Weekly Update 2025-11-23
Taking names and giving Thanks
This has been a busy week – for me, and for games I’ve been tracking with interest. I hadn’t expected to have so much to play, write about, record, edit – if I had, maybe I wouldn’t have chosen this week to screw around with my hardware.
Game Releases and Updates
Stalker 2 Expedition update – Stalker 2 version 1.7 represents the latest attempt by GSC Game World to convince me that they’ve turned the proprietary “A-Life” system into something more than a glorified spawn timer. With a new, higher difficulty, [no thanks] new anomalies, and a host of quality-of-life changes, 1.7 also purports to add territorial control dynamics to the game’s many factions, as well as other, vague, A-Life improvements. There are a few genuinely nice surprises – AI vision through foliage has supposedly been adjusted, jogging around outside of combat seems not to force you to chug energy drinks anymore [a betrayal of Slav-punk immersion, maybe, but one I will happily overlook] and perhaps most importantly, artifacts and other items have actual visible stat bars to show you what they affect, rather than your loadout being based on guesswork and parsing word choice.
Does this mean I’ll play Stalker 2 again sometime? N-not yet. The changes that have been made in the months since I finished it have seemed largely positive, but I don’t know that they’ve really gotten to the heart of why I prefer the first game in the series over any other – and besides, I’m more interested in trying one of the mods eventually.
Approaching Infinity shipyards DLC and update – along with the full release of the ship-customization DLC, the biggest baddest roguelike in space has a grip of new features added to the base game. New devices, new quests, and the ability to throw pokeballs at creatures and create your own little menagerie of monsters. It’s great when a developer has such a wealth of ideas that they continue to add whole new things to do into a game, and – hang on, he nerfed Another Volley? Alright, screw this dev.
Battlefield 6 California Resistance – the first major event since BF6’s release sees the addition of a new map, new weapons, and new modes. And, for the most part, they’re all pretty fun… at least at first. The new map is excellent, a sunny Southern California suburb full of hedges, tacky mansions, swimming pools, and tons of ambush spots and destructible clutter. And don’t forget the golf carts! Well, you can kind of forget the golf carts, as the majority of them have been relegated to static map prop by way of a little plastic chain along their sides. Cmon, man, I know how to jump a golf cart, are you telling me these elite military operators have to hope the keys are in the thing?
One of the more interesting inclusions to the new map are special weapon spawns, returning from Battlefield One. I’ve not played around with them much, but it’s a fun way to add in some slightly more near-future silly weapon ideas that helped make 2042 more fun than it deserved without completely ruining the feel and balance of the game. Unfortunately, the new map also highlights just how insanely bad enemy visibility is in general, and how much worse it is with dynamic light. Anyone within a building is effectively invisible from the outside, and what do you know, the map is almost entirely about squatting in shady buildings or trying to shoot into them.
I’ve only played a bit of the new Sabotage mode, which is basically Rush except instead of needing to arm a series of bombs and defend them, the attackers merely need to damage a set of destructible objects around each point. It’s one of those things that seems like a decent idea at first, but very, very quickly resolves into every attacker running in or making Hail Mary shots with RPGs, while the defenders, if they are very minutely coordinated and familiar with the maps, can trivially lock down every approach, because the mode has oppressively tight out-of-bounds boundaries, and a timer that’s been artificially shortened to prevent you from just, like, hopping around a fence. This is the sort of objective that might work as part of a much larger scale competitive format, but when it’s your ONLY goal? Well, why would I do anything BUT a suicide run?
It’s not like these characters can throw a fucking GRENADE HARDER THAN AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLER.
Phantom Brigade 2.0 – when this mech-based tactics game came out, I’d played and enjoyed the demo, but early impressions from people who jumped on the full release painted a picture of unrealized potential and unsatisfying balance. The game’s had a few major updates in the years since, but this 2.0 version is more like a complete overhaul of the game’s systems. Reception has been mixed, but with the amount of work done, and the fact that the pre-2.0 version is still available as a legacy branch, plus a celebratory sale, I was finally convinced to pick this up myself.
Brush Burial: Gutter World – I briefly tried the demo for this sequel to one of the most visually repulsive stealth games I’ve ever seen, before deciding it really wasn’t worth getting too invested when I still haven’t played through all of the first game. Well, I still haven’t, and I have no immediate plans to return to it, but this seems worth noting, anyway, as an oddity that might have more going on than the rough presentation lets on.
Idosra patch – first the good news: the developer of Idosra: The Electric Renaissance made good on their claim to have a patch ready for the problems I pointed out with the boss at the end of Chapter 1. I was then able to beat it, continue into Chapter 2, and play a ton more levels, unlocking new abilities and even returning to earlier areas to attempt higher completion ranks [so I can read more books, obviously!]
The bad news is the patch is still a beta, and I finally hit an area of significant instability, meaning I’m again glumly biding my time until this patch gets fixed and officially released, or at least a hotfix applied so I can play on.
Cleared Hot Early Access – one of the Next Fest games I was most excited for, Cleared Hot is a twin-stick heli shooter that draws clear inspiration from the 16-bit Strike series but forsakes the sprawling, layered objective format for shorter missions, more loadout variety, and a lot of genuinely entertaining humor.
The fact that it’s still in early access is a catch… but not much of one. I’ve mentioned before that I’m becoming loathe to join in on EA releases as much as I used to, but that’s mostly because so many games getting developed via months or years worth of player feedback are both too long and too ‘touched’ by the constant redressing of complaints and need for broadening content scope to make repeatedly replaying them worth the time. Not so with Cleared Hot – it being developed as a strictly episodic game means there’s a convenient cutoff for the developer to pick up from for each major version, players have a coherent window of new content to try, and I very much doubt anything down the line could make the first few hours already available significantly worse.
In fact, I’ve already played through most of Chapter 1 twice, I have no doubt I’ll happily play through the game afresh in its entirety once the full version is completed next year… hell, I might be playing through it again more often than that.
Neon Inferno release – after a small delay, this run’n’gun from the developers of Steel Assault has finally hit the blacktop, and damn, does it look good. I’ll probably hold off on it, personally, just to avoid stacking my current short list any higher than it already is, but once I make a Cobra-sized hole in my gaming schedule, I think I’ll make time for it. I found Arcade mode too hard for me back when I played the demo, so hopefully the non-Arcade mode has enough teeth to still be satisfying.
Void War planetary assaults beta – a new type of encounter, presumably removing the many inherent qualities of ship-to-ship combat [like engines and dodge chance] might not be the biggest change for not-quite-legally-distinct FTL, but it’s yet another reminder that I have plenty of new Commander types to try out, and a hint that I might be finally ready to commit my thoughts on the game to a write-up.
Devil Spire Falls NPC patch – I mentioned a few weeks ago that this open-ended survival-adventure game had been chugging along at an impressive pace, and it really seems to be taking form as something other than an ambitious but hollow proof of concept. But the reason I bring it up this week is because I really liked this particular patch note.
“Dispose: NPCs will now dispose of dead bodies inside their houses by dragging them to the door and outside. No more rotting, festering corpses of beloved dead ones inside!”
Forestrike release – I decided to pick up this roguelite brawler on a whim, not even realizing it was by the developers of 2021’s Olija. Forestrike is a bit like 2021’s Fights in Tight Spaces, consisting of a series of encounters where you have to combine attacks, limited dodges, and various improvised weapons to beat up a group of enemies that ambush you in a small one-dimensional arena. The enemies have complex behaviors, some able to dodge or block direct strikes and then immediately retaliate, some throwing weapons at you or doing a charge tackle, and every encounter is generated to be ‘solvable,’ as in, you can technically find a way to beat them without getting hit. But unless you’re already a master of the movesets and enemy types, your only real hope of doing so is by using foresight.
Each encounter begins with everyone positioned around you and poised for combat, and you must commit to the engagement to start the action. But before that happens, you can do a sort of dry run of the fight, with every action and reaction pre-determined and so predictable, and restart the encounter as many times as you want to work out the best order of operations and practice it until you’re confident you can execute it without slipping up. Some of the enemy types and situations are pretty chaotic or tough to handle on their own, but your expanding arsenal of martial arts techniques are usually enough to let you turn one enemy into a headache for another.
Each run, you pick one of your unlocked styles to take along, and the default one is based around pacifism and redirection, with perks and active skills along the way that encourage you to let your enemies do most of the heavy lifting in eliminating themselves. Combined with the occasional optional challenge that crops up, and it makes even relatively straightforward encounters a bit more engaging than you’d expect.
I’ve beaten two bosses so far, and unlocked one extra martial arts style, but there’s a lot more to do and see in this game, and it might be a while before I have time to really dig into it. My first impressions, though, are pretty positive, and I’m definitely glad I picked it up and gave it a shot.
The State of Games Played
Arc Raiders hasn’t quite gotten under my skin in the same way I think it has for a lot of people… but it’s still been fun enough that I’ve put several more hours into it this week. There’s a good variety in the environments, dangers, and play styles, it’s easy enough to commit to a single uninterrupted outing without feeling like you’re locked in for hours, and it has an enduring level of tension that isn’t totally miserable. Plus, it’s a lot of fun to be kind of an asshole.
While I’ve mostly played solo, I’ve gotten a few rounds in with some other friends, and the game really shines when you’re moving as a team and chatting away about things you see, pointing out distant locations, zapping each other with shield recovers, laughing at each other getting electrocuted by trapped caches, and blaming each other for wipes.
I believe I’m at the home stretch of Abiotic Factor – the past few ‘areas’ have been pretty linear combat gauntlets, and I’ve finally entered the Residential zone, so although I still have a few pending equipment upgrades, I can’t see this taking me too much longer unless Residences is somehow even more sprawling than Reactors was.
And I also should be nearing the end of Toziuha Night, or at least the ‘bad’ ending of it. I’m not sure how much grinding and extra activity is required for the better endings, but I think I’ll just look up what to do once I’ve rolled credits at least once. The game has been fun, but I feel like I’ve been through every area a few too many times already.
Writing
No, I haven’t done any writing of any note this week, and for obvious reasons [to Americans, anyway] will probably be light on meaningful progress this week too. But December should provide a window for some exciting news.
Other
One of the reasons I didn’t get as much done as I wanted this week is due to hardware concerns – I set out to replace my Steam Deck’s internal hard drive with something with a bit more leg room, but morning of the planned procedure I was met with an uncooperative machine that refused to boot and let me finish my file backups. To be clear, I doubt very much this is an inherent issue with the Steam Deck and almost certainly a conflict with the third-party utility Decky, which I’ve been fighting with ever since I started using it. I wasted a good part of my day trying and failing to restore the Deck’s ability to boot. After giving up and simply swapping the drives, installing a fresh SteamOS instance on the new one rather than cloning the drive as I’d hoped, and using an NVMe enclosure to pull the last few files to safety, I then had a scare when my actual external backup drive, the contents of which I’m going to be relying on for the next month or two at minimum, refused to mount on the Deck. Cue a bunch more USB juggling, squinting at hundreds of gigs of files, backups of backups of backups from the past decade, and, well… I think everything’s okay, for now, and I’m running smooth, sans Decky.
And so I didn’t really mark my sudden [feeling] approach to my Substack’s first major [feeling] milestone – after the better part of a year, I’ve reached 50 subscribers, with over a third coming just in this past month of distraction and inconsistent effort on my part. It’s more than I ever expected for my first year, and I’m grateful to everyone who helped, by sharing or promoting my work, by engaging with me, or even just by doing your own writing for me to engage with.
My plans for the end of this year and the start of the next have been firm, and maybe a bit ambitious considering my current situation, but I don’t see any need to change them one way or the other regardless of this milestone – but it does mean I have a bit more confidence in my efforts being worth the trouble. It also means I do want to do a kind of celebratory post, one that I can throw together with very little effort, just to get something on the page that isn’t an essay I’ve taken too long to finalize. And, most importantly, an excuse to work on something fun that has nothing to do with the looming holidays.
Wow, the A-Life system discussion really stood out. As someone interested in AI, I always wonder about the actual depth of these simulated ecologies. You're so right about the guesswork for items; that's a huge pet peeve. Still not sure if Stalker 2 will get there, but your analisis is always spot on.
Idosra's developer reacting so quickly to your criticism makes that game even more appealing than it already was from your previous write-ups, I think I may well end up giving it a chance later on.