Death Howl on The Afterimage

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.

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.

Review : Death Howl [2025]

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never fully been able to put my finger on why, but using the term “deckbuilder” when describing a game has historically been a surefire way to make me immediately lose interest in it. Despite having several friends that were into Magic the Gathering and other collectible card games, I never personally got into them. I think primary hangup on these types of games might have something to do with the mental effort necessary to craft a cohesive deck out of so many options, but also from needing to juggle the mental load within a game, running the mental probabilities of getting a card from my draw pile that might make a specific tactic work. Maybe that’s not strictly necessary for casual play, but I have the type of personality where when I commit to a new hobby or game I have a deep need to be good at it.

Death Howl is one of the rare games that has been able to push past my reluctance to engage with deckbuilding games and even ended up being one I truly loved. It describes itself as a “soulslike deckbuilder,” a combination of genres that I can’t say that I’ve seen before. I’d personally describe it as a grid-based tactical deckbuilder game with soulslike elements; sometimes I do feel as if the soulslike label is simply overused as shorthand for a difficult game but I do see other parallels that I’ll touch on later.

The biggest element that got me to ignore my initial reservations is the fantastic pixel art and dark vibes of the setting. Death Howl is a story set in 6000BC Scandinavia where a mother (and budding shaman) named Ro journeys into the spirit world to bring back the soul of her deceased son Olvi, who suffered an untimely death under circumstances that are initially unclear to the player. The spirit world is beautiful but harsh, and she is beset on all sides by spirits of wild beasts and other twisted beings, hellbent on preventing her from disrupting the natural order of life and death. It effectively mixes magical elements with the grounded reality of human emotion, and is a highly affecting contemplation on death, grieving, and guilt. The aesthetic is truly excellent, with the aforementioned pixel art featuring strong character design, vibrant colors and grotesquely beautiful creature art. The sound and music is worth shouting out as well; most of the tracks are understated but thrum with latent tension and dread, kicking up the drums, shakers, and other percussive instruments when combat begins.

Death Howl’s card interactions and deckbuilding mechanics are also incredibly well designed. One very smart thing that does is that it limits the maximum size of the player’s deck to a slim 20 cards, which helped to make the mental load of calculating probabilities far more manageable for me. It also limits you to a maximum of 5 exhaust cards, which are powerful but are discarded for the remainder of the battle and will not recycle back to your draw pile. When it comes time to create your deck, you will start with Realmless cards as a base and will gradually unlock cards specific to the region you are in which synergize with its central mechanics. There are 4 main regions in the spirit world and each will ask you to play in a drastically different way and build your deck to suit one of a few playstyles specific to it.

Ro has 5 mana at the start of the battle and this recharges every on player turn. Cards have a mana cost associated with them, and playing them in various ways will charge Ro’s Overwhelmed special meter which has a different effect per region such as healing Ro, restoring her mana, et cetera. Importantly, cards from a realm different from the one you’re currently in are hit with an additional +1 mana cost. This makes it so that realm-specific cards still can be played in different realms, but you’re encouraged to create decks specifically tailored for certain zones that primarily feature cards unlocked there. This keeps the deckbuilding element fresh and interesting. In games with this many options there is a natural tendency for players to try to find one approach that works well and use it like a skeleton key to crack open the rest of the game; fortunately Death Howl avoids this pitfall and is all the better for it.

Each region has a set of central mechanics that the decks naturally synergize with. All are very engaging, and it’s hard for me to pick a favorite region because the synergies are all so strong and satisfying to use, whether that be the emphasis on high mobility and backstabbing enemies in the Realm of Hostile Plains region, or the complete opposite in the Realm of Piercing Winds which rewards you for moving as little as possible, dragging enemies to you, and tanking their hits by building up your block stat (which also fills your Overwhelmed gauge). Winning battles and acquiring crafting materials expands the array of cards available to you, and it was both delightful and agonizing to see great new cards appear and wondering what I’m going to drop from my deck to make room for them.

So as to why the developers describe this as soulslike – the game definitely brings the difficulty and intimately learning its core systems and enemy attack patterns are crucial to survival. You’ll take a lot of damage and barely scrape through battles early on in new regions, before you begin to unlock realm-specific cards. Enemies also respawn whenever you rest at a ritual circle, this game’s equivalent of bonfires. Fortunately the game does let you roam freely from realm to realm and perhaps encourages you to do so, because each area has its own specific progression tree featuring a unique buff trinket and allows you to unlock an additional trinket slot that is a permanent character upgrade. You can also freely experiment with deck creation; there are 15 unique save slots for decks that you can freely swap between and tweak between battles. Often you’ll be tasked with getting through several difficult battles in a row; tailoring your deck to the challenge, playing cautiously, and preserving your health becomes very important in these instances. Each area also features a fully unique boss encounter where the puzzle-like design of the encounters really shines. In the game’s best encounters, you may find yourself chaining together a golden set of actions that lets you rip through the enemies and end your turn with all enemies dead or otherwise unable to harm you, and these instances are so incredibly satisfying and reward strategic play. Build your deck right and you will almost never find yourself saying “I got screwed by a bad draw.” Although this is not a genre I frequently engage with, I still found the level of challenge to be well-balanced and rarely frustrating.

It’s a testament to Death Howl’s solid design and unique aesthetic that it got even an avowed deckbuilder hater like me to not just play it, but play it to 100% completion. If any of this has sounded even slightly appealing I encourage you to at least give its demo a try. It’s a triumph on so many levels, with fantastic system design and a somber, affecting atmosphere and story.

Incredible

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Read about my rating methodology here.