Weekly Update 2025-10-05
A Substack for Simpletons
This week is another calm before a storm, and when I wasn’t busy otherwise, [and I was pretty busy] I played a lot of only a few games. Get ready for a slim update.
Game Releases and Updates
Not much has released or gotten a major update this week that I really feel like talking about. Not too unusual, as this is during a major Steam sale, and new things usually don’t drop right in the middle of those. To make up for that, I’d like to try something a little different and sum up the recent update history for some games I haven’t had the opportunity to mention much.
Devil Spire Falls has gotten its 13th content update this week, expanding the game’s faction system, including the ability to create your own faction and manage them by recruiting, promoting, and banishing NPCs. Since I stopped mentioning it in these weekly posts, the game been getting consistent major content overhauls touching on just about every part of the game - gear, enemies, locations, even the interface. I still haven’t seen anything that has sold me on jumping into yet another Early Access pile, but on a slow news week like this, I think it’s worth mentioning yet again that the game’s development genuinely seems to be chugging along respectably.
Dawnsbury Days, on the other hand, is a game I’ve already bought, and haven’t gotten around to trying yet for other reasons. It’s by all appearances a fairly dense and thorough translation of the tabletop Pathfinder 2E ruleset, one that has been getting its fair share of consistent updates, with patch notes that stretch on forever as the developers try to port as much of the sprawling d20 setting to a digital format and then troubleshoot all the quirks and bugs that result. And that breadth of content, or at least the appearance of it, has intimidated me slightly… do I really have the time to pour over potential feats and attribute scaling and everything that goes into making a character for a dense RPG right now? That’s not even scratching the surface of its mods, which, like Solasta, have added just about every conceivable class and specialization, along with custom encounters and scenarios for one-off adventures.
Well, in anticipation of its second full expansion, Dawnsbury Days has, just yesterday, added the Alchemist class to the base game, an archetype that speaks to me, and looks to have an impressive amount of complex utility. This might be the push I need to finally sit down and squint my way through an hour’s worth of character creation to get started.
Banquet for Fools, a followup to 2015’s Serpent in the Staglands, is a claymation-styled isometric RPG, and might really be up my alley… except I’ve put my foot down on playing it while it’s still in Early Access. It’s one thing to pick over a game mid-development if it’s gameplay-focused and holds up on frequent restarts, but I’ve had less enjoyment coming back to an RPG repeatedly over months or years long cycles. BfF is, however, nearing completion, with an early 2026 release date and some sizeable, consistent updates throughout the past year. I’m still resolved to hold out on playing the game until full release, but the updated demo might be worth checking out soon…
The State of Games Played
I underestimated how long it would take me to finish up Mystery of the Malign - more specifically, how long I would spend convinced I could track down every loose end completely unassisted. I spent several hours combing through the Goddard Public Museum, top to bottom, restarting and playing back through the game in its entirety, and then restarting once again to go more carefully through the first hour or so. While it was worth it in the end, I still tied myself up for much of the first part of the week on a game I just wrote up and don’t have much else to say about.
I then spent most of my limited free time in the second half of the week hopping into Tokyo Xtreme Racer, and ended up tearing through much of the new content - chapters 3 and 4 are now almost completely wrecked, and my new ‘97 NSX is out for blood and vengeance. I’m holding off on revisiting the VR enabled through the UEVR project until I’ve completed the story, and as I expected, some of the boss encounters are unbelievably brutal, so I probably have another week of chipping away at this until I’ve got a clear enough picture to write it up. In the meantime, enjoy this clip of me demolishing Devil Road Run.
Finally stopped chasing side content in Silksong and defeated the end boss… only to discover that the ‘Act 3’ I’d heard rumors about isn’t unlocked just by finishing the game, but by finishing the majority of the side quests. With a heavy heart and a fair amount of irritation, I went to work doing deliveries, [easier than the first game’s version] awful, awful enemy grinds [worse than the first game’s grinding] and a handful of decent optional areas and boss fights. I think I’m right about to finish this up and get started on whatever this third act entails, which had better be worth all this bull shit.
And I tried to get a bit further in Into the Radius 2, hoping to unlock more new weapons and play around with their new modular parts, but damn… it’s not easy. I have enemy spawns turned all the way down but the missions manually add enemies that aren’t affected by the difficulty tuning and they just shred me. At least the game looks nicer now.
Last but certainly not least, I got my way through the Hydroplant section of Abiotic Factor, unlocked some really fun new toys, and spent a lot of time just puttering around sprucing up my base and setting up Forward Operating branches, with a shelf of teleport units to take me around to key points and resource harvest locations. I feel like I’m playing Terraria for the first time again, and hopefully the endgame isn’t nearly as obnoxious. Some of these enemy types are annoying enough in solo mode already.
Writing
Mystery of the Malign is one of those games that’s a little hard to talk about in detail because it’s genuinely worth playing without spoilers. But I think I did a good job showcasing its charm and quality without ruining the experience for anyone who’s crazy enough to give it a try.
And just as I’d underestimated how deeply MotM would dig its claws into me, I underestimated pretty drastically how much effort my Genre Reveal post would take. For one thing, I do still plan on making it a whole series, which means I’m agonizing over the formatting and tone, wondering if I’m going to be able to keep it relatively consistent throughout the project. For another, I’m finding myself wanting to source more media, draw my own graphs, and just do a lot more work than I really need to. I’d better wrap this up this week, though, because I’m not going to have a whole hell of a lot of time afterwards.
Other
Mohrta, the new Scumhead first-person… thing, has an official release date - October 14th. That’s pretty close, and this is easily the Scumhead crap I’ve been most excited for yet. Will I be playing it at release? Considering that’s the exact day Steam Next Fest starts… we’ll see how much it costs. If day one doesn’t inspire, I may need it as a palate cleanser.
Speaking of Next Fest, I have a handful of demos I’ve been meaning to check out and mention on here for a few weeks, but I’m considering holding onto them and just rolling them into the Next Fest posts. A demo’s a demo, and I’m sure most of the things I’m already sitting on will be a part of the event anyway.