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.