There is no title

I live by one rule. Never not reblog Bebop.

[thatoldstandby]

Demos What I Played 2k26: Summer Part 2

What's up chat. This is only.... two weeks late. Look. July has sucked; not only is it crazy hot (who agreed to this), but work has gotten crazy. I'm so late on some of these that I think the full game has come out? Don't check me on that. I don't accept corrections (I would, I'll just cry). Oh also, heads up, this section could also be titled "Demos Where I Picked Some Junk Up and Ran Away."

2025 End of Year Entries: GOTY, Epilogue

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

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

VOID DIVER: Escape from the Abyss

Let’s kick off part two of the NextFest with the first (of…. four?) indie extraction games. VOID DIVER is an extraction game where you play an individual who dives into a dungeon to get various things. The dungeon is, as dungeons are wont to be, full of dangerous monsters that you have to deal with. The game’s in a top down view, so it plays like an action RPG that’s a bit jank. The control is a touch off; it feels kind of laggy? In that way that poorly tuned ARPGs can. 

There’s a lot I actually like here? I love the concept of a megacity built up around a megadungeon; that’s a rich worldbuilding vein to explore that always grabs me, and some of the characters are super cool. Raven is super cool, and I can’t wait to play her in the game. I’m looking forward to this, even despite the jank.

Is what I would say, if I hadn’t dug anymore. When I did my quick check on the store page to hit the wishlist button, I finally saw the AI usage alert. Now, to be clear, I’m glad they’re saying something about it on the main page. Not everything has, even though I have my Suspicions, so good on the devs here. And what they’re saying they used it for is… I mean, no use is good, but for a smaller indie team I can get it.

I still don’t really respect it. So, the team says they use it for “. . . background music, translation, and streamlining early-stage work,” but “. . . all final art assets in the game have been meticulously hand-finished and completed by human artists.” This makes it impossible to tell what was made by a person and what wasn’t, even if a human artist touched the final files once. It means the music will, at best, be forgettable slop, and at worst be ill-suited and poorly produced for what it needs to be. And god knows if the translation is going to be accurate, or localized such that it’s fun to read. And the fact that an indie team would rely on AI for so many distinct and vital bits of their game leaves me with less faith in their abilities.

I get it, especially for smaller teams. But I started this year with a pretty firm “No AI” policy, and everything that’s happened since has only reinforced my stance. You can’t really set aside the ecological, economic, or political problems with generative AI, but for the purposes of closing out this minireview, do so, and consider the philosophical. Here you have a group of people who are creating a thing, but care so little for it or think so little of their own skills that they’re willing to rely on a thing that creates on the mean of everything loaded in. I don’t want to partake of something that’s mid at best (ignore what I read in Jump). So it sucks, but I’m bowing out of VOID DIVER. Or any other game that I find has used AI at this point.

Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator

I think I should reconsider this in the full version. This is an interesting game, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of it since. You play in the middle of the Iron Nest which, as the subtitle may suggest, is a heavy turret. For each level, you wake up in the bowels of your heavy gun emplacement and you get instructions via a teletype machine on what you have to do. From there, you’re given a work place simulator where you fulfill the steps of plotting shell trajectories, firing angles, loading the shells, and finally putting them downstream. It’s zen, for simulating what is a mass death machine and your part in it as a cog, but it’s also really satisfying. When you’re doing the work of figuring everything out, you’re working off a giant grid map. You’re given a compass, pencils, pens, models, everything you need to work off a giant map. It’s neat, and surprisingly tactile. What really got me though is that when you shoot, the map animates the line of your shell flying through the air, and then places air photos of the impact scene. So, you end up seeing the results of your actions, if from a bird’s eye view. I dunno, it’s neat, I think there’s space for some fun narrative bits.

RetroSpace

RetroSpace’s devs very obviously have a favorite video game, and that game is System Shock 2. I also love SysShock 2, so this should be further up my alley. It’s…. Fine. Whereas Iron Nest has only grown in my estimation, RetroSpace has definitely fallen. The basics of the game are definitely there. You’re exploring a space station/ship where something spoopy has happened and there are but bodies and audio logs left. It’s a first person imsim, so you’re allowed to futz with boxes (and I guess the environment if you’re spicy) to attempt to complete your goals. It’s kind of jank though? The guns shoot super poorly and feels weak against the main enemies, and navigating the environment is more difficult than it should be based on the level design and piss-poor lighting. The biggest issue I have with it is the special gimmick. Every time you die, you get resurrected for a nominal fee. That’s fine, that’s been standard since BioShock. What’s different is that you come back worse, until you find your old body. Sometimes that worse isn’t bad. Such as, whenever you get hit with a common cold. That just means your character sneezes intermittently, which is annoying but liveable. Sometimes it means you regenerate with color blindness, which puts everything into grayscale, which can make an already difficult to navigate spoopy space ship super frustrating. And these conditions can stack, so god help you if you get a bunch of the worst issues. I dunno; I liked it a lot coming out, but I think it’s got some massive issues that need to be ironed out before I can really recommend it.

Penguin Colony

Ok so like, here’s the pitch: You play as a penguin. You do penguin things, like slide around the ice and swim. As you explore, you come across human settlements and activity as they’re doing their human things. And then the Disco Elysium starts reading out…. An adaptation of, or something heavily based on, HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains Of Madness. This is entirely a walking simulator. It is also great. Genuinely loved the vibes of this, loved exploring as best I could, loved coming across the horrors that were. I’m sure the horrors are only there and nowhere else. This was rad, and probably the best from this half of the demos.

HOPE 01

I feel bad for this game? It’s the second of the extraction shooters from this batch, and it’s interesting in that it’s a side-scrolling platformer dealie. The problem is, this game is hella unstable for me. I couldn’t reliably get this to load, and couldn’t really get into levels frequently. When I did, it controlled pretty poorly. I dunno, I may let this percolate a bit before touching it again, since it kind of looks neat? I dunno. Could be neat, wasn’t based on what I played, maybe I’m unlucky. Moving on.

Flock of the Seraphim

Remember last year when I was playing a lot of MegaBonk to figure out how and why I felt about MegaBonk only to determine at the end that I really didn’t like MegaBonk? Flock of the Seraphim is MegaBonk: Catholicism Edition. You play a nun with guns (and blades) and you’re killing demons in a 3D zone that you can move around in. It’s not as good as MegaBonk, which has way more juice and interesting. I don’t like MegaBonk, this is bad MegaBonk, and the theming does less than nothing for me.

No Such Place

The third, and not final extraction shooter from this batch. Much like VOID DIVER, this one’s in a top-down view. The difference is that it is a proper shooter, in that you get and play with a bunch of guns. This actually leads to an interesting system where they let you aim down sights (ADS) on the map. But since you’re in a top-down view, that’s difficult to show. Other games have it so that, like, your targeting line is more stable or adds some other effect to show you’re ADSing. This game gives you proper iron sights or scope while you’re ADSing, so you have to line up the enemy sprite with your new targeting reticule. It’s super neat.

But hey guess what, I’m pretty sure it uses Gen AI. The opening cutscene is a heavily VHS distorted video of a man in a suit talking at you. This is fine. The problem is, the voice is… extremely abnormal to my ear. It’s clearly going for a broadcast style, but the intonation and pace are too smooth. It doesn’t sound like a text to speech either. Look, I don’t know, maybe I’m being oversensitive, but this doesn’t feel like a human had any hand in it. I can’t prove it, but it’s enough to trigger my ire. 

Omen

Finally, after this, I’m done talking about extraction shooters (probably for about a month). This one’s unique in that it’s a space shooter, so you’ll be going around shooting space ships (and emplacements) instead of dudes/monsters. That’s neat. It’s fine; there’s some cool Space Lore, but like. I dunno. There’s not a whole lot there to latch on to. This is more for someone than the other extraction shooters I played, but that someone isn’t really me.

Drop Command (Gameplay here)

And finally, the last game that I downloaded well after the NextFest ended. Normally, I wouldn’t count it as it’s well after, but I hadn’t written most of these paragraphs out, and then this game hit me in my specific interests. Namely, this is an indie Mechwarrior. I love Mechwarrior. This…. Is fine? It’s early, I think. I’ve played a lot of Mechwarrior in my day, and this is similar enough that the differences are jarring. The biggest issue I have isn’t treating it like a tank, that’s normal Mechwarrior stuff. The biggest issue I have is that controlling and aiming the arms feels more sluggish than I feel like it should. That can be adjusted, and might just be a setting that I should have tweaked elsewhere.

The actual game itself is kind of impressive for an indie bit. The main game is very much Mechwarrior, but it’s got more combined arms with the ability to pilot mechs, tanks, aircraft, and personal armor sized suits. This plays out in-mission like ye olde Mechwarrior. You are placed in the cockpit of your vehicle, which you control. It’s a fun feeling; I love cockpit simulators (see also my love letter to TIE Fighter), and Mechwarrior is almost as nostalgic for me. The difficulty of controlling the legs separately from the arms is great, and that leads to a slower, more deliberate first person shooter than, say, Doom or Marathon. It’s good, if not a common taste for a game. On top of this, the game also puts a 4X-lite system on the strategic layer, so you’re fighting for control of planets which give you access to various resources and building options. It’s not deep, per se, but it adds an interesting layer.

This may be good, especially if you’re jonesing for a new Mechwarrior hit. I’m not saying I’m not; but I’m more likely to play the MW games I haven’t (or at least attempt to patch them so they’re good) than play this without some tweaks. Is that unfair? Yeah probably. But Mechwarrior lets me pilot a Warhammer. Does this have a Warhammer? Probably not. Unless it also wants to (arguably) steal a Macross design. Then, maybe.

Ok that's it, that's every demo I've played this summer. I think I'm done with demos. Right ok look forward to a normal entry in less than two weeks.

"Look, with your special eyes."

[stealingpotatoes]

who up controlling their resonant or something

(commission info // tip jar!)

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

You are an adventurer in a generic fantasy world and you use this weapon!

Do you like it?

YES!!!!!

yes

Eh it's okay

No

NO!!!!!!!

Voting ended onJul 21

[all-pacas]

do you ever find something that is so funny and you want to share it with everyone but it also requires 18 layers of context spanning things like. 90s anime. aviation history. europop. canada. in order to even remotely understand why it is so funny

[all-pacas]

in the late 90s there was an anime called initial d which was all about street racing and drifting. naturally every single drift was played for great drama and excitement.

in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.

in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."

what is a side-slip, you ask?

it's drifting.

the guy goddamn drifted his 767.

in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.

and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:

[bwooomscratches]

[thatoldstandby]

Demos What I Played: Summer (part 1)

What's up chat. It's only been a few days, I hear you saying to yourself. Who do you, writer, think you are, coming back mere days later to talk about yet more games. This is the first half of the bunch of crap I downloaded during the recent Steam NextFest. This is obviously too much to add on to my monthly posts, and also I like writing so like. Here's a bunch of shit I downloaded, then played when I woke from my stupor and realized I had nearly twenty demos downloaded. So join me on my journey through incrementals, extraction shooters, and killing god (who is a fish).

2025 End of Year Entries: GOTY, Epilogue

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

2026 Demos: Spring (Part 1, Part 2); Summer (Part 1 is this one)

IGTAP: An Incremental Game That’s Also a Platformer

I expected this to be more of a gimmick than it actually was. To be clear, I think this is mostly still a gimmick, and I’d imagine that it’s probably going to be best cheap, but the gimmick is pretty strong. So, like, it’s an incremental game that you spend points on upgrades to get more points to buy more upgrades to earn more upgrades to earn more points to buy more upgrades… You get the gist. I’ve talked about these before. The trick is, in this game you earn points by completing platforming courses. Once you’ve completed a course, you set a ghost, which will run the course and earn you passive points. You could stop here, let the ghost slowly accumulate points, and buy upgrades that way. But that’s not very cash money of you, is it? No, you can do better. You can be faster. You can improve. So you run it again, and you’re faster, so now your ghosts are faster, so now your points come in, so you can buy more upgrades to go faster to earn more points to buy more upgrades to go faster to earn more points to buy more upgrades to -

What helps is that neither part of this game feels half-assed. The incremental bit works really well, and it’s surprisingly satisfying seeing a line of ghosts run through the course comically quickly. But more impressive is the fact that the movement feels good. Your little guy is extremely responsive, which makes the platforming bit work really well. I’m impressed, enough that I actually joined a discord for a game, something I am loath to do at the best of times. It’s a cool little thing.

Defrag Incremental

Look. I try to have something insightful to say here most of the time. I like to think I’m successful more often than not. I get that not everything is going to appeal to me, and theoretically, some things just aren’t going to be fun or interesting. I try not to approach games, or other works of art, like that though. It seems defeatist to just say “Yeah, I don’t get it.” Someone, somewhere, sat down, and was like “Boy, I’d love to see an incremental game exist that you play fully through the BIOS screen that no one’s seen for… let’s say twenty years, conservatively. There won’t really be stakes, you’ll randomly choose one of three heavily fragged drives, choose an algorithm deciding how best to approach the drive, and just let it sit. At the end of every day, you get an arbitrary amount of money which will ultimately decide whether your run ends or not.” And you know what. They certainly did it. Maybe they shouldn’t have though. I cannot think of who this is possibly for. There’s nothing here to recommend unless you love BIOS blue, and that’s bad given how nostalgic I am for that era of computer.

Meaningless Random Numbers

Y’all. Y’all. Look, I’m wracking my brain, trying to find a way to describe this game. It’s kind of nothing. The game is the most barebones of an incremental game. You have sold your soul to the devil, and so you must roll dice. You get paid based on the face of the die; and any poker hands you may put together. Once you reach a certain amount earned, you move on to the next challenge where you have to earn more. You get an Anxiety multiplier by finishing a section early, but eventually that won’t cut it. So on your first prestige, you are given a gun, and told to Kill. Look, this was an incredible experience; a fever dream of fast rolling, murder, and fish (accurately) calling me a sinner. This is an instant buy, based solely off the demo alone, even if it is almost entirely vibes driven. I love this and I don't know that words can fully say why.

Tactical Radio Action Burn-9

I love Metal Gear Solid. I have always had a soft-spot for tacticool military fiction; I probably read Rainbow Six way too young. MGS has always been cool, in just about every iteration. It remains the only series that I have ever bought consoles for; multiple times, with the various PSP games that were released. I was young, and I’m still dumb. Long story short, I’m a sucker for anything flavored similarly.

Tactical Radio Action: Burn-9 is a visual novel dressed up as a Metal Gear game. You play a guy in a chair overseeing some kind of military op to a remote island with a base that’s been taken over by a crack military unit. There’s near future sci-fi tech going on, military jargon, and the general graphic and character design are basically just ripping off the game. I enjoyed this; to a certain point. Visual Novels aren’t really my bag, and while I enjoyed the demo well enough, I didn’t run into enough friction slash I’m a genius so I made all the right decisions to not die, so I didn’t have too many issues. This is a game that will live or die by the writing and plot, and it seemed… fine? I’m not uninterested in this when it comes out; and it’s still one of the better demos I tried out, but it’s definitely something I think I’m waiting on a sale for.

Unsight

Oh boy, this one. This is the rent lowering gunshots of this batch of demos. I’m not even entirely sure why I downloaded it; obviously I saw something. Maybe I just wanted a first person shooter, I don’t know. This was really bad. Last demo bevy, I tried out a bog standard spooky find the pages game and wrote about it in my favorite social media thread I’ve ever done.The reason I’m bringing that up here rather than leaving it buried forever, as it deserves to be, is because Unsight is literally the same type of game. A bunch of pre-bought Unreal assets that are put together in the shape of a game, but don’t really gel. There’s enemies, but their AI is either off or on, the guns are a weird mish-mash of types that don’t feel good to shoot, and the movement is weird and feels bad. There is nothing here to recommend anything for and my life is worse for having played it. But I did play it.

Desktop Explorer

Let’s talk about something cooler. Desktop Explorer is a UI game where you’re playing an old adventure game. I’ve gone at length about how much I love UI games; there’s a real pleasure in a game acknowledging and using the old tricks like renaming files to change their file type or figuring out passwords from context clues to hack into old protected files. This handles that maybe the best of any UI game I’ve played recently, and even played with some weird functions I’ve never seen a puzzle game handle before. I’ve never seen Notepad’s Word Wrap function used to that effect. This was fun; there were some tough puzzles, so I imagine the full game may be pretty difficult. But I'm looking forward to the full version.

Demon Bluff

The sell on this is super easy. What if you wanted to play single player Mafia/Werewolf/Secret Hitler in a cute art style? Because if so, hey, this is great. I actually really like this. I haven’t played a social deduction game in…. A while. Years. God has it been years? Fuck. I can’t say I’ve really wanted to, in that time, to be clear, just weird to think on it considering how much I was into them. So, the trick here is, there’s an array of cards of villagers and demons. You have to kill the demons. Every character gives you hints about what the other cards are. You have to determine which clues are valid and where they’re pointing. It plays similar to the Clock Spots raid game. It’s a neat puzzle, and it works out well. I’d recommend this generally, though I’m not sure I’ll go deeper into it.

Truck-kun is Supporting Me From Another World!!?

Sometimes, you need to download a title that’s so completely unhinged it’s either going to be the worst thing you’ve played or a sleeper hit. I can safely say this isn’t the worst thing I played; and I’m not sure it’s a sleeper hit, but it’s way better than I thought it would be. This is obviously using the classic isekai trope of the main character being hit by a truck and going to a fantastical realm. Here’s the problem: The truck picked maybe the worst person they could have, and also you’re not actually playing as the isekai’d individual. You’re playing Truck-kun, and the isekai’d individual quickly has you begin isekaing other people to help her. Not as fellow party members, but as monster she can kill to power level so she can get back to the real world.

You do this by playing what is effectively Crazy Taxi. It’s a fun arcade style racer where you get randomly assigned missions that range from “Hit X number of Y” to “Deliver package from Point A to Point B.” It plays well enough, and it’s been a while since we’ve had a really good arcade-style racing experience. The trick is going to be how cloying the writing is. I don’t know how well it’s going to do, but I also do not care for isekai as a genre so who knows. 

Unhuman

Look I’m going to be real; just about everything else here (and in the next post), I can recall something about the game based on title. I’ve got nothing here, let me refer to my screen shot…. Wait fuck I didn’t take any screenshots. Why do I do this to myself….  Oh my god right. Ok. So, this Steamfest, I got advertised a bunch of what called themselves extraction shooters. This is the first of them, and arguably I’d be better off swapping around the order so this is attached with the others. I’m obviously not going to do that, I just wanted to acknowledge that, were I a better writer with an editor who cared, this is a problem with an easy solution. 

Right, extraction shooter. This is obviously because I’ve been playing an unhealthy amount of Marathon, but it was also big between Arc Raiders and Marathon recently. Whether it’ll remain that way remains to be seen, but there’s clearly something in the zeitgeist. Or there was at the time a bunch of these were started.

This wasn’t a good example, because this was also trying to be an incremental game. You don’t actually directly control your character in the field; they go about and do their thing by going to the various points of interest and looting on their own. You do select their loadouts prior to the match, and hopefully they come back, but otherwise, eesh. I like an incremental, I apparently like at least one extraction shooter, but this isn’t a peanut butter/chocolate secret combination. I think I finished the tutorial; I immediately lost my first foray afterward and closed out the demo. I didn’t even take a screenshot. This entire exercise has obviously been a bit of journalistic malpractice and I have wasted all of our time. Please forgive my indiscretions, dear chat.

Right ok, that's the first half of the demos done. Look forward to the next batch, where I talk about more extraction shooters, AI, and... penguins?

[bourtange]

republicans: homeless people should be ground into sausage and fed to schoolchildren

democrats: persons experiencing houselessness should be ground into sausage and fed to schoolchildren

[txttletale]

this post posits a utopian world where either of these parties would support feeding schoolchildren, making it a masterclass in "hopepunk"

[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.

[scifigirl-deactivated20250601]

The X-Men — Marvel vs. Capcom 2

[greatcheshire]

Hnnnng. Colonel. I’ve infiltrated Shadow Moses.

[zestydippingsauce]

[drunkenskunk]

[thatoldstandby]

Games What I Played May 2k26

What's up chat, it's the end of another month. Somehow. I don't know why, but it also tends to sneak up on me. Anyway, I've played a few games, as is usual. Less than normal though; after finish Cold Steel 4, I decided slash was bulled into taking a break. So I decided to read a couple books, touch some grass, the works. It was good. So surely this month will be shorter than normal, right? Right? Ha. Haha.

Oh also, I didn't take a bunch of screenshots for some games, and I took a lot of screenshots for one in particular, so I've dropped a couple of those bonus screenshots in with other games because I have so many. I hope they don't stand out too much, I just wanted to make sure that people wouldn't be confused when Slay the Spire suddenly has a gun, making it 1000% better.

2025 End of Year Entries: GOTY, Epilogue

2026 Entries: January, February, March, April

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

Old Games

Slay the Spire

I hate Slay the Spire. I want to be very clear. I hate this game. It doesn’t click with me at all, and I didn’t expect it to. “So then why’d you play it?” Thanks, reasonable person I made up just now, that’s a good question. I can’t think of any indie game that continues to be as influential as it is  Which is to say, maybe the most influential indie game? Even though I hadn’t played this before, I knew that this is probably where the pick-three structure of basically every modern roguelike comes from, where you get to pick one of three cards as a reward for each match. The level select option is brilliant, and while pretty clearly based on something like FTL’s level structure, has itself been stolen by other roguelikes. It’s foundational in a way that I think is weird, and I’ve always kind of had it in the back of my head that “Hey, I should check this out, huh.” And then Slay the Spire 2 came out, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get even the tiniest bit of fomo. So now, seven years after it first came out, I can finally give my thoughts.

And I hate it. I dislike playing it. I beat a run with each of the characters, where beat means I beat the third floor boss; I did not beat the heart, or anything that would come after. (Though I don’t think anything actually comes after?) Some of the characters were a cakewalk; I think the Ironclad and the Silent still have a number of unlocks they could get, and I can’t say I didn’t have fun. This automatically puts it above, say, Demonschool, a game that I hate because I think it is foundationally broken. (Though there’s been a new patch that added a bunch of stuff, maybe it’s gotten better. Who knows. I won’t.) No, I hate Slay the Spire because it does what it intends to do very well, and it makes me feel dumb because I cannot wrap my brain around it.

Slay the Spire is a deckbuilder. Slay the Spire is maybe the best, most pure deck builder that exists outside of like, Dominion. Your character enters the tower with ten cards, some attack, some defense, some with other effects, and you have to beat monsters and climb the titular spire because a whale told you to. Along the way, you’re presented the option of picking up cards. Now, you could pick up cards, and in other deck building games I’ll be talking about later in this very post you may be well suited to pick those cards up. But Slay the Spire doesn’t want you to do that, and will punish you later if your deck is bloated and inefficient.

When this works, it works beautifully. Part of the reason I continued playing through with each character was because the sheer amount of joy I got with my Shiv Silent and Lightning Orb Defect was astounding. I had a level of power in a card game that you don’t really see in card builders. But, those ideal builds were few and far between, and built off lucky streaks where the stars aligned and my card offerings were good. Which is where my issues lie.

If I had played another 10, 20 hours in Slay the Spire, and really knuckled down, I could probably have the necessary skill and knowledge to be able to ameliorate any bad luck, or be able to identify the different effective builds I could go for with whatever card is available. That’s a problem with me, because I have so many other games I want to play that I can’t really allow myself to get too bogged down in something I’m not *really* enjoying. 

But a bigger issue is that I just don’t understand deck building at a fundamental level. I can recognize when a deck is doing what something cool, but I have trouble figuring out what’s worth going for, what can be safely cut without losing too much power, when it should be cut, when a run isn’t going to work, etc. I have this issue with Magic: The Gathering and other TCG games as well. I know this also stems from a lack of knowledge, and I could solve that by netdecking, at least, but that seems to take a lot of the fun out of it. 

Ultimately, I hate Slay the Spire. It’s a good game, a really good game, and I can see how it’s gotten where it is. I may give Slay the Spire 2 a try later on, even, though I’d imagine my issues will never be addressed. But boy am I glad that this doesn’t click with me.

Picayune Dreams

I’ve previously talked about how much I like Vampy Survivy. I love that game, but more importantly, I love the genre it spawned. I’m always willing to try out a new one, so when I saw a streamer bounce off Picayune basically immediately, I had to give it a try.

And I can wholly tell why. This game is one of the most intentionally opaque games I’ve ever played. The character and enemy sprites are jarring and absurdist, the field gets littered with numbers (instead of some other experience indicator) leading to a busy looking game screen, and all the weapon effects are displayed to you in code during a run, so fuck you if you can’t read code or don’t know what the weapon does. All this coalesces into a game that’s so much visual noise.

It took a bit, but I did get used to it, and I found a pretty good Vampy Survivy in there. It’s maybe the hardest I’ve played, and it leans more into bullet hell-style encounters than most of it’s contemporaries, with boss patterns that wouldn’t feel terribly out of place for an early-game Touhou enemy. I’ve had a lot of fun poking at it and trying out various combinations, and every win feels like a triumph, unlike modern-day Vampy Survivy. It’s good, and it’s got a plot that’s fine and told in an interesting enough way. I’ll probably never see the true end (due to being awful at bullet hell), but I’ll certainly continue to try. 

New

Forbidden Solitaire

I was really excited for this, so you’d best believe I picked it up on launch and sat down and played it immediately. And then I stood up five hours later after beating it. Prognosis: It’s good! It’s fun. It’s a good solitaire with a neat wrapper.

I had higher hopes; I think (one of) the team’s previous game, Home Safety Hotline, was more interesting and had better hooks. But I haven’t played an honest to god solitaire game in a while, and it was kind of refreshing. The wrapper story is cute and evocative of both a certain era of games (that I have nostalgia for) and like decade old creepypasta stories (which I also have nostalgia for, but more in that they’re bad). It’s neat, recommended. 

A Planet Full of Cats

Speaking of games that were cute, I’ve been tangentially aware of the X Full of Cats series for a while, because Steam advertises them at me for some reason. They’re essentially cute Where’s Waldo games where you have to find cats (and other things) in a large illustration. They’re simple, cute, and do not appeal to me. But then I saw this one was advertised as a Metroidvania, and I had to figure out how it was a Metroidvania.

And the answer is not really. There’s “upgrades” you find that allow you to access new areas, which is basically the definition of a Metroidvania I guess, but that’s where the similarities end. That and the game map basically takes place on cat Brinstar. The game is still Where’s Waldo, but there’s a few more steps, and the map is slightly more complicated. I enjoyed my time; very much the “Sensible Chuckle” of the month.

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors

As previously stated, I fucking love Vampy Survivy. Sure, I adore the genre it created, and frankly I still think it feels the best to play of any of the rest that have followed to date. But I also love the aesthetics, and how they’ve moved from blatantly ripping off Castlevania sprites to slightly-less-blatantly ripping off Castlevania sprites. It’s great. Bayonetta is still basically on the title screen! So I was intrigued when they announced Vampire Crawlers as the first spin-off, I was intrigued. Maybe a little dismayed too. I knew how addictive Vampy Survivy was to me, and I knew how addictive Slay the Spire was to others, so a combination of the two seemed like black tar heroin.

Having played it now…. It’s ok. It’s fine. It plays basically the same as Slay the Spire, though there’s more emphasis on playing with a larger deck. Each card has a mana cost, and you have limited amounts of mana. The trick is, though, that if you play cards in a run (that is to say, sequentially), the later cards in the combo will have more power, which means more damage or more mana or armor gain or stat buffs. It’s a simple change, but I think it lends itself more to a large deck that you’re trying to shuffle through or, in the ideal, draw all at once and have 30+ cards in your hand to play with.

I don’t think this is as elegant as Slay the Spire. I think Slay the Spire is a better designed game with better deckbuilding. But I like Vampire Crawlers more; it’s ethos is way more suited for how I play games and the collecting I want to do. And more than that, I think this emulates the way Vampy Survivy feels in a slower paced, less actiony environment. It’s kind of a miracle? One that I’m fine with. I really enjoyed my time, and I’ve now gotten every cheevo. There’s one last thing I will probably do, but may be putting down until some kind of content update. And there’s room for more content here, so I’ll be super interested to see how it evolves in the future.

Marathon

I hate this game, because now I have to offer a revision to what I said back in… February, jesus. I wasn’t fully wrong, in that review of the demo, that’s a lot of what Marathon is. Marathon is an extraction shooter with short time to kill, and extraction games are games made for perverts. The thing is, I was wrong about whether this was a genre for me. It is. I just need the Bully.

The match that really convinced me I was wrong, I loaded in with a free loadout, which the game provides if you’re poor and need a handout, and the loadout included the Bully SMG. I don’t know that it’s the best gun in the game. I do know that it’s my favorite. The speed, accuracy, and audiovisual feedback of shooting the gun triggered every good brain feel that an FPS can give me. So I knew that I was fully grabbed. But on top of that, I think I finally understood Marathon. Marathon is a game that’s made of two halves, and which half you’re playing depends on if you’re with anyone else. When you’re solo, you’re in a stealth horror game. The best way to play is move slowly, scoping out zones before running in, and keeping a mental note of the environment around you and how you can escape if violence suddenly explodes around you. And encounters have a way of exploding. It’s great, it’s tense, and every escape feels like a victory. It’s reminiscent of the best stealth games, another genre I love. Aces.

The second half is just as good, but much more madcap. Whenever you’ve got friends with you, congratulations, you’re playing a game with friends. It’s automatically a good time, because you’re hanging out with people you like. And here, you get to act like a fireteam who have each other’s backs. You can move faster, because you’ve got automatic support, and you still have to pay attention, but at least you’re (hopefully) close enough.

Everything else about Marathon is as impeccably designed. The maps are sprawling, and each of the areas has interesting map design that lead to good fire fights. Map design is a science, and god damn if Bungie doesn’t have it down. The aesthetics are on-point. I’ve got so many screenshots from this game, because the sky boxes are brilliant sci-fi paintings, and the world design is an intentional weird, plastic look because everything is 3D silk-spit printed. The codex is fascinating to read, has great audio logs, and is a good callback to the terminals in Marathon Classic. It all coalesces.

It’s not perfect, it’s very much not for everyone, and if I’m being honest, I think it’s kind of doomed. Sony bought Bungie for (frankly) too much at the time, and Bungie was, and maybe still is, extremely mismanaged, which led to Destiny 2 falling off and then dying. I don’t know how long Bungie has left, and I don’t know how a niche genre is going to thrive in an era where Sony is realizing that GaaS games don’t print money, especially games as niche as Marathon. But until then, I’ll enjoy what we have, for we have already lost it. 

Real Media

The River Has Roots

I don’t talk a lot about the alternative media I experience. A part of that is because I have trouble finding time to sit down and actually watch or read stuff. It’s not impossible; y’all have read my games musing for a year and a half or so at this point, I clearly have the time. I just have trouble being the mindspace for a new show or book.

Luckily, I’ve been able to force myself to read for fun a bit more than usual, and one of the books I’ve had in my TBR for…. A year? A half year? has been The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar. El-Mohtar has been running in SFF circles for a while, primarily as a short form author and reviewer. I’ve read a few of her short stories, I believe, not a lot of her poetry. I think it’s safe to say that she became more widely known as one of the two authors on This is How You Lose the Time War, particularly after noted Twitter reviewer bigolas dickolas wolfwood gave a glowing review. If I can be a bit of a hipster for a second, I was always in on This is How You Lose the Time War, mostly because I was aware, and a fan, of Max Gladstone’s other works. Three Parts Dead was so good that I threw it against the wall more than a few times out of jealousy. Hate it, highly recommended.

Anyway, pulling it back, only to immediately go on another tangent; I love reading romaence novels. I will never discuss them with people, and I don’t really critically consume them. As much as it’s a genre I enjoy, I don’t really have a broad enough experience with it to really critically approach it, and I don’t really feel like discussing it with people at large. But, one of the reasons I enjoy it is the adherence to a formula. It’s mentally satisfying, like a procedural show, to have a framework for understanding what’s going to happen. And then the genre is entirely about two people coming to a mutual understanding. It’s great.

All of that to say, The River Has Roots is a romaence novel. Of sorts. It’s also a faerie tale. Of sorts. But the reason I’m discussing it here is that it’s more than that; it’s maybe one of the most beautiful love letters to the idea of language as a whole.

This story is about a pair of sisters whose job is to sing to willows, because in singing they impart some kind of magic to them. Their home is on a river, which is downstream of some fae nonsense, and fae nonsense is suffused throughout the story. It’s a love story, a lot of love stories. A love story between sisters, between lovers, and most of all with language. It’s beautiful, and worth the effort to work through, especially for how short it is.

[lakevida]

Put me on a crane and I would instinctually know how to operate it. It would be like reuniting with a love from a past life to me

when children reach an age that they can sit upright unassisted they should be placed in the cab of lots of different types of heavy machines to see what they can innately pilot

[smolwriter]

i went at not writing island and saw all of you there

[starknstarwars]

Me on not writing island, looking at you on not writing island knowing we’ll both be here tomorrow.

[niraves]

[cloudabserk]

WARNING do NOT start reading books and comics or watching movies or looking at art!!! you will start wanting to create art yourself. or god forbid. writing.

[cambriancrew]

[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!

[hateusandseeifwemind]