Weekly Update 2026-01-11
Bad to the boner
It’s been a long week, starting with saying goodbye to an old dog, my shower breaking, my car battery dying, the weather turning back to shit, and my coffee taking too long to get delivered. Luckily, there’s not a whole lot of new releases to keep up with.
Game Releases and Updates
Distant Flux: System Initializing ‘approachability’ patch – okay, look at this game. Tell me if you believe it has been made ‘approachable’ with a patch.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. The only thing keeping me from spending 20 hours trying to figure out how to play this game already is the fact that it costs… well, an amount of dollars I can’t see myself parting with for Dwarf Fortress but with spreadsheets instead of graphics.
Cyberdrifter Virtual Desktop update – I was fully prepared to write this off as an excuse to complain about the state of the Tron IP but it only took a few weeks for the developers to apparently fix the incompatibility with Virtual Desktop, which means I might, one day, decide to try this out.
Pathologic 3 release – I think I’ll pass. The demo did not convince me Ice Pick Lodge have any idea what they’re doing, Pathologic 2 did not convince me Ice Pick Lodge have any idea what they’re doing, hey, shit, what the hell do I know? I know I ain’t playing Pathologic 3. On the plus side, they’re now two thirds done with what should’ve been an easy update to one of the best games of all time that’s somehow taken a decade. I know, why don’t you guys make Pathologic 4 a turn based JRPG where the Changling travels into a painting world and meets all kinds of weird, masked characters? If you take half as long as these past two took, nobody will even remember what you’re ripping off!
The State of Games Played
Inexplicably spent most of my gaming time this week, or, well, a plurality of it, with Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. It’s got a lot of… tonal problems, a clunky inventory, too many consumables and no convenient way to burn through them, very, very ugly character models, and combat that oscillates between extremes, and I’m having a decent time. I’m hoping it will either improve significantly upon moving to the next chapter, or get so fucking bad I either bail or become invested in hate-playing it, but I’m scared it’ll just be more of the same.
I did play a few more games in UFO 50, with the highlight being Mortol, a cross between maso-core platformer and Lemmings clone, where you can opt to sacrifice your current guy to turn him into a platform, a stone block, or a bomb, paving the way for your next life. It’s a clever concept, it has decent controls, and most importantly, has a tangible overall goal rather than just a scoreboard. I might actually finish this one.
Speaking of ‘I might actually finish this,’ I underestimated how much of Angeline Era I was willing to play before going for the ending, and I underestimated even more drastically how long that ending would take to finish. It’s gotten… weird, as you might guess from the above screenshot, and I am still so confused that I don’t really have an opinion yet on, well, any of it. I will say, however, that my 2025 Babe of the Year award may have been preemptive…
This crazy bitch might get Babe of the Decade.
But wait, there’s more! I decided to play a bunch of demos this week, including a few upcoming releases.
DEMOS
Hark the Ghoul – I played the first demo for this King’s Field-but-with-bugs a while back, and did not find time to try the updated demo during the most recent Next Fest, so this has been sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to play it or uninstall it, and that was a big reason I decided to do a batch of demos this week. This particular KF-like has a few cute gimmicks – a Bloodborne-esque off-hand pistol, [albeit with no apparent parrying properties] a Dark Messiah-esque off-hand kick button, [which is mostly used for rearranging crates and knocking rocks into enemies] and enemies can friendly fire.
It feels pretty good, it looks really great in my opinion, and it might end up edging out Lunacid as my favorite KF knock-off. Might. I’m still not totally convinced by the weird perk-based leveling system, the combat still feels pretty stiff and backpedal-y, and I did not find any particularly exciting weapons or spells in what I played of the demo.
NEUROXUS – this is a blindingly ugly and hollow Armored Core knockoff. And then on top of that it’s one of those roguelites where you get three ‘perk’ choices every couple big square rooms you go through. Barf.
Valkyrie Saga – this might genuinely be one of the ugliest games I’ve played that wasn’t intentionally made ugly. Very, very hard to look at, and yes, it has CRT filters offered to you at the start, but no, I seriously doubt they would’ve made this any better.
Gameplay-wise, it’s not much more impressive. The one good idea it has is that, rather than giving you new moves as upgrades, which you then string together or can’t string together to gate your progression, you start with all the basic movement tech unlocked, and then your upgrades simply increment how many moves you can string together without landing. So, for example, you can do two jumps, or a jump and an air dash, or a spring up from a ground pound with one crystal. With two, you can throw one more of each basic move at the end of your combo. Unfortunately none of the moves feel very good to perform, the world is too big and empty and UGLY AS SHIT, the enemies are miserable to fight and pointless to fight to boot, and there’s just no conceivable argument for me playing this instead of maybe doing another run of Pseudoregalia. At least this one gives you a shadow.
Heavy Hearts – a pornographic VN/RPG that, hear me out, I downloaded because I was curious about the combat. Yes, the combat that includes a combo input for Masturbate. Well, the combat is a tiny bit interesting, in a way. It’s a kind of ATB, except you’re supposed to mash the attack button, but take a break to block or parry enemy shots. Then you also have the ability to imbue your weapon with various elements, and combine that with charged heavy attacks or magic shots of your own.
The problem is the enemy attacks have very little telegraphing, there’s little incentive in the few actual fights I had to try understanding how elemental damage works, and it just doesn’t end up being that engaging in practice. Like a lot of ATB, there’s a lot of waiting around, or more specifically, a lot of stroking yourself while waiting for gauges to fill. That’s one thing in sex scenes, another in combat. In combat, it’s boring.
Speaking of boring, the game, like many pornographic games, simply isn’t that titillating OR amusing, and simply wouldn’t hold up as a non-pornographic title. The very first area includes both a several minute-long drawn VN segment of a woman masturbating in a hot spring and an equally long segment of a pixelated woman masturbating in a tent. There’s weird inclusions, like the ability to toggle on different opacity layers in the tent scene so you can, I dunno, just watch her silhouette as she fingers herself, you have to hammer on the skip dialogue button to get her to finish, or the fact that triggering random sex animations in the overworld gives you piddling temporary combat buffs. I dunno, maybe everyone would’ve been happier if I’d found the eggplant before triggering that event.
Tearscape – Link’s Awakening by way of Bloodborne. Or at least that’s the pitch. Aesthetics aside it really doesn’t do much in the vein of either, and was a pretty bland top-down Zelda-lite, at least up to the point it pissed me off with an enemy that two-shots you. Oh, and it refused to be recorded right for some reason so no audio for you.
Parasite Mutant – sick of me calling things clones and knock-offs? Too bad! Parasite Mutant is a naked reference to Parasite Eve, from the developers of Tower Hunter and Frontier Hunter. It’s also not bad! Parasite Eve is one of those series that I think some people would like to see more games inspired by, and I think the mildly realistic anime style is a solid fit for the perspective.
I have two big problems with it – one is that I think the combat needs a little bit more player agency than just running in circles waiting for bars to fill. Enemy attacks are sometimes incredibly difficult to avoid just with positioning, and it feels like the addition of a dodge that drains a bit of your ATB gauge would pull it all together. The other problem is that I couldn’t figure out where to go or where to find the codes for the RE-style computer and combination lock I found, and wound up walking all the way back to the start of the demo. I did really like that the fixed camera had a completely inexplicable fixation on a forklift.
Writing
It’s looking like Angeline Era will be my first 2026 write-up, and I’m hoping to have it wrapped sometime this week. No promises, though, as, depending on how this ending goes, I might still be sitting alone in the dark trying to process how I feel about the game by next weekend.
Other
A few announcements this week: first, the results of my year-end poll are in. The consensus seems to be… no major changes. A focus on indie games, [duh] primarily game write-ups with the occasional longer or less focused article, potentially a cooking show, and, quote, “more dong.” These responses adhere pretty closely to what I already had planned for 2026, so it’s gratifying to see that my readership is already so in sync with me.
Secondly, I’m going to be editing and uploading write-ups that I wrote in the past several years before starting this Substack, with the majority being paywalled. There are a few reasons for this scheme. I want to give at least some tangible benefit to paid subs but can’t justify paywalling anything I put a lot of recent work into and actually want people to read. I also think my earlier pieces are generally rougher, besides which it would be overwhelming if I just dumped 5x as many write-ups on the base readership this year. Finally, I have been meaning to revisit a lot of games, to see how they hold up, potentially to produce better write-ups on them, and archiving these for reference is going to be part of that.
I’ll be tagging these pieces as ‘archival’ with a forward including the year it was originally written, and probably a short afterward with a summary of any major changes as to the game’s status or my opinion of it that has occurred. I’m also making a special exception for the games that made it into each year’s top ten rankings, and they will be available for free subscribers.
I have a few other plans for events and special posts, including potentially some video or audio posts, some of which will be paywalled, especially when I’m still experimenting. I don’t have the energy or the reliability to launch a full-on podcast or anything, and I prefer writing in general anyway. None of this, by the way, will be taking time away from new write-ups or essays, and can mostly be safely ignored.
My last announcement is that I was so hyped by the details of the upcoming Age of Empires 2 DLC [three new South American civs, Inca overhaul] that I preordered it and also bought the Alexander the Great Chronicles DLC, even though I spent a year saying I needed to finish the Battle for Greece one. I think I’m ready now to go back to Battle for Greece, turn the difficulty up, and give it a write-up, after which I hope to not be too burned out for Alexander. It might be a lot of AoE in the coming weeks. I’m ready for it. Are you?
I tried the demo for Neuroxus for one of the recent Next Fests. It was so awful that I actually forgot I had played it until I was about to publish the article on the next fest and double-checked my library. Saw it, thought about adding it, then thought "There isn't a single person who would care about this thing", and left it off. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
And what did you mean about the tonal problems with Tainted Grail? That’s one that’s been on my short list to get back to. I wandered off from that because of some of the other stuff you were describing, particularly too much awkward combat. the interesting world and aesthetic is what keeps the idea alive for me, though. What issues are you seeing?
It’s coming back to me a bit. I loved the sort of pre-Christian mysticism they had going in the intro, but they immediately gamified a bunch of those elements, and I lost some of my interest. Was that your issue?