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.

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.