Data may suggest that I've neglected the Glog over this past year:

... but that suggestion is only mostly correct. Unlike my excuse about backlog-culling in 2022, I must admit that in 2023, I simply didn't play very many games.

However! Technically, pedantically, loophole-ally, I very much did not neglect the Glog's code; what started as a weekend hacking project, revamping how I build this website, eventually turned into automated data updates with auto-correcting reference links.

Now I'm just waiting for that reference-correction case ... to actually occur ...

Anyway, I did play some games in 2023, new and otherwise:

Last year started with me wrapping up a Witcher 3 replay in Blood and Wine. Although I'd timed this replay to take advantage of the game's late 2022 tech update, Blood and Wine reminded me that:

... Witcher 3 didn't need an update to make it worth replaying. And nowhere is this more evident than Toussaint, where the Blood and Wine expansion doesn't just paint a beautiful rural-urban-hybrid landscape with the same kind of deeply enthralling content as the main game.

[...] [Blood and Wine] encapsulates all the best that Witcher 3 has to offer, in an irresistably beautiful virtual France.

Later in the year, I returned to Middle-earth in Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. The former always felt a bit like a proof-of-concept, a prototype, for the game Monolith really had in mind -- and the new-to-me Bright Lord DLC, with its territory and army features, kinda confirmed that.

Mordor's Lord of the Hunt add-on, and War's Blade of Galadriel and Desolation of Mordor, were also more fun than I'd expected them to be. That last DLC in particular felt like a successful experiment in re-theming the base game's mechanics:

... thanks to Desolation of Mordor's other design ambition: Batman tech.

Baranor may not have elf magic, but he does have gadgets - okay, "Numenorean artifacts" - which let him grapple up walls, glide through the air, and lob explosives from afar, plus a few tricks for controlling crowds and stunning captains.

So, my replayed games in 2023 were already pretty DLC-heavy, but wait: there's more! (More DLC, I mean.)

Although I praised Outer Wilds in 2022, I didn't write about- okay, I didn't give up on its Echoes of the Eye expansion until months later.

... I've been reluctant to return because this DLC is chock-full of the exact "obtuse points" that only occasionally marred my Outer Wilds playthrough.

The confusingly-named, also-first-person, also-in-space, but wholly-unrelated The Outer Worlds came with a couple DLCs of its own: Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos. These ended up feeling like "more of the same" of the base game, for better and for worse:

Like the main game, Gorgon and Eridanos are stuffed with a large amount of content, but it's thoroughly one-note and unimaginative. [...]

Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos aren't bad, but they are bland; and if you already felt that way about the base game, then these expansions won't change your mind.

Hey, speaking of Meh games:

I played my share of underwhelming titles in 2023 -- particularly, cool ideas with flawed execution, like Return of the Obra Dinn being skewered by its unhelpful notebook; Midnight Protocol ruining its hacking strategy with random dice-rolls; A Way Out struggling to balance co-op gimmicks with storytelling; and Eternal Threads moving way too slowly as it unraveled its narrative.

Most heartbreaking, for sure, was Last Call BBS feeling more like a retrocomputing demo than a fitting farewell to Zachtronics:

The holistic experience feels like a warmly authentic celebration of the era when personal computers were fascinating toys, and not quite yet indispensable tools. But - and here's the disappointing bit - it doesn't meaningfully celebrate Zachtronics' back catalog of programming puzzle games.

[...] Some of these games are short, and some are too long and repetitive, but they're all -- well, not "simple" exactly, but shallow. Even the implementation details of the three programming games don't feel like "depth" so much as overcomplications of small ideas.

But! I also played some stand-out Awesome games in 2023, even aside from old-favorite replays. Disco Elysium was a real treat, dense with uniquely weird world-building and interactions:

Points of interest in Martinaise, and its population's personalities, are all rich with fine, meticulous, artisinal details to unravel. There's so much fascinating history, and colorful commentary!, to read through. It's like Mass Effect's Codex but with dialog choices.

[...] Sometimes, actually quite often, Disco Elysium's side-stories are so intriguing and enthralling that you'll forget all about its primary thread. Which makes the murder-mystery plot's twists and turns extra surprising.

And Tears of the Kingdom did an incredible job of revisiting, but also reinvigorating, its predecessor:

The Depths recapture the same feelings that made Breath of the Wild so memorable: being overwhelmed by a huge new world, and terrified by its angry inhabitants; getting taunted by its dangers as you carefully work on quests in its margins; gradually powering up and becoming more comfortable in it; and eventually overpowering it by eating its big, weird baddies for breakfast.

[...] Like last time, [quality-of-life] issues melt away in light of Tears of the Kingdom's awe-inspiring new environments, its refreshing twists on the old, and the incredible amount of stuff you can do in its even-more-massive world.

And then there's Cyberpunk 2077.

I called it Good, I enjoyed it in parts, but ultimately I couldn't ignore that it felt "very unfinished":

There are good parts: mechanics that're functional and fun, missions that tell memorable stories, character interactions that feel real and engaging. But there are also plenty of lulls, and misses, and outright mistakes. [...]

It's a shame that Cyberpunk 2077's impossible ambition prevented it from telling a complete story.

But just a couple months after that post, CD Projekt announced their "Update 2.0" patch alongside the Phantom Liberty expansion. So, yeah, we will see.

What else am I looking forward to in 2024? Well, aside from upcoming releases like Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores (on PC) and Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy, there are a bunch more 2023 releases that I still need to catch up on -- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Baldur's Gate III, Super Mario RPG (2023), and The Talos Principle II (whose demo I quite enjoyed), just to name a few.

At the moment, I'm quite enjoying some deep-sea fishing and sushi-ing with Dave the Diver. But Dave had better solve the "Sea People's" problems soon, 'cause my backlog is starting to grow again.

So, remember how Gone Home overcame "walking simulator" bullshit by focusing on a single, tightly-crafted story, even at the cost of its running-length? And remember how Fullbright's next game, Tacoma, delivered more interactivity and additional character development but still kept it brisk and brief?

Eternal Threads had an idea similar to Tacoma's - scrub through a timeline to learn characters' stories and uncover key secrets - plus, branching decisions like a choose-your-own-adventure; but it fumbles by spending entirely too much time on un-critical, un-interesting content.

Foremost, there's the "experiments in time travel" sci-fi meta-narrative, which forces you to sit and stare at a prologue filled with boring, inconsequential technobabble. But even in its core narrative, made up of nearly 200 individual scenes, Eternal Threads can't help but waste time in many scenes that just aren't meaningful to the plot nor to its cast. There's considerable "filler" that, even when it's well-written, didn't need to be here.

The mechanical gameplay is a bit of a slog, too. Credit where it's due: Eternal Threads has a pretty damned convenient timeline navigation interface, like a streamlined view of Elsinore's schedule notebook -- plus, here, you can seek to any event at random. But to watch a scene, after selecting it in that interface, you then need to walk your character to the scene's location. Following the timeline's order of events means you'll do lots of going upstairs, watching a bit, going downstairs, watching another bit, going back upstairs...

This is where I wish Eternal Threads had copied Tacoma's homework, and let me walk along with characters as they moved from one event to the next. With this game's scene design, even if I'm only following one character's scenes, I still need to pull up the Time Map and select the next one every time.

Okay, the game is annoyingly slow and a little clunky, so why did I keep playing it? Well, the upside is that this story is actually, legitimately good. I put the hours into Eternal Threads because I wanted to unravel the mysteries of its house, to investigate each character's personal mysteries, and to observe all of their possible outcomes.

And although the characters' presentations are imperfect - rough models, primitive lip-sync, mediocre voice acting - their writing is really well-done. The emotive exposition each has, and the way they interact with one another, really made me feel like I understood these people and their individual plights.

Though I hestitate to recommend the game, due to its pacing struggles, Eternal Threads does have a strong-enough narrative to be noteworthy. (Maybe it would've been more fun as a co-op activity, choosing branches and watching them play out with a partner.)

Better than: Dear Esther, Shadow of Destiny, Until Dawn
Not as good as: Elsinore, The Forgotten City, Gone Home, Tacoma
... one more caveat: getting the "good ending," making the branch decisions that the game wants you to make, isn't always what I would call logical or reasonable. The destination isn't as satisfying as the journey.

A Way Out, the game that Hazelight Studios made before It Takes Two, is similar but not as well-made. Shocker, right?

Where its successor uses surreal magic as a basis for fantastical levels, puzzles, and action sequences, A Way Out leans on ideas from crime-thriller cinema. You and your partner will more-or-less re-enact movie and TV scenes about prison breaks and life on the lam - helping them survive a yard beating, distracting guards while they smuggle an escape tool, giving them a boost to the air vent - inbetween trite minigames like "mash X to bench-press weights."

A Way Out's storytelling also feels heavily influenced by (what I assume are) Josef Fares's favorite films, although that narrative doesn't really warm up until the game is mostly over. Its first half or so over-emphasizes purely mechanical scenarios for the sake of gimmicky co-opportunities, neglecting plot and character development; It Takes Two's story may have been far from perfect, but it was certainly paced better than this.

(This game also suffers from a bit more not-quite-right English than its follow-up -- totally understandable, for a Swedish developer, but very noticable in settings like "American prison" and "American trailer park.")

And it should be - unfortunately - unsurprising that A Way Out also suffers from occasional-to-frequent confusing button prompts, missing button prompts, and frustrating controls. I don't think that the game ever explicitly tells you that you need to "move" away from cover to detach from it; you've just got to figure that out by accident or luck.

Co-op games that don't suck are few and far between, so, I appreciate that A Way Out put in the effort. But I appreciate even more that Hazelight continued banging this drum with It Takes Two, and I hope they continue refining these ideas with whatever they do next.

Better than: Biped
Not as good as: It Takes Two
It's hard to call out some of the clearest film references without spoiling anything: but in general, if you've watched a movie about organized crime, you'll probably find this story pretty familiar.

I'm not just feeling down about Last Call BBS because it's "the last game from Zachtronics." I'm also down about it because it isn't very good.

Last Call BBS does knock one thing out of the park: retrocomputing nostalgia. Its low-res fictional desktop environment, curiously clicking around to explore settings and files, the false tones of its modem dialing in, waiting forever for a game to download, being baffled by that game's total lack of instructions...

The holistic experience feels like a warmly authentic celebration of the era when personal computers were fascinating toys, and not quite yet indispensable tools. But - and here's the disappointing bit - it doesn't meaningfully celebrate Zachtronics' back catalog of programming puzzle games.

Last Call BBS is a virtual desktop that functions as a minigame collection; instead of working through progressive stages of one overarching game concept, you'll install and play eight different games from the titular BBS. You might suspect that this unfocused design could result in multiple only-partially-baked experiences, and well, you wouldn't be wrong.

Of its eight minigames, there are three that resemble typical Zachtronics fare, but all of them are unambitious in scope and frustrating to play:

• "20th Century Food Court" sees you architecting assembly lines and chaining logic elements to craft and deliver food orders. It's a promising idea - as proven by other similar games - but with frustrating mechanical controls and no narrative integration, early puzzles don't suggest any payoff except more fiddly tedium. (Just look at some of these spaghetti solutions.)
• "ChipWizard Professional" goes all the way down to the metal, as in, etching silicon to fabricate transistors and implement logical operators. Laying out elements the right way is needlessly meticulous, manipulating PCB layers is glitchy, and the non-game theme is overwhelmingly dull; this felt way too much like a fake version of an electrical engineering course.
• "X'PBGH: The Forbidden Path" is about cellular automation. I think. Between its deliberately arcane interface and its discomforting Giger-esque presentation, I just couldn't tolerate this one for very long.

There are more, non-programming minigames, too:

• "Dungeons & Diagrams" is a neat grid-solving puzzle game, which I did enjoy for a bit, but started feeling pretty samey after a dozen or so screens (of ... 64!?).
• "HACK*MATCH" is an arcade falling-block-swapper clone, with the impenetrable difficulty you might expect from a schmup-themed action puzzler.
• "Kabufuda Solitaire" and "Sawayama Solitaire" each evoke a different take on solitaire card games -- just like the tiresome solitaires from previous Zachtronics titles.
• And finally there's "STEED FORCE Hobby Studio," a cozy and pleasant - but extremely brief - clicking game where you assemble mecha models out of digitized part sheets.

Some of these games are short, and some are too long and repetitive, but they're all -- well, not "simple" exactly, but shallow. Even the implementation details of the three programming games don't feel like "depth" so much as overcomplications of small ideas.

It certainly doesn't help that, much like real-world pre-Y2K software, many of the minigames are an absolute chore to control -- even after reading and re-reading their (authentically) terse instructional guides.

As I think back on 10+ years of Zachtronics game experience - from my first taste of SpaceChem's delightful sci-fi concurrency puzzles; through their experiments with 3D space in Infinifactory, with smaller scale in TIS-100, with high-level abstractions in Shenzhen I/O, and with stronger storytelling in Opus Magnum; to a grand culmination of these works in Exapunks, and then Eliza (2019)'s promising foray into a new genre - man, these games were so strongly, fondly memorable.

Molek-Syntez may have been a step back from some of its predecessors, but at least it was mechanically substantial.

In some interviews about shutting down, Zachtronics folks express feeling bored of making their traditional games -- which is fair, they've been doing it for a while. I'd say Last Call BBS shows just how bored they got.

Better than: Glyphs Apprentice
Not as good as: Human Resource Machine, Silicon Zeroes, ... or any of the Zachtronics games I linked above.
As endgame celebrations go, not as good as: Mass Effect 3: Citadel

Just as with Blade of Galadriel, I'd previously dismissed Desolation of Mordor for neglecting some of Shadow of War's fundamentals -- in particular, Talion's "gravewalking" through death with minimal penalty. Baranor, unfortunately, is a mere mortal and his life uh ... resets, upon death.

This DLC's rogue-like approach, where you can lose hired mercenaries and looted gear upgrades if a captain gets the better of you, made me put my gamepad down in annoyed frustration a couple times. But I was lured back, and ultimately finished Baranor's story, thanks to Desolation of Mordor's other design ambition: Batman tech.

Baranor may not have elf magic, but he does have gadgets - okay, "Numenorean artifacts" - which let him grapple up walls, glide through the air, and lob explosives from afar, plus a few tricks for controlling crowds and stunning captains.

Although the process of unlocking those abilties is needlessly obtuse (the game's hints about their locations are garbage -- seriously, just find a map online), they don't reset when Baranor dies, so prioritizing them is a no-brainer. And with a full utility belt, Baranor is a pretty unstoppable force, even without looted weapons or hired mercs.

Heck, after I'd collected all the Numenor tech, using it to plow through orc captains and outposts and the Shindram fortress was fairly trivial. Not that I'm complaining; I love mowing down orcs. With upgrades, Baranor can feel even more overpowered than Talion did, so long as he stops to refill his health kits every now and then.

It's a shame that Desolation of Mordor didn't aim higher with its narrative: aside from a few fun bits of banter with Baranor's brother Serka, and brief interactions with Torvin (yeah, the dwarf from Lord of the Hunt!), there just isn't much to it. But I guess a threadbare story makes sense for this DLC's focus on replaying and speedrunning through Lithlad.

Which isn't really my cup of tea. But! I'm still glad that I gave Desolation of Mordor enough chances to enjoy deploying a deadly gadget arsenal on a hapless fortess of orcs.

Better than: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor - The Bright Lord
Not as good as: Middle-earth: Shadow of War - Blade of Galadriel
I dunno if I should get my hopes up: but this DLC suggests that Monolith could pull off emulating Rocksteady's formula in their planned Wonder Woman game.

Back in 2018, I dismissed the Blade of Galadriel add-on as presumably diminished by the absence of Shadow of War's excellent Nemesis System. But despite that, Blade of Galadriel does have merits of its own, separate from Talion's big orc-conquering adventure.

Eltariel's light-element powers make for a couple interesting changes to combat: shining her elven flashlight into orcs' faces is a neat crowd-control trick, and wonderfully effective when bum-rushing an enemy party. Stunning a group then disintegrating them one by one is a fun, satisfying time.

(Though it is annoying that so many captains are conveniently immune to light.)

Oh, and though Eltarial doesn't "dominate" them like Talion, she does still meet plenty of orc captains with colorful personalities -- sometimes even on friendly terms. Her quest includes scripted missions to recruit helpful champions, and these weirdos - like an architecturally-minded Olog with a huge hammer and a pair of burn-damaged bomb enthusiasts - channel the same quirky energies that made Ratbag and Bruz such fun to work with.

Yeah, it's a relatively short story, not as engrossing as Shadow of War in mechanics nor in narrative ambition. (The DLC's ending cinematic, which reveals the origin of the "Rogue Nazgul", is even more bizarre than Shelob wearing a dress.) But, much like Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor - Lord of the Hunt, it has enough new gameplay and enough entertaining writing to justify its running-length.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is awesome for a good, long while -- after you unlock the domination ability, and before the endgame Shadow Wars combat becomes tiresome.

Shadow of War really does feel like the fulfillment of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor's orc-conquering promise, particularly as teased in the Bright Lord DLC. Finally, you can build an army of brainwashed orcs; sabotage an enemy fortress's defenders; storm the gates, take the throne and change its color on the map which surely pisses Sauron off quite a bit.

And you get to do so in more, more-diverse map areas, a very welcome improvement over the last game's limited environments. Shadow of War even does a pretty great job of guiding Talion into and through those maps with its multi-threaded, free-form quest lines. (Although the moments when one quest thread is blocked by another can be a little awkward and confusing.)

The embellished inventory system feels kinda unnecessary, with so many equipment slots and so many item types and so many stat effects, and ultimately none of it matters so much as just choosing the highest-level gear. At least there's an upgrade option, so if your equipment is old and falling behind, you can bring its stats up to your current level.

The captains with multiple invulnerabilities problem seems like it's even worse this time, though. Maybe because of how crowded and chaotic battles can get; if there's one thing worse than a shield-wielding captain who blocks normal attacks, can't be countered, is immune to vault reversals, and is immune to freezing -- it's when that captain is densely covered by other orcs, and the game's targeting system misdirects your strikes on them to annoyingly bounce off of the super-captain instead.

Encounters like that can really take the fun out of combat, and coupled with how monotonous the wave-based siege defense mode gets, the Shadow Wars epilogue just doesn't feel worthwhile.

That aside, though, Shadow of War's proof of the concept set up by Shadow of Mordor is pretty thoroughly satisfying.

It was hard for me to imagine how a sequel to The Talos Principle would work, but The Talos Principle II's demo did a great job of clarifying its intent.

First, with some reminders of how the last game worked: flipping switches and connecting lasers in Egypt-themed puzzle rooms. These felt less like "real puzzles" than like a gentle reintroduction to Croteam's methods, although I did have to remember a few old tricks, like avoiding intersecting laser beams and fan-lifting tools with a stabilizing hexahedron.

Then Talos 2 reveals its narrative ambition, which is surprising because -- well, because of how clear that ambition is. The first game's (excellent) Horizon-like plot was told very unconventionally, intertwined with philosophical musings in static data recordings. This time, there are NPCs you have conversations with, and they have faces, even lipsynced speaking animations.

It's a big change from detached, asynchronous recordings, and from Road to Gehenna's BBS text chats. But Talos 2 keeps those techniques too (including a PDA for texts and recordings), and it applies all of its storytelling tools to a fascinating combination of old-world history, new-world lore following Talos 1's ending, and present-day twisty-and-turny events.

As for Talos 2's new world and puzzles, well, I'm cautiously optimistic.

I love the variety of environments here, especially the Mediterranean-esque cliffs and shores, which reminded me of The Witness (2016)'s beautiful geography. New mechanics, on the other hand, are off-putting from their introductions: the RGB connector didn't work at all like I expected, and the rules of when teleporters can't teleport (or when drillers can't drill) are simularly counterintuitive.

Hopefully the full game's puzzles fill in the confusing blanks of those rules, and do better at teaching the player how to find solutions. I'd love to avoid leaning on interweb guides like I did for Road to Gehenna's brain-meltingly nuanced mazes.

Progress: "Finished" the demo (pretty certain I missed a bunch of hidden secrets).

Eight years ago, I turned the Glog into a static site, using Hugo to generate webpages from post text and metadata. And while this was a big improvement on what came before, that Glog still ... wasn't ... quite everything I wanted it to be.

Though if I'm being honest with myself, finally pulling the trigger on my own static site generator had less to do with Hugo's (and golang's) awkward extensibility limitations, and more to do with my hunger for weekend software development.

So now the Glog has its own static site generator, and it's on GitHub. (The code is public, not for general-purpose use or for community-building, just to "show my work.")

I've already been building live Glog content with GlogGenerator for a couple weeks -- once I got it over the hurdle of matching Hugo's output. Now I'm at the fun part: gradually working through an endless TO-DO list of workflow fixes and output enhancements.

What does this mean for the Glog as you see it? ... not a hell of a lot! So far, there are only a few intentional changes, like ensuring that inter-Glog links (such as a post's links to Game or Tag pages) are always valid.

(There've also been some unintentional changes, like new URLs to some of those Game and Tag pages, as a result of fixing how punctuation is URL-ized.)

But, at least for the foreseeable future, GlogGenerator isn't meant to revolutionize how I complain about videogames. It's meant to be a project I can hack away on as a hobby. ... like the Glog itself.

Oh yeah, there's a new Lord of the Rings game out!, and ... hmm, you know what. Maybe I'll replay Shadow of Mordor instead.

Nearly a decade on, Talion's quest plays mostly as I remember it, for better and for worse:

• Narratively explaining, and justifying, how Talion returns after death is still a cool ludonarrative trick.
• The story overall isn't very impressive, with Talion and Celebrimbor experiencing little growth from beginning to end, and quest NPCs feeling entirely disposable.
• Sneaking around and stealthily dispatching orcs is a brutal, merciless joy. So is un-stealthily brawling with a group as you dodge, counter, and execute them one by one. (Some frustrating bullshit notwithstanding, like captains with multiple invulnerabilities.)
• It takes entirely too long for the "brand" power to unlock; without the ability to brainwash orcs, the first half of the game feels mechanically incomplete.

This time around, though, Shadow of Mordor's high points feel more familiar and its low points more prominent -- particularly since that "brand" pacing stumble hides the true potential of the Nemesis system for so long.

So while "Assassin's Creed in Mordor" is still a fun time, newer open-world adventures - especially this game's own sequel - have left it slightly diminished.

As for the DLC side-stories, which I hadn't played until now: I'm impressed! Though Lord of the Hunt and The Bright Lord don't exceed the main game's low narrative bar, they do take some surprisingly fun liberties with its gameplay.

In the main campaign, Caragors and Graugs were less frequently "useful tools" and more frequently "annoying obstacles"; but in Lord of the Hunt, stealthy panther-like Caragaths and disgusting acid-vomiting Wretched Graugs are powerful enough to be worth capturing and wielding. Using these formidable beasts to infiltrate (or straight-up invade) enemy strongholds puts a legitimately new twist on Talion's previous tactics.

And in The Bright Lord, as Celebrimbor doesn't just brand one or two Uruks but enlists entire regions of them, the endgame's promise of dominating Mordor and building an army against Sauron is finally fulfilled.

Although I wish I could've done that with Talion's full suite of overpowered upgrades, rather than Celebrimbor's more-limited abilities. (... wait, isn't that just Shadow of War? I guess it is!)

In retrospect, it does seem like a lot of Shadow of Mordor was just a stepping stone to the bigger, bad-asser maps and mechanics in Shadow of War.

But slaughtering orcs in this first installment was still enjoyable, and! I'm glad to have finally caught up on its DLCs' fascinating twists on that orc-slaughtering formula.