December's already shaping up to be ending the year the same way it started: awfully. In spite of what might be occurring and who might be robbing whom of a future, let's instead focus ourselves on things we can do and things we can change. Like all our GOTY lists in the eleventh hour? That's what I've been doing with this year's season of Go! Go! GOTY!, checking out a handful of remaining 2017 games before it's time to make some tough decisions.

People tend to get worn down around the GOTY season, in part because it's already a very stressful and cold month where Christmas-themed commercials remind us of all the things we don't have, but largely because we have this weird compulsion to argue about which game is superior to which other. Games don't work like that, of course: while an element of objective competence is more applicable to the mechanically-based video game medium than something of a pure artform like poetry or portraiture, games are still a form of artistic expression and are thus beholden to same rules concerning individual subjectivity. It's important to keep that in mind and not lose our heads if someone ranks Nier over Mario, or Horizon over Zelda, or any other schisms we're all imagining erupting on the Giant Bomb podcasts or in the forums. GOTY season is a time for ribald spirited debate, of course, but we can't lose sight of our united love of video games; a passion that can sometimes get out of control, and by sometimes I mean always if we're talking Twitter or YouTube. The community here is at least better than most, though, both in temperament and in their breadth of expertise, so I'm hoping to see not only a lot of very different GOTY lists emerge to highlight what a great year for the industry it's been, but a whole lot of ideas for avenues to look into in 2018 and beyond as I work, forever, on adjusting my own "true" list of favorite games of the year.

Which is something else I'm looking forward to in January: not only amending my own recently published 2017 GOTY list in my head as the year moves on and I fill some important gaps, but going back to the lists for 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and, though they have yet to exist, perhaps some amended lists for 2010, 2011 and 2012 and reconsider where everything is ranked and adding what I was fortunate to catch up on in 2017. There's value in a GOTY list made in the year itself - it's when your memories of those games are at their freshest, and it can definitely be hard to compare a game you played five years ago to one you only caught up with more recently - but I've really taken a shine to this experiment and seeing how my tastes have changed over the years, as well as pushing me to go back to fill in everything I missed. It's an approach that's definitely easier for those who are a tad on the frugal side, as I and many others have had and will have to be...

Whoops, I'm edging into vaguely political doom and gloom again, so I'd better stop here and move onto a busy week of bloggin':

• The Top Shelf isn't so much dealing with doom but Mt. Doom, as its intrepid fellowship of The Lord of the Rings licensed games take on each other for the crown of "The One LOTR Game to Rule Them All". What's remarkable, and I've said this a few times now, is how the first game precipitated the rest, despite having a different developer and publisher team and was forced to be as unlike the movies as possible for legal reasons. The second and third have far more in common, despite also again having different developers, and I found something to praise in all three as a result. You'll notice that I had something of a cop-out twist ending to this particular Battle Royale, but I stand by it.
• The Indie Game of the Week, which will be the last one for a couple of Summaries, is the retro spacewhipper Alwa's Awakening, which you might recognize from its inclusion in this year's Summer Games Done Quick event. All I'll say about this game is that it won't surprise you a whole lot: what you see is definitely what you're getting if you take a glance at the screenshots or trailers on its Steam page. However, I will also say that it's an excellent if streamlined one of those games with an ideal length of around 8-10 hours, so if you've been looking for more games in that vein it shouldn't disappoint. (Shout-outs to Castle in the Darkness, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight and, of course, Shovel Knight - all excellent games of the same style, format and calibre.)
• We also have the contents page and first entry of Go! Go! GOTY!, my risibly named recurring end-of-year blogging feature that attempts to cram as many remaining GOTY-contenders into the first couple of weeks of December. I've managed to scrounge up six as-yet unplayed Indie games from this year to work my way through, with the intent to get stuck into Prey before I run out of time and start putting together my GOTY list and (delightfully!) dumb comic awards blog. The first entry looks at Loot Rascals, a flamboyant roguelike released earlier this March that switches out the mysterious colored potions and kobolds of the venerable ASCII RPG format with a card-based equipment system that can involve a few logic inventory puzzles to maximize its effectiveness, and a group of doofy-looking aliens with silly names and mannerisms. It definitely feels like a licensed game for a sci-fi 2010s cartoon show that doesn't exist, every bit the contemporary of the likes of Adventure Time or Misadventures of Flapjack or that recent OK K.O., and it's definitely a strong point. However, it's not something I'm going to make a lot of headway into without any form of permanent progression, so I quickly eliminated it in favor of more approachable fare. Be sure to look out for more Go! Go! GOTY! updates this week and next.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

I haven't been up to much this week besides polishing off Champions: Return to Arms for a looter-centric The Top Shelf coming soon, and starting on the aforementioned to-do list for Go! Go! GOTY!, but I did manage to slip in a playthrough of the new mini-adventure (though "mini" definitely doesn't give it enough credit) in the Uncharted franchise, which has moved on from the completed journeys of Nathan "Wiseacre" Drake to his almost equally sarcastic former companion Chloe Frazer and her unlikely friendship and partnership with Uncharted 4's secondary antagonist Nadine Ross. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy quickly falls into old patterns, with several linear levels broken up with shoot-outs in suspiciously arena-like locations with ample amounts of tall grass to hide in if stealth is more your flavor, combined with lots of climbing obstacle courses with the requisite "this handhold fell apart as soon as I jumped to it" moments of panic and improvisation. It's definitely a familiar routine, but not an entirely unwelcome one.

If you're somehow not familiar with the Uncharted universe, or haven't been following the series for a while, I might not recommend The Lost Legacy as a place to jump back in. That's really only because it's filled with spoilers for Uncharted 4 as a matter of circumstances - Lost Legacy was meant, after all, to be a DLC campaign that followed that game before it got large enough that the developers figured they might as well turn it into a standalone adventure. Trouble is, if you go to the trouble to play Uncharted 4 first, you might find yourself completely satiated by this particular brand of acrobatic climbing, spontaneity-rich gunplay and smart-assed back-and-forth badinage.

Lost Legacy's been getting some praise for its relative brevity, as it greatly reduces the bloat of Uncharted 4 while retaining its wit, its evolution of the "Uncharted combat" to one with more options to consider, its incredible visuals, its occasional breaks into a more open-world format for a little while, and for how well it understands its characters and their interplay and using that to elicit the occasional moments of humanizing drama from what would normally be some rough and tumble archetypal amateur archeologists and accomplished adventurers. The Uncharted games have always had an appealing movie-like quality to them, from their heavily choreographed set-pieces to the blistering pace of adventurous fun, and the comparatively brief run-time really helps to hammer that aspect home. The examples set by this game and similarly-devised contemporaries like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice are something I hope future Uncharted games, if Naughty Dog does indeed continue with them in conjunction with their zombie torture porn franchise, keeps in mind as they more forward. If nothing else, I'm liking the idea of an expanded world of varied treasure hunters with no end of ancient mystical ruins filled with incongruously elaborate machinery to discover.

All this makes Uncharted: The Lost Legacy an interesting game to recommend, because it might actually be my favorite game in this series after Uncharted 2: it finds the right tempo, and builds on what the series had evolved into by Uncharted 4 while mitigating that game's few drawbacks. It's worth working your way up to that game, so to speak, especially if you're someone like me who has found yourself drifting away from the franchise with 3 and 4 but still think about replaying 2 on occasion.