Weekly Update 2026-06-28

made school more gay

It’s been two weeks, but it feels like there’s about two month’s worth of news. When it rains, it pours. Oh, it actually is raining now. Shit.

Game Releases and Updates

VOIN Inferno update – this solo-dev first person slasher has been in Early Access for a while, and based on the 0.5.0 designation, this update marks the halfway point towards launch [though I’ve been around the block enough to guess otherwise] and with what look like new areas, new weapons, and a flashy new boss. I didn’t quite click with it the past couple times I’ve tried it out, but I might take it for another spin and see if I’m going to be eager for 1.0 down the line.

Gastova: The Witches of Arkana 1.0 release – this is kind of what I mean by being around the block a while. Gastova’s been in near-vaporware status for a year or more before this recent push to a full release, which seems to have involved stripping out a lot of intended systems. The current reception is pretty negative, which doesn’t bode well for a game with such a seemingly troubled development. I’ll try to get through it and see if it’s still decent or at least salvageable, but I’m quite a bit less excited for it than I was initially. And I’m also super fucking sick of the voice acting.

The Last Salvage Squad release – speaking of salvage… this was one of my picks from February’s Next Fest, and seems to be exactly the kind of low-stakes bite-sized shooter I’m currently in the mood for. Run-n-gun through little chunks of city, jumping from roof to roof blasting at aliens, and almost every stage is over in a minute or so. Plus I can choose a really ugly palette because the graphics are so simple.

Into the Radius 2 co-op and shooting range – one of the reasons I’ve kind of stalled out on getting further in this game since release is that I’ve been waiting for exactly this update… no, not the expanded co-op that presumably would be nice for people with 3 friends rich enough to own full PCVR setups and not be busy every week night, the shooting range.

Finally, I can kit out a new gun, put all kinds of stupid attachments on it, and then play around with it without setting up safety saves in case I don’t like it. I probably wound up screwing around in the shooting range in ItR1 more than I did playing the actual game by the time the sequel launched into Early Access, and I’ll definitely spend a good amount of time here too.

Convergence Mod 3.0 – it’s been… plenty of time, since I played some Elden Ring. In fact, I think it was about a year ago that I last mentioned playing it, with this particular mod. The Convergence is a gargantuan overhaul of a game that itself is so big it makes the mod not seem that extensive unless you’re overly familiar with the base, which I am.

Well, this mod just rolled out one of its biggest updates yet, touching almost every aspect of the overhauled experience, adding whole new dungeons and bosses and of course dozens of new weapons and spells, but much more importantly, more thorough integration of Elden Ring’s DLC content than FromSoft attempted. And a complete balance pass that includes NG+.

Metroid Prime VR mod – PrimedGun is a fully customized patch and launcher for the Dolphin emulator just to perfect the experience of playing Metroid Prime in VR. That means full head tracking, full 6 DoF aiming, a full suite of in-game accessible VR settings, just about everything you could possibly want to drop yourself as deeply into one of the most enchanting game worlds ever created. What do you think I’ve been doing all week?

Void War Jewel Worlds – I already liked this blatant FTL clone a lot more than its inspiration back when it first came out, and I’m honestly overwhelmed by how much they keep adding to it. This week’s expansion includes a whole new system type, with its own unique race, sporting new ship types, new planet dungeons, new weapons, the whole shebang. I naturally beelined for these greener pastures on a new run, and managed to die in humiliating fashion without even glimpsing any of this fresh content. But that’s a me problem, I’m sure they’re not lying about it.

Fortune Summoners Special Edition update – as with Into the Radius 2, highly astute readers [though I’d assume you’d have to be bordering on stalker territory to keep score like this] might have noted that I brought up playing this like, a couple months ago, and then nothing since. Well, the secret’s out – I knew this was getting some more content in the near future, but not exactly what or when, so I cooled my heels a bit.

Sure, I probably would have been fine without immediate access to the new rogue-like side dungeon and all its rewards, but I’m just happy to see this game get some much-deserved attention once again.

The Last Caretaker 5.0 New Horizons – I mentioned this during last year’s Next Fest, and have been keeping an eye on its development since. This most recent update adds some things that seem to have been in demand for a while, and also happens to be the last clearly defined item on their current roadmap… not that I believe they’re nearing full release quite yet. Which is part of why I’m still holding off, and not because it doesn’t look pretty good already – I end up losing a lot of time to these kinds of games as it is, and doing it twice or splitting up a playthrough between updates is not an appealing thought right now.

TEVI Fauna Arcana DLC – I’m mostly mentioning this here as an excuse to bring up TEVI and give myself a reason to finally sit down and play through this followup to Rabi-Ribi. The DLC sounds like it is at least as substantial as Rabi-Ribi’s main expansion, and apparently just as hard – which is not a good sign for me ever beating it. But I should be able to get through the base game, and I intend to do just that. Soon.

TEXNOPLAZM Episode 2 – another Next Fest pick, and one that I haven’t bought yet, though this brings it closer to desirability. The notes for Episode 2 promise enhanced level design, more enemies, weapons, and upgrades, and most importantly, exploding barrels. Can you believe this game didn’t have exploding barrels before now? My guess is that there’s one more episode’s worth of content left to develop before this goes gold, and I’ll probably wait until then to pick it up, but the demo has apparently gotten some tweaks to showcase some of the changes since last year, so if you’re interested in some snappy first person brawler action, definitely give it a shot.

Crimson Capes Bounty Quests – Sometimes a game gets an update that looks so cool it makes me finally bite the bullet and give it a shot… other times, an update merely reminds me of something I already thought was pretty cool. This is the latter – I honestly don’t even understand what the concept of adding bounties could mean for a sidescrolling open-world cinematic-sword-fighter, but hey, it’s on sale and I’m no longer burnt out on parryslop from Nioh. Let’s give it a shot and…

Holy shit what a cool intro. The last game I played that had a start this metal was The Myth of a Godslayer. I’m definitely playing this sooner rather than later.

STREET UNI X 2.0 – I really enjoyed this Tony Hawks Pro Unicycler game back when it came out, but it was a little slim on levels and… honestly a little harder than I expected, so I maxed out one or two of the characters and then never got around to writing it up. Sadly, this update doesn’t address my biggest problem…no, not the psychotic soundtrack, the fact that there’s only like 3 stages, but it does make a pretty incredible claim:

• made school more gay

Now, I couldn’t really tell how, and also, nothing could be gayer than school, but then again, the patch notes also claim “improvements to level geometry, design, and flow across all levels” and this still happens:

---

The State of Games Played

I was pretty worn out with all the demos and writing about demos, so I didn’t get a whole lot of proper game playing done in my free time… but after the release of Xanthiom 2 I did carve out enough to play through the entirety of Side Scape, something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while. And it was more than good enough to get me excited to tear through the rest of this developer’s catalog.

I also spent a good bit of time with the Metroid Prime VR port mentioned above. It’s an exhilarating experience, and the fact that people put forth so much time and effort to translate some of the best gaming experiences to an even more intensely immersive format is one of the reasons I’m such a VR devotee. Prime, of course, looks amazing, sounds incredible, bursts with life and character and personality, and the port does a great job making exploring it with a control scheme totally removed from the original intent completely seamless… with exactly one exception.

Sadly, the scan visor’s layering seems to just be intractably complicated to work around, and so there’s a glaring caveat to this mod’s playability, which is that it’s kind of a pain in the ass to use your scanner, especially on moving targets. Now, I’ve played Metroid Prime, uh… once or twice before, so I don’t really need to read the little tips on every boss or look around all wide-eyed at everything in a room to know what I need to scan to move on. But it is still annoying that you have to align yourself to, like, an invisible ‘original’ orientation for your HMD, and manually move the camera around to lock on. It’s not nearly enough of a headache to put me off spending most of my coming week on Tallon IV, but it is still obnoxious.

And, against my better judgment, I’ve also been putting even more hours into the Convergence Mod for Elden Ring. As I said above, this is a pretty beefy overhaul, and the main thrust of it, I suppose I would say, is to vastly expand the ‘class’ fantasy of each playstyle in the base game into a fully fledged build with its own equal amount of progression and diversity. Which means, of course, that the already unfathomably bloated Elden Ring starts to feel positively smothering… if you allow yourself to get sidetracked with every newly discovered weapon or set of spells you encounter. I’m going to do my best to just stick with the Nox class, gather up the flowing, liquid silver weapons, only cast my dedicated Night Lord spells, and…

Oh, hang on. What’s this spear? Is this new? That’s a pretty cool moveset. I could probably use this.

Finally, despite saying I was done with demos, I noticed that Echoes of Aincrad was near the top of the most-played list, and got curious enough to give it a shot. And it is pretty much exactly what it looks like – an anime action RPG somewhere between Dark Souls and a Falcom game. You run through a linear dungeon or across an empty plain doing the Jamrock shuffle between every lootable context point and slashing up anything that aggros along the way, with an AI partner picking up the slack. It’s got parries, perfect dodges, and even enemy limb dismemberment, which is kind of cool.

I also liked how the main antagonists are a pair of griefer streamers who don’t seem to understand how the game they’re griefing people in actually works. Nobody in this universe seems to know how videogames work. Oh. It turns out this is a direct Sword Art Online spinoff, despite the publisher taking great pains to not put the words Sword Art Online anywhere on the store page. Now it makes sense why nobody knows how a fucking MMO works. Also the game’s releasing at 70 dollars USD.

Dawg. GTA6 shaking the industry to its core and its only retailing at ten dollars more than that. Now I know nobody actually likes this except for SAO whales and you could probably charge over 100 dollars… oh, I see you’ve covered that base with the Ultimate Edition. But still, 70 dollars for a game that looks like it could have come out 15 years ago is wild.

---

Writing

I wrote up about 50 demos in the week prior, than re-wrote about half of that, and then wrote a big rant about bad storefront presentations afterwards. So it was all Next Fest all the time and I’m pretty worn out on demos. I’m pretty worn out in general, actually.

But that shouldn’t keep me from knocking out a write-up for Side Scape, after which I’ve got some real world business that might swallow me up until next weekend.

---

Other

Steam Summer Sale is going on, and rather than flood everyone with recommendations I’m just going to post my own haul here.

Golden Krone Hotel – less than a dollar for what is by all accounts a solid and standard roguelike, but I liked the art and I like the gimmick of it all revolving around vampires and dynamic lighting.

God’s Gift – Lemmings but you’re an otherworldly entity horrifically mutating your cultists to get them around. Also super cheap.

Geneforge 1 and 2 remakes – I actually have the entire Geneforge series, and quite a few other Spiderweb games in my library already, but the only one I got through back in the day was The Black Fortress. I’ve been meaning to take another crack at them, and a modernized start to this series feels like a good excuse.

Thrasher – this is the same artist and composer from Thumper, so even if this game doesn’t have the oppressive rhythm game sequences, it turns out in the end that Thumper wasn’t all that hard to just finish, so maybe it doesn’t matter. Either way, this also supports VR and I’m going to subject myself to it the next time I want an audiovisual assault.

Persona 3 Reload – the Persona games are one of those big gaps in my gaming canon history, and somebody gave me a copy of P5R that I still haven’t played, but at some point I decided I wanted to play Persona 3 first, and, well, here we are. Now I just need to actually start it.

Crow Country – a couple years ago this was the Resident Evil-like everyone told me I should play, and it did look charming and cool and fun, but too many people told me to play it and played it themselves and I didn’t want to join the crowd so I played the snob and waited. Now it’s been long enough that I only hear the occasional mention of Crow Country so I’ll happily play it and act like I discovered it on my own and you guys just don’t know how good it is.

Crimson Capes – oh, I already mentioned this above.

---