HurrJackal1

August 2026

  • Stasis: Bone Totem: Highly atmospheric horror adventure, as a couple and their deceased daughter’s robot bear (so ugly a design!) explore an abandoned deep ocean rig, descending into a post-Lovecraftian nightmare (post Tomb Raider 2015 too, I think). Satisfying puzzles, reasonable acting, and story development that on a number of occasions answered some initial skepticism. You will be handwaving the science throughout; the ability to teleport objects between the characters is a core mechanic introduced almost immediately. It has body horror, gore, and the deep ocean, and is tense but not scary (there are some death scenes, but they’re more of a tension break because of the way they’re rendered). Particularly welcome was how the game immediately identified necessary points of interest. There were two earlier games (Stasis, and the free CAYNE) which I haven’t played, but they don’t appear particularly related, or necessary to have played first. 9+/10 (Steamgifts win)
  • Pseudoregalia: 3d metroidvania platformer built around a range of movement abilities. There’s only a few times when you actually need to fight, and most enemies are just a minor hazard that can easily be ignored, particularly the near-harmless chickens – it’s the traversal and exploration that’s the star of the game. Particularly nice is the way that so many small shortcuts can be unlocked to facilitate speedy backtracking. The interconnectivity plus the range of abilities consequently allows for some flexible routing; there were a few times when exiting an area that I realised I could have approached from that way instead. Geometry and texturing is very N64-era (though thankfully without the pop-in of those games), but this can actually aid readability as your agile anthropomorphic jackalope (?) navigates the world: a hazy crumbling castle, which is perhaps influenced by those in games from Ueda and Miyazaki. The map is where it falls down very slightly, with no markings for collectables or save points, no identification of your position and orientation in the “room”, and no way to look at other areas to help plan what to do next. The challenge ramps up towards the end as you need to do some fairly well-timed sequences of wall runs and multiple wall kicks, but it’s still all on the right side of frustration. No achievements, so endgame screenshots a,b,c 9/10 (Steamgifts win)
  • Fourmiworld: A truly open world 2d side-on digger/metroidvania, where almost all terrain is destructable. It’s a little hard to explain, but this feels particularly unironically old-school UK (say mid-80s to mid-90s) in a way that I’ve not seen too many modern retro games even aim for: it’s not just the aesthetics, but the combination of overall focus (there are requirements for completion that aren’t digging, but it doesn’t feel discontinuous from the core game) and playful experimental weirdness in the details. A very subjective and debatable 9/10. (free, but you can pay for the lore tracker DLC)
  • Voidwrought: A metroidvania, which got much much better once I finally defeated the second boss (I should have done it sooner rather than exploring thoroughly… although it might have been possible to get Phased Flesh before that, which would have opened things right up)… and then I accidentally sequence broke my way to a late-game ability. Routing is highly flexible and much of the game is optional, as the map is nicely interconnected , and there’s a range of core and special abilities and buffs (double jump was my last ability gained, I apparently missed an ability, and there’s a method of augmenting a different form of traversal which I barely used). The world record is well under an hour. I took much longer. 9/10
  • Pixeljunk Eden: In search of five “Spectra” blossoms in each Garden world, you collect nearby pollen to grow new plants that you can scale on your way upwards and outwards. Each world adds something new into the mix, whether moves, enemies, or changes in the world rules. You are mostly leaping from perch to perch. There’s a swing, but this is mostly for area control/collection and only every so often for additional distance in traversal but it’s not really chainable. Good electro+vocals music, and abstract/psychadelic silhouette graphics. Overall an enjoyable experience. Interestingly (?) there’s no recorded speedrun.com completions for Garden 10 or Any%, so you could become a World Champion if you were so inclined to time and record it. 8.5/10
  • ILA: A Frosty Glide: An exploration collectathon where a young witch must summit an island in search of her cat. It is not hard, but certainly a little more difficult at times than its kiddy veneer might suggest. Often not entirely different to a wintery Re:Fresh in vibe, but better overall. There was one thoroughly unintuitive progress blocker where got stuck because I needed to repeatedly stomp something a lot despite the lack of feedback or (I believe) significant cluing that that was what was needed. 8/10
  • Candellum: A free very short game (there’s an achievement for completing in under 10 minutes) with an interesting life mechanic: as a warrior candle, your wax is constantly burning away, but you can send your flame to enemies and regain wax through killing them. It’s a linear set of arenas and puzzles, with one necessary upgrade, one “collectable” on a branch, and one boss – not (as the tags might have you believe) a metroidvania. It is, however, excellent for a student game. 7.5/10 (free)
  • Where the Water Tastes Like Wine: You travel an out-of-time and mythic dustbowl-era America, experiencing events and hearing stories, which you later discover have mutated into taller tales in the retelling. At campfires dotted throughout the land, you’ll run across travellers and share tales with them – travellers who are in the process of transforming mythically themselves. It’s well written, overall (there’s a wide range of writers; you may recognise some), the mutation of the stories can be very amusing, and I wanted to see where everything went. The music is great. Where this game fights you – and fights you hard – is the travel. The map is large, you need to physically move from story to story, they are scattered at random locations and at named cities, the map has untraversable mountain ranges that constrain your pathing, and … walking … is … slow. You can hitchhike, but cars go only one way on roads and you can’t hop out voluntarily if you see events to pick up. You can hop a train, but each will take you to only one city, and distribution is uneven. You need to complete the journeys of all 16 fireside travellers, with multiple fireside chats at different locations per traveller, to finish the game. Each of the travellers rewards you with an item allowing fast travel to a city, but even with that they’re unevenly distributed and there’s so much tracking and backtracking and backtracking. I think this would have been more enjoyable if navigation were abstracted out. Particularly cheeky is that the final achievement deliberately cannot be obtained. 7.5/10
  • Mind over Magnet: Short and pretty good puzzler about flipping switches, magnetic fields, and polarity. I got stuck on the very last level, forgot about it for a couple of months, and on returning had another few stabs at the level, and then discovered that it could be skipped in the options… which sent me to the end and gave me the final achievement. Having rediscovered a mechanic while the credits were scrolling, I then went back and solved it for real. 7.5/10
  • Late Shift: An FMV, with high production values and overall good acting, but some incredibly dubious plot developments. As a made-up example, imagine if the main character had been knocked down by a hit and run driver, and a paramedic tells him “You’ve got some broken bones and internal bleeding, and you’re going to die if you don’t get treated properly. It’ll take you at least an hour to reach a hospital. Better start walking that way.” The achievements suggest that the game should be played multiple times to see its seven endings and everything in between. The game suggests that this should be arduous, because previously watched scenes are unskippable. 7+/10
  • Dave the Diver: Dave the Diver is about the most jack-of-all-trades master-of-none of games I’ve played. It can be charming and amusing, and I thought I’d like this way way more than I did, as I hadn’t paid attention to reviews, but knew it had a bunch of awards, and remembered hearing good things about it in passing from a couple of streamers. On the one hand there is the more-or-less expected roguelite as its core, where you dive, catch fish, upgrade your gear, explore, complete quests and sidequests, and face bosses. On the other it’s what must be hundreds of different minigames and systems in a trenchcoatwetsuit, and most of them are not particularly good. The real Balatro is certainly better than this one’s anemic micro version. Even the various special harpoon heads each have an individual mechanic for how they reel in resistant fish. One requires frantically waggling the thumbstick – which is pleasant for neither hand nor controller, and is a mechanic that should have gone out of fashion in the 1980s. The map variety in the Blue Hole is limited; its fish and pickups will vary in their range and location, but not significantly. The key problem in its apparent focus – catching fish – is that your harpoon damage upgrade path tops out both early and with relatively low damage, which means that you need to be spearing even small fish on deeper levels 2-5 times before you can catch it – and that adds length and tedium but generally not challenge. If you like your games to have more variety than focus, with a grab-bag of systems and a huge list of things to collect and upgrade you may well be one of the many who love it. I, however, avoid restaurant and farming and grindy crafting and bullet hell games, and Dave the Diver is all of that and more and more. A justifiably biased 7/10 (Steamgifts win)
  • Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: This is absolutely a love letter to the Jet Set Radio series, though I only played JSR Future and don’t remember its details after so many years (my vibe is I enjoyed it). But that released in 2002, and we’ve had a number of arcadey extreme sports with deeper mechanics and level design since (and before – THPS3!), such as Tony Hawk 4, Aggressive Inline, and various snowboarding and wakeboarding and cycling games, among others. BRC may well replicate JSR/F’s gameplay, but in 2026 it disappointed, with: perfect balance no matter how long the grind (you grind not only for navigation/mobility, but for required points/combo so it matters in a way it didn’t in, say, Gori or Sonic); a limited range of tricks; levels with way too much dead/mundane space (with limited lines, and without things like skitching to speed traversal or named gaps to keep areas meaningful); unsatisfying regular combat with unlimited enemies when you trigger heat by graffiti-ing, only being reset by changing your outfit (and at some point even once will trigger or raise heat); and overall a relatively low level of challenge. On the upside, the art and music is pleasant, controls are fine, the bosses are ok, and levels have some optional secret side areas for collectables and tag spots. 7/10 (Steamgifts win)
  • Etrian Odyssey II HD: A Japanese blobber RPG whose key gimmick is that you draw your own map (although there is an automap option to skip that; I didn’t). Given that you have thirty character slots available in town, and your party size is five, there’s some complexity available in combining and optimising character builds that’s severely lacking in the dungeon crawling but I didn’t get around to exploring that. You’ll have a random encounter every twenty steps or so, there’s a few secret walls that can be passed through inspection, and a couple of minor stepping puzzles to avoid tough enemies (represented by a featureless disc of various colours), but the dungeon world is thoroughly non-interactive compared with Grimrock, Eye of the Beholder, etc, though apparently there’s some kind of gimmicks in strata after the first. I killed the first major boss on the fifth floor, climbed the stairs to the second zone, and quit. The pop-in from the extremely limited viewing-distance is emblematic of how lazy this feels. 5.5/10 (Steamgifts win)
about 5 hours ago* 2 comments
fernandopa

Absurd line-up, so many games there that I want to play, in particular Stasis: Bone Totem, Pseudoregalia, Voidwrought, Dave the Diver and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. To be honest I haven’t played Jet Set Radio so maybe I’ll start with that since I already own it hahahah

Congrats on beating so many, great job!

about 3 hours ago
Lex

I played some of the first Stasis game, but it was too gross. That’s the only one of these I came close to playing.

I think Bomb Rush Cyberfunk probably hits people harder if they were still waiting for JSRF sequels that never came. And David the Diver seems to trade on atmosphere and experience with some underbaked gameplay.

about 2 hours ago