Her Story is a masterpiece, a game that explored an uncommon, fascinating approach for video game storytelling. That's why I anxiously awaited the release of Telling Lies, the spiritual successor by Her Story's creator Sam Barlow. Telling Lies had a lot to live up to, and on its release, I pushed the backlog aside and dove in headfirst. And did I regret it.

If you played its predecessor, you pretty much know what to expect from Telling Lies, as it uses the exact same mechanical framework with only a few new interface quirks. If you haven't played HS -- well, play that instead, but -- this is how it goes: you, the player, are given access to a video database with over one hundred clips that happened over a given period of time.

The catch is that, to actually view any one video, you have to query the database with words that are said in the video, so you have to know what questions to ask before you can get any answers. Additionally, if your query happens to be too generic and results in more than five videos, it'll only show five, and only those that happened earlier in the chronology.

Instead of a murder interrogation like in Her Story, in Telling Lies, you find yourself perusing a database containing recordings of video calls between a man named David and several other individuals, from his family, to his friends, to his boss, and so on. As the game starts, you don't even know what you're supposed to be looking for in the footage.

It's the first of Telling Lies's mistakes: the game doesn't have any kind of hook to engage its player as it opens. Her Story began the game with an ominous "MURDER" query, which is bound to draw a player in not only by instigating a morbid curiosity, but also by beckoning them to don their detective hats and solve the mystery of whodunnit.

In contrast, Telling Lies opens with a rather empty "LOVE" query, which results in a set of disconnected videos that I guess are meant to introduce its main set of characters, but really only manages to instill confusion as to why these people spend so much of these videos without saying a word.

You see, Telling Lies’s pretense is that you’re supposed to be accessing a database containing recordings of video calls between David and the other characters. Except, each video isn’t the whole call, it's the audio and video feed from one side of the conversation, complete with awkward silence whenever the other side is speaking. You often won’t find both sides of a given conversation at the same time.

While, mechanically, this does create situations where you’re trying to catch on to keywords that the other side might be saying so you can search for them, it has the unfortunate consequence of having the recordings being silent at least half the time. With the lack of good you UI or a reliable fast forward feature, this is an annoying waste of time.

But if that was the full extent of Telling Lies’s issues, it would still have been a great game. Its greatest flaws lie in its storytelling, both in regards to the "story" and the "telling". It’s astounding how this is supposed to be the successor to a game that excelled in that area, and yet, it seems to wholly misunderstand what made its predecessor so great.

A key element of Her Story’s storytelling is how much of a complete mess it is. Yes, I know that sounds contradictory, but it’s actually the point: you’re listening to a woman retelling the circumstances around a crime she is being suspected of. We don't even know if she's mentally sound, and even if she is, she has every reason to lie. It’s the textbook example of an unreliable narrator.

Combine that with a confusing, completely unthinkable chain of events, and the more you dig into the game, the more questions you have. By the end, even after seeing every video there is, it’s still impossible to be sure of what’s true and what’s not. The last video on the chronology actually alludes to this fact, with the woman stating that “all we’ve been telling each other here are just stories“. This lingering uncertainty is a huge part of what made the original game so memorable.

Contrast with Telling Lies and, from the format alone, we already have a far different beast on our hands. This isn’t an interrogation, they’re conversations; not a retelling, but the facts unfolding as you go, and because of that, there is far less uncertainty to the events of the game.

The game is very much about David, a man who, through some questionable decisions, ends up in a very bad situation. I won't spoil anything as it’s sort of the point of the game to find out who David is and what happened to him, but I will say this: the story is as boring and predictable as it seems to be, and any twists you might want to happen are simply not coming — again, in stark contrast to its predecessor. If I was to be generous, I'd call this "cheap Hollywood drama".

It's even more disappointing when you take into account the outright deceitful pre-release material. When Telling Lies was announced, with a trailer showing recordings of multiple characters and suggesting multiple perspectives, I figured that was the direction it was going to go. Early reviews from the pre-release period seemed to indicate that as well, claiming that the game contained multiple perspectives about different story threads.

That's an interesting narrative framework that's been successfully used in many stories. Very famously, there is In a Grove, a short story, more known from its film adaptation Rashomon, that uses the perspectives of different characters to present contradictory accounts of the same incident. Since each of those characters presents a limited, sometimes deceitful or self-serving version of the facts, it's impossible to tell what the absolute truth from the accounts alone.

To my shock, in Telling Lies, this never happens, and all those reviews I saw turned out to be flat-out lies taken straight from PR releases. I thought I was crazy at first, having played the game on the weekend it released, but a few weeks later, the Steam rating dipped to a Mixed level, a lot of other people pointing out this exact contradiction.

The story in Telling Lies is simple and is told pretty straightforwardly by the videos. The additional characters are just window dressing to David's narrative, and present they present no conflicting or questionable accounts. This is the ultimate irony about the game: it's called Telling Lies, and yet, nobody actually lies in it.

So much for having high expectations placed upon you, and so much for thinking that a bigger budget means a higher quality. Telling Lies is a boorish attempt to build upon Her Story whose existence is hard to justify. It's a game I'm legitimately confused as to how it turned out this poorly.

As a side note: I get that it's meant to emphasize the voyeurism angle the storytelling is supposed to have, but god, was it infuriating to have to sit through minutes of people being awkwardly horny at each other. I hope to never go through such a thing again.

Games are a unique medium for storytelling, being able to mimic what movies, and books and other media can do, but also being capable of taking the player and their decisions and making them part of the story. When people talk about stories that can only be told within videogames, one name that always comes to mind is Her Story.

I'm not sure I can say much about Her Story that hasn't been said before by more eloquent people. If you've never even heard of it, it's a story-driven game that revolves around a British woman being interviewed by the police in regards to the disappearance and presumed murder of her husband.

The twist, or rather, one of the many twists, is that it's a non-linear narrative. You play as someone who's accessing the police database that contains all of the interviews they conducted with the suspect. The answer to each question asked by the investigators is present in the database as its own separate video file, but there's no way to access them sequentially. Instead, you must use the search bar and look for videos using keywords.

You can type in a word, and if it shows up on any of the videos, that video is shown to you. If the keyword is too vague and appear in a ton of videos, you can only watch the first five results, ordered by how early they appear in the interrogation, which more often than not ends up as a dead end. For instance, if you search for the name of the husband, around 60 videos are returned, but 55 will be out of your grasp, making it a bad clue.

I don't think I can express how much I appreciate this style of storytelling. You have all the answers in your reach, but you need to know which question to ask -- you need to find out what you want to know so you can try to learn it. The game endlessly instigates your curiosity, throwing leads and red herrings, namedropping places and people, pulling you towards even more searches and more videos.

What's more, the game beckons you to put together the pieces of the story as you go, but since there are different paths to take, each person will have a different experience playing the game. I formulated wild theories as I was playing, and I've seen other people do the same, only based on completely different ideas.

You can find the videos that discuss the husband's fate relatively quickly, or it may take you until the database is exhausted -- it just depends on your choice of keywords. It's possible you'll stumble upon those videos while trying to answer a whole different set of questions, and you'll want to keep playing for the sake of those still missing pieces.

The credits roll once you tell them to, by stating that you're satisfied with your findings. There's no answer to be given, no specific video to be found that signifies a win state. It's just you, your faint reflection on the screen in front of you, and videos. You just keep going until you think you have all the answers, and that's it.

What's amusing about that is that, even after exhausting the database, it's unlikely you'll have a clear picture of the facts, not only because the game leaves a few threads hanging, but also, the testimony of one person is all you have to go by, and you know she is lying about certain things. How much can you really trust her? It's doubt that lingers even after you close the game and set out to do something else. In several ways, the game plays you as much as you play it.

I love Her Story. More than simply an enticing narrative, it's a narrative that works precisely because it's a videogame, precisely because it embraces the uniqueness of the medium, and for that, I consider it a foundational piece of video game storytelling. If you're into that at all, you absolutely must experience it yourself.

Hotline Miami is a top-down shooter where you play as a deranged man who murders entire groups of people at the whims of a voice from his phone. The game is famous for its incredible soundtrack, bright visuals, and of course, high difficulty: whichever the stage, your character will die in only one hit. A mere press of a button will respawn you back at the beginning of the stage, making for an intense and rewarding action experience.

The Hong Kong Massacre... wishes it was that game.

I'm a Hotline Miami fan, and when met with the promise of Hotline Miami with the bullet time mechanics of Max Payne in a Hong Kong detective thriller, I was instantly hooked. THKM did not receive the best of review ratings, but with an average 71 on Metacritic, I expected it to be at least serviceable. I did not expect it to be so aggressively underwhelming.

I usually like opening reviews by explaining the premise of the game, but a paragraph can fit the entirety of the narrative with room to spare. You're a detective whose partner was executed by the Hong Kong Triads, and who sets off in a murderous rampage as revenge, invading triad hideouts and killing everyone inside, all the way to the triad's boss. The end.

It's clear the game is trying to mimic the first HL's vague and trippy storytelling here -- from the disjointed sequences, to an ending that abruptly cuts the story, to even using a friendly bartender as an intermission -- but it doesn't seem to understand why its inspiration worked so well. Every aspect of HL felt surreal, from the visuals to the music to the increasingly uncomfortable cutscenes, and most of all, it did not bother to offer an explanation for the killing (at least, not in the first game). For all you knew, you were a psychopath, or a drug addict, a lowlife living to slaughter others.

THKM feels incredibly restrained in comparison. The premise is a pretty run of the mill detective story with no ambiguity or sense of urgency that fails to escalate in any meaningful way. To make it worse, the dodgy, mistake-laden writing, clumsy exposition and repetitive, blurry cutscenes actually do a disservice to the storytelling instead of adding to it. And considering how long the game is, it really needed something to carry the experience along.

THKM makes some great arguments for the idea that less is more, the first being in its length. Like its inspiration, the game is a top-down shooter where you have to kill every enemy in a given area without getting hit. There are thirty stages of that, plus five bosses, and it would have been better to take away at least half of those.

That's because there are not enough environment assets, or enemy types, or weapon types, or even OST tracks to carry that many stages, and there's a feeling at multiple points in the game of "having played this stage before". Heck, the bosses are probably the worst offenders, as they are all the same long, drawn out fight that plays out in a slightly different environment, and where the otherwise unremarkable goon has a different name.

There's also a case to be made for less visual fidelity. The game's complex visuals and blurry effects make it hard to see enemies and gunshots, as well as to understand which parts of your environment are solid and which aren't. HL did a fine job at that by coloring its enemies with bright colors and making breakable obstacles distinct, but here, you really need to look carefully and keep count of the goons in your head to avoid cheap deaths.

Speaking of cheap deaths, let's talk about having enemies that are less smart and capable. Enemies in THKM are incredibly alert and will shoot you as soon as one of their hairs is onscreen. They make impossible trickshots through corners and ajar doors, but at the same time, they're also not easily baited, and keep mobile so to weave through your bullets. Most of them even have a dodge-roll which, like the player's, gives invincibility frames. There's nothing quite as annoying as perfectly executing a stunt, but being put in a bad spot and dying because a couple of enemies frame-perfect dodged your bullets like agents in The Matrix.

Finally, the star system, where you complete stages without using slowmotion or missing any shots and get points to upgrade your weapons? That should have been completely scrapped. Not only does the weapon upgrade system exacerbate the disparity between weapon types, but the stars force you to play the game in unfun, nearly unplayable ways.

Is the game completely disfunctional? Not really, it's just underdeveloped in every regard. The core of the gameplay, the top-down shoot-outs with bullet time abilities, actually works pretty well, and had the level design provided some variety and the other elements of the game worked to enhance the core mechanics instead of detract from them, we could have had a respectable HL clone.

As it is, though... The Hong Kong Massacre is undeniably less than the sum of its parts. It looks good on Youtube, but there are better options to actually play. If you want Hotline Miami or Max Payne, just redownload those games, and if you want HK police drama... I don't know, may I suggest Sleeping Dogs? That's an underrated videogame that does the triad thing really well. And it often goes on sale for less than THKM, too.

The Last of Us was the PS3's swan song, an incredibly polished game from the developers of Uncharted. I remember being pretty hyped because of that: I was always a fan of games with lots of story and, while I was never into plain shooters before, Uncharted managed to win me over with its charming characters and movie-like beats, with a campy approach to both narrative and gameplay. When I saw the reception The Last of Us was getting, I jumped right into... and I didn't like it that much. I didn't hate it, either -- far from that -- but I felt it played to its strengths too little.

For its time, it was one of the most beautiful games you'd see, squeezing what it could from the PS3's hardware. But it wasn't just a matter of visual fidelity or graphical effects: the game counted on stellar audio design; the art direction and environment composition were near flawless and the animation quality was on par with 3D animation movies, creating scenes with an impressive attention to detail, from transitioning between animations to body language to facial movements to even eye movements. All of which the game puts towards building its characters.

The Last of Us takes place in an America destroyed by a Cordyceps variant. Cordyceps, in the real world, is a parasitic genus of fungus which infects insects, taking control of the host's brain and forcing it to help spread its spores from tall places. In The Last of Us, it has made the leap to humans, infecting those who come in contact with its spores and turning them into mindless monsters.

You play as Joel, a man made bitter by the loss of his daughter to the zombie apocalypse. Joel finds himself tasked with escorting Ellie, a young girl whose significance is unknown as the two meet, but is explained over the course of the narrative. Over the course of the adventure, you see a bond develop between the two characters, as Joel becomes something of a father figure to Ellie and begins to open up his heart. TLoU was part of the "dad game" trend of its time, which featured middle aged men taking care of children or teenagers, and it did a lot of work towards making that trend more popular.

I'm not fond of that trend. It's not that I can't empathize with the situation of someone being thrown in the role of a parent all of a sudden, it's that, as it is most often used, the trope glorifies male violence, turning parenthood from a constructive activity to a destructive one, where the father's role is to kill everything that threatens his precious, vulnerable daughter. Joel TheLastOfUs is the epitome of that, a man closed off from his emotions who, for a lot of the game, knows only violence, and only begins to improve when Ellie starts influencing him.

Ellie completely stole the show on this one -- such a layered character. She's a fantastic depiction of a child who was raised on this ravaged world, who never knew normal, and so, simultaneously and paradoxically, is very mature for her age and prone to childish moments, yearning for a normal childhood all while dealing with survivor's guilt from people she's lost. Far from the female McGuffin that gets escorted around and kidnapped a lot in videogames, she's vulnerable, but not helpless, and definitely not window dressing.

Ellie makes Joel a lot more likeable by proxy, and the game shines the most when it's focusing on them and their character developments. The sections that see Ellie looking after Joel, or that see the two getting separated, are some of the most intense in the game, and the epilogue to the story carries such incredible nuance that I still wonder if I'm reading too much into it.

It's just too bad that, to see all of that unfold, you have to put up with so much generic AAA shooter gameplay. The game is filled with standard action sequences or ridiculous zombie movie situations that feel jarring and disconnected from what is supposed to be a serious, character-driven story.

First, let's talk about the abundance of guns and human enemies. This is a desolate world that was destroyed over twenty years before the main story began, whatever's left of American civilization being governed by the US military with an iron fist.

Everywhere you go, though, there seem to be these gangs of bandits who just randomly stick around, sitting on their traps, waiting for someone to go through so they can rummage their belongings. You'd think, twenty years into the apocalypse and most of the human population gone, that would be one of the most inefficient ways to sustain a population. After all, we meet two other people going through these areas, and get to see or hear about maybe half a dozen victims, while the bandits number in the tens of dozens. And they get gunned down by a single man -- it says a lot about the life expectancy in this line of work.

Half the times when the game needs enemies, it will summon bandit attacks, which in at least one occasion, are shown to have a devastating efficiency in penetrating settlements, but also completely fail to kill the people living in them. These men count on limitless guns as well as infinite ammo, which allow them to shoot at you nonstop, yet they leave only a couple of bullets in their corpses, their stocks having mysteriously depleted so that the game can maintain an illusion of resource scarcity. It's feels like a joke, really -- this is a world where knives are rarer than guns. And probably more useful, too, but we'll get to that in a second.

When the game isn't using "bandit attack" as an excuse, it's probably going to go for "guided zombie horde", an even more annoying cliché of the zombie game genre. One made worse here, mind you: the fungus that causes The Last of Us's zombies replaces the brain, and will eventually grow to the point of destroying most of the head, making its victims rely on echolocation as they lose their eyesight.

It's one of the coolest aspects of the game's lore, and one it doesn't respect this at all -- there are hundreds of presumably freshly turned zombies everywhere, all with perfect eyesight, ready to zerg rush you. This is true even in the middle of snowy nowhere, where one of the most tense character moments in the game gets randomly interrupted by a horde of hundreds of the critters you're then made to fight. In this sequences, even the variants that can't see are seen breaking through barricades and climbing walls twenty plus feet tall to drop in through the roof. It's simultaneously one of the hardest, most random and most pathetic action sequences in the entire game.

The Last of Us spends too much time being Uncharted: The Gritty Reboot. The same waves of numerous enemies, the same evenly spread, chest-high walls, the convenient amount of firearms and ammo in the hands of thugs and/or hidden in desolate places... It's like some executive walked into the people making a tense, stealthy zombie game and forbade them from continuing, because according to marketing, that kind of thing doesn't sell.

And the thing is, part of that game is still here! Clickers, the echolocating zombie variants that cannot see, are an incredibly terrifying presence. Sections where you must carefully navigate dilapidated buildings -- which, mind you, feel like real places instead of action game setpieces -- all while trying to avoid these disfigured humans roaming around, making their cursed clicking sounds... wondering if you should use the one improvised knife you managed to make on the one right in front of you...

These make for the best parts of the game, and should have been its focus. Mind you, I'm not saying there should not have been any action sequences in the game, only that they should have been fewer and more interestingly tuned. Knives, in their scarcity and frailty, but also game-changing efficiency, are what guns should have been, and in fact, the game world actually gives us a perfect additional reason for using guns sparingly, even when against plain humans, as it could draw the attention of dangerous zombies elsewhere.

There could have been so much more here, and I was left with confusing feelings regarding The Last of Us. On one hand, finishing it was kind of a painful slog, marred by generic shootouts I couldn't care less about. On another, it presented fascinating characters, an interesting world, and created scenarios that felt genuinely threatening. Maybe, one day, it would get DLC that would really play to these strengths a bit more (hint hint). But for now, I guess I can just say it's pretty neat.

With Atelier Rorona and Totori being such utter delights, it was hard to imagine Atelier Meruru being in any way disappointing. And naturally, it was anything but, joining its prequels as some of my favorite games of all time.

Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland sees you in the shoes of the titular Merurulince Rede Arls -- Meruru, for short. Meruru is the princess of the kingdom of Arls, a small country to the northeast of Arland. She isn't, however, interested in her royal duties nor in playing the role of princess, a fact that puts her constantly at odds with her father, the king.

A familiar face to the player comes to Arls to assist its people, none other than the accomplished alchemist Totooria Helmond herself. Her and Meruru quickly grow close, with Meruru developing an interest in alchemy and ultimately opting to pursue that instead of her life of nobility. With the help of her now mentor, she convinces her father to let her try to concilliate her royal duty with her newfound passion, by finding ways to develop the kingdom using alchemy.

As is standard for the series, the premise for the story is very simple, maybe even mundane. There is no imminent threat, no antagonist to fight, and even the ordeal the characters are faced with are simply an excuse to get their stories moving. In fact, so long as you are on top of your game, Meruru will have proven herself to her father by the halfway point of the game, freeing her to focus on other things that have been set in motion.

To the plot-obsessed kind of person that is especially common in Western audiences, this might seem absurd, but again, this is a series of character-driven games where the premise is just an excuse to get the characters moving. Atelier games are journeys of self improvement that lead to the main character growing as a person, helping others grow, and causing many other stories unravel.

Meruru actually acknowledges this late in the game, in what I found to be a beautiful moment of self reflection that perfectly encapsulates her game, and how her journey isn't simply about alchemy or the kingdom, but about her finding herself in those two things.

I think I get it now – what I saw that day, in the act of alchemy… It was actually the potential within myself.

Meruru, herself, is a fantastic main character, again, as per series standards. She's headstrong and adventurous, but also has a big heart and treats her people as equals. She has many allies, both in old friends from her own kingdom as well as returning faces from previous games. In fact, all four generations of alchemists, all the way up to Astrid are here, and the payoff of seeing these four together is quite incredible. In addition, the relationships between other characters, such as Sterk and Gino, Totori and Mimi, among others, is deepened.

Also made deeper is the synthesis system. Its characters being alchemists, the Arland trilogy is home to a deep crafting system where items have lists of traits that can be passed to other items when those are used as ingredients. By carefully choosing components and planning your syntheses, those traits can be passed on, as well as combined to create more powerful versions of themselves.

Atelier Meruru perfected this system, creating the version that would later be backported to the Plus and DX versions of its predecessors. I cannot stress enough how much time I’ve spent in the crafting menu for these games: they have truly clever mechanics that had me taking notes at every turn. And it all feels incredibly rewarding as well, with the game allowing you to become brutally overpowered if you put enough effort into preparing for battle.

If anything, I think the game has two issues: One, the crafting UI could afford to offer more information so to be more approachable. Rorona Plus has better filters for items and traits, so I’m betting Meruru DX also has those. It would have been nice, also, to have the ability to view the list of items in certain categories in game, as it would make planning syntheses a lot easier.

On another note, as much as I don’t mind myself, I don’t like that the game requires you to play through it twice to unlock all endings. Rorona did it as well with the millionaire ending, but Meruru takes it up a notch by having an entire plotline only be available in NG+. To me, this wasn’t as much of an issue since I dedicated NG to creating powerful equipment for NG+, but it added 40 hours to my playtime and definitely makes the game less approachable.

All of that said, though, Meruru wraps up the trilogy so well that I feel like jumping straight into Lulua, to see more of these characters I love so much. There’s still plenty of Atelier for me to see, but the wholesome experiences the Arland trilogy will always have a place in my heart.

Cold Darkness Awakened adds an extra level to RotR where Lara explores a chemical factory from which a mysterious gas is being released into the air, gas which makes all men who breathe it become deranged and aggressive. Yes, it's a zombie level.

The game actually sets you up for failure by suggesting you take things slow and stealthily -- this is actually the worst thing you can do to yourself, since the spawn mechanics are very agressive and every now and then a horde of zombies is sent your way, telepathically guided. No, just run and gun everything you can as soon as you get your hands on a firearm. You'll do much better.

Once it gets going, though, this level is enjoyable. There's many ways to traverse the area, with the game leaving the order of objectives up to you, and within the chemical plants Lara has to infiltrate, there are some procedural puzzles built atop an interesting framework that has you identifying components of the plant and their connections.

This DLC for Rise of the Tomb Raider consists of two modes: Croft Manor is an exploration of Lara's past as she searches the manor for clues about her mother, and Lara's Nightmare is a roguelike mode that has you exploring the same mansion as it is taken over by a dark presence.

Both modes are actually really fun! Croft Manor delivers on the character exploration I felt the main game was lacking, and Lara's Nightmare turns said map upside down by filling it with dangerous monsters. Of all the DLCs for the game, I think this is by far the best.

Tomb Raider 2013 rebooted the long running franchise into a new format, more apt to compete with other games of its time. Rise of the Tomb Raider... Is more of that, I guess?

RotR follows Lara in the search for the Divine Source, a lost artifact that is said to grant people immortality. She tracks it down to a lost city in Siberia, but is followed by a group of mercenaries named Trinity, a secret organization that seeks to use the artifact for its own goals.

First of all, I'm really sorry to anyone who played this back to back with the first game, you probably walked out completely burnt out. RoTR is pretty much a repeat of all of the first games ideas, and while I enjoyed it, after finally completing it, I felt like I had my fill of this flavor of game for a good two years or so.

Especially with the useless extra game modes. The first game had dead-on-arrival multiplayer, whereas this one has a bunch of score attacks. It's not intrusive or particularly bad, but it all feels so unnecessary.

The game scratches more or less the same itches that the first did, with the same metroidvania style of level design and the same shooter gameplay. There's a mystery that unravels over the course of the plot, this time pertaining to a fictitious civilization that would have been entrenched in the mountains of Siberia.

Lara is still here, and she's a fantastic character who doesn't believe in karmic death and also doesn't take crap from anyone, however, there's a distinct lack of character development over the course of the story, as well as the personal stake that was ever present in the first game. In particular, the arbitrary removal of Sam from the story, especially in light of how there was supposed to be a romance between the two, feels especially painful.

This is the middle game in a trilogy, so it's expected for the story to be a bit middling. There's an obvious setup for the sequel at the end of the game, but even so, I worry about how sustainable this reboot will be if this continues.

Anyway, RotR struggles a bit to justify its existence, but is still a definite recommendation for any fans of the 2013 game.

Remember how Microsoft bought a temporary exclusivity for Rise of the Tomb Raider so to secure a new franchise (or some other dumb idea) and create hype over the Xbox One? Well, joke’s on them, because I only jumped onto the new Tomb Raider train in 2018!

Lara Croft is one of the, if not the most known videogame character that’s not a mascot of sorts. Her name is synonymous with adventure and exploration; she was featured in a ton of games and (regrettably) even got a movie adaptation. However, since the later parts of the PS2 era, the franchise she was born in had been struggling to keep itself relevant, and with the advent of the PS3 and 360, and the leap of quality that generation brought to action games, it only got worse.

The Uncharted series, in particular, ran pretty much the same core concept as TR: it set up this big archeological mystery on a desolate place, which our charming protagonist sets out to solve by the means of 1) platforming over ruins; and 2) gunplay that leaves behind an unjustifiably large body count. Uncharted had modernized this idea in a way that turned all eyes to it, and the ball was now in Tomb Raider’s court to either reinvent itself or to fade into oblivion.

The former option was chosen, of course. The series went silent after the badly received release of Tomb Raider: Underworld in 2008. A couple of years later, a spin-off series named after Lara began with Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, which I remember saw a somewhat positive reception, but its still lying on my unfinished pile, so I can’t really tell.

Some speculated at the time whether that was to be the fate of Lara Croft, to be delegated to smaller, more puzzle focused games, but Square Enix, who now owned Eidos and the TR franchise, were not about to let that name die. They handed the franchise over to developer Crystal Dynamics to find a way to make the franchise relevant again. Finally, a reboot of the series was released in 2013.

This new series has Lara as a graduate of archeology from London going on her first official expedition. Accompanying her are her mentor Roth, her best friend Sam, and several others. Their destination is the Dragon Triangle, which Lara believes is the location lost kingdom of Yamatai, once ruled by the legendary queen Himiko. Now, Himiko is an actual historical figure about whom not much is known, but that actually ruled over a kingdom called Yamatai, located somewhere in Japan.

The reason so much is unknown about her is because Yamatai ceased to exist somewhere around the third century, with Himiko ruling between the late second and early third centuries. These time frames predate the creation of a Japanese writing system: Chinese characters would be adopted from the fifth century forward, and from that, the Japanese would slowly develop a system of their own over the centuries, one that would only be fully consolidated in the 20th century.

The only records we have of Yamatai and its people are those written by Chinese people who happened to interact with them, which is why their history is vague at best. It’s also why I’d smirk whenever Lara found texts written by people in Himiko’s court, some of them in modern Japanese complete with English loanwords. It’s like when I see people “hacking” on TV shows, it’s always funny.

That is, of course, not a complaint, just me noting a funny quirk of the writing. The writers are allowed and encouraged to take this kind of liberty with their setting for the sake of their story, and one of the reasons I find their choice of setting so good is exactly because they picked a real civilization that few people have heard of and we know very little about, giving them a lot of leeway. In the game world, Lara discovers that the reason no one ever found Yamatai is because it happened to be located on an island surrounded by storms -- something Lara experiences firsthand as said storms cause her and her crew to be shipwrecked. After the accident, Lara awakes in a cave, and must now find her way out and reunite with her crew.

I heard a lot of comparisons of this game to Uncharted, gameplay-wise, and I confess I was afraid it would turn out to be a carbon copy. I’m glad to see it’s not – yes, there are scripted platforming sequences with the same general flow, and that incorporate some almost identical setpieces, but in other areas, Tomb Raider manages to differentiate itself enough to feel like its own unique flavor of gameplay.

Unlike Nathan Drake’s series, in which stages are one-off and self-contained, Tomb Raider has metroidvania-ish level design: you can come and go as you please, and you're expected to use new gear you obtain to open new paths. In the combat side, you have four main weapons, plus a melee one you can use in a pinch. All of those weapons can be obtained and upgraded in different points of the game, and since the resources you need to do so are handed out sparingly, you have to choose which upgrades will favor you the most.

Now, a crafting system for weapons brings forth painful memories of the gunplay in The Last of Us, where everything was made deliberately wobbly so to force you to gather and craft. Fortunately, this is not the case here: while gunplay in Tomb Raider is a bit heavier than in Nate’s series, with more emphasis on recoil and firing/reload speed, Lara’s guns are functional on their own, and upgrades are helpful, but not essential. If you’re a good shot, the game will not outright sabotage you just because you have the basic weapons equipped.

The game encourages you to explore with every new piece of gear you obtain: there’s ton of side objectives hidden around the different areas of the island, from optional ruins hidden in each area that offer environmental puzzles for you to solve, and reward you if you get to the end, to documents and relics that tell the story of the island and the people that were there over the centuries – an important element of the game’s storytelling.

As for the main story, it’s actually pretty good. Like I mentioned, there's the whole mystery surrounding Yamatai and Himiko, but there's also a personal stake involving Lara's crew, people who she loves and feels guilty for endangering. It all culminates into a very emotional ending that ties the game with a neat little bow.

The biggest issue with the game, to me, is actually how the narrative is at odds with the gameplay. The game is an origin story, meant to show how Lara went from a graduate student in Archeology who’s not really into adventures, into a thrill seeking explorer who kills people who cross her path. She went through a lot of physical and psychological pain and saw a bunch of her friends die during her stay in Yamatai, and that made her into the Lara Croft we know.

The problem is in how the game chooses to express this – by torturing Lara at every chance it gets. The game inflicts an unnecessary amount of physical pain onto her over the course of the story, to a point where you wonder how she can even still walk. And hope to god you don’t die, because every death that’s not her being shot includes a gruesome death cutscene. Crushed, impaled, stabbed, drowned, these are but a few of the cruel fates that can befall our protagonist, and honestly, the obsession with these scenes is a tad disturbing.

The cutscenes from the first half of the game actively try to enforce this idea of a weak and insecure Lara, who is not sure of what she must do. But then the gameplay starts and the ludonarrative dissonance kicks in. Far from what the cutscenes say, within the first hour of the game, Lara’s shown to be a competent archer, fighter, climber and hunter, among other things, able to end others' lives without a second thought. Her arsenal of survival skills makes her one of the most competent video game protagonists I have ever seen.

So you’re gunning down grunts one by one, ruthlessly, then a cutscene starts in which and Lara is hesitant and afraid. She suffers some serious injury, but gets up and is back to normal as soon as control is returned to the player. The one time the game hurts her for real, it's done to funnel you into the direction of the plot -- a sequence that has Lara, wounded and unable to climb, wading through sewage with an open wound (!!!) to get to her destination.

I have to play devil's advocate here, though... I get why the game is like this. Most players don't finish the games they play, so if Lara's growth was actually expressed via the game's mechanics, and the first half of the game had her struggling to shoot and fight, people would quit the game before it got good and say it's crap. So as jarring as the disconnect is, it's also easy to understand in the contect of the industry.

Either way, the two dissonant parts come together after the halfway point, when the mysteries of the island are identified and a hardened Lara, having gone through inhumane experiences, becomes the survivor the game wanted to show her becoming. It's a legitimate character growth moment, where the once timid girl now begins to act as a leader to her crew. In a medium where only male characters tend to get those roles, I really appreciate being able to play a game with a protagonist such as her.

Which is to say, even though I joined the party years late, the first game set high expectations for the rest of its franchise. Tomb Raider 2013 is a game I thoroughly enjoyed. Yes, it has some flaws, but they’re easy to forgive when you look at the whole picture, and at the game’s high quality. I’m glad the attempt to revive the franchise worked so well.

Lone Survivor is a 2D sidescrolling horror game that has you playing the role of a man who is the lone survivor (ha!) of a zombie infestation that destroyed his town. It's loosely inspired by games like Silent Hill, inspirations it wears on its sleeve.

I think the game's aesthetics and sound design are worthy of that homage, but the mechanics and story... for the year it came out, it certainly must have been an impressive game, but now, it feels clunky and outdated. The twists are dull, the multiple endings are unamusing and based around equally tedious mechanics. There are more interesting horror games to play in this day and age.

(The GBA version really ought to have its own page, as it's a completely different game)

Unlike the household simulator it takes its name from, The Sims: Bustin' Out is a mission based life sim that has you controlling a character taking a holiday vacation in SimValley, and while decorating your home is part of the gameplay, you spend more time outside the house than in it -- hence the title.

And it was pretty fun and imaginative, way more than what you'd expect from an ostensive cash-grab spin-off. It had a complete storyline in which you went from living in a literal barn to owning a mansion while helping everyone else in town. Instead of a traditional career, the game had you taking all these odd jobs around town, such as bartending, mowing grass or making pizza.

It was a really fun twist on The Sims's formula that not many people noticed existed.