Ghost of Tsushima is not a particularly innovative game – it’s fairly standard open-world adventure fare with enemy camps, side quests, skill trees and so on – but there are a couple of little things that distinguish it from what might otherwise have just been Assassin’s Creed Samurai.

The neatest trick that developer Sucker Punch seem to have pulled off is that the game is almost constantly stunning to look at. Sure, it’s no graphical powerhouse – which was very extra-obvious to many folks coming straight to this game from The Last of Us Part 2 – and sure, the recent Assassin’s Creed releases have had their moments in Egypt and Greece – but Ghost of Tsushima features a day-night cycle that almost constantly presents itself as “Screen-Shot” worthy wherever you happen to be in it’s neatly contained island game world.

It’s a tremendously impressive acheivement.

The game’s other Tent-Pole features – the Stand-Offs which provide a fun, occasionally tense pacing interlude, and what we’ll call The Natural Environment where foxes, birds and the wind help guide you around and help keep on-screen junk to a minimum – do a decent job of supporting the Ghost of Tsushima’s central conceits.

Where the game struggles is unfortunately in the central plot tension between Good Player Path/Bad Player Path.

Asobo’s “A Plague Tale: Innocence” is a better game than it’s awkward klunky title might suggest.

It has a strong narrative that takes many interesting twists and turns.

It has a compelling central cast.

Interesting game mechanics – rather than “Action Adventure” genre I’d suggest it was more like Action Puzzle. There’s very little combat but most of the game’s simple mechanisms are well paced and well explored. I particularly liked the way you never felt under-skilled but new additions always added to one’s feeling of mastery as the game unfolded.

It looks amazing and like the game engine was developed in-house – it has wonderful anti-aliasing and a way of artfully guiding one’s focus that reminded me of Octopath Traveller but all grown up. One downside of the effect was that it did look in places like I was playing a 3D game and should have been wearing the correct glasses.

I found the controls a bit fiddly at times and even turning the camera feels like you’re in treacle but you get used to it.

The game does a great job making the rat swarms icky – which I’m sure was harder than it might seem.

What I did find jarring was how grown-up many of the game’s prepubescent characters seem to be. Maybe it’s because my own kids are developing a little slower – maybe it’s that the current times are inhibiting progress in ways that oldern-times did not. Maybe the kids in this game were all just early bloomers.

There was something about the line delivery that felt like the script had been run through a clumsy translation service – there was an unnatural remove about it but again its an element that grinds the pedantic gears initially but fades a little with time.

I just worked out that I started playing The Last Of Us around July 2013 on my newly acquired PS3. I finally watched the credits roll for the first time yesterday on my PS4pro – nearly 7 years and nearly 3 consoles later.

So what gives?

Firstly it was hard to go back to to the original on the PS3 once the Remastered and the PS4 was available.

It was mainly impatience – running into hard bits – but most critically I lost some game save data in the move from PS4 to PS4pro and felt I lacked the patience to be that far back and go again. Also the save put me back in the middle of a lumber yard fight as Ellie with very little ammo and you know how it can be trying to figure out control schemes after a gap of a year or so.

It was easier just to put it aside and focus on newer games.

But I was very pleased to have finally got the time to re-focus and push through the hard bit and get through the end of the game with a couple of weeks to go  before the launch of The Last of Us Part 2.

The overwhelming impression I was left with having finally finished this game was how mature modern game storytelling could be. The Last of Us could be frantic and and “Action-y”, shooty and race-y and all the other “gameplay” mainstays we’ve come to expect but it doesn’t feel like the point here like it does in so many other games – here the mechanics seem much more to serve the story and the overall experience is far richer for it.

I won’t deny that having waited – or procrastinated – so long to get through to the end, the famous sequences were a little less impactful but I’m still tremendously glad to have finally completed this game.

A month or so ago I took advantage of a JB HiFi offer to pick up Shadow of the Tomb Raider for the princely sum of AU$9. I also paid an additional AU$9 to add the “definitive edition” content pack which was basically a bunch of DLC “challenge tombs”.

I had recently finished cutting and uploading the last of our Death Stranding playlist and had intended to pick up Contro again but thought “Oh I’ll just pop SOTTR in to check it out. A week later I was pretty much done – main story and challenge tombs – and despite the hideously cringeworthy cultural inappropriate elements of the plot, the moment to moment gameplay was tremendously enjoyable – somewhere between Uncharted and I guess Assassin’s Creed Odyssey played as Kassandra?

Shadow of the Tomb Raider felt more “big action” oriented than 2016’s “Rise of the Tomb Raider” which I also have fond memories of. Shadow has big set pieces where you’re basically outrunning floods or storms or attack helicopters – its all very high action but really at very low risk – they’re basically Quick Time Events without the prompts – but they’re still fun enough.

We do have to talk about the narrative elements though. It’s truly ghastly. Basically Shadow of the Tomb Raider follows Lara Croft the white girl from great mansion-y privilege – and her “ethnic” side-kick Jonah – as she rocks up in a series of small impoverished South American villages, plundering both their homes and their temples and then pissing off their gods to the extent that great natural disasters then completely destroy those villages. She then presumes to essentially become their god for a bit before a late twist renders her ascension “unnecessary” and things return to normal – for her.

To say it’s tone deaf is underselling it completely.