Weekly Update 2025-11-2
Damn my good looks and lack of health insurance!
Game Releases and Updates
Toziuha Night: Order of the Alchemists 1.0 – Now watch me whip, now watch me nae-nae. I’ve been excited for this DSVania inspired platformer to finish development since last year, when I bought into the Early Access and played the devs more standard Castlevania inspired game that serves as an immediate prequel for this. You play as Xandria, an iron alchemist, in her quest to ignore work emails and instead pursue personal vengeance.
I’ve only had time to go back through the prologue again, and unfortunately I’ll probably have to restart now anyway, as a hotfix to address difficulty concerns literally doubled your starting HP and MP after the prologue, and from my memories of how brutal the beginning of the game proper is, well, I’ll take what I can get.
Mech Havoc Early Access – the real Brigador Killer. I played the demo for this top-down mech-based stomp-n-gun during a Next Fest last year, and found it teased just enough variety that it might be worth picking up in the future. I still feel that way, but a soft launch into Early Access isn’t quite enough for me to jump aboard… yet.
Labyrinth of the Demon King NG+ update – This, on the other hand, might be what I’ve been waiting for. I’ve been recommended this grainy, Japanesey King’s Fieldish horror game several times, and held off because I figured it would be short, thin on content, and would be just as good if I got it on a decent discount. This latest update apparently adds a significant amount of meat on the bone, and at a price that’s unlikely to be driven much lower by the holidays. Hey, if I have time.
Halls of Torment Bard and Boglands – let’s see your vampire survive this. One of my favorite Vampire Survivor-likes, riding largely on its Diablo 1 aesthetic, has reached its one-year anniversary of full launch, and celebrated with a dual release of two DLCs, one free, and one paid. The free DLC adds a new Bard character as an option, who is about as unique as the classes get in HoT – he has his own completely unique set of spells, a quest tree and upgrade paths to unlock just like any other character, and not one, not two, but three new music tracks to hop around to.
He’s actually really fun, and I love how his spells genuinely do make him look like he’s doing a concert, with confetti poppers going off, mosh pits of imps bouncing all over each other, and gouts of flame firing off as he shreds on his lute. He’s also maybe a little overpowered, or maybe I just haven’t played in very long and got my sense of balance all screwed up, because he seemed to easily demolish most of the maps I brought him into, albeit not at a particularly high Torment level.
The bigger DLC is the paid one, of course, and adds two additional new characters, a new map [significant, as the base game does feel notably short on maps] and more items and artifacts to interact with the new characters’ mechanics. I’ve only done a round or two with each of these characters, and they seem fine. Thankfully, you can unlock the ability to take Bard abilities with other characters, and even unlock his music tracks, which all pick up steam the more you level up. The game’s still just a bit slow overall, especially for a VS-like, and the glut of worthwhile choices to make in leveling means I often spend almost as much time staring at menus as I do actually playing in a round. But this is a nice enough excuse to pop into HoT once in a while for a wind-down, and I’m happy to throw a couple more bucks at a developer I feel could charge a lot more.
The State of Games Played
I played a bit of the new Synthetik 2 update on a real computer, and I don’t know if all the changes actually made a difference or if I just got in the zone and everything clicked, but I got very near the end of the game for the first time since I bought it, and felt something very close to what I had for the first game. Then I died very abruptly to an unknown enemy. Well, I’ll give it a few more runs before I totally shelve it again.
I’m currently at the second to last stage of BALL x PIT, and I’m still quite impressed with its tweaks to the VS-like genre. I unlocked the ability to take two different characters together on a run, which has them each apply their unique effect, if any, to the ball launching mechanics, bring a specific ball into the round, now partially upgraded, and if you clear the map in such a way, it counts as having cleared it for both individually anyway. I’m less impressed with how much seems to be based on persistent stat upgrades – buildings adding base stats and improving scaling, characters leveling up through use, and even whole mechanics like banish and reroll tokens locked behind currency investment. It’s all the best and some of the worst of the genre.
I had less trouble than I thought I would with the final, permadeath challenge of Splintered, wrapping up in only one attempt, though to be fair, I had prepared for the second final boss but only had to kill the first. There were still a few close calls, and I loved the way you ‘build’ your equipment out with random perks as you level it up, almost like the level up choices in a Vampire Survivors-like. Now that I’m done, what’s left? Besides the write-up, of course. Well, I can definitely see myself doing a few random runs just for fun, but I really want the developer to add in the ability to go into a ‘blind’ seed, with the settings themselves randomized and needing to be deduced from the observed evidence. Then we can really start setting up obnoxious races. Incidentally, is anyone reading this familiar with speedrun and randomizer races? Maybe some friendly competition is in order.
I played a bit more of The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles, and now am actually, maybe, probably mostly, through the tutorials. I think. It’s cracked me up a few more times already, and I’m perfectly happy to chip away at this for a while, though I do almost wish it were more hands-off – a game more like Banished in this style is what I’m looking for, and who knows, TCHDC might get there… eventually.
And I once again vastly underestimated House of Necrosis – not only is it quite a bit longer and more involved than I thought a few weeks ago when I finished my first run and assumed it was just a short, gorgeously styled but relatively shallow Mystery Dungeon/Shiren type game. I’ve completed two of the post-game challenge dungeons now, lost some incredibly good gear to my own overconfidence and lapses of attention, eventually found even better gear to replace it, and unlocked the ability to preserve my new gear from loss on death. Now I have one final grind, to collect the last few spells needed to unlock the final challenge, and I’m playing obsessively until I make it. Along the way, I’ve learned so many small quirks of the items, the enemies, and the map generations – I don’t think I’ve understood a game of this type so thoroughly in years.
Writing
Because of my continuing obligation to House of Necrosis, I’ll have to put off its write-up a bit longer. But I will have plenty to say once I do get around to it. I also find myself occasionally dipping back into Tokyo Xtreme Racer, and might want to cross a few more names off my list before committing to any writing on it. That leaves Splintered, which I actually have begun the write-up for, and plan, fingers crossed, to have done early this week.
But I did, actually, have something published this week, though not on my own page - I contributed a short blurb about one of my favorite games to Harrison Polites’ collaborative article on videogame villains. It’s a good read, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. And now that I already played through one day of Pathologic Classic HD just to get a screenshot, I may have to finish the run sometime soon.
Other
The Myth of a Godslayer, which was one of the more vaguely scheduled games I selected in my Best of Next Fest last month, has a real release date now - November 27th, less than a month away. That puts it in good company, with other heavy-hitters [at least to my taste] like Constance, Verho, Cook for Me Grandpa, and Idosra. Now if only we could get a confirmation that Exo Rally Championship will make it out this year, I would be confident in calling 2025 the best year in gaming this decade.