Weekly Update 2025-06-29
I'd rather be Intergalactic Fishing
This is going to be a long one - I played a lot this week, and did very little actual work, which is maybe the ideal outcome for me. I'd rather have a lot to think about than a lot to show for it. Is that good for you? Only if you like reading snippets about completely random games you'll never have any interest in. Buckle up!
Game Releases and Updates
Splintered chapter 3a and new classes - this update to the Randomizer RPG has basically doubled the amount of gear, with the new items essentially forming three new 'class' archetypes for characters to follow. I've so far only really played with the Dragon Hunter items, which pair nicely with early spawns of dragon type enemies you can grind to improve their inherent buffs. I'm not sure why chapter 3 is being split into multiple parts, but the pace and quality of updates has kept me playing throughout Early Access so far.
Stalker 2 patch - another big update, this time addressing some things that really bothered me when I played it earlier this year. The ability to harvest parts from mutants might make it slightly less annoying when some crappy dogs spawn on you and force you to waste a bunch of ammo and durability for no gain, but much more important is the fact that reload animations are broken up into phases and can be partially interrupted without forcing you to restart the whole procedure if you need to dodge an attack or use a stim. Still not willing to replay this yet, but at least they're making some progress towards it being less miserable to play.
Combined Arms 1.07 - I last played this freeware fan RTS a year ago, on patch 1.03, and every update I kind of scroll through the changes and my eyes glaze over. It's based on the OpenRA engine and has five full factions from all the mainline Command and Conquer games, plus sub-factions, upgrade trees that transform units into different forms, many of which have specific usable abilities… there's too much going on. But it is pretty fun to play around with, and it has a massive campaign that's been expanded multiple times. I just wish I knew what units did what.
Synthetik 2 Grand Operations Mega Update - I never quite clicked with Synthetik 2 the way I did with the first game, but, you know, it's been in Early Access for a few years now, and this is probably the biggest update so far. Just about every aspect of the game has been touched, and skimming through the novel length patch notes, enough popped out at me that I gave it a few rounds this week. It's certainly better, and I'll probably take it for a spin a bit more often than I have been, but I think it needs a little more love still.
Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades - remember last week when I meant to try out the new night vision gear and just played normal Take and Hold instead? This week's alpha release was a specific darkened version of the Take and Hold map, with a new character that claimed 'stealth progression' and obviously designed to let you engage with the headsets and scopes in a tactical setting. Or that's what I thought - he actually just starts with a flashlight, which you have to hold CQC style or shove in your pocket to see where you're going and who you're shooting… which is fine, but I had to turn on the item spawner so I could just give myself a set of NV goggles.
The State of Games Played
I advanced my new captain in Approaching Infinity to the point where they could finally unlock the Pirate Buccaneer officer, and promptly decided I would rather have gone for one of the other new classes… lucky for me I then underestimated a swarm of Vordalene ships defending their station on my quest to start the Eater victory. How was I supposed to know they were using Blister Beams? Nothing I could do. At least now I can start all over and unlock the Gruff Hunt-Leader instead.
During the Steam Fishing Game Sale [yes, I didn't make that up] I was recommended a bizarre looking game called simply Intergalactic Fishing, and after nodding appreciatively at its dated and rudimentary graphics, I scrolled down to find a bunch of reviewers claiming with apparent sincerity that it was one of the best fishing games out there. I picked it up and found that, once you get through a bit of onboarding, it really is pretty fantastic. The conceit is that you and every other fisherman in the galaxy is able to freely teleport between ponds on dozens of planets, each inhabited by a small variety of pretty normal Earth-style fish, and you have to learn how to catch each one.
What makes it really engaging is how much surprising variety there is in your goals and ways of making money, which you need for upgrades to your gear. The most straightforward is catching and selling fish - some fish are called out as worth more than others, some can grow to impressive size that fetches a price worth the effort of reeling them in, and some smaller fish markets you can sell to will pay a premium for a rotating wish list of varieties. Or you can pursue bounties on specific species, or teleport to randomly generated lakes and sell the new data on the black market. You can even join constantly cycling tournaments, usually set in a single lake with everyone involved trying to fill their holds with the biggest fish. Then there's a treasure hunt, a main story that introduces you to new mechanics, tons of modules, and a mechanic for hand-tweaking your lure to change its properties and better attract your mark.
Then at the start of the Steam Summer Sale, I picked up a few more things I've had my eye on [though I'll only mention the ones I played already]. The first was Moonscars, a game that looks and plays a bit like Blasphemous but less Spanish Catholic and more monochrome. I've heard good things about it on and off since its release, and though the demo I played pre-release didn't blow me away as I remember, I figured it's time to give it a shot. I've gotten a wee ways in, and I've found it at least tolerable, if not immediately revelatory. It does look nice, in an odd sort of way, and the parries and special attacks are satisfying when they do land. The story is trying a bit too hard, though, and the very first voice acted line cracked me up pretty bad.
I also bought Underspace and took it out for a spin - this game is very openly an imitation of Freelancer, a space combat/trading/flight game from 2000. It has the exact same high-speed lanes, planetary docking rings, random mission types, and mouse-driven flight controls, but with much less budget and much more humor. Again, the voice acting is not very good - about 90% of it is non-existent, with a popup notice that the text is a placeholder for future voice acting, which includes a ton of mission-critical information that's being told to you while you're trying to fly or even dogfight, and the bits that are in are rough and not even leveled correctly.
But it is still in Early Access, it is very reminiscent of Freelancer, and most importantly, it is trying to do a few new things. One mechanic introduced in the first mission, as an optional second objective, are massive space storms that blow in, ramping up the difficulty and spawning new enemies unless you decide to dive to their heart, fight a giant monster defending their core, and dispel the thing yourself. The game's got technical issues out the wazoo, from terrible pop-in to your wingmen rear-ending you every time you engage your cruise control, but it might be fun enough already to get me through the pain.
And guess what? I also played a few demos this week. I just can't stop myself.
First up, a game I saw featured on Katya Ryabova's recent post about the Toronto XP Game Summit, and was curious enough about to find and download, Ambrosia Sky. This is a first person adventure game with a little bit of Powerwash Simulator mechanics - the main obstacle in your way are fungal blooms that choke corridors, poison the air, and sometimes conduct electricity, shorting out critical infrastructure in the space stations you're sent into, and the only way to clean them up is by spraying them with a hose. Your sprayer has a little bit of an overheat meter, but infinite, uh, antifungal juice or whatever.
The first mission is very much a tutorial, and teaches you how to fight fungus and find your way around. The game has some promise of verticality, with switches and electrical shorts happening up on the ceiling, a grappling hook that you can use to yank yourself around, and even a zero-G area that you can clean up and turn the artificial gravity on and off in at will. It's not very hard - the main 'skill-based' trick is that the fungus has fruiting bodies that you can precisely trim out without hitting directly to collect the materials, which are then used in a somewhat underwhelming skill tree. Other than that you just make your way, cleaning up moldy hallways and hosing the lightning stuff off doors you need to use. I did really like how the lights turn on once you relieve them of their shorts. Wait, that sounded wrong!
The second mission seems a little bit more free-form, and has you grappling your way through air ducts and around larger rooms to find your way into a private residence. It also unlocks two alternate sprayer types - flammable and electric, neither of which I could tell how to use or even if I was supposed to use them in the mission. The first mission ended with a Descent-style countdown and escape, where you have to furiously blast fungus growing to cut off your route, which wasn't super challenging but did leave me a bit disappointed when the same didn't happen in the second level and I just had a quiet walk back. Overall, the game has kept my interest, and though it might wind up a little shallow, a little clunky, and too sentimental, I'm looking forward to how it turns out at release.
I gave the demo for Project Turboblast a shot after some urging from my friend Cabbagepots - it's a racing game primarily focused on drift boosting and zigzagging through boost pads. It's also very fast, very unforgiving, and very difficult. It reminded me a lot of F-Zero, with the ability to dip into your car's health pool to perform straight-line boosts, then recover that health with drifts around the corners. Presumably you can even ram other racers enough to blow them up, but I think everyone respawns on death anyway. There's also a 'trick' mechanic you can do while airborne but the tracks in the demo had very little in the way of verticality and no obstacles to force you to use the hop button, and I couldn't manage to land a trick to save my life. I gave up on it - maybe if you're a seasoned F-Zero fan you can wrestle this game to the ground and get some fun out of it, but it's not for me.
Then I tried the demo for Bloodbreaker: Labyrinth of the Witch. I had high hopes for this one, especially after a starting sequence that is directly stolen from SotN but even more anime. Unfortunately, the game kind of falls apart once you start playing it. It reminds me of the 2D Bloodrayne game, where you have to weaken certain enemies and then drink their blood to regain resources, but the movement, combat, and collision are equal parts unreliable and unbelievably stiff. Your primary attack is an insanely rapid three hit combo that locks you in place and occurs as fast as you can mash your button, but still isn't fast enough for you to get more than one round in before needing to dodge any enemy capable of attacking. And that's if it works.
I completely stone-walled on the very first miniboss, and every time I died to him I had to start the several minute long level over from scratch. Not to brag, I'm alright at games like this, but I swear to God I could not beat this thing. I gave it like five or six attempts before finally taking Bloodbreaker out back and sending it to the big farm upstate.
Next up was NUSNUR, which is actually a demo I've had around for a while and never got around to trying. NUSNUR is an RPG with a very, VERY long winded and almost incoherent story, with multiple several-hundred-year time skips just in the first few bits. The actual gameplay is mostly turn-based combat, with a mix of Undertale style bullet-dodging defense and incredibly overcomplicated skill usage. Your main character is unique in being able to use every 'color' of skill, or at least more than one at the start, and every combat turn involves swapping to the correct color, choosing a skill from the selection available for that color, optionally performing some other actions like… badmouthing your opponent for some reason, and then confirming your choices.
On the face of it, it's a kind of interesting system - some colors are more offensive, some have defensive or restorative or utility skills, and each color affects what special ability you have in the Undertale dodging minigame that turn. Unfortunately it's simply too slow - both in pushing through all the menus and also with high health pools for even basic enemies and high miss rates for attacks. Clair Obscur has probably spoiled me pretty badly on turn-based combat, but even if I hadn't played that this year, NUSNUR would still be frustrating. I'm still curious where the story will go [it seems authentically outsider art if you know what I mean] but I've got a few other quirky amateur JRPGs to work through before I bite this hook.
Finally, I spotted THREE VERSES3 on Exploring The Games's article Indie Oddities & Unexpected Delights: Five Games, Five Vibes and thought it, too, looked authentically insane. I downloaded and played through the demo, and, yeah, it's pretty wild, but also a bit shallow. You explore the world in a first-person dungeon crawler perspective, with clunky tile-based movement and turning, and the game presents with a very retro PSX graphics style. Your objective is to find three people trying to complete poems, then find some divine source that will let you reveal the final verse to them. In order to get the verse, you usually have to do a bit of adventuring, in one case slaughtering a horde of gargoyles fucking up a public restroom, in another solving a maze.
The second 'half' of the demo is a bit more tightly constrained, and has you mostly walking back and forth between two workers repeating whatever words the last one kindly left fully capitalized when they spoke to you. And then you have to play dice until you win. At least it has this awesome dakimakura you can put hands on.
Neither of these parts are very good, and though they're certainly bizarre and stylish, the zaniness feels put on and inauthentic. Almost every 'puzzle' devolves to you writing down something in all caps, or which you are DIRECTLY told to write down as a code [the game does have a little notepad you can pull up at any time to type these in so you don't have to physically write anything, but the input is clunky and doesn't display very nicely] and the combat is mindnumbing. You get warned not to fight the gargoyles until you have all three 'attack spells' but you can get by just fine without them by just bashing them with melee attacks and casting heal. [if you want a better game where you attack by furiously typing in commands repeatedly, no, I wasn't about to suggest Typing of the Dead for the millionth time - I was actually going to say Midnight Protocol, which was also one of the best 'hacking simulator' games I've ever played] The most frustrating thing is that the movement is pretty unreliable in a way that an actual tile-based dungeon crawler wouldn't be - you seem to actually slide a certain distance in the direction you move, and I got caught on shit a shocking amount. I will say the game got a couple chuckles out of me, but otherwise it was pretty disappointing.
Writing
That's all to say that, no, I did not in fact manage to finish my next essay in time for publishing. I have plenty of excuses, including that I tweaked my back pretty bad at some point and couldn't comfortably sit at my writing desk for long periods most of the week. But the main reason is that I kept adding to it and didn't feel like trying to rush it in the few more days I have. I definitely was not spending most of my time Intergalactic Fishing and Approaching Infinity, that would be irresponsible. Anyway, I definitely won't be publishing my next essay until I return from my trip, which will be a little more than a week, but I will still be working on it off and on, and might even have a Weekly Update next week, published almost entirely from my Steam Deck most likely.
Other
My caffeine break went about as well as I could have hoped - one day of mild headaches with just a cup of black tea, then one day sober with slightly worse headaches, and then the better part of a week totally fine. Only problem is my need for hot beverages has meant I've crushed my supply of herbal teas. I've just finished my first cup of coffee in a week, and am now enjoying my second. Thankfully I wasn't nearly as tolerant as I have been in the past, and though I know these resets are supposed to be longer, I'm not really looking to turboblast my neurons with total receptor confusion or cut back to two cups a week for maximum psychoactive response utility bullshit. I just wanted a cup or two in the morning to work better than a splash of cold water on my face, and I think I've accomplished that much. See you in a week, or maybe a bit more.