PixelJunk Eden

PixelJunk Eden is something that I would neeeeever have played if not for forcing myself to go through this backlog of games.  I'm not sure why I even bought it, vector graphics really make a game feel dated and platformers are not my cup of tea.  That said, this one was pretty fun for what it was.

The controls are mindlessly simple and the game is really smooth, effectively you play as a spiderish being that can jump from swaying "plants" collecting pollen to seed other "plant" sproutings in order to find a number of orchid hidden in a level.  

This is probably a great phone game, but I probably won't come back to it on PC.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an exploration/experience game that you should play during the daytime.  Not because of the jump scares, but because otherwise you will fall right asleep.

The gameplay is effectively wandering around until you find hotspots that have no clue in the environment where they are, so you must wander and walk up to everything and check.  This is done to further the story of Ethan and his dysfunctional family.

I was wondering if they were creating that Twilight Zone scenario of "The Boy Who Dreams" -- but I don't believe it was that.  I think his family just sucked and didn't understand the boy and his imagination.  I ended up reading the remaining bits on a Wiki and do enjoy that they allowed the ending up to interpretation, if only it was more stimulating to play...,

Superliminal

Superliminal a perspective based first person game where, similar to Portal, you are presented with a series of puzzles and a way to break out of the test environment.  

It was enjoyable on the surface, you have the ability to interact with objects and make them larger or smaller, so a candy bar you could move and make as big as a house to push multiple buttons at once, or make a house the size of a candy bar so you could carry it through the door.  

It also has perspective based puzzles, where you need to stand in a certain area and look to for an image from what is painted on the area in 2d, at which point you can pluck it out as a 3-D object.  These were by far the most annoying and non-sensical puzzles to include, effectively look everywhere at every perspective and see if things line up to make a picture that you can then jump through.   Not seeing it left me wandering a level back and forth trying to see what it was I was missing.

Done.

Twelve Minutes

 Twelve Minutes is a game that is brilliant in concept but ends up getting a little rough in execution.

You play the last moments of your lives in Sim fashion as a few minutes into the evening a "detective" (Willem DaFoe) breaks into your apartments and kills your wife and possibly you based on your actions.  You are forced to live through these last "twelve minutes" repeatedly, but able to use what you learn in previous episodes as options in future encounters.  

I inadvertently stumbled across a hotspot early on for something important and was able to get to what you might consider a fairly good resolution, only to have it thwarted at the last second because I didn't decide to knife the knocked-out detective.    Twelve Minutes done in sixty-four.

I considered myself done and went to watch videos of what I missed.   But I was considering the object of the game to be saving my wife and myself from the detective.  Apparently it gets super deep as you can investigate the motivation of the detective -- and then super "wait whaa?" as character interactions get a little mixed up (explained I suppose because you are going a bit crazy in the repetition I bet) --- and then super "ok now come on" as you find out you're the cause of everyone's problems.

So I suppose I quite at the right time.  Great idea that might have been taken a bit too far.  A bunch of interesting ways to deal with something and a number of scenarios.  That's the game I want to play.