Weekly Update 2025-12-14
Buddy, I'm thickened enough already
Game Releases and Updates
Angeline Era release – bumpslop from the developers of the Anodyne games and Sephonie, neither of which I’ve played. Well, I played the first Anodyne but that was over a decade ago. The full release was preceded by a large and distinct demo, which I enjoyed enough to push me towards getting the full version. The game has two main features – the bump combat, somewhat similar to the earliest Ys games, but sped up and with a jump button to bridge the gap with later Ys titles, and the exploration, which is based on searching interesting looking tiles and hoping you get a reward.
The overworld contains its own secrets, including treasure caches, new routes, and even whole levels. The movement, combat, and art style reminded me most of all of Nihon Falcom’s Gurumin, but with a little bit of the three dimensional grid platforming of Crystal Project. I haven’t had time to dig into the full release yet, but it’s definitely going into my rotation sooner rather than later.
Skate Story release – this is what happens to your lungs when you vape. Very stylized, very moody, very vibey skateboarding game where you play as a demon made of glass, and have to roll around doing fetch quests for stone heads. It’s pretty loose on its requirements for tricks and timings, and so far it feels more like a weird narrative game with the occasional obstacle course breaking up the pacing. This isn’t exactly something I’d normally pick up for myself, but it was an early Christmas present, so I got a bit into the second area, and I’ll probably finish it, though not until after the new year.
Ascend to ZERO playtest – the time-bending roguelite from the June Steam Next Fest opened up applications for a more expansive playtest prior to release, and since I barely tried the updated demo in October, I had the urge to play more of this anyway. I’ve already opened up the second area, and therefore Hard mode, plus I’m using an Avatar that I’d not touched before, so I’m enjoying it despite the slight performance issues running it on the Deck. Maybe I just need to tweak some settings.
Terminator 2D: NO FATE release – I’ve been looking forward to this very direct arcade sidescroller adaptation of one of the best action movies ever made, but now that it’s out… I’ve got cold feet. Maybe it’s because the reception has been mixed, maybe it’s because I’ve got so much I really want to play already on my plate, or maybe it’s because the game is almost THIRTY US DOLLARS for a game that isn’t much longer than a typical Contra-like but apparently feels padded. Yeah, it’s mostly the price. I’ll pick it up somewhere down the line, but c’mon, I just spent 20 dollars on an action adventure game that doesn’t even have a manual attack button.
Clair Obscur Thank You update – hmm, do you think they were confident about their award show performance? Shortly after winning GOTY at the Game Awards, along with about a dozen other individual awards at the same event, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 announced the release of a celebratory update, including a new area, more boss refights, and a bunch of other shit that, you know what? Probably should have been added already.
None of it is going to make me drop everything and go replay Clair Obscur right away, but ONE thing stood out to me – the ability to create ‘sets’ of luminas, along with more filters for sorting your pictos and luminas. That was one of the very few complaints I had with the game at launch, and I’m glad it was finally addressed, though how well and why it took so long I can’t say. Thanks, I guess.
Battlefield 6 Winter Offensive update – Hell has frozen over, and I actually played Battlefield 6 the day of a patch. The new map’s gimmick, besides being visually snowy [love snow maps] is… weird. You basically lose your normal health regen when ‘cold,’ which is your default state on the map, even indoors, or literally anywhere that’s not five feet away from one of the pre-placed barrels of fire scattered around in frankly arbitrary and odd locations. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s not really that fun, and it detracts a bit from the good parts of the patch, though not a whole lot.
The new mode is also very weird. It’s a sort of ranked elimination scheme, where you and several other squads get split into two groups and then compete in multiple small-scale objectives, with the worst performing squads getting dumped entirely, and the highest scoring by the final round getting the win. Each objective is also mostly new to the game, and a little too complex – there’s arming objectives where you actually have to grab and carry a bomb, and it shows your position to the enemy team the entire time you’re holding it, there’s a mission where you have to carry flash drives to drones like in the Ice Cube War of the Worlds, and the mode has some kind of backstory I didn’t understand or care about. It’s too much thrown at the wall at once, and while I got an easy win on my first set, my second set had half my squad sandbagging at spawn for some reason and making it literally impossible to play. Welp. Can’t say I cared much for Fall Guys with guns.
I was mostly hoping there would be some noticeable difference from the claimed changes to TTK and player visibility, but the only thing I saw, which I could tell was different and show off, were a few moments where enemy models seemed to have… like, an aura around them. Which, I don’t know if that’s what they did to ‘improve visibility’ or if that’s just a weird visual glitch with some graphical effects conflicting, but okay. All right. I guess this game’s problems run a bit deeper than I thought.
Temple of Elemental Evil rerelease – this classic Troika CRPG was never the Baldur’s Gate-killer it hoped to be… actually, did any Troika games do what they were attempting? Either way, for several decades, this has been one of those games that PC nerds love to pretend to love, the bugs and unfinished content and rough edges all lending a bit of ‘cred’ to their claims to have ever actually played it. This rerelease is not really a remaster or even official overhaul – it’s not even a port to a different graphics frontend like Oblivion’s rerelease earlier this year. It’s just the same base game pre-installed with a giant list of fanmade mods, patches, and tweaks. Honestly, that’s kind of cool… I don’t know if it fixes enough, or changes too much, but I can’t imagine it’s much worse than trying to get a game from 2003 to run on your own would be.
Cook for Me Grandpa! Online versus mode update – How’s this for a weird surprise? That’s right, the cooking sim with AI family members critiquing your cuisine has gotten, of all things, a head-to-head online competitive mode. Why? Who could I even play this against? Am I really going to have to buy a copy for someone almost as insane as I am just so I can do cook-off with chatbot judges? Yes, I will. Incidentally, the update also adds a sandbox mode, so you can just try out different recipes without needing to manage your budget, learn new techniques, or get requests from your Skynet-hijacked grandchildren. But what’s the fun in that?
The State of Games Played
I spent most of my week revisiting levels in Idosra, trying and mostly succeeding in my hunt for the various magic trinkets that enable the endgame powers I’ll need to finish the last few levels… but still running into control bugs, collision problems, and quite a few incredibly grueling gauntlets. I can’t put this game down, but I badly wish it had a little more straightforward direction and hints for important progress.
Made a little bit more progress in The Myth of a Godslayer, including a surprisingly tolerable stealth section [you can just fight all the guards instead] and a similarly surprising rapid pace of ability unlocks. I’m still really enjoying the setting and writing too, especially the incidental overheard dialogue you can either run past or linger on to read more. That, and the optional hidden chest hunts in the overworld, remind me a lot of Crosscode.
I have mostly redeemed myself this week in Arc Raiders, tackling most of the mid-range enemies solo, finishing all of my workbench upgrades, and even considering going forward with the prestige system before the deadline next week. All I need now are lightbulbs. STUPID! Why didn’t I keep all my lightbulbs?
I had a really genuinely nice moment in Arc Raiders where I was looking for the fans needed for the expedition project, and wound up crossing paths with another solo player who also was only looking for one thing, and we both set aside the bloodthirst and helped each other out. Or rather, I thought that’s what happened, until I edited the above clip and realized I’d misheard the guy and took him to a container that had a totally different item than he was looking for and then marched off all proud of myself.
Finally got around to starting Cook for Me Grandpa! thanks to the update piquing my curiosity, and I’m already through the first week that I did in the demo. However, now that I’m newly informed, and have access to the Advanced mode, which lets you specify times, temperatures, and other details for each step, I was able to whip up a far more respectable approximation of my lemon chicken stir-fry… which my ungrateful robotic granddaughter HATED!
Grow up, kid! Granted, I had to throw thin lemon slices in rather than juicing it, because I hadn’t gone on enough quests to learn how to squeeze fruit, but you’re not supposed to EAT them! If this is the threat looming over our entire workforce, I ain’t scared of shit.
Writing
Aside from the writeup of Abiotic Factor, I haven’t done much writing this week, and don’t plan on doing much next week either. For one thing, I’m otherwise occupied, and feel like leaving most of my bigger projects for the new year at this point anyway. I also don’t really plan on pursuing completion and write-ups for any game other than Idosra before the end of 2025.
But most of all, it’s because, only a few weeks after celebrating my first 50 subscribers, I’ve been catapulted to double that, and had already meant to celebrate [almost] a year of this page with a companion piece to my bitchy Thanksgiving column for Christmas. So that’s what I’ll be working on, off and on, between shoveling snow, watching speedruns, and eating too many cookies.
Other
The Game Awards have come and gone, and, as I expected, Clair Obscur all but swept the board.
I don’t really have too much to say about awards and ceremony and all that, but I did want to mention the part I did bother to watch – all the trailers from the event that caught my eye.
TankRat looks extremely sick, and pretty much exactly what I’d actually hoped for from FUMES. Really hoping this gets a demo during one of next year’s Next Fests, and if it does, you can put money on me playing the shit out of it.
Another Divinity game out of Larian Studios, and while I am a bit less dismissive of the Original Sin games [especially the sequel] than a lot of people I know, I really hope this isn’t another isometric RPG with ‘tactical’ combat. Larian’s real strength, before they got into this comfortable and profitable rut, is that they didn’t really have a specific strength, and each game was pretty distinct from the last, but still cool. Divinity 2 might be the weakest member of the Larian rogue’s gallery [depending on how disappointed you were by Beyond Divinity] but it’s the one I most want to see something similar to now, with Larian’s unfathomable success and presumably more substantial budget. But who am I kidding? I bet it’ll just be Baldur’s Gate minus the license. But there’s always hope… of a Dragon Commander sequel that has nothing to do with the trailer! Hell yeah!
I didn’t really like Control. Yes, part of that is because I thought SCP stuff was corny and Control doesn’t really do anything interesting with the concept unlike Abiotic Factor. But it was also because functionally it’s just a kind of bland third-person shooter, and it’s one of the rare games in the past few years I burnt out on so hard I failed to ever complete it. I wasn’t terribly excited for Control 2 or whatever they’re calling it… which is why I was surprised that the trailer piqued me at all. If nothing else, it looks a lot like Remedy are aping Nier more than iterating on the first game, and frankly that’s probably a better idea than a real Control 2 would be.
Ace Combat 8 looks every bit as dumb and spectacular as AC7 was, and that’s all I need to say.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer – who knew that pod racing was eventually going to be the thing to save the Star Wars media empire? This genuinely looks pretty sick, and if it can somehow stay focused and NOT give you Jedi bullettime or something, it could be an incredible, unexpected flowering of that Star Wars magic… which, if it’s actually any good, will inevitably be kneecapped, pushed into a shallow grave, and buried still screaming like Squadrons was.
I wish Phantom Blade 0 was coming out sooner.
Man, Mega Man 11 sucked. I wish they’d just have Inti Creates do MM2 style games forever instead of this crap.
Finally, the real reason I don’t care about The Game Awards is because, like the past several years, I’m going to host my own private Game Awards, for my own edification. In a very unoriginal format, I’ll be talking to myself, and to the occasional friend, about every single game I’ve written up this year, then placing them one at a time in a long, linear ranking, which will determine once and for all the best games that I played and wrote a post about this year. I haven’t decided yet what, if any, of it I will post to this site, but I will at least proclaim the final results here, nearish the end of the year or the start of the next. Unless it takes me a goddamn month to pin down enough people like it did last year.
Man, The Temple of Elemental Evil… I got it when it came out and finally finished it a couple of years ago.
There’s a lot to recommend it. The combat is perfect, and developing your character is a ton of fun. Unfortunately it doesn’t work well and the actual adventure is just an insane pile of stinking shit. Nothing works right, the 100% necessary fan-created mods makes the game hilariously unbalanced, and it all goes to hell once you finally access the titular Temple. Oh, and it ends so abruptly that I’m not 100% sure that I didn’t find some sort of consolation prize ending and missed the “true” one.
Couldn't agree more, your observations on Angeline Era's design are so sharp, especially comparing it to Gurumin and Crystal Project. I’m super curious, what if that specific blend of Gurumin’s style and Crystal Project’s grid platforming actually create a whole new subgenre for exploration games, it would be pretty cool to see.