Well, we're done with Tiny Brains. Total running time was about two hours.

I guess the campaign is short enough to run through repeatedly, maybe even as a party game, but I'm not especially anxious to revisit these glitchy physics.

(And in retrospect, I am pretty sure that some puzzles are actually impossible if you're playing by yourself.)

There are a handful of tricky brain-teasers in here, and the game thankfully doesn't overstay its welcome. But neither does it ever really impress.

Better than: HeartZ: Co-Hope Puzzles, Kalimba
Not as good as: Pitfall Planet, Trine Enchanted Edition
Best not to bring this game up: to PETA, what with all the laboratory animal testing.

Progress: Finished the campaign with two players.

Tiny Brains is another Trine-like, where one or more players can switch between characters with unique abilities. Tiny Brains is more about puzzles than about action, although there are some combat stages as well.

The puzzles so far have been fairly simple, and although some solutions require precise timing, there is still a heavier emphasis on planning than on execution. (That said, from my experience with two players and two characters acting at once, it seems like some puzzles would be pretty damn tough playing alone.)

The collision physics don't work right all the time. Jumping up onto a ledge is not always as easy as it should be.

It's ... difficult to pick out anything that Tiny Brains does especially well. It doesn't have stupid controller issues, and the puzzle mechanics work fine despite occasional physics quirks. But the puzzles and the character-specific abilities are pretty basic; and the story, which so far is just a guy yelling in a fake Russian accent, isn't very compelling.

Maybe some mechanical enhancements or puzzle designs later on will impress me more.

Progress: Finished Chapter 1.

The minutes-long, excruciatingly-boring intro movie is not my biggest concern about Shiftlings so far. That honor goes to the fact that my second player and I completely failed to get local co-op to work.

Our experience was just as this poster describes, where the game's functions seemed to become split between two controllers. (It reminded me of my controller issues with Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, which is not good company to be in.)

Local co-op was the whole reason I bought Shiftlings, so I was prepared to write it off completely until I found this post claiming that it "works," but is terribly messaged by the UI.

After calibrating once, both controllers work in-game. Note that only the first controller works in the main menu, though, which arguably can be confusing.

There should be a text in the top-right corner of the screen saying something like "join the game by pressing Return or Start on second controller". It disappears fairly quick, though, so it I guess it's easy to miss.

I'm willing to give it another try, but this bullshit has already soured my opinion of Shiftlings significantly.

Cat Quest is shallow, but adorable.

The action RPG is pretty simple: no skill trees, limited combat abilities, straightforward plot; and it's designed to be playable on a smartphone. It's not complicated or crazy enough to hold my interest.

Which is sort of a shame, because it's a perfectly functional game, and the cat motif is really damn cute. Map areas are named "The Catpital" and "Mewtown." You save the game and restore health by taking a Cat Nap. You can find and equip clothing like hats, and put a hat on the cat and it's just so aww.

I'll definitely be recommending this to others, and hell, I just might pick up an Android version when that comes out.

Progress: Finished the demo.

Child of Light's story continued being obtuse, and obfuscated by unnecessary rhyming, for most of its running length. The ending moments worked well enough, but it really feels like this story could have been told a lot better than it was.

It was the RPG gameplay that kept me coming back. And I wouldn't say that it was quite perfect, either; but it worked, and the ideas it presented (particularly around the timeline and interruptions) were uniquely compelling.

If Ubisoft were to give Child of Light the franchise treatment, my biggest request would be to enlarge the in-combat party sizes. Being limited to two party members in battle made it a little too easy for the three-member enemy party to overwhelm me from the start; I would have been a lot happier with three-versus-four battles. It also felt unjustly restrictive toward combinations of party member specialties -- it's hard to justify using one of only two party slots for a "red mage" buff/debuff archetype.

I had a few frustrations with the UI as well (I accidentally combined a bunch of Oculi that I didn't want), but overall the game's systems worked very well. Character progression, both through skill points and with Oculi gems, struck a great balance between power and simplicity. Although you could argue that there are more types of gem than really seem necessary.

The difficulty level did end up biting me a few times. Some encounters in the game's second half were ... really hard, especially in instances where the whole enemy party was faster than me, repeatedly interrupting my attempts to survive. Fortunately, the game makes it easy to try again; when you die, you get all your HP and MP back, and are restored just before the encounter that killed you.

So, yeah. Enlarge the battle parties, and get rid of the obstructive rhyme-based storytelling, and baby -- you've got a stew going.

Better than: Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
Not as good as: I guess... classics like Chrono Trigger? (Has it really been so long since I've played an excellent 2D RPG?)
Also better than: Valiant Hearts, that other debut UbiArt game.

Progress: Finished on Expert.

Compared to Infinifactory and TIS-100, I am blazing through Shenzhen I/O. Less because I'm compelled by the fun, and more because I'm already familiar with its challenges.

Since I last wrote about Shenzhen, the puzzles have become more nuanced and elaborate; the premise of each one is intriguing, as are the narratively-appropriate components and peripherals. Thematically, these puzzles do a great job of building on TIS's image-plotting puzzles, by making the output values feel meaningful and cool.

However, these unique twists almost never factor into what makes the puzzles difficult. And what does make them difficult is disappointingly familiar: limited instruction space, and occasionally, limited input/output ports.

Yup -- the exact same things that stymied me in TIS-100. It's still entertaining, but ... not as satisfying as new challenges would be.

I've also got mixed feelings about Shenzhen's faux-desktop interface, which is Zachtronics's most visually-appealing UI yet, but is click-heavy and obtuse to actually use. And the email-based storyline, which sometimes feels like it's subtly building up to something, but is so subtle that I wonder if I'm just imagining it.

I'm having enough fun with the puzzles to keep going, but it certainly feels like the weakest Zachtronics release so far.

Progress: "Electronic Door Lock"

Although the level-select screen makes me appear within striking distance of Infinifactory's end (for real, this time), the levels themselves paint a different picture. Like the puzzles that closed the game's first half, these final levels are work.

I've still been enjoying my time working through them, but ... each one takes an evening, now, or even multiple evenings. These last few puzzles require enough task planning and complexity management to rival software challenges I've actually been paid to work on.

So it may seem weird that I'm taking a "break" by playing Shenzhen I/O, but relatively speaking, it really does feel quite relaxing.

Progress: The Homeward Fleet

Child of Light's fairytale narrative is diluted, significantly, by its insistence on rhyming dialog. The writing is routinely stretched and twisted just for the sake of a barely-rhyming word, sucking the personality out of any given character's lines.

(With the exception of the jester, Rubella, who adorably flubs the system by using a rhyming word's non-rhyming synonym instead.)

The game's story feels weak overall, as Aurora's goal is never terribly clear. That is to say: She's trying to get out of this dream world, but how? Something about a song? And a mirror? All I'm really doing is exploring my way through the map, and continually getting distracted by side-characters.

The gameplay, though, is uniquely fascinating and compelling. Both in the sidescroller-style overworld - which has enough light puzzle-solving, obstacle-avoidance, and maze-finding to add some substance to its aesthetic beauty - and in the real-time combat.

Probably the most defining characteristic of its battle system is the timeline, and how it can lead to interruptions. Each character has a speed stat, which defines how quickly it progresses through the "wait" part of the battle timeline; and each action you select has a speed, which is how long it spends in the "cast" part of the timeline. While a character is in the "cast" part, it can be interrupted by an enemy attack.

So while you're trying to time your attacks to interrupt foes, you're simultaneously trying to avoid being interrupted yourself -- using Defend to defer your action until later, or choosing a high-speed action to beat your enemies to the punch. The timeline pauses when you're making selections, giving you plenty of time to think your tactics over.

Combat also incorporates some real-time interactivity, via the whisp, Igniculus. He's moved with the right analog stick, and using his power will either slow down a specific enemy, or gradually heal a party member. The slowing, in particular, is pretty vital in working the timeline to your advantage.

There are plenty of other quirks to Child of Light's battles, like character-specific talent trees and the element-infused Oculi gems, but most of these components are never so prevalent that they make the game feel overly complex. For an RPG, it's relatively easy to wrap your head around.

It's worth noting that I'm playing on Expert difficulty (as opposed to the default, Casual setting), which I wouldn't say feels "expert" so much as it does "moderately challenging." There are some enemies who really frustrate me, but having fought through maybe half of the game so far, I've only had to use inventory items a handful of times.

Child of Light's storytelling is disappointingly thin; but the core gameplay is solid. More than seeing the plot through, I'm really looking forward to leveling up my party.

Progress: Chapter 6

At least so far, Shenzhen I/O feels a lot like a direct sequel to TIS-100. It's focused a little less on raw computation, and more on connectivity, in order to integrate with other components; but I'm still writing assembly-like code, blocking on inputs from other processors' outputs, and wrangling tiny amounts of runtime memory.

Time will tell, but at this point Shenzhen feels like a simpler game than its forebears, with puzzles that are more "cool" than puzzling.

Minor digression, but the solitaire minigame is total bullshit. The unstackable "dragon" cards really ruin it. I guess I'm supposed to fully analyze the card layout before making a hasty play; but ugh.

Progress: "Prototyping new ideas"

While the last few levels of Infinifactory's first half had begun to feel tiresome, its second half comes out swinging, with new blocks and new environmental quirks. The puzzles built on these new mechanics feel fresh, and have really revitalized my interest in pushing forward.

The story is heating up a little bit, too, although it's still not exactly thrilling stuff. More compelling than TIS-100, but only about par with SpaceChem.

The end of the game - the real end, this time, I'm ... pretty sure - is practically within my reach, now.

Progress: Atropos Station