When I was 100%-ing Watch Dogs, I would see and hear the icon for hacking gates and doors whenever I went past them.

When I originally played Fallout 4, I would feel a compulsion to take any duct tape I saw.

I really liked the hacking puzzles in Half-Life Alyx. There was a nice variety to the different type of puzzles that could appear, and the difficulty never felt like it got out of hand.

I’m continuing Daggerfall Unity now that version 1.0 is out. There were only 2 minor issues that I had with it when I previously played, and they both look to be fixed. I’ve joined a knights order, a temple, and the Dark Brotherhood, and got my character up to a high enough level that I would be comfortable with going for the main quest.

I just finished Scorn, it was very interesting.

I feel like the combat wasn’t necessary since the puzzles and exploration felt like the main focus of the game, but at the same time, I don’t know how they could have made the environment feel dangerous without the threat of death. There was a puzzle later in the game that did require you to injure yourself, but I don’t think that would have worked as a replacement for combat in the rest of the game, and being present throughout the game would lessen the impact of it in the short moment where it is actually necessary. Also, the guns were very neat looking, so that is an additional upside to having combat.

Even though this sounds like a lot of complaining, I don’t think I could come up with any other criticisms, as pretty much everything else about the game felt perfect. I don’t think it is the sort of thing I will play again, but it will be something I will think back on more than most other games.

Does that really matter if there are proper systems to deal with the pollution?

I’ve been playing the original Doom for the first time over the last few days, and just beat it today. It was really good and I can see why it was such a big deal at the time. It was a significant improvement over Wolfenstein 3D in every way, not just technically, but also in terms of level design and story.

I just finished playing Submachine: Legacy. I was really looking forward to it, and it surpassed my expectations. It is a remaster of the whole Submachine series of flash games, but a lot of stuff has been reworked and improved from the originals. There was actually a fairly significant amount of new content, so even though I was already familiar with the originals, I ended up spending the whole weekend playing it.

Stuff I liked:

• Viewfinder: My favorite demo of all of the ones I played. A really neat puzzle mechanic that seems well implemented with lots of creative variations.
• The Invincible: I was interested in this one before the demo, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It seems to mostly be walking around, examining things, and listening to conversations between the player character and someone else. The graphics are quite pretty and it seems like the story will be good, so I will probably take a look at it at some point in the future.
• Crime O’Clock: An interesting take on the hidden object genre where you have to examine a sequence of scenes from an event to solve a crime.
• Cipher Zero: A simple puzzle game with a neat aesthetic. New mechanics are introduced in a way that makes them intuitive by the time another one is introduced. Some puzzles have multiple solutions, and each one is counted for full completion of a level.
• Kanji Industry: An automation puzzle game where you build Japanese letters from their component parts. Needs some serious polish, but it is an interesting concept.
• Cuisineer: A game where you inherit your parents’ restaurant. You need to explore dungeons and kill monsters to gather ingredients to make food, and complete quests for people in town to earn recipes.
• Word Factori: A similar concept to Kanji Industry, but with more polish. You build English letters and words using only the letter “I” as a base to work with.
• Little Kitty, Big City: Great animation, funny characters, and lots of little things to do with the end goal of returning home.
• Station to Station: A puzzle game where you have to connect various buildings with train stations to create a complete network of supply and demand.

Stuff I didn’t like (or at least not enough to buy):

• Sea of Stars: The art was very pretty, but the gameplay just didn’t capture me for some reason. It seems like the demo takes place somewhere in the middle of the story without providing any context, making it feel like you have just continued someone else’s save file in the middle of a game.
• Pygmalion: The puzzles were fine, but it got a bit annoying to constantly have the gameplay interrupted by story, and the story constantly interrupted by gameplay. Maybe it would have felt better if there were large story chunks at the end of a set of levels instead of a few sentences after every single level. It probably didn’t help that the demo only shows the first 3 sets of levels, which are probably the easiest in the game, all able to be solved in just a few seconds.
• Cardbob: The aesthetic of cardboard robots is cool, and using the trailing bandana to show remaining HP is super unique, but the gameplay felt a bit generic and I could never find a way to survive the room immediately after the first boss.
• Robotherapy: Very funny story, but that’s about all it has going for it.
• Tiny Room Stories: Rift Escape: This one was pretty good and seems like it has an interesting story, but I ended up getting stuck in a room for about 10 minutes before giving up since there was no hint option available in the game.
• Broken Lens: A spot the difference game where you play as a robot with a broken lens in one of its eyes. The screen is split into two halves, and you have to click and drag to explore a scene to find discrepancies. It has a hint function, but none of the objects are randomized in the scenes, which trivializes the gameplay if you don’t feel like finding the objects yourself. I liked how there were hidden papers in each of the levels that had a little bit of lore in them.
• Street of Secrets: Another hidden object game, the gimmick of this one seems to be that the objects are hidden in multiple rooms within a house that you have to navigate between. Nothing really wrong with this one, it just doesn’t stand out to me in any special way.
• One Lonely Outpost: I was previously planning on buying this one, but the demo convinced me otherwise. Terrible inventory management, the days are too short to do anything meaningful, and there is little explanation of what you are supposed to do.
• Lovux: A neat puzzle game, but the music got really annoying really fast, and the animations for interacting with things took a long time, making a large part of the game just waiting for animations to finish so you can click on the next thing.