SteamWorld Dig

SteamWorld Dig has a classic arcade game feel.  You are a small robot that is left an inheritance of a mine beneath a small western robot city.

Mining materials can be sold on the surface to purchase mining supplies and you can find upgrades within puzzle type caves as well.   It's fairly quick paced play but more fun than I imagined when just starting.

There is incentive to keep going -- your pack gets full of gems, so you unload them and upgrade something like an upgraded pickaxe, which is inspiration to then go collect another pack full of treasure.  The full game took about 3 hours - with only one boss fight.

The Forgotten City

The Forgotten City is "Groundhog's Day" and has you travelling in a time loop while trapped in an ancient Roman(ish) city.

The city is under somewhat of a martial law by the gods -- if anyone sins in any way, everyone is killed.  You are able to escape the destruction and play out the following day with the knowledge and items that you got from the previous episode.

This is mainly a dialog based game as you uncover secrets and try to determine who the next primary sinner is going to be.  One for example of gameplay had a hitman find his way into the city, on the first encounter I denied knowing anything and was shot = reset.  The second encounter, I claimed I knew exactly who he was hunting for but directed him to a building I knew was going to collapse - problem solved? No, when discussing that I knew the building was going to collapse, people realized I murdered the hitman = reset.  Finally I was able to figure out a consistent scenario that dealt with the hitman threat.

You weren't locked into one storyline too - so kind of like a garden slowly growing, all of the threads of the various stories were blooming to completion and then to the main path.  Artfully done game for a small development group.

Short and worth it.

Deadlight

Deadlight is an action sidescroller where you are a survivor of a zombie apocalypse who is immediately separated from your party and searching for your family.  Level design is fairly simple - shoot a lock from a grate, jump to grab ledges and climb up buildings in this dystopia while avoiding zombies.

You do eventually get some weapons, but most of the levels appear to be designed with a speedrun mentality in mind, so you can avoid a lot by being efficient in what you do.   This also fell flat on its face in a couple sequences where the building starts collapsing around you and making one wrong move results in replaying the sequence.

The story has "bad guys" who captured your crew, when you finally rescue one of them from the base - you're chased in a seemingly no-escape situation with your companion who starts yelling "KILL ME!", whereupon you have a flashback to what really happened on Day 0.   Similar to the end of The Mist, you and your wife and daughter were trapped in a room with two bullets.   Blam!   Blam!   This gives you power to burst through some planks for your companion to escape -- and you to monolog while getting eaten.  

Pretty good quickie.

The Shore

The Shore was more walking simulator than game.   There are simple puzzles to open a path, and a few instances where you need to travel directly to avoid being eaten by one of the creatures in the current area.   But nothing that really required "gamer skill".

It tells the story of a man wandering and apparently stranded on a beach looking for his lost daughter.   There are relics of previous people and letters that help reveal the story of the island and people going crazy, as well as Lovecraftian artifacts.

Spoilers ahead.

Eventually you make it into a Geiger'ish / Hellish tunnel system in order to release some of the old gods. The end has you viewing your history as Azathoth looks on and the narrator telling you that your daughter isn't real, he fed you memories of her and you have been his play thing "but it's not too late" as you could will her into Azathoth's dream.  The final moments have you walking towards her (illusion?) and turning into the oily look of some of the creatures you passed on your way.  Roll credits.

For a Lovecraftian based game I think they did a great job - it wasn't necessarily "fun" but it was definitely interesting and creepy at times.   I mean, I suppose I technically destroyed the universe by waking Azathoth ... so ... Achievement Unlocked?

Gauntlet

Gauntlet is a 4 person co-op game that pays homage to the original Gauntely coin-op game, tries to expand on it, but misses the charm of the original by a mark.

This instead is a pseudo-Diablo dungeon crawl Smash Brothers TV Show.  I only played as Warrior, but I feel like I had enough of it with just that.  It's probably a decent amount of fun with 4 player co-op, but as a single player it's a bit overwhelming at times and not super fun to make up for that.

Risen 3: Titan Lords

Risen 3: Titan Lords is a sword and sorcery RPG with a pirate theme.   You are killed and brought back to life, looking for your sister.  It's chock full of dialog options, and it looks decent in cutscenes - but the characters have no more than speaking expressions.  It was unsettling seeing my sister "cry" over my dead body shaking with a slight smile, kind of felt like laughter.

This has quests that make sense though -- you're reborn with nothing and need to build your life back, so doing an errand to earn gold makes perfect sense.  If a guy wants to pay me to put flowers on his wife's grave - done, I had other quests in that zone anyways.

The fighting mechanics are pretty weak, and as a swordsman pretty much every slow attack is interruptible by your foe with a quick triple attack, so it's a lot of dodging and waiting for opportunities, or having your companion tank and swap aggro back and forth.

The main reason I'm quitting this one is I can't stay awake playing it.  There are SO much dialog and story exposition, compulsion is making me wander every dialog tree - and as good as the dialog might be (not necessarily the delivery), the lack of anything beyond that makes me ... makes m... zzzzzzzz.

If I played this 15 years ago, it would have been amazing.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider had some cinematic moments in the original game, and I think that's something that they've focused on being the core part of their game excitement.  Running along a dock as explosions are happening around you, jumping from log to log as you race down a river torrent, blast up a ramp and slow-mo over a catwalk on your jetski.   

Shadow of the Tomb Raider had some of that which was well done, but it also had a lot of monotonous pseudo-gameplay as well.  Like -- push forward on the stick so you can climb up a hole, but you just hold it down for the 10 second struggle up and out as things are collapsing around you.

It also suffers from that Tomb Raider'ish problem of severe rails and only one pathway, so if you can't understand what they're trying to present as a puzzle, you could be stumped.  This happened a few times with a "scrambling up" mechanic, kind of like a double jump up a wall.  I got stumped when the only way out was to jump across a gap and scramble up the far cliff, because the physics of it is absurd and there is a different key for holding onto the ledge that I was just a little bit short of and feeling like I was making bad jumps.  Nope - just bad design.

Story was ... nothing amazing?  Run of the mill Lara trying to keep the "object" out of the hands of the "agency", where she is always one step ahead but "agency" resources end up getting the "object" anyway -- cue final battle.

Nice looking game, seemless cutscenes and area transitions, the joke 20 some years ago was "how many poly's they used on Lara's boobs" -- I think more poly's might have been spent elsewhere.  I believe the kids nowadays refer to this as a high poly badonkadonk.

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Dragon Age Inquisition came out in 2014, and visually it looks pretty good for the year, gameplay-wise it's very bad for the year it was made.

Once again the fate of the world rests upon your shoulders, you are the only one who can close the demon-rifts that have starting forming and terrorizing the lands.  Meanwhile the world is divided as it was into factions that you presumably will team up with for whatever final battle this formula-in-a-box adventure has for you.   

Being that my character is the only character that can close these rifts, it seems odd that in these "adventure" games you're mostly an errand boy.  Badly attenuated dialog requests; the farmer who can't bring flowers to his wife's grave, the scout that has gone missing, the ring that was lost when the bandits raided the village, it's so much "been done before and better" that I can't bear to play it any more.

The combat also did not feel right.  It was spamming various ability buttons to add bonus hits to your attacks as you maneuver around the battleground with tank controls trying to target things.  There is a tactical mode where you can pause and assign individual orders, and if the battle was super complicated or ... fun ... maybe it would be worth doing it XCOM style.  

Not an improvement on the first game in anything other than engine, they didn't learn how to tell a story.

Valheim

Valheim is a viking/survival game, a spiritual successor to Minecraft in that you have to manually get a bunch of resources and can craft bases and upgrades for your gear as you move around looking for the series of bosses in the land.

It's divided into "ages" effectively as you will need to craft bronze gear before you are able to make it to the swamps and get iron ore and then in turn go somewhere else - and each area involves a lot of grinding, pickaxe the ore, cart it to the smelter, exchange wood for coal in the smoker, smelt the ore and then forge it into what you want -- it's a decent crafting system, but the grind is real.

I killed the Elder - the boss associated with the bronze age and mayyyyyyyybe I'll play more in the future, but likely I'm done until I have a reason to play multiplayer

 

Batman: The Enemy Within

Batman: The Enemy Within was a Telltale game and the second in their Batman series.  It has you as friend to John Doe (Joker) before he goes full crazy - also stars Bane, Mr. Freeze and Harley Quinn as the baddies along with the ever-shady Amanda Waller.

As a Telltale game, it was mostly clicking a few objects in order to propel the story, with the action bits becoming quicktime events, but it was very well done - similar to Quantum Break except you were part of a comic story-arc rather than a movie.

My choices tended to be sympathetic to John - perhaps because of the Joker movie, when I told him I wouldn't betray him early on, I kept to that rule.  It was at the very end when seeing my decisions ranked with what other people chose that I saw you could have turned him evil by betraying him.   As it was in my game, he was an awkward but skilled sidekick for a bit.

Quantum Break

Quantum Break is a heavily story driven game that has some amazing acting in it.  Some games give you the sensation of being the star in a movie, but this one takes it a step further - with live action in between each of the acts.   Did I say live action?  I mean like a 10 minute movie based on your choices, it's both jarring and amazing.

Gameplay is mostly reading computer terminals and notebooks for more story expose (does anybody lock their computers in a video game?) - followed by *retch*rooms full of guards to kill with your sexy time powers.

Really the only time power I used consistently was my dash around that slowed time slightly.  Story was great for something that is timey-wimey I feel like they stuck the landing even without explaining everything.

However.  The last level was just steamy dogshit where you fight a few waves of enemies while your rival throws large AOE insta-death fields at you.  It was frustrating AF -- with no elation payoff with excitement, because it wasn't what I was doing - it was just surviving what he was doing.  

The Testament of Sherlock Holmes

I really want to like The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, and there are things about it that really do shine - but the failings to it have literally put me to sleep on multiple occasions so I'm sending it to the bin.

This is an interactive story adventure where you (obviously) play as Sherlock Holmes as you solve cases in London.  What it does well is involve you in some escape room type puzzle solving, what it does poorly is every time I'm riding on the "this is pretty good" vibe, I get into a situation of tracing everywhere I have just been trying to find the hotspot I must have missed.

...zzzzzzzz.... visuals/story are interesting but not so great as to want to follow a walkthrough to solve it all.

Stranded Deep

Stranded Deep is a survival game in the vein of Green Hell where you are on a desert island with limited resources and need to island hop traversing treacherous water in order to survive.

In comparison to Green Hell, I'd say it's a little easier to survive?  You battle the sun mostly - trying not to overheat during the day and still be able to sleep a little at night, but mainly the islands have been fairly tame - the biggest thing to watch out for are sharks, and if you keep to your raft you seem to be fine - even getting chomped a little.

I got fairly far, could have started serious base building, my raft was fairly sturdy - but decided I'd go explore a wreck, got a little greedy and tried to find a back door underwater that didn't exist.  All good, it was starting to be a little grindy.

Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3 is the next in line in the franchise, and is the continuation of the vault hunting story from there.  It plays in a very similar manner to all Borderlands games, providing you incentive to go kill room after room of monsters/aliens/rival gangs.

In the beginning it's really amusing to have this crazy wacky future where bandit leaders are wearing underwear headdresses and talking bro-speak as a mission backdrop, but it's really a one trick pony in that regard.  It would be like walking across the country with Joe Pesci doing a Joe Pesci gangster impression, at first you would be amused and pleased with the free food you get at a random diner every so often.  But then on day 173 you want to murder anything or anyone that makes him start in on his bit.  Oh .. Yeah ... HA HA.  HA HAAAAAAAA!

Anyways, there is only so long that you can mask a shooter that is room full of enemies after room full of enemies, in the end you have to make me want to play in some way.  Visible accomplishments or meaniful world changing/building/revenging.