As a programming-puzzle game featuring an obtuse language, Brainfuck is right up my alley. I bought this without a second thought.

So it was an extra-huge disappointment when I gave up on it and requested a refund.

I spent about 20 minutes in the game, and most of that was taking screenshots to demonstrate bugs I encountered. They were all pretty heinous, but most importantly: none of the puzzle UI worked, meaning the game was totally unplayable.

I just expect games about programming to be, uh, well-programmed. Zachtronics really has spoiled me, hasn't it?

More than five years later, Chasm finally got released. It's technologically solid, and has a nice, clean art style. That concludes the nice things I can say about it.

Chasm just isn't fun.

Combat, for starters, is somehow simple yet clunky. Attacks are slow and can't be canceled - not by jumping, not by an evasive backward-dash - so most of the damage I suffered was well-telegraphed, but practically unavoidable. Chasm abides by an antiquated combat design in which you must jump, then attack to preserve mobility -- not just silly and cumbersome, but impossible in some cramped corridors or over rough terrain.

Chasm has some elements of RPG progression, but doesn't execute them very well. As you delve into the mine, you'll earn experience points from killing enemies, collect coin for purchasing upgrades, and gradually rescue townsfolk who can craft said upgrades. But leveling up is slow, and grindy; collecting enough money for upgrades also feels grindy; and critically, good upgrades seem to be locked behind finding and rescuing the Blacksmith. Until then, the only way to get better weapons or armor is random chance from enemy drops (which, again... feels grindy).

Some rescued townsfolk also prod along the game's underwhelming attempt at a story. The light prologue, some collectible journal pages, and scant dialog all hint toward a backstory that's ... not very interesting. Some legend about an old king and an apocalypse cult, and then -- oh, you awakened an ancient evil in the mines? You don't say.

The game's world feels overall uncreative and empty. The mine's levels are blatantly inspired by Diablo, not only in how they change themes as you descend, but also in how they're procedurally assembled. But while Diablo's randomly-arranged rooms showed "character" through the enemies you fought there, Chasm's enemies aren't that engaging, nor is anything else happening in its bland, interchangeable levels.

(There are a few environmental puzzles, but nothing comparable to, say, a Zelda block-pushing puzzle.)

Chasm wears its Diablo and Castlevania inspirations on its sleeve, but fails both to replicate the highlights of its predecessors, and to introduce any unique strengths of its own. It's admirable, for a Kickstarted game, at being technically playable; but I couldn't give a good answer for why you would play it.

Better than: Bear Simulator
Not as good as: Torchlight, or maybe even SteamWorld Dig
Arguably on-par with: Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn

Progress: Gave up in the catacombs.

Prey is a great free-roam action-RPG, in the vein of Deus Ex. It's a great story-driven adventure, a'la BioShock. And it's a great pulse-pounding survival-action game, like Resident Evil 4. I loved it, and will never forget my experience on Talos I. But how those aspects sometimes conflict with one another wasn't so great.

The game's atmosphere is incredibly tense and foreboding: enemies look and behave legitimately frightening; the disaster-struck level design looks thoroughly unsafe; and the music, man, the music is anxiety incarnate. Speaking as someone who doesn't care for horror games, I can still appreciate and respect how evocative Prey is in this way. But...

As I crawled slowly down corridors and hid from Phantoms, avoiding traps and trying to conserve my ammo -- my desires to explore, and to progress the story, felt slowed down by this anxiety. In the early and mid-game, the tense atmosphere (and high enemy difficulty) suffocated both the sense of freedom and the storytelling. ... And then, later on - when I revisited the same areas, with way more health and combat upgrades - that sense of tension all but disappeared. As excellent as the "tense" parts of the game were, I feel like Prey would have been better served by using them less often.

The jump-scaring "mimics" are an excellent example of a great mechanic that felt detrimental to the overall game. Aside from a handful of scripted moments, they were legitimately and expertly hidden among a room's objects, and being surprised by one meant - in addition to jumping up in my chair - taking a big chunk of damage.

So of course, I equipped the Psychoscope upgrade that allowed me to see disguised mimics, and kept my 'scope on ... all the time. That solved my scared-and-dead problem, but sacrified some audio clarity and visual quality, like Batman's Detective Mode or Witcher Vision. I was pretty disappointed that there was never a passive upgrade for detecting mimics.

Maybe I'm just a scaredy-cat; but that wasn't the only way that I felt Prey was conflicted. Another big one was narrative choice, and my "fear of missing out."

The quality of Prey's narrative content was consistently excellent, not just in the main story and side missions, but even in the text and audio logs that filled in background details and characterization. This story wasn't great in the same way as The Witcher's -- but more like Metroid Prime, in that I was collecting clues and hints to gradually uncover the plot's mystery. And that's where Prey's strength as a story-driven adventure ran headlong into its strength as an RPG.

Occasionally, the game would present me with a choice - like saving or killing a person, using a key item or destroying it - that just deprived me of some amount of that backstory. And what was worse was when I wasn't "presented" with a choice at all; Prey has a few instances of surprise choice. Following one mission might prevent another one from showing up. Upgrading your Typhon powers will - surprise! - make the anti-Typhon defenses start to target you. Even something as simple as walking into a room at a certain time might set story-changing events into motion.

This kind of stuff made me really paranoid about missing story content, and being unable to solve the game's central mysteries. Hell -- one optional mission, starting near the beginning of the game, can lead to an early, alternate ending, that spoils the "real" ending. Like some kind of narrative trap, ruining the story if you happened to choose wrong.

Tangentially, I avoided many of these traps by searching online. (I also searched for the locations of some key items, like the fabrication plan for medkits, because that seemed important.) And I wouldn't necessarily recommend that; online resources for Prey are very spoilery.

Another, simpler design conflict in Prey was how painful backtracking tended to be. As a non-linear Metroidvania-style game, and as an RPG with plenty of optional missions and pickups, Prey involved a lot of return visits to areas I'd explored before. And as an action-adventure game, Prey felt the need to continually re-populate (most of) the enemies in those areas. With no fast travel, every trip from A to B and back again included some repetitive encounters, and felt like a waste of my precious ammo.

This made some of Prey's Deus Ex-ey obstacles more frustrating than fun. As I explored more of Prey's map, I'd find a door blocked by items too heavy for me to lift; a computer with too high a security level to hack; a broken machine that I wasn't skilled enough to repair. And though I was later able to get upgrades for unlocking these, the backtracking I would have to do to find them again didn't feel worthwhile -- especially for things that weren't related to a mission, and therefore weren't trackable on the map.

What's disappointing, and fascinating, about Prey is that these irritations aren't born of small missteps or mistakes; in fact, they only stand out because each individual aspect of the game is so incredibly well-executed. This makes Prey ultimately feel like less than the sum of its parts.

Nevertheless, I fell in love with those parts. The character- and equipment-upgrading loop, the tight action gameplay, the excellently-realized sci-fi setting, the mysteries uncovered by snooping in computers and audio logs, and the intriguing storyline (with an even more intriguing ending!); all of these aspects of Prey kept me riveted, and drove me to drop hour after hour into it.

As much as I wish it was better, Prey is impressively great already. My criticisms don't change the fact that it's a masterful blast of a game.

Better than: BioShock Infinite, Dishonored, Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition
Not as good as: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the non-story aspects of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
But: an emphatic no, thank you to the rogue-like Mooncrash DLC.

Back when I replayed Guerrilla's "Steam Edition," I said that "I don't need a new open-world destruction game, at least not yet. This one is still good."

Well, three years on, it's still good. But my desire for a successor is growing.

Driving trucks through buildings, solving destruction puzzles a'la Blast Corps, and whacking Mars-nazis with a hammer like you're at the driving range; all of this remains super-duper fun. Meanwhile, the lifeless B-grade plot, the terribly sparse Badlands map, and bugs (like progression loss, or crashing during the final mission!); these feel more prominent and detrimental than they used to.

At its high points, like slinging rockets at EDF jets or mowing down soldiers with a mech walker, there's still nothing else quite like RF:G. And I hope that doesn't remain true -- since its low points are feeling more and more antiquated.

Kudos to this game's re-Mars-terers; here's hoping for the next one. (I'm legit stoked for any Saints Row remaster.) And beyond that, I hope that THQ Nordic someday sees fit to top Guerrilla with a new, not-a-corridor-shooter Red Faction installment.

Better than: Agents of Mayhem, I would argue.
Not as good as: it felt 8-9 years ago.
Sometime soon: I'll have to check out how The Saboteur has held up.

Progress: 20 missions and 43 guerrilla actions completed.

I knew, going into Prey, to expect some BioShock-like immersive storytelling. And it's delivering on that front, with a really intriguing plot that I'm anxious to unravel by reading notes and chasing down mysteries.

What I didn't expect was how much gameplay feels borrowed from Deus Ex. And I love it. The best parts of Human Revolution and Mankind Divided were when my character choices led to options and openness in a mission - investing in strength opens a barricaded door, investing in hacking reveals a locked room's passcode - and Prey looks like a whole game's worth of that.

Prey absolutely nails its aesthetic and theme, too, using both weathered and fresh in-game narrative techniques to make its sci-fi setting feel seamless. From notes scribbled on whiteboards and "science-y" weapons like the Gloo Cannon, to the mechanical foundations of the intro/tutorial sequence, every aspect of the game feels both natural within the world, and exciting to see and play with. It's a real triumph of first-person world-building.

From what I've seen so far, anyway. I'm making slow progress because of how meticulous I'm being in exploring Talos I, and collecting all the scrap material I can find.

Also, I'm terrified of the phantoms. Huge kudos to the visual and audio design that makes Prey's enemies so surprisingly intimidating. This is a feeling I've not felt since RE4's chainsaw man.

Progress: Skulking around in the Machine Shop.

Red Faction: Guerrilla and I are well-acquainted; nothing in its Re-Mars-tered edition will be a surprise to me. Nevertheless, three minutes of Dunkey was enough to make me yearn once more for the joy of demolition and some screwball physics.

Guerrilla is getting on in years, though, and it shows. This Re-Mars-tering helps the game look modern - it really does! - and even the controls and mechanical depth feel contemporary enough. But the muted color palette and dull level design, not to mention a 90s B-movie plot, become more immersion-breaking with each passing year.

Then again, I haven't even gotten the Rocket Launcher yet. That should distract me from the red-brown desert.

Nine years later, it's funny to me that some of RFG's most distinctive features still haven't been copied into more games. Not just Geo-Mod destructibility -- but its discoverable, dynamic-feeling "Guerrilla Missions," and how civilians react to high morale by joining your fight. These are things that would feel right at home in Ubisoft Game.

Between "Deathinitive," "Warmastered," and now "Re-Mars-tered" editions of THQ's old games, THQ Nordic has established a clear pattern. I really hope it leads to a "Resanctified" version of Saints Row 2 or maybe a "Waterfront Genkification" edition of The Third. (And I hope Volition comes up with better puns than mine.)

Progress: Just got to Dust.

Mid-game DLC is an interesting experiment, and to its credit, Baba Yaga integrates well into Rise of the Tomb Raider's first non-linear hub area. ... as well as anything else works in that hub, anyway.

But this content suffers from the same key shortcoming as the main game: it just isn't very interesting. There's one sequence that's pretty cool-looking, with hallucinatory flashbacks and trippy visuals -- you know, just like the Scarecrow sequences in the Batman games. (And the poison dart scene in Uncharted 3.) It feels overwhelmingly like a rip-off.

Other than that, there isn't much to this DLC. A fidgety puzzle, a frustrating boss fight, and a "twist" that's telegraphed a mile away by collectible audio diaries. Yep -- Baba Yaga is more of the same, for Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Better than: Red Faction: Guerrilla - Demons of the Badlands
Not as good as: BioShock 2: Minerva's Den
At least it's better than: that Harley Quinn mini-fight DLC, in Arkham Knight.

Rise of the Tomb Raider just doesn't feel like a positive iteration on its predecessor.

It has the same gameplay elements that made the 2013 game work -- blending stealthy assassination with run-and-gun action, combining thoughtful wilderness exploration and high-octane chases through exploding ruins. A few years ago, this mixture of gameplay had Lara Croft challenging the likes of Nathan Drake and Batman. But while Arkham Knight and Uncharted 4 pushed envelopes like open-world traversal, exploration puzzles, and parkour combat, not to mention strong characterization and storytelling... Tomb Raider hasn't evolved.

Rise's open-ish hub areas have lots "to do," in the form of vapid collectibles and checkbox challenges. But their implementation suffers from a trio of fundamental flaws-

1. Your first time through the area, you won't have the necessary abilities for everything (like fire arrows, or, uh, explosive arrows). This discourages organic exploration, suggesting that you come back for the collectibles later.
2. You have to collect too many things to get a reward; getting all of a certain collectible takes too much time. The collection itself isn't fun, mostly just searching for semi-hidden glowy or flashy spots. So the act of collecting is tedious.
3. Finally, the rewards themselves aren't very good! Lara might get a slightly more powerful shotgun, or a silencer attachment for the pistol -- but none of these upgrades really change how the game is played. (Even the silencer isn't as good as using bow-and-arrows instead.)

After I got bored of the first hub area, the only extras I continued to seek out were the Challenge Tombs. It's the name of the game, after all! Lara raids tombs. And while the upgrades from these tombs did feel meaningful, the tombs themselves were still very underwhelming: each one consists of a single puzzle. They're over in a few minutes.

Overall, the non-linear aspects of Rise simply aren't very fun. The game got more enjoyable once I focused on its linear campaign. And while - like I whined about last time - Ms. Croft never feels like she has a good reason to be in this adventure, it is still an adventure.

The main storyline provides plenty of exhilirating action sequences, like climbing up a crumbling tower, or running through a burning building, or evading pursuers by diving underwater. Unfortunately, it also has its fair share of disappointments -- like a few action scenes (and even one puzzle) that play out in cinematics instead of being interactive. And then there's the final boss fight, which ... well, when the final boss is a helicopter, you know you've run out of ideas.

But the real shame is how dumb the plot is. The story is full of revelations that are either easily guessable, or flat-out spoiled by collectible audio diaries; frequently, Lara is the last person to figure something out. And the cartoonishly "evil" Trinity organization is just bland and uninteresting as a villain.

If Nathan Drake is like the Indiana Jones of video games, Lara is starting to feel more like National Treasure's Nick Cage.

It's this foundational failure to build an interesting plot that hurts the most. Rise's failed attempts to improve the formula - the tiresome NPC sidequests, the difficult-to-use Broadhead Arrows, the microtransaction-driven Expedition Mode - and even its occasional bugginess, like when I kept getting hit by an invisible enemy and had to reload my save file ... all of that would have been easy to forgive if I was engaged in Lara's journey.

It'll be nice if Shadow of the Tomb Raider makes its hub areas less boring, and even better if it adds truly meaningful new mechanics -- but the best thing it can do for Lara is to give her a riveting and compelling story.

Better than: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Not as good as: Tomb Raider (2013), or any of the Uncharted sequels.
The cliffhanger mystery ending: did not hook me. I don't care what happens with Trinity. There's your challenge, Crystal Dynamics: make me care.

I tried revisiting Tomb Raider (2013) a few months back, and didn't get awfully far: while my first playthrough ended in very high praise, coming back felt ... dull. I was no longer shocked by the brutality of Lara's plights, nor intrigued by the openness of its explorable areas. Knowing what to expect from it, the game's "leisurely" beginning was too boring to keep my interest.

Unfortunately, now that I'm finally starting Rise of the Tomb Raider, I'm bordering on that same disinterest. The game's pacing and environmental themes feel overfamiliar with the 2013 reboot -- seriously, can Lara try visiting someplace other than a secret Soviet military installation?

(It doesn't help that the game's opening moments also feel very borrowed from Uncharted: Lara starts on a frozen mountain, then flashes back to how she got there (Uncharted 2); then after some storytelling in London, she travels to Syria (Uncharted 3). It's too much to be coincidental, and more pervasive than a "homage" really should be.)

The main story is also pretty underwhelming. Like her last adventure on Yamatai, the foundation of this plot is a mystical legend that most people believe is pure bunk; and like in 2013, Lara spends more time trying to survive than trying to solve an ancient mystery. But this time, her drive isn't to rescue her friends, but to ... vindicate her dead dad? Or maybe to save the world? When she explains herself in cinematics, the dead dad tends to come out on top.

Her character comes across as more pitiable than noble. It doesn't seem like she has a good reason for being here.

And the villains aren't narratively engaging, either. Trinity is frequently implicitly compared to the Nazis, on a magic treasure hunt that they believe is a divine mission. About as two-dimensional as bad guys get. There was some flavor text that hinted at a story of strife within the organization ... but that turned out to be a simple backstory for your weapon shop, run by a defector.

There are friendly NPCs, too, with optional quests. Like go to a place and save 2 people. Or kill 5 wolves. These optional quests are as immersive, and as relevant to the plot, as a dwarf asking you to gather rat pelts in return for a jacket.

I haven't talked a whole lot about gameplay, because there just isn't much to say about it. The game plays competently, for the most part, but it's not terribly innovative or exciting. Out of habit, I've been doing a lot of collectible-hunting in my current area; but neither the gameplay to find these items, nor the items themselves, feel very rewarding. (Like the sparkles that litter an Assassin's Creed map.)

So next time I sit down with Lara, I'll probably skip the collectibles and soldier on with her story. I hope that story gets better.

Progress: following Jacob.

I found the problem with Nonogram.

The "Classic" puzzles are big, right? I got up to a 70 x 40 puzzle. That's big. But as Nonogram's puzzles get bigger, its technical issues become harder to ignore.

When ex-ing out or filling in a bunch of squares in sequence - as one is likely to do in a large puzzle - the game often hitches for several seconds at a time. One moment, you'll be dragging the cursor along a row; then suddenly, visual feedback stops; then three seconds later, it'll catch up again, and you'll be unsure how many boxes got filled. And then, because of how many boxes you filled, it'll likely hitch again pretty soon.

This is annoying, but not breaking; the breaking issue I encountered was in trying to correct a logical flaw in that 70 x 40 puzzle. I jammed on the Undo button to revert to a known-good state, and after a certain amount of undos (admittedly, quite a few) the game crashed displaying a "gc" error.

Clearly, something very memory-inefficient is going on each time a square is clicked. These allocations pile up, and eventually fragment the game's heap to a critical point, upon which the game has no choice but to wait on some garbage collection. (I'm guessing that's what the hitching is about.) And when the Undo/Redo history is invoked too frequently, the garbage collector can no longer keep up. Boom.

But the real problem, the icing on this crash-cake, is that there's no autosave. That crash lost me 45 minutes of puzzle-solving. This wasn't my first crash, either, and I just assume it would continue recurring in similar circumstances.

I might have been willing to put up with Nonogram's technical infidelity if it at least saved my progress. But it doesn't, so I can't.

It's a shame, because otherwise, Nonogram is a great implementation of picross puzzling. Its UX is the best I've ever seen, and its puzzle gallery might be, too. If only it didn't crash and lose progress.

Better than: InfiniPicross
Not as good as: Paint it Back, Pepper's Puzzles
Just because you're using Unity to make checkbox puzzles: doesn't mean that you can ignore your memory usage.

Progress: 126/126 Gallery, 13/50 Classic, 35/50 Speed