Weekly Update 2025-12-07
Sugoku Kawaisou
Game Releases and Updates
Idosra: The Electric Renaissance patch – all my whining and criticism has borne fruit, as this week’s patch includes a rebalance of book locations, an adjustment of some attack hitboxes and timings, and a massive nerf to the boss I was struggling with last week. There’s a bonus surprise, though, an old-school holiday level that you can play as a standalone mod from the loader. It’s not much, it’s just a short gauntlet for you to run though jump-kicking goons, and there’s no actual reward since you aren’t playing it on your actual save file, but it’s adorable, and a great callback to classic Easter eggs.
Gunlocked 2 update – I wasn’t expecting this to get so many updates so quickly, and this is the biggest one yet. Endless mode, negative modifiers, plus a few new pilots and weapons. The negative augments are a fun addition – the game gets a bit too easy once a build comes together, and just being able to ramp up enemy density and remove some of the bonuses you get levels the playing field enough to make it a little more exciting. I wish some more of the modifiers were more creative, though, and had sliders so I could really crank things up, the way you could in Nomad Survival. [a Vampire Survivors clone that looks more generic than it is] This is apparently hurtling toward full release, and while I like this developer, I really hope they take their time with their next project and make something that isn’t a Survivors-like at all.
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow release – This is an odd way to resurrect a franchise that’s been buried, then crudely exhumed, and little more for over a decade. But even more surprising is that it honestly looks pretty good, or at least like a better translation of the core series than the Assassins Creed VR game was. I obviously haven’t had a chance to try it [being on the wrong side of the country to reach my headset and all] but the impressions I’ve seen have been startlingly positive.
Aside from lackluster graphics, [likely to enable standalone performance on the Quest] bad combat, [combat is always bad in Thief games] and apparently completely moronic AI [bad AI is more fun to take advantage of than good AI] the game is apparently very true to the original series, [i.e. they brought back Stephen Russell as the voice of Garrett, and kept the new player character less vocal] and flush with good, immersive touches and mechanics. Plus, pickpocketing and blackjacking guards is exactly the kind of shit that VR should be great for.
Battlefield 6 Iced Over Empire State and visibility update – I saw that there were massive patch notes from DICE promising pretty sweeping balance tweaks, adjustments to netcode and hit detection, and some vague gesture at improving enemy visibility in general. Plus a retexture of a map to make it snowy! Well, fine, I guess I’ll do a few rounds and see if it feels any better. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find this new map, or new game mode, or tell any difference whatsoever in how anything looked or felt. Maybe it was just too subtle?
Actually, it turns out that these changes won’t be implemented until the 9th of December, a fact that is mentioned nowhere in the entire novel-length news post with the patch notes. I don’t know how this team does it. They manage to make even patch notes maximally irritating and unhelpful. I did get a chance to play with the little minigun that spawns on some maps, though, and that was fun as hell. Ignore the fact that I’d planted a claymore on the spawn. I wasn’t tunnel visioned at all.
Tactical Nexus ‘pitiful enemies’ update – sometimes a game gets a feature that it absolutely needed but you don’t realize until you see it that it was meant to be. This week’s patch adds what sounds like a very minor feature – enemies now have unique, ‘kawaisou’ sprites that they switch to when players gain enough stats to kill them with zero damage taken, i.e. they are free to kill for their XP and drops. This small bit of readability is a huge deal for a game that’s all about min-maxing stats and kill order, and it’s also just a really cute touch. But the real reward, as usual, is reading the developer’s news post about it, which I encourage you to do in full, but will include my favorite line:
▲Several “too pitiful-looking” morale-breaking graphics were scrapped because “they dampen the player’s desire to defeat the enemy (some players even felt guilty)”
The State of Games Played
A disappointing week in ARC Raiders, with little tangible progress, and massive setbacks, mostly revolving around my own failed attempts to kill some medium enemies without knowing what I was doing:
And Carwash’s doomed crusade to finally get the achievement for killing a Queen, which saw most of our runs start on the wrong side of the map, and the few times we decided to walk all the way to the Harvester ending in an ambush, by what seemed almost every time to be a pack of meta-gaming campers, coordinating like old MMO guilds to make sure nobody in the world is allowed to kill the boss they’ve claimed.
Pray for Carwash, friends, he lost his Hullcrackers, he lost his Deadlines, he lost his will to get all achievements, he lost his pride, and – hang on, I’m being informed that he will never give up on getting all achievements. What a man.
I left Hollow Knight: Silksong hanging over my head on a silken thread for too long, so I finally buckled down and whipped it in time for GOTY talks. It was fine. It was alright. It wasn’t too bad.
With the Chapter 2 boss of Idosra getting a brutal, maybe excessive nerf, I finally made it into the next act, and hoo boy did the brakes come off. Mana skills, new bosses I actually liked, revisiting levels and finding second, even third exits, and finally getting that sweet title drop.
There’s no game I want to finish before the end of the year more than Idosra, and I have a feeling it won’t be too much longer before I do.
But if there’s one thing that’ll take some time away from Idosra, it’s The Myth of a Godslayer. I’m still only through the second dungeon, and I don’t think I’ll try to get through it in time for New Years, but I’m enjoying every minute of it. The more advanced combat techniques are growing on me as I’ve gotten more comfortable weaving them in, swapping between the two powers at my disposal, and looking forward to more.
And finally, I finally finished Abiotic Factor. The last few areas were somewhat underwhelming, the endcap boss fight was… not exactly playing to the game’s strengths, but it maintained a tone and style that was thoroughly endearing, and I’m glad I played through it. I almost wish I had played the whole game in co-op, despite my asocial nature and flakiness with schedules, because it seems like having at least two people would really liven up some of the slower bits and alleviate the occasional grind and preparation that caused my playthrough to slump. And it’d be funnier when I pooped myself because I got lost. Alone, it’s just kind of sad.
Writing
Finished writeups for Tokyo Xtreme Racer and Silksong. I’d been putting off TXR with the vague idea that I’d maybe want to finish NG+ and make an attempt at the obscene post-game bosses that open up, but after a few months where I barely did anything but chip away at Chapter 2, even with the most powerful cars at my disposal, I realized I could go ahead and put a fork in it. Similar story with Hollow Knight 2, a game I knew I’d be disappointed at myself for leaving much longer, but didn’t really have the energy to ‘complete’ the way I would most other ‘vanias.
But because I started both of those write-ups before finishing Abiotic Factor, that one’s been bumped to this week. I have a lot, good and bad, to say about it, but unlike the games I complained about on Thanksgiving, I’m very happy I got badgered into playing it. Now, unfortunately, I really will have to start all the other game’s I’ve been promising people I’ll play.
Other
G-Rebels, the Blade Runner flying car game I played the demo of during Next Fest, has announced its upcoming Early Access launch, and offered some details about what’s going to be included, which wound up being enough beyond my expectations that I thought it warranted mention, considering my lukewarm feelings about the demo. More maps, more diverse mission types, and most importantly, a rough but ready VR mode has been promised, and that last feature is probably the one that’s going to sell me on trying it if it’s better than ‘godawful.’ Call me a hipster, call me a grump, call me a boomer, a gooner, a guy who made Moonring his GOTY, but I have a real weakness for immersive VR crap. I’d play a VR experience that’s just you sitting in a public toilet stall squeezing one out, and I’d probably sing its praises too.