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.

If you recall last month, I stacked the deck with the Dredge of Seventeen feature because I knew May was going to be a light one. For whatever reason known only to a former version of myself, I spend every May focusing on a backlog project, usually of a particular vintage. This year was another edition of May Millennials, where I played through four games from the 2000s - Tales of Graces F, Enclave, Painkiller, and Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland - to see how well they hold up and to finally tick them off my waiting list. That also meant very little time left over for anything else, including 2017 games.

As such, I have three games I managed to squeeze in under the wire, none of which are going to make a significant impact on the overall list. Even so, they're all worth talking about, so that's what I'm going to do:

One Dog Story

This was my big hope for this month's batch; what looked like an explormer featuring a talking dog set in a laboratory where the experiments had run amok. Sadly, even though my expectations weren't too high, this game couldn't even sit up to meet them.

The biggest issue was that the game is glitchy as balls. Whenever this happens with a PC game, there's some small part of me that wants to hold back on the vitriol in case there was some issue with the installation process or it's an optimization/compatibility kerfuffle: this laptop wasn't exactly gaming ready when it was new, and it's coming up on its tenth birthday pretty shortly. If it were an animal, it'd be reaching that stage of its life where it wanders into the forest to die. However, I can't imagine how much that should affect a game that is deliberately aping a 16-bit pixel style without a whole lot of graphical flourishes (there's some lighting and particle effects, but they're mostly subtle). And while that might explain the input lag, it probably doesn't explain falling through floors, frozen checkpoints that necessitate a reset, or some of its lousy level design towards the end (which, granted, is not really a glitch but still not great).

It's also not really an explormer. While there are permanent health upgrades and better equipment you can find, there's no backtracking and many doors will lock themselves behind you after you pass through them. There are level names that pop up Half-Life style at certain junctures while exploring the facility (there's more than a few Half-Life allusions in this subterranean laboratory full of doomed scientists and weird monsters, which is why I figured the level names popping up while you're moving around was another one), and at the end of each is a boss fight or some other challenging encounter. I'd say, structurally, the game it resembles the most is Cave Story: it's a bit more linear than most games of its type and there's a wide variety of weapons to find, each of which has one or two temporary upgrades that might make you want to switch over to them even if the gun you're using is generally better. Its variety of enemy types also factor into weapon considerations: an enemy charging at you might be better dealt with via the plasma rifle, which works like a chaingun with a steady stream of bullets, while the trickier, more maneuverable flying enemies are best taken down with a shotgun that has more coverage and is therefore harder to evade. If all else fails, the protagonist has a baseball bat to fall back on and can pull off some Zelda II style up-stabs and down-stabs. You've also got the usual traversal friendly stuff like a double-jump and, eventually, a jet-pack. There's also a Back to the Future hoverboard but the less said about that the better: it can only be used for two on-rails sections that resemble Donkey Kong Country's much reviled minecart levels.

One Dog Story turned out to be one of those nightmares where I can just about see the kernel of a great game buried deep within, and may have been the case in an alternative universe. The weapon variance is always welcome when the encounter design bothers to include it as a factor; the story is a fairly rote "science gone awry!" yarn but the idea of a friendly chimera dog-man hybrid faintly recalling his happier days as a mindless mutt has potential, even if this game's narrative goes off the rails several times towards the end; playing on the harder difficulty did lead to a lot of tense moments, but some sequences like a claustrophobic Final Fight-esque lift sequence filling with enemies made the flaws in the combat engine that much more apparent as I was stun-locked to death again and again; and mentioned above there are some late-game regions where a map would've been extremely helpful, filled as they were with incidental rooms and areas immaterial to progression that existed only to make those zones more vast and harder to navigate. Even minor annoyances like having to skip the same flashback cutscenes over and over - even though it has a skip function, you still have to watch your dog hero suddenly collapse and then fade into the flashback sequence each time - started grating as much as the larger issues.

This is one of those cases where I generally recommend against playing the game, but also couldn't say for sure that your experience will be the same. I've played enough games where a slight lag or input delay has a sort of cascading effect that causes all sorts of glitches and technical issues to manifest, and without all those (and maybe playing on normal for your own sanity; there's a few enemies like the pigs or the hedgehog boss which were not pleasant to deal with) the game might actually be tolerable. Caveat emptor, I suppose. Either way, this might be the first game I've covered for this feature where I don't feel inclined to stick it anywhere on the list, such is my antipathy towards it.

Ranking: F. (I'm not putting this anywhere near a top whatever list.)

Faces of Illusion: The Twin Phantoms

It's around this point where I'm starting to get a little enervated by the inclusion of these monthly HOPAs. I'd been lucky enough so far to hit a few of the higher quality ones for this 2017 feature, but Faces of Illusion was a clunker and it's only now that I remember how awkward some of these games can be - even after a dozen years of following a codified blueprint - and that I should probably stop playing a new one every month just so I have something to fill out the bottom of this slowly-forming top 100 list. It's not just FoI's bizarre emphasis on character animations which have always been sub-par in these HOPA games; it's not the constant typos and localization errors; it's not the decision that the game's hidden object scenes include esoteric Catholic paraphernalia like "chaplet" or "aspergillum" that give me no idea what to look for (for reference's sake: a chaplet is like a rosary and an aspergillum is a little brush); and it's not that the game lacks many of the quality-of-life features included in the other 2017 HOPAs I've covered, like a shining jewel that tells you if a collectible is hidden nearby. Really, it's a combination of all of them at once that made Faces of Illusion so aggressively underwhelming.

Even its story is remarkably dumb, even for a HOPA: a Parisian ballerina at the end of the 19th century is kidnapped by a has-been illusionist in the middle of her performance, and a journalist and the ballerina's kid brother chase after them through the strangely dilapidated back rooms of the theater before passing through the Parisian catacombs and to the illusionist's trap-filled mansion. That ought to be enough, but at the core of it all is an ancient grimoire from the Byzantine era that contains a malignant presence that ensorcells anyone who reads it; the quest then becomes saving everyone from the evil influence of a magic book. I figure if you have an ingenious stage magician antagonist tossing various illusions and trickery at you and then introduce a genuine magical artifact later in the same story, you've maybe made some wrong steps.

I think I'll pass on including any more of these for the next three months at least, since they've become both a little rote (especially to talk about, as I seem to start every entry on them with "well, it's another HOPA...") and too much of a crutch with which to keep my monthly completion average up. While it's true that I am almost out of the shorter Indie games in my 2017 backlog - there's some big hitters remaining, but they're like 40+ hour RPGs and visual novels - I think we could all survive without the constant sliding puzzles and eastern European localization jank of this genre for a while.

Ranking: E. (Welcome to 100th place, Faces of Illusion. At least you weren't completely busted. A low bar to pass.)

Far From Noise

I'll end on a game I actually did enjoy, though it was a little on the ephemeral side. Far From Noise is a brief narrative adventure game - closer to a visual novel than most, though for stylistic reasons it probably shouldn't count - about a car dangling off a side of the cliff, its sole passenger running a gamut of emotions from fear to acceptance. The game features a single static shot of the car hovering between oblivion and terra firma, with an ocean horizon stretched out in the distance along with a slowly setting sun.

The player's inactivity, as limited as it is, comes from selecting the next line of dialogue from our unseen protagonist. The results of some of these prompts are entirely superficial - there's not a whole lot of variance that ensues whether you pick "oh god" and "agh!" - but others will branch out into distinct little discussions based on how the player chooses to shape this main character's life and outlook. A discussion about what they went to university to learn, for example, then segues into an anecdote about how they became interested in that subject; I chose architecture and got a cute story about the character's father's obsession with wallpaper patterns, though other subjects (and possibly other inspirations) were available if I ever wanted to play the game again and see them. The player could choose to listen to the radio at one point, or attempt starting the engine, and while neither leads to a significant variance in the resulting progression of events it makes the narrative feel that little more bespoke. Without spoiling much, the protagonist eventually finds a conversational partner and the game becomes a lot more philosophical, as the beauty of the natural world and the relative inconsequence of a single person's existence become topics of discussion. Other events, usually quite small, happen on the periphery as the game progresses which then in turn become new talking points.

I won't say how the game ends, since the tension is an important aspect of the storytelling (I'm seriously not telling, go play it yourselves if you bought the Itch.io Racial Justice and Equality bundle since it was included in that), nor do I want to really get into all these micro-events along the way. It's a deeply contemplative game that perhaps tends to repeat itself a bit and has something of a second-year philosophy student energy to it (there's a few famous authors in the credits' "inspired by" section, all of whom are typically studied in college degrees), but I don't hold it against the game because it feels accurate to the scenario. Being that out of your mind with fear in a scenario where any sudden move could send you careening over a cliff would make your mind wander and give you time to think and philosophize; especially since there's almost literally nothing else you can do without risking a quick demise. The game makes great use of its static scene, treating it like a stage in a theater where "characters" enter and exit, and occasionally playing around with perspective in its more dreamlike sequences. The whole thing took about 90 minutes so it definitely had that feeling of a single-act play. As always, I enjoy games like this because of how it finds a new avenue for the adventure game format; one that has proven to be so broad in its storytelling potential that the Indie circuit has broadened it from three or four traditional sub-genres to what feels like several dozen.

(And also, not to put too fine a point on it, but being trapped in an isolating circumstance due to the very real possibility of death and using that as an opportunity to take inventory of one's life has kinda been a pervading theme of this year and last. Can't imagine why.)

Ranking: C. (A curious game worth seeing once, just to see how much narrative mileage you could get from a car teetering over a cliff.)