Hurr Jackal

September 2026

  • 20 More, Somehow Even Smaller, Mazes: Another very nice assortment of maze-based/themed puzzles, each with their own innovation. 9/10 (free)
  • The Magister: A bit of a mixed bag, this game. There’s the overall murder-mystery frame, where you seek out clues to help you determine the culprit. This is randomised, but on my first playthrough, I was thinking that I could already see the seams, the second time was way too close to the first, and the third start really showed how formulaic the randomness was. To progress through the game, there’s there’s not one but two deckbuilding games - a combat oriented one with tactical positioning, and a social one. I liked the social quite a bit better, but the combat one is still pretty good. Then there’s some side quests and another system or three with that. It’s worth at least a run, but after that too much of the rest of the game needs to be dealt with for me to play for the card games alone. 8/10 for one run, but it could really use its own Kaycee’s Mod to streamline things after that. (Steamgifts win)
  • ONE BTN BOSSES: A bullet hell game where you autofire at the level’s enemy, while moving on a track. Your single action button reverses your direction by default, but there are alternative weapons (eg: laser) and abilities (eg: dash) which may be better for overcoming a particular level. What made beating the game achievable is that the levels before bosses are relatively easy, and I only needed half-plus-one of a boss’s linked levels. 8/10 (Steamgifts win)
  • 007 First Light: This is nowhere near as good as Hitman’s World of Assassination trilogy, but then it’s not aiming to be WOA, and the developers were chafing against the standard WOA level design well before the end of Hitman 3. First Light does capture the feel of Bond films, the writing is more or less up to scratch, and the acting is good: Bond is an asshole, but a likeable one, which is rather important to capture, and its principal side characters stand out (though most of your class are more cardboard than ideal). Its stealth segments are far smaller, more constrained, and more linear, but also have a different flavour of social stealth as you can just bald-faced bluff non-enforcers without needing a change in uniform. Its AI is really not great, which was ok in WOA, effectively a tactical puzzle game, where the quirks of the AI is an advantage and avoiding notice is the goal, but stands out more here. On the other hand, if you get rumbled here, you normally just shrug and launch into combat, rather than restart, which is probably a healthier playstyle. The driving is ok. The hand to hand combat is reasonable. The gunfighting is there, and often mandatory, where you have the opportunity to mow down an army of mooks, but I would probably have been happier if I’d used more aim assist. There’s a disappointingly quarter-baked Mr Freeze style fight. I suspect that its replayability is going to be much much lower, though your selection of gadgets would alter things a little, IO do have a roadmap for continued play, and there’s clearly intentions of a sequel. 8-/10
  • What Lies in the Multiverse: A good set of puzzles (different mechanics in each world) embedded into a walk-and-talk story. The game does not respect the time of its players (there’s a lot of unnecessary dead space to traverse, particularly if backtracking), and there’s so much text. But the writing quality is good, and the puzzles are both good and varied. 7.5/10, but patience/buy-in is needed. (Steamgifts win)
  • Haak: Metroidvania as junk food: it’s fun enough while playing, movement is reasonable, difficulty is relatively low provided you have the right upgrades (and they offer the opportunity to make things even easier via options, a set of currency to temporarily make different things easier, and allowing a couple of codes resulting from some rather obscure puzzles to just be given), but exploration can be a little unfocussed (you can’t mark your map sufficiently), and it really doesn’t have anything that stands out after having finished it: Less than two weeks later and I’m having difficulty remembering details of any of the boss fights, for instance. Its reliance on access codes probably means that it is rather sequence breakable on a second playthrough. 7+/10
  • HunterX: Very disappointing Soulsvania. It’s definitely oriented towards combat but that’s not nearly good enough to offset the uninspired level design and uninteresting platforming. A particular sin is a plethora of breakable crystals that give you souls. It would have been better to have either made these autocollect, or omitted these entirely and just adjusted costs. 5.5/10
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