Mandagon is a brief experience -- I played through it in 36 minutes, and even got all the "hidden" achivements without trying. And it's not a complicated game; nor is it thrilling, nor very thought-provoking.

But it's serene and relaxing, and exploring its single, Tibet-infused level is exactly engaging enough to sustain that running length. (And it's free, which is good.)

It's no Uncharted 2, but Mandagon's short trip to a snowy mountain peak is pretty satisfying, for what it is.

Better than: Escape the Game
Not as good as: Dyadic, I guess?
And...: this isn't a promotional demo for a paid game? Feels surprisingly "zen."

While the most striking thing about Glyphs Apprentice is how terrible its user interface is, the second-most striking thing is how uncannily it resembles Opus Magnum. Not only are there programmable arms that can grab alchemical elements, rotate, and extend or retract; the elements can also bind to others, and transform into ... familiar variations.

Today I learned: both games are based closely on some of Zachtronics' pre-Steam work. Huh.

From my limited time with it, Glyphs looks like it has a couple of advantages over Opus Magnum -- more puzzles, and more complexity in its later puzzles. And while my biggest gripe with Opus Magnum was how "simple" it felt... this feels like the wrong kind of complexity.

It's the kind that gets lost in that terrible UI, for one thing. There are so many permutations of tool type and of elemental variety, and they are all blue. The only visual distinction between one thing and another is a few low-detail lines.

There are a number of tutorial-level puzzles with extensive help text, but these are so prescriptive - click this button, now click these buttons, now confirm that it looks like this example - that it only teaches how to use the game, not how to understand it.

For whatever faults I'd ascribe to Zachtronics' more recent games, one thing they've continued to get right is the Miyamoto style of teaching: progressively enticing you to discover the tools you need, reinforcing each lesson with a feeling of accomplishment. Glyphs instead barks out directions, and hopes that by gradually barking less, you'll learn to recall previous barkings.

Outside of the puzzles themselves, Glyphs doesn't appear to have any redeeming aspects. There's zero story content, and there's no soundtrack. It's quite dull. C'mon, even SpaceChem had some smooth background music.

As with Silicon Zeroes, my biggest takeaway from Glyphs Apprentice is a renewed appreciation for how professionally-produced Zachtronics games are. And maybe it isn't fair of me to ignore the amount of content that Glyphs is offering -- but given the quality of its competition, I just can't take it seriously.

Progress: Did a few of the tutorial puzzles.

Considering it's a fan-game that's clearly ... inspired by Ace Attorney, Regeria Hope brings a couple of surprisingly-fresh ideas to the table.

The first is testimony selection: You, as the defense attorney, can help script your client's testimony. He may plan on some statement that could, uh, damage the case, which you can rephrase or remove entirely. It's an interesting twist on Phoenix Wright's prescribed dialog - imagine if you could actually tell Larry Butz to be less of a goddamned idiot! - albeit limited to a pretty small portion of the trial.

The other is that you can intentionally throw the case. Which is, ehh, not great in terms of a defense attorney's story. But I suppose that part of the game author's grand plan is a Telltale-style branching story? Maybe it would be more significant in a multi-chapter career mode, ... but this feature is hard to appraise in only a single episode.

And aside from those new ideas, this first episode of Regeria Hope is mostly what you'd expect of Phoenix Wright fan-fiction. The plot is pretty-well telegraphed, the dialog has its fair share of typos, the Unity-default GUI is just-a-bit shameful, and the narrative isn't as much "branching" as it is a branch of what the author thought seemed interesting.

If Regeria Hope's author can iterate on this strategy, then I might really look forward to a Phoenix Wright rival. But in the meantime, Hope seems pretty-well sequestered to "fanfic" - and if you're looking for a prosecutor-versus-defendant adventure with credentials, Aviary Attorney is a better bet than this imitator.

Better than: Phoenix Wright: Asinine Attorney, an officially-sanctioned fan-game disaster.
Not as good as: Aviary Attorney, a fan game with its own intriguing characters and plot.
Really, author: You can do better, if you recognize that the strength of Ace Attorney isn't suits and ties, but the interaction of uniquely interesting characters. Larry was a great foil for Phoenix because their childhood friendship conflicted with the Steel Samurai case. How can you make me care about Brock 'En Hart? What's my motivation?

I may only have played Dark Souls for about two hours, and The Surge's demo for less than an hour, but ... wow, yeah. This sure looks like a modern sci-fi reskin of Dark Souls.

Are all "souls-like" games this uncanny? Where save points restock your healing potions, and respawn enemies you've killed? Where you lose experience points when you die, but can recover them from your corpse? Where there's no in-game map, and bad guys jump out from behind a wall to slice half of your health bar off? ... Is it always this specific?

As with Dark Souls, I didn't mind the high-risk combat so much as I did the mazelike levels and "no in-game map." A hologram told me to go to some place, and although the areas I'm walking through all have names, I really couldn't tell you where I was going or how far to the next bonfire medical bay.

I compared Dark Souls to VVVVVV, which is a little ironic in this light -- because VVVVVV championed plentiful checkpoints. When I die in The Surge, I have to repeat several minutes of wandering through uninteresting wreckage, and high-stakes, resource-constrained combat.

I hope this isn't what all "souls-like" games are like.

Progress: Did not finish the demo.

I should probably note that I tried playing The Witcher some years back, but quickly bounced off of it. The animation quality was distractingly bad - like that time I tried New Vegas after having finished Skyrim - and the controls were just a mess.

As for Witcher 2, well, the animations are a lot better.

...

I really want to like Witcher 2, and for the most part, I do! The writing lends weight to some darkly interesting characters, the environments are beautifully engrossing, the combat-preparation mechanics are unlike anything I've really seen before, and the basic swords-and-sorcery stuff more-or-less works.

So I'm putting up with the controls. The moments when I have to press a button twice before something happens; or when I have to struggle to point the camera at an item pickup; or when the camera moves itself in a way I really can't agree with; or when melee combat with multiple opponents is just a silly clusterfuck; or when I want to equip an item in my inventory, and the menu interface just, absolutely, goddamned, doesn't work at all. I put up with those moments.

(It's a good thing that the game automatically put me in Easy mode, because otherwise I'd be dead, like, all the time.)

And I should be a little discerning in my praise of the game's writing. It somewhat frequently betrays the franchise's literary roots, by telling events in an order that would be cool - in a book - but is maddening in the context of player choice. (Read: having to select Geralt's dialog without knowing who or what he's talking about, yet.) And it sometimes suffers from the same misleading-dialog-option problem that I keep pinning on Mass Effect, where Geralt and I have differing opinions on conversational etiquette.

But in spite of its flaws, Witcher 2 is compelling due to the strength of its characters and events. I'm genuinely interested in what Geralt has to say. I'm curious about his companions' motivations, and intrigued by the mystery he's stumbled into. I want to learn more about his gray-soaked fantasy world, and I want to see him deal with the relatable, human evils throughout it.

Since I'm playing on Easy, I'll also enjoy mashing the 'X' button to sloppily eviscerate my inept enemies. And maybe, given enough practice, I'll even figure out how to equip my off-hand sword.

Progress: Finished the prologue.

Reaper of Souls's plot isn't as terrible as the core game's - after all, what could be? - but it's still fairly dumb. I mean, I know we're talking about somewhat-trashy gothic power fantasy here, but at least the events of Diablo II felt consistent within the established world. Seven evils, Horadric staff, no one cared about Izual; pretty straightforward stuff.

Reaper of Souls turns the main game's "black soulstone" into a deus ex machina, more than once! The reaper Malthael's relationship with the angelic pantheon is just as groan-worthy as the "nephalem" garbage-lore. And the ending is so terse and anti-climactic, it's like it was picked out of a hat.

But hey, there's no Leah, so ... yeah, not as terrible as before.

My previous concerns about the trivial campaign difficulty were not abated by Act V. The final boss did succeed in making me pay attention to my health bar; but I still didn't die, nor did my companion. (Again, this was in the "Hard" difficulty.) And he dropped loot for above our current level! So I'd definitely call the game's definition of difficulty pretty suspect.

I know the whole point of Diablo is to continue climbing the loot ladder, and I've heard that the current game's Nephalem Rifts and Adventure Mode features are way better than previous iterations' Nightmare and Hell mode bullshit. But the early rungs of this ladder are unsatisfying and overlong. I'm not going to keep climbing on the gamble that it will eventually become fun.

Better than: current-day Diablo III
Not as good as: I remember Diablo II: Lord of Destruction being.
As for potential follow-ups: I lost interest in Torchlight II, and a brief try at Path of Exile didn't grab me... but I've heard good things about Grim Dawn? At any rate, more Borderlands is next on the schedule.

Progress: Finished the campaign on Hard.

Escape the Game's fourth-wall-breaking self-awareness isn't great, but not as bad as some others I've played. And the gameplay is rote at first, but quickly adds a grappling-hook power that makes the game feel fast, and interesting.

And then it's over. In ten minutes.

This free game is over two years old, and I guess it was supposed to serve as a demo for a fuller release? But the "Episode 1" DLC still has a release date of "2017 Q1" -- and the creator seems to have abandoned this idea in favor of an ARG that will lead up to a sequel... maybe.

Well, good luck with all that!

Better than: Toren
Not as good as: Thomas Was Alone
For more in "vaporware," see: Luminesca

I was just doing a quick update on my upcoming games list (here's hoping the Shadow of the Colossus remake doesn't suck), and ... well, there wasn't much to update.

It feels like most of my list has been shifting from "releasing this year" to "releasing next year," over the past several years.

• A.N.N.E. looked like a cute, little game on Kickstarter in May of 2013. The campaign page still estimates delivery in March of 2014. Their December 31st update says "2018 will be the year."
• I backed Bloodstained on Kickstarter in September of 2015. As of a couple weeks ago, "No official release date beyond '2018' yet."
• Chasm, like A.N.N.E., looked like a fun little Kickstarter in May of 2013. Campaign page says estimated delivery in May of 2014. Their current estimate is "TBD."
• I rarely spend time on Early Access games, but CrossCode had a good demo and hooked me ... in November of 2015. Their last release-date estimate, from May of last year, targeted Early 2018.
• Factorio similarly wowed me with its pre-release demo. That was in November of 2014. Their roadmap looks like it's close to completion, but there doesn't seem to be a formal release date estimate.
• Indivisible had a pretty cool demo while it was up on Indiegogo, in December of 2016. "Indivisible will be released in 2018."
• Even in the initial May, 2014 Indiegogo campaign, Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn seemed like a bit of a joke. The campaign's last update, in December of 2016, said "we're 99% there."
• I liked the look and description of Timespinner in their Kickstarter campaign. That was in August of 2014. As of September: "For awhile now I've said that I hope to release in 2017 and it's looking like that's less likely to happen."

Game development is hard; it is known. And scheduling things is also pretty hard. Even the industry's heavy-hitters screw this pooch with some frequency. But ... come on, really guys?

It feels weird to praise Yooka-Laylee for anything, but at least those industry vets knew how to schedule themselves; they only had 2 years from Kickstarter (May, 2015) to release (April, 2017). And to be fair, Bloodstained and Indivisible aren't doing all that bad, either -- projects which are similarly staffed by game development veterans.

I hope that these Kickstarter indies, and anyone looking to follow in their footsteps, have come to understand the precarious position of years-long hype periods. Games like Chasm and Timespinner looked fresh and exciting when they were announced, but now their community interest is all but gone. Factorio's mechanics were brilliant, when it was new; now its competitors have had years to copy and iterate on its ideas. Several of these games have even had to change their targeted platforms, the Wii U having come and gone.

And if a game in development for three, four, or even five years is even slightly underwhelming, well... may Gunpei have mercy on the developers' Twitter accounts.

For my part, these release-date fails (especially A.N.N.E. and Chasm) have taught me to be much, much more discerning about what I crowdfund. Which, for the sake of nascent developers and their ideas, is kind of a shame.

Silicon Zeroes started out pretty simple, as I saw in the demo; and these humble beginnings had me looking forward to more complex algorithmic puzzles in the later game.

Unfortunately, the later puzzles tend to feel more like riddles: solving an otherwise-straightforward problem without using a crucial component, or in a time limit that requires otherwise-counterproductive pipelining. It's even worse than TIS-100, whose limitations were at least consistent within the world of the game; in Silicon Zeroes, a component will be given to you in one puzzle, then taken away in another.

One particularly frustrating aspect of the game's mechanics is how it treats floating or undefined values. In digital electronics, an undefined voltage level is never useful; but in many of Silicon Zeroes' puzzles, an undefined input gets used as a behavioral switch, effectively disabling a component's output. And this mechanic is a critical part of many puzzles' solutions.

This interacts especially poorly with the game's timing system. Clock ticks and component-specific "mTick" delays appear to be meant as a simulation of actual CPU pipelining; and while you'd imagine that specific parts of the pipeline would be active or inactive based on preceding input, the game doesn't really offer those conditional tools, except as a side-effect of undefined input.

It feels janky. And weird.

I don't want to overplay my frustrations with the game, because I did have some fun with it, especially in the early and simple puzzles. It just felt like, as the puzzles became more complicated, their ambitions outstripped the game's mechanical capabilities.

The dull story didn't help, either. (I'd recommend the first season of Halt and Catch Fire, instead.)

Silicon Zeroes is somewhat short, unless you want to do the extra post-campaign puzzles -- which I didn't. Longer than Human Resource Machine, if not by much. By the time I saw the "ending" cinematic, I was very ready to stop playing, despite how many more puzzles I have left.

Better than: Prelogate
Not as good as: Human Resource Machine, Opus Magnum
Instead of outshining Opus Magnum: Silicon Zeroes ended up reminding me that Zachtronics, even at its worst, is still pretty good.

Progress: Finished board 3.

Well, the ending is pretty terrible. Opus Magnum's story is generally awkward - the first chapter is stiff and wooden, then the remaining four are just meandering - but nowhere moreso than in the final story scene, in which the villain (who hadn't even been clearly identified, up to this point) claims to have outsmarted you, threatens to kill you, and then offers for you to join him, only to finally discover that he was talking to a mannequin! And the fates of the protagonists are left to your imagination.

Of course, I don't play these games for the story; I play them for the logical coordination challenge. And in that respect, Opus Magnum never really changed my first impression of it -- of being overall simpler and less satisfying than SpaceChem. Like Shenzhen I/O, it feels like Opus Magnum has focused too much on style, and not enough on substance.

And as with Shenzhen, I'm just not interested enough to keep going into the extra post-campaign puzzles.

As an aside, while Zachtronics games tend to have a pretty close connection to real computer programming principles, I couldn't help but get hung up on how Opus Magnum combines runtime instructions - the movement of arms and elements - with resource contention; much of my debugging time was just trying to stop things from colliding. This multiplexing of instructions and resource access doesn't closely resemble a conventional programming language... but it does closely resemble some intentionally-frustrating toy languages like Brainfuck.

Better than: Sethian
Not as good as: Human Resource Machine, or any of the other Zachtronics puzzlers.
I think I really would rather: have replayed SpaceChem instead.

Progress: Finished the main campaign.