Video Games I Played in May 2026
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 couldn’t off-hand a shield and block properly, but by then nothing did damage that mattered anyways. I’ll take it over Oblivion level-scaling I guess.
Coyote Climb – 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. Didn’t end up finishing it because there were some positively nonsensical spiked corridors at the end, but fun little concept.
Clockwork Ambrosia – I really wanted to like this game because I deeply appreciate any metroidvania that isn’t melee-focused, and was also excited to see a gun customization mechanic like Xanthiom Zero fleshed out into a larger game. Unfortunately certain ideas don’t operate at scale. Four guns is what killed the game. It doesn’t 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 don’t reload passively, and so using them is much more stilted and frustrating. Gun parts aren’t fungible between equipment, so if you hate the pistol then any upgrade for it is a waste of progression. There’s some neat concepts regardless like explosive pistol rounds letting you use bomb modifiers from the grenade launcher, but overall there’s 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 didn’t just crash immediately) and atrocious save point placement and I had to tap out.
TOMOMI – I was recommended this game primarily because it’s cheap, it features a large-breasted OL, and is just a cute and simple metroidvania with solid combat. What I wasn’t expecting was some clever map design and writing that while somewhat cliché was quite endearing. It’s not uncommon for me to fall off metroidvanias and even rarer for me to replay ones I’ve beaten, but this is one of the only ones I’ve beaten and immediately done NG+. The short runtime certainly helped, both playthroughs together took less than six hours, but the bosses each had a new NG+ moveset and the game was a blast to just tear through at full strength. I very nearly bought the sequel and tore into to right after, and honestly might do so after writing this review.
MOTORSLICE – If you’re making a game like Mirror’s 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 there’s a veneer of imprecision that I can only equate to visual bloom; a gloss that makes things “smoother” but muddy and hard to look at for extended periods. The combat is tacked on and didn’t have the balls to actually copy the Revengeance slicing system so it’s 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 that’s a shame because the parts are cool.
Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core – I have 800 hours in DRG. I enjoyed exploring caves, I enjoyed the guns, I enjoyed the scout’s 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 would’ve 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, I’d be interested enough to buy it in early access. Rogue Core isn’t 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 someone’s first game, let alone a team with millions of sales in a very similar title. I’m sure the game will be great eventually, but I’m annoyed that it isn’t good yet.
Mohrta – Scumhead is a truly magnificent dev, with a very unique aesthetic and some of the most magnificent and fascinating magitech societies I’ve 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 you’re 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 I’m pissed I missed out on the makership for her). Mohrta is their latest game and it’s absolutely stretching the limits of what you can do in GZDoom. After Hedon Bloodrite I was worried that wads just weren’t for me but this game’s guns felt damn good and the maps were phenomenal. Environments were striking and distinct, layouts were clever, secrets were hidden but never punishingly so. It’s 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 – I very nearly bought this on release because “edgy anime Pac-Man Metroidvania” 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. It’s 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 aren’t playing as one. But then you’ll touch a grind rail or go into the Pac-Man dimension and suddenly it’s 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 couldn’t be bothered to slog through. I’m glad I experienced the game because the concept alone was a fever dream worth the price of admission.















