Weekly Update 2026-06-07
Strong toes, nice ol' tree to piss on. What more could you ask for?
Game Releases and Updates
Fatekeeper Early Access release – the trailers for this game have done a pretty good job painting it as a potential successor to Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Weighty hits that topple the scuttling goblin enemies, off-hand magic to ice over puddles and ignite oil, and most importantly, a front kick for splintering conveniently fragile scaffolding or simply punting enemies off cliffs – yeah, Fatekeeper’s got all that. Unfortunately, at the moment, it’s only got a brief tasting menu of that stuff, not to mention all the other mechanics this ambitiously physical hack-n-slasher is planting the seeds for.
But it’s also only ten bucks for access to what is essentially a demo, for a game I would probably end up buying at release if it actually manages to reach completion, and I wanted to check it out myself, so I ponied up. Thus far my main impressions are that it looks good and runs pretty well, and everything else is pretty slow and incomplete feeling. In fact, there was already a patch rushed out that, among other things, straight up boosted the player move speed by 10%. Pretty funny. I kind of wish they’d followed the Sid Meier maxim of ‘double it or cut it in half.’ Either direction would have been even funnier.
Gothic 1 Remake release – speaking of new coats of paint on PC gaming grognard idols, the long-dormant Gothic IP has been unearthed, and, no, of course it’s not a totally new game, are you crazy? The idea of a full remake of Gothic 1 has been floating around about since the game’s initial release, already considered dated in controls and graphics at the time, but its taken multiple decades and multiple deathblows to the franchise to finally have that dream realized. Now that it’s here… well, I dunno. Reception seems mostly positive aside from performance complaints, and who would’ve ever thought that 25 years later Gothic would still run like shit and have system requirements far exceeding what its graphics should really demand? I’ll wait to see if anyone I trust says it’s now the best way to replay Gothic before spending 50 dollars on a second experimental dose of Eurojank.
The State of Games Played
I am very nearly at the end of Blades of Fire… or at least, I feel that I’ve exhausted any obvious means of additional progression, though there’s certainly at least one more area to complete and a decent amount of optional activities scattered through the three whole maps I’ve been through so far. I’m really hoping to put a fork in this game, or at least roll credits and get my write-up finished before the end of this week, though I’m quite certain I’ll be back to screw around more than is strictly necessary afterwards.
I did, in fact, roll credits in EMUUROM… though in this case it really feels like just the beginning. The musical denouement was very reminiscent of Void Stranger, and I’ve already had a few moments of revelation to match… but I’ve also gotten stuck making loops in the overworld and forced to climb back out of the same areas multiple times.
Pretty soon I’m going to have to stop hopping around aimlessly and actually sit down, pour through all my screenshots and map notes and EMUDEX entries, and decide what I need to do next. But maybe if I keep jumping around I’ll stumble into a new room I haven’t seen yet!
I’ve completed every available mission thus far in Mech Havoc, and reached the new bottom of the energy-weapons-and-hovertank third of the tech tree, and am ready to put this early access game back in the oven for a while and see how it progresses. I really like a lot of the individual systems, and I feel like it really just needs a bit more objective variety and interesting mission mutators to really shine.
With Next Fest rapidly approaching, I desperately needed to clear out some of my backlog, and so I played some...
DEMOS
Homgard
This nonogram [a la Picross] game is contextualized as an excuse to slowly unveil a map of a fantasy world, each clump of tiles being broken up into individual puzzles, some of which have little lore snippets unlocked as you complete them. As you go out further from the capital, new regions also include new gimmicks and mechanics that alter the logic of the nonograms, and there are some surprisingly cool twists. In fact, after setting the demo down initially feeling pretty dismissive of it, I broke down and started going into the further zones and got so hooked I wound up 100%ing the demo.
Depending on your sensibilities, though, the rest of the game might wind up turning you off even if you do like Picross-style mild mental exercises. The developer is very open about the fact that they used AI to generate multiple different ‘genre’ radio stations for you to listen to as you play, as well as for generating some background art, and to be honest, I thought the music was fine. God knows I’d be lost trying to make music for my own game, and I can’t fault anyone strongly for taking the cheaper route out for a solo project.
The bigger issue is that having ANY foreground assets be acknowledged as AI generated casts serious doubt on the rest – do I really want to read through dozens of pages worth of journal entries and backstory just for it to slowly dawn on me that I could’ve asked any of the dozens of virtual assistants to write me some fantasy world bullshit to the same effect? Do I want to spend hours doing puzzles to reveal a map that, upon closer inspection, is just a sprawling machine hallucination vaguely conveying the idea of every image ever tagged as ‘fantasy map’ online? I’m not even making the accusation that those things are generated, just stating that the thought that they could be kind of spoils my mood a little bit. But the puzzles themselves were fun enough that I’ll probably wait for a sale.
BAKUDO
Anime dodgeball themed boss rush. Seems to be playing with some pretty decent ideas – every rival has their own behaviors, weaknesses, telegraphs, and so on, and so it ends up being a little bit like Punch-Out!! but with dodgeball instead of boxing. Or, that’s the impression I gather from what little I managed to play, because I fucking suck at this game.
The timing window between someone winding up and the ball impacting my character’s skull at Mach 5 seems insanely small, both post-tutorial bouts I tried took me out in like three hits, and I just could not for the life of me finish a round. I’m praying it’s a weird framerate problem and not the first sign of me getting too old to game, but either way I don’t really have too much to say about how this plays.
Deep Space Exploitation
This looks, and plays, like a chill, little bite-sized miner game, especially at the start, but after just an hour, I quit the demo, checked to find that the full game was already out [released in November of 2025] and bought it right then and there before even reaching the end of the demo.
Each day, you choose from a small selection of available ‘missions,’ and each one takes place entirely on a single screen, with the sides wrapping over, a discrete, limited amount of ore available to collect, and usually a time limit. Once you run out of time or decide to leave on your own, your extraction shuttle roars into a random spot, opens up a bay, and gives you a few seconds to sort yourself out, get in there without damaging company property, and takes you back home to cash in.
Or rather, to wring you out – the game’s plot is very on-the-nose anticorporatism, just shy of Red Faction, though as an asteroid miner whose armaments are presumably disabled anywhere within several miles of the C-suites, your opportunities for direct action are more limited. As the title suggests, you are being exploited, and in what is lately becoming a very recognizable pattern of increasing costs, decreasing support, and smothering demands coupled with inescapable surveillance. Your email slowly fills with receipts for damages to company property, notices that interest rates on the debt you are indentured for have increased, and fines for failing to report violators of information restriction clauses. And a handful of actually helpful tips and ominous demands from someone capable of injecting text into company broadcasts.
All that story crap could fall flat if the game wasn’t actually enjoyable enough to put up with, but it’s actually fantastic. Mission selection gives you a surprising amount of detail in just a few notes, your expanding arsenal of upgrades, mining tools, and sensors really force you to make tough decisions and consider what to bring on a job, the limits on cargo space and time keep you from tediously 100% clearing every single site, and most of all, the game keeps changing things up a lot more than I ever could have expected from something so superficially straightforward.
I’ve had missions where a scrap processor tags along, letting me push or toss bits of shrapnel and even my own mining gun cartridges in to smash down into a more valuable and compact cube. I’ve learned the hard way why mining lasers, though precise and cost-effective, are not recommended for prizing out highly resonant crystals. I’ve dealt with mines, corporate scanning drones getting in the way, refurbished demo charges that blow up in your face. And I haven’t made any real progress in paying off my debt, because who am I kidding – they’ll never actually let me off the hook unless I can smuggle some of this high explosive into the right office, will they? I’m very excited to play more of this, and highly recommend checking out the demo yourself.
Monster Lily
A true roguelike with some thoroughly immature ‘mature’ content thrown in. To be totally fair, the only thing I saw that really stood out was the fact that you have the ability to squat and pee to stun all enemies in line of sight, and to do that you have to actually fill your bladder by drinking potions. Alright, fine, but the game’s difficulty seems obnoxiously brutal anyway, and chugging random unidentified potions in a roguelike is never a particularly good idea. Hell, none of the potions I drank in this demo did anything good for me, and there just wasn’t that much else going on in terms of mitigation strategies or identification techniques, at least not that I could discern.
So I guess if you want to see an ASCII animation of a beast woman peeing, Monster Lily’s the game for you, though even if that is your fetish, I – hang on, you know what, I bet I could solve it. Just make potions have multiple uses, that way you can at least identify a single ‘stack’ of them and still have at least one more quaff to use for filling your bladder if its at least relatively safe. There, half a second of thought and I made the whole concept a lot more viable. Was that so hard?
ALARIC
Another game whose ambitions wildly outstrip the dev’s capabilities. ALARIC starts out with an extended intro sequence where you play as a character at max ‘level’ [whatever that’s supposed to mean to you starting out] who dual wields pistols and has a weak front kick that siphons a couple of pistol rounds out of enemies when it lands. But you have to shoot SO many enemies that you wind up just kind of keeping some alive and kicking them over and over to farm bullets so the next wave doesn’t overwhelm you. Thankfully, after a boss fight, you shift to a different character, who just has one gun and a whip on his off-hand, and HIS kick actually siphons like 20 rounds AND can be upgraded to do decent damage. What did you put 99 levels into, first guy? Resistance? Idiot.
Once you get to the second character it becomes apparent that ALARIC really wants to have a sort of open-world Dark Souls-style layout but just technically can’t actually achieve that – everything is boxy hallways, each map is located through a totally indistinguishable loading door like fucking Castlevania 64, enemies respawn, and they’re just mobs of zombies and such that swarm you Worst of all, you frequently have to backtrack through shit you already did. I quit after doing a bit of platforming across arbitrary squares of floor over a pit, getting to the other side, finding a key, and realizing I’d have to do the whole thing in reverse, with not even any enemies or hazards or anything else going on. I wish this had more to entice me or just a little bit better design in general, because I’d suffer through an amateurish first person Castlevania 64. Just not one this amateurish.
Mortal Shell 2 open beta
This isn’t really a demo but it’s close enough. I honestly did not like the first Mortal Shell all that much, but I appreciated what the devs were going for enough to sit up straight at the first announcement trailer and think ‘maybe they could stick the landing this time.’ After having played through [nearly] the whole open beta, I’m doubling down. Cold Symmetry don’t just seem to have learned some lessons from the failures of Mortal Shell, I think they might have addressed nearly every fucking criticism I had of the first game, and then some.
First off, probably the single most recognizable ‘feature’ of the first game was the Hardening system – essentially, at any point in any animation, you can interrupt yourself by holding a button to turn to stone, causing anything attacking you to get interrupted in turn, and letting you then resume whatever unwieldy, overly plodding shit you’d been trying to do. Some people liked it, but I always felt like it was a Band-Aid over their bad animations and deciding that was a good way to address the fact that literally every enemy and boss could just hit you out of a heavy attack.
For a while in the beta, I thought they’d abandoned the idea completely – you start with the ability to block with your weapon, with good timing also causing posture damage to the enemy that’s been interrupted, exposing them to a riposte once filled. But after the first boss, it turns out that the item you use to ‘block’ with is itself a new type of equipment, and each variant changes the mechanic up – there’s also a sort-of buckler that tightens the window and keeps you from holding block but does a lot more posture damage, and a seal that gives you back the MS1 hardening, this time with a timing window for a little bit of posture damage too.
You can swap them out as your preference dictates, or situationally, since they all do have their own strengths and drawbacks [weapon parrying can be re-attempted immediately if you fail to parry part of a combo, while hardening goes on a short cool-down if you don’t nail the timing] and I wound up appreciating the whole system a lot more when it was an option. Plus it feels pretty sick to perfect guard through a combo while doing your own combo, Sekiro-style.
Consumables have been completely stripped out and split into two different things – items that permanently grant you some bonus as you acquire more of them, sort of like collectables, and items that act as reusable buffs or special abilities that you can equip. MS1 had a kind of cute system where consumables would be black boxes until you started using them, revealing more descriptive text and even additional effects as you became more familiar with them through consumption… except the system was also annoying and half-baked for obvious reasons. This seems to take most of the good parts of that, without forcing you to swallow a bunch of poison mushrooms for no reason or try to use a bunch of items with bizarre and frustrating conditions and laughably low time limits.
Even your ranged option has been overhauled, removing the concept of ammo entirely and having it draw from the same pool of energy your shells’ special abilities use instead, which is filled by landing melee hits. Incredibly good change, I love being able to whip out my little shotgun crossbow and turn a guy into gibs before laying into his buddies, or get some breathing room from a boss and not have it be totally wasted time.
I do kind of miss the ridiculous rocket-launcher crossbow from the first game, but I have a feeling they’ll bring it back. It fits in perfectly with them leaning a bit more into the sillier, over-the-top tone.
They’ve just gotten rid of stamina entirely – a bold move for a Souls-like, and one that I think is just fine in this case. This game has some real potential as a brutal, hyper-aggressive brawler, and being forced to lean out of that in order to catch your breath after every couple swings would not be playing to the strength of the game’s tone and style. Being able to now freely interrupt your own light attacks with a dodge also helps the combat feel better in general, in spite of the animations still feeling weighty and impactful.
I liked the changes to the Shell system too, the biggest of which is that your Shell-less form is no longer a one-hit kill from any damage. Shells instead just have extra health on top of your default, plus some abilities unique to them, which you can upgrade.
The upgrade tree seems a lot better designed than in the first game, though I did note that you can technically build the thief to spawn poison clouds WITHOUT unlocking the skill that makes him immune to poison again, but you have to go a lot more out of your way this time. I also liked the other thief skills, which let you go invisible and land big hits on enemies that are either totally unaware or are flailing around trying to find you.
There’s a lot more to say, but I think I’ve covered the big things. Even if you bounced off of or didn’t like the first Mortal Shell, if you’re a Souls-like fan, I genuinely think this beta might convert you. It took me from ‘eh, it could be alright, who knows’ to ‘I’m going to buy and play this at release.’
Writing
I almost feel bad writing up a game I like when it’s still being actively patched, and problems that I have could theoretically be resolved, but I think I captured the essence of both what is interesting and appealing about Starvester and what is its sort of innate or major flaws.
I’m going to be working on writing up Blades of Fire and then taking as much of a break as I can before the start of Next Fest.
Other
Earlier this week, Gravity Circuit 2 was announced, and as part of the announcement, the devs have made the first game free to claim on Steam for a limited time. I had written up Gravity Circuit several years ago, before I started this page, so I dug back into my archives and posted it here to do my part in bringing awareness to one of the best action games of the past decade.
I have been checking on the latest crop of trailers and announcement events, but this post is plenty long and I’m tired and I really don’t have too much to say about any of it – no easy witticism comes to mind about Tupac being digitally reincarnated, I have no excitement or hot take to share over another overwritten God of War sequel, I didn’t like the first Alien: Isolation, I ain’t never played none of these games getting sequels and DLC and spinoffs. Alright, I am kind of interested in Star Wars + Rabbids Galaxy Battle. But not because of Hayden Christensen. ...not entirely because of Hayden Christensen.
I found myself unable to avoid writing about the Summer Game Fest; I needed a space to vent over a few paragraphs about the Tupac situation.