The DMC3 to Hollow Knight's DMC1. Bigger, harder, faster, and more complex on a fundamental level.

I Can't Believe It's Not Quake

I didn't grow up playing any of the variants of Adventure, but I *did* catch Zork and the text parser era of graphical adventures, in particular several of the King's Quests, so when Roberta showed back up with a remake of CCA talking about what an inspiration it was, I had to see where it all began out of historical curiosity.

And for a game from 1977, with no prior art to build on, it really is remarkable. Rough in some respects—I don't know what purpose the exits with RNG outcomes serve beyond annoying the player, never mind the ever-present threat of RNG death that makes "save early, save often" more essential than usual with early adventure games—and the puzzle design won't stymie a seasoned adventurer, but there's a few of those "aha!" moments to be had, and the real brainteaser is figuring out the routing required to maximize your score. The caves are vast and thoroughly interconnected, and there's just enough friction to make a clean sweep tricky.

The caves are also just plain weird, in that charming, adventure game-y sort of way I won't spoil here. Anyone who's played the earlier KQs will recognize the hodgepodge of design sensibilities at work here.

Aside from some quibbles—I really don't need the narrator to automatically read the name of an inventory item every single time I mouse over it, please—the remake itself is quite nice. It won't be the *same* experience as a proper text adventure by any means, but the audiovisual presentation sells the atmosphere and the simple point and click interface suits a game with such simple commands just fine.

The closest you're going to get to more Hollow Knight until Silksong comes out. Come for the exploration and platforming, stay for the boss fight against the Persian equivalent of Vergil from DMC.

Sooner than expected, it's More Talos 2.

A lotmore. You'd think Croteam would've run out of ways to make routing lasers a novel challenge by now, but it's genuinely incredible how many dozens of puzzles they're still wringing out of the core concept. A lot of them won't stymie anyone who's familiar with the process of breaking the logic of these puzzles down for too long, but there's always some knot to untangle that makes them satisfying all the same, and there's still plenty in here that'll make Gehenna veterans sweat.

Some mechanics do feel underutilized—maybe the base game already covered most of what the devs could think of for item swappers, mobile platforms, and teleporters, but you'll see a lot less of them compared to the PhD in laser wrangling you'll have by the end. There's some real showstopper puzzles here too, though, great big rooms with bespoke scripted mechanics that you won't see anywhere else, and those are a real treat.

Storywise, you're getting what amounts to an epilogue. Not as utterly disconnected as Gehenna was, not a full story in its own right, just some nice followup and closure for the cast and a glimpse at how society's doing and where it's going. The three chapter structure means you're getting a variety of stories and vibes, and every single story delivery mechanism from selfies to text adventures is here somewhere.

If you liked the base game and want more, get it. God knows a third entry isn't happening any time soon.