2026 on The Afterimage

September 2026 Roundup

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from Future? No Thanks!

Whew, what a relief to be putting the finishing touches on this post. Between planning an overseas vacation that we’re leaving for later this month, hosting visiting friends and family, and playing some long-anticipated game releases, it’s been quite the packed month.

You may have noticed some differences in the site! As of this month I’m rebranding it; although I am indeed still Mike and these are my musings, the blog has a new name and domain : The Afterimage, located at its new home — theafterimage.net. If you’re curious about what’s behind the name, I’ve updated the About page with some details. I’m considering changing up the look and layout of the site as we approach its first birthday, so stay tuned.

My latest obsession has been Fire Emblem : Fortune’s Weave, the game that finally made me give in and purchase a Switch 2. The Fire Emblem series is near and dear to my heart, but I haven’t actually played one since Fire Emblem : Radiant Dawn for the Wii. I think it was about time that I tried one of the modern entries, so I pushed past my misgivings about its massive playtime and jumped in. Well, I’m over 100 hours in at this point and am still only barely at the doorstep of the final act of the game. It’s proven itself to be quite unbingeable, which is rough for me and the way that I tend to engage with games. I’d say expect some impressions for next month’s article, but I can’t say for sure I’ll even be finished with it by then. Wild.

Got a good slate of other games from September though, before Fire Emblem consumed all of my free time. Let’s get into it.

I've forgotten which way is up

CONTROL Resonant

TBD

Score TBD

∅

Recommendation TBD

First things first, it’s finally out in the world: the long-awaited sequel to Remedy’s CONTROL, the David Lynch/SCP Foundation-inspired game that sits high in the rankings of my favorite games of all time. I tend to take some vacation time around my birthday every year, and coincidentally this mini-vacation lined up with Resonant’s September 24th release date. Once it launched my partner and I grabbed some snacks, turned the lights down low and prepared to binge our most anticipated game of the year.

We emerged about four days later, groggy but satisfied with having seen the game through to the end. Although it has the characteristic rough edges of a Remedy production, there is still so much to love about Resonant’s characters, worldbuilding, and dizzying moment-to-moment gravity-warping gameplay. I have a lot to say about it, so I’m going to spin off my thoughts into a full review. Expect it soon; when I publish it I’ll come back to this article and add the final score I’ve settled on.

Groucho Marx + Karl Marx =

Future? No Thanks!

Excellent

★ ★

Highly Recommended

What is one to do when society passes you by? When by all accounts the world around you has undoubtedly improved, but you find it utterly incomprehensible? That’s the dilemma of one Harvey P. Huffstone, a baby boomer and former insurance adjuster who now lives in the Socialist Republic of Pittsburgh in the year 2045.

Harvey’s response to this dilemma is “Future? No Thanks!” He’s made the choice to undergo gentle euthanasia, but before this is approved he’s encouraged to enjoy his last day on earth via a laundry list of tasks (mostly centered around consumption, as his death doula observes) where he’ll experience vestiges of joy from the version of the world he remembers. This presents itself as an open-world adventure game where you’re tasked with pursuing simple pleasures such as drinking the last can of Coca-Cola in Pittsburgh, eating a real steak, getting in a fistfight (he always wanted to do that), and perhaps enjoying the touch of a woman one last time. Accompanied by his sunny robotic dog companion Omegabot, he sets out to do so.

This game’s developer, Molleindustria Games, is the project of Carnegie Mellon University professor Paolo Pedercini. His previous works have been much smaller, focused experiences geared toward both educating and entertaining through a leftist lens, such as McDonald’s Videogame, Green New Deal Simulator, and Meet Me At The Workers’ Club. Future? No Thanks! Is his most ambitious project yet, over five years in the making. It’s set against an aggressively-miniaturized but still recognizable version of Pittsburgh’s downtown and surrounding areas (North Side, Oakland, and the Strip District). A fun fact about me is that I actually lived and worked in the Pittsburgh area for the better part of a decade, so it was delightful to run across so many iconic Pittsburgh buildings and landmarks while drifting through the streets in Harvey’s souped-up motorized wheelchair.

Putting my own nostalgia aside, this new socialist Yinzer utopia is a blast to explore. This is a freeform open world game that feels like a classic adventure game; there’s a new character to talk to around every corner and they are by-and-large hilarious. The writing of the game is uniformly fantastic, deftly employing dark humor alongside some interesting worldbuilding about how drastically the former United States has changed. Pedercini makes no secret of the fact that his politics lean left, but is more than willing to poke fun at or skewer those on the same side of the ideological spectrum as himself whenever it’s called for, often highlighting the possible pain points of implementing worker-centered socialism with dry wit and humor. It’s very easy for a piece of art written from a certain ideological perspective to morph into a vapid soapbox for its author (see anything written by Ayn Rand, or the many painfully unfunny conservative comedians), but Pedercini’s self-aware dialogue steps confidently over this pitfall and had my partner and I howling with laughter during many character interactions.

During one memorable scene at the local worker-owned brothel, Harvey can choose to spend the night with a human sex worker for 10 work credits, or for the considerable discount of 5 credits, a robot sex worker. We went back during a second run to try the option we hadn’t picked before and I honestly can’t decide which one was funnier. Another great interaction occurs at a coffee shop where the barista pelts Harvey with a lecture about how problematic the coffee trade has historically been… Except that it abruptly cuts to a black screen with “30 Minutes Later…” and then back to Harvey sporting a thousand-yard stare while the barista prods him that his coffee is ready. Probably my favorite scene, though, involves a group of self-proclaimed Cybertarians (part cyborg, part libertarian) you find in the US Steel Tower who spout quotes from the 90s cult classic Hackers and wax poetic about how capitalism shall rise again.

Future? No Thanks! is full of incredible character moments like this. Humor is so difficult to pull off in a video game, so when it lands as well as it does here it’s something to take note of. This game also has a surprising amount of pathos as well; Harvey is objectively problematic but in a mostly harmless way, but also quite relatable in the sense that one day we’ll all reach the point where the modern world ceases to follow the same comfortable rules and logic we’re familiar with. Harvey’s personal failings and dated views are often the butt of the joke, but there are a few pleasantly surprising parts of the story where the satire steps aside and instead views him through an empathetic lens, which ultimately is a main element that keeps the game from becoming too one-note. It’s an impressive high-wire act, and Molleindustria deserves credit for sticking the landing where a lot of similar games stumble.

I highly encourage you to check it out yourself. Maybe it’s just laser-targeted at my own politics and sense of humor, but I think it’s legitimately the best-written and funniest game I’ve played this year. I’ve put together a supercut of a handful of my favorite scenes below; if you get a laugh out of these I think it’s likely it’ll land for you as well as it did for me.

Pont-and-click with a dash of horror

Endacopia

Very Good

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Although just a handful of studios continue to make them, the venerable point-and-click adventure game genre has fallen by the wayside. Looking back at the 1990s, I would say that the genre was actually one of the leading testbeds for new technology during that decade; many of them deployed rudimentary 3D, full-motion video clips, and full voice acting long before those things became commonplace. I consider myself fortunate to have been there during that transformational period and to have played so many of the classics (Full Throttle, the Broken Sword series, Blade Runner, the Tex Murphy saga, and of course Monkey Island).

Nowadays, I play maybe one or two of these per year. I’d heard lots of positive buzz about Endacopia, a crowdfunded and highly-anticipated surreal comedy-horror adventure game by animator and pixel artist Andrés Guerrero, more commonly known by his handle ANDYLAND. Guerrero has a style that utilizes bright colors and cutesy imagery that hides an unsettling dark side just underneath the cheery veneer. A good example of his style is Dinkle, one of his short animations on youtube.

Endacopia adheres to this same kind of style where it constantly rides the line between lighthearted and deeply disturbing, with the bright colors of the characters and setpieces frequently being tinged with a macabre undertone. This is enough to keep the player on edge, and it sprinkles in a handful of legitimate scares to reinforce that atmosphere. The game keeps most details about its setting ambiguous during the early hours; you are dropped into the role of the “guardian angel” of a boy named Mellow as he tries to escape the house of his guardian/captor Henry, a giant lizard who claims to know what’s best for Mellow and will not hesitate to cave in his head with his mallet if he steps out of line. Mellow escapes Henry’s house by making a deal with a strange toilet parasite and gets flushed deep into the underground. It’s a rough trip and Mellow is cartoonishly shaken-apart, and his first task will be to put his body back together and reacquire all of his senses before moving on to meet the strange residents of the underground and solve its mysteries. There are three main areas you can choose to tackle in any order: the strange carnival of Misery Town, the cheery-but-haunted animal village of Timesville, and the brutalist corporate parody The Office.

It’s up to the player to piece together the lore of this world and what is actually going on behind the scenes, but without going into detail I can say that the story went in a different direction that I imagined and subverted a lot of my expectations. It’s definitely worth a play if you dig ANDYLAND’s aesthetic or adventure games in general, and can be finished in a lean 6 hours or so.

A good day for a swell battle!

Cuphead : The Delicious Last Course

Incredible

★

Recommended

So here’s a totally random one. Recently a friend of mine was visiting us, and in-between our scheduled activities we were looking for a co-op game to play to pass the time. We sifted through my Steam library and then checked my wishlist. I had totally forgotten that Cuphead got a DLC (the Delicious Last Course… oh I get it) and that it’d passed me by. “Yo.. Cuphead?” was my proposition, which he was totally down to try. We’d both played and beaten it when the game was new, so surely picking it up again would be like riding a bike, right?

Wrong. To warm up we went all the way back to the base game’s first boss, Cagney Carnation, and got our asses handed to us for about 20 minutes before the latent muscle memory started to come back. After we finally took down the damnable flower, we jumped right into the DLC bosses. Cuphead is a notoriously difficult 2D platformer-shooter to begin with, and the new encounters are certainly no joke - they will put your reflexes and tenacity to the test. There are six brand-new bosses plus a secret boss, as well as a section called The King’s Leap which is a series of chess piece-themed challenges that test your ability to dodge and parry attacks. To assist you in surmounting these new challenges, you can buy an item that will allow either you or your co-op buddy to play as brand-new character Ms. Chalice, whose double-jump, dash-parry, and extra health point can prove invaluable.

I played through the entirety of the base game solo, so playing co-op was a novel experience for me. Cuphead is a visually busy game to begin with, so having more than one player character on screen spewing projectiles made certain situations (and enemy attacks) harder to parse, which is somewhat offset by the fact that you can tag your partner back in when they die by executing a parry on their ghost. We made use of this… extensively. The first few bosses were pretty rough for us but eventually we hit our stride and started progressing much faster. I think we finished the whole thing in just over 6 hours, split between several sessions.

The Delicious Last Course retains the stunning 1930s-style rubber hose animation and swanky jazz from the base game and is full of personality and delightful visual flourishes from its set of screen-filling, oddball enemies. This was an unexpected detour, but a welcome one, and I enjoyed having a reason to return to Cuphead once more. The Delicious Last Course is every bit as savory as the base game and I definitely recommend it to fans of the original, but be ready to be humbled.

Great Odin's Raven!

Valheim

Good

★

Recommended

At last, the complete 1.0 version of Valheim has come ashore, over 5 years after the game launched in early access. This is a game I’ve been keeping an eye on, and it’s one that my friends love and have played off and on during its development. I originally played it with some of them shortly after early access began, and I remember having a great time exploring this beautiful Viking world set against a low-poly PS1 aesthetic; it was the perfect thing to distract me from the doldrums of the Covid-19 pandemic. We dove back into it when 1.0 launched last month, and currently there’s a small PC humming away in the corner of my basement hosting our dedicated server.

Like with most early access titles, I was content to wait for the complete version of the game before really investing time in it. So what has changed between then and now? As far as I’m concerned, not a whole lot. The slow but steady series of updates to the game added new biomes to challenge such as the Mistlands, Ashlands, and beyond, but I’ve never seen these as I haven’t progressed that far in the game. If you’re unfamiliar with Valheim, the game is set up as an procedurally-generated open world survival crafting game with fairly strict vertical progression. By that I mean you’ll start in the Meadows biome, build your Viking village, harvest enough basic resources to craft rudimentary weapons and armor, kill the area boss, move to the next biome, harvest its key resources and upgrade your gear (in this case copper and tin to make bronze) and so on. The farthest I’ve personally made it is the Swamp biome (the third out of a total of eight). After killing the boss there and setting sail to new lands, I made landfall on the Plains. Wait, what’s that in the distance? It’s coming at me awfully fast. … What’s a “Deathsquito?”

And here’s where I ran headfirst into the reality of how this game is set up. Valheim can be unforgiving in its brutality; it’s inevitable that you’ll be spending time running back to your corpse and retrieving your dropped gear after a monster annihilates you (which the aforementioned Deathsquito did despite my best efforts to fight back). It rewards accumulation of game knowledge but also methodical preparation and a cautious approach to combat. The accursed insect (bane of many new players) may not have oneshot my character if I were geared appropriately, but aside from looking up information on a wiki, there was no way to learn this without a lesson from the School of Getting Wrecked and Respawning. I later found out that the next logical place to progress to would be the Mountain biome, but around that time is when most of my friends fell off the game — and so did I.

I had a similar experience when booting up the 1.0 version of the game. As I mentioned earlier, not much has changed in the early-game experience aside from a handful of new recipes and building pieces. After getting back to the Swamp and exploring it a bit, I felt my momentum waning and my desire to move onto something else overtaking it. I’m starting to think that the genre of survival crafting just isn’t for me, maybe? There’s lots to love about Valheim — the experience of sailing across its oceans and exploring new lands is fantastic, its excellent lighting brings more life into the world than you’d expect from a low-poly style — for lack of a better term it’s just a vibe. I think its perceived faults have to do more with my own biases than an objective lack of quality; survival crafting games lose their sheen for me quickly and playing Final Fantasy XIV for over a decade kind of burned me out on highly-grindy vertical progression. The netcode is also a bit wack but I’ll spare you the full explanation; suffice to say it makes some… let’s say interesting choices in regards to how NPC and physics simulations are handled in multiplayer that don’t always make for a great experience. I do still recommend it if this is your genre though, assuming you haven’t already put your life in the hands of great Odin.

August 2026 Roundup

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from Big Walk

Hello dear readers, happy August (and ragweed season, ick) to you. It’s been hot, damn hot here lately so I’ve been spending lots of time in our very temperate and newly-remodeled basement, from which I’m penning this.

I’ve been thinking, and I’ve reached a point where I’ve got to be more realistic with myself when it comes to my gaming habits — because of my ADHD tendencies I’ve made a habit of forcing myself to finish games before picking up another due to my tendency of getting distracted by the new shiny object and ultimately finishing none of them. This kind of effort has been healthy for me before (and in other parts of my life), but I think I also need to be reasonable and allow myself to drop a game now and then, even if I’m mostly enjoying it. Any game left unfinished has led to a persistent open tab in the back of my brain which doesn’t feel great, and I’m feeling the need to shift my mindset. When it comes to the blog, I feel guilty about giving a game a score if I haven’t hit end credits on it yet, so in effect that leaves some games in perpetual limbo, even games I mostly liked (looking at you, Mewgenics). I think there’s got to be a happy medium where I feel like I’ve seen enough to pass judgment. I dunno, I’ll figure out what works for me eventually.

If nothing else, allowing myself to drop some titles will afford me the space to start new games — like Star Wars : Zero Company, a game that came completely out of nowhere and has really scratched a tactical itch I’ve had for a while without being fully conscious of it. Expect some impressions in a month or two from now. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here’s my slate of finished games from August which were uniformly pretty great, with two even reaching all-timer status! Starting off with a legitimate game of the year contender…

It really is about the journey, in this case.

Big Walk

Incredible

★ ★ ★

Must-Play

Some games are simultaneously both easy and difficult to describe. Such is the case for Big Walk, the newest co-op sensation recently released by House House, the Australian developer responsible for the goofy and chaotic Untitled Goose Game — a perfect interactive representation of the “go, do a crime” meme. Big Walk is quite different from their previous endeavor though, aiming for less goose-based shenanigans and more nature-trekking and puzzle-solving, creating a singular and unique experience that you can play through with a handful of friends (or perfect strangers!). It’s pretty unassuming at first look though, and takes some explaining to really reveal what’s special about it.

The term “friendslop” has recently become a mainstay of the gaming lexicon. It sounds derogatory, but is more of a good-natured ribbing of games with short development cycles that focus on a core loop of doing some kind of activity with a small group of friends. Examples are the excellent PEAK, a light-hearted game about being stranded on an island and having to cooperatively ascend a dangerous mountain in order to call for help, and last year’s R.E.P.O., which has you and your buds controlling a bunch of gabbin’ robots who are trying to extract valuables from haunted places full of bizarre and sometimes terrifying creatures. The common throughline is that these games focus on a relatively simple core loop but with enough randomization (or escalating levels of difficulty) that it makes it interesting for your group to come back to repeatedly. They also tend to be priced quite affordably (I again refer you to the PEAK dev’s famous spiel) to the point where grabbing it for a few fun, memorable sessions with your buds is well worthwhile.

Big Walk is also available at an affordable price point (About $20), but where it differs greatly is its central premise. The repeatable, randomized core loop of the friendslop genre isn’t present here; instead what you’ll find is a huge, detailed island wilderness full of unique puzzles that test your ability to communicate and coordinate with a group of friends. You can play Big Walk with as few as two people or as many as 12, but the puzzles are designed to scale for 2, 3, or 4+ players. I played through with two good friends of mine who I used to do Savage-tier raids in Final Fantasy XIV with, but I also had an experience playing with a group of 6 which was both uniquely fun and more chaotic. The puzzles never change between playthroughs aside from scaling for the number of players, so expect this to be more of a one-time experience to savor.

It must be said that good communication is the key to success in Big Walk, and it cleverly utilizes an in-game proximity voice chat that quickly falls off in volume as you get farther away from your friends. Most of the puzzles you find are based around this limitation, forcing you to use various hand signals or other ways of conveying your intent. Other puzzles will limit you in other ways like physically blocking your line of sight, restricting your movement or vision in some way, or even just slapping a pane of sound-proof glass between you that you have to account for. The puzzles start easy in the initial area but quickly get subtly devious and challenging as you progress, though the many years of talking through raid strategies with my friends definitely gave us a leg up. The cleverness and complexity ramps up and made for a lot of fun surprises, and I also need to point out that this game can be so damn funny at times. The odd limitations it places on you makes for some natural comedic moments, and the one goofball in your friend group will inevitably also find many, many ways to make you laugh through game mechanics.

It’s also just kind of a beautiful game? It fosters a light-hearted atmosphere with its antlike player characters whose mouths go noot-noot as the player talks, and the approach of putting bright primary-colored puzzle areas against a lush, detailed wilderness environment (designed in the image of Australian national parks) makes for a unique visual style that also makes the island easy to navigate. There is a day-night cycle, and it gets so dark at night that all you can see of your friends is the glow of their eyeballs, and in the darkness you may just have to hunker down and wait for the (gorgeous) sunrise if you didn’t plan ahead and bring a light. The sound design also deserves accolades, the whooshing sound effects when you make hand signals and the pitter-patter of your feet against the various surfaces you’ll walk across are very satisfying. Voices will reverberate in enclosed spaces and may carry farther than you think based on the area’s acoustic profile. You can be very objective-driven through Big Walk, but I still found that it gave a lot of natural breaks to slow down, enjoy the sights, and to just chat with your friends and catch up on what’s happening in their lives.

And that, I believe, is the biggest draw and differentiator between Big Walk and other similar games. It ends up feeling like a chill journey with your friends, and is a memorable trip at that. I’m fortunate enough to have a group of friends I regularly game with, but I’ve also seen anecdotes of others who found strangers to play with through LFG threads in Discord and came out the other side having had an absolute blast (and in some instances, with new friends). It’s hard not to get emotional at the end of the game, seeing the journey coming to its natural conclusion and walking off into the proverbial sunset. It’s thematically beautiful, a feast for the eyes and ears, and also incredibly accessible even to people who don’t play a ton of games. It comes with my highest recommendation, and is one of the best games I’ve played so far in 2026. Walk on!

🎶We're knights of the round table, our shows are for-mid-able🎶

Sovereign Tower

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Ah yes, the “Choices Matter” genre, one that is like an irresistible catnip to me. I love it when a game drops a serious moral dilemma into my lap, especially if my choice will have huge ramifications for how the following events play out. Sovereign Tower by Wild Wits Games wasn’t on my radar until it was practically ready to launch, but when I saw it in my Steam release calendar I knew it was going to be worth a play. I’d totally missed out on royal management sim Yes, Your Grace and… wait, they already made a sequel to that game, just last year. Ugh. My backlog is already a dragon I will never slay, so I think it doesn’t need to be any longer. My apologies, your Grace.

Anyhow. Sovereign Tower! You play the role of a lowly leper who narrowly escapes an attack on their village by the Empire of Angelor and then is unexpectedly judged worthy to open the titular tower of legend, thus becoming its Sovereign. The tower is enchanted with powerful magic, giving its Sovereign reign over the surrounding lands of Brizh as well as giving the knights that serve its round table capabilities beyond ordinary mortals. Your ascension inevitably attracts attention from the surrounding lands, for better or worse, and you must build up your retinue of advisors and knights in order to confront the challenges that will come your way.

I made the comparison to Yes, Your Grace earlier because most of what you’ll be doing here is taking audiences with petitioners from the lands of Brizh and beyond, hearing of their plight, and making decisions on how address all of these various problems which fall anywhere between petty disputes between nobles and potentially kingdom-destroying conspiracies. The other main portion of this game consists of assigning your knights to embark beyond the tower walls on quests to solve these problems. This part actually reminds me of last year’s excellent Dispatch, specifically in that in both games your success is based on the core stats of who you send forth to see that your will be done. Your knights have six stats : Strength, Agility, Charisma, Luck, Magic, and Wit. Beyond that, your knights also have distinct personalities and character traits which could affect their performance on missions, cause unexpected outcomes, or cause them to rebel or leave your service if the tasks they’re put on are frequently distasteful to them. Unlike Dispatch, however, there is no random element to their success or failure; it is determined solely by a points system that takes into account their stats, their gear, and their unique traits (which I appreciate). For example, send kind-hearted animal-loving knight Angelica on a quest to slay a great forest wolf terrorizing a village and she may instead just come back to the tower with a new friend in tow.

This highly incentivizes reading the quest text closely and doing your best to match the most suitable knight(s) to the task at hand. They will often drop hints to their unique quirks in conversation, or you can also just assign your attendant (and shameless gossip) Alwena to investigate rumors about them. Since you will spend so much time conversing with your knights and the people of Brizh, it’s a pleasure for me to report that the writing is uniformly excellent. The lovable idiots at your round table have specific strengths, quirks, and vices and will often offer unique quests when you reach a certain level of trust with them. There are also unique synergies between knights assigned to quests together, or hidden attributes that only reveal themselves under certain circumstances. This encourages experimentation and bolsters replayability, though it’s inevitable that you’ll make at least a few bad calls and be confronted with the loss of a knight or another painful consequence.

But you can always go back. In the deepest depths of the tower dungeon is an imprisoned demon who will offer you the ability to turn back the hands of time and rectify your mistakes, or even simply to see an alternative conclusion to a storyline. Time travel, baby! This is where I think Sovereign Tower really distinguishes itself; you can actually take all that knowledge back with you in a concrete way. Unlike a game like Outer Wilds where you take literally nothing back with you but an understanding of how that world works, your Sovereign actually retains their core attributes and can also use their foreknowledge of events as a game mechanic; you will actually get new dialogue options that inevitably freak out your petitioners and advisors with your penchant for somehow knowing exactly what is to come. With your retained Sovereign attributes — the four statistics of Audacity, Wisdom, Tyranny, and Kindness — you also gain access to choices only available when those attributes reach a certain threshold. The choice is yours when it comes to how you want to rule and if/when to use the demon’s power. Even if you decide to avoid using it, the fact that it is constantly whispering “you could have prevented this outcome” into your ear adds additional weight to your decisions. It also adds a level of replayability that is more accessible without starting the entire game from square one again. Aside from a few minor continuity issues that I saw after a rewind, they mostly pulled off this herculean juggling act (subsequent patches have also helped). Thinking about how many intertwined variables they are probably tracking behind the curtain makes the programmer part of me want to lay down and cover my head. Seriously, it’s impressive.

With its beautiful ripped-from-a-storybook aesthetic, compelling and frequently funny character writing, meaningful decisions, and surprising depth, Sovereign Tower is an easy recommendation from me. There is a ton to enjoy here, and it’s obvious that its development team enjoyed creating it as well. Can’t wait to see what they do next.

A PC-98 throwback with modern sensibilities

Stories From Sol: The Gun-Dog [2025]

Great

★ ★

Highly Recommended

The Visual Novel genre has always been a bit of an odd bird. I’m one who really loves long, detailed narratives, but when playing a VN often wonder to myself if the story being told would have been better suited to being expanded within a physical text. I’m definitely not a hater or gameplay purist, there are some traditional VNs that I love (still begging everyone to play The House in Fata Morgana), but the medium of games is ripe for stories that let the player guide them to some extent.

Stories from Sol - The Gun-Dog initially drew me in with its eye-catching, detailed pixel work, but held onto me by presenting a great story with memorable characters and a deceptive amount of player choice. The visual stylings evoke the era of PC-98 adventure games and feature some really great technical art. It’s set against the backdrop of a war that has engulfed the solar system, with humans who have colonized the outer planets (Mars and the moons of Jupiter) pitted against Earth forces. The main character, who you name, is a recently-recruited Armored Frame (read: mobile suit) pilot in the Jovian military, set to launch on their first mission during the final battle in Earth orbit… Only, when the launch order comes, nothing happens. The ship’s suit docking collar jams and will not release the Frame, so our protagonist is forced to sit there helplessly and listen to the panicked comms of their squadron as they are ambushed and picked off one-by-one.

This trauma sits with them even 4 years later, long after an armistice is signed and they have been promoted to Lieutenant and assigned to be the security officer of the JFS Gun-Dog, a fast-response gunboat ship. Their paramour Cassie has pulled some strings to get them reassigned to the Gun-Dog alongside her, where she is second-in-command. After a brief introduction to the ship and the various strong personalities that make up its crew, the Gun-Dog is hit by an unknown energy pulse that completely knocks out the ship’s power and communications, and results in both the Captain and Cassie being incapacitated. Within this leadership vacuum, you must take action to re-enable power and life support and thus save the ship’s crew, and then figure out who (or what) disabled the Gun-Dog and ravaged the other Jovian military ship that you were scheduled to rendezvous with.

The major story beats are mostly set in stone, but there are a surprising number of choices you can make along the way (some not even readily apparent) that determine the fate of several supporting characters and what attitudes they hold toward you. The script is quite well-written and features some delicious conflict between your character and other crewmembers, the most notable among them being Hansen Crwys, the only other survivor of your AF squad that was decimated in the last battle above earth. Hansen constantly needles and torments the protagonist and unfairly blames them for the death of their comrades, and it’s largely up to the player whether you decide to take the high road and try to change his opinion of you, let the comments slide, or give in and decide to antagonize him right back. After the game ends you’re shown a story graph with all the major choices you could have made, and I was surprised to see just how many there were. After finishing the game I looked up what some of the other potential routes were and was surprised to see that the death of a supporting character I experienced in my playthrough was not set in stone, one or more of the crew may lose their lives or survive based on your choices.

Stories from Sol impressed me; it’s a solid sci-fi visual novel with some meaningful player influence on the course of the story, boosted by some great animations and technical design. It comes in at a relatively tight 5 to 6 hours of gameplay and is great on a portable device like a Steam Deck, so I highly recommend giving it a whirl if this is your style of game. It apparently sold fairly well and may end up getting a sequel, and if it does, it’ll be a day 1 play for me.

Danger, danger! High voltage!

ElecHead [2021]

Great

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Whoops, Mike-wearing-editor-hat here with a late addition to the post. Here’s another bite-sized puzzle game from Nama Takahashi, the developer that created the excellent puzzle game Öoo, which I reviewed back in March. The two games share a lot in common, both are puzzle games built around one central mechanic. In this one, you’re a little robot dude deployed to a moon facility to determine why the power is out, and if possible, to get it back online. Due to its short length (and the fact that I played it on the Steam Deck while our basement was being worked on), I nearly forgot to include it on this month’s list! That’d have been a real shame, because there’s a lot to love about ElecHead.

Where Öoo had you strategically placing bombs to solve puzzles, ElecHead is about using the power within your battery-like character to complete circuits and power different areas of rooms. Within the screenshots you’ll notice that some platforms are lit up yellow, this means that they are energized and with the circuit completed, will trigger platforms to move (or traps to trigger). Not far into the game, your character gains the ability to throw their head (which is the power source) in a cardinal direction, which allows you to more carefully manipulate what is and is not powered at a given time. After throwing your head you have 10 seconds to move your body to rejoin it, else your battery boi perishes. It’s a really interesting mechanic and Takahashi deploys it well in the back half of the game; some of the later puzzles are trickier than you might think given how simple the basic mechanics are.

It’s definitely worth a play, and can easily be completed within a handful of hours. Both it and its spiritual successor Öoo are great little games, but if I had to choose between the two I’d give ElecHead a slight edge for how clever the lategame puzzles are.

July 2026 Roundup

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice

Oof. At some point we flew past the midpoint of summer and I feel like I still haven’t done much with mine so far. Definitely feeling the need to plan some sort of vacation in the next month or two, even if it just involves me staying at home and diving into my games backlog.

Speaking of the backlog, this month’s roundup features two games from 2019, two horror games involving cursed software, and the friendslop hit of the summer playing the role as the awkward fifth wheel. Some really good stuff in here this month, so let’s get into it.

As if Windows couldn't get any more cursed

Desktop Explorer

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Oh how I love a good diegetic interface in a video game. I think over time I’ve come to appreciate how much the subtleties of a well-designed and good-looking UI does for the immersion of a title, because I sure notice it now when it looks like an interface has been tacked-on as an afterthought. Games that mimic old PC user interfaces are becoming more common as people look back wistfully upon a much simpler and more rough-edged era of computing, and I think even without my personal nostalgia I’d still appreciate these.

Desktop Explorer is a game that asks “what if Windows 95, but cursed?” Your viewpoint character is a young woman who has just inherited an old PC from her beloved uncle Hal and has decided to try to excavate any information she can from it. This will lead her down a rabbit hole of family secrets and perhaps help to solve the mystery of a family member’s disappearance once and for all. It accomplishes this through a very impressive recreation of a mid-90s Windows-like interface. Through this fake OS, you will be asked to solve various puzzles that require you to use the OS’s features in unconventional and creative ways.

So yeah, about that “cursed” part. This PC you’ve inherited has a program installed on it (or infected with?) called Desktop Explorer, which represents itself through a quirky little anthropomorphized notepad mascot called Pizarro. It’s giving shades of an ominous version of Clippy, which I’m sure is what the developers were going for. Now I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a horror aficionado; I despise cheap jumpscares and tend to stay mostly on the psychological horror side of the spectrum. You can probably source that back to having unlimited access as a teenager to an early 2000s internet which was full of horrifying shock sites and screamer jumpscare pranks — that era of the internet was a bizarre and wild place.

Fortunately, no zombies or scary ghosts are going to be popping up in your face and screaming. Desktop Explorer relies more on fostering a creepy atmosphere of mystery and dread, and I’d call the handful of scares it serves up to be fairly mild overall. The mystery it has you digging into is excellent though, as you uncover more and more about the PC’s previous users and what this rogue program did to them. This is a puzzle game first and foremost, and a fantastic one at that. The problems it puts in front of you to solve often require some creative and non-linear thinking, and there were so many moments where I thought up an unconventional way of interacting with something only to find that it was the intended solution for the puzzle. This is how the best puzzle games operate, sprinkling about enough individual clues so that you can synthesize that “aha” moment that makes everything click.

Desktop Explorer mostly leans on your use of the filesystem and the various programs on the PC to solve puzzles in the first main section, but rather than resting on its laurels it impressively expands its gameworld in the following chapters. You will be exploring an abandoned online space ala Second Life and even getting familiar with the PC’s terminal in later parts. Think of it as a mashup between something like Hypnospace Outlaw (also excellent and recommended) and last year’s Blue Prince. I highly recommend it to my fellow puzzle game enthusiasts if you’re looking for something compelling, unique, and perhaps a bit creepy.

A symphony of ringing steel

Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice

Incredible

★

Recommended

Frequent readers may recall that back in April I played and quite loved Nine Sols, a combat-centric Metroidvania with excellent visual design and parry mechanics. I promised a few friends recently that I’d go back and play the game that it shares the most DNA with, and I’m pleased to report that Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice has lived up to all expectations; I’m actually shocked I hadn’t plucked it out of my backlog sooner.

Sekiro is set in a fantastical version of 16th century Sengoku-era Japan; the main thrust of the story centers around the fate of Kuro, heir to a divine bloodline that makes him immortal. Wolf, the faithful shinobi sworn to his service, is the character that you take control of in pursuit of Kuro’s wish of ending this dubious blessing; the young Lord is a pawn in a political scheme and becomes caught in-between several factions vying for the power of immortality that he holds. Much like From Software’s other games, this basic premise is all you really need to know, and the details are filled in from a smattering of character interactions and other worldbuilding conveyed by visual design, architecture, and of course the detailed item descriptions.

I’ve long been a fan of Fromsoft games. I skipped a few in the middle of their roster (Sekiro being one of them), but the original Demon’s Souls and of course its hugely influential followup Dark Souls were formative games for me. Fromsoft games are known for being quite difficult without very many levers to pull to influence their difficulty, and as far as I know none of them have an explicit difficulty setting. This has been somewhat controversial, but in many of them you could still mitigate some of the difficulty via building your character in a specific way. 2023’s Elden Ring was a great example of this; the possible ways to customize your character were numerous. I personally chose a Strength/Faith build that had me dual-wielding claymores for big bonkage and big stagger, but alternatively you could build toward almost the opposite, using consumable items to poison or weaken your foes, and keeping your distance while taking chunks out of their healthbar with spells. Buildcrafting is a big draw of those games and allows for a lot of player expressivity.

Sekiro is almost exactly the opposite, but not to its detriment. Wolf has a predetermined set of abilities (expandable and enhanceable by several skill trees) that you will need to learn to use for the entire duration of the game. Rather than giving you flexibility in your build, Sekiro practically grabs you by the throat and makes you sit up, pay attention, and master its moveset if you want to succeed. The early game definitely has a learning curve and it will undoubtedly lose some people here, but for those that persevere, what is here is a highly kinetic and incredible combat system. Whereas Dark Souls and Elden Ring demand that you learn spacing from your enemy and how to use dodge rolls, Sekiro is all about the deflection, baby. All enemies (and Wolf himself) have both a health bar and a posture bar, the latter of which builds up when you perfect parry their attacks, cause damage to them, or they block your attacks. When the posture bar fills completely, they are stance broken and you can perform a deathblow on them. This is enough to kill most weaker enemies, but minibosses and the game’s major encounters will require you to land two or sometimes even three deathblows to finish the fight.

This system hugely rewards learning the enemy attack patterns so that you can get those sweet series of perfect parries that will throw your enemies off-balance, and when not defending you should always be aggressive so as not to let them regain their posture. “Hesitation is defeat” is a common meme from this game for good reason. This is one of the rare games that has let me reach that fabled flow state while playing it; when the combat clicks and you’re parrying, counterattacking, and executing one enemy after the other, it is a feeling of power and satisfaction that is indescribable. Sword strikes are weighty, and enemy designs and animations are excellent across the board. With only a few possible exceptions, the boss encounters are very challenging but ultimately fair, and had me pumping my fist and jumping out of my chair after clutching out close victories. Before my experience of playing Dark Souls I’m not sure I would have described myself as someone who sought out difficult games, but it and its successors certainly taught me the value of perseverance and how good it feels to come out victorious in the end. I’m all for greater accessibility in most games, but Fromsoft has proven time and again that there is an undeniable allure in a carefully-crafted difficult experience.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has lived up to all the glowing praise I’ve heard and then some. As much as I revere Dark Souls and From Software’s other projects such as Elden Ring and Armored Core, in my opinion it takes the #1 spot as the best game they’ve ever made. If you think you have it in you to surmount that initial learning curve and walk the perilous path of the shinobi, I cannot recommend it enough.

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodnight

Sayonara Wild Hearts

Very Good

★

Recommended

Back in May’s edition I lamented my recent struggle of finding a rhythm game that I really clicked with. I’ve always loved the genre all the way back to my days playing Dance Dance Revolution at my local arcades (which I still do over 20 years later). Rhythm Doctor was endearing but had some glaring flaws toward the end of the game, and my experience with D-Cell’s Unbeatable was… mixed, to say the least. The next stop on my quest for a satisfying rhythm game was Simogo’s Sayonara Wild Hearts, a game I’d frequently heard about but had been perpetually backlogged until now.

The first thing I’ll say is that it’s less of a rhythm game than I initially believed it to be; it’s an autoscrolling action game where your primary objective is to maneuver to pick up heart tokens that increase your score as you race through the various (and often stunning) levels. There are some sections where you tap the interact button along with the beat to dodge enemy attacks, but it’s mostly score chasing while enjoying the visual glitz and the excellent soundtrack. It really has to be seen to be understood, so I offer up a video of one of the earlier stages for your consideration :

The best description I’ve heard for Sayonara is a “playable pop album.” The tale is presented through some narrative bits (narrated by the one and only Queen Latifah) and a whole lot of visual storytelling. It tells the tale of the protagonist overcoming heartbreak, bitterness, and disappointment to grow as a person and gain the ability to love and pursue her passions once again. It’s quite a feast for the eyes while you’re racing through the detailed, dynamically-shifting levels, but the upbeat synth-pop soundtrack is the main draw. It often had me tapping my foot and bobbing my head to the beat, and I’ve added several of its tracks to my ever-growing list of game soundtrack favorites.

It is also a VERY short game; my entire playthrough came in at just around an hour or so. There are some additional, optional challenges you can undertake if you’re really digging the gameplay, but I think I was satisfied at the end of my brief time with it. This developer is mostly known for mobile games, which makes its length and format make a lot more sense in context. I definitely found far less to dislike about it than the games I mentioned earlier, but was also left wanting more of it. It was released in 2019 and often goes on sale, so if you’re in the mood for a nice audiovisual snack that you can play through in a single sitting, Sayonara Wild Hearts may just fit the bill.

OK, maybe the moral panic was justified

Forbidden Solitaire

Excellent

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Well, July certainly was a good month for horror in the style of retro PC gaming, because here’s another easy recommendation in a similar lane to Desktop Explorer. A few years back I picked up a game by Night Signal Entertainment called Home Safety Hotline, a game where the player takes the role of a telephone operator who takes calls about paranormal occurrences and helps the caller identify and rectify their mild haunting, or possibly, impending tragedy. I would say that I liked it but didn’t quite love it, but the retro PC interface it presented itself through and the grainy, blurry images of various cryptids provided by callers made for a fun, creepy atmosphere regardless.

For their next title, Night Signal teamed up with the husband-and-wife pair that makes up Grey Alien Games, who over the last decade have specialized in the very specific niche of creating solitaire games, and by all accounts have made sustainable careers out of it. This collaboration between the two studios has resulted in a bona fide hit; Forbidden Solitaire marries Grey Alien’s polished solitaire gameplay with Night Signal’s delightful and purposefully-schlocky crude 3D and early FMV game aesthetic to create a sum much greater than its parts.

This looks like one of those point-and-click adventure games from the 90s that featured low-detail, pre-rendered 3D visuals but make no mistake — the one and only verb you use to interact with your environment is a game of solitaire. Need to hide from a prowling beast out for your blood? Solitaire. In a life-or-death confrontation with an abomination that refuses to die? That’s a Solitaire. Contemplating the nature of a mysterious orb you found? You guessed it, deal them cards. It’s a good thing that the core gameplay is so engaging because you’ll be doing a lot of it, and it’s truly a credit to Grey Alien’s craft.

Sometimes the solitaire game pits you against an enemy, tasking you with whittling down their health by chaining cards and effects together before they deplete your own health. Others are more puzzle-like, asking you to clear the game board before your deck runs down to its last card. Forbidden Solitaire puts its own spin on the game it’s based upon by adding cards that have special effects or detriments, such as armor cards that protect you from X amount of damage for a single turn, crystallized cards that damage you when playing them, or cursed cards that reduce the damage you do to your opponent as long as they’re face-up on the board. You also get a limited hand of special effect cards that can get you out of a bind or crank up the damage on an already massive combo. There’s definitely some strategy involved in when you choose to pass a turn and draw from your deck, when you trigger buff cards to mitigate your foe’s heavy hits, and when you decide to burn your inventory of consumables to rack up a long combo for big damage. The enemy’s next move is always displayed at the top of the screen so you can plan your counterplay accordingly.

As someone who lived through the game industry’s growing pains of the 1990s, the aesthetic is bang-on accurate, often being very tongue-in-cheek when dealing with the conventions and, let’s say… boundary-pushing of games of that period and how they were marketed. The pre-rendered 3D background scenes and FMV videos depicting the fictional game’s advertisements and resulting public backlash made me laugh out loud more than once (keep an eye out for a hilarious cameo from Strange Scaffold’s Xalavier Nelson Jr). Forbidden Solitaire is presented as a game within a game, a cursed piece of software obtained at a thrift store that you’re playing on a more modern PC. The mystery slowly unravels as you get deeper into the game and start receiving increasingly alarming messages from your sister who is doing research on the game and picking up clues about what happened to its developers. It’s good stuff. It’s great to see two indie developers strike gold like this. Forbidden Solitaire is a gem in every respect; the compelling card game and the mystery at its core make it a hell of a ride.

Surprisingly, not a game about robot lizards

Meccha Chameleon

Great

★ ★

Highly Recommended

If you get any gaming content in your social media feeds, you are probably aware of the breakout indie friendslop hit that is Meccha Chameleon. You may have even played it yourself, given that it’s dirt cheap, runs on anything with more computing power than a toaster, and has reportedly sold over 15 million copies to date.

This is another one of those games that is incredible when you have a group of friends to play it with. It’s basically a hide-and-seek where one team of players paints themselves to blend in with the various landscapes of the built-in levels (or the many, many custom maps available through the Steam Workshop) and another team of hunters seeks them out. Simple, but executed extremely well. There are so many reels of people inventing absolutely devious hiding spots, and the tools provided really allow players to flex their imaginative chops. As I said, it’s dirt cheap so if you have a group of gaming friends to play with and an ounce of creativity, there’s no reason not to give it a try and see what kind of masterwork you can create. But if nothing else, you can always look up the game on your short-form media platform of choice and enjoy it vicariously.

June 2026 Roundup

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from 007 First Light.

Hello folks, hope everyone had a great holiday weekend (ridiculously hot/stormy weather notwithstanding). I’m glad to finally be getting this post up; lately I’ve frequently found myself in a state where my brain is exhausted or the words just aren’t coming to me when I sit down to write, and in those situations I try not to force myself to. One of many reasons I don’t think I’d ever try to make this more than a hobby. I feel like when my brain IS engaged though, I end up being really proud of the pieces I put together.

So despite stumbling through a misasma of brain fog, I have indeed managed to play some video games. The primary one I have in progress right now is Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice, which I finally plucked off the top of my backlog. Given how much I enjoyed Nine Sols, I think it was natural to go back and play one of its primary gameplay influences. It’s probably no surprise that I adore it so far, despite some early difficulty bumps. I’m also currently in the middle of Mina the Hollower, which I am definitely enjoying and will get back to after Sekiro releases me from its clutches. I also just finished playing the bite-sized experience that is Sayonara Wild Hearts, but I’ve decided to write about that in next month’s update instead. But as for games I played in June, let’s begin with my favorite.

Licence to Thrill

007 First Light

Excellent

★ ★

Highly Recommended

I’m not sure that I’ve ever had any strong attachment to the 007 series of films. I mostly remember seeing a few films from the Brosnan era from when I was growing up, and of course I spent many summer nights playing Goldeneye 007 with my friends on the N64. I think the first Bond movie that honestly impressed and stuck with me was 2006’s Casino Royale, a well-constructed and entertaining film which reimagined the character as a version that thankfully left behind some of the goofiness (and misogyny) of prior incarnations.

007 First Light is the origin story for a whole new James Bond imagined by the developers IO Interactive, the studio responsible for the Hitman series of games. It begins with a covert operation by the British Special Forces going awry; inbound via helicopter to a site on the coast of Iceland they are shot down by a group of heavily-armed mercenaries. The only survivor isn’t one of the elite SAS soldiers, but rather a regular air crewman, our new James Bond. Alone and surrounded by hostiles, Bond is directed by an MI6 handler to extract a group of scientists involved in retrieving intel from a crashed satellite. Needless to say, Bond proves his ability to think quickly, improvise, and favorably resolve an intractable situation. Because of this, he is invited to join the 00 program, recently resurrected by the new head of MI6.

First Light hits the gas right from the jump; the initial scenario after the helicopter crash is incredibly engaging and it rolls directly into a training montage where Bond and a small cohort of trainees learn what’s necessary to become the most elite of Britain’s covert operations force. If you’re the type that gets bored easily by tutorials, I promise that this is one that won’t put you to sleep. It’s a rapid-fire series of mini challenges which will have you training in hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, parkour, and high-speed driving — all the while effectively portraying Bond’s budding friendships and rivalries with his fellow potential 00s. It’s honestly one of the best tutorial sequences I’ve ever experienced, equipping you with skills you’ll use the rest of the game and managing to be a fantastically entertaining scenario.

After some classic Bond shenanigans around how he finishes his capstone trial, he and his cohort are put on a critical mission : to bring in rogue agent Rhys Beckett, AKA 009, who has been on the run for a decade. This first real mission, at an international chess tournament in Slovakia, highlights how flexible First Light’s mission structure is. There are often multiple ways to accomplish your objectives, and based on your own preferences (and which gadgets you bring from Q Lab), you can play it full stealth or instead choose violence, cracking skulls in melee combat or running in guns ablaze. Certain gadgets will make some approaches easier — for example the watch laser can cut through locks and give access to areas otherwise inaccessible, the dart phone can give a guard standing in your way an expedited trip to Sicksville allowing you to slip past, and the Q Watch itself has the function of being able to hack or otherwise manipulate nearby electronics to provide distractions. In the event that you’re spotted or your cover is blown, you can try to bluff your way out of the situation or simply let your fists do the talking; quickly knocking out your opponents before they sound the alarm will lower the alert level back to baseline (so long as their bodies aren’t found by others). It’s also perfectly viable in many scenarios to go in guns blazing, if that is what you prefer. It’s still level-based and not quite what I would call an immersive sim, but still provides a good amount of player agency.

No matter which approach you take though, First Light will present you with an incredibly polished gameplay experience. The gunplay is snappy and mixes well with the melee combat; emptying your clip and throwing the empty gun at an enemy before taking him down in melee, taking his weapon, and repeating the process never gets old. You can also improvise and use objects in the environment against your foes, and there are often fun, unique voice lines that go with these interactions. For example, KOing an enemy by kicking in a door prompts a “knock knock!” from Bond, and beaning an enemy with a coffee mug might get a quippy “two sugars right?” If you choose stealth you have a plethora of options including the aforementioned special gadgets as well as other environmental distractions. You can also stealth takedown enemies from behind, get the jump on them from above, or yank them off a ledge while hanging. The two modes of gameplay complement each other incredibly well, and I tended to just roll with it if I botched a stealth portion and had to go loud. It honestly feels true to the spirit of the films and I’m glad they leaned into it rather than it leading directly to a failure state.

I went into 007 First Light with very few expectations or pre-existing hype and ended up very pleasantly surprised. Besides the main campaign there are also standalone Tac-Sim missions I haven’t touched yet but plan on going back to, since the core gameplay loop is just that good. It’s definitely one of my favorite games of this year and comes highly recommended.

True horror lies within the hearts of men

Still Wakes the Deep

Very Good

★

Recommended

Eldritch Horror is one of those genres that I think lends itself really well to being adapted to video games, though it can also be challenging for artists to visually depict things that are often described as “horrors beyond comprehension” in written text. 2024’s Still Wakes the Deep manages to pull it off convincingly, all within a setting that I’m not sure has been depicted before in a video game.

The year is 1975, and you play the role of Cameron “Caz” McLeary, an electrician, husband, and father of two who has recently taken a job on an offshore oil rig near Scotland called the Beira D. This was out of necessity; Caz is laying low after a bar fight he got into left his opponent seriously injured and in the hospital. Consequences are catching up to him as the story begins; he is fired by the ornery rig supervisor and a police chopper has arrived to arrest and bring him back to the mainland. Before he is able to board, however, the rig’s main drill strikes something horrible and alien. The rig lurches violently, the helicopter crashes, and Caz is sent plummeting into the sea.

He comes to after being fished out of the water and resuscitated by a crewmate, and in the brief time he was unconscious the situation has gone to hell in a handbasket. The Beira D has been enveloped by strange, almost alien tendrils reaching up from the sea floor. His fellow rig workers have also been affected by the unknown lifeform to varying degrees; some have been driven mad and others completely warped and transformed into unspeakable horrors. The organism has an effect on anyone who gets close to it; Caz will see spots in his vision and also flashbacks of his own memories during certain parts when he comes into close contact.

The game mostly consists of exploring the rig and trying to rectify the hopeless situation the crew finds itself in. There’s some light first-person platforming and sequences where you’ll have to avoid or confront your crewmates that have been transformed by the entity in the process. Frequent flashbacks serve to add more context to Caz’s character and how he ended up here, though it’s not always clear that Caz is a reliable narrator. The story itself isn’t quite as interesting as I’d hoped but it does get major points for its creature design and the level of detail put into crafting the interior and exterior of the oil rig. The whole thing is a tight 3 to 4 hours worth of gameplay so I’d say that it’s definitely worth grabbing while on sale.

Classics reborn for a new era

Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake

Great

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Well, I’ve finally done it. Almost 35 years after playing (and ragequitting) the original US release of Dragon Warrior II on the Nintendo Entertainment System, I’ve finally seen the end of this story through the newly-released HD-2D Remake edition. This version fleshes out story and characterization and smooths out some considerable difficulty issues that were part of the original (notoriously untested) NES release. This is absolutely the definitive edition of this game, and if you’re in the mood for a classic RPG that has been brought up to modern standards, I definitely recommend it. I had a lot to say about it, so I wrote a full review which can be read here.

May 2026 Roundup

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from Mixtape.

Whew. Well this one’s coming in a little hot and a little late because the end of May has been… eventful. We lost our sweet elderly cat Savannah (who I wrote a short eulogy for) last week; between that and general craziness at work, our brand-new niece making her worldly debut early, and various other smaller preoccupations it’s been hard to focus lately. Apologies in advance if this one feels a bit more disjointed than usual, I’m basically running on fumes at the moment.

Not only has it been tough to focus on writing, it’s been tough to focus on playing any one game, period. I’ve always tried to limit myself to only playing one or two games at a time, because if I don’t I’m cursed to never finish any of them. “Blame it on the A.D.D.,” as that one song goes. I finished the four games in this article in May, but also started playing Mina the Hollower, Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake, 007 First Light (which I’m playing with my partner), Luna Abyss, Titanium Court, and a distressingly small amount of Esoteric Ebb. Hopefully I’ll get it together enough to finish at least a few of those titles once life feels more normal again.

I’m also currently working on the second half of my Top 20 of the Decade list (part 1 can be found here), which I hope to have out sometime in June. Depending on how long some of these essays get, I may further split that top 10 in half. Some of these games affected me deeply in various ways and I can’t wait to heap praise on them and tell you why I found them so meaningful. I guess that’s enough stalling — here’s what I dove into during the month of May.

Just a binder full of CD-Rs and a dream

Mixtape

Excellent

★ ★

Highly Recommended

If you pay any attention to games media, the conversation around Mixtape has been, well, kind of annoying. IGN rated this game a 10/10 alongside a plethora of other outlets also giving it glowing reviews, which was always inevitably going to attract basic contrarians and cheap ragebait content. Putting all of that aside, I figured this is the kind of game I could definitely enjoy, so I decided to go into it with an open mind and see how it landed for me.

Mixtape is a story about three friends on the cusp of the next big chapter of their lives. The gang includes main character Stacey Rockford, a headphone-clad music geek and creator of the titular mixtape that you listen to throughout the game, her childhood best friend Van Slater, a budding musician and good-natured stoner type, and the newest addition to the group, Cassandra Morino, rebellious daughter of a local cop who has imminent plans to leave for college. This ends up being the source of some friction within the trio; all three were supposed to roadtrip to Los Angeles together to get Cass settled for college but Stacey (who just prefers to go by just “Rockford”) decided to bail in favor of flying to New York in an effort to connect with a famous music supervisor. Rockford has designs on going into the same career and she’s mapped out exactly how this will go in her head: she’ll essentially stalk this individual and get her to listen to her own personal mixtape, and she’s convinced that she’ll be so impressed by it that she’ll agree to take Rockford under her wing as a protégé.

A lot of the complaints I’ve seen around this game center around Rockford being kind of insufferable; she has the utmost confidence in her ability to pick the perfect soundtrack for the events of her own life and by extension any piece of media that she works on. She’ll frequently break the fourth wall to speak directly to the player about the song they are about to hear and what led her, ever the the song sommelier, to pick this for her mix. She painstakingly crafts her mixtapes with the expectation that she knows exactly how events will unfold (or alternatively deludes herself into thinking she can bend them to her will). I think we’ve all known someone like Stacey Rockford, the snob who sees themselves as above-it-all, the ultimate arbiter of quality, and yeah… I do understand why some people find it a bit grating.

But the way I see it, that’s an intended part of the whole point of this narrative. Let’s face it, teenagers just kind of suck. You sucked when you were that age, I sure did, we all did. We had grand designs for our lives and thought we could chart out the exact path we’d be walking, that is until life punched most of us straight in the mouth and humbled us, telling us that no, we didn’t know what we were doing and in fact knew almost nothing about how the world actually works. Being a teenager is a state of being messy and wrong about a lot of things, but of course there’s also a definite upside of being this age. Every experience and emotion felt is supercharged, meaning that while minor setbacks can feel crushing, every moment of joy can be transcendent in a way that I think we lose as we transition to adulthood. The game features many daydream-like sequences that reflect the intensity of the emotions Rockford is feeling, such as one where the gang is flying head over heels through an idyllic field on a windy day and whooping with joy as they tumble about, or when her anger boils over and she envisions blowing up mailboxes and parked cars when she flips them the bird. This is a reflection of her rage that her plan for her final day with her friends (and therefore her perfectly-curated mixtape) has gone off the rails. Mixtape is full of these fantastical sequences which of course do not reflect the literal reality of what happened, but convey the feelings associated with those moments perfectly.

Aesthetically, Mixtape is a pure shot of 90s nostalgia. The characters (animated on twos creating a pseudo stop-motion effect) explore painstakingly-crafted environments which might look very familiar if you grew up during that time. I definitely see the symbols of my own childhood in the wood-paneled bedrooms, the primitive home computers, the fashion worn by the local teens, and in so many other little details. The soundtrack, unsurprisingly, is excellent through and through. It features a handful of crowd-pleasers from this era such as Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division, and The Cure, but also contains a lot of (often older) deeper cuts that the game’s scenes are tailored around. I’m not sure I’ve ever said this about a video game but I do think that the licensed tracks are a core part of its identity, lend a certain authenticity to it, and it would be diminished as a piece of art without them.

Once it has taken a few beats to establish its characters and the relationships between them, Mixtape becomes a charming and unforgettable exploration of the messy experience of being a teenage delinquent and what one leaves behind when you start to take the first steps toward life outside of the small world you’ve always known. I couldn’t help but smile during some of the late game sequences which were often poignant, funny, and touching. I’m not sure I’d call it a perfect game (and it won’t land for everyone) but it’s a brief-yet-rich slice-of-life adventure that I definitely recommend.

More like Beatable. Because I finished it. How curious.

Unbeatable

Good

∅

No Recommendation

I’ll level with you, reader. I’ve been having kind of an existential crisis lately when it comes to rhythm games. I think most friends of mine know that I LOVE music/rhythm games. After last month’s disappointing playthrough of Rhythm Doctor I was jonesing for a really good rhythm game, and picked up D-Cell’s Unbeatable in an attempt to satiate that craving. My feelings about it ended up being, well, complex. It’s a solid one at its core but it makes several big missteps in terms of its story presentation and is also rife with technical issues. That being said I still did find some really enjoyable moments in it, but the important caveat is that the best parts of the game are backloaded. Ironically, I think this ended up being the poster child for why I chose a dual rating system when I started this blog. If you’re curious about why I liked it despite its flaws but can’t quite bring myself to recommend it, you can read my full review here.

At last, Chess II.

Gambonanza

Great

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Welp, we all saw this coming. After Balatro became one of the surprise breakout hits of 2024, it was only a matter of time before we started to see other games imitate and (hopefully) iterate on the formula it introduced. Where the core concept of Balatro was “what if poker, but a roguelike,” Gambonanza merges the structure of a roguelike with the timeless, elegant game of chess.

If you’ve played Balatro you pretty much know what to expect. You can hold up to five Gambits, which modify your gameplay much like Balatro’s joker cards do, and you will plan your strategy around them. Some Gambits allow pieces to take extra turns under certain conditions, others give you a chance for an effect on taking or losing a piece, so on and so forth. There are also special tile modifiers that you can affix to the spaces of the game board such as a trap tile to ensnare a piece and make it lose its turn, or a shield tile that gives the piece that moves onto it one turn of protection from being captured. You also have a stock that you can store spare pieces in, and from which you can deploy them mid-game. It definitely mixes up the base formula of chess quite a bit, to the point where it’s unique unto itself and you certainly don’t need to be a grandmaster to enjoy it.

I think one of the main issues that arise with this combination, however, is that the inherent complexity of a game like chess is magnitudes greater than Balatro’s poker hand-making gameplay, where you’re mostly juggling mental odds and molding your deck toward a certain purpose. The game board starts as a miniaturized 5x5 stage with a handful of enemy tokens but gradually expands as you progress, eventually reaching full-width and has you facing off against a full retinue of opposing pieces. Add the complexity of gambits, special tiles, and even enemy abilities in the special boss stages and the cognitive load adds up staggeringly fast. Gambonanza attempts to ease some of this by allowing you to mouse over and see the attack range of any piece and also makes your pieces shudder and sweat when they’re threatened, but I still frequently found myself cursing under my breath when I failed to account for one or more factors and blundered a good piece into a trap. I hit upon a few synergies that felt broken in a good way (much like its progenitor Balatro) but I think you need to be prepared to inevitably trade pieces sometimes and replenish your stock in the store phase between rounds. I will say that there’s a ton of potential for Gambonanza to generate moments in which you feel like a genius and bring a run back from the brink; during my first winning run I thought I was dead in the water sometime around the second boss. When it does happen, it feels incredible.

Some cognitive overload issues aside, Gambonanza is still very worth a try, particularly if you’re the type of person that frequents Chess.com. I can only do a few runs at a time before my brain starts to feel the effect of decision fatigue and needs a break, but it is quite compelling. You can almost look at every round like a miniature puzzle to be solved, and the variety between runs is very high. I guess the remaining question is, what game gets the Balatro treatment next? Backgammon? Checkers? Mancala?? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Pilgrimage Complete

Final Fantasy X

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Back in March I mentioned that I’d started a playthrough of the remaster of Final Fantasy X, one of my favorite Playstation 2 games and one of the RPGs in my personal pantheon of all-time greats. Hard to believe the game is now old enough to vote, drink, and rent a car having just turned 25 years old. I think it’s my duty to tell you that if you have fond memories of playing this game when it was new, you should probably go easy on your lower back and also consider scheduling a colonoscopy.

All japery aside, my goal was to see if this classic still holds up in the modern era. The remastered version released on modern consoles and PC takes a light-touch approach, upscaling the graphics and replacing some textures, but leaves the gameplay from 2001 fully intact. There are a handful of assist features that let you speed up the game or increase/eliminate random battles which is greatly appreciated, though I did wish for a bit more granularity in these options. Being able to double the EXP and Gil earned while cutting the encounter rate in half would make the experience just about perfect, in my opinion. It’s definitely still a product of its time but I’m pleased to report that surprisingly, the game doesn’t feel archaic. The sphere grid is still a fascinating method of character advancement and the battles themselves reward good tactics; many boss fights are more an exercise in problem-solving versus grinding out the raw levels to overcome them.

The battle system is definitely a draw but the main course consists of the characterization and story. Although the dialogue is certainly stilted at times (and I actually only recently learned the real reason behind this), the emotional beats of Yuna’s pilgrimage to defeat Sin still hit and the whole cast is just so damn quirky and lovable. When the plot really kicks into gear it’s among the best stories in the series, and the world-building for the vividly-colored but cursed land of Spira is unforgettable. This is one of the entries in the Final Fantasy series that is most fondly remembered and for good reason. If you haven’t played it, I can still recommend it as a crucial and enjoyable piece of JRPG history.

Top 20 of the Decade - Part 1

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know about you, but personally whenever someone asks me to name my all-time favorite game, movie, song, what have you… My brain just shuts off and I stand there slack-jawed. I guess I find it nearly impossible to pick one favorite anything; I’m the kind of person who dabbles in a lot of different genres and tries to have a lot of unique experiences. There are so many pieces of art that I love but for very different reasons; comparing them against each other sometimes seems impossible.

I have been reflecting on the past ten years recently. Through college I was actually more of a console gamer; I played World of Warcraft on my increasingly-ancient PC for a while but drifted more toward the PS2, PS3, and Xbox 360 over that time. It wasn’t until about 2012 when a coworker offered me some of his spare PC parts that I decided to assemble a gaming PC once again. I did so, but didn’t do a ton with it until I started playing Final Fantasy XIV in 2013. I met a group of really great friends (and my partner!) through that game, and after quitting my shitty, stressful job a few years later started to branch out and play more, different games.

I have always played games throughout my life but it actually wasn’t until around 2015 when I started to consider it one of my primary hobbies. It’s fascinating to reflect and see just how far the art form has come in terms of storytelling and presentation within the span of the decade. I challenged myself to figure out what my all-time favorite games of this past decade are, and ultimately decided to write a bit about it. So without further ado, here is the first half of my twenty favorite games of the past 10 years. I hope you find something here that resonates with you, or perhaps even a new favorite of your own.

[#20] Baba Is You

Incredible

★

Recommended

Man, how to even start describing Baba Is You? I guess I’d start by sharing the important caveat that this is a sicko puzzle game for puzzle sickos, essentially a mashup of two different sub-genres (sokoban block-pusher and logic puzzler). You control the titular Baba, a sheep-like (or rabbit-like?) creature whose objective is to reach a gold flag in order to win the level. Sounds easy, but the way you will typically accomplish this is by pushing objects and words around; the words on the stage form phrases that define the logic for the level. For example, most early levels include the phrases BABA IS YOU and FLAG IS WIN. So theoretically let’s say there’s a giant wall around the flag and the phrase WALL IS STOP is on the stage as well. There’s a few different ways to solve this; you could move STOP away from WALL IS so that you can walk right through it, or perhaps you rearrange the logic to say WALL IS YOU, and now controlling the wall you can move it over the flag to win. It starts simple enough, but quickly ramps up and gets very, very complex. Again, I cannot stress enough, sicko game for sickos.

Baba Is You has plenty of surprises and at its best is one of the most fascinating games I’ve ever played. There are also certain levels that are absolute bastards, stumpers that had me spending hours on them looking for the right solution. I never hit credits in this game but I feel strongly that I still greatly enjoyed my time with it and still have yet to play another puzzle game that hits a similar niche.

[#19] Balatro

Incredible

★ ★ ★

Must-Play

Balatro is one of those games that come out of nowhere and has you scratching your head, thinking to yourself “Wait, this is brilliant. Why did no one think of this before now?” Named for the Latin word for “jester,” this game is a wildly unique poker hand-based roguelike where you’re challenged to build high-scoring hands out of a randomly-dealt deck of cards. The twist is that between blinds (the term this game uses for a single level) you’re sent to a virtual shop to buy various Joker cards which all work in different ways to provide higher base score or a multiplier for certain types of hands. There are 150 different Jokers in all, and also sets of arcana and celestial cards you can get in the shop that modify the actual cards themselves in your deck to make them behave differently during scoring.

Balatro had a demo that was picked up by several prominent streamers, and when the game released it absolutely exploded in popularity. One of the game’s greatest virtues is that no two runs are alike; there are an insane number of synergies and strategies you can build toward, and you’d be surprised how many wins you can pull off if you remain flexible in your deckbuilding strategy and pivot when necessary. It’s another one of those games where every now and then you’ll find a game-breaking, disgustingly-effective strategy that makes you feel like a genius. The scaling here is so wild that you’ll start with blinds that ask you to get 300, then 600, then 1000 points and then eventually you’ll get to a point where you’ll need millions, billions, or perhaps even more to proceed to the next ante. There’s something hypnotic about the game’s animations and sound; the cards shake and pop with escalating pitch and volume as they trigger and your score shoots up and up and up. That mixed with the psychedelic visuals and musical themes make for an experience that’s intoxicating. I would recommend it to just about anyone, it’s a simple to learn but devilishly complex to master type of game.

[#18] Beat Saber

Incredible

★ ★ ★

Must-Play

When it comes to VR, I’ve been what most people would call an enthusiast. After demoing a work friend’s Oculus Rift back in 2017, I knew that this was something I had to incorporate into my regular gaming. For all of the obvious downsides of the current generation of VR headsets, it really can’t be overstated how immersive an experience it can be. I picked up a Windows Mixed Reality headset made by Acer the following week and dove into this exciting new ecosystem of games. I played Space Pirate Trainer, Moss, Until You Fall, Half-Life Alyx, all these and so many other games now considered VR classics. I was a newly-minted software developer at the time and the consulting company I worked for had several projects in the pipeline that involved creating an environment in VR space for simulations, job training, all sorts of stuff. The future of the tech seemed bright and appeared to be a natural evolution for gaming.

Fast-forward almost 10 years into the future, and modern VR is an industry on life support. Microsoft killed off the whole WMR line of headsets I got my start with; recent Windows 11 updates have even broken their compatibility with the OS effectively making them e-waste. Meta gobbled up Oculus and has cornered the market with their Quest series of headsets, which of course are heavily-subsidized in order to make the promise of the Metaverse come to fruition. Years later this turns out to have just been an exercise in lighting approximately 80 billion dollars on fire. Apple’s ludicrously-expensive Vision Pro headset proved to be a flop as well. There are smaller players in the market such as Valve, Pico, Pimax, etc but none have been able to make a dent in Meta’s enormous market share. The VR game development sphere has shrunk considerably as well, since the demand simply isn’t there. In short, it’s bleak out there and decidedly NOT where gaming has gone in the interim.

But through it all, one of the clear successes in the VR sphere has been Beat Saber. It’s a simple but brilliant concept: you as the player wield two colored lightsabers and slash like-colored blocks to the rhythm of the music. The game’s base OST is filled with lots of EDM and rock music but can be further modded on PC to import gobs of user-generated beatmap patterns set to popular music. Beat Saber is a game I continually come back to when the urge rises to put the headset back on. It’s a great time, and manages to be a way more intense cardio workout than you’d expect.

I truly enjoyed all the other games I listed earlier but out of all the VR games out there, Beat Saber is the undisputed classic that I would recommend to anyone with a VR headset. Maybe one day we’ll see another big technical leap in VR that makes it more immersive and/or accessible and puts it back in the limelight, but until then I’ll still be hopping in from time to time to get my Jedi on and slash blocks to the music.

[#17] Helldivers II

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

From the moment I saw the tongue-in-cheek Super Earth propaganda video that serves as the intro to Arrowhead Studios’s Helldivers II, I knew this was going to be a special game. The Helldivers are an elite military unit of shock troopers who wield absurd weaponry and copious amounts of explosives to eliminate the threat of hostile aliens hell-bent on the destruction of humanity (never mind the fact that each faction has ample reason to hate humanity for the countless atrocities committed against them). It’s an over-the-top satire of a fascistic and jingoistic human society that has cast aside its squabbles and hatred of one another and now instead focuses its xenophobia outward into the cosmos onto literal, actual aliens. “That’s called DEMOCRACY!” your character yells as they call in an airstrike that levels a city block and reduces a hundred alien enemies to unidentifiable goop. It’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but fortunately it is really damn funny.

Helldivers II is quite possibly the best co-op PvE shooter I’ve played. There’s a huge array of different weapons to wield against the foes of Freedom as well as a delightful array of excessively-destructive attacks you can call in from your ship in orbit or to be delivered by a close-support fighter jet. There’s turrets, there’s vehicles, there’s lumbering fire-support mechs, Helldivers II really has it all. You’ll have to choose carefully though, as not every weapon works great on every front. There are three distinct factions to fight : the Terminids (think Starship Troopers’s Arachnids), the Automatons (think Terminators), and the Illuminate (think War of the Worlds mixed with the Flood from Halo). The three factions have very different units and will call for different loadouts and tactics, furthermore complicated by which mission types you choose. For example, the Automatons have primarily ranged attacks and emphasize using cover and precisely hitting their weakspots, whereas the Terminids will actively chase and hunt you down, forcing you to continually be on the move and to bring heavy anti-tank capability for their big units with hardened carapaces. Sometimes you’ll be tasked with defensive missions where fixed emplacements and turrets make more sense, on others you’ll be dropping into an active warzone and assigned to eliminate a hardened base. Crafting effective loadouts for each situation is one of the best parts of the game to me, but sometimes it’s fun to just say “fuck it” and take a total meme loadout. All fire weapons is my favorite for when I’m feeling spicy, and I must mention that HDII has the best version of a flamethrower I’ve ever seen in a game.

The game’s developers also maintain an ongoing “galactic war,” basically one big futuristic D&D campaign set on a galactic map where divers fight to push back the borders of the enemy factions and where grand strategy plays out. As they continue to develop the game’s ongoing narrative and add new enemies, weapons, and missions I will keep diving in to see the new sights. The enemies of Super Earth never rest.

[#16] Tunic

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

It’s hard to talk about Andrew Shouldice’s Tunic without inadvertently spoiling anything. On its surface it looks like a 3D isometric Zelda-like starring a cute lil fox guy with a sword and shield, but if you even start to lightly scratch that surface you will discover that this is really a game about exploration and the joy of discovery.

See, our sword-wielding vulpine hero can find pages of a book scattered around the map, and you’ll quickly identify them as some sort of game manual. The pages are written in an unfamiliar script but are also filled with screenshots and illustrations that hint that there’s a lot more of this game to discover than you might think, from hidden areas to entirely obscured game mechanics that aren’t immediately obvious, even through basic experimentation. I listened to a Remap Radio interview of Shouldice a while back talking about how these game manual discoveries were inspired by experiences from his childhood when he couldn’t quite read most of the things he saw in old NES game manuals but still faithfully flipped through them, gleaning what he could.

Ultimately, discovery is the draw of Tunic and if this sounds at all appealing to you, stop reading right now and go pick it up. You’ll have to walk the path yourself before you fully understand exactly what makes it so fantastic, but I believe that the process of discovery is a reward unto itself.

[#15] Death Howl

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Never thought I’d be heaping praise onto a deckbuilder, but here we are. Death Howl is an outstanding tactics game that describes itself as a soulslike (in this case shorthand for difficult) deckbuilder. It follows the protagonist Ro, a mother grieving the recent loss of her son, into a fantastical spirit realm where the metaphorical is made literal and where her goal is to bring back the soul of her child. It’s a beautiful, atmospheric rumination on grief and loss which also manages to be a mechanically-dense tactical deckbuilder that caught me, an avowed deckbuilder hater, completely by surprise with how simultaneously complex and manageable it was.

Back in January of this year I wrote a full review of Death Howl which can be read here..

[#14] Signalis

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

It’s funny how nostalgia for past eras of media rolls in, like big waves crashing into a beach. I think at this point the wave of 16-bit era nostalgia has peaked and we’ve moved onto wistfully remembering the chunky, unstable, highly-aliased polygonal models that characterized the time of the original Playstation. It’s a weird thing to me because I feel like games in that early epoch of fully-3D titles have probably aged worse than your average retro game due to issues with janky control schemes, unstable framerates, and overall low scrutability.

Where it shines, though, is in the specific genre of lo-fi horror. Sometimes a crude representation of something terrible or a hint toward a source of fright just offscreen can drive a spike into your amygdala in a way that is completely different from the way high-budget horror fare does. In this context enters Signalis, a sci-fi horror retro throwback title that invokes Resident Evil just as much as it does Clock Tower or Fatal Frame. Played from an overhead isometric view with a control scheme reminiscent of early RE tank controls, the game oozes style and tension from its excellent environments and character art. You play as Elster, a Replika unit (essentially an android created in a human’s image) who crash lands onto a planet with a doomed mining colony and is single-mindedly looking for her single lost crewmate amongst the death and chaos that has overtaken the facility.

Things are not quite as they seem though, and as Elster begins to discover more about the situation she finds herself in, she will begin to question her purpose in being here, her own memories, and perhaps even her own perception of time itself. This is a work of horror both psychological and supernatural and is heavily inspired by Chambers’s The King In Yellow. The game’s story has some ambiguous elements to it and is at least partially up to your own interpretation, but even if you dislike such ambiguity I think you can still find a lot to love here in the gorgeous PSX-styled visuals and its stellar sound design and music. Horror is not a genre I frequently seek out, but Signalis is so thought-provoking and aesthetically striking that it’s something I still have vivid memories of, even years after playing it.

[#13] Hades

Incredible

★ ★ ★

Must-Play

Really, do I even need to write anything about Hades, possibly one of the most well-known and successful indie games to date? A quick glance at my steam friends list shows a whopping twenty other people who own and have played a considerable amount of it, so I think it’s safe to say that it has wide appeal.

It’s popular for an array of damn good reasons. It’s got vibrant and distinctive art, fantastic characters, fast and frenetic gameplay, and an incredible soundtrack. Its roguelite structure lets you mix things up by picking different weapons, god boons, and run modifiers which ensures that no two runs are ever the same. Against all odds, even if you get your ass repeatedly kicked and sent back to the House of Hades without progressing, every character somehow always has something new to say. There is an absurd amount of dialogue written and recorded in Hades and even losing a run just means that you get to go back, get a little bit stronger for next time, and pleasantly chat up all your fellow Hot Underworld Gods.

Seriously, it’s just excellent. If you haven’t played it, first of all what planet have you been living on, and secondly go pick it up from the next Steam sale, it can regularly be found for less than the price of a fancy coffee.

[#12] Citizen Sleeper

Incredible

★ ★ ★

Must-Play

Glancing at my list of all-time favorite games, I think it’s fair to say that Gareth Damian Martin’s Citizen Sleeper is probably my favorite narrative-focused game of all time (maybe because I still haven’t played Disco Elysium, so TBD). Sure, there are mechanics focused around the distribution of dice rolls to perform various activities, but the main draw here is the fantastically-scripted narrative.

The premise immediately drew me in: you are a Sleeper, an emulated human consciousness separated from its body and core memories, placed into a cybernetic body, and entered into what is essentially wage slavery, toiling away at hazardous jobs while your meatspace progenitor is in cryosleep. You manage to escape your captors to a remote space station called Erlin’s Eye, but you are immediately met with another significant problem: your body is breaking down rapidly, lacking the stabilizer solution needed to keep it operational. Planned obsolescence by the company that built your artificial body. Citizen Sleeper, unsurprisingly, has a lot to say about capitalism and bodily autonomy. It’s a story about survival against all odds, developing connections to others, and finding warmth and community in the midst of a harsh world.

The gameplay is relatively simple but is more than enough to keep you engaged. At the start of every day you roll five dice. Each dice roll can be used to perform an activity of your choice, using your base stats as modifiers. You’ll pick an initial character class (Machinist, Operator, or Extractor) which determines your starting stats and you will have the chance to upgrade them periodically as you finish quest lines. Most activities will present more than one approach to resolve the situation which lets you tailor your approach based on how you’re building your Sleeper. Like any dice-based game though, sometimes the dice do not cooperate and you get a slate of lousy rolls. These low rolls can be used for hacking and discovering secrets hidden deep within the decommissioned networks of the Eye, but sometimes it might just be better to take only low-risk activities and then call it a day. Renata Price of Waypoint Radio likened this to a disability metaphor; this certainly rings true with my own experience of having chronic illness which makes me constantly exhausted no matter what I try. Sometimes, all you can do is just hang on.

A funny thing happened to me in the midgame though and will probably happen to a lot of players — suddenly, acquiring stabilizer is no longer a problem and the resource curve of the game kind of just breaks. Normally this would be indicative of a mechanical flaw but I think this may actually be a case of (accidental?) ludonarrative harmony. At this point in the game you’ve made connections and befriended people, you have steady work and people who stick their necks out for you so that you can get what you need to survive. Again I can’t say if this is intended or a happy accident, but this is one of the game’s few flaws and I’d argue it’s actually a plus when viewed from this perspective.

Again, the quality of the writing in Citizen Sleeper cannot be overstated. The character stories are often touching, sometimes tragic, but always thought-provoking. There are also multiple endings, essentially letting you choose what your Sleeper’s “canon” ending will be (while still allowing you to proceed to see the rest of the game, if you want to). If storytelling in games is a primary draw for you, you owe it to yourself to experience a life on the Eye.

[#11] The Last Spell

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Here’s the scene: against all odds my heroes remain on their feet, though they are bloodied, beaten-down, and running low on supplies. The north walls of my base have collapsed and vicious, angry monsters are about to breach the west side as well. The wizards at the center of the town chant hurriedly, rushing to enact the complex spell that will erase magic from this world forever. It’s looking grim, but if I can just figure out a way to get my dagger-wielding assassin hero to the north side of the battlefield I could perhaps destroy the archdemon, the source of this chaos.

My longbowman up in the watchtower fires a wide volley, clearing a path for the assassin who uses her last charge of a teleport scroll to blink into existence outside the walls and then makes a mad dash for the eldritch horror before her. My palms are sweaty and my heart is pounding; if I don’t win on this round they’re going to breach the western walls, kill my defender there, and then it’s probably game over. The assassin makes a few quick slices with the dagger, and then she switches to her axe for what I hope will be enough damage to deal the coup de grace. She leaps into the air and slams it down on the enemy commander, emptying its health bar and causing it to erupt into searing light, turning the rest of its underlings to dust. VICTORY! I jumped out of my chair and pumped my fist. It was by the skin of my teeth, but I’d finally won the war.

This was my experience in the final stage of The Last Spell, undoubtedly one of my favorite tactics games of all time. It is a turn-based hybrid of a grid-based tactical game and a tower defense game, where you are tasked with protecting a circle of wizards while they cast a spell to rid the world of the scourge of magic which has destroyed entire civilizations and killed millions. In order to do this you’ll need to train and equip your heroes, build up a makeshift town around the magic circle, and build defenses such as walls, catapults, ballistae, and traps in order to repel the monsters that appear every night, attracted by the magical energy. It’s masterfully designed; all of these different systems interlock and synergize extremely well to create a compelling loop. Moreover, I’d be doing a disservice if I didn’t mention how great the presentation of this game is. The isometric pixel art is colorful and sharp and shows tons of character, and the soundtrack (composed by Remi Gallego of The Algorithm) blends thumping rhythms with crushing metal guitar riffs plus various horns, strings, and harpsichord melodies. This all comes together to create an experience that is distinctly its own, and even almost 3 years after playing it I still remember that final battle like it was yesterday. If you have any affection for the genre of turn-based tactics, you absolutely must try The Last Spell.

April 2026 Roundup

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from Nine Sols.

Hope you all had a nice April. I briefly considered penning a fake, glowing review for some total piece of garbage like Big Rigs : Over the Road Racing or I dunno, League of Legends as an April Fools prank but given that it’s now May and the fact that nobody really seems to like April Fool’s Day shenanigans anymore anyways, I quickly decided against it. Maybe next year if some really funny concept comes to me. Anyways, onto a game that I can give a glowing, non-satirical review to…

Zen and the art of deflection

Nine Sols

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Take one part metroidvania, mix in an Eastern fantasy visual style, and sprinkle with Sekiro-style parry-based combat and voila, you’ve got Red Candle’s excellent Nine Sols. This is a game I’ve been meaning to get to for a while after hearing lots of positive buzz and I’m quite glad that I did.

Red Candle is a Taiwanese studio that you may recognize for their first few games Detention and Devotion. The latter is infamous for being at the center of a scandal in which an asset was discovered in the game that mocked Chinese President Xi Jinping, leading to a wave of review bombing and its subsequent removal from all major stores (to this day, you can only buy it directly from the developer’s website). Controversy aside, both were excellent horror games and lauded by critics. Nine Sols is a hard left turn for the studio into developing a tough-as-nails 2D action game, but I’ve gotta say that you wouldn’t know it’s their first game in the genre because they crushed it. Red Candle made a game that has rocketed to my upper echelon of metroidvanias, landing below only the excellent Hollow Knight : Silksong and the one that arguably started it all, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

The game begins with the protagonist Yi, our protagonist and small catlike fella, barely hanging on for his life to the edge of a cliff after having lost a duel with his former mentor. Yi’s strength falters and he plunges to his gruesome death at the bottom of the chasm, only to be wrapped up by spectral roots which start to heal and regenerate his body. He is eventually restored to the land of the living, but still needs time to regain his full strength afterwards. He joins a nearby village of humans and develops a bond with a young boy named Shuanshuan, an orphan whose parents were killed years ago as part of a ritual sacrifice. Shuanshuan himself is set to go through the same ritual this year, and claims that he’ll get to see his parents after he “ascends,” not knowing the truth behind it. Yi intervenes during the ritual, saving his life, and through this gains access to the strange mechanical tunnels below the village. Not all is as it seems, our hero is much more than meets the eye, and he has unfinished business deep within this labyrinth. Eventually he’ll make a number of allies and meet up again with Shuanshuan who has followed him into the facility; soon after Yi will begin unleashing his vengeance upon the Nine Sols, the council that controls this realm.

Your main verbs in this game are slashing, dashing, and parrying. The latter is the most important; it grants a Qi charge that can be used to dash through an enemy and apply one or more talismans, which burst for heavy damage. You have some invulnerability frames when dashing, but parrying is the primary way that you mitigate damage and build your Qi meter. I personally still haven’t played Sekiro, but by all indications Nine Sols takes heavy inspiration from its deflection-based combat where learning attack patterns and timing is paramount to success. You’ll likely get knocked around a lot while learning the difficult fights but when the parrying clicks, it feels INCREDIBLY good to execute. I found the parry timing to be fairly forgiving, and even if you don’t parry perfectly you will take temporary damage that regenerates over time (and you still generate Qi from imperfect parries). Once you have a few early mobility upgrades the combat really sings, especially so during the boss battles, all of which are bangers without exception. The final boss in particular is one of the best boss fights I’ve ever experienced in a game of this type, and finally locking in the parry timings made me feel like my brain was expanding to the size of the cosmos. If you like deflection-based combat, it really doesn’t get much better than this. This is a first for this blog, but because I think this game has to be seen in motion to be understood, here’s a recording of me fighting one of the later-game major bosses (minor spoilers ahead, of course). It helps that my winning attempt was clean as hell, one of those instances where you just enter a flow state and completely lock-in.

The game is also just gorgeous and so damn charming. The art is colorful and lush, expressing a unique futuristic Taopunk style with gorgeous animations that also serve to clearly telegraph enemy attacks. Eventually you’ll establish a home base where Shuanshuan and your band of misfits will reside while you’re out accomplishing Yi’s mission, and I especially liked the interactions between Yi’s old friend Kuafu (a portly orange cat-man with a boba tea container strapped to his chest) and of course with Shuanshuan, his surrogate younger brother. You can bring back various relics to him you find in the world and it’s adorable to watch him learn and adapt to this bizarre and fantastic new world he finds himself in. During important story scenes I was also delighted to find that many of these parts are depicted as meticulously-illustrated comic panels, all of which feel like they could have been pulled straight of an acclaimed graphic novel.

Truly, I believe Nine Sols is a top-tier action game and I’m fascinated to see what Red Candle has in store next. On the standard difficulty it is quite challenging, but it has excellent granular difficulty settings where you can tune damage you inflict and damage done to you from anywhere between 1% and 1000% based on how mellow or sweaty you’re feeling at the time. It comfortably lands in the hallowed grounds of the 90s and comes with a very high recommendation.

Rad Dad Simulator 2026

Pragmata

Excellent

★ ★

Highly Recommended

At first I wasn’t sure what to make of Pragmata. I recall seeing the original trailer for it a year or so back and wondering if this was some sort of odd gritty MegaMan spinoff given the bright blue coat worn by the deuteragonist, the pint-sized android Diana. I’m pleased to report that no, this is a wholly original new IP concocted by the wizards at Capcom, a company that is both releasing blockbuster hits as well as more experimental and interesting projects like this.

It begins with a fairly straightforward concept: a moon base called the Cradle has been emitting a distress signal, and engineer Hugh Williams and his team are dispatched from the earth to the moon to find out what went wrong. The Cradle is home to a research facility where a newly-discovered material called Lunafilament is being experimented with, a material that can closely mimic any other type of matter and could change the world. Upon arrival, things quickly go awry with a dramatic moonquake causing the structure they’re in to collapse and the other three members of Hugh’s squad to perish amongst the chaos. He wakes up to his suit being patched by a small android girl who has lost her memory. She rattles off her designation number but Hugh gives her the name Diana, which she enthusiastically takes to. The two team up to survive, combining Hugh’s talent for weaponry with Diana’s natural hacking which makes them a formidable team. Together they take on the rogue AI IDUS which has caused the facility’s bots to go berserk.

This makes for a combat system which is different from anything I’ve seen before. Aiming Hugh’s weapon with LT also brings up Diana’s hacking grid for the enemy you’re aiming at. Navigating through the grid with the face buttons and connecting nodes to the final green node pops open enemy weakspots and makes them vulnerable for Hugh to blast away at. Eventually you also gain the ability to execute subsequent hacks when the enemy is already open, causing additional damage and/or status effects like overheat, confusion, etc. If you really want a challenge, try doing both at once. Fire off a few rounds with Hugh, hack away with Diana while the weapon cycles, and all the while keep an eye on your surroundings and dodge incoming enemy attacks. All of the modes of play are relatively average for this kind of game, but it’s the synthesis of them and interplay between them that makes for some really unique and engaging gameplay. There are simulation challenges unlocked periodically in the game that are a blast to run through and often teach you more skills and tactics you can apply during the regular game.

The draw here is definitely the gameplay, but the fantastic technical art for the environment and enemies bears mentioning, and Capcom’s in-house RE Engine shines here, delivering buttery smooth gameplay where it feels great to move through the world and blast bots. I wouldn’t say the game’s plot is groundbreaking, but I do have to give credit for the great characterization of Hugh and Diana and the relationship and trust they build throughout the game. Despite being a highly-advanced android, Diana is very much modeled in appearance and personality on a 6-year-old child and behaves as such. You can find memory modules throughout the game that can be brought back to the shelter hub area to replicate fun objects from earth that Diana can play with. She’ll play and frolic, she’ll bring you adorable crayon drawings, and I couldn’t help but smile. Hugh’s voice actor brings some very “gee golly” midwest uncle energy which is sometimes at odds with the tone of the game, but mostly works. There’s definitely a theme of found family here; Hugh eventually confides to Diana that he was adopted and it’s clear to see partway through the game that the amnesiac Diana comes to see him as a surrogate parent in turn.

By all accounts Pragmata has received positive critical acclaim and seems to be selling well. I would love to see Capcom return to this universe and have another bite at the apple. This game is great as it is, and I think a proper sequel could end up being something really special. I say we’ve seen enough Sad Dad games, give me more Rad Dad games like this.

Lo-fi beats to tap Spacebar to

Rhythm Doctor

Okay

★

Recommended

I have always loved rhythm games. In my teens and early 20s I always loved playing Dance Dance Revolution as well as the more gimmicky music games that used specialized controllers like Beatmania, Taiko Drum Master, and of course the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. So all of that having been said, I’m disappointed to have to turn in a mixed review of Rhythm Doctor, a music game with a unique one-button gameplay gimmick.

The setup for the game’s premise is something like this : a strange virus called Connectifia Abortus that causes cardiac illness has manifested in Middlesea Hospital and you are an intern tasked with treating it through a novel new initiative called the Rhythm Doctor Program. You as the intern appear on screen as a disembodied arm that taps a button in time with the beat. They are actually not kidding when they describe this as a one-button game, you tap the spacebar with the beat and that’s your entire method of action upon the game world (it’s actually played for laughs when characters ask questions to the intern and then realize you cannot reply). At first you’ll tap strictly on the 7th beat of a phrase, but as the story progresses it steadily adds more complexity. Some patients will manifest swing beats, others will need you to tap on the second beat of a two-beat pattern, some feature freeze beats where the rhythm shows a 2 or 3 beat pattern which you then tap on the last beat when that rhythm repeats, so on and so forth. Furthermore, the game often has you treating more than one patient at a time, each of whom has their own specific beat pattern to tap along to at various parts of a musical phrase. The complexity adds up fast, and the game to its credit also features some nice visual glitz and effects that adds to the overall experience.

When it works it’s a really great experience; you can kind of zone out and feel where your button press should fall while enjoying the show on screen. Where it starts to fall apart, I think, is later in the game (around late Act 5 through the Finale) where in order to add challenge it starts to layer (in my opinion) too many of these elements at once. Juggling three or more patients with completely different beat patterns starts to trigger some real cognitive overload, and even a music game enthusiast like myself ended up saying “I’m not sure this is fun anymore,” flipping it to the easiest difficulty, and finishing the last few story levels like that. The real achilles heel of the single-button setup is that adding difficulty necessitates this kind of stacking of differing rhythms and cognitive juggling and eventually for me it just got to be too overwhelming. The game introduces new beat patterns and variations so frequently that toward the end I just started to groan when inevitably the tutorial section came up after selecting a level.

This may not be your experience; Rhythm Doctor does in fact have lots of favorable reviews on Steam and there are many other aspects of the game that work such as the strong, earnest character writing and generally good to excellent original music. It’s enough for me to still give this a recommendation star despite my obvious issues with it. Looking at Steam achievements though, only 8.1% of players at the time of this writing have actually finished the story finale so it makes me wonder if I’m not as alone in my opinion as I might think. It’s worth mentioning that the game has a custom level editor and Steam workshop support which could add a ton of replayability if it indeed ends up being a hit for you. Maybe check it out, if you like rhythm games.

March 2026 Roundup

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from Cairn.

Greetings, dear reader. We’re finally starting to emerge from the brutally-cold winters around here, and honestly I couldn’t be more glad. I’m used to long, snowy winters (I grew up with them) but even after living here for years now, I’m still not used to how harsh and ridiculously cold it can get. It affects me and my overall mood more than I’d like to admit, so I’m welcoming Spring with open arms.

As for what games you won’t see in this month’s rundown, the most notable one is Mewgenics. I still consider it in-progress and I intend to get back to it, but as I said before that game definitely strikes me more as a marathon than a sprint. I’ve also continued to dip in and out of Helldivers II whenever duty calls.

I always like to start off strong with the game I have the most to say about, and this month that game is…

Everyone has a personal summit. Some are more literal.

Cairn

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

There are only a handful of games that are based primarily around climbing. I’m not simply talking about games that feature climbing as a mechanic; something like Breath of the Wild technically has it but it’s not the primary focus of the game. I’ve done top-rope climbing out in Appalachia and have been to local bouldering gyms a handful of times; I won’t claim to be an expert but I think I know the fundamentals. The thing I most distinctly remember about learning climbing techniques while top-roping was my instructor constantly telling me “get your legs up!” to get into a stronger hold or to pry the rest of my body up onto an overhang. There’s a widespread mistaken assumption among climbing novices that having a lot of raw strength is necessary to get started. It certainly helps on harder routes, but it’s far more important to have good technique and an understanding of how best to place your hands and feet so that you don’t need to rely on sheer effort on difficult moves.

Playing Cairn activated something deep inside me and all those fond memories on the rock wall came flooding back. It’s certainly the most authentic representation of climbing that I’ve seen in a video game so far, and absolutely nails the mental game that is an essential part of the sport. Half the battle on the wall is finding a route that will work for you; you have to understand what your body is capable of, where the tough moves will be, and where you can afford to hang for a bit and give your muscles a break. In Cairn you control the protagonist Aava’s limbs one-by-one, placing them into crevices and ledges as you scramble up the face of Kami, the fictional equivalent of Mt. Everest or K2. You’ll also contend with a survival layer where you’ll need to manage her hunger, thirst, and eventually also body temperature which becomes a factor as you get higher up the mountain. Aava is an experienced mountaineer (one of the best in the world, in fact) and can forage for food and water but you’ll also be able to scavenge random foodstuffs and useful tools from the bodies of the unfortunate souls who perished on the mountain long before you arrived. It’s all a lot to think about, but the game does offer accessibility features which tone down the difficulty of the climbing and/or survival elements if you so desire.

As for Aava herself, she is an experienced and confident climber who aims to be the first to summit the unconquered Mount Kami. Aava has an intense demeanor; if you watch enough interviews with people who are at the top of their sport or vocation you tend to see this kind of personality a lot and I found it to be pretty authentic in that way. She’s a bit of a mess in her personal life; it’s heavily implied early on that her relationship with her partner Naomi is in bad shape, she refuses to return her agent’s calls, and whenever she receives a message through her mechanical assistant ClimbBot she seems more annoyed than anything that her focus is taken away from her ascent. She spends so much time on mountain faces as a way of forcing the problems of her personal life to take a backseat. She’s not always likable, but she is relatable. She struggles to understand and be understood by other people and feels isolated because of it. I found her to be a compelling character, and later in the game you’ll make several important choices which impact how her story ultimately ends.

Cairn is one of those rare games that put me into a state of hyperfocus; the climbing is challenging and incredibly engrossing. Aava’s arms and legs will start to shake and she’ll start to audibly strain when losing her grip. Learning to take your climbs slow and steady and to suppress the panic when her grip starts to falter are key to success on Kami. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that this game is drop-dead gorgeous, featuring dramatic rises and incredible vistas. I’m not a guy who uses photo modes in games a lot, but I found myself stopping to snap some breathtaking shots frequently. I have so many damn screenshots — almost 200 — and choosing a handful to put on this post was legitimately tough. All in all, this was a memorable journey that will stick with me and is easily among the best game experiences I’ve had this year. It comes highly recommended.

The Very Angry Caterpillar

Öoo

Great

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Öoo (which I’ve been pronouncing out loud as “ooOOOoo”) is a brilliant, bite-sized puzzle game from Nama Takahashi whose previous game was ElecHead, a retro Megaman-styled puzzle platformer. I finished the entire thing in just over two hours so talking too much about the gameplay might constitute spoilers, but the concept is that you control a lil’ caterpillar dude who has been snatched up by an asshole bird, and your task is to avoid digestion by getting him out.

Our bug protagonist has the ability to drop sections of his body as bombs, and this is how you solve the majority of the game’s puzzles. You can use them as steps, to propel you in one direction or another, or one of several other techniques that the game masterfully teaches you through the quality of its level design. The controls are very simple (move with the stick, a button to place a bomb, and a button to detonate) but there are a surprising amount of moments where you realize that there are useful/necessary tricks with them that you could have performed the entire time which let you solve rooms which at a point looked impossible. In short, it’s delightful. It’s so smartly-designed, and very worth picking up for an afternoon’s worth of entertainment. Time for me to go check out ElecHead, I think…

Turns out, the thing golf was missing was PvP

Super Battle Golf

Excellent

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Here I am, back again this month to give the verdict and tell you that Super Battle Golf absolutely rules. I’ve played several more sessions with friends and the game not only holds up in terms of sheer enjoyment, but also has more mechanical depth than you’d think. Turns out you can do some really wacky shit like diving in front of others’ shots Secret Service style; I’ve seen several duels between friends at the putting green that left me crying with laughter.

You can play this online with randoms, but if you’ve got a group of friends you can convince to get it, consider this a 3-star recommendation instead. More updates are coming and they’ve promised Steam Workshop integration in the future, so I can’t wait to see what kind of wild courses and new items we get. I’ll leave you with a few highlights from our most recent games.

Your Wish is My Suggestion

Many Nights a Whisper

Very Good

★

Recommended

Another bite-sized game, Many Nights a Whisper is a story-focused indie game about a world where any wish can come true, as long as a certain ritual is completed. The player controls the Dreamer, the individual at the center of said ritual. Every night, villagers visit the Dreamer and confess their deepest desires from the other side of a wall. Each villager that professes a wish puts a braid of hair they have been growing out through an opening in the wall, and if the Dreamer chooses to grant the wish they cut the braid. The Dreamer is the sole arbiter of which wishes get granted and which do not, and ultimately to make them come true they must use a slingshot to light a flame pyre on the day of the ritual. Their mentor has been training them for 10 years for this one moment, and he will talk you through both the technique of making the shot and also about which wishes you’re choosing to grant and why.

This ultimately is the main draw of the narrative. Some of the wishes are relatively low-stakes; one villager wishes for a rival to help push them to their limits in all respects. Others are much more serious and world-altering. One person asks to make all world religions vanish overnight. They also say they realize that there’s an inherent darkness in the heart of humanity that will never go away, but that eliminating organized religion might prevent lots of pain and suffering inflicted in the name of dogma. Another person confesses that they are experiencing gender dysphoria, and wants you to eliminate the whole concept of gender altogether. For both of these, you’re forced to grapple with the concept of a world without either of these prevailing forces and consider what improvements or unintended consequences could come from changing such fundamental things about humanity.

It’s fascinating stuff, and ultimately it’s up to you to grapple with these choices and decide whether or not to grant the wish. Of course, this all hinges upon you making that one consequential shot on the final day. You’ll have the Dreamer train during the daytime, in between the sequences at night where you’re hearing the wishes of the villagers. It’s also fully up to you whether you want to commit to making the shot, or perhaps you might decide that putting this much responsibility on one person is too much, and to miss it on purpose. Either way, it’s all up to you…

Back on the road to Zanarkand

Final Fantasy X HD Remaster [2001 / 2016]

TBD

Score TBD

∅

Recommendation TBD

Final Fantasy X is certainly not among the first JRPGs I ever played, but it is one of the ones that to this day I still clearly and fondly remember. Revisiting a game that’s such a fixture in your personal pantheon can be a risky endeavor; as the years pass we tend to remember more of what we liked about certain things while the pain points slowly fade away. What I remember about FFX is being floored by its visual presentation and the fact that this was the first proper Final Fantasy to be fully voice-acted. I remember its worldbuilding being top-notch and its characters to be endearing and memorable. Yuna is one of my favorite characters in the whole series and I consider her to be the pinnacle of the archetype of the Final Fantasy Summoner.

I’m pleased to say that the game mostly holds up so far. I’m keeping in mind that in 2001, localizations were generally quite rough and the trade of voice acting for games was still in its relative infancy. It’s still leaps and bounds beyond many of its contemporaries and immediate predecessors, and its turn-based battle system is still one of my favorites. You can see a lot of the DNA of more modern RPG battle systems (most notably the Atlus SMT and Persona games) here, and they liberally borrow elements of FFX for good reason. My partner is watching while I play this (this is her first time seeing the game) and we’ve just hit Macalania Temple. Once I’ve rolled credits I’ll report back on how well I think it holds up as an entire work and what she thought about it as well.

February 2026 Roundup

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from Mewgenics.

Well so much for February being a shorter, quieter month and this post being less effort than January’s. Aside from finishing up a few games I started playing in the months prior, February also brought the release of the long-awaited Mewgenics from the creator of The Binding of Isaac. I also sampled the hot new friendslop game and discovered a new platforming gem. There’s a lot to talk about, so let’s get to it.

Kick your shoes off, grab a cup of tea, stay a while...

Wanderstop

Very Good

★ ★

Highly Recommended

I’ve always felt a lot of tension between the part of me that wants to just go with the flow and chill, and the voice in my head that won’t stop screaming that my time on this earth is limited and I should spend as much time as possible bettering myself, having unique experiences, and generally trying to not waste a single moment. Alta, the protagonist of Wanderstop, has only heard that second voice throughout her entire life. She’s an arena fighter who is perpetually driving herself to train harder, to be the best, to never lose a match. After three years of being undefeated, she begins to suffer loss after loss after loss. Beaten-down and psychologically shattered, she sets off to find a legendary master in the forest who she thinks she can train her back to her former greatness.

Things, of course, don’t go as planned. Collapsing from exhaustion, she finds herself awakening at the tea shop Wanderstop, having been carried there by its kind and gentle owner Boro. No matter how much she tries, she collapses when trying to resume her journey and it turns out she can’t even lift her sword anymore for some reason. Boro invites her to stay a while, to rest and to heal. She does so reluctantly, learning how to make tea, tend the garden, decorate the shop, and converse with the odd smattering of visitors that meander into the clearing where the shop resides. Whether she realizes it or not, all of these visitors have a valuable lesson to teach, if she’ll only listen.

Wanderstop is a cozy game with a poignant message for any of us who have that innate drive to try to optimize our time spent down to the minute. There is no time pressure on any of the game’s tasks, the environment is comfortable and relaxing, and Boro is endlessly supportive as Alta works through her burnout and comes to terms with the fact that nothing lasts forever. It’s about becoming more assertive with that inner voice and learning to live a more examined life. It’s about the ephemerality of our identity and how it naturally changes over time; how elements of our lives that once defined us fade into the background and we perpetually reinvent ourselves.

It’s a funny thing when your opinion on a piece of media grows and changes the more you turn it over in your head, and the more time passes since experiencing its conclusion. There were times while playing Wanderstop when I found it mildly tedious or a little dull, but as the end of the game crept closer and closer I found myself feeling prematurely nostalgic for my time in the tiny clearing in the forest. I wanted to spend just a bit more time brewing tea for the quirky characters who wandered through and chatting with the kindly proprietor. Boro actually tells you toward the end that you should take a little bit of time to choose what you want to do before you leave, and to try to simply let yourself be bored. That is, in the end, the message that Wanderstop wants to leave us with : that life cannot and should not simply be reduced to an endless series of to-do lists. The truth of what it had to say rang true to me; we owe it to ourselves to just slow down and be alone with our thoughts, simply enjoying a coffee or tea and taking in the simple joys of a beautiful day. I think it’s in those moments we can reflect upon what truly matters to us.

Defensive battle, initiate!

The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy

Great

★

Recommended

Finally, after about putting about 100 hours into this game and seeing 52 endings, I have emerged from the (metaphorical) Weeb Cave and am finally ready to talk about The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy. This is a visual novel/tactics hybrid that has a positively absurd number of choices to make and storyline ramifications to observe that result from said choices. It’s like one of those choose-your-own adventure books brought to life in interactive media. Although it’s uneven in some ways, I enjoyed it quite a bit and admire the ambition and passion behind it. I had enough to say about it that I wrote a full review of it which can be read here.

It's Lacey..?

Love Eternal

Very Good

★

Recommended

This one was a pleasant surprise. The Remap Radio podcast posted an interview with developer Toby Alden and after hearing him describe his game Love Eternal as a “psychological horror precision platformer,” I knew I had to give it a look. It actually reminds me a lot of VVVVVV (which you should also play) for its gravity-swapping mechanic, and its spike-filled rooms are bite-sized bits of extreme platforming challenge. Unfortunately the game lacks accessibility settings, so if platformers aren’t your genre it’s going to be a tough sell.

The game’s vibe is genuinely unsettling without resorting to cheap scares though, and is well-worth the price of admission if you can handle the difficulty. Its gameplay sections are also broken up by adventure game-esque segments that reveal more of the main character Maya’s story and the bizarre things that begin to happen to her, mostly centered around her interactions with her friend Lacey. It also does something kinda wild in its last act that I’ve legitimately never seen another game do before, and I refuse to spoil this. Get to it, my fellow platformer sickos.

Helldivers never die! (terms and conditions apply)

Helldivers II

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

This third-person shooter/excessive force simulator from Arrowhead is a game I still keep up with, hopping in to check out the newest developments in the galactic war at its center and to play with all the new destructive toys. It helps a lot that it’s basically the only game that my partner plays at this point, and also that her mother wanted to learn to play it with us as she starts her retirement. It’s been an honestly fascinating process teaching her; there are so many things you take for granted about games if you grew up with them that aren’t immediately apparent that need to be explained to someone brand-new to gaming. We’re all having a great time though, and have gotten many clippable moments like this :

Teaching new Divers aside, the game masters have led us into a campaign against the Automatons and their masters the Cyborgs, all the way to their homeworld of Cyberstan. There are new units, new objectives, and the campaign on Cyberstan has been legitimately challenging. This is where I need to rant a bit though… Not about the game itself, but the community of players engaging with it.

Sure, in any live service game there’s always going to be some amount of power creep, and Helldivers II is no exception. Helldiver armaments have continually gotten stronger while enemies have mostly stayed the same. The new units attempt to shake up this dynamic somewhat and bring back some of the difficulty for the most hardcore players. People claim they want challenge but in fact so many gamers scream bloody murder when novel challenges force them outside their established comfort zone. It’s gotten to the point that when the controversy around difficulty reaches a fever pitch I just have to tune out because it gets so toxic. So many feel like it’s a personal affront to their ego to bump the difficulty down a few levels (there are 10 for crying out loud) so that they can refine their tactics and re-learn what works and what doesn’t. Arrowhead isn’t perfect but I think they’ve done a fairly good job overall when it comes to game balance lately.

Sorry, just had to get that out. I feel better now. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Anyways, Helldivers II is still a great time with friends (or family!) and I still highly recommend it.

🎶 All of my nights, I'm chasin' rats~ (Chasin' the rats!!) 🎶

Mewgenics

TBD

Score TBD

∅

Recommendation TBD

It’s hard to believe that in the year 2026 we’re finally playing Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s Mewgenics. Originally announced in 2012, canceled in the mid 2010s, and then revived in 2018, the duo’s feline magnum opus has finally seen the light of day. If you’ve played McMillen’s previous game The Binding Of Isaac you kind of know what to expect from this game’s overall tone and artwork style, which is to say that it’s a lot of crass humor, poop and fart jokes, you get the picture. Some people will undoubtedly bounce off of it for that reason, but those that stick with it will find an incredibly deep and satisfying roguelite tactics game where you outfit a group of stray cats to go out on adventures and then come home to breed and raise the next generation of fighting cats. The art is reminiscent of 2000s Newgrounds animations (true to McMillen’s origins) and the music is another high point in its favor. It’s full of jazzy, jaunty tunes with lyrics that reveal themselves when you reach the boss encounter. It’s the kind of soundtrack that burrows into your brain and refuses to leave; I have legitimately lost sleep because I can’t get this damn song out of my head.

When I say this game is deep, I really mean DEEP. I’ve seen accounts of people spending upwards of 100, 200, or even more hours exploring the depths of Mewgenics. There are over 1000 unique skills for your cats to use and 900+ items on a sliding scale of grossness to equip them with. That plus the massive enemy variety ensures that almost no two runs are the same. Between this and Silksong, it’s been fascinating to see what passionate indie devs can do when given a long runway and essentially unlimited budget. I am admittedly very early in this game, only having played 18 hours and having barely scratched the surface of Act 2. I’m very much looking forward to sinking more time into it, though I’m also trying to pace myself knowing just how long of a journey it will be to the end.

"The price is wrong, bitch!"

Super Battle Golf

TBD

Score TBD

∅

Recommendation TBD

Babe, wake up. New friendslop just dropped.

One of the greatest disappointments of my life happened when I was a teenager, browsing a local store that carried used classic video games. In these bins of plastic cartridges I found Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf for the NES, and thought “huh, what an interesting concept,” and picked it up on a whim for like $2.50.

I regret to inform you that there is no actual fighting in Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf.

There is a character in it called Big Jumbo, but that mildly amusing fact was no consolation for the total lack of fisticuffs. I wanted to thwack my opponents with a 5-iron or throw down on the links Happy Gilmore style!

Over two decades later, along comes Super Battle Golf to heal my long-festering disappointment. I also picked it up for a pittance for 6.39 (which, as we’ve learned, is basically five bucks according to the PEAK devs) and I could not be happier with it. This game is a madcap race to the fairway between you and up to 7 of your friends, all the while people are smashing your kneecaps with their clubs, shooting at you with pistols or elephant guns, or running you down with a golf cart. It’s all very slapstick and it’s been a while since a game has made me laugh like this one has.

I can’t wait to play more. What else can I say? It’s basically five bucks. Go get it.

Mythic+ without the fuss

Fellowship [EARLY ACCESS]

TBD

Score TBD

∅

Recommendation TBD

World of Warcraft’s Mythic+ dungeon mode is genuinely one of the best things they’ve ever added to the game. It provides a (theoretically) infinitely-scaling dungeon challenge for you and 4 other allies, which is far more accessible than putting a whole raid group together. Having run a WoW raiding guild during the days of Vanilla and early TBC, I can most definitely say that’s something I would never want to do again. Last year some friends and I decided to get into M+, and after not having played WoW for probably at least 15 years… Boy, things have changed a lot. The game is overstuffed with things to do and learning all the systems and currencies you need to interact with is enough to make your head spin, and at endgame it piles on even more to think about.

Along comes Fellowship, which distills the M+ experience into a standalone package. There’s no grinding to level cap or gearing up before you can get to the good stuff, just choose one of a roster of heroes, find a group, pick a difficulty, and go. I do miss the character customization inherent to a proper MMORPG (I grew quite attached to my Demon Hunter, Brymmleaighe), but the heroes in Fellowship serve well enough in their archetypes and most mirror existing character classes from other similar games. It feels very familiar in a positive way; if you’ve ever done M+ you’ll be able to slide right into Fellowship with no problems. It’s still early access and needs some polish, but seems to be moving in the right direction.

January 2026 Roundup

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy.

Welcome to the January 2026 Roundup, a collection of brief thoughts about the various games I’ve been playing this month. Given that a full review is a lot of work to put together, I think this is a nice compromise, almost like a game journal. I imagine this will be a bit longer than its successors, as I also wanted to talk about several games I tried during my extended vacation at the end of last year. I’ll begin with my favorite of the batch…

I'm over the moon for...

Death Howl

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

A pleasant surprise toward the end of 2025, Death Howl is a tactical deckbuilder game in which the protagonist Ro travels through a fantastical and dangerous spirit world on a journey through loss, grief, and acceptance. The build synergies are excellent, the art is eye-catching, and I highly recommend it even to those like myself who aren’t typically into deckbuilders.

I wrote a full review of Death Howl which can be read here..

I devoured...

Consume Me

Excellent

★ ★

Highly Recommended

A really great slice-of-life game that also manages to be very relatable. Consume Me is based on developer Jenny Jiao Hsia’s personal experiences in high school into college but I think it will also resonate with anyone who has ever gone on a crash diet and painstakingly counted calories in order to lose weight. The game deftly handles some pretty heavy subject material including disordered eating and an unhealthy obsession with hyperoptimizing every element of life. This is not sustainable, of course, and Consume Me does not pretend that it ever can be, showing how everything crashed down around Jenny when it all became too much to juggle. Don’t take this to mean that the game is some sort of dour cautionary tale though; the art is colorful and vibrant and its goofy animations and sharp sense of humor kept me laughing throughout. It’s a brave and risky thing to put so much of yourself into a piece of art, but it came together in a very cohesive, and enjoyable package.

I find that a lot of autobiographical games like this tend to mostly focus on telling the author’s story and are light on actual game mechanics. Consume Me is a notable exception here; practically every action in the game is associated with a WarioWare-esque minigame, whether that be folding the laundry, putting together a healthy lunch, walking the dog, or trying to keep Jenny’s wandering eyes on her assigned summer reading. All of that is assembled within the framework of a daily schedule in which you’re tasked with putting the right strings of actions together in order to balance Jenny’s energy, happiness, and hunger with getting all of her weekly tasks done. It throws some serious curveballs at you, especially in later chapters. Part of Chapter 5 seemed literally impossible at first, but the game subtly nudged me toward the power of unhealthy amounts of caffiene and extraordinarily late nights as a way of gaining near-infinite actions at the expense of Jenny’s overall health and happiness. It’s ludonarrative harmony at its best, where the mechanics reinforce the core themes of the narrative, and overall is a superb balancing act by the developers. It’s a great time, and it comes highly recommended from me.

I took a chance on...

Q-UP

Okay

∅

No Recommendation

Imagine an esport in which all of consideration of balance is removed, where the RNG is always perfectly fair and everything comes down to 50/50 odds. Well Q-UP literally does this, with every round being based around two teams competing over a series of coin flips with each team winning when their selected side comes out on top after the flip. The game is a tongue-in-cheek work, poking fun at esports devs fruitlessly pursuing that unattainable moving target of Perfect Game Balance.

There are character classes to pick from as well as skill trees… Why, you ask? Because in the end this is a classic “number go up” type of game, where you tailor your selected skills to emphasize the strong points and cover the weaknesses of your selected character. It didn’t quite hit for me, but I could see this being enjoyable to people who love spending hours buildcrafting and sitting back while their chosen strategy pays off, launching their score into the stratosphere. I will say that the humor in the game’s UI, item flavor text, and fake emails from the corporation behind Q-UP is all very funny if you follow the internal workings of the games industry. It’s not quite enough of a game to keep me coming back to it, but its sharp and humorous evisceration of modern esports did have me laughing.

I plinked around in...

Nubby's Number Factory

Great

★ ★

Highly Recommended

The Price is Right was basically late-morning white noise in my household growing up, a pleasant distraction between the early morning news/talk shows and the afternoon soap operas ubiquitous to network TV. I think most people who saw it will remember Plinko, the game where the contestant climbed to the top of a tall pegboard and dropped a bouncy disc which would eventually settle into a cradle at the bottom corresponding to various amounts of money and prizes. I’m confident in saying that the dev behind Nubby’s Number Factory also remembers Plinko, because it marries that basic setup of a bouncy object plinking around a board with a run-based buildcrafting system. It reminds me a lot of Balatro in that way, but instead of creating poker hands you’re launching the eponymous Nubby at the pegs below, trying to create a perfect series of bounces that will rack up a boatload of points. It’s become one of those games I’ll fire up when I need to play something that doesn’t require a ton of brainpower (more common than I’d like lately) and is a fun, welcome distraction from.. Well, motions at everything. It also looks like something straight out of the 90s edutainment software aesthetic which is yet another point in its favor.

I am still savoring...

The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy

Great

★

Recommended

This is an ambitious, anime-styled hybrid of a visual novel and a turn-based tactics game from the developers who brought you the Danganronpa and Zero Escape series. A group of high school students are whisked away from their normal lives to the titular Last Defense Academy and chosen to defend a secret at the heart of the school that could be the salvation or doom of humanity. The narrative is vast and branching with 100 different potential endings, and I am still working my way through some of the late-game scenarios I want to see. I’m really enjoying it overall and have a lot of thoughts, so I plan to write a full review article for this soon. Stay tuned.

I wrapped up...

Promise Mascot Agency

Great

★ ★

Highly Recommended

”Former Yakuza enforcer is exiled to the countryside to run a contracting agency for bizarre mascots” is one of those game pitches that sounds like it came right out of a fever dream, and ultimately was one I couldn’t pass up. This game comes from Kaizen Game Works, developers of the well-regarded murder mystery game Paradise Killer. It leans into and pokes fun at all of the typical yakuza tropes, and leans so far into this bit that they were actually able to get the japanese voice of Kazuma Kiryu, Mr. Yakuza himself Takaya Kuroda as the main character Michi AKA “The Janitor.” After disgracing himself and putting his yakuza family in financial ruin by botching a major financial transaction, Michi’s death is faked and he is sent to the rural town of Kaso-Machi to redeem himself by restarting a long-dormant mascot agency and making as much money as he can for the family.

Mascots in this world aren’t simply people in costumes, they’re supernatural life forms who take on all sorts of shapes and personalities. Michi’s main assistant and primary companion is Pinky, a brash and hilarious mascot in the shape of a giant severed fingertip. I really was not exaggerating when I called this concept a fever dream. Fortunately, the mascot and human characters you meet in Kaso-Machi are charming and often very funny. You’ll spend most of your gameplay driving around in Michi’s nigh-indestructible all-terrain kei truck, assigning mascots to jobs around the town, and unraveling the mystery surrounding a yakuza-killing curse purported to be on the town. I was struck by the quality of the narrative, the charm of the various oddball mascots (business cat Salary-Nyan and sentient foodstuff To-Fu being my favorites), and the sheer density of things to do in Kaso-Machi. This is an open-world checklist game à la Assassin’s Creed with tons of stuff to do on the map, but remarkably it is condensed into a fraction of the time any of those games take to play. I hit 100% achievements and saw most of what the game has to offer in a tight 18 hours, and I can’t help but feel like modern, bloated open-world games should take notes from it. I typically don’t play those types of game specifically because they are so overstuffed, so Promise Mascot Agency was really a breath of fresh air and made me believe they could be more focused and probably better overall for it.

I sampled...

StarRupture [EARLY ACCESS]

TBD

Score TBD

∅

Recommendation TBD

”It’s basically Satisfactory,” say all of the reductive takes on the internet. Well, ok, they’re not completely wrong. StarRupture definitely shares the same DNA as the factory-genre giant (and personal favorite of mine), but in my brief five hours with it I found that it is trying to differentiate itself through its greater emphasis on combat with native fauna, its deeper characterization with its main cast of interstellar indentured prisoners, and of course the cycle of the nearby star erupting and the planet regenerating from its damage. I’m not sure how engaging that cycle is after the first couple of times you see it or how well-realized the characters are (the voice acting could use some work) but it’s VERY early access so I will reserve judgment. Generally my policy on early access games is that I’ll play it for a short time and then shelve it until 1.0 as long as I think it’s got potential. All the essential elements for something fun is there, so hopefully this team is able to fully develop and mesh them together over time.

I slowed down for...

Wanderstop

TBD

Score TBD

∅

Recommendation TBD

Not much to say here yet because I’m still early on in Wanderstop, but I’m already charmed by its characters and earnest approach to the subject of burnout. The main character Alta is acutely dealing with this after her career as a gladiator takes a precipitous dive after years of being undefeated. After collapsing in the woods while looking for a legendary warrior to re-train her, Alta is forced to slow down and acknowledge that sheer effort is sometimes counterproductive. The gameplay revolves around Alta helping to run a tea shop in the woods while she recovers and heals, and is a narrative about life changes and healing. It’s charming so far and I’ve found it to be well-written and relatable. I’ll report back after I’ve seen more of what it has to offer.