This is pretty much what I've been playing this year.

I played Dark Souls II through a couple times but got fed up with the non-Miyazaki nature of the storyline, which basically boils down to "jilted woman loses her shit." And some other random misogyny. Also while some of the levels are really great, others were really phoned in. Kind of like Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith in the first. So that was kind of a letdown. I really think Demon's Souls is the best of the three of them for environment. I'm really hoping Bloodborne (which is where Miyazaki focused his time instead of paying attention to DkS2) steers much more back in the DeS direction, and if there's a bit of Silent Hill horror in there that won't be a bad thing either. 

I bought Reckoning/Amalur/Kingdom whatever that thing that 38 Studios (the big clusturfuck in Delaware) made; it was $5 on sale and seemed like it might be a kind of fun sort of actiony RPG thing to pass the time with. I started it on hard mode, because I have low expectations for a US studio title. I wish it would actually get hard. I'm not even using magic. It's certainly got a big world, but it's just so effing boring after 60 hours. It doesn't have the drama of a Final Fantasy plot so it's mostly just grind through whatever step-and-fetchit quests you can tolerate and smack the baddies now and then.

Hohokum was very pleasant but doesn't have much replayability. It's kind of a "busy box" sort of game. Once you've pushed all the buttons and seen all the little cutscenes, there's not much more to it. I love the soundtrack, though. And the art style is super cute. I recommend this game highly as a diversion or something to haul out and get lost in when you're slightly altered. (I wasn't able to get the two apparently female figures to marry, though. That irritated me.)

Child of Eden I wrote about in another venue. Basically REZ, but with a video damsel to save, which really kind of ruins it for me. Not what I want in my techno rail shooter. At all. I'll keep poking at it, though.

I also played ThatGameCompany's Flower and Journey, which are mellow, score-less, exploration-driven, quest-type pastimes. They are games in that there are objectives and gradually increasing difficulty in completing them. But they seem to focus more on environmental enjoyment and just flying or wandering around in surreal, minimalist landscapes. Nice soundtracks and pleasant visuals, and some interesting play mechanics, but I didn't find them really compelling in any ongoing way. (Perhaps this is best signified by the fact that I forgot to write them up last night when I originally created this post.)

I just started American McGee's Alice (as a bonus pack-in to Alice: Madness Returns; I haven't played it yet) runs on the Quake III engine, which should give you an idea of how ancient it is. I actually died several times, though mostly from issues related to its remapping of a mouse view/keyboard strafe model to the controller. I started doing much better when I discovered the shoulder buttons would shoot as well, saving me from "claw" grip.

I also just started Mass Effect, which I've never played before and know very little about. Of course I'm playing as a woman; I always do when presented with a choice. I usually stay away from western shooters because of misogyny & patriarchy issues but reports are that BioWare did pretty well on this series so when the trilogy came on sale for $20 I decided to go for it. I'm just a couple hours in but it feels rather too linear for my taste. We'll see how it goes after 20 or however long it takes.

I picked up Trine 2 for a couple bucks, and while I have to say the visuals are really extraordinarily beautiful, the gameplay is wrenchingly dull. It reminds me of The Incredible Machine or Contraptions or other things like that where you have a bucket of tools and have to figure out what super secret combination of them will get you through the next screen. These kind of puzzles almost always devolve into "solve it our way or get stuffed." Yeah, sure, here's a sequence for ya, which number comes next: 6 21 3 11 15 6 _. I'll probably gnaw through it 20 minutes at a time just because I'm stubborn.

I loved Dragon's Dogma, almost everything about it, except that I think the damage equations are improperly coded with a logit rather than sigmoidal shape, so there's only a narrow range of player levels where you are evenly matched with your foes -- much higher than them and they are like paper, much lower and it's like punching granite. A sigmoid function, akin to what the Souls series provides, would provide many more opportunities for challenging interactions. I'd probably still be playing it if all of my characters didn't basically get to the point of "press X to win".  Special mention for the goblins in this game -- absolute best characterization I've seen in a foe in any game so far.

D mostly is playing Final Fantasy XIII-2, also known as "the RPG Westerners Hate Because It Doesn't Spoon-Feed You A Plot And It Has Non-Linear Gameplay." We're grooving on it pretty well, though I personally could do without the pseudo-Pokemon thing. 

When Mass Effect is done, there's ME2 and ME3, and when Alice is done there's Madness Returns, so my Winter videogaming needs are fairly well seen to, assuming I don't just burn through them all before the Solstice. I might consider Dragon Age Inquisition, but the previous titles have been problematic in some ways so I'll hold off until I know what I'd be getting into. Apparently Capcom is doing something called Deep Down but reports are it won't even have a female option for the lead so that's not going to work.

I'm looking forward to No Man's Sky, the procedurally generated galaxy explorer, and whichever of that or Bloodborne releases first will be the impetus for us to get a PS4 -- all of the titles I've mentioned I play on our PS3.

So that's kind of where I'm at for gaming!