2026's Game Journal

So here's a question: What do you even call it when a game you REALLY like stresses you out to a point where you have to work up the mood to play it? Because that's how I feel about this game

I'm being so genuine when I say Casualties: Unknown may actually be the single most immersive survival game I have ever played, like ever. I think if I were to place a finger on what really makes it, it'll be the same thing most will tell you: the depth of the game's medical system. Just about every single vital part of the body is simulated and accounted for. Individual limbs, heart rate, blood pressure, blood volume, respratory rate... Each system is deep and realistic enough that I start to feel like I'm looking after and controlling a real creature, as strange as it sounds.

Some of my strange sympathy towards the experiments could also be within the context of the game existing. The experiments you play as being the illegal creation of some unnamed company kept under cruel and inhumane conditions used as expendible resources to further their own goals. Not sure! All I know is I wince and become uncomfortable when my character is suffering...

There's Landmines in the Desert

This is another game that's like... what is there to really talk about? I thought it was okay I guess. As far as idle/incremental games go it's not a "stand-out" game in any particular way. It's sort of a novel concept needing to actually scratch tickets and cash them in to buy new tickets... but the illusion of it actually feeling like real scratchers wears off really quickly, especially when the game starts giving the player more and more tools to not interface with the one and only interesting part of the game. Even the prestiege mechanics feel pretty half-baked if I'm being completely honest.

That being said though, it's not bad, I just had higher hopes for something that seems to be so popular out of the blue.

Honest to god I hate this game so much I am literally going to copy/paste my steam review and call it a day! I really do not feel like spending any more time on it ever. see you in 3 years when I try again and come to the exact same conclusions.

Outward would rather see you dead and suffering trying to understand it's mechanics before allowing you even a moment to step back and assess what you're dealing with. The game will take a mile long before giving you a measly inch. My time spent in this game will be low on steam but do know this marks the 4th time now I have attempted to really try and dip my toes in the water to what honestly looks like the vast and interesting world of Outward. If I were to guesstimate my actual total time, it would be somewhere around 9 hours across maybe 12 save files over 3 years. Each time I've returned with a newfound optimism that is very unfortunately met with my face being spit in with a generous offering of mud to help wipe myself clean.

For how fun Outward looks from the outside, it's one of the most brutal early games I've ever seen in my life. You are started in your home to gather your supplies, a good start to somewhat familiarize the player with the types of items you will come across in the adventure to come. Food? Must be survival mechanics. Bandages? I'm going to need to heal myself with items. A backpack? Traveling essentials! Then when you leave your home you come to find you're being evicted if you do not pay a debt you have no reasonable way of making up. Standard stuff to set you on your journey. A bit more freeform tutorial later and you are finally free to enter the HELL that is the open world.

Life outside of the town sucks, and it sucks HARD. Almost every single thing you will encounter save for maybe the large birds that run away from you when struck will leave you on the brink of death if not kill you outright, and given this game's particular flavor of clunky combat, death is the most likely outcome. What happens when you die? Well, fortunately you don't actually lose your entire inventory (usually, more on that later) but what you DO lose is all of your survival stats! Survival stats as in, hunger, thirst, and MAXIMUM HEALTH. Yeah, you lose maximum health when you take damage, along with your actual health. So in a game that is already brutally difficult to survive even the most basic of combat encounters, chances are your first few deaths will lead to an inevitable spiral of deaths where you lose more and more of your max HP, until you can't survive even a single hit from that wolf who snuck up on you while you were scrolling through your inventory desperately trying to eat what little food you've foraged trying to recover from the hours lost due to your last encounter with a wolf. It makes you feel awful and that's because it is awful, no two ways about it. Even if you didn't lose maximum health, the amount of food you have to eat after recovering from death is enough to feed a small village of starving families.

Speaking of which, why do I need to eat 4 piles of cooked berries and 3 loafs of bread to be satiated enough to not take MORE damage to my maximum health to begin with? Hell, why does the player need to eat at ALL? I understand the game is tagged as a "survival" game but honestly who actively WANTS to engage with these awful survival mechanics these days? Food and thirst meters were always nothing more than a chore to add an additional game loop on top of more basic primary game loops for a sense of added depth. I understand Outward likely has some mechanics associated with cooking and regeneration and weather resistances but can you at least OFFER the player the option to not have to deal with the forced "if you don't eat or drink you will die!" mechanic? It isn't fun.

Back to death punishment. What happens when you die? Well, you don't wake up at home, that much is for sure. In fact, to be totally honest, even for how many times I've died I'm not exactly sure what happens! I die near town and I appear to wake up in a cave about 4 miles away, then another death and I wake up outside of what appeared to be a dungeon. I went inside the dungeon and of course, died because there was no way to leave once you go too deep. Then after that death I woke up back outside of the dungeon, so cool, now I understand you seem to respawn at a landmark somewhere nearby your death? Or maybe it's just dungeons that respawn you outside of them when you die inside. I wouldn't know! Because oops while trying to recover from my last death I ate a perfectly fine boiled berry that apparently didn't agree with my stomach and now I have food poisoning (not actual poison mind you) ticking down 1 health every second. Were I to respawn with all of my max hp, this wouldn't have been an issue but you see, because I died 5 times before on this save I only had 28 health and this debuff lasted about 45 seconds. Of course, I died once again.
Expecting to wake up right back in front of the dungeon, imagine my surprise when I wake up in a PRISON. None of my items with me anymore, given only basic rags and a pickaxe. I'm then told the only way to leave is to get to work. Why am I here? What did I even do? If I attacked people in a town I'd at least understand but literally all I did in this save file was eat and die, why am I imprisoned??? You are literally expected to sit there and mine rocks, literally slaving away as the game completely disrespects me and my time, following this unforgiving theme of what feels like hatred and malice towards the player.

So no, honestly I'm done giving Outward "second chances". As much as I genuinely want to explore this game's progression and magic system I really feel like it doesn't even want me to. I have better things to play.

UH OH SCARY OPINION ALERT I DON'T REALLY LIKE SLAY THE SPIRE 2 THAT MUCH!!

Though I guess that isn't entirely true, I actually enjoy a LOT about Slay The Spire 2 over the first game, particularly in it's polish. Lots of new shiny bells and whistles that honestly really do add a whole lot more... but the balancing, ohhh the balancing...

I honest to God think that the balancing of Slay The Spire 2 is so bad that until it expects anything less than perfect of me I just can't feel the want to play it. There's no reason basic encounters should be dealing 32 damage on your second turn as early as act 2. It's felt like it's entirely up to luck whether or not I'm ever going to get a defensive card to the point where I'm passing on incredible attack cards just for a common that does nothing but give me 9 block halfway through a run just due to the crazy incoming damage every other turn. And even when you do have defense so many enemies in act 1 are centered around gaining strength, so every turn spent blocking damage instead of dealing damage is way too punishing when before you could "take your time" with most encounters as long as you had the block to take no damage. It's brutal. As early as Act 1 I cannot find myself wanting to do anything but heal at every single campfire because of the amount of unavoidable incoming damage, meaning no upgraded cards going into Act 2, which is a total momentum loss. I'm much more casual when it comes to deckbuilders, I really really do not want to have to hyperoptimize every single run I play, that's what ascensions are for in a game like this.

As far as gameplay changes I DO like though, the new characters are pretty cool. Regent has a lot of potential but even after a couple runs I cannot wrap my brain around an additional resource to manage, I never manage to get any cards to generate stars so most of my runs with him have stalled out and died pretty early. Necrobinder is on the other side though, really fun and quite easy to get ahold of. Even despite struggling to form a proper "build" with her, it remains my most played character in the sequel easily.

Multiplayer is also GREAT. Genuinely a fantastic edition to the game. It made a whole lot more sense after I learned that the Slay The Spire board game was quite literally, more or less just a coop version of the video game (awesome)

At this point I have 26 hours in the game, and I keep feeling the PULL to play more and more but almost every single run leaves me feeling hollow, like it ended WAY sooner than it should just due to factors out of my control. I probably have a combined total of 250 hours in Slay The Spire 1 between when I originally pirated the game, my hours on steam, and the hours on my phone. I found ascension difficulty progression to be unfun so I never played much past A10 but I can confidently say Slay The Spire 2 is way more difficult than it should be, at least on A0.

My one and only singleplayer win. Relic starved, elites way too scary.

Alright so I've seen way too many people call this a "gooner game" to the point where it's a little concerning. At most you could maybe suggest the creator has something of a guro fetish, but beyond that no the game is not for "gooners" just because it features sexuality as a theme along with it's many other themes and overall tone. It just feels very...dismissive.

Anyways, with that absolutely insane opener for a game most people have probably never heard of out of the way, what even IS Beyond Citadel? It's a boomer shooter, specifically what I would currently consider to be my favorite boomer shooter at the moment. I am very fascinated with the game's gunplay... Reloading is all manual, cocking your weapon is manual, and guns can degrade with use which can cause your gun to JAM. It sounds annoying, and the gameplay feels a bit "jank" at first but man oh man did it click with me quick after the first act. Level design past the third act hasn't been the greatest, though I didn't even realize there was a fullscreen map until the end of act 4 so that solved most of my issues anyways.

The story and lore of this game has also been pretty interesting and I'm still kicking myself over skipping all of the dialog and ignoring the story until about the third act, atoning for it by going back and replaying previous levels just to read all of the npc dialog. I might even find myself playing the game that came before this one just for some better context. Generally speaking I'm not one to care much for narratives in games so I thought I wouldn't miss out on anything... OOPS!

This is a game I played entirely on a whim, I remember seeing it a few months ago posted by the developer on twitter and today I thought I'd give it a try.

Very disappointing though tbh, the actual "rhythm" aspect of the game feels pretty awful. Even going back to try and fully understand how the game is meant to be played I couldn't find myself able to complete a single stage without taking damage and the only way I could earn the "medal" for completing a stage quickly was by completely ignoring the rhythm and brute force mashing the attack button.

I get that it's a Touhou fan game but the bullet hell is far too chaotic for a game like this man... And I don't have much else to say.

brute force = speed

HOLY. SHIT.

First thing I will say for starters... I was not excited for Mewgenics. At least not until less than a week before it's release when I found out it wasn't pure roguelite, and acted more like a Darkest Dungeon 1 campaign. I was at most anticipating it's release because it was the big new Edmund Mcmillen game, I GOTTA play the newest Edmund Mcmillen game... I mean c'mon, I did a presenation on this guy in 6th grade. That being said, I really was *not* going too crazy over his last few releases. The End is Nigh was a good game, a great game even... but it didn't scratch the Super Meat Boy itch I was hoping for when it launched, leaving me ultimately disappointed. Then there was The Legend of Bumbo... which wasn't really good at all. But enough about those games I'd rather talk about peak

And peak it is! Mewgenics might actually be my game of 2026 unless something REALLY blows me away later this year. Sorry Slay The Spire 2, you've been outclassed by cats.

For starters, I think Mewgenics may actually be the first roguelite I've played that does turn-based tactics really well, and not only does it do it well it does it FLAWLESSLY. I'm very fatigued by "roguelike elements" at the moment but I was so relieved to find the game feels so much less like the usual "roguelite" and more like Darkest Dungeon as previously mentioned. It's actually kind of FUNNY because I am excited over the progression in this game for the same reasons I was hooked on Umamasume for that brief period a several months ago, each run you do will contribute to literal future "generations" of runs that come after, depending on how you choose to breed your cats. I vastly prefer this style of roguelite progression to the Hades' "Collect 2,000 currency and dump them into permanent upgrades" I feel like I'm actively taking part in the work towards an objective this way, rather than paying someone else to do it. Very fun!

But that isn't even the actual gameplay... Gameplaywise, Mewgenics may actually be one of the best turn-based tactics games ever made, fullstop. If you're unfamiliar with the turn-based tactics genre, that's too bad because all I can think of as a comparison point is something like Final Fantasy Tactics or Xcom. So imagine those two games you don't know but with a whooole lot more emergent gameplay. It's actually one of the things Mewgenics does best. It feels like almost every encounter is a sort of "puzzle" and the environment and my abilities are the tools to solve it! Much like Tears of the Kingdom if every solution wasn't a hoverbike or extensive use of the "ascend" ability.

However, there is one major complaint I have that has really been bringing me down the last few times I've played the game: consistency. Every class in Mewgenics has (practically speaking) limitless potential, however what they don't all have is consistency. In particular, mage, thief, and tinkerer are the big three that *always* feel like a gamble every time I take them on an adventure, even cleric to a degree. Every time I take one of these classes it feels like I'm running 70% odds that they're going to be practically useless beyond their basic attack because so many of their class abilities are useless without the right synergies to make them good. Of the last 4 clerics I've brought, the best class ability I've picked up was the one to clear debuffs in an area and all of the other clerics were only useful because I thought to bring along the teleporter item which lets you move to any space once per battle. Now this COULD be a simple "skill issue" but it's worth mentioning I'm near the end of act 2 and haven't lost a single run yet. It's just annoying never wanting to bring classes I like the idea behind because there's a good chance I might as well have only brought 3 cats instead of 4.

There's also a smaller issue where the game hates my computer and occasionally never launches past the initial loading screen PLEASE FIX THE GAME I WANT TO PLAY IT!!

As of writing this I only JUST unlocked a third room.