There are already some big things I'm worried about from the Extinction gameplay presentation: like the balance of grinding through trash mobs versus "real" combat with ogres, and how important checkpoints will be if the ogres can kill you in one hit.

But it's also ticking some important boxes for me. The traversal mechanics are robust, and flitting around rooftops and giant ogres looks super fun (with more freshness than Assassin's Creed: Pyramids). And the ogre fights have a shade of Shadow of the Colossus to them (for which I have more optimism, re: usable controls, than I do for Colossus's upcoming remake).

On balance, Extinction looks like a pleasant surprise from the studio best known for ruining Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. Let's see how they fare with an original production.

This is not a reveal, Nintendo. You just put the words "Metroid" and "Prime" and "4" next to each other. Call me back when you're confident enough in the game's existence to show it.

Maybe I'm the only person on Earth who played Beyond Good & Evil and didn't like it. Over a decade later, all I can say is that it was profoundly un-memorable; the story wasn't noteworthy and the gameplay was very routine.

(I do remember that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time came out around the same time, and that game was super frickin' sweet.)

So it's doubly mystifying to me how the no-gameplay prequel trailer is driving so much hype. Is it because the monkey says "motherfucker?" It certainly can't be because of the hackneyed and Michael Bay-esque police chase.

Maybe if I could borrow Playtonic's time machine, I could go back to 2004, play BG&E again, and try to understand why the game became so beloved. For now, I don't remember the game as anything but wholly unremarkable.

So The New Colossus takes New Order's alternate-history resistance to the Nazi empire, and moves it to America? One, please.

I only hope that New Colossus can meet the storytelling bar set by its predecessor -- and the trailer shows some great potential.

Book of Demons is immediately jarring, not just because of its slickly-animated high-definition papercraft presentation (like an amped-up Epistory), but also because it's a clear "homage" to Diablo. And when I say "homage," I mean that there is an old man standing by the tiny, depressed village's well, and he asks you to delve under the haunted church, into the 3/4-isometric catacombs to fight evil.

They're clearly going for a nostalgia angle, but to me it just feels uninspired. At least Torchlight, for all it cribbed from Diablo, tried a little bit to make a game world of its own. Book of Demons puts forth no effort whatsoever.

That said, Book of Demons does propose a suitably unique set of gameplay systems: equipment, spells, and passive skills are all squashed into virtual cards. Your mana is consumed either by a card's base/equip cost, or by using an ability -- so, with six mana points, you could equip a four-mana weapon and cast a one-mana spell twice. (If I understood the system correctly.)

The game also makes an attempt to streamline combat, although I think it is somewhat misguided. There is an auto-attack feature, so you will automatically hit the closest enemy at a slow rate, but if you click and hold on the enemy your attacks will be more rapid. Which makes the auto-attack more of a nuisance than anything, as coming in range of an enemy will just annoy it with slow attacks.

There are some fun twists on click-and-hold combat, like shields that have to be clicked before you can start damaging the enemy underneath, or infected enemies that explode when they die, requiring some tactical movement.

There is also an irritating mechanic where removing poison requires clicking on your health orb at the right time. (My guess, at this point, is that they are designing primarily for mobile/touch-based platforms.)

Dungeon movement is also ... streamlined, in a way. Dungeons are mapped out with grid lines, and when you click on a line, you'll keep moving in that direction until it ends, or until an enemy stops you. It may free the player from having to click-and-hold, or hold a keyboard button, to move; but it makes stopping, or reversing direction, more fiddly and error-prone than it should be.

The last thing I saw in my brief playtime was the game's system for choosing dungeon length. Every time you enter the dungeon, you choose how many floors will be generated, based on how long you want to play. But ... what if you want to go right to a more difficult level, like how Diablo allowed you to quickly travel to deeper floors? It isn't clear to me if the game has a feature like this, or if it wants me to keep playing freshly-generated "early" floors, over and over again.

Book of Demons has a really cool visual style, and there are a couple interesting mechanical riffs on Diablo-like clicking. But its clear efforts to court the mobile-games audience do it more damage than favor, in the form of a shallow narrative, an unnecessary "card" metaphor, and mouse-unfriendly controls.

Progress: Played the demo, finished two short dungeons.

As with the un-remastered BioShock 2, the worst thing about BioShock 2 Remastered is that it just isn't as interesting as the first game. Especially in its opening levels, which lean very heavily on the implicit appeal of Rapture and the Big Daddy/Little Sister motif, offering very little intrigue of their own.

To wit, I started playing it shortly after finishing BioShock Remastered and didn't muster enough interest to return to it for almost six months.

And - frustratingly - also like the 2010 version, BioShock 2 Remastered suffers from console-first design. Hacking is dumbed-down. There's no UI for quickly switching between weapons or plasmids. If you have a gamepad plugged in when the game starts, the keyboard just doesn't work. I feel almost grateful that there are graphics options at all.

While the core gameplay is still engaging enough, and the remaster does add some appreciated graphical polish, there's nothing to really do about BioShock 2's biggest problem: Andrew Ryan's story was better.

To lazily quote myself from about seven years ago:

Once it gets going, BioShock 2's combat is fun -- but as in the first game, it isn't really enough to make the game great. What made the first game great was the freshness and mystique of its atmosphere, which simply can't be bottled up and re-released.

Progress: Dionysis Park

Infinifactory's middle levels had me a little perplexed -- not just because of the puzzles themselves, but because I still hadn't identified the fundamental "thing" of the game. In SpaceChem, puzzles became ruled by your ability to master concurrency and synchronization tools; in TIS-100, by your resourcefulness in storing and moving data.

It wasn't until the last couple puzzles in Production Zone 2 that it clicked for me. Infinifactory's "thing" is flow control: using pushers and blockers, along with 3D space (and gravity!), to manage the position and timing of each part in fine detail. I'm just now stumbling through the primitive mechanisms of preventing overflow and synchronizing multi-step processes, and it feels like I'm finally learning the game, at last.

I might argue that Infinifactory's earlier puzzles don't stress these lessons enough, but, it's hard to really knock it for that. Even when it was only teaching me how to use various types of block, I was having plenty of fun completing puzzles and pushing the narrative forward.

Progress: Resource Site 338.11

Great Permutator takes its titular descriptor seriously; more seriously than I'd expected it to. While on its face, the game looks like a 2D version of assembly-line puzzler Infinifactory, Permutator's puzzle mechanics are actually quite different.

The goal in each level is to re-order the input blocks. That's it.

There are two things that make this difficult:

• The conveyor belts can't cross each other, so moving inputs across the floor requires the precise arrangement of special permutating devices.
• And timing is important, but timing can only be affected by shortening or lengthening the conveyor belts between devices.

Frankly, these challenges aren't fun to me. Limited mechanics can make for a fun game - TIS-100 is proof of that - but these mechanics are so limited, that I can't muster the interest to work through them.

It doesn't help that the game looks not just basic, but dull. It doesn't feel like there's any visual payoff for solving a puzzle.

For someone who can remain engaged with it, Great Permutator offers a lot of puzzles to solve. And, hey, they're even pretty challenging. I just don't care enough to spend time with it.

But wait -- I have to correct what I said about "limited" mechanics. From some internet research, I can see that later levels include devices like block duplicators and color analyzers. Those sound fun! Why can't I play with those?

Unfortunately, Great Permutator doesn't allow me to skip ahead by more than three levels. And there are a whole lot of limited puzzles to suffer through before those fun parts come into play.

Progress: Finished 7 levels.

Sitting somewhere between Minecraft: Java Edition and Don't Starve, crafting-and-adventuring-survival-game Crashlands is impressive in many respects. The premise is immediately engaging thanks to some humorous writing; the early game strikes a comfortable balance between tutorials and discovered gameplay; it has cross-platform cloud saves, so you can play it on damn near anything; and the game itself is pretty fun, or at least it starts out that way.

But there are two things that made me tire of Crashlands after just a couple of hours:

(1) Combat is boring. There isn't much in the way of tactics: at least as far as I played, none of the secondary weapon options were nearly as important as just continuing to hit something with your main weapon. And although enemies often telegraph their attacks, there are no dodges or parries. You can try to walk away from an enemy's attack, and then re-engage it, but doing this with a mouse is fidgety and tedious.

Ultimately, combat comes down to who has the bigger offense and defense stats. Which forms a poor combo with my second complaint:

(2) The overwhelming influence of randomness on equipment strength. All of your weapons and armor pieces are crafted, but at the time of crafting, they're granted randomly-selected attributes of randomly-determined quality. Sometimes you'll get exceptionally lucky and make an "Excellent" piece of armor that makes combat a cinch. Other times you'll get an "Acceptable" item that hardly offers any resistance or bonus effects.

If you made an item that turned out to be shitty, you can salvage it and get some of the materials back; but it won't be enough to make another one, so you'll need to get back out there and grind more materials before you can try crafting it again.

The shallow combat means that your primary goal is crafting good items -- and the randomness of crafting turns the game primarily into a grind for materials.

It's a shame, because the premise and presentation of Crashlands is really compelling; but after only a couple hours, its gameplay just became too dull for me.

Better than: Don't Starve
Not as good as: Factorio
Comparable with: Terraria, sans multiplayer

Regency Solitaire isn't what I expected, in a few different ways.

For one thing, it isn't quite the solitaire ruleset that I'm familiar with (which is Klondike, I guess). Rather than playing cards from piles or from the deck onto multiple "foundations," cards from the piles are played onto the deck; effectively replacing four persistent foundations with one, volatile one. This simplification makes the game easy to jump into, but also reduces the number of possible plays at any given time, making it pretty easy to get stuck.

(Of note is that you cannot recycle the deck; once you've run through it, the round is over.)

Also, you play as a noble daughter attempting to court with a rich lord. Not only is this Jane Eyre-esque plot ... bizarre, for a video game, it has nothing to do with the game itself. The protagonist isn't some ace card player on a quest to prove herself a solitaire champion; the game sessions and storytelling simply take detached turns, one after the other. Imagine if Kratos played checkers inbetween cutscenes of Greek gods being disemboweled.

Regency Solitaire also has power-ups, unlocked by upgrades that you purchase with gold from clearing piles of cards. These power-ups reveal hidden cards on the board, clear arbitrary cards, allow you to play wildcards... Oh, and there are also lock cards, and key cards, and some special lock cards that unlock when you play a certain number of face cards. Yeah, there's plenty of wacky shit in here.

But while said wacky shit can occasionally get you out of a jam, by and large the game is still heavily reliant on luck. Which pile should you play from to reveal a crucial card, and which one will leave you stuck? Will using a power-up now help you, or remove a card you should have played? Will you find another play before the deck runs out and the round ends? Well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Regency Solitaire is weird in a bunch of ways, and to a degree I admire its mechanical creativity. But even aside from my total lack of interest in its Victorian romance story -- I really don't enjoy my success or failure being decided by random chance.