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There aren't many games I've played that seem like they ought to be required curriculum for young adult students. 911 Operator is one of those games.

In it, you are tasked with directing Fire, Police, and EMS units to various disasters around a given city. Seeing the logistics of emergency services from this angle gives a useful perspective, if an imperfect one, and drives home the point that if you're calling 9-1-1, you should be ready to give your location immediately. You need to give the operator a street address or an intersection if you want anyone to know where to go.

But let's talk about those imperfections. From the game's perspective, an $80,000 truck gives you the same increased capability to address disasters as a $20,000 truck and a $3000 tool box. This is not even remotely true. The way the capabilities of your different units in this game are calculated is - to put it mildly - weird. This gives you some bizarre financial incentives, such as the aforementioned cash savings of having your firemen drive around in pickup trucks instead of fire engines. You'd think that a defibrillator would belong with EMS units, but I ended up giving it to a motorcycle policeman instead because he could double as an ad-hoc bomb squad.

To the game's credit, though, the numbers of your staff's abilities (which are the only thing that ultimately matter for resolving disasters) are fed into a difficulty calculator that seems to spit out challenges just possible to solve, with perfect management of your units (especially on Expert). Because the calculations use abilities and distance, agnostic of map shape, you can plug in any real-world city or county of sufficient size and run Emergency Services in your hometown (or, at least, the nearest major metropolitan area).

The result is a challenging but satisfying game of triage, redirection, occasional pulling of units from their existing assignments and general plate-spinning that kept me engaged for the full 13 hours it took to 100%. I ended up sticking with Chicago for my single-city run because it's nice and dense, so my units had less distance to travel. I didn't touch the DLC; I'm weighing whether to pick it up or just buy 112 Operator instead.

Recommended.

Start game. Walk away. Return. Open new present(s) after several attempts.

I didn't like Botanik, but it at least made an attempt at a multiplayer component. This is just an interactive screensaver, and not even a very good one. "Mountain" appears to do the same thing, better, for a third of the price.

Before anyone comes at me: If you liked it, great. I didn't.

Not recommended.

The description of "1+ hour of gameplay and endless exploration" is strangely fitting; you could pour days of your life into this game and come away with no more than an hour's worth of mediocre gameplay, stretched across millions of miles of empty roads and nondescript box buildings.

You'll come across a random zombie about every five minutes. Half the time they've already died - presumably of boredom. The game clock helpfully ticks away in the top-left corner, reminding you that every minute you spend in the game is another minute of your one, precious life that you'll never get back. You'll pass dozens upon dozens of sticks, screeching to a halt whenever you see the occasional fruit, driving a vehicle with possibly the jankiest physics I've ever encountered in a videogame - the back tires swinging wide with every turn, as though you were drifting around a corner at six miles per hour. A bug where your car would just straight-up disappear has thankfully been patched; the only thing worse than exploring Dead Run's desolate landscape in a vehicle would be doing so on foot. Unfortunately a bug where you'll destroy a gas can when cancelling its use remains. The radio signal turns out to be scientists who need you to - guess what - drive to other locations and report back to them. Nope. Absolutely not. One hour spent playing this game was already an hour too many.

The best thing that I can say about Dead Run is that I hope the developer can one day use the knowledge and experience they gained from creating it to make another game. One that isn't terrible. One that is unlike this one.

Not worth your money, your time, or your interest. If you want a game about exploration, I promise you that any device capable of running Steam can support a better game than this one. Your machine deserves better.

Not recommended.

Wild-9's first playthrough should take you roughly half an hour, as it says in the description.

Adding a speedrun achievement to this game, in my opinion, was a mistake. Your speedrun attempts will expose many of the flaws in this game. First, deleting your save and starting over is very likely to generate a broken seed that doesn't spawn any enemies - you can check this almost immediately by noticing the absence of the first enemy you're supposed to encounter. If you want to start a new run, you need to close out and re-open the game first. Second, you'll come to rely on a highly-exploitable quirk where enemies will teleport back to their starting position if they wander too far away from it, where you can basically spawn-camp them. (Better than them getting lost, though.) Third, upon each death, you'll respawn at your spaceship with a scooter, but not necessarily the same class of scooter you had - meaning you might get a free upgrade. I also encountered a CTD on my first run of the game, none afterward though.

With the speedrun, this will probably net you just over an hour of playtime. Do I still recommend it? Ehhh... Not at full price, that's for sure. If you don't have the subscription, you should pick this one up on sale - ideally as part of a discounted bundle. It's worth your time, I'm just not sure it's worth your money.

With that huge caveat, recommended.

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is a short 3rd-person exploration and photography game that's perfect for kids and pleasant for adults. You follow on-screen prompts to the next person or animal that needs your help, and you help them. You look around for the next animal you haven't photographed yet, and you photograph them.

The 3-4 hour runtime is quite short, probably closer to 3 hours or less if you don't plan on cataloging all of the animals (there's no achievement for doing so, mercifully). It's not going to be anyone's GOTY but I quite liked it.

Recommended at whatever price point you think is worth ~3 hours of wholesome goodness.

Post Cards has three parts that can each be beaten in about two minutes. I would hesitate to even call these "mini-games" because that would imply a higher replayability factor than they have. These "micro-games" aren't bad, but they are extremely short.

Recommended at whatever price you think is worth six minutes of play.

Paradise Killer's core strengths lie in its character writing, visual aesthetic/presentation, and story. This isn't a Myst type game - although there are a ton of worldbuilding details, most of it is superfluous and can be ignored, if you choose. The environmental puzzles are all quite simple, and the collectibles serve little purpose.

This is ultimately a detective focused game, and it executes that quite well. I found all of the investigative work to be well-done and the overall story was very satisfying.

Recommended.

Deckbuilders and turn-based tactics are two of my favorite genres, so FiTS was an immediate purchase. 13.5 hours later, after a handful of properly failed runs and one shamelessly-savescummed successful run, I think there's enough to recommend here.

The Good:
FiTS definitely delivers on the trailers' promises of stylish turn-based combat. The aesthetic is somewhere between Superhot and Canabalt; I dig it. The different enemies you encounter are distinct and have strong motifs, and the ability to view replays is a great touch. Repositioning an enemy so they attack another enemy never fails to feel satisfying.

The Bad:
Make no mistake, you'll need to do a lot of that repositioning. Unless you're finishing up a level, you'll rarely have less than three enemies to deal with simultaneously. Their damage output quickly ramps past the point where tanking multiple foes' hits is possible, and they also become too spongy to defeat in a single (or even in a few) turn(s). The default five-card hand feels very restrictive in the late game, and many of your starting cards are so weak that your best move is to pay to remove them. The margin for error is tiny in most circumstances, and unless you deliberately craft a very lean, very strong deck, you'll be depending on the relocation of enemies and yourself to survive.

The Ugly:
Nowhere is this more apparent than with enemies you encounter approximately 2/3rds through the campaign that pack assault rifles, as well as the "Overwatch" ability from Spacehulk. They will shoot you anytime you move in front of them or attack in front of them (even if you're not attacking them, which is unusually strong by itself), plus they will turn to face you if you get to either side of them. The level where I had to fight two of these Terminators was - no exaggeration - the hardest level in the game, easily harder than the final boss level. And it was halfway through the third campaign! They're so difficult to deal with that you start to wonder why your character isn't packing heat of his own, which pulls you out of the whole experience. And while I'm at it, the banality of the "You Failed Your Mission" pop-up leaves a really bad taste in your mouth at the end of an unsuccessful run. (The victory screen isn't much better.) I feel like other roguelikes have more encouraging end-of-run screens that make players feel better about the loss.

The Verdict
Despite that, this is still a solid game, provided you have the disposition to focus on enjoying the journey rather than the destination. I look forward to the devs adding more content; in particular, I feel like a female character model for the main character would be a good addition. The level generation is strong enough that you could probably sink dozens of hours into this game before it starts feeling stale, and there's always the daily leaderboards if you're into that sort of thing.

All-in-all, this feels worth what I paid.

Recommended.

Absolute Drift provided a surprisingly robust simulation of the interaction between tires and terrain, considering it was the work of a single creator. Now, that creator has taken that simulation and applied it to a rally format. Rather than the abstract dreamscape of its predecessor, Art of Rally sees you carving your way through more realistic outdoor settings, and more carefully recreated real-life tracks. Overall, the level of visual fidelity is a mark above Absolute Drift, even if it's not quite as a e s t h e t i c.

In order to earn first place - even on normal difficulty - you'll need to develop a keen awareness of how road types and elevation change effect your traction. This is not an "arcadey" racer; in fact it's quite punishing compared to many titles in the genre. That's where some of its more irritating aspects become more visible.

Glancing a guardrail will frequently bring you to a dead halt, rather than merely slowing you down while you slide against it. The curved terrain outside the track is many polygons short of smoothness, creating jagged edges that kick you into the air if you contact them. Worst of all, the off-road area to either side of the track has invisible boundaries that - if crossed - will fade out the screen, put you back in the center of the road Lakitu-style, and penalize you five seconds. There is no consistent indication of where these boundaries are. They are not a set distance from the track - they seem wider on the outside of turns and more restrictive inside of corners - and even in the late-game I found myself accidentally crossing them, without having lost control of my vehicle. Penalizing me for cutting corners is fine, but at least give me a visual indication of how much cutting is too much for each turn!

There are also, it must be noted, a couple of really grindy achievements - one which requires you to drive 555 km in one of the cars, and another which requires you to complete 1000 races (for context, it takes <250 to complete career mode).

If you want the mechanics of a proper rally game with a low-poly aesthetic, Art of Rally is the game for you. Just be prepared for frustration with the track boundaries.

Recommended.

Majora's Mask, Sexy Brutale, and Outer Wilds are among my all-time favorite games. Pocket Watch is not as expansive, as impressive, or as complex as any of those games. It's not as expensive, either. That's why placing Pocket Watch in their ranks makes sense.

I believe this is, without question, the best Time Loop game three dollars can buy. If any of those games had been made with the dev team, budget, and timeline that Pocket Watch had, I'd be shocked if the final product were as cohesive and charming as this one. Honestly, considering it's less than a third of the price of Minit, I'd say it's the better value proposition between them.

The graphics, uh, take some getting used to, the physics aren't flawless (AFAIK you'll need to exploit that for the speedrun), and the fixed camera angle makes some platforming rather finicky. Nevertheless, this was a great little world to inhabit, explore, and conquer. Probably one of Sokpop's best titles, and well worth full price.

Highly recommended.