Sine Mora is a tough nut to crack. For starters, there's the name. It's Latin. The game was developed in Japan, and has voice-overs in ... Hungarian, but the title is Latin. Why not.

The storyline is also pretty hard to parse: not only because of its drip-fed explanations of the central war and its related factions, but also because it involves time travel, and is told in a mismatched, Pulp Fiction style. Or perhaps more accurately, a Memento style, since different parties know different things at different times, and since it deliberately plays with and defies the viewer's expectations at practically every turn. These vague hints and out-of-order events never really make any cohesive sense until the very end of the campaign.

Even the gameplay is a little perplexing, although it's rooted in simple schmup mechanics. Special weapons have bizarre and varying effects, depending on the specific mission. In-game time can be slowed with a collectible powerup, enabling easier attacks and dodges, but an on-screen timer continues counting down at a normal pace -- and depletes when hits are taken, acting as a life bar of sorts. And there are "permanent" weapon upgrade pickups, carrying over into subsequent missions, but these are reset to zero if otherwise-meaningless "continues" are used up. While the time-limit mechanic is much more forgiving than a traditional shoot-em-up, the use of continues is just ... weirdly anachronistic.

But Sine Mora's confusing elements add up to something surprisingly enthralling. Its core shooting gameplay is fun, with well-designed encounters and legitimately impressive boss fights. And the arcane premise and storytelling lend an air of mystery to the campaign as it progresses. Like a catchy K-pop song, being unable to understand it doesn't necessarily diminish how fun it is.

It helps that the game is absolutely gorgeous to look at, and that the camera-work in scripted fly-by sequences makes for some of the most beautiful vistas in modern gaming. (Actually, this sometimes works to the game's detriment, when the ship starts blending in with a colorful and varied backdrop. But on the whole, it's just really, incredibly good-looking.)

Sine Mora is a different sort of schmup. It's very forgiving to imperfections, it has a thoroughly-written story, and there are time-traveling animals flying amphibious airplanes. The game is about as outside-the-box as it can be, while still fulfilling the common requirements of a scrolling shooter. The result is a game that isn't exactly revolutionary, but is pleasantly accommodating, and undeniably fresh and unique.

Better than: Ikaruga
Not as good as: ... actually, I don't really have any better schmups to compare against.
And there are flashes of self-awareness, too: as in the fight against a boss named "SSOB PU DEKCUF."

Progress: Finished on Normal (mostly rank 'E').

Puzzle complexity continues to ramp up all the way to the end, with a final puzzle that demands mastery over the game's most advanced mechanics, in simultaneous combination. That's one "problem" with Gateways -- it's reliant on gameplay skills that it isn't very helpful in building up. Where a smoothly-polished game design would evolve these mechanics gradually and iteratively, training the player almost by accident, Gateways isn't shy about throwing up walls and walking away. (... I guess, to be fair, there are unlockable in-game hints, but I actively avoided them in order to think through puzzles on my own. Although I wish that some hints were available for the last puzzle, which was a real bear.)

I call this a "problem," using under-emphatic quotation marks, because this sense of overwhelming challenge does lend a certain character to the game. But the real problem with Gateways is that, outside of the puzzle designs, the platforming gameplay that ties puzzles together just isn't very well-implemented. As testing as it was to understand and mentally solve a puzzle, I had even more difficulty just wrangling the game into executing my solution, without falling off of inopportune ledges and totally screwing up strict timing and/or positioning. It's just so frustrating having to re-attempt a puzzle over and over, not because the solution was no good, but because of an awkward landing after a jump.

As for the game's other qualifications, the graphics and soundtrack are adequate but mediocre; there's no story except a total throwaway ending; and the game is technologically a mixed bag, with impressive portal rendering but a raft of seemingly-random infirmities (like what happened when I tried to change the resolution, which was, uh, nothing). Really, Gateways could be summed up as: great puzzles, mediocre everything else. But for players who like creative puzzles, it's worth tolerating the rest of the game for them.

Better than: Magrunner: Dark Pulse
Not as good as: Portal, Braid
Seriously, there's something sadistic: about posting the solution to the final puzzle in Hard mode, which is unrelated to the same puzzle in Normal mode.

Progress: 100% on Normal.

The perspective-bending puzzles in Gateways have quite an arc.

At first, the game is little more than an amateurish platformer. There are enemies, there are spikes. The running and jumping controls are, well, not very good. It isn't too long before the titular gateway gun shows up, though, which introduces some Portal-styled locomotion puzzles: how to get across long gaps, how to reach high ledges, how to use momentum in portal jumps, et cetera. But since it's all in two dimensions, puzzles stay pretty easy for this portion of the game.

Then there are new puzzle items to work with. A mirror that reflects light at an angle; a new gun that shrinks or enlarges the player character. Brain-teasing, intellectually-interesting puzzles. Neat stuff.

Then there is a time machine. Immediately, the time-warp gun triples the complexity of the game. It took me a good while to get acclimated to how the damn thing worked, and I'm still learning how to actually use it effectively. And, just for funsies, the game tosses in upgrades and puzzles that increase the number of parallel time folds. Yeah. Fucking brutal.

And then! Then. Then - following an interlude with a gun that rotates the map - there is the "multi gun." See, up to this point, switching gun types - gateway, resize, time, rotate - disabled the effect of whatever gun was previously in use. But with the multi-gun, everything can be in play at the same time. Let's just combine resizing mechanics and teleportation and spatial rotation with time travel, because, why not! Goddamn. It's bonkers and I am in awe of it.

Unfortunately, even when it's pulling off physics tricks that put Antichamber to shame, Gateways still suffers from unpolished controls. It's way too easy to step out of a time portal and into a paradox, purely by accident. It's way too easy to screw up a routine cliff-climbing maneuver from slipping a few pixels too far over a ledge. And it's way too easy to get confused about where a rotation is going, because there isn't a clear image of what's on the other side of the portal.

I don't usually keep playing games when their basic controls frustrate me as much as Gateways's are. Nor when the technical performance is this shaky; portal effects aside, there's no good reason for framerate to suffer when the graphical fidelity is this low. But I really want to see this one through -- if only to shove it in the game's face, and spite it for believing itself better than me.

Progress: 64%

The Steam promotional content had me optimistically expecting Hard Truck: Apocalypse to be some kind of middle ground between Mad Max and Red Faction: Guerrilla, driving around a nuked-up open world with way too many machine guns. And, well, that's sort of accurate -- but what most strongly characterized my time in Hard Truck: Apocalypse was the lack of things to do. Driving across mostly-empty expanses of barren world. Holding down a trigger to burn down an incompetent enemy, who barely fights back or poses any risk. Clicking through conversations where most of the dialog choices only had one option. And it's not like there's an epic story to suffer through this tedium for. What is the point?

It hardly matters that the production values are so poor, including baffling voice acting that sounds like it went through a few rounds of Google Translate. The gameplay itself just isn't interesting.

Drox Operative is ... not what I expected.

What I expected, I guess, was an Escape Velocity-like trek across a galaxy, with trading, ship upgrades, divergent campaigns, et cetera. And there are similarities, certainly: it's in space, there are some Newtonian physics, there are lasers, planetary communications grant quests -- but the core concepts of Drox Operative seem to be informed by a number of other, different genres. The realtime gameplay, for one, most closely resembles Diablo, with random drops and equipment slots featuring pretty heavily. The randomly-generated game universe invokes a sense of Terraria, and the diplomacy and war options are reminiscent of Civilization or other similarly-sophisticated 4X-es. Point being, Drox Operative shows a fairly diverse set of inspirations, and some pretty lofty aspirations for itself.

Unfortunately, in combining all of these disparate mechanics, the game suffers from a serious lack of focus. Like a Civ match, there are multiple different ways to "win" the game, but each objective is so complicated and nuanced - involving intergalactic politics, experience levels, ship upgrades, equipment slots, named enemies, travel quests... yikes. While I'm normally a fan of dense open worlds, the elements littering Drox Operative's universe don't seem to have any intermediate purpose, other than more breadcrumbs leading to a victory condition. I don't know -- in the absence of a tightly-scripted campaign or questline, I just didn't feel interested in stumbling randomly around the universe looking for things to do.

And the learning curve is a tough sell. It took me long enough just to get the hang of the twin-stick and dungeon-clicker hybrid combat system. And I'm still nowhere near being able to understand the differences between the in-game races, which are a Dungeons & Dragons-like cloud of wacky statistical attributes and abilities.

I admire the hell out of Drox Operative for its ambitious design and marriage of varied game elements. But it's hard to play, and the moment-to-moment gameplay doesn't feel rewarding enough for the amount of effort it asks.

Compared to League of Legends, Dota 2 seems immediately deeper and more complicated -- while still fitting pretty cleanly within the mold of "based on a Warcraft III map." There are more mechanics at play, here, like messengers to shuttle items up from the shop, and "secret" item stores. And yet the core gameplay is still indistinguishable from micromanaging hero units in a Blizzard-styled strategy game.

Dota 2 suffers, comparatively, from a less-polished UI than LoL's - actually, it looks nicer, but is more difficult to navigate - and from not adequately explaining its additional mechanics, such as the massive and labyrinthine item and crafting shop. The game's "training" mode drops off after just a couple of levels, showing off some of the game's ropes and then hurling the player straight into the deep end of unguided combat; it's a fair start, but there are obvious missing pieces. To be fair, LoL's tutorial is also missing any semblance of strategic or tactical advice, but the omission seems more glaring in Dota 2.

As much as I admired LoL's model of giving characters away for free, Dota 2 does one better by giving all the characters away. Other than cosmetic customizations, I'm not sure that there even is anything to buy, here. So that's cool.

What I really want from Dota 2, even moreso than from its peers, is a full-fledged story mode. It has all the RTS-inspired features to support it, and the training missions even start off with background lore and narrated objectives. But this never really goes anywhere. Valve could use Dota 2's foundation to make a pretty radical story-driven small-scale strategy game, if it really cared to.

Progress: Did the first round of training missions, fought some bots.

Hah!

As funny as Microsoft's non-comments on Rise of the Tomb Raider have been, I think this one really takes the Gamescom cake. Although I must give credit to Yoshida-san for admitting - re: the game being "totally re-engineered" - that if and when The Last Guardian is seen again, it may not bear any resemblance to the teaser from 2009.

From the moment the "exclusivity" announcement was made, it was obvious (if not direct) that Rise of the Tomb Raider would be coming to other platforms after the holiday. And from the way that Microsoft, Square Enix, and Crystal Dynamics refused to explicitly state this, it became clear that the deal has a gag order on it. Silly, and disappointing, but at least comprehensible.

And now the story is taking a turn into the hilariously stupid, with phrases like "My job is not to talk about games I don't own," and "I can talk about the deal I have" (then proceeding to not talk about that deal). I mean, wow. Yesterday it would have been impossible to believe that this announcement could be made any more awkward. But here we are.

I was looking forward to playing this game on a tricked-out PC, and I still am. All this "exclusivity" means for me is that when I get the game, it'll probably be a few months later, and either a few dollars less, or bundled with some post-launch DLC. At this point, the story of the story is infinitely more interesting than the story itself.

Transcripted is a creative, fun, flawed, fascinating game.

At its core, Transcripted is a hybrid match-three puzzler and twin-stick shooter. Imagine if a game like Luxor was played by flying a spaceship around and shooting floating enemies to collect game pieces. That, plus a generous helping of more minor game concepts, is the abstract of Transcripted. It's fairly original, as far as I know, and some excellently-implemented controls and mechanics (like upgrades and secondary weapons!) make it an immediately fun experience. There are even varying level objectives, including some where the goal is effectively to prevent the AI from winning the puzzle. Yeah -- creative.

The game's production values are pretty impressive on the whole, with slick visuals and a pleasant soundtrack. It even has a sizable game script and substantial voice acting, although the initially-interesting sci-fi plot veers into awkward implausibility pretty early on. (And the ending is distinctly of the "hey look we ran out of time" variety.) But those gripes aside, it's obvious that a lot of care and effort went into this release.

What ultimately holds Transcripted back is its relative brevity - at around three to five hours, depending on skill level - and narrow focus. The core gameplay is fun, and the campaign has a surprising amount of level variety; but the story is a throwaway justification for introducing new level constructs. And optional offerings, such as earning higher scores and completing extra-narrative challenges, aren't really compelling. The story mode has just enough of Transcripted's puzzle-shooter formula to satisfy, and so there isn't much reason to re-tread that formula just for a high score (especially since the optional challenges don't include any of the campaign's cool upgrades).

Transcripted looks, sounds, and plays great. Its narrative framing is a bit lackluster, and its replay value doesn't amount to much. But within its relatively narrow scope, it definitely delivers; and most levels (except for one near the end, with one-of-a-kind insta-kill obstacles) are a unique joy to play. It's quite unlike anything I've played before, and a fine production at that.

Better than: Ikaruga
Not as good as: SpaceChem
Oh, uh, also: apparently it is no longer available. That sucks. Pretty hard.

Progress: Beat on Normal shooter difficulty + Normal puzzle difficulty.

What surprised me about Halo: Spartan Assault wasn't -- you know, that it isn't a Halo game, really, at all. That much I knew going in: that this is a twin-stick shooter set in the Halo universe. No, what surprised me was that the gameplay is pretty bare.

Spartan Assault emulates the weapons and grenades of a first-person Halo game, but the top-down perspective removes any sense of verticality, and the zoomed-out perspective minimizes battle tension. Again, it's no surprise that this isn't much like other Halos, but what's surprising is that Spartan Assault doesn't bring anything new to the table to replace these legacy features. The gameplay just feels insufficient.

Also, the levels are short. I only did a couple, but evidently they're all just a few minutes long. The game's "story" is told exclusively inbetween mission sets - that is, not even inbetween each mission - and isn't very interesting anyway, just recounting some rote-sounding human-on-covenant conflict. Not a lot going on.

I didn't remember, until I'd stopped playing, that Halo: Spartan Assault had started out as a mobile (Windows Phone) game; the high-fidelity graphics are a good distraction from that. But the game's overall lack of depth makes perfect sense in that context. Despite its relatively-high production values, Spartan Assault as a whole comes across as too shallow to be a "real" video game.

Progress: Finished level A-2.