Weekly Update 2026-04-12
Eat me.
Game Releases and Updates
Puzzling Places PC release – This is a game I’ve played a ton in its original standalone incarnation on the Quest, but was happy to shell out for the port to PC. Puzzling Places is a 3D jigsaw puzzle game, and one of the best virtual jigsaw games period. There are a variety of 3D scanned and modeled locations and objects, a ton of wonderful details, and it’s easily one of the most engaging things you can do in VR without breaking a sweat.
The PC port primarily introduces the flat-screen mode, which is decent, but a little cumbersome and overwhelming still, especially on high piece counts. The mode just lacks some quality of life stuff like piece grouping and the ability to grab more than one piece at a time, plus manipulating the camera and pieces in three dimensions with a mouse and keyboard is just less intuitive than grabbing and moving in VR.
The other feature is PCVR mode, which has been expanded over the standalone version – better graphics options, a lot more options in general, and a whole new mode intended for casual play, where the only pieces presented to you are guaranteed to fit on the portion you’ve already got together. Really the only downgrade from the standalone is the loss of passthrough and fewer puzzles overall, since they haven’t started porting the DLC packs yet. The game is still a little buggy, the small team means it might take time for quality of life suggestions to get implemented, and the biggest selling point is still VR, but I’m still pretty happy, especially if crossplay and the new local co-op work well.
WRATH: Aeon of Ruin VR – speaking of throwing money at VR stuff I already own. I normally wouldn’t jump on a VR port for a game I technically still haven’t finished otherwise, but I’m making an exception in this case because of who’s involved. Team Beef have been behind a string of incredible [and free] VR ports of virtually every classic PC FPS game you can think of, all with the same amount of love and the inclusion of the full spectrum of VR options for true VR obsessed sickos. I think their ports of the later Jedi Knight games might just be the best ways to play them, and playing Doom and Quake in VR is an experience every retro gamer needs to try.
Team Beef’s work on WRATH is no disappointment. The level of care and detail is amazing, the way they tweaked weapon functionality is cool, the little animations for you using consumables is cute, and even the menu has been integrated as a magical tome you summon and flip through with an enchanted quill. I still probably should just run through the flatscreen version before getting too engrossed in this, but I have no doubts that this port will at least be a worthwhile replay.
Echo Point Nova NG+ update – another huge update for this dizzying cloud-surfing shooter. [I played the free expansion last year] The NewGame+ update mostly just adds a vast array of options for replays, letting you individually keep or reset your progress on almost every conceivable unlock in the game, adjust enemy scaling with some granularity, and even swap the mobility options for new, slightly tweaked variants. It’s not something that’s going to pull me in for an immediate replay, but it’s a great idea to shake things up for people who are eager for more EPN.
Supraworld update – been keeping track of the latest Supra-game’s development, and while I don’t have much to say about the current state of its early access [aside from the developers claiming it’s already much bigger than the first game] I did want to share a quote from the latest patch notes that cracked me up: “Cut stupid harmonica puzzle and replaced it”
No Man’s Sky Xeno Arena – I did not buy No Man’s Sky when it came out. I was too clever, too true a gamer, and I could smell Sean Murray’s lies and flop sweat. I did not buy No Man’s Sky when it was declared ‘actually good now,’ after years of patches and content additions. I was too jaded, too principled, to allow popular sentiment to spoil my negativity. I did buy No Man’s Sky after they added Pokemon.
The State of Games Played
I plowed through most of the back half of The Myth of a Godslayer this week, which included unlocking the Arena challenges, many major plot reveals, and the triumphant declaration of my own clan. I’m currently knocking out some major side content cleanup before heading into the endgame – I doubt I’ll go for full completion, at least on this playthrough, but there are a few things I still want to do before wrapping up.
I appear to be about halfway through the total number of chapters for Granser Act 1, which is shocking in a way and simultaneously kind of interesting and refreshing. I don’t know if I’ll actually reach a part of the plot where the world will open up or if it’ll continue to be a linear series of vignettes but I’ve been impressed with the encounter design and number of little additions so far.
Now that Thief Gold is done and dusted, it’s time to start Thief 2. I’m really looking forward to some of the better maps coming up, and I don’t think this revisit will take me as long as the first game, unless some really crazy new releases drop soon.
And finally, I’ve still been picking away at Esoteric Ebb. I wound up staying up absurdly late on the first day, unwilling to give up on prodding around until deep into the next morning, but the exhaustion mechanics finally made dice rolls for even trivial things too risky. Now that I’ve actually accomplished one or two tasks, though, I feel like I should be in the groove to make some real headway this week.
Writing
Thief Gold took a long time, not least because I clipped virtually every cutscene and voice line and had to choose my favorites to include. I’m sure I’ll have a similarly overwhelming catalog of clips and screenshots for the sequel.
I decided to take a little break afterwards rather than starting on the writeup for Gunlocked 2 immediately. I’ll probably tackle that this week, while also working on a ‘real’ essay.
Other
I had a few games on my watchlist that were going to be featuring in the Triple I Initiative, a roundup of trailers for indie games that dropped on Thursday. The majority were, as you might expect, the kind of farming, mining, crafting, survival friendslop crap that is currently flooding the market, which I mostly skipped through. Hey, if you like that shit, or have friends, happy for you. I wanted to get to the good stuff.
Alkahest – the store-brand Dark Messiah your grandma gets at Big Lots. I’m still looking forward to this, though the most recent trailer did have a bit more awkwardness to the animations and ragdolls than I liked.
Belmont’s Curse – Evil Empire’s turn at making yet another Castlevania reboot. They’re being pretty insistent about it NOT being a roguelite, which is absolutely a good thing, but how much of a Metroidvania is it really going to be at the end of the day? It still looks pretty much exactly like the flow and pacing of Dead Cells to me, so I’m expecting whatever layout the game has to include a lot of linear gauntlets, at least, and that might not mesh well with a standard MV map design. And it’s French? That’s so 2025.
Dead As Disco – I don’t usually go in for rhythm games, especially ones this flashy, but this looks like a compelling blend of No More Heroes and Sifu with the rhythm sync as a bonus layer on top. Will it be at least as good as Metal: Hellsinger? If it’s close, I might still enjoy it.
Barotrauma DLC – I’m kind of shocked this game’s still chugging along. It’s a weird, niche setup and format for a game, mixing management, survival, and exploration in a clunky, overwhelming sidescroller, one that I mostly bounced off of because of the headache of managing bots. Of course, the secret truth is that this game is really meant to be played in co-op, meaning it’s technically a survival crafting friendslop pile, but I’m asocial and so I look at this game and all its updates with a little bit of wistful sadness, knowing I’ll never have the patience to learn to wrangle its systems alone or the psychic energy to wrangle other people into playing it with me.
Neverway – wow, survival horror AND farming? The pixel art and animations are doing a lot of heavy lifting making this remotely appealing, and I hope the action holds up enough for me to overlook the… fucking… tree-chopping and NPC relationshiping.
Alabaster Dawn – definitely the highlight for me, and the reason I was even aware of the event in the first place. This followup to CrossCode was one of the best demos I played last year, and one of my most anticipated games of this year. And we finally have a release date! A… uh… oh. A release date for Early Access. That’s exactly what I was worried about. Will Alabaster Dawn actually make it out this year? Probably not, considering CrossCode was in EA for like three years. I don’t know if I’ll be desperate enough to play this to jump into EA this time, but I guess at least it’s going somewhere. I just hope they’re secretly further along than it seems.
I can testify that Barotrauma is a hell of a lot of fun co-op with friends. I was never into the griefing experience from either side, so I haven't tried it with randoms.
You know I'm gonna be about Alkahest. Just hoping it'll be interesting enough with at least something new to let me do in alchemy