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.

"AWE" is Control's TLA for Altered World Event, but in Control: AWE, it might just mean Alan Wake Expansion.

That's my gripe with this expansion: it's not only tied into Alan Wake's story, its cutscenes are in Alan Wake's storytelling style. The author-narrating-himself, verbose-stream-of-consciousness style that I didn't care for in that game.

Otherwise, it's the same Control stuff - weird environments, creepy conspiracies, paranormal combat action, that stuff - I'd already fallen in love with. And like The Foundation, this expansion has a satisfying amount of that content to play around in.

It doesn't have as much distinctive gameplay as The Foundation did, though; just some light-based puzzles and puzzle-boss-battles that, while neat, could get a little frustrating (what with unpredictable shadow-monster super-attacks).

... but, despite AWE's fixation on some other game, it's still a fulfilling and fun experience for anyone wanting more Control.

Better than: Batman: Arkham Origins - Cold, Cold Heart, Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds
Not as good as: Control: The Foundation
If the next Alan Wake includes more Control lore: I might actually muster up some interest for it.

Progress: Finished all the main and side missions.

Control: The Foundation adds lore and mechanics to the base game, but they fit Control's mold so well, that I'd really call The Foundation "more of the same." In a good way!

More strange and imaginative environments, including the tried-and-true like haunted offices, but also new cavern spaces that showcase late-game mobility powers.

More bizarre and ominous story beats and backstory collectibles, building on your previous interactions with the astral plane, but also shedding new light on the history of the Bureau and The Oldest House.

More paranormal gameplay mechanics, which don't overshadow your existing powers, but set up some exciting new navigation and combat challenges.

(More weapon mod types, which I could've done without, since none of their esoteric benefits were better than my already-optimized loadout.)

And it's got a substantial amount of content, filling a fairly hefty sub-map with story objectives and optional side-missions.

The Foundation ticks all the same boxes as Control's main game, without feeling overly familiar.

Better than: Batman: Arkham Origins - Cold, Cold Heart, Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds
Not as good as: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Hearts of Stone
The "Swift Platform" side mission may not top the Ashtray Maze: but it comes impressively close.

Progress: Finished all the main and side missions.