Normally Iām more on the ball with these writeups but I just started a new job and pretty much spaced completely on the fact the month was over. It didnāt help that this was another month where I poured a massive amount of time into a small number of games, which causes time to bleed together a bit.
Final Fantasy VII ā Iāve been playing this game off and on with a friend for several years, but May/June was when we started making some real progress in actually beating the game. Itās fascinating culturally how so many of the most interesting facets of the gameās story are completely ignored in the broader conception of the game. Iām not sure how much of that is people losing steam after the opening in Midgar (which is where we stopped years ago) and not seeing the game itself, and how much of that is the rest of the game being kind of ass. The materia system is interesting but leads to each party member feeling replaceable, ATB is indefensible as a combat rhythm, and every time the game starts to hit its stride they introduce a new mandatory minigame. But, this is the crucible that was necessary for Advent Children and Kingdom Hearts to exist, and if what it takes to reach those heights is Cid being an unmarried wifebeater, so be it. Ā
Kingdoms of the Dump ā I enjoyed Small Saga well enough a few years ago, and this looked like a similar game. What I did not anticipate was instead of being a dense 10-hour RPG, itās a sprawling 40-hour mess. The good news is that playing FFVII alongside it reveals the intentionality and design ethos driving many of its decisions. The bad news is the result is pretty resoundingly mediocre. The world is filled with one-way cutscene triggers that can do anything from forcibly transition you to an entirely new map to changing party composition (locking the lost party memberās items in limbo until they rejoin). Colossal amounts of time are spent on characterization and worldbuilding despite the fact that three times in a row a major faction is introduced as allies, they are subject to defeat or betrayal, and their region is abandoned. For some of them theyāre introduced and killed in the same cutscene. 30 hours into the game you get the airship and can start doing cleanup, but by that point your endgame equipment outclasses basically anything you can find. Thereās earnestness and heart here and that was enough to get me to the end, but it doesnāt stop it from feeling like a waste of time.
Pokopia ā As the only person below the age of 35 who hasnāt played Minecraft or Animal Crossing, I didnāt really know what to expect going into this game. Iād heard the comparisons to Dragon Quest Builders but havenāt played that either. The game is strange. If using a deliberately clunky interface to make a little house out of blocks and then invite pikachu to live there sounds charming to you, youāll love the game. If that sounds kind of anemic youāre likely to be frustrated by the hand-holding quests that gate your progress through the areas, the lack of basic QoL tools for navigation and item storage, and the pace of play tied to real-time elapsed. I havenāt clicked with it the same way my girlfriend has, but itās cute and itās satisfying to build something even if itās simple. Fuck game keycards though.
Blood West: Scavengers ā I was shocked at the degree to which I enjoyed Blood West when I tried it earlier this year, and so I was eagerly awaiting this roguelike DLC that makes full use of the density and complexity of the maps. Objectives are simple enough; get the item in this location, kill this large enemy, clear out all the enemies in this zone. The trouble is resource scarcity, a strict time limit, and the unrelenting lethality where even basic enemies can two-shot you if you get caught out of position. This frequently frustrated me to the point I uninstalled, especially when items that were supposed to save you from death failed to work (they would trigger, revive you at 10HP, and then youād die to staggered damage or a DoT). It didnāt help that I was also still playing DRG: Rogue Core which is a much more slapdash attempt to retrofit a roguelite mode onto an existing set of guns and tools. That being said, it feels truly phenomenal to shoot people in this game and I love looting shit. I spent more time in this mode than I did on the base game, and only stopped because once I hit critical mass I was essentially unkillable. Thereās some cool stuff going on with items that scale in power for each in-game day that passes, but they also have the reverse like a rifle that starts with absurd damage but decays rapidly to the point of uselessness over the course of a week. The devs are apparently making a very similar game to Blood West already so Iāll likely get that on release.
Xanthiom 2 ā I was looking forward to this for years. I loved the previous two games by this solo-dev as theyāre both dense metroidvanias with fascinating designs, unique puzzles, and incredibly inventive mechanics. Sadly, a sequel lead to some stagnation, and this ends up being a bloated and meandering mess compared to Xanthiom. The gun modification is still fun and far better than Clockwork Ambrosia, but the map is directionless rather than being open with the result that I would be hard-gated in a region because I was missing a major upgrade in an unremarkable location on the other side of the map. Thankfully the map markers are some of the best Iāve ever seen, choosing label/shape/color and also having the photography system from The Lost Crown. That doesnāt make up for the fact that poor communication of objectives and mechanics is rampant, with little correlation between difficulty and reward. Part of me suspects the map was overcooked to allow for nonlinearity in the built-in randomizer, but itās also possible that this is like a lot of sequels where itās full of things that shouldāve been left on the cutting-room floor for the first game.
Orb of Creation ā I have a mixed relationship with idle games, as I tend to latch onto them only during the worst parts of my life. In that sense, Iām glad I played only an hour or so of Orb of Creation. Itās an exceptionally well-made active idle game. In many ways it feels more similar to a factory game where specializing in areas of development and actively curating production is more important than just waiting, especially as your abilities have short cooldowns and often want to be triggered in sequence. Thereās a world where I spent a month just playing this and watching youtube, doing very little else. Iāve been in that world before. I hope not to be in that world again.
ROLLING STAR ā I was extremely endeared to TOMOMI and so happily picked this soft-sequel up in the summer sale. Unfortunately itās not quite as good, for similar reasons to Xanthiom 2. Itās a little bogged down in maximalism, the best version of these ideas were already used, and the gimmick is a bit stale. The attempt to broaden the map by filling the area between sections with zero-grav zones you fly around in a mech is interesting, but the currency used to scan for treasure is too rare and the mech is too slow for it to be satisfying, but the supplies that can only be found out there are vital for crafting equipment. I need to try the DLC that lets you play as the first gameās protag, Iām hoping that melee adds a bit more zip to the combat.
If I was luxord and I found out I wasn't being sent to castle oblivion I'd have been pissed. Oh no it's ok, send the others to the card-themed hellhole. I didn't even want to go. I'm sure fucking marluxia has it handled
Most of this month was spent putting an inordinate amount of time into Tainted Grail. While that game did start to fall apart at the end, at least it was the fun sort of falling apart where I was primarily specialized into spellcasting but due to a combination of skill perks, items, and DLC buffs my best source of actual damage was beating the tar out of enemies with a wand. Not casting a spell with the wand, just straight up bludgeoning them to death. Sadly the game did not anticipate this so you couldnāt off-hand a shield and block properly, but by then nothing did damage that mattered anyways. Iāll take it over Oblivion level-scaling I guess.
Coyote Climb ā It took a week and a half for me to play anything other than Tainted Grail or Tametsi, and my amuse bouche was a cute little itch game - https://adriendittrick.itch.io/coyoteclimb . Interesting concept of a mini metroidvania where you can only jump during coyote time and all progression is knowledge gates on system interactions and the controls. Didnāt end up finishing it because there were some positively nonsensical spiked corridors at the end, but fun little concept.
Clockwork Ambrosia ā I really wanted to like this game because I deeply appreciate any metroidvania that isnāt melee-focused, and was also excited to see a gun customization mechanic like Xanthiom Zero fleshed out into a larger game. Unfortunately certain ideas donāt operate at scale. Four guns is what killed the game. It doesnāt take long to have an assault rifle, rocket launcher, pistol, and grenade launcher, but you can only equip two at a time. The latter two donāt reload passively, and so using them is much more stilted and frustrating. Gun parts arenāt fungible between equipment, so if you hate the pistol then any upgrade for it is a waste of progression. Thereās some neat concepts regardless like explosive pistol rounds letting you use bomb modifiers from the grenade launcher, but overall thereās just too many fiddly options and not enough reason to choose anything other than raw DPS. Add in multiple collision errors shunting me into adjacent rooms and softlocking me (when it didnāt just crash immediately) and atrocious save point placement and I had to tap out.
MOTORSLICE ā If youāre making a game like Mirrorās Edge, there are two things that matter. Your parkour needs to feel great and your concrete needs to look great. Motorslice is a miss on both. Movement is full of jerky magnetism to the next climbable object or grabbable ledge, your momentum feels inconsistent, and overall thereās a veneer of imprecision that I can only equate to visual bloom; a gloss that makes things āsmootherā but muddy and hard to look at for extended periods. The combat is tacked on and didnāt have the balls to actually copy the Revengeance slicing system so itās just wooden with finicky parries. There was more thought put into the selfie camera than the camera I use to look and see if a jump will kill me. This game feels less than the sum of its parts and thatās a shame because the parts are cool.
Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core ā I have 800 hours in DRG. I enjoyed exploring caves, I enjoyed the guns, I enjoyed the scoutās grappling hook and force-a-nature. That goodwill caused me to buy DRG: Survivors, a clumsy attempt at a survivors game with limited content, game design that was more concerned with homage to the base game than its cohesion with the game it was in, poor balance, and an overall lack of structure in what the game was trying to be. I excused that as the nature of the genre having been played out, and the license having been shopped out to another studio. I then tried Rogue Core, and those same issues rear their head. I wouldāve happily played Deep Rock Galactic 2: We Found Deeper Rocks. If Ghost Ship wanted to make a completely unrelated co-op resource extraction game with tight time limits and roguelike elements, Iād be interested enough to buy it in early access. Rogue Core isnāt sure which of those two it is, and so neither contingent is happy. The pace of play, objectives, enemy design, and cave design do not fit the vast majority of the weapons on offer, and grabbing a random weapon and walking straight forward towards an elevator you defend before going deeper is literally all there is. I know DRG launched in a similarly unhewn state but this game had years of development time and is making rookie errors that would be embarrassing for someoneās first game, let alone a team with millions of sales in a very similar title. Iām sure the game will be great eventually, but Iām annoyed that it isnāt good yet.
Mohrta ā Scumhead is a truly magnificent dev, with a very unique aesthetic and some of the most magnificent and fascinating magitech societies Iāve seen in games. Their writing is evocative, dripping with character, and pulls you into the world. The visuals are gnarly and grimy. But you never know if youāre going to see a dragon divebomb from the moon that screams at a pitch which causes chromatic aberration, or a squeaky doll that was loved so much it came to life and loves you so much that squeezing her heals you (and Iām pissed I missed out on the makership for her). Mohrta is their latest game and itās absolutely stretching the limits of what you can do in GZDoom. After Hedon Bloodrite I was worried that wads just werenāt for me but this gameās guns felt damn good and the maps were phenomenal. Environments were striking and distinct, layouts were clever, secrets were hidden but never punishingly so. Itās just a damn good game start to finish. Also most of the bosses are buxom furry ladies in varying degrees of undress which I fully respect.
Shadow Labyrinth ā I very nearly bought this on release because āedgy anime Pac-Man Metroidvaniaā is one hell of a sales pitch, but for $30-40 it was a very tough sell when reviews were mixed and nothing about the game itself was striking other than the promo clip of your Pac-Man robot possessing your body and causing you to vomit a colossal Pac-Man of dripping black ichor whose maw was the size of the screen, messily chomping at the fallen boss and devouring it with all the grace of a snapping turtle. The game itself, were it not Pac-Man related, would be merely strange. Itās your standard anime metroidvania in the vein of Afterimage or Frontier Hunters; enemies have drop tables for a crafting system, opportunities to sequence break with pogos/grapples are rampant, the story is edgelord chuuni nonsense, waifish anime girls with jiggle physics are everywhere if you somehow arenāt playing as one. But then youāll touch a grind rail or go into the Pac-Man dimension and suddenly itās waka waka eating dots and fighting ghosts. Bizarre game. Boss design was pretty atrocious the end was a gauntlet of damage sponges that I just couldnāt be bothered to slog through. Iām glad I experienced the game because the concept alone was a fever dream worth the price of admission.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Never let them tell you that enshittification was a mystery. Enshittification isn't downstream of the "iron laws of economics" or an unrealistic demand by "consumers" to get stuff for free.
Enshittification comes from specific policy choices, made by named individuals, that had the foreseeable and foreseen result of making the web worse:
Like, there was once a time when an ever-increasing proportion of web users kept tabs on what was going on with RSS. RSS is a simple, powerful way for websites to publish "feeds" of their articles, and for readers to subscribe to those feeds and get notified when something new was posted, and even read that new material right there in your RSS reader tab or app.
RSS is simple and versatile. It's the backbone of podcasts (though Apple and Spotify have done their best to kill it, along with public broadcasters like the BBC, all of whom want you to switch to proprietary apps that spy on you and control you). It's how many automated processes communicate with one another, untouched by human hands. But above all, it's a way to find out when something new has been published on the web.
RSS's liftoff was driven by Google, who released a great RSS reader called "Google Reader" in 2007. Reader was free and reliable, and other RSS readers struggled to compete with it, with the effect that most of us just ended up using Google's product, which made it even harder to launch a competitor.
But in 2013, Google quietly knifed Reader. I've always found the timing suspicious: it came right in the middle of Google's desperate scramble to become Facebook, by means of a product called Google Plus (G+). Famously, Google product managers' bonuses depended on how much G+ engagement they drove, with the effect that every Google product suddenly sprouted G+ buttons that either did something stupid, or something that confusingly duplicated existing functionality (like commenting on Youtube videos).
Google treated G+ as an existential priority, and for good reason. Google was running out of growth potential, having comprehensively conquered Search, and having repeatedly demonstrated that Search was a one-off success, with nearly every other made-in-Google product dying off. What successes Google could claim were far more modest, like Gmail, Google's Hotmail clone. Google augmented its growth by buying other peoples' companies (Blogger, YouTube, Maps, ad-tech, Docs, Android, etc), but its internal initiatives were turkeys.
Eventually, Wall Street was going to conclude that Google had reached the end of its growth period, and Google's shares would fall to a fraction of their value, with a price-to-earnings ratio commensurate with a "mature" company.
Google needed a new growth story, and "Google will conquer Facebook's market" was a pretty good one. After all, investors didn't have to speculate about whether Facebook was profitable, they could just look at Facebook's income statements, which Google proposed to transfer to its own balance sheet. The G+ full-court press was as much a narrative strategy as a business strategy: by tying product managers' bonuses to a metric that demonstrated G+'s rise, Google could convince Wall Street that they had a lot of growth on their horizon.
Of course, tying individual executives' bonuses to making a number go up has a predictably perverse outcome. As Goodhart's law has it, "Any metric becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful metric." As soon as key decision-makers' personal net worth depending on making the G+ number go up, they crammed G+ everywhere and started to sneak in ways to trigger unintentional G+ sessions. This still happens today ā think of how often you accidentally invoke an unbanishable AI feature while using Google's products (and products from rival giant, moribund companies relying on an AI narrative to convince investors that they will continue to grow):
Like I said, Google Reader died at the peak of Google's scramble to make the G+ number go up. I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google realized that Reader's core functionality (helping users discover, share and discuss interesting new web pages) was exactly the kind of thing Google wanted us to use G+ for, and so they killed Reader in a bid to drive us to the stalled-out service they'd bet the company on.
If Google killed Reader in a bid to push users to discover and consume web pages using a proprietary social media service, they succeeded. Unfortunately, the social media service they pushed users into was Facebook ā and G+ died shortly thereafter.
For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It's a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:
https://kottke.org/rolodex/
There are many good RSS readers. I've been paying for Newsblur since 2011, and consider the $36 I send them every year to be a very good investment:
https://newsblur.com/
But RSS continues to be a power user-coded niche, despite the fact that RSS readers are really easy to set up and ā crucially ā make using the web much easier. Last week, Caroline Crampton (co-editor of The Browser) wrote about her experiences using RSS:
As Crampton points out, much of the web (including some of the cruftiest, most enshittified websites) publish full-text RSS feeds, meaning that you can read their articles right there in your RSS reader, with no ads, no popups, no nag-screens asking you to sign up for a newsletter, verify your age, or submit to their terms of service.
It's almost impossible to overstate how superior RSS is to the median web page. Imagine if the newsletters you followed were rendered with black, clear type on a plain white background (rather than the sadistically infinitesimal, greyed-out type that designers favor thanks to the unkillable urban legend that black type on a white screen causes eye-strain). Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or "keep reading" links.
Now, not every website publishes a fulltext feed. Often, you will just get a teaser, and if you want to read the whole article, you have to click through. I have a few tips for making other websites ā even ones like Wired and The Intercept ā as easy to read as an RSS reader, at least for Firefox users.
Firefox has a built-in "Reader View" that re-renders the contents of a web-page as black type on a white background. Firefox does some kind of mysterious calculation to determine whether a page can be displayed in Reader View, but you can override this with the Activate Reader View, which adds a Reader View toggle for every page:
Lots of websites (like The Guardian) want you to login before you can read them, and even if you pay to subscribe to them, these sites often want you to re-login every time you visit them (especially if you're running a full suite of privacy blockers). You can skip this whole process by simply toggling Reader View as soon as you get the login pop up. On some websites (like The Verge and Wired), you'll only see the first couple paragraphs of the article in Reader View. But if you then hit reload, the whole article loads.
Activate Reader View puts a Reader View toggle on every page, but clicking that toggle sometimes throws up an error message, when the page is so cursed that Firefox can't figure out what part of it is the article. When this happens, you're stuck reading the page in the site's own default (and usually terrible) view. As you scroll down the page, you will often hit pop-ups that try to get you to sign up for a mailing list, agree to terms of service, or do something else you don't want to do. Rather than hunting for the button to close these pop-ups (or agree to objectionable terms of service), you can install "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that reaches into the page's layout files and deletes any element that isn't designed to scroll with the rest of the text:
https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky
Other websites (like Slashdot and Core77) load computer-destroying Javascript (often as part of an anti-adblock strategy). For these, I use the "Javascript Toggle On and Off" plugin, which lets you create a blacklist of websites that aren't allowed to run any scripts:
Some websites (like Yahoo) load so much crap that they defeat all of these countermeasures. For these websites, I use the "Element Blocker" plug-in, which lets you delete parts of the web-page, either for a single session, or permanently:
It's ridiculous that websites put so many barriers up to a pleasant reading experience. A slow-moving avalanche of enshittogenic phenomena got us here. There's corporate enshittification, like Google/Meta's monopolization of ads and Meta/Twitter's crushing of the open web. There's regulatory enshittification, like the EU's failure crack down on companies the pretend that forcing you to click an endless stream of "cookie consent" popups is the same as complying with the GDPR.
Those are real problems, but they don't have to be your problem, at least when you want to read the web. A couple years ago, I wrote a guide to using RSS to improve your web experience, evade lock-in and duck algorithmic recommendation systems:
Customizing your browser takes this to the next level, disenshittifying many websites ā even if they block or restrict RSS. Most of this stuff only applies to desktop browsers, though. Mobile browsers are far more locked down (even mobile Firefox ā remember, every iOS browser, including Firefox, is just a re-skinned version of Safari, thanks to Apple's ban rival browser engines). And of course, apps are the worst. An app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to improve it in any way:
And even if you do customize your mobile browser (Android Firefox lets you do some of this stuff), many apps (Twitter, Tumblr) open external links in their own browser (usually an in-app Chrome instance) with all the bullshit that entails.
The promise of locked-down mobile platforms was that they were going to "just work," without any of the confusing customization options of desktop OSes. It turns out that taking away those confusing customization options was an invitation to every enshittifier to turn the web into an unreadable, extractive, nagging mess. This was the foreseeable ā and foreseen ā consequence of a new kind of technology where everything that isn't mandatory is prohibited:
After Marchās meat grinder Iām glad that I played games at a much saner pace in April. It helped that the first two weeks were dominated by me tearing through the second and third books of The Lord of the Rings. Turns out my middle school friends werenāt lying when they said it was good. I also sank my teeth into more games, though sadly very few of them were ultimately worth my time. Oddly most of them were also the same dark fantasy aesthetic so I imagine my memories of which one was which are going to blur really easily.
Horizonās Gate ā This is someoneās favorite video game. It has grid-based combat that I assume is ripping off Final Fantasy tactics. It has a ludicrously deep class system with dozens of specialties to swap between each with their own XP track, passive/active skills, and stat spreads. It has party management, each of whom has access to those same classes. It has sailing. It has keeping track of your partyās provisions while sailing. It has trade. It has mercantile factions and investing in ports to sway their political allegiances. It also has a learning curve like a brick wall and if I was going to put up with this horseshit Iād get back into Tales of MajāEyal and/or finally play Caves of Qud like Iāve been meaning to for years.
Kairo ā Iāve played a lot of games recently in the vein of āletās explore the big concrete cityā and this one is probably the worst of the lot. Puzzles were a bit too opaque and metaphorical, environments werenāt very visually interesting, but the real death knell was not being able to remap the controls. Iāve had to set up a steam category for games like that where Iām going to either set up autohotkey or get an Xinput keypad or something. One of the many joys of being left-handed.
Diablo II: Resurrected ā If Iāve still got a prepaid gamepass subscription I may as well use it and I figured this would be a nice way for my NEET ass to throw time in a woodchipper. That very well couldāve been what happened if I didnāt once again run into issues remapping my controls. Firstly, the game does not offer global control remapping, you have to pick a character and then you can remap THEIR controls. Then, you save those controls as a new binding, helpfully categorized under ādefaultsā. Then, you apply that binding. Then, if youāre me, it instantly reverts to an actual default binding and renders your work pointless. After a half-hour of banging my head against this wall and searching for solutions, I gave up, especially since unfucking the battle.net launcher had already etched away at my patience. Probably for the best overall that it didnāt snare me but still a nice reminder of Blizzardās incompetence.
Verho: Curse of Faces ā This was my favorite game this month, which is normally high praise and this month means itās the only game I 1) liked and 2) have played enough of to form an opinion. It turns out what I wanted from shitty soulslikes was in Kingās Field clones all along. The environments are interesting and fun to explore, the weapons have a lot of variety and cool effects, the lore is unique and compelling. The stat system is a little bloated and combat has a weird cadence because only charge attacks do any damage, but getting a big fuckoff greatsword that one-shots most enemies is enough to make me forgive my quibbles. Itās also nice when a game like this has a good balance of archery being powerful and useful without being centralizing. The game isnāt perfect, but I donāt need it to be.
Kingdom Shell ā The real issue with my penchant for dogshit metroidvanias isnāt the fact that theyāre bad. Itās that when my tank runs low and I pick up the ones that didnāt initially pass my sniff test, theyāre positively dreadful. This one is a greatest-hits collection of failstates. Breathlessly and exhaustively communicating lore that doesnāt matter. Donutsteel main character who was the first sprite made so heās overdesigned, out of place, and lower quality than the background assets. Rote combat with an overpowered dagger spell because it was good in SotN. Bosses that are either HP sponges or puzzle bosses with instadeath attacks. This game plays, looks, and sounds like a shallow knockoff of Blasphemous and if youāre going to play ball in that park your art direction needs to be stellar because mechanically that well is bone dry.
Frontier Hunter: Erzaās Wheel of Fortune ā This is a sequel to a mediocre roguelite metroidvania which I have not played. Itās bizarre to me that thereās an entire genre for this exact style of motion-tweened anime aesthetic with incredibly fiddly stats, endless special attacks, Castlevania enemy/map design, and cooking. Vigil: The Longest Night, Afterimage, Awaken ā Astral Bladeā¦ I think Bloodstained is what kicked off the trend but itās strange the degree to which this is its own little ecosystem separate to the whirls and eddies of Hollow Knight clones in the western indie space. The game itself is fine, Iām still not a fan of character swapping and the fact the main character gets the most weapon types, most weapon combos, and strongest weapons is pretty grating because I spent the majority of the game as the gunner with a big cannon that shot piercing electric AoEs then juggled enemies through them. āBalanceā isnāt really a consideration in these games as it gets in the way of maximalism, and that at least I appreciate. I didnāt slog through the postgame and crafting, especially because although I liked the soul system being a grid on each piece of equipment that you socketed souls of different sizes into, the UI for it was godawful and there wasnāt any favorite system to filter through the chaff. Lots of interesting concepts, and if youāre going to get the unfettered nonsense sometimes that means rucking through the bits that show why fetters are useful.
Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors ā I need to just play Shiren or something. Every time I play a dungeon crawler roguelite like this or Dungeons of Aether I get frustrated at how shallow the positioning and sequencing are. As a deckbuilder itās fine, though I havenāt played enough of the popular ones like Slay the Spire or Balatro to speak to how much is innovative. I did really enjoy the combo system of chaining mana costs, as thereās a lot of clever mechanics to let you restart or alter the chain such that you go infinite and are drawing your whole deck over and over. With the character that gets card draw, mana rituals, and projectile count boosts it felt like playing a grapeshot storm deck in Magic, and much like with other deckbuilders once I start going āhuh I should play Magicā I get bored. I got to Diamond 1 in Arena limited though.
Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree ā Every day I learn something new to appreciate about Hollow Knight. Thereās so many dogshit ways to blend soulslikes and metroidvanias and every day I learn new ones. Inconsistency in what ledges are grabbable and how mantling a ledge works. Instead of a platforming challenge or hidden area hiding a weapon, it hides a blueprint that you need raw materials, the associated crafter, and for that crafter to be at a sufficient level. Passive abilities locked behind a skill tree thatās fully visible from the start but active abilities for every class are hidden in the world so certain builds donāt have key pieces unless you happen to fight a particular miniboss or unlock a particular unmarked door. Inconsistent communication of whether a hazard deals damage while touching it, respawns you nearby with HP loss, or kills you outright. No defensive options unless you have a shield but a magic system that requires you be using an offhand item to cast anything. With some smarter balance this game couldāve been solid but generic and instead it pissed me off, especially because once again I fell for the trap of sticking with a mediocre game for 20+ hours instead of stopping a bad game in a quarter of the time.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon ā If Todd isnāt going to make Skyrim 2 someone is. Iām not far enough into this to have a concrete judgment but Iāve already cheesed multiple bosses by pinning them behind doors and cheapshotting them, made a paltry amount of gold by stealing everything in a dungeon that wasnāt nailed down and selling it to the first vendor I met, and used the TF2 Dead Ringer to survive fall damage from jumping off a cliff. As always thereās the wistfulness of being 5 hours into this game and barely past the tutorial vs. 5 hours being the end of some complete and complex experiences, but itās also nice to really sink my teeth into a game like this after three different metroidvanias. Saber may not be here but I can sure as hell be stealth Archer.
I started 27 new games this month, which is very nearly one a day. I beat 11 of them, and some of the ones I didnāt beat are roguelikes or time-trial games where the definition of āendā is ambiguous. I also read all of book one of The Lord of the Rings (aka 200 pages of the entire 1000 in this omnibus), which is a media property I have somehow gone over 30 years of being a nerd without reading or watching. Suffice to say I got precious little done this month materially, but if all Iām going to do with myself is sit on my duff and play games Iām at least schmooving.
Angeline Era - I do not suffer under the delusion of having cultivated a refined palate. I drink Mountain Dew on the daily. I am an ardent fan of The Fast and The Furious. I once wore the same pair of sweatpants so many days in a row that I eroded a dinner-plate sized hole in the ass. So when I say this game after 10 hours struck me as stupefyingly well-crafted but I think itās unmitigated ass, Iām willing to call that a āmeā problem. My understanding is Analgesic Productions has been on their bullshit for well over a decade and perhaps a greater familiarity with their body of work would better align me with their motifs and methodologies, but for a newcomer this game was as catastrophically discordant and grotesque as Drakengard but without a sultry lady dragon telling me to kill people. Let me tell you, I put up with a lot of Avowedās horseshit because I entered a soul pact with a would-be goddess who had some enthusiastic suggestions about the amount of murder going on, and thatās a way worse game than Angeline Era. Take notes people.
Minishoot' Adventures ā I donāt like twin-stick shooters. Iām leery of isometric metroidvanias because their abilities tend to be very explicit lock/key design with no larger structure or interweaving of navigation and combat tools (compare the flexibility of air dash in Hollow Knight to the dash in Hyper Light Drifter, and also the material difference between a grounded dash and an air dash in general). This failed to convince me from either stance. The map was fairly rote, the combat was in a sourspot of too omnipresent for someone bad at shmups but too easy to provide interesting challenges, and the gameplay failed to meaningfully evolve over its runtime. Unlike something like Yokuās Island Express the novelty of the form-factor doesnāt make up for the friction it creates, and the result is inoffensive but bland. I have no idea why that apostrophe is in the title.
Wild Bastards ā I liked Void Bastards well enough, though it was very easy to hit critical mass and essentially ignore the roguelike mechanics. The writing was also distractingly callous and nihilistic, which is an impressive bar to clear for a game thatās 90% mechanics. That being said, I enjoyed doing train heists on randomly-generated ships, and thatās something Iāve unsuccessfully tried to find in other games since then. The search is also unsuccessful here. Instead of ships, you navigate around a map screen with small groups, routing your moves through various waypoints and teleporters to get the right people to the right places before your pursuers show up. Split up and you can cover more ground, but stay together and you have more firepower in the inevitable fights. The trouble is the fights suck. Small skirmishes in samey maps with guns that feel terrible to shoot, and right when you start hitting a groove youāve killed the half-dozen enemies for that skirmish and itās back to the map. I think the character interactions and barks are supposed to be a lot of the appeal, but none of them interested me in the slightest. More and more Iāve felt like modern roguelites are just a pile of mechanics that couldnāt be combined into a coherent game and the player is left to find their own fun.
Vampire Hunters ā Itās genuinely impressive how many Vampire Survivors clones have seemingly never played Vampire Survivors or internalized what made it compelling. Item combinations and niche synergies are what keep things fresh, and if I just wanted to run around in a circle with a dozen pistols Mothergunship came out almost a decade ago. All I really wanted was to throw a few hours in the woodchipper and it did do that, but I wish thereād been any spice whatsoever. It didnāt help that one of the stronger items doubled your XP gain but removed your ability to pick your reward, so itād be 10+ minutes of firing and strafing with no breaks or intercessions of thought.
Lil Gator Game ā I think Minishootā Adventures stole this gameās apostrophe. Iām glad thereās a game for people who played A Short Hike and said āYeah I could go for just a normal hike after thatā. The recent DLC doubles the length of the game and adds a bunch of cool weapons/items/mechanics, and feels almost more like a sequel than anything else. Technically you can use them on the surface island but many of them only function in the DLC area or are so egregiously powerful with their movement that they destroy any semblance of the gameās already limited challenge. The gameās fun, the story is good, the characters are endearing. I canāt wait for A Long Hike.
Lost and Found Co. ā I almost missed this one in my writeup and that wouldāve been a shame because itās one of my favorites this month. My partner and I enjoy hidden object games as something to do together, and this one is endlessly charming with cute characters and a light sense of humor. The fact the pink dragon companion reminds me of Midna certainly doesnāt hurt, but what actually got me to pull the trigger on buying it was the fact that the player character is a duck turned into a human. What can I say, Princess Tutu has its hooks deep in my heart.
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure ā Iām godawful at these sorts of spatial reasoning puzzles. Rubix Cubes, tile sliding puzzles, the works. Iām not any better at it now. The boss fights were cool if a little janky, couldāve done without the twee little cutscenes about self-expression and how all the puzzles are a metaphor for being a better person. I thought indie games got that out of their system around the Braid era but here we are. Still a cute little thing and some very clever ideas. Makes me want to go back and beat Crown Trick.
Peaks of Yore ā I watched a buddy play this on a call once and it gave me such immediate vertigo to the point that I needed to close the video. Playing it myself is slightly better. Slightly. Iād enjoyed the hand-over-hand climbing of Grow Up and I really like the more grounded version here, though at times itās a little close to QWOP for my taste and the difference between limply humping a wall and rocketing over several handholds seems random. Compared to something like Jusant itās far more realistic in some respects, though itās also very willing to let you launch yourself with no rope and no room for failure. Overall itās a very compelling game, and I mean to get back to the harder stages soon. Iām just hoping the palm sweat doesnāt break my mouse.
Skin Deep ā Going back to me being a basic bitch, I need to admit to myself that studios like Blendo donāt make games I enjoy. I would like to be the sort of person that enjoys Annapurnaās catalogue. I would like to enjoy tone-based humor and genre pieces. I do not. I came into this game hoping for something between Void Bastards and Heat Signature, and instead I got Prey by way of Austin Powers. Movement was stiff, physics interactions were inconsistent and buggy, the humor didnāt land, and when the levels did deign to provide puzzles more advanced than āuse code from room A on box in room Bā it was only by adding interstitial boxes and codes. The levels arenāt dense or complex enough to make up for the gameās linearity, with the game feeling like the off-kilter shallowness of a roguelike but with static scenarios. At least they didnāt go whole-hog on that concept like Chasm.
OUTBUDDIES DX ā I have a sickness that makes me try dogshit metroidvanias because some of them are really inventive and cool despite their technical problems. This one isnāt inventive or cool. Iām not sure why they thought Super Metroid needed blown out sprites with colors that offer no contrast, a swimming animation that causes the hitbox to change shape wildly, or a drone you need to awkwardly swap to in order to scout and do physics puzzles. I get thereās some co-op concepts at play here that I ignored but Iām going to continue to ignore them. They also managed to make the controls even more fiddly than Super Metroid which deserves an award.
Magenta Horizon ā Neverending Harvest ā This oneās not even a metroidvania, itās a 2D spectacle fighter that gives you 10+ pages of combos from the word go and expects you to juggle things to your heartās content. Iāve yet to see a 2D spectacle fighter solve the fact that positioning and spacing are less interesting and mechanically deep in 2D than 3D, and you end up with a clusterfuck of hitboxes and particle effects without any features to differentiate them. Also, as much as I hate the drip feed and currency bottlenecks of Devil May Cry, it at least stops you from drowning in options and having no clue what tools are situational and which are your bread and butter. The aesthetics of this game deserve praise though, itās incredibly visually striking. Just not for me in the second-to-second hitting buttons.
Frogun ā Iām not sure what cruel pallor has caused so many indie collectathons to be level-based speedrun games rather than cohesive worlds but I want it to stop. The grappling hook in this game is neat but itās very fiddly in how it targets and what it prioritizes, and many mechanics like how items are thrown and the level geometry seem optimized around zipping through the levels rather than playing the game. Itās possible that it needs an hour or two to get into the groove, and I hear the sequel is smoother.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time ā The Sands of Time trilogy were some of my favorite games as a kid, and Iāve played each of them a half-dozen times at least on the Xbox. I hadnāt done so in a decade, and so I decided to give them a replay. Foolishly I coveted the convenience of save states and modern controllers, so I used a PS2 emulator. I didnāt realize the PS2 versions were buggier and uglier until I was already halfway through Two Thrones, chalking it up to rose-colored glasses. For the games themselves, this is still far and away the best one despite the combat being tedious and a few rough patches. The platforming is crisp and well conveyed, the Prince and Farahās dialogue is charming, and the game is structured to play to its strengths. Time reversal is such an elegant way to solve the inherent trial-and-error of complex platforming, and itās odd we havenāt seen that mechanic copied.
Tower of Kalemonvo ā Itās been a while since Iād played a diablo-style ARPG and this one piqued my interest as well as being part of the same sale as Magenta Horizon. I also saw a clip that in addition to standard barrel and chest mimics there were door mimics that would tear off entire sections of wall to attack you. Unfortunately the game is very old school; six potion slots, no currency, no classes, just you and your stat sticks going deeper and deeper into a hole. Your inventory is just for holding equipment you canāt use yet, and the classless system means you just allocate stats to pursue whatever your best upgrade is. It seemed like the game wanted permadeath from its structure, but it was happy to let you savescum. Because accuracy was extremely unreliable and the difference between wiping a floor and getting mulched while every attack whiffed was pure RNG, after a while itās hard to imagine how youād progress if you didnāt savescum. It was a nice experiment, but definitely made me reconsider trying out Diablo 2 itself.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within ā For years Iād assumed that this game was a knee-jerk tone shift to trendchase God of War, but it was actually a year prior. The writing and setting take a nosedive compared to the first game, really luxuriating in the M rating with metal bikinis and random swearing. Despite the emphasis on combat and adding pages and pages of combos, basic mooks are a chore and the boss designs are atrocious; parry fishing or exploiting sand powers trivializes them but no other strategies work. You can really see how they got from this to Assassinās Creed. The platforming and room layouts also regress, and the gameās āopen worldā structure with four wings of one building has you going through the same rooms over and over with very little signposting as to what entails progress. I spent a non-trivial amount of the game playing at x2 speed and it was interesting how much that helped the flow of the platforming. All problems aside, the Dahaka remains one of the coolest concepts for an enemy Iāve ever seen and Iām sad he goes out like a buster.
Briar Flame ā Iām accustomed to your standard Hollow Knight ripoffs that have germinated the past decade; your Voidwroughts, your Deviators, your Crownsworns. This is perhaps the most gleefully brazen, stealing the protagonistās design, several enemy designs, and the entire UI. Whatās baffling is the bosses and areas in this game that arenāt Hollow Knight ripoffs are very clever and diverse, they just decided to go whole hog on plagiarism and hide their light under a bushel. Normally I have zero patience for that sort of malarkey but for a solo dev so Iām mostly just rolling my eyes. The game itself is extremely short and pretty rote, but for its length it was jam-packed with bosses and I had fun taking a high-damage axe and going on DPS races against many of them.
BABBDI ā Itās free and an hour long, honestly just play this yourself. Explore a concrete city with a variety of strange movement tools, submerge yourself in the jank, be unsettled by the NPCs and the contents of the nooks and crannies. Iām glad games like this exist.
Ancient Mind ā I keep trying Zelda clones and they keep disappointing me. For every Pipistrello or Master Key thereās a dozen like this one, taking the wrong lessons and making laborious dungeons that are just checklists. Movement is slow, combat is stiff, and while some puzzles were interesting they were frequently undermined by the inconsistent contextual button prompts or deliberate tedium. The real death knell was that the game was structured as a level-based series of dungeons, but that means that if you left a dungeon through a secondary exit, your progress was reset. You only get the gem that you need to advance past checkpoints for finding every chest in a level, so you end up needing to go through the same sluggish puzzles again and again if you miss something or use a key incorrectly. Also who the fuck says āun-alivedā when saying how many times the player died?
Metal Garden ā Similar to BABBDI this is about exploring a concrete megacity, but this one is a tight Half-Life-inspired FPS with a few hours of clever level design and solid gunplay. Itās always fascinating how some games can introduce an entire story arc, all their worldbuilding, escalating and evolving mechanics, and several design motifs in the space of a few hours, and others languish with 5+ hours of tutorials and basic introductions. Also this is the first time Iāve sniped a man while riding on the blades of a windmill and that ruled.
Bargalian Regicide ā This is exactly the flavor of dogshit Iām in love with. This game is cacophonous, abrasive, barely solvent, full of snags and deliberate friction, and I adore it. It reminds me of Zeno Clash in all the best ways and has the same rusty magitech as Vexx. The sheer variety of level structures and aesthetics is staggering, and the music is unlike anything else Iāve heard. I canāt say the game is good, but I can say itās $2 and Iām going to think about it for a long time.
Journey of the Garden Rose ā I wish I understood why the jank in Bargalian Regicide had me waxing poetic and the jank here had me gritting my teeth while playing and eventually returning the game. Maybe itās the movement being incredibly slow, maybe itās combat feeling punishing and unfinished rather than frantic and raw, maybe itās just the tone. I think this is from a solo dev or small team that has made several games in this milieu/universe so this could be a Colorgrave situation where I just donāt like their house style. Damn shame because the overall aesthetic looked neat but I think this is a situation where I was most aggressively chasing another Dread Delusion.
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones ā Remember when a video game trilogy would come out through yearly releases? Itās not necessarily a good thing, this game is clearly scraps and cobbled-together mechanics, but itās better than coming out once per decade. Despite being the most polished in some ways I think this is the weakest of the trilogy. The new platforming elements are interesting but mostly used for one-way traversal and masked loading screens rather than puzzles to be navigated. Combat is a bit more streamlined and the boss designs are more elaborate but the Princeās combat arenas are designed for chaining stealth kills and the Dark Princeās combat arenas are just mindless hack-and-slash where every kill heals you to full. While the dialogue isnāt as abrasive as Warrior Within the quality of the delivery is worse, and this version of Farah has no chemistry with the Prince. This game did ignite my love of spiked chains if nothing else.
Rum & Gun ā I was still feeling the ARPG kick after Tower of Kalemonvo didnāt quite do it for me, and while Iām so-so on pirates this had good reviews from the people who buy solo-dev projects. While this didnāt dislodge Chronicon from my top spot, it definitely earned its place in the rotation. Youāve got rum instead of healing potions, gunpowder instead of mana, a liver slot to help your drink speed, and play Drunken Sailor on an accordion to attract loot. Weapons and armor are all statsticks but runes are both attacks and different passive buffs based on whether theyāre slotted in a weapon/armor/helmet/rum bottle/liver. The result is a very interesting juggling of passive and active abilities until you hit critical mass and find your alpha rotation. I wish there was a little more endgame and maybe some set bonuses or legendaries to give something to hunt for beyond bigger numbers, but I still had a fun 20 hours for $5.
Lornās Lure ā Iāve had an eye on this game even before it released so Iām very happy that a friend gave me a copy. The game itself is halfway between Peaks of Yore and Hypogea, and I need to finish the former before I get too deep into it. You can climb anything concrete with your pickaxes, but stamina is limited and fall damage is brutal. The sheer scale of the levels is staggering, well beyond any other game of this type Iāve played. Thereās a button that will tell you which way progress is through the maze of wires and pipes that fades into the dusty void, and while thatās for bitches sometimes Iām bitches.
Bombun ā I am not immune to propaganda. Did I buy this primarily because the vivacity and frequency with which the dev mentioned that the titular bunny enters into carnal relations with human men? Yes. Is the game fun on its own merits? Also yes. As I mentioned with Frogun, Iām not a fan how most indie platformers and collectathons have devolved into these speedrun-centric levels but the movement is crisp and the shortcuts available always feel like youāre getting away with something even when theyāre intended. I didnāt get too deep into it before getting distracted but I definitely want to see what horseshit the later levels get up to.
Frogsong ā Another swing and a miss on a Zelda clone. Iām at the point that I need to just stop playing indie games with frogs in them because theyāve become a shibboleth for a certain style of ācozyā design that is anathema to actual structure or vision with mechanics. Everything here is both rote and executed poorly. The game is woefully short and exclusively fetch quests back and forth across barren hallways with enemies who beeline for you with no AI, but the sword is so mediocre that youāll often get womboād to death anyways. Thereās a bevy of options for making the combat easier like making yourself invincible or activating the AI companion bug that will stunlock and murder any enemy or boss within range, but none that make the combat feel fun or interesting. In a game like this if the exploring sucks, the combat sucks, and the story sucks (which it does, itās insultingly twee and utterly devoid of texture) then thereās nothing at all. I was hoping for something comfortably mediocre like Garden Story but this couldnāt even reach that level.
Grime II ā I enjoyed the first Grime well enough back in 2022 and when I replayed it last year I was mostly struck by how much easier it was after Nine Sols forced me to master parrying and also by how much the overall structure had been changed by DLC and balance tweaks. This sequel is a much more holistically cohesive design, and so far Iām enjoying it immensely. Combat feels great, movement feels great, environments are colorful and strange, and the lore remains delightfully bizarre. The devs are still rapidly tweaking and polishing so Iām interested to see where this ends up in a few years, but Iām deeply enjoying where itās at now. So far my favorite part by far is the fact that weāre finally moving beyond corpse runs, stamina management, and fall damage in metroidvanias. A new day is dawning. Ā
In addition to 15 games this month (two of which got 40+ hours each) I spent ~20 hours playing Magic, namely Vintage Cube drafts on Arena. Itās not a game I typically put in my ledger as itās more of a perennial which Iāve played off and on for years, and also because my thoughts on magic are a decades-long gyre of ideas about capitalism, the needs of game design to serve diametrically-opposed subsections of the audience, and the ultimate purpose of randomness in contests of skill. As an experienced player my winrate has been around 60% regardless of format for years, which is still a firm notch below the best players who average 65-70%. The prize payouts for events are structured such that maintaining a 60% winrate is just barely insufficient for a draftās rewards paying for its entry fee, requiring supplemental rewards from either purchases or grinding daily quests. This puts me in a profoundly frustrating state where each loss stings not because Iāve lost, but because that loss fundamentally undermines my ability to play further. In many ways Magic pioneered the lootbox model so I canāt be surprised or disappointed that they refuse to let players get the virtual cardboard for a fixed price, but itās still disheartening. Unrelated but shoutouts to my Strange Festive Rocket Launcher selling for a cool $120 on steam marketplace, funding many of the games I played this month. RIP Lunaās Comet, you were a hell of a gun but I havenāt played TF2 in almost a decade.
The Edge of Allegoria ā I have a complex relationship with Pokemon. I love the world. The pokemon designs. The bright air of adventure and camaraderie. The games themselves are ass. I love the side games; Ranger, Mystery Dungeon, Legends, Pinball... Not a fan of the core JRPGs. This makes it a problem when I play other monster-collectors, as they typically harvest the mechanics I could do without and discard the tone that I find essential. Typically the inversion is not this cynical and surgical. Iām flabbergasted that this game came out in 2024 as the humor is as 2000s newgrounds as possible, to the level of having End of Ze World references, and itās āadultā insofar as thereās constant jokes about child abuse, sex, and drugs. Instead of collecting a team, the player is a blue mage that harvests attacks from each type of monster defeated which leads to a novel enough cadence of mastering skills and equipment before cycling through to new ones. As a game itās solvent enough but I canāt fathom anyone wanting to put up with more than an hour or two of writing worse than Kramerās Quest for Hentai.
Teslagrad Remastered ā I didnāt pay much attention to the indie game scene until ~2015, so a lot of 2010s games were never on my radar unless they were in a Humble Bundle. Teslagrad Iād seen in passing on lists of metroidvanias and they were on sale so I gave it a shot. Much like how you can instantly tell from gamefeel if a shooter is from the 360 era, thereās something about early 2010s platformers that has a distinct feel. Floaty and with a tempo that makes precision impossible, on top of endless inconsistent physics puzzles. Thereās a lot of neat ideas here, but after the third prolonged death that felt like a Buster Keaton gag I was good.
Northern Journey ā Literally all I want from video games is to fuck around in the woods shooting things with a bow and nicking their shit. Northern Journey is 15 hours of that with some beautiful foggy hinterlands and mountain vistas. Itās unfortunately also 2 hours of godawful swimming and some pretty sketchy boss fights. The highs are incredibly high and the atmosphere here is unmatched, but you need some serious jank tolerance. Overall I think the level of polish and focus was greater than The Axis Unseen but somehow I still think I prefer the latter.
Tile ā Neat little itch platformer by one of the Rusted Moss devs: https://emlise.itch.io/tile . Itās a lot of jumping/burrowing puzzles like Leap Year but a lot denser and more compact. Fun vignette.
Outriders ā Borderlands 3 wasnāt doing it and this was on sale. Itās somehow making all the mistakes of Borderlands, Destiny, and Diablo 4 at the same time. Guns are just stat sticks, your action skills define everything but depending on class that can be either be āguns, but with cooldownsā or hypermobile wrecking ball, itās ostensibly a cover-based shooter but cover does nothing and most arenas donāt actually have it. I do like how weapon and armor perks can be salvaged and then modded onto new gear, it reminds me pleasantly of Kanaiās Cube in Diablo 3 with the layers of optimization as you alter how your abilities work and which ones you care about. The writing is nihilistic and crass to the point of meaninglessness, the environments are generic, the lore uninspired, the characters detestable. We gave up Bulletstorm 2 for this.
Teslagrad 2 ā After getting frustrated with the first game I decided to move on to the sequel. Itās essentially the same game but with some new abilities and faster progression. When I was in the groove it was a pleasant enough puzzle platformer, but again and again there were demands for precision that the platforming simply didnāt support. What broke me was the boss fights. Inconsistent AI, buggy physics, one-hit kills, and profoundly ungenerous hitboxes were all omnipresent. There was at least a cute googirl with sharp teeth that gets a few fun cutscenes, but even that wasnāt enough to see this through.
Tearscape ā Itās rare for me to try demos as I usually find them to be a poor vertical slice of a game and also my hit rate of predicting if Iāll like a game from a demo seems somehow less accurate than my barometer for a purchase. Nevertheless I tried this one as Mina the Hollower is never coming out and Havenlocked still has no release date. As a 2D clone of Bloodborne itās fairly unashamed, but unlike games such as Fountains itās doing nothing to try and translate the feel or level design. Rooms were fairly rote, combat was dull (with a strange asymmetry to the swing arcs when facing various directions making you unable to hit enemies southeast of you), and nothing about the game inspired confidence. Would I have moved through that and found something to enjoy had I bought the game? Maybe! But for now Iām moving on.
Dead Estate ā I bought a bundle of games by this publisher that all looked interesting, and I started with the one I was the least likely to enjoy because Iām a moron. I donāt like twin-stick shooters. Iāve become jaded with roguelikes. I particularly didnāt gel with Nuclear Throne/Enter the Gungeon/Binding of Isaac. There was really no shot here. For every neat idea thereās a half-dozen things done just to ensure the player dies often, and the layers of byzantine nonsense for various alternate endings and challenges make playing the game for the first time an exercise in wiki trawling or blind confusion. For fans of the genre maybe the gameās fine but getting mulched by an enemy obscured behind a text popup isnāt my idea of a good time.
Babushkaās Glitch Dungeon ā Iām not sure this is my idea of a good time either. Every time I think Iām a fan of esoteric puzzle horeshit I play something like Baba is You or Tunic that reminds me that Iām not a hobbyist cryptographer and that my spatial reasoning is average at best. Thereās parts of Babushka is You that I really enjoyed, you can only have two of your spells equipped at once and theyāre very clever about making rooms for each combination and rewarding you for taking a different spell into a zone where it makes some puzzles trivial and others much more challenging. That being said, at the end of the game when the precision platforming and the puzzle elements combined to minutes-long sequences that demanded absolute perfection or needing a reset, I decided I was good. That puts me at 1/9 for finishing games this month, and Tile was a short little itch game. I like to think of myself as someone that sticks with games but Iāve also tried to get better at pulling the ripcord if Iām not having fun and donāt expect to have fun later. Not sure how to feel about that.
Avowed ā People rightfully give Bethesda a lot of shit for the Elder Scrolls but Avowed really hammered home for me that having that amount of content, even if itās shallow/generic/unbalanced/shitty, is truly colossal. This wasnāt swinging for that fence but it was closer than they had the juice for, and the result is a game thatās 6/10 but constantly clotheslining itself. Every time I started to care about a storyline or get interested in how a rare equipment might interact with my build, Iād get a crash or a scummy dialogue choice with no context or yet another sidequest with a sanctimonious subversion. The gameās fine overall but Dread Delusion kicks the shit out of Avowed in storytelling, setting, characters, RPG mechanics, map design, dungeon design, movement, running without making a 4070 Super stutter over 30FPS frame rate, you name it. That being said, words cannot describe my bafflement when the anniversary update came without notice while I was playing, so one day I loaded up and had +2 to Dex with the explanation āElfā with no context as to why I hadnāt been one previously. Motherfuckers sent me to elf practice and no wiki could help me because the patch was that day and gamepass is godawful at telling you when something updated. Despite the scuff marks I still probably wouldāve finished the game had that update not absolutely thrown the performance into the dumpster, and if I hadnāt likely softlocked myself by getting a combination of quest flags that required me to go into a city that would no longer lower its drawbridge. Compared to Starfield bricking my save after 100 hours with an XP glitch that set me to level 2^36, Iāll take it.
Relooted ā I will preface this by saying that I am so white that if I stand still long enough in a Staples an employee will eventually pick me up and try to put me on the shelf with the printer paper. I cannot speak intelligently to the complex history of stolen museum pieces, racist paternalism in the stewardship of cultural artifacts, or how best to practice reparations. However, despite its delusions of grandeur this game cannot either. I was interested in the conceit of museum heists to restore African history to its people, but the first mission after the tutorial is stealing Olympic medals from a private collector who bought them at auction so that you can blackmail your friend into helping you on more elaborate heists. I really enjoyed Tales of Kenzera: ZAU (rip). I was glad when Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (rip) tried to be more actively Persian and played the game with Persian voice acting. This concept could have been an interesting way to explore and convey cultures that get very little spotlight in video games. Instead this comes off as smarmy and exploitative, and even that I couldāve forgiven if the heists and parkour in the parkour heist game didnāt suck eggs. Canned animations, stilted movement, your cool gadgets are exclusively used by your allies as assists you pre-place at various points, and the most elaborate tool in your arsenal is pushing tables around to hold switches or keep doors open. Itās an absolute disaster to play, which is a shame when itās clear someone did give a shit about this at some point.
CiniCross ā Ever since playing Master Keyās picross sidegame in mid-2024 Iāve been on a tear of playing nonograms/minesweeper of various flavors. I didnāt have Picross roguelike on my bingo card but CiniCross delivered a need I didnāt know I had. Iād played a lot of DemonCrawl (recently back from being delisted after some dev drama) and that was a solid minesweeper roguelike, so I knew a rough sketch of how this was gonna go; earlygame youāre actually playing nonograms and using hints because HP conservation and time management are important, lategame youāre using item synergies to mulch through boards while slamming the mouse button like itās Cookie Clicker. Thatās fun the first few times and I did have a nice ten hours or so, but unfortunately the gameās in a weird spot where the easy puzzles are trivial for experienced solvers and the harder puzzles are slogs with really poor UI/UX unless youāre banking on perk spam to clear the board for you. Still a fun novelty if nothing else.
Under the Island ā Perfectly reasonable Zelda clone. A lot of the pieces are rote; island setting with desert/jungle/forest/city, sword/bombs/fire rod, find four pieces of heart to get more HP, cut bushes for money. But itās the small things that make the game interesting. Your melee weapon is a hockey stick, so you can slapshot bombs and environmental objects to solve puzzles or spice up combat. One of your items is animal treats you use to lure rams into knocking over objects, coax yaks into holding down buttons, or convince wolves to fight alongside you. The boomerang is a bird you control with the right stick, though sadly you canāt go full Astral Chain and move it while youāre moving yourself. The shovel can make balls of earth that fill holes or can be sent careening into enemies. On the whole it's nowhere near Master Key or Pipistrello in terms of quality or charm but itās fun and has enough clever design to be worth playing for fans of the genre.
Blood West ā In almost any month Northern Journey would be far and away the most āfucking about in the woods before shooting an arrow into a manās head and nicking his shitā game I played, but Blood West came in under the wire and stole the show. I almost didnāt buy it when the sale came up because the western aesthetic isnāt really my thing and it looked stilted. Iām very glad I did. Guns feel great, bows feel great, enemies do brutal amounts of damage but headshots will instantly kill damn near anything so as long as youāre careful with stealth and have a plan it never feels truly unfair. I poured 10 hours into it in a single day and I pushed through the final boss with some minor quibbles about pacing and progression seeming to cap out early. As it died and I got the achievement for āChapter 1ā I realized I still had 2/3rds of the game to go. The game isnāt for everyone. You die quickly and death is punishing. Stealth is simple but mandatory. Inventory management is constant. Unless you are scrabbling through every corner looking for supplies and ammo the early game is a nightmare, and even then itās best to rely heavily on bows because you can get arrows back. I had a phenomenal time with it all the same, and my real takeaway is that much like Dread Delusion I think what I really want out of games is small dense maps full of shit to steal that donāt overstay their welcome. Maybe I should give Thief another shot.
Dice A Million ā It was on gamepass and I wanted to put my brain in the smoothie machine. Itās a bad Balatro knockoff with dice, and I can say that even as someone who has played zero Balatro. While not as galling as Clover Pit itās still a fairly ghoulish cacophony of lights and sounds. I maintain my assertion that long after roguelites abandoned Rogue as a signpost, theyāre now abandoning even the pretense of gameplay. Ever since Vampire Survivors itās been more about the cascades of item interactions and getting another pull of the slot machine than anything approaching tactics or strategy. I wouldāve thought that Unfair Flips or Q-UP wouldāve been when the snake ate its tail but the spiral continues.
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