Sethian has a really fascinating premise and a very impressive design, but wastes itself on an incomplete plot and a disappointing narrative.

The game's primary interface is the keyboard for an alien computer, and you have to talk to the computer to figure out what's going on. It sits about halfway between puzzle game and a visual novel -- slightly evocative of games like TIS-100, in learning how to use the alien language; and of games like Analogue: A Hate Story, in solving a mystery through dialog interaction.

This ambitious combination of ideas requires an intricate linguistic design, and much to its credit, Sethian actually pulls it off. Its invented language has both a suitable dictionary, with quirks that lend to (and hint at) the backstory of the Sethian people; as well as a grammatical structure that, while complete, is foreign enough to steep all of your interactions in uncertainty.

Another critical part of Sethian's design is comfortably introducing players to the language -- and this, too, is done surprisingly well. An in-game journal holds your hand at the start, gradually introducing new grammatical concepts as it helps you walk through the story. Later on, its instructions get more ambiguous, forcing you to determine on your own how to translate thoughts into alienese.

And then it just ... kind of stops.

Sethian has two endings, "bad" and "good." The bad ending essentially concludes the journal's story, and it only took me about an hour and a half to get there. It felt abrupt, like I never got far enough to properly master the language; and while the ending was somewhat interesting in terms of explaining the plot, I felt like it dulled too much of the setting's intrigue.

The good ending, contrarily, requires more outside-the-box thinking. To wit: I looked up online how to start it, plus a couple steps after that. This was bothersome to me in the same way as "classic" adventure games with nonsensically arbitrary solutions. (And in the end, it didn't expand much on the bad ending's narrative, either.)

Sethian really feels to me like it could have been incredible, if it had built a more complicated backstory and then written more gameplay to explore it. As it is, it's practically a tech demo.

Better than: Pony Island, Dear Esther
Not as good as: TIS-100, Analogue: A Hate Story
I will still be interested: If this is sequelized.

I got 100% of the Steam achievements for Skyrim, and I barely cheated at all!

• For Oblivion Walker, I tried to re-do the "Waking Nightmare" quest (because I had picked the "wrong" outcome last time), but nothing I was doing would reset the quest NPC correctly. So instead I gave myself a second copy of the Savior's Hide item, and that triggered the achievement.
• And for Legend, after finally reaching level 50, I saw that this kind of dragon doesn't show up until level 78 -- so I just said "Fuck it" while cheating my level up 28 times. (I still fought and killed the dragon!)

Of course, I also had to use console cheats in some non-achievement scenarios, just to play the game. One incident I remember particularly well was in the quest Lost to the Ages, where the quest NPC (Katria) got stuck, and I needed to manually tinker with the quest status in order to un-stuck her.

And there was one quest bug so heinous that I never was able to fix it, even with all the console cheats I could muster. I am still a werewolf because the Purity quest just doesn't fucking work for me. Farkas says he'll meet me at the dungeon and then never shows up.

(In one attempt at cheating my way through, I got him to go to the dungeon and we killed the necessary monster, but then he became stuck as a follower who was unable to stop following me.)

Skyrim is a vast world full of interesting content to explore, and I love it. Getting all the achievements and spending 180 hours in that world has me ... pretty satisfied, but there is still more content in here that I just might come back to. That the game is so technologically flawed, and I still love it, is a credit to how well-crafted that world is.

Seriously, if I worked at Bethesda I would shut the whole thing down until their quest system had full coverage of build verification tests. This shit is gnarly.

Hexcells Infinite is the final form of Hexcells. It still doesn't look all that great, but it has puzzles just as challenging as those in Hexcells Plus, as well as an "infinite" mode (randomly generated puzzles that, well, aren't all that hard, but provide even more puzzles if you should feel the need for those).

Most importantly, it finally saves puzzle progress when you exit to the menu, and it has Steam cloud saves.

Finally!

Better than: Hexcells Plus
Not as good as: Paint it Back
Thanks for the "infinite" puzzles: but after doing the hundred or so from all three games, I think I'm all set, thanks.

Hexcells was a brief, amateurish, promising collection of puzzles. Hexcells Plus "pluses" it.

This is like the second run through a Mario game -- the rules are the same, but now you really have to understand them inside and out. Hexcells Plus has about the same amount of puzzles as its predecessor, but where those puzzles took me less than two hours to burn through, this game's were more like 10. The last few puzzles were, well, really challenging!

It is still an amateurish package, with font resolution that can make it hard to tell between a "5" and a "6," and the puzzles still reset when you go to the menu, and still no Steam cloud saves. But in terms of puzzles, this more than justifies the slapdash-looking Hexcells rules.

... of course, it still falls a bit short of Hexcells Infinite.

Better than: Hexcells
Not as good as: Hexcells Infinite
Are you kidding me: still no Steam cloud saves? Come on!

I had a much easier time accepting Hexcells's puzzle conceits than SquareCells's -- probably because it didn't look like picross. (Yeah, not a great reason, but here we are.)

Like its squarer follow-up, Hexcells feels very much like an amateur game. The formatting of puzzle clues looks like it was made up on the spot; going back to the menu resets a puzzle in progress; and there's no Steam cloud saving, which is baffling, right? This game was put on Steam in 2014, well after the point I'd expect any new game to have cloud saves.

But, at least for me, the puzzle mechanics felt more cohesive this time around. I didn't feel frustrated with a puzzle's lack of apparent information; I felt just intrigued enough to actually figure it out.

Of course the puzzles in Hexcells also don't get very hard. That, apparently, is what Hexcells Plus is for.

Better than: SquareCells
Not as good as: Hexcells Plus
Seriously, guy: Steam cloud saves. Come on!

In 2015, I lamented a sharp drop in my yearly games played, from 100+ to 29. Ouch.

In 2016, I managed 45. So... still not great. But less not-great! I'm getting more un-non-great.

And, yeah, I did fall critically behind on my glogging for most of October, November, and December; 14 of those games didn't get glogged until the last week of the year. It was, and still is, a struggle to write stuff up when there's so much Skyrim to do.

If I had to pick a theme for my gaming habits this past year, ... I really don't know that I could. (Gun to my head, I would probably get shot.) My 2016 held a pretty even mix of originals (24) and franchise entries (21), with some replays (4) but mostly in the form of remasters (3).

So I think I did alright. Could have done worse, anyway.

Platform breakdown:

• PC: 36 (41 games, 3 DLCs, 1 demo)
• PS4: 4 (actually six, but I didn't bother glogging about playing through Uncharted 2 and 3 again)
• Android: 3 (more than any previous year)
• 3DS: 2 (and they were both picross games!)

Pleasant original experiences

• Aviary Attorney: "It's smart, funny, and almost entirely logical, despite ... birds."
• Her Story: "[...] organically stumbling upon story beats is satisfying in a really unique way."
• Last Word: "You gain experience by winning arguments. If that isn't one of the coolest game ideas you've ever heard, then, you're wrong."
• TIS-100: "[...] successfully replicates the euphoric rush of fixing some ugly code and watching the computer tear through its task."
• The Witness: "The island itself is one big, gorgeous, baffling puzzle."

Unpleasant original experiences

• Bear Simulator: "I felt like a chump after I scaled a hill and crossed a river using a makeshift log bridge, then found absolutely nothing on the other side."
• Murdered: Soul Suspect: "Murdered doesn't just lean heavily on its poorly-told story, it has thoroughly underwhelming game mechanics to boot."
• Pony Island: "[...] Pony Island's neat premise wears out its welcome well before the end."
• Remember Me: "[...] it all feels tepid, like a halfhearted imitation of other AAA games."
• Toren: "[...] a story that just doesn't go anywhere; an obtuse fable that twists and writhes in its own nonsense."

Satisfying sequels

• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided: "[...] Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has a lot of fun in it, if you're into exploring finely-detailed game worlds and scouring over their lore."
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dawnguard and Dragonborn, and even Hearthfire: "[...] a solid addition of questing and exploration to Skyrim's already-impressive world."
• The Jackbox Party Pack 3: "I drew a Pac-Man ghost, and wrote "Eat a bag of dicks," and now my friend owns that on a t-shirt."
• Uncharted 4: A Thief's End: "When Drake careens down a steep slope, grapples to a tree branch, swings across a ravine and narrowly avoids a grim fate by jamming a piton into a sheer cliff, it's just ... man. It's exhilirating."

Disappointing rehashes

• Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate: "More than a poor Batman game, and more than a poor game in general, Blackgate is confusingly bad."
• LEGO Marvel's Avengers: "[...] while this game doesn't literally re-tread Super Heroes' ground, it feels an awful lot like it does."
• Pokémon Picross: "[...] in terms of overall design, the game assumes that I'm not interested in solving puzzles, which is very distasteful and off-putting."
• Wolfenstein: The Old Blood: "[...] there isn't any grand narrative payoff to defeating a room full of crazy enemies. There are only more crazy enemies."

Ongoing obsessions

• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition will watch me die.
• And Monkey Wrench is what I'll be playing during bathroom breaks.

Anything cool coming up in 2017?

• Yooka-Laylee should be good. Not too worried about that one.
• Will Factorio finally be released? (I'm not getting my hopes up.)
• Who knows, maybe The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mass Effect: Andromeda won't be huge disappointments. Maybe.

I spent over a year stuck on a single puzzle in TIS-100: "Sequence Sorter." Today I finally finished it. Yes. (I almost had to include this game in yet another end-of-year recap post.)

Although it continues to infuriate me with its limited amount of data (and instruction!) memory, TIS-100 successfully replicates the euphoric rush of fixing some ugly code and watching the computer tear through its task.

Now that I've finished the main menu of puzzles, I can finally feel good about moving on to Infinifactory and Shenzhen I/O. Oh, Zachtronics. You spoil me.

Better than: Human Resource Machine
Not as good as: SpaceChem (arguably, if only for having less content)
Maybe I will come back to do the "Directory" puzzles: sometime in 2018.

Progress: Repaired all "Segment Map" nodes.

In its first episode, Batman: The Telltale Series does a fair job of living up to the standard Telltale set in The Wolf Among Us. But I wouldn't really call that a good thing -- this is a Batman game, and like it or not, the standards are different.

It would be foolish to expect pulse-pounding action sequences from a Telltale game - they're just not on the same level as Rocksteady - but that didn't stop them from trying. Batman's quick-time events are similar to those in Wolf and in Telltale's other recent games, but played faster and with more moving elements on the screen. And their engine simply can't handle it. Some of the button prompts I missed were because my input never registered, and one was because the frame rate tanked so hard that I never even saw the prompt.

Fortunately, this game isn't too reliant on action sequences; unfortunately, its crime scene investigations aren't much more pleasant. While the Arkham games' detective-mode portions could be accused of being overly simplistic, this game's investigations apply a frustrating amount of "classic adventure game logic" in the form of 3D pixel hunting. You'll probably piece together the evidence long before Batman does, since he's still looking for a tiny, insignificant "clue" over in the corner somewhere.

Then there's the interactive storytelling, and I'm afraid that I have to be harsh on this. As a character, Bruce Wayne has been portrayed in multiple ways, in comics, TV, movies, and games; and Telltale's Batman makes the mistake of showing the player dialog options, but deciding what his personality "should" be, behind the scenes. When I tried to play Batman as a horrifying monster, and Bruce as a bumbling playboy (as in Batman: The Animated Series), the game chided me for my violence and my ineffectiveness. Later, scripted lines from Batman and/or Bruce would directly contradict the direction I'd intended to take.

By the end of the episode it really felt like there were "right" and "wrong" answers to the dialog prompts, and the game did a poor job of telegraphing which was which. And I know I'm not the only player with this perspective, because the end-of-episode recap said that almost everyone chose to help Jim Gordon instead of Vicki Vale -- neither character showed much personality in the game's first episode, but Gordon is just a better character in the Batman mythos.

This game also suffers heavily from a classic dialog-choice problem: Frequently, the option I saw and chose did not match up with what the character said as a result. (See also: Mass Effect, L.A. Noire.) It's a real immersion-killer.

The story itself was minimally engaging, up until an end-of-episode twist that I don't have enough interest to pursue. Nevermind that Batman just doesn't sound quite right from anyone other than Kevin Conroy, or that mafioso Carmine Falcone sounds an awful lot like Sully; despite Telltale's apparent desire to forge their own Batman, a lot of his story is either excessively familiar (as in the conflict between Mayor Hill and D.A. Harvey Dent), or overtly underdelivered (as in the overlong foreshadowing from Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot).

In retrospect, it was probably unfair of me to turn my appreciation of The Wolf Among Us into anticipation for Telltale's take on Batman. While they've shown me that they can do dark, adult stories in an interesting way, Batman comes with too much baggage to really be made their own. Hell, they might have been better off re-skinning the character as something original, like "The Flying Horror" or "Nightman."

Progress: Played the first episode.

Learning from Dawnguard's map-placement problems, Dragonborn puts a whole new (miniature) content on a separate map. You travel to the island of Solstheim from a dock in Windhelm, and can then fast-travel between brand new destinations on the island itself.

Solstheim is bigger than the areas added by Dawnguard, with a correspondingly larger amount of questing content. Dragonborn even introduces new alchemy ingredients, weapons and armor, and spells. It's more ambitious overall than Bethesda's last DLC, and wholeheartedly delivers on that ambition.

What makes the Dragonborn content especially satisfying, though, is how intertwined it is with Solstheim itself. Much of Dawnguard had me running back through parts of Skyrim I'd already travelled, but Dragonborn feels fresher with its new towns and dungeons spread out over a whole new map. I didn't just find a new dungeon in the tundra; I got to walk that tundra for the first time, and discover more of Bethesda's meticulous environmental worksmanship.

The only thing I really didn't like was this campaign's predilection to drop me into Hermaeus Mora's wacky, irritating books-and-monsters realm. Similar to Skyrim's dwemer ruins and falmer caves, these areas just felt repetitive, and their enemies were annoying.

But that didn't end up accounting for a huge fraction of Dragonborn's content, and also I learned how to ride dragons, so yeah, this is a pretty excellent expansion to Skyrim's massive world.

Better than: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dawnguard
Not as good as: maybe Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony, but that's not a great comparison
Word of warning, if you're collecting books: Hermaeus Mora's realm has so many books. I filled my pack with books. Books, books, books.

Hearthfire doesn't add quests or maps to Skyrim; it just adds the ability to build houses. (And to marry an NPC, and adopt NPC children, but ugh, who cares.)

The house-building project, though, is oddly satisfying; collecting the necessarily materials to erect and upgrade your mansion feels like a whole new mini-campaign, and the visual reward of exploring your house is even rewarding, in its own way.

Hearthfire doesn't add a whole lot to Skyrim, but what it does add is pretty, pretty good.

Better than: Saints Row IV: Enter the Dominatrix
Not as good as: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dawnguard
Comparable to: base-building in World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, but better because it's less annoyingly demanding.