Weekly Update 2026-05-03
On behalf of humankind
Game Releases and Updates
Assetto Corsa Rally Subarus and snow – the 0.4 update for this [far more serious than Super Woden: Rally Edge] rally race sim has brought the snow weather effect to the other two locales, added a few more cars, and, as I mentioned in my note a few days ago, forgot to add the ability to put snow tires on in those newly snowy maps. Or maybe I was just doing something wrong.
Either way, I fumbled through a few races in the snow like a teen driver seeing their first winter behind the wheel, and realized I wasn’t satisfied so I started actually doing the intended, structured events. I even got a few silver medals! I’m not as bad as my clips make me seem!
Ball X Pit Shadow Update, ARC Raiders new map, Helldivers mech rebalance – a triple helping of updates that should be the sort of thing to get me excited to play these games again, but for reasons intrinsic to their nature, fail to evoke that. What would I even do with a new Ball X Pit character? Partner them with the AI controlled character and let them heat up my room while I look at my phone, probably.
Proton VR early access – this VR arcade shooter was the best VR demo I played during the most recent Next Fest, and has enough promise that I’m willing to drop money on an extremely early Early Access pitch, one that even the dev seems happy to caution people to wait on. At first I thought it was even smaller than the demo – there are two maps you can enter, and the default one has you running around charging batteries and doing little puzzles while fending off respawning enemies, but is a pretty small location otherwise.
But the EA does include the perk tree and weapon upgrade and attachment features, which were part of why I was excited to see someone pick up where COMPOUND VR left off. And even though not all the guns are customizable, the ones that are have a good number of options, and some really fun ones at that, like turning the basic pistol into some Robocop shit. Good stuff.
Mech Havoc – the actual update that dropped this week is less important than the fact that enough sizable looking updates have occurred recently that I want to give this top-down Brigador-lite a shot already. And I’ve been pretty happy with the early game – the bite-sized missions and massive list of guns and mechs and truck chassis unlocks remind me pleasantly of Viktor Origins, and there’s something satisfying about firing a railgun through a wall into an explosive fuel tank and watching the carnage.
Gastova: The Witches of Arkana – and now for an EA game that I’ve had for far too long. Gastova is a platformer of the Shantae/Wonder Boy variety, and it’s been in Early Access since 2022. Development has been a bit slow, playable updates even slower, and the developer has admitted frequently to succumbing to feature creep. But a new playable build after… I’m not sure how long, means I finally get to try out some of the long hyped changes, like replacing consumable potions with replenishing spells and a hard difficulty that gives enemies a chance to have random elemental powers. I’m still hopeful this game gets finished this year, and it’s looking likelier now than it has… well, since 2022.
Tainted Grail challenge mode – another new update to the Scrolls-like I never got around to finishing. This one is particularly interesting, as it’s a whole new mode that is intended to massively ramp up the difficulty of a replay, by imposing a choice of two permanent anti-perks every act you complete, and every two XP levels you gain. This is a format I’ve seen before, most notably in the Daughters of Ash mod for Dark Souls and a similar update for Souls-like-with-guns game Immortal: Unchained. In fact, for reasons I can’t fully explain, I actually finished that challenge for Immortal.
I don’t know that I would actually even attempt the same for an Oblivion-style RPG, though. It seems like the sort of thing that would either force you to engage in ridiculous cheesy meta-gaming or simply turn tedious as you piled damage reduction onto enemies that are already damage sponges. But it’s kind of cute that they’re making the attempt.
The State of Games Played
I’m nearing what I assume is the end of Esoteric Ebb. It’s been a nice counterpoint to whatever more demanding thing I’ve been playing alongside it, with a few rough edges or overlooked problems but generally very impressive. I might have to take a second dive for a couple hours after rolling credits just to see how far off the rails you can go, at least early on, before starting a write-up, but it’s no longer on the distant horizon.
Following Scanlines’ post about Hexen, and some discussion about the Nightdive ports of id FPSes, I decided to break down and buy the new Heretic + Hexen bundle, which comes with plenty of enhancements and quality of life features, and one new campaign for each game – I’m currently playing through the Faith Renewed campaign made for Heretic, and having a good time. Maybe my favorite new feature is the ability to assign specific inventory items to their own hotkeys, so you can actually pop a ring of invul or tome of power when you need it without having prophetic powers.
I finished Thumper, which means I was actually able to get myself into Into the Radius 2 long enough to clear the earliest bits and unlock the second map. I’ve got a huge variety of guns available to unlock now, tons of options for reflex sights and night vision rigs and foregrips and that’s still only about half the shop. I think I’ll take my time on this phase and grind up some actual gear before rushing off to the combat gauntlet that stalled me out before.
It’s time to light up, clean some guns, and return, for the first time since the first game, to my comfort zone, my safe space.
I also finished the Shadow of the Eclipse mod for Dark Souls. It might now be my favorite mod – ambitious but not oppressive, full of interesting additions and new features though still pretty rough and unfinished in a lot of similar ways to the base game. I don’t really have any interest in NG+, though, so I think I’m ready for the write-up.
Plus, I played some demos this week.
DEMOS
Ratcheteer DX
One more Link’s Awakening-like, taking place in a mid-apocalyptic setting, full of machinery and power conduits to toggle off and on, and presumably even a mech suit at some point. Unfortunately it just wasn’t that fun or engaging to play. Biggest problem is the lighting gimmick – about 80% of the demo consists of dark rooms only barely lit by your lantern, and its really frustrating. I got stuck on simple puzzles because I assumed there were mechanisms operating but I couldn’t actually see them to tell.
Vampire’s Veil
A Metroidvania reminiscent of Shantae with a little dash of Blasphemous thrown in. You play as a vampire lady who claws her way through the human defenders of a village and heals by grabbing screaming, fleeing maidens and draining their blood. It opens with an extended tutorial, one that, like the recent Inti Creates Gal Guardians demos, goes on far too long before removing all your powerups and making you explore a big empty map.
There’s nothing really wrong with the game, aside from the amount of kind of wasted space in the map, but it just didn’t excite me that much. I did like the art and animation, though.
Puzzle ATLAS
Just a digitized compilation of the sorts of logic puzzles you’d find in one of those bathroom readers targeted at gifted children. Oh, and a Simon Says ‘puzzle.’ There’s too much reading, too little fanfare when you lock in a correct answer, and I didn’t even parse some of these things as puzzles. Terrible.
Dead as Disco
This is a little bit less Sifu than I’d hoped and more like endless Batman: Arkham series brawls with some scoring that presumably improves with your timing. Mash attack, hit dodge when the dodge button flashes above an enemy, hit parry when the parry button flashes above an enemy, and, if you feel like it, hit the finisher button to lock yourself into a canned beatdown or do a button combo to do a faster execution, if you even remember that combo exists.
The demo does at least show off two obvious gimmicks for the train station themed stage it includes – fighting on tracks, with trains going by and obliterating everyone still on the wrong side of the arena [except you, who just gets hurt and bounces away] and fighting inside the train with a locked sidescrolling perspective, Oldboy style. I have to say, I hate when demos like this tease you with a bossfight but don’t let you do it. That’s the hook. You don’t catch shit by reeling a bit of line around.
A Fox Tale
A precision platformer with not a lot going on except some speciesism.
Very bland, not even that hard, nothing else to say about it.
Gecko Gods
A 3D platformer where you play as a gecko, and the one thing that everyone knows is that geckos can walk on any surface in any orientation so that’s the gimmick of this game. Except sometimes I still came unstuck and fell off, which was annoying.
Other than that, it’s pretty standard 3D exploration – switches, elevators, obvious power conduits to follow to more switches, moving water levels up and down, you get the idea. It’s fine but didn’t totally click with me, and the demo ends right as you get your Windwaker tiny sailboat so I guess the full game is you going around to different islands where you climb all over stuff and rage when you fall off randomly.
Queen’s Domain
Another King’s Field clone, this time very specifically emulating the look and feel of the PS2 evolution of the franchise, King’s Field IV. And it genuinely looks outstanding – gorgeous vistas, detailed and charismatic enemy models, rich environmental detail, all in a style that might not be totally authentic but sure feels nostalgic. From the first moments I gained control I was stunned by just how good it looked. It plays pretty good too.
The movement and combat is authentically stiff and plodding, but with careful calibration and just enough extra innovation layered on to make it more than a mindless mimicry. Like a real KF game, your weapon damage scales with the amount of stamina you’ve recovered since your last swing or sprint, but it’s further augmented by how long you’ve held your swing, up to a point. Each weapon also has two attack types, giving the KF formula a taste of the Dark Souls moveset diversity, and giving weapon types more distinction, flavor, and situational value than their raw stats would otherwise add. Some weapons even do different ‘types’ of damage for each attack – the rusted sword’s lunge does piercing instead of slash damage, for instance.
You eventually find a set of throwing daggers, which are my favorite addition – they are an off-hand ranged option, regenerate very slowly, and so can be used for extra damage, to draw aggro from a distance, as a Bloodborne-esque interrupt, and to pop the annoying fucking eye plants that laser you constantly and are the biggest threat in the demo until you find the knives.
The demo is pretty short, but has plenty to it to make it one of my most anticipated upcoming games already – there are secrets to find, extra weapon variants, a shop you can visit after beating the boss, with one of the absolute hardest shop themes I’ve ever heard, and though the demo unfortunately prevents you from grabbing the ‘flying’ sword showcased in the trailer, it turns out that you can abuse some of the leftover speed from a normal sword lunge to access quite a bit more of the starting island than you’re probably meant to… and the developer might have known that, because there’s even more stuff to find beyond.
I really cannot wait until this game comes out, and it might end up being among my favorite King’s Field-inspired games yet.
Writing
Myth of a Godslayer is another fantastic game I don’t think I would have found or played if I wasn’t spending so much time and energy combing through demos and releases, so hopefully I did a good enough job showcasing it that someone else who otherwise wouldn’t have known about it had their curiosity piqued.
As I spent more time finishing the Dark Souls mod than I expected, I didn’t have quite enough time to finish the write-up of that mod, which I’m going to do prior to writing up Thumper. Assuming I have enough time left over after both of those are out, I’ll be chipping away at my next longer piece as well.
Other
I’ve just climbed above 250 subscribers, a milestone I find mildly significant and somewhat surprising – it’s five times what I had only six months ago, and I feel a lot less like I’m pouring words into a bottomless pit than I did before. I kind of wanted to do something to mark the occasion, but I couldn’t think of anything good so I’m just going to play and write up games even harder until I get tired again.
congrats on hitting 250!
We have a pet gecko and sometimes she randomly comes unstuck and falls down, so count that as realism.