Weekly Update 2025-11-16
Friendly? Friendly? NOT FRIENDLY!
Game Releases and Updates
Gunlocked 2 balance overhaul – a nearly across-the-board buff of every build, including the dramatic move to remove a ton of upgrades or roll them into others, something I frankly wish a lot of these sorts of games would consider. After a round or two, I can confidently say the game is much easier, but also a little more engaging, and the stage is now set for the higher difficulty modifier updates that are apparently up next.
Kingdom Come 2 Mysteria Ecclesiae DLC – the final KCD2 DLC, and what do you know, I seem to have been mostly right in my suspicions. A longer adventure, revolving around monasteries and priests, presumably adding many church and chapel interiors, and apparently wrapping up Henry of Skalitz’s story to some degree. But I am going to leave it there, and avoid any details until I get back to my real PC and also feel like starting a hardcore run of the game.
Ambrosia Sky act 1 – I thought the demo of this narrative-driven survival Powerwash Simulator clone had some potential, and the fact that it’s coming out in an episodic format rather than the usual Early Access period is… different. Based on what I’ve gathered from the current reviews, there’s not a lot to see that wasn’t in the demo, at least outside of story and worldbuilding additions, and that frankly isn’t enough to excite me at this point. But some people might actually prefer it releasing as a self-contained episode rather than a chunk of unfinished game that will be iterated on for a year or more, so it’s worth mentioning.
Distant Flux: System Initializing content update – a massive overhaul of a game which I honestly still can’t comprehend. The new perk system sounds interesting, being able to set a beacon for quick returns to a particular location seems like a huge quality of life change, and a whole mode that condenses the game into a single world might… okay, no, really, I don’t totally understand, but it’s heartening that a game with a grand total of ONE review is still having this much work put into it.
The State of Games Played
I finally figured out where to go to make some progress in Toziuha Night, and cleared quite a few decent bosses before running up against another upgrade I’m missing that’s gating a significant part of the remaining game. Or at least I think I need it. Or maybe there are two upgrades I need. Guidance and backtracking are definitely going to be among my biggest problems once it comes time for the write-up, and I don’t even know how close I am to the end.
And speaking of getting lost and not knowing how to proceed, I had to look up a few things to make progress in Abiotic Factor this week, and am finally back on track to FINALLY move on from the gargantuan Reactors area. So long, Reactors, I won’t really miss you.
And I came upon a couple real difficulty spikes in Idosra that have stalled out my progress in THAT game as well. Well, the first difficulty spike was actually just me not understanding what a button did, and I had a great time doing most of the rest of chapter one after the developer told me what I’d missed, but the second one? This boss fight is so insanely unbalanced, erratic, and unfair that I’m refusing to even attempt it again until the game is patched… which the developer has said should happen by the end of the weekend.
I’ll be waiting with bated breath, because I really want to play more Idosra, and I also really don’t want to brute force my way through this boss as it stands.
Played another couple rounds of Battlefield 6, and am more and more inclined toward takes like Scanlines’ assessment of it – it’s a snappy, well-made shooter, but it isn’t quite Battlefield. Something’s off, something’s missing, something’s not quite right. I’m not going to pretend to have the refinement of taste or the clarity of vision to fully dissect and diagnose it… yet. I remain hopeful that adjustments down the line, including to visibility, time-to-kill, and especially map size, bring the game more into line with whatever nebulous expectations all gently disappointed parties have, because the effects, both visual and audio, and much of the control feel and gameplay are too good for the whole thing to be abandoned.
And finally, once again, against my will, I have been dragged along the rip tide of mass popularity, and been gifted ARC Raiders, the extraction shooter phenom du jour. I’ve played for a few hours, begun upgrading my base, done a couple rounds of co-op, and even scored a few PvP kills, and can say with supreme confidence that the game is alright.
Alright, I can spare another word or two. I’ve never played much of this genre, and ARC Raiders feels like an earnest attempt to address all the many reasons why I, and apparently most of the people currently playing ARC, have failed to embrace the format. To call it more player-friendly than most is both an understatement and a bit of a oversimplification. I would instead say that ARC’s developers have managed to make the game fun… in general, rather than largely miserable and tedious with the twisted promise of your schadenfreude and sadism paying off in a single rush of sociopathic glee when you ruin someone else’s day to make your pay. But… you can still be an asshole.
Although there’s a lot to be said about the merits of the game’s itemization and map design that encourage tense but not outright murderous play sessions, so much so I just wrote too many paragraphs about just that and shaved them off to be a part of my eventual write-up, the real star of the show are the robots. The ARC are a variety of armed quad-copter style drones, rolling suicide bots, and multi-legged mechs, all moving in a surprisingly fluid and realistic way thanks to the developer’s open embrace of machine learning, which has apparently played a role in both the enemies’ ability to move around the environment and [somewhat vaguely] in adjusting behaviors to account for data collected from interactions with players. The real upshot of it is that the bots, even the very basic ones, are REALLY pretty fun to tangle with and take down. Knock off one of the engine pods from a little drone, and you can watch it cartwheel around, firing wildly as it attempts to right and then stabilize itself, no longer as smooth and nimble as it was, but still angling to take another shot at you through whatever window it can draw a bead on you through. The visuals and sound design are also spectacular, and it’s been a long time since I played a game that benefited so much from high quality headphones.
And my summary of the coop experience is basically this:
Just kidding. My friend Carwash was good enough to take a break from his higher level excursions and long-sighted goals to babysit me as I did a few entry-tier quests and collected fruits for my rooster. He took me to new maps, showed me the ropes, saved my skin from a player ambush, and only spent half an hour dragging things in and out of his inventory.
I’m aware that the game is currently in the throes of AI-driven drama, not to do with the proud press release bullet points about enemy animations and the like, but AI-generated voice acting. I don’t want to come across as edgy or contrarian, but I have to say this: frankly, this whole goddamn game feels a little AI generated. The item design, the loading screen tips, the voices and dialogue [not just the ones causing the current backlash] and especially the cutscenes all feel… off.
The cutscenes really strike me as bizarre, full of non-sequitur quotes from random people, intercut with short, arbitrary shots of unrelated things happening. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m just becoming so AI-fatigued I see the hand of the Machine Devil in all works, rightly or not. But maybe I’m right, and ARC Raiders is ironically a game made by AI to warn of the dangers of AI. Hey, wouldn’t that be fun? Tell me what would be more fun than that.
Writing
My write-up of House of Necrosis is a wild success, almost certainly thanks to some kind signal boosting from better posters than I rather than the game’s own inherent quality… although I am glad I managed to get a few more eyes on a game like that.
My write-up for BALL x PIT has been finished as of late last night… but you know how I feel about posting actual articles on the weekend. Expect it sometime Monday… after which I will begin the dreaded operation to swap my current hard drive out of my Steam Deck for a bit of an upgrade.
Other
Everyone’s already had their say about Valve’s latest hardware announcements, but I like to save my comments on things like this for Sunday afternoon, long after every take has already been taken and I can offer my slightly stale opinion.
The Wii may have been two GameCubes taped together, but the Steam Machine will be SIX Steam Decks shoved into a little box! The value of that will, of course, come down almost entirely to the price point it hits, but I think it’s worth celebrating another step forward for SteamOS and broader Linux use in general, especially as Windows finally begins to buckle under its own weight and more people become genuinely willing to forfeit a little bit of convenience and social cohesion as the price of opting out of the decaying derelict that is the Microsoft ecosystem. And it’s not even that much convenience you’re giving up these days, not only as open-source options become better and better, but as the ‘premium’ programs become more intolerable even more quickly.
The Steam Frame… also, comes down entirely to price. A brief scan of the actual specs side by side with the Meta Quest 3 and all I can say is it’s a shame they had to cheap out on the passthrough. A dedicated wi-fi 6 dongle is a nice concession to the people too poor to also buy an entire dedicated VR router on top of all the other bullshit that goes into making wireless PCVR viable, but it’s not a game changer. Nobody will really know how it compares in terms of comfort, effective battery life, or performance until real, living humans get ahold of it, and that means not until its actual commercial release. Sorry, I just spent like ten hours this week playing a game I can’t be sure isn’t entirely an AI generated hallucination, there’s nothing to convince me that any given tech reviewer isn’t second cousin to the fat lady dropping a rock on a glass bridge.
And the controller looks like bullshit. At least it doesn’t have the weird inverted nipples this time.
I was eating an Amish fry pie and wondered if maybe, we could start a religious movement to return to the late 80’s/early 90’s, hand crafting games for DOS and NES homebrews while living in trailers with fake wood paneling on the walls and cigarette smoke stains on all the textured ceilings and CRT monitors. Think of how low our budgets would be, and how rapid development cycles were, back when people were fueled by caffeine and nicotine, as God intended, rather than methamphetamine and social media likes. Perhaps that is the true way forward, not to embrace algorithmic generative content, but to return to a simpler way of life, one where you could put a butt out on the most valuable thing you owned without flinching.
Man, God bless Warhorse. It took balls to put Henry in another monastery.
ARC Raiders seems like it might actually have legs. I thought extraction shooters were on the way out in between Marathon's grisly collapse and all of Tarkov's nonsense, but I guess folks are responding to what looks like an earnest effort to push the envelope in spite of how uncanny it all comes across.