Weekly Update 2025-09-14
Things are different now that I can play as the girl bug
Game Releases and Updates
Into the Radius 2 update beta - VR Stalker-like's latest beta build has split most of the guns into multiple pieces, which allows you to swap out parts, buy individual pieces, and tweak a ton of stats while having a lot more flexibility than just the unmodified and modded versions of each gun. Presumably this will also mean you can find damaged guns you normally couldn't buy outright yet and tear them down and buy replacement parts to fix them up, which would solve a lot of the gating problems the game has. I'm already pretty excited, and I haven't even gotten to play with the newly added guns because of course this update makes save files incompatible again.
Toziuha Night: Order of the Alchemists home stretch - the latest update for this DSvania inspired platformer is purportedly the last major one, and the game is still on track for an October release according to the developers. I'm really looking forward to starting a new file to play through the complete game, and pretty glad I wound up not playing it too much in early access.
The Little Tomb: The Maholova Club and the Search for a Dead Body release - an insane title for an insane game pitch from a probably insane developer. I covered this game’s demo during June’s Steam Next Fest. I really don't know how CAVYHOUSE is still operational with game after game that I feel like I'm the only one who's ever played or even heard of. That said, as curious as I am about this one, I still have to play the copy of the last CAVYHOUSE game I bought, The Sealed Ampoule, which is unique among CAVYHOUSE games for having obvious gameplay.
KCD2 DLC and patch - I meant it when I said I wanted to finish and write up Kingdom Come 2 before the next DLC so I wouldn't be compelled to play it. But I did want to mention my favorite line in the patch notes - "Prisoners in the pillory now react to being hit by a pebble."
The State of Games Played
I'm really not much of a trend follower, I don't pin my ego or my reputation on being the first to comment on something, and I'm pretty good about not catching FOMO fever, which helps me keep my game playing and writing rotation endearingly schizophrenic and detached. So I wasn't really planning on getting and playing Hollow Knight: Silksong right away - it's not like it's a huge financial investment, or would be imminently knocked down by a sale, and frankly I have plenty of stuff I'm just as happy to play as the indie darling of the moment.
But I was lucky enough to have received it as a gift, and there's not really any sense in NOT playing it at that point, so I have. I don't have much to say about it, though, and certainly nothing anyone active in the community hasn't heard a million times. It feels pretty good to play, [at least once you unlock the sprint] it's got some neat new mechanics, and the game looks and sounds just as good as the original Hollow Knight. But it is just Hollow Knight again under all the poofy skirts and journalistic pearl clutching about difficulty settings. I'm enjoying it, but it's going into the juggle with everything else, and I'll take my sweet time with it, so don't expect a write-up terribly soon. [unless it's way shorter than I think]
Because while Silksong might be the game everyone and their dog can't shut up about this month, Siralim Ultimate is the game I can't stop booting up and thinking about. While working on my write-up for it, I repeatedly got sucked in for grinding sessions, upgrading my first Avatar beast and unlocking another one, creeping a little closer to the final major mechanic of the game [Guilds] and even sitting down and building out a totally new party for my favorite specialization [Engineer] which I'm pretty happy with. I felt a little bad about shoving Siralim to the backburner for a few months, but I think I needed the time away to come back and appreciate what it does well beneath all the grinding and obtuse combat logs.
I did a couple more runs in Shadowed: The Demon Castle of Ooe, and failed most of them quite miserably. Intellectually, I know I'm just being too greedy in the early maps, and taking on risks I don't have the resources to manage, but I'm in the phase where I just feel like I've gotten worse and worse the more I play. Hopefully I can break through and finish a run, because I'm still really enjoying the game, I just haven't been able to fully absorb its lessons.
Played the first hour and a half of Caput Mortum, and man, is it a joy. I'm pretty indifferent to 'horror,' especially in games, where it usually just means occasional jump scares and otherwise terrible visuals and game design. Caput Mortum is genuinely different, and feels like the sort of thing that could've existed alongside King's Field. The horror is less Newgrounds Screamer Flash and more Penumbra jiggling door handles as a low-poly monster rounds a corner, the visuals are strong without being obnoxious or edgy, and the sound design is good enough to get a jump out of me without resorting to actual jump scares. This is exactly the sort of thing I'm okay with setting Silksong aside for.
I also played a couple demos this week - no reason, nothing going on, just saw some that I was curious about and decided to knock them out.
Children of the Spring - another top-down… brawler? I don't really know what to call these, but you get a sword and you do a couple swipes at enemies and it feels pretty bad. I eventually got a wand that let me shoot a couple lightning bolts before going back to slapping stuff with a sword but nothing about it [except maybe the character designs] gave me any hope for or interest in the full game.
Blinding Lite - this action platformer seems to draw very obvious inspiration from Shovel Knight for its stage design and general looks, but it also doesn't look as good or have anywhere near as good of stages. The gameplay is totally different too - you are a bird with incredibly fast movement [too fast for the graphic style frankly] an air-dash, and a separate diagonal dive attack that lets you bounce off stuff [just like Silksong] and you have to combine those to ping-pong through the stages. It's too visually busy to confidently tell what's going on at a glance, which means you have to stop and lose your momentum, and the combat is pretty awful with only your dive attack and a hilariously short-ranged melee option. I can maybe see someone getting into this and trying to speedrun it [it has a timer going at all times in the UI] but I don't see many people, myself included, enjoying playing through it casually.
Bloodbreaker: Labyrinth of the Witch - I tried to play the demo of this a while ago and got totally stonewalled on the first boss. Scratch that, the first miniboss. Hell, maybe it was just a big enemy. Anyway, I was curious enough about it that I kept an eye on its updates, and a while back they mentioned they'd updated the demo to address some feedback, and I redownloaded it to give it a second shot. Well, I still died to that enemy initially, but to my relief there is now a respawn point just before it [originally dying there reset the demo progress entirely and sent you to the start of the mandatory tutorial stuff] so I was actually able to kill it and move on. At which point it turns out this game is also a roguelite? You have to move through a linear sequence of randomly chosen rooms to get to the boss, anyway, although I honestly didn't see that many different layouts or anything of particular interest. I did manage to get stuck and soft-locked, which is good. Not impressed with the combat, the platforming, or really any specific part of the game, but there's just something about it that keeps me from writing it off entirely.
Hordelord - wave-based arena shooter. And that's pretty much it. The one noteworthy gimmick is that you can teleport to surfaces with a glowing blue texture on them, gibbing any enemies along the way, but those surfaces only get revealed pretty late in the map and are placed about as inconveniently as possible for actually getting kills with them. More importantly, the guns feel like fucking shit, there's no impact, enemies just kind of slump over and stop animating when you blast them with a shotgun, it's miserable. Arena shooter with Vampire Survivors perk choices and weapon upgrades isn't a terrible idea by any means, but if you're going to give a player a shotgun in a video game it has to feel good to shoot or you have failed in your only mission as a developer.
Katanaut - 2D platformer with what legitimately may be the worst combat I've experienced in a long time. And I played this not long after Bloodbreaker. Your regular attacks launch you uncontrollably forward, meaning if you want to hit an enemy more than once, you have to constantly flip around, usually hurling yourself into an enemy attack, and even your light attack costs stamina. In a 2D game. Wow! That's a choice! You can change to a different melee weapon that has… less baked-in forward momentum, but the combat feels even more weak and feedback-less than in Hordelord.
Writing
When I wrote up the new Shinobi game, I wound up actually looking up the composers and mentioning them for probably the first time in a write-up, and it felt a little awkward. I usually don't have anything much to say about music, I don't play or follow any musicians or bands or composers, and writing about it in too specific terms makes me a little nervous, like I'm inherently unqualified to address it. But I did think both composers' backgrounds were relevant to the musical style of the game, so I poured over what info I could find and tried to make sure they really did work on what I thought they had and for some reason, somewhere in the back of my mind, I still worried I was somehow completely wrong about, like, hearing one of the tracks from the game and immediately thinking of Streets of Rage. I don't know why I'm so self-conscious about music commentary in particular. Does this still qualify for the Writing section or have I gone off-topic? Who cares? You're not gonna catch me worrying about that sort of shit.
I actually have the Siralim Ultimate write-up pretty much finished, but I don't really like releasing things on the weekend so I'll squirt it out Monday. It's a big one, probably too big, but as Siralim is mostly mechanics, I didn't feel like I really needed to cut out a lot of just mechanical discussion.
Other
There are a few more little indie releases in the next month or so I'm looking forward to, October looks like it'll be a busy one, with Daimon Blades, Battlefield 6, and that cool looking Terminator 2D game, plus another Next Fest, and who even knows what's eventually going to make it out before New Years. 2025 legitimately is shaping up to be one of the best years for new releases, at least for my taste, in decades, and I'm extremely relieved I finally broke down and made this page this year. I'm about as good with gratitude as I am with writing about music, but I'd like to thank everyone who's decided my endless droning about games few people care about is worth checking out occasionally.