Weekly Update 2026-08-02
Yasuke rides again!
Game Releases and Updates
Yasuke Simulator Rise of the Takeda DLC – last year’s most historically accurate [and culturally respectful!] samurai sim had a handful of modestly priced DLCs available at launch – not at all outside the norm for a AAA, or even AAAA release. This year, however, we finally get another proper taste of Yasuke’s journey, with a full expansion DLC, touting 10 new levels, new enemies, new vehicles, and even more excellent music. Friends, I can’t tell you how excited I am that the most authentic Sengoku era game of recent memory has finally been expanded.
Oh yeah. We’re so back.
Sir, We Have an Orc Problem release – one of my many Next Fest picks, and to be totally honest, one that’s a bit further down the list than most. I’m a bit incremental’d out, I’ve never been a huge Tower Defense fan, and from early impressions I’ve heard, it seems like the full game doesn’t fully deliver on the promise of the demo. But I’ll keep an eye on it – it’s certainly doing well enough without my help.
Moonsigil Atlas Accumulate decks – a new mechanic added to a rare deckbuilder Next Fest pick from last year, focused on stacking bonuses onto a single card and unleashing it all at once. Apparently every character gets their own deck focused on the new mechanic, and the size of the update gives me hope that continued support will add even more interesting things to an already tempting exception.
Dverghold EA release – this dungeon crawler also mildly piqued me during Next Fest, and though I’m not in the mood to jump on it right away, I’m eager to see how its early access proceeds now.
Kusan: City of Wolves release – a game I played the demo of after seeing a note by Felix Roth of Corerunner, and saw a lot of promise for. This scalp-cam game is fast, gory, and had hints of solid customization even back in that preview, and based on its reception so far, I’d say it’s a worthy contender.
Quasimorph release – another DoomRL style roguelike, with a style and features teased that almost tempted me in already… but then again, I should probably just play Jupiter Hell a bit more.
Devil Spire Falls – Couldn’t end this week’s updates without an amusing DSF patch note:
You’ll now properly Eat Shit if you collide with buildings or the ground while flying
The State of Games Played
I may have slightly overestimated how close I was to the end of Requiem of Reuinis… well, not technically, since I only had to kill one boss to see an ending. But that ending is so clearly just a tease, an opt-out point for weaklings who don’t have the particular combination of mental ailments required to appreciate optimization strategy games… and it outright tells you after the credits that seeing the ‘real’ ending requires a bit more legwork. So I did some legwork, hunting down every optional boss I could find, bouncing back to base to respec for a couple actually challenging bosses, finishing my collection of conspicuously visible equipment and bonuses, and then collected the manifestations of all Seven Deadly Sins before rechallenging the false final boss and unlocking…
An entire goddamn dungeon full of immortal seraphim and minibosses that I was neither mentally nor mechanically equipped for. So I returned home, did a bit of quick ‘grinding,’ and decided to start chipping away at some of the deeper puzzles I’d encountered, hoping for some easy edge on the final gauntlet, and instead running into a boss refight that quickly obliterated me, a secret area that was even more dense and impenetrable than the Tower of Babel between me and the second ending, and, most spectacularly, a boss fight with, like, five separate, escalating phases.
As of this morning, I’ve managed to overcome the latter two of those challenges, and indeed, they were arguably worth the effort, though I can’t say for certain that I’ll end up actually needing the rewards. Along the way I also got a bunch of stuff that is just… very complicated. Amusingly so. But I think I’m about ready to set off on that final voyage, and I really can’t wait to wrap this one up.
In the rare times I sat at my computer and didn’t immediately boot up Reuinis, I got back into some things I’d left hanging, one of which was The Last Salvage Squad. This run’n’gun mini-EDF is full of charm, has some fun weapon options, and doesn’t overstay its welcome… oh, wait. I got a fake ending in this one too…
Well, I’m not too mad. Though the NG+ cycle does force you through the same 25 levels again, the enemy spawns are ramped up, along with a few new mechanics that keep the second loop interesting, and it’s short enough I’m not going to burn out unless it gets REALLY hard soon.
I also occasionally took a break from going blurry eyed looking at paragraph-length equipment effect descriptions in Reuinis to go blurry eyed digging through chemical reaction chains in Atomcraft, and worked my way through the tech tree deep enough to reach what appears to be the deepest level of the planet, full of uranium-rich ores, and you know what that means! Nuke party!
...uhhhhhh. Oh yeah. You can’t store hydrofluoric acid in glass. I knew that. And whoever lives below me knows that too.
Wait a minute, nitroglycerin is volatile??? Nobody ever told me THAT!
I mentioned it offhand once, so I’m determined now to get through Thief 2 before I crack 500 subs. Just hope this guy doesn’t give me away.
I have defeated every boss in Gurei… at least once. And I even had a run that got within two bosses of the end before dying in humiliating fashion to a bird with a bow. I’m pretty impressed with the variety of additional moves enemies gain as you encounter them later, and it’s definitely making me consider what order I want to tackle them in even moreso than the abilities they unlock.
Except for the shield guy. I don’t want to give up my shield.
As I’m winding down from my obsession with Reuinis, I’m also getting back to my relaxation with The Message from Deep Space, where I’ve learned the most important lesson: nothing is the absence of something. Or something. I’m guessing here.
But hey, guess what? I couldn’t help myself but play a couple DEMOS
DEMOS
Slain 2: The Beast Within
This was the reason I decided to spend any time at all on demos this week. Steel Mantis’s debut title Slain! was... not a good game, but a pretty cool one, and one which the developer strove to improve after release, eventually turning it from a clunky excuse for excessive pixel art gore into a slightly less clunky excuse for excessive pixel art gore. It was followed by Valfaris, which I contend is not only a massive improvement, but one of the best modern run’n’gun games period, a pixelated geyser of blood, explosions, plasmic energy, and headbanging that looks and plays like That One Kid’s ultimate dream of Sega Genesis platforming. I didn’t play the immediate successor to Valfaris because it was a shmup with 3D models.
Slain 2, as you might guess, is a return to the studio’s grimdark fantasy roots, but incorporates plenty from the other two games as well. It’s got the techno-fantasy underpinning from Valfaris in the sentient sword that plunges from orbit into your hands, along with its hologram digital assistant, it’s got the 3D models from Mecha Therion, but integrated almost passably into the 2D environments, and it’s got the transformations from Altered Beast.
As far as how it plays… well, it’s also sort of a middle ground here, to be honest. The melee combat is stiff, pretty repetitive, and almost certainly a step backwards from Valfaris, but it does have a bit more going on with the parries and backstep evasions, and who knows, the full game might introduce more that’s not shown here… but you probably should show it off in a demo. I didn’t save all the Metal Slug hostages in the one demo stage, and I didn’t get an opportunity to spend the coins I collected, so it’s plausible there’s an upgrade system similar to Vafaris’s later on.
Tower Realm
Now, though I definitely have had my fill of optimization strategy for a while due to Reuinis, I saw this Tower of the Sorcerer inspired game approaching release [coming Monday] and wanted to give its demo a shot. Tower Realm takes the ‘multiple tower’ angle of Tactical Nexus and seems to remove the meta-progression from it, replacing tokens for unlocking new paths and rewards with augments to attempt ‘custom’ runs of the towers with different challenge conditions. I only vaguely grasp what they’re going for, and it could either be really cool or pretty bland depending on the execution.
Rather than scaling difficulty through meta-progression, Tower Realm gives you an infinite-use green key, which can be used to open various shortcuts and caches along the way, with the caveat being that using the green key is the ‘easy’ difficulty. Again, I don’t know quite how to feel about this – it seems pretty arbitrary, and I don’t understand how or even if the game tracks your moments of weakness, if it affects anything, or if it’s just purely on the honor system. The game claims that there’s ‘at least one’ solution to every tower that does NOT use green keys whatsoever… but that’s actually less reassuring than no statement regarding its completability would be. At least one? One valid solution is all you’re willing to commit to?
I got pretty far without cracking open a single green door, but I did find myself seemingly coming up short on completing the demo on a single attempt, which, to be clear, is not a condemnation – I probably shouldn’t be able to trivially unravel an optimization tower on first encounter without any assistance. My problem is… do I crack open all the green key caches, press on as far as I can to get some knowledge of later hurdles and rewards, or restart and take advantage of them along the way, including caches that I snuck into via pickaxes?
I liked a few of the other things in the game – the story is told via dialogue with NPCs you meet who are also challenging the tower in parallel with you, and the intro made me crack a smile. The equipment has potential depth, and reminded me a little bit of the weapon swaps in the DROD RPG games, as did the shop you can summon at any time to spend gold on stat upgrades. And the game has okay items, though I’ve been badly spoiled by Reuinis in that department – the teleport consumable, for example, is slightly unique in that it can ONLY move you to the exact opposite tile from the one you’re currently occupying on the intended floor, which could potentially be an interesting restriction to work around. And one very odd but kind of relieving mechanical choice is that you can freely warp to any floor you’ve ever entered, even if you wouldn’t normally have an open route between the staircases. It makes backtracking for cleanup and cache raiding a lot less tedious and annoying, it lets you jump ahead without fear of getting locked into an inescapable trap, and it interacts with mechanics like the ‘pressured’ status, replacing the standard auto-damage on tiles with a temporary debuff that goes away when you warp out.
Whether I pick this up tomorrow or not depends heavily on the asking price at release – I’m pretty Magic Tower’d out at the moment, and digging in to another heaping helping is only going to happen if it doesn’t put the ‘pressured’ status on my wallet.
Writing
I just about finished my writeup of Reactor Incremental, but it was late, and I don’t really feel like publishing it on a weekend, so I’m going to hold onto it until Monday or Tuesday, barring any disaster.
I’m also fairly confident I’ll both finish Reuinis [or enough of it to be satisfied with] and be engrossed in writing about it such that I don’t think it’ll take me all week to get that write-up out too. That ought to make up for no write-up last week. If I really get bored, I might even be able to knock out The Last Salvage Squad.
I was considering writing a piece about the whole integrated AI detector thing, but it was just going to be a joke and at this point I don’t think anyone really wants to hear any more about it until its canned anyway, so I’ll just screenshot my 100% here and leave it at that.
Other
Speaking of talking myself out of bad jokes, I was thinking of doing a one or two paragraph write-up of Trip Harrison’s game jam pile, and to be honest, only two things stopped me: one, I would’ve had to immediately follow it up with Reactor Incremental, which I have about as much to say about, and two, because I would’ve had to play it again and pay attention to the intro instead of skipping it.
Go read his post about participating in his first game jam, and by all means, give his submission a go, but whatever you do, skip the intro. Don’t give him the satisfaction. He could’ve spent that time adding something cool! Like guns!
Thanks for the shout out! I will take a deeper look at Kusan soon and let you guys know my thoughts. I wanted to jump in right at release but I'm currently moving and super busy. It might take a while but I'll get there.