Underground Blossom

Underground Blossom is the next escape room style game by Rusty Lake studios.  

This one has you going from subway stop to subway stop solving escape room-esque type puzzles, each station also represents a significant moment-in-time of a young girl, Laura's life -- infancy, childhood, school, love, loss, etc..   I believe her mother dies tragically and she goes a bit crazy for it, but I might be reading into things somewhat.

The game does a great job in not being overly obtuse with the clues, but I did find myself on occasion trying the old "try every object on every thing" tactic to get past a few things that didn't quite make sense.

A good two hours spent.

Black Myth: Wukong

Black Myth: Wukong was a great game, very much a Soulslike with an Asian flair.

This game actually has a rather large backstory that I won't try to mess up here, but effectively you play as a reincarnation of the Monkey God, fighting your way through various territories to defeat ???? 

There were bosses literally everywhere, but no easy potion resting mechanic and no soul retrieval - but all of these mini-bosses would disappear giving you a clean shot with all of your potions at the main bosses for the levels.   

Fun game ... I didn't finish because I stopped playing for a few weeks and feel like I can't pick up where I was, which was stuck on a super fast/hard boss.

shapez 2

shapez 2 is the successor to shapez, which is the little brother of Satisfactory.   

It is a topdown factory builder for stackable colored shapes that can get more and more complicated.   It's fun, but it's also one of those games that "the next time you play" you would play so much better, because each of the parts tend to add to themselves.

For example, you'll deliver a shape that is a semi-circle on top of a square, but then the next shape you'll have to deliver will have the shapes colored and then swapped, so you have to somehow fit that kind of process into your already established production chain, or rebuild everything.   Your factories in the first playthrough look like spaghetti because of it and are horribly inefficient at times when all the sudden you need 10x a process or resource to happen, "the next time I play" I'll know what the final shape is and/or build in a modular way to make that easy.

But maybe I'll try that when shapez 3 comes out.

Firewatch

 Firewatch is a walking simulator where you play the role of a park ranger in a remote location.  Throughout this you are told the story of your wife who has developed Alzheimer's disease, making choices that define the narrative for why you are here at this remote location instead of staying with her.  This pretty much paints you as a jerk (IMHO), and indeed as I viewed some of the potential outcomes one is that you get overfly flirtatious with the anonymous voice on the radio.

The day involves you following a series of park events that eventually culminate in a fire.  

It did not have the emotional impact I think they were going for, I got annoyed with my guy and bored with the walking around.

Inscryption

Inscryption is a card/puzzle game that has to battling an unknown entity in a room/purgatory, learning clues as you play to unlock things in the room that enhance your deck to get further.

The mechanics are pretty straightforward and enjoyable as you enhance your deck, but the main part of the gameplay involves working around the ways a boss can cheat (steal your cards, destroy everything, etc).  

What is unfortunate and made me stop playing is that you are not working on a main deck/card/anything -- if you die, you try again.   That's tolerable when you are 5 minutes into a game, but as you progress - the end boss you have to figure out how to cheese is 30-45 minutes deep.

Birth

Birth is a point-and-click puzzle game that has you trying to amass and assemble bones and flesh into a companion, a "wet warm heart".

The puzzles are very quick and oftentimes simple, like clearing the scales off a fish and assembling the remaining bits into the correct locations, nothing that involved deeper thought like a sliding pane puzzle, they are more about finding missing components by noticing things like loose threads you can pull on.

I would say it is as fun and plays similar to the recent Boxes game, but with 2D animations.

Chorus

Chorus is a space combat game where you play as a super agent turned renegade of "the Prophet" who intends to subjugate the galaxy, sing with the Chorus or are destroyed.  While you play, you're plagued in a Hellblade: Sensua way, as you remember and lament the atrocities you committed as a member of Chorus.

The gameplay is fairly well done for an aerial combat, aim assist is a huge help -- but it does suffer from the same problems every game like this does, losing track of things that go past you.  It doubles down on this problem by having no reverse ability - so when navigating a corridor with obstacles it can be a pain to nose bump your craft back onto the correct path.

The game introduces a symbiotic ship, that you're able to use some meta abilities with - like a short range teleport and a way to drift in space (which one would think would be automatic with no friction ..).  I have no interest in playing more nor watching the remaining as a Let's Play for cutscenes to make it make more sense.