Serious Play:
Super Lucky’s Tale: I can see why they made New SLT, the difficulty spikes in this game and the tightly sequential area gating are not kid-friendly. Different enough to be interesting yet familiar. Probably won’t be squeezing out all of the achievements for this one.
Untitled Goose Game: What I learned from this game is that Geese Are Dicks. Since I’m playing the goose, that’s great. Screw with people all over the town. Charming art and sound. The last few timed achievements can be brutally tight and dependent on timing outside of your control. Tip: pull the stool out from under the old guy sooner rather than later, if you wait till the last moment he’ll notice. Counterintuitive, but that’s the mechanic.
Gnomes Garden, 2, 3, 4: I used to play this sort of logistics game (manage resources to build assets to complete goals) on my smartphone, and using the joystick as a mouse control is less than optimal. The levels can range from fun and easy to brutally hard to time out correctly. Been eating these games up like popcorn.
Doug Hates His Job: A short, fun, and funny game about a guy who keeps having to isometrically brawl his way out of his job-related encounters, with a scattered handful of other genre examples like driving, rail shooter, or 3D arena fighter. The price matched the length. Made for a pleasant couple of hours. Tip: you pretty much have to cheese the last boss fight, just keep jump-kicking him as he’s getting up.
Sundered Eldritch Edition: I wish this game hadn’t turned suckingly hard after getting past the first zone. Could have been a 4.5 star metroidvania, but it becomes close to unfinishable after about 3.0 stars worth of fun. A great big FU to the designers for making progression-necessary areas impossible to clean out by designating them constant combat areas. And they mean constant.
Glass Masquerade: A short, pleasant picture-puzzle game.
Toe-dipping:
Trailmakers: I get the idea, explore the zone to enhance your vehicle and build your escape rocket. The implementation sucks, though. It’s too spread out, making exploration tedious. Vehicle control is too imprecise for the car-based combat the game is asking you to do.
Destroy All Humans Remake: I forgot how tedious this game could get when it asked the player to do stealth-based tasks.
Glass Masquerade 2: “fixes” the original by adding a lot of progression mechanics. Not impressed.
Bard’s Tale Remastered: I guess this was funny back in the day. The remaster is pretty hit-or-miss as to what assets got upgraded to modern standards.
Adventure Pals: Another game with neat “cover” art and pixellated play. Sigh. Still, doesn’t play bad in short bursts.
Hyperdot: Speaking of short bursts, I don’t see how anyone could play this for multiple hours in a row. Too much twicthyness required.
Tetris Effect Connected: It’s Tetris, except with trippy techno music and Lumines-style changing bricks. Balls-hard once the speed level gets over 9. And this one goes to 11 and 12. Stops being fun surprisingly quickly.