Weekly Update 2026-03-22
I'm off to the Beach, Sam! To my Beach!
Game Releases and Updates
Cleared Hot Arcade mode – while we won’t be seeing a second chapter for a good while yet, this patch purports to improve performance, especially on the Steam Deck, which was a sticking point for me earlier in EA.
I haven’t had the chance to test it out on the Deck, but I have tooled around in the new Arcade modes, which are pretty good fun. The skee-ball and minigolf minigames especially are impressive and clever gimmicks. Now get back to work on chapter 2!
Toziuha Night Atreu Mode – just in time, days after me uninstalling the game for the first time in months, Order of the Alchemists rips off another part of Order of Ecclesia and added an extra playable character who uses a gun as their primary weapon. From the moment Atreu appeared in-game I knew what he was a reference to, but I honestly didn’t expect the developer to go all the way and make him fully playable.
I say ‘fully’ because technically he is – you can, as far as I can tell, play the whole game with Atreu, leaning on his shotgun blast and grenade lob skills primarily as his actual pistol shots do very little damage, triple jump by shooting the air beneath himself, and very little else. He can’t change equipment, he doesn’t seem to get access to any elemental circuits, he still needs to collect key items to get through arbitrary gates, and worst of all, he can’t use any consumable items. He can pick them up, but the inventory menu for using them is just gone, which means he cannot heal. Yikes.
Tainted Grail weapons update – a free content expansion that seems to mostly consist of a bunch of extra unique weapons to find. Most of these designs seem… let’s say heavily inspired by Elden Ring weapon designs in particular, which is not a bad thing.
Possibly more interesting is the note at the end of the news post announcing this DLC, which teased a couple games coming from publisher Awaken Realms’ internal teams. The one that caught my eye, Hoarder, is a horror… ‘clean-up’ game, and actually looks to have some clever gameplay, humor, and maybe even a half-decent story. The news post mentions that the project director is a co-creator of Darkwood, and the trailer was good enough that I wishlisted it despite not playing horror games much.
Crimson Capes seamless co-op – I played the demo to this sequel of Windmills during a Next Fest last year, and while it was pretty interesting, I didn’t wind up getting it. Now, it’s received an update to allow for seamless co-op, without the need to re-initiate the session, which is great if you like to play with a friend. I would probably never do a game like this in co-op but it has reminded me that this game exists and might be worth grabbing soon.
Devil Spire Falls - the good times are over: “Cut Impact to Force by 50% again. Stop complaining about it or I’ll nerf it until you can no longer throw enemies even if you’re a max level hulk with 999 STR kicking a level 1 mushroom”
You know, I think impact values are fine. No further notes.
Death Stranding 2 PC port – My nearly-completed save file is stuck on a console many hours away, so while I usually wait to pick up a second copy of a game like this, I need to finish it sometime.
The State of Games Played
I’m already through Mexico and into Australia on my second run of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. Boy, it really speeds things up when you can skip cutscenes in a Kojima game. I got a good laugh when the chapter 2 title came up and I held the button to skip cutscene and it went directly to chapter 3. I’m also laughing again at Norman Reedus’s delivery of lines like this:
I don’t think I’ll have the energy to bulldoze through the 80% of the game I’ve already seen too quickly, although I will be popping into DS2 and making progress when I can, if only because I have so much fun with the photo mode in these games.
I finally finished the last stage of Haunted Lands, and am going to assume, maybe incorrectly, that I’ve seen enough of the optional content to do this game justice in a write-up, so I don’t have to spend another week combing through extremely long and difficult levels and banging my head against improved miniboss variants. This is one of the best games I’ve played in a while, period, and I want to write about it sooner rather than later.
I also completed the Battle of the Blight in Approaching Infinity, which was probably the most engaging and tense setup for a gimmick run in a roguelike I’ve played, and got me fired up enough to immediately boot up my other run where I was heading to Sector 1000 and finish that off too. Meeting the Engravers was absolutely worth the effort, and having a fresh crop of ships to unlock, meta-progression bonuses to unlock [even if I don’t use them] and challenges to impose on myself has made me consider doing each of the modes added in the DLC so I have an excuse to write it up and thereby gush more about Approaching Infinity.
Writing
Nioh 3 definitely exists, and I totally wrote a post about it.
I’m currently psyching myself up to write up Haunted Lands, and should be publishing this week alongside some more bonus content. I also have to work on a project with a fast-approaching deadline… stay tuned!
Other
Idosra 2 has officially been announced, teasing a revamped structure, more abilities, and maybe most importantly, an engine update from Stencyl to Godot. The first game has had some trouble on some Windows machines, which is a pretty major issue, one that a new engine might help with, and one of the aims of the shift is to port the first game into the new engine. This is all very exciting news for me.
I really enjoyed this post from the developer of Fortune Summoners explaining their inspirations for the game, including gamebooks like the Fighting Fantasy series and Sorcery! I’m not sure why they decided to post this now, but it’s reminded me that I’ve been meaning to pick up the second release and see how it is. And it’s a cute post.
I'm glad you like Haunted Lands that much! I've been having a good time playing it these past few days, although I'll admit it's been hard navigating some difficulty frustrations. The moment to moment gameplay and overall level design is fantastic and pushes me further, however.