Ori and the Blind Forest starts awkwardly, with several minutes of mildly-interactive cutscene -- holding "left" or "right" to walk through a cinematic introduction. While I can appreciate the production value that Ori brings to its story, with awe-inspiring visuals and heartstring-pulling music, it left me wondering for some time when can I start playing the game?

The game proper is a fairly solid Metroidvania action-platformer. Like if Dust: An Elysian Tail had one interconnected map, and if it was less slashy and more jumpy. (And, like Dust, a huge part of Ori's appeal is just in how gorgeous it looks.)

It ticks the important boxes for a game of this type: health and power upgrades littered around the map, traversal abilities that unlock new areas, aesthetically-varied regions, teleport rooms... the usual stuff.

The platforming generally controls quite well, except that Ori feels slippery, in the same way that Super Meat Boy did. I still haven't quite gotten the hang of landing a jump on a narrow platform, and wall-jumping is fraught with slip-sliding inaccuracy. Ori's poor footing really makes me look forward to finding new aerial abilities.

But my biggest problem with the game so far is its ... innovative approach to save points. You expend a unit of energy to create one, i.e. if you've run out of energy, you're out of luck; and there are some places (like wobbly platforms or specific enemy-filled rooms) where the game simply doesn't allow you to save.

My last play session culminated in a minutes-long chase scene, which I had to re-attempt a dozen or two times from the beginning over the span of about half an hour. It's evocative of the kind of Mega Man bullshit that I really can't stand, where after learning and adapting to ten instant-death obstacles, suddenly an eleventh appears, and knocks you all the way back to the start.

I'm still enjoying progressing through Ori's world, but by modern standards, this deliberate exclusion of automatic checkpoints is a dick move and I'm not impressed by it.

Progress: 32%

Splasher has been on my radar for a while, but only recently got a demo.

It's not quite as much like Portal 2 or Super Mario Sunshine as I expected -- that is, the special paint effects, and cleaning them, are not the biggest part of the game. They're still big! But, as it turns out, the real focus of Splasher is on skillful platforming.

This is something I've historically been not-that-great at; so I'm a little apprehensive about how difficult it might become in later levels. But I'm still pretty interested, due to the platforming nuances introduced by paint.

Based on the demo, I wouldn't hesitate at all to call Splasher a "more fun" version of Dustforce or Super Meat Boy.

I hope I can put up with all the dying I'll do in Splasher, because it seems pretty fun so far.

Progress: Finished the demo.

Despite missing a couple of modern creature-comforts, like selecting multiple objectives or fast-traveling from anywhere, Borderlands 2 still holds up really, really well.

As long as you can get past the boring starting zones.

And assuming you have at least one friend to play with. (Alone, I think it might get more dull, and frustrating.)

The crazy world design, the humorous dialog, and the allure of random, awesome loot all pull together into a silly, yet substantial game. And there's so much content! The enemy variety, amount of quests, different ability and gun modifiers... are all just bonkers.

It's going to be hard to temper expectations for the next game. Gearbox has a lot to measure up to.

... oh yeah, I guess I should get around to the Pre-Sequel, at some point. Maybe once we're done with this game's DLCs.

Better than: Borderlands
Not as good as: for local multiplayer/co-op? maybe nothing.
Avast: time to plunder some booty!

Progress: Finished almost all the base game's quests, except the arena challenges and Terramorphous.

Toward the end, playing through Majora's Mask 3D felt like I was just going through the motions. And sure, I didn't need to check all the checkboxes and collect all the collectibles, but ... well, I'll get to that in a minute.

It's especially evident in the shadow of Breath of the Wild, but Majora's Mask feels more like a precursor to open-world design, than like a real sandbox. It's not really "open" in the current sense of the term; it's more like a sequence of, do the first dungeon, then some things that unlock after that, then the second dungeon, then some things after that, et cetera.

Both the main storyline, and the bulk of the game's sidequests, are gated by a fairly static sequence of items. You can't roam the world and do whatever activities you find; first you have to climb the equipment ladder. And that means doing the dungeons, and events around the dungeons, in an enforced order.

But it isn't just the lock-step sequence of dungeons and sidequests that makes Majora's Mask feel so antiquated. Many sidequests - and even some errands necessary for the main story - are time-sensitive within Termina's three-day span. If you happen to have the necessary items, at the right place, but not at the right time, you might never know that there's an event there at all.

Like going back to Metroid and finding that there was no in-game map, the lack of discoverability (even with new hints!) around Termina's various events is a humbling, surprising disappointment.

But if you decided not to care about optional events and sidequests - i.e. if you were only to progress through the main quest - you'd find that there isn't much to Majora's Mask. There are only four dungeons, all of them fairly brief (though two of them are pretty creative). And the critical-path content between dungeons tends to be laborious, like Skyward Sword's tedium but without that game's explicit guidance.

Majora's Mask 3D is a commendable upgrade from the N64 original, both in its graphics and its user-friendliness -- the save system and time controls are way better, now. But the things that made Majora's Mask so memorable for me - the richly complex sidequests - are brought low by the game's now-archaic world design.

Better than: Darksiders: Warmastered Edition
Not as good as: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
Hard to say: how it compares to Skyward Sword, which I'm not interested in playing again.

Progress: Completed the Bomber's Notebook.

I've tried, and failed, to really sink into Majora's Mask 3D multiple times over the past two and a half years. I think it's fair to say that the game's opening hasn't aged very well:

• Narratively, it's weird and fairly un-charming;
• Before you've picked up some key items (like the bow), it's extremely linear;
• And the main quest sometimes stumbles over obtuse "adventure game logic" scenarios.

... but once I finally powered myself through the first few in-game days, these issues began to clear up. The plot's disparate elements feel more relevant as you free each Guardian giant, and the game's sidequest-heavy design comes to the fore once the map actually opens up.

As for that last bit; well, there's an in-game hint system, now.

Majora's Mask doesn't really command the same regard that it did back in 2000, especially in light of Breath of the Wild's fresh and powerful take on an open Zelda world. But the adventure is still fun.

And, more than anything else, I'm looking forward to filling up my Bomber's Notebook again.

Progress: Completed 2 temples.

Silicon Zeroes, in the same vein as Human Resource Machine, is like a Zachtronics programming metaphor that's pretty thin on the "metaphor." It's set in 1960s Silicon Valley. You use adders and memory to perform math and logic. It's pretty straightforward.

The facade that distinguishes it from straight-up programming is that you develop algorithms using a visual node graph -- similar to how Shenzhen I/O visualized connecting inputs and outputs. (Except that Silicon Zeroes doesn't make you micromanage the connection lines.)

It's got a charming aesthetic, and there are optimization goals for each puzzle.

What more is there to say? Of course I'm going to buy and play this, someday.

Progress: Finished the demo.

Considering that Cat Quest is a mobile game, it offers quite a lot of content: multiple hours of simplified hack-and-slash gameplay, treasure chests with adorable loot, dozens of quests, and a metric buttload of cat puns.

The story gets a bit groan-worthy toward the end. But that wasn't the reason I was playing this game, anyway. I played it for the cat puns.

So many cat puns.

It's refreshing that Cat Quest doesn't have any in-app purchases or other trite monetization bullshit. (Although there is a quest that explicitly references another game, which itself is ad-supported.) It's a game that you buy and then play.

For what it is, Cat Quest is a satisfying - and sometimes even challenging - action RPG. Although your mileage may vary based on your investment in cat puns.

Better than: Swords & Soldiers, Uncharted: Fortune Hunter (in other words: the few other mobile action games I've played)
Not as good as: Child of Light, Ittle Dew (in other words: a deeper RPG)
The game hints at a sequel or expansion, with dogs: I hope it's a good boy.

Progress: Level 100, completed all the things

Cat Quest finally came out on Android, and now my phone's battery is dead.

Despite how proud I am of this post's title, mobile isn't a "perfect" fit for Cat Quest's combat: avoiding attacks (by moving away from them) is harder than with a mouse or controller, and so combat is more spammy and chaotic than when I played on PC.

But given the simple nature of the game, having it in my pocket is pretty ideal. I can play it while I'm waiting for important things to happen.

(With the aforementioned deleterious effect to my phone battery.)

What's impressed me most is that Cat Quest is signposting a lot more content than I expected. The map is surprisingly big! There are a ton more equipment types than I though there'd be. I walked by a dungeon that says I should be level 40.

Neat.

Progress: Level 18

When Darksiders was more recent, it compared fairly well to Twilight Princess -- and favorably, even, to Skyward Sword.

But games have moved on, and even Zelda has moved on, in the years since.

And so while Darksiders: Warmastered Edition is certainly an admirable graphical improvement over the original, the gameplay mechanics have aged poorly. I'm no more excited about hacking through dozens of garbage enemies today than I was in 2010.

Progress feels slow. The game world isn't that interesting. Combat is repetitive. I'd wanted to get to the horse, at least, but that's still several hours away -- and I just can't muster the interest for it.

If you loved the previous game, there's no reason not to love this remaster; the visual upgrade is pretty great. But for me, this iteration only highlights the original game's shortcomings.

Progress: Got to the Twilight Cathedral.

I reached the end of Origin's ten-hour Mass Effect: Andromeda trial in about five hours -- including probably an hour or so of reading Codex entries. And while it's hard to form a complete opinion of such an ambitious game in that time, what I've glimpsed is ... interesting.

The introductory mission is rough. Lots of jump-jet jumping, which doesn't work that great. Some getting lost in an open-ish map with linear-ish objectives. Emotionally-stilted dialog, wacky animations, flat starting characters... which, if we're being honest, Mass Effect has always had problems with.

Toward the end of the demo, though, the new approach to world design started to grow on me. It's not as enchantingly open as, say, Breath of the Wild, but what I've seen so far makes me wonder how much free-form planetary exploration I can pull off.

At the same time, there are some game systems that really feel like steps backward from Mass Effect 3. The menus and submenus are overly complicated, taking way too many clicks to do anything. The disassociation of class-specialization and abilities is messy and confusing. Opportunities for modifying your loadout are too infrequent and restrictive.

... and the "new" stuff in the Andromeda galaxy is very underwhelming, so far. There's a new hostile race, which I shoot at and it dies. There's a new forerunner promethean ancient race with ruins to explore. All of your friends are the same races you know from the Milky Way.

It's still intriguing enough that I'll get the full game, eventually. And maybe the game world will become more engrossing as the hours add up. Hopefully.

Progress: Finished the demo.