Paradox Spiral @mujunrasen - Tumblr Blog

Games What I Played March 2k26

Chat, I must confess, this one feels weird. In part, I want to say it hasn't been that long since I did the demo thing, and that was a lot of fun. But also, I dunno, March just kind of feels like it didn't happen. I even took an all too brief vacation, but like. I dunno, I can't believe this month happened. But I woke up today to find roughly four thousand words about roughly ten games, so like, something happened somewhere. So let's see what past-me thought; hopefully the stream of thought is legible.

2025 End of Year Entries: GOTY, Epilogue

2026 Entries: January, February

2026 Demos: Spring (Part 1, Part 2);

Old Games

Really Big Sky

So, I’ve been looking for a new second screen game; one I can pick up for a run, play a few minutes, and then put down. Low impact, kind of mindless something to fill my brain or reflexes while I’m “watching” YouTube or stealing time from work. I don’t know why I felt this was necessarily a good choice, but it’s fun to go back to. Really Big Sky is a side-scrolling shmup that I can barely make heads or tails of, but I enjoy watching and playing it. It’s fun; though I’ve never been good enough to pick it up long term, and if I’m being honest I’m not well enough versed in shmups to really say if it’s good or not. It’s also a touch too high intensity for a second screener. Ah well, the search continues.

Blocks that Matter

So, my Steam account has four major categories of games. The first is for games that I’ve Beaten (261 games at time of writing). How a game gets here is obvious; I have to roll credits at least once (assuming the credits are at the end of the game.) Occasionally I’ll pull something out and put it back in the main mix, but by and large I’ve gotten what I wanted out of them and they can rest. The next are for Fightgames (9) specifically; games that you can’t really Win per-se and I may feel like revisiting every year or so. The third are games that I will Never Again (68) play; these are games that I bounce hard off of for whatever reason (Mercenary Kings, X-COM Interceptor), games that are dead and aren’t worth powering up again (The Ship, Dark Horizons: Mechanized Corps), or games that would be… detrimental to my health if I picked them up again (Depression Quest, MechWarrior Online.) On review, there’s a lot more 4X style games in there than I care to think about, huh. Anyway, most of these games are in Never Again either for quality or lack of multiplayer reasons. I don’t often grab things from here and move it back into rotation unless I really feel like I’ve missed something. The rest are Uncategorized (189), which is my catch-all for things that are *technically* still in rotation. Most are games I haven’t played, some are games I want to replay, fewer are games that I have played but haven’t categorized. They may sit there for years, but one day I’ll get hands on.

One such game is Blocks that Matter, a 2011 puzzle-platformer that I have had for years and never touched. I probably picked it up through one of the many Humble Bundles. So, in a fit of wanting to make some forward progress, I picked a random one to try it out. It’s interesting the differences between indie games now and in 2011. I tried to give this a better shot, but the thing that really got me was that the Block-bot main character controls really poorly. I’ve been conditioned by modern games to expect responsive characters, and I spent more time being frustrated by the bot not responding to a jump and having to restart the level as a result. I tried, I did, but after a half hour I was not having fun, so into Never Again it goes. I am not, at time of writing, super interested in reconsidering, so I think it can stay there for a bit. Maybe I’m missing out on a classic, but I doubt it.

20 Minutes Till Dawn

I technically wrote about this last January, but those entries were bad, so, let’s try this again. The problem is I don’t know if this paragraph is going to be much different from the previous paragraph, since my fundamental use of the game hasn’t really changed. 20 Minutes ‘til Dawn is a Vampy Survivy-like with a few major mechanical differences. Instead of building up a bevy of weapons, you have only have one main gun that has ammo. Once your gun fires through the ammo you have, you spend a few seconds to reload. And since you don’t get new weapons on level up, each level up allows you to choose one of four passive upgrades to work on your build. By time played, it’s probably my second-most Vampy Survivy-like, though I think it has some massive mechanical issues. Namely, the builds you create tend to feel same-y since they’re all passives and there isn’t such a wide-variety that you’re going to see massively different choices every game. The game *tries* to ameliorate this problem by having essentially prestige choices available if you max out two or more specific paths of upgrades, but the game also doesn’t give you a way to affect which passives you get or re-roll at all, so I think I’ve seen these prestige upgrades in two or three runs, and those tend to be at lower levels due to the larger number of upgrades you get. It’s kind of disappointing, but I think the rest of the game is strong enough to override that. I’ve now gotten everything done in it. It’s great. Hopefully whatever update is allegedly happening actually does.

Trails of Cold Steel IV

Hey guess what. I’ve continued working through Cold Steel IV. It’s still pretty good! It’s kind of got all the flaws and strengths that the Cold Steel series has had the entire time. On the one hand, the characters are mostly pretty ok! On the other hand, everything rotates around Rean F(ucking) Schwarzer to an extent that the Trails series has pretty well avoided, and on top of that there’s a prophecy now? Look, this is good, but it’s good because I have a deep and abiding love for everything that’s not Erebonian here. I dunno, I think next month might have a bit where I grapple with the fact that while I can recommend up until Azure pretty handily, I don’t know that I can recommend anyone get this much further into the Trails series. Unless you’re mad, like me, where you’ve already determined that you’ll play through everything, common sense be damned.

I guess I should give a slight update; I’ve officially reached the start of Act II and everything is opening up, which, based on Cold Steel II, means that everything will take forever to go through, even playing through with a spoiler-lite walkthrough.

Proverbs

Look, it’s another one of those Mosaic games I’ve discussed…. Three? Times now. It’s not as good as Mosaic of the Strange because it’s still not really a puzzle game, but it’s satisfying to fill in. Ok, necessary spiel out of the way. Netherlandish Proverbs is a work of art from 1559 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder showing a scene of people, animals, and things enacting proverbs and idioms. It’s a fascinating piece of work I’ve never seen and kind of love; the Wiki article I linked lists out 126 proverbs. I mention this because Proverbs, the game, is literally just that; only it pops up what the proverb the section you’re working in is describing when you finish a section. It’s a deeply weird way to engage with another work of art; programming and developing a game based on it, but I kind of dig it. There’s some wildass proverbs too.

Digseum

No trailer for these next two; here have some soundtracks that play in my brain 24/7. - Management

This is going to short, but it’s a pretty short game. I picked this and the next entry up in an effort to look for a good idle game. This isn’t quite an idle game; it’s an incremental clicker where you click to dig through some dirt for relics, get paid based on the relics, and continue. It’s fine; maybe a bit long with a poor reward ratio. The initial rewards take a while to build up and it’s a slow start, and then in the mid-game you start building enough of the incremental reward in a single life that you’re buying through the prestige upgrades five to ten nodes at a time. It’s fine. What really got me was that the end credits were just a really nice note from the dev to the players. I wasn’t expecting it, and I think it’s a nice touch when the dev directly thanks the players. I’d recommend it just based on that honestly. This was a good couple hours.

nodebuster

Gonna have to pull together a list of things I've linked instead of trailers so I don't repeat myself. - Management

I picked this up with Digseum, and luckily, this is much more of an idle. It’s really similar to A Game About Feeding a Black Hole. Here, you are… a square? And you move your mouse around a screen full of squares and intermittently do damage. It’s a fine; it’s a bit abstract for my taste, and if I’m being honest, I think Black Hole does everything this game does, but better.

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3

This one kind of snuck in at the last minute; it’s been pretty heavily pushed to me by Steam for what I think are obvious reasons, and I’ve been wanting something that’s marginally puzzlier than usual. Puzzle games are fun y’all. One of my favorite bits of Cold Steel 4 is the return of their Puyo Puyo (Puyo Puyo was created in Zemuria before TV and with the advent of the internet), and I spend a lot of time on my phone playing a bunch of puzzle games. And less than puzzle games, but still, some minimal amount of brain tunage. So I gave CRDM3 a shot, and it’s fine. It’s puzzle quest, but with a meta game dev story wrapper about a game that failed to launch in basically every way. Like I said, it’s fine. The dialogue isn’t great and I skipped through tons of it, there’s some bits in there that elicited a sensible chuckle, but never a heartfelt belly laugh. I’d honestly probably be more negative on the thing if the credits hadn’t been a message from the devs about the rocky history of the game and a heartfelt thanks. That was enough to get me to go back through and wrap the bits that remained too, so, mission accomplished I guess. If you’re hankering for more Puzzle Quest, then you could certainly do worse.

New Games

TR-49

Two notes on this before we begin. First, on review, I did not take a ton of screenshots of this game. I contemplated going back to grab some screens, but as a puzzle game, and a textual puzzle game at that, I kind of run into the issue where basically anything I provide is going to include spoilers of some variety. That feels bad to me, unless I truly loathed the game, so I haven't gotten more screenshots. What I'll do to break up the paragraphs is drop some unrelated Trails screenshots in, because I have so many of those. Second, I think I’m going to end up meaner to this game than I intend to be, and I’m going to do that by being mean to a game that is generally enjoyed. I’m not quite sure how this is going to look, so I’m going to be blunt: TR-49 is fine, but.

I didn’t know anything about TR-49 before I watched a trailer for it. The trailer was fascinating, so I looked up the Steam page, as one does. The blurb got me pretty hard in my interests. The game explicitly lists the following inspirations: The Rootrees are Dead (I wrote about that in one of my early entries in this series, February 2025 [Management apologizes for the mess; this was before I had stumbled onto a format I like. I liked Rootrees fine, end parenthetical]), The Return of the Obra Dinn (It’s one of the Perfect games), Type Help (I know nothing about this), and Her Story (Well. Can’t go four for four for quality I guess.), and audio dramas/podcasts The Magnus Archives (Didn’t grab me at all) and ars PARADOXICA (Loved it at the time, I do not have memories beyond being confused near the end). Of those, I love one, like two, am ambivalent of two, and actively dislike one. It seemed like this game was pretty promising.

Unfortunately, and this is where I’m going to be mean to this game, it’s less Obra Dinn and more Her Story. In TR-49, you are digging through a computer database that’s been corrupted somehow. Your goal is to uncorrupt the database by associating the name of each entry’s book, magazine, or letter with that specific entry. So, for example, an entry under AC17 may be the first issue of the Author’s Compendium journal. The names of each piece of writing can be found in various other entries, and from there you have a fun enough logic puzzle for each of the fifty entries (and some super neat surprises elsewhere that I’d be remiss not to mention, but I’m not going to go into details because I thought they were cool.)

The narrative thrust of the game is delivered in two ways. First, you have a few people in the world outside the database talking at you. Through this, you learn about the immediate concerns of the world…. Kind of. It’s all pretty vague and inexplicably sci-fi. The rest of the story is told in the entries, which further (kind of) expound on the status of the world and illustrate the changing relationships between the system’s creators and maintainers.

The problem with this, and it is a problem since this is attempting to be narrative forward, is that TR-49 largely bases it’s narrative design around Her Story. Her Story, for those who don’t know, is a “puzzle” game where you go through a database with responses from a woman’s interview. The story, such as it is, is told through her responses, because you don’t get to hear the questions she’s asked, and you don’t necessarily know what the context around the question or response is. Once you’ve seen enough of the interview, the game ends. There is no further explanation. Maybe you’ve pieced something together. You probably haven’t, though, because everything is too broken up. It’s an interesting experiment, and in a better designer’s hand something could maybe be done with it, but Sam Barlow is neither that writer or designer.

TR-49 provides more narrative bone for the player to latch on to, and I think it’s mostly successful with the interpersonal stuff it jumps into, but as to the state of the world? While I was playing, I was mostly lost as to what was actually going on, until the game decided to just tell me what to do (which it does after you’ve identified everything.) In part, I was able to stumble through because I’m a braingenius and I deduced the actual labeling conventions super early, so I ended up, ah, brute forcing something like 80% of the entries. This is, in retrospect, not the ideal way to engage with the narrative or narrative design. Whoops.

It’s fine. I don’t know that I’d really recommend this to anyone after playing, but if you’ve already played Obra Dinn or Rootree? You could certainly do worse. Certainly better than Her Story or Immortality.

Resident Evil: re9uiem

I think I’ve scrapped this bit and started over three times now. I don’t know if it’s clear from the rest of this series, but I don’t edit. I write down my thoughts, give it a once over, and call it good. There’s horizons to explore and games to pontificate on, I don’t have time for this editing bullshit. So I’m not entirely sure why I’ve had such troubles with this. I mean, it seems like a slam dunk. Resident Evil: requiem is the ninth(ish) mainline entry in the long running series, which in itself is one of the big legendary franchises. Even if you pay a quarter of the attention to the hobby that I do, you are at least aware of RE. I could, reasonably, just end this bit here by saying “Hey, it’s a new RE game. It’s pretty good. It’s not as good as RE4, but that’s maybe the least fair comparison I’ve made, even in this post today where I compared TR-49 to Obra Dinn. This isn’t the best starting point, but it’s still worth playing, and frankly the RE plot isn’t really worth worrying about even if I think it’s fun.

And that certainly sums up my thoughts on it, but it feels incomplete, certainly for the purposes of my own bloviating. Like, I have a weird history with Resident Evil that the above doesn’t really touch upon. Growing up, I was a Nintendo kid. My first console was a transparent OG Game Boy circa 199something, followed by an N64 near the end of its lifespan, and then I picked up a Gamecube when that was released. So, I didn’t have anything that Resident Evil reasonably came out on until RE4 in 2005. And yet, I have a weird amount of nostalgia out of envy of the people who could play it, appreciation of the art behind the game design, and second hand knowledge from creators who are hella entwined in the series. And on top of that, you have the fact that I abhor horror and being scared. I should probably hate Resident Evil.

But I don’t; Resident Evil is one of my favorite series, and has been pretty consistently. While I haven’t played every game, and I have definitely ducked out of a few out of fear, I still count it among my favorite series. A part of that is definitely the ridiculous plot; it’s Bad in a really fun B-movie schlocky way, but also in a way that is so close to being good. Like, now that the Good RE games have been remade, there’s a few that are next up. One that gets mentioned frequently is Resident Evil 5, which will never be remade because it was probably a mistake the first time. The optics on it ain’t great. The thing is, Resident Evil 5 is about a western corporation, headed by a genetically engineered blonde haired blue/red eyed superman, pillaging the land at the expense of the people who live there. I am not the right person to write this, but this feels to me like something that could be made better, even approaching good. And to be clear, the rest of RE’s plot is Not Good, to the point that Resi9 literally ends with a 60 page “This is what the story of this series is, never ask me for anything ever again,” document. But it’s fun, and it makes for good games.

No, I primarily love RE because survival horror is a genre I really mesh with. I hate using items in games. It actively causes me distress. I’m the idiot who ends every RPG with as many elixirs as exist in a game. I actively hate Final Fantasy 8 because it turns magic, which is already normally tied to a resource I hate using, into consumable items that you also need for stat growth? Forget about it. Fuck that noise. So you present me with a genre that rewards you for hoarding items? Hell yeah.

On top of that, survival horror games also reward you for methodical game plans, which is something that I really twig to in stealth games. I’ll probably talk about this more if I ever replay any given Metal Gear or Hitman game, but I appreciate being presented with an area, allowed to sit back and watch it for a bit, build a mental plan and then execute on that plan. It’s super satisfying when it works out, and if it doesn’t work out then hopefully I have enough werewithal to save myself.

This is a lot of words and preamble to say that every ResiEvil game is appointment gaming, ignoring the fact that I got to this like a month late. Luckily, Requiem is one of the good ones. Modern Resident Evil essentially has two different gameplay styles these days, both of which are represented in Requiem. The first style, introduced in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (or, if you’re a weeb, Biohazard 7: Resident Evil), is from a first-person perspective, which emphasizes the horror of the setting. Remember when I said earlier that I haven’t played every ResiEvil game? The big one is 7, it’s Big Scary. This version of the series is seen through the eyes of Grace Ashcroft, who is great, as she primarily explores the Rhode Hills Care Center. Rhode Hills is one of the best designed Zone 1s that the series has ever had, by the by. But, Grace has way fewer weapons and way more zombies. She would have trouble with this game’s Crimson Head equivalent, but I never ran into that due to how much of a boss I am at these games. Grace and her sections are excellent, no notes.

The other half of Requiem is Leon’s sections, which are the more recent action oriented style of Resi4 onwards. This is, as always, great. Resident Evil 4 nailed third person combat in a way that no other game had until that point, and as a franchise Resident Evil has remained best in class at what it does. I think this is because RE makes their player characters kind of slow and tanky. You have a lot of movement, especially compared to the zombie (or equivalent) you tend to fight, but you have to commit to getting somewhere. On top of that, the guns all feel weighty and excellent. They are maybe the best feeling guns in gaming this side of a first person shooter, and RE even puts a lot of FPS games to shame.

Unfortunately for Requiem, this is kind of where the issues lie. I love Leon, and his sections are mostly great in a vacuum, but swapping between the points of view means that the game is going for two different gameplay tones that don’t entirely mesh. The enemy variety is kind of weak for Leon’s gameplay purposes. There are effectively…. Five? Six? Different enemy types, and the second area is an area dedicated to Leon that’s more open-world than the average Resident Evil area. It’s fine; the problem is that the section is a little bit too long and it’s visually drab. Everything is a beige or grey tone.

Honestly, Leon’s sections and systems feel somewhat tacked on, more out of obligation than any design sense. So like, he has more weapons than Grace, but not too many more, which leads to an RE with a very limited arsenal. He can upgrade weapons, but the upgrades are bought using a generic point counter that’s maybe the most video game-y currency I’ve seen in a ResiEvil, and it’s done through a boring menu at the item box. The menu-design itself feels less fun than previous games.

A part of this is that I’m comparing Requiem to Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 4 is perfect, and RE4make is pretty close. On the one hand, it’s not Resi9’s fault that it’s not perfect. Requiem juggling a lot of plates that RE4 never did and it’s doing an admirable job of it. Namely, it actually cares about the overall plot of Resident Evil and is acting like a capstone on the Umbrella chunk of it. I’m going to be honest; this is not the PSX classic franchise that I care about the convoluted plot overmuch. Maybe I would if I replayed through the series; and maybe I will once I finish my Trails pilgrimage, but the game is doing a lot of franchise-referential design and callouts. I loved the ones I recognized, I was able to place another couple, but a lot of the specifics were probably lost on me.

Luckily, Requiem’s plot and focus on Leon and Grace can stand on it’s own. I am invested in Leon S. Kennedy, as someone who I've seen and played for upwards of twenty years. He’s at his most super heroic, which is kind of ironic considering that he’s dying of a slow T-virus infection and spends the last third of the game hacking an old-man cough. I’ve already said how much I love Grace and her evolution through the game, and the lab section may be the best lab that Resident Evil has had.

It’s great. Resident Evil: Requiem is a fantastic game that does precisely what it needs to. It’s not as good as RE2make or RE4make, and I’d probably say Village is better, but it’s still great. I’m excited for what comes next, and I’m super curious what the Mercenaries is going to look like and whatever DLC is coming. I’d believe more that this is the end of Leon’s story if Ada showed up at all, but there’s time to reveal that his wedding ring was from Ada.

Ok I think that wraps it up. I really liked it. So, the following message is for Capcom and Capcom only. If you’re not Capcom, stop reading here this isn’t for you. Ok, I think they’re gone. Hello Capcom, you’ve made some of my favorite games and I love playing your stuff, even if it’s kind of mid. I’m really looking forward to Pragmata! But, if I could make one tiny suggestion. Please stop giving us CP to spend on unlocks in games. I get that that probably stands for Completion Points or Capcom Points, but like. It means something else in English that isn’t great. Trust me, you’re not alone, I have issues with the Trails series and their incorporation of the Epstein Foundation, and I imagine we’ll get there eventually, but like. It kind of sucks to quit out of a session and find out I’ve been awarded thousands of CP for playing the video game. It’s a tiny thing! I know. But please, maybe consider changing those couple letters. Oh, and give me a remaster of Mega Man Legends 1 and 2 ok thank you I love you bye.