Mid-game DLC is an interesting experiment, and to its credit, Baba Yaga integrates well into Rise of the Tomb Raider's first non-linear hub area. ... as well as anything else works in that hub, anyway.

But this content suffers from the same key shortcoming as the main game: it just isn't very interesting. There's one sequence that's pretty cool-looking, with hallucinatory flashbacks and trippy visuals -- you know, just like the Scarecrow sequences in the Batman games. (And the poison dart scene in Uncharted 3.) It feels overwhelmingly like a rip-off.

Other than that, there isn't much to this DLC. A fidgety puzzle, a frustrating boss fight, and a "twist" that's telegraphed a mile away by collectible audio diaries. Yep -- Baba Yaga is more of the same, for Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Better than: Red Faction: Guerrilla - Demons of the Badlands
Not as good as: BioShock 2: Minerva's Den
At least it's better than: that Harley Quinn mini-fight DLC, in Arkham Knight.

Rise of the Tomb Raider just doesn't feel like a positive iteration on its predecessor.

It has the same gameplay elements that made the 2013 game work -- blending stealthy assassination with run-and-gun action, combining thoughtful wilderness exploration and high-octane chases through exploding ruins. A few years ago, this mixture of gameplay had Lara Croft challenging the likes of Nathan Drake and Batman. But while Arkham Knight and Uncharted 4 pushed envelopes like open-world traversal, exploration puzzles, and parkour combat, not to mention strong characterization and storytelling... Tomb Raider hasn't evolved.

Rise's open-ish hub areas have lots "to do," in the form of vapid collectibles and checkbox challenges. But their implementation suffers from a trio of fundamental flaws-

1. Your first time through the area, you won't have the necessary abilities for everything (like fire arrows, or, uh, explosive arrows). This discourages organic exploration, suggesting that you come back for the collectibles later.
2. You have to collect too many things to get a reward; getting all of a certain collectible takes too much time. The collection itself isn't fun, mostly just searching for semi-hidden glowy or flashy spots. So the act of collecting is tedious.
3. Finally, the rewards themselves aren't very good! Lara might get a slightly more powerful shotgun, or a silencer attachment for the pistol -- but none of these upgrades really change how the game is played. (Even the silencer isn't as good as using bow-and-arrows instead.)

After I got bored of the first hub area, the only extras I continued to seek out were the Challenge Tombs. It's the name of the game, after all! Lara raids tombs. And while the upgrades from these tombs did feel meaningful, the tombs themselves were still very underwhelming: each one consists of a single puzzle. They're over in a few minutes.

Overall, the non-linear aspects of Rise simply aren't very fun. The game got more enjoyable once I focused on its linear campaign. And while - like I whined about last time - Ms. Croft never feels like she has a good reason to be in this adventure, it is still an adventure.

The main storyline provides plenty of exhilirating action sequences, like climbing up a crumbling tower, or running through a burning building, or evading pursuers by diving underwater. Unfortunately, it also has its fair share of disappointments -- like a few action scenes (and even one puzzle) that play out in cinematics instead of being interactive. And then there's the final boss fight, which ... well, when the final boss is a helicopter, you know you've run out of ideas.

But the real shame is how dumb the plot is. The story is full of revelations that are either easily guessable, or flat-out spoiled by collectible audio diaries; frequently, Lara is the last person to figure something out. And the cartoonishly "evil" Trinity organization is just bland and uninteresting as a villain.

If Nathan Drake is like the Indiana Jones of video games, Lara is starting to feel more like National Treasure's Nick Cage.

It's this foundational failure to build an interesting plot that hurts the most. Rise's failed attempts to improve the formula - the tiresome NPC sidequests, the difficult-to-use Broadhead Arrows, the microtransaction-driven Expedition Mode - and even its occasional bugginess, like when I kept getting hit by an invisible enemy and had to reload my save file ... all of that would have been easy to forgive if I was engaged in Lara's journey.

It'll be nice if Shadow of the Tomb Raider makes its hub areas less boring, and even better if it adds truly meaningful new mechanics -- but the best thing it can do for Lara is to give her a riveting and compelling story.

Better than: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Not as good as: Tomb Raider (2013), or any of the Uncharted sequels.
The cliffhanger mystery ending: did not hook me. I don't care what happens with Trinity. There's your challenge, Crystal Dynamics: make me care.

I tried revisiting Tomb Raider (2013) a few months back, and didn't get awfully far: while my first playthrough ended in very high praise, coming back felt ... dull. I was no longer shocked by the brutality of Lara's plights, nor intrigued by the openness of its explorable areas. Knowing what to expect from it, the game's "leisurely" beginning was too boring to keep my interest.

Unfortunately, now that I'm finally starting Rise of the Tomb Raider, I'm bordering on that same disinterest. The game's pacing and environmental themes feel overfamiliar with the 2013 reboot -- seriously, can Lara try visiting someplace other than a secret Soviet military installation?

(It doesn't help that the game's opening moments also feel very borrowed from Uncharted: Lara starts on a frozen mountain, then flashes back to how she got there (Uncharted 2); then after some storytelling in London, she travels to Syria (Uncharted 3). It's too much to be coincidental, and more pervasive than a "homage" really should be.)

The main story is also pretty underwhelming. Like her last adventure on Yamatai, the foundation of this plot is a mystical legend that most people believe is pure bunk; and like in 2013, Lara spends more time trying to survive than trying to solve an ancient mystery. But this time, her drive isn't to rescue her friends, but to ... vindicate her dead dad? Or maybe to save the world? When she explains herself in cinematics, the dead dad tends to come out on top.

Her character comes across as more pitiable than noble. It doesn't seem like she has a good reason for being here.

And the villains aren't narratively engaging, either. Trinity is frequently implicitly compared to the Nazis, on a magic treasure hunt that they believe is a divine mission. About as two-dimensional as bad guys get. There was some flavor text that hinted at a story of strife within the organization ... but that turned out to be a simple backstory for your weapon shop, run by a defector.

There are friendly NPCs, too, with optional quests. Like go to a place and save 2 people. Or kill 5 wolves. These optional quests are as immersive, and as relevant to the plot, as a dwarf asking you to gather rat pelts in return for a jacket.

I haven't talked a whole lot about gameplay, because there just isn't much to say about it. The game plays competently, for the most part, but it's not terribly innovative or exciting. Out of habit, I've been doing a lot of collectible-hunting in my current area; but neither the gameplay to find these items, nor the items themselves, feel very rewarding. (Like the sparkles that litter an Assassin's Creed map.)

So next time I sit down with Lara, I'll probably skip the collectibles and soldier on with her story. I hope that story gets better.

Progress: following Jacob.

I found the problem with Nonogram.

The "Classic" puzzles are big, right? I got up to a 70 x 40 puzzle. That's big. But as Nonogram's puzzles get bigger, its technical issues become harder to ignore.

When ex-ing out or filling in a bunch of squares in sequence - as one is likely to do in a large puzzle - the game often hitches for several seconds at a time. One moment, you'll be dragging the cursor along a row; then suddenly, visual feedback stops; then three seconds later, it'll catch up again, and you'll be unsure how many boxes got filled. And then, because of how many boxes you filled, it'll likely hitch again pretty soon.

This is annoying, but not breaking; the breaking issue I encountered was in trying to correct a logical flaw in that 70 x 40 puzzle. I jammed on the Undo button to revert to a known-good state, and after a certain amount of undos (admittedly, quite a few) the game crashed displaying a "gc" error.

Clearly, something very memory-inefficient is going on each time a square is clicked. These allocations pile up, and eventually fragment the game's heap to a critical point, upon which the game has no choice but to wait on some garbage collection. (I'm guessing that's what the hitching is about.) And when the Undo/Redo history is invoked too frequently, the garbage collector can no longer keep up. Boom.

But the real problem, the icing on this crash-cake, is that there's no autosave. That crash lost me 45 minutes of puzzle-solving. This wasn't my first crash, either, and I just assume it would continue recurring in similar circumstances.

I might have been willing to put up with Nonogram's technical infidelity if it at least saved my progress. But it doesn't, so I can't.

It's a shame, because otherwise, Nonogram is a great implementation of picross puzzling. Its UX is the best I've ever seen, and its puzzle gallery might be, too. If only it didn't crash and lose progress.

Better than: InfiniPicross
Not as good as: Paint it Back, Pepper's Puzzles
Just because you're using Unity to make checkbox puzzles: doesn't mean that you can ignore your memory usage.

Progress: 126/126 Gallery, 13/50 Classic, 35/50 Speed

The ending is ... okay. Like the rest of Shadow of War's story, it somehow manages to simultaneously feel cool and bizarre. The final act is pretty impressive, but more for its visual flair and its new gameplay than for any narrative payoff.

When I say "final act," I mean Act III: Shadow and Flames. This linear capstone on Act II's open-world orc-slaughter represents the cinematic culmination of Talion's struggle against Sauron.

... but then, the game keeps going. Non-spoiler: no, Talion doesn't defeat Sauron in some alternate-universe retelling of Tolkien's stories. Instead, the Epilogue: Shadow Wars shows Talion continuing his sisyphean toil against the uruk legions. After conquering each of the game world's five fortresses, now, they must be defended!

I did the first defense stage, with attackers somewhat below my level, and it was pretty easy. Then the second, with attackers near my level, and it was kind of hard. I saw the third stage had some attackers above my level. And then I looked up how many stages there are. Ten?

Evidently, Shadow Wars requires a hell of a lot more grinding through orcs, leveling-up, captain-promoting, and warchief-buffing, with absolutely no narrative integration until the very end.

By electing not to continue this tiring routine, I'm departing Shadow of War with a high opinion of it. Building my army and conquering Mordor was way fun. After 40 hours of it, though, I've got no interest in the epilogue -- nor in its awkward-sounding DLCs.

(Blade of Galadriel strips out the Nemesis system? And Desolation of Mordor removes respawning? Nah, thanks.)

Better than: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Agents of Mayhem
Not as good as: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Boy, if they try to sequelize this again: Monolith will really have their lore-work cut out for them.

Progress: 95%, level 48

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a lot like its predecessor -- like, a lot like it.

• Shadow of Mordor's story was well-acted and cinematically cool, but the lore and setup felt dumb. That's still true in Shadow of War. (A "New Ring?" Yeah, okay. But Talion still looks like he could be in a Peter Jackson movie.)
• Shadow of Mordor's mechanics felt very lifted from other games, like Assassin's Creed-style sneaking and Batman Arkham-style brawling. Shadow of War layers on some new mechanics, like Dark Souls-style online integration and ... some more Assassin's Creed-style meaningless collectibles.
• Shadow of Mordor didn't show its whole hand until several hours in, when Talion learned how to dominate and brainwash uruks. Somehow, he forgot how to do this, and Shadow of War also keeps that card hidden up its sleeve for the first several hours.
• I was really impressed by the Nemesis System back in 2014, and I figured the next several years of open-world games would pick it up. As of 2018, this is still true: it's an awesome system and I can't believe more games aren't doing it.
• As repetitive as it can seem, mowing down hordes of orcs is still really fun. Using combos to charge meters to activate special abilities to clear the area, only for more enemies to stream in afterward -- it makes Talion feel like a damn super-hero. It's empowering and challenging at the same time.

Shadow of War has basically the same faults as the previous game, but also the same strengths. And while many of its new features aren't that remarkable - the Shelob memories feel especially like trivial filler - it does bring a grander scale. Simply put, there are five regions (compared to Shadow of Mordor's two), and each one has its own orcish org-chart and its own fortress to siege and conquer.

Taking the first fortress was easy, but by the second, it became clear that hunting down bodyguards and planting spies among the warchiefs are necessary tactics. Middle-earth spycraft!

I'm not sure how well it'll all turn out, considering that Frodo and Sam never saw the Bright Lord on their way through Mordor. But at least for now, I really feel like I'm delivering on Celebrimbor's goal of building an army to rival Sauron's.

Shadow of War is a good counter-example to my recent experience with Agents of Mayhem. The latter had mechanically fun gameplay, but a dumb and unengaging plot, and I was unsatisfied with its sense of progression; I didn't feel like I was really making a difference in Seoul.

Shadow of War also has mechanically fun gameplay, and while its plot is still dumb and unengaging -- the sense of progression is very satisfying. As I slaughter uruks by the hundreds, I know that their corpses are building my way toward a better Mordor.

Progress: Just took my second fortress.

I spent a week with Agents of Mayhem, and I ... really wanted to like it. Its fundamental mechanics are fun enough, and it has a bunch of cool ideas for expanding Volition's typical comfort zone. But all of that ambition is brought low by major missteps -- often, confusing missteps, given what Saints Row IV achieved.

AoM's overall theme is the biggest disappointment, to me. It's set up like a Saturday morning cartoon, particularly G.I. Joe, with a collection of Mayhem's "good guys" teaming up against the army of Legion's "bad guys." It even has some pithy loading-screen tips to parody the old "Knowing is half the battle" PSAs. But the parody is extremely thin: the game's story plays out more like a grown-up retelling of a cartoon. Characters may drop an F-bomb every now and then, but it's otherwise just as melodramatic and predictable as a children's show.

It baffles me why AoM has completely discarded the over-the-top silliness of the Saints Row games. That same irreverence would have worked perfectly here, mocking how the Agents are so geographically distributed, or how the villain always escapes at the last second; but instead of mockery, dildo bats, or Mayor Burt Reynolds, it just has flat characters in a bland setting. And villains that actually escape at the last second.

A handful of the character backstories are funny on paper -- like Hollywood, the actor who needed protection after fumbling with a real gun on set; or Daisy, the roller-derby girl whose intro mission is being blackout drunk. But even in most of these cases, AoM's story is delivered in a no-nonsense tone, and its humor is an all-too-brief respite from the banality of the mission.

So the theme is a bust. At least there's a solid game underneath it, right? Well... sometimes.

The running-and-gunning mechanics descend directly from Saints Row and Red Faction. Third-person aiming has gotten better, but it's still not perfect. Jumping works ... well-enough. Driving is serviceable, but still not as sophisticated as, say, GTA 4.

What makes AoM's action-gameplay interesting is its set of damage strengths and weaknesses, along with diverse buffs and debuffs. As the challenge level ramps up, you'll need to know how to use the right characters, abilities, and tactics against various enemies and situations. These fundamentals work really well, and learning them is a few hours of good fun.

Unfortunately, these mechanics are let down by the lackluster content surrounding them. Said content comes in three flavors:

• Dungeons, which are thoroughly, overwhelmingly bland. They're always full of empty corridors and samey battle-chambers. They're so repetitive that I assume they were randomly generated from a small selection of rooms and hallways.
• The city of Seoul, which - while it's an "open" world - isn't fun to explore, due to being crowded by tall buildings. (That'd be fine if you had Saints Row IV superpowers, or Crackdown super-jumps! but you don't, so buildings just get in the way.)
• And some isolated events and hot-spots in the open city, which are as copy-and-paste as the dungeons.

I felt like the environment design wasn't engaging enough to support the amount of time I spent in it, especially in dungeons. AoM employs amateurish techniques of stretching its content further: like filling dungeons with room after room of wave-based encounters, or missions that ask you to drive all the way across the city, then back again. Or the Ark headquarters, which frequently interrupts the flow of the game.

Want to change your three-agent loadout? Need to jump to the Ark, then warp back to the city -- with a loading screen on each. Want to build and equip a tech upgrade you just found? Need to jump to the Ark, then warp back to the city. Want to send an agent on a new Global Conflict mission? Need to jump to the Ark...

That "Global Conflict" mode, by the way, is the worst attempt I've seen yet at an asynchronous time-management minigame. You send some agents off to do a timed mission, after which they bring back some reward and unlock more missions. Right? Assassin's Creed has been doing this since Brotherhood - in 2010 - and AoM's implementation is worse, in difficult-to-understand ways.

• The Global Conflict world map is split into multiple regions. To start, the East Asia region is unlocked; all the rest are locked. To unlock a new region ... you need to do all the missions in your current region. Hence: you can only have one region unlocked at a time. Why even have a world map?
• Agents don't gain experience points when they're sent on these missions. They're just unable to be deployed. (And remember, you need to go back to the Ark after the mission to get them back!)
• And once you finally finish all the regions, you can storm Legion headquarters in Moscow ... which is yet another bland and samey dungeon, with no narrative significance whatsoever. After finishing the HQ, the Global Conflict map resets, "allowing" you to start it all over again.

Even the checklist-ey nature of AoM's open world - a quality I usually enjoy for its own sake - is sabotaged, seemingly, to make the game more "endless." Several locations that you can conquer or claim in Seoul are reclaimed by Legion, as a consequence of continuing to fight them in the city.

Between the insipid story, dull environments, and continuously-reset objectives, Agents of Mayhem fails to establish a meaningful goal to play towards. Other than perhaps unlocking all the agents. Having done that, my motivation to continue has dried up.

Which is a shame, because the core action mechanics of the game are really not bad. They just aren't enough to keep me interested in the rest of AoM's campaign.

I hope that Volition's next game gets the creative budget (and time) it needs to build on AoM's half-baked ideas.

Better than: arguably, the first Saints Row (X360).
Not as good as: Saints Row 2, The Third, IV, or even Gat Out of Hell.
I failed to care about most of the agents: but I might spring for a spinoff game about Daisy.

Progress: 73% -- Campaign: 60%, Agency: 94%, Assets: 65%

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight does some things well. The combat mechanics are easy to learn, and have a bit of satisfying depth; upgrades come at a good pace and feel meaningful; regions have distinctive visual and audio themes. And the map is a good-enough example of non-linear Metroidvania layout, given how short the game is.

But - despite how short it is - Reverie fails to make a meaningful impression. Its mechanics aren't special, its art style is unremarkable, and its story is threadbare, supported by a handful of impersonal lines and a small cast of incredibly flat characters. Even with NPCs, this game feels deader and emptier than Metroid or Super Metroid.

Without interesting gameplay or narrative stakes, the map itself was the only motivation I had to keep playing. And that isn't a great motivation.

Only one anecdote stands out in my memory, and it isn't a good one. I got to the final boss, killed it, and then ... died, cinematically?, clearly having received a "bad ending." But as I could only muster the slimmest margin of interest, I looked up how to get the "good ending" online, which was to backtrack for a groan-worthy hidden item, then re-fight the boss. It doesn't feel reasonable to me that a needle in a haystack is the only way out of a disappointing ending.

(Granted, even the good ending is pretty bland and unfulfilling.)

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight is competent enough in its fundamentals, but just doesn't have anything noteworthy to say for itself. I don't regret the three-and-a-half hours I spent with it, but have no interest in hunting down its secrets -- nor in trying the rest of the Momodora series.

Better than: Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut, if only just.
Not as good as: Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition, which wasn't really my favorite, either.
Hard to say if better or worse than: Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition; at least that was memorable, albeit frustrating as shit.

Progress: Got the True Ending, 98% map completion.

At its best, CrossCells feels like an inductive-reasoning "expansion pack" on puzzles like sudoku and picross. Like the other 'Cells games, it incorporates multiple mathematical mechanics, and plays their hints off one another. And as I worked through its later puzzles, I felt very satisfied with their logical tightness.

But while CrossCells is pretty satisfying when it "works," it just as often "doesn't." Whether because I hadn't learned its rules adequately, or because the rules weren't applied rigorously enough - I couldn't say, in retrospect - many levels felt like I had to guess to move forward. Only after following that guess for several steps would I know if I was on the right track.

CrossCells would really have benefited from a "try it out" system, like some picross games have, to follow a hypothesis for a while and then undo it if necessary. But, let alone that -- CrossCells doesn't even have a "reset" function. Its interface is as minimally-functional as can be.

(Made a bunch of wrong moves? To reset the puzzle, you need to exit to the menu and click the puzzle again. And the annoying water-ripple animations draw this process out to several seconds. Ugh.)

CrossCells shows mechanical promise, but just isn't quite friendly and sophisticated enough (both in UI and in its difficulty-ramp) to be very noteworthy. And it's pretty short, to boot.

Better than: Hexcells, SquareCells
Not as good as: Hexcells Plus, Hexcells Infinite
... but for a sale price of under $1: it's hard to go wrong.

Progress: Finished all 50 puzzles.

I play different puzzle games for different reasons. Some, like a picross game, are relaxing ways to unwind. Some, like Portal 2 or Antichamber, are fun to learn and explore -- as a journey of understanding the designers' ideas. And some, like SpaceChem or TIS-100, humble me because they make me feel like a complete idiot.

Cypher is in that last category. It really makes me feel stupid. And I love it.

Surprising, at least to me, considering its developer is known for small and relatively-simple puzzlers like Hexcells. Cypher is a huge step up in terms of complexity: after spending a few hours with it, I legitimately believe that three-letter-agency cryptographers might respect these puzzles. Forget about my praise for Nonogram's in-game hints -- Cypher is praiseworthy because you need a pencil and paper to work these guys out.

And it's a step up in production quality, too. Strangely it still uses the default Unity taskbar icon... but the minimalist 3D world, and soft piano soundtrack, form a fantastically soothing library-like aesthetic around these hard-as-shit crypto puzzles.

Zach Barth and Jonathan Blow have a new peer in my esteem of puzzle-creators.

Progress: 039%