Now here's a game that (unlike some others) really understands, and builds upon, its forebears. Ittle Dew, aside from having a pretty fun title, is a refreshing and exciting homage to the top-down Zelda formula, and arguably to Link's Awakening and Phantom Hourglass in particular.

The pitch is pretty straightforward: a small-scope island map, with four interconnected regions, each with a dungeon, a magic treasure, and a boss. Dungeon puzzles don't waste any time becoming awesomely devious, and some bonus puzzles scattered around the map - which conceal heart pieces, as well as extra collectibles - definitely push the envelope re: strategic block pushing. Seriously, these are some of the best-designed block puzzles I've ever seen.

One of Ittle Dew's really fascinating twists on the Zelda approach is re-ordering the formula's basic sequence. In a Zelda game, you'll be given some story goal (get the thing to save the person with the thing, yada yada yada), then explore the overworld to get to the dungeon, crawl the dungeon to get the thing, and finally beat a boss to escape the dungeon.

Ittle Dew upends that by first having you explore a central dungeon - ala Phantom Hourglass's Temple of the Ocean King - to collect gold, to use for "buying" a magic item, which causes the shopkeeper to teleport you inside the dungeon where that item lives; then you get the item, solve puzzles and beat a boss to escape, and make the relatively short trek back through the overworld to the hub. It's a bit jarring at first, but this approach has some distinct benefits: like removing the need to retread ground in the overworld, and cutting out the thing-for-person-with-thing bullshit (which, you'll note, had become a blight upon modern Zelda). Ittle Dew maintains a big-picture overall goal, but keeps things light along the way.

This sense of whimsy is reflected in the game's art and writing as well, which is infused throughout by eye-catching designs and irreverent humor. Ittle Dew's characters and elements are weird, but not unsettling weird, like Anodyne's -- off-the-wall weird, like, people in animal costumes; pancakes that fly around; and dungeon obstacles with faces. Encountering an enemy type for the first time will initiate a brief get-to-know-you conversation. Sometimes you'll run into a non-sequitor art detail, like a birdhouse on the wall, and Ittle will pop up a bit of flavor text. The presentation overall is just fun.

Beyond its well-informed gameplay and entertaining aesthetics, Ittle Dew offers a lot of opportunity for additional difficulty via sequence breaking. There are three magic items to collect, but evidently it's possible to finish the game with any combination of only two of those! Dungeons and the overworld are also filled with puzzles that can be accomplished with combinations of items, or with only a single item, if you really want to test your mettle. And then there are the optional collectibles and a pair of bonus dungeons, just for extra challenge. Personally I'm not that motivated to squeeze yet more life out of the game, but if I was, Ittle Dew would certainly be accommodating.

Sadly, all stories must have villains, and the big one here is that the game is short. I wrapped it up in under three hours - including the tens of minutes I spent staring at some particularly fiendish puzzles - and there is a Steam achievement for finishing in less than 15 minutes, so, apparently that's a thing that is possible. Again, there is plenty of extra content, if you're so inclined; but as the crow flies, it's over fairly quickly.

The PC version of Ittle Dew also seems to have a baffling performance issue, which gets exacerbated by the amount of constantly-moving elements on-screen at any given time. It's bizarre, since this is a Unity game that also runs on mobile (there's even an Ouya version). But if you can live with some frame-skipping, it's at least tolerable.

Ittle Dew is a short, tightly-crafted Zelda-like that does some things (block puzzles!) better than Zelda ever has. It oozes fun from all its pores, and never weighs itself down with unnecessary filler. I really, really hope to see more from this franchise in the future.

Better than: Anodyne, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
Not as good as: The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
Less content, but more densely satisfying than: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

Progress: Completed the game with all three items.

Evoland is a love letter to older adventure games and RPGs -- but this letter isn't thoughtful, or emotive, or even enticing. Evoland's metaphorical letter is cloying and shallow. It smacks of desperation, of a naive desire to be best friends with those older games; of a deep-seated infatuation with their outward appearances, while completely misunderstanding their deeper significance. It's a few steps away from an "I WANT TO WEAR YOUR SKIN, HA HA HA," kind of letter.

It starts innocently enough, with a DLC Quest-style demake approach that incrementally introduces key game mechanics. This, at least, is interesting insomuch as it demonstrates abstract game concepts in the absence of fundamentals like music and health points.

But, it isn't long until Evoland "evolves" into what will become its two primary game modes: top-down Zelda-inspired wilderness and dungeon navigation, and Final Fantasy-inspired overworld traversal with random turn-based battles. "But wait," your inner voice might be wondering, "aren't those radically different approaches to statistics, inventory, combat, and pretty much everything else?" They sure are. And there are a smattering of other such "inspirations" in here as well, including a Diablo level and a 3D action-based fight. As much as Evoland may have wanted to frame these game modes as different perspectives on the same core game, the inconsistencies are just too wild to see them as even remotely related to one another.

So the game is left with a wide variety of mechanics, all directly inspired by popular and historic games. None of them are implemented very well; that is to say, if split off into individual games, none of them would even be worth mentioning. The Zelda-style gameplay suffers from poor hit detection and dull level design. The Final Fantasy-style sections are plagued by uninteresting monsters, a dearth of combat options, and an absurdly high random-encounter rate. And the others similarly outstay their welcomes, descending into tedium well before their levels are up. It's hard to call any of this stuff "gameplay" at all, until near the end, where there are actually a couple of fire-arrow puzzles to solve.

And all that would be fine if Evoland successfully parodied its inspirations, or reveled in genuine nostalgia. But its references are both too narrow, and too simple, to accomplish anything meaningful. Nearly half the campaign could be considered a poor fan-sequel for Final Fantasy VII specifically, with practically everything else in the game world directly attributable to Final Fantasy VIII, or The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, or Diablo II (or maybe Torchlight instead). But even with such a narrow focus on source material, Evoland almost always stops short of outright parody or satire. "Hey, that's Cloud's sword." "Hey, that guy's name is Cid." These aren't jokes. These are just facts.

The funniest the game gets is in its Diablo-alike section, where random (and pointless) loot drops fill equipment slots with attributes that don't exist in Evoland, or in any other game. But this is the only memorable highlight.

Un-funny, non-compelling, poorly-executed, stale-by-design. And with its ancient approach to save points, Evoland even manages to make itself as frustrating as its progenitors, while nonetheless lacking the attributes that made them fun to play.

At about three hours - excluding backtracking for meaningless collectibles - Evoland is at least two hours too long.

Better than: Caster
Not as good as: DLC Quest
If you do decide to play Evoland: don't make the same mistake I did, and assume that the game is on its last legs as you're growing tired of it. Just stop. It's not worth pressing on to find out how wrong you are.

Progress: Finished the story.

Savant: Ascent is an arcade-style game for fans of the artist's (Savant's) music. In that respect, it's a clear victory, with action and aesthetics that seem very well-suited to its high-energy soundtrack. Aside from its musical association, though, there isn't really much here of value. To put it another way -- the game is currently going for $2, and that seems like a pretty appropriate price.

The gameplay itself is similar to a twin-stick shooter, but with restricted player movement: you can only move between two spots on the screen, to dodge enemies when they lunge towards you. (This is also used to fair effect in a boss battle at the end.) Otherwise, you'll just hold the mouse button to shoot at enemies that swarm around you, and occasionally use a special powered-up shot to deal more significant damage.

Ascent has a "story" mode which uses hand-drawn scenes (which, honestly, don't look nearly as nice as the in-game sprites) to tell a vague story about the player character being thrown from the tower he must subsequently ascend. There are only three "levels" in the story: one at the bottom, one on an elevator that climbs upward (this is the fun-looking part from the game's trailers), and one at the top with a boss fight. I hesitate to even call these levels, really, since you can't start at any particular one; you can only continue from the most recent one if you die during the ascent.

There are a few different types of enemy, although the only one that's really meaningfully different from random-flying-object is a snake that needs to be dodged and beaten down a bit. And the boss battle is neat, although it was also a bit dumbfounding for me until I looked up the necessary technique for defeating its final form.

There are extra modes for high scores and collectibles and so on, but personally I feel - having put about half an hour into finishing the story mode - that I've gotten my fill of Savant: Ascent. I appreciate the effort that went into producing the game, and it's a nice bit of fun for what it is, but it's hard to see as anything more than a bonus for Savant's fans.

Better than: a behind-the-scenes video, or some other dumb pack-in album bonus.
Not as good as: a real, full-fledged video game.
It would be pretty interesting-slash-cool: if this companion-game idea caught on for music.

Progress: Finished story mode once.

Papers, Please isn't fun. I know that's the point. But that doesn't make it fun. It's a slow, gruelling, depressing, irritatingly inconvenient exercise in simulated bureaucracy. Each progressive day at the border checkpoint adds more paperwork bullshit to deal with -- reading data, verifying it against the rulebook, clicking this, dragging that, clicking another thing... ugh. I don't want to do any of these things.

Wait, what? People actually like this?

I just don't understand the appeal, at all.

Progress: Got to day 4.

(This is a terrible post title, since a significant aspect of Thomas Was Alone's theme was the power and meaning of teamwork. Oh well.)

To be blunt, the new "Benjamin's Flight" content for Thomas Was Alone - two additional chapters of ten levels each - is not worth bothering with.

• It's short. Not that Thomas Was Alone was a lengthy game on its own, but expect the new chapters to keep you busy for under an hour, total.
• The story isn't interesting. It isn't new or shocking enough to stand on its own, and it isn't long enough to develop anything as meaningful as the main game's characters or themes.
• There isn't enough gameplay variety. There are only four block-characters in the whole thing, with the majority of its levels centered around Benjamin, who has a jetpack -- which as neat as it is, becomes tedious pretty quickly. And the other characters don't really add anything worthwhile; in fact, most of the levels' challenges involve Benjamin escorting these characters to the end.
• The level design is frustrating. There are a whole bunch of levels with spike walls, spike ceilings, and insta-kill water-filled pits, and trying to pilot Benjamin and his jetpack through these areas becomes maddening. It's like VVVVVV but with worse checkpoints.

Thomas Was Alone is still an awesome, incredible game. But these additional chapters don't add anything of value to it.

For some months now, Syder Arcade has been sitting in my backlog, my only exposure to the game being its incredible soundtrack. (Seriously, it's a great arrangement of Halo- and Mass Effect-like swells, and more schmup-style high-energy beats. It's really good.) I hadn't given the game itself a real try until now. And ... well. While the presentation is certainly impressive, between the (great!) soundtrack and some surprisingly high-quality graphics, the game itself really isn't something I can get excited about.

Syder Arcade incorporates a neat mixture of shoot-em-up twists, specifically different categories of weapon pickups (ala Raiden), a fixed free-roamable arena, and some light StarFox-like mission variety including some escort and protection objectives. But at its heart, it hews closest to bullet-hell chaos, with explosive bullets and missiles and enemy spawns and all kinds of shit just running amok all over the place. The campaign becomes a hectic bullet-dodging mess by the third mission. ... Granted, the campaign is only six missions long, but that brevity is just another thing I'd complain about.

Also, at least with all the modern, high-powered graphics settings turned up, I found projectile effects sometimes difficult to differentiate from shiny background art. Not that I would necessarily have performed better even if I could have clearly seen all the bullets. But it's still not great.

The short campaign and difficulty curve - and, yeah, the title of the game I guess - make it clear that this is an arcade-styled game, oriented around high-speed action and high score challenges. And I'm just not interested in that stuff.

But I still love this soundtrack!

Progress: Almost finished the third campaign mission.

Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten is a humble game: it has a simple audiovisual presentation, it's technologically unambitious (based in Flash, or, Air, or whatever), and it has a no-bullshit mission statement. But atop these humble foundations lies a finely-crafted experience, carefully polished and brimming with personality. The game's lack of bombast and ego allows the developer's passion to shine through, and, well, it's really hard not to get caught up in it.

Defender's Quest bills itself as a tower defense/RPG hybrid, and while that's literally true, it doesn't really do justice to the gameplay formula. Within a combat encounter, the game resembles tower defense more than anything else, as you place different unit types - melee attackers, ranged attackers, healers, magic support, et al - in strategic positions to prevent waves of enemies from passing through lanes to the end of the map. You can also use some magic abilities in real-time, and fiddle with individual unit AI, but none of these facets are even remotely as important as unit placement and in-combat upgrades ("boosts" in the game's parlance).

It's outside of battle that the RPG elements step into the spotlight. Every unit you can place - some given to you by the campaign, others you can recruit for money - has an experience level and gains experience points from participating in battle. Level-ups give units skill points that you can invest in active or passive skills: active skills unlock and power-up new abilities that get enabled by boosting, while passive skills can be anything from increased attack power to a chance of special effects like blind or freeze.

In addition to experience points, there's also a "scrap" currency you accumulate from winning battles, which can be used to buy new armor and weapons for your deployable units. Weapons especially can have a dramatic effect on the damage output of a melee class. So, yeah -- outside of combat, it's a lot like a traditional RPG. It's this balance between the game's two sides - realtime combat like a tower defense game, and leisurely out-of-combat statistical planning like an RPG - that I found really appealing.

What I also found appealing was the campaign's writing, which is where the game's personality shines brightest. The premise on its own is suitably fascinating and compelling, but Defender's Quest doesn't rely on melodrama to keep its narrative interesting; it's got a very healthy sense of humor as well. What's really commendable about it is that the dialogue banter between campaign characters is neither sterile nor over-the-top, but grounded and believably witty. Good writing is rare enough in video games, but this is really among the best I've seen.

There is a lot going for Defender's Quest, but I can't simply forget its flaws, either. Most of the game's mechanics are very well explained by introductory tutorials, but some important and non-obvious aspects of the game (like re-doing earlier encounters on higher difficulties to earn new rewards) are left to discover by accident. Controlling the overworld map can be a bit painful, due to an odd decision to path through partially-hidden caves. And the campaign's difficulty ramps up sharply toward the end, requiring quite a bit of stat-grinding to get through the final levels. Ultimately it was this grind that most significantly lowered my opinion of the game.

But it succeeds on its basic promises, despite its overall humility -- in fact, some of its shortcomings, like the flat animation style, add to its charm. Defender's Quest is a fun, fairly-unique game, with refreshing writing and minimal time-wasting garbage. I'm not quite sure if I'm ready for a sequel yet, but I'm at least happy to have experienced this one.

Better than: Anomaly: Warzone Earth
Not as good as: in theory, a full-fledged strategy/tactical RPG, but I haven't played a good one of those in recent memory.
I think it's also better than: Plants vs. Zombies, but it's hard to remember that for sure, either.

Progress: Finished the campaign on default settings.

Take a base of Limbo (for its platform-puzzling and deadly traps). Add two parts Walking Dead (the story, not necessarily the game, for its terrible-people-in-a-zombie-apocalypse story); one part Shadow Complex (for 2.5-D graphics in an Unreal Engine sidescroller); and one tablespoon of awful platforming controls. Stir in a pinch of shameful writing and voice acting. Bake for 3-4 hours. Congratulations! You've got a Deadlight.

It's certainly not the worst game I've ever played, but Deadlight presents a diverse mix of content that's either carbon-copied from other titles, or very poorly executed -- or both. The game's most persistent irritation is its over-reliance on precision platforming, despite its controls really not supporting this at all. I suffered dozens of insta-gib deaths from triggering traps, or falling down pits, or stumbling into death-orgies, as a result of over- or under-extended collision detection or unrecognized button presses. And why is it that this guy can fucking long-jump and wall-bounce, but can't swim? And then there are the numerous frustrating instances of enemies or chasms directly behind a blind door. And the utter hopelessness of being stunlocked to death by a pack of infinitely-respawning zombies (due to the game's lengthy animations).

Deadlight is typically generous with checkpoints, so it isn't an issue of wasted time, so much as it is an issue of outright unfairness. In games, a "good" death is one that you can learn something from, whether it's what you should have done instead, or merely what you shouldn't have done. But Deadlight's deaths are overwhelmingly cheap technical or design flukes, that challenge you only to fiddle with your timing until it magically works.

There are frequent hints, such as dangling story references and awkward cutscene transitions, that significant amounts of content were cut; and for once, I'm really glad for that, because the gameplay could certainly have buckled under a larger time commitment. In the end, Deadlight is mostly playable, and short enough that it's ultimately inoffensive. But its familiarity and poor execution make it hard to recommend, in the face of other games that do the same things better.

Better than: The Walking Dead (arguably -- at least Deadlight kept my attention throughout its brief running time)
Not as good as: Limbo, Shadow Complex
Such terrible voice acting: I seriously suspect that they just recorded random members of the development team.

Progress: Finished on Normal.

I wouldn't say that I'm bewildered by a game very often, but Cloudbuilt has definitely done it, and pretty quickly to boot. I guess it shouldn't be a huge surprise: when you hear someone pitch a jetpack-powered free-running wall-jumping game with lasers -- as awesome as that sounds, the first doubt fomenting in your head should be, "will it even be possible to control this?" Cloudbuilt's answer is, "sort of!"

The introductory level feels like a jarring, into-the-deep-end tutorial about the game's wall-running and jumping controls, and it's impossible not to notice how loose these controls are. So much functionality relies on the camera angle, which is of course swinging wildly as you jump around; and the distinction between surfaces you can or can't run across, or ledges you can or can't jump to, is really unclear. It took me a few minutes to come to the conclusion that I should just embrace and revel in these fast-and-loose mechanics.

Then the intro level is over, and the first real level begins. And now there's a jetpack! All the tutorial's mechanics are blown way, way up, and brand new control hints just keep popping up - how to double-jump, how to run up walls, how to control elevation, shooting, charging, placing checkpoints! sweet Jebus - it's like a constant stream of disorienting bullshit, in addition to the already-disorienting controls.

The game works best when it's running fast (not unlike Mirror's Edge, Prince of Persia, et al), but the controls are so wacky and sensitive that it's impossible to do this game fast. Well, it's impossible for me to do this game fast. I'd bet that a practiced player could get there, but man. There's just no hope for me.

Progress: Finished the first real level.

This isn't even a three-strikes-and-you're-out scenario -- WayForward already got tagged out from Explore the Dungeon. Epic Quest is a different kind of game from a different developer. Cartoon Network put a new player up to bat, and now I just want to throw them out for making a mockery of game development. ... This metaphor is starting to fall apart, but the point is, Finn and Jake's Epic Quest is also a bad game.

There's one thing that it gets right, and it's the look of Adventure Time -- not in terms of hand-drawn artistic style, but the character models, environment detail, color palette, ability effects; they all look the part of the cartoon. Unfortunately, Epic Quest doesn't have much in the way of dialog or exposition, so it can't exploit the same witty writing that Wayforward's efforts were able to.

But that isn't what makes this game bad. What makes it bad is the flat, dull gameplay. This is a button-mashy character action game, with slightly-floaty controls, overly shallow abilities, and enough enemy health that combat becomes repetitive very quickly. It's largely the kind of simple, no-frills game you could attribute to a younger-skewing target playerbase, except that there are also incredibly frustrating combat situations that most kids would not have the patience to tolerate. Large enemies that can only be attacked from behind, flying enemies that flee faster than you can chase, enemy attacks that reverse your directional controls; this kind of bullshit starts happening even in the game's first five minutes.

Epic Quest's gameplay lives somewhere between lifeless and grind-fest, and it just doesn't pull off anything exciting enough to keep me engaged. And what's amazing is that, based on the overview of the game map, there is a ton more content -- like dozens of levels, of which I could only put up with two and a half. I can't even begin to imagine tolerating that much of this game.

Better than: Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I Don't Know!
Not as good as: Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!
My dream of a high-quality, open-world adventure-RPG in Ooo: has been pretty much annihilated by now.

Progress: Level 1-3