Weekly Update 2026-01-25
Bean me once, shame on bean
Game Releases and Updates
Cook For Me Grandpa update – over 50 additional ingredients added to the AI recipe judging game of the century, on top of an option to give new players all your unlocked techniques in ‘Versus’ mode so you can have cooking battle on an even footing. Wow. Unfortunately my granddaughter still has terrible taste and only wants to eat omurice.
The State of Games Played
Played a bit of Void War for the first time in a while, trying to get a victory in the Corpsemother while also encountering the new planetary invasion missions. I don’t know if this run will go the distance – Death Cultist units are pretty squishy even with their extra health module, and I haven’t found a single good fighter so far. But I can load enemy ships up with fart clouds quite trivially so that’s something.
Also got a bit further in Wizordum as the new Blood Mage character, almost through the first episode already and trucking along nicely. I almost wish this were the default class – it’s much more fun relying on health leaching attacks and magic than scouring corners and chugging consumables to keep your health up.
Finally bought my way into the Group B races in Super Woden: Rally Edge, and added a mod to change the generic makes and models into real names. Or rather, what some guy guesses is the real car, and I gotta be honest, I don’t know most of these names. This much horsepower is also a little squirrely, at least without any traction or brake upgrades. Maybe I should do some more Group C before I kill a spectator.
Picked Toziuha Night back up, and this time for sure I’m near the end – because I gave up and found a map so I don’t have to go back and forth across the whole game blind for several more hours. I’m not happy that a patch that dropped sometime while I had this backburnered nerfed my primary damage spell, but I am kind of happy the same patch lowered the mana cost of elemental whips so I don’t feel like I have to leave them off all the time.
Space detective game Between Horizons went on sale this week, and I enjoyed the demo of it I played… gosh, it must have been a couple years back now. So I considered picking it up, then remembered, oh, yeah, I wanted to play through DigiTales’ earlier game Lacuna first, before committing, and, hey, it’s probably pretty short anyway. Except I bought Lacuna on the Nintendo Switch and I don’t have my Switch with me. So I bought Lacuna on Steam and played through it finally, and honestly was pretty happy I finally had an excuse.
And most importantly, I broke down and bought Zexion, which turned out to be possibly the best Metroid clone I’ve ever played, and played it almost the whole rest of the week. But I still had time for… demos.
DEMOS
Well, only two, and they aren’t really demos.
NOT REALLY DEMOS
First, I tried the playtest for Being and Becoming, a metroidvania I have… a history with, or at least a history of mishearing its title as Bean and Becoming. The game has a striking art style, some flashy animations… and feels pretty mediocre, to be honest.
It reminded me of Blasphemous with the overdone animations and especially the focus on parries, but the movement and platforming were kind of unsatisfying, there wasn’t a single interesting gimmick to any of the admittedly short bit I played, it’s completely bloodless, and there are too many voiced NPCs.
Maybe it’ll be better at release but that’s not going to be my discovery to make.
Then I saw No Rest for the Wicked was having a free weekend to promote the release of its co-op update. This ARPG from the developers of Ori and the Blind Forest has been in Early Access for a while now, and I’ve been very slightly curious about how developers who have, until now, only made two Ori games [which I did not particularly like] would fare at making an ARPG. Well, now I know.
Very first impression, right when you start making a character, is holy shit, these character designs are grotesque. I’m guessing the proportions have something to do with the fixed perspective but GOD DAMN. Don’t show me this. Fake it, change it behind my back, I don’t want to think about the fact that every character is hybridized with gorillas.
The game is isometric action dodgerollslop with a fixed camera and too many controls. The fixed camera makes exploration weird and tedious, as you press yourself against a wall to slide around a ledge to get to an entrance that’s on the back side of a structure, or tiptoe along tightrope bridges at fixed awkward angles, and I imagine it would eventually cause problems in combat too. The tightrope walking in particular forced me to abandon the mouse and keyboard, which I’d started with in the anticipation of playing an ARPG, but, as you might guess, makes navigating arbitrary-angle tightropes a bit uncomfortable.
But immediately afterwards, as I swapped to controller and started engaging with the combat, I noticed an even bigger issue – almost every combat-relevant command is ‘on release.’ Before you roll your eyes, hear me out. By ‘on-release,’ I mean that every single button you press to do anything in the game has one action bound to a quick tap and another bound to the button being held down, but in order to parse those, the ‘quick tap’ commands actually don’t trigger on initial press, but on you releasing the button. The additional amount of effective input lag and uncertainty in feedback isn’t huge, or shouldn’t be, but it’s there.
People have been arguing about the issue of ‘on-release’ inputs for years, including, as a great example, in the context of Dark Souls’s dodge roll, which must be ‘on-release’ because holding the dodge button is how you sprint. Well, No Rest For the Wicked does something I don’t think I’ve seen before, by making nearly every single input you do get stacked with some other potential held input, meaning they are ALL ‘on-release.’ Dodge-roll? On-release. Parry? On-release. Your basic light attack is on-release. Even trying to open a door can cause you to instead flatten yourself against it. Everything you can try to do in a fight feels like it has fucked up timing, and then once you realize why, just a constantly fluctuating amount of input lag. For a game that’s trying to adapt the dynamics of Souls-like combat to a distant, detached perspective, it’s incredible to me that the controls are handled wrong. And I do mean wrong, as in, incorrect, as in, you should know better if you’ve made games before or thought critically about them in your life. Unbelievable.
Also this isn’t a fucking horseshoe crab. There are dead horseshoe crabs you can loot on the beach and then there are giant crabs you can kill and loot ‘horseshoe crab’ off them too, but those are just CRABS not HORSESHOE CRABS. *Starts growling and snarling and trashing my own desk* Don’t get me started on the fact that 80% of the crap I picked up was crafting materials. I don’t know, maybe I’m just in a bad mood.
Writing
Lacuna was an easy game to play, an easy game to write up, and made me wonder why I don’t play more things like that. Then I remembered how bad most adventure games are. Do you know most of them don’t even let your character smoke?
I’ve beaten Zexion already, so I should be working on that write-up, too… except I’m too busy playing a randomized seed of Zexion now. Maybe sometime this week I’ll be able to peel myself away from Zexion long enough to write about it.
This Wednesday will mark the true first anniversary of this Substack, and I probably should mark the occasion in some way… but I think I won’t. Got most of that out of the way on New Years, and I’d rather save my energy… for Valentine’s.
Other
My poll from last week has concluded, and with around 18 people actually offering their opinions, it looks like the results are pretty conclusive – the Thief series is far and away the most popular choice, followed distantly by FromSoft and a tie between Gothic and Ultima. I am shocked, shocked, that nobody at all cares about Descent, a series whose last proper entry was… in 1999. C’mon, I… I was going to do Overload too. Just for that I’m going to do Wing Commander or something instead.
The "on-release" issue sounds like a bug, not a feature... But not getting horseshoe crabs right is worse, come on.
I care about Descent.