When I started this quest, it was intimidating in every dimension: the enormous map, full of surprising terrain and weather effects; the ferocious monsters, demanding thoughtful combat preparation and reflexes; the breadth of activities to do, from townsfolk's quests to secrets hidden throughout the landscape; and the mysterious story, blending a post-apocalyptic world with Zelda-flavored myths.

Unfortunately, in all of these aspects, Breath of the Wild's intrigue does eventually run out.

• While the game world is beautifully crafted, and the map is a joy to explore, returning to its scenic vistas in later quests becomes tedious.
• While the early game is defined by monsters that can destroy Link without batting an eye, equipment upgrades eventually trivialize even the mighty Guardians.
• While the game's towns are dense with side-quests, it doesn't take long to find that there are only a few towns to visit, and the total quest count remains somewhat low.
• And while recovering Link's memories seems interesting at first, the backstory ends up being pretty underdeveloped and disappointing.

I want to clarify that, up until Breath of the Wild's "endgame" crests, it is a splendid, incredible experience; not just a reinvigoration of the Zelda franchise, but an exemplary game on its own. There are dozens of hours of fun in running across its grassy fields, recovering its ancient artifacts, solving the hylians' hum-drum problems, and slapping bokoblins around with glowing laser swords.

From now on, Breath of the Wild is the bar that other action-adventure games should be striving for.

It's just a shame that the final dungeon, the final boss, and the final cutscene are all so ... drab. And that there's never really any sense of narrative payoff -- almost all the characters you meet are lifelessly flat, and tales of the ancient past never fully develop.

I also need to call out the game's graphical performance (on Wii U, although as far as I know it isn't dramatically different on Switch). The resolution is noticeably low, and the frame rate can get abysmal, particularly in populated towns. The game is at its worst when a moblin starts to ragdoll, and the screen can freeze for a full, excruciating second. ... it's bad.

Then again, it occurs to me that Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask also ran like total shit on N64. And they're still remembered pretty fondly. So there's that. (At least Breath of the Wild has a pretty great draw distance.)

Despite some performance issues and its story's shortcomings, I extracted nearly 100 hours of enchanting and/or exhilirating adventure out of Breath of the Wild, with no regrets. It's pretty great.

Better than: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
Not as good as: in terms of content richness, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition and its DLCs; although Breath of the Wild's own DLCs could change this.
Can't wait to play the high-performance remaster: ten years from now, assuming that Nintendo is still in business by then.

Progress: Rescued the four things, killed the evil shit, all 120 shrines found

Breath of the Wild is exactly the kick in the pants that the Zelda franchise needed so badly. In some ways, it makes Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and (especially) Skyward Sword look more like demos than full-fledged games -- while its forebears hinted at deep combat mechanics and a stamina system, Breath of the Wild fleshes its systems all the way out.

That the game's overall design has been heavily inspired by Skyrim is pretty clear (and, if I recall correctly, was noted explicitly by Nintendo in previous interviews). What's really admirable, though, is that Breath of the Wild is neither a Nintendo-style "we'll do it our way" imitation that misses the point, nor a lazy copy-and-paste design; it incorporates parts of Elder Scrolls (and Assassin's Creed) games that worked, fixes some that didn't, and includes more than enough unique flavor of its own.

For example, while Skyrim trains you to mash the quick-save key because of how infrequently it autosaves, Breath of the Wild smartly autosaves at every landmark, every time you approach an enemy camp, and every time you unlock a chest or uncover a secret. While the crafting systems in an Elder Scrolls game (and many other RPGs) can often feel like meaningless distractions, in Breath of the Wild they're necessary tools for surviving dangerous environments and difficult encounters.

Where Assassin's Creed uses climbing as a vertical version of walking, Zelda's implementation requires you to examine a cliff face beforehand, find resting points, and maybe even prepare some stamina-restoring items. And although Breath of the Wild has towers that you climb in order to unlock the map, similar to Ubisoft Game, they don't magically trivialize exploration; hidden secrets are still hidden. Rather, the benefits of climbing a tower are more literal -- a high vantage point for surveying the landscape, and a convenient jumping-off point for your paraglider.

Breath of the Wild, as a comprehensive package of gameplay mechanics and a huge world of content, produces a highly compelling gameplay loop: fighting enemies and collecting items, buying and crafting better equipment, exploring tougher areas, and finding new enemies and new items. Specifically, having to cope with boiling-hot and freezing-cold areas is a surprisingly effective motivator -- I'm always thinking about my stockpile of food that affects temperature resistance, and about the materials I still need for more permanent heat- and cold-resistant equipment.

Combat is tougher than it's ever been in a Zelda game. These enemies are seriously indimidating. And while it's wise for a tiny dude with a wooden sword to run from a giant mechanical spider with fuck-you lasers, eventually you're going to have to figure out how to kill it. I've only recently started fighting back against Guardians, and seeing them crumble before me is oh, so satisfying.

There's also a story in here. I don't mean to belittle it! It's actually pretty interesting, and I'm dying to uncover more of the plot by unlocking my amnesiac avatar's hidden memories. But the challenges between me and those memories are tough, and I have to go collect materials for this encounter, and oh is that a shrine off in the distance?

There is so much to do in Breath of the Wild's expansive world. Whether it requires survival skills, combat prowess, or puzzle-solving, all of it demands something from you. And all of it offers a reward for that effort, even if only in the form of "Now, go do the next thing." 'Cause the next thing is probably even cooler.

Progress: Revealed the full map, 39 shrines found

In its opening scenes, Oxenfree seemed like a clever-but-flawed story-based adventure game.

The clever part is that dialog choices take place in real time, as other characters are engaged in active conversation, and you decide how to contribute to it -- or to not contribute, choosing nothing and staying silent. It makes the characters really feel alive and fun to talk to. The flawed part is that the time limits on these choices are sometimes way too brief, and I felt at times like the game had cheated me out of an option by going too fast (or, other times, cheated another character's story by making me interrupt them).

However, it isn't all that long before the real star of Oxenfree shows up: its supernatural, radio-signals, creepy-shit plot. Dialog choices are still crucial, but they - and the excellent writing and voice acting - support the telling of a chilling, fascinating, and scary story.

It's not a horror game in the Resident Evil sense, at all. There aren't any moments that I would call "jump-scares." But there are events, and spooky noises, and it's all very curious and foreboding and tense. It's like the first half of Stranger Things. Yeah, the good shit.

I would complain that Oxenfree has an occasional problem with backtracking; the map can be a little confusing, and the path you walk re-treads a fair amount of ground. I was really hoping for the game to end just a bit faster than it did.

Consequently, I don't have any interest in playing through it a second time to explore the different possibilities and alternate endings. But the first playthrough was definitely, absolutely worthwhile.

Better than: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Until Dawn
Not as good as: well, it's a rough comparison, but Oxenfree's story falls just short of BioShock Infinite's
Also better than: Donnie Darko, and if you liked that, you'll absolutely love this.

Rebel Galaxy is a jack of many trades, and - thankfully - a master of one. Maybe two.

There is an attachment curve, at first, trying to figure out what the "deal" is in Rebel Galaxy. As an open-world nonlinear sandbox, there are a bunch of activities you can do... but most of them aren't very fun.

• Mining asteroids is shitty; rewards are rare, and very small when you get them.
• Doing trade runs is cool when it works, but it usually doesn't, because prices fluctuate so unpredictably. (Also, trading profits don't scale with upgrade costs as the game goes on.)
• Flying around the galaxy is boring. As nice as the game is to look at, space is preeeeetty empty. The limited set of random events, like distress beacons, gets repetitive real fast.
• Combat is occasionally thrilling, even though so many weapons fire automatically; but in a typical encounter, either you handily outclass your foes or they handily outclass you. Most battles are over before they've started.
• The randomized or semi-scripted optional missions are a key source of income, but are rarely very interesting -- generally either "Kill all the dudes at this place" or "Go do this thing, oh wait there are dudes there?, guess you need to kill them."
• And the story missions aren't much better; they add voice-acted dialog, but it just isn't written all that well. The premise is somewhat hackneyed and the way it plays out is dull and predictable.

But if you stick with Rebel Galaxy, you might find what I would say is its core loop: getting blown up by some asshole ship, grinding mission rewards out of spite, buying a bigger ship, and smiling as you blow up that asshole ship in return.

Everything else about the game I would call adequate, on average. But the sense of growth and accomplishment you get from taking high-paying missions, then using that cash to buy deadlier lasers, tougher shields, or a ship bristling with even more cannons -- this was my primary motive for spending 25+ hours flying around the galaxy.

Also, the soundtrack is pretty good. Not exactly my favorite music, but very thematic, and catchy.

I would say that some of Rebel Galaxy's shortcomings could be addressed pretty easily: if the upgrade costs were rebalanced so they didn't outscale mining and trading; if core ship health wasn't so small that unbalanced fights end immediately; if the almost-completely-broken "Pair Warp" feature didn't make escort missions a total write-off. And I do wish that the story was better, overall.

But nevertheless, the upgrade chase and the space-truckin' soundtrack worked well enough for me.

Better than: Space Run
Not as good as: Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut
Maybe better, maybe worse than: Escape Velocity Nova, but hard to compare them a decade apart

Progress: Finished the main story, bought a Blackgate

Eon Altar swings hard at establishing a next generation of digital RPGs; by putting your character sheet and controls on your smartphone, Jackbox-style, it could deliver on a true multiplayer approach to CRPGs like Baldur's Gate. Unfortunately, it strikes out due to numerous implementation issues.

First: There are five characters to select from, but you can only have up to four players. What up with that?

Second: The phone app isn't all that well-made. A party member of mine accidentally paused the game (for everyone) because he switched to another app while we were playing. The UI is a mess, failing utterly at attempting to simplify a D&D players' manual; the number of menus you have to navigate just to use a potion is prohibitively inconvenient. And the movement controls just aren't polished enough to be comfortable to use ("free" movement is tied to a very small margin of touchscreen space).

Third: Performance isn't adequate, or at least, not universally. I played Eon Altar once with a full party, running on my Macbook; and later by myself, on a Windows PC. My full-party attempt had noticeable input delays -- not a huge deal for turn-based combat, but very annoying when we were just trying to run to the next quest marker.

(My solo adventure didn't have these delays, but I can't speak for whether this suggests a problem in the Mac application or with the number of players. I will say that the Mac version appears to have dramatically worse rendering quality, not just in terms of e.g. texture resolution, but in terms of 3D math correctness.)

Fourth: The overhead camera does a poor job of zooming out to allow independent control of disparate characters. You guys -- this is a pretty basic thing, for co-op games. If a party member falls out of the viewport because they weren't moving fast enough, that's a problem.

Fifth: The game just isn't all that interesting. Underneath all the menu complexity, and despite a handful of ingenious features (like asking players to speak their character's dialog out loud), Eon Altar takes place in a rote-sounding fantasy world and leans on well-traveled tropes for its character classes and abilities.

If it had been a flawless execution of a scripted, multiplayer fantasy campaign, that would be fine. Or if it had been a flawed, but innovative approach to grimdark or cyberpunk or some other genre. But Eon Altar, clever as it is at times, just isn't clever enough to deliver a memorably fun experience.

Progress: Almost none.

Slight disclaimer: I went to college with the guy who made this game.

Hackmud caught my eye for the "hack" part much more than for the "mud" part. I'm not really interested in playing with people online, but terminal emulators and hacking stories are very much within my interests. Unfortunately, Hackmud has its own oil-and-water relationship with hacking and mudding.

The first two hours or so of the game are a tutorial mode - in a (pretend) isolated VLAN, as opposed to the wider internet - made up of scripted missions given by NPCs, with their own brief, AI-based backstories. You'll follow their directions and use some critical thinking (and probably some Google thinking) to solve password riddles, read log files, uncover secret keys, transfer virtual credits, et cetera.

At the tutorial's completion, you're opened up into the multi-user aspect of the game, and it's a pretty jarring transition. The scripted directions are gone, replaced with a general chat channel and an amalgam of human users and AI bots. It's a bit like finding your way out of a maze and then discovering you're on an alien planet.

What I realized, after reading more about it in Hackmud's Steam forum and subreddit, is that this - the "real" game - is, unsurprisingly, a MUD. The tutorial's goal was not to acclimate me to its overall gameplay loop, but to show me the raw mechanics involved in its multiplayer, largely community-driven world. There are still some NPC interactions here, in the form of AI bots with crypto locks and virtual bank accounts, but the process of discovering goals and decoding riddles is more oriented around collaboration with other live players.

It seems like there is a small, but devoted playerbase that's still committed to this world. As well as, unfortunately, barriers to entry that put new players at a disadvantage. But it would hardly matter to me either way; I was only in it for the NPC interactions. And so while I enjoyed the tutorial, short as it was, I have no meaningful opinion on the multiplayer game that Hackmud truly intended me to play.

I do, though, have a fine-pointed complaint about Hackmud's implementation. As a game that revolves around reliable, correct interactions with other players' scripts and saved information, it is naturally server-authoritative. And while you might think that the server load for a text-based game would be pretty light, server responsiveness in Hackmud is actually quite terrible. Waiting five seconds or longer for the output of my command is really ... suboptimal. (At least I haven't encountered the "service unavailable" errors that early players seem to have had.)

Hackmud is, at its core, not for me. And I can't and won't fault my former classmate for that. I do, though, hope that he works on those server performance issues.

Progress: Escaped the vlan.

Detective Grimoire has:

• Smart, engaging, and humorous writing;
• Talented rapid-fire voice-acting;
• A neat mechanic in its thought-assembling conclusions;
• Fun, distracting little puzzles;
• And some pleasant-looking pixels to stare at.

But it also:

• Underdelivers on that unique conclusions mechanic;
• Occasionally hides clues in obtuse locations, just assuming that you'll click on everything;
• Doesn't let you examine evidence when you're asked to present it (I forgot what all those items were for!);
• And takes too much of its time showing you the story instead of letting you figure it out;
• Right up until the end (only ~2 hours later), a poorly-paced gauntlet of tedious evidence presentation.

Grimoire has some narrative chops, for sure. But it just isn't implemented as well as, say, an Ace Attorney.

Better than: Puzzle Agent
Not as good as: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (NDS)
The ending was also a little: ... bizarre.

Space Run isn't very shy about drawing influence from the board game Galaxy Trucker. It has the same kinds of tiles (lasers, missiles, thrusters, shields, generators, cargo...) and the same basic mechanics of attack and defense (asteroids or enemies coming from specific angles).

And while it's cool to see these ideas play out in real-time, what made me tire of Space Run was the same thing that makes Galaxy Trucker irritatingly challenging: there just isn't enough room on your ship to do a good job. Turrets get in the way of other turrets. Forced trade-offs between thrust speed and rear-facing defense. Higher-powered structures take up a huge amount of space. Like its board game inspiration, it isn't really possible to build a robust, adaptable ship; you need to configure it for specific threat vectors (and, frequently, tear down and reconfigure for new attacks).

There's also a grinding problem: Engineering upgrades are expensive, and you're not going to have enough money to keep up with the upgrade curve just by passing each mission. The game seems to expect you to replay old missions in order to earn upgrade money -- missions which are, as far as I saw, pretty boring once you've done them the first time.

Space Run manages a fresh take on the Galaxy Trucker premise, and its lighthearted flavor text is a nice touch, too. But its flaws made me bored with it before very long.

Better than: Battle Group 2
Not as good as: Kingdom Rush
Props to the voice acting, too: And un-props for the spelling and grammar errors.

Progress: 38 Reputation

What I like about Another Perspective is that it's challenging. It did a pretty good job of pacing its levels such that each mechanic was introduced casually, and their combined complexity ramped up gradually, to the point where I really had to understand how it all worked together to finish a level.

What made me bored of the game was that -- there weren't that many mechanics. Where, for example, Braid kept changing and appending to its rules after each "world" of levels, Another Perspective only had one world's worth of rules.

(To be fair, I didn't get far in the "Mystery" section of bonus levels. But it looked like this wasn't about introducing new challenges so much as cranking up the existing ones.)

It didn't help that the game's sense of narrative, self-aware as it was, wasn't very interesting. There was some quasi-philosophical waxing on the nature of existence and sentience, but it was up-front about these topics not meaning much in the context of a puzzle game.

Another Perspective was fun while it lasted, but didn't last all that long (~ 90 minutes to clear the main levels). And while there are more levels I could do, I'm just not interested enough to do them -- certainly not by the game's plain aesthetic and unmoving narrative.

Better than: The Bridge
Not as good as: Braid
It's obvious, isn't it?: That the visual style is aping Braid? How the character's body and hair are animated? It's not just me, right?

Progress: Finished the main levels, lost interest in the Mystery levels.

I typically stay away from "rogue-likes" -- debates about misapplication of the term aside, it does tend to describe the kind of game where you are expected to fail after a significant time investment, and try again from scratch. I am an impatient man, and dislike losing my progress -- and especially dislike re-treading old ground.

That said, 80 Days managed to impress me, largely in the quality of its writing. In a vein similar to (but lighter than) Sunless Sea, the game looks at an alternate history where weird, magic-sounding technology mingles with Victorian romanticism. Reading about the protagonists' encounters with magic streetlamps, desert hover-cars, and teleportation devices lent a strong and fascinating sense of mystery to the whole thing.

And the charming music and sound effects didn't hurt, either. For a game with no animated cutscenes or 3D landscapes, it does a great job of immersing you in its environs.

Those bits aside, though, 80 Days still feels pretty thoroughly like a game that wants me to lose. When I went to careful effort to build up my travel coffers, the travel time ticked up, and up, and up; then while I paid close attention to Fogg's stamina meter, my money seemed to rapidly vanish. Sometimes I would spot a beneficial route, then find at the destination that I had been effectively stranded -- a trap, in other words. Occasionally a travel hop would be diverted at the last moment, ruining the rest of my itinerary.

I can certainly guess that particular, "correct" routes would have made the trip easily within eighty days. But I had no way of knowing these routes beforehand, and my guesses were statistically unlikely to find them.

I will also freely admit that my efficacy at traveling the world suffered due to my terrible sense of world geography. When an event informed me that I might find fortune in Khartoum, or a swift route through Freetown, I just ... smiled and nodded. Yes, those certainly are places!, I resolved.

I would also argue that 80 Days is lacking some design polish; parts of the game seem conflicted with one another. City markets allow you to purchase goods that may be resold elsewhere for a tidy profit, but the game frequently (or perhaps always?) forbids you from traveling backwards, so properly executing complex trade routes is impossible. Attending to Fogg's health while traveling is usually mandatory, but meanwhile precludes opportunities for finding new routes.

Most of the game's critical decisions, like reacting to opportunities on the road, or engaging with local townsfolk to find new routes, stop the clock; you can take as much time as you want to choose a dialog path. But some choices, like buying and selling goods, or interrogating a travel companion about possible routes, leave the clock running; not only limiting how much you can do, but effectively penalizing you for not acting quickly enough. The vacillation between "turn-based" and "real-time" decision-making seems haphazard to me.

80 Days entertained me with its writing, and there are enough cities in it that I might even enjoy a second run. But I still can't relish the idea of starting another expedition -- especially when I think about encountering a side-story for the second time, or re-experiencing the exact same travel perils.

I would continue playing this kind of game to more fully explore its world, but not to read the same prose over and over again.

Progress: Around the world in 112 days