Flying solo, Kalimba feels totally different. I think that's for two reasons, one being the single-player campaign's "unique" mechanics -- like color-swapping, ice platforms, and anti-gravity. I'm fake-quoting "unique" because, since I didn't make it very far in the co-op campaign, it's possible that these features would have popped up eventually.

But the other reason is that, like I complained about last time, co-op's fundamental four-totem stacking mechanic is simply broken. The timing and positioning requirements are just too precise.

One brain, using one controller, can maybe manage to coordinate two totems well enough for Kalimba's levels. Hell, a one-player four-totem quadruple-jump would be hard enough. But adding a layer of human communication to it, and still expecting timing with 0.1-second precision, is just cruel sabotage.

The single-player game was just interesting enough to see me through its first third; the regular introduction of new mechanics was neat, but the demanding platforming wore me down.

As for the co-op, I can only summarize it as unplayable.

Progress: Solo, 33% (beat the first world/boss); co-op, gave up in the second level.

At about five hours, and with more collectibles to go if we wanted (but we didn't), Pitfall Planet has a fairly substantial amount of content. The game's simple controls are exercised really well throughout its run, and the stranded-little-robots premise never feels worn out.

Other than the fact that the mouse cursor stays on-screen - there's got to be a "hide cursor" setting they just missed - the whole affair is very well-polished. Even occasional physics quirks, like needing to fiddle with angles to get up some ledges, feel appropriate within the game world.

Pitfall Planet is satisfying and fun, and while it may be a bit on the "mild" side, it's hard to pick out any real flaws with it. (As long as you have exactly two local players.)

Better than: Dyadic, Trine Enchanted Edition
Not as good as: Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (not co-op, but otherwise thematically similar)
And the soundtrack is cool: stay a while, and listen.

Progress: fixed the spaceship, 89% item collection, got the cat-ears hat

Pitfall Planet is the endearing story of two simple robots trying to repair their spaceship, by harvesting ore from co-operative puzzle-platform levels.

As in any successful co-op game, you can grab and throw your fellow robot, over an obstacle -- or off of a cliff.

The majority of the levels aren't hard on their own, but revolve around basic coordination tactics. You throw me over this pit, I grab this item and throw it to you, you use the item to hit a switch, I go up this platform to hit another switch... and so on.

That said, there have been a couple levels that stumped me and my companion for quite some time: like a giant Rube Goldberg device, or a falling floor-tile maze over a pit of lava. And although most of the game's difficulty is in figuring out what to do, there are occasional challenges of timing as well (like running away from tiny drill robots).

Pitfall Planet really excels at encouraging teamwork in solving puzzles, helped by an engaging soundtrack and a slightly-mysterious world design. (I hope, before the game ends, we discover what happened to this planet's previous inhabitants.)

Progress: 72%, 28 ore, 389 gems

In the first few moments of Kalimba's co-op, one player has one totem piece, and the other player has another piece. They need to be moved in tandem, stacked in a particular order, and jumped with coordinated timing. Simple, cool, fun.

It isn't long, though, before the game gives two totem pieces to each player. And then - given that either player's pieces usually move at the same time - both players need to coordinate stacking all four totems in specific arrangements.

I feel like there must be some aspect of the controls I'm missing, because this four-part stacking just seems ridiculously difficult to me. Maybe I'll try the single-player mode and see if it's more instructive.

Barring that, Kalimba is hypothetically interesting, but the fun is blocked by how hard these basic stacking operations are.

Progress: Gave up in the second co-op level.

The combat-oriented demo of Nadia Was Here managed to both impress me with its unique gameplay, and scare me away from the full version.

Nadia's battle system is organized into lanes, sort-of like Mega Man Battle Network or Radiant Historia. They're narrower, i.e. only one party member and one enemy can fit in a lane, but the interesting part is that - while those other games are all turn-based - Nadia is real-time, with a continually-ticking attack timer on each character.

The result of this combination of mechanics is that you can move a party member into a lane to strategically attack an enemy, and then move out of an enemy's lane to avoid being attacked. And since enemies can also move, there is an element of evasive strategy to staying ahead of them.

The practical consequence, then, is that you have to keep track of all the concurrent, slightly-offset attack timers; and continue moving around just to survive. It's a startling amount of micro-management for an otherwise simple premise.

I admire what this system was able to pull off, but have no interest in subjecting myself to more of it.

Progress: Didn't finish the demo.

Eight years ago, I pointed out a critical flaw in Trine's co-op experience: the game isn't really designed for it -- and most obstacles don't accommodate multiple players.

While Trine Enchanted Edition may be prettier than the original, it doesn't solve this problem.

Trine is still fun to stumble through with a friend's help - or alternatively, fun to make your friend stumble through by accident - but isn't quite "enchanted" enough to motivate a full run. Plus, as I once lamented on Trine 2, the "floaty platforming and shoddy hit-detection" aren't as easy to live with as they used to be.

Progress: Gave up at Fangle Forest

"Linelight is a refreshingly inventive, minimalist puzzle-adventure game." ... it's not as pretentious as it sounds, I promise.

Linelight is a puzzle-platformer, although it doesn't immediately identify itself as such. Imagine if a game like Limbo or Braid replaced the ground with a line, and your character with a line segment, and you'll basically have it. It's abstract; like Thomas Was Alone, but without a narrator. Just ... shapes.

It starts off easy enough: follow this path instead of that one, hit these switches and not those other ones, time your movement to avoid the evil red lines. In fact, I would say that most of the game is "simple," either in being outright easy, or in teaching you new mechanics so elegantly that it never feels like a struggle. Up until the end, the game's pace of introducing new rules and tricks is actually quite commendable.

But, there are a couple sore spots that I would say hold Linelight back from its full potential. For one, the theme is utterly uninteresting -- you are a line, and you move along other lines, and there are colors, and, uh, lighting effects. The music is nice, but gets repetitive after a few minutes. Ultimately there isn't much of Linelight that's memorable. (Other than the final sequence of World 6, which is pretty delightful.)

For another, the game is occasionally mechanically inconsistent, with rules applying differently in some levels than in others. This is the kind of thing that would make Jonathan Blow lose his fucking mind -- although it only happens a handful of times.

I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I had to look up the solution to the last bonus world's final puzzle. It used a pre-existing obstacle in a different way than any preceding level had used it. I'm not thrilled about that; but, only one puzzle? Not a huge deal.

Linelight succeeds in delivering fun and engaging gameplay, and has a satisfying amount of puzzle content. It just doesn't stand out quite enough to be memorable among its puzzle-platformer peers.

Better than: Limbo
Not as good as: Braid, Thomas Was Alone
And it's more surprising than it is frustrating: that in 2017, a Unity-engine game would be released without Steam Cloud saves.

Progress: 240/240 yellow stars, 12/60 green stars

On its face, Dyadic is a simple and clever puzzle-platformer for two players (or for one player, a'la Brothers). What sells it - or what sold it to me - is how accessible the controls are, and how easy the game is to jump into.

And the puzzles themselves are pretty well crafted; never devilishly difficult, but just complicated enough to make you think.

But the experience ends up being brought down by overall bugginess: checkpoints restoring you to game-breaking positions, characters and items getting stuck in the terrain, sound effects spontaneously disappearing or becoming stuck. It's not a well-polished game.

The experience wasn't helped by some glaring design flaws. Chief among them, the camera zooms in and out automatically to show both players at all times -- so if it's zoomed too far in, the vital puzzles surrounding you will be hidden; and if it's zoomed too far out, you'll scarcely be able to tell where anything is. Another issue that comes to mind is the continuous, disorienting screen-shaking earthquake effect through the first several levels.

That Dyadic is over almost as soon as it starts might be seen as merciful. I finished the game and got all its achievements in 90 minutes played. (Including time spent retrying broken levels.)

It's impressively fun, in its core conceit, but Dyadic is dearly in need of more development love before it could be considered a "good" game.

Better than: Eon Altar
Not as good as: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
At least it does shine at: the ability to accidentally - or not-so-accidentally - kill your co-op partner.

HeartZ: Co-Hope Puzzles is a lot like Trine (or, maybe even more like The Lost Vikings). There are three characters, each with distinct abilities that allow them to - using teamwork - solve puzzles and traverse levels. But HeartZ makes some simple mistakes that leave it firmly behind its progenitors.

For one thing, the story and theme are threadbare. There's a brief scene in the beginning which seems to explain that some cybernetic creatures got their hearts combined by mad science -- but the characters have no personality, and there's no sense of continuous storytelling as the game goes on. You're just a bunch of weird robot-things in a laboratory.

I also feel like HeartZ takes too long to introduce each character's special moves. For the first set of levels, none of the characters felt different from one another.

But the most heinous of HeartZ's transgressions is its death model: if any one of the characters dies, all three of them are sent back to the last checkpoint. And I mean, as a co-op platformer, you should expect a fair amount of accidental death -- resulting in all players being punished every time any one of them fails.

HeartZ isn't exactly bad, but there doesn't seem like any reason to play it when other games do the same idea so much better.

Progress: Finished Act 2

The free demo for Stories Untold conveys a few messages very powerfully:

1. These guys know how to write a creepy fucking story. (I would say, moreso than Until Dawn's admirable creep-factor.) The combination of evocative text and well-directed graphical effects makes for a very powerfully-ominous presentation.
2. I am a scaredy cat.
3. And... I guess it's pretty short. Of the four stories in Stories Untold, this first one lasted 20 minutes.
4. Also, phrase-based text adventures suck. As creepy as it can be, trying to guess what keywords the game will parse really ruins the immersion.

If I was into being scared, I would probably be pretty enthusiastic about this. But... since I'm not, the stilted design and apparent brevity is just icing on the no-thank-you cake.

Progress: Finished The House Abandon in the demo.