DLC Quest + Live Freemium Or Die

1.5 Hours

Both the game and expansion are easily beaten in 90 minutes, which would be a questionable value proposition in most cases, but here it's likely part of the satire. The pathetic state of modern gaming (superfluous downloadable content, pre-order bonuses, grinding, etc...) becomes a target for this game's many jokes. While the game that surrounds the parody is simplistic to a fault, the fact that it keeps you playing until the end likely proves its thesis.

Hexcells

1.5 Hours

A brute force puzzler, along the lines of Sudoku or Pic Pic, Hexcells seems apt to send players who like this sort of thing into a state of zen. The buzz doesn't last long, though, as there are only about thirty puzzles, and only the last five or so are devious. As a proof of concept, this is more than promising. Give me 1,000 more of these mind-benders and I'll play forever.

Injustice: Gods Among Us

4.5 Hours

For the fans? The creaky Mortal Kombat skeleton here diminishes what seems to check a lot of the right boxes for a contemporary fighting game. Even from playing through the extended single-player campaign, it became obvious that the combo damage scaling in this game is out of whack, with most simple combos with special moves doing less damage than a universally applicable jumpkick/sweep one-two. The story is unsurprisingly embarrassing. The characters have very little personality, considering how well-established they are at this point.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

7 Hours

A straightforward corridor shooter in which dead ends are literally reimagined as the cantakerous unreliable narrator doubles back upon himself, jumps around chronologically and even takes bathroom breaks. In many ways, this does what The Stanley Parable sets out to do, with none of the pretensions. As a shooter, it embraces the arcadey roots of the genre, with a well-integrated chaining combo system and stupid enemies that might as well have targets painted on them. Surprisingly full-featured for a downloadable exclusive.

Papers, Please

4 Hours

I tried to maximize the dehumanizing aspects here by playing an in-game shift a day, to make the experience seem more like a job. There's no getting around the fact that this is very gamelike at its core, though... a hidden-object game with a conscience. That isn't a knock, but it does invariably inflect any moral decisions that one might make while playing. 319 travelers processed.

The Walking Dead: 400 Days

1.5 Hours

A distillation of the Telltale The Walking Dead formula. The game sets up multiple archetypical scenarios, each of which asks you to make a horrible, life-or-death decision within minutes. Forget The Last of Us. For emotional bang for your buck, no 2013 game surpassed it. Alas, it's one hour long, and merely a commercial for TWD Season 2, which has continued the series' high standards through its first episode. Here's to hoping decisions made at the spur of the moment during this flurry of bleak fun come back to haunt me later on...

VVVVVV

2.5 Hours

Unlike so-called "art" games, this is retro without belaboring the point. It nails both its C64 aesthetic and the era's level of challenge, which provides a constant state of frustration and the sense that any challenge can be overcome with perseverance. Died 862 times.

Tomb Raider (2013)

13 Hours

A better Uncharted than Uncharted, but still more exhausting than fun to play by the time I hit the six hour mark. Close calls lose their effect when every escape is a near-death escape. Good riddance.