When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro blog.

This was my least productive month yet for completing games from 2017, almost entirely due to the unexpected size of an Indie RPG named Underrail: I first wrote about it back in late July and am still plugging away at it, little by little. As such, I could only get a few hours into the one 2017 playthrough I was anticipating the most this year; you can see how that went by scrolling to the bottom of this month's Dredge of Seventeen entry.

Prior to that, I took on one of few my precious remaining explormers from that year and another from the stack of games granted by 2020's Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. With just two completions this month I'm not all that much closer to my 100 game goal, but I am still hoping I can still hit 105 by the end of December: that's the number I'll need to bump off all those hidden object puzzle adventure games I used to pad out the bottom of the list. September's going to be dedicated to one 2017 game in particular, and I've earmarked a bunch of horror games for October given it's the season and all, so at least I haven't run out of content quite yet. As always, click the link in that italicized intro to find out how I'm doing.

The Mummy Demastered

Trust WayForward to keep the explormer fires burning, as one of a few developers mostly dedicated to the format. They are of course best known for their Shantae series of genie explormers, but WayForward's a powerhouse when it comes to 16-bit throwbacks with memorable soundtracks and cute aesthetics. They're currently working on that Advance Wars reboot/remaster and a sequel to 2019's River City Girls, the Kunio-kun successor that focuses on the usual protagonists' girlfriends instead. The only WayForward game relevant to our interests here is the only one they developed in 2017: The Mummy Demastered, a 16-bit tie-in to the Tom Cruise/Sofia Boutella movie about a powerful ancient mummified princess and a secret paramilitary organization, Prodigium, founded to combat supernatural threats like her.

I haven't been able to make my mind up between two possibilities with regard to The Mummy Demastered: that WayForward took the proposal given to them by Universal to mean a competent but no-frills licensed game that wouldn't embarrass themselves or the movie creators and opted to use that guideline to create the sort of 16-bit explormer they could make in their sleep, or whether WayForward figured this cinematic "Dark Universe" would somehow become a big deal with a huge established fanbase to whom this tie-in game could act as an effective introduction to the rest of WayForward's library (particularly Shantae and Aliens: Infestation) and used that reasoning as incentive to make a tie-in that was better than it has any right to be. It's oddly high-quality for a licensed game, is the point I'm making, especially for a movie that didn't feel like it needed to do much of a good job itself: it could be WayForward just takes every project seriously because they're pros (this makes the most sense), but it feels like the stakes were both higher and lower than they needed to be given peoples' expectations for licensed games and how readily WayForward could've phoned it in. And to some extent they did, building on the innovations introduced in Aliens: Infestation - your protagonist is an anonymous soldier that uses a mix of firearms for offense, and their death means replacing them with a new, equally interchangeable grunt who then has to find the corpse of the previous to recover all their traversal gear and upgrades - and setting you against crows, rats, spiders, bats, and other quotidian fauna corrupted by the titular mummified princess Ahmanet. The game's also not that large, is relatively easy (which bolsters my "introduction to WayForward" argument), and doesn't have any upgrades you haven't seen before; conversely, it controls exceptionally well with the multi-angled Metroid "hold a button to shoot in place" gunplay, and has nice pixel sprite animations and a killer synthwave soundtrack. Even on auto-pilot (possibly) WayForward has become really good at making this very specific type of game.

My memories of the game are fading pretty quickly but one thing that stood out was just how approachable the game was after the intro. The intro is tough; it's vaguely similar to how Super Metroid starts, dropping you in a prologue that sets up the game but - due to the nature of your faceless protagonists - is not necessarily one you're meant to survive. Escaping Ahmanet's tomb after she resurrects the initial failed Prodigium expedition is challenging on a single energy tank but just about doable. After that, enemies drop health and ammo with surprising frequency and it's only a few health upgrades later (and maybe a weapon better than your starting SMG) that you're more or less invincible while exploring - if your health really gets critical it doesn't take much to sit around and farm health from weaker enemies and destructible objects for a little while. Bosses are a slightly different matter: most are bullet sponges and you spend most of the time trying to avoid their attacks as you whittle them down with whatever weaponry you've found, though they're obviously whittling you down in the process too. There's little in the way of environmental hazards to sap your health or puzzles to solve - just a few upgrade-related barriers like flooded sections or high jumps - but there are at least plenty of upgrades to find, not all of which are necessary but can make the game easier including the aforementioned health upgrades, new weapons, artifacts that grant useful passive skills like more armor or damage, and the vital traversal abilities learned from ancient mummy scrolls. There's also a scavenger hunt for fifty "relics," many of which are placed in non-descript destructible objects which can make them hard to find: if they stand out at all, it's because their crates and barrels are slightly harder to reach than most. Since they don't offer anything besides game completion %, you can safely skip those unless you have the same collectathon brain worms I do.

I'm about done with what I can write about this well-made but garden-variety explormer except that I can't say enough good things about its soundtrack. It feels like it was taken from a Stranger Things tie-in game that WayForward never got the chance to make: that same sort of retro, '80s horror synth that the Hawkins, Indiana-set show helped to popularize years after its initial success as a John Carpenter movie soundtrack staple. These catchy and atmospheric jams were composed by Gavin Allen, a.k.a. Monomer, who would later work with WayForward again on their 2019 Shantae sequel Shantae and the Seven Sirens: clearly, as with Jake "virt" Kaufman years prior, WayForward has an ear for hiring excellent video game musicians.

Ranking: B. (My reasoning is that the B-tier also includes The Dragon's Trap, which has many of the same strengths as an explormer and a similar retro vibe, and I'd argue The Mummy Demastered deserves to sit very close to it.)

Luna

I've yet to come up with a name for the specific genre of game Luna is, one that can also be attributed to their follow-up Wattam and many Amanita Design games, but the closest I've come is "mess around and find out simulator." To be fair to Luna, it has more direction than most: your task as a little bird that is tricked into absorbing some of the waning moon's essence by an irascible owl is to break through your moon-induced haze and recall how the world used to be. This is done first by recalling the memories of plants and wildlife, performed with a series of constellation-reconstruction mini-games, and then placing all the plants and trees around a habitat to coax out the animal friend that lives there. By singing to them, reminding them who they are, they're able to shake off their own moon-influence and return those chunks to the pale orb itself, which fills in more after every encounter. You then repeat this process for all four friends - a turtle, a swan, a bear, and a fox - before settling things with the owl that set off this series of events.

The game certainly is beautiful, with a painterly approach that reminded me of Ori's otherworldly arboreal visuals just in a 3D format, and the fairytale storytelling structure is germane to the child-friendly format of the mini-games and minor interactivity. The game was also built to be played in VR, with some UI and navigation controls that would be just as intuitive in a VR environment as it is with a mouse. However, that's about as positive as I can get about the game; the simple structure, repeated four times, wouldn't be particularly compelling even if I was in the single-digit age range that the game perhaps is best suited for. The constellation mini-game is a rote trial-and-error exercise that nonetheless won't take long with the small number of stars to realign and while filling each biome with all the plants you've remembered is a little more involved, there's no rhyme or reason as to the success state: you just need to place things and tinker with them a little bit, and suddenly everything's fine and you can talk to your friend and move on. The whole game took about an hour, coasting largely on its charm and aesthetic.

I'd feel too much like a heel to come down too hard on a cute little game like this, especially since it does have a more approachable structure than many of its peers to a degree that you're never left in a state where you're unsure what to do, but it missed the mark by repeating the same mini-games over and over. A game like this should be all about bouncing from one unknown surprise to the next, igniting the imagination of its audience with new obstacles to overcome in order to move the story along. I'm split on whether the biome decoration should have more of a list of objectives to meet or if being entirely arbitrary is better all round for giving players the freedom to plant these flora wherever they wish, but either way it wasn't all that rewarding to just scatter them all around and have the game determine you did it well enough. This is perhaps one of those times where I can shrug and decide the game wasn't intended for an old-as-dirt adult man like myself and be glad I didn't spend any money on it.

Ranking: E. (Purely a subjective take I'll reiterate, but there wasn't a whole lot to Luna besides its well-delivered fairytale narrative and a handful of repeating puzzles. It's entirely possible it resonates more with a different age group, or maybe it hits different in VR, but I've seen many better takes on its particular casual interactive playset approach.)

Bonus: The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd

I believe I've played just enough of Trails in the Sky the 3rd to understand where its priorities lie, in particular in trying to create a sequel to Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter that would make sense given that game's decisive conclusion. Following a new pair of protagonists with a quasi-romantic relationship, Trails in the Sky the 3rd makes the bold leap of dropping its heroes - plus previous playable characters - into an inter-dimensional dungeon to foil the machinations of another mysterious antagonist that, at first blush, doesn't seem to share a connection with overall franchise villains the Ouroboros Society. It's bold in part because one of Trails's biggest strengths was its worldbuilding: exploring Liberl in the first game and then revisiting those locations in the second after all the events that transpired helped establish those towns, dungeons, and NPCs and made the world feel like a lived-in place that would evolve and change with time. Likewise, switching protagonists from Estelle Bright - one of the most complex and charismatic video game heroines of all time - to spiky-haired playboy secret agent/priest Kevin Graham was a choice, albeit one that makes a certain amount of sense given the narrative objectives of this third game.

However, after spending a few hours with it, I think there's something very appealing about the approach Trails in the Sky the 3rd has conceived. Creating a massive dungeon with warp points and a hub full of amenities is a good way to ground the abstract madness to come with some stability, and after seeing my first "moon door" I can definitely see the value of the game's more vignette-sized approach to telling stories with characters I've come to love over the last two games. Focusing on these new changes one a time, let's start with that dungeon-crawling format. After a little prologue airship heist that feels like the cold open to a Bond movie, escaping with the prize just before what would've been some intro credits with dancing silhouettes, you're sent to recover an artifact kept underneath the Grancel cathedral - Grancel being the opulent capital city of Trails in the Sky's setting of Liberl - and become trapped in the aforementioned labyrinthine inter-dimensional maze after the artifact suddenly activates. Setting up a home base in the "Hermit's Garden" - a library and resting place that appears to be stuck in space-time - the duo of Gralsritter (i.e., Grail Knight, a high-ranking operative of the Septian Church whose job it is to recover artifacts too powerful to sit in the hands of mortals) Kevin Graham and his new "squire" assistant (and new character to the series) Ries Argent start exploring the nearby passageways until they come across a barrier and a "sealing stone." Taking the sealing stone back to the Hermit's Garden and activating it not only removes the barrier but also summons Tita - the youngest travelling companion of Estelle's original party, known for her brilliant mind and her various guns and gadgets. Tita chooses to help Kevin and Ries with their predicament and joins the party, adding to their strength. The game appears as if it'll continue in this manner, giving you occasional roadblocks in a mostly linear path through these dungeons that frequently add new party members to the mix - there's spaces for way more than your four-person party can hold, and there's a system where anyone you leave behind in the Hermit's Garden will "support" the active party with passive buffs - and then encourages you to use certain party combinations with its system of special doors.

To speak further on those doors, which look to be the main meat of the game, you'll occasionally come across portals emblazened with either a moon, a star, or the sun. Each leads to a sort of self-contained side-quest, the type of symbol representing the approximate length: the moon doors have longer cutscenes or objectives involved, while the star doors are shorter and sweeter affairs, and the sun doors are simply mini-game challenges. Each one also requires that you have certain party members with you, and possibly other prerequisites (I've only found the one door so far). Naturally, the first required that I had Tita in tow - impossible not to, given I've yet to find enough characters to fill out the active party - and this lead to a single battle between Tita and three enemies with a special condition (see the screenshots below for more details). After this battle, I was treated a long "memory fragment" cutscene of what Tita's been up to since the end of the second game, mostly involving her absent inventor parents finally coming home after hearing (and being slightly worried) about Tita's adventures fighting Ouroboros alongside Estelle and exploring the enormous, sinister Liber Ark relic that appeared over Liberl in Second Chapter's dramatic final act. This cutscene was a decent length - somewhere around 30-45 minutes - and I'm looking forward to seeing the others as I recruit more characters and complete more of these door challenges. I've been told that Trails in the Sky the 3rd exists largely as fanservice for those who loved the first two games, if not quite as essential to the overarching story as either, but I'm all for it: Trails in the Sky as a whole has some of the best storytelling and characterization (not to mention localizations that took many a painstaking year to complete) of any RPG franchise I've ever played, and I'm down for any excuse to spend more time with those personalities especially if it also means enjoying the abstract framing story and surreal dungeon-crawler set around it.

Another slightly unusual and risky design quirk of Trails in the Sky the 3rd is how it persists with the increasing levels of its cast. Many sequels reset character levels back to 1 or 5 or something low so you can have the joy of slowly coming into your many skills and abilities afresh, but Trails in the Sky Second Chapter started you at somewhere like level 50 with most of your late-game skills intact from the previous game. This includes the Arts and Crafts system of the Legend of Heroes games: the former are spells that are determined by your orbment set-up, a versatile and customizable system nominally similar to the materia of Final Fantasy VII in that you have to find and equip these elemental orbs to use the many spells attached to them; while the latter are character-specific skills that require a type of currency that slowly builds while fighting, and you can either burn off 20-50 points for a useful skill (either offensive or defensive, it depends on the character) or wait until you have 100 points for a much stronger "S-Break" skill that can be activated at any time, even when it's not that character's turn. In fact, it's useful to have one in the chamber because of the way certain bonuses will appear on the timeline and affect whomever happens to have their turn at the same time: if an enemy turn is coming up where it looks like they'll get a heal or a strength buff, it's for the best if you can interrupt that turn somehow and take that bonus for yourself. Manipulating the turn order like this is one of many nuances to the Trails combat system that makes a triumphant return here, enhanced further with even more potential bonuses that might pop up: for some examples, there's one that makes it so any attack made will be neutralized (best to let enemies have that one) and one that guarantees an item drop if you can defeat an enemy on that turn. Just as Second Chapter starts your party off at a high level, The 3rd sets everyone initially at the impressive level of 90. Of course, since all the enemies are around level 90 and attacks continue to take off a certain chunk of your health bar regardless it doesn't make a significant impact, but it does reflect that all those quests completed and levels earned and major enemies defeated from the previous two games have stuck with you. There's even a fun abilitease moment where you start with powerful array of orbment spells already installed that you then lose almost as soon as the game begins; it'll take most of playthrough before I'm able to use those high-level arts again, but I can't say I dislike having my own tabula rasa upon which to construct an orbment build to my liking.

Needless to say, I'm excited to continue this game as soon as I've concluded a few other ongoing playthroughs - Underrail first and foremost - but I wanted at least something to report about my most promising 2017 remainder to close out this month's entry of Dredge of Seventeen. I'm still far too early in to say anything definitive about where the game might end up on the GOTY list, but at the rate it's currently winning me over with its obtuse structure and focus on more personal character "episodes" I don't think a top ten spot is out of the question. September's going to be a month to enjoy this year, and boy howdy I could use something chill after the hot and sticky summer I've had.

Ranking: TBA.