Games I Played In 2026 And Whether Or Not I Thought They Were Good [2/?]
It's Slay the Spire but more of it.
This is my playtime in Slay the Spire 1:
So like. Maybe don't do that to yourself a second time. The new one is pretty much more of the same but it looks slightly better and is less balanced around needing energy relics from bosses to be viable lategame, and you can draw on the map now, aaaaand there's multiplayer now which is fun. But don't. It's too brain-eaty. If there's anything more worth saying about it that gets added during early access, I'll keep you posted.
Y'know Yacht Club? The guys who did Shovel Knight? They're finally back with a new IP, and this time it's like... Link's Awakening meets Castlevania meets Dark Souls. And it's pretty darn good! They know what they're doing over there.
Mina is a "Hollower", which is apparently a kind of mad scientist, who built a bunch of electrical towers for an island kingdom a while ago. She gets a letter from the client saying "hey, turns out when your towers need maintenance and start dimming, it causes a frankenstein apocalypse where the dead rise from the earth and try to kill everyone, so can you come and fix them for me?" And so she does, exploring this big open world that's infested with various body horror halloweentown monsters.
Per Yacht Club standards, the gameplay is super tight- every room is dense with puzzles and secrets and ways to use the interactions between mechanics creatively. The map's very rewarding to explore and the combat design is polished to a mirror sheen, which is impressive given the kinda awkward Zelda controls.
I feel like the Castlevania inspiration kind of works against it a little, though? What with the awkward windup on your attacks, and the inconsistent subweapons that drop out of random torches on walls. Running into a new toy and the reaction being "aw, fuck, I have to give up my current toy just to try this" is a feelbad they didn't need to have IMO.
The story this time is a very odd duck. Mina is a technician doing her job, and emphatically not a hero- this is a game that takes a Soulslike grimdark tone where NPCs die all the time, and... plays it for comedy? Most things you do in the world make it very slightly worse, and Mina doesn't really care. There's a subplot with this very obviously heroic rebel leader character trying to convince her to do the right thing, who she no-sells the whole time with obvious exasperation. I won't spoil how it all resolves, since it's interesting, but I feel like they didn't quite lean into the tension inherent in the premise enough.
At least once a year, I'll see the Game Grumps play something that looks kind of interesting, and they will spend the entire episode steadfastly ignoring incredibly obvious mechanics that the game is screaming in their face to use and not making any progress whatsoever. I will then buy and play the game, purely so I can see what the game is like when you haven't all the way turned your brain off. This may be a deliberate strategy on their part. I have no idea.
Berry Bury Berry is this year's first entry in that category- it's an incremental game that's doing some like... kinda bog-standard analog horror mascot horror creepypasta stuff, initially. It's about a public access kids' TV show, it's got a CRT filter, things are spooky and ominous... you know the drill. It's what kids buy these days.
What impressed me about BBB is that it really put a lot of thought into how its creepy visuals play into its secret murder backstory. Everything in this game is remarkably intentional! There's all these bits of seemingly disparate kitschy visual theming that turn out to play into the narrative really elegantly. Everything's a metaphor! There's nothing too groundbreaking about the story itself, but it's really cool how it reveals that you were experiencing that story the whole time.
The game itself is also just like, fun to play. A plant spawns berries, you throw the berries in the hole, it spits out money you spend to improve berry production and otherwise get berries in and money out more efficiently. This would be satisfying on its own, but it also has this really fun Donut County-style mechanic where you can move the hole and swallow up items in the environment for a separate upgrade currency, and as the world opens up you find a bunch of new ways to use it. It's a fun six hours or so!
You ever play Prop Hunt in Garry's Mod? Hide and seek, only you're disguised as objects in a cluttered environment and the hunters have to suss out what's out of place? This game is just Prop Hunt... except instead of turning into props, you're a little obviously-out-of-place stick figure... which you can paint to blend in with the environment. Also you can gecko climb on walls and stuff for extra verticality. It gives you a little eyedropper tool to pick colors from the screen, too.
The premise is exactly as fun as it sounds. It's so fun to hide in plain sight with a clever paint job, watching the hunters stumble around shooting everything but you.
(At least... it's fun for a few hours before the novelty kinda wears off and people figure out how to look for stuff. I'm not a huge Prop Hunt guy generally, and the dynamics are exactly the same- you can only play for so long before the players get good enough that the hide-and-seek gets too easy.)
Pippin Please: Adequate Attorney
This is a free, one-case Ace-Attorney-like I played a couple months back, where you play as a nervous little mouse guy solving a murder in an animal-people world. It's cute! It works! And it has this really weird and gruesome gimmick to it that plays into some stuff you automatically take for granted about the setting in a hilarious way! There's... like one really annoying sideways nonsense deduction that got me stuck for over an hour, so I gotta dock it a little for that, but otherwise it's a clever little angle on the genre that I enjoyed a lot.
This one's looking to be the last "filler" chapter before the overarching plot really kicks into gear, and for what it is, it's very fun. Probably the most fun to play so far? They have this really cool new gimmick where the world shifts between this isometric top-down view and a side-on platforming view, and it gets used in a lot of really clever ways- sort of a Fez meets Papyrus's blue attack situation. Now that Deltarune has like, a team and a budget, it gets away with some pretty impressive stuff.
This one feels... a little more unfocused than usual, though? It's hard to say, since of course there's a big overarching mystery and we don't know where everything is going and what's significant yet, but... Deltarune's got this weird duality going on between its interconnected and personal Light World plot, and... the game you're actually playing, which usually focuses on the tormented psychology of some Darkner who's completely unconnected to what's going on. I always love these little freaks, but I'm never sure if they're like, developing themes and parallels, or drip-feeding information, or setting up characters who will pay off later in the plot, or just... Fucking Around.
And don't get me wrong- I love the Fucking Around! Deltarune remains a masterclass in leveraging game mechanics for comedy. But if that's all we're doing this late in the game, I'm a little nervous that it'll stick the landing. We'll see!
The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere (Demo)
Zero and I have been working on this for a while, and we just released a demo! TFTBN is an elaborate sci-fi murder mystery that deals with questions of the social consequences of longevity, the human psyche as it relates to eternity, what is and isn't truly fundamental to human identity, and whether or not Kamrusepa of Tuon will succeed in getting Utsushikome of Fusai angry enough to punch her in the teeth sexual style.
The demo is around 30,000 words and is mainly introducing characters and setting up the scenario, so don't expect the murder mystery just yet- but if you're hooked, the webnovel we're adapting is considerably further along.
