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.

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.