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.

When I was playing Mad Max, I felt continuously compelled to hunt down another objective -- to chase the scrap, to earn the next upgrade, to unlock the next mission. But when I wasn't playing it, all I could think about were its flaws. While the game delivers impeccably on the experience of driving through a desert wasteland, almost everything within and throughout its game world is underwhelming.

There are some incredibly frustrating technical issues, like groups of enemies occasionally respawning over and over again; a gun's auto-aim being inordinately difficult to move away from the wrong target; or the fact that aiming a parry/counter correctly becomes nearly impossible when Max is surrounded (making already-tough fights even more enraging).

And there are some clear cases where content was stretched thin -- like all the "Top Dog" mini-bosses having the same character model, or action scenes that are purely non-interactive, even though they would have worked perfectly as real in-game events. The extremely low number of story missions leaves huge gaps between story "beats," and the final battle and ending sequence is a huge letdown.

But what hurts Mad Max the most are the parts that are working correctly, and were designed and implemented to completion, but just aren't fun. Most of the enemy "camp" dungeons are confusing and ponderous mazes. Attacking a Convoy is fun the first time, but quickly becomes repetitive. Scarecrows and other static objectives littering the map are thoroughly unrewarding. Even the Death Race events are invariably either dull, due to the opponents being basically useless, or unfairly aggravating, due to an overpowered enemy being able to kill you almost immediately.

There is some good in Mad Max, specifically the thrill of speeding through the desert in a haphazardly-constructed car. But you really need to have a solid tolerance for same-y open world games to put up with its generally-mediocre content.

Better than: Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry
Not as good as: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Too many times during the game: I felt like I should be watching Fury Road, or playing Borderlands, instead.

Progress: Defeated Scrotus, did some other stuff.

Mad Max nails the 'strayan wasteland aesthetic. The rest of the game, ... well. I'm having fun with it.

At its best, Mad Max is scratching the itch that I was aiming for in Assassin's Creed Rogue: Mysterious destinations, emergent random encounters, and a story that I can basically ignore. But for every oil rig I blow up and every War Boy I punch to death, I can't help but think of the game that might have been.

Many of Mad Max's mechanics hint at a survival-based design that was smoothed-out before release. Early on, Max has short supplies of fuel, water, and ammo, forcing him to keep a close eye on his inventory and to scramble for salvage like a true wastelander. But this tension is ruined when upgrades make fuel depletion trivial; when water becomes plentiful; and when ammo starts getting refilled automatically. After a few hours, any semblance of resource-based danger is totally gone.

Meanwhile, the pacing of missions and upgrades is just plain wrong from practically the beginning. As soon as the world opens up, you'll encounter objectives that make you and your car feel underpowered, and a whole ton of bright red harpoon targets that straight-up tell you to buy some upgrades. But these same upgrades are blocked by your progress in "reducing influence," by completing said objectives. The game all but requires you to grind through several dungeon-clears and random fetch quests before you've unlocked enough upgrades, and collected enough salvage currency, to actually make progress in the story missions -- which are anemic and abridged in comparison with the optional stuff.

Mad Max's fighting engine, a relatively straightforward combo-and-counter affair (see Batman, Shadow of Mordor et al) would be pretty satisfying if not for a couple of heinous bugs. One, that the camera frequently makes certain attack angles impossible to see. And two, that enemies are sometimes capable of starting an attack and landing it while you're stuck in an animation. Many games with this kind of combat system allow you to "flow" into a counter mid-move; Mad Max just lets the War Boy hit you.

And I have to add, that the menu bugs, of all bugs, are irritating enough that they really bring the experience down. Shortcuts to new log entries break the menu hierarchy every time. Buying an upgrade triggers an input-stuttering save, every time. Just navigating the galleries is a pain. The menu UI was clearly a junior employee's task that no one ever had the time to fix.

Despite all these un-missable, far-reaching flaws, though, it's still easy for me to get stuck in a "just one more objective" loop in Mad Max's world. It helps that the driving, while still not great - steering a junker through a windy desert feels just like you'd expect - is good enough to make exploring the world legitimately enjoyable. Like my first Great Sea adventure in The Wind Waker, the world's relative emptiness is essentially a feature. Becoming engrossed in the well-rendered post-apocalyptic wasteland is an important, and effective, part of the experience.

Mad Max isn't as good as it should be, but it's managed to get some sharp hooks in me anyway.

Progress: Met Pink Eye.

I had high hopes for Words for Evil, but ended up hating it even more than Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey.

My reason is pretty simple. I was annoyed by Letter Quest because it didn't have very many letters, and spelling satisfying words wasn't usually possible. Words for Evil has a visibly larger letter field, which is great!, but you can only spell using letters that are next to each other -- which is even more limiting.

Well, there are a few different types of spelling challenge, but the typical "fight an enemy" one requires letter adjacency bullshit, so I don't even care about the other types. I want a word game that lets you spell things with minimal interference from other mechanics. Am I really the only one?

Progress: Didn't finish the intro level.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood makes short work of the goodwill built by The New Order. The latter succeeded as a parcel of entertainment because it wrapped a technically-tight shooter with interesting characters, intriguing settings, and a thrill-a-minute rollercoaster ride of level design. But the former lays said technically-tight shooter bare: This is a Nazi-killin' game, with little else to it.

If Old Blood does anything better than its predecessor, it's putting forth challenging encounters with multiple and/or tough enemies. And frankly, I don't consider that to the game's benefit. Heavily-armored bullet-sponge enemies are annoying as shit -- throwing several of them at me at once is not what I consider a fun time. And when I can mow down dozens of Nazis only to die near-instantaneously to a machine-gun brute hidden in a monster closet; well. That's even less of a fun time.

But what hurts the most about Old Blood isn't that the shooting is hard, I mean, I would be more than willing to put up with that if the game scenario was as engaging as New Order. But it isn't. I have no motivation to go on in this game -- there isn't any grand narrative payoff to defeating a room full of crazy enemies. There are only more crazy enemies.

This might be pretty great for someone who was super into the older Wolfenstein games. But for me, it's a solid "meh," benefiting only from the fact that it's still a technically-tight shooter.

Better than: Sniper: Ghost Warrior
Not as good as: Wolfenstein: The New Order
And yeah: I know that I'm most of the way through the game, already. I feel like an idiot for wasting as many hours on it as I did.

Progress: Gave up in Chapter 6 - Ruins.

Like TIS-100, Prelogate was frequently infuriating to me because of how it's almost like real computer programming. Unlike TIS - and several other contemporaries - Prelogate suffered worse for this due to some unfortunate design flaws.

Prelogate is a curious combination of color-based mirror puzzles and signal-based logic puzzles. At its most clever, it up-ends binary logic problems with the additional dimensions of colors and color combinations -- plus organizing reflectors and gates in physical space. Some of its puzzles are pretty damned cool.

The limitation that really fucked with my head was the lack of negative logic gates. As all engineers know, NAND (or NOR) is super important; so solving logic puzzles without any negation construct - in a world where Karnaugh maps don't work! - got fairly fucking annoying. Especially puzzles based more on the management of physical space than on logical deduction, i.e. assuming I'd already figured out the magic logic algorithm and just had to move mirrors around to make it work.

Unfortunately, my fury toward these puzzles was made even worse by two discrete problems with Prelogate's sense of pacing. The first is that, aside from tutorials that cover basic color combinations and logic gates, there is no ramp-up in puzzle difficulty. The game's ten chapters generally each focus on entirely unique challenges, such as color versus boolean logic versus spatial solving, and most of the game makes no effort to educate you about a puzzle's fundamental challenges before you run headlong into them.

The second problem is a simpler but even more damaging one: Prelogate's levels must be unlocked sequentially. Most puzzle games have either optional puzzles that can be skipped, or a point system that allows the player to skip some puzzles at their discretion. But you can't progress at all in Prelogate until you complete each puzzle, in order. When a frustrating puzzle blocks your progress, it may as well be game over.

Prelogate has some solid content to enjoy, but an equal amount of frustration to muddle through to get there. That the game makes so little effort in easing the player into this frustrating content makes it all the more disappointing.

Better than: Lyne
Not as good as: Human Resource Machine, TIS-100
I'll never forgive it: For "making" me cheat on the last few puzzles, 'cause I didn't have enough patience to guess the right logic algorithms. It's the game's fault for breaking Karnaugh maps! God damn it!

Progress: Finished all puzzles.

Her Story is a short story told in a pleasantly unorthodox way. Unlike Gone Home, which was touching but straightforward, Her Story is actually architected in a way that ties its mechanics to its premise.

The simple, central conceit of the game is piecing together the story of a crime, by keyword searching through archived interrogation clips. What makes it a "game" is that each search is limited to five results, so even if you know a keyword that will reveal the whole plot, you won't get very far until you can formulate a more specific search. So the game is a genuine quest to forensically ascertain key story details, by gradually looking farther into whichever rabbit holes you're able to find. And this process of organically stumbling upon story beats is satisfying in a really unique way.

Unfortunately, Her Story doesn't conclude on a high note; actually, it doesn't conclude much at all. At the risk of spoiling it, the point at which the game prompts you to "end" is pretty arbitrary. And even after this point - for that matter, even after viewing every clip in the archive - there are a couple of tantalizing subplots that aren't adequately addressed. Sure, it's fun to speculate about the main mystery, but I feel like-- if this was a real police investigation, then a lot of important information has gone missing.

Although the end is a bit of an immersion-breaking let-down, the (brief) ride there is a fresh, fun take on the mystery game. I think it demonstrates a lot of potential for more, and more sophisticated, investigation-driven games in a similar vein.

Better than: Gone Home
Not as good as: BioShock Infinite, I guess?, I don't fuckin' know what's comparable.
One specific complaint: The "Delete Session Data" function deletes more than just "session" data. That was annoying.

There is a very short list of complaints I have against The New Order: The two-timelines mechanic is not compelling enough to make me start a second playthrough; collectibles and upgrades in previous chapters can be missed forever (which, again, not quite compelling enough for a replay); and two or three encounters felt unfair, requiring a specific set of tactics and maneuvers to survive.

Otherwise, and in general, this is an incredibly well-made and captivating game that just happens to be a first-person shooter about killin' Nazis. It's one of the finest story-driven games I've played, with an impeccable presentation all throughout. And the gameplay, from knife-throwing to rocket-launching and everything inbetween, is consistently tight and rewarding.

This is the caliber of game everyone should play. Except those who get squeamish about graphic evisceration and dismemberment, I guess.

Better than: Spec Ops: The Line
Not as good as: BioShock, if only because of that game's more-open game world.
I've never felt quite so emotionally attached: to a game character who just killed hundreds of people.

Progress: Completed on "Bring 'em On" (normal) difficulty.