Weekly Update 2026-05-10
You piss with the dick you've got
Happy Mother’s Day, everybody. Sorry this is out so late but I was busy, you know, celebrating my mother and all that.
It was a pretty crazy week for me, especially the first few days, so I didn’t get a lot of gaming done before a flood of news and releases swept me up. Buckle up for a big one.
Game Releases and Updates
Nethack 5.0.0 – this truly ancient roguelike has been slowly updated over several decades. It’s also the one I’ve played the most by a pretty huge margin, so I actually bothered to look through the gargantuan and entirely unsorted patch notes for this rare major update. The majority of the changes are either minor text corrections for edge cases or ‘wizard mode’ [aka the debug mode you can use to set up and test scenarios] specific fixes, but I spent a few more minutes than I really wanted to squinting at the .txt file and picked out a few that I thought were interesting, actually relevant, or funny.
“add a small chance of surviving food poisoning” – becoming ‘deathly sick’ was one of many reasons having a unicorn horn was essentially a requirement for completion, so this very slightly deprioritizes that part of an ascension kit. VERY slightly. Food poisoning is the one thing cured by a unicorn horn that is entirely self-inflicted, and a ‘small chance’ at dodging an otherwise guaranteed death is not exactly the sort of thing you should bank on in a roguelike. I assume this is mostly for new players to not die every single time they shove some zombie meat in their face hole.
“blessed scroll of teleportation gives a single controlled teleport” – having a way to get effective Teleport Control for at least a few scrolls without actually having TC deprioritizes finding and eating tengu and one less ring to juggle
“scatter exploding bag of holding contents instead of outright deleting them” – probably the single biggest sigh of relief from me in these notes, tinged with a bit of sadness. I’ve lost at least one run that was ‘in the bag’ by blowing up my bag. Hopefully the scattering still causes enough of a mess to ensure players learn to never stash an un-ID’d wand again.
“allow random mimics to show up mimicking more furniture than just stairs” – great, just what we need, more fucking mimics. Just turn every item in the game into a mimic, see if I care. Why can’t more mimics be as cool as Meek?
“allow displacing peaceful creatures” – no more screaming at a gnome to move or going on a gnome killing spree just because they were slow at going through a hallway. Now I’ll find other reasons to go on a gnome killing spree.
“praying on an altar with pet corpse or statue on it can revive the pet” – if you’ve ever tried to actually keep your pet around for any length of time in this game, you’ll appreciate this. For a game that’s all about building up a massive arsenal of ways to counteract brutal deaths, there’s not much you can do about a pet dying sometimes.
“Entering a special room, only wake up the monsters in that room instead of doing a level-wide wake-up” – zoos are bad enough as it is without stealth, needing to sweep the entire floor first so you don’t get flanked was too much.
“some monsters should not have been scared of bugle playing”
“resistances gained from worn or wielded items also protect hero’s inventory” – as in, I guess all your potions and scrolls won’t explode and burn if you decide to actually take advantage of your supposed fire resistance.
“hide-under monsters who can be turned to stone aren’t able to hide under a cockatrice corpse unless there is something else present but make sure that the other items aren’t all more cockatrice corpses” – I just liked the riddle-like structure of this one and the mental picture you start to create working it out.
“using a marker to write “novel” or “paperback book” on a known blank spellbook was producing a randomly chosen Pratchett novel; make it fail instead” – I don’t think this totally removes the Discworld references, just makes it so you can’t waste two valuable resources making pointless reference items intentionally. Boo. Nobody’s going to try to write a novel accidentally.
“change Demonbane to a silver mace, make it the first sac gift for priests,
and give it an invoke ability to banish demons” – there were a bunch of random looking changes to Demonbane throughout the patch notes before this, and I guess this is the reason. How good is this previously mostly forgettable artifact weapon now? Well, I’m probably still going to wish for Grayswandir instead.
“eating garlic makes nearby monsters flee”
“if hero is engulfed and polymorphs into a monster form which is too big to be
engulfed, make engulfer expel the poly’d hero” – I thought this already worked. Didn’t this already work?
Dead As Disco Early Access release – I wasn’t blown away by the demo for this rhythm brawler, but I got a copy as a gift so I played it anyway, and was surprised to discover I liked it more than I expected. The full… well, fuller game, has a skill tree that you can unlock new special moves at, with new trees opening after each boss. Those bosses are also a lot more interesting than the goon hordes you dispatch to get to them, and I stand by my assertion that not even letting you play through one phase of a bossfight in the demo was a mistake.
Abiotic Factor Cosmic Companions – a whole bunch of extra stuff to play with in a game that kind of has plenty already. I do like the idea of the chemistry set that you can make potions and throwing flasks with, but whether it would be fun really depends on how tedious it is to craft them. I guess I’ll have to try harder to finish my co-op run sometime.
Alabaster Dawn EA release – one of my most anticipated games, the followup to the excellent CrossCode, is finally out…
PSYCH! Only the first chapter and a half is playable, and the developers project a two-year process remaining to complete the rest of the game. The classic Early Access prank. No, it’s fine. I’m not mad.
I don’t intend to actually play along as chapters release over the next two years, but I bought the game already because I would eventually anyway, and played through past the point where the demo from a few months back skipped ahead. Maybe I can perfectly pace myself to play this game over the course of two years.
Devil Spire Falls Loathsome Creatures update – they finally added ME to the game! Ha ha ha! I do appreciate that Devil Spire’s dev just adds these new ‘races’ as player options too, so you can do a ridiculous gimmick run as a Skinwalker taking on human form to infiltrate settlements. This patch also adds repair kits, letting you maintain the game’s agonizingly brittle weapons, and if memory serves, a patch from a few weeks ago also toned down the amount of extra durability damage you did when you were swinging a weapon with more force, which was causing extremely powerful characters to shatter every blade they swung. Which was epic but not fun.
OVRLRD DO OR DIE update – OVRLRD is one of those games that’s so insanely niche even I find myself struggling to find opportunities to bring it up, as much as I love it. It’s a mech sim developed primarily for VR, with entirely ‘physically’ operated controls, ridiculously granular weapon management and ballistics, a bunch of monitors in your cockpit that you can toggle to any configuration of status displays you want or just watch anime on, and on and on and on. It’s also one of those games that’s been in Early Access so long and updated so infrequently at times I forget it exists even though it’s, on paper, a dream game.
Well, this slow-burn development cycle might be coming to an end – in the most recent news post, the developer has announced that they are being laid off from their real job and now have to either finish OVRLRD once and for all or abandon it, and they’re going to attempt the former. This patch adds dynamic weather, fire propagation, improved sound and visuals, better performance, smarter and deadlier AI, a cinematic camera [only in non-VR mode so far] and too many bugfixes to list. It also includes a teaser for the new story campaign, which has, as promised in the post, abysmal voice acting, and retooled versions of the old missions that had gotten out of date after the mission editor released.
I’ve played a bit of it since this update, and it certainly seems to run better AND I can confirm that the AI will absolutely annihilate you if you’re not careful. Or if you just don’t have a point defense laser. Or if you miss with your train-car-length harpoon gun.
It’s also, frankly, still extremely rough, still very unfinished, still unbelievably niche. But I hope the developer manages to pull it together. If this game, God willing, manages to cross the finish line at some point in the near future, it WILL be the kind of killer app that sells at least a few people on VR.
District Steel Akimbo update – and speaking of updates that have taken too damn long to get to… District Steel was one of my all-time favorite VR combat games just as an Early Access work in development, something I played through the available levels for multiple times, and had almost given up hope for seeing another update for. This first update in three years includes multiple new levels, new guns hidden within them [and in existing levels] and most importantly, the ability to dual wield the basic handgun and go full John Woo on some bots.
It took me a long time [and some help from the developer] to actually figure out how to use the dualies, [I just overlooked it in the weapon wheel] but once I did, I realized I have to finish this playthrough at all costs. The question is: will this game ever be finished? This is not a 1.0, or anything close [it’s version 0.3.0] so this isn’t one of those ‘one last updates and then I’m done’ things, but the announcement post is… brief, even if it wasn’t in comparison to the sprawling blog post for OVRLRD’s comeback, so I don’t really know what the plan is or the timeline.
The State of Games Played
My big fixation this week was Mech Havoc, which is an excellent game to hop into and knock out a mission or two at a time when you’re stretched thin - try out a new vehicle, play with a silly loadout, realize the silly loadout is actually way better than the guns you’re used to using, and unlock more. At some point I realized that the short range, high damage plasma cutters can be used to just carve your own openings through walls and the mortar weapons can lob shells over them, so you can pummel stuff that can’t get line of sight on you and then melt your own door once it’s safe.
Since I had my headset on a lot anyway, I got a bit further in Into the Radius 2 – actually, I think I’m further now than I have been at any point during Early Access. The new nightvision stuff is a gamechanger, one that is worth the slight eye strain and lack of a helmet.
Well, the fact that I’m not wearing any protection at all might be why the last mission was so hard, but it would’ve been even harder with flashlights.
I had the itch to play a metroidvania, so I finally got around to starting Constance, the Hollow Knight that could, and probably could’ve a little bit harder if it hadn’t literally come out right after Silksong. I’m past the first area that was demo’d in the demo, and really enjoying the mixture of art, animation, combat and platforming. But most of all, I’m grateful that they decided to do mumble-voices instead of actual voice-acting. I’m so sick of people who aren’t Stephen Russell attempting to do voice-acting.
Got a bit further in Thief 2, now past the first… not so great level of the game. But on the flip side, I’m now about to hear the wonderful voice of one of the best villains in gaming history, so I’m looking forward to getting back to it.
But that’s not all, because I had a few demos I needed to play this week!
DEMOS
Kusan: City of Wolves
Shout out to Corerunner’s Felix Roth for posting… or, uh, Note-ing about this game getting a demo. This is a scalp-cam brawler in the vein of Hotline Miami or Slaughter Void with a very distinctive… uh, Neon-Noir animal-people style, comic panel cutscenes, and a very loud soundtrack. It’s also insanely gory and brutal, even for this particular twin-stick subgenre – you’re splattering guys all over truly dingy drug dens, there’s people tweaking out in the side rooms, at one point you have to backtrack through a lab you’ve just carved your way through to rifle through all the already dead scientists to find a keycard and it’s genuinely pretty grim.
It’s also pretty damn hard. At least it was for me – your mileage may vary if you’re a big Hotline Miami fan. You have a punch, which one-shots just about anything but can also be charged up to launch crates, doors, and even goons with enough sheer force to instantly pulp whoever else they hit, a throwing knife that gives you a mid-range instakill that you can just barely whip out before getting shot by a gun-wielder, and later a revolver that takes two shots to kill, but the first shot can stun enemies long enough to let you finish them off with a punch… assuming you’ve got the time.
It all comes together pretty well, stages get pretty long and even occasionally branch, so you can pick your own route through and tackle difficult rooms from different angles, and you have a Tetris-inventory grid where you can equip weapons and upgrades – eventually, you can expand the inventory and pay to shrink your favorite chips by one tile to make them easier to fit. There’s even a decent boss fight at the end of the demo, which was a surprising and satisfying endcap to this kind of game. It just moves a bit too fast for me to feel confident in my abilities, and I might struggle to get through a full game of this, but the style might be cool enough to drag me through.
Brigador Killers
If you haven’t played the first Brigador yet, well, you probably should. It was a fantastic isometric city-wrecker, a crazy mix of tactics and positioning giving way to wanton destruction, with a variety of mechs, tanks, and silly mercenary pilots [aka… Brigadors] to choose from for each mission. This sequel has been a long time coming, and now, a decade later, we can finally get a taste of what’s been cooking.
And what’s been cooking is a lot more Fallout Tactics than I expected. Brigador Killers, as the title declares, revolves around a fresh group of terrorist revolutionaries preparing a series very public assassinations of the Brigadors who overthrew the old order in the first game and then promptly became part of the new ruling party. Through the introductory campaign in the demo, you’ll take one new member out to wax one old member at a time, sniping them, driving a van loaded with explosives into their mansion, or just walking up in an exosuit and caving their chest in with a front kick, then running for the exit.
The main change in BK is that you aren’t just playing as a pilot in a vehicle, but a little person roughly on the scale of the foot police and innocent bystanders you’ll be stomping and driving through, who has their own equipment but can then commandeer vehicles, including the mechs and tanks the series is more known for. It’s still pretty chaotic, and I suspect most missions will involve you spending 99% of the time as a piloted vehicle of some sort anyway, but the greater diversity might make for some interesting mission structure.
After the introductory campaign is over, you unlock the Garage, which is basically a free-campaign mode, where you start as a lone merc with a bunker and a dream, loot some bits and pieces out of a scrapyard, take on missions, and eventually, I suppose, build yourself a private military arsenal of bipeds, treads, and turrets. Unfortunately, doing so seems to require a hell of a lot of inventory management, and that is frankly more cumbersome than I’ve seen since the fucking 90s. Veering a little too authentic here with this ‘pick up ten credits and then escort them to the other side of the screen to introduce them to the other 30 credits you already have, then do the same with every ammo type.’ [there are 300 ammo types]
It’s impossible to say what this will actually look like when it’s done – deeply niche, sprawling projects like this kind of defy the ‘vertical slice’ you need for a representational demo. But that’s also what makes me want to keep an eye on things like this. Will Brigador Killers get finished before OVRLRD? Maybe more importantly, will it get as finished as OVRLRD? Time will tell.
Writing
I had the time last week to finish my write-up of a Dark Souls mod, but not enough to finish Thumper. I hope to get that out pretty early this week, plus something a little special soon.
Other
As I did last year for Mother’s Day, I took my mother on a tour in VR via Wooorld, an app that lets you hop around to every Google Streetview location and, more importantly, every spot anyone’s ever uploaded a 360 photo from, all geolocated so you can zoom in on a map and see spots where people have populated the view.
This year while scouting I picked a few drone shots above Niagara Falls, a bunch of sites in Peru, and even found a lot of places where people had done underwater 360 shots during dives. Pretty sick.
Oh man, I completely forgot about Brigador Killers! I never finished the first game, but I deeply enjoyed what I've played of it.
I've also always found Nethack fascinating, but I bounced off it more times than I can count. While I do enjoy roguelikes, I think my proper introduction to them being slightly more modern and forgiving titles such as Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Tales of Maj'Eyal has spoiled the game a bit for me.
On that note, I suddenly got an horrible itch to play Cataclysm: DDA again... and I don't even particularly like the game as it is.
Hey, how do you manage to juggle so many games at once without getting overwhelmed or forgetting mechanics? Do you use a journal?
I'm very curious how you manage to do it all especially if this isn't your main job.