Given I couldn't get into Baldur's Gate or Divinity: Original Sin - I was years late in both cases, but, still - I was initially skeptical of Baldur's Gate 3, even despite the "universal acclaim." Now, after dozens of hours of magic missiles and reckless attacks, chatting up goblins and demigods and livestock, searching abandoned temples and haunted houses and random corpses for quest clues -- after I realized, more than 30 hours deep, I was still in the game's first act; I couldn't be more glad I was wrong.

There are, I have to say, some parts of this game I still don't care for. Things I'd call legacy genre baggage, like an overabundance of options with unclear consequences; from the character creator's enormous menus and lengthy list of abilities at level 1, through to mid-level upgrade selections and sub-selections -- just as an example, I reset and re-leveled my barbarian after using a feat to unlock heavy armor, then finding out that heavy armor disables raging.

And of course I have to complain about narrative dice rolls, which can hide interesting content just 'cause of bad luck. You'd better believe I'm save-scumming just like I did in Disco Elysium. (Heck, sometimes just to get a better combat outcome, too.)

But! Those gripes are easy to get over because of how enthralling Baldur's Gate 3 is, in its storytelling and worldbuilding.

The game opens strong with grandiose cinematics and a straight-into-the-deep-end intro scene -- and rapidly starts weaving in compelling characters, particularly the sparkling personalities who join your party. Then as events progress, plot mysteries deepening and companions' backstories accumulating, NPCs and sidequests are all-the-while tossing out more and more plot threads to pull on.

There's so much writing in this game's conversations, scripted scenes, and notes, not to mention ambient storytelling in the environment; the world feels alive, and huge to boot. And it blends dire, epic themes like the main storyline with fun and silly shit like bribing entrepreneurial ogres.

Plus, as a role-playing sandbox, there are tons of opportunities for your own choices to impact that world and its stories. Often with even more significance than my choice to give Gale magic gloves which increase armor "when unarmored."

The world of Baldur's Gate 3 is so, so full of content to explore and lore to find, and I can't wait for my bumbling party of wackos to discover more of it.

Progress: Exploring the Shadow-Cursed Lands.

If "The Defenestration Trilogy" wasn't clear-enough branding, Tactical Breach Wizards - based on the free demo - is very up-front with its tone: magic-wielding special-ops soldiers trade irreverent banter, then knock down doors and blast baddies. (Yes, often out a window.) Like Gunpoint, this game's narrative elements are unflinchingly sarcastic and irreverent, and I love it.

But the tactical gameplay ... I dunno, I'm not "feeling" it. Even though it completely avoids the unpredictable dice-roll fuck-ups that I often associate with tactical games - "high-hit-percent missed-shot bullshit" as I lamented in Shadowrun: Dragonfall - because all actions are totally deterministic, and you can even rewind turns to try a different approach.

Really, Tactical Breach Wizards combat is more like a chess puzzle, asking you to figure out the right moves to stay alive and kill the bad dudes. And I guess that "figure out" part is what I'm not feeling: staring at the map to plan out each move is kinda boring. (Rewind-ability means I could just try stuff, too, but I'm not stoked on the idea of retrying moves over and over again.)

As much as I like the game's personality, its fully-predictable game mechanics are ironically too dull to hold my interest.

I don't tend to go for Open World Survival Craft games -- not since the halcyon days of Minecraft and Terraria. I haven't given half a thought to Pokémon in forever, either. And I usually avoid games in Early Access, so, how did Palworld get its hooks in me?

Playing with a friend helped, but this isn't one of those ... "so janky it's funny" or mock-with-your-friends kinds of games. In fact, Early Access or not, Palworld's mechanics and its overall game loop work pretty well! And I think what makes Palworld's loop especially engaging is that it's not just another surival crafting routine.

Your captured Poké- Pals can work in your base and run infrastructure, like an automation game, and they do so based on Pal-specific abilities. A rock-breaking Pal can work a mining quarry, collecting raw ore; a fire-breathing Pal can run a furnace, smelting that ore into ingots; and then you can craft those ingots into more powerful armor and swords and guns and so on.

So you put Pals to work in your base, and to keep them fed you need more infrastructure - run by more Pals who plant seeds, water and harvest crops - and support structures that'll keep them rested and healthy. The touchpoints between hunting and catching Pals, and automating (well, Pal-o-mating) your base, turn Palworld into a surprisingly effective combat-survival infrastructure-scaling hybrid game.

And it provides a ton of open-ended freedom in how you play, whether you want to hyper-optimize your Pal workflows or go out and farm materials yourself, approaching objectives and powering up however you see fit. ... for a while.

Palworld's upgrade grind does eventually get very grindy, the experience point thresholds ramping up and Palsphere capture chances dwindling down so much that gameplay can start to feel like a chore -- even when you configure your private server (like my buddy and I did) to soften those numbers up. And the recent Sakurajima update worryingly adds even grindier endgame components like oil and "plasteel", that all but require you to leave the game idle as Pals are laboring away.

My buddy and I are done catching 'em all for now, but I could see myself coming back to Palworld after Early Access if it makes that endgame content less toilsome. And assuming it smooths out some quality-of-life issues, like covering more of the map with fast travel, making it easier to transport materials between bases, and improving pathfinding for Pals getting to their workstations.

But what's impressive about Palworld already is how few of those rough spots get in the way of having fun with it, and how much of its Pal-catching and base-building is there to enjoy today. And, also, that you can build your dinosaur Pal a shoulder-mounted missile launcher.

What did I say about Horizon Forbidden West last time? That it plays to the "same strengths" and hits the "same highs" as Zero Dawn? Well, yeah, though that's an awfully succinct way to describe a world I've spent over a hundred hours in.

I'd forgotten how varied this map is: from canyons and deserts to forests and beaches, icy mountain peaks and treetop villages to overgrown skyscrapers and underwater Vegas, and all of it chock-full of activities. Tribal NPCs with side-quests to chase, rebel outposts to reclaim, lore-heavy collectables to unearth, components to gather for equipment upgrades!

Forbidden West's world is so damn captivating, I really couldn't help but keep returning to wring out every last drop of it.

And the second time around, it was pretty easy for me to ignore trivial shortcomings like inventory management. (Just had to always remember to "refill from stash.")

The plot isn't as jaw-dropping as Zero Dawn's - a high bar for sure - and ultimately Far Zenith felt more like a setup for Aloy's next game. Her motley crew of allies, though, help add meaning to this journey: it's always a delight listening to Erend's struggles with technology, to Kotallo's swearings of vengeance, to Alva's manic joy for data.

As for Burning Shores, well -- like Frozen Wilds before it, this expansion is a perfectly serviceable and enjoyable addition to the main game, not much more.

Londra's story tries to embellish those rascally Zeniths with a deep-dive into one particular narcissist, but it doesn't add much substance to the space wizards we already knew. (Though his Pangea Park is a fun excuse for glib Jurassic Park references.) And new companion Seyka has an engaging personality, but is no substitute for the group of friends that came along with Aloy in the main game.

Flying on a ptero-bot mount was a thrilling, climactic upgrade in Forbidden West, unlocking free exploration of the whole map; creating a new problem in Burning Shores, whose new map would be trivialized if you could fly over it immediately. It was smart of Guerrilla Games to invent a flight block that you could later remove, so once you defeat Londra's anti-air space-magic laser, you can fly around LA's ruins too -- it's just a shame that the main game's grand capstone moment had to be undone (and then rehashed) for the expansion's sake.

I wish Burning Shores had added more off-the-beaten-path sidequests and activities. I mean, what's here is fine, a little unraveling of the Quen's org chart and some more flight recorder stories from Operation: Enduring Victory, I just ... wanted more.

Not that the "complete edition" package of Forbidden West is lacking content. Man. The hundred-plus hours I clocked uncovering this world's mysteries, solving its people's problems, upgrading my weapons to blow up robot dinosaurs, I loved all of it.

Except maybe those Gauntlet Run races. Could do without those in Horizon 3.

Progress: finished on Normal, 95.96% main game progression, 92.00% Burning Shores progression

Voxelgram was one of my favorites in 2021, so I was thrilled to see its new DLC come up for sale. No-brainer.

What was really surprising, though, was booting Voxelgram back up and seeing even more new puzzles, added for free.

Some of these fuckers - I mean that affectionately - some of these new puzzles get up to an eye-watering 15 x 15 x 15. Thousands and thousands of voxels!

Honestly, that immense scale of nonogram and all its toilsome scanning and rotating and re-scanning is asking a lot, even for a superfan like myself. So it's a good thing that another recent update added hint highlights, making it easy to find the next step in these massive grids.

I'm very satisfied with Voxelgram's DLC pack, hopefully the first of many, but moreover I'm blown away by the game's commitment to new content and features -- years after its initial release.

It was only last month that I wrote:

... there isn't much Ace Attorney left for Capcom to re-release ...

... but I'd still buy a remastered Ace Attorney Investigations collection, if they made it.

So, uh, that was an easy sale.

But I hope Capcom has some Ace Attorney 7 news soon, 'cause now they've really run out of back catalog.

Imagine - what if - after 2011's Saints Row: The Third, Volition had not pushed the franchise even further into zany crazy-pants town -- if instead, they'd kept doing the "San Andreas successor" thing, following a hyperviolent crime boss's rise to power.

Now imagine that their next try didn't just reboot its location, story, and characters; it re-iterated virtually all of the last game's features and activities, re-implemented the same loose aiming and floaty driving, and ended up being basically... the same game again.

You don't have to imagine hard: it's Saints Row (2022), the story of a new "boss" in a new city. You make friends with some gung-ho personalities, make enemies with three rival gangs, shoot your way through over-the-top heists and chases and rescues, earn money by running drugs and falling in front of cars (Insurance Fraud), claim criminal enterprises, grow territory, and collect outfits.

Y'know, just like in Saints Row 3.

After a few introductory missions establishing the cast, which could just as well have been cut, the reboot turns into that same crime-boss ascent story with the same structure and minigames we've seen before. It'd be a respectable "clone" of The Third, if it was from a different developer ... and wasn't more than ten years later.

What's strange is that Volition did embrace their wackier side, after SR3, in its alien-Matrix super-powered sequel and a spinoff in literal Hell. Then Agents of Mayhem, though not as bombastic as I'd have liked, built new strength-and-weakness mechanics around its superhero team premise. The Saints Row reboot, in contrast, is uncreative and unambitious; like it's not even trying to do anything Saints Row hasn't done before.

(Except pad the outer areas of the map with mostly-empty desert regions. Which suck.)

What's also strange is that Saints Row: The Third Remastered came out just before this reboot. I mean, it makes sense if Volition's business plan was to start cranking out yearly installments of the same formula, and oversaturate their own market, Assassin's Creed-style. But I digress.

Here's the upside: this Saints Row 3 re-skin isn't "bad," in pure gameplay and content terms. As a franchise addict, I happily - or at least, contentedly - sank hours and hours into the seen-this-done-that activities I've just been complaining about. Even the ultra-brief story DLCs The Heist & The Hazardous and A Song of Ice & Dust were, like Gangstas in Space and The Trouble with Clones before them, a fun-enough way to spend an hour or two.

But the reboot still isn't "as good as" Saints Row: The Third due to its technical infidelity. Frequent framerate stutters are sometimes violent enough to interfere with driving or aiming. You can see cars pop-in down any highway; I even noticed pop-out sometimes, a car next to me suddenly fading away! Occasionally reloading a gun plays the animation, but doesn't put any ammo in.

And non-critically, but very visibly, voiceover playback seems to always drift from video framerate -- resulting in subtitles and lipsync not matching audible dialog.

The in-game phone having an ad for the Murder Circus DLC is just a bitter-tasting cherry on top.

At its best, Saints Row (2022) is a more-modern re-do of Saints Rows past. But, it isn't always at its best.

Better than: Agents of Mayhem
Not as good as: Saints Row: The Third Remastered
Credit where it's due: the Mad Max-ian LARPing missions with Eli are legitimately hilarious. Play-fighting dudes in cardboard costumes is a delightful twist on normal combat.

Finally, after treading (re-treading) through the growing pains of new cast members in Apollo Justice and new three-dee technology in Dual Destinies, Spirit of Justice feels like a confident return to Ace Attorney's sweeping melodrama -- interspersed by investigative minigames and courtroom hijinks.

Kinda ironic that, back in 2017, I called out Spirit of Justice for its "safe" narrative focus and for doing "so little to build on the series' gameplay." In retrospect, maintaining a priority on Ace Attorney's storytelling strengths was definitely the right call.

Sure, these cases can be rightly accused of rejecting reasonable evidence -- several cross-examinations requiring you to "Present" a counter-intuitive item. And, following recent games' precedent, other courtroom mechanics like Apollo's Perceive - or even the new Divination Seance - don't get much use.

At least out-of-court investigations are more open to Examine-ation, and chock full of flavor text, compared to Dual Destinies.

... but my point is, what makes Spirit of Justice compelling and memorable - maybe more now, than on a tiny 3DS screen - is the same grandiose storytelling, tying up multiple cases and previous games in a wonderfully satisfying bow, that Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles did so well.

It keeps its lead characters grounded and relatable, by taking us along with them through crazy, bewildering events. It delivers heavy plot moments, made impactful by our attachments to the main cast. And it keeps things interesting with a colorful menagerie of zany supporting players.

And of course, Spirit of Justice also recognizes the value of fan service, with a tension-breaking 4th case featuring Athena and Simon. (Plus that DLC episode reuniting the old gang of Nick, Maya, Miles, and Larry.)

Considering there isn't much Ace Attorney left for Capcom to re-release - Professor Layton Versus being a Level-5 collab, and Edgeworth's investigations being ... limited - I can't help but wonder what's next. Dare I dream for some news about Athena's law career, and Apollo's Khura'in office, in an Ace Attorney 7?

Dare I hope?

Better than: as a collection, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
Not as good as: as a collection, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy
I mean, I'll rag on it: but I'd still buy a remastered Ace Attorney Investigations collection, if they made it. 'Cause I'm a sucker.

Dual Destinies was Phoenix and co's first 3D adventure - barring the Japanese release of that wacky detective crossover - and, just like I was a decade ago, I'm impressed by how well their over-the-top art style has been translated.

Ace Attorney's knack for eccentric characters carries a lot of water for this game's overall story -- like I also observed back in 2013, the early cases are underwhelming, and its "dark age of the law" plot doesn't really get rolling until quite late.

Dual Destinies also under-delivers on the "investigation" part of its gameplay formula, as a lot of scenes don't even have an Examine button -- and this lack of interactivity and flavor text makes the early cases' slow-moving narratives stand out even more.

At least newcomer Athena's "mood matrix" mechanic gets plenty of opportunities to spice up conversations and cross-examinations. The variety here is a welcome improvement on how anemically Apollo's debut used his own new trick.

(Alhough it's disappointing that Ema's forensic evidence minigames are totally absent, until the Turnabout Reclaimed DLC case.)

In the end, while I'll still heap praise upon this game's characters and overall flair ...

... the bulk of its cases aren't all that engaging, in their investigations nor in their narrative pacing.

Given that, I'm not sure whether I should expect Spirit of Justice to have aged more gracefully.

Progress: Finished Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies

... puzzles have always been important to our culture. To me, they represent the idea that the application of reason can lead us forward.

-- Byron (7)

The Talos Principle II feels like it was made for me. Not just because it's a story-driven puzzle sandbox, or because it includes first-person physics riddles, or even because it's an all-around improvement upon the first game. Talos 2 is downright targeting me with its housecat-informed philosophizing.

This sequel improves what I found wanting, and enhances what I loved, about the 2014 original: fully-voiced NPCs with memorable personalities enrich its narrative, new puzzle tools strongly distinguish it from the first game, and some new design directives - especially, numbered puzzles with accumulating complexity - were a huge help in teaching me how to apply those tools and reason through the game's challenges.

That's in contrast to The Talos Principle's later stages leaving me bitter when I felt stuck, forced to look up hints on the interweb. Talos 2 puts in the effort to carefully build its complexity, one puzzle at a time, so that you won't need hints -- you'll readily recognize twists on patterns you've solved before, and can make informed guesses about how previously-isolated tools might work together.

(... there are, in this game's "best ending" endgame challenges, some impossible-to-find scavenger hunts and a few can't-reverse-mistakes puzzles that I still needed hints on. But these frustrations are fewer and shorter-lived than last time around.)

As I noted when playing the demo, Talos 2's fresh and diverse environments are also a visual treat, evoking the serene-yet-mysterious feel of Myst or The Witness (2016). Talos 2's world isn't really that "open" - each of its 12 regions is unlocked in order, by story progress - but the spaces between puzzles feel very open to free-form exploration.

The Talos Principle II's scripted story, its philosophical backdrop, its brain-tickling puzzle gameplay, and its charming world, all feel like excellent upgrades on the last game; and despite lacking nonograms or computer programming, it really does feel perfectly tailored just for me.

Better than: The Talos Principle, The Witness (2016)
Not as good as: ... the third game might be? I guess?
More substantial, and arguably better!, than: Portal 2