Pixel Poppers

[THOUGHT] Disc Rage Isn't About Discs

2026-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

This is a hot take that deserves a fuller treatment, but:

The outrage about Sony giving up on producing physical discs isn’t about discs. It’s about ownership.

Physical game sales are super low, and PC gaming has been essentially digital only for some time without an uproar. But, like—thanks to sales and bundles, PC games are often available at deep discounts. This is becoming more true for console games but they do lag behind, and so the option to buy used is much more important there: even if you don’t buy physical, the fact that it’s an option puts a cap on what the digital store can charge. And a lot of PC games (especially if bought on GOG) can easily be backed up and played completely offline, whereas it’s not at all unheard of for even single-player games to become unplayable if PSN goes down… unless you have the disc. And of course there have been multiple news items recently about PSN closing digital stores (which isn’t new) and removing content, including from the libraries of people who spent money on it—again, having the physical media prevents this entirely. (Patches notwithstanding.)

The lack of physical media on PC isn’t that big of a deal, because that platform is consumer-friendly enough that you don’t need physical media as a bulwark. But Sony have repeatedly demonstrated consumer hostility, and physical media is an important defense against it. Without physical media, the PSN store becomes a true monopoly (especially for first-party titles since Sony is no longer bringing their games to PC) and consumers are subject to their whims. There will no longer be (legal) ways around their DRM and expired licenses. And rather than passing on the savings, I think we’ll see less discounting of PlayStation games now that they won’t have to compete with the physical and second-hand markets.

That’s why people are mad about Sony ditching discs. Because it’s them consolidating their control, so they can be more monopolistic and consumer-hostile.

[REVIEW] Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

2026-07-26T01:00:00+00:00

An action RPG built on rotating between interconnected combat, gathering, and crafting grinds.

An action RPG where the gimmick is that you play all parts of an MMORPG-like economy. There are four combat classes, four gathering glasses, and six crafting classes each with their own progression and you can play any and all of them. You also accumulate AI-controlled “buddies” of each class who can help and to some extent cover for kinds of gameplay you may be less interested in, but no individual type of gameplay is especially deep: the core appeal of the game is being able to rotate between them in a complex-but-not-overwhelming set of interconnected systems where advancing in each one helps you advance in all the others.

The game is beautiful, the soundtrack is solid, and the world is visually enticing. But the story, characters, and worldbuilding are extremely thin. This is the game’s most prominent flaw, as it’s present from the beginning and the story is forced on you despite not really having anything worth caring about. The game is only enjoyable if you engage with the systems and approach it as a mechanical experience, but you are still obliged to sit through cutscenes and so forth until you finish the story, which you have to do to unlock all the mechanics.

Gameplay is split among a few fairly-distinct modes:

The story takes place in a typical action RPG world where you visit a series of islands, towns, and dungeons. In addition to the story quests and class progression, NPCs have a number of uninteresting side quests that tap into the various classes (kill X of Y, fetch X of Y, craft an X).
“Ginormosia” is a large non-linear open-world area that seems partly inspired by Breath of the Wild. There are a bunch of combat/gathering/puzzle challenge shrines, semi-random combat/gathering challenge events, and a handful of villages with short chains of uninteresting side quests. Each region can also be leveled up by fighting, gathering, and completing challenges in it, which increases the level of its enemies and nodes, improves its rewards, and unlocks rarer challenges and drops (some of which can’t be found anywhere else).
“Treasure Groves” are procedural dungeons presenting combat or gathering challenges. They can be explored thoroughly for more experience and resources or just rushed through, and they each culminate in a combat or gathering boss, some of which are extremely rare and give rewards that can’t be found elsewhere.
“Base Camp” is a town-builder clearly inspired by Animal Crossing: New Horizons. You can arrange and decorate an island area and your own house, create housing for the buddies, place created artworks in a gallery, and do a bit of farming. Interacting with the buddies here can reward many different crafting recipes that can’t be acquired any other way. It’s pretty shallow, though, and there isn’t actually much to do here.
“Snoozaland” is a roguelike mode that was patched in some time after launch as a sort of free expansion. It remixes established game mechanics alongside new ones by starting you at level one with no gear and giving you twenty minutes to complete combat and gathering challenges to get experiences, equipment, and other resources and finally challenge a combat or gathering boss. Success allows you to spend points based on what you collected along the way to get unique recipes and cosmetics for back in the main game.

For much of the game, you can bounce between the modes as desired. I really appreciate this, as it means that when you get tired of one you can just swap to another for fresher gameplay but everything still feeds together and helps you advance (though naturally Snoozaland is more separate than the other modes). Most resources can be found in at least two modes, but some late-game resources can only be found in one and even then tend to be behind rare or time-gated events. The last few achievements and a lot of potential post-game goals thus basically require reading guides even to know what tedious die-rolling grinding you’re going to have to do.

Those frustrations aside, this is a robustly constructed system of interconnected progress treadmills, complex enough to obscure its ultimate pointlessness and feel satisfying in a way somewhat similar to incremental games without being so unwieldy as to ever become overwhelming. Once I got through the story, I still found it great as a sort of second-screen game in which I could relaxedly make gradual deliberate progress against medium-term goals, though those goals were increasingly meaningless (such as maxing out all my buddies and equipment despite having already overcome all the game’s challenges).

I do wish there were more meat to the world, to make occupying it more enjoyable and the story more satisfying; I think that would have made this a five-star game for me. As it is, even though it may be my most-played single-player game ever, and it’s really good at scratching its particular itch, much of the time I spent with it felt like compulsive snacking and I felt bad if I played it for too long instead of doing more constructive or novel things.

I Stopped Playing When: I haven’t stopped so much as tapered off. I got the final achievement at about 185 hours, and as of this writing have continued to about 333 hours. I expect to still pop in every once in a while for second-screen grinding.

Docprof's Rating: ★★★★☆

Four Stars: Great. Not only did I finish the game, I probably played through the whole thing again and/or completed any optional objectives. It's an easy recommendation for any genre fan.

You can get it or learn more here.

[REVIEW] Sigma Star Saga DX

2026-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

An intriguing story in a compelling sci-fi world with genre-mixing gameplay held back by outdated technical limitations.

A hybrid side-scrolling space shooter and top-down action adventure brought to modern platforms twenty years after its original release with bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements.

Most narrative progress happens in the top-down adventure on a series of planets and space stations. This is sort of a “Zelda-Lite”; there’s combat, exploration, traversal puzzles, secrets to find, and new abilities you gain as the story progresses that allow you to reach new places, but none of this is particularly complex. Puzzles and combat are both fairly trivial and the abilities are more key than tool, letting you pass specific obstacles rather than recontextualizing gameplay. The only real secrets or collectibles are varyingly-hidden “gun data” that can be used in the shooter segments.

Those shooter segments come in two varieties: random encounters that interrupt the top-down gameplay to teleport you to a ship and task you with taking out a number of weak enemies or a single miniboss, and boss stages at story climaxes that send you through a challenging course and culminate in a unique boss fight. In all cases, you use the weapon you’ve customized through equipping gun data (choosing between the firing patterns, bullet types, and bonus effects you’ve collected so far) but don’t get to pick the ship to use (which affects your hitbox, durability, and maneuvering speed). Enemies drop experience orbs when defeated; collecting enough of these levels you up which increases all ships’ offense and defense stats.

Both kinds of gameplay are fairly simple and seem to suffer from the technical limitations of the original GBA platform. As annoying as it can be to have your exploration interrupted by a shooter, I do think alternating between the modes is important to keep either from getting too stale. By far the best mechanical aspect is the gun data system: there are tons of varied combinations, it’s fun to experiment and create overpowered setups, and finding gun data thus makes top-down exploration rewarding. (Though I do wish you could create two different custom weapons and switch between them—you can only switch between your custom weapon and each ship’s default weapon. That means that many of the interesting highly-situational custom weapons are not feasible in practice, since you never know which ship you’ll be using or what kind of level layout and enemy setup you’ll be facing so you’re obliged to use a custom weapon that’s useful for anything the game might throw at you. It’d be fun to be able to have a generic weapon and a situational one.)

The story, world, and characters are all intriguing, though things feel a bit rushed in the end. There’s a strong atmosphere created by great art, soundtrack, and sound effects, as well as dialog and storytelling that imply a larger and richer universe that I wish could be explored further. I really enjoyed occupying the game’s world.

All in all, Sigma Star Saga is a game with some fantastic and creative ideas that are not really used to their full potential. The mechanics are an interesting and unique-feeling mix held back by the limited controls, screen size, and processing ability of the Game Boy Advance, but substantially bolstered by the intriguing world and story. As glad as I am that this DX version filed off the worst pain points and made the game easier to appreciate (I don’t think I could have made it through the original) it leaves me wanting more—a full remake or a sequel that lives up to what this setting and genre mashup have to offer. And it should definitely keep the gun data system.

I Stopped Playing When: I finished a completionist playthrough with all gun data and both of the endings you can get on an initial playthrough after 12.9 hours. I did a New Game Plus playthrough for the remaining two endings which took 4.5 hours, bringing my total to 17.4 hours.

Docprof's Rating: ★★★☆☆

Three Stars: Good. I liked the game enough to finish it (or just play it a bunch, for games that don't end). I recommend it to most genre fans.

You can get it or learn more here.

[THOUGHT] When What's Old is Renewed

2026-04-12T10:15:00+02:00

A couple thoughts on bringing old games to new hardware…

In 2006, the Jak and Daxter series got its fifth installment: Daxter. It was the first game in the franchise to be developed by someone other than Naughty Dog (though Ready at Dawn’s founders did include Naughty Dog alumni). It was the series’ first midquel, taking place during the time skip at the beginning of Jak II. It was the series’ first game to be on the PSP instead of the PS2, and it was the first game to star Daxter as the main playable character instead of Jak.

Those last two factors go together. In 2006, handheld games were smaller and lesser than console ones. The limits of technology meant that to gain portability, you had to give up scope and scale and graphical fidelity and even some controls (handhelds always had fewer buttons, and it wasn’t until the Vita in 2011 that a handheld came out with dual analog sticks). The PSP was in some ways perceived as the PS2’s more-compact and less-powerful sidekick, so going from PS2 to PSP was like going from Jak to Daxter, and it made sense to embrace that in the game’s design and premise.

But Daxter outperformed those expectations. I remember seeing multiple reviews saying it wasn’t just good for a handheld game, it was a good game period, and it was proof that handhelds were now capable of delivering console-level experiences. This was a huge deal at the time, and not only was Daxter widely considered one of the PSP’s best games and a system seller (certainly it’s the reason I bought one), it was seen as a worthy entry in the beloved Jak and Daxter franchise.

Time and console generations marched on, and while Jak and Daxter’s PS2-based installments were ported to the PS3, Vita, and PS4/PS5, Daxter was left behind. This didn’t change until 2024, when it (along with the other much less-well-regarded PSP installment The Lost Frontier) got ported to PS4/PS5, making it possible for the first time to play the entire series on the same system.

Obviously I love this from a games preservation perspective, but there’s a kind of bittersweet note to it. If you play through the series for the first time this way, all on the same system, without a nostalgic framing, in an era when there is no longer any real distinction between handheld and console games, Daxter hits in a very different way. It’s no longer a shockingly-strong handheld game that manages to reach up to the lower range of console-level quality; it’s a weak console game that just sits down in that lower range.

It’s hard not to be sad about it. Daxter has aged poorly through no fault of its own and will never again be as enjoyable as when it first came out. It was a revelation that changed what we could expect from handheld games, but the glorious future it pointed to has left it behind and now it’s a footnote in the Jak and Daxter series.

But of course this is because we now live in that glorious future. The tech has grown and the industry has advanced and “good for a handheld game” no longer even makes sense. So it’s hard to be too upset.

In 2005, Sigma Star Saga was released for the GBA. It was a hybrid RPG and space shooter that I found intriguing and certainly eyed a few times at my local GameStop, but middling reviews and my limited budget meant I never actually tried it out, and as the industry and I both moved on from the GBA it was left behind.

There are a lot of games like this, that were on my radar for a long time but that I never actually experienced. Games have a shorter shelf life than less-interactive media; not only does hardware age out and make it difficult or expensive to (legally) play old games, design sensibilities evolve and it becomes unappealing to suffer through outdatedly obtuse or punishing experiences (at least for folks like me who lost patience as we got older).

But then, a few days ago, an enhanced port called Sigma Star Saga DX came out for PC, PS5, and Switch with bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements. Suddenly it’s easy (and legal) to play this game on modern hardware, and its most glaring flaws have been polished away. Suddenly this game is relevant again.

There are a lot of good old games that are essentially trapped on defunct hardware and buried under unapproachable design. A lot of art that’s effectively lost to the ages and to new generations. So when those works get a fresh coat of paint (far less expensive than making entirely new games) and can be introduced to a new audience, I get excited. It’s great when it means I can reexperience a modernized take on a game I loved, and it’s great when it means I can finally experience a game I wondered about for years and eventually gave up on.

So I’m eager to cast an economic vote for this by snapping up this game, and I’m eager to finally play it. More than that: I am stoked. I’m going to play it on my Steam Deck in handheld mode, which I hope will help me stay in the right mindset with the right expectations. But no matter what, I’m glad this game is no longer left behind.

[THOUGHT] Putting Games in Cultural and Historical Context

2026-02-27T09:27:00+01:00

It’s easy to forget how much game design and marketing is driven by external cultural, technological, and political developments. It’s hard to see the shape of a moment that you’re in the middle of, but looking back can draw things into better focus. Here are two videos that do that in very different ways.

First is “playstation games that might be evil”.

This is a retrospective of some of the odder games from the first couple generations of PlayStation hardware. For people of my age who were gaming during these times, it’s nostalgic but it also recontextualizes things. It’s easy to forget that a lot of things we now take for granted in game design (perhaps most obviously, movement and camera control in 3D games) didn’t start with an obviously-correct convention and had some wide-ranging experimentation for a while, and in hindsight it’s much easier to see the cultural forces behind then-normal-and-now-weird marketing decisions. Video games are such a fast-evolving art form; it’s worth pausing to look back over the path once in a while.

Second is “Kriegsspiel! How Napoleon Accidentally Invented Strategy Games”.

This is a deeply-researched look at the evolution of strategy/war games over centuries of human history. It discusses their origins, purpose, and development, and how they are downstream of cultural and political changes and the ways people think about (and enact) real-life warfare. I’ve only dabbled in these kinds of games, but Weidman frames things clearly enough that I had no trouble following and I gained a new appreciation for how these games fit in to the way civilization has progressed.

These videos have very different vibes, but I find they improve each other. Starting with a look back at an era I lived through helped remind me how these developments feel while they are happening, and remind me that it’s possible to look back at them and understand them more deeply. That made the sweeping historical overview hit harder since I could analogize it to my own experiences and imagine how things felt at the time but also see how our modern perspective gives us a richer understanding. And looking back that far helped me understand that effects like those in the PlayStation video have been going on for as long as humanity has been creating art.

#nostalgia, #history

[THOUGHT] My Top Games of 2025

2025-12-31T00:00:07-08:00

My Top Five (Non-Incremental) Games I Played in 2025

Other Games From 2025 That Probably Would Have Made the List but I Haven’t Played Them Yet

I was more stressed in 2025 than I have been for a while. Based on historical data, I assume this is why I also played more games this year than I have in a while too. And because of the nature of the stress, I also played a lot of incremental games in particular. I may write some of my thoughts about their design trade-offs later; for now, here are my favorites from the year.

The Best Incremental Games I Played in 2025

#top ten

[THOUGHT] Incremental Progress

2025-12-31T00:00:06-08:00

They say we seek in our escapism what we miss in our normal life. It’s helpful to keep this in mind when your tastes change and you find yourself drawn to something new, as it can reveal things you didn’t even realize were bothering you, and point to what you most need to fix.

For example…

For me, the start of 2025 was a stressful and unpredictable time. Without getting too into-the-weeds on my personal situation: I was working toward a very important life-changing goal and knew roughly what I needed to do, but it was something I’d never done before and a lot of the particulars were outside my control. There were significant aspects of it where I just had to wait and hope. (Everything has turned out fine so far, by the way, and I am in a much less stressful place now.)

At the same time, I suddenly found myself drawn to incremental games more than ever before. Sometimes also called “idle games” or “clicker games”, these are games where the central mechanic is Number Go Up. Typically, you accumulate a resource by clicking, and then spend that resource on various ways to make Number Go Up faster, such as increasing the amount of resource rewarded by each click or making it so that the resource is also accumulated passively over time. A ton of games have built on this basic formula in a lot of varied and interesting ways, but that’s the heart of the genre.

That means these games are more directly about progress itself than most games (heck, the generally-accepted “first” incremental game is called “Progress Quest”). And that progress is clear (you can see Number and watch how fast it Go Up), player-driven (it’s your own actions or choices that make Number Go Up), and inevitable (there’s some challenge to figuring out the best sequence of actions to make Number Go Up as fast as possible, but as long as you keep doing things Number will Go Up).

In thinking about this, I am reminded of Bennett Foddy’s introduction to Getting Over It, in which he contrasts his game to ones that are “empowering” and “inch you steadily forward”. And while there is definitely a place for games that reject that paradigm, there’s also a place for games that embrace it.

Incremental games helped me avoid feeling powerless at a time when I couldn’t tell if I was moving in the direction I needed to go. I’m grateful for them.

#incremental games

[REVIEW] Wanderstop

2025-12-31T00:00:05-08:00

A cozy narrative game designed to heal the soul.

Wanderstop is a character-based narrative game with some life sim elements. The mechanics are about running a tea shop, most centrally by brewing drinks but also through simple meditative chores like farming drink ingredients and cleaning and decorating the shop and surrounding area. The story is mainly delivered through dialog between the player character and the shop’s customers, occasionally requiring you to fill a drink order before things will progress further.

It’s clear that a lot of thought and effort went into making the game frustration-free. There is never any time pressure, and while there are a lot of dialog choices there aren’t any incorrect ones. Sometimes customers won’t tell you exactly what they want and you have to figure out the right drink based on clues, but giving someone the wrong drink just gives you the chance to try again, and if you are ever stumped there is an in-game hint system that tells you exactly what to do. You can also engage as little or as much as you like with the optional content; there are a lot of decorations you can fiddle with and the player character and shop owner have reactions to a lot of different drinks you can make.

So the mechanics are gentle, the pace is relaxed, and the player has few constraints. The game is also beautiful and well-animated with a great soundtrack. Add it all together and the vibes are super cozy. A lot of work must have gone into this and it’s very effective, but ultimately it’s just stage-setting. It creates a safe space for you to take in the game’s real payload: its characters and story. They have the emotional depth and truth I’ve come to expect from Davey Wreden, but the scope is more ambitious than ever. This game is about burnout and self-care, trauma and recovery, coping with fear and finding peace. It’s by turns hilarious and heart-wrenching. And shop owner Boro is my favorite character in a long time.

This isn’t a game for people looking for excitement or challenge. But I think a lot of people would find it therapeutic.

I Stopped Playing When: I finished the game (with all achievements, though that doesn’t mean the same thing here that it usually does).

Docprof's Rating: ★★★★★

Five Stars: Favorite. This is one of my all-time favorite games that made a significant impact on me or that I've returned to time and again.

You can get it or learn more here.

[REVIEW] Haven

2025-12-31T00:00:04-08:00

A cozy sci-fi RPG that's all about the well-developed relationship between its two leads.

Play as couple Kay and Yu who have recently fled to an uninhabited planet in order to be with each other instead of the mates assigned by their authoritarian society.

When judged against other RPG video games, it can easily be found lacking. In most traditional categories (exploration, farming/crafting, combat) its mechanics may seem shallow. But looking at it this way would be missing the point: this game is about Yu and Kay. The mechanics use the familiar framework of an RPG but the point of everything is to let the player inhabit the characters’ relationship and world. That includes cooperation-based systems, lots of dialogue and interaction scenes between Kay and Yu, a very cozy home base and camp sites, and an absolutely beautiful setting and soundtrack.

Yu and Kay level up by doing things together, including obvious things like winning battles (which requires some rhythmic cooperation) and less-typical ones like enjoying home-cooked meals, and it always comes with a relationship scene that’s at least as much of a reward as the stat boosts. But to spread out the pacing and add weight and structure, these moments punctuate a lot of rote activities. There are a lot of samey regions to clean up and to explore for cooking ingredients, and while this can feel like you are part of Kay and Yu’s relaxing routine in a life-sim-lite kind of way, it can also feel like repetitive chores that slow down the story.

All in all, the game is enjoyable if and only if the core relationship works for you. For me, it works beautifully. I loved the way Yu and Kay act as a team and the fact that much of the game is a cozy way to hang out with them; this is more than enough to let me look past any complaints about some of the less-polished mechanics and I was absolutely left wanting to spend more time with Kay and Yu.

I Stopped Playing When: I finished the game with all achievements. A couple months later, The Game Bakers celebrated the game’s fifth anniversary by releasing a free auto-runnner tie-in game. It may not have much story, but it’s a cute way to revisit these characters and world, and it’s a wonderful gift from creators who love this game as much as its fans do.

Docprof's Rating: ★★★★☆

Four Stars: Great. Not only did I finish the game, I probably played through the whole thing again and/or completed any optional objectives. It's an easy recommendation for any genre fan.

You can get it or learn more here.

[REVIEW] DC's Justice League: Cosmic Chaos

2025-12-31T00:00:03-08:00

An action RPG with a vibe like a playable superhero cartoon that really should have had multiplayer for the main game.

Play as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (swap freely between them) in a smallish open world where you can wander around picking fights, explore the “dungeons” (some of which are used in missions and some of which are just there to explore), find and complete side quests, or do the story missions.

There’s a surprising amount to do. Most of it is centered around combat, though there are also exploration and even some platforming elements, and there are a lot of themed areas/missions that change up how you play (the Blue Snowman dungeon, for example, has a temperature mechanic requiring you to periodically warm yourself near fires, which changes how you explore and fight in it). Combat itself is approachable but surprisingly deep as character-specific upgradeable skills as well as equipment that anyone can use allow for creating a variety of builds, and since you can freely switch between three characters you can absolutely specialize them for different situations. There are also a few kinds of minigames, unlockable costumes for each character that are (occasionally very deep-cut) references to classic comics, some just-for-fun toys like carnival games and rides, and a high polish level with full voice acting and sharp writing that’s loaded with DC characters and lore.

The only significant omission is the lack of multiplayer for the main game. The basic setup here is screaming for co-op, but the only multiplayer is in a slapped-on-feeling free-roaming “Instant Action” combat mode. I suspect this is why the game is so overlooked despite its high quality and the popularity of its IP.

But it can still be a lot of fun to play alone, if you enjoy DC and open world beat-’em-up gameplay.

I Stopped Playing When: I finished the game with all achievements.

Docprof's Rating: ★★★★☆

Four Stars: Great. Not only did I finish the game, I probably played through the whole thing again and/or completed any optional objectives. It's an easy recommendation for any genre fan.

You can get it or learn more here.

[REVIEW] Caravan SandWitch

2025-12-31T00:00:02-08:00

A cozy exploration game that's a bit less than the sum of its parts.

Mechanically, Caravan SandWitch is an open-world game with no combat. Traversal is both on foot (you can run, jump short distances, and climb a bit) and in the van (which starts as just a normal van but accumulates several upgrades over the game that add new options). Missions take you back and forth across a small open world; along the way you can encounter points of interest that generally present simple puzzle platforming segments to reach collectibles and/or plot tokens (and that often have additional semi-hidden collectibles). There’s no combat, fall damage, or risk of death, though there are places where if you are careless you can fall and have to redo a decent bit of platforming (but you can teleport to the van at any time, so placing it strategically can help a lot).

There are some Metroidvania elements to the exploration: most places you go, you’ll run into areas you can’t access until you get more van upgrades, though this usually just blocks some more collectibles you can come back for later. I know some players like this for the sense of progression it creates, but for me it mostly just felt like the game was constantly giving me homework, and it didn’t help that there wasn’t a good mechanism for tracking what places I needed to come back to. For me, that often made exploration unsatisfying and uncozy.

On the narrative side, this is a sci-fi story set in an interesting world. You spend nearly all of the game on a planet that was abandoned forty years previously by an interstellar “Consortium” who were basically strip-mining it for resources to power their civilization; you meet people who miss the jobs and support from the Consortium and people who consider them ruinous exploiters who were destroying the natural life on this planet (including a very interesting sentient race that I would have loved to learn more about).

The problem is that the translation is surprisingly weak, making it hard to feel immersed in the game world or like you are really getting to know its characters and sometimes making the plot hard to understand. (STRUCTURAL SPOILERS IN THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH.) On top of that, the ending is structured in a frustrating way—it doesn’t really serve as a climax of what the story had been setting up, and it culminates in a completely unnecessary binary ending choice that just serves to make you replay the ending sequence, robbing it of what emotional impact it does have, so that you can see both anticlimactic endings. (END SPOILERS.)

The aesthetic and vibes are really good. The visuals are beautiful and the soundtrack is super chill. I got some enjoyment spending time in the game’s world, but by the end of my time (I 100%’d the game in almost exactly twelve hours) I was very much ready to be done.

I Stopped Playing When: I finished the game with all achievements.

Docprof's Rating: ★★★☆☆

Three Stars: Good. I liked the game enough to finish it (or just play it a bunch, for games that don't end). I recommend it to most genre fans.

You can get it or learn more here.

[REVIEW] The Gunk

2025-12-31T00:00:01-08:00

A beautifully-animated platform adventure without much depth.

The Gunk is an action adventure with 3D platformer and puzzle platformer elements. Explore a quasi-post-apocalyptic alien world and gradually learn what happened there by cleaning up the gunk, solving environmental puzzles, and engaging in light combat.

Your main tool is a vacuum gun; it’s used for cleaning up the titular gunk as well as solving puzzles by pulling some things and picking up and throwing others. You also get a simple projectile mostly used to hit switches; there are optional upgrades to make it useful in combat and to provide a defensive decoy for combat as well.

None of the mechanics are especially strenuous. The platforming and combat are simple and the punishment for death is extremely gentle. The puzzles are also mostly trivial until the lead-up to the final boss. There is optional exploration for hidden collectibles; this is not necessary in order to finish the game but it is necessary to get all the upgrades and all the achievements. (Unfortunately, exploring the environments thoroughly will often lead to getting stuck on the geometry; thankfully I never ended up having to reload.)

While the game is strong on atmosphere, there isn’t a lot to recommend about the story. The writing is shallow, the plot and backstory are thin, the relationship between the player character and the main supporting character is weak, and their voice acting isn’t great, so I found it hard to like these characters or get invested in any of their situations.

Fortunately, both the soundtrack and the visuals are beautiful. The gunk in particular is well-animated, which I’m sure was challenging. So even though the rest of the game never really rose beyond just okay, I didn’t mind spending several hours in this world, and the mechanics were low-friction enough that I never got particularly frustrated.

I Stopped Playing When: I finished the game with all achievements.

Docprof's Rating: ★★★☆☆

Three Stars: Good. I liked the game enough to finish it (or just play it a bunch, for games that don't end). I recommend it to most genre fans.

You can get it or learn more here.

[ANNOUNCEMENT] Dan Yums

2025-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t post here much and when I do it’s kind of grumpy. I’m just not gaming a lot these days, and my time and energy and writing are focused elsewhere.

If you’d like to hear from me more consistently, about happier things, and are okay with it not being all about video games, check out my new site:

😋 Dan Yums: A Blog of Simple Pleasures

Every day of 2025, I’ll be posting something I like. Something that makes me smile or that’s improved my life or that sparks joy. One of my yums. I hope you’ll find it to be a nice little daily dose of positivity.

For more of my other websites, visit One Dan Thing After Another.

[THOUGHT] My Top Games of 2024

2024-12-29T00:00:03-08:00

My Game of the Year

Dungeons of Hinterberg

Literally the Only Other 2024 Game I Played This Year

Cat Quest III

Game I Played the Most This Year

Farming Simulator 22, which I still play with Senpai-chan

Games I Returned to This Year

Faerie Solitaire Remastered, which kept me sane in a lot of hour-long work meetings for which I had to be on camera the whole time but only needed to pay attention for a couple of minutes
Orbit, an obscure game for an obscure platform that scratches a specific itch that’s otherwise pretty hard to scratch these days

Game Which I Might Have Bought This Year, Except I Felt Burned on Early Adoption of Indie Titles

Caravan SandWitch, which seemed fun and chill, but after both of the indie games I bought and played around their release had significant updates adding content and polish after I finished playing them, I felt like I was being punished for early adoption and remembered why I often wait to play indie games

#top ten

[THOUGHT] The Platform is the Playstyle: Going the Distance

2024-12-29T00:00:02-08:00

There’s a subgenre of game where you launch something and it travels a distance based partly on skill and partly on luck, and the further you manage to go the more resources you collect which you can then spend on upgrades that let you go farther and farther. Like Yetisports: Pingu Throw with a progression treadmill, and kind of a precursor to endless runners like Canabalt and its descendants.

I feel like there were a lot of these for a while, but people largely stopped making this kind of game. Maybe the mechanics were a bit too simple, or maybe endless runners were more appealing. But even the games that were made are now mostly lost to time. The problem is that their style of gameplay as well as the era in which they were popular meant they were mostly Flash games, which of course is now a dead platform, or early iOS games, which is an anti-preservation platform. (Or both.)

One of my favorites was Orbit, which came out exclusively as a PlayStation Mini. Like PlayStation Mobile, PlayStation Minis are a now-defunct platform of small digital-only games. These were aimed primarily at the PSP, but also often playable on the PS3 and later the Vita and PlayStation TV. I think the Minis might technically still be purchasable and downloadable if you have the right hardware, but some of them (including Orbit) are long-since delisted.

If you weren’t in the PlayStation ecosystem when Sony was pushing PlayStation Minis, it’s hard to even find evidence they ever existed. Try searching “PlayStation Mini” now and you’ll mostly just find results for the PlayStation Classic instead. So Orbit is even deader than the Flash or early mobile games of its ilk.

These games were pretty popular, but they effectively only existed for a few years and have been all-but wiped from history. Their remembered impact is so minor that I can’t even find an agreed-upon genre name for them (I call them “distance games”).

It’s a shame, because sometimes this sort of mindless progression is just what the doctor ordered, and I feel like it would still be right at home on mobile. Maybe they just don’t monetize as well as gacha bullshit.

#games preservation, #distance games