The reason I put myself through this rigmarole every year is partly due to the joy of discovery: having an excuse to go into that inexplicably immense library of mine and pick a few games I've somehow never heard of despite owning them, just to see what their deal is and to share it with everyone. Occasionally, though, playing too many Indie games in a row can be hazardous to one's sanity. There's never any guarantee that what I'm loading up is actually any good, or even runs correctly.

So today, we're looking at three sequels to big name Steam Indies; games that I very much enjoyed back when I played them. The idea being that I can feel moderately assured that I'll enjoy these bigger and improved sequels to a similar if not greater extent than their predecessors. After three years of picking through bundle scraps and gambling on unplayable curios, I kinda feel like I need this.

Bit.Trip Presents... Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien

The game: The sesquipedalian Bit.Trip Presents... Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien from Gaijin Games. It's a musically-empowered endless runner 2D platformer.

The source: The Humble Bundle X.

The pre-amble: Bit.Trip Runner 2 is the sequel to the original Bit.Trip Runner, which in turn is one of several games under Bit.Trip's funky umbrella. Every game in the series emphasizes rhythm-based gameplay in some manner: whether you're platforming, playing Pong or flying through a bullet hell shooter, there's a persistent rhythm to your actions that complements the background music and helps you concentrate. As a result, keeping to the beat isn't always of the utmost importance, but doing so will make the game's challenges far more approachable. Bit Trip Runner 2 is notable within the Bit Trip franchise for breaking free of the series's distinctive pixel aesthetic and adopting a far more whimsical dreamscape art style more reminiscent of a Double Fine game, or perhaps Might & Delight's Pid.

The playthrough: Sigh. Where to start? (You might want to skip to the next game if you're not a fan of griping.)

It's far too pretty. In most game franchises, suddenly getting a budget and sprucing up your sequel to look gorgeous is a huge plus. For a game like Bit.Trip Runner, in which minimal lag and latency is of paramount importance to the gameplay, adding a bunch of fancy frou frou graphics is enough to slow down any computer that isn't a fairly decent gaming PC. For a standard office PC like my own (I'm perpetually broke), it's a death knell. Even with a tiny bit of latency, this game becomes so unbearably frustrating to play that it isn't even worth getting invested enough to play through those breezy early levels where such pinpoint accuracy isn't quite as vital.

You might point out that the game's entirely playable if you aren't trying to grab every single gold bar and speed power-up, but even if I weren't a huge completionist nut whose happiness with a game involves collecting any and all shiny things they might have lying around (which worries me far more than it does you, I can assure you), getting everything on the stage is almost entirely the point of Bit.Trip Runner: You're constantly being reminded of the value of collecting gold by how frequently it's required for opening new levels, and how your friends' highscores are only assailable with perfect runs. On top of that, collecting the gold adds extra notes to the music, and you're only getting the true benefit of the game's fantastic soundtrack by yoinking them all in time with the beat.

In addition, the game manages to not only shit the bed but takes those poor abused sheets with them to their first dinner with their girlfriend's parents by adding more things the player has to remember to press beyond "jump" and "slide". These are unnecessary complications meant presumably to cause even more frustration that the little melody cannot be followed accurately; something that the original Bit.Trip games - paragons of fun rhythm games with simple gameplay mechanics and minimalist graphical styles - managed to convey so much more effectively. If you don't have a controller hooked up, then I'm afraid you'll want to move that cursor over to your Steam library and uninstall the game tout de suite because it is not interested in your scruffy, keyboard-only custom, good sir. The game doesn't quite go so far as to place a bouncer at the door that turns away nervous-looking people clutching keyboards to their bosoms, but the message comes across loud and clear when all these additional mechanics require various function keys spaced randomly across the keyboard: You need to hit Space (or J) to jump, the down arrow to slide, the W key to use high-jump springs and the K key to kick certain obstacles you cannot duck or jump over. Here's a fun little exercise for all of you reading this on a PC or Mac: try finding a comfortable position to put your hands that gives you easy access to all four of those above keys simultaneously. Now keep those hands in place while you hypothetically assume (because there's no reason why the game wouldn't do this) that you'll eventually need to reach the P key - to Parachute slowly down long gaps perhaps - and the Z key - to "Zap" enemies in your way with Commander Video's space blaster that cannot be kicked or avoided - and then measure how quickly your motivation to play this game dissipates into the ether. If you're using a stopwatch, you might want to find one that can count in milliseconds.

Runner 2 looks and sounds amazing. The backgrounds are full of fun, goofy little details, the various characters with their new models are a far cry from the rudimentary pixel-based heroes of the Bit.Trip universe of prior games and Charles Martinet's voiceover, thankfully devoid of any xenophobic stereotypes, is both charming and silly. As previously established, however, none of these graphical advancements are warranted nor, I can't imagine, sorely desired from the fanbase, excepting perhaps a gaggle of idiots who have no idea how video games sometimes require a bit of minimalism for their core mechanics to work at peak efficiency. It puts rhythm game developers in an unenviable position caught between rock and roll and a hard place who have to then cater to said idiots or go bankrupt when the game refuses to sell well enough to pay for all of Martinet's gourmet spaghetti he demanded up front as payment for his voice acting services. Man, that sentence ran on longer than Commander Video through one this game's marathon stages.

I don't hate Bit.Trip Runner 2. Actually I do, but I don't want to hate it. It's super charming. I suspect a large proportion of my gripes will go away once I buy a PC that can handle it without incident (or just pick up a console version somewhere so I don't have to worry about optimization messing me up). For now, though, it's getting uninstalled and left in a dusty sub-folder in my Steam library named "Nuh-uh". Hmm, that's what happened to the first Bit.Trip Runner as well, for as much fun as I thought that one was too. I guess I never learn.

The verdict: I can't see myself playing it for much longer, at least not without upgrading the PC so I can be totally sure that I'm responsible for all my fuck ups. Might help if I get one of those dongles that lets me use a 360 pad on the PC too.

Toki Tori 2+

The game: Two Tribes' Toki Tori 2+, an open-world exploration puzzle-platformer game.

The source: The Humble Weekly Sale: Two Tribes.

The pre-amble: Toki Tori 2+ is the sequel to one of the best puzzle-platformer games to hit Steam in its early days (and was oddly enough originally a Game Boy Color game), and one that required very precise timing and accuracy in order to achieve some of its extremely challenging puzzles. Toki Tori 2, while still maintaining a degree of challenging brainteaser sequences, is an open-world game in the SpaceWhipper vein.

The player is free to go in any direction, and there's no upgrades to worry about. All you have at your disposal is a tweet button (as in melodic bird noises, not one of those things that sends your progress to a social networking site) and a stomp move, and almost everything in the game has a distinct reaction to both of those techniques, as well as their own place in each puzzle. There's also a few songs which you learn early on and can activate by tweeting notes in a certain Morse Code fashion, but they provide non-essential boons like a fast-travel system, a way to detect treasures in the vicinity (a group of little cog collectibles of some importance to the end game) and summoning a camera bird that will log the enemies and important objects it snaps in a "Tokidex" as part of an optional sidequest reminiscent of that long photography sidequest in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.

The playthrough: I'm about halfway through, but I'm still marveling at all the little details and how different this game feels compared to the previous now that the whole world is contiguous instead of stage-based. The game's also stunning; the original Toki Tori had a very colorful and simple aesthetic that relied on a lot of particle and lighting effects to make it pop out, and Toki Tori 2 appears to have doubled down on this aesthetic philosophy. There are points where the game zooms out to focus on enormous background details like a distant mountain, and there's plenty of attractive uses of light and shadow with the cave/underground sections. The game has a very approachable sensibility to it as well, even in spite of how tough some of its puzzles have been so far: there's not a whole lot of dialogue or text in-game beyond the menus, just various context clues and a few telltale elements in the background to watch out for. It's a bit like how Fez would relay information to the player in a very non-intrusive manner, to the extent that it was occasionally easy to miss finer details. Because you don't acquire any new abilities at any point (or at least I haven't yet), every obstacle can be overcome with a little bit of ratiocination and experimentation, despite seeming apparently impossible. The songs are helpful, but are never essential to progression with perhaps the one exception of the "rewind song" which drops you off at the last checkpoint should you get stuck.

I think it's fair to say I adore this game so far. I'm always going to be predisposed towards an Indie SpaceWhipper despite my best intentions of approaching every game with a somewhat objective open mind. I enjoyed the original Toki Tori's very deliberate and slow-paced (well, for the most part) puzzles, and they've managed to transfer that style of gameplay to this open-world environment quite comfortably. If I had to compare it to another game, I'd say it scratches the same itch as Nifflas' Knytt Underground: a largely pacifistic, non-combat oriented exploration game with a lot of diabolical puzzles, even more charm and some stunning looking environments. But yeah, it's worth mentioning that I haven't beaten it yet. Maybe it starts to really sucks after the halfway point. There's that objective open-mindedness for ya.

The verdict: Currently still playing it. It's definitely on my list of games to go back to and finish off once May Madness has concluded.

Zeno Clash II

The game: ACE Team's Zeno Clash II. A first-person brawler adventure game, like the first, but this time with a more open-world angle to it.

The source: The Humble Weekly Sale: ACE Team, Atlus and Tripwire Interactive. (Man, the Humble Bundle representing hard today.)

The pre-amble: Zeno Clash was an extremely odd game in more ways than one. Though its odd world of colorful (if nightmarish) creatures and bizarre geometry were unusual enough, so too was the fact that the game was a first-person brawler. With the exception of a Condemned or two, there weren't many serious fighting games (by which I mean combos, blocking, dodging and the like) that used that perspective and seemed to revel in the chaos that ensued whenever you were fighting multiple opponents at once while being surrounded on all sides.

Despite these barriers of incomprehension, Zeno Clash managed to pull off a fun, layered game with a fairly intriguing plot of a large, possibly hermaphroditic creature that stole and raised a bunch of children as her/his own, and a young man's journey to the end of the world to find answers. Zeno Clash stopped just short of those meaningful answers, but Zeno Clash II appears to continue briefly after where the last left off.

The playthrough: So already, we're seeing what we've seen twice before for this particular chapter of May Madness: an interesting and enjoyable game does well, creates a sequel with a bigger budget and far more going on under the hood, and I'm left with a PC that can barely run it. It feels kind of like that small band you liked to visit in bars suddenly becoming huge and selling tickets for a prohibitively high price; sometimes that old gag of hipsters "liking something before it was cool" has a kernel of legitimacy behind it, especially if it means those hipsters can no longer enjoy that thing as easily as they once did.

But anyway, there's no point in me making any protestations about not being a dirty hipster, seeing as I'm covering Indie games for a whole month. So instead let's focus on the game itself: It certainly looks better, but most of the graphical improvements are entirely of the technical kind. The environments and character models look the same as ever, and I'm extremely glad the game didn't feel the need to get less weird now that's all high and mighty with its fancy shadow effects and bloom and light shafts. It's the same old Zeno Clash we all love to get weirded out by, and many of the game's areas appears to have been lifted wholesale from the original game, with many more brand new ones branching off from areas previously inaccessible. It's kind of neat to expand a world in this way; not making everything different for the sake of needing something new for a sequel, but still adding more content in a way that makes sense.

The fighting's still a lot of fun too, but it feels as if the game's becoming a little more serious by adding so much more to its system of blocking and combo attacks. The game's provided a lot of new defensive options, it feels, and expects you to use them by making it far more necessary to avoid damage. Damage can be healed with pick-ups between battles (or during, if you feel bold enough to turn your back on your opponents and run for the nearest item chest), but it's in the player's best interest to simply avoid getting hurt whenever possible by using the evades, dodges and blocks at their advantage. Fights can have opponent numbers in the double figures, and while the player is able to summon help before a fight starts, this ability is not something they can rely on too often - for one thing, your companions get battered easily and frequently have to sit future battles out. This results in fights that require a bit more finesse and strategy, rather than swinging wildly into a big Andy Capp-esque ball of smoke and fists and hoping you're the last man standing. It's probably for the best that this system is a little more involved, but at the same time there's something to be said for the mad chaos of an all-out brawl you can barely follow from the first-person perspective. At least having companions around makes the fights more interesting to watch on the periphery.

Anyway, Zeno Clash II looks like a lot of the same but with a bit more non-linear freedom and a few new RPG systems adding a bit of depth to the original's admittedly light mechanics. I've not gotten too far yet, having just freed FatherMother and escaped the city of Halstedom to look for my scattered adoptive siblings, but I'm liking that the game's already building up the mystery behind the enigmatic and intelligent Golem entity and setting up a plot that seems like it'll be a little more significant to the world of Zeno Clash. I might have to put it on hiatus until I get a computer that can run it better, but it's certainly not leaving my backlog any time soon.

The verdict: I'm going to keep playing it. Just... not right now. Later. When things aren't spinning around quite so jerkily.

The Moment of Truth

Well, my favorite game of this batch is easily Toki Tori 2+, but I don't feel like I've given any one of these games a fair shake due to how much of a toll they're taking on my poor, crappy system.

I will say that there's a few changes to Bit.Trip Runner 2 that I was not a fan of, and the same's true of Zeno Clash 2 to a lesser extent. Toki Tori 2's changes, however, I'm absolutely in harmony with. It doesn't seem like it's puzzles will necessarily be easier, but it's been a lot more forgiving so far in terms of accuracy and timing. I also like SpaceWhippers a whole lot, so if that tiny yellow bird wants to run around a non-linear world looking for collectibles who am I to stand in its way?

Anyway, I feel I can still easily recommend all three of these, my misgivings of a few aspects notwithstanding. They do all feel like they've kept the spirits of their ancestors alive, at least.

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