CONSCRIPT: Director’s Cut

I’m surprised I haven’t seen more online discourse about CONSCRIPT since its original release in 2024. I purchased CONSCRIPT after it received its major ‘Director’s Cut’ update in 2025 so I can’t speak for the quality of the game prior to the update but what is on sale now is an incredible piece of work, made even more impressive by the fact that it was all at the hands of solo developer Jordan Mochi. An unfathomable amount of work has gone into capturing the unrelenting, chaotic and catastrophic horrors of World War I in CONSCRIPT, which portrays the conflict as a top-down survival horror adventure. It is an ode to the classic survival horror games of old, notably Resident Evil, with obvious nods to the series such as inventory management, burning corpses and a shopkeeper that manages to turn up at every store to ask “whaddya buyin’”.

CONSCRIPT isn’t simply a cheap imitation though; it has ideas of its own and stands apart from the Resident Evil games whilst still clearly being inspired by them. CONSCRIPT could have so easily introduced supernatural elements (i.e. zombies) but restrained itself and, in doing so, further differentiates itself from its muse and provides as best a portrayal of the Great War I’ve seen in video games next to the likes of Valiant Hearts.

I played through CONSCRIPT on a lower difficulty because whilst I do enjoy the frantic combat, ammo conservation and min/max-ing with multiple saves that are representative of the survival horror genre, I slightly prefer the puzzles, inventory management and, yes, even the backtracking. Also, in a game as insanely detailed as CONSCRIPT, I was grateful for the less intense pace so I could really take in the amazing pixel art that excellently illustrates the muddy labyrinthine trenches, razed city streets and buildings reduced to rubble of 1916 Verdun.

CONSCRIPT: Director’s Cut was a blast to play and my Steam Deck was glued to my mitts from the moment I pressed start. CONSCRIPT absolutely sits alongside some of the best examples in the recent resurgence of old-school survival horror games such as SIGNALIS and Crow Country and is definitely worthy of your time.

Roto Force

Twin-stick bullet hell shooters are a dime a dozen on Steam and finding a good one sometimes requires word of mouth or trial and error. Roto Force on the other hand only requires a quick glance at its screenshots to get an idea of its bright and colourful nature, which is in stark contrast to a lot of other shooters that simply have geometric shapes floating around on a black background. Don’t get me wrong, there are several arcade shooters that have that aesthetic and are brilliant, like the recent Sektori, but it is refreshing to see a game like Roto Force that has more of a distinctive art style and personality with tonnes of different colour palettes, enemy sprites and weapons meaning you rarely see the same thing twice across its nine main stages.

What also separates Roto Force from others is that instead of having free roam of the virtual space, you can only navigate your little worm character around the edges of the screen. You can catapult the creature from one edge to another but only the enemy characters are able to move freely within the borders of each stage. It creates a different kind of gameplay and strategy whilst also maintaining that satisfying but hectic feeling of claustrophobia emblematic of bullet hell shooters.

Roto Force is another example where I’m grateful for developer Accidentally Awesome including various modifiers and accessibility settings that allowed me to slow down the gameplay and turn up the damage multiplier on the fly. These settings allowed me to continue having fun instead of bashing my head against a wall and rage quitting upon the game’s harder sections. This way I was able to see the game through to its conclusion, having a great time in the process.

Boxes: Lost Fragments

This was free on the Epic Games Store and whilst it is extremely derivative of The Room series, Fireproof Games haven’t released a new, non-VR entry into the series in some time so Boxes: Lost Fragments is a decent substitute. Boxes: Lost Fragments doesn’t have the same level of thought-provoking puzzles as The Room; in fact it’s very much on the easier side, but it still has that satisfying tactility of manipulating objects and revealing the nested layers of intricate puzzle boxes. Rotating gears, twisting keys, raising levers, unscrewing bolts, that kind of thing. Whilst its mostly an ersatz version of The Room, isn’t revolutionary in its gameplay or ideas, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a puzzle that stumps you for more than a few seconds, taken on its own merits, Boxes: Lost Fragments was a comfortable distraction to keep my brain occupied during its four-hour runtime.

Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf

If you enjoyed Planet of Lana in 2023 then you’ll enjoy Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf because it is pretty much more of the same. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way as Planet of Lana was a stunning cinematic platformer with satisfying puzzles that I very much enjoyed. So ‘more of the same’ was all I really wanted from its sequel. Planet of Lana II is a continuation of the story and gameplay of its predecessor, just with a greater air of confidence as it has the conviction to spend more time developing its narrative and to introduce players to trickier puzzles right off the bat; both of which were a comparatively slow burn in the previous game. There is a considerable step up in Planet of Lana II’s visuals, which is quite a feat given the first game’s striking art. The greatest compliment I can pay to Planet of Lana II is that it looks like Star Wars and Spirited Away had a baby. The animation is smoother and the environments are more diverse with a sweeping orchestral score that accompanies beautiful landscapes that look like Hoth and Endor. No sophomore slump to be had here. I’m looking forward to seeing what the third game (that is quite obviously teased at the end of Planet of Lana II) serves up in a few years. Again, I hope it’s just more of same.

Spilled!

I bought and finished Spilled! yesterday so this one is hot of the press! It’s a relaxing one-hour experience that sees you pilot a little ship that goes around cleaning up ocean waste. The more oil spillages you clean the more coins you are awarded that allow you to upgrade the speed of the ship, its capacity to hold oil and the width of its loader bucket that can sweep up objects like oil drums into its path. Given its short runtime there’s not much to Spilled! outside of this small gameplay loop other than a couple of other elements such as a crane to collect submerged drums and a hose to put out fires and restore ice sheets. It’s a rather rudimentary game and whilst I was probably more enamoured by the developer’s personal story of making the game whilst living on an actual house boat, I was still happy to indulge in Spilled!’s colourful pixel art, PowerWash Simulator-like cleanup satisfaction and hopeful outlook on climate change intervention.

And that’s it for this three-part series now we’re all caught up to present day. Stay tuned and I’ll hopefully have more in the following weeks where I hope to finish the likes of REANIMAL, Mind Over Magnet, CARIMARA, The Boba Teashop and more from the backlog.

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The Roottrees are Dead

I’m glad I finally got round to this one after hearing nothing but glowing praise from critics and players alike upon its release last year. The Roottrees are Dead is another investigative/deduction game that tasks you with completing a genealogical family chart in order to discover who is the rightful heir to the fortune of the deceased Roottree family who perished in a plane crash. Searching for keywords on an early internet computer terminal, you must discover the faces, names and occupations of each member of the family tree and, much like in The Return of the Obra Dinn, the game locks in each set of three successfully identified members.

Whilst The Roottrees are Dead is set in 1998, it could have been set in any other year and I wish the developers leaned into early internet culture more as this choice of time period appears to simply for superficially aesthetic purposes and a convenient way of having web pages that are quite sparse. Perhaps overwhelming the web pages with too much time-specific dressings ala Hypnospace Outlaw would take the spotlight away from the key information relevant to your search but still, I wish there was a bit more references to the late nineties.

What matters more is that The Roottrees are Dead excels at the puzzle aspect of its gameplay; entrusting the player to use research and deductive reasoning skills and whilst providing just enough of a breadcrumb trail in order for them to reach its satisfying conclusion with a bit of a twist.

Loretta

I initially started Loretta when it released in 2023 but never managed to see it through to its completion despite its fairly short runtime of around three to four hours. A lot of games struggle with narrative dissonance with you frequently playing as a character who is portrayed as sympathetic and relatable while they’re committing acts of genocide and mowing down entire villages with an assault rifle. This isn’t the case with Loretta. Set in 1940s New York, you play as the titular Loretta who, at the very beginning of the game, decides to murder her husband. What unfolds is her continued descent into homicidal mania and wanton destruction.

The game contains social commentary about navigating the misogyny of 1940s America (not much has changed in that respect) and none of the characters Loretta meets are sympathetic, but ultimately Loretta is a middle-class white woman who married into wealth and had it far easier than most. It was therefore difficult for me to fully empathise with her strife despite what I believe were the game’s attempts to portray her as some sort of antihero femme fatale. But that’s what is intriguing about Loretta and why I returned to it several years later; it’s not often you get to play as a protagonist, especially a female protagonist, who is deeply flawed with almost no redeeming qualities and I was curious to see how far the game’s narrative was prepared to push the boundaries of her already depraved character. Turns out a lot depending on the decisions you make and the various endings you can unlock.

Overall I think Loretta ends up being more of a campy showcase of (great) pixel art murder porn than a deeply philosophical think piece on psychosis but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless.

Schattenjäger

The title ‘Schattenjäger’ alone is like a siren song to my adventure game-addled brain and if, like me, you fall into the Venn Diagram of sickos who have a nerdy interest in both the Gabriel Knight series and the early Castlevania games then this one is for you. Schattenjäger is a rather rudimentary action platformer but its main gimmick is that you can zoom in and out of the whole Castlevania III-like stage. No loading screens, screen tearing or slow down, but still the ability to get killed far too easily whilst going up and down a flight of steps. Oh, and you play as Gabriel Knight. Schattenjäger is nothing more than a weird novelty that superfluously merges two properties I hold near and dear to my heart so I can’t say it’s a must play, especially if you don’t have an affinity to either the Gabriel Knight or Castlevania franchises. Even so Schattenjäger is still a short, free experience on itch.io if you want to give it a whirl.

Creature Kitchen

This is probably my favourite game so far this year. In Creature Kitchen you are the new proprietor of a cabin in the woods and are tasked with keeping the local animals and cryptids fed and happy. Take a picture of each of the denizens of the surrounding forest with your polaroid camera and you’ll uncover the various dishes of their choice. Some are strict carnivores, some are vegetarian, some love cheese. Preparing meals involves Cooking Mama-like mechanics of whisking, chopping and frying ingredients, and combining them in a magical oven. Once you’ve sufficiently fed and become friends with each animal, they’ll provide a key that unlocks new areas in and around the cabin where you’ll find new recipes to add to your cookbook. Although on its surface it has a lo-fi spooky, horror vibe, Creature Kitchen is actually a wholesome affair with a sentimental message at its conclusion that’ll I remember for a long time. What a gem.

That’s it for part II, I’ll see you later for what should be the final drop of games in part III!

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Apologies for the lack of posts over the last few months. I assure you that it’s with good reason. Although I managed to publish a few musings last year, in terms of actually playing games, 2025 was an extremely fallow period with fewer games completed than any other year I can remember in my adult history. This year I have strived to do better and this resolution was made easier by the fact that I have had time away from work and training in the gym. As a result, my focus and concentration levels have increased, as has my desire for playing games.

I am thrilled to say that I have played more games in these first two-and-a-half months of 2026 than I did for the entirety of 2025. And that’s the reason behind the lack of posts; I am choosing not to look a gift horse in its mouth, striking whilst the iron is hot, and dedicating any free time I have to playing as many games as I can whilst life circumstances afford me that privilege. Whilst I haven’t written singular posts for each game, true to original purpose of this Substack, I will be providing some (very) short musings on each of the games I have played so far this year to catch up to present day. Here is part one of three to be dropped in the coming days.

Big Hops

It’s essential for any platformer to nail its movement system and Big Hops does this in leaps and bounds (pun very much intended) with your player character, a frog, having a satisfising sense of weight, momentum and agility. What differentiates Big Hops from the many other 3D mascot platformers that have come out recently is in its confidence to provide player agency. Your playable frog has a backpack that can hold a selection of different types of ‘fruit’ plucked from plants found in the world. Each of these fruits interact with the environment in different ways, providing alternate means of traversing through the world. For example, acorns grow vines that can be climbed up; mushrooms turn into bounce pads; and cacti shoot out a slackline between two anchor points. These fruit can be thrown onto almost every surface and can be utilised at any throughout the game, providing you have them in your backpack, so much of the fun and freedom in Big Hops is found by completing platforming obstacles in ways that perhaps the developers didn’t intend. This, combined with interesting movement tech means it will no doubt be a speedrunning favourite and I will be shocked if it doesn’t end up on the roster for this year’s Summer Games Done Quick.

Despite my enjoyment of Big Hops, I’d be remiss to not disclose that I encountered a hardlock during my playtime and was only able to continue by editing and transferring save files between my Steam Deck and Desktop, continuing from a developer save state, and losing a lot of my own unlocks in the process. The irony is that the hardlock wasn’t even a result of finding creative ways to break the game using different fruit where not intended; it simply occurred from losing all my health in an area near the end of a level and the game reloading to a end-level state without the ability to progress.

I played Big Hops close to its release and the game has since had updates and patches but, according to recent posts in the Steam forums, it appears that hardlocking the game is still a possibility that can arise. Despite this misfortune, I still hold Big Hops in high regard but at the same time I can’t recommend it if you don’t have the patience or confidence to modify save files.

Keep Driving

I’m not sure this game will speak to everyone but it certainly did for me as a game about road tripping across Sweden in the early 2000s. Although I got my licence a few years later in 2007, Keep Driving captures the feeling of freedom that passing your driving test affords you as a teenager. This was a period in my life pre-GPS, pre-smartphone and, with my 1998 Vauxhall Corsa, it was even pre-CD player and pre-power steering (no wonder I’ve always had big biceps). All I had was a tape deck, an A-to-Z and an open road in front of me. And it was glorious.

Keep Driving distils this sense of independence and teenage frugality into a turn-based management sim where your car is your trusted ally despite its limitations. You have to contend with the elements, other drivers, acquired passengers, wear and tear to your vehicle etc. as you press on in your meandering adventure. The management part of the game provides just enough friction where you just about make it to your next destination with the fuel gauge on red; your side mirror hanging from its hinge, secured only by a reel of duct tape; and one krona to your name.

I wish there was a bit more of a narrative element to the game and the on-road turn-based battle system is fairly simplistic and lacking depth, but honestly, I was content with staying within Keep Driving’s world largely for its immaculate school’s out, summer road trip vibes.

The Drifter

I say this with no hyperbole: The Drifter is one of the best point and click adventure games I have played in a long, long time. The dark and gritty narrative immediately draws you in and keeps you intrigued from start to finish. The pixel art is some of the best I’ve ever seen and it complements and underscores the game’s pulpy and moody atmosphere in exemplary fashion. True to the genre, The Drifter’s has inventory-based point and click puzzles that provide enough challenge and friction without ever devolving into frustrating, obtuse nonsense, which could have so easily been the case given the sci-fi tinged elements in its story.

The interface is excellent and features a radial menu that changes dynamically depending on where you move the player character and what’s in their vicinity. It plays just as well on a controller as with a mouse and I’d be surprised if this kind of interactivity wasn’t used by all point and clicks going forward.

In every aspect The Drifter is a delight to play and matches, if not surpasses the very best the point and click genre has to offer.

Ells Tales: Chicken

I don’t even know what to say about this one. You play as a hen in a gloomy chicken coop doing sokoban puzzles. It’s weird. It’s also another game with early PlayStation-style graphics, which is a trend that I’ve enjoyed more than I expected and has given way to some of my favourite games in recent history such as Crow Country, Signalis, Mouthwashing and this year’s Creature Kitchen (more on that later this week). Whilst Ells Tales: Chicken is not comparable to the quality of those games in any way, it’s still nice to see these quirky, blocky, polygonal experiences pop up in places outside of itch.io.

TR-49

A narrative deduction game that falls under the same umbrella as other investigative / detective games such as Her Story and The Roottrees are Dead (more on that later this week). This time you’re in a bunker searching for a certain book in a World War II computer using four-digit alphanumerical codes (like TR-49) where the letters represent the first and last name of the author and the numbers represent the year of publication.

You’re told, from a disembodied voice over a radio above ground, that finding this singular publication will alter the course of history. The voice acting feels a bit hammy with the tone of a radio play like The Archers but it still manages to create a sense of atmosphere and urgency to proceedings as you soon discover that you’re not the only one looking to exploit the machine for its untold power and influence.

This underlying story is doled out piecemeal through the other voice on the radio but it was hard to concentrate on that whilst I was busy reading searching the archive and reading entries from the microfilm-like device. From what I could discern, a lot of the game’s meaning and social commentary is left unsaid and is down to player interpretation. All I really took away from it is that words are powerful and curation and censorship, especially in the wrong hands, can have wide-ranging effects. If you can’t tell from that pre-GCSE-level synopsis, I’m no philosopher and most of my enjoyment from the game found in using deductive and sometimes mathematical thinking as well as real-world knowledge to unearth more of the machine’s archive.

Although I needed a few nudges on how to complete the game once I had found the code for the elusive publication, the route to get there unfolds in quite natural way so it’s unlikely players will be able to stumble upon the code accidentally or prematurely.

All in all TR-49 is a competent deduction game and I’m extremely happy for the game’s success given it’s inkle’s best-selling game in their history and came together in around nine months! We love to see it.

That’s the first crop of games I’ve played so far this year. Stay tuned for part two!

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Kicking the main show off, Geoff Keighley actually displayed human emotion (outside of stanning for his BFF Hideo Kojima) about how games provided him with levity in a year that saw his Los Angeles home burn down and the passing of his father. It was a touching moment that proves he’s not an android and I thought this would potentially set the tone of the show. That was until I saw a trailer with pigs eating vomit next to a public orgy and a man flagellating himself…

Let’s start there. That Divinity trailer was disgusting and unnecessary. I’m not clutching my pearls but it was like I had been transported back twenty years to 2005 where the only directive to the advertising team was ‘the grosser the better’. I almost turned the whole show off then it was so abhorrent. I don’t care how much Baldur’s Gate 3 owes its infamy/celebrity to being known as ‘the game where you fuck a bear’; there was no need to go this hard for Larian Studio’s next game. Larian may not be a household name for the layman but a splash screen that read ‘from the studio that brought you Baldur’s Gate 3 - the one where you fuck bears’ and a more palatable trailer would have had achieved the same, if not better effect of advertising Divinity. It’s absolutely tragic that we got this mess of a trailer from a developer who often speak out against the tiresome practices of modern game companies. In three minutes they proved they’re no better than anyone else in the industry and that’s not even mentioning that stupid marketing gimmick of having a statue in the desert.

This has always been a trending theme in The Game Awards. Whatever is next on the roster, whether it be an award, an announcement, a comedy sketch, an advert (the new game announcements are also adverts but you get what I mean), it always undermines the section that came before it so any human moments would always be followed up by some nonsense. The most nonsense was trotting out almost the entire cast of B-list-and-below celebrities (sorry, Jason Momoa, but playing Aquaman and looking like a divorced dad mid-crisis in that one Fast and the Furious film makes you a B-list celebrity) for a new Street Fighter movie that I didn’t know existed. Apparently 50 Cent is in it but I’d wager he’s an A-list celebrity and therefore above making a Game Awards stage appearance, especially since he’s probably cashing in that pay cheque for that Netflix-backed Diddy documentary.

The celebrities that were on stage were clearly high/drunk and doing their best to outshine the inebriated shenanigans of Jamie Foxx, Zac Efron and Snoop Dogg at ‘weed3’ 2016. The film looks like stupid fun and I’m here for it but who knows if it’ll see the light of day since the film is being distributed by Paramount Pictures who have recently made a bid for Warner Bros. and have every chance of assuming their shitty practices of canning the whole thing as a tax write off.

I’m not a huge fan of RPGs so I know next to nothing about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 but it won a lot of awards. A truly human moment (they were few and far between) was when composer Lorien Testard, who worked on Clair Obscur’s soundtrack read out an emotional acceptance speech. He was understandably nervous given he was under bright lights, talking in front of a huge crowd about his passion, and English was not his first language but it was delivered in a manner that was perfectly comprehensible to any anglophone. What was bizarre was when the woman who had stood next to him the whole time interrupted the musical version of the Vaudeville hook that plays winners off before their acceptance speech gets to Christopher Judge-levels of intolerable and recited Testard’s exact speech in somewhat better English, yet still in a French accent. Odd.

Indie games announcements were few and far between but that is to be expected since getting a three-minute trailer trailer played at the game awards reportedly costs ONE MILLION DOLLARS. The only smaller game I recall that looked interesting was Coven of the Chicken Foot; a game from Bruce Straley, co-creator of The Last of Us, and his new studio. Speaking of, The Last of Us was of course part of the show (it wouldn’t be The Game Awards without it) with the TV adaption picking up an award. Despite his seemingly questionable politics, I did enjoy Neil Druckmann making a point to not know what ‘streaming overlord’ (his words, not mine) the TV show is attached to now (LOL).

As ever, the Game Awards will trot out the same faces to read the nominees and winner for various awards. I could digitally remap what the roof of Todd Howard’s mouth looks like from memory at this point.

Almost none of the new game announcements were interesting because the industry is so fucking homogenised it’s tiring and 50% of these games will all be cancelled by the 2027 financial quarter in the pursuit of corporate greed anyway. 75% of them are probably also part- or fully-owned by the same problematic public investment fund, which would also explain why they all look the same.

We’re still betting the house on third-person action games and sequels because creativity in the triple-A space is basically on life support. I’d say the game wedged in that depressing Venn diagram that looks intriguing is Control Resonant. I don’t know how Remedy afforded to bring the trailer and its accompanying Cirque du Soleil act to the Game Awards given that Alan Wake 2 and that Firebreak game both flopped commercially. But then again, aren’t Remedy also backed by an overseas investment fund who would foot the bill? That’s a slightly less depressing thought than the idea of Sam Lake tap dancing in Keighley’s LA mansion (RIP) for a discount on that fee of ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

I will say that I’m not a massive fan of the first Control; I thought the combat was actually worse than that in Quantum Break and the in-game map seems like it was designed by that murderous fridge; but the vibes were immaculate. The switch to melee combat in the sequel looks like an interesting departure.

Despite my protestations about massive conglomerates, I do think the feel-good factor of this year’s show is the reemergence of Star Wars franchise games in a sequel to the Old Republic and a new pod galactic-racing game. I can’t be bothered to look up the name of the games because I really don’t care an ounce about Star Wars as an intellectual property but I thought it was cool to see the revival of some cult classics and I imagine many folk I like and respect will feel the same. The cynic in me is wondering whether these games will actually release given Disney have a penchant for cancelling projects and, if Microsoft have taught us anything, a big company like Disney will slowly siphon any money ringfenced for game development and redirect it towards their recently-announced push into AI.

On a positive note, two budding developers who have been part of the Girls Make Games scholarship fund took to the stage to accept an award on behalf of the organisation, to which I have donated in the past and encourage you do the same if you’re financially able. I can’t help but feel it was an overcorrection from that Summer Games Fest where not a single female or female-presenting developer was included, especially with the camera panning to any woman the camera crew could find in the audience, but it was nice to see future talent up there on stage. Let’s hope they don’t get swallowed up by the mire that is the video game industry - moving half way across the country to work for a company they’ve idolised only to be sacked with no severance two months later (UNIONISE!).

One of the girls on stage was one of the first beneficiaries of the scholarship fund and said that they were now studying at USC (that’s the University of Southern California for all of us non-Americans). That elicited a big cheer from the crowd in the LA Peacock Theater and whilst a lot of game studios are based in SoCal and undoubtedly employ many USC alumni, I couldn’t help but think most of the audience would have to be from the general area given anyone flying in with a foreign passport, accent or slight tan would risk being kidnapped by ICE and held in a detainment centre (read: concentration camp) for three months. Speaking of, has anyone checked on Rahul Kohli or any of the Clair Obscur devs, who were all donning red berets, which is essentially the equivalent of painting a target on your back, since the show?

Keighley apologised to us Europeans for the time difference at the start of the show. We’re not pissed that it’s 1am Geoff; we’re pissed because our compatriots can’t collect a sodding reward without risk of detainment by your fascist government.

Also leaving a sour taste in my mouth was that right after the Girls Make Games section, we got a look at our new yassified iteration of Lara Croft. She’s back to having waterproof eyeliner and a push-up bra again…but dinosaurs are back so I too am in favour of giving the middle finger to feminism and progressivism on this occasion.

If you’ve made it this far you can probably tell I’m pretty down on The Game Awards once again. I shouldn’t really blame Keighley or the show itself since it really is just a reflection of the state of the entire video game industry. Just like every year since 2023 (and probably even prior to that), whatever anyone says to you, 2025 has not been a good year for video games. It can’t possibly be when developers are being fired and driven out the industry in record numbers. And it will only get worse, as shown by The Game Awards’ new game announcements; low-risk, made-by-committee, homogenised, boring-as-shit titles we’ve seen before. Sure, there are outliers like Clair Obscur, but unless we support developers and their creativity over corporate overlords, we’re going to be stuck in this death spiral for a long while. Strap in.

To end on a happy note, the Day of the Devs showcase was awesome, go watch that instead.

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In Winter Burrow you play as a mouse returning to their sylvan family home after living in the city for much of your life. After your parents pass, depressingly from working in the city mines (yay capitalism!) in order to provide a better life, you return back to the woods to the hollow in a tree where you grew up to reconnect with your aunt and other inhabitants of the forest. Unlike other survival games that rely on emergent gameplay to tell a story, there is a narrative in Winter Burrow with quests to complete and a clear progression. In between these quests the moment-to-moment gameplay is all about acquiring the tools and items to withstand the elements and stave off the creeping cold of the snowy forest that surrounds you.

Winter Burrow gets off to a great start; the gameplay loop is immediately apparent and addictive but, similar to 2023’s Dredge, the core mechanics don’t really expand or evolve beyond those which you’re introduced to from the get go. I didn’t find this to be an issue because the loop, whilst repetitive, is so satisfying. It follows the typical Minecraft formula; forage for items, construct tools (shovel, pickaxe and hatchet), forage for new items, knit warmer clothing, trek further afield, forage for new items, construct better tools…rinse and repeat. Winter Burrow is far more structured with tools being locked behind quests and far more contained with a smaller world to explore. The biomes aren’t nearly as varied as in Minecraft and you never gain access to a world map, so whilst the game world isn’t huge, it’s annoyingly easy to get lost amongst its diverging paths, which is exacerbated by the fact that the quest log isn’t always clear so you’re sometimes backtracking to areas because you unknowingly neglected to go through additional dialogue with one of the game’s side characters.

These are probably the only frustrations to be had in Winter Burrow. For those of you whose eyes glaze over at the mention of survival in a video game (I do the same for anything that is a roguelike or procedurally generated), don’t fear. Winter Burrow isn’t The Long Dark or even something less sadistic like Don’t Starve. It definitely leans on ‘cosy’ more than ‘survival’ and is a much more forgiving experience than your average survival game. Much more lighthearted like The Wind in the Willows than say, the often brutal The Animals of Farthing Wood.

The best way I can describe Winter Burrow is frictionless. Although you’re limited by your thin clothing, weak tools and small inventory space in the opening hours, it never becomes punishing. You can run away from combat encounters with the forest’s creepy crawlies (there’s an arachnophobia mode as well, which is nice) and even felling the biggest of foes only takes a few whacks of one of your trusty axes if you do decide to engage. Getting caught out too long in the cold and losing all of your health apparently only results you in waking up back in your home with the choice to go retrieve your items. I say apparently because this never happened to me as I always managed to fight critters unscathed and get back to the warmth of my indoor fire to thaw my freezing paws just in time. Even the UI is intuitive and has smart quality of life features like the ability to pin and track quests and recipes or rearrange your home furniture (that you’ve crafted) on a useful grid system.

At the beginning of Winter Burrow there was enough tension and friction to the survival gameplay that made progression all the more satisfying but this tension and friction had mostly subsided towards the middle and late game when I had ample supplies, clothing and inventory space to keep all of the mouse’s needs in balance. Whilst some survival aficionados might find this disappointing, it very much aligned with my expectations for the game. When I first saw a trailer for Winter Burrow, my first thoughts were, ‘that looks delightful, I hope it doesn’t lean to much into the survival aspect’. Honestly, a hard difficulty curve wouldn’t mesh with Winter Burrow’s aesthetics. The delightfully charming, children’s storybook art aligns much better with the direction of the gameplay, which thankfully lands on the more cosy and relaxing end of the survival spectrum.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Winter Burrow so much so that I finished it over the course of two evenings. It was the perfect game to cosy up to with my Steam Deck (played via Xbox Game Pass) as the nights were drawing in and with Storm Claudia on the horizon. Whilst the story in Winter Burrow is brief, it still reminds you that winter isn’t always about survival and you can take joy in the cosy vibes, whether that’s in knitting a jumper, taking time to make your indoor space more comfortable or enjoying a nice meal around the dinner table with family and friends.

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I’m almost all the way through this light-hearted adventure about a sentient lighthouse and its bird companion and, unfortunately the premise had more promise than the final product that has been delivered. I think Keeper will land where most Double Fine games do; praised because it’s made by Double Fine and we all love Double Fine, but from a gameplay point of view, completely middle of the road. Keeper has a lot of colour and character but is essentially a walking simulator, focused more on sweeping panoramic shots and flattering camera angles than actually offering any depth in terms of gameplay and puzzles.

Don’t get me wrong; there are some Double Fine games that I think are underrated gems (I’ll go to bat for Stacking, The Cave and Headlander) but I don’t think Keeper is anything special. I’m glad that in this industry that’s increasingly suffering at the hands of corporate greed, average games like Keeper can exist. I’m of the belief that Microsoft won’t shutter Double Fine (yet) because it will be a PR nightmare but are lying in wait for the opportunity. And if I were a hard-nosed Microsoft accountant, Keeper would be the type of game I’d reference when sliding everyone at Double Fine their P45s or the American equivalent.

Perhaps Keeper being on Game Pass is extra armour and protection against Microsoft’s financial Eye of Sauron in addition to Double Fine’s status as an indie darling. I hope they remain bulletproof as they are too much of a creative beacon to be snuffed out in favour of a shareholder being able to redecorate their yacht. So whilst I don’t agree with many outlets saying Keeper is cult classic material (it’s not good or memorable enough to be in my opinion), I’m glad they’re vouching for it so that the payroll at Double Fine remains nothing more than rounding error for the moneymen at Xbox and Microsoft.

Dispatch

It’s good to have the spirit of the Telltale Games back in the form of this superhero workplace comedy from AdHoc Studio. Even the visual glitches I experienced whilst playing the first episode of Dispatch made me nostalgic for the once-promising Telltale era of narrative adventure games. I’m only one episode into Dispatch (so far only the first four episodes of eight have dropped) but it gives a strong first impression. The art, animation and voice acting are all top-notch and whilst the gameplay (basically 911 Operator with some Quick Times Events thrown in) doesn’t look that inspiring, I’m really looking forward to see what a modern, adult take on the superhero experience looks like now that we’re removed from the sludgy mire of cookie-cutter MCU movies.

Strange Antiquities

As someone who doesn’t do too well with horror games (even Little Nightmares II was a test of my resolve), it was nice to still be able to partake in the spooky October festivities whilst not have my nerves absolutely fraught. Quite the opposite as Strange Antiquities probably aligns more with the ‘wholesome’ and ‘cosy’ genres than horror. Like the equally satisfying Strange Horticulture that preceded it, Strange Antiquities is set in the moody town of Undermere; picture Victorian England with a heavy dose of occultism; and sees you act as the purveyor of strange artifacts.

The cosiness comes from the fact that you don’t move beyond the four secret-laden walls (screens) of your antiquities shop where you’ll do much of the puzzle solving. Expeditions to find more artifacts are portrayed in the style of a text adventure whilst you remain in situ, still within reach of the shop owner’s pet cat that adorably lays on the front counter. There’s a growing unease in Undermere that reveals itself across the nineteen-day story but it doesn’t stray into outright horror, just an eerie level of intrigue. Strange Antiquities doesn’t stray too much from the winning formula that Strange Horticulture nailed but it does improve on the experience with UI and quality of life tweaks and more challenging and varied puzzles.

Although I treated Strange Antiquities as a game to wind down with as the autumnal evenings set in, it is still a game that requires a good level of thought and consideration. Whilst there are no real fail states, Strange Antiquities compels you to engage your brain. You’ll need to use deductive reasoning in order to identify the correct names and properties of the various artifacts to sell to your patrons; lateral thinking to solve various riddles to discover more artifacts; and attentiveness to avoid red herrings. Strange Antiquities doesn’t hold the player’s hand and trusts the intelligence of its audience all the while offering the perfect outlet for cosy autumn vibes.

Prince of Prussia

A free PICO-8 game from Adam Saltsman of Canabalt fame that can be played in-browser over on itch.io. It’s a minimalist puzzle platformer that riffs on the original Prince of Persia; essentially jumping over gaps, avoiding spike pits and taking out guards, albeit with much better controls and set during WWII. It’s a short, fifteen-minute experience that reminds us that the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

PowerWash Simulator 2

The ultimate therapeutic experience. I feel like I enter a state of zen whenever playing PowerWash Simulator 2 and become one with the hose. I’ve only completed three jobs and will savour the rest of the levels across the next several months. The only reason I don’t enter a complete fugue state when playing PowerWash Simulator 2 is due to the occasional narrative pop up that emerges during one of your cleans. The story arc in the first game was so delightfully ridiculous and, for me, is what elevated PowerWash Simulator from being a great game to an all-time favourite. I’ve already cleaned a public toilet that emerges from the ground like an automatic bollard so I’m eager to see what bizarre twists the writers have in store and what mad shit I’ll be hosing down in the future.

The Rise of the Golden Idol: The Curse of the Last Reaper DLC

The last DLC drop we’re getting for The Rise of the Golden Idol. Even throughout my most arid of gaming droughts, I’ve always played the two Idol games and their respective DLCs because they remain the pinnacle of logic games. Like the DLCs that preceded it, The Curse of the Last Reaper tells a standalone story in the same Idol universe that has treated us to various absurdist tales of greed and megalomania. This time we witness the downfall of a group of pirates seeking a Lemurian artifact; the folly of so many across the Idol universe (will they ever learn?). The Curse of the Last Reaper pays homage to that which came before it with an entire scenario seemingly dedicated to being a tribute to Return of the Obra Dinn; arguably the game to which the Idol games owe their entire existence. The Curse of the Last Reaper maintains the same quality we’ve come to expect from the Idol games; grotesque caricatures, grisly deaths, other-worldly occurrences, subtle cluing, intelligent deductive reasoning and mind-blowing revelations. I enjoy every entry into the Idol games and pray this isn’t the last we’ll see of the series.

What’s next for November?

Speaking of Return of the Obra Dinn, have enough years passed to replay that with a fresh pair of eyes? Maybe but to be honest, I’m probably going to dedicate my time to newer games that I seem to keep amassing in my Steam library. The Séance of Blake Manor recently came out and whilst I was going to play it anyway as I loved the Darkside Detective games from Spooky Doorway, the gaming press have likened it to games such as the Idol Series, Return of the Obra Dinn and Blue Prince so that’s moved up the priority list.

Pacific Drive dropped onto Game Pass so I might try my hand at some apocalyptic jalopy driving. Alternatively, other driving-adjacent games Easy Delivery Co. and Keep Driving are still calling out to me.

Remedy’s games are solid but I didn’t play Alan Wake II when it released a couple of years ago. I couldn’t resist picking it up for £15 on sale even though it’ll probably be free on some service by the time I get to it if I don’t make it my mission to get to it sooner. It’s a beefier game than I’m used to these days but I hope to at least give it a go and see whether I can cope with it’s level of horror.

Anything else I should be looking out for this month? What are you playing? Let me know!

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The game begins with your player character, the titular Poco, a small clown attempting to gain entry to the circus by completing a performance exam of sorts in front of a foreboding panel of towering, disembodied clown faces. Perhaps an allegory for the fact that Poco itself was a university thesis project that was required in order for the team to graduate. During the exam you’re immediately tasked to ace a series of mini games involving unicycling, balloon twisting and trumpeting. Without having any knowledge of how the mini games work, you promptly fail the exam and are unceremoniously dropped through a trapdoor into the Below World, a scrapheap inhabited by other undesirables and discarded detritus.

The art style is immediately striking with 3D, almost Claymation-like characters (definitely gave me some Neverhood vibes) layered on top of 2D hand-drawn watercolour backgrounds. Poco is bright, colourful and immediately inviting, including in its sound design and animation with Poco’s bell hat clinking and chiming as he bops and bounces along. The characters you meet along the way are equally colourful; a set of five siblings with designs based on the five senses who each help Poco attain a piece of a rocket ship that will help him ascend from the Below World back to the circus. There’s an endearing story that underlines proceedings; a group of siblings reuniting after growing apart and becoming indifferent to one another over the years; but there’s also a lot of dark humour to be found throughout the ninety-minute experience, especially with the ‘bad’ ending and a worm character you can interact with. These moments of macabre are unexpected but had me laughing out loud, often in shock.

The gameplay is nothing revolutionary and is what you’d expect from a point and click adventure, which is essentially just a list of fetch quests. Although obtuse old school point and click games are my safe haven, Poco circumvents a lot of the frustrations found in those games of yore by simplifying the experience. You have an inventory but are not tasked with combining or dragging and dropping items onto interactable objects in the world. There are only a few interactable elements per screen and these are identified by your cursor; a cute little white glove that wiggles its fingers once it hovers over an interactable object. Sometimes it’s a bit tricky to discern what objects are interactable or retrievable and there’s a bit of pixel hunting to be done but not to the frustrating effect of most point and click adventures. Once you’ve clicked on an interactable item, your inventory will automatically pop up and you’re asked to choose an item that does the desired task such as finding a suitable item that can cut through vines or an item that can be used as an oar for a boat. Yes, there is trial and error and you can cycle through your entire inventory and solve puzzles by attrition but usually the solution is quite straight forward so you’re not having to do much guesswork. No chicken pulleys here.

There are some nice touches and quality of life mechanics (such as double clicking to run or an option in the menu to auto-run) that even veteran developers often overlook, which is what impresses me the most about Poco. It’s clear that a lot of care and attention went into making it a frustration-free experience. There a few mini games scattered throughout the game that might be irksome for some but I didn’t find them too laborious, especially as they made sense within the context of the game as they are the same mini games that you failed in the initial performance exam. Despite him caving under the pressure of the performance exam, I found it endearing to see Poco use the skills he had all along to overcome real-world hurdles on his quest.

Poco makes me hopeful for the future of point and click adventure games. A genre that was almost lost to obscurity in the early 2000s due to an ill-advised pursuit of clunky 3D graphics and the waning patience of an audience for obtuse puzzles is, fortunately, still alive and well today and Poco proves you can smooth down the rough edges whilst still remaining true to the original formula. If it were up to me those students would have graduated with a distinction. What a gem.

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Like the first game, Little Nightmares II sees you control a small, forlorn, childlike figure as they navigate through a foreboding and hostile world full of unnerving and grotesque nasties. Where Little Nightmares II differs from the first game is that you’re accompanied by a second non-playable character who you soon learn is the protagonist of the first game, Six. Having Six as a companion is enough of a change to make Little Nightmares II feel distinct from the first game but it doesn’t make the experience feel any less isolating and daunting, especially as there are often sections of the game where you’re separated from Six and are forced to proceed on your own.

Little Nightmares II is essentially a puzzle platformer with light stealth, combat and chase sequences interspersed throughout. There is a good flow to the gameplay with nerve-fraying sections of horror and survival broken up by moments of reprieve via puzzling sections. Even though I was sometimes able to predict what type of gameplay sequence was around the corner, I was never truly confident of what type of monstrosity I’d be facing next and was kept on edge throughout the entire game.

That is where Little Nightmares II shines, in its unique aesthetics and horror. The visuals of the the series remain a highlight, drawing inspiration from those stop motion and Claymation short films that were made back in the day and that we somehow decided were kid-friendly yet still haunt our collective consciousness decades later. Each of the game’s five chapters introduces a new main antagonist; a marionette-like caricature that will be skulking around the levels, eventually becoming your pursuer. And there are plenty of other abhorrent creatures to avoid and overcome in between. Even though Little Nightmares relies on familiar horror tropes that prey on deep-rooted childhood fears, it manages to do so to great effect. Without going into spoilers, there was a section that plays on a particular trope that is rife in horror video games but nonetheless scared the absolute shit out of me and had me constantly on edge, squirming and squealing as I gripped the edges of my Steam Deck.

Little Nightmares II is not without its frustrations that feel like a hangover from the first game that came out in 2017 (and also the 2019 mobile game Very Little Nightmares, which I’m probably one of only ten people to play but really enjoyed as well). Some parts of the gameplay are a bit clunky as a result of inconsistent physics and the game’s 2.5D presentation. Examples of the former are the game hesitating when you try to throw an object at a specific target or try to boost jump off your companion Six. I’d have issues gauging my positioning on the 2.5D plane and there’d be times where I thought I’d made a successful jump to only have completely misjudged it and plummet to my death. Or get caught on parts of the geometry that I wasn’t supposed to during a chase sequence and unceremoniously get scooped up by my pursuant and have to start the sequence again.

There are also some parts of the game that unnecessarily throw too much challenge or ask too much of the player given the inconsistent physics. That particular section I mentioned that scared the living Christ out of me; there was a sequence that I had to repeat multiple times to the point where that initial scare dulled over time because the novelty and fear of getting caught had worn off and devolved into frustration. It’s a shame because that section is otherwise a highlight of the series. I appreciate it’s a hard line to toe between making the experience too easy and having a sense of peril but there are times Little Nightmares II doesn’t cooperate within the confines of its gameplay and tries to unnecessarily push beyond its limitations. The saving grace is that examples of this are few and far between and the checkpointing is very generous.

Despite its challenges, Little Nightmares II is still a fantastic experience and a worthy successor to the first game. The best compliment I can give to Little Nightmares II is that it’s one of the closest experiences I have had to playing INSIDE, having the same sense of unease yet curiosity of what was to come. Whilst it doesn’t have the impeccable polish of INSIDE, Little Nightmares II has an undeniable intrigue and mystery to its world with an eeriness and grotesqueness that is matched by few other games. I enjoyed being in its world so much that I replayed it to get 100% of the game’s achievements and am reinvigorated to play Little Nightmares III when it releases in just a few weeks. Bring on the scares!

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The game starts out with the protagonist, what I can only describe as some kind of Öoo shaped caterpillar, being swallowed by a bird and then delving into its innards in order to find a way out, Jonah’s whale style. Instead of relying on divine intervention through the act of prayer, the Öoo caterpillar must navigate a small labyrinth using its only means of escape – bombs.

During the final credits of Öoo, several games are listed as inspiration: Bomb Chicken, BoxBoy!, Celeste, Metroid, Yoshi’s Island, Cocoon and VVVVVV. A stellar list that includes a few of my own personal favourites. Whilst Bomb Chicken is probably the most obvious analogue, the manner in which Öoo ramps up and progresses is very BoxBoy!-coded. Your navigation through the belly of the bird doesn’t unfold through stumbling on new upgrades and abilities every few minutes like, in say, a Metroidvania (no shade, it’s my favourite genre), but instead stretching the game’s single mechanic to its limits. Thinking outside of the box, noticing subtle hints scattered throughout the world that are hidden in plain sight and discovering different ways to use your limited toolset. Every time you come to a dead end Öoo quietly ushers you with an unseen hand to other areas in order to learn how to use the bombs and the world around you in new and fantastic ways. Then you’ll come back to what you thought was a dead end and realise that you had all the tools you needed to overcome the obstacle all along, you just weren’t equipped with the requisite knowledge. These revelations are spaced so masterfully throughout Öoo’s four-or-so hour runtime and I don’t want to say more lest I spoil any of the game’s brilliance. Just know that it’s such a purposeful but subtle masterstroke of game design.

The platforming doesn’t require any kind of skill apart from a small handful of puzzles that require some timing, although these are never too precise. The game is also very forgiving; should your caterpillar fall into a pit of spikes or suffer any similar demise, you respawn immediately at one of the very generously placed checkpoints, which are clearly signposted by flags and found at the start of every puzzling section. This is because Öoo encourages you to use trial and error in order to puzzle your way through its various puzzles that typically involve traversing to out of reach platforms and collecting flies for frogs that essentially act as blockades throughout the world.

Öoo’s presentation leans into nostalgia with striking neon pixel art and a chiptune soundtrack with dreamy and otherworldly synth-like tones The animation and cutesy sound effects are equally brilliant and provide the Öoo caterpillar and overall game with so much character and charm. The best compliment I could give Öoo is that it feels like a lost GameBoy Advanced game and is certainly one of, if not my favourite gaming experience of the year so far.

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As soon as I read about Cheese Rolling (thanks, PC Gamer), I downloaded it onto my Steam Deck. It didn’t take long as it’s only 500MB, which comes as no surprise given it emulates the blocky, low-poly art style of the original PlayStation era and has the limited draw distance to match. It looks terrible, which is perfect for the rustic and ridiculous nature of the original sport. The characters are all dressed in medieval garb and the start screen is accompanied by period-appropriate lute music, which lends to the theory that Cheese-Rolling is a tradition much older than its first recording in 1826.

I jumped into a lobby and a match began instantaneously as you can start a round of games with just two players instead of waiting for a full lobby of eight to fill, although the game seems densely populated at the moment. There’s also a solo mode for those averse to online multiplayer. Each round often takes less than ten seconds so I was soon dropped into a match and placed in a line with the other players at the top of a low-poly version of Cooper's Hill. A klaxon sounded and I saw that the cheese wheel was already on the move so I instinctively began to move my character with the left joystick. Just like the real race, I started off fleet-footed and hopeful, but then, after a few seconds, gravity humbly took over and my character’s legs crumpled underneath them. I was sent tumbling down the rest of the hill, amalgamating with a pile of flailing limbs at the bottom; my competitors and I forming a mass of human flesh not too dissimilar to Legion in the Castlevania games or The Huddle at the end of INSIDE.

The ragdoll physics that cause you to stumble, flip and careen down the hill are rib-tickling and match the absurd tone of the game and the sport itself. At first, I believed I was at the mercy of Cheese Rolling’s unpredictable physics-driven system but after a few rounds of hurtling to the bottom of the hill with no luck, I got used to the idiosyncratic physics and was able to anticipate the movement of my character and the cheese wheel. I learned when to use the A button to do a ‘jump’ and launch my character mid-roll; when to slow down, sometimes by pressing down on the joystick or by holding onto a fellow competitor to reduce my momentum; and when to make a desperate grasp for the wheel, or just wait until I could scoop it into my flailing arms after over-shooting its trajectory. After a few tries, I became much more adept at catching that slippery cheese wheel, sometimes in glorious fashion; pirouetting down the hill at full speed and catching it in mid-air. It became apparent there is actually some skill to Cheese Rolling, much like the real-life sport. I thought the winner was anyone who was lucky enough to reach the bottom of Cooper’s Hill without breaking a spine but that’s clearly not the case given how there have often been repeat winners, such as Christopher Anderson who has won the competition a record twenty-three times.

Cheese Rolling is a free game (you can buy an in-game knight in armour skin for £1.49 to support the devs) so is, as expected, pretty barebones beyond the experience of ragdolling down a hill in the pursuit of cheese. There are a couple of different settings, like a volcano level with lava either side of the hill that spews out any cheese or human that comes in contact with it, and a snowy level that has a frozen lake at the bottom that adds to the hilarity of multiple competitors slipping, sliding and colliding into one another in a desperate attempt to grab the cheese that has become a yellow hockey puck. There’s voice chat that can be muted (and your microphone is on by default so maybe check if you’re alright with that before jumping in!) but is mostly wholesome with people similarly desperately grunting and pissing themselves laughing at the absurdity of it all. I was in a lobby where two Japanese guys would purposefully grab my character at the start at the race in order to slow my descent and impede my progress and, honestly, I admired the shithousery, especially as they would laugh incessantly every time they did it. It added another wrinkle to gameplay to try and, at first, avoid their clutches, and then eventually play them at their own game and grab them back, resulting in a three-person brawl at the top of hill to the backdrop of Japanese guffaws, Takeshi’s Castle style.

It's such a simple yet joyous game and I’ve been playing Cheese Rolling for much longer than I anticipated (three hours now according to Steam). I would say it’s great as a second screen experience whilst chilling out on the sofa, but your laughs will surely drown out whatever’s on the TV.

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So here’s some short musings about what I’ve been playing recently:

Is This Seat Taken? is a logic puzzle game from Poti Poti Studio about assigning seats to anthropomorphic shapes in various settings from buses to classrooms, cinemas, offices, diners and more. The puzzle element comes from the fact that each shape has a list of preferences and therefore can only be placed in a limited number of seats, sometimes just the one. For example, in the cinema level some shapes have bad eyesight and therefore want to sit in the front row. Another shape may want to steal somebody else’s popcorn so you have to position them next to someone who has a bag of popcorn but then they’ll have their own list of specific preferences. Maybe they don’t want to sit in a dirty seat or sit behind someone who’s on their phone.

It’s a simple concept that manages to ramp up the difficulty by increasing the number of conditions each shape has and often at the same time decrease the number of seats available. By the end of the game, you’re having to use some serious brain power to assign every shape their preferred seat without upsetting someone else. You can complete a level without accommodating to every shape’s needs but then this is not conducive to ‘100% completion’ gamer brain and it prevents you from unlocking the bonus levels. There’s quite the variety to the levels in the game’s four-or-so-hour runtime but the bonus levels unlock fun additional settings such as a wedding reception and the beach.

The presentation of the game is great with cartoonish character designs and soft pastel colours that are relaxing on the eye. The pleasant visuals are accompanied by a jazzy guitar soundtrack that evokes ‘£5 for a flat white’ coffee shop vibes and are as equally relaxing on the ear.

There’s a low-stakes story about the pursuit of becoming a movie star but this is mostly Hallmark Christmas movie-like fluff to give a vague outline to proceedings. Each set of levels is set in a different city and I do wish Poti Poti Studio had made each city a bit more distinct from a visual or gameplay element. For example, there wasn’t really any noticeable difference between the public transport in each city. They could have had you assigning a seat for Pizza Rat in the New York subway or have a Greggs bag with a half-eaten sausage roll taking up a seat on a double decker in London.

Even still, in what appears to be the debut outing from Poti Poti Studio, Is This Seat Taken? is still a great experience that strikes an excellent balance between putting your brain cells to work and lulling you with its relaxing visuals and soundtrack. I definitely recommend picking it up.

Many thanks to Popagenda and Out of Lives for providing a code for Is This Seat Taken?

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I’d urge you to do the same and check out some gameplay but I’ll do my best at explaining the base mechanics. A run in Balatro is split up into eight antes, each containing three rounds known as blinds. The aim of each blind is to rack up the highest score possible and if you fail to meet the minimum threshold in each round, your run is over; hence the roguelike sensibilities. In most game modes you start a run with a typical fifty-two-card deck and are dealt a selection of cards from the deck in each round. The hand size is typically eight, although this number can be decreased or increased at the start of or throughout the run. From those eight cards you must find the best scoring hand, based on the typical poker hands such as pair, two pair, three of a kind, flush etc. and can play between one and five cards. You can discard up to five cards and hedge your bets to get a new, and hopefully more optimised deal, but you have a limit as to how many times you can discard cards per blind, although, again, this limit can be increased and decreased.

The base level gameplay combines the best attributes of many of my favourite card games such as Poker (Texas Hold ‘Em and Five Card Draw) and Blackjack but its magic and depth come from the sheer number of modifiers that are available to you in each run. These modifiers come in various forms and can be purchased from the shop that appears after every blind. There are Joker cards, which are the highlight of the game, offering the most variation to the gameplay. Their effects are numerous; some add active or passive buffs or debuffs to cards; some alter the way in each round is scored; some make changes to the cost of items and how often they appear in the shop; some increase or decrease your hand size; some allow you to earn extra money to spend in the shop. Honestly, far too many effects to mention. And then you have other types of modifiers acting simultaneously, creating even more options to tweak the gameplay. Celestial cards upgrade the level of your hands; that is to say it increases the number of points gained when playing particular hands – so if you’re building a deck and your run around high-scoring flushes, it’s best to level up the flush hand. New, enhanced cards can be cherry picked from Card Packs whilst Arcana cards, Vouchers and Spectral cards offer additional effects, bonuses and extras. The number of modifiers is staggering and I’m still discovering new ones, even after dozens of runs.

The gameplay is far too layered and complex to be explained in this post so, again, I’d recommend you watch some gameplay lest I write a ten-thousand-word thesis. What I’d rather do within my self-imposed word limit is stress that Balatro is one of the most captivating (addictive) deck-builders I’ve played and reaches the same lofty heights of Inscryption in terms of its core card-playing gameplay. Although Balatro has a similarly trickster-esque charm, amazing sound design and crowd-pleasing CRT effect, it probably won’t have the lasting impression that Inscryption had on me since, unlike Inscryption, Balatro doesn’t have a compelling underlying narrative or meta-narrative, at least not one that I have found. Despite this, Balatro is just as mechanically rich as Inscryption and boasts an equally infinite number of ways to modify your deck, making each and every run incredibly unique and distinct.    

Playing Balatro has led me to strategizing, calculating probabilities, and using statistics (something I also learned at college and subsequently forgot) in order to optimise hands and runs; far more math than I’ve ever applied to poker or blackjack which, as a casual player, I usually rely on luck alone even when money is involved. When playing several deck-builders, which, to the chagrin of many others includes Slay the Spire, I’ve often felt that a successful run hinges on RNG(esus), leading me to playing with such tunnel vision, waiting for that specific run-saving card to be dealt. In Balatro I’m far more comfortable in taking the blinkers off and adapting to the hand that I’ve been dealt. The ability to sell the main modifiers – the Joker cards and buy new ones provides a flexibility that most deck-builders cannot tout. You can change strategy mid-run, meaning you’re never backed into a corner or locked in to a certain build. I had a run in which I didn’t start to formulate a plan until around half way through and ended up successfully completing the run with a deck of around 75% Jacks, playing ‘five of a kind’ for each hand. I’m never mad when a run ends prematurely, often because I’ve failed to min-max or pursue the optimal build with the cards that have been dealt. I see it as an opportunity to learn and play around with the game’s mechanics more.

Every time I land on a winning formula, it feels like I’m secretly breaking the game in a way the designers never intended. But Balatro is very much in on the joke; it’s so incredibly designed and balance that it has the confidence within itself to encourage you push its gameplay to its limits and to try and break the boundaries of its mechanics. It wants you to explore its infinite possibilities and that’s why for the last week my Steam Deck has been fused to my hands and I can’t seem to put it down.

Other musings:

• Balatro’s addictive qualities very much reminds me of ‘Ajimbo’.

• A really nice touch is that at the end of your round generates a seed number so you can replay the exact same scenario or send it to someone else

• The download size is somehow only 62MB – to be fair there’s only one music track but that’s still impressive.

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If you still remember your GCSE French, you won’t be surprised that you play as a rabbit in this precision platformer. Lapin’s cutesy art style, gentle music and Ghibli-esque animation belie the challenging nature of the gameplay, which isn’t for the faint hearted. Five minutes into playing Lapin, it’s obvious that Celeste had a massive influence on Korean developer Studio Doodal but those are some big shoes to fill considering Celeste is one of, if not the best platformer of the modern era. I’d argue it’s the latter since Celeste was my favourite game that came out in 2018 and no platformer has yet been able to top it. And after finishing Lapin, that is still the case. Whilst Lapin borrows some ideas and mechanics from Celeste, it doesn’t do it with nearly as much finesse or polish and the gameplay oscillates between flashes of platforming brilliance and periods of immense frustration. 

The gameplay is what you’d expect from a precision platformer that mimics the likes of Celeste and Super Meat Boy. You’re performing precise jumps whilst avoiding pitfalls, spikes and other obstacles and, in the process, racking up countless deaths whilst rinsing and repeating each single-screen level until you master each sequence. The game adds new platforming mechanics in each of its six chapters to keep things fresh and interesting, although a lot of these are borrowed from Celeste. For example, there’s the similar bubble mechanic that gives you an extra mid-air jump/dash; a current mechanic that sweeps your character along like the Space Blocks in Celeste; and there are sequences that have you running from a weasel that chases you in the same way Badeline does in Celeste.

Lapin occasionally brings a few of its own ideas to the table such as raising and lowering water levels and using balloons as trampolines and perhaps Lapin should have relied more on its own ideas since its semblance to Celeste only invites comparison to the game it is aping. And in that sense, Lapin ends up feeling somewhat underwhelming as an overall package. Don’t get me wrong, there is some excellent level design on show in Lapin and there are many occasions where you can’t help but be transported into a flow state, enjoying the challenging but satisfying platforming. However, there are too many occasions where you’re wrenched out of this rhythm, either by inconsistent gameplay, difficulty spikes or over-expositional dialogue.  

At times Lapin asks of the player a level of precision that the game can’t keep up with. Your character’s hit boxes seem ill-defined and the collision detection with certain obstacles is temperamental at best. Even when I felt that my movements and inputs remained consistent run-to-run, the game would still produce inconsistent results. The worst instance of this was during a late game auto-scrolling sequence on the game’s critical path that resembles the chase set pieces in the Ori games such as the Giant Sandworm in Ori and the Will of the Wisps and the Ginso Tree in Ori and the Blind Forest. The difference is that these sequences are paced and timed impeccably, whereas in the case of Lapin, you’re given little time to react on the fly, encounter cheap deaths and are at the behest of the game’s erratic determination of whether your player character is still within the bounds of the game’s auto-scroll limit. To be fair, the majority of the levels in Lapin don’t encounter these issues but when the game does ask for this degree of precision, often in optional discoverable levels where you find the game’s Strawberry Seed collectibles, the lack of consistency and polish is glaring. Lapin’s saving grace is that the respawn upon death is instant (as should be the case with any precision platformer worth its salt) and you can switch to easy mode on the fly with no penalty, save for missing out on some of the game’s achievements*. 

When it’s not the inconsistent platforming grinding things to a halt, it’s sections of tedious story and dialogue that you’re unable to skip through. The last thing I want to do after completing white-knuckle, rewarding platforming sections is to continue mashing the A button for another five minutes to get through Lapin’s cutscenes and story sections. The game started off with some intrigue; you play as a rabbit named Liebe who lives with a small community of four other bunnies who have had to flee their burrow due to the encroachment of human construction. I wondered if there was going to be some interesting Watership Down / Fern Gully-like commentary on deforestation, conservationism and environmentalism but too many instances of overstuffed, superfluous dialogue meant I never bothered to find out.

There also didn’t seem to be many stakes or peril to the narrative; it’s more akin to a Saturday morning cartoon (although cartoons back in the day did tend to have dark story lines - The Animals of Farthing Wood still haunts me to this day) with interpersonal conflict and politics amongst the rabbits that all melt away in service of the game’s strangely placed “Friendship Level” mechanic. Engaging in extra dialogue trees allows you to gain affection with your cohort but I struggle to see why you would do this given there doesn’t seem to be any romance options in the game. I’m not partial to romance options in games, I couldn’t care less most of the time, but it seems like a missed opportunity in this case given all the characters are rabbits (and we all know what rabbits like to do) and there should be some reward for sitting through the game’s excruciatingly slow dialogue. Fortunately this, as well as a lot of other dialogue and writing in the game is avoidable; I just wish that was the case for all of it. Again, this seems like Lapin is taking direct influence from Celeste, which has an exceptional story about mental health and identity, but Celeste is better paced and knows when to pick and choose its moments for story without interfering with the flow of its gameplay.   

Maybe comparing Lapin to one of the greatest platformers of all time is unfair. But when you borrow so much, you’re inevitably inviting that level of comparison and therefore criticism when your game falls short in several areas. Whilst this article may read as quite scathing, I actually enjoyed most of the eight-hour experience. The movement of the character itself feels great and there are some excellently designed levels. It’s just that the devil is in the details and it’s that slight lack of fine tuning and polish that leads moments of brilliance to be overshadowed by gameplay inconsistencies and a slog of a story. I’m conflicted but I can’t wholly recommend Lapin, especially when there are many more precision platformers on the market that provide a more polished and consistent experience…like Celeste - just go and play Celeste. 

*I was quite surprised by the low level of completion of the achievements on Xbox. Every achievement in this game is a rare one i.e. less than 10% of players have earned it. Even the achievement for completing the five-minute prologue only has a completion rate of 7%. In fact, most of the achievements in Lapin have a completion rate of less than 1%. I know early access games don’t have achievements so maybe most people played this before achievements were patched into the game. Or perhaps it’s because this game does the cardinal sun of having EVEN GAMERSCORE POINTS!! Achievement hunters are extremely anal creatures that must have a Gamerscore that is divisible by 5 or 10 - I gave up on that years ago. 

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To ease myself back into gaming, I instinctively turned to Air Twister; an arcade rail shooter that originally released on Apple Arcade but has now come to all platforms (full disclosure: I received a review code for Xbox Series X). Now, dear reader, you may be wondering why I would turn to this niche, esoteric little oddity when other well-reviewed, blockbuster titles like Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Spider-Man 2 and Alan Wake 2 have come out in recent weeks. Well, that’s simply because Air Twister is Space Harrier in all but name and, if you know anything about me, you know I have an unconditional love for Space Harrier. 

Air Twister was developed and published by YS Net, a small indie outfit founded and headed by Yu Suzuki. Suzuki may be more well known for being the creator of Shenmue and Virtua Fighter, but for me, he’s first and foremost the genius who created Space Harrier. Whilst Suzuki is apparently hesitant to say Air Twister is the spiritual successor to Space Harrier, he’s not kidding anybody. It might as well be called Space Harrier III (or 3-D 2, I suppose).  

Air Twister has you play as Princess Arch; a cutscene at the beginning of the game shows her home planet being sieged by a horde of space creatures, some of which seem to have a hilarious naming convention according to the game’s achievements (Tetrabeans, Dodecabeans and the like) and are carbon copies of those seen in Space Harrier, even down to their polygonal bodies and pill-shaped neon-coloured projectiles. Her fellow citizens, riding on the backs of giant geese, try to fend off the attack but are largely unsuccessful. This is when we take control of Princess Arch, who has the ability to float around the screen, just like Harrier, and is armed with a crossbow that can inexplicably shoot single and multiple homing missiles. 

There’s a quick tutorial to get used to the simple controls for those who have little exposure to Space Harrier, or any arcade rail shooter for that matter. Unlike Space Harrier, the first few levels are very forgiving, easing you into the flow of the gameplay wherein the jumpsuit-clad, crossbow-wielding heroine flies around the screen dispatching enemies whilst dodging oncoming enemy fire that zooms towards her. There are twelve main stages, each accompanied by a variety of interesting enemy designs, from stingrays to bone dragons, culminating in a boss fight at the end. It’s in these boss fights where the gameplay leans towards that of Panzer Dragoon and has you piloting your trusty goose or other rideable beasts that are encountered throughout the game. It’s all very silly stuff that I couldn’t help but be amused by.

 In terms of difficulty, Air Twister is nowhere near as punishing as its Space Harrier predecessors. You’re given several continues and Princess Arch can absorb a lot of hits before you’re even having to resort to putting in an extra metaphorical quarter. It took until the seventh stage, when I was appropriately warned in a cutscene that the enemies had become fiercer, for me to see my first ‘Game Over’. I welcome this lower level of difficulty; even with years of practice I still struggle immensely with Space Harrier at times and it’s nice to see Air Twister is a much more forgiving game that newer generations can enjoy whilst still getting the quintessential arcade experience.  

If you do happen to game over, Air Twister offers an interesting rogue-like element where, using stars collected in stages, you can upgrade a skill tree that will unlock new abilities, weapons, amulets and jumpsuits. Some of these will affect gameplay such as offering you more durability, an increased number of lock-ons, shields, slow-down and the like whilst others are purely cosmetic so you can customise Princess Arch with different face paints, jumpsuit colours etc. In addition to this there are also daily, weekly and time-limited tasks where you can earn additional stars or you can try your hand at the the game’s challenge and bosh rush modes.

With the lessened emphasis on difficulty, I was able to thoroughly soak in and enjoy Air Twister’s ridiculous spectacle. In terms of the visuals, some of the background textures are quite muddy, especially when blown up on my 55 inch TV, but this is entirely understandable given the game was originally developed for mobile devices for Apple Arcade (I’d like to find the person at Apple who greenlit this game and buy them a drink). There’s still a sharpness to some of the assets and at times the game can look quite dazzling. There’s a colourful variety to each of the stages environments, from tawny desert landscapes to verdant forests, and with the eccentric art direction and enemy design (one boss is essentially Cogsworth and Lumière from Beauty and the Beast), the game’s the lack of fidelity is easily overlooked.

Accompanying proceedings is a bizarrely placed rock opera soundtrack. The title screen song, titled Phantom of the Opera 2022 (yeah…), had my ears tricked for a split second where I was convinced I was listening to an alternate version of Bohemian Rhapsody on the B-side of a Queen LP. But no, it was just the ululations of Dutch multi-instrumentalist Valensia who was asked by Suzuki, a big fan it seems, over Facebook Message to create the game’s soundtrack. Is it completely incongruous to the game’s genre and gameplay? Yes. Do I love the absurdity of it? Absolutely.

As you may already be able to tell, it’s hard to be objective about Air Twister. For someone who laments the lack of modern arcade shooters and thought a Space Harrier successor would be less likely than world peace, I’m so grateful that Air Twister somehow exists. The only criticism I have is that there’s no way to access the settings menu once you’re in the game - I wanted to boost the music over the sound effects because I needed to hear it in all its ridiculous splendour. Other than that, I’ll make any excuse for Air Twister, whether that’s it’s ugly menu design or overly-simplified gameplay. There’s a rough charm to Air Twister and, whilst I can’t recommend it to most people, it’s nostalgic gameplay will certainly satiate any Space Harrier fan. And really, that’s all I wanted.

Many thanks to PR Hound who provided a review code for Air Twister

Other musings: 

• I recently procured my late uncle’s Sega Master System II; one of the consoles he lent me when I was a child; and the first cartridge I put in and played was, you guessed it, Space Harrier.

• For anybody (nobody) wondering about this article’s subheading, it’s from good ol’ Australian kids comedy series Round The Twist, which I’m sure only me and my sister watched in the early nineties.

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If, dear reader, you’re unfamiliar with Sokpop Collective, they are a collective developer based in Utrecht and funded by Patreon for which, spoilers, I am a member. Whilst they recently made a slight tweak to their mission statement, Sokpop’s original pitch was to make and release a new game every month with development funded almost entirely by Patreon. This business model, as you’d expect, resulted in small, bitesize games being released on a (mostly) regular cadence. Whilst their games admittedly range in quality and the developers have been candid about some struggles in the creative process such as shelving ideas and switching to different projects to avoid burnout, the overall model seems to have worked (they’ve been going since 2017) and appears to be a far more sustainable approach when other studios their size are sadly shuttering their doors at a worrying pace. 

Sokpop’s open dialogue with patrons is a breath of fresh air in an industry mired in secrecy and their releases span a multitude of blended genres such as quirky sandboxes, idle farming games, co-op dungeon crawlers and dice-based tower defense RPGs so there’s always something for everyone. Some of their games such as tiny adventure game Pear Quest, card-based villager builder Stacklands (probably their most successful game to date) and time-looping adventure Pocket Watch have ranked as some of the best games I’ve played for their respective years and would recommend them to just about anyone (you can buy their games piecemeal and in bundles known as ‘season’s so run, don’t walk) so I’m always intrigued by the next Sokpop release that drops into my inbox. 

One of Sokpop’s most recent games (their 101st!) is Frog Adventures. Just like the rest of Sokpop’s output, it’s almost too cute to look at with a bright and colourful hand-drawn artstyle. As the name suggests, it’s an adventure game about a frog that was granted sentience by an evil fairy and, like any cognisant being, realises that having sentience sucks and proceeds to track the fairy down to reverse the spell. This mainly involves fetch quests, speaking with other begrudgingly woodland critters and acquiring items needed to further your quest. Not too dissimilar to another game starring a titular amphibian. You may turn your nose up at a game that is fundamentally a series of fetch quests (although I’d debate whether that is any different from playing something like Starfield) but the further I proceeded through Frog Adventures, the more impressed I was with how much depth it had than first meets the eye. I’m not talking about deep RPG systems or a hidden metagame like another frog game, but more mechanics than you’d expect for a game that was made in around the same time it takes a tadpole to metamorph into a frog (fourteen weeks if you were wondering). I was constantly delighted and charmed by the different ways you could interact with the world that were incrementally introduced across the sixty-or-so-minute adventure. 

Whilst some may argue that Frog’s Adventure is still, at its core, a simple point and click adventure game I see no issue with this. It’s refreshing to have a developer consistently produce quality, well-polished and, most importantly, fun titles without feature creep, overscoping or burnout seeping into the development cycle and that’s why Sokpop and their games continue to amaze me and I’ll always be a proponent of their work. 

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I first dipped into Prodeus in 2022 and was instantly enamoured by its unapologetically faithful homage to nineties-era first-person shooters. Similar to many other boomer shooters, often affectionately (or unaffectionately depending on who you ask) referred to as DOOM clones, Prodeus is basically the spawn of DOOM and Quake if id Software had access to modern-day technology three decades ago. Prodeus stays true to the genre’s roots and focuses on over-the-top, bloody, fast-paced action whilst making the most of modern lighting and rendering techniques.

Just like most boomer shooters, Prodeus knows its audience and is made for and advertised to those of us who have grown weary of modern-day shooters that seem to eschew entertainment in service of realism and po-faced narratives. Even DOOM Eternal failed to capitalise on what made DOOM 2016 so special; overburdening the follow-up with perfunctory mechanics and skill trees (I’m still bitter if you couldn’t tell). Prodeus on the other hand gets straight to the action. It takes an excruciating twenty or so seconds before you’re handed your first weapon and then the game just rolls on from there. No hand-holding, no excessive tutorialisation, no story (that’s worth paying attention to anyway), no cutscenes, no filler, no fuss.  

Prodeus has around twenty campaign levels (with a few time trials thrown in between), each taking around 15-30 minutes each, probably longer if you feel inclined to find all the secrets in each level, which will give you access to additional weapons and movement abilities. Levels are what you’d expect if you’ve ever played DOOM or Quake with you zipping through arenas, close-quarter corridors and towering facilities finding keycards to open previously locked passages while mowing down hordes of enemies and turning them into a red pixelated mist. The game inexplicably gives you the option to aim down your sights (safe to say I shot from the hip throughout the entire game) but shooting feels satisfying for the most part, although I wish there was a bit more weight and punch to some of the weapons; namely the shotguns.

Whilst Prodeus starts off on a high note, it fails to improve from there; in fact I’d argue my enjoyment had a downward trajectory the further I progressed through the game. There’s not enough diversity in the appearance of the levels nor the enemy types; the level design becomes busier and less intelligible the further you go; and, worst of all, the difficulty becomes increasingly wayward. I played the first two thirds of the game on Hard difficulty and even then the challenge was mostly lacking but by the time I reached the final third, playing on normal was sometimes a struggle in itself. There doesn’t appear to be any intelligent scaling or balancing to the difficulty such as better enemy pathing, awareness or AI. Instead enemies just inflict more damage and become insanely efficient sharpshooters. All of these issues are mitigated by a host of (gratefully included) accessibility options and generous checkpointing but by this point Prodeus had already been relegated to the pile of ‘just another boomer shooter’ and I had already resigned to the fact that nothing in Prodeus would ever come close to the heart-racing thrills I experienced playing DOOM (2016).  

So yes, whilst few games make killing 2D sprites in 3D environments look this good, dynamic lighting and pixel shaders aren’t everything and if you’re looking for more depth from your boomer shooter, maybe look elsewhere. If you’ve had even one eye on the PC gaming space these last few years, you’ll know there’s been a resurgence of boomer shooters and it won’t take you long to find one. They all blur together in my head and I honestly couldn’t tell you where one ends and the next begins. Is Prodeus different from the rest? Not at all but really that’s no bad thing - it’s an entertaining, albeit mindless diversion for times when all you want to do is disengage your brain and shoot shambling enemies with a Big F*cking Gun.

Other musings: 

• Kinda miffed that the same day Prodeus left Game Pass was the same day this wicked-looking DLC was announced. They could have at least waited a week…    

• Instead of making an ill-advised decision of purchasing Prodeus just to play the DLC, I could always just play the Quake II remaster that was recently dropped on Game Pass. 

• Speaking of Quake, here’s a cool little piece about a 1997 all-women Quake tournament. Stevie "Killcreek" Case was part of it whose interesting rise to fame I first read about in the excellent Masters of Doom.

• Which reminds me…I would very much like to get round to reading John Romero’s autobiography Doom Guy, which I pre-ordered last year, forgot about, and is now collecting dust on my bookshelf. There aren’t enough hours in the day.

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It’s no surprise; there are many corners and pockets of the internet that have way bigger followings than I’m aware of and/or could ever fathom. Whilst the Rusty Lake series doesn’t quite have the cultural cachet or digital footprint in gaming fandom as say, some random anime multiplayer game from Tencent I’ve never even heard of, the series still has a dedicated following. You only have to look at Steam where Underground Blossom, which came out just over a week ago, has already amassed 2,051 overwhelmingly positive reviews at the time of writing. 

It’s no surprise really; the series had humble beginnings, releasing as free but incredibly well-made point and click adventure games known as the Cube Escape Series. The games featured escape-the-room scenarios, which are very popular amongst the mobile gaming community, and maintained a quality that most AppStore and Google Play Store compatriots could only dream of. The games had an eerie, complex, intertwined storyline that eventually bled over into an inscrutable meta-game and ARG. You know, the kind of stuff the internet eats up. 

Unlike the Cube Escape series, Underground Blossom is a premium release; at some point in the last few years developer Rusty Lake pivoted into making their games standalone, purchasable offerings. I’m a little unsure how these paid releases are that much different from the free Cube Escape games; maybe the seemingly reused art assets are a bit crisper and I assume the games are more fleshed out since they don’t release as often (I dunno, it’s been about five years since the last free Cube Escape game); but I have no qualms with Rusty Lake wishing to get paid for their hard efforts; in fact I encourage it. It would be far too privileged and entitled of me to expect such high quality games to remain free forever and I am more than happy to pay less than the price of a coffee to experience the continuation of the fateful story of Laura Vanderboom.

Underground Blossom takes place across seven levels, recounting the life and times of central character Laura Vanderboom, portrayed through vignettes that take place at different underground railway stations. The most enjoyable aspect of the series is its disturbing and sinister but sometimes hilariously crude tone and it’s nice to see that still portrayed in Underground Blossom wherein I remained equal parts tickled and unsettled throughout its runtime. 

Underground Blossom continues the Rusty Lake tradition using satisfying puzzle gameplay to add to the series’ overall complicated lore, which I’m not even going to attempt to explain, nor understand. The gameplay in the Rusty Lake anthology is far more simplistic than most point and click adventures that I gravitate towards, for example the likes of the LucasArts and Revolution Software games and their many successors and influences. There’s no combination of inventory items and whilst the puzzles are not even remotely grounded in reality due to the Rusty Lake series’ other-worldly, Twin Peaks-esque setting, they are still very straightforward, avoiding any goat or monkey wrench pitfalls (if you know, you know). Even so, I’m pleased to say that Underground Blossom was just as enjoyable as Rusty Lake’s previous releases; it provided a good two hours’ worth of distraction and, unlike their other releases, I was able to easily engage with its post-game content that adds about another hour of puzzles to proceedings without having to dedicate my life to hunting down ARG clues in online forums and wikis. However, that is also available for those who want it as there is a significant ARG portion to Underground Blossom as well, as is custom with every Rusty Lake release.

Whilst Rusty Lake’s first paid release (Rusty Lake Hotel) still remains the highlight of the series for me, I am glad developer Rusty Lake has developed such a following and is able to continue making these games. I guess at this point I should also consider myself as much a dedicated fan as anyone else; there are very few developers who I trust implicitly and whose new game I will pick up without hesitation upon release, and yet I find myself doing so for a Rusty Lake game every single time.

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As a second-generation immigrant, Venba was a game that instantly piqued my interest when I first knew of its existence several years ago. The story centres on a South Indian (Tamil) couple; the titular Venba and her husband Paavalan; as they emigrate to Canada from Chennai and look to make a living and a family. The game’s narrative is essentially an immigrant’s story seen via the perspective of both the first generation and second generation. Watching pre-release trailers, you may get the idea that Venba is a cooking game, but often the cooking takes a backseat to the narrative developer Visai Games want to tell about the struggles of resettling in foreign country where no one sounds, looks or eats like you, and the subsequent effects on the next generation. Venba is as much a cooking game as Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown is a cooking show; which, for the uninitiated, is much more focussed on the political landscape of different countries rather than their respective cuisines. And to be honest, that’s what makes Venba heartfelt and interesting. 

Soon after starting the game, the couple welcome their son Kavin into the world. The game has some quite large, and sometimes slightly jarring, time jumps between its seven chapters; often a new chapter will take place years, at times even as much as a decade after that which preceded it, but the game’s narrative does just enough to help you fill in the blanks as to what occurred during those years. What you’re meant to infer is the difficulties that Kavin had to endure growing up, what I presume to be, the only brown kid in school and his parents feeling despondent by the fact that their child is embarrassed by his Tamil background and wishes to distance himself from his roots. 

It’s brutal but honest. My upbringing was in a West Indian household, which is still…well…the West so my childhood experience wasn’t quite as jarring as Kavin’s; for example, I still spoke English at home and didn’t have anyone want or need to Anglicise my name. Whilst I was never ashamed of my background, I still empathised with Kavin’s story of being “other”, certainly when it came to food. Despite its colourful appearance, Venba doesn’t shy away from heavier topics like racism, unconscious bias, hate crimes and even death, but it does so in a way that doesn’t linger on these issues that may resurrect any trauma any player of colour may be carrying. The upbeat music, excellent proverbs of Thiruvalluvar and cooking also help to ensure that Venba isn’t a dour affair. 

Speaking of the cooking, the mechanics are very basic - they resemble those of a simplified Cooking Mama game where at most you’re twirling the analog stick or dragging and dropping ingredients. Each recipe has a puzzle element, often having to figure out the order of steps because your recipe book, passed down from previous generations, is dog-eared and worn to the point of it being illegible. This provides a fun little wrinkle to proceedings but don’t go into Venba expecting deep puzzle or gameplay mechanics. The cooking isn’t quite perfunctory but it’s no more than flavour text. 

More than the actual cooking I appreciate the fact that South Indian cuisine is in the spotlight. Okay, given my Guyanese heritage, I may know how to make tadka dal already but a large portion of the game’s playerbase (especially by virtue of it being available day one on Xbox Game Pass) may have never even heard of idli. I think Venba missed a trick of not having an actual recipe book, perhaps in the main menu, for those interested in recreating the recipes in real life. But hey, as an immigrant I know how tiring it can be to have to explain every little detail about your culture - people can go seek out that information themselves if they’re curious, which they should be as the sights and sounds of Venba make dishes look delectable. 

Although the cooking mechanics are not as layered as the biryani* you make in chapter four, the presence of food in Venba is nevertheless important and central to the game’s story and deeper message. Venba uses food as an effective way to tell an immigrant’s story in a way that is as heartbreaking as it is heartwarming. Seeing the joy Venba gets from steaming idli despite suffering from nausea during her pregnancy is harshly contrasted by Kavin later declining to take his mother’s food to college for fear that it would smell out the car on the journey up. Even little touches like seeing Kavin’s father Paavalan eat dinner with his hands whilst Kavin is picking at his own with a spoon are subtle but powerful. Inevitably, Kavin comes full circle and as an adult wishes to reconnect with his background and culture and, surprising no one, the catalyst for this epiphany is food. 

Venba relies on the well-acknowledged but still comforting notion that food is what reminds us of home, what binds us to our respective cultures and what is passed down through generations. Whilst other things like language, literature and customs may get left behind, food always remains. It’s beautiful, it’s heartfelt and it deserves your time.

*This game validated my staunch refusal to ever cook biryani - too much work.

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It may be ironic that my first post on “Short Musings” is about a video game that some would debate is not even a video game. But this is my blog and I don’t care for such trivial discussion – if I download it from a video game storefront, it’s a video game. Except Detroit Become Human – that’s not a video game but an affront to art itself.  

Anyway, South Scrimshaw, Part One is basically a visual storybook – there are no mechanics to speak of other than clicking to proceed through text and narration. There aren’t even any things like dialogue choices that would allow you to shoehorn it into the category of visual novel. Instead it’s a tale of an extraterrestrial whale in a faraway ocean told via the framework of a fictional nature documentary. Think of Blue Planet except without the charm of Attenborough’s grandfatherly dulcet tones. Here Attenborough’s distinctive delivery is substituted with voice actors who are much more robotic, charmless and who occasionally misplace inflections and stumble on the game’s more complex verbiage (at least they’re British). This is entirely forgivable seeing as this is my only quibble with South Scrimshaw and because it is a completely free offering, which is so mind-boggling that I deemed it only right to donate to creator Nathan Marsh’s Ko-fi after I finished the game. 

Everything else about South Scrimshaw, Part One is fantastic. I wouldn’t want to reveal the details of the story, since this is a game that is essentially all story, and this post would go beyond what would be considered ‘short musings’ if I were to start waxing lyrical about the contents of the narrative. But let me just tell you that in a short runtime of around ninety minutes, Marsh is able to create an incredibly rich sci-fi lore. First surrounding the human expedition to this extraterrestrial planet and second in the subsequent documentation of the fate of a juvenile whale calf as it strives to survive through to adulthood in a familiar but very much alien ocean. It reminds me of the extremely atmospheric In Other Waters from Jump Over the Age (who also made my favourite game of last year, Citizen Sleeper) except this is coupled with beautifully illustrated, Ghibli-esque watercolour images and animations to give life to the game’s excellent writing and world-building.

As this is just Part One (Marsh is still working on Part Two), this doesn’t recount the whole story and ends just on the cusp of the juvenile whale making a life-defining decision that will shape the destiny of his adult life. It’s not a cliffhanger as such; more a natural endpoint to the first half of this story; but that doesn’t lessen my excitement for what Part Two will bring. There’s enough tantalising intrigue that’ll make me pick it up straight away, whether it’s free or at a (deservedly) premium price.

I’ve always said sea exploration is way more interesting than space exploration – we know for sure there’s some crazy sh*t in our oceans whilst there could be nothing in the infinite reaches of space, or at least what is accessible to us at this moment in time. With South Scrimshaw I get the best of both worlds: I get to satiate the wistful part of my brain that occasionally thinks I should have become a marine biologist whilst also tickling the whimsical side of my brain wondering WTF other alien species could be down there in the depths of the ocean. It’s an impressive labour of love and I’d encourage you to go pick it up (for absolutely nothing!) on itch.io, Steam or GOG.

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More purposeful curation means the games I play these days are usually ones I really enjoy and would like to write about. And so, I’ve decided to do that here. I’ll still write the occasional review where the guys at OutofLives.net kindly host them, but those are more informative and more critical in tone whilst this blog will aim to feature more informal and more personal musings - sort of like a written version of my ramblings on Tanked Up Podcast.  

Even though I play far fewer games now, I don’t expect to write about every game I play, especially the ones I don’t like and/or don’t finish. Oftentimes those aren’t mutually exclusive; for example, I was loving Hi-Fi Rush earlier this year but life stuff got in the way and I still haven’t got back to it. It’ll still probably rank in my Top Ten list for the year though, so maybe I’ll write about games that I haven’t finished, providing I have enough to say. Maybe I’ll even write about games that I don’t consider to be “short”. I guess we’ll just have to see.   

So yeah, welcome to my newsletter which, at least for now, I’ll dub “Short Musings about Short Video Games”. Hopefully it’ll be interesting for those of you who know me and are also interested in the small, unique curios found in the depths and crevices of itch.io. Those and every Metroidvania I can get my hands on that will fill the void the ever-delayed Silksong has left in my soul. For those of you that don’t know me, I hope you’ll be able to get a feel for my personality from my writing in lieu of me composing what would be a very boring bio. For those of you who don’t know me or anything about video games, I don’t know how you got here but I hope you enjoy nonetheless! And most of all, I hope I can keep up with it; it’d be grand to look back in a year’s time and see a dozen or so posts under my belt, even if it’s just one a month and nobody but myself is reading.

If you’re still reading and made it this far, thanks for checking out this blog of sorts and be sure to sign up to the newsletter lest you miss any hard-hitting criticism about a niche 2D sidescroller you’ve never even heard of. By signing up you’ll be the first to find out how this newsletter changes, morphs and (optimistically) grows along with me. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to start writing… 

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