Weekly Update 2026-01-18
My cross to bear
Game Releases and Updates
Shadows of Doubt Workshop update – this sandbox voxelized detective immersive sim has been bouncing at the periphery of my awareness since I played the first demo. The core idea is fantastic, plopping you in a randomly generated chunk of rainy noir town, adding a randomly generated serial killer, and cutting you loose to identify them by spraying for fingerprints, combing through trash cans for receipts, and breaking into random people’s apartments in a drunken haze.
Unfortunately, in spite of the excellent conceit and solid presentation, the game by most accounts seems to be woefully underbaked. After an apparently highly premature exit from Early Access, the tenor of discussion around it has been mixed at best, and it looks like it still struggles with the same basic bugginess that plagued my attempts in the early demo.
All those fortunes could change, though, with the addition of the Steam Workshop functionality and expanded modding support. After all, if Bethesda has taught the gaming industry anything, it’s that you can leave a game any percentage unfinished you want, as long as there’s a sad hoard of wannabe developers, underemployed programmers, and middling modders ready to fix every issue that isn’t baked into the engine and provide at least the illusion of endless content. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s not a solution that will salvage every fumbled release, and, more to the point, the Workshop mods need to actually fucking work, and they apparently don’t yet for Shadows of Doubt.
Super Woden: Rally Edge release – turning from bitter disappointment to utter joy, this sequel to 2023’s Super Woden GP II has finally released, and is everything I’d hoped for and more. The Super Woden series is a melding of top-down arcade racing and a little bit of garage management and tuning from the likes of Gran Turismo. Rally Edge takes my favorite parts of GP II, focuses entirely on the rally-type cars and stages, moves the camera to a rear chase, and goddamn is it good.
The State of Games Played
After its release on Thursday, I tore through the first few tiers of Super Woden: Rally Edge’s campaign, earning myself a few free cars, saving up to buy what I think is a Nissan Silvia [the cars are all based on real cars but obviously without any licensing] and just having a great time. The variety of track type includes dramatic weather events, there’s gymkhana events where you have to swerve through an obstacle course, the tracks are more dynamic than anything in the last game, and you still have an option to wash your car after a race.
I also made my way to the second zone of Tainted Grail, following a miserable boss fight and a hilariously awkward cutscene. Well, multiple hilariously awkward cutscenes, frankly. The game in general is picking up a bit, mostly because I finally got some good spells.
And by good spells I mean mostly stuff that blows enemies away so hard they sail over the horizon.
Plus my character actually looks kind of cool now and not like trash.
Tried a few more UFO 50 games, and they were pretty good ones, too. Velgress is like a sped-up arcade-y-er Kid Icarus, and while it’s probably the hardest UFO 50 game so far, it’s also one of the most fun. Planet Zoldath, on the other hand, is a sort of micro roguelike where you’re plopped on a randomly generated planet and have to find various tools and components to help you proceed.
Finally, having put Angeline Era behind me, I jumped back into The Myth of a Godslayer, which is still impressing me with its dungeons, artifacts, and world. I really liked being able to do an optional area to get an artifact that makes me immune to lava… right before doing the lava dungeon. This might be the next game I really focus on finishing soon.
Writing
I usually wouldn’t put a write-up out on the weekend, but I realized it was going to be my third week without one if I didn’t go ahead and publish it, so I had to wrap up my thoughts on Angeline Era, then immediately turn here and consider my thoughts on how I conveyed my thoughts on it. In the end, I’m pretty happy with it. The holiday stupor has not quite completely worn off, and I should be back to a fairly regular schedule of actually finishing things soon.
Other
There are a lot of games I’ve been thinking about revisiting, now that I have a relatively respectable platform, and a few of those are parts of series that have had a big impact on me personally. I’ve been kicking around the idea of trying to get through at least one franchise-spanning set of games in one year, but it’s hard to commit on any one in particular. Then I realized [I should’ve realized this a few weeks ago] that you can embed polls into these posts. So, just out of curiosity, here are some of the franchises I’ve been thinking of replaying and writing up this year. Oh, great, you can only put five options in a single embedded poll. Well, fuck it. Let’s do it like this.
No promises I even do any of them, no oath to play EVERY game technically included, although I will say a few of these series have spinoffs I’d probably throw in too. Also I probably wouldn’t bother with games I’ve written up in the past year or two for obvious reasons. And I have no idea how this will actually be tabulated or if you can pick multiple options. Hey Substack, give your poll widget more options!
Any talk of replaying Ultima seems to require a shout out to the CRPG Addict.
https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/
Shadows of Doubt might have a bigger gap between potential and execution than any other game I've ever played. It initially blew my goddamned mind when I first played it in 2024, but that wore off after about an hour. The first time you desperately cloister yourself in a bathroom vent to avoid a suspicious homeowner who returned to their apartment ahead of schedule is right up there with the best moments in immersive sims. The tenth time just doesn't hit, especially when the case bugs out and the crucial evidence never spawns in the first place. Still praying for whatever fixes will finally enable the horde of depraved modders to work their magic, but I'm not holding out much hope at this point.
I'm for Thief, by the way. You ever play that Black Parade mod for the first game that came out a couple years ago? Or the weird-ass VR installment from last month?