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

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.