After a slightly-over-plotted introduction, Mankind Divided plops Adam Jensen into Prague -- a brighter, more Slavic spin on Human Revolution's Detroit hub. And it's as dense with detail and care as The Citadel or anything else of its ilk. I'm picking up sidequests and collectibles and flavor text all over the place.

And while the press has pretty universally panned its plot, so far I'm delighted in the color being built up by Prague's ambience, and in the conspiratorial intrigue attached to both the world and to Jensen.

I'm trying to take it stealthy and non-lethal for now. I wonder how the boss fights will work out.

Pony Island's premise is a clever twist on the kind of "hacking" adventure-slash-visual-novel game that has you investigating and uncovering secrets in a virtual computer environment. The twist is that it's the devil's computer and that he wants you to play his videogame. This actually leads to some interesting theming around both archdemons and cynical game developers.

Unfortunately, it's only got about an hour of content stretched across two or three hours of pacing. Text scrolls slowly; action scenes plod along; unpredictable deaths force tedious retries. The game rarely managed to surprise me, because of how sluggishly it unfolded itself.

And the action, such as it is, really isn't any good. The game's various mechanics consist of point-and-click pixel-hunting, a slow-paced auto-running platformer, and an automatic variant on hacking puzzles (the program counter is always moving).

Despite being a short game overall, Pony Island's neat premise wears out its welcome well before the end.

Better than: Toren
Not as good as: Analogue: A Hate Story
There are a few good tricks up Pony Island's sleeve: I hope they show up in some better games, too.

GemCraft is, mechanically, an excellently well-crafted tower defense game. And basically nothing else.

There is a plot in GemCraft, allegedly, but even if it wasn't face-palmingly generic - wizard gets screwed over by dark magic; film at 11 - the game simply doesn't make a case for its relevancy. A cartoony tower-defense game like Kingdom Rush may not feel smart, but the way it intertwines its theme with the level-to-level gameplay lends it an air of charming continuity, at least.

GemCraft has technical polish to spare, with a bevy of mechanics to explore (although none seem as effective as straightforward gem upgrades), but no charm at all to speak of. Everything in the game is intentionally flat and uninspiring, so it can get out of the way of raw, calculated tactics.

To die-hard tower defense fans, GemCraft offers expert-level mechanical design and plenty of content to master. To everyone else, though, there's practically nothing to love here. A few minutes of entertainment, at least -- but nothing that makes you wonder what might happen in the next level.

Progress: Wizard level 36, 21 fields explored

I remarked to multiple other E3-observers that I literally did not believe that Nintendo was capable of making a game like the one they just showed. I would be more inclined to believe that it was a bullshot fabrication than a real product of Nintendo EAD's traditional, tightly-scripted assembly lines.

So hearing that an open-world RPG developer is actually doing it makes a lot, lot more sense. Which is good, because now I can actually believe that this refreshingly-free-spirited adventure might really exist.

It was an unclear button prompt that pushed me to finally give up on Remember Me, but this habit is far from the game's biggest problem.

Remember Me focuses too heavily on its boring environment traversal and its repetitive combat. Fights don't take long to become very un-fun; as the camera weaves around like a maniac, combos reset when another enemy gets in the way, and enemy attacks require you to dodge over and over and over and over... the customizable combo system might be cool if encounters actually gave you the chance to fully execute a lengthy combo, but they seem determined to prevent this.

And while I wasn't wild about the one memory remix I got to do, I would have welcomed another one just to break up the monotony of running through slums and dodging "leaper" attacks. At least it would have been more narratively interesting than a voice on a radio shoving story beats down my throat.

Remember Me makes surprisingly poor use of the tools it has for keeping the player engaged. Even given the lack of polish in each of its design components, the haphazardly-assembled experience ends up feeling like less than the sum of its parts.

Better than: Jumper: Griffin's Story
Not as good as: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (NGC, PC, PS2, PS3, XBOX), Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Still can't get over: The nonsense vocabulary. Sensen. Remembrane. Comfortress. Errorist. It all just sounds so... stupid.

Progress: Didn't finish Episode 3.

Starting Remember Me so soon after Uncharted 4 was definitely a mistake. Both games prominently feature acrobatic environment traversal and dialog-based storytelling, and the latter blows the former out of the water in both cases. Hell, combo-based combat is an afterthought in Uncharted, and it still works better than Remember Me's, which thus far seems to be more dodge-based than attack-based.

Even the memory remixing sequence I did in Episode 1 was pretty underwhelming. Setting aside that a crucial bit of the controls weren't explained properly (a UI prompt that looked like "click the left stick" actually meant "move the left stick down") it really just feels like a hidden object game with a time dimension.

Nothing about Remember Me is necessarily bad - except the game's silly-sounding future vocabulary, that sure is - but it all feels tepid, like a halfhearted imitation of other AAA games. There is still time for the game to surprise me, but at this point it has a distinct jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none thing going on.

Progress: Episode 2

Maybe it's a tad overwrought, but Uncharted 4's ending hits all the right emotional notes, satisfyingly wrapping up Nathan Drake's stories with a pleasantly open-ended bow.

Uncharted 4 isn't better than its predecessors because of its amazing graphics -- even though they are, really, totally goddamned incredible. It's better than its predecessors because of its strategic and well-executed gameplay innovations. When Drake careens down a steep slope, grapples to a tree branch, swings across a ravine and narrowly avoids a grim fate by jamming a piton into a sheer cliff, it's just ... man. It's exhilirating.

(The driving segments are also kind of cool, but probably would have overstayed their welcome if they were any more frequent.)

What I can't really speak for is the shooting gameplay, because the last three games taught me that I would probably hate it anyway. I fully recognize that Explorer difficulty is way, way easy, and I don't care because I would much rather plow through fields of enemies without even trying, than have to suffer through multiple die-and-retry cycles every time a bullet-sponge juggernaut catches me between cover spots.

But I digress. Assuming that the gunplay isn't really important - because, to me, it isn't - Uncharted 4 is a shining jewel in the franchise and a triumph of interactive storytelling.

Better than: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Not as good as: Oh, forget it.
Whatever Naughty Dog does next: I can't wait to see it.

Reading the feature promises for Civ 6, it's pretty clear that this - and not Beyond Earth - was always meant to be the next step in the franchise after Civ 5: Brave New World. So, it's good to see that progress is being made on truly enhancing and tuning the core Civilization game.

And I guess I'm glad that I never sprung for Beyond Earth, now.

There is a high-level misstep in Uncharted 4's early hours, haphazardly combining the flash-forward technique of Uncharted 2's opener with the flash-back technique of Uncharted 3's. So it's a big credit to the game's narrative implementation that this misstep is almost unnoticeable.

The way that Nate's brother, Sam, is introduced, you'd think that he was part of the series all along. And although Nate's lifestyle has slowed down since his last adventure, the human conversations and high-tension banter between teammates is as excellent as it's ever been.

As are the set pieces, with new navigation mechanics like sliding down hills and grappling rope points -- not to mention the incredibly welcome addition of stealth indicators; now you can have an idea of how and where enemies are seeing you, making it much more realistic to sneak around and take them out silently.

But of course, the most obvious and awe-inspiring improvement in Uncharted 4 is the overall graphical fidelity. Uncharteds 2 and 3 were no slouch in this department, but 4 raises the bar even higher. Clothes ripple believably in the wind as Drake climbs a sheer cliff. Facial animations are so fluid and expressive that you hardly even need to hear what a character is saying. And despite the game's pace, every now and then it's tempting to stare out at the far-reaching scenery (especially when the water is nearby, which is frequently).

I've got plenty of charting left to do, but this is already shaping up to be a more-than-fitting end to Drake's adventures.

Progress: Chapter 10

Uncharted: Fortune Hunter is a pretty great-looking mobile game, and even includes some fun, if you can believe it. Block and movement puzzles, you know?

But its bite-sized appeal is hampered somewhat by long loading times, and at least in the early game, the puzzles themselves are more laborious than they are clever -- flipping all the switches to see what they do, and waiting for Drake to finish walking to his destination.

It's a cool idea, and has a lot of graphical polish, but I think could have used some more gameplay polish. ... And seriously, those load times, come on.

Progress: Completed 6 puzzles.