Weekly Update 2026-05-24
Talk is over!
Game Releases and Updates
Haunted Lands checkpoints – Haunted Lands suffered a bit at launch from people bouncing off of it due to its difficulty, and one of the first announcements the developer made was that they would find a way to add additional, optional checkpoints to the stages. That patch has finally arrived and it’s not quite what I expected. The game now has additional statues throughout the levels, and you can interact with them to pay some of your collected cash to get either a quicksave or a healing item.
It’s an interesting system, and I think accomplishes the goal of making it easier to get through an initial run without changing endgame challenge-hunting gameplay at all, plus it gives you a reason to collect the score bonus loot besides going for the full collection reward. I don’t know if spending the points prevents you from earning that reward, I don’t know how many extra checkpoints and health items are in the game now, and most of all, I don’t know if it does enough to ease more players into the game or just make it a little more confusing. But at least they’re trying.
Lacuna chapter select update – when I wrote this detective adventure up earlier this year, I mentioned that I didn’t feel like replaying it after realizing how much kind of pointless running around and unskippable cutscenes were involved [compared to its total runtime] and this patch addresses that… somewhat, by letting you skip around to any chapter you’ve reached on your profile, including back to an earlier branch point, and play from there, though the chapter select only saves actions and decisions from your current playthrough. You still have to go through the game following each branch, you can’t skip between branches easily, and sadly, I would apparently need to replay the entire game now anyway in order to populate the list with branch points. But it would’ve been nice if it’d been available when I played it.
The State of Games Played
Most of my time this week was spent with Blades of Fire, which I’m becoming more and more enamored with. I’m almost through the longest area yet, and I’ve got an arsenal of pretty ridiculous and fun weapons. I’m also enjoying the characters and banter more than I expected, even when it gets interrupted ironically. I can’t guess how much longer this game will be, and I’m not even sure if I’ll be happier for it to be shorter than I expect or longer.
I got around to starting Verho – Curse of Faces, another Next Fest pick from last year, and I got decently far. I found a weapon specifically for spellswords, which aligns well with my starting class, so I dumped my stat points accordingly and am now past one major boss with two big areas available to explore. Death comes abruptly, though, and I’ve taken a couple that made me so mad I just punched out to desktop out of frustration.
I finished Constance and immediately started working on 100% completion, which was a pretty fun wind-down with a couple mild difficulty spikes. Once I was done there, I started playing more of Clockwork Ambrosia. This is another Metroidvania that seems like it’ll err on the shorter side, but again, that might be for the best. The weapon augmentation system is still pretty fun to screw around with, but some of the mods feel like they could’ve worked better just as… things you can do. I’m mostly talking about needing to go into a menu to change the revolvers so they shoot up or down. Even if the other weapons still can’t angle their shots, I don’t think it would break the game for the revolvers to be able to do so without swapping parts.
I finally beat Esoteric Ebb, which I’m very happy with, and immediately reloaded a pre-point-of-no-return save to run around exploring a bit, almost instantly finding whole areas and NPCs I’d never met. Then I rolled up a fresh run to experiment a little and AGAIN started running into NPCs I’d never seen once on my first playthrough and checking out options I didn’t take.
I played more Thief 2.
I got a bit further in District Steel, unlocking a new rifle, and discovering a tragic infinite-death loop that has hopefully been patched since. The patch also includes a buff to the revolver, which is good, because that’s the weapon that makes me look coolest to use.
Finally, I once again have my PS5 available, and so have started Saros, Housemarque’s followup to Returnal. And, yeah, it’s basically just Returnal again, but at least this gives me an excuse to stop thinking about buying a PC copy of Returnal. For now.1
Are they taunting me for not finishing Death Stranding 2 yet??
Writing
Constance is a game that is very hard to even describe without constant references to other games and how it adheres to formulas or branches out from them. So I maybe spent a bit too much of that write-up talking about games that weren’t Constance, but it would’ve been too hard and probably a little disingenuous to intentionally avoid that.
My post-game exploration of Esoteric Ebb has allowed me to stall a bit on starting its write-up. I do feel like I need to get a better sense of just how wide the possibility space is for players before committing anything firm, but I also am just still enjoying the writing and creativity too much to stop playing around. I’ll try to work on it this week once I’ve satisfied my curiosity a bit more.
Other
Alongside the news post for chapter select in Lacuna, developer DigiTales announced a new game in the works, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s another sci-fi detective adventure. The store page for From Ruins claims it’s more inspired by The Case Of The Golden Idol and Return Of The Obra Dinn, and going to be more about solving a full case than tinkering with puzzles… but it still has a puzzle in one of the screenshots and it looks like it’ll be very similar to Lacuna again. Not that that’s a bad thing. I’ll have to play through Between Horizions before this comes out.
According to a recent news post, Witchaven and Witchaven II are being delisted off Steam soon… do we know the next obscure FPS pile Nightdive Studios are remaking, or is foul play afoot? Does anyone really care? How many people remember these games exist? Is someone ever gonna remake Amulets and Armor?
Apparently it works in VR, though…