Weekly Update 2026-06-14
One small step on the accelerator for Man, one giant leap for his awesome dune buggy.
Game Releases and Updates
Exo Rally Championship release – maybe not the biggest release of the year… for you! But it’s definitely up there for me. This was one of the games I played during Next Fest last year that had me occasionally just… looking back at the store page to see if there was a release date announcement I’d missed, pining for more exoplanet rally race action, and signing up for the closed playtest just to get an early taste. So I was caught off guard this week when, shortly after posting my Weekly Update, ERC dropped out of the aether right onto my head. And then I played the shit out of it. More in the next section.
VOID/BREAKER Ascension update – I still think this roguelite arena shooter is just too visually noisy and a little frustrating at times, but when it hits, it hits, and the new sniper rifle hits pretty damn hard… especially with the gimmick mod I found this run that gives your next shot a massive power boost every time you do an aerial 360.
I absolutely melt bosses, it’s a fun thing to throw in, it reminds me of the kind of perk that should be in something like Echo Point Nova, it’s great, and I wish the game was a little more of that and a little less 10 minutes straight of enemies spawning and filling the room with AoEs that garble my UI.
Cave Story+ major update – I posted about this weeks ago, mostly because it was a slow week and I wanted to vent about trying to test it out and discovering that it was actually still in beta. It’s out of beta now and I don’t feel like playing Cave Story anymore. So I don’t know how it is. And it’s mostly stuff I’m not interested in. Why am I even including it? Because I shouldn’t have included it last time, that’s why.
Vigil: The Longest Night [maybe] final update – I haven’t played this 2D Souls-lite in years, and haven’t exactly been keeping up with its occasional small updates, but this one caught my eye because of the number of changes and the developer’s mention that it might be the last. I really hope they’re closing the book on this one because they’ve got a new game up their sleeve, because in spite of my many issues with it [most of which, who knows, might have been addressed in the years since, I’m not going to comb through all the patch notes] I still think it was pretty interesting.
And when I booted it up to capture some action I got jumpscared by this loading screen item preview for something I definitely don’t remember in the game right after the intro. I kind of want to play back through now so I can assemble the human skin set.
Blasphemous 2 The Third Sin update – I liked the first Blasphemous alright, once I was convinced to give it an honest shot, but the sequel has been pretty consistently floating at just above a price point I would’ve been able to argue myself out of for a while, and I’ve had plenty to play. This latest update, though, touts itself as a full free expansion, kind of a relief after the direction The Game Kitchen seemed to be going with the earlier, uh, very paid expansion DLC, and coinciding with a discount deep enough that I couldn’t put it off anymore. Hey, Game Kitchen, don’t get it twisted, this one’s for Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound 2.
Xanthiom 2 release – So a few years ago I started playing a very bizarre game called Side Scape where you change forms between a top down Zelda type character and a sidescrolling Metroid type character, on a unified map. So like, walls would become floors and so on. I liked it enough that I bought the… prequel[?] called Xanthiom Zero, and then for whatever reason just completely forgot to play either. Well, Xanthiom 2 is out, and has shaken me out of my stupor, causing me to reinstall and play through some of Side Scape, and I think I may just go ahead and get X2. Without even playing XZ first, I hear you cry? Well, X2 apparently includes a port of XZ in the X2 engine, which is such a weird and admirable effort that I kind of want to play both versions now and double this two-game backlog all at once.
Devil Spire Falls – another week, another DSF patch note I can’t help but want to share: “Skeletons can now wear clothes much better, instead of cling-wrapping them to their bones”
Also when I made a new map to check out the update, I discovered with terror that plant matter is now collected with an extra significant figure. And the bug where you start falling through the floor after entering a house still isn’t fixed.
The State of Games Played
I’ve gotten a little bit further in Saros, tackling a couple bosses, getting some mildly more interesting weapon types, finally fucking getting the parry ability, and most importantly, unlocking the difficulty augmentation system that is supposed to be its big distinction from Returnal. And it is pretty cool. I like that you can tweak out your own bonuses and run-long debuffs, a bit like the character creation from Daggerfall. I don’t like how tanky and annoying some of the minibosses are.
I also don’t really like any of the characters or the story, at all. Except Primary. I kind of love how openly the company’s computer hates everyone.
Speaking of companies hating people and grinding them under heel, I also played a bit more of Deep Space Exploitation, which is still staying very enjoyable while easing up on the extra mechanics… I thought, until I returned home from a shift to find my console smashed up and my wall tagged with anti-corpo graffiti and an email in my in-box prompting me to start actively informing on my coworkers for union sympathies. AND the pixel asteroid mining is still fun!
I’ve made little meaningful progress in EMUUROM, and will have no mental bandwidth next week to make any more, so I wasn’t sure if I should even bother mentioning it this week. But I am going to anyway as an excuse to share this clip of a fox laughing at me. What could it mean? Seriously, if anyone knows…
I plowed through… most of the available content in Fatekeeper, though maybe ‘plowed’ is a bad choice of word as it implies some amount of speed. The game has some promise already, but it’s a bit hard to appreciate at the fucking glacial pace the current player character maintains. Everything takes too long, man! Swinging your weapon takes too long, putting poison on your sword takes too long, walking down a hallway takes too long, and sprinting drains your stamina and still takes too long, even taking out your torch or putting it away takes too damn long!
But I did enjoy punting goblins down the pit from 300.
I finished Blades of Fire early enough to spend a good amount of time on the write-up, then found myself booting it back up as a relaxing wind-down for a couple nights, starting the NG+ and tearing through the early game on a higher difficulty but with end-game weapons and no need to detour for all the collectables I already got. One neat thing about NG+ is that it keeps the map totally visible, and adds a bunch of new weapon part unlock statues throughout the game, so you can learn NG+ unique variants of… some weapon types. Like this sweet ass axe.
I’m a little sad that there aren’t more of these… or at least, like, one for all weapon types. I’m not really planning on making a rapier at this point no matter how cool it looks, give me more katana or cleaver parts!!
Finally, as promised, I spent most of my time this week in Exo Rally Championship.
The full game is just about everything I’d hoped for – dynamic, free-form rally on varied and difficult terrain, a focus on preparation and forethought, and just enough control to wrangle yourself out of the bad situations you’ve gotten into. As I mentioned in my followup to my initial post, one of the big features of the game is that you get a short window to scout each event with a quadcopter drone, getting a lay of the terrain and painting out your own lines and pins that then get put on your HUD, crucial as the game otherwise just highlights the next checkpoint and gives you a straightline pointer. What I didn’t know then was that the drone is itself a physically modeled vehicle, and if you crash it… well, no more scouting until your next service stop, which means you’ll have to read the next course as you drive it. Epic.
I’m about halfway through the campaign now, including visiting The Moon – yes, our moon, which is by far the most radical environment to race on despite its inherently sterile nature, and a hell of a lot of fun. You can use your RCS to push yourself down into the regolith for grip, but the lack of atmosphere means the thrusters can’t cool down, and every bump or pebble could launch you up into the… well, not the air, I suppose.
I’ve been playing mostly on the Professional difficulty, which, if I’m honest, seems a bit easy – I’ve been pretty consistently nailing first-place finishes without using restarts, I rarely incur damage that even requires repair time, and though I’ve had some bad runs it doesn’t seem that hard to make the podium. I tried running the difficulty up to the next level – the slider increments AI ‘competitiveness’ [I think just the times to beat] primarily, and then at certain thresholds changes other mechanics as well. Unfortunately, on Champion, the damage modeling is a little restrictive, and my rover was getting battered enough to require more repair time each service stop than I had, meaning I was going out with like, busted shocks, and then having to drive better than on Professional anyway to keep up. I wish these were separate toggles instead of being tied to ‘drive perfectly or fuck off’ AI scaling.
Writing
Blades of Fire was a fun one to write up, though I maybe spent too much of it just droning on about the crafting mechanic. I think it was worth it, though, because just saying ‘the weapons degrade and you have to make new ones’ doesn’t do it justice and lumps BoF in with games that have thoughtless and tedious maintenance loops that I think it actually transcends. And even with how long the write-up ended up being, I feel like I could have gone on even longer – I had dozens more clips and things I could have mentioned, if I didn’t want to keep it relatively short and tidy. Maybe I could get away with doing supplemental posts on longer games as a bonus.
Other
Well, a few weeks ago I mentioned that the Witchaven games were getting delisted, and speculated [half-jokingly] that it might be a sign that they’re the next old niche pile getting the Nightdive Remaster treatment. I was wrong. So… so wrong. The next old pile being remastered by Nightdive is, in fact, Thief. Yes, that Thief.
And, as I have just finished revisiting it, I am pretty confident in saying it’s one of the more unnecessary efforts thus far by Nightdive – the game runs just fine with the right launcher, doesn’t require a whole lot of tweaking even if you want to run it with a bunch of mods and on a modern display, and the new graphics honestly look awful. My real reservation, though, is with the audio. Does the KEX engine really support the sort of sound propagation and environmental effects that give Thief and Thief 2 their soundscape? Maybe, but do I trust them to tinker with one of the greatest games of all time? Tough to say – I never tried their remaster of System Shock 2, which I think would be the closest comparison point. What do you think? Is out-of-the-box playability worth paying 30 dollars to play a 7 dollar game with mandated ugly-ass upscaled textures? Shit, if it works for FromSoft…
Tomorrow is the start of Next Fest, the thrice-yearly Steam event where everyone dumps their demo into a big pile and then sets it all on fire. I mean, sits around hoping someone plays their demo. Like the past four times this event has come up since I started this page, I’m planning on spending a few hours going through as much of the raw list as I physically can, selecting a short list of options, and then working my way through them each day this week. I’ve gone back and tagged all my prior Next Fest posts and put the tab on my frontpage, mostly for my own convenience, but feel free to look back at those.
More importantly, though, if you are also planning on digging through the dumpster and talking about demos… well, for one, watch out, because I’m fairly confident this is going to be the most bloated and unappealing list yet, but also, let me know if there’s anything you really enjoyed or thought I should cover! Unless it’s that Jonathan Blow game.
I’d actually like to hear about the System Shock 2 remake. I came to it super late and only played a little of the original. I was thinking about picking up the remake but the price is a little high. What do devotees of the original think? Worth it?
I couldn’t get Thief running on Steam. Is there something I need to know?
omg that comic is literally me!!!
Seriously though, I don't think you're wrong that this Next Fest's list is going to be the most bloated one. Just the preliminary list I've been looking at seems to have many more non-games than I've ever seen.