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.

Underhero has a pretty neat premise: you're trying to save the world, but you work for The Bad Guy. The Good Guy died, so you loot his magical equipment, and go on a sabotage mission within the Bad Guy organization.

Unfortunately Underhero's storytelling isn't creative enough to live up to that premise. The game brings a light sense of humor to this role-reversal setup, but at least within the span of the demo, it didn't sell me on the characters, the world, or how the plot might turn out.

Its storytelling techniques are... well, they're blatantly inspired by Super Mario RPG and the Mario & Luigi games. The protagonist is mute, while real exposition is delivered by an annoying companion, to whom the protagonist reacts with pop-up exclamation points, wild hand-waving emotes, spontaneously falling down, et cetera.

The game is presented as a side-scrolling platformer, with some dubious ground rules - literally, it's inconsistent on whether stair-like platforms have horizontal collision - and the level available in the demo felt bland and remedial. Like the Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! game, boring level design feels doubly boring when you ask the player to backtrack through it.

Combat segments are where the game could shine, except the rules feel poorly thought out. It bears some similarity to, uh, the Mario & Luigi gimmick of using timing to dodge or parry enemy attacks. Including the aspect that enemy "tells" are totally unpredictable until you've seen them at least once, which I hate.

Underhero's combat isn't turn-based, it's real-time: both you and your enemy have to manage your actions with a stamina meter. Both attacking and defending will drain the meter, so if you attack too aggressively, you'll be unable to defend effectively. There are some cool quirks to this system, like well-timed dodges restoring some stamina, and well-timed parries temporarily incapacatating the enemy; but...

Fundamentally, this system's problem is that to get more stamina, you need to wait -- wait for an enemy attack to dodge, or if the enemy isn't attacking, wait for the meter to build up on its own. If you're trying to budget your stamina, you'll have to sit and wait for the right opportunities. And if you don't budget correctly, using too much stamina, you'll have to sit and wait while eating enemy attacks.

In aggregate, waiting occupies a too-significant portion of any given fight. I would rather just take turns.

Did I mention that the level-up screen is practically identical to Super Mario RPG's? Or that the audio sounds like it was composed on a Sega Genesis? Or that the main menu looks uncomfortably like the Unity engine's default UI tools?

Overall, Underhero feels like an enthusiastic, but under-cooked tribute to the developer's favorite games. It's a respectable effort, but doesn't execute as well as its inspirations, and its unique features aren't strong enough to distract from that.

Progress: Finished the demo.

Given it's been over a decade since I played Zone of the Enders, I was surprised at how distinctly the demo of Zone of The Enders: The 2nd Runner Mars reminded me of the original.

At first, I'd mistakenly believed that this sequel was brand new -- but, no, it's a remaster of a PS2 game from 2003. And through that lens, the game's apparent shortcomings make a lot more sense.

To be fair: the remaster looks great, with crisp models and silky-smooth effects. And, admirably, the control scheme still holds up fairly well.

But in the limited demo for 2nd Runner, I could already tell that it re-checks all the bad boxes I wrote about the original:

• "Camera movement is basically impossible?" Check.
• "Pretty much [only] two enemies?" Check.
• "Lengthy dialog sessions" with "insipid banter?" Check.
• "Terrible" voice acting? Check.

Even within the span of the demo, I was already waiting for it to end.

Progress: Finished the demo.

No, The Frozen Wilds didn't wrap up Horizon's cliffhanger ending. I guess they're saving that for a sequel.

Overall, Frozen Wilds is more of the same Horizon stuff, but smaller: a main story, some side quests, some collectibles, and a few new weapons and enemies.

A side quest in The Frozen Wilds unlocks modification sockets for the spear weapon. You can find and collect spear mods during the main game - and I found several - but there's no way to use them until doing this quest. Huh.

The main quest line is relatively short, and the story focuses a little more on its characters' personal growth than the main game's story did. Otherwise, it feels a lot like a subset of Horizon's story: the plot is basically the same, the technological details are the same, and the themes are extremely similar. It's a bit disappointing that, narratively speaking, this expansion adds so little to the game.

It doesn't add much to the gameplay, either. Except frustration with the new enemies. Particularly the Scorcher, a wolf-styled machine that can leap across the whole damn map and can attack like a billion times a second.

In the main game, I hated when evading multiple attackers gave me precious little time to counterattack. But with the new enemy types in The Frozen Wilds, solo attackers have the same effect; it feels close to impossible to fight back. And unlike most of Horizon's high-threat machines, which have big glowy components that can be removed or destroyed to make them substantially less dangerous -- the fucking fire wolves never stop with their pouncing and slashing and flamethrowing.

In a broader sense, those fuckers - and to a lesser extent, also the new bear-type machines - feel like a misstep in Horizon's combat design. Most of the main game's enemies set a pretty good precedent for teaching me what weapons to use, and what components to target; I became better at fighting them by developing those techniques. The wolves are less vulnerable and less complex; all I learned from fighting them was how to roll away.

But I digress. I didn't have to fight very many of those fucking fire wolves, so I can't begrudge The Frozen Wilds too much for having them.

What I will begrudge it, a little, is not pushing the envelope more -- especially with its storytelling. The Firebreak backstory was entertaining, but didn't reveal anything about the "metal world" that I didn't already know from the main game.

The Frozen Wilds is worthwhile, but I don't think it quite meets the quality bar set by the main game.

Better than: Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned
Not as good as: Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
While most of Horizon's backstory is well-researched and believable: the idea that real scientists would do a node-rotating puzzle for security clearance is pretty silly.

It's kind of a shame that Horizon Zero Dawn came out at, like, the same time as Breath of the Wild. It's impossible to avoid comparing the two. (In fairness, Horizon did beat Zelda to store shelves by ... uh, a week.)

So here's the short version: Horizon has a much better main story, but its combat is a bit sloppier, and its open world isn't as strong overall. On its own, though, it's still a fantastic adventure and a fun sandbox to play around in.

The jewel of Horizon is its main story, which -- actually, is somewhat awkward and boring for the first few hours. Its opening scenes consist largely of a character monologuing his situation out loud, to no one in particular. And after the introductory tutorial, the plot stays pretty mundane, limited to the hemmings and hawings of a primitive tribe of hunters; up until a shocking twist several hours in.

After that, though - when the backstory starts to reveal itself - Horizon's main quest line turns into an enthralling sci-fi epic. Aloy's adventure is both an engaging Hero's Journey, and an intriguing mystery, as she gradually uncovers the dramatic secrets of the ancient "metal world." The pacing of these main quests, the personalities of the characters along the way, the emotive voice acting, well-written dialog, expressive animations, fascinating text and voice collectibles... all of these contribute to an overall excellently-crafted story.

One painful hiccup in Horizon's technique is the lip sync animations. The animations themselves are quite realistic and convincing, except, they often don't match the characters' spoken words; either moving too slowly for the audio, or mouthing what are, clearly, very different words than what's being said. (I guess the lip-sync data just got desynchronized from the final recordings.) But it's easy enough to listen, read the subtitles, and avoid being distracted by this.

Unfortunately, the optional side quests don't fare as well; the majority of them feel like more of the same from the intro. That is, throwaway characters and mundane events. Horizon's side quests feel a little like filler material as Aloy travels between major plot beats.

And the mechanics used in most quests are ... well, they work fine, but they don't feel very unique. You've got your "go to this object and press a button" mechanic, your "talk to this character" mechanic, naturally a "kill this group of things" mechanic; and there's a Focus-vision for finding clues and following trails, a'la Detective Mode or Witcher Vision, but its uses are pretty dull and uninspired.

Interestingly, dialog scenes occasionally have choices, but not for anything important. Any moments that would actually change the outcome of an event are fully scripted. A little like Golden Sun, these choices supposedly allow you to inject your personality into the story, but it's fairly transparent that these decisions are totally inconsequential.

Really, Horizon's story didn't need these at all. This is no Witcher or Mass Effect; Horizon has one scripted sequence of events to show off, and that sequence is damn good just as it is.

(Standing in stark contrast to Breath of the Wild's rote and barely-there backstory.)

Meanwhile, there are some dialog events that play out differently depending upon Aloy's actions so far -- that is, if you've done a relevant quest before talking to a character in another quest, that previous experience might come up in the conversation. Like the choices, this doesn't affect any outcomes, but it's a very nice immersive touch that makes Aloy's journey feel meaningful.

So, the main story is pretty great. But Horizon is also a game about high-octane robot-fighting action, open-world traversal, RPG progression, item collection and crafting... and in these areas, it does mostly well.

Combat is a lot of fun! when it works, which is most of the time; and until it becomes tedious, which it sometimes does. At a high level, combat manifests as a third-person shooter with Aloy's bow, and aiming at weak points unique to each enemy type, sometimes twisted by elemental vulnerabilities. There are some cool strategic elements at play here, especially the ability to directly target an enemy's weapons or other components to remove them.

The problem with Horizon's shooting is that, even in slow-motion bullet-time, it's irritatingly easy and common for the enemy to jerk suddenly and evade your arrow. This doesn't happen most of the time, but often enough that especially-small weak points just don't seem worth trying to target.

But what can really make the combat frustrating is a combination of stunted mobility, and unintentional "adds." Aloy has a dodge roll - great! - but all-too-often gets stuck in the terrain as she's trying to evade an attack. Many terrains just aren't well-suited for evasive maneuvers. And yet, trying to run away to more open ground only increases the likelihood of more asshole robots joining the fight.

Generally, even the hugest, most gun-bristling machines are pretty simple to fight one-on-one. But when you throw in a second, Aloy hardly has any time to draw her bow between evading each enemy's attacks. First one attacks, then the other; there's little room to breathe inbetween. So when a second, third, fourth, or fifth enemy joins a fight - especially when they jump at Aloy from behind, with little warning - it can get a lot more "exciting" than you'd counted on.

Zelda could have this problem too, but it feels worse in Horizon. A few too many fights felt physically exhausting to me.

Aside from fighting shit, the other big draw of Horizon's open world is just exploring it. And it does present some interestingly-varied biomes: snowy mountains, dusty deserts, and dense jungles; but aside from the big city of Meridian, there aren't many particularly memorable regions or landmarks, and few geography-specific events. It's immersive and fun to play around in, but doesn't really measure up to the awe-inspiring vistas of Breath of the Wild, or the character-rich set pieces in Skyrim.

Horizon's other supporting features are kinda mediocre. It's got cliff-climbing parkour, but the movement just doesn't work as well as an Uncharted, or even a Tomb Raider. A few too many transitions can miss completely, planting Aloy's feet on a glitchy edge that inevitably falls to her death.

And the inventory system is a train-wreck, with no good way of sorting "useless" and "important" items. My pack is full of resources that I'll probably never need, but they claim to be used in some crafting recipes, so who knows if I'll want them in the future? I could sell them for money (Scraps), but the only use I even have for that is to buy treasure boxes with random loot, usually even more stuff that I don't need or want.

Don't get me started on weapon upgrades, which, due to that randomness, feel less like a progression mechanic and more like gambling.

But! But. Horizon's lows can't compare to its highs, not just the usually-fun combat and generally-enjoyable world, but especially its incredibly interesting story. Uncovering this world's mysterious past is a real treat every step of the way. Just, maybe, skip the side-quests along that way.

I'm really looking forward to a sequel that copies Zelda's versatile climbing, adds some kind of lock-on targeting, and throws out this garbage-fire of an inventory system.

Better than: Middle-earth: Shadow of War
Not as good as: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (... but the story is better), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger: but I'm hoping that The Frozen Wilds helps wrap that up.