Borderlands 3 is a technological step forward, and it succeeds in reiterating the franchise's manic-weapons-and-zany-scenarios formula. But it barely attempts to meaningfully distinguish itself from its predecessors, and those attempts don't generally work in the threequel's favor.

I want to be clear that the core "Borderlands" gameplay - running around and shooting bandits and exploding their dumb faces - is surviving and thriving in Borderlands 3. Its character classes are powerfully distinctive. Its combat is more beautifully chaotic than ever, with what feels like a record number of enemies in every encounter. Its new environments and their corresponding enemy designs are diverse and creative, as are the random weapon drops; upgrading from one crazy weapon to another, differently-crazy one is still a blast.

But given that we're nearly a decade on from Borderlands 2 (and 5+ years from the Pre-Sequel side-story), it seems reasonable to expect Borderlands 3 to stand out from its forebears. It doesn't -- instead, it's more like a remaster of the second game, with an upgraded engine and re-skinned content. Everything it does well was also done well in Borderlands 2.

That "remaster" sensation includes some surprising failures to meet contemporary game expectations. You can't track multiple quests at a time, finding fast-travel destinations is a pain, even clicking on menu buttons with a mouse just doesn't work as well as it should. (Which is especially confounding since the game has been released on PC for over a year, now.)

And, while there are a few stand-out moments in Borderlands 3's narrative - here I'm thinking particularly of Ice-T's and Penn and Teller's amazing guest spots - it overall falls short of the bar set by Handsome Jack's tale. Troy and Tyreen are lackluster villains (more annoying than anything else), cutscenes distractingly railroad the story away from you, late-game plot revelations fall flat, and even cameos from series favorites like Tiny Tina (who's less tiny, now) are disappointingly short-lived.

Also, what the hell happened to the "effervescent" items showed off in Borderlands 2: Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary? I thought that teasing those super-shiny guns for the third game was, like, the whole point of that DLC.

... but I digress.

The problem isn't that Borderlands 3 is un-fun -- it is fun. In terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, it's as fun as the series has ever been. It just seems like it's still lingering in the shadow of Borderlands 2.

Better than: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
Not as good as: Borderlands 2
Waiting for its DLC packs: to be done, let alone be on sale at a reasonable price.

Progress: Beat the main campaign.

I know that I've impulse-purchased some questionable games, but this year - as I've made a concerted effort to clean up my backlog - it's struck me just how many poor purchasing decisions are in there.

Enter Onikira: Demon Killer. Why did I buy this? Maybe because its screenshots look shiny and colorful, like Muramasa: The Demon Blade? Evidently I didn't pay enough attention to the Steam reviews, or I would have considered that Onikira might have quality control issues.

The context in the previous screen doesn't turn that subtitle into a question. That's just a typo.

Only a few minutes with Onikira was enough to convince me to uninstall. It's a sloppy implementation of a game I've played and gotten tired of many times before. (Shaq Fu being a recent and poignant example.)

It's somewhat fulfilling to clear the trash out of my backlog, but as I'll describe in my upcoming year-end review, games like this are why I frequently return to known quantities like Batman and GTA.

Progress: Didn't even make it through the tutorial.

Recursed is a pretty great brain-twister, with a strong central theme - resembling the idea of stack-based scope, plus occasional recursion into that stack, hence the game's title - and a surprising variety of mechanics layered on top.

Jumping into a treasure chest enters a new room, and entering a room resets its state. For example: There are two locked doors in front of you, and a chest leading to a room with a key; you go into the chest, pick up the key, jump back out, use the key on the first lock, go into the chest again, pick up the key again, jump out again, and use the second key on the second lock. Make sense?

You can also pick up the treasure chest, and carry it into a new room -- changing the path to that chest, and hence the path to resetting its state. Imagine if the chest leading to the key was "before" the room with the locked doors; that would mean each time you grab a key and bring it to the lock-room, the locks have been reset. So you'd need to pick up the chest with the key-room, and move it into the lock-room, so that the lock-room's state can be retained while you're retrieving each key.

And that's just the beginning, before rooms start having variable water levels and stateful objects. Recursed isn't afraid of throwing some pretty tough puzzles at you; but I wouldn't say that they're intimidating or obtuse, like Dyo could be. Recursed's puzzles are generally good at making their solutions appear within reach, given a few minutes of staring at each room and poking around.

But they're mentally exhausting, and I can only do a handful in one sitting before I need to take a break. Keeping track of all the state involved in a given puzzle, and plotting a route through its myriad permutations, is work.

That's why I've kept hesitating to dive back into Recursed since ... June, and why I'm now deciding to move on with my life.

Maybe a more-substantial story could have helped string me along, but it's not like Recursed is "bad," or lacking in good puzzle ideas. It just takes more effort than I'd like.

(I will throw a little shade at the game's "restart crow," which is supposed to tell you when the level has become unsolvable and you need to reset. I don't think it shows up as often as it should. ... or maybe I'm not as smart as I thought? No, that can't be it.)

Better than: Cypher (2018)
Not as good as: Braid
Maybe equitably as good as: Gateways

Progress: Got to the Ruins.

In my 2019 review, I made a promise - to myself, I suppose - that I would attempt Hollow Knight again.

That's why it's been sitting in my "Playing" section for the last 11 months.

The good news is that, when I finally did jump back into Hallownest, it didn't feel like I'd missed much. For all its ability unlocks and upgrades and technical nuance... for all the progression in Hollow Knight, its fundamentals stay pretty simple. Attack, jump, dodge. I fully expected my return trip to end in a quick death -- but I actually made progress, uncovered some new territory, and it wasn't long before I'd knocked off the Dreamers that'd been haunting my world map since last year.

Hollow Knight's literally-dark aesthetics and eldritch lore can make the thought of delving its depths intimidating. (Especially in Deepnest. With the low visibility and the crawling noises and the surprise spiders.) Hell, last time I said that I "lacked the courage" to keep going. So it was really ... comforting, I guess, that a little bravery was enough to get me back in the game.

And "when it works," which is most of the time, Hollow Knight delivers a sharply-focused take on the Metroidvania subgenre. The joy of discovering a new room, or of finally unlocking a door you've passed by, is even more poignant in the face of Hallownest's dark and mysterious hostility.

After I gathered some more upgrades, I even went back to the Hive to get revenge on those motherfuckin' bees! That felt pretty great.

But there is a, er, "dark" side to Hollow Knight that goes beyond its pitch-black environments and sometimes-evil challenges. Its sense of mystery is a double-edged sword: many of its opportunities for advancement or improvement are hidden so well that I'd never have found them without internet guidance. Even a significant chunk of late-game content is devilishly concealed.

It doesn't help that traversing the game's massive map, to scour it for missed secrets, is fairly inconvenient. While Hallownest does offer some fast travel options in its Stagways and Tram, big sections of it are still several lengthy rooms - and several annoying fights - removed from travel points.

Also, the sometimes-evil challenges are ... evil, sometimes. Many hazards or encounters seem to hit you out of nowhere. Most bosses are, just, complete assholes. The White Palace is some Super Meat Boy kinda shit. Checkpoint and save-bench placements aren't brutally unfair, but still feel more punishing than they need to be.

Ultimately I would say that my successes in Hollow Knight had less to do with my timing or reflexes, and more to do with my studious investments in health and damage upgrades.

Which isn't a bad thing, is it? I mean, I wanna be clear, that while I can complain about some frustrating encounters and not enough fast-travel nodes -- I had a lot of fun poking around the map, unlocking new abilities, and increasing the Knight's mastery over this dark fantasy world.

Its expertly-crafted content misses the mark just a bit for its hostility toward my desire for exploration, and the amount of back-tracking involved in routine travel.

Also, the story just didn't make sense. Even after reading a synopsis online, I've got no investment in the Pale King or the dreamscape or whatever the hell this plot was supposed to be about.

Better than: Headlander, Iconoclasts, Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition, Timespinner
Not as good as: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Knight, Indivisible
Anxiously optimistic for: Hollow Knight: Silksong

Progress: Defeated the Radiance, 101%

Masquerada: Songs and Shadows feels spiritually similar to a Final Fantasy game, in some key ways.

Its got a deep world-mythos, for one. Not unlike your Espers or your Mako, the setting of Masquerada is steeped in an original mythology which shapes the game's characters and events; and the protagonists discover dramatic truths about that mythology as the story proceeds.

The game has an introductory problem, with an overload of mytho-babble about mascherines and Contadani and The Registry and other buzzwords that haven't been explained yet. But the pieces come together after the first hour or so, and as the plot's central mystery takes off, that initial sense of confusion turns into a hunger to learn more about this magical world.

Through a handy Mass Effect-style in-game codex, lore-nerds like myself can spend a large chunk of playtime reading background exposition and well-written, in-character anecdotes.

Something Masquerada does really well - and which I'd call hit-or-miss in Square Enix's games - is humanizing its characters, creating compelling bridges between the player and this unfamiliar world. It doesn't just use class struggle as a narrative theme, it moulds character personalities around their troubled upbringings; while there are political events that drive the story, those events and their consequences are rooted in personal motives and emotions.

It helps that the game's writing and voice acting are stellar. A lot of "gameplay" time (maybe even most of it) is spent in conversation, and little of that time feels wasted, but it's also not overly pragmatic or rushed. Masquerada's spoken dialog delivers pathos without being melodramatic, which is impressive for any game production.

That being said, I'd stop short of calling the story itself a masterpiece -- while it's told well, the greater mythology plot can be somewhat dry, and some points remain conspicuously unexplained (or at least unfinished) in the end. The game's resolution fulfilled my interest in its characters, but not so much in its fantasy world.

Another way in which Masquerada reminds me of Final Fantasy is its combat: not because of mechanical similarities, but because while Masqerada's tactical action is somewhat deep and intricate, it is so easy that it's handily overshadowed by the game's other elements.

In fact, more-so than in most other RPGs, Masquerada's combat gameplay ultimately feels inconsequential to its entertainment value. I actually really like the mechanical designs of no-experience-points skill upgrades and low-impact equipment options, while I simultaneously disliked how chaotic the battlefield could get (causing problems when trying to click on a specific target); but in the end, it hardly mattered how well or how poorly I did in combat.

Of the small number of times I party-wiped, they were all due to bad positioning and getting flanked by the enemy. So long as I kept my party together and kept clicking my ability buttons, there was never anything to worry about.

When you disregard combat, there isn't much left to Masquerada other than walking through the map toward the next story beat (and optionally collecting lore to read in the pause menu). Which makes it sound like an isometric-3/4-view visual novel ... which isn't entirely off-base.

What else? Well, the music is a mixed bag, with some tracks greatly evocative of "mystery" or "action" but others that are tediously operatic and hymn-like. And animated character portraits do an excellent job of helping characters emote, while the field graphics are just fine, nothing particularly good or bad to note.

Considering that Masquerada's writing and story presentation are far and away the stars of this show, it's remarkable how much work clearly went into other aspects of the game. The map is filled with colorful NPCs and even dynamic physics objects, but NPCs' idle chatter is totally meaningless, and those physics objects have no impact on how you play the game. And though the combat mechanics are super-detailed, those details are practically irrelevant to the outcome.

It makes me feel a little bad for the people who worked on those parts of the game; their admirable design considerations and attention to detail didn't really pay off. But Masquerada was nevertheless a satisfying experience, due to its well-grounded, and well-told, fantasy story.

Better than: Analogue: A Hate Story, CrossCode, Final Fantasy XII
Not as good as: Chrono Trigger, Indivisible
It's awkward to compare it to: other real-time-with-pause RPGs like Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age, because Masquerada's combat is such an insignificant part of the game overall.

Progress: Finished on Normal, got ... most? of the lore pickups.

I've done quite a bit of LEGO gaming in the past, to say nothing of real-life LEGO-ing, and I'm well-aware that the "LEGO" part of these games' appeal is fairly shallow.

I enjoyed LEGO: The Lord of the Rings because I love The Lord of the Rings. And I enjoyed LEGO City Undercover because I love ... GTA. But LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes and LEGO Marvel Super Heroes - and its dead-horse-beating follow-up LEGO Marvel's Avengers - strained my attachments to those franchises. The LEGO Movie Videogame was fan-service-y fun just like The LEGO Movie was, but...

I have no attachment to Ninjago, so The LEGO Ninjago Movie Video Game had an uphill battle for my attention to start with. And this game's addition of broad combat "techniques" failed to distract me from its rote beat-em-up formula, environments which are as visually-noisy as they are boring, and a story which is clearly doing a lazy job of following a movie script.

Also, the game crashed to my desktop twice, in the ~60 minutes I played it. Fortunately its checkpoints weren't far behind, but... that's statistically worrying.

I do have to give the game credit for getting me interested in The Lego Ninjago Movie. Many of the game's cutscenes appear to have been lifted directly from the film, and their silly, fast-paced quips were definitely my favorite parts of my brief playing time.

It's rather telling that Steam achievement records show a sharp drop-off between players who finished the tutorial/prologue (Training Dojo) and those who made it through the first major story beat (completing Chapter 3 / Location 1).

Progress: Got to Chapter 4 / the beach.

Given my recent positive impressions of Hitman (2016), is it possible that I missed some fun assassination-puzzle gameplay in 2012's Hitman: Absolution?

Well let me put it this way: when you re-load a checkpoint, previously-killed goons respawn (reference 1, reference 2).

So, no. If Hitman: Absolution won't allow me to retry just my last move - instead resetting all of my stealth clean-up, which makes me wonder if I'm supposed to shoot my way through? - then I don't think I've missed much.

Progress: Gave up as soon as I was detected, and found out about this checkpoint garbage.

Ages ago, I bounced off of the older Hitman games due to sheer difficulty. So it's great that Hitman (2016) has added user interface conveniences that help you stay hidden; mostly-generous autosaves to simplify recovering from a mistake; and plentiful hints (eavesdropping and otherwise) which reveal potential assassination solutions.

And I gotta say, interpreting each mission as a puzzle - sneakily impersonating wait staff to observe the target, carefully laying out the pieces of a death trap, and finally watching those pieces come together - can be pretty damn satisfying. Particularly because of how elaborate Hitman's levels are, with so many moving parts to take advantage of.

That said, the game is pretty up-front about wanting you to replay each mission multiple times to attempt different approaches and methods. I admire the variety of possibilities, but not quite enough to go back through a level all over again.

Also, the story is ... well, it's mysterious but not in a good way. Bare-bones conspiracy porn stuff, like, hey there's a shadowy figure pulling strings, hey there's a secret society or something. It's a bland excuse for gravelly voice-overs and well-animated cutscenes.

But I got more excited about Hitman's gameplay than I expected to, so that's pretty cool. I might even have done more missions, if I hadn't run out of free/demo ones.

Now I'm at least a little curious about how IO Interactive's upcoming James Bond game might turn out.

Progress: Finished the Sapienza mission.

A high school friend of mine was way into real-time strategy games, and Rise of Nations was one of the few I actually enjoyed myself (along with StarCraft).

Fast forward a decade-and-change, and the Extended Edition is a potent shot of nostalgia. There's still a lot of joy to be had in managing your nation's resource incomes, researching your way through the ages of humanity, and upgrading infrastructure into the modern era -- especially when this results in out-teching your opponent and slaughtering their hoplites with machine guns.

Of course, even if RoN was ahead of its time for 2003, strategy games have come a ways since then. This user interface is considerably more meticulous than a modern Civ, with most parts of the "tech tree" only accessible from part-specific buildings; and convenience functions like "find an idle worker" are hidden in obscure hot-keys.

Not to mention, the unit pathfinding is kind-of terrible, frequently taking an absurd route or getting stuck in the city. (It's easy to forget how bad RTS pathfinding used to be, back before super-parallelized CPUs and PhD-level AI theses.)

If you're up for a bunch of micro-management, including repeated attempts to move units to the right places, Rise of Nations might still be a solid diversion. As for me, though, I lost the patience for unit-level micro-management some years ago.

Progress: Finished a tutorial campaign mission.

It'd be reductive to call Uncharted: The Lost Legacy the "girl version" of a Nathan Drake game, just as it'd be reductive to call it a bite-sized Uncharted. Chloe and Nadine are strongly-written characters with engrossing personalities; their adventure's parkour-ing and puzzle-solving easily measure up to Drake's best; and this installment's experiments (chiefly the free-roam Western Ghats chapter) are overall successful.

... but the fact remains that Lost Legacy is a short installment of Uncharted. Chloe and Nadine get a little character development, but not as much as you'd expect in a longer tale. The villain doesn't get built up enough to be truly intimidating. The sandbox experiment is held back by the lack of narrative value in its optional content.

And while there are some great set-pieces - wide-open vistas in the Western Ghats, climbing a huge Shiva statue, ... a remaster of Uncharted 2's train chase - it still feels like about half-a-game's worth of memorable moments, because this is about half of a full game's running length.

Lost Legacy is well-polished enough to be very enjoyable on its own; don't dismiss it as a side-story or tech demo. But Naughty Dog itself has proven that a full-length adventure can be even more fulfilling.

Better than: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Not as good as: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Hearts of Stone
And not as good as its other full-length siblings: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves or Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, let alone Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Progress: Finished on Explorer, with none of the optional collectibles.