It’s crazy to think that, basically, since 2017, there hasn’t been a bad mainline Resident Evil game. Sure, the RE3 remake was a bit of a misstep, but it was still pretty dang good. I, of course, also say mainline games, because those multiplayer efforts were a waste of fuckin’ time for everyone involved.

Still, though, six games spread over nearly a decade, and they’re all good if not great? Not too shabby, Capcom, not too shabby at all.

And what’s even more surprising is that the latest entry, Resident Evil Requiem, might be one of, if not the best, Resident Evil games ever made. And I say that only partially subjectively, because objectively speaking, Requiem crams just about everything into it, including the kitchen sink – and it does it well.1

It’s not only a follow-up to Village, but also basically a sequel to the RE4 remake, as well. Requiem does so much, and covers so much ground (both in terms of Resident Evil lore, but also simply because it’s surprisingly meaty in terms of length).

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Not that I’m a Resident Evil expert or anything. I never really got around to playing the old games while growing up, so the first one I really sank my teeth into, surprisingly enough, was Resident Evil 5. I remember enjoying that game, for the most part, but that’s about it.

Beyond that, I still haven’t touched 6, although I probably will eventually for shits and giggles; it seems like a fun co-op time. And I still think the logo looks like a giraffe getting sucked off, so that’s also fun.

I also dabbled in 7 when it first came out, but didn’t beat it for years, so I wouldn’t really say I became a fan of the series until the Resident Evil 2 remake. But since then, I’ve been pretty on board, having loved 2, 4, Village, and, as I mentioned earlier, the remake of 3 is good, too, for the most part.

Needless to say, the moment Requiem was revealed, I was all over it, and now that I’ve beaten it, I want to talk about it. I won’t shy away from spoilers, just so you’re forewarned. Perhaps the biggest spoiler is that I didn’t really think that the story of this RE game, or any RE game, is anything special. They’re schlocky B-movie hijinx, and that’s about it.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Grace and Leon

As you probably know by now, Requiem offers a large dose of playing as both Grace and Leon, and the dichotomy between each of their playstyles does a great job of keeping the roughly 18-hour-long game from getting too long in the tooth.

That said, I do kind of wish that Capcom had kept Leon under wraps and just advertised Requiem as a Grace game. I don’t know how many people would have skipped buying this game had they only seen the trailers featuring Grace. But it might’ve been cool to have gone into it blind and gradually realized what role Leon plays.

And for what it’s worth, Leon plays the role of total badass. It’s actually somewhat hilarious.

Grace plays similarly to how Ethan played in 7 & 8. She defaults to first person (Leon to third—although you can choose first or third for both). She plays more like a survival horror experience: sneaking around, trying to avoid combat, and struggling if you do happen to have to fight a zombie.

Conversely, Leon John Wick’s the fuck out of these zombies. From the moment he shows up, with his fuckin’ jacket and his Porsche, he’s on a tear, and it’s glorious – even though he’s also afflicted with the T-Virus and is dying. Doesn’t stop him from tearing shit up, though.

Perhaps Requiem’s greatest claim to fame is just how effectively it melds the two different flavors of modern RE games. You have the 7 & 8 gameplay of Grace, and then the remake-like gameplay of Leon, and Capcom found a way to do both, and to combine them so effectively.

Rhodes Hill

The first area, Rhodes Hill, is peak Resident Evil. After Grace is kidnapped during what’s basically the prologue (a very moody and effective prologue at that), you wake up inside this mental hospital, and have to figure your shit out.

It’s pretty quick that you realize Grace is more at home behind a desk at the FBI field office than she is out in the field—it just so happens to be a bad turn of events that the “field” is also littered with the undead.

It’s a stark contrast to Leon, who has spent the better part of the last thirty years cleaning up Umbrella’s messes. And that’s exactly how it feels playing the early part of Requiem.

I do wish that they’d found a way to tie Grace’s FBI background into the gameplay a little more. But I guess this is a Resident Evil game, not Alan Wake 2, although Saga’s stuff was very well done.

Once Grace is loosed on Rhodes Hill, it becomes a Resident Evil game: go here, find a key there, avoid zombies over there. That’s not to say it’s rote or forgettable; quite the opposite, actually. Rhodes Hill might go down as one of the finest Resident Evil locations in the modern games.

This new strain of the T-Virus affecting the patients in Rhodes Hill actually causes parts of their personality to continue to persist even beyond zombification. This leads them to sticking to routines they had while alive: maids maiding, chefs, cheffing, opera singers singing, etc. You can use this to your advantage as you navigate the location to avoid direct confrontations – or you can just shoot them through your head.

Either way, after Grace has attained three keys to unlock the main door, she can finally escape. This is where Leon comes back into play, as he follows in her wake. His search for the missing FBI agent takes him back through the level that you just explored as Grace, only this time, you’re plowing through everything like a complete badass.

It’s actually quite satisfying to do a bit of “clean up” after spending a few hours sneaking around as Grace. This back-and-forth happens a few times. You play as Grace, struggling your way to the next story point, and then Leon comes in like a wrecking ball and cleans up the mess.

So, in essence, the Leon portions of the game are perhaps slightly easier, at least early on in the game, especially if you’re trying to go guns blazing with Grace, which is perhaps not 100% recommended. It seems like the intention is for you to sneak past most zombies as Grace, but if you put a gun in my hand, I’m probably going to want to use it.

On a semi-related note, I also played the game on Standard (Classic), so Grace had to use Ink Ribbons in order to save. Leon seems to have evolved beyond needing ribbons, because he can save freely.

But for Grace, this had a pretty big impact on how I played the first few hours, since I questioned whether it was a good time to waste a ribbon on saving. That only lasted a short while, because at one point, you get the ability to craft Ink Ribbons, and it’s never really an issue again.

Turns out, blood really is the key (to crafting). In true Resident Evil fashion, Grace can craft items with the help of blood that she sucks up. This is how she can get more ammo, heals, and, of course, Ink Ribbons, as well as health upgrades.

While playing Classic spices things up a bit at the onset, it never really gets too difficult, whether you’re playing as Grace or Leon, which is perhaps a knock against Requiem.

Once you beat the game, you unlock Insanity difficulty, but it would be nice if there was something like Hardcore that slotted in between Standard and Insanity, which you could play right from the start.

But once Grace makes it out of Rhodes Hill, and does a few more levels in that general vicinity, she gets whisked away by our game’s villains (who we’ll talk about later), and Leon gets back in his Porsche and goes after her.

And that leads you to the second half of the game, which takes you …

Back to Raccoon City

For the first half of the game, Grace is the star of the show, with Leon showing up for brief interludes to basically kick some ass and then disappearing back into the shadows.

The Rhodes Hill stuff had me questioning how much of a role Leon would really play in RE9. But once make it to Raccoon, it’s basically the Leon show, with Grace becoming the side character. In that way, it almost feels like two different games, and to good effort, although I don’t think Raccoon City is nearly as good of a level as Rhodes Hill is.

While it does have its highlights, like going back to the police station, which is honestly one of the best sections of the game, so much else about Raccoon City is just sort of samesy, and quite ugly to boot. But of course, the city is in ruins, so it’s about how you’d expect the city to look after thirty years.

It’s also worth mentioning that, while the performance for the first half of the game was great, I had some mean frame rate drops in Raccoon City. Turns out, it was a BIOS setting called Resizable Bar causing the issues. So, if you have some terrible frame drops there, too, it would be worth trying that for yourself – if you feel comfortable rooting around in your BIOS. I’ve also read that some people found better performance by lowering mesh quality.

As a city in shambles, as you’d expect, a lot of Raccoon City is brown, gray, and drab, and the level design isn’t nearly as interesting as the first half of the game. It does get better as you go on, but the first couple of hours of Raccoon City, at least visually speaking, were a bit of a disappointment.

Requiem, however, finds a way to keep it at least somewhat interesting. Once you start playing Leon for real real, you gain access to a new mechanic too. Leon quickly picks up a bracelet that tracks his kills in a sort of gamefied credit system. He can then use the credits he earns to buy and upgrade weapons and consumables.

Zombies also take a conceptual step down. No longer are these next-gen zombies that retain some of their traits of being alive. Now, they’re a mix of newly zombified soldiers who arrived here some time before Leon, as well as zombies who somehow survived since the bombing of Raccoon City.

They get the job done (and Leon does a good job of slaying them), but they’re not all that interesting. Somehow, they still retain the ability to operate mortars to try fuck up Leon’s day, so that’s weird. But hey, video games. While the first part of Raccoon City is a bit of a drab downer, in addition to RPD, there’s also a section where you climb a building that had partly collapsed, which was really enjoyable. The windows become the ground, and you can shoot out the glass to make zombies fall.

Beyond this, there’s also a really silly motorcycle chase halfway through the Racoon City part of the game. It’s goofy fun, and I really enjoyed it – although it makes the city seem way more navigable than it really should be. Still, it’s ultimately a great deal of bombastic fun that gives you unlimited ammo and tells you to go hog wild.

Once you make it through the city, you enter another clandestine lab, which plays host to the end of the game. This area is very neat, visually speaking. It’s very futuristic, clean, and sci-fi, maybe too much so for a facility that was, in theory, originally constructed in the 90s, but hey, that’s Umbrella for you.

Raccoon City also shows the return of an old nemesis (but not that Nemesis) of Leon, which means it’s finally time to talk about boss fights.

Shoot the Glowy Bits

It’s while in the RPD that Leon bumps into the Tyrant once again – because nothing is ever truly dead. After avoiding him in the station, you eventually have a showdown in a parking lot that opens with a hilariously awesome scene of Mr. X tossing a badass missile right at you. From there, his chest opens up, because why not, and you dump ammo into his heart to kill him.

It’s perhaps the most “RE” of all the boss fights, but there are a few others both after this and before, as well as a few scenarios that play out similarly to boss fights. Grace must evade “the Girl” throughout the entire first part of the game, bumping into her a few times. Eventually, though, she’s able to finally kill her by exposing her to sunlight, because why not?

As someone who really isn’t all that physically capable, not like Leon, who is physically capable of just about anything, that’s about the only boss fight with Grace, although she can choose to kill one other enemy, one of the huge monstrosities called Chunk, but you can also leave it alone. For the most part, Leon gets to have the rest of the fun, even having to kill a different Chunk.

About the only boss fight that gave me any sort of trouble was Planet 43, which you bump into on your way to the clandestine lab. That’s only because I kept trying to parry the fucker, but you specifically can’t do that and need to move out of the way of vine strikes – but I’m stubborn. However, once you kill the weed, it’s onward to the end of the game.

Victor, Zeno, and the Story at Large

This lab, however, is where you have the final showdown with the game’s villain(s), Victor Gideon, and some random fucker named Zeno. Both villains are a bit of a wash. Victor kinda lumbers around the entire game, acting like he has a grand plan, but that grand plan in the end was hilariously off.

Zeno, who doesn’t seem to have much of a role to play except for being a reason to squeeze Albert Wesker back into the game. I’m assuming he’s a clone, although his origins are pretty unclear – and he has a pretty unceremonious end. But clearly, Wesker always returns.

There’s some solid mustache-twirling shenanigans from both of them, but the end of the game kinda proves how silly they both are. They spend the entire game searching Elpis (you know, Elpis Prespley), thinking that it is some kind of superweapon that will let them mind control people. To this end, they believe that Grace is somehow the key to unlocking the power of Elpis.

So, the end of the game comes, and you’re left with two choices: either release Elpis or destroy it. As it turns out, Elpis isn’t a mind control drug. One of Umbrella’s original founders, Oswell E. Spencer, had second thoughts about the whole Umbrella malarky and created a second hope for redemption. (Elpis is the Greek goddess of hope.)

As such, Elpis is an antiviral. Which is great news for Leon, who, as this whole scenario is playing out, is literally lying on the ground dying of the T-Virus. It’s just a bit hilarious that as Zeno injects himself, thinking that Elpis will give him godly mind control powers. Funnily enough, all his T-Virus bullshit vanishes, Grace waits an oddly long time to run over and inject Leon with Elpis as well, but she eventually does, and just as soon as Leon gets his mojo back, the final boss fight with a mutated Victory plays out.

While this is the canon ending, if you choose to destroy Elpis, a much shorter ending plays out in which Leon gets his brains blown out, and Grace narrowly escapes. So, one ending is significantly better than the other.

I’m not exactly a Resident Evil lore aficionado or anything, but it seems like Requiem has plenty of lore tidbits and new information for any diehard fans of the franchise to sink their teeth into – which is in stark contrast to 7 & 8, which are sort of their own thing, and only tangentially related to the greater lore.

I will say, once you finish the game, one of the extras that unlocks is Grace’s FBI report, which I found to help explain certain aspects of the story very well. It’s a fairly short read, too, that is more like a PowerPoint presentation than an actual FBI report.

Let’s Wrap This Baby Up

I feel like I could maybe make an argument that Resident Evil Requiem is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s not to say any of its parts are mediocre, but Capcom is able to so skillfully combine so many different flavors of RE that it’s rather sort of amazing.

I think the Grace stuff is better than RE7 and 8, but the Leon stuff at the end of the day, probably isn’t as good as RE2 and 4 remake, but it comes damn close. And personally, I enjoyed playing as Leon more than playing as Grace. But again, I liked everything about Requiem – there are just certain aspects I liked more.

I do want to go back and try to grab a few more achievements, not that I’m someone who chases platinums (or the Steam equivalent). Requiem was just good, and I want a reason to play more of it.

It ultimately left me really excited for the franchise’s future. I know there’s a hot-off-the-presses rumor of another RE1 remake, which I’m all for. That first game is a classic, but I tried to play it and just found myself annoyed at how dated some of it was.

There’s also been talk of a Code Veronica remake. Sign me up. And of course, there will eventually be Resident Evil 10. Sign me up for that, too, while you’re at it.

While Voyager might not be the best Star Trek series, for me personally, it perhaps holds the most nostalgia. TNG was, for what it’s worth, before my time—if only barely, and while DS9 is great, I didn’t learn that till a little later. But as a wee lad of barely 9 years old, I just had a love for a bunch of people on a bridge doing bridge stuff. Fast forward 30 years, and I can safely say DS9 > Voyager—but only barely.

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As you can see, for young Frak, Voyager was my jam, so it was no surprise that when Across the Universe was announced, my first impression was “holy hell, a Star Trek game, an actual Star Trek game.”

I’m a Resurgence stan, but I kinda figured it would be at least another decade before another Star Trek game came out. Turns out, I didn’t need to wait that long.

Plus, there was a pretty solid demo that basically sold me on the game. Now, 14 hours into the actual game (I haven’t actually beaten it yet, but more on that later), I have some thoughts. And I’m here to share ‘em.

It’s a Video Game

Remove the Voyager vibes, and Across the Universe is a management/survival game that echoes shades of FTL, Xcom (the base management more than gameplay), and The Alters—a game that, if you’ve been around long enough, you would know that I didn’t love.

While thanks primarily to the fact that it’s a fucking Star Trek game, I liked Across the Universe more than Alters, but I didn’t love it either. The management part of the game is great. You manage everything from a cutout of the Voyager, which – by the way – looks like an LCARS screen. There, you can place different modules and arrange them how you want, while also clearing out rubble from your bumpy trip to the Delta Quadrant.

However, some of the choices become a little too RNG-dependent, and you can lose crew members and have bad outcomes based purely on a bad string of luck. When that happens more than a few times in a row, it makes you want to yeet Voyager directly into a star.

And that’s exactly what I did toward the end of my current playthrough. After encountering quite the no-win scenario pretty late into the game, I realized my best course of action was probably to roll back to a previous save and try again, and I didn’t really feel like doing that. So, I dropped Voyager for the time being.

However, when everything is going your way, Voyager is fantastically fun. You’re piloting from planet to planet to collect resources to upgrade the ship, letting the crew go from Emergency Quarters to fancy Officer’s Quarters. Or you’re building even more Shield Generators to make sure you’re not getting pounded too hard during combat.

Fortunately, there are three difficulties to choose from, and while the middle one is probably the preferred one, if you want a more relaxing experience, easy difficulty probably isn’t a bad idea. If you want something that probably resembles a rogue-like, where you see how far you can make it before you implode, try hard mode.

Keeping People Happy and the Lights On

Ultimately, Across the Unknown’s ship management comes down to two mechanics: Morale and Energy.

Keep your crew’s Morale happy, and they perform better. Poor Morale, and they’re lazy fucks. If your Morale bottoms out for an extended period of time, it’s game over. So keeping people happy is paramount. There’s also a Homesick mechanic, which gradually makes your people more and more unhappy the further you make it into the game.

There are plenty of ways to boost morale. Sometimes, story missions will go so well that it will make everyone happy. Perhaps the best way to make everyone happy is to give them access to all those “special” Holodeck programs that Quark is well-known for. Kidding, mostly. While the Holodeck does provide a nice Morale boost, really, you just gotta keep them from starving to death—if Neelix’s cooking doesn’t kill them first.

(Actually, Neelix provides a nice boost to the Mess Hall when he’s assigned there, and each of the other characters, which the game calls Heroes, has their own preferred assignments.)

Feed them well, and the Crew is happy, but it drains your resources fast. Force Emergency Rations on them, and it reduces Morale. If you want them to eat fancy replicator feasts, then that will keep them super happy, naturally, but it will also drain your energy faster.

While the Warp Core does a serviceable job keeping the lights on, a hungry beast it is, so you’re constantly having to make sure you’re feeding it with Deuterium, or you run out of energy, and the lights go off.

Every room you build, from Crew Quarters to Hydroponics (for food), drains energy, and while you can build batteries to help give yourself a nice little buffer, you’re constantly chasing Deuterium to keep the Warp Core fed.

Occasionally, you’ll realize that the projected number of Cycles (which is how the game meters time) isn’t going to cut it, with as far away as a Deuterium source is.

Then, you’ll need to power down certain rooms to keep the lights on. Otherwise, you run the risk of running out of energy completely and going into Gray Mode, which is a Warp Core mode that turns everything off and functions without any power. It’ll keep you from being dead in the proverbial water, but it definitely makes people quite unhappy and degrades your morale.

It’s a Scavenger’s Life

In addition to Deuterium, Voyager requires a host of other resources that are needed to build new rooms and then upgrade them. I won’t bore you by going over each and every one, but there are a few, and you need a lot of them all.

This loop involves you going to each point of interest (be it a planet or a derelict ship), and scavenging resources, which will probably be one of your first forays in Across the Unknowns’ RNG dice rolls. That Deuterium you so desperately need to keep the lights on? You'd better hope that when you make it to a planet with it as a resource, the dice rolls in your favor. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself with a vastly reduced amount—or nothing at all.

And if you get unlucky too many times, you might just find yourself running on fumes. The same goes for every resource. Fortunately, though, every resource … source … has a few options available to you. Typically, there’s the high-risk, high-reward option, but then there’s often also a safer option that is vastly more likely to succeed (or at least, not fail catastrophically), but you won’t get as many resources.

Sometimes, however, you can find yourself locked out of a couple of the four options because you don’t have the necessary ship upgrade, so sometimes, all you’ll have are less-than-ideal options. Sometimes, that can be harrowing and fun, and sometimes it can be frustrating.

Since many of the systems are randomly generated, you’ll make your way to a new system, desperate to find some Deuterium, only to find one source—if that. Then, if you get unlucky with that roll, it can literally take the wind from your sails.

But at the end of the day, that’s just the way things are with RNG-based mechanics. The highs are high, and the lows are low. The RNG also extends to the away mission design, too, because it wouldn’t be a Star Trek game without away missions.

Away We Go

Virtually all the Main Missions, as well as Side Missions, feature at least one away mission. These have you assembling your Heroes (basically everyone you know from the show—and then some) into 3-man teams to complete objectives.

These are entirely story-based. You’re reading scenarios, and then deciding which option represents how you want to respond to them. So, some of them describe action, but if you want to actually see action, the only place you’ll experience that is in the ship-to-ship battles. We’ll jump into those next.

Each Away Mission lets you know the kind of challenges to expect, so you can gather your Heroes accordingly. Need someone with medical know-how? Better bring the Doctor. If you’re going to need someone who knows which Phaser setting is for killing and which is for stunning, better grab Chakotay or Tuvok.

Once you get to beamin’, you’ll quickly encounter your first challenge. Say you need to fight someone, and it requires a Phaser skill of at least 35, and Chakotay has his at 40. Easy-peasy. But if the skill required is 50, and your Hero only has a skill of 35? Uh oh.

You can double up Heroes with similar skills. So if that Phaser challenge has a skill level of 80, and Chakotay and Tuvok together have a skill of 92, then you’re good.

Heroes can level up, and increase their skill, so it’s important not to put all your eggs in one basket and try to give everyone the chance to level up. But if you end up failing, people can end up injured and dead, even Heroes like Tom Paris and Harry Kim. In my aforementioned no-win scenario from earlier, virtually everyone had died, so I ended up unable to even do most away missions. Good times all around.

Janeway herself can’t go on away missions, and probably means she can’t be outright killed, but she can level up, and there are choices you must make while on the bridge that can win or lose based on her level. So, you can get fucked there, too.

Photon Torpedos, Full Spread

Often, someone will want to forgo negotiations and simply blow you out of the sky—or space, as it were. That’s where the ship combat comes into play. While visually, it’s really neat looking, and it lets you see the USS Voyager in all her glory.

That’s about all they are, a pretty little show. At any point, you can pause and choose which of the enemy systems to target, or which part of Voyager to defend. I usually just targeted weapons, because if you take those out, you won’t have to worry about using resources for hull repairs. You can also assign Heroes that let you use tactical abilities on a cooldown, but that’s just pressing a button every 30 seconds or so.

Battles boil down to a combat rating. If yours is higher, Voyager will be fine. You can autoresolve these fights without having to play them out, but that has a higher chance of hull damage, so you’ll need to repair the ship afterward, which takes time and resources. For that reason alone, it’s often better just to blow shit up by hand.

Making Your Life Easier

Across the Unknown also has a big ole Tech Tree to help make the Delta Quadrant more palatable. Here, you can research a whole host of different upgrades, with the help of Science, one of the resources you can collect. With it, you can research a vast treasure trove of upgrades, from passive upgrades to new technologies, all of which make your life just a little easier.

Once you research Cargo Bays, you can haul more resources, which means you have to harvest them a little less often. Or research how to make Hydroponics Bays, both small and large, to make your food way more manageable. Or research combat upgrades to kick even more ass, both in ship combat, as well as in away missions. Later in the game, there are also plenty of Borg upgrades, too. You can even research the Doctor’s Mobile Emitter.

The research is highly important, and there’s a lot of it. You probably won’t be able to get everything in one playthrough, so you’ll need to pick and choose what you value the most, which will typically vary depending on where you’re getting fucked the most.

What Even Is Canon?

Across the Unknown follows the events of the TV show fairly directly, hitting on all the major plot points as they happen. So, if you’re familiar with the source material, you’ll have a pretty good idea about what happens and when.

Things get a little crazy when you start making choices that Captain Janeway herself didn’t make in the show, allowing you to have a bit of fun with canon—even if the broad strokes remain the same.

The best example, the one the game itself uses, is our buddy Tuvix. In one episode of the Show, Neelix and Tuvok get merged in a transporter episode. In proper TV fashion, the two get separated, and everything is back to normal in a lean 42 mins. However, in the game, you can choose to keep the two merged, resulting in the death of Tuvok and Neelix, technically speaking, but Tuvix lives on.

These little moments are a highlight: the ability to toy around with the events of the show. It might be best if you try to divest yourself of what really happened—if at all possible—and just take the choices as they come.

From a story standpoint, the writing is all very solid, and the game looks pretty good too, melding 3D and 2D quite effectively. There’s very little voice acting, which is understandable, because doing otherwise would be quite the Herculean task.

Developer Gamexcite was able to pull in Tim Russ and Robert Duncan McNeill to do personal logs at the start of each chapter as their respective characters, Tuvok and Tom Paris. So, that’s pretty neat.

The Final Frontier

Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown is a pretty trekking good time. The RNG can sometimes work against you more than you’d like, and if you get in a bad luck rut, then you can sometimes be forced to roll back your save—they did actually add manual saves recently, so that helps, if you can resist the urge to save-scum.

But the overall experience is a very satisfying management and survival experience, one that will certainly tickle your Voyager nostalgia if you have any. That’s, of course, ignoring the fact that I didn’t beat it, but nearly 14 hours of playtime, I’d say I got a pretty good look at it.

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Despite having run the proverbial gauntlet over the last few years, I’m still a relative newcomer to the Yakuza franchise. I haven’t played them all, but I’ve played most of them at this point, and have a pretty good handle on the overall formula.

Funnily enough, my first Yakuza game was probably the worst possible one to start with: Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name.

I didn’t know who Kiryu was, I didn’t know why he erased his name, nor did I have any knowledge of the last 20 years of his life. Still, I enjoyed the hell out of that game, so I kept going.

To date, I’ve played:

• Gaiden

• Yakuza: Like a Dragon

• Judgment

• Lost Judgment

• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

• Yakuza 0

• Yakuza Kiwami 1

• Yakuza Kiwami 2

• Pirate Yakuza

• Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties

As you can see, I’ve gotten a good view of Kiryu’s early life, as well as his later life, but I have a nice big hole right in the middle. That’s why, almost against my better judgment (since I know they probably haven’t aged super well), I’ve decided that I wanna go ahead and play 4, 5, & 6.

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I’ve also technically played a little Ishin, but only for a couple of hours till I decided I didn’t really feel like it was worth the effort. For anyone who’s never played a Yakuza game, I’d say the best place to start is either with Yakuza 0, or, if you want a standalone experience, the Judgment games are probably still my faves.

So, my experiences with the Yakuza cover the modern era primarily—although Yakuza 0 is over ten years old at this point. But you get the gist. I’ve gotten pretty used to the patented Yakuza formula and have enjoyed watching it evolve over the years.

The Yakuza Formula

If you’ve played more than 1 Yakuza game, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a certain format that they use to crank these babies out. Even the turn-based ones (Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Infinite Wealth), are similar enough to the older game—developer RGG (Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio) just swapped out the real-time combat for a turn-based RPG alternative, replete with plenty of loot.

So, for me, Yakuza has become a known quantity, one that I’m clearly pretty happy to play at least once a year. And Kiwami 3 is just that. More Yakuza. It has chapters, with fully voiced cutscenes and plenty of drama, people constantly accosting you on the street to pick fights, substories are as goofy as ever, and you can invest in yourself to punch harder, acquire more moves, and bolster that health.

Overall, if you’ve played any other Yakuza game in the last 5-10 years, you’ll feel right at home pretty fast. I know that there’s been a bit of controversy surrounding this game in particular. I won’t get into it, but it’s a shame RGG didn’t make a few better decisions. But the game itself is solid, even if there isn’t anything too special or new here. Except, of course, DADDY RANK.

Running an Orphanage

In the wake of the events of Kiwami 2, Kiryu is faced with perhaps his toughest challenge of all: children. Between all the fisticuffs, the plotting and scheming, and people getting shot, our buddy Kazuma Kiryu is also trying to manage an orphanage.

This proves to be the biggest side activity in the game, and though I’ve never played the original Yakuza 3, it seems as though RGG expanded this part of the game by a lot.

There’s cooking to do, homework to help with, sewing to take care of, bugs to catch, and you can even play Reversi. There’s a whole damn world of mini games here, and everything you do improves your Daddy Rank, while also increasing your bond with the children.

Cooking requires planting crops, feeding livestock, and going fishing, all of which culminate in the cooking minigame I best remember from Pirate Yakuza.

Helping with the homework is similar to the vocational school from previous games, only the questions are significantly easier (because it’s childrens’ homework) and there are far fewer of them. Despite being easier, they also have a pretty tight timer, so if you haven’t done much basic arithmetic in 25 years and counting (I’m old, okay), you might stumble a little.

Sewing is basically a little racing game where you need to stay within the borders and adjust speed for the best possible score. It makes it seem as though speed-sewing is a competitive sport.

All of the minigames with the children have a time mechanic that seems a little out of place. Why must I answer these simple math problems within 10 seconds?! But hey, it’s a video game.

Kamurocho, I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down

The locations in the Yakuza series are just as much a character as Kazuma Kiryu himself. Kamurocho has been a mainstay in just about every Yakuza game, but Kiwami 3 has Kiryu moving out of Kamurocho to run the Morning Glory orphanage in Okinawa. So, in addition to the first map, you quickly make your way to Ryukyu—Kiwami 3’s second map.

It’s small. It’s also evidently smaller than the original area, with one of the streets up at the top of the map cut. The map already feels like it’s hardly more than a single block of the city, so it surprises me that RGG chose to cut from it instead of expanding it.

What’s there is good, though. I just wish there were more of it. There’s the typical bevy of shops and places to eat. The city feels quite alive regardless. Because, no matter which direction you go, someone’s always trying to punch you in the face. It just so happens that Kiryu’s forte is exactly that: punching people in the face.

Get Styled Upon

In good Yakuza fashion, Kiryu has his Dragon of Dojima fighting style that has become his signature throughout virtually all the games. Next to that, he has a new fighting style: Ryukyu.

I wasn’t immediately sold on Ryukyu style, but the more upgrades I got and the more accustomed I got to it, the more it started to click with me. The style has a bunch of built-in weapons that you automatically switch between depending on which attack you do and the combo.

Needless to say, it takes a little getting used to, especially since the Dragon style is defined by punching people … really hard. It still reigns supreme for 1-on-1 fights, especially the boss fights, but Ryukyu proved to be really effective for groups of enemies, especially during Kiwami 3’s new mini-game adventure shenanigans: the biker gang.

Joining a Biker Gang

Leave it to Kazuma Kiryu to take a break from his primary duties to join a (formerly) all-girl biker gang called the Hansai Girls. The “Bad Boy Dragon,” as the game calls it—although I can’t read that name without thinking about a certain sex toy company—is another series of activities and minigames that are squeezed into Kiwami 3.

Much like recruiting pirates in Pirate Yakuza, you have to recruit new biker members and level them up through battles. These combat sections play out like big, surprisingly fun brawls. These throw you and your squad(s) of biker buddies into large melees, including large-scale battles that play a lot like Dynasty Warriors. Pretty fun stuff.

The biker gang storyline is basically just a conduit for the gameplay, but it boils down to you gradually taking over, defeating rival gangs, and growing larger in the process, all while proving that the Hansai Girls (and boys) are nothing to be trifled with.

I ended up really enjoying the biker gang stuff; however, there’s one moment in the story that Kiwami 3 crams it down your throat before you can continue with the good stuff, which rubbed me the wrong way. Mostly because, as a new addition to Kiwami 3, the biker gang stuff sort of lives in its own vacuum and doesn’t connect with the main game.

I can just imagine poor Haruka being asked by the other Orphans where Kiryu is, and she has to tell them that he’s off on an adventure with his biker gang.

The biker gang stuff is almost entirely unvoiced, too. I don’t mind the unvoiced dialogue for the substories, since those are so short, but the biker gang has a lot of story, and hardly any of it is voiced. So, when you’re trying to stream these games, and want to put some effort into voicing the unvoiced stuff, the biker subplot gets a little long in the tooth.

The good news is that the main plot of the game is still fully voiced and cinematic—and aside from fun-ass minigames, the story continues to be my favorite thing about the Yakuza series.

The Plot

I won’t spoil too much from the game, just for those who may not have played the original one way back in 2009. Basically, the plot boils down to a turf war over the land the orphanage is on, and it’s shocking just how many colorful characters get involved in this little land grab.

In typical Yakuza fashion, there are heinous acts of violence and truly loathsome characters (including loathsome characters played by loathsome actors). And poor Kiryu ends up spread quite thin trying to protect all those he cares about.

While the story starts slow, it picks up pace pretty well, and the last three or four chapters are quite good. Even if the whole plot itself seems needlessly complicated with too many players from too many different random organizations.

From my understanding, the story remains roughly the same as it did 15 years ago, but RGG did retcon the ending, which might serve to indicate where the series might be going after this. They’ll need more Gaiden games, after all.

But Wait, There’s More

In addition to Kiwami 3 proper, the game also comes bundled with Dark Ties, which, for all intents and purposes, is a mini Gaiden game all on its own, and it’s pretty dang spiffy.

While Dark Ties is technically a prequel to the events in Kiwami 3, there are some spoilers, so it’s recommended that you play the main game first. Although, ret-cons aside, if you’ve played the original Yakuza 3, you could probably start with it instead.

You play as Mine. During the events of Kiwami 3, you will get to see a lot of him, but probably not nearly as much as you’d want. Fortunately, Dark Ties does a good job of feeling like a slightly different experience than Kiwami 3 proper. For starters, Mine plays a bit differently, and secondly, there are a couple of new activities to do.

The first of which has you improving the reputation of one of the story’s most unsavory characters: Kanda. No, really, he’s a gigantic piece of shit, so there’s something humorous about going out of your way during this to help out this pathetic fuck.

If you’ve played Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, helping out Kanda will feel very familiar, since it’s basically just the Akame Network series of quests from that game. So, expect a lot of fetch quests, people to beat up, and random people looking for their cats. It’s good busy work while you’re running around the city doing other things.

Dark Ties is also home to Hell’s Arena, which is a vastly reworked version of the dungeons found in the turn-based games. I was pretty shocked to see how much depth and progression there is in Hell’s Arena. There are multiple dungeons, with varying difficulty, and you can grow stronger by collecting items found within. It’s a great way to get more powerful without impacting the balance outside the dungeon. It turned out to be a really fun grind.

If you skip all this and focus on the story alone, of which there are only three chapters, you’ll probably be done with this in about three hours or so, but if you do all the side stuff, and delve into the dungeon for a while, you’re probably looking more at 6-8 hours, which isn’t too bad at all.

A Note on the Graphics

I like that the Yakuza games all run on the Dragon Engine—at least every game since Kiwami 2 has. It’s nice not having to contend with UE5 troubles, since the Yakuza games tend to run really well.

However, graphically and art-wise, they’re a bit of a mixed bag. I really enjoyed Pirate Yakuza, but holy hell is that game ugly. There’s just something wrong with the contrast, or brightness, or the exposure.

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Kiwami 3, fortunately, doesn’t have that issue, but I would still say it’s a graphical step back from the likes of Gaiden and Infinite Wealth. I was surprised by how good the PC version of Kiwami 2 looked, despite showing its age in a few areas.

It just seems like, at some point in the last 5 years or so, RGG messed up the lighting in the Dragon Engine and is gradually fixing it. I guess we’ll just have to see how the next game or two looks.

Yak Me Up

I might not have been playing Yakuza for too long, in the grand scheme, but at this point, I’ve become a steadfast fan of the franchise. And for what has basically become a yearly franchise at this point, I can accept if each game has its faults.

I don’t mind the retcons in Kiwami 3—mostly because I have no loyalty to the original—so it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. Between what happens in the main game, and the Dark Ties DLC, there’s room here for a game or two set between this game and the future that are potentially all-original.

In the immediate future, however, we have a non-Yakuza game from RGG: Stranger Than Heaven. I’m really curious what this turns out to be. They haven’t shown much yet, but what they have shown makes it seem at least different enough from Yakuza to provide something fresh. That might be out as early as later this year.

Either way, I continue to be on board for more Yakuza/Like a Dragon.

(Although, admittedly, some of those are Battlestar Galactica, one is The Orville, and there’s also the Nostromo from Alien, but still.)

Needless to say, I’m boldly going, and I’m goin’ hard.

Growing up, I loved the ‘90s shows. And later, I thought the Abrams’ movies were mid to great. More recently, “nu-Trek,” as it has been dubbed, is a bit of a mixed bag, but personally, I find it to be more good than bad—although I ain’t touching the Section 31 movie with a 10-foot pole. But I do think Starfleet Academy has a lot to like about it (just not everything).

Basically, I’ll take any Trek I can get.

Enter, Star Trek: Resurgence, a Tell-Tale-esque game that came out originally in 2023. As a proper nerd, I played it back then, but for the last year or so (I’m slow, okay), I had been meaning to revisit it for a second playthrough for some time. And I finally decided to make it so.

Replaying it reminded me of two things: how fucking awesome 90s Trek was and still is—and how disappointing some of the game (and technical) aspects of Resurgence are.

But, as I said, I’m happy with Star Trek in just about any form, and video games have been few and far between, especially in recent years—although I do keep thinking I need to dive back into Star Trek Online. I haven’t played that thing for like a decade.

But one Trek at a time. Let’s talk Resurgence.

Resurgence: The Trek

Because I think it would be cool if people, especially Trek fans, played this game if they haven’t already … I’ll avoid spoilers.

However, at its most basic, Resurgence feels like a run-of-the-mill 90s Trek episode, and if you’ve watched TNG, DS9, or VOY, you know what I mean. It’s certainly not so laughably bad that you remember it out of spite (i.e., it’s not a clip episode), but it’s also not the cream of the crop. It’s enjoyable enough, but you probably won’t remember it when you decide to do a rewatch after a decade or two. When you get to it, though, you’re like “oh, this one!”

It’s that kind of Trek. But it’s also a game … with choices! But you can tell from the onset that developer Dramatic Labs was constrained by a pretty tight and shoestring budget, so don’t expect those choices to result in vastly different experiences.

Speaking of Dramatic Labs. It seems like they are all but kaput, having deleted basically everything but their site. So, if you liked this game and were hoping for a sequel sooner rather than later, best not get too excited.

But back to Resurgence. The story centers on an alien race first introduced during The Next Generation: the Tkon, so in many ways, it’s a follow-up to that episode. Portal 63 is my boy.

The Enterprise, however, this is not. Resurgence takes place aboard the USS Resolute, a science vessel. As a Centaur-class starship, it has its warp nacelles on the bottom, which I always found to look cool in other similar ships, like the Cerritos—but that’s a California-class ship.

The Resolute’s Captain ain’t no Picard, either, or Kirk for that matter. Captain Solano is, for lack of a better phrase, a piece of shit—even from the onset, he seemed more interested in covering his own ass than trying to serve his crew or the Federation.

You play as two different characters: a Kobliad, Commander Jara Rydek, and Petty Officer Carter Diaz. The perspective shifts are a pretty clever way of structuring the game, since with Rydek, you get the view of a member of the command crew, and with Diaz, you get someone who serves on the lower decks, so you get to see what life is like down there, too.

And if you want to see more, definitely watch Star Trek: Lower Decks, because it’s great; it’s also where you’ll see the USS Cerritos.

So, if you’re coming into Resurgence purely for some Trek love, then you’ll find a pretty nostalgic trip down memory lane, complete with Spock playing a major role, and Jonathan Frakes himself returning for everyone’s favorite number one. I have a few more reservations if you couldn’t give fewer fucks about Star Trek (even if you should), and are coming into Resurgence for purely the game parts.

Resurgence: the Game

If you’re not a Trekkie and care more about the state of the game itself, you’ll find that Resurgence is a little rough around the edges. In true Telltale fashion, the game is rife with choices, quick-time events, and characters approving or disapproving of many of those choices.

If you’ve played any similar games, Dark Pictures and Dispatch including, you’ll feel right at home.

Resurgence may rely a little too heavily on quick-time events, and these little mini games that you must partake in every time you turn around. It’s very “video-gamey,” but it does help to make you feel as though you’re doing Star Trek stuff, which helps alleviate some of the ever-so-slight annoyance.

Perhaps the biggest negative is that, even after nearly three years, the game unfortunately still runs pretty poorly, with some scenes dropping from a solid 144 to 20, with no obvious reason why. Nevertheless, the game itself looks fine, with good fidelity across the board.

At least where pure looks are concerned.

As for animations, they’re a little stilted, especially the facial animations. They’re almost laughably bad. The highest form of emoting that most characters are capable of doing are eyebrow raises that would make the Rock jealous.

Nevertheless, the voice acting, and writing in general, are pretty solid. It really does make you feel like you’re choosing your own way through an episode of Star Trek, which is really something that should be more common.

I’ll Shut Up Now

So, as a Star Trek video game thing, Resurgence is probably one of the best ones to come out of the modern era. But as purely a game, it’s servicable, if a little mid in areas.

One of the reasons I decided to revisit this now, aside from having a brief lil gap in the games I had on planning, was because there’s another Star Trek game on the horizon that’s lookin’ pretty spiffy: Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown.

That’s out in less than a week at the time of this writing, so I’ll definitely be checking it out. And with any luck, it won’t be another 3 months until my next post.

I just finished Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. I have to say “Marvel’s” so you don’t confuse it with all the other Spider(s)-Men(s) games or movies out there. That aside, since I’m only a couple of years late to this shindig, I won’t yap too much about the game itself.

I enjoyed it, but I’m also a fuckin’ nerd who bought a PS4 Pro to play the first game. And not just any regular PS4 Pro, the Spider-Man one, cause I’m that much of a fuckin’ nerd. I eventually gave that PS4 to a good home and don’t have it anymore, but it served me well, since Marvel’s Spider-Man was the first PlayStation game I platinumed.

Though I had intended to eventually buy a PS5, now that Sony’s games have started (eventually) coming out on PC, I figured it was no longer necessary. So, when Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 came out, I was like “Oh, I’ll just wait to play that on PC,” and then when it finally came out on PC early this year, the port looked fuckin’ rough, so I figured I’d wait on it. And wait I did, until last week, when I finally picked it up and started swinging.

The game itself is fine; it’s no worse or better than the first game by any quantifiable metrics. The combat still feels fun as fuck, swinging is immediately satisfying, and the game is quite pretty. I do feel that Miles and Peter play a little too similarly, but that might be somewhat on me. I think I only camouflaged as Miles like once.

The story and writing are good—but not amazing, or spectacular, or anything. I still love Yuri Lowenthal as Peter. He, by the way, is also great in the Old Gods of Appalachia podcast, where he pops up now and again to play a villain. Check that out if you haven’t.

So, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a swinging good time, but since the novelty of the first game had long worn off, and in the interim, there was also the Miles Morales game, the game felt a little rote. However, there’s one new thing that Spider-Man 2 brought to the table: SSDs, baby.

Out with the Old, in with the New

I’m not new to solid-state drives (SSDs). I think I bought my first SSD, a lil 240 GB one, way back in 2017 or 2018, and I don’t think I’ve installed a game to a regular old hard drive in like 4 or 5 years.

But if I can thank the most recent generation of consoles for anything, it’s for putting developers in a position to actually develop games around the power of an SSD, because, lemme tell ya, there’s a big difference between playing a regular old game on an SSD, and playin games that were made for SSDs.

Granted, Microsoft has (slowly) been cookin’ DirectStorage as a way to leverage blazing fast SSDs and modern GPUs for even faster load times, but that technology’s adoption has been woefully slow, and I think you can count on one hand the number of games that use DirectStorage.

But back to Arachno-Boi: Two. While it wasn’t the first game that leveraged the power of an SSD, props to developer Insomniac. I think Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was the first game that I remember really using them to a cool effect. (It’s also one of the few games that uses DirectStorage). In Rift Apart, you can bounce around through rifts from one location to another instantly, which is far neater than it sounds if you’ve spent most of your life wading through load screens.

Spoiler, but Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 also uses portals, specifically in one of the side quests that has our old buddy Black Cat steal a wand and begin teleporting around like Doctor Strange. While teleporting around is a fun little gimmick (that’s definitely used a bit more effectively in Rift Apart), the real star of the show is the fast travel system. They’re almost like a glimpse into a future where load screens are no longer necessary, or at least greatly reduced.

Not that I didn’t love having to sit through a load screen every time I tried to go anywhere in Starfield (of course, that’s perhaps the least of that game’s faults), but being able to click a spot on the opposite side of the map and have a short transition before you’re swinging away. Character swapping is near instantaneous, too, when you’re switching from Peter to Miles or vice versa.

There’s still a load time, but it’s masked underneath some pretty slick animations, and it sure beats cutting to a traditional load screen. There are a couple of seconds where it’s clearly loading something, but it’s all seamless, with hardly any clear breaks. You just open the map, hold the button, and within a couple of seconds, the game transitions to Spider-Man swinging through an entirely different part of the city. It made me giddy almost every time I did it (yes, I’m weird).

(That stuttering is why we love PC gaming.)

I’m far too lazy for this, but it would be fun to compare load times between an NVME drive, a SATA drive, and an old hard drive. For the unaware, just know that NVME is the fastest, and SATA is still fast, just not as fast, and old hard drives (the ones with the disks) are snail-paced by comparison. I bet those fast travels will be far less fast.

IN CLOSING

I guess it says a lot about not only me, but Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, that the only really interesting thing I want to talk about is how snappy the load times are. I guess we’ll mention Venom, too. It’s an interesting take on the character that’s still pretty comic-appropriate, and as one of the last things Tony Todd did before his unfortunate passing, he nailed it. It would’ve been nice to have more of him specifically, but more isn’t always better.

I fuckin’ love making choices in video games. Maybe it’s because I do such a poor job of making them in real life, but I don’t know. I’m not here to psychoanalyze myself. I’m here to talk about Dispatch.

I’m sort of kicking myself for waiting until all the episodes were out to play it, since it probably would’ve been a hoot to experience this thing week to week.

Nevertheless, it’s a great time, and though I do kinda wish the story paths diverged a bit more depending on your choices, I’m also well aware that doing that requires exponentially more time and effort—two things that AdHoc probably didn’t have endless troves of.

What Is This Thing?

For the unfamiliar out there, Dispatch is a narrative adventure game, replete with choices. It’s quite similar to the Telltale games of yore, which should come as no surprise, seeing that many of the core team are Telltale veterans. In many ways, AdHoc is carrying that torch.

Let’s just hope that after Dispatch’s success (and boy has it been successful), AdHoc doesn’t suffer the same fate as Telltale by agreeing to release a new game every six months for every IP under the sun, although if they end up making an Invincible game, I wouldn’t be too bothered.

But back to Dispatch, which revolves around the ongoings of Robert Robertson, who used to be known as Mecha-Man, but he sort of got his ass kicked and had to retire, because maintenance on a mech suit isn’t cheap, and Tony Stark he is not, although at least conceptually, he comes close.

So, while at rock bottom, beaten and bruised, Robert gets a job offer from Blonde Blazer, another one of this universe’s many heroes. So, over the course of episode 1, Robert Robberson goes from Mecha-Man to Dispatcher for SDN, the Superhero Dispatcher Network.

So, therein you have the two sides of Dispatch: the narrative and the game. I’ll avoid talking too much about the narrative, since I think for many people (present company included), it will be the primary draw.

Dispatch: The Game

For all intents and purposes, the narrative occurs through playable cutscenes that bookend each episode. Those are all great, and very well animated, written, and voice-acted.

Between those bookends, you have the game, which could be best described as a management game. You dispatch heroes to where they are needed the most. If something needs its face pounded, you send a hero who is good at face-pounding. If you need to make a television appearance, you send someone with loads of charisma. Need to solve a problem? Send a smart one.

As you succeed in your dispatching, you can level up your heroes and boost their stats, to make the fighters more fightery and the smart ones more smartery. Fail, and they get injured. Fail again, and they get knocked out. There’s no difficulty, and I never found the game to be too hard, so knockouts were rare.

There’s also a hacking minigame to do, which is a welcome shift from the hero management.

So, episodes begin with a bit of story and choice-making, then there’s a dispatch shift, and then there’s a break, with a little more story, then a second shift, although some episodes only have one shift. But that’s kind of the gist. And then each episode ends with a bit more story.

The shifts have plenty of pretty enjoyable banter between the cast of characters. Your roster tends not to change much over the course of the game, although there are a couple of spots where you can mix things up via some choice-based shenanigans.

But by and large, you’ll have plenty of time with the Z-Team across the 8 episodes (technically 7, since they’re not really in the first one). Z-Team is also, as it turns out, made up of reformed villains, like some kind of Suicide Squad.

Z-Team, Best Team?

As you might imagine, the heart and soul of Dispatch lie in its characters. Through the game, they go from a ragtag group of villains at each other’s throats to a cohesive team.

A few of them, notably Invisigal, start off as downright unlikeable, but go through a pretty believable and enjoyable developmental arc by the end. Invisigirl perhaps gets the most focus, but Dispatch does a good job of not letting any of the other characters fall by the wayside (unless, of course, you cut them).

Voice acting is also great, at least from the main characters. Aaron Paul as Mechy, Laura Bailey as Invisigal, Erin Yvette as Blonde Blazer, and Jeffrey Wright as Chase/Track-Star take the spotlight, but everyone else has their moments, too.

A lot of Z-Team actually pulls from content creators and streamers for their voices, and you could tell that most of their talents aren’t in voice acting, but they got the job done. Some of the most famous voices included Jacksepticeye as Punch Up, MoistCr1TiKaL as Sonar, and Alanah Pearce as Malevola. There’s also Thot Squad as Prism, whom I’d never heard of till Dispatch, but she did a solid job, too.

Overall Narrative Thoughts, aka the “Illusion” of Choice

While the game isn’t exactly too spoiler-heavy, I’ll avoid talking too much about specifics, because one of the best things about Dispatch is experiencing how everything plays out with the characters and your choices, so it’s best to go into it as blind as possible.

I will say that if you go into Dispatch expecting every decision you make to have far-sweeping consequences down the line, completely altering the story and things you do—you’ll be a little disappointed. After all, it’s not like AdHoc had limitless resources, and nor would that be the least bit feasible.

But the choices feel like the matter, which is all that really matters. The game does a great job of making the choices feel impactful as they’re happening, even if they don’t completely alter the timeline and make for an entirely different game.

Like Playing an Animated Show

It’s not an accident that I mentioned Invincible earlier. Art-wise, Dispatch reminds me a lot of the comic (that became a TV series). The game really feels like playing an animated superhero TV show, and tone-wise, it’s very similar to Invincible as well. (It’s also very vulgar, which I love, but I know it rubbed some people I know the wrong way.)

Ultimately, though, the animation and art are so well-done that, outside of the gameplay sections, it’s easy to forget that you’re playing a video game. It gets to a point, at least in my own personal experience, that the dispatch “mini-game” that you engage in each episode ends up being a bit of a chore while waiting for more story stuff. Still fun, though, and a good way to extend the experience.

Shutting the Fuck Up Now

I don’t really think there’s much else to say about Dispatch. If you like ye old Telltale Games, you’ll probably like this, and MIGHT I ALSO RECOMMEND STAR TREK: RESURGENCE, which, no joke, is perhaps the best Star Trek game in like 20 years. LIVE LONG AND PROSPER.

However, as for Dispatch. If you like narrative-focused games, and especially Superheroes, you’ll probably have a great fuckin’ time with Dispatch, and you might end up keeping your eyes peeled, as present company will be doing, to keep an eye out for further AdHoc games.

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Granted, the one older Blooper game I've heard great things about, Observer, is the one I haven't played yet, so silly me, I guess. But Layers of Fear, Blair Witch, the Medium, and the new Layers of Fear were all mid to solid. And I actually really liked the Medium, but it wasn't without its faults.

So, in the months leading up to Silent Hill 2's release over a year ago, things were looking promising, but I wasn't getting my hopes up, and I was fully expecting to get Blooped on again.

But lo and behold, the Silent Hill 2 remake was great, like fan-fucking-tastic. Granted, the blueprints were already there, since the original game is also amazing, but Blooper did a great job of modernizing it while staying true to the original.

Thus, when Cronos: The New Dawn was first announced, I was cautiously optimistic. And for good reason: assuming Silent Hill 2 wasn't a fluke, Cronos was still coming out less than a year after it, so naturally, it's likely different teams worked on each one.

Be that as it may, Cronos turned out pretty damn awesome. And while it definitely wasn't to the heights of Silent Hill 2, it was solid in its own right, and proof that maybe, just maybe, Blooper has finally hit its stride.

What Is Cronos: The New Dawn?

Cronos is first and foremost a survival horror game; if you were to play it, you'd definitely draw parallels to Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and even some Dead Space, especially with how the main character moves—and especially stomps. It's a nice heavy stompy stomp, and everyone loves a good stompy stomp.

You play as the Traveler, who has been sent back in time to continue the mission of the Collective. From the moment you leave the Traveler's little pod, you'll notice the game's art direction. Its retro-futuristic vibes are nothing short of delicious; it seems almost Fallout-ish, but is able to carve its own identity.

You arrive in 1980s Poland, well after the Change has turned most of humanity into grotesque monsters called Orphans. Your goal is to continue the investigation of a previous Traveler who seems to have most likely done a bit of orphaning themselves, assuming they had children.

From there, it's a series of going places, doing things, and trying to figure out exactly what happened to turn the human race into these monstrous fucks. Along the way, you can find new weapons, use resources to upgrade them and yourself, and scavenge your heart out for health and ammo.

Ultimately, I found the game to be pretty engaging, although never too hard, but by the end, I found myself invested in seeing how the story played out.

Never a Struggle to Survive

Granted, I can click heads quite well in games like these, and most of the time, I find that combat balance in these types of third-person shooters is centered around controllers, and not necessarily the precision of a mouse. It's a shame that when you first play the game, there's only one difficulty, and while a hard mode unlocks when you beat it, it would've been nice to have a more challenging option from the start.

I only died a handful of times, and most of the combat encounters weren't too bad, although there were a few times where I went into "oh shit, I might run out of ammo if I'm not careful" mode, and tried to be a little more conservative, but by and large, I slew.

Even the lauded "merging" feature, where enemies can absorb the dead ones to become more powerful, wasn't really too impactful. It seems cool on paper, and I went in thinking that if I let them merge, they'd create giant flesh monstrosities that I worship; however, it really functions like a buff and extra armor on the monster. You just shoot it off, and the monster goes back to normal.

On top of that, enemy variety is also pretty slim, and by about the halfway point, you don't really run into anything new, just some minor variations. Those include these headless fodder enemies, weaker enemies with heads, and then spiky boys that are basically like more difficult versions of the regular enemies. That template pretty much applies to all the enemies in the game.

There is one specific enemy that annoyed the shit out of me: this grabby boy who is stuck to a wall and moans a lot. They are also conveniently placed right around corners, and will latch onto you with tentacles and pull you in. During one section of the game, Cronos threw like fifteen too many of these fuckers at you back-to-back-to-back-to-back, and it got to be more tiresome than anything. I didn't mind most of the combat, but I definitely didn't love that.

While Cronos is by no means a complete walk in the park, I never really found the combat to be much more than something to keep me occupied while exploring or finding the next objective.

If anything, the biggest struggle for survival is the goddamn inventory system.

A Whole Section Dedicated to How Shitty Inventory Is

I get it. On some level, it wouldn't be a survival horror game without some semblance of inventory management, but Cronos takes "management" and turns it into an utter pain in the ass, so let's rant.

By default, you have eight slots (but you can upgrade yourself to twelve slots!!!!!), and with those slots, you have to figure out the best way to carry around guns, ammo, health items, upgrade items, quest items, keys, etc.

You can equip up to four different weapons, so if you want to do that, and also carry around ammo for each of those weapons, then well, you do the math. Then you have the health items, of which there are three different types, and each only stacks to two. Then you also have a couple of offensive items, the Pyres (landmines/grenades) and fuel for your Flamethrower.

While that's already pretty bad, I could somewhat manage, since it's very late before you even have four different weapons, so you could probably just make do with two, and most of the time, you're using consumables like health and Pyres pretty as you get them.

But holy hell, the fact that every key and quest item also takes up an inventory slot was almost the straw that broke the camel's back. There's even a puzzle later in the game that requires roughly four separate items, and that's when you start making runs back and forth to the stash to put away items.

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The good news is that the keys and such disappear when you use them, and that includes stuff that is used multiple times, like keycards. There is, however, a bolt cutter that I lugged around throughout most of the game to remove the chain from certain doors found on occasion, so that was one inventory spot forever reserved.

Cores are used for suit upgrades, like health, inventory slots, resource capacity (there are resources you can use to fabricate items that don't take an inventory spot—yipee!), so whenever you find one of these, you're basically forced to make sure you have a spot, and I never did.

The worst part is that I don't know I'd want Blooper to change anything. The inventory system made me make some tough decisions about what was worth carrying around—it was annoying, but it felt very deliberate.

It would be nice, however, for quest items not to take up space, especially since everything else is mostly optional, but more than once, I had to make room for a fuse that I had to carry to the literal other side of the room. That's a good time, and it's not like you could set stuff down.

So, by the end of Cronos: The New Dawn, I felt as though I'd survived not the orphans and other monsters, but the fuckin' inventory system.

Everything Else Is Actually Rather Solid

The inventory forces you to make some tough decisions, the game is a little on the easy side, and the merging mechanic is a bit disappointing, but those are only minor complaints in the grand scheme of what is otherwise an enjoyable experience. The story kept me going, and the environments are pretty cool, if not a bit depressing, except for the 2nd one (a fucking boring-ass steel mill).

One thing I especially liked, even at the fuckin' steel mill, was that most levels work like this: you visit them in the "present" in search of a time anomaly. Levels are pretty linear, although there are some shortcuts and looping, so you'll find yourself revisiting spots and backtracking, which never gets to the point of being painful—although I did get lost in the fucking steel mill a couple times, because fuck that place.

Across the board, levels involve a bit of door unlocking, light puzzle solving, and a bit of pathfinding. There are plenty of enemies to kill, and the gunplay feels solid, so I never got bored. After a bit of survival horroring, you'll make it to the anomaly, at which point you can attune yourself to it and travel back in time to an important point in history.

This involves you exploring a less-fucked-up version of the same area, usually with the human target running around trying to avoid all the monsters. It's cool—and reminds me a bit of Medium, which had the spirit world basically "overlaid" on top of the real world, giving two different versions of the same level. Cronos does something similar, but better.

Whenever you travel back in time, the level is different enough that it doesn't seem like having to backtrack or retread ground. One of the later levels, a hospital, actually has you traveling back in time the moment you get there. You travel across town to get to the hospital, then you open the doors, and the anomaly is right there, waiting for you. Thus, you never really have to navigate the hospital in the present; at this point in the story, it was a welcome change.

Once you've traveled back in time, your goal is to find your target and extract their essence.

Gettin Them Brains

Extracting basically means "downloading" their consciousness and storing it in your Traveller's hard drive, which presumably does not bode well for your target's physical form, though. Once they're extracted, you then have to deal with voices talking to you throughout the rest of the game.

There are the primary essences gained from the target you've been sent to extract, but then you can find random dead bodies here and there as you explore, and extract those essences, too. Each has a benefit, like shotguns do more damage if you hit more than one enemy or more accuracy with a certain gun if you're standing still—stuff like that.

These essence perks are nifty, but you can only have three at once, and if you want to replace one, you need to delete it, which basically means deleting someone's consciousness, and, uh, they don't like that.

There are also some choices as to who you extract, and at the time, it seemed like these choices might make a difference, but (spoilers) it doesn't seem like they do, and you'll get to the same ending no matter what.

The essence perks don't make or break anything, but if you're leaning toward a certain weapon, then it can help to make that weapon even better.

A Little Shooty Shooty

Naturally, the best way to survive is to riddle anything that moves with hot lead—and also shed your material possessions since they'll just clog up your inventory.

Cronos has a few different weapons: two pistols, two shotguns, two carbines, and the Arbalest. I liked the pistol the best, and stuck with that as my primary gun throughout most of the game. It had a satisfying kapow and was precise to boot.

The pistol and other weapons have a "charge" mechanic, where instead of pressing the button, you hold it down to charge a shot, which does more damage and is more ammo conservative. So, I did that throughout most of the game. The second pistol sacrifices this charge shot for being full auto, and no thank you to that, so I shoved that fucker right in the stash.

The shotgun also served to be really useful if I knew a monster was invading my personal space. I only ever found the one shotgun, but there is a second one. I know where it is; I just left before finishing that puzzle—but I had no issues with the first one, so oh well. Out of sight, out of mind.

The carbine was pretty cool, too, especially the second one, which had a really accurate triple-round burst. The first one was full auto, so it just ended up blowing through ammo. I ended up using the second one a lot throughout the last part of the game—mostly because you do find it so late.

I found it worthwhile to carry around one of each type of weapon, mostly to give you something advantageous to do with the ammo. Otherwise, you'd just have to get rid of it to make room.

No matter your weapon of choice, you can use energy that you find all over the place (literally) to upgrade one, from damage to clip size to charge speed. These upgrades can make the guns handle far better, and if you ever want to try something else, you can refund the energy used in a weapon and put it in another.

The other purpose of energy is to buy ammo and consumables from the store that you find in the safe hubs placed in each level, which is where you can save, upgrade items, and sort through your stash.

The "best" gun, the Arbalest, you find pretty late into the game. I only used it once, firing two whole shots that exploded wonderfully. It seems great, but shortly after using it, I put it in my stash, thinking I'd pull it out again once I found more ammo, and I never got around to it before beating the game.

Oh, Right, There's Also a Story

I spent most of the game wondering how well Cronos would be explaining exactly what the fuck was going on. The answer turned out to be: to a decent degree, but not entirely.

Brace thyselves for spoilers.

Perhaps my biggest issue with the story is that a lot of the exposition and specifics are very backloaded. Like, you spend most of the game piecing together bits of the story until the last hour or so, then it dumped, and it dumped hard.

This opaqueness throughout most of the game was perhaps necessary so that it was harder to see the twist coming, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

We, as the Traveler, work for the "Collective," undertaking the "Vocation," which is basically the mission of finding and extracting targets. I'm not entirely sure what the "Travelers" are, but they seem to be lifeless husks, perhaps cybernetic (or cyBORGnetic) in nature, and the collective transfers essences into them before booting them up.

The big thing that's implied but never truly stated, I don't think (I probably didn't listen to every audio log, or read every diary entry), but the "Collective" is literally humanity after the "Change."

In other words, a large portion of the human race merged, became a collective consciousness, and now you work for them. Good times, right? Presumably, somewhere in the future, there's a big ole flesh mass that includes a great deal of humanity. Or at least that's my head canon.

I wager that the essences powering the Travelers are pulled from the Collective, so they aren't exactly used to being individuals, and maybe need a bit of brainwashing to make sure they don't go rogue. It kinda reminds me of Borg drones, really.

You and the Warden both speak very slowly, like people-just-learning-to-be-people slow, but audiologs from other Travelers depict some of them speaking far more normally. So maybe those are seasoned Travelers who have grown accustomed to being people again. Or maybe that's just an accidental inconsistency. Or maybe those audiologs I thought were previous Travelers weren't

The monsters dubbed "Orphans" are just humans who have undergone the Change and have yet to join the Collective, or were disconnected from it for some other reason, and your targets are people that the Collective has deemed "juicy" that it wants to absorb. Presumably, these targets died somehow without having undergone the Change or joined the Collective, either from being disembowled or just dying of natural causes down the line.

So, that's your goal: find and extract targets the Collective wants to merge with.

BUT WAIT. That's not your goal at all, because you don't actually work for the Collective, at least not directly. Wowzers. The Warden that you met partway through the game actually "activated" seemingly without the involvement of the Collective.

Turns out, back before the Warden was known as the Warden, he was known as the Pathfinder, whose goal is to basically prepare the path for Travelers to do their thing. Anyway, one of the Pathfinders' targets was to extract the essence of Weronika Kamiński.

Turns out, rather than doing that, the Pathfinder went and fell in love with Weronika and decided to seemingly go rogue. But as any Romeo and Juliet pair would tell you, they did not live happily ever after.

So, the Wardenfinder hatches a scheme in which he puts Weronika's essence inside the body of a Traveler in an attempt to bring her to life in a way that would make Amy Lee proud.

These efforts prove unsuccessful, but being a time Traveler, the Warden can try and try again—a dozen or so times, judging by the number of dead Travelers in his little hideout.

That brings us to our Traveler, who turns out to be the Warden's most recent and most successful attempt at rebirthing Weronika, and the events of the game have nothing to do with the Collective or Vocation (at least not directly) and are all about refining Weronika's essence.

Thus, after a pretty lengthy final boss fight, you have the Warden dead to rights and can choose to either put him out of his misery or let him live to probably try all this again. I chose to put a cap in his ass. Evidently, NG+ has a third ending that seems like the true ending, but I just read about it: you and the real Weronika run away together to continue trying to find a cure for the Change.

Oh Lawd, So Many Words

I don't know what spurred me to wax poetic so much about this game's story. I guess it's because so much of what is going on is so opaque that it helped my own understanding of everything to write all down. You're just along for the ride.

And though I didn't really see the twist coming, looking back, I can see that the pieces were there; I was just too busy fussing with the inventory to see them.

Overall, good time, though, and I do think there's enough world-building here to support a sequel if Blooper wanted, and since it seemingly self-published, they could definitely do it if they want. The foundation is definitely solid, and a sequel would potentially be more and better, so sign me up.

What Is VOID/BREAKER?

VoidBreaker is an FPS roguelite set in a world overrun by an evil AI set on making you live, die, and repeat in its ongoing quest for combat data, because if we’ve learned anything from Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds, it’s that everyone loves data.

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The game is, ultimately, fast, it’s frantic, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun. AND, it’s made by just one person, Daniel Stubbington of Stubby Games, which is an impressive feat all in itself.

It is, however, still in early access, so there’s plenty of game left to be made and plenty of room for improvement—although I wonder how long it’ll take one person to put out substantial updates. It’s a good thing that the foundation is already so fucking solid. But I, for one, am keen to watch this thing grow up.

At the time of writing this, I’ve beaten what’s currently available, unlocked Hard difficulty as well as endless mode, and gotten every permanent upgrade. Thus, for the moment, at least, I feel like I am all but “done” with VoidBreaker, although, because the game is just so damn fun to play, and I’m a slut for data, I might continue to occasionally dive in while I wait for the next big update.

What It’s Like to Live, Die, Repeat

The gameplay loop goes something like this: you start a run with your preferred gun, kill enemies while simultaneously dodging bullets, collect upgrades for you and your weapon in the form of modifications, make it to the end of the biome, and then attempt to kill the boss. Succeed, and you can move on to the next area; fail, and it’s game over, and you have to start again.

When you do fail, you can take some permanent resources you collected during the run to upgrade yourself to ever-so-slightly increase your chances of success the next run. Then you just jump in and do it again, all in the endless pursuit of data.

“Playing” VoidBreaker isn’t exceedingly hard—and maybe it’s a little on the easy side—but there’s a lot of depth in crafting a build based on the modifications you’ve given throughout a run, and there are a lot of mechanics to play around with blasting robot after robot.

But before any of that, you have to jump into your first run. Let’s start there.

Your First Run

Technically, before your first run, you have the tutorial, which teaches you the basics as though VoidBreaker might very well be your first video game. No shade—it makes sense thematically since the evil AI overlord is also calibrating you to the system, so it has to make sure you know how to jump and look around. How else are you going to help it harvest data? After all, Ice Cube ain’t here to stop us.

During this short orientation, someone makes contact with you, another test subject who previously attempted to escape from this indefinite loop of data collection. As a note, it’s not really clear (at least to me), whether VoidBreaker takes place in a simulation—or if it’s sort of an augmented reality situation where you can die and come back due to COMPUTER MAGIC. It doesn’t really matter, as the end results are roughly the same, but it’s a thought.

Once you get out of the tutorial/orientation session and make it to your home base—which coincidentally resembles more of a jail cell—you discover that the person talking to you about escaping was unable to do so himself, cause you find his skeleton in the basement. But, in true sci-fi shenanigans, he’s still going to try to help you escape because he’s uploaded his consciousness to the Matrix.

Thus, with a hope and a dream, and only a pistol (you unlock the other weapons as you go), you descend the elevator for your first run. Don’t expect to make it too far on your first go, but you never know, maybe you’re really good or get really lucky.

Choosing Where to Go

The ultimate goal of your first or any other run is to make it to the boss at the end of the biome. To do this, you have to navigate through a series of “islands,” with most of which being combat encounters of some variety, but a few of them are stuff like shops, loot, small incursions, gambling obelisks that can either help or harm, and Corruptors that will make the next encounter harder for better rewards.

If you’ve played games like Slay the Spire, these paths will seem quite familiar, and they help to add a little more variation to your runs. Hopefully, as the game progresses and gets more biomes, these maps become more intricate with more paths to help you spend hours feeling like you’re in a grueling dungeon. That’s what I want, for my psyche to be whittled down.

Fightin’, and Bouncin, and Stunnin’

It’s just a hop, dash, skip, and slide before you and your trusty pistol are facing your first group of enemies, and naturally, you’ll discover how well all the stuff you learned in the tutorial has stuck.

Regardless of how much you leverage the tools at your disposal, you’ll probably notice just how good VoidBreaker feels, which, again, is especially impressive considering that just one person made all this. Guns are satisfying to shoot, and the game feels bouncy and floaty in a really great way, like everything you do has a lot of momentum to it—and it does, since you can really build up speed as you bounce around.

Move or Die

VoidBreaker really is a proper shoot ‘em up, complete with a hellish inferno of bullets. It’s not crazy, but if you stand still, you will die, so you really do have to keep moving. So, if your strategy involves standing still and taking projectiles to the face over and over, like it’s some kind of kink, then you probably aren’t long for the VoidBreaker world.

To help, the game does have a wide swath of movement mechanics: you can double jump, dash, slide, and even grind on rails like some kind of Tony Hawk. And momentum really does carry, so if you grind into a jump, then a dash, then a slide, you’ll be pretty shocked by how much ground you can cover. It only takes a little bit of practice before you’re able to quickly and efficiently get the hell out of Dodge.

Once you reach the second biome, you’ll also get a grapple ability that lets you latch onto hooks hanging around the map, which just adds even more movement tech to your toolbelt, but you gotta beat the first boss before you can unlock that.

Stun, Stun, Stun

As the tutorial tried to teach you, in VoidBreaker, it’s all about stunning enemies. Guns are great, and if you shoot enemies, they will die, but you really want to stun them before that happens, because when you do, you get a large amount of health and ammo.

Here, grenades are more like “stun tech” than something intended to do damage to large swaths of enemies; they’ll still do damage, but you’ll primarily be using grenades to “stagger” enemies, and if you stagger them enough, filling up a green bar, you’ll stun them. Then just kill them before the stun wears off, and you get that tasty, tasty health and ammo.

Beyond grenades, there’s another great way to stagger and subsequently stun enemies, and that’s with the very awesome Gravity Tether that lets you grab objects and chunk them at enemies. Between grenades and objects, you almost always want to be throwing shit at enemies—outside of buillets, which will also always be flying.

It’s also not lost on me that whenever you launch an item, the sound that play is hilariously similar to the one that plays when you launch an item at enemies in Control. Homage or coincidence, it’s a great sound.

If you throw enough grenades and explosive objects, you’ll quickly realize just how much destruction is in VoidBreaker. It’s fucking fantastic. There’s nothing more satisfying than throwing a grenade at a wall and that wall crumbling, and then taking out more walls, and an entire building just collapsing in a pile of rubble. It tickles all the best parts of my brain.

Granted, there are gameplay reasons to bring entire buildings down on enemies—not that I personally need gameplay reasons to do it, since it’s just so damn fun. But if you cause enough rubble to crash down on enemies, it will definitely stun and damage the ever living hell out of them, making it pretty easy to kill them—and get plenty of health and ammo in the process.

One of my biggest hopes for VoidBreaker is that the destruction only grows: more buildings, bigger buildings, maybe even terrain deformation. Honestly, I want these combat encounters to look like a nuke went off after we’re done fighting.

Gunz and Modz

While you’ll be thrust into your first run with only a pistol, before the end of your first run, you’ll probably have enough Decryptors (those blue lock-lookin’ things) to unlock the assault rifle, and that will probably be everyone’s favorite gun—but there’s also a shotgun and a marksman rifle that you unlock, as you go.

All weapons can probably be viable given the right build, even the pistol, and I actually beat my first run with the marksman rifle and had some great runs with the shotgun, too. However, it definitely feels like the assault rifle is the most well-rounded weapon and probably the easiest to do well with.

Outside of weapons, you have a few other tools at your disposal. There’s a melee attack that feels clunky and slow to use, so hopefully that gets reworked during early access.

The biggest tool, however, aside from yours truly, is the modification system. With it, you can create some pretty nutty builds.

Sorting Through Mountains of Mods

Unless you just get super unlucky—or if this is literally your first shooter—you should be able to get through your first encounter relatively unscathed; but if you do die, then that’s part of the process, and you can just jump into a new run for a new attempt to gather data for our AI overlord.

While you can definitely finish a run without any mods—if you’re a VoidBreaker prodigy—most of the time, modifications will make or break a run. Besides, who doesn’t love trying to create broken-ass builds (as opposed to broken ass-builds; granted, I’m a fan of those, too).

With mods, you can enhance just about anything: your weapon, your grenade, yourself, etc; you can even equip a specific ability to use, such as fireballs or lightning strikes. These abilities are usually not super strong on their own, but they synergize with other aspects of your build. At the end of the day, your gun will be your primary source of kickin’ ass.

Even now, during Early Access, there are a lot of mods, each with its own rarity. So naturally, the legendary ones are way fancier than the common ones. And mixing and matching them can create some pretty interesting interactions.

For your weapon, there are different ammo types, sights, and fire modes, and you can hit “B” if you’re using mouse & keyboard (which you should for a game like this), to open up a T menu to swap different modes you’ve picked up through mods, as well as select which ability you want to use if you have more than one.

Most mods seem great, at least for their intended purpose, but there are some that have odd interactions, where if you equip one mod with another mod, the result will be less than optimal, and you might just end up screwing yourself over.

I also think that some of the really legendary rare mods have really specific use-cases and aren’t always good. Other mods have odd interactions that might ruin a build if you combine them, but you can always equip and unequip modifications at will.

Juggling all the different mods and playing a sort of “inventory” Tetris with how you equip them is a pretty large part of VoidBreaker. Mods even stack, and there are also “repeater” mods that will cause a mod to double up its effect.

While there are already a lot of mods, you can unlock new ones by finding schematics throughout the game. I assume more of these will get added as the updates roll out.

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Keepin’ My Eye on This One

And by “keeping my eye,” I mean that I’m still fuckin’ playin’ it even now (literally, as I just suspended a run to write this conclusion). It’s been a long while since I felt a shooter this satisfying to play, and with a loop that keeps me coming back for me. It’s a good thing I don’t do crack.

And even if I do happen to drop my video game habit for a crack habit (highly unlikely—I could never afford DRUGS), I’ll probably revisit this thing every time a new major update comes out. It’s really quite good.

It’s only $20 if you buy it outright, and it’s on Game Pass, so it’s really kind of a shame if you miss out on VOID/BREAKER if you’re a fan of shooters, especially of the rogue-lite variety.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers

If you’ve not really seen much from Wuchang, and thought to yourself that it might be somehow related to that other game that came out last year, Black Myth: Wukong, then don’t sell yourself too short. I’ve seen this confusion myself a few times.

But nope, despite both being similar and both made by Chinese developers, they are in fact not related. Despite that, I didn’t come out of either one with glowingly positive impressions—although truth be told, my opinion of Black Myth has probably softened, and I’ve been thinking recently that I might want to do a NG+ run, but I’m also a fool.

But let’s talk about Wuchang instead. It’s a souls-like, similar to the eponymous Dark Souls, as well as Elden Ring, Lies of P, and, of course, Wukong. And it leaves a really solid first impression that gradually sours as the difficulty ramps up.

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It’s Not All Bad

There are aspects of Wuchang that I really appreciated, especially with the combat and progression. There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had in building and maximizing a build.

The skill tree (Impetus Repository) contains quite literally everything. It’s where you increase your stat points, empower your flasks (both usage and potency), and train your weapon mastery (instead of upgrading the weapons themselves). It’s split into six branches: a general one and one for each different type of weapon.

It takes a little getting used to, especially since the entire tree uses a few different currencies; the primary one is Red Mercury, which is also what you get from killing enemies. You can distill that into Essences that serve as skill points to level up all of the attribute increases in the Repository. Everything else—the flask upgrades, the weapon masteries, etc.—has its own resource, too.

One thing that it took me, and definitely a few other people I’ve seen play the game, a little while to realize is that while the attribute upgrades all require Red Mercury skill points, other upgrades don’t require these skill points at all, and just the material that you’d find in the world.

What this means is that you can spend your skill points to gain access to these other non-attribute upgrades, and then unlock those without needing a skill point, just their respective resources. It’s a little weird, but it’s ultimately pretty dang nifty.

Best yet, you can respec the Impetus Repository for free whenever you’re at a Shrine (which is Wuchang’s version of a bonfire), so if you want to try something different, or move around a few skill points, it’s easy. I respec’d a few times to try a different weapon, and a few times just for shits and giggles.

Dress for the Occasion

Another nice thing is that Wuchang doesn’t have a weight system, so you can wear just about whatever without worrying about how it impacts your mobility—no fat rolling here.

That just means that armor only really serves to give you resistances and mitigation for certain types of damage, which is important to keep in mind for some of the areas and some boss fights.

More than once, I found myself dressing for the occasion, equipping the best gear I had for Frostbite or Corruption resistance, or if a boss did Slashing damage, I made sure to stack that. It was hard to tell how much these resistances really helped—but they sure didn’t hurt.

Weapons and Combat

Another great thing is that, unlike most of these types of games, where you upgrade your weapons with some sort of crafting material found throughout the game, in Wuchang, the weapon upgrades come in the form of masteries on the skill tree.

As such, whenever you want to try out a different weapon of the same class, i.e., longsword or dual blades, you can just swap it out and get hackin’. Since each weapon has slightly different scaling, and unique abilities, it’s really nifty to be able to swap them out and see how they feel.

I stuck primarily with the dual blades, for a bit of fast slicing and dicing, but I also played a fair amount of the longsword. It’s also worth mentioning that you can equip two weapons and swap between them—and there’s even an attack that will switch your weapons, but I hardly ever used any of these mechanics.

For dual blades, there are a bunch of different options, but I stuck with one of the first pairs of blades I found: the Twin Bandits. They come with the ability to deflect attacks, which can really come in handy—too bad I hardly took advantage of it.

In terms of basic attacks, you can, of course, perform a Light Attack, a Heavy Attack, and if you hold the heavy attack button, you can perform a Charged Heavy Attack, and if you’re behind a humanoid enemy when that happens, you stun it and then perform a big “Obliterate” attack, which does a lot of damage.

On that note, enemies also have an Obliterate meter, and if you keep the pressure on by constantly attacking, you’ll fill that poise meter, and they’ll also get stunned that way, too. But if you aren’t able to keep the pressure on, that meter will reset, which sucks.

Another reason I loved the dual blades is that they are really good at clashing. Think of this mechanic as being similar to a soft parry. With clash, if you’re attacking while the enemy is attacking, you’ll negate a lot of the damage. It’s seriously great, but at the same time, if you rely too heavily on clashing every attack, and you take a few hits, it’s game over. So, it’s a little risky, but when it works, it’s fantastic.

There are five total different types of weapons (dual blades, longswords, axes, spears, and one-handed swords), so there’s plenty of room for experimentation to find a build that suits you.

Needles and Gems

You can further customize weapons through a couple of avenues: Tempering and Benediction. Tempering allows you to use your feathered arm to buff your weapon. There’s a lot of customization here through Bone Needles and Stone Needles.

Bonies, as we’ll call them, let you set a specific damage effect, like Fire or Poison, while Stonies let you have a smaller buff, like faster damage build-up or longer tempering. There are a lot of combinations here, so you can find something that works for most builds.

You can basically look at Benediction as a sort of Gem system that allows you to socket “gems” into the weapon for various buffs. There are even set bonuses if you socket all the same type of “gem.”

The Might of the Skyborn

Integral to the combat system, no matter which weapon you’re wielding, is the Skyborn Might system. This is a limited resource you gain by perfect dodging, parrying, and through certain weapon attacks. For instance, the last attack in the Dual Blades combo gives you an instance of Skyborn Might.

So, once your build “comes online,” which happens pretty early into the game, you can get charges pretty quickly, stacking up to five. Skyborn Might can then be expended to power up attacks or cast spells.

What I mostly used Skyborn Might for was to instantly cast a Charged Heavy Attack, which was basically my entire strategy throughout the game: Perfect Dodge everything, build up Skyborn Might, get behind enemies, stun them with a Charged Heavy attack, and then Obliterate.

You can also empower other special abilities with Skyborn Might, and cast spells. I didn’t rely too heavily on spells, but there were a few that I used throughout the game—the cheaper ones. Spells cost anywhere between one and five stacks of Skyborn Might, and I really preferred to spam Charged Heavy Attacks rather than do anything else with Skyborn Might.

Ultimately, I grew to really enjoy the combat system in Wuchang; it’s too bad that the bosses tended not to let me use any of these tools … like ever.

Wild Goose Chases Masquerading as Boss Fights

My biggest issue with Wuchang is the boss fights. It’s not that they’re difficult; it’s just that they’re annoying and frustrating—at least most of them; there are a few really enjoyable ones.

It’s not even polish-related, although there are some recurring strangeness with the hitboxes: “How did you hit me?” … or my favorite, “Why didn’t I hit you!?”

Often, I’d go into a Charged Heavy Attack, and they’d leap away or move before it actually made contact, and sometimes, it appeared as though the attack should’ve connected but didn’t.

And on top of that, the constant movement of a lot of these bosses made it annoyingly tricky to keep the obliterate meter from resetting—which was even more annoying on the non-humanoid enemies, since they couldn’t be instantly stunned from behind with a Charged Heavy Attack.

Ultimately, I feel like a lot of the bosses are just designed to be unfun. Souls games should be challenging, but never unfun. And really, most of the bosses in Wuchang aren’t even that challenging. I think I only got stuck a couple of times, specifically on one of the later bosses: Fierce Tiger.

And this fucker pretty much exemplifies what I dislike the most about the boss fights in Wuchang, and it’s ultimately a really simple complaint: they move around too fucking much.

Take the Fierce Tiger as an example. This dives in and jumps away constantly throughout the fight, forcing you to chase him all over the arena while he lobs near-one-shot attacks at you.

It would be fine if this were just a one-off design, but so many of Wuchang’s bosses work in a similar fashion. They’re constantly leaping around the arena and prove to be more annoying to fight than challenging.

There are a few exceptions, and all of those are the skill-check bosses that just sit still and allow you to trade blows, dodges, deflects, and clashes. Those were the fights I really enjoyed.

Level Design Was Also a Bit Underwhelming

By and large, I think Wuchang looks quite good: solid art design, good graphical fidelity, and animations are pretty good too. Level design, however, leaves something to be desired.

Most areas could best be described as relatively samesy and meandering. More than once, I found myself exploring a location and not being exactly sure where I had and hadn’t been because everything looked pretty similar.

Areas weren’t even that open; they were just linear with diverging paths that looped around each other with a main path to the next boss, shrine, or objective.

These level-design woes extended to the stretches of time between some shrines. There are a few spots where it feels like hours (slight hyperbole) go by without another shrine and another chance to save your progress.

Then, to add insult to injury, right after you trudge through eighteen hours (slightly more hyperbole) of adventuring and finally make it to a shrine, within the general vicinity, you’ll find five separate shortcuts and then the next shrine right around the corner—something I found to be quite hilarious.

Levels overall aren’t without a few moments of glory, with some great views of certain set pieces—and some of those many seemingly unnecessary shortcuts do come in handy—but once you actually go from the outskirts to the interior of any level, it gets old rather quickly.

But At Least It’s Purdy

The good news is that while you’re going around in circles, Wuchang (both the game and admittedly the person) looks quite striking. For the person (her name is literally Wuchang), you can dress her up in all manner of gear, and if you don’t like the look of what you’re wearing, you can change it to look like any other piece of equipment for that slot. The looks range from risqué, because of course, to way less risqué and rather badass.

The game itself also looks pretty great, even if it’s subject to a lot of the performance issues typically found in Unreal Engine 5 games, but nothing that detracts too much from the experience, and I ended up having a pretty good time on my computer, but my computer’s pretty good.

The lighting, environments, settings, and overall art design are really nice, even if some of the areas do tend to get a little repetitive. Then, toward the end, when things become a little more fantastical, the environments start to look really cool—but still repetitive.

Final Thoughts

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is by no means a bad game. In fact, if it had come out a few years ago, it might be the best third-party Souls-like out there. But in that time, we’ve seen so many great games, such as Lies of P, Wukong, and Khazan. I haven’t played that last one yet, but everyone I know who’s a fan of these types of games loves it. So, it’s definitely on my list.

Wuchang, however, sits behind all of these games. It has a pretty promising start, and I was rather digging it throughout the first 6 or 7 hours, but once the difficulty started to ramp up, it started to annoy me more than bring me joy, especially the boss fights.

As an experience, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is fun enough (minus a few of the boss fights and level design), carried mostly by the satisfaction derived from slicing fools up. But I don’t think it’ll be as well-loved as some of the other Souls-likes standing amongst a pantheon of great games. As a Game Pass download, though, it’s an easy recommendation.

Admittedly, I fuckin’ love body horror. Don’t ask me why. The Substance was one of the best movies of 2024. The Thing is one of the best movies ever. In The Fly, Jeff Goldblum turns into a true handsome devil. And who would’ve thought that Justin Long would make such a great walrus?

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why Slitterhead piqued my interest from the moment I first laid eyes on it last year. I was keen to play it at launch, but considering that it got a bit of a mixed reception, I figured I’d wait till a sale—and that’s exactly what I did. Fast forward a few months, and I nabbed it for 50% off on the Steam Summer Sale.

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And I’m glad I did; as expected, certain parts of the game are right up my alley. For starters, the body horror inspirations are plain to see—and though it doesn’t match the heights of some of the best examples of the genre out there, I don’t know why anyone would have expected it to.

After all, it’s a video game, not a movie, and on top of that, it’s unfair to compare it to some of the best examples of the genre. It’s not every day you get to see Jeff Goldblum become a fly-man. Slitterhead does, however, conjure up thoughts of Parasyte: The Maxim—or that recent Netflix spin-off, Parasyte: The Grey (which is honestly better than you’d expect).

So, absolute cinema this is not, but Slitterhead certainly has its moments—typically reserved in some of the pre-rendered cutscenes. Outside of those handful of pre-rendered moments when this game gets deliciously grotesque, it’s just that—a game.

Sadly, it’s also not an amazing game, although it’s by no means a bad one. I came out of my nearly 20 hours thinking more good than bad about it. Deep down, it’s got a lot of interesting ideas and some novelty (while also feeling quite dated, in a good way). And, outside of the body horror, some of my favorite aspects of Slitterhead came as a surprise.

So, let’s get Slittering.

Oh Hey, It’s the Guy Who Made Silent Hill

Though you probably won’t be able to tell from looking at it, and probably not from playing it, either—although there are moments—the creative director of Slitterhead is none other than the creative director of Silent Hill: Keiichiro Toyama, who’s also behind classic games such as Siren and Gravity Rush.

Slitterhead probably won’t be as well remembered as those games, but I think there’s enough here to give it cult status in a decade or two. Out of my own little friend group, only a handful of people had even heard of it.

But Body Horror Aside, What Is This Thing?

Slitterhead, at its core, is a 3rd-person action/horror game. These “Slitterheads” in question are monsters that have begun to infect people in the city of Kowlong (basically a fictionalized version of Kowloon Walled City) during the 90s. So, imagine a cramped, little city with lots of high buildings and alleyways—and lots of prostitutes. It would probably stink, too, if you could smell video games.

You play as the “Spirit” (or Hyoki), a disembodied being that can jump into the minds of mere humans to control them to kick Slitterhead butt. Soon, one of the first characters you meet in the game, Julee, decides to call you Night Owl after a story she remembers.

Julee, aside from having naming privileges, is a “Rarity.” For her and others like her, Night Owl can not only possess them but also grant them more power and special abilities. In a sense, these Rarities become your party members and accompany you throughout the rest of the game.

A Bevy of Rarities

A lot of the game revolves around the Rarities, specifically their interactions with Night Owl, and the story, for what it is, has as much to do with them (as people) as it does laying some whoop-ass on those pesky Slitterheads. These interactions and the story that unfolds turned out to be one of my favorite aspects of the game.

All together, there are eight Rarities, with the most important of the two being Julee and Alex—the latter of which is an angry fucker who likes to go around in a motorcycle helmet and kill every last Slitterhead. A major plot point is how Alex’s anger affects Night Owl later in the game.

Between missions, there’s an entire screen dedicated to talking to the Rarities, and you’ll learn lots about each of them, their motivations, and how they feel about being thrust into this Slitterhead shindig. It’s also through talking to them that you unlock most (if not all) of the missions. So, it’s not something that you can avoid.

There’s very little voice acting, except for a few of the pre-rendered cutscenes, so these conversations play out through lines of text. Most of the writing is mostly fine—with a few localization woes. You could make the choice to skip through all of it, but you’d be pretty lost when it comes to the story.

And for what it’s worth, I really enjoyed the story. Slight spoilers to follow, with even more later.

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It gets especially interesting when it’s revealed that Night Owl can send his consciousness backwards and forwards through time. So, before long, you’re getting into some time travel/causality stuff that, as a sci-fi nerd, I really dug. Though it is a slight spoiler, I’m sharing timey-wimey stuff as a motivator for people to check out the game: the most interesting aspects of Slitterhead’s story have literally very little to do with the Slitterheads themselves.

In fact, the game’s events take place over the course of three days. You can just jump around this span and do different versions of missions depending on which time loop you’re on.

This pre-mission warm-up screen, where you chat with your Rarities, is also where you upgrade them, including their weapons, abilities, and an array of passive buffs they receive. With enough skill points, which you earn on those missions, they can become pretty dang powerful.

Outside of that, it’s just a matter of picking a mission, selecting which two Rarities you want to bring along, and go, go go.

Slitterheads and More

Despite only taking place over three days, there are actually quite a few missions, and though some of them are just different versions of the same mission (thanks time travel), the game does a good job of not becoming too repetitive—but it is a wee bit repetitive.

No matter the mission, the game has you engaging in three different activities: either fighting Slitterheads, chasing Slitterheads, or stealthing past Slitterheads. For what it’s worth, I rather disliked having to chase Slitterheads around, especially since you have to do it so often—and for so long. Typically, you’ll start fighting an enemy, and it’ll up and run off after a certain point, then you have to chase it and repeat the process.

Granted, I didn’t much like the stealthing either, but those sections were few and far between, so it wasn’t too bad. Combat is easily the best part of the game (outside of the story), but even then, because of the limited enemy varieties, you’ll start to feel that repetition toward the end.

Those enemy varieties include little penis monsters, bigger penis monsters, and then the titular Slitterheads. Early on, these are primarily humans with a monster head, and then those will often (but not always) transform into full-blown Slitterheads.

The big Slitterheads are great because they have little lifeless human bodies dangling from their backsides, right where you’d imagine their butt might be, which, to me, is far more hilarious than grotesque.

The downside is that each of the full-blown slitterheads is of roughly a similar design, just with a different skin and different attacks, so it ends up being a case of: “If you’ve fought one big ole Slitterhead, you’ve fought them all.” You can attack that dangling body to remove it, which stuns them—and that’s fun.

Outside of regular enemies, there are also the bosses, which are a highlight, fortunately. Not only do each of the major ones receive a great little pre-rendered cutscene showing the human transformation, but the fights themselves are interesting too.

It’s during these bossfights that the combat system really shines, probably because it’s the one part of Slitterhead’s gameplay that has the most depth.

Blood as a Weapon (Because Why Not)

One neat thing is that whenever Night Owl possesses a person, he can use their blood to conjure up a weapon and to cast various abilities. This applies not only to regular old civvies, who give simple mace-like weapons, but also the Rarities, who get unique blood weapons, as well as upgradeable abilities.

As a tip, don’t be afraid to use the civilians. They’re not half bad—although when you’re host-hopping, it can be pretty easy to lose track of where your Rarities are in the fray, since there’s not a special highlight for them or anything.

Melee combat involves either attacking or blocking, and if you’re blocking, there’s a directional parry system that you can use to power up an ability that slows down time and gives you mana to cast spells that don’t outright use blood.

As a multi-purpose resource—since you use it for both dealing damage and taking damage—blood is a hot little commodity. Use too much of it to deal damage, and you’ll be at a sliver of health and then, boom, dead. Then, if your host goes down, Night Owl loses a life, although if you’re quick enough to leave a host right before it gets downed and switch to another, you don’t lose one of these lives, but if you get taken out three times, that’s game over.

Juggling seems to be the best way to handle the enemies. Get a few whacks in, then once the Slitterhead starts gunning for you, jump ship to a new host, be it a regular civilian or a Rarity, and you can usually get a few hits without resistance.

Unfortunately, the AI tracks you pretty effectively, so you really do have to juggle, because they’ll probably switch to target your host not long after you’ve gotten in the driver’s seat. Sticking to one character allows you to get parries in and cast abilities, which is pretty nifty, too.

Each Rarity has four separate abilities. Three that are unique to the character, and one that is shared with either the other Rarity you brought to the mission or the civvies. This leads to some pretty interesting combinations depending on which two Rarities you bring along with you on missions.

It’s this head-hopping, resource management, and ability usage that keeps the combat from being too repetitive.

A Few More Spoilers

To explain why I ended up really liking Slitterhead, I kind of have to talk about spoilers, so if you’re already on board with the game, maybe skip this section. But I’m not the boss of you, either, so do whatever you want.

Time travel really does play a major role in this game, because—although it really doesn’t make a huge difference in the long run—it’s revealed that the Slitterheads themselves are time travelers who were turned into monsters when the time travel process went awry.

Regardless, toward the end of the game, things get really neat when Slitterhead becomes less about fighting with the Slitterheads and more about trying to stop our angry cohort, Alex, who sort of lost it after his lady friend, Lisa, is Slitterified and then killed.

Alex isn’t alone in going rogue; he has the assistance of another Hyoki, Leopard Head, and the two of them go on a rampage, killing the other Rarities. This is where things get really fun, as Night Owl and Leopard Head start to bounce around the timeline, getting into all sorts of shenanigans that have little to do with the Slitterheads themselves.

Although it’s not really too surprising, Leopard Head turns out to be really just a different version of Night Owl who has let Alex’s burning hatred take over.

So, at the end of the game, while you fight Alex to try to defeat him and keep the other Rarities alive, Alex just says fuck it and flies a goddamn plane into Kowlong, killing just about everyone.

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Oh, but the game doesn’t end there. Night Owl time travels once more to try to fix things, which is where the game’s post-game comes into play—and wrapping things up a second time didn’t take too long, and would’ve taken less time if I could read.

You can fix things if you help Night Owl go back into missions and reduce the number of causalities that occur (or that’s what I thought it read). It made enough sense to me—it’s a game about time travel after all—so I jumped into my first mission to unbranch this time shit, without a clue how to actually lower the causalities, and after replaying a couple of missions, still kind of clueless as to what to do.

It’s at that point that I realized that I, writer and editor extraordinaire, had misread the objective: it had said CASUALITIES, not CAUSALITIES, which, in hindsight, made infinitely more sense.

So, the goal then is to replay the missions and try to avoid civilian deaths. This didn’t take me too long, just replaying 2 or 3 missions, but be warned that on some of the missions, death is unavoidable. Even so, it didn’t take me long to go from 166 casualties to the required 100.

At that point, you can do it over one more time, defeat Alex for once and for all, and save Kowlong to get the true, true ending. There’s still collectibles and shit to gather, but who has time for that? I don’t.

Putting It All Together

While I came out of my time with Slitterhead more up on the game than down, it’s not without its faults. To reiterate again: it gets a little repetitive, the localization isn’t great in spots, and I hope to never have to chase another Slitterhead for as long as I live.

However, that said, I really appreciated both the overarching story as well as the body horror vibes that it was going for. I guess, at the end of the day, I’m just a sucker for horror.

So, would I recommend it? Maybe. If you made it this far and my words piqued any sort of interest, give it a whirl.

Despite the fact that, at times (okay … most of the time), The Alters felt like I was trying to wrangle a gaggle of unruly toddlers, I still came out of the experience having enjoyed it.

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But boy were parts of it an utter pain in the ass, and to add icing to the cake, I’m pretty sure I probably got one of the less-good endings. I also got hard-stuck once due to a bug, and I had to wait for a patch to be able to progress, and let me tell you, when I didn’t realize that I was bugged and thought the game was just being difficult … I was ready to throw in the towel.

Despite all this, I want to play it again at some point to see if I can do better, especially now that I have a better grasp on the myriad mechanics.

I do think I’ll wait a little bit; as much as I want to prove to myself that I can, in fact, herd cats, I am going to wait a little bit, mostly to place a little distance between me and the game—and partly because I think I’ll wait for a few patches. I was still experiencing some performance issues that detracted from the experience.

So yeah, The Alters is solid, but I’m going to wait a while before even considering a revisit. Read on for some impressions, as well as a few spoilers. (You are warned.)

But What Is This Thing?

For the unaware, The Alters is a sci-fi survival, base-building, resource (and people) management strategy game. It’s made by 11 Bit Studios, who you might know for such games as Frostpunk, This War of Mine, and if you’re really cool: Anomaly: Warzone Earth.

The Alters feels similar enough to Frostpunk and This War, but also its own thing. It’s also on Game Pass and is relatively cheap if you were to buy it outright, so that’s cool.

In the first moments of the game, your mission goes horribly wrong and crashes into the planet, leaving you, Jan Dolski, as the sole survivor. The company, of course, wants you to continue with your mission: to mine Rapidium, a new element that can revolutionize … everything.

It can also give you the upper hand in surviving. Turns out, Rapidium can also allow you to grow alternate versions of yourself from different quantum timelines to help you survive and complete your mission—hence the name, The Alters.

So, within the first hour of the game, you’ve mined some Rapidium and used it to grow your first alternate. Though there are a bunch of different ones available (Doctor, Scientist, Miner, Refiner, Worker, Guard, Shrink, and Botanist), the Technician is always the first one. After that, you can create them in almost any order, seeing as the Shrink requires the Doctor, for example.

Once you’ve grown yourself a nice family, the game revolves around keeping the base operating as you journey across the surface of the planet, trying to gather up enough resources to survive while simultaneously trying to outrun the sun, cause seeing sunrise will burn you like Count Orlok saw at the end of Nosferatu … and lead to an immediate game over.

More on Those Namesakes

As you might imagine, when these Alters awaken to discover that they’ve been created out of a bit of quantum shenanigans and that they’re lives, for all intents and purposes, were merely figments of their imaginations … they’re none too happy.

So, it’s not too surprising that they get a bit peeved a bit easily, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. Every time you turn around, someone is upset over something. Not only that, but unless you actually assign one of them to kitchen duties, they’ll just starve and rebel against you. And if you aren’t able to quell that or any other rebellion, it’s game over.

That’s where I encountered my game-breaking bug. During Act 2, the Alters at an all time “tired of his shit” high, and decided to rebel against me unless I made them all happy. And I just couldn’t do it.

No matter what I did, I kept getting a game over. I watched movies with them (the movies, by the way, are live action skits from YouTubers Chris and Jack … and fucking amazing), played beer pong, built them contemplation rooms and gyms and personal cabins … and I kept getting game over.

At this point, I was about ready to throw in the fuckin’ towel. But as it turns out, that rebellion was just bugged. Too bad the only fix at the time was rolling back to a much, much, much earlier save or to restart the game—two things I most definitely wasn’t willing to do.

The good news is that 11 Bit patched that issue after not too long, and I was able to take care of that rebellion with no issue.

Aside from being a whiny bunch of children, the Alters are all very well realized. Although each one is Jan Dolski, they’re all quite distinct, and their personalities and backstories are all very well realized. The voice acting is also great, even the doctor who happens to have a southern accent, unlike the other Alters.

While they do require a bit of hand-holding, they will ask you if you want them to take care of a pending task. So, if you’ve queued up food to be cooked, but nobody’s cooking it, they’ll ask if you want them to put on their chef’s hat.

Each Alter has a specialty, so the Technician is good at repairing the base, and the Doctor likens himself a Chef, so he’s not only good at fixing people up in the infirmary, but he also has a bonus to cooking. Anyone can cook, but the Doctor does it better. The same goes for most of the other tasks: anyone can refine, mine, craft items in the workshop, farm food at the greenhouse—but one Alter in particular is specialized for it. Unsurprisingly, the Scientist is the only one who can conduct research.

Once you get everyone working in concert, barring the occasional (daily) drama, things can get pretty smooth, but it does take a village to keep your base functioning, which is basically a giant wheel.

Keep Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’

Beyond trying to make your Alters feel better after their daily crisis, base building and resource gathering are the name of the game. The Alters is split into three acts, with the goal being to accomplish a few objectives before sunrise so you can pack everything up and move your base before everything bursts into flames.

At the start of each act, you must venture from your base into the desolate landscape, climbing and clearing rocks to get a lay of the land. You’ll find resource deposits, set up outposts to mine them, and scavenge wreckage for personal effects to give to your Alters to make them whine slightly less. (Don’t ask me why every scattered suitcase you can find is yours and has your belongings in it.)

It was during this exploration that I encountered the highest frequency of stuttering, which definitely sucked, but even so, I really enjoyed wandering around this fuckin’ rock. There’s a satisfying loop to excavating dig sites, setting up outposts for mining, then connecting them to the base’s power supply with a series of pylons and power lines.

Then, back at the base, you take those abundant resources to craft new equipment, build new modules for you and the Alters, and conduct the Scientist’s research to make life a bit easier. The more of that you do, the better you’ll be able to explore and the more efficiently you’ll be able to gather resources. There’s even an automatic outpost that can make gathering minerals way better—so I’d prioritize that if I were you (cause I didn’t, but I’m a fool).

Eventually, you’ll need to put a lot of those resources to use and build more modules. As a giant wheel, your base can only contain so many, so placing everything you need (including storage space to hold all the junk in your trunk) requires a bit of inventory Tetris to maximize your usage of the available space. The best feeling is when you expand your base (which you can do a few times), and get a brief sense of relief at all the extra space you now have—which you will then use up within an hour or two.

Choices, Choices, Choices

While Alters isn’t huge on choices and consequences, there are a few, especially a really big one about halfway through the game. It’s not enough to drastically change the experience, but it was enough to motivate me to try playing it again in the future.

Plus, that’ll give me the opportunity to try to do the other parts of the game more efficiently while also trying to keep all these whiny little fucks a little happier.

Evidently, with that big choice (spoilers inc), I picked the poorer of the two options. Turns out, when faced with death, the Alters would rather let a corporation put chips in their heads rather than just grow an empty vessel to harvest for brain matter. Weirdos, right?

The plot boils down to whether you want to side with the corporation or the quirky scientist who plays fast and loose with moral and ethical concerns. That scientist is voiced by the actor behind everyone’s favorite Witcher, Doug Cockle. I don’t really see the problem, but of course, I’m not an Alter.

Wrapping It Up

The whole time I was playing The Alters, I was mostly enjoying myself—but I was also mildly annoyed by the amount of bullshit you have to balance. It ended up being quite stressful and mildly frustrating. That, however, is the point of the game, really. So, I can’t fault it too badly. If anything, between this, Frostpunk, and This War of Mine, 11 Bit has sort of nailed this type of gameplay loop—even if it isn’t for everyone.

Ultimately, despite me wanting to strangle each of the Alters at least once, I enjoyed the overall experience enough to want to replay it again down the line, mostly to provide to myself (and them), that I can in fact be the captain (and to see how much different the story can play out).

Be that as it may, there was a time in my life when E3 (or the Electronic Entertainment Expo) was one of my favorite times of the year. Granted, I’ve never been a professional videogamesman, but just a passionate one. So, I never went to E3, just watched it religiously year after year—mostly Giant Bomb’s coverage, and loved almost every second of it.

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From giant enemy crabs to Microsoft almost shooting themselves in the foot with the Xbox One (thanks, Don Mattrick), there were so many great moments over the years.

But like all good things in the world, E3 had to eventually die a slow death, thanks mostly to the online streaming age and each publisher just doing their own press conferences during E3 week, as well as the deathblow of COVID-19.

Enter Geoff Keighley and Summer Game Fest and The Game Awards

Now, the Game Awards have been around for a while—it just hit its 10-year anniversary, so Geoff Keighley has been gracing video games with his presence for some time, even before this lovely meme:

Look at those eyes; it’s no wonder he thought “The Game Awards” was legitimately a good name for an award show. We’ve got Golden Joysticks, and Oscars and Emmys and Grammies … and Gamies?

So yeah, Geoff’s got his corny little award show that publishers use as a vehicle for new announcements—which is all that most people care about.

With E3 in its death throes, Geoff “Mountain Due and Doritos” Keighley rose up to give us the lines of games we so ravenously snorted through our straws with Summer Game Fest.

And with as snarky as I’ve been thus far (cut me some slack, I’m old and crotchety), there was some good shit shown over the last week. A lot of it was at Summer Game Fest, while Sony and Microsoft also had their own streams of new shit.

So that’s why I’m here: to talk about all the new shit that excites me. To skip this from being 15,000 words long, I’ll skip games that have been previously announced elsewhere but which excite me greatly (lookin’ at you Ninja Gaiden 4 and Onimusha).

In no particular order, here’s a batch of games that might, just might, tickle my fancy.

Nioh 3

I guess Nioh 3 is the reason that Team Ninja isn’t the only one making Ninja Gaiden 4. (Platinum Games is also helping them out.)

And boy does Nioh 3 looks scrumptious—although much to my chagrin, the beta wasn’t available on PC, which would’ve been nice, because let’s just say that as great as the modern Team Ninja games are (yes, even Wo Long and Rise of the Ronin), their PC versions haven’t quite been up to par.

All that aside, Nioh 3 looks great, and so too did the demo. I really feel that Team Ninja has hit their stride with the Nioh games, making their own take on the souls-like genre, so I’m keen for more.

Romeo Is a Dead Man

Suda51 is a madman, and I mean that in the best possible way. When this trailer played, my first impression was “the fuck is this shit” with the pseudo-2D art, but once the gameplay started, I was like “Oh, I think I know who made this,” and I was right, and looks just the right amount of ridiculous.

I’m not really sure what to expect from it, but it looks like a mix between Dead Rising and Lollipop Chainsaw, so sign me the fuck up.

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn

Between the Pathfinder games, Rogue Trader, and now Dark Heresy (another Warhammer game) and Osiris Reborn, Owlcat Games has been on a roll.

Granted, from the reveal trailer, it’s hard to tell exactly what this game is, although you can tell immediately that it’s set in the Expanse universe, thanks primarily to those accents. But the trailer was, at first, a little misleading, since it appeared at first that this might be some kind of 3rd person shooter, maybe Gears-esque.

But nope, evidently, Osiris Reborn is basically trying to emulate Mass Effect, which is maybe not only a great match for an Expanse game, but also a good fit for Owlcat. In many ways, the studio has become the modern BioWare. And I’m pretty confident Osiris Reborn will be great.

Resident Evil Requiem

Everyone knew a new RE game was on the horizon, but when June Takeuchi said, “Now, about the latest Resident Evil game you’ve all been waiting for, bear with us a little longer—just a blink of an eye more, and it’ll be ready,” he almost made everyone think that RE9 wouldn’t be at Game Fest.

Then the show ended with it.

Pretty good trolling on Capcom’s part. You couldn’t really glean much from the Trailer, just that it would involve Grace Ashcroft, the daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft—a character I know nothing about because I don’t know shit about Resident Evil Outbreak. I’m sure that won’t be a problem, though.

It looks like Requiem will take the franchise in a new direction, so that’ll be neat, and revisiting Raccoon City (or what’s left of it) after all these years will be a delight. Capcom’s been at their best with the modern Resident Evil games, so I expect this to also be great.

Pragmata*

Requiem wasn’t the only game Capcom showed off at Summer Game Fest, although technically Pragmata was announced years ago, but everyone, myself included, assumed the project was probably dead. So while I started this list by saying that I was only going to talk about new games, I’m making an exception for this one (and one other).

Even the trailer kinda took the piss, since from the first minute or so, it’s hard to tell what this game even is, but then it’s like, “Haha, it’s the game you probably thought was cancelled!” Good job, Capcom.

Pragmata seems promising, though. Who doesn’t want to embark upon an entire adventure with a little android girl? As an action/adventure game, though, it looks pretty neat—and I’m just happy it still exists. Next, Capcom is gonna have to resurrect Deep Down.

Mortal Shell 2

I played Mortal Shell 1. It was pretty mid; I didn’t finish it. But if the trailer for Mortal Shell 2 is anything to go off of, the sequel is gonna be totes lit fr fr (as the kids say). Before realizing what the game was, I commented in a friend’s Twitch chat who was streaming it at the time: “Looks like Mortaler Sheller.”

You could see the similarities, but honestly, the trailer made Mortal Shell 2 look like a very different game, complete with some pretty metal guns that look like they could be straight out of Doom: The Dark Ages.

The only downside is that when the first game came out, mid or not, there weren’t that many Souls-likes, but now, times have changed, and there are a lot of good ones out there. So competition is much fiercer.

Here’s hoping Mortal Shell 1 stumbled so the sequel could gallop.

Stranger Than Heaven*

I’m also sort of cheating with this one, because technically, Stranger Than Heaven was revealed earlier this year with just a brief glimpse and with a working title of Project Century. Then, it was just a short little teaser showing the game in 1915, but now we know it’s real name and that it’ll also take place in 1929 and 1943. So, that’s cool.

Judging from what little gameplay we’ve seen, it definitely looks like a Yakuza game, without being a Yakuza game. And I love the Yakuza games, especially the real-time brawly ones, and this one looks like more of that, but across a 30-year timespan.

The only downside is that it has the weird (bad) lighting/contrast from Pirate Yakuza, so hopefully they do something about that.

I’ll still play it regardless.

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy

The Plague Tale games are quite rad, if I do say so myself, and while the second game hinted at potentially a third game set in the present, or near future. So, I was a little surprised to see that the next game would actually be a spin-off starring the very rad Sophia, who appeared in Requiem.

The trailer didn’t show much in the way of gameplay, but I suppose the sequel has the opportunity to provide something a little different from the base games, which are definitely stealth games in which you play as kids.

Sophia is a swashbuckling pirate, so maybe this new one will provide something slightly different. I suppose time will tell. I’m definitely curious to see more.

Beast of Reincarnation

Game Freak, the developer behind this one, is known for basically one thing: Pokemon games. Though they’ve occasionally flexed their talents in other gdirections, they’ve almost always been “the Pokemon” studio.

Needless to say, Beast of Reincarnation is their first real AAA effort and looks nothing like Pokemon, or any of their other projects, so color me intrigued. It has hues of Nier: Automata and Black Myth: Wukong, and it’s set in 4026, which seems like exactly 2000 years after the game will come out—not that I think that will have any impact on anything.

But boy do I love sci-fi.

Aphelion

DON’T NOD has been sort of hit or miss. They always have interesting ideas, but they don’t always stick the landing. However, Aphelion still looks fuckin’ cool (pun intended).

I’m a sucker for good narratives, even if they have to eschew a bit of gameplay to really pull it off (walking simulator shouldn’t be a pejorative).

The adventure aspects of this, at least what’s in the trailer, seem great, too, so I’ll be curious to check this out, even if it’s just a short little narrative experience.

Out of Words

I fuckin’ love stop motion and puppetry, so Out of Words immediately struck me and at least looking fucking amazing. And much like Harold Halibut, a game I also adored, this one is also made by creating real-life puppets and objects and scanning them for the game. And it shows in hand-crafted beauty.

However, I’m not nearly as sold on the gameplay of Out of Words as I am on the aristry that went into making it. It looks like a decent take on something like Unravel—a side-scrolling adventure, or more specifically Unravel Two since it’s a 2-person co-op game. So, I guess if it nails that aspect, we might have our next Split Fiction or It Takes Two on our hands, or I guess Unravel 2.

Tip of the Ole ‘Berg

FUCKIN’ VIDEO GAMES, RIGHT? While this is only scratching the surface, plenty more got announced during the week formerly known as E3. There’s plenty else that looked cool I didn’t mention because they’d been shown off before. Clockwork Revolution, 007: First Light, Blood of Dawnwalker, Silent Hill Flatulence—the list goes on.

But if I talked bout each and every one of these, we’d be here all day, and since this thing is already going to be weeks late, THIS’LL HAVE TO DO.

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With the release of Dark Ages, these modern Doom games have cemented themselves as some of my favorite games of the last decade. In fact, I’d probably say that this is my favorite trilogy since Batman Arkham.

You could even make parallels with the Atlan and dragon sections in Dark Ages with the Batmobile in Arkham Knight. I guess the good news is that id Software didn’t cram its dragon or mech sections down your throat as hard as Rocksteady crammed the Batmobile down everyone’s throats back in 2015, despite how great Arkham Knight was.

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So, while the dragon and Atlan levels in Doom: The Dark Ages are a bit superfluous, at least they aren’t integrated like the Batmobile was. They’re just featured in a few levels, provide a quick shift from the normal flow of the game, and then you’re back rippin’ and tearin’ in no time.

Back to the Dark Ages

For anyone whose reaction might be, “Wait, there’s a new Doom game?” the Dark Ages is a prequel set in the distant past—and the separate world of Argent D’Nur, for that matter—which helps to explain that while Doom is a prequel set in the “dark ages” it’s still very much a sci-fi game with guns and ships and shit.

To be honest, I haven’t really paid super close attention to the lore of Doom, but from what I understand, the Doom Slayer as we know him is originally a dude from Earth who got thrust into the past somehow, either to a different world or a different dimension altogether (fuck if I know). I guess it’s sort of like what happened to Ash in Army of Darkness—which is a great fuckin movie, by the way.

I would also be remiss to not at least mention music once—and only once. Mick Gordon’s mark is sorely missed from this game, and it’s a shame what happened to him. The music in Dark Ages is fine, but it’s not nearly as novel or original as what he did in the previous games, or what he would’ve done. The best advice I can give is to just crank the volume up.

Ultimately, all that really matters is that there are demons to kill, and the slayer proceeds to do his fuckin’ thing—only this time he has a shield, and it sure seems like he’s having a fuckin’ blast the whole time throughout this game, which is good because …

So Did I

After about 25 hours, I have now completed Doom: The Dark Ages on Nightmare, 100%ed the game, and thoroughly enjoyed every fuckin’ minute of this game. I did find it a little easy—but they also proceeded to increase the difficulty basically right after I finished it, so I guess I’ll have to replay it again in a few months.

One cool thing that Dark Ages does is that in addition to the typical difficulty levels, there are also sliders to either make the experience harder or easier. It includes stuff like bigger or smaller parry windows, more or less damage from enemies—stuff like that. I didn’t touch any them, but it’s great that they’re there for anyone who wants to tweak their experience.

Having said all that, I would still say that, for me personally, Eternal is still the best modern Doom game, but Doom 2016 and The Dark Ages are both also great in their own ways. If I were to slap arbitrary numbers on them out of 100, I’d say Eternal is like 93, 2016 is like 89, and Dark Ages is like 87. So like, still great, but probably not quite as great as the other two.

A lot of this, of course, comes down to personal preference, because all three games play very differently. While Eternal has you jumping around and dashing and grabbing onto bars—it’s acrobatic as fuck—Dark Ages has you parrying and blocking shots, and shield charging left and right and all over the place. Doom 2016, by comparison, is “just” a solid fucking shooter.

After 2016, Eternal felt like an evolution of the formula. And you know what? Dark Ages also feels like an evolution, but not over Eternal, but a separate evolution over 2016. Regardless, I wouldn’t be surprised if those who didn’t like Eternal but loved 2016 probably look more fondly on Dark Ages.

Where I’m standing (and fighting), I love each game on its own merits—but it’s Eternal whose merits I love the most. That said …

Shields Are Fuckin’ Fun

In a word, combat in the Dark Ages is exhilarating, and a different kind of exhilarating than Eternal was, and that’s all thanks to the shield. You use it to block and parry, shield charge from a surprisingly great distance, or even throw it to outright kill fodder demons or stun bigger ones. You’re basically a Space Marine version of Captain America—and that’s cool.

It’s a surprisingly satisfying tool in the Slayer’s arsenal.

Parrying is a bit easy (unless you tighten those windows); simply block as the green projectiles or melee attacks hit you, time slows, and you can follow it up with a melee attack or a super shotgun blast to the face.

Considering how fast the game is, and with as many attacks as there are coming your way, the green highlight works pretty well, and it’s probably good that the parry window is generously large by default. However, on Nightmare, when things get hairy, and everything just flows, it is a beautiful rhythm of clangs and melee whacks.

However, I do wish there was a way to turn off the slow-mo, or reduce it. I know there’s a mod out there that can do that, but it’d be great if id added a toggle or a slider.

But of course, shields and melee weapons aren’t the only tools in your arsenal; Doom wouldn’t be Doom without a plethora of weapons.

Medieval Guns … Best Guns?

In previous Doom games, you could definitely feel the lineage of each gun that came before, and I guess, in a manner of thinking, this is supposed to be the arsenal that inspired all the guns. There’s still a rocket launcher, but it’s a cannon—like literally. There’s also a grenade launcher, which is basically a cannon that shoots bouncing balls.

Speaking of balls, there’s also a gun that shoots a ball on a chain—for when you really want to slap your foes in the face with your balls (and it’s highly effective).

Balls aside, like any good Doom arsenal, Dark Ages also includes two plasma weapons: one that serves as a sort of fast-firing submachine gun, and another that kind of fills the same role as the Chaingun, the Cycler.

Perhaps the coolest (at least thematically) guns in the game are the skull crushers, which, as the name implies, crush skulls up in a grinder and spit them out at enemies. There are two of them, the Pulverizer and the Ravager. The former is great at clearing fields of fodder demons, and the latter is great at killing the tougher enemies, although it’s a bit overpowered at the moment.

My personal favorite gun, next to the Super Shotgun, was one of the “Railspike”-class weapons: the Impaler. This thing is basically Dark Ages’ version of a sniper; it fires large nails that destroy most enemies, but it’s got some pretty serious drop, so you have to account for that with every shot. The other Railspike weapon is called the Shredder. It shreds—I hardly used it.

So, there are quite a few weapons, about twelve (not counting the melee weapons). For each weapon “category,” you can only have one equipped at a time, so you can either have the Cycler or the Accelerator, or the Combat Shotgun or the Super Shotgun, or the Rocket Launcher, or the Grenade Launcher … you get the picture.

This time around, rather than a BFG, we have the BFC—the Big Fuckin’ Crossbow (or actually the Ballistic Force Crossbow). It’s exceedingly cool.

There are also three melee weapons, a power fist, a flail (my personal favorite), and a big-ass mace. They’re all pretty great, and each one has slightly different pros and cons.

While some weapons, both melee and guns, are certainly better for certain situations, the entire arsenal is viable—and very fun to use. My least favorite was probably the grenade launcher, but with the cluster upgrade (we’ll talk about upgrades shortly), it was still a blast to grenade entire groups of enemies.

The Forces of Hell

Enemies in the Dark Ages feature a nice mix of some old classics, new foes, and clever remixes of old enemies. Take, for instance, our old friend the revenant. He went from airborne rocket jumper to something more befitting of his name: a ghostly floating reaper who fires magic skulls at you and can briefly become invincible. Quite the glow-up.

There are some other clever takes on enemies: the Cacodemon is quite different now, and the Baron of Hell became a Cosmic Baron.

Otherwise, Imps are still fun to squash, Hell Knights have evidently remained relatively unchained, and someone at id thought it would be cool to give a Komodo Dragon a gun and a spear, and they were right.

Gold, Rubies, and Wraithstones

Like any good modern Doom game, the Dark Ages has bountiful upgrades for both the Slayer and your arsenal. While Doom Eternal might have arguably overcomplicated the upgrade process, the Dark Ages streamlines it in ways that I personally find a bit more preferable.

Most upgrades require a simple currency: gold. How very medieval, right? With it, you can bolster your weapons, shield, and melee weapons. Beyond that, you can also collect Rubies and Wraithstones to upgrade your weapons even further with even more powerful perks. The upgrade system is really where you can come up with some interesting builds, and it also helps to make the melee weapons a bit more distinctive.

Separate from this, there’s also a Rune system for the shield, which provides four different effects that occur when you parry ranged attacks. Each of these is pretty cool, although you don’t get the first one until fairly late into the game.

What About Modifications?

While Dark Ages does away with the modification system found in 2016 and Eternal, there are still upgrade choices for each weapon, although for the most part, one upgrade seemed a hell of a lot cooler than the other, for nearly all weapons. But your mileage may vary. I found that generally speaking, each mod for the weapons in Eternal was pretty dang solid, and you could swap between them situationally. In Dark Ages, I picked my favorite one and never switched.

As for health, ammo, and armor upgrades, there are special “leader” enemies throughout the game, and killing these foes allows you to tear out their heart and consume it for an upgrade. So, you basically get all of these in a specific order, as the game wants you to; gone are the days of stacking all of your upgrades in ammo and ignoring health and shields because you’re a badass.

Overall, Dark Ages provides pretty constant power boosts, and those power boosts are typically a little more streamlined. The Wraithstones to get the final upgrades are pretty scarce, so you have to decide which weapons you most want to upgrade. I went for the Impaler and Super Shotgun first.

Big Ole Levels

For the most part, each of the Dark Ages’ 22 chapters contains some pretty open spaces and loads of secrets. Some of them are more linear, with small branching paths to find the occasional secrets; others are more open and provide you with a big open space to run around and complete objectives.

The game never really got stale, but toward the end, one of the later chapters was basically just a slightly different version of a chapter from earlier in the game. This one could’ve been either cut or redesigned not to be so similar. It’s a good thing that killing demons never got boring.

The secrets themselves were all relatively easy to find, and I quickly decided I was going to try to 100% the game, and by keeping an eye on the map, I didn’t really have to replay much to accomplish this. The only achievement that took any bit of effort was the one for the all-weapon mastery challenges.

And, as promised, the game has a bigger focus on story, and aside from some basic radio chatter, most of that plays out through bookended cutscenes at the beginning and end of a chapter. I don’t really have much to say about the story, but for all intents and purposes, it’s fine.

The actual writing is formulaic and a bit goofy—and not necessarily in a bad way—and the cutscenes at least allow you to marvel at how great this new version of the id Tech engine is.

An Ode to id Tech 8

To truly appreciate id Tech, I guess you gotta start with Unreal Engine, which has become nothing short of pervasive, and with it, so too does the endemic #stutterstruggle that plagues so many games built with the engine. It’s not impossible to create a good Unreal experience—plenty of games do it quite well. Plus, the engine is just so damn prevalent.

The modern Doom games, on the other hand, are all running on the id Tech engine, with Doom 2016 running on Tech 6 and Dark Ages running on Tech 8. And boy do I love this engine; it’s just so damn performant, with impressive frame rates and nary a stutter.

It helps that id Tech is really only used in a few games, mostly the Doom ones (as well as the newer Wolfenstein games and Indiana Jones), so it’s not like many other games have had an opportunity to provide a bad id Tech experience. Regardless, it’s hard to argue about how good id Tech is.

And the 8th version is no different, although that comes with a big caveat, because …

Ray Tracing Has Arrived

This time around, Doom: The Dark Ages requires a ray-tracing capable video card, much like Indiana Jones did. That means, on PC, unless you have an RTX 20 series or later Nvidia card or a RX 6000 series or later AMD card, you’re shit out of luck—unless you try to bypass the game anyway, and doing so completely breaks the lighting.

I know ray tracing, in general, is a pretty controversial feature, but I love it. Or at least, I love it when it’s been well-implemented and you can still get a decent frame rate with capable hardware, and while the Doom: The Dark Ages framerate might not hit the heights of Eternal, it still runs really well.

However, I might be a bit biased because I just bought a 9070 XT a few months ago, with XeSS on Ultra Quality Plus, I was getting right around 110 FPS, give or take. I’d use FSR, but the old version is utter garbo, and FSR 4 isn’t supported in any Vulkan game, even with Optiscaler, but with any luck, that will come with time.

For what it’s worth, id straight-up built Dark Ages with ray tracing, so simply turning it off isn’t an option. They’d need to redo all the lighting in the game, which would probably take another few years of development.

I’ve seen some people on reddit—a bastion of people who know what they’re talking about—spouting bullshit about a non-ray tracing patch, but I believe they’ve confusing that with the upcoming path tracing update. And path tracing is like ray tracing extreme.

I’m not even sure my 9070 XT can play the game with path tracing in a manner that would be enjoyable—but I’m definitely going to find out!

Even without path tracing, the Dark Ages looks great. Eternal had ray-traced reflections, which are very cool and far better than the old way of doing it, with screen space reflections. Those basically just “reflect” anything that you can “see” in the screenspace, whereas ray tracing reflects everything on the level, and does it well. It helps that Eternal just has so many damn reflective surfaces. Dark Ages really just has … puddles.

The game does, however, take ray tracing a step further with global illumination, which basically simulates how light illuminates (and shadows) everything, and it’s really striking. While talented artists can definitely approximate the look that ray tracing can provide (as evidenced by Eternal still looking fuckin’ great after 5 years), ray tracing just does it faster (as in development time) and better.

Time to Stop Talking

I realize now that I’ve been waxing poetic for far longer than I thought I would, but I really did love this fuckin’ game—as well as all the Doom games that came before it.

Like I said, overall, Eternal is still peak Doom for me, personally, but more Doom is good Doom. Eternal also has a lot more replay built into it, but a lot of that came after the game launch, so I’m sure that the Dark Ages will also get plenty of post-release content, including, of course, the story DLC.

But Master Levels, Horde Mode, or a full NG+ would all be really welcome here. Because, as it stands now, once you finish the Campaign, all that’s really left is to hunt any collectibles, secrets, or achievements you missed.

Ultimately, it’s just crazy to me that 33 years and running, Doom games are still just … plain … fun. And who doesn’t like to have fun?

Turns out, Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 is also fan-fucking-tastic and excels at just about everything it does, from gameplay to art to music to writing and to its overall story—and since the story is one of my favorite aspects of this game, I won’t shy away from spoilers.

My own love of Clair Obscur game aside, it’s been pretty wild to see the overwhelmingly positive reception it’s received; I still remember when I saw the game for the first time, about a year ago, and thinking to myself, “Oh, that looks interesting.” And now it’s potentially (and quite objectively) one of the best games of the year, even if we still have a long six months or so ahead of us.

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Perhaps one of the greatest things about Clair Obscur is the music—and not just great. It will probably have the best music in any game this year, with a close runner-up of South of Midnight. (Crazy that two great games with great music were released side-by-side.)

What’s crazy is that, evidently, Sandfall just found someone talented on Soundcloud and were like, “HEY YOU WANNA WORK ON A VIDEO GAME.”

Or so I heard; not sure if that’s accurate. But I want to believe.

Regardless of where this talented fellow, Lorien Testard, came from, the work he’s done in Clair Obscur is straight fire—each and every track. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being one of the best soundtracks of the year in one of the best games of the year.

But for now, let’s talk about the game itself.

A Brief Overview

For anyone who has maybe only embarked upon Expedition 33 in passing, Clair Obscur is a turn-based RPG, and a damn good one at that.

The general plot, and we’ll get into spoilers soon, is that roughly sixty-seven years ago, a calamity called “the Fracture” went and shattered life in Lumiere, a city that, for all intents and purposes, is a fictionalized Paris (complete with the Eiffel Tower).

Every year since then, an entity known as the Paintress paints a number on a monolith, and the ensuing “Gommage” makes everyone over the age of that number disappear. It’s like if Thanos snapped once a year. The first Gommage, presumably, was something like age 100, and it’s counted down from there.

Meanwhile, each year, Lumiere sends an expedition of people who are next up to be Gommaged to try and kill the Paintress, and for sixty-seven years, they have been unsuccessful. Enter Expedition 33.

There’s a bit of a prologue, but it’s not long before you embark upon your expedition—one that has almost everyone dead within the first few minutes of making landfall, slain by a mysterious older man by the name of Renoir, who is voiced by Gollum/Smeagol himself, Andy Serkis.

Turn-Based, But More Interactive

With the expedition all but decimated, Gustave, our fearless leader (who’s voiced by Daredevil himself, Charlie Cox), then tries to muster up a team in an effort to complete the mission of killing the paintress, and away we go.

It’s not long before you’ve reunited with what would become the main group: Lune, Maelle, and Sciel. At the end of Act 1, Gustave actually dies very heroically at the hands of Renoir(the whole cutscene is wonderful), and is almost immediately replaced by a new character, Verso, which is kinda funny in hindsight. As Gustave lies dying, Verso walks in from off-camera.

Verso claims to be immortal and has helped many expeditions through the years, and although clearly he’s an important character, it isn’t until the tail end of the game that more about his nature is revealed, although with as much of a connection as he seems to have Maelle, it’s not really super surprising that he turns out to be, wait for it, her brother, and Renoir is their father. That’s one dysfunctional family.

There is eventually another team member: Monoco. Although you can only fight with three at once, but if your primary team dies, you can throw in your two bench warmers to try to win.

Outside of that, it’s not long before you’re fighting your first Nevron, which are the game’s enemies, of which there are many.

If you’ve ever played a turn-based game and been bored out of you mind, wishing you could do something—anything—during an average turn, Clair Obscur might pique your interest, since you’re able to parry and dodge enemy attacks.

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The bad news is that if you don’t like having to parry and dodge, then you’re in for a world of hurt. When parrying, the timings are really tight, so it’s not uncommon to miss and get smashed in the face, and on normal difficulty (the “intended” one), you definitely want to take as little damage possible; otherwise, you’re fucked. However, if you time the parries just right, it’s delicious.

Parry, Parry, Parry, Parry, Counterattack

And it gets even more delicious, because there are also counterattacks. Most enemy attacks come in combo sets of two to sometimes six or seven (although some attacks don’t have combos at all, so you counterattack after just one usually big attack). If you’re able to parry every attack in a combo, you then perform an immensely satisfying counterattack that sometimes outright kills the enemy. These can make or break battles.

Granted, parrying itself can make or break battles, but if you’re able to counterattack enemies, you can really show your foes who’s boss. Similarly, if you fuck up all the parries and get hit constantly, you will struggle.

Fortunately, if you do struggle with the parries, dodging exists in a happy middle ground. They’re easier to pull off, but you don’t get the benefit of counterattacking. There are also attacks you have to jump over, but those play out like a QTE.

A Whole Roster of Fun

Granted, all of the parrying and dodging and getting smashed in the face happen during the enemy’s turn. When it’s time to take your turn, you get to leverage each expedition member’s unique abilities.

Everyone has their own gimmick, and in a good way—although it surmounts to using the right abilities at the right time in order to activate certain mechanics unique to each character.

For instance, our buddy Gustave has perhaps the simplest mechanic. He can overcharge his prosthetic arm and give enemies a good zappy zappy.

Each of Gustave’s abilities provides varying amounts of charge, up to 10, and though you can cast the overcharge ability at any number, doing so when it’s maxed out provides the biggest, most satisfying zappy zap.

Back to his untimely demise: I guess it makes sense that he’s objectively the simplest character to play, since you only have access to him for the first act. Maybe that’s why Charlie Cox was able to take time out of his busy schedule to voice the character. It also makes sense that the mechanics for Verso are a bit more in-depth and differ quite a lot from Gustave's.

The same could be said for each party member, and though I won’t go into too much of a diatribe for each of them, Sandfall Interactive did a great job giving each character their own unique spin on combat.

Of course, that didn’t prevent me from just picking whichever abilities would do the most damage without much fuss or muss. I leaned mostly toward fire damage and building up burn stacks, which was really great—unless the enemy was resistant to fire.

But for the industrious player, you can figure out all sorts of interesting (and likely very overpowered) builds.

That RPG Life

Like any good RPG, Clair Obscur is all about the numbers. Your level gets higher, as do your stats, allowing you to hit harder, faster, and take less damage in the process.

Next to that, enemies most likely have some similar level corresponding with their power, which the game doesn’t really say, you just have to take a guess depending on how hard you get smashed in the face.

Most of the key story fights feel pretty well balanced, although some of them proved a little tricky—but of course, personal mileage may vary.

There’s also side content to explore, both while on a mission and exploring the overworld map. There are also friendly Nekrons that give you some simple fetch quests to do. The random mini-bosses found during missions prove to be some of the most difficult battles I encountered during the game.

There are also difficult encounters to be found on the map, which brings me to perhaps my only real issue with Clair Obscur, although it’s not one that really impacts the overall experience.

The game really doesn’t provide much information; nothing has any levels, and there’s no “quest log” per se, which is fine. It’s just a little difficult to be really thorough. You just have to remember to do the Nevron quests, and difficult side areas just say “Danger,” and the only way to know whether or not you can handle them is to jump and see how badly your face gets smashed.

On a similar note, none of the mission levels have maps, which is a deliberate choice. It certainly makes exploration a bit more immersive, but sometimes you’ll find yourself running around in circles, not quite sure where to go. South of Midnight allowed you to highlight the main path, and something like that would be great in Clair Obscur.

All this said, as much as I loved my time with Clair Obscur, I didn’t really feel compelled to do too much side content, and though there is content to do post-game, I really had no interest in that either—especially since the story wrapped up so nicely.

Closing Thoughts on the Story

I spent a lot of time wondering exactly how well Clair Obscur would tie up the story, and whether it would end up being ambiguous in the end—and while I don’t mind a well-told story with an ambiguous ending, it’s certainly not my favorite.

Boy was I glad that Clair Obscur went out of its way to explain the nature of everything—it rivaled Lord of the Rings with how long its ending went on. First, you had the first epilogue, then you had the 2nd part of the first epilogue, then you had the surprise Act 3, and then you finally had the real epilogue.

And I loved every second of it.

(Even if the last few hours of the game have an awful lot of exposition dumping.)

I knew the game would have some splainin’ to do at some point after coming to the realization that Maelle and Alicia were definitely the same person, at least in some way, shape, or form.

Little did I know that the Paintress was actually the good guy, and Maelle’s mother, and that her father, Renoir, was the one causing all this ruckus.

Not only that, but the entire world was a painting done to try to keep a piece of her dead brother (Verso) alive indefinitely. That naturally means that all the characters in the game, except for Maelle, Renoir, and Aline (her mother), are not real.

That didn’t keep Gustave’s death from being any less surprising, and for painted people, each character was delightfully developed.

What’s also funny is that Clair Obscur could’ve easily been a sci-fi game, with the world being some kind of simulation or hologram.

I’m glad it wasn’t; the setting is exceedingly awesome, and the backstory of these magical painters and writers who are at war is quite intriguing (I know which side I’d be on). Very little is really explored about the whole conflict, or what the writers do.

However, if I were to guess, if the paintings created by the painters create little magical worlds, then I would imagine writers may do something similar.

While Expedition 33 wraps up pretty nicely, there’s definitely room for some kind of follow-up set in the universe. Presumably, there are other paintings out there, or written stories. It would be cool to see the universe explored in more detail, even if Maelle’s story is over.

Sandfall Interactive definitely came out of the gate swinging, so I’m keen to see what they do next, because Clair Obscur is nothing short of a masterpiece.

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South of Midnight might end up being one of my favorite games of the year. Granted, there’s still a long road ahead of us with games like Doom: The Dark Ages coming out really soon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up near the top of a GOTY list I probably won’t bother compiling.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for the stop-motion aesthetic. After all, Harold Halibut was one of my favorite games last year. And boy howdy did Slow Bros., the team that made Harold, go all-in. They actually made many of the assets in real life and 3D scanned them to build out the game.

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But enough about ole Harold—South of Midnight didn’t go to nearly the same extremes, although the effect is nearly as good. Compulsion Games, the team behind Midnight, modeled everything in Unreal, and just made it appear as though it was stop motion.

The effect is very cool. Cutscenes are locked at 30 FPS, and all animations are halved to 15 FPS, to give everything a jerky, frame-by-frame quality that’s quite reminiscent of stop motion. On top of that, South of Midnight also has a very impressive opening cinematic, which is actually made with real-life puppets. The game actually plays it every time you launch the game, which I would normally hate, but to be frank, I watched it every time.

This all, of course, only applies to the in-game cutscenes. The actual gameplay runs at whatever framerate your PC (or console) can muster, while the animations (much like in the cutscenes) run a little slower to give that stop-motion vibe.

The good news is that if the animations bother you, you can disable the effect in the settings. Then, the game just runs like a normal game, except for the cutscenes.

Southern Folklore at Its Finest

South of Midnight takes place in a fictionalized Southern United States. While the game’s town is called Prospero, I don’t think they ever provide a state, but it sure seems pretty heavily inspired by Louisiana—plus, the events of the game happen during and immediately after a flood caused by a hurricane. So, there are definitely parallels to make.

In the game’s prologue, flood waters are rising, and Hazel Flood (nice last name) is hurriedly packing, getting ready to evacuate with her mom. Needless to say, shit goes from bad to worse, and Hazel is flung on an adventure filled with voodoo, hoodoo, and exploring the pain of the people of Prospero.

It’s very cool to see this sort of story realized so well in video game form. I also play a lot of Hunt: Showdown, which is set in Louisiana (among other places), but that’s a wholly different beast compared to this.

I’m by no means an expert, as a generic white dude who hardly leaves his house, but the care and execution Compulsion Games demonstrated with South of Midnight is really impressive.

Especially since, between you and me, the team’s last game, We Happy Few, was pretty mid. That game had a lot of fine ideas, but it struggled to really execute on them effectively.

Fortunately, South of Midnight comes together splendidly, with one relatively small exception.

Everything Is Great, Except…

We’ll get into the many aspects of South of Midnight that I absolutely adored shortly—which is basically every other aspect of the game, but first, let’s get my only point of contention out of the way. And it’s not even like an actual issue. It’s just that, with as great as nearly every aspect of this game is, from art to story to music, it’s just kind of a shame that the combat is just sort of … okay.

Thankfully, it doesn’t detract from the experience much at all, and it’s completely servicable, and not wholly unenjoyable, but compared to everything else, it feels like typical third-person action shenanigans.

You go into an arena, haints (the enemies in the game) spawn, you put them out of their misery, and then you pop a little orb to finish the encounter. That’s basically all you do throughout the entire game, barring boss fights (which are great, we’ll get into those shortly).

The encounters never really got too boring, thanks to continued upgrades and pretty decent enemy variety. I was also playing on the hardest difficulty, so it kept me on my toes pretty well.

But toward the end of the game, I felt as though these encounters were just breaking up the pacing of the rest of the game in a way that, overall, didn’t add much to the experience—just padded it out.

I guess that’s partly thanks to everything else about South of Midnight being so joyous. And even then, fightin’ enemies is never a chore, and the design of everything—animations, the enemies themselves, the sound—helps to hide the fact that there’s not much going on.

Everything Else Is Great

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s gush. While I wasn’t too fussed during the combat encounters, I loved the rest of the game. Between each of these combat encounters, there are swaths of platforming, Uncharted-esque climbing, and, of course, story.

For starters, it’s beautiful. Stop-motion aesthetic aside, the lighting and attention to detail, especially in a lot of the interior spaces, are delightful. Each house or building feels actually lived-in, and the art style and lighting heighten this to another level. In many ways, it looks like an animated movie—similar but still quite different from Kena: Bridge of Spirits (another great game).

Bosses Have a lot of Character

While the combat itself isn’t really anything special, the boss fights are. There are five boss fights spread throughout the game, and the chapters leading up to each one help to explain the pain and trauma that led to their creation.

The first one, Benjy, isn’t even really a boss fight—unless you’re scared of heights. Instead, it entails an extended platforming section set to a pretty fantastic song.

The other fights are actually fights. Each one has a little gimmick to figure out in order to defeat them. I say “figure out” very lightly; they amount to: “Oh hey, I better ring this bell that’s lying here for no obvious reason.”

It’s pretty neat. By the time you get to the boss, you’ll have learned enough about their backstory that these thematic elements add a lot, even if the amount to ringing a bell.

Ticklin’ the Ears

Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of South of Midnight is the music. Composer Olivier Derivière knocked it out of the fuckin’ park with this one, and honestly, it seems pretty different from most of the other stuff he’s done.

A mix between folk and jazz, the music permeates nearly everything you do. Not only does each of the boss fights have its own corresponding theme, and each one is distinct and fantastic in its own right.

These righteous tunes also extend to the combat music, which is just the right amount of chaotic jazz (and probably one of the reasons those encounters don’t detract too much from the overall experience).

Overall, the music and sound design are some of the best things about South of Midnight.

Story’s Good Too

I think, while South of Midnight will probably pull people in based primarily on the setting, the art, and maybe the music, deep down’s a pretty good story, too, both as a tour through Southern folklore as well as a personal story of Hazel’s search for her mother after she was swept up in the flood.

I won’t get into too many spoilers, because I think it would be rad if everyone played it, but it plays out like a fine little adventure, without too many crazy reveals or twists. South of Midnight primarily feels like a well-written vehicle to explore Southern culture and folklore, and that alone is worth the price of admission—plus it’s on Game Pass, so the price of admission might be nothing if you’re already subscribed.

What Else Can I Say?

South of Midnight impressed me from start to finish—and maybe lost me a little bit with the combat, but really, even on hard, it never got boring or frustrating, it was just there, and fun enough.

It’s just fortunate that nearly every other aspect of South of Midnight elevated the experience to impressive heights. I highly recommend it.

Atomfall might be the quintessential Game Pass game. It probably won’t “wow” you, but it probably also won’t bore you to death, either. Sometimes, that’s really all you want out of a game—not being bored to death.

Maybe if you were to spend your hard-earned money on it, you might be a wee bit disappointed. But, if judged as “something” to play on Game Pass, it’s a jolly good time, mate.

At least, for its 15-20 hour length, at which point, you’ll probably move onto the next thing and forget all about Atomfall in a month or two. (In my case, that next thing is South of Midnight—but more on that once I finish it in the next week or so).

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Rebellion’s At It Again

But, for the unaware, Atomfall is the new game from veteran studio Rebellion, which has been pumping out games of varying degrees of quality since the early 90s. Surprisingly, Atomfall might be their best game yet—or at least up there … and at least in my opinion, which amounts to basically nothing since I don’t think I’ve played most of the other ones.

For all intents and purposes, Atomfall is an open world (ish) survival game (ish). The “ish” is there because it doesn’t really go hard in either of those areas. The world is relatively open, but it’s split into regions that you can travel between, which reminded me somewhat of the other “A” game that came out recently, Avowed. Only, I spent way more time revisiting the regions in this game than that one. Maybe too much time. I think some of that is due to my own haphazard way of playing.

The survival aspects basically amount to “don’t run out of ammo or the crafting resources for healing.” But even on the 2nd hardest difficulty, I never ran out of either of those things completely.

Jolly Old England

Perhaps one of the biggest draws of this game, especially for a dumb American such as myself, is the setting of Northern England, near the Windscale Power Plant, to be precise. For the unaware, Atomfall provides an alternate story to the famous Windscale fire of 1957, going from simply a terrible disaster to a terrible disaster of cosmic proportions, with a dash of conspiracies. Oh, and robots.

Artistically, Atomfall looks good, with rolling hills and some nice set pieces. Graphically, it’s a bit dated, but that’s not too big of a nitpick. For some reason, however, the game decided not to use any upscalers, which I’m sure was some kind of technical hurdle Rebellion couldn’t overcome.

I don’t think the game is really heavy enough to need them, but the antialiasing implementation is piss-poor, so it would’ve been nice to be able to use FSR or DLSS as an alternative. But oh well … I can’t imagine that’s a dealbreaker for anyone. And if it is, that’s weird.

Exploration Reigns Supreme

So, much like Avowed, exploration is the highlight here—although Atomfall didn’t reach the same heights as Avowed did, but it came close.

You’ll find yourself exploring the English countryside, delving into every nook and cranny in search of hidden treasures or interesting experiences.

This can include everything from ruined buildings or installations, hidden bunkers and caves, or just random encampments. Each place is fun enough to explore, but they reuse a lot of assets and layouts, especially with some of the bunkers—but I guess that’s the nature of bunkers.

These spaces are all enjoyable to explore, but they lack a “wow” factor that you might have found in a game with a higher budget and bigger scope.

There are some interesting things to see later in the game, but that would be spoilers, and nobody likes spoilers—well, some people do, but those people aren’t welcome here.

Pew Pew

No matter where you go, no matter what you do, no matter which cave you go spelunking into, someone’s probably going to try to kill you. Be it outlaws, druid cultists, or soldiers who are trying to keep this whole quarantine thing happening.

Most of these people will have guns—except for the druids, who seem to think that they can run at you with their axes and bows and not be popped in the head with a bullet. Sucks to be them.

Everyone else has varying degrees of firearms, with the soldiers having the best ones. There’s a whole condition system, with guns you can find being rusty, stock, or pristine. You can eventually learn how to upgrade guns, which involves just smashing two rusty guns together and somehow creating a stock gun, then doing the same with two stock guns to create a pristine gun.

Don’t ask me how you’re supposed to be able to carry all these guns to be able to upgrade them with the limited-ass inventory system, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

The gunplay is servicable, but it doesn’t exactly impress in any way, shape, or form. I don't think pristine guns really feel much better than rusty ones, but of course I didn’t analyze them too closely, nor am I a weapon specialist. They at least look way cooler when they’re pristine, so that’s a plus.

While ammo is limited, it’s never too limited to be a real issue, even if enemies respawn in a way that can best be described as stupidly. If you’re in a camp, save, exit the game, and load back in, I’ve found that they’ll often be respawned. They’ll also respawn if you leave and come back. It gets to be a chore, and I often found myself just sprinting past enemies. (Or, systematically taking them out with headshots because I’m a pro gamer.)

It’s a Survival Game, So of Course There’s Crafting

I’ll go ahead and cram a bit more about the crafting at the end of the section that’s primarily about combat, because nothing matters. Outside of gun upgrades, you can craft an assortment of other items, including healing, resistance potions, explosives, etc. Everything but arrows. And when 9/10 of your arrows break when you shoot them into the head of an enemy—that sort of bites. Huge missed opportunity to not allow you to craft arrows.

You’ll earn most of these crafting recipes by exploring the world and trading with merchants. That’s also how you get survival books, to unlock new skills to learn. The sense of advancement and growing more powerful is actually pretty good. There’s even a whole set of skills for the bow. If only you could craft arrows.

The crafting system isn’t too necessary, especially since there’s not much of a need to “survive” in Atomfall. But the resistance potions prove to be exceedingly useful for some of the environmental hazards.

I Listened to the Creepy Voice on the Tele(phone)

The crux of the story is to find a way out of the quarantine zone, especially since you can’t remember how you got into it in the first place. To accomplish this goal, you can align yourself with a few different characters who all say they will help you escape. So in that way, there are probably a few different “endings,” although I wager they are all variations on the theme.

One of those characters is someone (or something) that calls you up on the phone via the telephone boxes and guides you in your journey. I could’ve also allied with the army captain to escape with the soldiers (but nah I killed those fuckers). You could’ve also aligned yourself with a scientist or an herbalist. I think there are six or seven different ways to escape.

So, the story plays out slightly differently depending on whose escape plan you want to align yourself with. I just happened to like the creepy voice on the phone. He seemed nice, worth trusting.

Let’s Wrap This Thing Up

So, that was an awful lot of rambling for a game that I genuinely think is a 7/10. It does nothing exceedingly well, but it also doesn’t do anything exceedingly poorly. Not to compare it to Avowed again, but Avowed does a lot of things much better, but Avowed also has combat that almost bored me to death by the end.

At least in Atomfall, enemies die typically to one bullet to the end, even on the harder difficulties. But one’s a more traditional RPG and the other isn’t. So, it’s not really fair to compare the two.

However, 7/10 or not, I had an awfully enjoyable time making my way through Atomfall, and it’s not so long as to get long in the tooth, either. I guess the bottom line is that it’s basically the perfect AA Game Pass game.

And that’s something.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t spent the last few months gaming my balls off. I just haven’t been too concerned about writing about anything my balls have been doing.

Until now, that is.

So, rather than writing about just one game, I’m just going to wax poetic about everything I’ve played and been up to over the last 3 months (including buying a new video card!).

Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth

Back in January, after anxiously awaiting its PC release, I finally got to play through, although honestly, it came out far sooner than I was expecting, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I thought Remake was a fine game, and it was truly the first Final Fantasy game I sank my teeth into. I thought it was ultimately pretty fun, maybe with a bit too much filler—although it was trying to stretch one game into three full games, so I’ll cut the giant video game company known as “Squeenix” a little slack.

However, Rebirth fuckin’ rocked. It improved on just about every aspect of Remake, in my humblest of opinions. Except for Gongaga. Navivating that mushroom-laden shithole was a fucking chore and I hope climate change hits it first. And the Cait-Sith level—fuck that shit even harder.

Everything else, though … immaculate. The open world was fun to explore, and the side stuff was maybe a little on the excessive side (lookin’ at you Chadley), but I never really felt too exhausted during my experiences.

The game was also a lot more “fun” than Remake, like the coterie seemed to be somewhat enjoying themselves through a lot of it (but not all of it). And the game has a lot of little goofy and very enjoyable moments throughout moments of a lot of heaviness.

As my first real Final Fantasy game, I didn’t know much about the original game, although I did play Crisis Core, which, looking back, I sort of regret because that thing spoils a lot of some of the reveals that happen later in FF7. But oh well.

Rebirth is ultimately a great time—bring on the 3rd game.

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

While I do agree that this is probably the best pirate game since Black Flag (not that there are many contenders in that category), it still doesn’t quite hold a candle to Black Flag. It’s still very much a Yakuza game, one that happens to also have lots of (very fun) pirate shenanigans.

I, myself, am a relatively recent Yakuza convert, and Pirate is a great entry point into the series (minus the ugly saturation/contrat issues, but that’s a nitpick). There are some loose connections to primarily Infinite Wealth, but you can play through Pirate Yakuza without really knowing much of anything about the overarching Yakuza story.

It definitely feels like a side story in all the best ways. Just Majima off in Hawaii without his memories playing Pirate for a bit of time, and most of what happens is very self-contained.

Self-contained and tons of fun, albeit maybe a bit too easy. I was playing on the hardest difficulty, Professional, and there was nary a challenge to be found. That didn’t prevent both the brawlin’ and the ship battles from being loads of fun, but it was definitely on the easy side. But I’m also close to 100%ing it, so that’s a pretty ringing endorsement, since I don’t 100% many games.

Avowed

I have a lot of reverence for Obsidian Entertainment (can we get a whoop-whoop for Alpha Protocol). For the longest time, I’ve kinda considered them to be Bioware’s little sibling (at least back when Bioware was undeniably great—you could deny it a little now).

My first impressions of Avowed were quite high—unfortunately, they went down from there. I still think the game is good; however, by the end, I stopped thinking it was great.

One thing that’s undeniable about it is how pretty it is. Unreal Engine 5 is put to great use here. And the thing I liked most about Avowed was the sense of exploration and turning no stone unturned. The art design and general levels of eye candy and world-building were great.

Too bad that by the end, I was pretty much 100% over the combat in the game. I will take some blame for that. I went in playing on Path of the Damned, and while I feel like the game was never too challenging, boy were the enemies spongy. Despite having good gear, I felt like most enemies were just taking way too long to defeat.

Despite my initial intentions to play a Wizard, I picked up a bow and was like “Hey, headshots are fun,” so I ran with that—holy hell, were Rangers boring. I think it’s my fault for not bothering to change specializations later in the game. I was seriously considering it by the last area. The downside was that I was nearly done, so I didn’t want to bother.

So, that’s partly my own fault. I think maybe I would’ve had more fun playing a Fighter or a Wizard.

There just wasn’t much going on with Rangers, just a series of repeated head clicks with the crosshairs of a bow. It would’ve been great if they had added something to make combat a little more interesting, maybe some special arrows or magic enchantments or something.

All of the Ranger abilities, except for everyone’s favorite Bear Bro, were geared around letting you click heads a little more effectively and for a little more damage.

I do know that Obsidian is planning updates (and maybe DLC) and will be releasing a roadmap soon. I am definitely interested in revisiting Avowed in a year or so and playing a different spec.

It’s a good thing the choice-filled story seemed to have other paths to take, so for that reason alone, it’s probably worth at least two playthroughs. I do think the story was solid, but nothing to really write home about. Just fairly solid writing across the board.

I do feel like the game feels more like a really good AA game and not a true AAA game, which is fine, and not every game needs to be AAA or even AAAA (nice try, Skull & Bones). As a Game Pass game, it’s an easy recommendation, but seeing that it’s priced at $69.99 USD, it’s hard to recommend buying it at that price.

I Got an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT

For over four years now, I’ve been using an RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition, which I was lucky enough to grab up at MSRP for $700. Truthfully, I didn’t need to upgrade, but I wanted to, so I did.

Originally, I was aiming to get an RTX 5080, but with as hard as Nvidia has dropped the ball with this generation, and with as nice as the RDNA 4 has been for AMD, I figured it was time to jump ship to Team Red (hell yeah, communism).

So, on release, I got lucky enough to snatch up a Gigabyte Aorus Elite 9070 XT, and so far, I am not disappointed. With my 3080, I was just getting to the point that I was no longer able to play games as smoothly as I wanted at settings that I wanted. And now I can. I did have some weird stuttering that I was able to solve by reinstalling the AMD drivers, so whatever.

Outside of that, it be fast. I even had the #1 score in 3DMark’s Steel Nomad benchmark with my CPU/GPU combo. It helps that I don’t think many people are using a 12900KF. The Aorus also seems like it’ll be a great overclocker, if I feel like putting effort into that. However, even with the performance tuning option in AMD Adrenaline, I’m boosting close to 3300mhz, which is certainly higher than the advertised 3100mhz. And it runs cooler than my 3080 did.

I was also interested in being a guinea pig (I’m a weirdo, I know), and use AMD for streaming—especially considering that, historically, AMD’s codecs have been far behind Nvidia’s Nvenc, but they evidently stepped up their game with the 90 series. And sure enough, they did. I’ve only streamed with it once so far, for about 7 hours, but I had 0 issues during that time, even using OBS’s enhanced broadcasting for shats and gaggles.

The quality seems quite comparable to Nvenc—maybe a minor, minor step down. You’d probably not even notice it unless you were squinting really hard. So, for anyone who streams who has been hesitant to get an AMD GPU because of the stranglehold that Nvenc had on streaming, it seems like AMD is finally a worthy contender. We just need Twitch to get their shit together and roll out wide support for either HEVC or AV1.

Some Random Music Recommendations

We’re only a little over three months into 2025, but there have been some stellar releases so far this year. In order of most badass:

Coheed and Cambria: The Father of Make Believe – Honestly, Coheed’s probably one of my favorite bands, and this album doesn’t disappoint. It’s just banger after banger after banger. Tethered Together is my favorite track so far. It’s hard not to want to belt the lyrics.

Bartees Strange: Horror – Bartees finds a way to blend so many different genres and sounds that it’s kind of like magic. I’ve loved every one of his albums, and it’s been a thrill watching his progression over the last 5 years or so. Sober is such an amazing track, and I say that as someone who’s only ever been addicted to video games.

Spiritbox: Tsunami Sea – This is the sophomore release, and it’s certainly no slump. More bangers to be found here.

L.S. Dunes: Violet – I love anything that Anthony Greene is involved in, ever since the 2003 Saosin EP, Translating the Name, and through every Circa Survive album, and The Sound of Animals fighting, and now L.S. Dunes. This is technically their 2nd album, too, and I think it’s even better than the first.

See You Later

I’ll try not to take four months to post again. But no promises.

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Thanks to my undying love of Dead Cells, the moment Windblown wafted into my radar, I smashed that wishlist button and bought it when it came out. Consider what follows to be tantamount to my first impressions of the game after about fifteen hours, although I think I’ve seen most everything that’s currently available.

That said, if you haven’t played Dead Cells, I’d honestly recommend just starting there. It has far more content and is basically done at this point. Then, by the time you’ve played it to exhaustion, Windblown should presumably be a bit further along, and you can check it out then.

However, read on if you’ve played the hell out of Dead Cells and are looking for something new to sink your teeth into.

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Windblown definitely feels like an evolution of Dead Cells, so expect me to compare the two throughout this. Deal with it. After all, I’ve put over 200 hours into Dead Cells, so it’s practically part of my DNA at this point. That’s since 2017 and throughout early access, and maybe also multiple saves? I don’t remember. I’m getting old.

Safe to say, anyone who’s spent a decent amount of time with Dead Cells will feel pretty much right at home with Windblown, even if its presentation might lead you to think otherwise.

WHAT IS THIS THING?

For starters, Windblown is fully 3D, although it uses a fixed, isometric camera. I’m a big fan of the art style, and the game is also Steam Deck verified, and runs quite well from my experience. Oh, and the music is a 10/10.

If you’ve played Dead Cells, you’ll doubtlessly notice a few parallels. You can equip two weapons, two trinkets, and a Magifish, which are friendly little fishies with significant effects that come with a long cooldown. You won’t unlock Magifish until a little later into the game.

To unlock new upgrades, including healing potions, the ability to sell gear, items at the start of a run, etc, you spend gears you collect. Other items require memory shards, including weapons, trinkets, and “gifts.”

Gifts are the upgrades that allow you to hone in on your build, much like the mutations in Dead Cells. You can pick up new ones during a run, or change them at will if you have too many.

You get three by default, but you can unlock more slots, allowing you to conjure up an even more overpowered build.

One of my personal favorites has been a Crystalize build. Crystalize is a core upgrade that you’ll unlock relatively early, allowing you to “finish” elite enemies and bosses.

Well, naturally, there are Gifts for Crystalize, notably one that allows you to Crystalize ANY enemy. There’s also a different gift that will let you gain a shield with every Crystalize. You can probably see how powerful that is. If you can crystalize enemies without taking damage, you’ll quickly develop an entirely new health bar.

There are also burn, bleed, and a billion other potential build options—and probably more to come as the game evolves and new Gifts are added. The trick is selecting gifts that work together in synergy.

After just a few hours, you’ll have more upgrades, both locked and unlocked, than you can shake a stick at, and much like Dead Cells, you’ll also earn some core upgrades that give you more tools for exploration—or murderin’.

Trading Openness for Linearity

One big difference compared to Dead Cells is that Windblown is quite linear. Rather than having open biomes that you can port around in, Windblown has you going from the beginning to the end of each zone; there are a few branching paths along the way, but it’s mostly a start and a finish, with a boss at the end of each biome.

Clearly, Motion Twin is going for something more similar to Hades, where you pick doors and choose rewards, but the overall structure is much more linear. Dead Cells makes you choose between going to the next biome or clearing the one you’re in for more rewards.

Windblown’s linear nature trades some of the sense of exploration—but there’s still plenty of that—for a really brisk pacing that will definitely appeal to a lot of people. However, I’m not sure I like it as much as what’s done in Hades or Dead Cells.

Of course, things could change over the course of early access and any potential subsequent DLC, but Motion Twin completely changing how levels are designed would be surprising.

The good news is that this level design means that you don’t really need a map, which Windblown doesn’t have—at least not currently. If you do happen to get lost, there are markers on the ground indicating the way forward.

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There are also lots of little hidden secrets and chests, plus some upgrades that allow you to go windsurfing to access new areas. However, every one of these side paths loop back around to the main path pretty quickly.

Windblown Isn’t Easy

Dead Cells wasn’t easy either, but you could take it slow, pick up Scrolls, get lots of health, and maybe brute force your way through the experience. In Windblown, Boosts take the place of Scrolls—at least in a broad sense.

Boosts, however, have many more upgrades available, and on top of that, boosts themselves can be lesser or greater, meaning sometimes you’ll get +25 health, and sometimes you’ll get +50. Other times, you’ll get 10% more critical damage or 30%.

So, each run seems to have way more variance than Dead Cells, or even Hades. You can go through five or six boosts and not have a single health upgrade. Rerolling might be a nice addition—maybe that will get added.

Otherwise, you have about 100 health by default, and some enemy attacks are 40 or 50 damage. In other words, don’t get hit—ever. There are health potions, but if you end up having to chug all those fuckers before you even make it to the first boss—or second—you might as well just throw in the towel.

Alterattacks

One neat new thing that Windblown brings to the table, at least in comparison to Dead Cells, is Alterattacks. Basically, once you complete a combo with one weapon, you can perform a finisher with another weapon. These attacks typically have a few i-frames tied to them, meaning they are great for dealing and avoiding damage.

Alterattacks will end up being key to most playstyles, and if you progress far enough, you’ll even unlock more powerful Alterattacks that you can perform in sequence, meaning that you have a finisher for your finisher if you’re able to chain together enough finishes. Fin.

Oh, It Has Co-op, Too

Although I haven’t had the chance to check it out myself—I like playing these games solo, but I’m open to grouping up with friends—Windblown does allow you to play with a group of up to four players.

One point of contention I’ve seen around the game, despite not having co-oped myself, pertains to a sudden death mechanic, where if someone dies, you need to kill ten enemies to revive them, which makes boss fights way more difficult.

I don’t have much of a horse in this race, because I couldn’t give two shits about co-op, but Motion Twin has said that they’re looking into tweaking this sudden-death mechanic.

Let’s Wrap This Thing Up

If you haven’t been able to tell, I like Windblown quite a lot—probably not as much as I like Dead Cells, but that’s after nearly a decade of updates. The foundation is there—Windbown is just as satisfying to play, although it borrows a lot from Dead Cells in its core design.

Judging by the achievements, I’ve gotten to the current last boss, but haven’t killed it yet. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still plenty to unlock or maybe new biomes to discover, but for the most part, I feel like I’ve seen the majority of what Windblown has to offer as it currently stands.

I’ll definitely be keeping up with its updates, like I did Dead Cells, and it’ll be fun to watch it grow and evolve like that game did.

In the meantime, a big Rogue Prince of Persia update comes out in a few days. I’ve been waiting on the opportunity to pull the trigger on that, and this is probably that opportunity.

All rogues all the time.

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Up until this remake, Blooper Team hadn’t exactly hit it out of the park or anything, although I have heard great things about Observer—another one I haven’t played. The original Layers of Fear was solid, but not anything special. Both Blair Witch and The Medium were middling. They did remake Layers of Fear to mixed reviews.

All that taken and averaged out into some semblance of something akin to expectations would lead one to believe that maybe, best case scenario, their Silent Hill 2 remake would be middling. Few times have I been this happy to have been this wrong, because Silent Hill 2 is one of the best games of the year.

I can’t really speak for how fans of the series might view it—although even that seems overwhelmingly positive, too. But I couldn’t have been more happy with how this remake turned out.

Does it mean that the golden age of Blooper is here? They sure hope so, considering that they told Gamespot recently that they were “done making shitty games.”

While it might be a while until we see another Silent Hill game out of them, Blooper did announce Chronos: The New Dawn for 2025, so we’ll see if they can put their money—well, I guess my money—where their mouth is. Fingers crossed.

Oh Yeah, We’re Talking about Silent Hill 2

While Blooper’s apparent surprise ability to make great games is interesting in its own right, let’s dive into Silent Hill 2.

Recently, I played through Hollowbody, and although I knew that it was inspired by games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, I wasn’t exactly sure how inspired it was until I actually played this new remake. It just reiterates how great of an homage Hollowbody is.

It’s pretty neat.

I Like It Hard – Mostly

Since I like to challenge myself—while at the same time not challenging myself (because I’m an enigma wrapped in mostly doofusness)—I chose to play the game with hard combat and light (easy) puzzles.

And let me tell you, it was a great time. Ammo and resources were scarce, and I think I went through most of the apartment building (the first big location) while being one band toe-stub away from death.

I don’t get scared in games, but being that pressured for resources made the game ten times more tense and enjoyable. I ended up not actually dying too much; I only felt like I was about to die practically all the time.

On a related note, I’ve more recently been playing through Last of Us Part 1 on Survivor difficulting, thinking it would be similar levels of fun. It is not. Don’t do that … unless you like to be constantly out of ammo while hoping someone—anyone—will drop a couple of hunting rifle rounds.

I guess it’s good that none of the enemies in Silent Hill 2 have guns, cause that probably would’ve made hard mode way harder. Fortunately, with the help of the melee weapons, even when you’re low on ammo, you can whip and weave and dodge and whack—and it usually works.

I did run out of ammo a few times and have to resort to these pro strategies—even on a few boss fights, where I was definitely thinking, “Oh god, I’m fucked. I better just whack it with this metal pipe a few times before it kills me.”

And lo and behold, somehow, those last few whacks did the trick, and I somehow killed the boss—at which point my next thought was, “Oh fuck, now I need to find some ammo.”

So yes, I didn’t find the game exceedingly scary—but the difficulty kept me on my toes.

If I had any criticism, it’s that maybe the game could’ve used a few more enemy varieties. Throughout Silent Hill 2, you’re primarily fighting the Lying Figures, Mannequins, and sexy, sexy nurses.

At night, you transition into the Otherworld, which offers slightly different versions of these enemies, but by and large, they’re your primary foe.

The Mannequins, especially, can go fuck themselves.

What You Do When You’re Not Shooting Sexy Nurses in the Head

Outside of the frequent encounters spent fighting tooth and nail with a slew of different enemies, there’s a ton of exploration, with plenty of nooks and crannies to explore. Silent Hill 2 isn’t completely open-world, but it’s open enough.

Your buddy James, when he’s not being utterly confounded by the things happening around him, will conveniently mark up his map, so it’s easy to tell where to go, and I rarely ever got lost, and it was pretty easy to keep track of your next objective.

Next to exploration is probably my favorite aspect of any game … puzzles—which is why I turned them down to easy.

Granted, I don’t mind puzzles, but a lot of the time in video games—Silent Hill 2 included—they err on the side of obnoxiously obtuse and illogical in a way that breaks immersion.

The good news is that because so much of this specific game takes place in James’s head (spoiler), the puzzles are basically a means of his mind trapping him in his little loop of guilt. This is way more acceptable than something like Resident Evil (a series I still love), where the puzzles really don’t make much logical sense except that someone in the mansion, police station, castle, whatever—was really an asshole.

However, even if the puzzles in Silent Hill 2 are all in James’s head—although I think some of them are probably in Silent Hill (the place) or a combination of the two—that doesn’t mean I want to spend more time than necessary trapped in a room with moths trying to figure out how many symbols to count and the math equation to give me the code for a lock.

If anything, I really appreciate when games have reduced difficulty for puzzles. I looked a few up, and Silent Hill 2 has different solutions depending on the difficulty, with hard puzzles taking a bit more brainwork.

Too bad I’m too lazy for difficult puzzles. On easy, for me at least, they provide a nice little break from the exploration and combat without being too much of a time consumer (time consuming, consume me — down and out, now; sorry sometimes I just go into random bouts of Coheed & Cambria).

A Guilty Conscious

I feel like the story of Silent Hill 2 (primarily the original) has been done to death at this point, so I won’t go into too much detail. One interesting idea that I read and agree with is that the Silent Hill 2 remake doesn’t really “replace” the original. In some ways, it’s like a complement to the first.

James has been living in this loop (or is a spiral?) for years now, stuck in his own guilty torment over killing his wife, reliving everything … over and over, since 2001.

In that sense, you could argue that this remake serves as a way of catching up with him and seeing what the old chap has been doing for the better part of the last 25 years. Silent Hill 2 (2001) is still canon, and so is this remake, and they all live in perpetuity as James continues beatin’ himself up.

Leaving Silent Hil

Ultimately, I think this remake is pretty fucking rad, from the graphics (minus a few stutters and framerate drops), to the story, to the way it sits in the Silent Hill mythos—of which I am only recently a newcomer.

I think, moving forward, the series is in good hands if Blooper gets to make another one—either a remake or something new. And this game definitely has given me renewed hope for what Blooper will do next—Chronos: The New Dawn. That game seems like it might be pretty dang rad. Here’s hoping the golden age of Blooper continues.

A couple of years ago, I checked out Chasing Static, a little indie game crafted by the solo developer helming Headware Games. It was a nice little sleeper that I’m sure a lot of people missed, but it’s thoroughly enjoyable, so mayhaps check it out if you haven’t.

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So, when his follow-up, Hollowbody, came out on September 12th, I naturally had to check it out—and at the low, low price of $16.99 (it was actually cheaper at launch), it was almost a no-brainer.

At its core, Hollowbody is an homage to the early 2000s-era horror games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil. It certainly looks the part, and it also features both fixed cameras at times and a very static over-the-shoulder camera at other times. It also has an option to enable tank controls—if you really want that authentic experience.

The UI is very reminiscent of that era, from the menus to the map; they just scream 2002. Weapon handling, too—both melee and firearms—feels very dated, but in a good way. If it weren’t for some of the scope concessions that come from a game built by one person, Hollowbody could feel like a hi-res version of a game that could’ve come out over 20 years ago.

Nothing is perfect

There are a few caveats. First off, there are only a handful of enemy types and two firearms, as well as a needless amount of backtracking. While maybe you could’ve found these facets of game design a couple of decades ago, by modern standards, they detract from the experience—not by much, however.

With as short as the game is, the repetitive enemies and backtracking never got annoying, but I was cognizant of it at the time. The save system also forced me to replay 20 to 30 minutes the few times that I died—which is about as bad as backtracking. But hey, git gud, right?

Why are we even here

The story focuses on you (Mica) going off in search of your missing partner in an abandoned Britain filled with monsters. While the beginning of the game has some fun cyberpunk vibes, with flying cars and neon lights, once you actually make it to Britain, it quickly becomes a post-apocalyptic trek through a derelict neighborhood (or neighbourhood).

There’s a lot of exploration, which helps to flesh out the backstory, but all of this rummaging doesn’t seem to serve much purpose otherwise. For instance, the first “level” is an apartment building, and while there are a lot of rooms to explore, only a handful of these rooms are required for progression. Otherwise, they serve to provide you with some decent audio logs and backstory for the people who lived in the building.

However, since these rooms tend to all look the same, I most definitely got lost after dying and reloading, not entirely sure where I had and hadn’t been, and walking around in circles a bit—great for the atmosphere, less great for gameplay.

I won’t spoil everything, although, to be fair, none of the locations are too exciting. However, outside of some exploratory endeavors, Hollowbody also features some light logic-based puzzle-solving, which involves finding random items and figuring out how to use them—or memorizing names for cross-referencing them with a graveyard. No puzzle in Hollowbody ever stumped me (and I have no patience for puzzles), so they helped with pacing.

Stompin’ heads

As for combat, there’s a simple “lock on target” and then simply whack ‘em with your melee weapon, or dump rounds into them with your firearm. Melee is also a bit clunky, but since beating it, Headware Games has already been tweaking some stuff, including melee balance. So, your mileage may vary.

Most enemies, after doing enough damage to them, will collapse, and you’ll need to finish them off by either stomping them or bustin’ a cap in their asses. This actually caused my first death. Unbeknownst to me, but these monsters can still attack exceedingly quickly once they’re down, so I ended up getting a little stun-locked and killed before I could do a little stomp-stomp.

While that’s a bit annoying, a patch that rolled out after I finished sped up Mica’s reaction to being hit, which might allow you to navigate those situations a little more easily. But I would still say it’s something to keep an eye out for whenever you beat one of these fucker’s down.

Like most of these games, ammo conservation is a concern, but it’s not a huge one, although I did start to worry about running out of ammo completely toward the end of the game—but you can always use melee weapons as a fallback.

Otherwise, I used the clever strategy of switching to whichever weapon had the most ammo at any given point in time. That alone kept me afloat throughout most of the game, aside from the aforementioned moment toward the end, where I was like, “Oh crap, we’re getting low; better take out this street sign and start whackin’ these monsters with it.”

Oh god, we’re done

Now that I’ve beaten Hollowbody, if I were to sum up my experiences in a few words, it would be that Hollowbody is good, but not great. I certainly don’t regret the nearly six hours I spent with it, especially considering that it’s a product of one person.

I might even return to it at some point. After finishing Hollowbody, NG+ unlocks, as well as a first-person mode, which I can only imagine completely changes the experience, so that’s probably worth a look.

Ultimately, though, for as cheap as it is, and considering the fact that you can finish it in one sitting, Hollowbody is easy to recommend, especially if you want to support a solo developer.