So yeah, I've been putting off revisiting - let alone posting about - Outer Wilds DLC Echoes of the Eye for quite a while.

Not because it feels unnecessary or tacked-onto the main game's trippy space mystery; I mean, Outer Wilds was just fine on its own, but the Eye's story integrates itself really well! And not because its new gameplay is a disappointment, although, it is; the spooky segments which earn this DLC's "Horror" tag are more off-putting than the annoying anglerfish were.

But that's not why I've been sleeping on Echoes of the Eye -- my first forays into it, last year, didn't even reach those spooky parts. No, I've been reluctant to return because this DLC is chock-full of the exact "obtuse points" that only occasionally marred my Outer Wilds playthrough.

Dense locations that make specific points-of-interest difficult to locate; timed events that add unexpected schedule constraints to an objective; non-obvious order-of-operations requirements that mean a small mix-up may force you to restart the loop. Echoes of the Eye mashes all of these frustrations together, and even with internet guidance, the new map's navigation challenges and time-sensitive elements make it ... not fun to explore and investigate.

It's a shame that this DLC's fascinating story, which manages to feel fresh while also pairing excellently with the existing lore, is something I only know because I read about it online.

Better than: Fallout 4: Nuka World
Not as good as: Fallout 4: Far Harbor, Outer Wilds
Proposed spinoffs, just to troll on The Outer Worlds: "Outer Words," a space exploration game where ancient ruins are locked by crossword puzzles; "Outer Swirls," a space exploration game with art styled after Picasso's The Starry Night; "Shouter Worlds," a space exploration game guided by NPCs rage-yelling on radio broadcasts. I've got more, guys.

Progress: gave up!

Peril on Gorgon presents an interesting change of pace from The Outer Worlds: a self-contained noir-infused mystery, investigating a dead bounty hunter and an industrial accident cover-up. ... until it turns into a re-hash of the main game's "evil corporation did evil thing" schtick.

Murder on Eridanos tries the murder-mystery angle again, and this time gives you a, uh, detective gun? Basically a talking magnifying glass, which reveals clues as you're investigating the area and interrogating suspects. But about half the "clues" are lukewarm gags, and your interrogations don't end up affecting the plot --

You know what, I'll spoil it, this one also re-hashes "evil corporation did evil thing." With, admittedly, a slight twist (the middle manager did it).

Gorgon and Eridanos both establish rich background lore, and even diverse environments!, that could be great foundations for compelling side-quests: some personal stories unrelated to "the mission," showing how ordinary people get by (or try to) in these weird worlds.

But Gorgon has almost no side-quests at all. And though Eridanos has plenty, none of them have any standalone substance; they're all just tiny diversions feeding back into the main plot.

Eridanos comes closest to a Memorable Vignette in one task that assembles multi-colored vodkas into a gatling gun, based on a drunk scientist's inebriated notes. (In a game that reveres its side-story personalities, like Borderlands 2, this would've been a smaller errand.)

Even these expansions' opportunity to rejuvenate The Outer Worlds's "fine" gunplay and underwhelming progression is wasted, because the level cap is only 36. I hit this cap pretty early into Gorgon, so on top of no more skill or perk upgrades, all the weapon and armor rewards I found were less powerful than the equipment I'd already upgraded.

In fairness, the cap of 36 is apparently higher than before the expansions? So if I'd played The Outer Worlds at release, I would've been frustrated by this problem even sooner.

Like the main game, Gorgon and Eridanos are stuffed with a large amount of content, but it's thoroughly one-note and unimaginative. I feel for the map designers, modelers, dialog writers, and especially the voice actors, who've put so much work into producing hours and hours of game that's so largely forgettable.

Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos aren't bad, but they are bland; and if you already felt that way about the base game, then these expansions won't change your mind.

The Outer Worlds builds squarely on top of Bethesda's wildly successful first-person RPG formula, and takes unabashed inspiration from some of science fiction's most thrilling and memorable stories; and yet, I couldn't help feeling bored through much of my time with it.

The gunplay is ... fine. There are some interesting elemental weapon effects, a'la Borderlands -- but nowhere near those games' breadth, or depth, of absurd gun behaviors. Use long guns at range, use shock against robots, and that's about "it."

Itemization, and loot overall in The Outer Worlds is past lackluster, well into annoying territory. I lamented Fallout 4 "[consuming] a significant amount of your precious carrying capacity with literal junk," but at least that game had something to do with junk; in The Outer Worlds, you'll pick up 10 new weapons and 10 new armor pieces on every mission, and they're all downgrades from what you've already got.

The galaxy map shows a bunch of planets, and some planets even have multiple maps to land in! ... but most landing sites are bare-bones, practically copy-pasted sterile space station corridors. Even the few larger areas have disappointingly uniform aesthetics, orange-ey jungle-ey frontier.

... and since you don't actually fly the ship, you just click on a destination and it goes there, I can't help but wonder if the whole game could've been on a single planet instead.

You'll recruit a half-dozen misfit crewmates as party members, but don't mistake them for The Dirty Dozen in Space -- all of their personalities are one-note, and most of their Companion Quest stories are paper-thin (though Pavarti's is somewhat captivating, and Max's has at least one fun bit).

And the main story isn't terrible, but... the not-terrible parts don't show up until the final act. Main missions intertwine with optional ones, inconsistently, and tediously; the few plot points that do have a payoff don't become apparent until the end.

Most of the game's writing reiterates the same theme of Workers vs. Corporatocracy over, and over, and over, and over again. It's funny the first time, but c'mon guys, you really didn't come up with any other material?

The Outer Worlds is a competently-designed and well-polished game that just doesn't have much excitement or fun in it. Hell, this is a game where you customize your character's appearance, and then never see it except in the pause screen. It's ... man, it has as much content and complexity as a full-fledged RPG adventure, but.

It all feels so paint-by-numbers, and starved for creativity.

Better than: Fallout 4: Nuka World
Not as good as: Fallout 4: Far Harbor
... but: I've already got the Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos DLCs, so I guess I might as well try them out.

As seen in 2020's demo, I really like Midnight Protocol's slick aesthetics, engrossing technobabble, and immersive keyboard-only interface.

I do not like its dice-roll intrusion traces, its anti-save-scum randomizations, and other chance-based twists.

It's awkward how most of Midnight Protocol's mechanics lean into careful, puzzle-like planning -- but unlucky rolls can ruin your plan and stick you in an unwinnable state.

I didn't even get far enough in the story to unlock any hardware upgrade options. ... like, I might have done some currency grinding to out-level the game's randomness, if it had given me the opportunity.

Given my inexhaustible disdain for the simulated data-entry tedium of Papers, Please, I was relieved to see Return of the Obra Dinn de-emphasizing those pointless-feeling points and clicks in favor of a mystery, and an overt objective to collect clues and solve that mystery.

Three hours later... who the hell are these 51 dead sailors? Or, more to the point -- why are my automatic notebook and magic moment-of-death-vision pocketwatch so awful at helping me solve this?

The confounding user interface - like Inside, allergic to the idea of explaining itself - would be bad enough. But what I didn't realize about Obra Dinn's hint-collection system, until after collecting them all, was how unhelpful it is correlating post-facto notes with the relevant moment-of-death context.

To put it another way: as you discover death events around the Obra Dinn, recognizing the parties in that event almost always requires more knowledge than you have; and then later, once you've collected more knowledge, it's unreasonably inconvenient to go find and re-observe those events to recover their full context.

(What I wouldn't give for Her Story-style video clip searches, instead of this go-find-a-corpse-on-a-ship nonsense.)

Ultimately, most of Obra Dinn's dot-connections are only possible if you're taking your own meticulous notes while the magic pocketwatch is revealing clues. Because the best the in-game notebook will do is list the locations of dead bodies that you can walk to and then re-watch a correlated event.

Why even have an in-game notebook with such incomplete notes?

Better than: Papers, Please cause I at least got to watch an interesting story play out.
Not as good as: Gone Home
Comparable to: Kentucky Route Zero, because its intriguing premise was ultimately un-parseable and unsatisfying.

Progress: Ended the investigation with 6 of 51 fates solved.

Disco Elysium is a game about failure. Society, infrastructure, the ambitions of almost every NPC, and - most of all - the protagonist. Oh boy, talk about a failure! The theme is common through all of the game's choices and narrative routes: this world is full of failure, and no matter how hard you try to "fix" things, there'll be plenty more failure left over.

Even you, the player, will face failure from random dice rolls and ... unforeseeable consequences. Unless you save scum and research beforehand, which is exactly what I did. I'm here for the story, game, not for you to withhold story from me. Anyway!

Points of interest in Martinaise, and its population's personalities, are all rich with fine, meticulous, artisinal details to unravel. There's so much fascinating history, and colorful commentary!, to read through. It's like Mass Effect's Codex but with dialog choices.

(And the protagonist's inner voices have plenty to contribute, too.)

Sometimes, actually quite often, Disco Elysium's side-stories are so intriguing and enthralling that you'll forget all about its primary thread. Which makes the murder-mystery plot's twists and turns extra surprising.

It's a really great story! With lots of meat on its bones, and lots of opportunities to be a detective, finding clues and following hunches. Aside from a handful of schedule constraints, the game excels at giving you a wide berth in where to go and what to do, letting you feel true agency in how the story unfolds.

Although its final two or three conversations are real walls-of-text, and droned on a bit for my taste.

The writing, the lore, and the voice acting of Disco Elysium aren't just individually excellent: they work together to weave a thrilling narrative adventure. From its opening moments to the final "solve," I could hardly put the game down.

Better than: my brief attempt at Planescape: Torment - Enhanced Edition, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
Not as good as: ... The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I guess?
Darker than, but kinda like: an open-world Ace Attorney. With a character sheet.

Lengthy sections of text, random dice-roll checks, having to wait while you walk to an objective, overly-sporadic autosaves; Disco Elysium checks quite a few of my "no, thanks" boxes. So it's especially remarkable, thanks to its thoroughly engrossing writing and world-building, that I'm still interested in playing it. (Even after I died abruptly from a mean kid damaging my morale.)

Disco Elysium puts its best foot immediately forward, and it's a hell of a foot: your avatar's consciousness is its own character -- multiple characters, in fact. The call of the void, the thirst for adventure, the pull of chemical addiction, all of these urges are implemented as personalities - voiced by the same actor, with unique inflections - who tell the avatar's story and who you (the player) interact with via dialog choices.

And as you learn more about the game world's mildly-retro dystopian motif, these insane personalities fit snugly into it. The avatar is a train-wreck of a person, living in a train-wreck of a world.

Throw in the (from what little I've played) heavy emphasis on non-combat challenges, like persuasion or investigation, influenced by a number of point-based mental skills like Rhetoric and Shivers ... yeah. I want more of this.

I'll just need to remember to dote on the F5 key from now on.

Progress: Just leaving the hotel.

Well, did Witcher 3's new-gen patch resolve its clunky controls? Is its slight amount of new content worthwhile? Does it breathe new life into the gradually-aging masterpiece?

... not really, I guess, and it didn't exactly need to.

Some minor quality-of-life improvements like quick-cast and herb auto-looting are nice, but Geralt still maneuvers like a sword-wielding RV.

The new "Netflix armor" quest, In the Eternal Fire's Shadow, is a meaty side-story and includes some solid writing -- but it's still just one sidequest.

And Witcher 3 on PC already looked great, at least to me, despite its apparent lack of ray-tracing and 4K faces and et cetera.

(The less said about Dandelion's new look, the better.)

But, see, Witcher 3 didn't need an update to make it worth replaying. And nowhere is this more evident than Toussaint, where the Blood and Wine expansion doesn't just paint a beautiful rural-urban-hybrid landscape with the same kind of deeply enthralling content as the main game.

It also adds narratively-relevant Knight Errant missions. And expanded, super-powerful skill mutations. And a homestead which you can decorate with fine art.

Blood and Wine may not have the invading-Empire, transdimensional-magic stakes of the main game -- but it otherwise encapsulates all the best that Witcher 3 has to offer, in an irresistably beautiful virtual France.

(Even if I do feel like Blood and Wine's ending-related choices are unnecessarily obtuse, and going back to try different choices comes with a disappointing amount of replaying lengthy mission content.)

Well worth replaying. Heck, depending on how the first game's remake is going, I might be back again in a few years.

Progress: Finished all the Blood and Wine quests I could find.

Steam launched a year-in-review feature called Replay -- it's pretty cool! And its gray "other games" bars highlight a certain pattern in my 2022 gaming:

As does comparing Steam's counters with Glog statistics:

Where did all those Steam games and demos go? Well, nowhere.

Building on my "less writing, more playing" agenda from 2021, I culled a considerable amount of my backlog last year, focusing my playtime and my Glog posts on fewer and more-remarkable games (as the Steam timeline's colored-in segments show).

As for those replays: I dug up Assassin's Creed IV after watching Our Flag Means Death, and The Witcher's TV series has had me jonesing to revisit Wild Hunt (plus Hearts of Stone) since my 2019 recap. Media consumption! Am I right?

... anyway. My DLC and expansion activity in 2022 tells a similar story:

While it'd be hard to beat the quantity of DLCs (especially Mass Effect's) I played in 2021, last year's quality of add-ons was surprisingly solid.

• South Park: The Fractured But Whole's extra chapters From Dusk Till Casa Bonita and Bring the Crunch both did great at channeling that classic South Park sense of humor, while experimenting with some passably-fun gameplay twists.
• Control's comprehensive, unsettling yet entertaining tone (and its tense shooting-supernatural-monsters action) carried through into very substantial side-stories in The Foundation and AWE.
• And of course, it cannot be overstated how essential Hearts of Stone is to the whole Geralt experience.

These add-ons were good, just like the main games I played last year. I mean, check out these rating values:

Here, summarily, is the glorious result of my ruthless backlog management. A majority - more than half! - of my post ratings were positive, for the first time since 2015 (which was itself a statistical aberration).

I played a satisfying amount of Awesome games, with the expectedly-impressive Horizon Forbidden West, the unexpectedly endearing Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, the shockingly compelling Control + The Foundation + AWE, and a comfortably enthralling return to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt + Hearts of Stone.

And I got a healthy serving of Good, highlights including the fun and funny South Park games, the action-packed time-hopping Deathloop, the science-fantasy time-bopping Outer Wilds, and the ... Shakespearean time-skipping Elsinore.

(Plus Omensight and The Forgotten City; I hadn't planned on getting stuck in so many time loops! Call that another of my niches, I guess, along with nonograms and programming puzzles.)

2022 only held a few, mild disappointments, like the over-extended Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (Meh), the genre-confused Batbarian: Testament of the Primordials (Meh), and the terminally dull Evoland 2 (Bad).

So what's next?

Some pretty exciting franchise entries and sequels are targeting 2023, like Hollow Knight: Silksong, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. But all of these games have histories with release dates that ... well, I'm not holding my breath.

God of War Ragnarök will almost certainly be the swan song of my PS4, since the upcoming Horizon Forbidden West DLC is apparently skipping it.

Although my backlog has thinned out, I've got positive expectations for its remainders, especially Cyberpunk 2077, Disco Elysium, and The Outer Worlds.

But for now, I'm already in the thick of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine. And I still need to finish investigating Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye -- more on that, uh, eventually.

I've been hankering for Witcher 3's "next-gen" (now well into current-gen) update since last year, so it's somewhat predictable that I had to stop waiting and just toss another coin at the existing Witcher before - literally the following week - the update finally got a release date.

Not like I was about to put the controller down and go back to waiting, though. I was already in too deep.

I had forgotten about the early-ish-game quest drought, after White Orchard but before most of Velen's content is level-appropriate; even Gwent opponents can feel over-powered until Geralt's put in a bit of exploratory grinding.

And I'd also forgotten how clunky the basic controls can feel -- Geralt's turning radius making it an occasional challenge to precisely target lootable objects.

No regrets, though. Even the un-updated game holds up well, telling an epic, enthralling tale with compelling characters and engaging sidequest content.

(This time around, I tried using internet guidance to ensure I got "the most" out the game - meaning, to avoid missing optional quest cutoffs - but I can't really recommend this approach. Tracking multi-dimensional storyline completion criteria is more work than it's worth, and felt like a distraction from the game's natural flow of events.)

Has the clunkiness been improved in this month's update? Is the (very slight) new content worthwhile? Well, I dunno yet. It was hard enough saving any quests until after the update finally went live; next stop, Beauclair.

Progress: Finished all main (and secondary? I think?) quests in the base game and Hearts of Stone.