#15 - 2025-2026 Roundup
It's been a while! It's been too long! Local idiot who keeps going 'boy, I should do more posts there, I have fun doing that, that's a neat and good thing to do, I like chronicling my thoughts on media' fails to do anything for months!!
And then I took so long I felt anxious about doing anything even though this is all just kind of a personal pet project. So it goes. I actually wrote the below post about a month ago (I even have Discord messages indicating exactly when I was working on it...) and faltered at, of all things, finishing touches and grabbing screenshots. Nice.
I decided I wanted to talk a little bit about stuff I've been playing towards the end of 2025 and into early 2026. Most of this is stuff I don't feel strongly enough to want to write a full post about--there is one major exception on this list--but, well, the point of this blog was to always write down my thoughts on stuff. A little diary that anyone is free to peek into. Admittedly, there's one other game on this list where I simply don't feel qualified to write anything at length, but let's not go there.
I'll be keeping things simple. 13 games, 13 screenshots, and a small paragraph for each. Er, except for the one game where I kept talking. Sorry. You know how it is.
In the future I want to get back to updating this more, so... if you're the type of person who was eagerly awaiting for me to write more? First of all, DM me and praise me. Wait, no, no, don't do that, I'll die of embarrassment. But anyway, seriously, I want to update this more, that is my plan, I need to do more things for personal enrichment even if it's just braindumping about video games and whatever.
- MAMIYA
MAMIYA. A Shared Illusion of the World's End. I honestly don't even want to say too much here to avoid giving away too much...? The above screencap is something from the demo, even, just to make sure I absolutely did not accidentally post anything further in the game. If you like boys being sad and fucked up things happening to them and also weird fucked up adults I highly recommend this. It uses Emotional Catharsis as a BGM at a couple of points, so you know it's good. Samejima, what the fuck is your problem, anyway...?!
- Astral Throne
Fire Emblem but a roguelike if I had to give the elevator pitch. You pick a main character and then someone else to basically act as the secondary PC and the rest of your ranks are a set pool of generics. There's character traits, and weapons tend to be impactful. I feel like some of the weapon types are a bit unintuitive to decipher at a glance, unfortunately, and I admit the aesthetic might not be for everyone. I got tired after 15-20 hours but I did enjoy my time with the game. There's a sequel in the works, but I'm going to be honest... well. The pictures on the Steam page look rough, there's no way around it.
- Crescent Tower
Odd. What's that character name doing there... this must be from the before time..!! Anyway, it's a dungeon crawler by way of Wizardry. Short if you just want to clear it once (12 hours), has rare drops to farm if you enjoy collecting Stuff. It's simple but felt like good comfort food. The final stretch felt a bit mean and like I had to grind a bit, but it wasn't awful or anything. I had fun and I'd recommend it. Some really nice pixel art, too!
- House of Necrosis
Shiren the Wanderer but with the vibes of Resident Evil. While I don't think this is a replacement for Shiren--Shiren the Wanderer is simply too good--I think this is pretty approachable for people who may not be sure if they're into this genre, and also it's doing some unique things of its own. There's some post-game stuff I never got around to--and possibly never will?--but I genuinely enjoyed the time I had with it. I do think it can get a little too easy with some of the potential loot mods and some of the enemies can get a little fucked up if they level up, but eh. I believe some of the post-game stuff is more than willing to punch you in the throat to make up for that, anyways.
- Digimon Story Time Stranger
I have to admit I dropped this ~15 hours in. I just wasn't feeling it. I don't really like most Digimon designs before you start seeing some of the cooler evos you'd expect to see closer to the mid-late point of the game, and too many of the early ones feel like completely indistinguishable Lil Guys to me. Combat felt kind of annoying to me and I didn't really like how the type match-ups felt. Also it felt like the audio balance was completely jacked so I couldn't even enjoy the combat BGM. I also really, really resented picking the girl MC which led to her basically becoming a mute so I could hear only the guy MC instead. I don't think it's a bad game, to be clear, and it's very possible it was a victim of "I played this at the wrong time".
- Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion
I'm conflicted. I like customizing my own robot and my actual pilot. I like slapping on whatever weapons and sub-weapons and shoulder weapons. That's all cool. The open world stuff just felt bad, and I did not care about the plot at all. Music was still good but I think I preferred the original's soundtrack on average? Cool animations. The monster DNA stuff was kind of cool too. I finished it but... I dunno, nothing about it stuck with me other than 'I like to control cool robot that I designed'. I'm happy that it exists, but also I wish what exists was better. I want more games where I make my cool robot and hit things with it. That's all I want!!! (throwing a tantrum)
- Pudding: Lyre Knight
I streamed this! I don't want to say a word about the plot! If you like Katatema's other games (Demon King Chronicle, Irisu Syndrome, Murasaki, etc) you should play this right now!!! It's really short!!! Hell, just go watch my VOD on Youtube if you really don't want to play it!! And I hate suggesting that because it's before I started getting more serious about voice training!! That's why I'm not linking it directly and I'm leaving it as an exercise for you to find, dear reader!!!! I don't know why I'm getting this excited!! (waving a knife around, for some reason, but you get the sense it was not very secretly linked inside this paragraph anyway)
- Look Outside
I'm going to be honest... I did not jive with this one. It looks amazing. The music/sound design is great. The gameplay felt like a miss and I got kind of cranky when I'd wipe to some enemy that did some wack thing I wasn't ready for or had some fucked up resistances I wasn't ready for and I'd have to redo everything I did in that day due to how saving works. Anyway, the vibes are good and I think the game is cool but I wasn't enjoying it so I shelved it. I'd still recommend it, all the same.
- Mushihimesama
Look, within a single play of it I liked it enough to want to grind out a 1cc. What else can I say? It's a good game and people speak fondly of it for a reason...! If nothing else, please listen to the soundtrack. I really like it visually (Even if I am not a bug enjoyer), it's fun to play, I liked routing the 1cc on original mode.. it's good. It's good!!!
- BIRDCAGE
I'm a bit torn on this one...! It looks awesome. The music is great. I like the presentation overall. However, after finishing the story, I just.. didn't feel any drive to try to replay it or get good at hard mode or anything? Maybe it needed more mechanically? I know it got a lot of RSG comparisons due to the sword, but I feel like they couldn't be any more different since I associate RSG pretty heavily with chaining and a huge variety of weapons and a million boss fights. Maybe that's just me, though...?
- Hypnospace Outlaw
Honestly I might do a longer piece on this later so I'm going to keep this brief but I think this is one of my favorite games ever made. If internet archaeology interests you at all then I think this game is delightful. Yes, there's a narrative here, I'm not gonna comment on anything about that here, but as someone born in 1989 this game just hits home really well since a lot of the stuff here is just lived experiences and made me somewhat yearn for the old days on the internet. Not that everything is worse nowadays (but a whole lot of things are definitely worse!) but... stuff is different, you know? It's a beautiful game and I cannot recommend it enough. Slayers X is great, too, afterwards.
- Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
Holy shit someone just made a really good kinda Zelda-adjacent game that just feels like a really good handheld title I would have been nutty over 20 years ago. Except I'm nutty about it today. Anyway, Pipistrello is great, I took a long time to finish it due to having too much fun exploring and poking around, plenty of little secrets to find but without being too pornographic so I don't think Shigeru Miyamoto will mind too much (sorry i'm not explaining that one, that's up to you to research) and having basically all of your movement tech be increasingly elaborate yoyo tricks is just fun. I think what this game does especially well is onboarding of all your new combat moves and movement techs--it's pretty common that the game will give you a new trick to do for fighting enemies and then set you up with a bunch of fights designed for it without overly tutorializing, just to let you go 'hey, this kicks ass in these situations, huh???'. Anyway, it was good enough that I played it for 30 hours during my morning treadmill workouts and did not get bored of it even once. Granted, some of that was definitely idle time, but, like. It was still a while.
- Labyrinth of Touhou Tri -The Dreaming Girls & The Mysterious Orbs-
This is an interesting one.. I think objectively the game is good, but I have some personal complaints with it. It's a dungeon crawler with turn-based combat featuring Touhou characters, big dungeon maps to uncover, treasure to find, level ups to gain, skill points to spend, etcetc. It does have an actual plot, too, if that interests you. Anyway, my main complaints: I wish random encounters felt like they had any meaningful attrition on your party (too much focus on just the boss fights and normal fights are exp/loot pinatas), I wish some of the map designs were more aggressively mean, and I don't really like how Lunatic mode gives increased exp/item/money drop rates. The latter is mostly because it just makes normal fights even easier and also it always struck me as odd that when you get forcibly de-leveled for a boss on Lunatic you still keep any skills/skill points spent above that level cap. Yes, this is silly to complain about, I know.
But I think the game is very good overall outside of a couple of ho-hum boss fights... can you tell it's a 'I really like this, but it frustrates me at times' sort of deal with how many words I'm dedicating to bitching while still saying how good it is? It's good. I also highly recommend the other two games in the series. The second is available on Steam, the first... well, do your best!
That's it!! There's others but I felt this was getting too long so I'll save them for a follow-up post within the next week or 2 before we get back to... er, well, I can't call them regularly scheduled posts. Irregularly scheduled posts?? Sure. Yeah. That sounds good.