Weekly Update 2026-07-19
I'll take a smoke, a drink, AND a lobotomy!
Game Releases and Updates
Ascend to Zero release – This game’s had a revolving door of demos and playtests since I first encountered it in one of last year’s Next Fests, and I’ve been occasionally re-downloading whatever was going on just to get another taste of this surprisingly compelling ‘pick-from-3’ action roguelite. It’s finally out for real, and I’ve put a couple hours into it, though not enough to do more than dip my toes into the new content.
Flux Empyrean release – I said I’d wait for release to see how it was received, and I have done my duty. Reception seems extremely positive from the couple dozen people who picked it up right away, which is about what I expected, but I think I’ll still wait a bit as I have far too much already being juggled at the moment. You’ll see.
Requiem of Reuinis release – I didn’t even realize the developer of Soulestination was making a new game until I saw this pop up on the calendar and downloaded the demo. This, and Soulestination itself, are part of a resurgence of sorts of the Magic Tower/Tower of the Sorcerer style of optimization puzzle games – Tactical Nexus, DROD RPG 2, and Towers of Scale, which has recently entered Early Access, are all good recent-ish examples. Well, Reuinis is a lot different from most Magic Tower games, taking bits of JRPGs, SRPGs, and even incremental games and working them into one package that was so addictive I immediately quit the demo and bought the full game as soon as it came out and have been playing it almost nonstop since. More in next section.
Letalis release – another game I caught on its way out the door and tried the demo for, and also worth keeping an eye on. Letalis is basically Pokemon R/B [or R/G] but with a Roman gladiatorial flavor, and what appears to be quite a bit of work trying to make the combat more strategic and interesting.
A big part of that push is that all fights are 3v3, with what looks like two possible benchwarmer slots, so just like Monster Sanctuary, there’s a lot more interplay with party composition than is possible in 1v1s. Furthermore, each slot in the active party is also a position, contributing to stat bonuses depending on if a character is in the front, middle, or back. Then there’s penalties for spamming single moves, equipment slots that grant new moves, permadeath for characters after a limited number of faints, and probably a lot more. I didn’t get too far in the demo yet, and am not really in the mood for another JRPG at the moment, but if the mood strikes I might sate it with Letalis.
Kyoto Xanadu release – I played Tokyo Xanadu several years ago, so I was slightly interested in this sequel, until I realized Falcom is releasing it on Steam with no English localization. I guess we’ve been spoiled so long that it seems crazier than it really is – back in the day games like this would come out and just never get localized, or get rereleased several years late, stuck on the PSP forever or something. Will we go back to the days of translation fanpatches and learning Japanese to play doujin games? I mean, probably not, not over a Falcom ARPG. They’ll localize it eventually.
Femme Fatality release – I didn’t make this one of my Next Fest picks but if you’re a fan of chaotic plate-spinning and misandrist sniping, now’s your chance to indulge yourself with matcha lattes and the blood of pigs.
LarsGadiel release – this DID make the cut of my NF picks, and is right up my alley – a game developed for NES given a more fleshed-out and feature-rich Steam release. I’ll definitely pick this up when I’ve got a bit more time for another sidescrolling Metroidvania.
Tales of Acilain release – we’re not quite done with Next Fest yet, though. I’m very curious how this game is structured and how it doles out and uses the powers teased in the sandbox section at the end of the demo… but, again, I’m under water on actually finishing games I’m still playing and if I was going to pick one more of these this week it’d probably be LarsGadiel.
The State of Games Played
As I indicated earlier, Requiem of Reuinis came out on Wednesday and I’ve spent essentially every free hour I’ve had since unable to put it down. You play as a mage, her friend with shady connections, and her nun tutor, exiled from school and set up by her father to operate an alchemical workshop while investigating nearby ruins. The game is split between repeated excursions into Magic Tower-esque dungeons, full of enemies, keys, stat crystals and alchemy materials, and then a research and management phase where you assign grid tiles in your lab to specific transmutations, keeping your raw resources stocked while refining them into consumables and stockpiles of higher quality reagents. You then invest scaling quantities of reagents into research, boosting the efficiency and volume of your reactions, unlocking permanent stat boosts, creating new equipment, and making counterfeit coins.
The whole thing starts pretty slow, with you having to make repeated stabs at the first cave to slowly build up the resources to push through a handful of gatekeeper enemies, but once you unlock a few of the extra mechanics, the game feels like it ramps up quickly, and the core gameplay loop is really fun, taking the best mind-bending complexity of later towers in something like Tactical Nexus and making you grapple with it immediately, in smaller chunks. Once you reach the second dungeon, for example, you gain the ability to assign and cast magic spells on a limited basis in each run, with even many basic early ones letting you ‘break’ the rigid Magic Tower structure of a run in interesting ways. One spell, for example, lets you do a weak magic attack on an adjacent enemy, but if that enemy has an empty space behind them and are at full health, you also teleport behind them, completely skipping what would be an impossible or very difficult fight entirely, or eliminating the need to deal with some on-death effect they’d proc.
The equipment is even more impressive and complex, letting you create whole builds that completely change the tenor of a run with major perks, independent activatable effects, and stat boosts or whole item transformations that require foresight and setup. One early item causes slain enemies to explode, dealing magic damage to any other enemy in range, and leading to really satisfying chain kills that pairs well with a sword that gains a hefty but temporary damage boost on kills, making you route fights in a totally different way than if you were only looking at raw stats and rewards.
And despite having an almost-incremental-genre layer to the management, it doesn’t feel grindy at all, because when you complete a dungeon run [by retreating, which you can do freely at any time] it gets recorded, with every material you collected, resource you consumed, and enemy killed tallied up, and saved so you can click a button and instantly roll to the next day as if you’d just done the dungeon run again. Assuming you still have as many potions as you’d used last time.
The whole thing strikes a perfect balance for me, making the most of many different genres, and then on top of it all, the character design and writing are excellent. I’m equal parts genuinely amused by intentional jokes and engaged with the backstory and worldbuilding presented so far… and that’s in spite of the fact that about 30% of the text boxes have spillover so you can’t read the full sentence someone is saying. Hopefully that gets fixed soon, because that is genuinely the only problem I have recommending this game at full price already even though I’m not even halfway through.
Did a little more progress in the Convergence mod for Elden Ring. I’m still mostly using the katana for my class [I feel like every class in this mod has a katana] but I’m about to go into the final new Legacy Dungeon this version of the mod has added to the DLC, after which I should be able to do cleanup and finish this run off.
Won the Exo Rally Championship, which was insane, brutal, and one of the best racing experiences in my life. I’ve been winding down a bit with the sort-of post-game series that has you driving a massive dump truck around the same alien terrain, which is still pretty fun and intense in its own way but definitely less of a white knuckle experience in general.
On a recommendation from a comment on my Starvester write-up, I’ve begun my initiation rites into incremental gaming with Reactor Incremental, a popular web-based game where you balance power generation, heat dispersion, and slotting components into a limited grid to make a stable nuclear reactor. You start off clicking a bunch, forced to manually pump heat and click the ‘sell power’ button until you can afford enough capacitors that your setup can turn the power into money without your input and you can minimize the tab and do something else for a while.
The main gimmick it has is the heat generation – if your cells aren’t placed next to cooling blocks, they’ll dump heat into the reactor itself, building up until its cap is exceeded, causing every component in your reactor to melt and explode and completely reset you, albeit with as much cash as you have left over and whatever permanent upgrades you’ve invested in to rebuild. Unfortunately, at a certain point, you outstrip your ability to simply place cells next to cooling blocks directly and efficiently, and presumably have to engineer complexes of heat pipes and outlets to manage a relatively low number of highly productive cells. I don’t know, this is as far as I’ve gotten without prestiging.
I also found some time to play a few other demos that weren’t for new releases.
DEMOS
Iris Dissolution
I was preparing my archival write-up of a free tank-control horror game called Bleeding Roots from a few years ago, and at the end I basically said ‘this isn’t really worth anyone’s time but the team that made it could go on to do something good.’ Well, when I looked them up for the Afterward section, I found that they were, indeed, working on making a new game, one that is far more substantial, and even had a demo.
Iris is, like Bleeding Roots, a low-poly, fixed-camera horror game with tank controls. Unlike BR, it’s more clearly a real survival horror game, in the vein of early Resident Evil. You get a gun, you open up your flip phone inventory to pop pills, and the whole cult-run rehab center or whatever you’re investigating is crawling with zombies, riddled with notes, and locked down with escape room-level puzzles.
And it’s great! I really liked the graphics, which are a big step up from Bleeding Roots. The fixed camera angles are diverse and well-used, heightening the tension and claustrophobia, setting up interesting perspectives, and reminded me, more than anything, of some of the best moments in Alone in the Dark, with spiny, slimy otherworldly caterpillars crawling through the foreground before you move to a position where you have to walk past them. And I liked what little was teased of the story and setting too. This was an instant wishlist for me, and a good reminder that it’s worth keeping an eye on devs that haven’t yet made something genuinely good.
Memoirium
Another attempt at a low-budget Souls-like, though sometimes it feels more like no-budget. Memoirium has… many of the mechanics of Elden Ring and the like, but is also pretty hard on the eyes, and not in a way that’s particularly cool or interesting.
Animations are okay, but the textures and effects are garish and hard to read, and anything getting hit and knocked away kind of just teleports backwards, including yourself, and your camera is attached to you so, uh, that’s a little disorientating. Even if you block, by the way, and like Sekiro you’re meant to block some attacks, dodge others, jump over and attack into still others…
This clearly has a lot going on, and some of the individual parts of it are compelling to me, but I don’t think it’s really coming together into a cohesive package. Honestly it reminded me too much of Weird RPG, except not as a tongue-in-cheek joke by a Chinese guy. It kind of feels like the developer’s biting off a little more than they can really chew in terms of mechanics to bring into balance and flesh out. But I guess we’ll see next month.
Fixer Undercover
A VR game that feels like someone saw the I Expect You to Die series floundering and decided to take a crack at emulating it. You play as another super spy, sent into a prison with your wise-cracking AI voice flying drone partner, disguised as a handyman with a handful of conventional tools to use in between solving Newgrounds escape-room puzzles where someone’s written a code broken up in three different spots.
I got two big problems with this one. One is that there’s too much talking, and both your character and your drone have distractingly obvious AI voice. The other is that the demo, at least, is extremely tightly scripted, to the point where I went to try to interact with something that obviously wasn’t related to the initial puzzle and had a message flash up telling me I couldn’t mess with the bed before I did the first task. Gross.
I like the idea of a game in the style of I Expect You to Die that actually allows you to move around a bit, and I think if this were better designed it could be pretty entertaining, but I feel like I’ve done all of these microtasks in VR before, and besides unscrewing panels and sawing through pipes there’s not much going on in the puzzle department. Really the only relatively interesting motion-control gimmick I encountered was using a bowl to carry filthy water from the sink to a toilet tank, and even then the puzzle that solved was completely illogical. Pass.
Writing
I’ll get around to finishing my write-up of Exo Rally Championship just as soon as I take a break from playing Requiem of Reuinis. I probably won’t wait until I complete the dump truck series in ERC necessarily, but I might be taking breaks to play that while writing if I get distracted.
Other
SNEG games is a publisher apparently founded by ex-GOG staff, and they’ve been snatching up licenses for and re-releasing several classic games that would otherwise probably be completely abandonware at this point – I mentioned last year about their release of 2003’s Temple of Elemental Evil from Troika, but that’s just scratching the surface of the many now-obscure gems they’ve already gotten on Steam and GOG. Blade of Darkness, the SSI Gold Box games, a bunch of old Warhammer games, and the bizarre adventure game Azrael’s Tear are all worth checking out, and I’m glad they’re being kept alive beyond even more obscure fan efforts.
What’s more exciting, though, is that they’ve recently announced a whole slate of upcoming re-releases coming at the end of this year – Pool of Radiance from 2001, aka the other pretty bad remake of an old D&D game, Dark Earth, and Ecstatica, a survival-horror-adventure game a la Alone in the Dark except everything is made from stretched balls. These are all really neat games to get to experience, and I hope these efforts give some people who don’t already have nostalgia for DOS gaming a taste of what they’ve been missing. Except maybe Pool of Radiance. I don’t know if anyone is really going to be happy to play that again.
Aw man Azrael's Tear! I remember playing this at my buddy's place in like 1997. We had no idea what we were doing. I think we switched over to it after playing Tomb Raider. Felt so dark and mysterious and utterly baffling. What a trip.
The SNEG releases are interesting, but other than TOEE did they DO anything to these games? I already own the Gold Box games on GOG. Is there any difference?