunt, this game's strained Slavic strings and chants feel just like home.

Thronebreaker didn't hook me in the way that I expected, but I'm hooked on it nevertheless.

Progress: Still in Lyria.

When I saw Alchemia pop up on Steam, I thought it might be a nice break from the brain-busting puzzles I was stuck on in Cypher.

Hahaha. Hah. Hahah.

Cypher's later puzzles don't tell you what the rules are; you're supposed to take the techniques you've learned so far, and think creatively about how they might apply. Alchemia starts there.

Even the structure of Alchemia isn't obvious at first, although I think I got that figured out.

What's really exciting about its puzzles is how they tie into out-of-game references -- or, to put it another way, how much weird detective-work I'm doing through Google searches. All of the puzzles have at least some tie-in to the "alchemy" theme, and most involve researching topics like Tycho Brahe or the location of Atlantis. It's clear that a whole ton of work went into planning out the game.

At the same time, the implementation quality is pretty cheap and simple. I'd kill for basic quality-of-life improvements like the ability to write notes in-game, or to copy the game's text for easier pasting into a search engine.

It's been hard for me to make progress in Alchemia, or even to know if I'm making progress. But it's the kind of challenge I really like getting lost in.

Progress: ???

These days, I think the phrase "art game" could mean one of two things. You could use it to describe games that focus on visual spectacle, like Journey or Epistory; you could also, snidely, use it to describe avant-garde "games" like Dear Esther that slog their way through a story about The Human Condition.

Inked is both. ... And it's also a fidgety physics-puzzle game, but not a very good one.

The puzzling is fairly basic, revolving around a limited number of different physics objects you can place ("draw") in the world. Use bridges and ramps to cross obstacles, use blocks to weigh down switches, use spheres to roll into holes. Resource management - you can only place a certain number of objects simultaneously - tends to be the challenging aspect of these puzzles, and toward the end of the demo, the puzzles were at least moderately complicated.

What made me hate those more-complex puzzles was how flakey the objects could be. Despite its isometric camera and hard angles, Inked's world isn't grid-based: placed objects can, and often do, move just a few pixels off-track when you walk into them, or when another object moves due to gravity or whatever else. Inked's uncertain physics aren't as bad as, say, World of Goo, but they do feel inappropriate for solving what are otherwise deterministic puzzles.

But I probably could've put up with more sketchy physics if the game wasn't so slow. Many puzzles felt held up by the slow walking speed. The totally empty sections of levels, inbetween puzzles, especially highlighted this. I guess the level design is paced out to let you admire the scenery (a'la Desert Bus), but I was over that pretty quickly.

And the storytelling, that felt excruciatingly slow. Occasionally the game dropped a fourth-wall-breaking story beat, alluding to traumatic events in the artist's past; these beats were heavy-handed with foreshadowing - gee, do you think there was a bus accident? - and got borderline repetitive, hammering on their implications over and over to really make sure I got the point, before they felt comfortable moving on to new information.

I don't know how Inked's story ends, but I could tell right away that it'd take a long time to get there.

Honestly, Inked doesn't even look that great in motion. The screenshots are gorgeous; I'd recommend just looking at those, and forgetting about the rest of this game.

Progress: Finished the demo.