All right, the advent of May is upon us, which means it's time to broach the subject of this year's May blogging feature. In previous years, May has been an excuse to sort through a lot of Steam backlog, playing and reviewing several games a week to sort the wheat from the chaff. More recently, with the slightly modified "May Mastery", I've doubled-down on the specific games I'd been wanting to play for a while, letting those I feel iffy or uncertain about fall to the wayside.

Because I want to keep my concurrent features active - Indie Game of the Week and The Top Shelf, for those just joining us - I'm not going to go full "daily" this May, nor am I going to schedule out a list of modern Indie games just to find that the limited hardware of my back-up laptop is unable to run them. Instead, we're going a little bit historical this year with some long-term backlog items. Really long-term.

This month's list of games all have one thing in common: they were originally released on PC in the 1990s. This includes a mix of Steam and GOG games I've let pile up, all of which I've either never concluded or never even began, but have been curious about for the twenty-ish years since they were first released. It's going to be a mix of graphic adventure games and CRPGs, which I'm planning to present in two stages: a "first impressions" blind playthrough screenshot LP that will cover the first few hours of gameplay, and a follow-up piece which will involve a more broad selection of screenshot highlights and/or a final review style write-up. These two articles will bookend every game I manage to complete during May, and while I expect the RPGs to slow me down considerably I hope to finish at least five of the games I have on my list. I'm setting myself a time limit also: no single game gets more than a week to itself, and I'm to continue onto the next one whether I manage to complete it or not.

Anyway, those are my plans for May this year. For its title I'm currently deliberating between "May Maturity", given the average age of the games involved, or "Mondo May", since that was a word that only seemed to exist during the 1990s. While I ratiocinate on how to kill this series dead on arrival with the worst possible name, I'll let you all consider the following batch of weekly blogging content:

• Turning our gaze slightly upwards, The Top Shelf this week is business as usual with a mix of PS2 games that deserve to be honored for all time and some purchases I'd sooner wish to forget. In particular, we inducted a pair of my favorite less-renowned PS2 games this week: Shadow Hearts Covenant, one of the most impressive RPGs for the system in part due to its alternative historical eldritch horror presentation and its sheer length, and Blood Will Tell, a boss rush driven character-action game with a really cool premise. The Top Shelf will continue throughout May - I just have to figure out how to squeeze its weekly 3000-4000 word updates around the schedule I'm planning.
• The Indie Game of the Week is actually the same game it was a fortnight ago: Tales from the Borderlands. This particular rundown analyzes the third and fourth episodes of Telltale's five-part series set within Gearbox's rough and tumble Borderlands universe. I'm enjoying the game's humor and writing still, but what little gameplay there is isn't implemented particularly well. It reminds me a lot of the QTE DVD games that were popular for a spell. With only one episode left to go, we will definitely be revisiting this again soon enough.

Dishonored 2

To properly elucidate why Arkane's Dishonored 2 is causing me consternation will involve some pre-amble. The game requires at least two full playthroughs to get all its trophies since there's now two playable characters, Corvo and Emily, which means I have an excuse to play this game a whole lot differently than I did Dishonored 1 in one of the two necessary "routes" to the Platinum. For one of these rules, they added a legitimate no-powers option - in the first game, you got a trophy for not buying any powers beyond the initial "blink" teleport, but in this game you can just straight out tell the interdimensional "Outsider" to stuff his powers up his Void and have absolutely no magical support for the whole game, including blink. I've done that, making the game a little more like a traditional Thief, and I'm also going the high chaos (a.k.a. high murder rate) route, regularly killing guards and tossing their bodies into the ocean or into forcefields to prevent the bloodfly epidemic (which takes over from the rat epidemic from the last game, and like that epidemic will become out of control after a high chaos playthrough regardless of how I dispose of bodies). Yet, my dissatisfaction of the game doesn't stem from playing it this specific way instead of my preferred no-detection, no-kill approach. On the contrary, not worrying about accidentally leaving an unconscious body where the rats can get it is improving my mood considerably.

Rather, it's that the game feels too big for its own good. When I was exploring "Neo-Prague" back in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided not too long ago, I found myself losing entire days just discovering all the passages and vents and tunnels that connected various parts of the city. I found it marvellous that the developers had built such an intricately interwoven environment to explore, and that same admiration extends to Dishonored 2's locales as well to a lesser extent, but the sheer size of the place threatened to slow what was already a typically deliberate and patient stealth game playthrough to a crawl. I'll levy some of the blame here towards my ill-advised hunt for trophies: one requires that you procure a certain percentage of all the wealth to be found across its locations, strewn around as loose coins, money pouches on guards and other NPCs, and certain high-value treasures that are usually challenging to reach or well hidden. I don't have the ability to teleport, so I already knew I wouldn't be able to find everything, but I regularly leave a level with around 80% of the total cash amount despite thoroughly combing each location over. It's a little exhilarating as a collectible nut to know that so much is so cleverly hidden that I'm unable to easily find it, but sweeping each of Dishonored 2's gargantuan levels is starting to take its toll. I swear I spend about three or four hours on every "mission" of the game, as you almost invariably have a whole block of apartments to explore that surrounds the already immense central structure that holds your next target. My favorite mission so far involved a former upper-class sanatorium turned research laboratory on a remote island: it was just the building itself, surrounded by ocean on all sides, and as odd as it feels to say I appreciated the restriction of movement.

I still think Dishonored 2 plays as well as the first, even without powers to rely on in the specific way I'm playing it. Enemy detection is conveyed about as well as the game's first-person format allows and it's really fun to play this game on high chaos, figuring out how to lead people to creative deaths. My favorite is switching the enemy/friend recognition on the world's "wall of light" forcefields and letting oblivious guards just wander into it while on patrol. I'd often stand on high ground somewhere and toss bottles down onto the street where the forcefields are so the suspicious guards would search around it, and usually into it. Knocking people unconscious and throwing them into the ocean to get eaten by fish, or tricking them into getting swarmed by bloodflies and dying horribly; it's all very sinister, I'll be the first to admit, but there's a morbid satisfaction in ensnaring all these guards in deathtraps and having one fewer pair of hostile eyes to worry about. Very Tecmo's Deception. The game also looks great in general, with its take on a vaguely Spanish/North African/Mediterranean city with the fictional Karnacas and the slightly exaggerated cartoon proportions it uses for its character design, but the animations seem a bit off-putting. I noticed when I was talking to the Outsider that his head bobs erratically from side to side while he talks and thought nothing of it at the time; the guy's meant to be a little disconcerting, as the world's equivalent of an all-knowing trickster deity. However, I started to notice other NPCs doing the same thing in conversations, and I'm no longer sure it's a deliberate quirk. I'll disagree with a certain sentiment that this game's targets don't stand out as much as the rogue's gallery of the previous game: though you meet almost all of your targets for the first time during their particular missions, which doesn't really befit a revenge tale where you'd normally have that scene with the room of conspirators mid-planning in order to understand how each of them was compicit in your downfall, I'd argue they're every bit as distinctive as the targets in the first Dishonored. The Florence Nightingale-like Dr. Hypatia and the brilliant clockwork inventor Kirin Jindosh are layered villains that, were you to take the time to learn about them from found documents and overheard conversations throughout their mission areas, you'd understand why Corvo/Emily would be just as likely to slit their throats as they might to keep them alive but incapacitated/neutralized in some fashion.

However, we come back to the fact that while I can't fault the game for giving players a lot of content for their money with its incredibly elaborate level design, this might be a case of having way too much of a good thing spoiling the meal. I'm up to Mission 6 and already starting to burn out a little with each of these immense locations - I haven't been back to it since Wednesday, though I hope to blast through more of it this weekend before May begins and I switch my focus. You might want to pace yourself with this one, if you're trying to be as thorough as I am.