[{"content":"Cover photo from Big Walk\nHello dear readers, happy August (and ragweed season, ick) to you. It’s been hot, damn hot here lately so I’ve been spending lots of time in our very temperate and newly-remodeled basement, from which I’m penning this.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking, and I’ve reached a point where I’ve got to be more realistic with myself when it comes to my gaming habits — because of my ADHD tendencies I\u0026rsquo;ve made a habit of forcing myself to finish games before picking up another due to my tendency of getting distracted by the new shiny object and ultimately finishing none of them. This kind of effort has been healthy for me before (and in other parts of my life), but I think I also need to be reasonable and allow myself to drop a game now and then, even if I’m mostly enjoying it. Any game left unfinished has led to a persistent open tab in the back of my brain which doesn’t feel great, and I\u0026rsquo;m feeling the need to shift my mindset. When it comes to the blog, I feel guilty about giving a game a score if I haven’t hit end credits on it yet, so in effect that leaves some games in perpetual limbo, even games I mostly liked (looking at you, Mewgenics). I think there’s got to be a happy medium where I feel like I’ve seen enough to pass judgment. I dunno, I’ll figure out what works for me eventually.\nIf nothing else, allowing myself to drop some titles will afford me the space to start new games — like Star Wars : Zero Company, a game that came completely out of nowhere and has really scratched a tactical itch I’ve had for a while without being fully conscious of it. Expect some impressions in a month or two from now. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here’s my slate of finished games from August which were uniformly pretty great, with two even reaching all-timer status! Starting off with a legitimate game of the year contender…\nIt really is about the journey, in this case. Big Walk 93 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Must-Play Some games are simultaneously both easy and difficult to describe. Such is the case for Big Walk, the newest co-op sensation recently released by House House, the Australian developer responsible for the goofy and chaotic Untitled Goose Game — a perfect interactive representation of the “go, do a crime” meme. Big Walk is quite different from their previous endeavor though, aiming for less goose-based shenanigans and more nature-trekking and puzzle-solving, creating a singular and unique experience that you can play through with a handful of friends (or perfect strangers!). It’s pretty unassuming at first look though, and takes some explaining to really reveal what’s special about it.\nThe term “friendslop” has recently become a mainstay of the gaming lexicon. It sounds derogatory, but is more of a good-natured ribbing of games with short development cycles that focus on a core loop of doing some kind of activity with a small group of friends. Examples are the excellent PEAK, a light-hearted game about being stranded on an island and having to cooperatively ascend a dangerous mountain in order to call for help, and last year’s R.E.P.O., which has you and your buds controlling a bunch of gabbin’ robots who are trying to extract valuables from haunted places full of bizarre and sometimes terrifying creatures. The common throughline is that these games focus on a relatively simple core loop but with enough randomization (or escalating levels of difficulty) that it makes it interesting for your group to come back to repeatedly. They also tend to be priced quite affordably (I again refer you to the PEAK dev’s famous spiel) to the point where grabbing it for a few fun, memorable sessions with your buds is well worthwhile.\nBig Walk is also available at an affordable price point (About $20), but where it differs greatly is its central premise. The repeatable, randomized core loop of the friendslop genre isn’t present here; instead what you’ll find is a huge, detailed island wilderness full of unique puzzles that test your ability to communicate and coordinate with a group of friends. You can play Big Walk with as few as two people or as many as 12, but the puzzles are designed to scale for 2, 3, or 4+ players. I played through with two good friends of mine who I used to do Savage-tier raids in Final Fantasy XIV with, but I also had an experience playing with a group of 6 which was both uniquely fun and more chaotic. The puzzles never change between playthroughs aside from scaling for the number of players, so expect this to be more of a one-time experience to savor.\nIt must be said that good communication is the key to success in Big Walk, and it cleverly utilizes an in-game proximity voice chat that quickly falls off in volume as you get farther away from your friends. Most of the puzzles you find are based around this limitation, forcing you to use various hand signals or other ways of conveying your intent. Other puzzles will limit you in other ways like physically blocking your line of sight, restricting your movement or vision in some way, or even just slapping a pane of sound-proof glass between you that you have to account for. The puzzles start easy in the initial area but quickly get subtly devious and challenging as you progress, though the many years of talking through raid strategies with my friends definitely gave us a leg up. The cleverness and complexity ramps up and made for a lot of fun surprises, and I also need to point out that this game can be so damn funny at times. The odd limitations it places on you makes for some natural comedic moments, and the one goofball in your friend group will inevitably also find many, many ways to make you laugh through game mechanics.\nIt’s also just kind of a beautiful game? It fosters a light-hearted atmosphere with its antlike player characters whose mouths go noot-noot as the player talks, and the approach of putting bright primary-colored puzzle areas against a lush, detailed wilderness environment (designed in the image of Australian national parks) makes for a unique visual style that also makes the island easy to navigate. There is a day-night cycle, and it gets so dark at night that all you can see of your friends is the glow of their eyeballs, and in the darkness you may just have to hunker down and wait for the (gorgeous) sunrise if you didn’t plan ahead and bring a light. The sound design also deserves accolades, the whooshing sound effects when you make hand signals and the pitter-patter of your feet against the various surfaces you’ll walk across are very satisfying. Voices will reverberate in enclosed spaces and may carry farther than you think based on the area\u0026rsquo;s acoustic profile. You can be very objective-driven through Big Walk, but I still found that it gave a lot of natural breaks to slow down, enjoy the sights, and to just chat with your friends and catch up on what’s happening in their lives.\nAnd that, I believe, is the biggest draw and differentiator between Big Walk and other similar games. It ends up feeling like a chill journey with your friends, and is a memorable trip at that. I’m fortunate enough to have a group of friends I regularly game with, but I’ve also seen anecdotes of others who found strangers to play with through LFG threads in Discord and came out the other side having had an absolute blast (and in some instances, with new friends). It’s hard not to get emotional at the end of the game, seeing the journey coming to its natural conclusion and walking off into the proverbial sunset. It’s thematically beautiful, a feast for the eyes and ears, and also incredibly accessible even to people who don’t play a ton of games. It comes with my highest recommendation, and is one of the best games I’ve played so far in 2026. Walk on!\n🎶We\u0026#39;re knights of the round table, our shows are for-mid-able🎶 Sovereign Tower 91 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Ah yes, the “Choices Matter” genre, one that is like an irresistible catnip to me. I love it when a game drops a serious moral dilemma into my lap, especially if my choice will have huge ramifications for how the following events play out. Sovereign Tower by Wild Wits Games wasn’t on my radar until it was practically ready to launch, but when I saw it in my Steam release calendar I knew it was going to be worth a play. I’d totally missed out on royal management sim Yes, Your Grace and\u0026hellip; wait, they already made a sequel to that game, just last year. Ugh. My backlog is already a dragon I will never slay, so I think it doesn’t need to be any longer. My apologies, your Grace.\nAnyhow. Sovereign Tower! You play the role of a lowly leper who narrowly escapes an attack on their village by the Empire of Angelor and then is unexpectedly judged worthy to open the titular tower of legend, thus becoming its Sovereign. The tower is enchanted with powerful magic, giving its Sovereign reign over the surrounding lands of Brizh as well as giving the knights that serve its round table capabilities beyond ordinary mortals. Your ascension inevitably attracts attention from the surrounding lands, for better or worse, and you must build up your retinue of advisors and knights in order to confront the challenges that will come your way.\nI made the comparison to Yes, Your Grace earlier because most of what you’ll be doing here is taking audiences with petitioners from the lands of Brizh and beyond, hearing of their plight, and making decisions on how address all of these various problems which fall anywhere between petty disputes between nobles and potentially kingdom-destroying conspiracies. The other main portion of this game consists of assigning your knights to embark beyond the tower walls on quests to solve these problems. This part actually reminds me of last year’s excellent Dispatch, specifically in that in both games your success is based on the core stats of who you send forth to see that your will be done. Your knights have six stats : Strength, Agility, Charisma, Luck, Magic, and Wit. Beyond that, your knights also have distinct personalities and character traits which could affect their performance on missions, cause unexpected outcomes, or cause them to rebel or leave your service if the tasks they’re put on are frequently distasteful to them. Unlike Dispatch, however, there is no random element to their success or failure; it is determined solely by a points system that takes into account their stats, their gear, and their unique traits (which I appreciate). For example, send kind-hearted animal-loving knight Angelica on a quest to slay a great forest wolf terrorizing a village and she may instead just come back to the tower with a new friend in tow.\nThis highly incentivizes reading the quest text closely and doing your best to match the most suitable knight(s) to the task at hand. They will often drop hints to their unique quirks in conversation, or you can also just assign your attendant (and shameless gossip) Alwena to investigate rumors about them. Since you will spend so much time conversing with your knights and the people of Brizh, it’s a pleasure for me to report that the writing is uniformly excellent. The lovable idiots at your round table have specific strengths, quirks, and vices and will often offer unique quests when you reach a certain level of trust with them. There are also unique synergies between knights assigned to quests together, or hidden attributes that only reveal themselves under certain circumstances. This encourages experimentation and bolsters replayability, though it’s inevitable that you’ll make at least a few bad calls and be confronted with the loss of a knight or another painful consequence.\nBut you can always go back. In the deepest depths of the tower dungeon is an imprisoned demon who will offer you the ability to turn back the hands of time and rectify your mistakes, or even simply to see an alternative conclusion to a storyline. Time travel, baby! This is where I think Sovereign Tower really distinguishes itself; you can actually take all that knowledge back with you in a concrete way. Unlike a game like Outer Wilds where you take literally nothing back with you but an understanding of how that world works, your Sovereign actually retains their core attributes and can also use their foreknowledge of events as a game mechanic; you will actually get new dialogue options that inevitably freak out your petitioners and advisors with your penchant for somehow knowing exactly what is to come. With your retained Sovereign attributes — the four statistics of Audacity, Wisdom, Tyranny, and Kindness — you also gain access to choices only available when those attributes reach a certain threshold. The choice is yours when it comes to how you want to rule and if/when to use the demon’s power. Even if you decide to avoid using it, the fact that it is constantly whispering “you could have prevented this outcome” into your ear adds additional weight to your decisions. It also adds a level of replayability that is more accessible without starting the entire game from square one again. Aside from a few minor continuity issues that I saw after a rewind, they mostly pulled off this herculean juggling act (subsequent patches have also helped). Thinking about how many intertwined variables they are probably tracking behind the curtain makes the programmer part of me want to lay down and cover my head. Seriously, it\u0026rsquo;s impressive.\nWith its beautiful ripped-from-a-storybook aesthetic, compelling and frequently funny character writing, meaningful decisions, and surprising depth, Sovereign Tower is an easy recommendation from me. There is a ton to enjoy here, and it’s obvious that its development team enjoyed creating it as well. Can’t wait to see what they do next.\nA PC-98 throwback with modern sensibilities Stories From Sol: The Gun-Dog [2025] 81 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended The Visual Novel genre has always been a bit of an odd bird. I’m one who really loves long, detailed narratives, but when playing a VN often wonder to myself if the story being told would have been better suited to being expanded within a physical text. I’m definitely not a hater or gameplay purist, there are some traditional VNs that I love (still begging everyone to play The House in Fata Morgana), but the medium of games is ripe for stories that let the player guide them to some extent.\nStories from Sol - The Gun-Dog initially drew me in with its eye-catching, detailed pixel work, but held onto me by presenting a great story with memorable characters and a deceptive amount of player choice. The visual stylings evoke the era of PC-98 adventure games and feature some really great technical art. It’s set against the backdrop of a war that has engulfed the solar system, with humans who have colonized the outer planets (Mars and the moons of Jupiter) pitted against Earth forces. The main character, who you name, is a recently-recruited Armored Frame (read: mobile suit) pilot in the Jovian military, set to launch on their first mission during the final battle in Earth orbit… Only, when the launch order comes, nothing happens. The ship’s suit docking collar jams and will not release the Frame, so our protagonist is forced to sit there helplessly and listen to the panicked comms of their squadron as they are ambushed and picked off one-by-one.\nThis trauma sits with them even 4 years later, long after an armistice is signed and they have been promoted to Lieutenant and assigned to be the security officer of the JFS Gun-Dog, a fast-response gunboat ship. Their paramour Cassie has pulled some strings to get them reassigned to the Gun-Dog alongside her, where she is second-in-command. After a brief introduction to the ship and the various strong personalities that make up its crew, the Gun-Dog is hit by an unknown energy pulse that completely knocks out the ship’s power and communications, and results in both the Captain and Cassie being incapacitated. Within this leadership vacuum, you must take action to re-enable power and life support and thus save the ship’s crew, and then figure out who (or what) disabled the Gun-Dog and ravaged the other Jovian military ship that you were scheduled to rendezvous with.\nThe major story beats are mostly set in stone, but there are a surprising number of choices you can make along the way (some not even readily apparent) that determine the fate of several supporting characters and what attitudes they hold toward you. The script is quite well-written and features some delicious conflict between your character and other crewmembers, the most notable among them being Hansen Crwys, the only other survivor of your AF squad that was decimated in the last battle above earth. Hansen constantly needles and torments the protagonist and unfairly blames them for the death of their comrades, and it’s largely up to the player whether you decide to take the high road and try to change his opinion of you, let the comments slide, or give in and decide to antagonize him right back. After the game ends you’re shown a story graph with all the major choices you could have made, and I was surprised to see just how many there were. After finishing the game I looked up what some of the other potential routes were and was surprised to see that the death of a supporting character I experienced in my playthrough was not set in stone, one or more of the crew may lose their lives or survive based on your choices.\nStories from Sol impressed me; it’s a solid sci-fi visual novel with some meaningful player influence on the course of the story, boosted by some great animations and technical design. It comes in at a relatively tight 5 to 6 hours of gameplay and is great on a portable device like a Steam Deck, so I highly recommend giving it a whirl if this is your style of game. It apparently sold fairly well and may end up getting a sequel, and if it does, it’ll be a day 1 play for me.\nDanger, danger! High voltage! ElecHead [2021] 84 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Whoops, Mike-wearing-editor-hat here with a late addition to the post. Here’s another bite-sized puzzle game from Nama Takahashi, the developer that created the excellent puzzle game Öoo, which I reviewed back in March. The two games share a lot in common, both are puzzle games built around one central mechanic. In this one, you’re a little robot dude deployed to a moon facility to determine why the power is out, and if possible, to get it back online. Due to its short length (and the fact that I played it on the Steam Deck while our basement was being worked on), I nearly forgot to include it on this month’s list! That’d have been a real shame, because there’s a lot to love about ElecHead.\nWhere Öoo had you strategically placing bombs to solve puzzles, ElecHead is about using the power within your battery-like character to complete circuits and power different areas of rooms. Within the screenshots you’ll notice that some platforms are lit up yellow, this means that they are energized and with the circuit completed, will trigger platforms to move (or traps to trigger). Not far into the game, your character gains the ability to throw their head (which is the power source) in a cardinal direction, which allows you to more carefully manipulate what is and is not powered at a given time. After throwing your head you have 10 seconds to move your body to rejoin it, else your battery boi perishes. It’s a really interesting mechanic and Takahashi deploys it well in the back half of the game; some of the later puzzles are trickier than you might think given how simple the basic mechanics are.\nIt’s definitely worth a play, and can easily be completed within a handful of hours. Both it and its spiritual successor Öoo are great little games, but if I had to choose between the two I’d give ElecHead a slight edge for how clever the lategame puzzles are.\n","date":"2026-09-05T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/august-2026-roundup/cover_hu_9e758ed0455f441.png","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/august-2026-roundup/","title":"August 2026 Roundup"},{"content":"Cover photo from Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice\nOof. At some point we flew past the midpoint of summer and I feel like I still haven\u0026rsquo;t done much with mine so far. Definitely feeling the need to plan some sort of vacation in the next month or two, even if it just involves me staying at home and diving into my games backlog.\nSpeaking of the backlog, this month\u0026rsquo;s roundup features two games from 2019, two horror games involving cursed software, and the friendslop hit of the summer playing the role as the awkward fifth wheel. Some really good stuff in here this month, so let\u0026rsquo;s get into it.\nAs if Windows couldn\u0026#39;t get any more cursed Desktop Explorer 90 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Oh how I love a good diegetic interface in a video game. I think over time I’ve come to appreciate how much the subtleties of a well-designed and good-looking UI does for the immersion of a title, because I sure notice it now when it looks like an interface has been tacked-on as an afterthought. Games that mimic old PC user interfaces are becoming more common as people look back wistfully upon a much simpler and more rough-edged era of computing, and I think even without my personal nostalgia I’d still appreciate these.\nDesktop Explorer is a game that asks “what if Windows 95, but cursed?” Your viewpoint character is a young woman who has just inherited an old PC from her beloved uncle Hal and has decided to try to excavate any information she can from it. This will lead her down a rabbit hole of family secrets and perhaps help to solve the mystery of a family member’s disappearance once and for all. It accomplishes this through a very impressive recreation of a mid-90s Windows-like interface. Through this fake OS, you will be asked to solve various puzzles that require you to use the OS’s features in unconventional and creative ways.\nSo yeah, about that “cursed” part. This PC you’ve inherited has a program installed on it (or infected with?) called Desktop Explorer, which represents itself through a quirky little anthropomorphized notepad mascot called Pizarro. It’s giving shades of an ominous version of Clippy, which I’m sure is what the developers were going for. Now I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a horror aficionado; I despise cheap jumpscares and tend to stay mostly on the psychological horror side of the spectrum. You can probably source that back to having unlimited access as a teenager to an early 2000s internet which was full of horrifying shock sites and screamer jumpscare pranks — that era of the internet was a bizarre and wild place.\nFortunately, no zombies or scary ghosts are going to be popping up in your face and screaming. Desktop Explorer relies more on fostering a creepy atmosphere of mystery and dread, and I’d call the handful of scares it serves up to be fairly mild overall. The mystery it has you digging into is excellent though, as you uncover more and more about the PC’s previous users and what this rogue program did to them. This is a puzzle game first and foremost, and a fantastic one at that. The problems it puts in front of you to solve often require some creative and non-linear thinking, and there were so many moments where I thought up an unconventional way of interacting with something only to find that it was the intended solution for the puzzle. This is how the best puzzle games operate, sprinkling about enough individual clues so that you can synthesize that “aha” moment that makes everything click.\nDesktop Explorer mostly leans on your use of the filesystem and the various programs on the PC to solve puzzles in the first main section, but rather than resting on its laurels it impressively expands its gameworld in the following chapters. You will be exploring an abandoned online space ala Second Life and even getting familiar with the PC’s terminal in later parts. Think of it as a mashup between something like Hypnospace Outlaw (also excellent and recommended) and last year’s Blue Prince. I highly recommend it to my fellow puzzle game enthusiasts if you’re looking for something compelling, unique, and perhaps a bit creepy.\nA symphony of ringing steel Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice 94 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; Recommended Frequent readers may recall that back in April I played and quite loved Nine Sols, a combat-centric Metroidvania with excellent visual design and parry mechanics. I promised a few friends recently that I’d go back and play the game that it shares the most DNA with, and I’m pleased to report that Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice has lived up to all expectations; I’m actually shocked I hadn’t plucked it out of my backlog sooner.\nSekiro is set in a fantastical version of 16th century Sengoku-era Japan; the main thrust of the story centers around the fate of Kuro, heir to a divine bloodline that makes him immortal. Wolf, the faithful shinobi sworn to his service, is the character that you take control of in pursuit of Kuro’s wish of ending this dubious blessing; the young Lord is a pawn in a political scheme and becomes caught in-between several factions vying for the power of immortality that he holds. Much like From Software’s other games, this basic premise is all you really need to know, and the details are filled in from a smattering of character interactions and other worldbuilding conveyed by visual design, architecture, and of course the detailed item descriptions.\nI’ve long been a fan of Fromsoft games. I skipped a few in the middle of their roster (Sekiro being one of them), but the original Demon’s Souls and of course its hugely influential followup Dark Souls were formative games for me. Fromsoft games are known for being quite difficult without very many levers to pull to influence their difficulty, and as far as I know none of them have an explicit difficulty setting. This has been somewhat controversial, but in many of them you could still mitigate some of the difficulty via building your character in a specific way. 2023’s Elden Ring was a great example of this; the possible ways to customize your character were numerous. I personally chose a Strength/Faith build that had me dual-wielding claymores for big bonkage and big stagger, but alternatively you could build toward almost the opposite, using consumable items to poison or weaken your foes, and keeping your distance while taking chunks out of their healthbar with spells. Buildcrafting is a big draw of those games and allows for a lot of player expressivity.\nSekiro is almost exactly the opposite, but not to its detriment. Wolf has a predetermined set of abilities (expandable and enhanceable by several skill trees) that you will need to learn to use for the entire duration of the game. Rather than giving you flexibility in your build, Sekiro practically grabs you by the throat and makes you sit up, pay attention, and master its moveset if you want to succeed. The early game definitely has a learning curve and it will undoubtedly lose some people here, but for those that persevere, what is here is a highly kinetic and incredible combat system. Whereas Dark Souls and Elden Ring demand that you learn spacing from your enemy and how to use dodge rolls, Sekiro is all about the deflection, baby. All enemies (and Wolf himself) have both a health bar and a posture bar, the latter of which builds up when you perfect parry their attacks, cause damage to them, or they block your attacks. When the posture bar fills completely, they are stance broken and you can perform a deathblow on them. This is enough to kill most weaker enemies, but minibosses and the game’s major encounters will require you to land two or sometimes even three deathblows to finish the fight.\nThis system hugely rewards learning the enemy attack patterns so that you can get those sweet series of perfect parries that will throw your enemies off-balance, and when not defending you should always be aggressive so as not to let them regain their posture. “Hesitation is defeat” is a common meme from this game for good reason. This is one of the rare games that has let me reach that fabled flow state while playing it; when the combat clicks and you\u0026rsquo;re parrying, counterattacking, and executing one enemy after the other, it is a feeling of power and satisfaction that is indescribable. Sword strikes are weighty, and enemy designs and animations are excellent across the board. With only a few possible exceptions, the boss encounters are very challenging but ultimately fair, and had me pumping my fist and jumping out of my chair after clutching out close victories. Before my experience of playing Dark Souls I’m not sure I would have described myself as someone who sought out difficult games, but it and its successors certainly taught me the value of perseverance and how good it feels to come out victorious in the end. I’m all for greater accessibility in most games, but Fromsoft has proven time and again that there is an undeniable allure in a carefully-crafted difficult experience.\nSekiro: Shadows Die Twice has lived up to all the glowing praise I’ve heard and then some. As much as I revere Dark Souls and From Software’s other projects such as Elden Ring and Armored Core, in my opinion it takes the #1 spot as the best game they’ve ever made. If you think you have it in you to surmount that initial learning curve and walk the perilous path of the shinobi, I cannot recommend it enough.\nSo long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodnight Sayonara Wild Hearts 77 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; Recommended Back in May\u0026rsquo;s edition I lamented my recent struggle of finding a rhythm game that I really clicked with. I’ve always loved the genre all the way back to my days playing Dance Dance Revolution at my local arcades (which I still do over 20 years later). Rhythm Doctor was endearing but had some glaring flaws toward the end of the game, and my experience with D-Cell’s Unbeatable was… mixed, to say the least. The next stop on my quest for a satisfying rhythm game was Simogo’s Sayonara Wild Hearts, a game I’d frequently heard about but had been perpetually backlogged until now.\nThe first thing I’ll say is that it’s less of a rhythm game than I initially believed it to be; it’s an autoscrolling action game where your primary objective is to maneuver to pick up heart tokens that increase your score as you race through the various (and often stunning) levels. There are some sections where you tap the interact button along with the beat to dodge enemy attacks, but it’s mostly score chasing while enjoying the visual glitz and the excellent soundtrack. It really has to be seen to be understood, so I offer up a video of one of the earlier stages for your consideration :\nThe best description I’ve heard for Sayonara is a “playable pop album.” The tale is presented through some narrative bits (narrated by the one and only Queen Latifah) and a whole lot of visual storytelling. It tells the tale of the protagonist overcoming heartbreak, bitterness, and disappointment to grow as a person and gain the ability to love and pursue her passions once again. It’s quite a feast for the eyes while you’re racing through the detailed, dynamically-shifting levels, but the upbeat synth-pop soundtrack is the main draw. It often had me tapping my foot and bobbing my head to the beat, and I’ve added several of its tracks to my ever-growing list of game soundtrack favorites.\nIt is also a VERY short game; my entire playthrough came in at just around an hour or so. There are some additional, optional challenges you can undertake if you’re really digging the gameplay, but I think I was satisfied at the end of my brief time with it. This developer is mostly known for mobile games, which makes its length and format make a lot more sense in context. I definitely found far less to dislike about it than the games I mentioned earlier, but was also left wanting more of it. It was released in 2019 and often goes on sale, so if you’re in the mood for a nice audiovisual snack that you can play through in a single sitting, Sayonara Wild Hearts may just fit the bill.\nOK, maybe the moral panic was justified Forbidden Solitaire 85 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Well, July certainly was a good month for horror in the style of retro PC gaming, because here’s another easy recommendation in a similar lane to Desktop Explorer. A few years back I picked up a game by Night Signal Entertainment called Home Safety Hotline, a game where the player takes the role of a telephone operator who takes calls about paranormal occurrences and helps the caller identify and rectify their mild haunting, or possibly, impending tragedy. I would say that I liked it but didn’t quite love it, but the retro PC interface it presented itself through and the grainy, blurry images of various cryptids provided by callers made for a fun, creepy atmosphere regardless.\nFor their next title, Night Signal teamed up with the husband-and-wife pair that makes up Grey Alien Games, who over the last decade have specialized in the very specific niche of creating solitaire games, and by all accounts have made sustainable careers out of it. This collaboration between the two studios has resulted in a bona fide hit; Forbidden Solitaire marries Grey Alien’s polished solitaire gameplay with Night Signal’s delightful and purposefully-schlocky crude 3D and early FMV game aesthetic to create a sum much greater than its parts.\nThis looks like one of those point-and-click adventure games from the 90s that featured low-detail, pre-rendered 3D visuals but make no mistake — the one and only verb you use to interact with your environment is a game of solitaire. Need to hide from a prowling beast out for your blood? Solitaire. In a life-or-death confrontation with an abomination that refuses to die? That’s a Solitaire. Contemplating the nature of a mysterious orb you found? You guessed it, deal them cards. It’s a good thing that the core gameplay is so engaging because you’ll be doing a lot of it, and it’s truly a credit to Grey Alien’s craft.\nSometimes the solitaire game pits you against an enemy, tasking you with whittling down their health by chaining cards and effects together before they deplete your own health. Others are more puzzle-like, asking you to clear the game board before your deck runs down to its last card. Forbidden Solitaire puts its own spin on the game it’s based upon by adding cards that have special effects or detriments, such as armor cards that protect you from X amount of damage for a single turn, crystallized cards that damage you when playing them, or cursed cards that reduce the damage you do to your opponent as long as they’re face-up on the board. You also get a limited hand of special effect cards that can get you out of a bind or crank up the damage on an already massive combo. There’s definitely some strategy involved in when you choose to pass a turn and draw from your deck, when you trigger buff cards to mitigate your foe’s heavy hits, and when you decide to burn your inventory of consumables to rack up a long combo for big damage. The enemy’s next move is always displayed at the top of the screen so you can plan your counterplay accordingly.\nAs someone who lived through the game industry’s growing pains of the 1990s, the aesthetic is bang-on accurate, often being very tongue-in-cheek when dealing with the conventions and, let’s say… boundary-pushing of games of that period and how they were marketed. The pre-rendered 3D background scenes and FMV videos depicting the fictional game’s advertisements and resulting public backlash made me laugh out loud more than once (keep an eye out for a hilarious cameo from Strange Scaffold’s Xalavier Nelson Jr). Forbidden Solitaire is presented as a game within a game, a cursed piece of software obtained at a thrift store that you’re playing on a more modern PC. The mystery slowly unravels as you get deeper into the game and start receiving increasingly alarming messages from your sister who is doing research on the game and picking up clues about what happened to its developers. It’s good stuff. It’s great to see two indie developers strike gold like this. Forbidden Solitaire is a gem in every respect; the compelling card game and the mystery at its core make it a hell of a ride.\nSurprisingly, not a game about robot lizards Meccha Chameleon 82 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended If you get any gaming content in your social media feeds, you are probably aware of the breakout indie friendslop hit that is Meccha Chameleon. You may have even played it yourself, given that it’s dirt cheap, runs on anything with more computing power than a toaster, and has reportedly sold over 15 million copies to date.\nThis is another one of those games that is incredible when you have a group of friends to play it with. It’s basically a hide-and-seek where one team of players paints themselves to blend in with the various landscapes of the built-in levels (or the many, many custom maps available through the Steam Workshop) and another team of hunters seeks them out. Simple, but executed extremely well. There are so many reels of people inventing absolutely devious hiding spots, and the tools provided really allow players to flex their imaginative chops. As I said, it’s dirt cheap so if you have a group of gaming friends to play with and an ounce of creativity, there’s no reason not to give it a try and see what kind of masterwork you can create. But if nothing else, you can always look up the game on your short-form media platform of choice and enjoy it vicariously.\n","date":"2026-08-05T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/july-2026-roundup/cover_hu_9d84d4a51ad8fcc1.png","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/july-2026-roundup/","title":"July 2026 Roundup"},{"content":"Cover photo from 007 First Light.\nHello folks, hope everyone had a great holiday weekend (ridiculously hot/stormy weather notwithstanding). I’m glad to finally be getting this post up; lately I’ve frequently found myself in a state where my brain is exhausted or the words just aren’t coming to me when I sit down to write, and in those situations I try not to force myself to. One of many reasons I don’t think I’d ever try to make this more than a hobby. I feel like when my brain IS engaged though, I end up being really proud of the pieces I put together.\nSo despite stumbling through a misasma of brain fog, I have indeed managed to play some video games. The primary one I have in progress right now is Sekiro : Shadows Die Twice, which I finally plucked off the top of my backlog. Given how much I enjoyed Nine Sols, I think it was natural to go back and play one of its primary gameplay influences. It\u0026rsquo;s probably no surprise that I adore it so far, despite some early difficulty bumps. I’m also currently in the middle of Mina the Hollower, which I am definitely enjoying and will get back to after Sekiro releases me from its clutches. I also just finished playing the bite-sized experience that is Sayonara Wild Hearts, but I’ve decided to write about that in next month’s update instead. But as for games I played in June, let’s begin with my favorite.\nLicence to Thrill 007 First Light 89 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended I’m not sure that I’ve ever had any strong attachment to the 007 series of films. I mostly remember seeing a few films from the Brosnan era from when I was growing up, and of course I spent many summer nights playing Goldeneye 007 with my friends on the N64. I think the first Bond movie that honestly impressed and stuck with me was 2006’s Casino Royale, a well-constructed and entertaining film which reimagined the character as a version that thankfully left behind some of the goofiness (and misogyny) of prior incarnations.\n007 First Light is the origin story for a whole new James Bond imagined by the developers IO Interactive, the studio responsible for the Hitman series of games. It begins with a covert operation by the British Special Forces going awry; inbound via helicopter to a site on the coast of Iceland they are shot down by a group of heavily-armed mercenaries. The only survivor isn’t one of the elite SAS soldiers, but rather a regular air crewman, our new James Bond. Alone and surrounded by hostiles, Bond is directed by an MI6 handler to extract a group of scientists involved in retrieving intel from a crashed satellite. Needless to say, Bond proves his ability to think quickly, improvise, and favorably resolve an intractable situation. Because of this, he is invited to join the 00 program, recently resurrected by the new head of MI6.\nFirst Light hits the gas right from the jump; the initial scenario after the helicopter crash is incredibly engaging and it rolls directly into a training montage where Bond and a small cohort of trainees learn what’s necessary to become the most elite of Britain’s covert operations force. If you’re the type that gets bored easily by tutorials, I promise that this is one that won’t put you to sleep. It’s a rapid-fire series of mini challenges which will have you training in hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, parkour, and high-speed driving — all the while effectively portraying Bond’s budding friendships and rivalries with his fellow potential 00s. It’s honestly one of the best tutorial sequences I’ve ever experienced, equipping you with skills you’ll use the rest of the game and managing to be a fantastically entertaining scenario.\nAfter some classic Bond shenanigans around how he finishes his capstone trial, he and his cohort are put on a critical mission : to bring in rogue agent Rhys Beckett, AKA 009, who has been on the run for a decade. This first real mission, at an international chess tournament in Slovakia, highlights how flexible First Light’s mission structure is. There are often multiple ways to accomplish your objectives, and based on your own preferences (and which gadgets you bring from Q Lab), you can play it full stealth or instead choose violence, cracking skulls in melee combat or running in guns ablaze. Certain gadgets will make some approaches easier — for example the watch laser can cut through locks and give access to areas otherwise inaccessible, the dart phone can give a guard standing in your way an expedited trip to Sicksville allowing you to slip past, and the Q Watch itself has the function of being able to hack or otherwise manipulate nearby electronics to provide distractions. In the event that you’re spotted or your cover is blown, you can try to bluff your way out of the situation or simply let your fists do the talking; quickly knocking out your opponents before they sound the alarm will lower the alert level back to baseline (so long as their bodies aren’t found by others). It’s also perfectly viable in many scenarios to go in guns blazing, if that is what you prefer. It’s still level-based and not quite what I would call an immersive sim, but still provides a good amount of player agency.\nNo matter which approach you take though, First Light will present you with an incredibly polished gameplay experience. The gunplay is snappy and mixes well with the melee combat; emptying your clip and throwing the empty gun at an enemy before taking him down in melee, taking his weapon, and repeating the process never gets old. You can also improvise and use objects in the environment against your foes, and there are often fun, unique voice lines that go with these interactions. For example, KOing an enemy by kicking in a door prompts a “knock knock!” from Bond, and beaning an enemy with a coffee mug might get a quippy “two sugars right?” If you choose stealth you have a plethora of options including the aforementioned special gadgets as well as other environmental distractions. You can also stealth takedown enemies from behind, get the jump on them from above, or yank them off a ledge while hanging. The two modes of gameplay complement each other incredibly well, and I tended to just roll with it if I botched a stealth portion and had to go loud. It honestly feels true to the spirit of the films and I’m glad they leaned into it rather than it leading directly to a failure state.\nI went into 007 First Light with very few expectations or pre-existing hype and ended up very pleasantly surprised. Besides the main campaign there are also standalone Tac-Sim missions I haven’t touched yet but plan on going back to, since the core gameplay loop is just that good. It’s definitely one of my favorite games of this year and comes highly recommended.\nTrue horror lies within the hearts of men Still Wakes the Deep 76 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; Recommended Eldritch Horror is one of those genres that I think lends itself really well to being adapted to video games, though it can also be challenging for artists to visually depict things that are often described as “horrors beyond comprehension” in written text. 2024’s Still Wakes the Deep manages to pull it off convincingly, all within a setting that I’m not sure has been depicted before in a video game.\nThe year is 1975, and you play the role of Cameron “Caz” McLeary, an electrician, husband, and father of two who has recently taken a job on an offshore oil rig near Scotland called the Beira D. This was out of necessity; Caz is laying low after a bar fight he got into left his opponent seriously injured and in the hospital. Consequences are catching up to him as the story begins; he is fired by the ornery rig supervisor and a police chopper has arrived to arrest and bring him back to the mainland. Before he is able to board, however, the rig’s main drill strikes something horrible and alien. The rig lurches violently, the helicopter crashes, and Caz is sent plummeting into the sea.\nHe comes to after being fished out of the water and resuscitated by a crewmate, and in the brief time he was unconscious the situation has gone to hell in a handbasket. The Beira D has been enveloped by strange, almost alien tendrils reaching up from the sea floor. His fellow rig workers have also been affected by the unknown lifeform to varying degrees; some have been driven mad and others completely warped and transformed into unspeakable horrors. The organism has an effect on anyone who gets close to it; Caz will see spots in his vision and also flashbacks of his own memories during certain parts when he comes into close contact.\nThe game mostly consists of exploring the rig and trying to rectify the hopeless situation the crew finds itself in. There’s some light first-person platforming and sequences where you’ll have to avoid or confront your crewmates that have been transformed by the entity in the process. Frequent flashbacks serve to add more context to Caz’s character and how he ended up here, though it’s not always clear that Caz is a reliable narrator. The story itself isn’t quite as interesting as I’d hoped but it does get major points for its creature design and the level of detail put into crafting the interior and exterior of the oil rig. The whole thing is a tight 3 to 4 hours worth of gameplay so I’d say that it’s definitely worth grabbing while on sale.\nClassics reborn for a new era Dragon Quest I \u0026amp; II HD-2D Remake 83 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Well, I’ve finally done it. Almost 35 years after playing (and ragequitting) the original US release of Dragon Warrior II on the Nintendo Entertainment System, I’ve finally seen the end of this story through the newly-released HD-2D Remake edition. This version fleshes out story and characterization and smooths out some considerable difficulty issues that were part of the original (notoriously untested) NES release. This is absolutely the definitive edition of this game, and if you’re in the mood for a classic RPG that has been brought up to modern standards, I definitely recommend it. I had a lot to say about it, so I wrote a full review which can be read here.\n","date":"2026-07-06T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/june-2026-roundup/cover_hu_cfd568136534a080.png","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/june-2026-roundup/","title":"June 2026 Roundup"},{"content":" Uh oh, here comes Grandpa Mike again to blabber about some ancient game from the Paleolithic Age. Sit down kids, and let me tell you about that classic JRPG series, Dragon Quest… Well back in my day it was called Dragon Warrior, because that’s what Enix chose to localize it as, and — oh yeah, did you know that Square and Enix used to be completely separate companies — hey, come back, where are you going?\nPutting the bit aside, Dragon Warrior II was a formative game in my youth. I played it when I was about 6 or 7 years old and man, what an awful introduction to JRPGs that was. That last sentence might come as a surprise. Truth is, the first third of the game is totally fine, but sometime around acquiring the ship the difficulty spikes like crazy and random enemies start to drown you in status effects, use instant kill spells on you, or just straight-up oneshot your characters with basic attacks. The game is infamous for this; a rushed development cycle led to the back half of the game barely being tested before release and as a result, was unbalanced to a truly comedic degree. People did manage to finish it, but it was often an exercise in frustration (or excessive level grinding). I certainly never finished it; the fact that I was an impatient kid with undiagnosed ADHD meant that I chose to flee from a lot of fights and thus got my underleveled ass handed to me, frequently.\nFortunately, SquareEnix saw saw fit to release an HD-2D Remake of Dragon Quest I \u0026amp; II late last year, and it is a considerable glow-up from its ancestors. I opted not to play the original Dragon Quest and jumped right into the sequel; from everything I’ve heard the original game just largely hasn’t held up as well since the party consists of only the hero, severely limiting the developer’s options for making combat interesting. Jumping right into Dragon Quest II felt immediately familiar though; the world, music, and aesthetic were immediately recognizable even with the fresh coat of paint. Akira Toriyama’s iconic art shines in this high-res spritework, and the orchestral remixes of the soundtrack are largely a delight. The Dragon Quest series has always been a little goofy and whimsical, so although a handful of the re-orchestrations sound a bit too stiff and fancy, the vast majority of the tracks are excellent (the remix of the overworld theme “Travelling With Friends” gets a special shoutout for being the best version of it).\nSo let’s talk about the main cast of your party members and how they work in combat; because this is a classic JRPG you’re going to be spending a lot of time with them in random encounters. All of the characters are the descendants of Erdrick, hero of the original game, whose children founded the kingdoms of Midenhall, Cannock, and Moonbrooke. This makes your characters the up-and-coming royals of these kingdoms and cousins to one another.\nFirst up is the Prince of Midenhall. He’s the main character and the one you name at the start of the game, and plays the role of your classic bruiser. He can’t use magic and is not very impressive in the early game, but he quickly learns a lot of specialized abilities and attacks that do extra damage to certain types of enemies, and in the mid to late game he is an absolute wrecking ball (especially when buffed by his allies). The Prince of Cannock is second to join the crew, and he strikes a balance between physical and magical power. He has some seriously useful and devastating spells such as Omniheal and Kazap, but they are very MP hungry and he’ll drain his reserves fast if you’re not careful. The Princess of Moonbrooke rounds out the original trio; she is your classic spellcaster and features a wide array of spells that cause or heal negative statuses, a smattering of healing spells, and of course a buffet of powerful attack spells of varying elements. Newly playable in the HD-2D remake is the Princess of Cannock, younger sister to the Prince and somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades, but she serves as an excellent buffer/debuffer and extra attacker in a pinch.\nI found the ability and spell spread between the characters to be generally well-thought-out, making for some interesting and strong synergies between them. Combat is frequent, but fortunately the game lets you choose from a set of AI tactics for any or all of your controlled characters, lightening the load and making combat flow much faster. New since the release of the remake of Dragon Quest III (which actually released before this title) is the ability to prohibit your characters from using certain abilities when being run by AI tactics, which is incredibly useful for preventing them from wasting a turn on sub-par spells or inversely, spamming their most expensive spells until they’re out of MP. There were times when the regular encounters got tedious (especially when exploring the larger dungeons), but the late game encounters and most of the boss fights are very engaging, encouraging you to take manual control and carefully plan out your turns. True to the Dragon Quest formula, you can also use many weapons and armor in combat to cast a specific spell at no cost, adding an extra incentive for you to carefully comb through dungeons for the really good unique loot. This makes gear feel much less disposable and itemization choices more meaningful.\nThe story itself is also greatly expanded, featuring a much larger script, voice acting for most of the important scenes, and also a handful of brand-new dungeons and encounters to overcome. I wouldn’t say that the story is groundbreaking, but it has some twists and turns, lots of great character moments, and so much of that unique, charming personality that the series is known for. This is capped off by the addition of a brand-new extra ending, culminating in an additional boss fight at the end and an epilogue that serves to tie together the entire Erdrick Saga in a fantastic, and honestly, touching way. The first three games in this series are connected but not in the way you might expect, and so I won’t spoil how if you aren’t already familiar with it. If you’ve previously played this trilogy though, I can wholeheartedly recommend seeing Dragon Quest II through to the true ending. I can, without a doubt, say that this is the definitive version of the origins of this classic series.\nIt feels great to have finally seen the end of this story, albeit almost 35 years later. Now, I’ll patiently wait for the inevitable HD-2D Remake of Dragon Quest (Warrior) IV, my personal favorite of the series and one that I actually did finish as a kid. Until then…\n83 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended ","date":"2026-06-27T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/review-dragon-quest-i-ii/cover_hu_411f2a08283b9fbf.jpg","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/review-dragon-quest-i-ii/","title":"Review : Dragon Quest I \u0026 II HD-2D Remake [2025]"},{"content":"Hey folks, trying something different today. Video games might be one of my primary hobbies, but I’d say music (the listening to and playing of) is something that has been ever-present in my life since a young age. I played about 4 different instruments between high school concert, marching, and jazz bands and also picked up playing the bass guitar in the last several years. I did so because I really missed making music, and I seem to be naturally drawn to songs with great bass parts. I’m also just constantly listening to music whether I’m at work, in the car, mowing the lawn, etc. I listen to a pretty wide variety of stuff too and always strive to add new songs to my master playlist (2,852 songs and counting).\nSo today, I’m starting a new mini-series on this blog where I pick a theme, build a small playlist of about five songs around that theme, and talk about why I think they’re worth a listen. These will be a lot shorter than my usual game-based entries, but I hope they’re enjoyable regardless. I will say that I’m not quite as comfortable talking about music as I am about videogames but the only way to grow is to struggle a bit, right?\nToday’s theme : Basslines That Slap. All of these are high-energy, upbeat songs with excellent, prominent basslines. I\u0026rsquo;ll provide links to them all, but you can also find a youtube playlist of all these songs here.\nM83 - Reunion Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is one of those albums that was an indie darling and got tons of critical acclaim upon its release in 2011. I think the single that everyone thinks of when you mention it has got to be the unique and unforgettable Midnight City, but for me personally, the top spot has to go to the second single, Reunion. This song is driven by the bass guitar from the first measure; unlike a lot of modern rock and pop where the bass simply doubles and supports the guitar part, the bass instead takes the lead here with the guitar slamming chords to accent the bassline.\nThis song is so goddamn fun to play. It’s got a ton of cheeky little slides and it’s a joy to hit the accents along with the drums and guitar parts. It hops along during the main chorus and keeps the energy going up to the bridge where the bass drops out for a while, before sliding back in and hammering it home for the last chorus. Just fantastic, and I adore it.\nRemi Wolf - Toro What’s that, you say? A swanky, playful bassline along with an infectious rhythm, fun raunchy lyrics, and soaring vocals from one (criminally underrated imo) Remi Wolf? Sign me the hell up. Her whole album Big Ideas is great, if you like this one you should also check out the lead track Cinderella as well. I would not be shocked to see her really pop off with her next album; her music is funky and fun and rarely takes itself overly seriously.\n311 - Feels So Good I think I first became aware of 311 through their cover of The Cure’s Lovesong, a pretty good cover that’s only mildly blemished by the fact that it was featured in an Adam Sandler movie. I didn’t revisit their older stuff until much, much later — at which point I was surprised to find a lot of songs of theirs that I really liked. Maybe putting bassist Aaron “P-Nut” Wills on this list is cheating, but there’s no denying his skill. Listen for “Yo P-Nut, beat that thang!” late in the song as a cue that you’re about to hear some primo slap bass.\nMuse - Plug In Baby Yeah, sue me, it’s another band with a critically-acclaimed bassist. There’s a reason that Chris Wolstenholme’s bassline from Hysteria is one of those things that people gravitate toward in Guitar Centers nationwide when they want to show off. I absolutely loved Muse in college; I’d go as far as to say they were my favorite band at the time. Unfortunately, I think they’ve fallen off in their later works to the point where they’re almost a parody of themselves, but man they were on a tear up through Black Holes and Revelations.\nOrigin of Symmetry is probably their most interesting and experimental album, and from that release comes Plug In Baby. Wolstenholme’s bass is heavily effected here with an electronic, nasally growl to it and is a crucial piece of why this song rocks so hard. There’s a bevy of great basslines throughout Muse’s catalog but this is one I keep coming back to over and over.\nMiki Matsubara - 真夜中のドア ~ stay with me One of the things I find so fascinating about Japanese music trends is the ubiquity of the jazz bass. This specific variation of the bass guitar shows up in so many different genres whether that’s jazz, j-rock, or j-pop. But there’s no genre where it’s more centered than in city pop, a Japan-pioneered genre of jazzy pop fusion that evokes the glitz of skyscrapers at night and the hum of neon signs.\nOne of the most well-known tracks in this subgenre is Miki Matsubara’s 真夜中のドア (Mayonaka no Door) ~ stay with me. This song blew up on TikTok and got really popular during the Covid-19 pandemic and for good reason. It’s an almost-frustratingly perfect pop song, with lyrics that evoke nostalgia for a love lost set against a deceptively-upbeat melody. The bassline here isn’t complex but it doesn’t need to be, it’s just an essential part of a fantastic ensemble performance here (including a bitchin’ saxophone solo in the bridge). I love this genre so don’t be surprised to see similar tracks recommended in the future.\n","date":"2026-06-24T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/interludes-1-basslines-that-slap/cover_hu_cbfb16826abdc4c7.jpg","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/interludes-1-basslines-that-slap/","title":"Interludes I - Basslines That Slap"},{"content":"Cover photo from Mixtape.\nWhew. Well this one’s coming in a little hot and a little late because the end of May has been… eventful. We lost our sweet elderly cat Savannah (who I wrote a short eulogy for) last week; between that and general craziness at work, our brand-new niece making her worldly debut early, and various other smaller preoccupations it\u0026rsquo;s been hard to focus lately. Apologies in advance if this one feels a bit more disjointed than usual, I\u0026rsquo;m basically running on fumes at the moment.\nNot only has it been tough to focus on writing, it’s been tough to focus on playing any one game, period. I’ve always tried to limit myself to only playing one or two games at a time, because if I don’t I\u0026rsquo;m cursed to never finish any of them. “Blame it on the A.D.D.,” as that one song goes. I finished the four games in this article in May, but also started playing Mina the Hollower, Dragon Quest I \u0026amp; II HD-2D Remake, 007 First Light (which I’m playing with my partner), Luna Abyss, Titanium Court, and a distressingly small amount of Esoteric Ebb. Hopefully I’ll get it together enough to finish at least a few of those titles once life feels more normal again.\nI’m also currently working on the second half of my Top 20 of the Decade list (part 1 can be found here), which I hope to have out sometime in June. Depending on how long some of these essays get, I may further split that top 10 in half. Some of these games affected me deeply in various ways and I can’t wait to heap praise on them and tell you why I found them so meaningful. I guess that’s enough stalling — here\u0026rsquo;s what I dove into during the month of May.\nJust a binder full of CD-Rs and a dream Mixtape 87 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended If you pay any attention to games media, the conversation around Mixtape has been, well, kind of annoying. IGN rated this game a 10/10 alongside a plethora of other outlets also giving it glowing reviews, which was always inevitably going to attract basic contrarians and cheap ragebait content. Putting all of that aside, I figured this is the kind of game I could definitely enjoy, so I decided to go into it with an open mind and see how it landed for me.\nMixtape is a story about three friends on the cusp of the next big chapter of their lives. The gang includes main character Stacey Rockford, a headphone-clad music geek and creator of the titular mixtape that you listen to throughout the game, her childhood best friend Van Slater, a budding musician and good-natured stoner type, and the newest addition to the group, Cassandra Morino, rebellious daughter of a local cop who has imminent plans to leave for college. This ends up being the source of some friction within the trio; all three were supposed to roadtrip to Los Angeles together to get Cass settled for college but Stacey (who just prefers to go by just “Rockford”) decided to bail in favor of flying to New York in an effort to connect with a famous music supervisor. Rockford has designs on going into the same career and she’s mapped out exactly how this will go in her head: she’ll essentially stalk this individual and get her to listen to her own personal mixtape, and she\u0026rsquo;s convinced that she\u0026rsquo;ll be so impressed by it that she’ll agree to take Rockford under her wing as a protégé.\nA lot of the complaints I\u0026rsquo;ve seen around this game center around Rockford being kind of insufferable; she has the utmost confidence in her ability to pick the perfect soundtrack for the events of her own life and by extension any piece of media that she works on. She’ll frequently break the fourth wall to speak directly to the player about the song they are about to hear and what led her, ever the the song sommelier, to pick this for her mix. She painstakingly crafts her mixtapes with the expectation that she knows exactly how events will unfold (or alternatively deludes herself into thinking she can bend them to her will). I think we’ve all known someone like Stacey Rockford, the snob who sees themselves as above-it-all, the ultimate arbiter of quality, and yeah\u0026hellip; I do understand why some people find it a bit grating.\nBut the way I see it, that’s an intended part of the whole point of this narrative. Let’s face it, teenagers just kind of suck. You sucked when you were that age, I sure did, we all did. We had grand designs for our lives and thought we could chart out the exact path we’d be walking, that is until life punched most of us straight in the mouth and humbled us, telling us that no, we didn’t know what we were doing and in fact knew almost nothing about how the world actually works. Being a teenager is a state of being messy and wrong about a lot of things, but of course there’s also a definite upside of being this age. Every experience and emotion felt is supercharged, meaning that while minor setbacks can feel crushing, every moment of joy can be transcendent in a way that I think we lose as we transition to adulthood. The game features many daydream-like sequences that reflect the intensity of the emotions Rockford is feeling, such as one where the gang is flying head over heels through an idyllic field on a windy day and whooping with joy as they tumble about, or when her anger boils over and she envisions blowing up mailboxes and parked cars when she flips them the bird. This is a reflection of her rage that her plan for her final day with her friends (and therefore her perfectly-curated mixtape) has gone off the rails. Mixtape is full of these fantastical sequences which of course do not reflect the literal reality of what happened, but convey the feelings associated with those moments perfectly.\nAesthetically, Mixtape is a pure shot of 90s nostalgia. The characters (animated on twos creating a pseudo stop-motion effect) explore painstakingly-crafted environments which might look very familiar if you grew up during that time. I definitely see the symbols of my own childhood in the wood-paneled bedrooms, the primitive home computers, the fashion worn by the local teens, and in so many other little details. The soundtrack, unsurprisingly, is excellent through and through. It features a handful of crowd-pleasers from this era such as Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division, and The Cure, but also contains a lot of (often older) deeper cuts that the game’s scenes are tailored around. I’m not sure I’ve ever said this about a video game but I do think that the licensed tracks are a core part of its identity, lend a certain authenticity to it, and it would be diminished as a piece of art without them.\nOnce it has taken a few beats to establish its characters and the relationships between them, Mixtape becomes a charming and unforgettable exploration of the messy experience of being a teenage delinquent and what one leaves behind when you start to take the first steps toward life outside of the small world you’ve always known. I couldn’t help but smile during some of the late game sequences which were often poignant, funny, and touching. I’m not sure I’d call it a perfect game (and it won\u0026rsquo;t land for everyone) but it’s a brief-yet-rich slice-of-life adventure that I definitely recommend.\nMore like Beatable. Because I finished it. How curious. Unbeatable 72 Overall Score \u0026#x2205; No Recommendation I’ll level with you, reader. I’ve been having kind of an existential crisis lately when it comes to rhythm games. I think most friends of mine know that I LOVE music/rhythm games. After last month’s disappointing playthrough of Rhythm Doctor I was jonesing for a really good rhythm game, and picked up D-Cell’s Unbeatable in an attempt to satiate that craving. My feelings about it ended up being, well, complex. It’s a solid one at its core but it makes several big missteps in terms of its story presentation and is also rife with technical issues. That being said I still did find some really enjoyable moments in it, but the important caveat is that the best parts of the game are backloaded. Ironically, I think this ended up being the poster child for why I chose a dual rating system when I started this blog. If you\u0026rsquo;re curious about why I liked it despite its flaws but can\u0026rsquo;t quite bring myself to recommend it, you can read my full review here.\nAt last, Chess II. Gambonanza 82 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Welp, we all saw this coming. After Balatro became one of the surprise breakout hits of 2024, it was only a matter of time before we started to see other games imitate and (hopefully) iterate on the formula it introduced. Where the core concept of Balatro was “what if poker, but a roguelike,” Gambonanza merges the structure of a roguelike with the timeless, elegant game of chess.\nIf you’ve played Balatro you pretty much know what to expect. You can hold up to five Gambits, which modify your gameplay much like Balatro’s joker cards do, and you will plan your strategy around them. Some Gambits allow pieces to take extra turns under certain conditions, others give you a chance for an effect on taking or losing a piece, so on and so forth. There are also special tile modifiers that you can affix to the spaces of the game board such as a trap tile to ensnare a piece and make it lose its turn, or a shield tile that gives the piece that moves onto it one turn of protection from being captured. You also have a stock that you can store spare pieces in, and from which you can deploy them mid-game. It definitely mixes up the base formula of chess quite a bit, to the point where it’s unique unto itself and you certainly don’t need to be a grandmaster to enjoy it.\nI think one of the main issues that arise with this combination, however, is that the inherent complexity of a game like chess is magnitudes greater than Balatro’s poker hand-making gameplay, where you’re mostly juggling mental odds and molding your deck toward a certain purpose. The game board starts as a miniaturized 5x5 stage with a handful of enemy tokens but gradually expands as you progress, eventually reaching full-width and has you facing off against a full retinue of opposing pieces. Add the complexity of gambits, special tiles, and even enemy abilities in the special boss stages and the cognitive load adds up staggeringly fast. Gambonanza attempts to ease some of this by allowing you to mouse over and see the attack range of any piece and also makes your pieces shudder and sweat when they’re threatened, but I still frequently found myself cursing under my breath when I failed to account for one or more factors and blundered a good piece into a trap. I hit upon a few synergies that felt broken in a good way (much like its progenitor Balatro) but I think you need to be prepared to inevitably trade pieces sometimes and replenish your stock in the store phase between rounds. I will say that there’s a ton of potential for Gambonanza to generate moments in which you feel like a genius and bring a run back from the brink; during my first winning run I thought I was dead in the water sometime around the second boss. When it does happen, it feels incredible.\nSome cognitive overload issues aside, Gambonanza is still very worth a try, particularly if you\u0026rsquo;re the type of person that frequents Chess.com. I can only do a few runs at a time before my brain starts to feel the effect of decision fatigue and needs a break, but it is quite compelling. You can almost look at every round like a miniature puzzle to be solved, and the variety between runs is very high. I guess the remaining question is, what game gets the Balatro treatment next? Backgammon? Checkers? Mancala?? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.\nPilgrimage Complete Final Fantasy X 90 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Back in March I mentioned that I’d started a playthrough of the remaster of Final Fantasy X, one of my favorite Playstation 2 games and one of the RPGs in my personal pantheon of all-time greats. Hard to believe the game is now old enough to vote, drink, and rent a car having just turned 25 years old. I think it\u0026rsquo;s my duty to tell you that if you have fond memories of playing this game when it was new, you should probably go easy on your lower back and also consider scheduling a colonoscopy.\nAll japery aside, my goal was to see if this classic still holds up in the modern era. The remastered version released on modern consoles and PC takes a light-touch approach, upscaling the graphics and replacing some textures, but leaves the gameplay from 2001 fully intact. There are a handful of assist features that let you speed up the game or increase/eliminate random battles which is greatly appreciated, though I did wish for a bit more granularity in these options. Being able to double the EXP and Gil earned while cutting the encounter rate in half would make the experience just about perfect, in my opinion. It’s definitely still a product of its time but I’m pleased to report that surprisingly, the game doesn’t feel archaic. The sphere grid is still a fascinating method of character advancement and the battles themselves reward good tactics; many boss fights are more an exercise in problem-solving versus grinding out the raw levels to overcome them.\nThe battle system is definitely a draw but the main course consists of the characterization and story. Although the dialogue is certainly stilted at times (and I actually only recently learned the real reason behind this), the emotional beats of Yuna’s pilgrimage to defeat Sin still hit and the whole cast is just so damn quirky and lovable. When the plot really kicks into gear it’s among the best stories in the series, and the world-building for the vividly-colored but cursed land of Spira is unforgettable. This is one of the entries in the Final Fantasy series that is most fondly remembered and for good reason. If you haven’t played it, I can still recommend it as a crucial and enjoyable piece of JRPG history.\n","date":"2026-06-02T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/may-2026-roundup/cover2_hu_a72add5fbfcd2ae1.png","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/may-2026-roundup/","title":"May 2026 Roundup"},{"content":" After playing Rhythm Doctor in April and being kind of disappointed with it, I was looking for another rhythm game that would satiate my craving for a good game in the genre. After a quick perusal of my Steam wishlist I invited D-Cell’s Unbeatable to step up to the challenge. Did it rise to meet my expectations? The answer to that question is… complicated. The core of the rhythm gameplay is enjoyable enough and it has a lot of poignant things to say about our innate drive toward creativity, but is hampered by some significant storytelling missteps and rampant technical issues.\nI definitely feel like I was primed to enjoy Unbeatable. I had originally heard about it from (personal favorite) YouTuber Julian “Noodle” Morley, who voices Treble, one of the main protagonists in the game. It honestly makes a great first impression, asking a series of questions about how you feel about music and rhythm games and then adjusts the difficulty based on your responses. Then you’re dropped right into the thick of things and assume the role of Eve, vocalist for famous rock band One More Final, which is about to perform one last show before they break up permanently. As Eve you can freely walk around the backstage area talking to people and getting a sense for how she relates to her bandmates Rest and Grace (guitarist and drummer, respectively). After taking the lay of the land and perhaps saying hello to some starstruck fans, you lead Eve onto the arena’s stage for one last show.\nIt really does start out with a bang. The cutscene depicting the band’s performance is animated with tons of expressivity, and the original music for the game is great and fits the vibe it’s trying to invoke. This is a trend that remains throughout; in terms of presentation Unbeatable is, well, exactly that.\nWhen it hard cuts from the concert to the present day and you take control of the main protagonist Beat, however, is where the cracks start to show. Your time between the rhythm game sections are spent in a directed adventure game type of gameplay where you can freely wander the immediate area and interact with people and points of interest, and this is how it tells most of its story. The first few chapters of the game struggle with pacing and establishing character motives; Beat is a down-on-her-luck singer and guitarist who links up with Eve’s 12 year-old daughter Quaver with the intention of starting a band. We get vague hints and gestures toward what happened at her mother’s concert 7 years ago - apparently a malevolent force called the Silence appeared during the concert and caused a disaster but the details are mostly murky. There’s also a paramilitary police force called HARM put into place to prevent the Silence from returning, music is now illegal and instruments are confiscated as contraband. Aside from those facts, frustratingly little is elaborated upon in regards to the state of the world the characters exist in. More is explained (much) later in the story, but in my opinion the game keeps its critical plot cards too close to the vest for too long.\nBecause of this, the relationship between cause and effect gets iffy when it comes to the characters’ actions. Supporting characters Treble and Clef get arrested by HARM in Chapter 2 supposedly because law enforcement thought they were connected to a chase that Beat and Quaver lead the cops on in the prior chapter, even though this doesn’t make any sense; at least fifty HARM officers would have gotten a clear view of their faces before or during the chase. Beat and Quaver decide they can’t let them take the fall for what they did and supposedly hatch a rescue plan… off-camera. The game smash cuts from one scene in a restaurant directly to them being in prison no more than a minute later after having botched said plan. This is played up for laughs somewhat but it still feels disjointed, as if I’d accidentally skipped a crucial scene somehow. This kind of thing happens constantly, with important development happening off-screen that changes character relationships and lurches the plot forward whenever the writers seem to have decided that they’ve lingered too long in one place. It happens enough to make me wonder if the development of this game was troubled and if a lot of material was cut, which at least would account for these notable gaps in storytelling.\nSpeaking of troubled development, remember how I mentioned technical issues? Well, Unbeatable has its fair share and then some. It was developed in the Unity engine but I can’t fault the toolset for the issues I see here; the game often feels tangibly janky, like a Jenga tower precariously wobbling back and forth in the wind. A rapid-fire list of some of my grievances follows:\nThe characters are 2D sprites that don’t always translate well to its 3D environments; area boundaries are often poorly-defined and there are some transitions between height levels that make the character sprites glitch out when passing over them. During dialogue sequences characters will often talk over each other and text boxes will overlap. Sometimes this appears to be intended but other instances are clearly not. I failed one puzzle in the sewers area because Quaver’s sprite popped into the foreground and I could no longer see what I was doing (frustrating, but also kinda funny). The jail pool minigame is just straight-up awful. For some reason there are two offset adjustments (why??) for the rhythm game portions but it still took me a lot of trial and error before I was satisfied with the visual and audio sync, despite the game having a (not so great) sync wizard. I could list a lot more issues and nitpicks but I think you get the picture. Between the technical issues and the baffling storytelling decisions, there were a few occasions where I nearly put the game down and resigned myself to not finishing it.\nBut then the funniest thing happened. Somewhere around Chapter 4 there’s a noticeable improvement in the quality of the dialogue and the coherence of the storytelling. I was chuckling more often than not at the characters’ quippy dialogue. It finally starts to answer some of the fundamental questions you’ve had since the start of the game, and character relationships evolve to become more fleshed-out and meaningful. What you’re playing no longer feels like disjointed filler, and honestly it seems like the developers hit their stride here and finally got their shit together.\nWhat follows is an incredibly insightful and affecting exploration of why people feel the drive to be creative and the process involved in getting to the point where your art truly reflects your own, authentic voice. In a flashback scene, Beat performs a song she wrote to her mother (who is also a musician) who gives her the valuable feedback that she’s “hitting all the right notes but performing like she can’t wait to be done with it.” This is essentially her character arc: her doing the incredibly difficult work involved in finding out how one expresses one’s true self in their art rather than imitating an ideal. At times the game is practically monologuing at you and it veers awfully close to being self-indulgent, but fortunately not to the extent where it didn’t land for me. I was captivated through the whole ending sequence, and the story finale was deeply memorable and left me with a warm feeling afterwards. After finishing it, I had the opening guitar riff from the game’s original song “Bookend” stuck in my head for days.\nYou’ll notice that I haven’t talked much about what is ostensibly the main point of the game, the rhythm action gameplay sections, and that is because… It’s OK. It’s fine, maybe even good. You’re basically hitting enemies on the beat when they overlap with either a high or low attack depending on their position. It shares a lot of the same elements with Dance Dance Revolution except with half the buttons, a different perspective, and of course without using your feet (though if you want to hook up a dance pad and try, be my guest). There’s an arcade mode alongside the story section which I’ve sunk a few hours into and yeah, overall it’s not bad. I certainly enjoyed its gameplay more than Rhythm Doctor’s.\nSo in the end, would I recommend Unbeatable to others? I’m not so sure. The game certainly has some lofty highs with its rocking soundtrack and excellent visual presentation — some of the setpiece moments of the story have some breathtaking animation and staging. Unfortunately the technical issues and the story’s dramatic early faceplant dampen my enthusiasm and make it hard for me to recommend. I’m glad I stuck with it in the end, but recommending a short game in which the first 70% is tedious but the back 30% is great is difficult for me to do. I think if you’ve read this far through you will have a good idea if this is your kind of game. It’s got deep flaws but also some very bright points. I’m still on the hunt for a rhythm game I’ll love; I think I’ll try Sayonara Wild Hearts next to see if that can finally scratch the itch for a game that’s the total package. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to share them.\n72 Overall Score \u0026#x2205; No Recommendation ","date":"2026-05-27T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/review-unbeatable/cover2_hu_d365aef0da6a70b0.jpg","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/review-unbeatable/","title":"Review : Unbeatable [2025]"},{"content":"Yesterday, May 24th, we said goodbye to our beloved elderly cat, Savannah. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings swirling around in my head right now and since I re-discovered my love for writing through creating this blog, I’ve found that this is the way I best express myself and order my thoughts. If you’re a fellow animal lover I understand this might be a tough read, so if that’s the case feel free to skip this one… But otherwise, let me tell you about my best friend.\nI adopted Savannah from a work friend of mine. This friend had four cats and the apartment she was moving to would only allow two, so she was looking to re-home half of them — fortunately, I was considering adopting a cat already. “I think Savannah would be perfect for you, why not come over and meet her this week?” she said to me during one shift. She showed me a very funny picture that encapsulated her personality: it was three of her cats side-by-side eating from a row of dishes at mealtime and then there was Savvy, munching reluctantly off to the side and perpendicular from the others. She was always a bit of a diva and my friend thought she’d probably do really well in a household with no other cats and no children. Later that week I would follow through on my promise to visit and meet her. When she immediately climbed onto my lap, sniffed my face, and then put herself in a tight loaf between the two of us I knew I had to take this sweet girl.\nI had finished college a few years prior and had been working in my small hometown, but had designs on moving to an actual city (Pittsburgh) and getting a job as a social worker there. Once my job and living situations were figured out and my car was packed to go, my last stop was to pick up Savannah. My friend already had her in a carrier for me, set me up with some bare necessities for her, and then we immediately hit the road. I remember her heartbreaking meows of confusion throughout the trip but I did my best to reassure her that she was going to be just fine with me. After we arrived and got my car mostly unpacked, I watched as she explored with some trepidation, sniffing around and wandering the perimeter of the apartment. I recall her being very shy at first, I would constantly find her hiding just around a corner and observing me from afar. I also remember that in the first week of having her she peed on a big stack of my nice work clothes. I was of course upset with her but recognized it was probably anxious behavior and tried to be as patient as possible.\nBefore long, Sav came out of her shell and showed just how sweet she really was. She became my constant companion, following me around the apartment and hopping up onto my lap (or in front of my monitor if she was in a mood) whenever possible. She showed this affection to others as well — my various roommates and visiting friends throughout the years loved her, and there’s practically an entire category of my camera roll where she’s sitting on yet another new person’s lap 5 minutes after meeting them. It was funny though, she was always super friendly until suddenly she decided she was done and retired to a quiet place in the house to recharge. I guess I never thought of it this way, but we were definitely both introverts.\nI will forever remember all the little quirks of her personality, from the way she would trill when jumping up onto countertops like a launch signal, or how she’d try to climb into cabinets and stuff herself into a little outward-facing loaf if you left them a bit open. Before she got very old she loved to drink out of the bathroom faucet and would follow me into the bathroom expecting me to open the tap for her. A little hydro homie til the end. She could be a troublemaker too; one time when my partner was cooking dinner she had some garlic butter out on the countertop, she turned around to face the stove for 10 seconds and when she turned back there was Savvy, making direct eye contact with her while licking the butter (she didn’t get much, fortunately). She had a funny habit of hopping into a bin in my closet that I kept socks in; when we would go looking for her and found her curled up in there we would always call out “Savvy is socks.”\nSavannah was 17 when we made the agonizing decision to say goodbye to her. She had gone blind from high blood pressure, had chronic kidney disease, arthritis, and likely had lung and/or heart trouble at the end as well. We made our home as comfortable and accommodating as possible for her in her golden years and I like to think she saw and appreciated that. Savvy had been my loyal companion for almost 15 years; I counted it up and figured out that she’d been with me through 10 moves, 4 jobs, and even a second stint in college. She\u0026rsquo;d been with me through it all, from being a flat broke student in a studio apartment all the way through buying a home, making a career, moving in with my partner and her dog, and adopting a little cat sister. All the while she was a constant source of love, companionship, and comfort. I remember in my time as a county social worker I’d often come home from a really shitty day and I swear she could recognize it; she’d immediately hop onto the couch with me, curl up on my chest, and purr up a storm while rubbing her face against mine. She helped me get through some very tough times and I’m not sure I’d be where I am today without her. She showed this kind of love and affection to anyone who walked through our door.\nThe sad thing about our beloved pets is that they can’t really advocate for themselves, and cats are particularly so good at hiding their pain as a survival behavior that it’s hard to gauge their pain day to day. The least we can do for them is to recognize when they’re suffering and have the strength to let them go when their quality of life has reached its nadir. In the end she passed peacefully in her own home, flanked by the people who loved her. All the while our dog anxiously stayed next to her, giving her a little affectionate nuzzle and lick on the ears as she entered her final sleep. Thank you for all the wonderful years together, my furry little friend. Rest well. I love you and will cherish the time we spent together forever and always.\nThank you for reading.\n","date":"2026-05-25T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/a-eulogy/cover_hu_217d516611cc10ba.jpg","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/a-eulogy/","title":"A eulogy for my best friend"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t know about you, but personally whenever someone asks me to name my all-time favorite game, movie, song, what have you\u0026hellip; My brain just shuts off and I stand there slack-jawed. I guess I find it nearly impossible to pick one favorite anything; I\u0026rsquo;m the kind of person who dabbles in a lot of different genres and tries to have a lot of unique experiences. There are so many pieces of art that I love but for very different reasons; comparing them against each other sometimes seems impossible.\nI have been reflecting on the past ten years recently. Through college I was actually more of a console gamer; I played World of Warcraft on my increasingly-ancient PC for a while but drifted more toward the PS2, PS3, and Xbox 360 over that time. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t until about 2012 when a coworker offered me some of his spare PC parts that I decided to assemble a gaming PC once again. I did so, but didn\u0026rsquo;t do a ton with it until I started playing Final Fantasy XIV in 2013. I met a group of really great friends (and my partner!) through that game, and after quitting my shitty, stressful job a few years later started to branch out and play more, different games.\nI have always played games throughout my life but it actually wasn\u0026rsquo;t until around 2015 when I started to consider it one of my primary hobbies. It\u0026rsquo;s fascinating to reflect and see just how far the art form has come in terms of storytelling and presentation within the span of the decade. I challenged myself to figure out what my all-time favorite games of this past decade are, and ultimately decided to write a bit about it. So without further ado, here is the first half of my twenty favorite games of the past 10 years. I hope you find something here that resonates with you, or perhaps even a new favorite of your own.\n[#20] Baba Is You 90 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; Recommended Man, how to even start describing Baba Is You? I guess I’d start by sharing the important caveat that this is a sicko puzzle game for puzzle sickos, essentially a mashup of two different sub-genres (sokoban block-pusher and logic puzzler). You control the titular Baba, a sheep-like (or rabbit-like?) creature whose objective is to reach a gold flag in order to win the level. Sounds easy, but the way you will typically accomplish this is by pushing objects and words around; the words on the stage form phrases that define the logic for the level. For example, most early levels include the phrases BABA IS YOU and FLAG IS WIN. So theoretically let’s say there’s a giant wall around the flag and the phrase WALL IS STOP is on the stage as well. There’s a few different ways to solve this; you could move STOP away from WALL IS so that you can walk right through it, or perhaps you rearrange the logic to say WALL IS YOU, and now controlling the wall you can move it over the flag to win. It starts simple enough, but quickly ramps up and gets very, very complex. Again, I cannot stress enough, sicko game for sickos.\nBaba Is You has plenty of surprises and at its best is one of the most fascinating games I’ve ever played. There are also certain levels that are absolute bastards, stumpers that had me spending hours on them looking for the right solution. I never hit credits in this game but I feel strongly that I still greatly enjoyed my time with it and still have yet to play another puzzle game that hits a similar niche.\n[#19] Balatro 90 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Must-Play Balatro is one of those games that come out of nowhere and has you scratching your head, thinking to yourself “Wait, this is brilliant. Why did no one think of this before now?” Named for the Latin word for “jester,” this game is a wildly unique poker hand-based roguelike where you’re challenged to build high-scoring hands out of a randomly-dealt deck of cards. The twist is that between blinds (the term this game uses for a single level) you’re sent to a virtual shop to buy various Joker cards which all work in different ways to provide higher base score or a multiplier for certain types of hands. There are 150 different Jokers in all, and also sets of arcana and celestial cards you can get in the shop that modify the actual cards themselves in your deck to make them behave differently during scoring.\nBalatro had a demo that was picked up by several prominent streamers, and when the game released it absolutely exploded in popularity. One of the game’s greatest virtues is that no two runs are alike; there are an insane number of synergies and strategies you can build toward, and you’d be surprised how many wins you can pull off if you remain flexible in your deckbuilding strategy and pivot when necessary. It’s another one of those games where every now and then you’ll find a game-breaking, disgustingly-effective strategy that makes you feel like a genius. The scaling here is so wild that you’ll start with blinds that ask you to get 300, then 600, then 1000 points and then eventually you’ll get to a point where you’ll need millions, billions, or perhaps even more to proceed to the next ante. There’s something hypnotic about the game’s animations and sound; the cards shake and pop with escalating pitch and volume as they trigger and your score shoots up and up and up. That mixed with the psychedelic visuals and musical themes make for an experience that’s intoxicating. I would recommend it to just about anyone, it’s a simple to learn but devilishly complex to master type of game.\n[#18] Beat Saber 91 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Must-Play When it comes to VR, I’ve been what most people would call an enthusiast. After demoing a work friend’s Oculus Rift back in 2017, I knew that this was something I had to incorporate into my regular gaming. For all of the obvious downsides of the current generation of VR headsets, it really can’t be overstated how immersive an experience it can be. I picked up a Windows Mixed Reality headset made by Acer the following week and dove into this exciting new ecosystem of games. I played Space Pirate Trainer, Moss, Until You Fall, Half-Life Alyx, all these and so many other games now considered VR classics. I was a newly-minted software developer at the time and the consulting company I worked for had several projects in the pipeline that involved creating an environment in VR space for simulations, job training, all sorts of stuff. The future of the tech seemed bright and appeared to be a natural evolution for gaming.\nFast-forward almost 10 years into the future, and modern VR is an industry on life support. Microsoft killed off the whole WMR line of headsets I got my start with; recent Windows 11 updates have even broken their compatibility with the OS effectively making them e-waste. Meta gobbled up Oculus and has cornered the market with their Quest series of headsets, which of course are heavily-subsidized in order to make the promise of the Metaverse come to fruition. Years later this turns out to have just been an exercise in lighting approximately 80 billion dollars on fire. Apple’s ludicrously-expensive Vision Pro headset proved to be a flop as well. There are smaller players in the market such as Valve, Pico, Pimax, etc but none have been able to make a dent in Meta’s enormous market share. The VR game development sphere has shrunk considerably as well, since the demand simply isn’t there. In short, it’s bleak out there and decidedly NOT where gaming has gone in the interim.\nBut through it all, one of the clear successes in the VR sphere has been Beat Saber. It\u0026rsquo;s a simple but brilliant concept: you as the player wield two colored lightsabers and slash like-colored blocks to the rhythm of the music. The game’s base OST is filled with lots of EDM and rock music but can be further modded on PC to import gobs of user-generated beatmap patterns set to popular music. Beat Saber is a game I continually come back to when the urge rises to put the headset back on. It’s a great time, and manages to be a way more intense cardio workout than you’d expect.\nI truly enjoyed all the other games I listed earlier but out of all the VR games out there, Beat Saber is the undisputed classic that I would recommend to anyone with a VR headset. Maybe one day we’ll see another big technical leap in VR that makes it more immersive and/or accessible and puts it back in the limelight, but until then I’ll still be hopping in from time to time to get my Jedi on and slash blocks to the music.\n[#17] Helldivers II 91 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended From the moment I saw the tongue-in-cheek Super Earth propaganda video that serves as the intro to Arrowhead Studios’s Helldivers II, I knew this was going to be a special game. The Helldivers are an elite military unit of shock troopers who wield absurd weaponry and copious amounts of explosives to eliminate the threat of hostile aliens hell-bent on the destruction of humanity (never mind the fact that each faction has ample reason to hate humanity for the countless atrocities committed against them). It’s an over-the-top satire of a fascistic and jingoistic human society that has cast aside its squabbles and hatred of one another and now instead focuses its xenophobia outward into the cosmos onto literal, actual aliens. “That’s called DEMOCRACY!” your character yells as they call in an airstrike that levels a city block and reduces a hundred alien enemies to unidentifiable goop. It’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but fortunately it is really damn funny.\nHelldivers II is quite possibly the best co-op PvE shooter I’ve played. There’s a huge array of different weapons to wield against the foes of Freedom as well as a delightful array of excessively-destructive attacks you can call in from your ship in orbit or to be delivered by a close-support fighter jet. There’s turrets, there’s vehicles, there’s lumbering fire-support mechs, Helldivers II really has it all. You’ll have to choose carefully though, as not every weapon works great on every front. There are three distinct factions to fight : the Terminids (think Starship Troopers’s Arachnids), the Automatons (think Terminators), and the Illuminate (think War of the Worlds mixed with the Flood from Halo). The three factions have very different units and will call for different loadouts and tactics, furthermore complicated by which mission types you choose. For example, the Automatons have primarily ranged attacks and emphasize using cover and precisely hitting their weakspots, whereas the Terminids will actively chase and hunt you down, forcing you to continually be on the move and to bring heavy anti-tank capability for their big units with hardened carapaces. Sometimes you’ll be tasked with defensive missions where fixed emplacements and turrets make more sense, on others you’ll be dropping into an active warzone and assigned to eliminate a hardened base. Crafting effective loadouts for each situation is one of the best parts of the game to me, but sometimes it’s fun to just say “fuck it” and take a total meme loadout. All fire weapons is my favorite for when I’m feeling spicy, and I must mention that HDII has the best version of a flamethrower I’ve ever seen in a game.\nThe game’s developers also maintain an ongoing “galactic war,” basically one big futuristic D\u0026amp;D campaign set on a galactic map where divers fight to push back the borders of the enemy factions and where grand strategy plays out. As they continue to develop the game’s ongoing narrative and add new enemies, weapons, and missions I will keep diving in to see the new sights. The enemies of Super Earth never rest.\n[#16] Tunic 91 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended It’s hard to talk about Andrew Shouldice’s Tunic without inadvertently spoiling anything. On its surface it looks like a 3D isometric Zelda-like starring a cute lil fox guy with a sword and shield, but if you even start to lightly scratch that surface you will discover that this is really a game about exploration and the joy of discovery.\nSee, our sword-wielding vulpine hero can find pages of a book scattered around the map, and you’ll quickly identify them as some sort of game manual. The pages are written in an unfamiliar script but are also filled with screenshots and illustrations that hint that there’s a lot more of this game to discover than you might think, from hidden areas to entirely obscured game mechanics that aren’t immediately obvious, even through basic experimentation. I listened to a Remap Radio interview of Shouldice a while back talking about how these game manual discoveries were inspired by experiences from his childhood when he couldn’t quite read most of the things he saw in old NES game manuals but still faithfully flipped through them, gleaning what he could.\nUltimately, discovery is the draw of Tunic and if this sounds at all appealing to you, stop reading right now and go pick it up. You’ll have to walk the path yourself before you fully understand exactly what makes it so fantastic, but I believe that the process of discovery is a reward unto itself.\n[#15] Death Howl 91 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Never thought I’d be heaping praise onto a deckbuilder, but here we are. Death Howl is an outstanding tactics game that describes itself as a soulslike (in this case shorthand for difficult) deckbuilder. It follows the protagonist Ro, a mother grieving the recent loss of her son, into a fantastical spirit realm where the metaphorical is made literal and where her goal is to bring back the soul of her child. It’s a beautiful, atmospheric rumination on grief and loss which also manages to be a mechanically-dense tactical deckbuilder that caught me, an avowed deckbuilder hater, completely by surprise with how simultaneously complex and manageable it was.\nBack in January of this year I wrote a full review of Death Howl which can be read here..\n[#14] Signalis 92 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended It’s funny how nostalgia for past eras of media rolls in, like big waves crashing into a beach. I think at this point the wave of 16-bit era nostalgia has peaked and we’ve moved onto wistfully remembering the chunky, unstable, highly-aliased polygonal models that characterized the time of the original Playstation. It’s a weird thing to me because I feel like games in that early epoch of fully-3D titles have probably aged worse than your average retro game due to issues with janky control schemes, unstable framerates, and overall low scrutability.\nWhere it shines, though, is in the specific genre of lo-fi horror. Sometimes a crude representation of something terrible or a hint toward a source of fright just offscreen can drive a spike into your amygdala in a way that is completely different from the way high-budget horror fare does. In this context enters Signalis, a sci-fi horror retro throwback title that invokes Resident Evil just as much as it does Clock Tower or Fatal Frame. Played from an overhead isometric view with a control scheme reminiscent of early RE tank controls, the game oozes style and tension from its excellent environments and character art. You play as Elster, a Replika unit (essentially an android created in a human’s image) who crash lands onto a planet with a doomed mining colony and is single-mindedly looking for her single lost crewmate amongst the death and chaos that has overtaken the facility.\nThings are not quite as they seem though, and as Elster begins to discover more about the situation she finds herself in, she will begin to question her purpose in being here, her own memories, and perhaps even her own perception of time itself. This is a work of horror both psychological and supernatural and is heavily inspired by Chambers’s The King In Yellow. The game’s story has some ambiguous elements to it and is at least partially up to your own interpretation, but even if you dislike such ambiguity I think you can still find a lot to love here in the gorgeous PSX-styled visuals and its stellar sound design and music. Horror is not a genre I frequently seek out, but Signalis is so thought-provoking and aesthetically striking that it’s something I still have vivid memories of, even years after playing it.\n[#13] Hades 93 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Must-Play Really, do I even need to write anything about Hades, possibly one of the most well-known and successful indie games to date? A quick glance at my steam friends list shows a whopping twenty other people who own and have played a considerable amount of it, so I think it’s safe to say that it has wide appeal.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s popular for an array of damn good reasons. It’s got vibrant and distinctive art, fantastic characters, fast and frenetic gameplay, and an incredible soundtrack. Its roguelite structure lets you mix things up by picking different weapons, god boons, and run modifiers which ensures that no two runs are ever the same. Against all odds, even if you get your ass repeatedly kicked and sent back to the House of Hades without progressing, every character somehow always has something new to say. There is an absurd amount of dialogue written and recorded in Hades and even losing a run just means that you get to go back, get a little bit stronger for next time, and pleasantly chat up all your fellow Hot Underworld Gods.\nSeriously, it’s just excellent. If you haven’t played it, first of all what planet have you been living on, and secondly go pick it up from the next Steam sale, it can regularly be found for less than the price of a fancy coffee.\n[#12] Citizen Sleeper 94 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Must-Play Glancing at my list of all-time favorite games, I think it’s fair to say that Gareth Damian Martin’s Citizen Sleeper is probably my favorite narrative-focused game of all time (maybe because I still haven’t played Disco Elysium, so TBD). Sure, there are mechanics focused around the distribution of dice rolls to perform various activities, but the main draw here is the fantastically-scripted narrative.\nThe premise immediately drew me in: you are a Sleeper, an emulated human consciousness separated from its body and core memories, placed into a cybernetic body, and entered into what is essentially wage slavery, toiling away at hazardous jobs while your meatspace progenitor is in cryosleep. You manage to escape your captors to a remote space station called Erlin’s Eye, but you are immediately met with another significant problem: your body is breaking down rapidly, lacking the stabilizer solution needed to keep it operational. Planned obsolescence by the company that built your artificial body. Citizen Sleeper, unsurprisingly, has a lot to say about capitalism and bodily autonomy. It’s a story about survival against all odds, developing connections to others, and finding warmth and community in the midst of a harsh world.\nThe gameplay is relatively simple but is more than enough to keep you engaged. At the start of every day you roll five dice. Each dice roll can be used to perform an activity of your choice, using your base stats as modifiers. You’ll pick an initial character class (Machinist, Operator, or Extractor) which determines your starting stats and you will have the chance to upgrade them periodically as you finish quest lines. Most activities will present more than one approach to resolve the situation which lets you tailor your approach based on how you’re building your Sleeper. Like any dice-based game though, sometimes the dice do not cooperate and you get a slate of lousy rolls. These low rolls can be used for hacking and discovering secrets hidden deep within the decommissioned networks of the Eye, but sometimes it might just be better to take only low-risk activities and then call it a day. Renata Price of Waypoint Radio likened this to a disability metaphor; this certainly rings true with my own experience of having chronic illness which makes me constantly exhausted no matter what I try. Sometimes, all you can do is just hang on.\nA funny thing happened to me in the midgame though and will probably happen to a lot of players — suddenly, acquiring stabilizer is no longer a problem and the resource curve of the game kind of just breaks. Normally this would be indicative of a mechanical flaw but I think this may actually be a case of (accidental?) ludonarrative harmony. At this point in the game you’ve made connections and befriended people, you have steady work and people who stick their necks out for you so that you can get what you need to survive. Again I can’t say if this is intended or a happy accident, but this is one of the game’s few flaws and I’d argue it’s actually a plus when viewed from this perspective.\nAgain, the quality of the writing in Citizen Sleeper cannot be overstated. The character stories are often touching, sometimes tragic, but always thought-provoking. There are also multiple endings, essentially letting you choose what your Sleeper\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;canon\u0026rdquo; ending will be (while still allowing you to proceed to see the rest of the game, if you want to). If storytelling in games is a primary draw for you, you owe it to yourself to experience a life on the Eye.\n[#11] The Last Spell 94 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Here’s the scene: against all odds my heroes remain on their feet, though they are bloodied, beaten-down, and running low on supplies. The north walls of my base have collapsed and vicious, angry monsters are about to breach the west side as well. The wizards at the center of the town chant hurriedly, rushing to enact the complex spell that will erase magic from this world forever. It’s looking grim, but if I can just figure out a way to get my dagger-wielding assassin hero to the north side of the battlefield I could perhaps destroy the archdemon, the source of this chaos.\nMy longbowman up in the watchtower fires a wide volley, clearing a path for the assassin who uses her last charge of a teleport scroll to blink into existence outside the walls and then makes a mad dash for the eldritch horror before her. My palms are sweaty and my heart is pounding; if I don’t win on this round they’re going to breach the western walls, kill my defender there, and then it’s probably game over. The assassin makes a few quick slices with the dagger, and then she switches to her axe for what I hope will be enough damage to deal the coup de grace. She leaps into the air and slams it down on the enemy commander, emptying its health bar and causing it to erupt into searing light, turning the rest of its underlings to dust. VICTORY! I jumped out of my chair and pumped my fist. It was by the skin of my teeth, but I’d finally won the war.\nThis was my experience in the final stage of The Last Spell, undoubtedly one of my favorite tactics games of all time. It is a turn-based hybrid of a grid-based tactical game and a tower defense game, where you are tasked with protecting a circle of wizards while they cast a spell to rid the world of the scourge of magic which has destroyed entire civilizations and killed millions. In order to do this you’ll need to train and equip your heroes, build up a makeshift town around the magic circle, and build defenses such as walls, catapults, ballistae, and traps in order to repel the monsters that appear every night, attracted by the magical energy. It’s masterfully designed; all of these different systems interlock and synergize extremely well to create a compelling loop. Moreover, I’d be doing a disservice if I didn’t mention how great the presentation of this game is. The isometric pixel art is colorful and sharp and shows tons of character, and the soundtrack (composed by Remi Gallego of The Algorithm) blends thumping rhythms with crushing metal guitar riffs plus various horns, strings, and harpsichord melodies. This all comes together to create an experience that is distinctly its own, and even almost 3 years after playing it I still remember that final battle like it was yesterday. If you have any affection for the genre of turn-based tactics, you absolutely must try The Last Spell.\n","date":"2026-05-16T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/20-of-10-pt1/cover_hu_2c8e4a66811ce090.jpg","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/20-of-10-pt1/","title":"Top 20 of the Decade - Part 1"},{"content":"Cover photo from Nine Sols.\nHope you all had a nice April. I briefly considered penning a fake, glowing review for some total piece of garbage like Big Rigs : Over the Road Racing or I dunno, League of Legends as an April Fools prank but given that it’s now May and the fact that nobody really seems to like April Fool’s Day shenanigans anymore anyways, I quickly decided against it. Maybe next year if some really funny concept comes to me. Anyways, onto a game that I can give a glowing, non-satirical review to\u0026hellip;\nZen and the art of deflection Nine Sols 91 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Take one part metroidvania, mix in an Eastern fantasy visual style, and sprinkle with Sekiro-style parry-based combat and voila, you’ve got Red Candle’s excellent Nine Sols. This is a game I’ve been meaning to get to for a while after hearing lots of positive buzz and I’m quite glad that I did.\nRed Candle is a Taiwanese studio that you may recognize for their first few games Detention and Devotion. The latter is infamous for being at the center of a scandal in which an asset was discovered in the game that mocked Chinese President Xi Jinping, leading to a wave of review bombing and its subsequent removal from all major stores (to this day, you can only buy it directly from the developer’s website). Controversy aside, both were excellent horror games and lauded by critics. Nine Sols is a hard left turn for the studio into developing a tough-as-nails 2D action game, but I\u0026rsquo;ve gotta say that you wouldn\u0026rsquo;t know it\u0026rsquo;s their first game in the genre because they crushed it. Red Candle made a game that has rocketed to my upper echelon of metroidvanias, landing below only the excellent Hollow Knight : Silksong and the one that arguably started it all, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.\nThe game begins with the protagonist Yi, our protagonist and small catlike fella, barely hanging on for his life to the edge of a cliff after having lost a duel with his former mentor. Yi’s strength falters and he plunges to his gruesome death at the bottom of the chasm, only to be wrapped up by spectral roots which start to heal and regenerate his body. He is eventually restored to the land of the living, but still needs time to regain his full strength afterwards. He joins a nearby village of humans and develops a bond with a young boy named Shuanshuan, an orphan whose parents were killed years ago as part of a ritual sacrifice. Shuanshuan himself is set to go through the same ritual this year, and claims that he’ll get to see his parents after he \u0026ldquo;ascends,\u0026rdquo; not knowing the truth behind it. Yi intervenes during the ritual, saving his life, and through this gains access to the strange mechanical tunnels below the village. Not all is as it seems, our hero is much more than meets the eye, and he has unfinished business deep within this labyrinth. Eventually he’ll make a number of allies and meet up again with Shuanshuan who has followed him into the facility; soon after Yi will begin unleashing his vengeance upon the Nine Sols, the council that controls this realm.\nYour main verbs in this game are slashing, dashing, and parrying. The latter is the most important; it grants a Qi charge that can be used to dash through an enemy and apply one or more talismans, which burst for heavy damage. You have some invulnerability frames when dashing, but parrying is the primary way that you mitigate damage and build your Qi meter. I personally still haven’t played Sekiro, but by all indications Nine Sols takes heavy inspiration from its deflection-based combat where learning attack patterns and timing is paramount to success. You’ll likely get knocked around a lot while learning the difficult fights but when the parrying clicks, it feels INCREDIBLY good to execute. I found the parry timing to be fairly forgiving, and even if you don’t parry perfectly you will take temporary damage that regenerates over time (and you still generate Qi from imperfect parries). Once you have a few early mobility upgrades the combat really sings, especially so during the boss battles, all of which are bangers without exception. The final boss in particular is one of the best boss fights I’ve ever experienced in a game of this type, and finally locking in the parry timings made me feel like my brain was expanding to the size of the cosmos. If you like deflection-based combat, it really doesn’t get much better than this. This is a first for this blog, but because I think this game has to be seen in motion to be understood, here\u0026rsquo;s a recording of me fighting one of the later-game major bosses (minor spoilers ahead, of course). It helps that my winning attempt was clean as hell, one of those instances where you just enter a flow state and completely lock-in.\nThe game is also just gorgeous and so damn charming. The art is colorful and lush, expressing a unique futuristic Taopunk style with gorgeous animations that also serve to clearly telegraph enemy attacks. Eventually you’ll establish a home base where Shuanshuan and your band of misfits will reside while you’re out accomplishing Yi’s mission, and I especially liked the interactions between Yi’s old friend Kuafu (a portly orange cat-man with a boba tea container strapped to his chest) and of course with Shuanshuan, his surrogate younger brother. You can bring back various relics to him you find in the world and it’s adorable to watch him learn and adapt to this bizarre and fantastic new world he finds himself in. During important story scenes I was also delighted to find that many of these parts are depicted as meticulously-illustrated comic panels, all of which feel like they could have been pulled straight of an acclaimed graphic novel.\nTruly, I believe Nine Sols is a top-tier action game and I’m fascinated to see what Red Candle has in store next. On the standard difficulty it is quite challenging, but it has excellent granular difficulty settings where you can tune damage you inflict and damage done to you from anywhere between 1% and 1000% based on how mellow or sweaty you’re feeling at the time. It comfortably lands in the hallowed grounds of the 90s and comes with a very high recommendation.\nRad Dad Simulator 2026 Pragmata 85 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended At first I wasn’t sure what to make of Pragmata. I recall seeing the original trailer for it a year or so back and wondering if this was some sort of odd gritty MegaMan spinoff given the bright blue coat worn by the deuteragonist, the pint-sized android Diana. I’m pleased to report that no, this is a wholly original new IP concocted by the wizards at Capcom, a company that is both releasing blockbuster hits as well as more experimental and interesting projects like this.\nIt begins with a fairly straightforward concept: a moon base called the Cradle has been emitting a distress signal, and engineer Hugh Williams and his team are dispatched from the earth to the moon to find out what went wrong. The Cradle is home to a research facility where a newly-discovered material called Lunafilament is being experimented with, a material that can closely mimic any other type of matter and could change the world. Upon arrival, things quickly go awry with a dramatic moonquake causing the structure they’re in to collapse and the other three members of Hugh’s squad to perish amongst the chaos. He wakes up to his suit being patched by a small android girl who has lost her memory. She rattles off her designation number but Hugh gives her the name Diana, which she enthusiastically takes to. The two team up to survive, combining Hugh’s talent for weaponry with Diana’s natural hacking which makes them a formidable team. Together they take on the rogue AI IDUS which has caused the facility\u0026rsquo;s bots to go berserk.\nThis makes for a combat system which is different from anything I’ve seen before. Aiming Hugh’s weapon with LT also brings up Diana’s hacking grid for the enemy you’re aiming at. Navigating through the grid with the face buttons and connecting nodes to the final green node pops open enemy weakspots and makes them vulnerable for Hugh to blast away at. Eventually you also gain the ability to execute subsequent hacks when the enemy is already open, causing additional damage and/or status effects like overheat, confusion, etc. If you really want a challenge, try doing both at once. Fire off a few rounds with Hugh, hack away with Diana while the weapon cycles, and all the while keep an eye on your surroundings and dodge incoming enemy attacks. All of the modes of play are relatively average for this kind of game, but it’s the synthesis of them and interplay between them that makes for some really unique and engaging gameplay. There are simulation challenges unlocked periodically in the game that are a blast to run through and often teach you more skills and tactics you can apply during the regular game.\nThe draw here is definitely the gameplay, but the fantastic technical art for the environment and enemies bears mentioning, and Capcom’s in-house RE Engine shines here, delivering buttery smooth gameplay where it feels great to move through the world and blast bots. I wouldn’t say the game’s plot is groundbreaking, but I do have to give credit for the great characterization of Hugh and Diana and the relationship and trust they build throughout the game. Despite being a highly-advanced android, Diana is very much modeled in appearance and personality on a 6-year-old child and behaves as such. You can find memory modules throughout the game that can be brought back to the shelter hub area to replicate fun objects from earth that Diana can play with. She’ll play and frolic, she’ll bring you adorable crayon drawings, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t help but smile. Hugh’s voice actor brings some very “gee golly” midwest uncle energy which is sometimes at odds with the tone of the game, but mostly works. There’s definitely a theme of found family here; Hugh eventually confides to Diana that he was adopted and it’s clear to see partway through the game that the amnesiac Diana comes to see him as a surrogate parent in turn.\nBy all accounts Pragmata has received positive critical acclaim and seems to be selling well. I would love to see Capcom return to this universe and have another bite at the apple. This game is great as it is, and I think a proper sequel could end up being something really special. I say we’ve seen enough Sad Dad games, give me more Rad Dad games like this.\nLo-fi beats to tap Spacebar to Rhythm Doctor 68 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; Recommended I have always loved rhythm games. In my teens and early 20s I always loved playing Dance Dance Revolution as well as the more gimmicky music games that used specialized controllers like Beatmania, Taiko Drum Master, and of course the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. So all of that having been said, I’m disappointed to have to turn in a mixed review of Rhythm Doctor, a music game with a unique one-button gameplay gimmick.\nThe setup for the game’s premise is something like this : a strange virus called Connectifia Abortus that causes cardiac illness has manifested in Middlesea Hospital and you are an intern tasked with treating it through a novel new initiative called the Rhythm Doctor Program. You as the intern appear on screen as a disembodied arm that taps a button in time with the beat. They are actually not kidding when they describe this as a one-button game, you tap the spacebar with the beat and that’s your entire method of action upon the game world (it\u0026rsquo;s actually played for laughs when characters ask questions to the intern and then realize you cannot reply). At first you’ll tap strictly on the 7th beat of a phrase, but as the story progresses it steadily adds more complexity. Some patients will manifest swing beats, others will need you to tap on the second beat of a two-beat pattern, some feature freeze beats where the rhythm shows a 2 or 3 beat pattern which you then tap on the last beat when that rhythm repeats, so on and so forth. Furthermore, the game often has you treating more than one patient at a time, each of whom has their own specific beat pattern to tap along to at various parts of a musical phrase. The complexity adds up fast, and the game to its credit also features some nice visual glitz and effects that adds to the overall experience.\nWhen it works it’s a really great experience; you can kind of zone out and feel where your button press should fall while enjoying the show on screen. Where it starts to fall apart, I think, is later in the game (around late Act 5 through the Finale) where in order to add challenge it starts to layer (in my opinion) too many of these elements at once. Juggling three or more patients with completely different beat patterns starts to trigger some real cognitive overload, and even a music game enthusiast like myself ended up saying “I’m not sure this is fun anymore,” flipping it to the easiest difficulty, and finishing the last few story levels like that. The real achilles heel of the single-button setup is that adding difficulty necessitates this kind of stacking of differing rhythms and cognitive juggling and eventually for me it just got to be too overwhelming. The game introduces new beat patterns and variations so frequently that toward the end I just started to groan when inevitably the tutorial section came up after selecting a level.\nThis may not be your experience; Rhythm Doctor does in fact have lots of favorable reviews on Steam and there are many other aspects of the game that work such as the strong, earnest character writing and generally good to excellent original music. It\u0026rsquo;s enough for me to still give this a recommendation star despite my obvious issues with it. Looking at Steam achievements though, only 8.1% of players at the time of this writing have actually finished the story finale so it makes me wonder if I’m not as alone in my opinion as I might think. It\u0026rsquo;s worth mentioning that the game has a custom level editor and Steam workshop support which could add a ton of replayability if it indeed ends up being a hit for you. Maybe check it out, if you like rhythm games.\n","date":"2026-05-01T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/april-2026-roundup/cover2_hu_95211494e53dafac.png","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/april-2026-roundup/","title":"April 2026 Roundup"},{"content":"Cover photo from Cairn.\nGreetings, dear reader. We’re finally starting to emerge from the brutally-cold winters around here, and honestly I couldn’t be more glad. I’m used to long, snowy winters (I grew up with them) but even after living here for years now, I’m still not used to how harsh and ridiculously cold it can get. It affects me and my overall mood more than I’d like to admit, so I\u0026rsquo;m welcoming Spring with open arms.\nAs for what games you won’t see in this month’s rundown, the most notable one is Mewgenics. I still consider it in-progress and I intend to get back to it, but as I said before that game definitely strikes me more as a marathon than a sprint. I’ve also continued to dip in and out of Helldivers II whenever duty calls.\nI always like to start off strong with the game I have the most to say about, and this month that game is…\nEveryone has a personal summit. Some are more literal. Cairn 93 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended There are only a handful of games that are based primarily around climbing. I’m not simply talking about games that feature climbing as a mechanic; something like Breath of the Wild technically has it but it’s not the primary focus of the game. I’ve done top-rope climbing out in Appalachia and have been to local bouldering gyms a handful of times; I won’t claim to be an expert but I think I know the fundamentals. The thing I most distinctly remember about learning climbing techniques while top-roping was my instructor constantly telling me “get your legs up!” to get into a stronger hold or to pry the rest of my body up onto an overhang. There’s a widespread mistaken assumption among climbing novices that having a lot of raw strength is necessary to get started. It certainly helps on harder routes, but it’s far more important to have good technique and an understanding of how best to place your hands and feet so that you don’t need to rely on sheer effort on difficult moves.\nPlaying Cairn activated something deep inside me and all those fond memories on the rock wall came flooding back. It’s certainly the most authentic representation of climbing that I’ve seen in a video game so far, and absolutely nails the mental game that is an essential part of the sport. Half the battle on the wall is finding a route that will work for you; you have to understand what your body is capable of, where the tough moves will be, and where you can afford to hang for a bit and give your muscles a break. In Cairn you control the protagonist Aava’s limbs one-by-one, placing them into crevices and ledges as you scramble up the face of Kami, the fictional equivalent of Mt. Everest or K2. You’ll also contend with a survival layer where you’ll need to manage her hunger, thirst, and eventually also body temperature which becomes a factor as you get higher up the mountain. Aava is an experienced mountaineer (one of the best in the world, in fact) and can forage for food and water but you’ll also be able to scavenge random foodstuffs and useful tools from the bodies of the unfortunate souls who perished on the mountain long before you arrived. It’s all a lot to think about, but the game does offer accessibility features which tone down the difficulty of the climbing and/or survival elements if you so desire.\nAs for Aava herself, she is an experienced and confident climber who aims to be the first to summit the unconquered Mount Kami. Aava has an intense demeanor; if you watch enough interviews with people who are at the top of their sport or vocation you tend to see this kind of personality a lot and I found it to be pretty authentic in that way. She’s a bit of a mess in her personal life; it’s heavily implied early on that her relationship with her partner Naomi is in bad shape, she refuses to return her agent’s calls, and whenever she receives a message through her mechanical assistant ClimbBot she seems more annoyed than anything that her focus is taken away from her ascent. She spends so much time on mountain faces as a way of forcing the problems of her personal life to take a backseat. She’s not always likable, but she is relatable. She struggles to understand and be understood by other people and feels isolated because of it. I found her to be a compelling character, and later in the game you’ll make several important choices which impact how her story ultimately ends.\nCairn is one of those rare games that put me into a state of hyperfocus; the climbing is challenging and incredibly engrossing. Aava’s arms and legs will start to shake and she’ll start to audibly strain when losing her grip. Learning to take your climbs slow and steady and to suppress the panic when her grip starts to falter are key to success on Kami. I\u0026rsquo;d be remiss if I didn\u0026rsquo;t also mention that this game is drop-dead gorgeous, featuring dramatic rises and incredible vistas. I’m not a guy who uses photo modes in games a lot, but I found myself stopping to snap some breathtaking shots frequently. I have so many damn screenshots — almost 200 — and choosing a handful to put on this post was legitimately tough. All in all, this was a memorable journey that will stick with me and is easily among the best game experiences I’ve had this year. It comes highly recommended.\nThe Very Angry Caterpillar Öoo 83 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Öoo (which I’ve been pronouncing out loud as “ooOOOoo”) is a brilliant, bite-sized puzzle game from Nama Takahashi whose previous game was ElecHead, a retro Megaman-styled puzzle platformer. I finished the entire thing in just over two hours so talking too much about the gameplay might constitute spoilers, but the concept is that you control a lil\u0026rsquo; caterpillar dude who has been snatched up by an asshole bird, and your task is to avoid digestion by getting him out.\nOur bug protagonist has the ability to drop sections of his body as bombs, and this is how you solve the majority of the game’s puzzles. You can use them as steps, to propel you in one direction or another, or one of several other techniques that the game masterfully teaches you through the quality of its level design. The controls are very simple (move with the stick, a button to place a bomb, and a button to detonate) but there are a surprising amount of moments where you realize that there are useful/necessary tricks with them that you could have performed the entire time which let you solve rooms which at a point looked impossible. In short, it\u0026rsquo;s delightful. It’s so smartly-designed, and very worth picking up for an afternoon’s worth of entertainment. Time for me to go check out ElecHead, I think…\nTurns out, the thing golf was missing was PvP Super Battle Golf 86 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Here I am, back again this month to give the verdict and tell you that Super Battle Golf absolutely rules. I’ve played several more sessions with friends and the game not only holds up in terms of sheer enjoyment, but also has more mechanical depth than you’d think. Turns out you can do some really wacky shit like diving in front of others’ shots Secret Service style; I’ve seen several duels between friends at the putting green that left me crying with laughter.\nYou can play this online with randoms, but if you’ve got a group of friends you can convince to get it, consider this a 3-star recommendation instead. More updates are coming and they’ve promised Steam Workshop integration in the future, so I can’t wait to see what kind of wild courses and new items we get. I’ll leave you with a few highlights from our most recent games.\nYour Wish is My Suggestion Many Nights a Whisper 76 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; Recommended Another bite-sized game, Many Nights a Whisper is a story-focused indie game about a world where any wish can come true, as long as a certain ritual is completed. The player controls the Dreamer, the individual at the center of said ritual. Every night, villagers visit the Dreamer and confess their deepest desires from the other side of a wall. Each villager that professes a wish puts a braid of hair they have been growing out through an opening in the wall, and if the Dreamer chooses to grant the wish they cut the braid. The Dreamer is the sole arbiter of which wishes get granted and which do not, and ultimately to make them come true they must use a slingshot to light a flame pyre on the day of the ritual. Their mentor has been training them for 10 years for this one moment, and he will talk you through both the technique of making the shot and also about which wishes you’re choosing to grant and why.\nThis ultimately is the main draw of the narrative. Some of the wishes are relatively low-stakes; one villager wishes for a rival to help push them to their limits in all respects. Others are much more serious and world-altering. One person asks to make all world religions vanish overnight. They also say they realize that there’s an inherent darkness in the heart of humanity that will never go away, but that eliminating organized religion might prevent lots of pain and suffering inflicted in the name of dogma. Another person confesses that they are experiencing gender dysphoria, and wants you to eliminate the whole concept of gender altogether. For both of these, you’re forced to grapple with the concept of a world without either of these prevailing forces and consider what improvements or unintended consequences could come from changing such fundamental things about humanity.\nIt’s fascinating stuff, and ultimately it’s up to you to grapple with these choices and decide whether or not to grant the wish. Of course, this all hinges upon you making that one consequential shot on the final day. You’ll have the Dreamer train during the daytime, in between the sequences at night where you’re hearing the wishes of the villagers. It’s also fully up to you whether you want to commit to making the shot, or perhaps you might decide that putting this much responsibility on one person is too much, and to miss it on purpose. Either way, it’s all up to you…\nBack on the road to Zanarkand Final Fantasy X HD Remaster [2001 / 2016] TBD Overall Score \u0026#x2205; Recommendation TBD Final Fantasy X is certainly not among the first JRPGs I ever played, but it is one of the ones that to this day I still clearly and fondly remember. Revisiting a game that’s such a fixture in your personal pantheon can be a risky endeavor; as the years pass we tend to remember more of what we liked about certain things while the pain points slowly fade away. What I remember about FFX is being floored by its visual presentation and the fact that this was the first proper Final Fantasy to be fully voice-acted. I remember its worldbuilding being top-notch and its characters to be endearing and memorable. Yuna is one of my favorite characters in the whole series and I consider her to be the pinnacle of the archetype of the Final Fantasy Summoner.\nI’m pleased to say that the game mostly holds up so far. I’m keeping in mind that in 2001, localizations were generally quite rough and the trade of voice acting for games was still in its relative infancy. It’s still leaps and bounds beyond many of its contemporaries and immediate predecessors, and its turn-based battle system is still one of my favorites. You can see a lot of the DNA of more modern RPG battle systems (most notably the Atlus SMT and Persona games) here, and they liberally borrow elements of FFX for good reason. My partner is watching while I play this (this is her first time seeing the game) and we’ve just hit Macalania Temple. Once I’ve rolled credits I’ll report back on how well I think it holds up as an entire work and what she thought about it as well.\n","date":"2026-03-31T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/march-2026-roundup/cover_hu_b022d4838aacefe5.jpg","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/march-2026-roundup/","title":"March 2026 Roundup"},{"content":"Cover photo from Mewgenics.\nWell so much for February being a shorter, quieter month and this post being less effort than January\u0026rsquo;s. Aside from finishing up a few games I started playing in the months prior, February also brought the release of the long-awaited Mewgenics from the creator of The Binding of Isaac. I also sampled the hot new friendslop game and discovered a new platforming gem. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot to talk about, so let\u0026rsquo;s get to it.\nKick your shoes off, grab a cup of tea, stay a while... Wanderstop 77 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended I’ve always felt a lot of tension between the part of me that wants to just go with the flow and chill, and the voice in my head that won’t stop screaming that my time on this earth is limited and I should spend as much time as possible bettering myself, having unique experiences, and generally trying to not waste a single moment. Alta, the protagonist of Wanderstop, has only heard that second voice throughout her entire life. She’s an arena fighter who is perpetually driving herself to train harder, to be the best, to never lose a match. After three years of being undefeated, she begins to suffer loss after loss after loss. Beaten-down and psychologically shattered, she sets off to find a legendary master in the forest who she thinks she can train her back to her former greatness.\nThings, of course, don’t go as planned. Collapsing from exhaustion, she finds herself awakening at the tea shop Wanderstop, having been carried there by its kind and gentle owner Boro. No matter how much she tries, she collapses when trying to resume her journey and it turns out she can’t even lift her sword anymore for some reason. Boro invites her to stay a while, to rest and to heal. She does so reluctantly, learning how to make tea, tend the garden, decorate the shop, and converse with the odd smattering of visitors that meander into the clearing where the shop resides. Whether she realizes it or not, all of these visitors have a valuable lesson to teach, if she’ll only listen.\nWanderstop is a cozy game with a poignant message for any of us who have that innate drive to try to optimize our time spent down to the minute. There is no time pressure on any of the game’s tasks, the environment is comfortable and relaxing, and Boro is endlessly supportive as Alta works through her burnout and comes to terms with the fact that nothing lasts forever. It’s about becoming more assertive with that inner voice and learning to live a more examined life. It’s about the ephemerality of our identity and how it naturally changes over time; how elements of our lives that once defined us fade into the background and we perpetually reinvent ourselves.\nIt’s a funny thing when your opinion on a piece of media grows and changes the more you turn it over in your head, and the more time passes since experiencing its conclusion. There were times while playing Wanderstop when I found it mildly tedious or a little dull, but as the end of the game crept closer and closer I found myself feeling prematurely nostalgic for my time in the tiny clearing in the forest. I wanted to spend just a bit more time brewing tea for the quirky characters who wandered through and chatting with the kindly proprietor. Boro actually tells you toward the end that you should take a little bit of time to choose what you want to do before you leave, and to try to simply let yourself be bored. That is, in the end, the message that Wanderstop wants to leave us with : that life cannot and should not simply be reduced to an endless series of to-do lists. The truth of what it had to say rang true to me; we owe it to ourselves to just slow down and be alone with our thoughts, simply enjoying a coffee or tea and taking in the simple joys of a beautiful day. I think it’s in those moments we can reflect upon what truly matters to us.\nDefensive battle, initiate! The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy 84 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; Recommended Finally, after about putting about 100 hours into this game and seeing 52 endings, I have emerged from the (metaphorical) Weeb Cave and am finally ready to talk about The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy. This is a visual novel/tactics hybrid that has a positively absurd number of choices to make and storyline ramifications to observe that result from said choices. It’s like one of those choose-your-own adventure books brought to life in interactive media. Although it’s uneven in some ways, I enjoyed it quite a bit and admire the ambition and passion behind it. I had enough to say about it that I wrote a full review of it which can be read here.\nIt\u0026#39;s Lacey..? Love Eternal 79 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; Recommended This one was a pleasant surprise. The Remap Radio podcast posted an interview with developer Toby Alden and after hearing him describe his game Love Eternal as a “psychological horror precision platformer,” I knew I had to give it a look. It actually reminds me a lot of VVVVVV (which you should also play) for its gravity-swapping mechanic, and its spike-filled rooms are bite-sized bits of extreme platforming challenge. Unfortunately the game lacks accessibility settings, so if platformers aren’t your genre it’s going to be a tough sell.\nThe game’s vibe is genuinely unsettling without resorting to cheap scares though, and is well-worth the price of admission if you can handle the difficulty. Its gameplay sections are also broken up by adventure game-esque segments that reveal more of the main character Maya\u0026rsquo;s story and the bizarre things that begin to happen to her, mostly centered around her interactions with her friend Lacey. It also does something kinda wild in its last act that I’ve legitimately never seen another game do before, and I refuse to spoil this. Get to it, my fellow platformer sickos.\nHelldivers never die! (terms and conditions apply) Helldivers II 91 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended This third-person shooter/excessive force simulator from Arrowhead is a game I still keep up with, hopping in to check out the newest developments in the galactic war at its center and to play with all the new destructive toys. It helps a lot that it’s basically the only game that my partner plays at this point, and also that her mother wanted to learn to play it with us as she starts her retirement. It’s been an honestly fascinating process teaching her; there are so many things you take for granted about games if you grew up with them that aren’t immediately apparent that need to be explained to someone brand-new to gaming. We’re all having a great time though, and have gotten many clippable moments like this :\nTeaching new Divers aside, the game masters have led us into a campaign against the Automatons and their masters the Cyborgs, all the way to their homeworld of Cyberstan. There are new units, new objectives, and the campaign on Cyberstan has been legitimately challenging. This is where I need to rant a bit though… Not about the game itself, but the community of players engaging with it.\nSure, in any live service game there’s always going to be some amount of power creep, and Helldivers II is no exception. Helldiver armaments have continually gotten stronger while enemies have mostly stayed the same. The new units attempt to shake up this dynamic somewhat and bring back some of the difficulty for the most hardcore players. People claim they want challenge but in fact so many gamers scream bloody murder when novel challenges force them outside their established comfort zone. It’s gotten to the point that when the controversy around difficulty reaches a fever pitch I just have to tune out because it gets so toxic. So many feel like it’s a personal affront to their ego to bump the difficulty down a few levels (there are 10 for crying out loud) so that they can refine their tactics and re-learn what works and what doesn’t. Arrowhead isn’t perfect but I think they’ve done a fairly good job overall when it comes to game balance lately.\nSorry, just had to get that out. I feel better now. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Anyways, Helldivers II is still a great time with friends (or family!) and I still highly recommend it.\n🎶 All of my nights, I\u0026#39;m chasin\u0026#39; rats~ (Chasin\u0026#39; the rats!!) 🎶 Mewgenics TBD Overall Score \u0026#x2205; Recommendation TBD It’s hard to believe that in the year 2026 we’re finally playing Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s Mewgenics. Originally announced in 2012, canceled in the mid 2010s, and then revived in 2018, the duo’s feline magnum opus has finally seen the light of day. If you’ve played McMillen’s previous game The Binding Of Isaac you kind of know what to expect from this game’s overall tone and artwork style, which is to say that it’s a lot of crass humor, poop and fart jokes, you get the picture. Some people will undoubtedly bounce off of it for that reason, but those that stick with it will find an incredibly deep and satisfying roguelite tactics game where you outfit a group of stray cats to go out on adventures and then come home to breed and raise the next generation of fighting cats. The art is reminiscent of 2000s Newgrounds animations (true to McMillen’s origins) and the music is another high point in its favor. It’s full of jazzy, jaunty tunes with lyrics that reveal themselves when you reach the boss encounter. It’s the kind of soundtrack that burrows into your brain and refuses to leave; I have legitimately lost sleep because I can’t get this damn song out of my head.\nWhen I say this game is deep, I really mean DEEP. I’ve seen accounts of people spending upwards of 100, 200, or even more hours exploring the depths of Mewgenics. There are over 1000 unique skills for your cats to use and 900+ items on a sliding scale of grossness to equip them with. That plus the massive enemy variety ensures that almost no two runs are the same. Between this and Silksong, it’s been fascinating to see what passionate indie devs can do when given a long runway and essentially unlimited budget. I am admittedly very early in this game, only having played 18 hours and having barely scratched the surface of Act 2. I’m very much looking forward to sinking more time into it, though I’m also trying to pace myself knowing just how long of a journey it will be to the end.\n\u0026#34;The price is wrong, bitch!\u0026#34; Super Battle Golf TBD Overall Score \u0026#x2205; Recommendation TBD Babe, wake up. New friendslop just dropped.\nOne of the greatest disappointments of my life happened when I was a teenager, browsing a local store that carried used classic video games. In these bins of plastic cartridges I found Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf for the NES, and thought “huh, what an interesting concept,” and picked it up on a whim for like $2.50.\nI regret to inform you that there is no actual fighting in Lee Trevino\u0026rsquo;s Fighting Golf.\nThere is a character in it called Big Jumbo, but that mildly amusing fact was no consolation for the total lack of fisticuffs. I wanted to thwack my opponents with a 5-iron or throw down on the links Happy Gilmore style!\nOver two decades later, along comes Super Battle Golf to heal my long-festering disappointment. I also picked it up for a pittance for 6.39 (which, as we’ve learned, is basically five bucks according to the PEAK devs) and I could not be happier with it. This game is a madcap race to the fairway between you and up to 7 of your friends, all the while people are smashing your kneecaps with their clubs, shooting at you with pistols or elephant guns, or running you down with a golf cart. It’s all very slapstick and it’s been a while since a game has made me laugh like this one has.\nI can’t wait to play more. What else can I say? It’s basically five bucks. Go get it.\nMythic\u0026#43; without the fuss Fellowship [EARLY ACCESS] TBD Overall Score \u0026#x2205; Recommendation TBD World of Warcraft’s Mythic+ dungeon mode is genuinely one of the best things they’ve ever added to the game. It provides a (theoretically) infinitely-scaling dungeon challenge for you and 4 other allies, which is far more accessible than putting a whole raid group together. Having run a WoW raiding guild during the days of Vanilla and early TBC, I can most definitely say that’s something I would never want to do again. Last year some friends and I decided to get into M+, and after not having played WoW for probably at least 15 years… Boy, things have changed a lot. The game is overstuffed with things to do and learning all the systems and currencies you need to interact with is enough to make your head spin, and at endgame it piles on even more to think about.\nAlong comes Fellowship, which distills the M+ experience into a standalone package. There’s no grinding to level cap or gearing up before you can get to the good stuff, just choose one of a roster of heroes, find a group, pick a difficulty, and go. I do miss the character customization inherent to a proper MMORPG (I grew quite attached to my Demon Hunter, Brymmleaighe), but the heroes in Fellowship serve well enough in their archetypes and most mirror existing character classes from other similar games. It feels very familiar in a positive way; if you’ve ever done M+ you’ll be able to slide right into Fellowship with no problems. It’s still early access and needs some polish, but seems to be moving in the right direction.\n","date":"2026-02-25T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/february-2026-roundup/mewgenics-cover_hu_6768a920c6a84170.jpg","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/february-2026-roundup/","title":"February 2026 Roundup"},{"content":" I’ve always been enamoured with the idea of a story that has multiple outcomes, one that allows the reader to be a participant and actively guide it onto a different track. Video games seem like a natural home for this type of narrative since player choice is a primary element of them, but in practice this is often a far more thorny proposition than it would seem due to the sheer amount of writing, art, programming, and sound design that needs to be coordinated to bring the vision to life. Many games try this, few truly succeed, and the vast majority end up making major compromises to end up with a shippable title.\nThe Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy is a game that takes this ambition and runs as far as it possibly can with it, resulting in a work that is one of the most impressive pieces of interactive fiction I’ve ever seen. Though it is far from perfect, the sheer variety of stories told based on the choices of the player make it a unique gem, and something well worth playing if this is your type of story. The developer, Too Kyo games (founded by Danganronpa’s Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Ushikoshi of Zero Escape fame) by all accounts bet the entire farm on this game’s success, and fortunately it has resonated with both critics and players.\nThe Hundred Line bears a resemblance to some familiar japanese RPG narratives such as Persona, but many of these similarities are only skin deep; it truly does feel like a fusion of the chief creatives’ prior works. The player takes the role of Takumi Sumino, a high-schooler whisked away from his peaceful life in the dome-like Tokyo Residential Complex and alongside a cast of delightfully weird characters, is tasked with defeating mysterious invaders in order to defend a secret inside the titular Last Defense Academy that could spell salvation or doom for all of humanity. The game primarily presents its story in a traditional visual novel format, but also features grid-based tactical battles where you command the Special Defense Unit members in protecting the school.\nIn all the media promotions I saw for The Hundred Line, the branching narrative and importance of player choice was often touted as a major factor. This could easily lead to some confusion though, as the first part of the story (“Route 0”) acts as an extended onboarding to the game and its large cast of characters and will take somewhere around 20 to 25 hours to complete. That’s not to say that it’s at all boring; it’s a fully-fledged narrative with lots of interesting twists and turns. Sacrifices will be made and truths will be revealed, culminating in the end of the route at Day 100. In the end, Takumi is left with a feeling of emptiness, having lost several of his comrades and wondering what he could do differently if he were able to do it all over again.\nThe Special Defense Unit members fight their battles using a power called Hemoanima, basically blood magic, which has mysterious properties that manifest differently in every user. It is also cannibalistic, meaning that it becomes stronger when the user drains the blood from another Hemoanima user. After reluctantly draining several other users, Takumi’s innate power to rewind individual turns in battle becomes supercharged and he is able to wind back the clock all the way to the beginning of the 100-day cycle at the school. He does so, and so begins the real meat of the game. Welcome to The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy 2!\nTakumi returns to the past with full knowledge of the events to come and immediately sets out to change history for the better. Almost immediately you’ll be confronted with heavy decisions that will drastically alter the timeline and thus the fate of the members of the unit. Some of these decisions lead to very unexpected places, but fortunately in the second portion of the game you’ll have access to a timeline map that allows you to jump back and forth between any branch or go back to any individual decision and see the alternative, all while keeping your progress. This is very welcome, because these diverging storylines can be so radically different that it’s inevitable that you’ll end up living through consequences you didn’t foresee. There is a proper “second scenario” written by Kodaka (and many excellent story branches off of this mainline) that culminates in an excellent-if-bittersweet ending, but also timelines that dip into almost any genre you could imagine. There is a route where there is a serial killer offing the unit members one by one, a slapstick comedy route, a sci-fi story (written by Ushikoshi), a horror/zombie tale, and even a route where Takumi unwittingly becomes a cult leader.\nThere are 22 main branches in all, and 100 unique endings split between them. These feature tons of unique pieces of art and are interspersed with voice acting to bring the characters to life. I cannot imagine how much of a task it was to coordinate all of these different timelines; even though they go in radically different directions they all share a central core of facts between them, and Ushikoshi’s sci-fi route even expands upon the time-travelling narrative and Takumi’s knowledge of other parallel realities. All of these are canon according to the devs, so players are free to pick which ending they prefer the most as their own personal canon.\nSo I’ve talked quite a bit about the story so far - what about the battles? Well, as a turn-based tactics fan I’m pleased to report that they are quite solid. I found the battles to be an enjoyable, almost puzzle-like experience; all characters have a set of 3 standard moves that can be upgraded with materials found through battles and exploration sequences, and all are completely different in terms of what they excel at i.e. clearing weak chaff enemies, focusing down elites, buffing allies, building up armor and tanking hits from large foes, etc. Furthermore each character has an ultimate attack used by consuming portions of the voltage meter, which is built up by damaging enemies or taking other defensive actions. These attacks are powerful and can wipe out a massive group of enemies all at once, and can even be used as a desperation attack at low health, which uses zero voltage but kills that character for the rest of the wave (slain allies revive between waves). Clearing medium and large enemies give back AP, which you can use to take additional actions on your turn. This makes for an interesting dynamic where you can smartly use your voltage to clear a big group of heavies, refunding enough AP to chain action after action, wiping out the majority of enemies in a single turn. This is where the puzzle-like element comes in, and it’s very satisfying to work out a sequence of actions that clears the board of the majority of enemies in one fell swoop.\nAlas, for all the strengths of this game it is still far from perfect. As enjoyable as the battles are, they start to become repetitive in the second portion of the game. You’ll often see repeats of the same battles or minor variations thereof, and the vast majority of them (but not all) are defensive battles at the school. Fortunately you can skip any battle you’ve seen previously and keep most of the rewards from winning, but despite this being a necessary quality-of-life feature, it makes the battles feel somewhat superfluous once you’re deep enough into the game. The branching story route structure is wildly creative but is also uneven in places. The sheer amount of writing that needed to go into this game necessitated splitting up the authorship duties between Kodaka, Ushikoshi, and several other support staff and guest writers. Characterization is not always totally consistent and certain routes feel like they were truncated due to a lack of time (see that article I linked above). This may be controversial but I do think seeking out a “skip list” in order to avoid the weakest storylines is totally reasonable, because the best storylines in the game are in fact VERY good. Certain routes such as Second Scenario, Retsnom, S.F., and Killing Game are widely regarded as some of the best material these devs have ever written and should be sought-out. I’d still recommend playing the game and picking whichever options seem right for your first couple of runs, however. Some of these twists are just too good to risk spoiling.\nThe Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy may not always be banging on all cylinders, but when it’s good it’s among the best video game storylines I’ve ever experienced. Its characters can lean into tropes but also show a level of depth at times that will surprise you. If you appreciate the art of interactive storytelling, it’s an ambitious experiment that is well-worth experiencing.\n84 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; Recommended Read about my rating methodology here. ","date":"2026-02-22T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/review-thehundredline/100-cover_hu_b1bcfcb6f23285d2.jpg","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/review-thehundredline/","title":"Review : The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy [2025]"},{"content":"Cover photo from The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy.\nWelcome to the January 2026 Roundup, a collection of brief thoughts about the various games I’ve been playing this month. Given that a full review is a lot of work to put together, I think this is a nice compromise, almost like a game journal. I imagine this will be a bit longer than its successors, as I also wanted to talk about several games I tried during my extended vacation at the end of last year. I\u0026rsquo;ll begin with my favorite of the batch\u0026hellip;\nI\u0026#39;m over the moon for... Death Howl 91 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended A pleasant surprise toward the end of 2025, Death Howl is a tactical deckbuilder game in which the protagonist Ro travels through a fantastical and dangerous spirit world on a journey through loss, grief, and acceptance. The build synergies are excellent, the art is eye-catching, and I highly recommend it even to those like myself who aren’t typically into deckbuilders.\nI wrote a full review of Death Howl which can be read here..\nI devoured... Consume Me 88 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended A really great slice-of-life game that also manages to be very relatable. Consume Me is based on developer Jenny Jiao Hsia’s personal experiences in high school into college but I think it will also resonate with anyone who has ever gone on a crash diet and painstakingly counted calories in order to lose weight. The game deftly handles some pretty heavy subject material including disordered eating and an unhealthy obsession with hyperoptimizing every element of life. This is not sustainable, of course, and Consume Me does not pretend that it ever can be, showing how everything crashed down around Jenny when it all became too much to juggle. Don’t take this to mean that the game is some sort of dour cautionary tale though; the art is colorful and vibrant and its goofy animations and sharp sense of humor kept me laughing throughout. It’s a brave and risky thing to put so much of yourself into a piece of art, but it came together in a very cohesive, and enjoyable package.\nI find that a lot of autobiographical games like this tend to mostly focus on telling the author’s story and are light on actual game mechanics. Consume Me is a notable exception here; practically every action in the game is associated with a WarioWare-esque minigame, whether that be folding the laundry, putting together a healthy lunch, walking the dog, or trying to keep Jenny’s wandering eyes on her assigned summer reading. All of that is assembled within the framework of a daily schedule in which you’re tasked with putting the right strings of actions together in order to balance Jenny’s energy, happiness, and hunger with getting all of her weekly tasks done. It throws some serious curveballs at you, especially in later chapters. Part of Chapter 5 seemed literally impossible at first, but the game subtly nudged me toward the power of unhealthy amounts of caffiene and extraordinarily late nights as a way of gaining near-infinite actions at the expense of Jenny’s overall health and happiness. It’s ludonarrative harmony at its best, where the mechanics reinforce the core themes of the narrative, and overall is a superb balancing act by the developers. It’s a great time, and it comes highly recommended from me.\nI took a chance on... Q-UP 65 Overall Score \u0026#x2205; No Recommendation Imagine an esport in which all of consideration of balance is removed, where the RNG is always perfectly fair and everything comes down to 50/50 odds. Well Q-UP literally does this, with every round being based around two teams competing over a series of coin flips with each team winning when their selected side comes out on top after the flip. The game is a tongue-in-cheek work, poking fun at esports devs fruitlessly pursuing that unattainable moving target of Perfect Game Balance.\nThere are character classes to pick from as well as skill trees… Why, you ask? Because in the end this is a classic “number go up” type of game, where you tailor your selected skills to emphasize the strong points and cover the weaknesses of your selected character. It didn’t quite hit for me, but I could see this being enjoyable to people who love spending hours buildcrafting and sitting back while their chosen strategy pays off, launching their score into the stratosphere. I will say that the humor in the game’s UI, item flavor text, and fake emails from the corporation behind Q-UP is all very funny if you follow the internal workings of the games industry. It’s not quite enough of a game to keep me coming back to it, but its sharp and humorous evisceration of modern esports did have me laughing.\nI plinked around in... Nubby\u0026#39;s Number Factory 80 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended The Price is Right was basically late-morning white noise in my household growing up, a pleasant distraction between the early morning news/talk shows and the afternoon soap operas ubiquitous to network TV. I think most people who saw it will remember Plinko, the game where the contestant climbed to the top of a tall pegboard and dropped a bouncy disc which would eventually settle into a cradle at the bottom corresponding to various amounts of money and prizes. I’m confident in saying that the dev behind Nubby’s Number Factory also remembers Plinko, because it marries that basic setup of a bouncy object plinking around a board with a run-based buildcrafting system. It reminds me a lot of Balatro in that way, but instead of creating poker hands you’re launching the eponymous Nubby at the pegs below, trying to create a perfect series of bounces that will rack up a boatload of points. It’s become one of those games I’ll fire up when I need to play something that doesn’t require a ton of brainpower (more common than I’d like lately) and is a fun, welcome distraction from.. Well, motions at everything. It also looks like something straight out of the 90s edutainment software aesthetic which is yet another point in its favor.\nI am still savoring... The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy 84 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; Recommended This is an ambitious, anime-styled hybrid of a visual novel and a turn-based tactics game from the developers who brought you the Danganronpa and Zero Escape series. A group of high school students are whisked away from their normal lives to the titular Last Defense Academy and chosen to defend a secret at the heart of the school that could be the salvation or doom of humanity. The narrative is vast and branching with 100 different potential endings, and I am still working my way through some of the late-game scenarios I want to see. I’m really enjoying it overall and have a lot of thoughts, so I plan to write a full review article for this soon. Stay tuned.\nI wrapped up... Promise Mascot Agency 82 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended ”Former Yakuza enforcer is exiled to the countryside to run a contracting agency for bizarre mascots” is one of those game pitches that sounds like it came right out of a fever dream, and ultimately was one I couldn’t pass up. This game comes from Kaizen Game Works, developers of the well-regarded murder mystery game Paradise Killer. It leans into and pokes fun at all of the typical yakuza tropes, and leans so far into this bit that they were actually able to get the japanese voice of Kazuma Kiryu, Mr. Yakuza himself Takaya Kuroda as the main character Michi AKA “The Janitor.” After disgracing himself and putting his yakuza family in financial ruin by botching a major financial transaction, Michi’s death is faked and he is sent to the rural town of Kaso-Machi to redeem himself by restarting a long-dormant mascot agency and making as much money as he can for the family.\nMascots in this world aren’t simply people in costumes, they’re supernatural life forms who take on all sorts of shapes and personalities. Michi’s main assistant and primary companion is Pinky, a brash and hilarious mascot in the shape of a giant severed fingertip. I really was not exaggerating when I called this concept a fever dream. Fortunately, the mascot and human characters you meet in Kaso-Machi are charming and often very funny. You’ll spend most of your gameplay driving around in Michi’s nigh-indestructible all-terrain kei truck, assigning mascots to jobs around the town, and unraveling the mystery surrounding a yakuza-killing curse purported to be on the town. I was struck by the quality of the narrative, the charm of the various oddball mascots (business cat Salary-Nyan and sentient foodstuff To-Fu being my favorites), and the sheer density of things to do in Kaso-Machi. This is an open-world checklist game à la Assassin’s Creed with tons of stuff to do on the map, but remarkably it is condensed into a fraction of the time any of those games take to play. I hit 100% achievements and saw most of what the game has to offer in a tight 18 hours, and I can’t help but feel like modern, bloated open-world games should take notes from it. I typically don’t play those types of game specifically because they are so overstuffed, so Promise Mascot Agency was really a breath of fresh air and made me believe they could be more focused and probably better overall for it.\nI sampled... StarRupture [EARLY ACCESS] TBD Overall Score \u0026#x2205; Recommendation TBD ”It’s basically Satisfactory,” say all of the reductive takes on the internet. Well, ok, they’re not completely wrong. StarRupture definitely shares the same DNA as the factory-genre giant (and personal favorite of mine), but in my brief five hours with it I found that it is trying to differentiate itself through its greater emphasis on combat with native fauna, its deeper characterization with its main cast of interstellar indentured prisoners, and of course the cycle of the nearby star erupting and the planet regenerating from its damage. I’m not sure how engaging that cycle is after the first couple of times you see it or how well-realized the characters are (the voice acting could use some work) but it’s VERY early access so I will reserve judgment. Generally my policy on early access games is that I’ll play it for a short time and then shelve it until 1.0 as long as I think it’s got potential. All the essential elements for something fun is there, so hopefully this team is able to fully develop and mesh them together over time.\nI slowed down for... Wanderstop TBD Overall Score \u0026#x2205; Recommendation TBD Not much to say here yet because I’m still early on in Wanderstop, but I’m already charmed by its characters and earnest approach to the subject of burnout. The main character Alta is acutely dealing with this after her career as a gladiator takes a precipitous dive after years of being undefeated. After collapsing in the woods while looking for a legendary warrior to re-train her, Alta is forced to slow down and acknowledge that sheer effort is sometimes counterproductive. The gameplay revolves around Alta helping to run a tea shop in the woods while she recovers and heals, and is a narrative about life changes and healing. It’s charming so far and I’ve found it to be well-written and relatable. I’ll report back after I’ve seen more of what it has to offer.\n","date":"2026-02-02T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/january-2026-roundup/hundredline-3_hu_74206ff0f89f7fe1.png","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/january-2026-roundup/","title":"January 2026 Roundup"},{"content":" I’ve never fully been able to put my finger on why, but using the term “deckbuilder” when describing a game has historically been a surefire way to make me immediately lose interest in it. Despite having several friends that were into Magic the Gathering and other collectible card games, I never personally got into them. I think primary hangup on these types of games might have something to do with the mental effort necessary to craft a cohesive deck out of so many options, but also from needing to juggle the mental load within a game, running the mental probabilities of getting a card from my draw pile that might make a specific tactic work. Maybe that\u0026rsquo;s not strictly necessary for casual play, but I have the type of personality where when I commit to a new hobby or game I have a deep need to be good at it.\nDeath Howl is one of the rare games that has been able to push past my reluctance to engage with deckbuilding games and even ended up being one I truly loved. It describes itself as a “soulslike deckbuilder,” a combination of genres that I can’t say that I’ve seen before. I’d personally describe it as a grid-based tactical deckbuilder game with soulslike elements; sometimes I do feel as if the soulslike label is simply overused as shorthand for a difficult game but I do see other parallels that I’ll touch on later.\nThe biggest element that got me to ignore my initial reservations is the fantastic pixel art and dark vibes of the setting. Death Howl is a story set in 6000BC Scandinavia where a mother (and budding shaman) named Ro journeys into the spirit world to bring back the soul of her deceased son Olvi, who suffered an untimely death under circumstances that are initially unclear to the player. The spirit world is beautiful but harsh, and she is beset on all sides by spirits of wild beasts and other twisted beings, hellbent on preventing her from disrupting the natural order of life and death. It effectively mixes magical elements with the grounded reality of human emotion, and is a highly affecting contemplation on death, grieving, and guilt. The aesthetic is truly excellent, with the aforementioned pixel art featuring strong character design, vibrant colors and grotesquely beautiful creature art. The sound and music is worth shouting out as well; most of the tracks are understated but thrum with latent tension and dread, kicking up the drums, shakers, and other percussive instruments when combat begins.\nDeath Howl’s card interactions and deckbuilding mechanics are also incredibly well designed. One very smart thing that does is that it limits the maximum size of the player’s deck to a slim 20 cards, which helped to make the mental load of calculating probabilities far more manageable for me. It also limits you to a maximum of 5 exhaust cards, which are powerful but are discarded for the remainder of the battle and will not recycle back to your draw pile. When it comes time to create your deck, you will start with Realmless cards as a base and will gradually unlock cards specific to the region you are in which synergize with its central mechanics. There are 4 main regions in the spirit world and each will ask you to play in a drastically different way and build your deck to suit one of a few playstyles specific to it.\nRo has 5 mana at the start of the battle and this recharges every on player turn. Cards have a mana cost associated with them, and playing them in various ways will charge Ro\u0026rsquo;s Overwhelmed special meter which has a different effect per region such as healing Ro, restoring her mana, et cetera. Importantly, cards from a realm different from the one you’re currently in are hit with an additional +1 mana cost. This makes it so that realm-specific cards still can be played in different realms, but you’re encouraged to create decks specifically tailored for certain zones that primarily feature cards unlocked there. This keeps the deckbuilding element fresh and interesting. In games with this many options there is a natural tendency for players to try to find one approach that works well and use it like a skeleton key to crack open the rest of the game; fortunately Death Howl avoids this pitfall and is all the better for it.\nEach region has a set of central mechanics that the decks naturally synergize with. All are very engaging, and it’s hard for me to pick a favorite region because the synergies are all so strong and satisfying to use, whether that be the emphasis on high mobility and backstabbing enemies in the Realm of Hostile Plains region, or the complete opposite in the Realm of Piercing Winds which rewards you for moving as little as possible, dragging enemies to you, and tanking their hits by building up your block stat (which also fills your Overwhelmed gauge). Winning battles and acquiring crafting materials expands the array of cards available to you, and it was both delightful and agonizing to see great new cards appear and wondering what I’m going to drop from my deck to make room for them.\nSo as to why the developers describe this as soulslike – the game definitely brings the difficulty and intimately learning its core systems and enemy attack patterns are crucial to survival. You’ll take a lot of damage and barely scrape through battles early on in new regions, before you begin to unlock realm-specific cards. Enemies also respawn whenever you rest at a ritual circle, this game’s equivalent of bonfires. Fortunately the game does let you roam freely from realm to realm and perhaps encourages you to do so, because each area has its own specific progression tree featuring a unique buff trinket and allows you to unlock an additional trinket slot that is a permanent character upgrade. You can also freely experiment with deck creation; there are 15 unique save slots for decks that you can freely swap between and tweak between battles. Often you’ll be tasked with getting through several difficult battles in a row; tailoring your deck to the challenge, playing cautiously, and preserving your health becomes very important in these instances. Each area also features a fully unique boss encounter where the puzzle-like design of the encounters really shines. In the game\u0026rsquo;s best encounters, you may find yourself chaining together a golden set of actions that lets you rip through the enemies and end your turn with all enemies dead or otherwise unable to harm you, and these instances are so incredibly satisfying and reward strategic play. Build your deck right and you will almost never find yourself saying \u0026ldquo;I got screwed by a bad draw.\u0026rdquo; Although this is not a genre I frequently engage with, I still found the level of challenge to be well-balanced and rarely frustrating.\nIt’s a testament to Death Howl’s solid design and unique aesthetic that it got even an avowed deckbuilder hater like me to not just play it, but play it to 100% completion. If any of this has sounded even slightly appealing I encourage you to at least give its demo a try. It\u0026rsquo;s a triumph on so many levels, with fantastic system design and a somber, affecting atmosphere and story.\n91 Overall Score \u0026#x2605; \u0026#x2605; Highly Recommended Read about my rating methodology here. ","date":"2026-01-25T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/review-deathhowl/dh-cover_hu_acb3160ef00d15af.jpg","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/review-deathhowl/","title":"Review : Death Howl [2025]"},{"content":"A visual version of this list can be viewed on Backloggd.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s that most wonderful time of the year once more \u0026ndash; the time to reflect on what I\u0026rsquo;ve played this year and start the fun-but-also-agonizing process of ranking them numerically. 2025 was a year that was often surprising and somewhat upsetting (tens of thousands of talented game devs lost their jobs during the course of the year), but we continued to see teams releasing incredible, sometimes landmark games throughout the year. I\u0026rsquo;ve wondered if this the the start of a larger industry shakeup; recently I started reflecting on my top games of the past decade and it\u0026rsquo;s plain to see how far the tools available to small studios have come and how accessible they have made game development to even the smallest of teams. It honestly looks like the leap you\u0026rsquo;d see between console generations when you put the best indie or AA games of 2015 next to those of 2025. In any case, for the sake of those in gamedev I hope we see a shift toward more sustainability and stability in the creation of this unique form of art that brings us so much joy.\nA quick note, much like my past lists this isn\u0026rsquo;t strictly limited to games released in 2025 (though most are), but features anything I\u0026rsquo;ve played and enjoyed during the course of the year. I used to limit it to a strict 10 but quickly gave up on that because arbitrarily cutting games I adored was too stressful. My list, my rules! Every game listed here is something I truly enjoyed and would recommend to others; they all get a flower in the end.\nSo, without further ado, let\u0026rsquo;s start this off weird with\u0026hellip;\n14. Arctic Eggs (2024) I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed in previous years that the lower entries on my list tend to be more oddball, experimental types of games. There\u0026rsquo;s a certain joy in a game that is kinda janky but is doing something interesting, and Arctic Eggs fits that archetype. It puts you in the shoes of a Poultry Prepper, someone assigned/condemned to cook eggs for the starving residents of an unnamed arctic colony managed by the Saint of Six Stomachs. Confused yet? Good, get used to that. Your interactions with the residents of the arctic dole out interesting tidbits about the state of the world but never fully pulls the curtain back, leaving you to fill in the gaps yourself.\nOdd lore aside, the gameplay consists of you cooking eggs for residents by tilting your frying pan back and forth to generate heat. Of course, both sides of the egg have to be cooked so learning a good flip technique is crucial. You’ll often have jobs where the client throws in other items (tins of fish, cigarettes, bullets, and more) that add unique challenges to each dish. Experimenting with the difficulty settings gave me a chuckle; Hard makes your pan almost completely flat with minimal lip and Easy mode gives you what is essentially a wok. A+ way of implementing difficulty here.\nOne final thing of note - revisiting Arctic Eggs before finalizing this list reminded me of just how sharply-written and hilarious it is. Characters will have darkly humorous conversations with one another, launch into amusing non-sequiturs, and occasionally you\u0026rsquo;ll be rewarded with a little jig after filling their stomach. It\u0026rsquo;s a fantastic slice of the \u0026ldquo;nihilistic humor at the end of the world\u0026rdquo; trope.\n13. Beyond Citadel Continuing the run of oddball favorites, here\u0026rsquo;s another that I personally enjoyed but wouldn\u0026rsquo;t recommend unconditionally to everyone. It\u0026rsquo;s a boomer shooter (dislike that term tbh) in the style of Doom with complex gun mechanics, set in a futuristic anime setting. My hesitation to recommend it comes primarily from the fact that the gore and brutality against your cloned anime girl adversaries can be extreme at times, with downed enemies firing weakly at you while struggling to breathe or pieces of them being strewn about when exploded. The art, while featuring excellent linework and great character designs, also sometimes borders on H-game material (the later collectible art being particularly so). The gore and the majority of the nudity can be disabled in the settings, but some of the character outfits still make this a game you might not want to play around family.\nIf you can get past those initial caveats, what is here is one of the most interesting throwback shooters I\u0026rsquo;ve played in years. There are two separate buttons for reload and cock, and each gun uses both slightly differently. For example, when using the pump-action shotgun, reload will pull the gun up and shove a shell into it, and cock will pump the slide and prepare it for fire. Because the gun handling is more realistic than in your average shooter, you can also use techniques that also work in real-life like slamfire (holding the shotgun\u0026rsquo;s trigger down and racking the slide to fire rapidly). For guns with magazines, you\u0026rsquo;ll often have to make the decision between slowly reloading rounds into your magazine versus simply dropping it to the floor and popping in another one during an intense firefight. That layer of extra mechanical depth and decision-making adds something meaningful and engaging to a genre formula that has been static for some time. I\u0026rsquo;d love to see other similar games copy its homework in the future.\n12. Baby Steps The sad sack protagonist of Baby Steps isn\u0026rsquo;t immediately sympathetic or relatable. In fact, the game presents him as a schlubby failson, eating pizza and watching One Piece in his parents\u0026rsquo; basement. He can\u0026rsquo;t even put one foot in front of the other without considerable effort, which makes the task of climbing a treacherous mountain full of garbage a particularly daunting endeavour. Against all odds though, he eventually started to win me over and by the time the game rolled credits I was fully on Team Nate.\nBaby Steps follows the trend of awkward-to-control protagonists in Foddy-like games, but I believe it\u0026rsquo;s far more approachable compared to his previous works such as QWOP and Getting Over It. It\u0026rsquo;s simple in concept but difficult to master : each trigger lifts a leg and the left stick is used to place them. You\u0026rsquo;ll fall - a lot at first - but gradually you develop a rhythm and moving Nate across uneven surfaces, rocky paths, sand, and ice becomes second nature. The critical path of reaching the top of the mountain is challenging but manageable, and if you want to really test your skills (and patience?), optional collectibles are here for you and BOY are they bastards to get. Fortunately, getting one often rewards you with an ad-libbed and often hilarious cutscene voiced by the game\u0026rsquo;s creators Cuzzillo and Foddy themselves.\nI\u0026rsquo;m loath to spoil where the game goes, but thematically it deals with the challenges of existing in modern masculinity and the value of asking for help, which Nate seems pathologically incapable of doing throughout the game to comedic effect. If your tolerance for frustration and setbacks in games is high, I think there\u0026rsquo;s something unique and interesting to be found.\n11. Citizen Sleeper 2 : Starward Vector The original Citizen Sleeper is an all-time narrative banger and a piece of art close to my heart. It touched on themes of having a disability within an unaccommodating society, developing a sense of community and reliance upon others, and forgiveness and second chances.\nIts sequel Starward Vector still maintains the sharp and concise writing and excellent characters, but takes a step forward mechanically. Both games rely on slotting in a set of six-sided dice rolled daily to perform various tasks to aid in your own survival. In the sequel, like the first, you are an emulated human consciousness in an android body fleeing from the corporation who claims ownership over you. Unlike the first, you are not primarily based in a single location but instead have a ship and a crew. You will jet about the system, taking contracts and tracking down leads to advance the main storyline. Each of your crewmembers excels at certain types of tasks related to their main statistics and can turn your lousy rolls into a fighting chance to accomplish something, and you\u0026rsquo;ll have to choose only two to take on a contract to supplement your own abilities.\nThis leads to a sequel that feels mechanically evolved from its predecessor, though narratively I will say I preferred the tight focus of the original\u0026rsquo;s story which was told within the confines of a single space station. It still gets a hearty thumbs-up from me, and I can’t wait to see what Gareth Damian Martin comes up with next.\n10. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024) “Indiana Jones Immersive Sim” was not on my radar as something I ever really wanted, but as a longtime fan of the movies I was pretty much immediately captivated once I got into it. It features an interesting enough plot that wouldn’t feel out-of-place in an Indy feature film (and is probably better than the last two actual films, tbh) and has all the hallmark elements you’d expect from one: recovering stolen artifacts, putting fun fictional twists on ancient history, and of course braining an absurd number of fascists with various blunt objects. Give it a look if you’re a fan of the character, or of immersive sims in general. I had a great time with it.\n9. Mars First Logistics Yeah, I was one of those kids who played with Legos. Not the full kits so much (my family was not loaded), but I did have a giant bucket of assorted pieces that I would cobble together into buildings, vehicles, spaceships, whatever was fascinating me at the time. Mars First Logistics invokes the feeling of playing like a physics-based puzzle game that also integrates the joy of assembling some monstrosity out of whatever is on hand.\nAt its core, Mars First Logistics is a game about transporting oddly-shaped, awkwardly heavy, or fragile objects from point A to point B. You unlock new parts for your Mars rover as you finish contracts and your designs evolve over time to incorporate new parts and articulating joints. This may seem intimidating but the game does something brilliant in that it gives you some pre-fabricated designs to perform a specific task, but many of them are flawed in some particular way. Because of that, you end up making tweaks to the existing designs to solve these flaws and in effect end up teaching yourself a lot of the fundamentals of the game, which generalizes to anything you create in the future. Rebuilds are free and pull from your existing stock of parts, so you can always re-tool and make something incredibly specific but incredibly effective for transporting one good or another. I found myself enjoying it in the same way I enjoy a game like Satisfactory, but with the potential of added humor when some bugshit monstrosity rover you slapped together fails in a spectacular way. The part variety is great and the ceiling of complexity for designs you can create is shockingly high; just check the most upvoted posts in the Steam Workshop if you want to see some truly impressive stuff.\n8. Keep Driving I think that anyone who’s played games for a while has a personal favorite that didn’t exactly light up the charts or sell like gangbusters, but has a certain indescribable vibe that resonates with you deeply. Keep Driving is one of those rare games for me, a fun enough game that is elevated into my personal pantheon of excellence by virtue of theme and presentation. It does an excellent job of distilling the feeling of being a young person who just wants to hit the road and be anywhere but here. You pick a car, a character background, and an objective, crank the tunes, and start solving some matching puzzles and managing your resources (car durability, gas, tiredness) carefully.\nGrowing up in a very rural and very non-walkable area of Pennsylvania, getting my learner’s permit at 16 years old was incredibly freeing. Once I finished my requisite hours with one of my parents in the passenger seat and got my junior license I immediately became the chauffeur for my friend group by default. My ride was a hand-me-down 1999 Chevy Lumina, a tank of a sedan my friends eventually took to calling the “Red Fury.” I vividly remember one night when I was driving home from my high school girlfriend’s house doing 55 miles per hour on a dark county route, when a massive deer leapt out of the darkness and into the road ahead of me. With no time for me to react, the car barrelled into the deer which bounced violently off the hood and was flung off the opposite side of the highway. Panicked, I pulled over and checked the status of the deer (it did not survive the collision) and then checked the hood of the car which had no damage beside some chipped paint. It survived several incidents like that which created an air of legend around it, but ironically after we sold it to a neighbor in the late 00’s her daughter totaled it within the span of a month (fortunately she walked away totally OK). Wildlife collisions and its later fate aside, it also played a supporting role in a lot of my best memories from my hometown. During the summers my friends and I would load up our massive desktop PCs and CRT monitors in its trunk and have a roving mini-LAN Party (ah, to be nerds in a time when the internet kinda sucked), posting up in one friend’s basement or living room for a few days and then moving onto someone else’s house before we overstayed our welcome. I have such fond memories of those times, as well as the handful of occasions when we’d make a longer road trip to one of the nearby cities that actually had worthwhile things to do. I loved that car for what it represented and all the fond memories associated with it.\nKeep Driving captures the feeling of automobile wanderlust immaculately, the need to strike out on your own and make your own unique experiences with the fresh eyes of youth. The gameplay is pretty straightforward but it gives you lots of choice in terms of where to go, what pace to set, and even which ultimate objective you want to chase to end your run. You might run in a rally race, or take a cross-country trip to visit your ailing grandmother, or stick to the default path of attending the big concert all your friends are going to. Maybe it’s simply precision-targeted at my own nostalgia, but I still believe the game captures something really unique for a video game.\n7. Blue Prince Puzzle gamers have been eating good in the last few years. There are so many great puzzle titles releasing that playing all of them has been an impossible task for me (I\u0026rsquo;ll get to Golden Idol, Seance of Blake Manor, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes eventually). But the one that I did play and made my entire month of April disappear into a fevered haze was Blue Prince.\nOn its surface, Blue Prince is a curious combination of a puzzle game and a roguelite. You draft 3 different floorplans whenever you open a door in the mansion of Mt. Holly, and that room gets placed on a 5x9 grid of the mansion which you fill in over the course of a run. But Blue Prince is far deeper than it initially seems, eventually revealing some truly absurd meta-puzzles which, when solved, break the whole game wide open. You eventually come to know Mt. Holly, its various rooms, and how they interlock on a deep level, and that mastery allows you to gradually bend the randomness of the roguelite structure in your favor. One early meta-puzzle in particular had me putting an array of various screenshots into MS Paint and annotating them with red text like some sort of mad conspiracist wielding red string. The madder part, however, was that I was actually on exactly the right track and it unlocked several new areas and gave me clues for the next set of puzzles. It is chock-full of well-hidden secrets and obscure interactions; it rewards creative thought and careful observation.\nBlue Prince is the type of game I’ve seen others refer to as a “notebook game,” one where keeping meticulous out-of-game notes and organized screenshots pays dividends. For certain that’s not for everybody, but if you are that kind of dedicated puzzle sicko there’s a very good chance this game is laser-targeted at you. Developer Tonda Ros took almost 8 years to develop it; looking at it initially your thought might be “it took EIGHT years to develop this?” but after getting waist deep into its mysteries that thought will certainly morph into “it ONLY took eight years to develop this?”\n6. Hades II Anyone that truly knows me knows that I am not an especially excitable person. Even when experiencing joy and satisfaction, it takes something truly momentous to get me to audibly or visibly react to something with excitement. So all that having been established, seeing the Hades II trailer for the first time made me pop the FUCK off, standing up out of my chair and saying “holy shit, it\u0026rsquo;s a sequel?”\nOnce early access launched I followed my usual protocol of buying it, playing a bit, and then sitting on it until the final release. I’ve since finished the game (though haven’t hit the epilogue yet), and I’m happy to report that Hades II is a very competently-made and satisfying sequel, even if not all elements of it are a slam dunk. Mechanically it more than justifies its existence, adding a whole new set of weapons, a changed Cast that allows for crowd control, and charged Omega Attacks that add variety to the combat. The design of the god boons and how they synergize is as good as its predecessor and perhaps better in some ways. The presentation is fantastic, with Supergiant’s art design being as sharp as ever and composer Darren Korb’s soundtrack exploring new subgenres and blowing the doors clean off during the game’s tense boss fights.\nThere has been much, much discourse about how the game ends and how people have been displeased with it. Without going into spoilers, I do think that the ending suffered from a lack of appropriate setup even though thematically I think it fits well with the themes of the first Hades. I’m not dramatic enough to say that it ruined the game for me (many people have already gone there), but I found its ending to be moderately weaker when compared to its predecessor. If you enjoyed the first game I still recommend Hades II without hesitation.\n5. ARC Raiders A late addition to this list, ARC Raiders climbed positions rapidly until finally breaching the top 5. It must be noted that this is a PvPvE Extraction Shooter, a genre I typically have no affection for. There are people in my life that have pitched Escape From Tarkov to me on multiple occasions to absolutely zero success. Despite that, the game’s excellent retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic aesthetic and the fact that my friends were interested in squadding up and giving it a try ultimately won me over.\nThe first thing I’ll say is that the game can be damn confusing at first. There are several currencies and a boatload of different bits, bobs, and doodads to loot that all serve different purposes. The first few hours can be merciless as other players can choose to ruin your day by sniping you from a vantage point or rushing you down as you desperately try to extract with your pack full of scrap metal, old world souvenirs, and various fruits and fungi. Once you get the lay of the land and the game’s systems start to click though, what is there is a thrilling and fascinating sandbox where individuals or small squads come into conflict while trying to chase loot, complete quests, destroy the robotic ARC, or simply hunt other raiders. This is one of those very systematic games that is a machine purpose-built for generating memorable interactions and clippable moments; you need only to look at gaming TikTok or Instagram to see how much this ARC Raiders has taken off. ARC Raiders is far more approachable and far less punishing than any of its contemporaries or predecessors in the genre and creates a great tension between the threat of the deadly ARC machines and the threat of another player convincing you they’re friendly and then ruthlessly shooting you in the back and looting your pack for a pistol, a rubber duck, and a handful of olives. It definitely isn’t for everyone, but it 100% deserves the moment in the sun it’s having right now. In a less stacked year, I think this could have made my top 3.\n4. Dispatch In one of the later Chapters of Dispatch, a sudden emergency forces the main character and superhero dispatcher Robert Robertson III (yes that is his real name) to call in his team of misfit ex-villians-turned-heroes to deal with the situation in the dead of night. One, the demoness Malevola, drops in late and apologizes because her phone was in DND mode. Another, the hulking rock beast Golem (voiced by rapper Yung Gravy) shows up high out of his mind on gummies he took to fall asleep and tells the team in his slow gravelly voice “Okay but, just so you y’all know, I don’t think I’m makin’ memories right now.” Dispatch is full to the brim of incredible character moments just like this.\nTelling a story that stands out and feels fresh in the already-crowded superhero genre is a difficult task in 2025. Though properties like the MCU movies and Amazon’s The Boys ostensibly share the same genre, they couldn’t differ more in both intention and tone. You would think that we’ve seen the full gamut of superhero stories that can be told, but Dispatch truly does feel like it’s something unique with its angle of superhero workplace comedy. It manages to be both earnest and mature in its storytelling, featuring many laugh-out-loud moments and emotional gut punches. The stacked voice cast turns in phenomenal performances and features Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul as the main character alongside veteran voice actors and streamers, musicians, and influencers. Even if you suffer from superhero fatigue like me, I think Dispatch is a breath of fresh air.\n3. The Alters Where Keep Driving was all about capturing a very specific experience of youth, The Alters instead explores something that I believe to be universal for every human on earth: the experience of pondering the “what-ifs” of life. What if you’d never met the person who’d become your partner or spouse? What if you’d chosen a different major in college? What if you’d never left your hometown or had a different relationship with your parents? The possibilities are endless and the act of thinking about them makes one realize that had any individual decision or stroke of luck gone differently, life could be unrecognizably different from the one you know. It\u0026rsquo;s a pretty humbling thought.\nI’m a sucker for this sort of navel-gazing introspection and thinking about the possibilities. The Alters uses this to craft a sci-fi narrative that brings its main character (literally) face to face with many of these possibilities. Jan Dolski is a crew member on a deep space expedition to find a rare element called rapidium that could forever change life on Earth. It is unique for its properties that, when harnessed, allow organisms to grow and develop in a matter of hours rather than years. Jan awakes from deep cryosleep to find that he is the only survivor of this doomed expedition, having crash-landed on the surface of an alien planet and lacking the crucial know-how needed to repair or operate the giant wheel-like mobile base the group was intended to use for exploration. Out of necessity he uses the base’s quantum computer and some extracted rapidium to create an alternate version of himself that has a simulated alternate life path and the crucial knowledge that can help him survive. This alter, the technician, is only the first of many he will need to create. All of Jan’s Alters awaken with memories of a full life lived up until this point even though they never actually existed in this world. Some Alters share a common life path with Jan Prime until relatively late in his life, while others deviate much earlier during his childhood and are almost unrecognizable if not for the shared genetics and some mannerisms. They work together (sometimes reluctantly) in the name of surviving and returning rapidium to Earth.\nIt’s fascinating stuff, but I also found the layers of light base management, exploration, and socializing with your alters to be engaging. Keeping everyone fed and happy is a paramount concern, but you are forced to balance that against the ever-pressing need to keep the base in top shape and moving fast enough to stay ahead of the deadly radiation emitted by the nearby star. Some alters may be upset with your choices or the things you say to them and refuse to work, forcing you to adapt to ever-changing circumstances and make some agonizing decisions in the name of survival. The conversational layer and the game’s mechanics work in harmony and are consistently surprising from chapter to chapter. Praise must be given to the script and voice actor as well; each version of Jan feels distinct with their own personality quirks and inner demons to overcome. If this sounds at all interesting and you\u0026rsquo;ve ever asked yourself those \u0026ldquo;what ifs,\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m practically begging you to check out The Alters, because in a year full of other incredible games it doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem like it\u0026rsquo;s gotten nearly enough accolades.\n2. Hollow Knight : Silksong And here we are, at the only other game that realistically could have taken the top spot on the list this year. I enjoyed the original Hollow Knight well enough for sure. I thought it was a great game and among the top echelon of Metroidvanias. But where I was content to say Hollow Knight was great, I’m inclined to say its sequel Silksong is a masterpiece.\nSilksong was originally envisioned as expansion content for the original game, (“Hornet DLC When?” was a common refrain in the game’s community) and its admittedly rough initial difficulty curve probably speaks to that. As a protagonist, however, Hornet is distinct from her predecessor both mechanically and from the angle that she actually has dialogue and her own thoughts that she expresses to the residents of Pharloom. She is far from the empty vessel that her predecessor the Knight was. This serves to make the game’s plot and worldbuilding less obtuse and more accessible. After a few early ability upgrades Hornet comes into her own as a playable protagonist, dashing across the expansive and beautifully-drawn areas of the underground and striking foes quickly and acrobatically. The work done to make her moveset gel with the level design is obvious from just how good it feels to navigate the map, and there are tons of well-hidden secrets to find that will reward close attention to the environments.\nAs I alluded to earlier, Silksong is not an easy game. Many have expressed frustration with the initial difficulty curve and how difficult certain bosses can be, but this is the kind of challenge a platformer sicko like me relishes. I\u0026rsquo;m glad they stuck to their vision and didn\u0026rsquo;t compromise, even though that will likely cause some people to bounce off of it. At times it feels like a fast-paced 2D soulslike and mastering the boss encounters was extremely satisfying. There are rare encounters in some games that force you to lock in and eventually reach a state of blissful harmony with the game. When that happens, suddenly the boss that was previously bullying you isn’t hitting you anymore. The download is complete and you dodge deftly and strike back viciously. Your foe lies defeated and you’re left with a flood of endorphins as you come down from that trance-like state. That feeling cannot be beaten. Most games are lucky if they achieve even one or two of these moments; Silksong had enough that I’d really have to think about it to come up with a grand total, definitely more than I could count on one hand. I don’t often play games to 100% completion, but it was achievable enough that I did it here and don’t regret that time spent in the least. I truly didn’t want it to end. Bravo to Team Cherry for delivering something amazing, it was well worth the 7-year wait.\n1. Clair Obscur : Expedition 33 At the time of this writing, Clair Obscur : Expedition 33 has just swept every award it was nominated for at the Golden Joystick awards (including Ultimate GOTY) and is currently the favorite to also win GOTY at The Game Awards, to the point where people are jokingly referring to this year’s awards show as “The Clair Obscur Awards” (Update : the prophecy is fulfilled). So is this game actually deserving of all the hype and accolades?\nIf its position at the top of this list didn\u0026rsquo;t already make that apparent, the answer is an enthusiastic YES. When making an end-of-year list there’s a normal human tendency (recency bias) to more highly rate things that are fresh in the memory. E33 released in April of this year but it made such an immediate impression that it shot immediately up to my #1 spot and it was going to be hard to knock down. A few strong contenders came along during the rest of 2025 but in the end, none succeeded in unseating the king.\nE33 succeeds by being set in a world that is wildly creative and truly unique, a vision of warped Belle Epoque France that is colorful and novel. From the jump it wins you over with its excellent worldbuilding, believable characterization, and deep humanity. The backdrop is a beautiful but slowly-dying world in which the oldest of humanity are erased from existence in a shower of petals by a demigoddess called the Paintress, and the age of erasure ticks down mercilessly every year. I cannot stress enough how masterful the worldbuilding and character development is even in the first 30 to 60 minutes of the game. I typically start any game expecting it to be kind of a slog while the necessary exposition, character introductions, and tutorials are spoon-fed to me. I always try to give a game some grace in the opening hours based on that expectation. This grace, however, was not necessary for Expedition 33. The world and characters captivated me almost immediately, and the combat starts engaging and stays engaging by introducing active parrying and a build customization system that continually opens up and gets more involved as the game progresses. The narrative is perfectly-paced, not overstaying its welcome and wrapping up perfectly in a package half the length of most big-budget RPGs. And that’s not even commenting about how gorgeous the game is visually, or how the soundtrack elevates the mood with its wistful melodies and soaring, layered vocals. Although very different mechanically, in presentation and theme it reminds me a lot of another favorite of mine, Nier : Automata (and that comparison is VERY high praise).\nI had a very active imagination as a kid. I also voraciously consumed game previews and concept art, which resulted in me often extrapolating and expanding upon those images I saw, dreaming up complex systems and beautiful graphics that were far beyond the realistic capabilities of hardware of that time. I think a good example is this particular concept art for Final Fantasy XIV\u0026rsquo;s Realm Reborn overhaul with its dynamic action, rich colors, gorgeous UI and soft cinematic depth of field. It\u0026rsquo;s gorgeous without a doubt but the final result was of course something much more practical and achievable by the dev team. Those games that sparked my imagination frequently DID end up being excellent, but never quite lived up to my imagined ideal. Clair Obscur, however, looks like it could have fallen out of one of these teenage daydreams. It is art in motion. The care put into every UI flourish, every bombastic animation, and every line of the excellent voice performances is immediately apparent. I recently saw someone on social media describe Une vie à t\u0026rsquo;aimer, a piece of music a late boss encounter is set to, as potentially being this generation’s One-Winged Angel and honestly I can see the merit in that.\nSo yeah, Clair Obscur : Expedition 33 is my #1 game of 2025 without a doubt. Typically I’m kind of annoyed whenever a single game sweeps multiple award categories (tons of other great games deserve recognition!), but E33 is completely deserving. I can’t wait to see the works of art that follow and are inspired by Sandfall’s masterpiece. For those who come after.\n","date":"2025-12-13T00:00:00Z","image":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/goty2025/2025-cover_hu_f9599db464a3595d.png","permalink":"https://mikes-musings.net/post/goty2025/","title":"Games of the Year - 2025"}]