That Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate (nevermind the ... unbelievable name) was given to Arkham Knight purchasers as an apology for that game's technical troubles, is a Joker-caliber prank. More than a poor Batman game, and more than a poor game in general, Blackgate is confusingly bad.

Unfortunately, it's easy to see why. Someone - probably inspired by the Arkham series's Metroid-like world design - pitched a 2D, sidescrolling Batman game; like, you know, Metroid. And then someone else - probably inspired by the fantastic critical and commercial success of Arkham Asylum and City - decided that this game absolutely must contain all of the core gameplay mechanics of the 3D Arkham games.

The soul-crushing result is a 3D game crammed into 2D by accident. Don't misunderstand -- Shadow Complex, for example, was a 2D game with some inappropriately-administered 3D gameplay. But in Blackgate, Batman has to punch enemies coming at him from all angles while he can only move in two directions. In Blackgate, Batman's routes through the map are eternally limited by the golden paths encoded into the map. In Blackgate, "depth" and "verticality" are merely poorly-messaged quicktime prompts.

The game is borderline unplayable. It's certainly not fun. The groan-worthy writing, shitty-looking moving-comic cutscenes, button-prompt bugs, and just-plain-bad "hacking" puzzles barely even factor into it.

The thing that confuses me about Blackgate is that this game made it all the way to release. By all rights, it should have been cancelled before the public even knew about it.

What's most disappointing about Blackgate isn't that it's associated with an otherwise-great franchise, or even that its fundamentally-broken game design should never have been greenlit. What's most disappointing is that Kevin Conroy and other legitimately-talented voice actors wasted their time.

Progress: Barely even got into Blackgate Penitentiary at all. My god. It's just so terrible.

The Witness starts slow, but ultimately has no problem matching Braid in terms of mental challenge and intellectual intrigue.

Virtually everything about the game, from tiny puzzle mechanics to world-spanning environmental mysteries, is crafted with such incredible care that it all feels ... real, in a way. The game's island is just so cohesive, meticulous, and entrancing; it's a thing of beauty, aesthetically and technologically. It's not hard to understand why Jonathan Blow took so long making this game, and I would certainly call it worthwhile.

Once I'd achieved "Endgame" I went online to research the handful of puzzles I wasn't able to solve on my own -- and in a couple instances, I did feel like the puzzle was kind of stupid. (Using mechanics in a way that seemed counter to the rest of the game.) But these accounted for such an infinitesimal proportion of the game's offerings that I really can't ding the overall package for them.

And yet, there are still some things about this game I haven't figured out. Some of them -- I don't know if anyone has figured out yet.

It's hard to say if The Witness is really for everyone - although it could be?, due to its friendly learning curve - but if you're even remotely interested in puzzles, it's a no-brainer. Which is good, because you'll need that brain to actually complete it.

Better than: Myst
Not as good as: maybe Portal 2, and its humorous narrative? That's a tough one.
Anxious to see how it stacks up against: The Talos Principle

Imagine the island from Myst. Not the esoteric book-worlds, not the mechanical puzzles, not the grainy FMV animations -- just the mysterious island that you were dropped on, with no introduction, and no directive but to explore, discover, and "solve." The Witness brings back that lonely exhiliration, that feeling of an alien land begging to be figured out.

The puzzles start out pretty simple, and you'll blow through a few dozen of them with basically no resistance. The learning curve is pleasantly subtle - gently introducing new concepts and tricks - and by the time the island feels like it's "opened up" there is a new, bewildering mechanic to encounter at almost every turn. Outside-the-box stuff. Revelatory stuff. Sick shit.

But The Witness would still be a pretty lame game if it was only a series of puzzles, so it's a good thing there's more to it than that. The puzzles and the exploration punctuate each other every step of the way; following power cables, looking for clues, or merely enjoying the beautiful environment. The island itself is one big, gorgeous, baffling puzzle.

And I have so much more to discover about it.

At first, Ink reminded me a lot of VVVVVV, for its lack of hesitation in killing you rapidly and frequently. Actually, that's kind of the point; Ink reveals the level layout with paint splatter when you die. Pretty fun!

When the levels started to get more lengthy and involved, I became more nervous about my ability to tolerate the die-and-retry cycle. But with a little perseverance, I found satisfaction in discovering each new level's design by dying all over it.

And then the spikes came. And then I had to jump through a spike tunnel. And died, and died, and died. I just ... I don't have the reflexes for this kind of thing, anymore. Maybe I never did.

If you're into the Super Meat Boy approach to punishing platformers, Ink applies a really cool aesthetic layer to that. Personally I just can't hack it.

Progress: Level 28

Last Word is an RPG about verbal discourse. No, not that kind of-- not with dialog trees or shit like that. Last Word is a combat-based game where the fighting is done with character attacks and tactful submission. You gain experience by winning arguments. If that isn't one of the coolest game ideas you've ever heard, then, you're wrong.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems with Last Word is that this combat isn't quite as fully-realized as it could be; that is, although you'll select moves in battle based on conversational tactics, the words associated with them are never spoken or even subtitled. Exactly what sharp-witted barb left your opponent in tatters is left to the player's imagination.

But it's an easy shortcoming to get over, because the word-battling is also very mechanically deep. There are two separate resources to manage, there is a buff/debuff point scale, there is a tug-of-war line to balance, there is a rock-paper-scissors cycle to move elements -- and this is all before special upgrade abilities come into play. It takes several fights to get the hang of all of Last Word's knobs and dials, but what's really remarkable is that even in the game's most difficult battles, every resource and every move can have an important purpose.

Outside of combat, the game is a well-written (and excellently-typed) story about aristocratic houses, a bottle episode mystery, and the fascinating foibles of a world where people fight each other with words. Although the critical path is rather short, there is a wealth of optional content to explore, that feels worthwhile just for the sake of filling in blanks in the game's backstory.

It's a shame, then, that a non-trivial amount of that optional content requires experience-grinding or pixel-hunting to unlock. And there are a few extras that can be permanently missed as the game progresses; they're not relevant to the storytelling, so it's not a big deal, but still a slightly obnoxious design quirk.

As in To the Moon, Last Word suffers somewhat from the RPG Maker engine underpinning it: The controls are garbage, menu transitions can be flaky, and the game lacks crucial options like screen resolution. But the good news is that Last Word has a tiny map, so it isn't as ass-blastingly annoying to walk around in as To the Moon was.

Despite its shortcomings - the less-than-fully-whelming combat flavor, the occasionally archaic extra content, the tire fire that is RPG Maker - Last Word is a laudably creative game that's also impressively well-executed.

I would be very interested to see a spiritual sequel with a bigger budget, done in an engine that isn't just ... shit.

Better than: To the Moon
Not as good as: Chrono Trigger, I guess
I'm serious about that sequel: I would kickstart the fuck out of that.

Progress: Secret ending.

Toren is a two-hour game, and I was bored of it within 45 minutes.

To its credit, Toren has some incredible art and an impressive air of mystery. But it squanders these talents on subpar animation and modeling, and a story that just doesn't go anywhere; an obtuse fable that twists and writhes in its own nonsense.

Top that with a mess of a camera, terribly-communicated control mechanics (i.e. magical jumps and inaccurate button prompts), uninspired level design, rendering pop-in, out-of-sync sound effects, environments that clip through other environments, and - overall - gameplay that just isn't engaging at all. At its most complex, Toren asks you to wait until a timed obstacle has gone away before moving past it.

Toren would be pretty good for a student project, but as a commercial game it falls short on virtually every level. Its art is really the only worthwhile thing in here.

Better than: ... hmm.
Not as good as: Ico, Papo & Yo
And the soundtrack, while clearly a big effort: feels generic and flat. Orchestral strings do not an epic game make.

Galacide can seem like a complex combination of mechanics, and in some ways, it is. But to me, the culminations of its eclectic parts form very simple praises and complaints.

The puzzle mode, which could be a pretty cool aesthetic twist on standard color-matching puzzles, becomes annoying when you factor in Galacide's mechanic of changing a block's color (instead of adding a new block with a new color). The standalone puzzle mode was clearly not the game's main production goal, and it just doesn't feel compatible with its mechanics.

Puzzle-intensive sections of the campaign are actually made more fun by this block-changing mechanic, as it allows blocks to be grouped densely in the map, and makes navigating through said blocks quite thrilling. However, Galacide has a bad habit of being stingy with the exact color of block you need to get through these obstacles, so the random number generator can really make or break your survival.

The pure-schmup sections of the campaign benefit from a cool weapon-level mechanic, such that your weapon gains experience as you move quickly through the level; encouraging you to take out enemies fast and charge ahead. But this fun comes to a stop pretty rapidly when block obstacles start crowding the level, and slowness causes the weapon to level down -- making enemies even more annoying to deal with than the blocks already made them. (Shades of God Hand, here.)

And while the schmup action is typically pretty easy, difficulty ramps up dramatically in a few boss fights. Having a bullet-hell thrown at you, by surprise, at the very end of a level, is ... unpleasant.

Galacide has some briefly-thrilling highs, and some briefly-irritatating lows. But ultimately, since the campaign is a mere 7 levels, brevity overrides whatever highs or lows you might encounter. Unless you're super-into the game, in which case the endless mode provides you with a way to compete for high scores, ... like pretty much any other schmup.

Better than: Syder Arcade
Not as good as: Sine Mora
Hard to say: if Galacide could be made more viable with further polish, or would always feel this haphazard.

Progress: Didn't quite beat the final boss.

I appreciate the juvenile and irreverent humor, and I actually dig being able to slice baddies into finely-articulated gibs. But having recently come off of Wolfenstein: The New Order, the Shadow Warrior remake - with relatively scant storytelling and gunplay - fails to make an impact. This feels more like the "classic" kind of shooter that I was never terribly interested in, while it simultaneously lacks The Old Blood's stellar standards of presentation.

Progress: Just far enough in Chapter 1 to get annoyed by a badly-placed checkpoint.

Grow Home reminds me of no other game more than Shadow of the Colossus -- because it's deliberately difficult to control, and this forms the basis of the game's challenge. Climbing Grow Home's "star plant" and directing its buds into nourishing, uh, energy rocks?, is frustrating to do but satisfying to pull off.

But, Grow Home's terrible controls go beyond just climbing, which I feel works to its detriment. The robot protagonist has way worse handling than Mad Max's wasteland junker, and it frequently feels like he's going in an effectively random direction. Even walking across a seemingly-horizontal section of plant can be fraught with danger.

And while falling, or dying, in Grow Home doesn't have much of an immediately-obvious punishment, having to re-climb up from the last checkpoint is a real chore.

There are some extra optional mechanics, like hard-to-find collectibles that unlock minimal upgrades, and hard-to-carry items that fill in, uh, text profiles in the pause menu. I guess, if you actually enjoy how the controls work against you, these features add some value. Personally I made a beeline for the main objectives and only collected what was in front of me.

Thankfully, that critical-path experience is brief, between 1 and 2 hours. I feel thoroughly okay about "beating" Grow Home, and absolutely no compulsion to spend any more time in it.

Better than: A Story About My Uncle
Not as good as: Shadow of the Colossus
The game does have a cute sense of humor: but applies it very sparingly.

Progress: Mission Status = Complete!!

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (more precisely, the Unreal Engine 4 "Redux" release) is probably the most gorgeous game you've ever seen. Unfortunately, it's also very shallow.

To be fair, the plot of Ethan Carter is actually pretty intriguing, and it's told in a very moody, atmospheric way. But most of the time I spent with the game had nothing to do with that story -- or with anything, really. Ethan Carter leans hard into the "walking" part of a Walking Simulator, as its surprisingly-large world is mostly empty. It also employs a three-dimensional, first-person approach to adventure game "pixel hunting," and so the process of wandering around looking for a tiny clue can be just ... dreadfully boring and forever-taking.

If I was into the Amnesia-style, tense spooky thriller genre, I might be more willing to put up with Ethan Carter's tedious, uninteresting shit. But purely for its story's sake, I don't have enough patience to see this through.

Better than: Dear Esther
Not as good as: Gone Home
But god damn: if this game isn't absolutely beautiful.

Progress: Gave up at the church.