"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.

Toward the end, Sands of Time's gameplay and scenario design shows its age poorly:

• As fights become lengthier and lengthier, you're more likely to run into issues with the rewind timer being reset. In the elevator encounter near the end, I had a handful of rage-inducing moments where I could only rewind back to a point that was already too late to avoid death.
• And in the final sequences, no longer having the Dagger of Time makes parkouring around surprisingly frustrating. The game spends hours getting you used to undoing your mistakes; and in its final hour, makes you resort to traditional checkpoints, instead.

But, all that considered, it's still quite good for a 14-year-old game. Its peers, like Enter the Matrix or Tales of Symphonia, would be lucky to have held up so well.

Hell, Sands of Time still has some things to teach modern games, particularly that the ability to rewind and try again is really, really satisfying. But I guess everyone is into "rogue-like" permadeath now, so... sigh.

Better than: Assassin's Creed II, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Not as good as: Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Just a reminder, Ubisoft: We haven't seen the Prince since Forgotten Sands in 2010.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is one of those games that sticks out prominently in my memory. Although I've had a rough time with some of those recently -- the Prince has weathered time fairly well, if not entirely unscathed.

Starting the game on my PC, the first issue I encountered was that everything looked like one big blur. I guess that sometime in the past decade or so, the GPU technique that these guys used for fog has become deprecated or broken; with fog turned on in graphics options, it is impossible to see a goddamn thing. Turned it off. I can see!

Second issue: my Xbox 360 controller doesn't work. Sands of Time has "Gamepad" options, but here is where I remember: it was released well before the Xbox 360 existed. Had to map all of the buttons manually. Slightly annoying, but now we're off!

The Prince starts telling his tale, and ... oh, there are no subtitles. There is no option for subtitles. That's unfortunate.

Aaaand now we're in the game proper! Huzzah!... well, the controls and camera movement suck a little bit, don't they? The Prince can't just start running, he needs to wind-up his speed first, which is somewhat irritating. The camera can get pretty spastic when going through some doorways or rounding certain corners. And the timing necessary for pulling off wall-jumping seems more punishing than it should be.

And, okay, fights are a bit dull. Generally speaking, the game uses a quantity-over-quality strategy of throwing enemies at you. (A flaw that I remember the sequel attempted to address.) And the battle music gets repetitive quite fast.

All that aside -- this is still a great game. The story is well-told (and well-acted!), the parkour gameplay is fun, and the environments are beautiful and memorable.

What I'm finding really incredible about re-treading Azad is that I still recognize practically all of the game's levels when I see them; this game made a strong impression on me, circa 2003-2004, and that impression is holding up.

Progress: 62%

Burial at Sea - Episode 2 does a much, much better job of delivering a coherent gameplay experience than the first episode did. It's still not as good, mechanically, as BioShock proper: "hacking" is still dumbed-down, there's really only one good plasmid, side-quests are surprisingly lacking (so many empty rooms!), and enemy encounters aren't varied enough to hold up a full-length game. But it works.

Unfortunately, just as in BioShock Infinite, the main attraction here is the story -- and that story leans heavily on shocking revelations about the links between Rapture and Columbia. Revelations which are no longer shocking in a second playthrough.

Burial at Sea still feels like a fitting narrative epilogue to BioShock Infinite; but I don't think there's any reason to play it more than once.

Better than: BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea - Episode 1
Not as good as: BioShock Infinite
As for Irrational Games: now "Ghost Story Games," well... we'll see.

Burial at Sea - Episode 1 still suffers from an easily-reproducible, game-breaking bug -- one which happens to highlight the folly of infrequent autosaves. Granted, Irrational Games only really had three months to fix it before being effectively shut down. But it only feels more biting, four years later.

That aside, Burial at Sea's first episode remains a short, sloppy, and mediocre story, married to a very poor gameplay direction (restricting my ammo doesn't make the shitty stealth any better!). It would be outright bad if not for the ending, which isn't that satisfying by itself, but does add a little flavor to BioShock Infinite's conclusion.

One more to go.

Better than: BioShock 2: Minerva's Den Remastered ... though that's still a maybe.
Not as good as: BioShock Infinite
I'm still quite proud: of my "dog of a DLC" quip from my first playthrough.

InfiniPicross's puzzles don't "look like" anything; they're randomly generated. To me, this isn't a weakness at all. The puzzles could look like Rorschach tests or traffic accidents for all I care; I just want to fill them out.

If all I had to do for the rest of my life was solve nonograms, InfiniPicross could facilitate that pretty well. But I do occasionally have to eat, sleep, and watch television. So the game's promise of "infinite" puzzles wasn't really what impressed me.

It was the fact that I generated a 99 x 50 puzzle - obliterating the 40 x 30 size record from Paint it Back - and took over three hours to solve it.

Even if I never start the game up again, that solve alone feels well worth InfiniPicross's paltry asking price.

Better than: Pokémon Picross
Not as good as: Paint it Back, just because I do like a scripted "campaign" of puzzles to solve.
It can generate up to 99 x 99: but I think I'll need a bigger monitor (and probably a full day) to pull that off.

I solved enough of the puzzles in Infinifactory's last level to look ahead to the game's ending -- or, what I thought was the ending. Apparently it really just unlocked the second half of the game.

I mean, I'm not going to complain about more puzzles, so long as they continue to present new and interesting challenges. But I am starting to feel a bit worn out. More so than in SpaceChem and TIS-100, Infinifactory's solutions require a considerable amount of work to implement -- due to having to manage moving parts and equipment in 3D space.

And as the puzzles become more complex, a surprising challenge has emerged: being able to move the avatar around the puzzle, and reach equipment you need to manipulate. I'd much rather that the avatar had no collision physics, so I could more easily debug my increasingly tightly-packed machinery.

Also, I was really hoping to close the book on this and move ahead to Shenzhen I/O. Oh, Zachtronics, you spoil me so.

Progress: Resource Site 902.42