Weekly Update 2025-11-30
Myth of a Game Player: War Crimes and Salt Mines
With Thanksgiving finally over, I can turn my attention to the really important things: playing videogames and thinking about playing videogames. God, I hope I get to play some more videogames before Christmas rolls around.
Game Releases and Updates
Constance release – I’d call this ‘the Hollow Knight we have at home’ but that would be unfair - everyone already has Hollow Knight and Silksong at home. I’d also make the case, based on the trailer and what I played of the demo, that it might be much more than just a well-animated Hollow Knight clone – the platforming challenges feel more in line with games like Aeterna Noctis, and seem to be more of a focus than the straightforward combat.
Unfortunately, I do still think this is releasing a little too soon after Silksong, especially since award season means everyone is forced to talk about Silksong again. And even I, who like to be contrarian in all matters, now feel like I have to actually finish the rest of Silksong before adding ANOTHER metroidvania to my rotation. Some day, Constance.
ARC Raiders door glitch patch – some of the loot caches in the extraction shooter that came out of the shadows to kneecap Tarkov require you to first loot up a key to enter them… well, that’s how it was supposed to work. Some of them could be entered by abusing a wall clip, something I actually had a random guy in solos show me once so we could both loot a locked room. Hey, sometimes people really are friendly. I didn’t even kill the guy afterwards.
Those days are gone, as ARC has patched out the exploit, not in any of the obvious ways [thicker walls, altered collision, item spawn toggles] but by adding flame traps inside every locked room that torch anyone who gets inside while the door is still locked, presumably leaving their cheating corpse there for the picking. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. I tried doing the glitch again afterwards and couldn’t get in, so it might just be a rumor. But that rumor is still a lot more creative and endearing than any handling of an exploit in a major multiplayer game in a long time. Reminds me of copy protection things in very old games that would just torment a pirate rather than outright pointing a finger at them, by making the game arbitrarily hard or broken.
Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord – War Sails DLC – Is Bannerlord even worth playing when Warband and all its mods still exist? That question is for the philosophers to debate. The more relevant question now is: are you excited for naval combat in Mount and Blade? What do you mean, no?
This DLC launch seems to be at least as sloppy, unconvincing, and polarizing as anything that ever comes out of TaleWorlds. The new faction apparently did not give their units head or hand armor initially, [addressed in a recent patch] the devs made the dubious decision to overhaul the entire game map, but only for the DLC, meaning the game now has two different overland maps, and the naval combat itself seems to be… pretty much what you’d expect from naval combat in a Mount and Blade game. But I think this is all well summed up by a review by Lysimachus on Steam:
Look, I like the game, have played it for hundreds of hours, and am confident in the modding community. But TaleWorlds.... If you do get any government assistance, it should be revoked and if I was a Turkish citizen that was a fan of your games, I would send a personal letter to members of the government to complain about how you are a waste of resources. This was obviously rushed even though you had thousands of dollars, multiple delays, and years to make it in the first place.
There may be no sentiment more relatable to a true PC gaming enthusiast than ‘I love this game and have played it for thousands of hours. I hope the entire development team gets black bagged and tortured to death.’
Oh, well. At least there’s still Girls’ Civilization 2.
The Myth of a Godslayer release – now, I’ve been shaking my head at Constance daring to share their release year with Silksong, but I have to say, even I’m surprised that Godslayer’s devs decided to drop this game on Thanksgiving day. That seems kind of insane to me, but honestly, and not to be judgmental, at this level of indie, frankly, it probably doesn’t matter at all. The Myth of a Godslayer could release on Christmas morning, it could come out alongside GTA6, they could put the game out on 9/11 2, it really wouldn’t affect its first week sales. You know why? Because I’d still be checking the store on 9/11 2.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I guess I should talk about the game. It was one of the demos I really enjoyed from the most recent Steam Next Fest, and I was going to pick it up eventually anyway. But in the last week before release, the devs went an extra step, updated the demo to be the entire introductory chapter of the full game, which included the whole dungeon that the original demo consisted of, and ensured that save progress would carry over to the full game. I only got around to playing through the new demo a bit after release, but the instant I finished it I went to the store page to play some more.
It’s an action RPG of the sort common in the 16-bit era, [Beyond Oasis as one explicitly stated inspiration] with the addition of some territory control stuff and some really nice modern conveniences, like a radial menu for power swapping and an option [at most difficulties] to restart a screen after death. What’s more, the story has surprised me – the game opens with your character committing war crimes, murders, and then revealing that he’s sworn to serve an evil asshole god and help him carve up a newly discovered land between the three old world factions. And also to carve up any indigenous populations standing in their way. It’s a shocking introduction that pays off pretty quickly, and I’m a lot more invested in the world and characters already than I normally am.
I’ll have more, much more to say as I play more of this, because while it’s a little janky, a little overwhelming, and somewhat amateurish, it’s also very ambitious, very engaging, and extremely interesting. This has the potential to be among my favorite games of the year, in a year crowded with such potential. If you have any interest in it, I highly recommend checking out the updated demo on Steam.
The Shimmering Horizon and Cursed Blacksmith release – this Mystery Dungeon-style roguelike was something I played a demo of in a Next Fest last year, and have been keeping an eye on since. After many delays, vague health concerns, an ill-advised maid cosplay, and lots and lots of apology posts, the game is finally out. Is it obvious it’s a hentai game yet? How about after seeing the main Guide NPC who refuses to wear pants?
Joking aside, if you’re not running the h-patch, presumably the game is at best mildly risque, and depending on your tastes, the gameplay might either be infuriating or gratifyingly bracing. The main gimmick, as you might guess from the title, is that all equipment has extremely low base durability, and will break apart after some use. As a Blacksmith, your character can salvage broken implements, combine them with various odds and ends, and create new, more useful weapons, including some with special abilities. According to the reviews, it looks like the difficulty scaling is pretty brutal, at least for a Mystery Dungeon-style game, and I just have too much on my plate now to jump into another dense game with a steep learning curve. But eventually, I do want to give it a shot – I remember being genuinely impressed with the first boss of the demo. And with the babes.
The State of Games Played
I made it all the way to the boss at the end of Chapter 2 of Idosra before hitting another brick wall – apparently, I’d completely missed a whole movement ability I was supposed to have, not to mention the upgrade that the developer suggested I find before attempting said boss. I went back, scoured the levels, and eventually found what I needed… and the boss is still pretty busted. The developer has already responded to my pleas, and promised that a patch to fix the boss’s movement patterns is in the works. Man, I hope I’m not one of those assholes who complains a game into banality…
Nah, even the dev admitted this thing seemed bugged. The rest of the game is so much fun, though, that the only thing keeping me from just punching out and replaying some other levels is how long the stage to get to this boss is.
Speaking of unpleasant bosses, I realized I had better get a move on to complete the third act of Silksong, which I backburnered after Next Fest so I could play things nobody knew or cared about. With December knocking, though, I can’t really put it off any longer if I want to include it in the ranking for the year it actually came out.
And that means I’ve got a few bosses to track down, i.e. look up the location of, because two of them were hidden behind secret passages and I’m over it. Hey, what’s better than Spore Spawn? How about a Spore Spawn fight where the floor is lava? I just want to get this over with at this point.
And I’ve played a bit more ARC Raiders, though not as much as everyone else playing it wants me to. My stash size is maxed out, I’m making slow but steady progress on leveling up every crafting station, I’m feeling confident, hydrated, and in my lane, and I’ve had more fun than frustration so far.
Most importantly, though, I’ve had fun with friends, and ruined the fun of people who are worse at the game than me and my friends. Except for Gumball, who has bad vibes.
Writing
I decided to do a little throwaway post to make up for not having a lot of gaming time over the holiday week, inspired by a similar post by Scanlines, and as a way to lightly celebrate hitting the modest milestone of 50 subscribers. It was a fun opportunity to rant and rave and spew venom, and out of nowhere it ended up performing almost an order of magnitude better by any given criteria than anything else I’ve posted so far. Go figure. I guess it’s time for me to shift into full-time ragebaiting. Hey, guess what I think about Ocarina of Time and Knights of the Old Republic? Boring! Ha ha!
Actually that sounds pretty boring. I’m thinking of doing a positive counterpoint to my last post as a Christmas gift, a celebration of my divine joy and mercy, but in the meantime, I’m also working on the long-awaited writeups of Tokyo Xtreme Racer, Abiotic Factor, and Toziuha Night. Or I was, but then they released another V-tuber skin I’ve gotta win!
Hey, don’t moralize with me, I don’t have an Integra yet!
Other
Such a massive [by my standards] influx of new subs puts a little more pressure on me to finally sit down, tweak some of my pages and information, and get things ready, on the back end and front of the house, for a significant overhaul of my Substack – not that I’ll be changing my focus or format but more of a tidying up, a spring cleaning that can’t wait until spring. I want to set up proper recommendations, [now that I’ve had a year to find other Substacks worth recommending] a more informative About page and subscription banner and the like [now that I’ve had a year to decide what I’m all about here] and go back to put store page links on relevant games, per a suggestion by ROP.
But I also just want to finish a few games and not think too hard about it. Time will tell which of those aims gets prioritized.