Paradox Spiral

RMT| ♀ 

[thatoldstandby]

Games What I Played June 2k26

What's up chat; would you believe we're halfway through the year already. I wouldn't. The inevitable march of time is ever progressing. And as always, I played some more games. Fewer than usual though; oddly. I'm not sure what happened (I am). Surely it's a mystery (it's not). Surely because I've only played five games it's going to be quick, right? (Ha. Ha.) Continue forth! To read about games what I played.

Oh I didn't write about it later on because while I really enjoy it, The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi hasn't hit me as hard as The River Has Roots. I like it, it's good, I'd recommend it. But it's just not as good.

(Above screenshot unrelated. For now.)

2025 End of Year Entries: GOTY, Epilogue

2026 Entries: January, February, March, April, May

2026 Demos: Spring (Part 1, Part 2)

Old

Trails into Reverie

I prommied a friend that I’d take a break after finishing Cold Steel 4, and frankly that was probably for the best. Look, I like the series a lot. But I’m nine large JRPGs deep in the series. That’s a lot of a thing you like, and even I need to take a break.

But now I’m back, and I’m not as far in as I’d like to be. This is almost entirely the fault of one (or two) games I’ll mention later, and doesn’t really reflect on Reverie. I only have love for (most) of Reverie so far. Honestly, having Lloyd “Crossbell” Bannings 9/11 the biggest tower in Crossbell as the first thing you see in the game is a Choice. A good Choice, but a Choice none-the-less.

I’m actually really excited to dig into Reverie further. This is the official end of the Erebonia arc as far as I can tell, and like Third, it’s got a weird structure. Here, it’s following three different groups: The Crossbell babies, Rean Schwarzer and his PTSD friends, and Lelouch Code Geass cosplayer C. The plot is a direct, if seemingly kind of dumb, consequence from the end of CS4. But the fact that it’s split into three different timelines that flits between different viewpoints means they can do weird stuff with characters. They could mix and match groups, they stealth introduce some limited alternative viewpoints. There’s a lot of things they could do, even if they don’t have the Doors available. It’s neat.

So far, the only new characters are stuck in C’s route, and I think they’re all kind of winners? C’s route opens on two characters, Swin and Nadia. They appear to be in a group similar to Bracers, but way more mercenary, and it’s not clear where they’re from. I’d guess Calvard, but that’s soft, and I’m not sure how much it really matters at the end of the day. Swin has maybe the dumbest Trails name (right up there with Wazy Hemisphere), and is the straight man of the group. Nadia is the younger, carefree character. They’re both great. They open up a box to find Lapis Rosenberg, a doll whose last name is mine so I get the joys of that for 50 to 60 hours. She’s cute.

The big mystery, and the big selling point of the narrative of the game is the mystery of C. I think I know who it is, for the following reasons. First, I think it’d be kind of dumb to make this a completely new character, especially at the tail end of the Erebonian arc, an arc that ended with a party of like 20 possible characters. Second, we don’t know many people who fight with the single sword-style that C uses. Third, based on the anime OP, C’s beef with a particular antagonist would bring stakes to the game and closure to this particular character’s arc.

UPDATE: Literally three hours after I wrote this whole thing, the game hard deconfirmed my guess. So who even knows what’s real.

It’s nice to be back on the Trail, I’m glad to have resumed my pilgrimage. Now let’s see how Rean Schwarzer, the world’s most perfectest boy, is going to annoy me in this game.

New

Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library

I have occasionally discussed podcast games in these write ups. That’s probably a good description of the genre, but for the sake of my word count, allow me to expound. A podcast game is something you could put on while listening to something else, be it a podcast or an overly long youtube video is playing or whatnot. I guess a better term would probably be a second screen activity; I don’t like that for the same reason I don’t like referring to media as “content.” It feels dismissive in a way that I don’t like. 

Anyway, this is one of those, very much in the stripe of Powerwasher Simulator, another game I like. In Librarian, you are the eponymous librarian, working for a generic magical school library. Don’t worry about it. The problem is that some mischievous fairy has gotten into the library and hucked all 3,072 of the books off the shelves and across the library. Your job is to reshelf all 3,072 of those books, ideally into their proper sections.

It’s kind of brilliant. I get a lot of joy out of being presented a seemingly impossible mess, only to work away at the edges and slowly work towards a clean scene. So why don’t I like to keep my apartment clean….

Right anyway let’s move on from my poor management skills and consider a game again. I really appreciate the theming of this game. Work simulators aren’t exactly new, but I’ve never played as a librarian before. On top of that, the titles of each of the books and the jokes in the series are pretty ok. For example, one of the shelves you have to put back involves bardic knowledge. On that shelf, one of the series is a complete codex of bardic spells. It is three volumes. As a point of comparison, this library has a five book series about C++, the programming language. One of the psychology series is The Psychology of Prioritizing Gaming Over Tidying Your Room. There’s a sociology section where like half of the series are about how underpaid everyone is. And the covers are great and really reminiscent of how books are in the real world. Each of the sections share similar design ethos that reflect real world counterparts. The law books are all bound in similar backs, probably by the same publisher. The philosophy books are all basically the same shade of white or with designs similar to marble. Some of the art books have these abstract gradient covers that remind me of old art books from the 70s or 80s my family had. All the math books have covers that remind me of a bunch of the math books I had in school growing up.

It’s really strong. I did have some complaints; in that I think the powers you get to make things easier make things too easy. Or I would have, if I hadn’t done three (four) playthroughs for each of the achievements. The spells were necessary for the speedrun achievement, but also requires that you play in a different manner from my instinct to get started. It was a fun challenge, and then I did my magicless for the pure joy of moving around and shelving things by hand. I don’t have a clean ending to this; if you’re into this, you probably ended up wishlisting or buying at the end of the third paragraph here. Highly recommended, it made me contemplate buying Powerwasher 2.

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse

I feel like I should apologize to Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse. I really liked the first Paranormasight; it’s a fun little VN with engaging gimmicks and puzzles. The art style is great, the music was fun. I enjoyed Paranormasight 1 enough that Paranormasight 2 was an instant buy, regardless of whatever it was actually about.

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse was announced, and released, in February of this year. I bought it on release. I didn’t touch it until… June 6. Whoops.

So, Paranormasight is a horror mystery visual novel series where you play as a series of characters embroiled in some supernatural murder dealiebob. Mermaid’s Curse takes place in the 80s, and I think the previous game may also, but it’s been long enough that that particular bit of knowledge has fled my brain entirely. 

What really sets this apart from other VNs like Phoenix Wright or 999 is the presentation. Each individual scene is a 360 degree panoramic view. Your character is the point-of-view in the center, and you rotate your view around to examine or talk to other characters. There’s nothing else like it, and it gives a really distinctive feel. Additionally, the character portraits are huge, and take up massive portions of the screen. This allows the artists to make highly expressive models, and really play with them in a scene. There’ll be depth of field, cinematic angles, dramatic close ups… It’s great, and really visually arresting in a genre that tends to be more staid.

The Mermaid’s Curse continues that method with aplomb, and I love all the characters I’ve met. I’d love to say more, buuut even though I start June 6, I basically immediately put it back down in favor of the next two games on this list. And the 17ish demos I downloaded during the NextFest. My shame is infinite. I’m going to finish it; it’s not like I put it down because I’m disliking my time with it, there’s just things that appeal to me more. Plus, if I’m being honest, the first Paranormasight really frontloaded the most interesting puzzles, but at least the puzzles were *really* fascinating, and required more abstract game thinking. So far, Mermaid’s Curse has been more straightforward; which isn’t bad, I’m still early days in it, so there’s certainly room to expand, but there’s just less to glom onto immediately. I don’t know if I’ll write about this again next month; but I’m certainly going to finish it. Probably.

Mina the Hollower

I know I said we’re halfway through the year, but it still feels early on, especially with the gamepocalypse that’s set to come in from September to November of this year. It feels early to be saying that something’s almost certainly going to be on my GOTY list.

Mina the Hollower is almost certainly going to be on my GOTY list.

I really loved Yacht Club Games’ first major title, Shovel Knight. Shovel Knight was a NES-As-You-Remember-It style game inspired by Mega Man and Duck Tales. It plays like a dream, the aesthetics are on point and cohesive, and the music was wonderful. Additionally, the added campaigns as the other bosses were almost all excellent, to the point that I think I liked some more than the main game. King Knight kind of sucked though. So when they announced Mina the Hollower, I was in on day one.

So if Shovel Knight is a combination of Mega Man and Duck Tales, Mina is a combination of the Legend of Zelda and Bloodborne. You traverse the world with a top-down view a la the classic Zeldas (the good ones, if I were feeling particularly daring or in a lying mood). Mina moves fairly slowly on the overworld while above ground, but has the ability to burrow under and move significantly faster. While you’re buried, you also avoid most forms of damage and gain an extra boost to your jump when you return to the level. This will be important later.

Basically everything else about the game is Bloodborne, or Bloodborne’s direct antecedent, Castlevania. Combat is fast and high-damage, both to you and your opponent. You have a limited series of weapons that have a few different upgraded abilities that can slightly modify how you use them. The aesthetics are basically just spooky Victorian society, but with animal people. If you die, you have to either get back to your soul pile, or fight whatever enemy your soul pile went into or risk losing your bones. Kos is there. (Kos is not there, that is a joke. Unless….)

It’s also hard. I have a friend who says it is not; she is lying. While I was able to make it through everything, I ended up losing collectively about 15,000 souls over the course of the game. This is a large number; but I also ended the game with about 50,000 excess souls, and I didn’t have anything to spend any of the currency on for a good six or seven hours at that point. But the combat and platforming really requires precision, and while there are definitely tools that makes things loads easier, particularly in the endgame, nothing is ever really trivialized except through hard work and practice.

But my god, the feeling of narrowly dodging an attack, only to pop up behind the enemy and deliver the final killing blow. Or the feeling of a hardfought boss battle? I haven’t had that tension in a while; it is addictive. It helps that basically every encounter or boss is meticulously designed and the absolute star of the show. They each bring something new to the table, some interesting pattern or facet of the systems. And there are so many, and so many you don’t even necessarily have to fight. I frequently came across bosses just off a random wander; and each time filled me with delight and terror at the thought of losing everything I had saved up. 

That’s kind of the feeling of the whole game though. Each of the screens that the game is broken up into has at least one secret as far as I can tell. And unlike Breath of the Wild, each secret is fun to find and materially changes how I handle the world. Maybe one screen gives me a trinket that I’m going to use for the rest of the game, maybe it gives me one that’s good for a puzzle, maybe another gives me enough souls that I can finally buy that one upgrade I need to make my build work. Or maybe it’s just something like I manage to get a man and woman with giant noses together despite their obvious issues, or I reincorporate an ooze by donating souls after I killed them in self-defense. 

Mina the Hollower is excellent, top to bottom. I have no real complaints, and I don’t think I’ve played anything as fun (with one exception) this year. It’s possible four other somethings are going to come along and bully Mina off my list, but I kind of doubt it. This game hit me in exactly the same point Shovel Knight did, and it seems to have taken off in the general zeitgeist as well. This is good; Yacht Club kind of needed it, especially after delaying it for as long as they have. I hope it does well; in part because I really want to see more from this, either as DLC or fully fledged sequels. I don’t know if you noticed in this section, but I don’t have a lot of screenshots. I was too busy enjoying the game. I can’t really say anything better than that.

Marathon

I’ve tried to cut down on covering games in multiple months. Sure, there’s the updates to my Pilgrimage down the Trails series, but even those have become more perfunctory because the game hasn’t really significantly changed aside from the story elements (I swear one of these months I’m going to do an essay on why I like the quartz system and why I think the old quartz system was better though). 

I kind of can’t with Marathon though. As much as I’d love to leave it with what I said last month, where my initial impressions were wrong and I was a poopy doo-doo head for thinking that, I can’t. To be clear, I was wrong. But I should revisit this a bit to make the following statement.

If Mina the Hollower is a virtual lock for my GOTY list, Marathon is absolutely a lock. And not number four or five.

As of the time of this writing, I have 95 hours logged in Marathon. I’m level…. 79ish? on the current battlepass. It’s even gotten to the point where I’m using a third-party website to keep track of my progress and give me a rough shopping list for whenever I go out on runs. It’s gotten to the point where I could stop playing now and it would still rank in my GOTY.

I place a lot of emphasis in games on how well it feels to move through and experience their worlds. As much as I love a good story, that’s harder to appreciate if moving through the world sucks. Moving through the world does not suck in Marathon, and is in fact it’s greatest achievement. Your shell moves through the game world in a deeply satisfying manner. The speed feels perfect, the sound effects and screenshake give a really solid feel for your place in the world, and your character is always as responsive as they need to be. But even better are the guns. I spoke with glowing terms about my beloved, the Bully, last month, and I could go further, but everything else (except the shotguns) feels so good to shoot. On top of that, they’re all highly distinctive, even across similar weapon profiles. The Bully may fill a similar role in your arsenal to the KKV, but they do so in a different way that you need to account for in any firefight you end up embroiled in. It’s brilliant.

You learn this by playing; the game doesn’t really give you a textual readout or strategy guide for the various guns. You learn by going down to the surface with nothing, picking something up randomly, and making due with what you have. Sometimes you get a winner, sometimes you get something that forces you to engage in ways you’re not great at.  Either way, your run is materially different and you have to react for any amount of success.

Take this into account with the map design, which are all designed such that every area gives you access to an interestingly designed map with varying heights, line of sight blockers, and third party NPCs to interfere with while being sprawling enough that escape to an entirely new area is frequently possible (and recommended), and you’ve got a game that has a massive amount of theoretical playing space. For as long as I’ve played, no two games have ever played the same, even when I’ve gone into the PVE mode where you only run into bots.

It’s gotten to the point where I’ll jump on Marathon when I just need a quick, 20 minute match of something. Whether it’s as I’m waking up, just before work, during lunch, or after work. It’s taken the place of Final Fantasy XIV or like, Marvel’s Spider-Man as “The Game I Fire Up Just to Do Something.” But more than either of those games, I focus solely on Marathon. Marathon is not a podcast game, even with nearly 100 hours in.

Like I said, I could stop now and it would still be on my GOTY. I’m not. I have to hit level 100. I need to go back into Cryo Archive with my friends and die in grenade and shotgun hell. I need to find Bingus. God do I need to find Bingus. So I’m down for this for the long haul.

I’m going to be honest though; I don’t know how long of a haul this is actually going to be. There’s announcements about what Season 3 has, which leads me to believe that it’s going to be a going concern until at least the end of the year. But more than that? I’ve got doubts.

First off, I don’t make the right choice in multiplayer games, by which I mean I choose the wrong ones. Back when Battle Royales were the Big Thing, I actually really liked Radical Heights, a sentence that’s literally never been written in any human language before and never will again. From there I went to Apex Legends for a hot minute, which is still the second best, at most. I spent a lot of time in Heroes of the Swarm, which also shut down. The examples go on. Look, I can’t decide why or how I like things; I just have a bad track record.

But beyond my own inability to pick winners, Bungie is one of the most Screwed-by-the-Executive-Class I’ve seen. Other people, smarter than me, have recounted the story, and a lot of it is tied into how Destiny 2 was very suddenly sunset  recently, followed by massive layoffs at the company. And this is all after Sony spent an absurd amount of money purchasing Bungie for a reason that eludes me because I don’t think it was worth billions of dollars, especially considering how many of those dollars went to said executive class to make bad decisions.

The main issue here is that Marathon is a game for perverts. It’s an extraction shooter, which means most people are going to spend a lot of hours losing everything all the time to ambushes. It’s taken me hours to be the level of good, which is best said with a half shrug and a question mark at the end, that I am. On top of that, most of the cosmetics, the things you would actually spend money on, have kind of sucked. I like the new Triage skin, and one of the knives, but that’s about it. I’ve bought both season passes, but that’s largely because I’ve spent enough time that it feels really cheap of me to not give them some dosh for it.

Look, I love Marathon, but I don’t really see a long-term path to it’s survival. I hope I’m wrong; this game deserves this live for a long time. I want to find out what Durandal, or at least this weird branch of Durandal, has been doing for centuries. I want to explore more areas of the UESC Marathon, I want to combat with the surviving aliens from the Phfor. But until it dies, I’m going to love it. This won’t be the last time I talk about this game; but the next one will likely be longer and on the Director’s Cut. Until then, I’m going to continue escaping. Maybe one day I’ll become god.

[thatoldstandby]

Games What I Played April 2k26

I'm going to be real; I genuinely didn't think I was going to get this done on time. Sure, this doesn't have any hard and fast deadlines. And maybe I let it slide to the first of the month a couple times in the past to make it more accurate to the games what I played in the month conceit that I have. And maybe no one cares about the timing.

But I do. I care. And I had to get these bits done and out on time. And chat, oh but there are bits in here. Bits for no one but me, which is why I don't have an editor who could tell me "Hey, this is dumb. Don't do it."

I'm sorry for what's about to happen. But not so sorry to scrap it and start over.

2025 End of Year Entries: GOTY, Epilogue

2026 Entries: January, February, March

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

Demos?

About Fishing

I don’t actually like fishing. This is weird, since I’ve always grown up around a lot of water. Hell, I grew up on the shores of Lake Huron and just off another, smaller lake. But something about standing around and watching a bit of line, or getting out in a boat too early in the morning to sit around doing nothing, and then the thought of cleaning the fish afterwards? Nah, I’m out.

This aversion largely spreads to video games as well, where I view fishing as a waste of time when I could be doing the more fun parts of games. This is *especially* bad with RPGs, which is probably my favorite genre, where they put clear statistical advantages behind this boring, boring activity. I blame Breath of Fire, as I do with many things.

So I didn’t have high hopes for About Fishing, a game that’s in playtesting now that I was gifted by a good friend. But, because I trust my friends implicitly, I tried it out. The game opens on a mermaid releasing a fish onto a hook, which is then pulled back by a small child, who shows it to her… grandpa? Her grandpa talks about stuff, as grandpas are wont to do, who then beseeches her to name the fish, and then catch more. For you see, once you catch enough fish, he will let you have curly fries.

I was immediately enamored. Graphically, it exists in the PSX realm, with super blocky characters and stretched facial textures. But the real draw here is the fishing. It’s an actual simulation of fishing. You control the direction and strength of the rod as you cast the line at a specific part, you control the line while it’s in flight, and then you control the bob and reel-in after you land. It’s complicated, meditative, and it works. It reminds me of a game I haven’t played, but love the idea of. Skate Story, released last year, is many things, but the most important of those is more a simulation take on skateboarding; where the trick-heavy high scores of Tony Hawk is replaced with more of a focus on the act of skating. Tricks are there and important, but getting from point A to B is more important.

It’s an approach I have a lot of love for, as my previous paens to other sim-games may imply. On top of that, the narrative stuff is obviously influenced by David Lynch’s films. Specifically the films too; as much as Twin Peaks shares a lot of similarities, it’s not quite what About Fishing is hitting. 

One of my favorite things about games, and one of the reasons I like compiling these lists, is getting hit by something I wasn’t expecting. This doesn’t happen as much anymore, in part due to the sheer number of things I’ve played, but when it does I’m definitely thinking about those titles for a while. In the hour I played of About Fishing, I went from knowing nothing about it to being one of it’s biggest fans. The only reason I haven’t played more is that I’m more interested in the final product at some point in the future. Definitely one to watch.

Old

Marathon (1994)

I decided to jump in to what the kids are playing these days and try out Marathon. Honestly, not sure what they see in this game. First off, graphically, it’s ancient. It looks like Doom with goofy cartoon characters. It controls super weird, the movement is shockingly slow for a game called Marathon, and the mouselook is kind of jank. On top of that, the level design is best described as fucked. I don’t know what the kids are talking about. Luckily it’s free, but at best it’s a historical curiosity.

Did I download and play this solely for A Bit? Yeah fuck you, it’s happened before it’ll happen again. Wait sorry I didn’t mean to be aggro with that. Let’s forget this ever happened.

Project Warlock

You know what’s a better shooter? Project Warlock is a boomer shooter released in 2017. I’d say it’s influenced by Doom, but like. It’s done in GZDoom, the game engine designed to feel like Doom. 

You play as the Warlock, a rogue warrior fighting through the dark forces of hell itself. As you are a tresspasser going through the dark corners of the earth, you have one job: GTFO amidst the ultrakill of hell. 

As a Doom-clone, the game gives you plenty of gun to do that with. Luckily, it’s one of the better arsenals too. A first person shooter lives or dies based on how the guns work, and the guns work pretty ok. It’s not the best shotgun in gaming (that’s Doom 2’s Super), but it’s respectable. You’re going to need them as your heretic runs his marathon through the pathways into darkness. There are four worlds, each themed and with some fun enemy variety. Sure, most of the enemies are dealt with in the same way, but that’s a Boomer Shooter for you.

That said, there’s a few things that set this apart. There’s a rudimentary level up and perk system, so your battlemage marginally improves in statistics and abilities throughout the game. You have access to various spells and abilities, so you could theoretically choose to cast magestorm instead of bulletstorm. And if you do choose to rely on your gunmetal, each weapon has two forms you can choose between to give yourself a bit of variety.

Much like Sprawl, another boomer shooter I played last year, this isn’t exactly going to set your world on fire, and there’s some weird bits. Enemies frequently spawn in behind you with no notice, even in rooms you’ve already cleared out, which can be frustrating and make navigating more difficult. And while no one lives forever, I think I only died a few times on the Ultraviolence-equivalent difficulty. It’s a fun little amuse-bouche of a game, and there’s a sequel that seems to lean into the RPG a bit more. I’m excited to take a look at that. Duke Nukem 3D.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 4

For all the many, many complaints I’ve made about Erebonia and Rean Schwarzer, I am sad that it’s done now. There’s only so much I can say about a Trails game at this point. I’ve played through nine of them, and I’ve nearly completed three of the major story arcs. The Trails strengths have only gotten better; the focus on presenting a relatively living world compared to any other JRPG is incredibly rewarding. Even the minor characters feel like characters; they’ve got stuff going on and they react to changes in the world. I now smile whenever my good friend Anton shows up to be the greatest loser across the continent. It’s great. It’s not just side characters either. The playable cast continues to be excellent, much as I may dislike them initially. The games are long, and big enough, that each of the minor characters gets their own moments to shine. While some aren’t super strong (Machias continues to be a nerd, but at least he chills out some, and I think Gaius will always be boring), others get enough big moments that I genuinely enjoy them (Looking at you, Jusis and Millium and Fie and Emma and Altina and….)

This has always been the strength of a Trails game; that initial friction as you get introduced to a tropey character archetype getting worn away as you spend time with them and they can develop interesting unique characteristics, but it’s especially prevalent with the Cold Steel games because of their length. These are all far and away the longest Trails so far, for better or worse. I think mostly worse, if I’m being honest. As much as I like the main cast, there’s too many of them. There’s multiple times where your party will split and you’ll run two to three parties simultaneously, and. Look. Mr. Trailsman, designer of the Trails games, I need to be so real with you. I’m never going to actually equip and build out more than the four characters necessary for my main party, and if they die I’m going to throw the fight and retry it. And that’s just with two or three parties. I actively refuse to kit out 16+ characters. Fuck you, respect my time more.

So not only is there massive cast bloat; but I have never gelled with the main plot of the Cold Steel games. I’ve spoken (at length) about my annoyances with Rean as a character, but like. The story he’s in equally annoying. I don’t like Erebonia as a place, it’s awful. But it’s also stupid. Cold Steel 4 happens during the second Erebonian Civil War to take place in two years, and you are actively working against the strongest the government has been in any of the games. There are magic robots flying around, insanely powerful mercenary squads moving around the nation, and Dracula and his coterie of minions are in controle. Despite this, Rean, Rean’s old classmates, and Rean’s combat ciddies are able to freely move around the nation and do whatever they want to do to weaken the government’s position on the literal eve of the biggest war to ever happen to Erebonia. They’ll even be assisted by government forces! On top of that, this is also another incredibly bloodless conflict. It’s disappointing, and the most anime (derogatory) the series has been, especially after Crossbell. Rot 13: Naq tbq qnzzvg, Pebfforyy'f sngr vf yrsg gb gur fnzr fyvqrfubj sebz gur raq bs Nmher. Jung n pebpx bs fuvg gung vf. Guvf vf ubj Fpbhevat bs gur Fuver snaf srry jvgu gur raq bs gur Ybeq bs gur Evatf.

It’s not enough to kill anything for me; I still think Trails is maybe the consistently best ongoing RPG series, and Cold Steel 3 and 4 definitely has some of my favorite characters and moments. But I don’t know that I love it. Hell, it’s gotten so long that even if I did love it, like I love Shadowbringers and Endwalker, I couldn’t possibly recommend it to anyone due to the time investment. I don’t regret this pilgrimage down the many trails life has to offer, but I can’t recommend it to anyone. Can’t wait to start Reverie (in about a month, to assuage my friends that I’m not burning myself out; I’m not depressed and in law school anymore so I can’t Yakuza again.) [At least, that’s what I’ve told them, but what they don’t know is that I don’t have self-control, so we’ll see how long that month stay lasts.]

Oh and while I’m here; Emma > Fie > Laura > Alisa, though Crow is basically the canon answer. Sara would be tops but is automatically disqualified as your high school teacher; Musse, Altina, and Juna are likewise disqualified as your students (though if Musse were slightly older I actually really like how their relationship built out over CS4). Elise is super disqualified as your stepsister, but I’ve a feeling that’s something Mr. Trailsman and I will have to have Words about. 

Guilty Gear -StrIVe-

HEAVEN OR HELL Start (2S or 6P or IAD+S or 236K+K or 2D or 44+236K+K or 6K if I’m feeling spicy) to Footsies, fish with f.S/IAD+S, fish for BnB of c.S+f.S+2/5HS+236HS+HS (I know it should be 623S but I can’t DP reliably); either reset to neutral or keep pressure going with 236K+K or 214P+P; make sure to disrespect them with some 6D. Reset with 236236HS, make sure to delay HS if initial is blocked because no one (at my rank) blocks the second hit. (Editor’s note: I wrote that while I was in high-bronze; now that I’m in low Gold, people are blocking it. It’s less safe to throw out, but still occasionally works.) Remember to RC occasionally, bonus points if it was actually a good RC.

IF I WIN:

By a lot: Nice

By a medium amount: Nice

By a little: Nice

IF I LOSE:

By a lot: What the fuck they’re smurfing

By a medium amount: God I’m terrible

By a little: Fuck that guy I’m better at footsies I just need to up my combo game (I will not up my combo game)

Unnamed Space Idle

From the Management: No trailer I could find on this one; so look at this other trailer instead. Will it be good? I don't know I'm not your boss or the arbiter of quality, I'm writing a blog about games I played.

I don’t talk about my phone games here. Part of that is that they’re not super notable. There’s only so much I can say about the picross game I’ve been playing for close to a decade where I’ve solved over… eight thousand (that feels fake) puzzles. They’re fine; overly ad-infused and probably stealing my information, but that’s fine. Such is the world we live in.

Unnamed Space Idle is an idle game, that is not really designed for a phone landscape. It’s fine, number go up etc. But I’ve gotten to a point in it where it needs slightly more conscious control and planning, so I just installed it on my PC. I don’t have a lot to say about it honestly. It’s certainly a free game.

New

Berry Bury Berry

The difference between an Idle game and an Incremental game is minute. Some would say academic. I would probably say academic, but I’m also trying to differentiate the genres and so I probably shouldn’t. Anyway, Idles and Incrementals begin the same way; you have a repetitive task that you do to collect some form of currency to improve your ability to do that task.

In Berry Bury Berry, that task is dropping berries into a hole, which in turn shoots out coins. You use these coins to buy upgrades at the end of the day; more berry spawners, upgrades to those berry spawners, longer days, etc. If this were just an Idle game, the loop would effectively end there; you would start the next day, accumulate berries, put said berries in the hold, get money, upgrade, and onward.

Where Incremental games differ is that the loop gets more complicated. Mechanics get added that require you to do more than build the most efficient berry-hole-machine. Here, you unlock the ability to move the hole around the world and maybe put more than berries in. From there, the rest of the game unfolds as you throw more things into holes and figure out the rest of what’s going on.

This is the true wonder of Incremental games. As much as I love number go up Idles, they’re really nothing more than dopamine devices. Cookie Clicker doesn’t really require much conscious thought, you just get the joy of making a lot of cookies into a lot more cookies. But a good incremental can break that mold and do something with the genre.

And Berry Bury Berry is a good incremental. There’s shit going on here that I don’t want to talk about because I think it’s cool. I was relatively cavalier with the overview of the plot of Cold Steel 4; I will not be here. But this game has some of the best pacing of any I’ve played this year. I cannot recommend this enough.

Black Hole Fishing

Conversely, Black Hole Fishing is an idle game. You use a black hole to collect fish which you put into the black hole for money. Rinse repeat. The game doesn’t really evolve all that much. It doesn’t have to, mind, it’s a decent idle game. But I completed it more out of obligation than any real enjoyment of the process. I will say, it has a lot of heart; the dev put a picture of him and his kid on the splash screen at the start, and the descriptions are full of little messages like “My wife designed this fish, so I’m leaving it in.” It’s really cute; I kind of hope it does well so he can have something nice to point at.

The Ratline

Oof. I don’t really love writing these all the time. This is one of those times. The Ratline is another deduction game in the mold of Obra Dinn or Rootrees. You play as a private detective in 1971 who is contacted by a Mysterious Third Party and essentially hired to find people. Specifically, you’re hunting down nazis in South America, trying to suss out their identity and where they currently are based on a series of interconnected documents and phone call transcripts. Each chapter gives you one to three (possibly more) individuals to identify, and then you have to go digging for the clues and photos yourself by reaching out to individuals or searching keywords in the library.

This should be my shit. See also: The Rootrees are Dead, TR-49, The Golden Idol series, or the fucking Return of the Obra Dinn. This is not my shit. To get the minor complaints out of the way, the UI is miserable. The amount of space you have to work with clues is super limited, which sucks because you need to blow the individual documents up to make anything out, and sometimes you need to be looking at multiple clues at the same time to help figure out what the game is looking at. So I spent a lot of time pulling one clue up, closing it out, pulling another clue up, closing it out, pulling clue one up and then trying to pull clue two up. And god help you if you need to access your phone or rolodex at the same time. Forget about it. And then, and this is the biggest minor gripe I have, your detective has a dog. That dog is probably adorable, I guess. But that dog is also always asleep. And it snores. And it has one snore sound effect, and that sound effect goes off every second or two. The option screen has a dog slider, and you best believe I turned that shit to zero right quick.

So with the minor stuff out of the way, I have to try to work out how I really feel about this game. And it’s not great. As a top level decision, I don’t know that any of the puzzles or writing were especially engrossing. As much as I enjoy a puzzle game, I admit that I do eventually reach the point where I hit the hint button a time or three. Usually though, I’m in the end game, the last quarter or tenth of the game where I’ve puzzled most everything else out and just need a bit of help with the more obtuse stuff. I was hitting the Ratline hints pretty regularly at about end of chapter four; which is around the halfway point as far as I can tell. In all that time, I don’t know that I really enjoyed any of the puzzles. A part of that is that the game never really gives you a wide array of things to solve at once; there’s no Rootree family tree or Obra Dinn ship where you’re presented forty to fifty puzzles to work through at once; you’re always super limited by what’s on the screen. And while some of the puzzles do call back and refer to older chapters, not enough do for my taste, and I don’t think I recall any especially fun solves. And then the most recent chapter I played introduced a mechanic where you get a magic machine that can give you recordings and images from specific rooms in a building, but only if you know the number of the building, the number of the room, and the assigned numbers of the individuals who were in that room conversing. I don’t really understand that puzzle, and it’s super abstracted from anything else in the real world that it put me off of it. I basically entirely relied on the hint system, which has super soured me on the title in general. 

It sucks, I don’t like being here, and like, I don’t know if it’s because I think it’s bad (Demonschool), if I played it when I wasn’t in a good headspace for it (Trails 3rd), or if it’s just not for me (basically any Civ game). I don’t like it. I don’t know if I’m going to go back and finish out the game or what; I’ve got two chapters left, and then an achievement for just letting it idle on a case for two hours. Maybe I will, but I don’t feel a burning urge to. That feeling in itself is probably damning.

Aaaand that's it for the month. Did you find all my bits? Did you find the secret link to the secret Director's Cut? Does all this annoy people more than not? Who knows! I mean it probably does, but at least it's out there to annoy you all. Ok thanks we'll see you next month when I talk about more Trails games and probably some dumb bullshit bye!

[thatoldstandby]

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.

Clair Obscur Update

Games I’ve beaten in 2026 before finishing Clair Obscur (To be updated every month until I finish Clair Obscur)

Trails of Cold Steel 2

Ace Combat 7

Discopup

Mosaic of the Strange

Feed the Reactor

Silent Hill f (x 5)

TIE Fighter

TR-49

Resident Evil: re9ium

20 Minutes till Dawn

Proverbs

Digseum

Nodebuster

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3

[lumamintz]

deserter

[blackpyrefly]

obsessed with this comment on the page for an item with a very low drop rate

[halcyonbequest]

big fan of those animations in the character menu so im making gifs of my favorite operators

[leechparties]

Mitchel/Giselle in a painting vs purikura!

Thinking about printing these as photocards...

[obscuretobyfox]

There's some pretty obscure dialogue you can find in Chapter 4 where Ralsei roasts the fuck out of Susie and its awesome

You specifically have to tell Ralsei not to park his butt in the room with the couch, and then backtrack here before the final boss!

(Source: https://x.com/pynchosa/status/1935780728119128350?s=46)

[beef-estrogenoff-deactivated-de]

they should make a show about w, ines, and (forgot the name of the only man involved here) uhhhhhh whore starting an idol group to save babel

[bapouro]

when Metal Gear Solid 5 came out the disc came with a poster that was just a map of northern Kabul, Afghanistan and me and my brother used to fight over it

[foodnun-deactivated20140601]

i made this blog when i was 15 and and now im 12 wtf

[newgodpho]

[v1leblood]

divorce is so funny. like never mind

[deepseasmetro]

im officially unemployed with no job prospects ❤️

[deepseasmetro]

as a disabled public health worker my future is incredibly uncertain and to be entirely honest im kind of terrified rn. jobs are increasingly very hard to come by and i have a lot of physical limitations to work around. in the meantime, itd mean a lot to have some extra cushioning for me and my girlfriend to pay the bills!

my venmo and cashapp are deepseametro and you can donate through paypal at paypal.me/cirow

a lot of people have more emergent situations rn so dont feel pressured. im okay for right now but i dont know how long thatll last AND my cat needs pretty emergency vet care in the next week for infected teeth so. 🤪🤪🤪

[rnismatch]

when you get paid byweekly

weekly: here is your money

me: thank you

weekly: no need to thanks me.

[thevideogameartarchive]

Winner ‘Pokemon Dash’ Nintendo DS

[tekkenjournalist]

A surge of Tekken power has just erupted from an Xbox One console