It's kind-of amazing just how up-to-date Ōkami HD feels, despite the original game's age. It still has some flaws, but is nevertheless distinctly refreshing.

Going back to what I wrote about it on PS2:

[...] intricately woven into the fabric of ancient tales. This manner of storytelling, combined with the game's infamous and extremely distinctive aesthetics, make for a really unique experience.

The Celestial Brush is a really cool gameplay mechanic - but controlling it is still a pain.

[...] a very big part of the game (I don't hesitate to say a majority of it) is in "optional" content.

This seems like an intentional choice on the part of the game's director to give the player a godlike feeling: you've got to take care of the little things, too.

[...] while combat and dungeon play isn't nearly as good as an actual Zelda, there is a lot of fun to be had in Ōkami.

A decade later, this is still how I'd sum the game up: the narrative and aesthetics are unique and breathtaking, the brush controls are fairly imperfect, the optional activities make the world feel alive, and the combat and puzzles are a little on the meh side.

And most of the time, the strengths more than make up for the shortcomings. It's all just so charming, from the beautiful art style to Issun's irreverent attitude.

Progress: Just finished the sunken ship.

Pepper's Puzzles is a humble little picross game, perhaps even humbler than Paint it Back. It pays some welcome attention toward subtle quality-of-life features, like a randomized soundtrack and a "dynamic background" to prevent the brain equivalent of burn-in.

It's also got a very-slightly quirky sense of humor, which is neat.

But what really attracted to me to Pepper's Puzzles, over some other picross games currently on Super-Steam-Sale, is its "200+" puzzles.

The Mosaic mode (like other picross games' assemble-a-bigger-picture puzzles), and the surprisingly-stressful Time Trial challenges, are nifty distractions. But I've bet on Pepper to give me plenty of hours of picture-puzzle solving, and it's looking pretty good so far.

Progress: 135/720 Classic stars, 13/184 Mosaic stars, 18/18 Time Trials stars.

Ōkami HD took quite a bit of warm-up time -- I don't mean the ridiculous 25 GB download, but the overlong non-interactive opening cutscene, and 30+ minutes of low-interactivity character introductions. It's slow to start.

Then of course I had to tweak the settings, because the default camera controls are just wacky, and the default volume for NPCs' cartoony chattering noises is ... too much. Like getting yelled at by adults from Peanuts.

But once it became playable, the charm I remember from the original game started to come back. Talking to quaint townsfolk about their problems; using the celestial brush to solve simple puzzles; Issun's impotent rage and Amaterasu's adorable dog noises. Largely down to its visual style, Ōkami is just fun to watch; and this HD iteration preserves that quality quite excellently.

The combat gameplay is somewhat milquetoast, which is basically how I remember it being before. So, hopefully that part of the game doesn't start showing its age too poorly. But I'm looking forward to rediscovering Ōkami's Japan, and unraveling its mystical adventure once again.

Progress: Just left Kamiki Village.

I just wasn't having any fun playing Shantae: Risky's Revenge.

For one thing, it's a pretty bad Metroidvania. Not in quite the same way as Ori and the Blind Forest, which felt more like a linear adventure with optional exploration; Risky's Revenge does include some meaningful backtracking, to discover routes that were previously locked or unreachable.

But the world map sucks, with whole sections that are uncharted, and frustratingly-placed teleporters. (They're rarely any better than walking.) Aside from how annoying it is just to open the map; actually getting from place to place, navigating the same mazes and fighting the same enemies over again, is surprisingly irritating for how tiny the game's world is.

It seems like Wayforward was trying to lean harder on Shantae's platforming and action chops than on exploration -- but the action isn't really any good, either. The collision on her ponytail attack is irritatingly narrow, and her magic abilities - despite consuming valuable portions of a magic bar - aren't any more effective. Trying to hit a tiny, flying enemy can be a real struggle in patience.

Throw in the aforementioned problems with control responsiveness and respawning - oh, plus some fairly blasé animal transformation abilities - and it's difficult for me to find anything enjoyable in here.

The game's world has a little charm, thanks to a cute art style and virt's mostly-great soundtrack. But that isn't really enough to make up for the general malaise of an uninteresting plot - collect the three things, from the three people, to save the whatever - and the thoroughly mediocre moment-to-moment gameplay.

Progress: turned into an elephant.

Bowser's Inside Story has some good fundamentals, but its pacing is a mess, and balancing problems can unexpectedly flip its combat from "fun" to "frustrating."

Let's start with some praise: as ever, the Mario RPG combination of platforming, turn-based battles, and real-time action is a good idea. When it works, it works great.

This formula feels at its best when Bowser is playable. His combat moves are fresh, and his ass-kicking ability is a blast to wield. Hands-down, my favorite moment in the game was when Bowser turned Godzilla-huge and started fighting a castle.

Like, literally punching a castle. Friggin' cool.

And playing as the Mario bros. can be pretty fun, too. Like I said, when it works.

Bowser's Inside Story gets marks off, though, for how often it doesn't work. And this is largely (though not entirely) a function of the game's bafflingly-bad pacing and level design.

In its first half or so, the story alternates focus between the Bros and Bowser. Early Bowser content is actually pretty fun -- watching him react to a rival villain, and seeing events from his boisterous perspective, is amusing for a while. But while he's out doing his dragon-turtle thing, Mario and Luigi are stuck in his mauve, labyrinthine interior, traversing bland levels and fighting repetitive enemies. The "inside" parts of Bowser's Inside Story are by far the least interesting.

Around the story's halfway point, a magical thing happens: Mario and Luigi are able to wander the open world. (By using warp pipes inside Bowser ... that warp to outside Bowser. It's weird.) All the outside areas that Bowser had covered, with suspiciously-foreshadowed Mario- and Luigi-sized blocks and paths, become re-explorable at your own pace.

It's kind of a shame that, as a result, walking the "open" world feels like re-treading old ground. There's approximately one new area that the Bros get to discover; the rest has little to offer, except bizarre combinations of old and new enemies. (Also, wow is the world map bad at showing how to travel between areas.)

This whole time, it's hard to care about the over-arching plot. Fawful is a boring villain, with a clichéd plot. The narrative never feels surprising or engaging, and the only sense of variety it seems to have is non-sequitur out-of-left-field directives. Suddenly we need to climb this tower? or talk to a doctor? or collect three macguffins? The whole thing has roughly the attention span of a preschool kids' cartoon.

That undirected-ness finally ends when, after Mario and Luigi finish their open-ish tasks, you prepare to assault the villain's castle. And here's where the story's pace irked me the most: this, which feels like the end of the game, is roughly its 75% mark. There are quite a few hours of dungeon-crawling and boss-fighting left to go, here -- and the remaining dungeons and encounters aren't varied enough to support this running length.

It's in these moments, when it feels like an endless series of similar-looking rooms and already-learned enemies, that the combat system's problems feel most poignant.

• Learning an enemy's patterns can be a crapshoot. Some enemies have a large number of attack patterns, and what looks like Pattern 5 may end up being a surprise! Pattern 6, whose defense is totally different.
• In many cases, the timing window for a successful defense (or attack) is astonishingly small. They're just really hard to do. And it's easy to get thrown off by the subtle timing differences of an attack targeting Mario versus targeting Luigi.
• The punishment for mistakes can be severe, especially when they cascade, e.g. getting hit might cause a character to be dazed and unable to defend against following hits. A single split-second misjudgment can mean the difference between a healthy Mario and a dead Mario.
• Most of the SP-consuming special moves are unrealistically difficult to pull off, due to how crazy their button and/or touch controls are. It's almost always a better idea to just use regular attacks, instead. (Luckily, the Bros and Bowser each have at least one late-game special move that isn't a huge pain to use.)
• In one of the almost-final boss battles, there is an unavoidable attack. The boss literally calls it his "Unavoidable Attack." That just seems mean.

I keep having to go back and remind myself that, yeah -- when the game works, it works well. And the combat works more often than it doesn't. If the overall story hadn't been so vacant and disoriented, and if the game's levels hadn't been so dull and tiresome, I wouldn't have given most of those flaws a second thought.

It's the fact that Partners in Time had these same problems with story pace and overlong levels, that makes me very wary about continuing on with the Mario & Luigi series. My playing time in this installment was on par with internet measurements, which estimate almost twice as long for the next installment, Dream Team.

I really would like more of the Mario RPG gameplay formula, even with the combat annoyances this series may have. But I'm not willing to slog through this caliber of storytelling for that many hours.

Better than: Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (Yeah, I know I said "Good" on that one, but ... hell, that was more than a decade ago.)
Not as good as: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, at least in terms of story and world-building.
I wonder: if Super Mario RPG has aged well at all.

Opus Magnum feels a bit like it carved a chunk out of SpaceChem, added one or two new ideas, and spent most of its development cycle trying to look pretty. (Like Shenzhen I/O did to TIS-100 before it.)

Where SpaceChem had chemical elements, Opus Magnum has alchemical elements. And where SpaceChem used traveling waldos to move atoms around, Opus Magnum uses arms, which can rotate or extend. (... But can also travel a path.) At least so far, there is no equivalent to SpaceChem's complex multi-factory problems. And the input/output sequence is locked, so there's no room for cleverly processing multiple jobs simultaneously; only one output at a time is allowed.

The gameplay focuses on different aspects of automation than SpaceChem did - at least to me, Opus Magnum feels more about micro-optimizations - but overall it seems simpler than its predecessor, which is a disappointment.

Also mildly disappointing is that the game's soundtrack frequently stutters and glitches. This really seems like the kind of thing that would have been ironed out in early access. EDIT: This appears to be a common problem in current Unity games.

The storytelling in Opus Magnum is a mechanical step forward for Zachtronics, if not a narrative one: there's actually a protagonist, with a name and a face. So where Shenzhen's emails or Infinifactory's NPC chatter felt like I was receiving flavorful directions, Opus Magnum really feels like it's telling me the story of Anataeus.

... That said, all the characters' dialog (including this protagonist's) is stiffly robotic, and their personalities are all pretty flat. The quality of the writing seems about on-par with SpaceChem's.

I will give some props to the built-in minigame, Sigmar's Garden, which is way less frustratingly obtuse than Shenzhen's solitaire game. It's still not all that engaging, but at least I don't actively hate it.

I'm definitely having fun with Opus Magnum, but I hope that later puzzles will find some more interesting high-level challenges for me.

Progress: almost done with Chapter II.

I've been telling myself since August that I would, eventually, come back and wrap up Infinifactory. But every time I actually think about it, I just can't even imagine myself enjoying the hours of work it'll take to do the five puzzles I have remaining.

At least of the puzzles currently available to me, they all require assembly from such a low level - like making a LEGO set out of only two-stud bricks - that the excitement of pulling off ingenious engineering becomes overshadowed by grueling tedium.

I would have to call these last few levels an unfortunate misstep for Infinifactory, and the culmination of an awkward pace (with multiple difficulty spikes) throughout the game.

But despite that, I have to commend Infinifactory on the whole, for delivering an impressive amount of great puzzle content. Not all of its puzzles are winners, but ... a great many of them are.

Better than: Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100 for sure; and probably SpaceChem, in general.
Not as good as: SpaceChem had a better difficulty curve (although its final boss was kind of terrible bullshit, too).
Just in time: for Opus Magnum! (hopefully coming out of Early Access soon?)

Progress: stopped at The Homeward Fleet - Fusion Reactor

Immediately, the most jarring thing about Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut is the high-definition UI art that it's putting on top of Nintendo DS-era gameplay graphics. (Honestly, they look even more like GBA graphics.) The modern-ish HD veneer fades away pretty quickly.

And beneath that veneer is a game that feels just a bit too antiquated for today. The controls aren't quite responsive enough; the hitboxes are never exactly what I expect; the menu sucks (where's my Map button); the UI's visual language is unclear; combat isn't interesting at all; the logic on enemy respawning is all over the place.

It's slightly bizarre that, although I definitely wouldn't call the game hard, I end up taking a fair amount of damage -- because I'm having a lot of trouble timing my attacks and movement correctly. Thankfully Shantae's HP is more than enough to accommodate this.

Gameplay aside, Shantae's world feels very minimally charming. Pixel-art belly-dancing can only go so far.

... actually, I guess my nitpicks don't necessarily indicate "antiquated" as much as they might "sloppy." A trend I really can't help but ascribe to WayForward, game after game after game.

Progress: Defeated the Squid Baron

So I guess Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has been on my backlog for about eight years. I'd totally forgotten about it.

And considering my fond memories of Superstar Saga and less-than-fond ones of Partners in Time, this installment is ... well, it's pretty okay.

• The light-hearted storytelling and strangely-Italian miming are still somewhat charming (especially now that Bowser's in on it). But the larger plot seems silly and unstructured, more like I'm following dots on a map than like I'm actually on a mission.
• The timing-based combat moves are fun, and keep gameplay more interesting than just selecting the right attack (i.e. not jumping on a spiny shell). But learning an enemy's tells can be frustrating, particularly when they're in dinky little details like a left-eye versus right-eye wink.
• Other RPG aspects, like equipment and stat points, don't feel all that important. I mean, leveling up definitely makes a visible difference in overall power; but the finer details aren't that impactful, so far.
• And then there are the overworld puzzles, and the bros' special moves like Luigi smushing Mario with a hammer so he can walk under short ceilings. This was one of the coolest parts of Superstar Saga; but until a genuinely new ability shows up, it's feeling a little over-familiar.

The aspect of switching control between Bowser (in the Mushroom Kingdom) and the bros (inside Bowser) hasn't come up much so far. There is some real promise in how Bowser's vacuum move can make a battle span both perspectives; but at least so far, they don't really integrate with each other all that much.

If I had played it when it was new, I'd probably be a lot more impressed. And it's not like I'm down on the game, exactly. It just hasn't "grabbed" me yet.

Progress: Plack Beach