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.

Yeah, Uncharted 4 is a narrative tour-de-force, a showcase of gameplay innovations - even if some, like piton-climbing, were clearly cribbed from Ms. Croft - and an incredible visual treat.

The only thing it's "missing" is a varied collection of disparate set-piece events. Not to disparage its action sequences, which do have some very high "highs," from an auction heist to a clock-tower climb and a street chase -- but few of them have that "postcard moment" feeling; perhaps because so many of the game's environments look similar to one another (dank caves filled with dead pirates).

And maybe there could've been better maintenance of the childhood-flashback storyline; although as it is, the mansion burglary is a very effective narrative punctuation-mark.

But, even if it's not as good as I think it "could have" been, it's clear that A Thief's End is an excellently-entertaining game and an extremely satisfying end for Nate.

Which won't stop me from looking forward to whatever full-sized adventure comes next: whether that's a spin-off with Sam and Sully doing shady shit, a prequel with Young Nate getting into trouble, or a sequel that builds up a new generation of treasure hunters.

Better than: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Not as good as: I'm hoping a hypothetical follow-up might be.
In 2017 I said Lost Legacy had "one of the best [puzzles] I can remember from any Uncharted game": but on revisiting A Thief's End, I really don't think anything can beat this game's pirate sigil puzzle.

Progress: Finished on Explorer, again.

The evil-base-defense-building genre isn't exactly novel, but it is rare, and Dungeons 2 is an encouraging example of what this kind of game can offer. If only it was less of a pain to play.

Going well beyond tower defense tactics, Dungeons 2 missions include RTS-style resource management and tech-tree growth. Actually, those mechanics are more prominent than laying traps or creating mazes; and it's a real delight to expand the Absolute Evil's power base, literally by digging out rooms or figuratively by investing in upgrades.

The "evil" premise is also mostly-well-delivered, although I'd argue that the narrator's fourth-wall-breaking sometimes tries too hard. At least his sense of humor is endearing, if imperfect.

But what holds Dungeons 2 back is confusing and seemingly broken controls. Like, it's bad enough that unit management significantly changes when you switch between "underworld" and "overworld" parts of the map -- missing drag-to-select in the underworld is a real hassle when you need to move defenders against intruders. The worst part, though, is how moving units between maps will change the camera to the destination map ... after a few seconds, stymying bulk-movement while also protracting one-by-one movement.

I'm tempted to complain about low unit limits and slow base-building, but my most recent mission suggested these might get resolved later; I finally saw a tech upgrade that'd allow more units at once, and hence more grunt workers to keep maintaining my dungeon. But that's speculative.

Much as I admire the simultaneous underworld-management and overworld-exploration elements, Dungeons 2 makes controlling those elements a frustrating chore.

Better than: ehh, I barely played Evil Genius, which is also more than 15 years old, but... yeah?
Not as good as: Overlord
Maybe, possibly, better than: Brütal Legend, but only if you ignore that game's voice cast (which is one of Brütal Legend's greatest features).

Progress: Finished campaign mission 4 / met the Nagas.

My previous writings on Uncharted 3 ranked it just below its predecessor, but this most-recent playthrough has me reconsidering.

Particularly, I'm re-thinking takes like there aren't as many standout "Uncharted" moments and pacing is kind of wacky. Yes, this round of adventuring sees Nate and his crew racking up a crazy amount of air-miles, and none of their destinations have quite the gravitas of Nepal or Shambhala...

But the other side of that coin is a considerable accumulation of "postcard moments." The burning chateau, the night-time fortress incursion, escaping a sinking ship, air-dropping into the desert, a horseback convoy chase; sure, Ubar itself isn't all that impressive, but the journey there has plenty of vivid set-pieces that make this adventure a memorable one.

And my anecdotal impression - that is, not a conclusion I've decisively measured - is that Naughty Dog (or perhaps Bluepoint) did a better job of facilitating the "Explorer" playstyle this time around. Generally speaking, Uncharted 3's combat encounters felt lighter in terms of tiresome bodycount, having fewer waves of mooks to senselessly mow down. Still enough to classify Nathan Drake as a bloodthirsty warlord, but, making positive progress.

On the other hand, I also encountered more-frequent frustrations with unclear parkour directions than in the last game. Especially in several Crash Bandicoot-esque "running towards the camera" chases which, just, come on guys -- some thrilling screenshots of Nate's "oh no" face aren't worth so many die-and-retry loops caused by invisible obstacles.

At this point in the franchise, though, trying to rank Uncharted 2 and 3 against each other is basically futile. We know that the fourth game out-classes them both.

Progress: Finished on Explorer, again.

My recent backlog-burning has been going pretty "Meh", so I'd been looking forward to playing a good game again. And Uncharted 2 delivers well-enough.

The PS4 Collection's graphical update is still looking good five years on, and Naughty Dog's banter-filled storytelling is still top-notch, even if the dissonance is hard to ignore.

On the flip side, while I've long been "over" Uncharted's combat - I switch to the Explorer difficulty by default - the amount of it is more groan-inducing than I'd remembered. Drake's body count is just absurd, and pumping round after round into wave after wave of enemy goons becomes a distracting chore between story beats.

And while the climbing and parkouring controls mostly work well, the moments when they don't stand out. Especially since the last few areas of the game seem to have so many of those moments. Unclear map directions and misleading climbing cues may be non-critical shortcomings, but they're shortcomings just the same.

I still love how the Uncharted franchise channels the spirit of Indiana Jones-style globe-trotting adventure, but as the series has aged, I'm not sure if Among Thieves is as critical an entry as it once was. I skipped over the first game for this round of replays; next time, I might skip the second, too.

Progress: Finished on Explorer, again.