Honestly for me, while I don’t like the UI and agree that it’s not good I could definitely get used to it. What irks me is feature removal. I miss getting more detailed stats during and after matches so much. Heatmaps, pass maps, touch maps, dribble visualisations, average positions, shot maps… All gone.

Also being unable to do much with your reserve and U18 teams. I don’t think you can even see their position in their respective leagues anymore? You used to be able to micromanage them, select specific players for specific positions (useful for retraining which I do a lot) etc.

How are you liking Mouse PI? I haven’t bought it yet as I just bought a couple of games recently and need to mind my backlog, but it looks really good.

Was my GOTY last year by a mile (and yes I also played E33). Absolutely incredible game, and also a super underrated but phenomenal OST, Trigg & Gusset really killed it. Great showcase of the bass clarinet.

Physical notes are absolutely vital, I ended the game with like 50 pages of notes and hundreds of screenshots!

Football Manager 26 was free on Steam this past weekend so my current playthroughs of other games got derailed as I lost a good couple of days to it, fully feeling the addiction seeping in again. I would still recommend FM 2024 over it all things told, but I have to admit the new tactics engine in 26 allowing for different formations in and out of possession is both realistic and a lot of fun to play with.

Otherwise before and after the weekend it’s been more of Death Howl. I’m having a good time with it so far. The art is absolutely beautiful, a gorgeous minimalistic but expressive pixel art in a very distinctive muted color palette. I have some complaints here and there with the gameplay but mechanically the turn based Soulslike grid-based strategy deckbuilder genre soup is a nice mix and the combat is very challenging but doable. I’m constantly just about scraping by between bonfires. On the deckbuilding side it’s not a game that puts a premium on creativity so far, and instead it seems more constructed like a series of small puzzles. Each zone has its own set of cards and its own set of encounters and it’s up to you to find the “correct” deck and approach for each encounter.

The story has been pretty mediocre so far, which is unfortunate. It’s ostensibly framed as this Orpheus tale of a mother going into the spirit world to rescue her child from death, but it’s very obviously actually a tale of a mother’s journey towards accepting the death of her child, with each zone representing one stage of grief. Maybe it hits different if you don’t pick this up right away, but me personally I’m mostly drumming my fingers as the story unfolds, waiting for the penny to drop for the protagonist.

It’s not really been story heavy though in fairness, so the majority of playtime is spent in battles, and those are still fun.

I am so completely torn on this game. On the one hand I suck at platformers and don’t much enjoy them and also from reviews it seems this game can be pretty fucking hard at times with some extremely precise timings.

On the other hand the game looks like an absolute work of art that I am craving to experience.

True gamers make do with a single mouse button. Mac is the ultimate platform.

That’s fair enough, but I really do recommend going into NG+ after too even if you start over from the beginning. It’s a really fun twist, and also streamlines things quite a bit so the NG+ run will be much faster than your first playthrough. And it has an exclusive ending!

I’m so impressed with this game, I can’t wait for the sequel.

Did you do NG+? It had one of the best NG+ implementations for me, so much fun. God I love that game. I really hope the sequel is a banger.

I mean, I love atmosphere to be clear. Several of my favourite games stand on the foundation of atmosphere, like STALKER, Cyberpunk, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Dishonored… Withering Rooms that I played recently was dripping with atmosphere, which is part of why I had trouble moving on from it.

Limbo does have good atmosphere but… its atmosphere is kind of one-note, like yeah it’s spooky shadows but that’s all there is. It’s neat, but it’s not really wowed me to the extent that it really elevated the game for me or anything. From what I’ve heard Inside has a bit more of a story to it, a which makes me hopeful I’ll like it better.

Artsy indie platformers can work for me, I really liked both GRIS and INMOST.

I think we’ve already been over it before, some time last year when I played Limbo. I’m not a huge fan of puzzle platformers in general so it starts as an uphill battle. There were one or two puzzles I liked (like the anti-gravity stuff was cool), but most I didn’t for various reasons. Most were either frustrating or forgettable. The liquid stuff was a bit overused. Towards the end it got a little too precision platformy and timed for my liking, some with really tight and unforgiving timing. Although I recognise that some people might enjoy that. Story wasn’t really anything either. It’s a cool mood and some decent looking scenes at times but apart from the graphics and art it almost felt like a browser game.

I finished Withering Rooms last week, and finally managed to tear myself away from it instead of doing a third straight playthrough. I’m still low-key obsessed with this game and am now waiting anxiously for the upcoming sequel. What a piece of art this game is. Beautiful art direction, beautiful music (all composed by the solo dev!), great gameplay despite the clunky combat and just such an interesting world and story, with some thematic throughlines of morality and responsibility running throughout. Possibly also a commentary on generative AI. It’s a super well made, super interesting and captivating game and I can’t recommend it enough.

Death Howl

I moved on to Death Howl as my next main game. It’s a Soulslike grid-based strategy deckbuilder (yes, that’s a mouthful) and so far it’s been… Decent but mixed, I’d say. I love the art. Beautiful pixel art in a very minimalistic but expressive style and a distinctive muted color palette. The story is okay but very very obvious and predictable, so while it’s a classic template and theme I am not really excited about getting to the next bit of story as I can already tell where it’s going, what it’s about and how it’s going to end.

The gameplay is fine so far, although the game is quite grindy which I don’t love. You need to do a lot of trash fights to grind out your deck for each area, and there is a mechanic that increases the mana cost of cards from outside your current area, which means you have to regrind a deck for every new area. It also means creativity in deckbuilding is restricted, as you really kind of are just limited to building one of the two deck archetypes provided by each area’s cards.

There are also some QoL features I don’t love, such as disabling fast travel while doing quests, which just means you waste enormous amounts of time walking. Overall it’s interesting but I don’t know whether I’d recommend it, outside of diehard deckbuilder fans who have already played everything else. It’s also fairly difficult.

Ninja Gaiden 4

I got derailed in my playthrough weeks ago, but have picked it up again and am probably in the final third now. I’m playing it in parallel for whenever I need something faster paced. Not much to add about it that I haven’t said previously. I have a ton of gripes with it, and it feels more like a half-brother to the older 3D Ninja Gaidens than a full blooded family member, but in isolation its combat systems are phenomenal, it’s fast and it’s fun and free-flowing and if you like action games you should absolutely play it.

It’ll probably be my next intermission artsy short game between longer titles. Did you play Limbo? If so how do they compare? I thought Limbo was only okay but I’ve heard people say Inside is a stronger game.

They did a pretty significant marketing push on Twitch for Crimson Desert, but in financial terms I don’t know if that is all that expensive, and certainly not in relation to 5 million copies sold.

I forgot that since I usually just check 6 months/1y/3y but they do huh. Even better!

https://isthereanydeal.com/ has 3 years of price history and tracks valid 3rd party stores too (not greymarket sites like G2A).

Ninja Gaiden 2 is calling.

Have you played STALKER Anomaly? It has the looting and shooting without being an extraction shooter, but still scratches a similar itch.

My condolences.

CDPR gambled for the masses and won with Witcher 3. I agree with you and would prefer the combat to be more methodical, require more preparation and be more visceral. I wish you’d have to actually manually brew the correct potions and oils in preparation, and then see those have a huge impact on whether you win or lose the fight.

At the same time, the super lightweight combat they went with allowed the game to be so approachable by the causal market that it sold millions and millions of copies and singlehandedly catapulted CDPR into a AAA studio. So it’s hard to argue they made a mistake not catering to players like us.

Some games have started to crop up that straddle the line between Souls and CAG, The Nioh series and First Berserker: Khazan come to mind. I’ve also heard good things about AI Limit, it looks pretty fast and it doesn’t have stamina.

Also not a Soulslike but I assume you’ve played Ninja Gaiden?

I tried playing it last year and really wanted to like it as it’s a classic and the comedy, art direction and vibe are all great. It just felt like the gameplay was ass. I don’t think it’s aged well.

If you want something with a bit more story I will keep proselytizing for Chrono Ark. If you enjoy roguelike deckbuilders like StS then this is one of the best ones from a pure game mechanics perspective, and it also has an entire visual novel baked in with a surprisingly interesting story.

Management games, strategy games, point-and-click games and isometric RPGs can all be played one-handed. Some might need spacebar (or whatever the pause button is) to a mouse thumb button for maximum comfort but that should be fine. Do any of these genres sound interesting?

EDIT: Card games should work great too, there is a vast ocean or deckbuilders out there!

Motorsport Manager is a banger, it’s a classic. Definitely recommend it if you’re into management games.

It can be a little moon logic at times and might be frustrating to play without a guide, but yeah it’s great and quite funny.

It’s a very fun series, they play very differently from a lot of other games so look up some video footage first maybe, but I think they’re fun. The missions are somewhat sandboxy and can make you feel pretty clever when you figure out how to set up a nice sequence.

While I think Rise of the Ronin has the better combat, the presentation for the duels in Ghost is much better for sure. I loved the fight amongst the lanterns too, was probably the most memorable part of the game for me as well.

I’m still deep in the Withering Rooms trenches - almost literally now (although I can’t say more without spoilers). The game is just absolutely excellent, and I am even starting to get used to the janky and clunky combat. I’m in Chapter 4 now and starting to get some kind of idea of a possibile endgame, although I’m sure there are plenty of more mysteries and secrets and twists to uncover. I also know there are multiple endings, but I am still unsure what decides which one you get as I’ve just been playing blind and I don’t feel like I’ve locked into anything yet.

I know it’s a completely different game and a completely different vibe, but this game’s exploration is giving me almost similar vibes to back when I was first exploring Dark Souls 1. An interesting and dangerous world, weird ass NPCs, distinct art direction, mysteries and secrets, world building and story in item descriptions, locations that connect through shortcuts and link back to previous areas… It’s just great.

Next on the agenda is exploring the extremely cursed attic, but I think I might need a dedicated gear loadout for it as my default set gets overwhelmed by curse damage after just a couple of seconds in there. After that’s it’s the endgame, I guess? Can’t wait to see how it ends.

I played some Desperados last year and tbh they hold up pretty well apart from some graphics/UI stuff. I don’t think I ever played Robin Hood beyond the demo back in the day, but I played enough Commandos/Desperados to know it’s quality.

One final subject i wanted too touch on is that this game makes me wish for a Robin Hood game.

I don’t know if it’s your type of game but Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood is a classic.

Rise of the Ronin is like Ghost but less cinematic and less graphically impressive but with better combat. I guess it depends on what you’re looking for exactly.

The upcoming I Have No Change has a certain Papers-esque feel to it. You’re stuck in a kiosk doing mundane things, and narratives are told through the characters that visit your kiosk.

Pope also said he was more wary of releasing a major new game now because he enjoyed such critical success with Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn that he doesn’t want to let players down.

“There’s also the sense that I was pretty happy with Obra Din and Papers, Please and I don’t… you know, maybe I can’t do it again, kind of thing. Do I really want to maybe just go out on a high note? Why drag my myself down with the next thing that people may not like?

You know, I feel him there. I can’t even imagine how to make a successful follow-up after two games that were not just smash hits, but brilliant and unconventional too. Everyone is basically expecting a piece of genius (me included). Not to mention the step up from Papers to Obra Dinn was so huge in terms of production and scope that it’s easy to expect another escalation.

I don’t think I play enough retro games to warrant owning one of these, and if I was to buy a handheld it’d probably be a Steam Deck. But they are such nice objects I kinda want one anyway.

Great article as always, I love your content. I especially appreciated the developer interviews about the 8GB RAM limitations.

Sorry, I forgot to answer but thanks for the reply! I do like Team Ninja so I might pick it up on a sale.

Same thing happened with music too, music piracy cratered with the success of Spotify.

I could barely get through one playthrough of it to be honest. The first 20ish hours were alright but by the end of the 60h playthrough I had to actively force myself to finish it. I agree that the story is competent but nothing special, and the way it’s mono-serious and every line is delivered in the same dour, stoic monotone just wore me down over the playthrough. Plus the quest design is repetitive and pretty dull, as is the open world stuff. And the combat is fine but really not deep or varied enough to fuel such a long playtime.

While the world is gorgeous from a visual design perspective, I didn’t really get the alive sensation at all personally. That is something I felt in RDR2 for sure, but Ghost just felt like a bog standard Ubisoft open world to me.

But I seem to be in a minority feeling this way about Ghost so maybe I’m just getting old and cranky.

I’m with you. I thought it was alright but I never saw what everyone else seemed to see in the game. I do admire it for being both beautiful and immaculately optimised however.

How are you finding Stranger Of Paradise? Since getting into Ninja Gaiden this past year I’ve come into contact with some more CAG players and some of them talked it up as having really great combat.

I like Civ V personally. I like the hexagons and I like the one-unit-per-tile instead of death stacks, even though the AI isn’t great at using it without community patches. I also like its visuals the most.

It also has the beloved fan mod Vox Populi, if you want to get into all that.