The last blog I wrote was a tiny one, chronicling my early days with Bloodborne’s great expansion. Here’s what I’ve been playing lately, now that the holidays are but a distant memory and Love Day is nigh:

I admired and stared on in utter bewilderment at The Witness.

The Witness is a game that’s all about moments of inspiration, of intuiting what’s expected of you after moments of starting down a single, grid-like maze on an in-game panel. It places beautiful, frequently haunting stone sculptures everywhere, often observing the world around them as scrupulously as you must. I spent twenty straight minutes on a puzzle earlier on before I cracked it, only for the sculpture next to me, gazing up in agony, to put a damper on things. It felt quietly rewarding, but not without its frustrations, even boredoms. And that’s far from the most time I’ve sat staring at a puzzle panel in The Witness.

After a few hours of poking and prodding at the island, connecting lines and beginning to grip the many, many mix-ups the game introduces to how lines must be made, every inch of the landscape begins to warrant a closer inspection. The game spends a lot less time easing you into new and trickier concepts. Symbols start appearing together on panels in ways that contradict the other’s ruleset, and all hell starts breaking loose in your head. In case you’re still working through the game as I am and want to keep things mysterious, I’ll simply say that many of my favourite puzzles from the game take place go beyond the panel. Each area has its own particular variation on puzzle panels, and it’s an enjoyable and often intimidating exercise to uncover a whole new trick...one that immediately shows all sorts of devilish potential. And then it ends up going way farther than you could’ve initially thought.

The Witness may often be tough, but it is almost always fair. Almost fair bears repeating. There’s a few sections toward the end - at least what could be considered an end - of the game that can feel pretty cheap, highlighting the design’s most devious subversions of rules in ways that feel more unfair or simply annoying than revelatory. They can be some of the most challenging puzzles in the game, no question, though often these late-game panels can feel like they’re challenging your resolve a little more than your intelligence. Cracking them is more relief than accomplishment, though more often than not the reward is, well, a few puzzles more difficult than the last set.

This leads me to something that’s more of a boon to The Witness than it is a complaint: this game refuses to hold your hand. More often than not, this suits the game’s commitment to wordless instruction and a mysterious nature. It’s worth noting that the openness of the game means you can walk away from a puzzle that’s giving you a hard time and go somewhere else, too. When you’re well and truly stuck, though? Like I am right now, with dead-ends greeting me in every obvious direction? There’s no recourse in-game to get you going again.

I’ve played maybe fifteen hours and with seven lasers going, I have my sights set on the endgame. Like I said earlier, the path to the end has been less enjoyable than many of the game’s other trials for me. I’m still having fun, but I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t play The Witness in big chunks anymore. I’m just chipping away now, happy to stretch my time out with it a little longer before I inevitably get puzzled out.

I finally got around to playing Resident Evil...in HD!

Resident Evil HD is a remastering of Resident Evil for the Gamecube, which was itself a full-on remake of the 1996 Playstation original. It’s my first real experience with the first chapter in the series at all; count me among the many who came in with the brilliant, hyper-polished action of the fourth game. I've been sporadically messing with RE games ever since, so many words Resident Evil HD is a tough and often obtuse adventure that requires a little bit of nerve and a lot of patience. If you can hang with that, your endurance pays off in all sorts of interesting and unexpected ways that can still feel real gratifying in 2016.

Like Barry. Barry still feels real gratifying in 2016.

Or take, as another and more concrete example, the many ways it establishes a strong sense of time and place between your actions in the mansion and what the other surviving members of the S.T.A.R.S. team are up to. Heading one way early on as Jill means you’ll score the incredibly handy shotgun early on in your game, while doubling back too soon earns you some acid ammo while sending a friendly character off on another trajectory. Saving a character can mean they show up to essentially handle a boss for you later on.

Those turns of fortune can be a lifesaver, because getting up in the Spencer mansion can be tough going. The sensation of eking your way through it is the result of many quirks and subsystems working together. It can occasionally just feel old, but it's surprising how much of Resident Evil still works beautifully twenty years after it was designed. The static cameras look great and are still suspenseful as hell. Having to manage your lighter fuel, inventory and paths through the mansion to avoid the dreaded crimson heads really drives home the reality that getting through the mansion takes skill beyond just pointing and shooting. You need knowledge of what to have with you when, of the mansion layout, of the shifting story beats themselves, to make it through with a less-than-catastrophic conclusion. And when you don't possess that knowledge...you sort of just have to beat your head against the mansion until you happen upon the item you need to move onward. Or check your progress against a guide. I did a decent amount of both during my playthrough.

While I had a pretty good time playing, the insight on Resident Evil as a whole was the main draw for me. At first I thought dipping into this remake would lead me straight into the more recent re-release of Resident Evil Zero but, nah! I think I’m good...for now.

I played through Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, a conflicted port of a solid game.

Xenoblade remains an exciting and expansive JRPG even when this handheld port, exclusively for the New 3DS hardware, lets its limitations harsh through.

I don’t want to rag on Xenoblade 3D too much. It’s impressive this game can squeeze down onto a handheld at all, though there’s enough issues with this port to prevent it being the definitive version of Xenoblade Chronicles. Things generally run pretty smoothly, which is a good baseline to work from. That mostly smooth performance extends to the load times as well, which let you load into your save or fast travel across the world in a second or two. That’s a godsend! But that steady performance comes at the cost of noticeable pop-in and quite a bit of aliasing. It's most noticeable when you zoom the camera out to fight a big or flying monster; Shulk and crew are pared down to a pixelated stew. Even with those concessions, particularly huge creatures or effect-heavy boss sequences can still cause waves of slowdown. And don't even think about engaging the barely-noticeable 3D unless you really want to cut things back. Xenoblade felt kind of constrained back on the Wii, and scaling it back further for a handheld was an inevitable outcome.

The physical size of the New 3DS causes some problems as well. There's a ton of UI to keep tabs on in this game, and the size and resolution of the screen means that much of it is taken up by big buttons, meters and targets as soon as a battle begins. It can make maintaining a decent view of several targets a little wonky. The New 3DS C-stick works well and feels good for things like camera control, but there’s just not enough real estate to make it all work seamlessly.

Port limitations don't apply to content whatsoever, and that’s no mean feat. Every quest, collectable trinket and sprawling landmass of the Wii original is completely in tact here on 3DS, and the thought of how challenging a task that must have been was not lost on me. It takes a good fifty hours or so just for the main quest, and many more if you want to delve into its copious side diversions along the way.

It didn’t hook me quite like I thought it would, and it took me months of off and on play to finish the storyline through, without too much in the way of sidequesting or extra affinity-building. It’s offline-MMO combat was real rad though, enough of a sell that I’ve already picked up Xenoblade Chronicles X, it’s Wii U-exclusive sequel that seems to take everything I dug about this game several steps further while minimizing some of the flatter bits. Time will tell!

Next time:

I reflect on Firewatch. Swapperoo ends up being the first iOS game that’s grabbed me in a while. And my sojourn through Xenoblade Chronicles X begins...