Monthly Update #21: September 2026

The worst thing has happened! Despite saying for months that Little Rocket Lab was at the top of my to play list, Microsoft removed it from Game Pass at the end of the month. They only give two weeks’ notice for game removals and the game is over 40 hours long, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to get to it in time and made the sad decision to remove it from my list entirely. It kinda sucks because I was looking forward to it and it has great reviews. I even made a thumbnail and everything! Oh well, it was bound to happen eventually. At least I was able to play another couple of games in time that also left the service.

Game Acquisitions

Another month of game bundle purchases and giveaways. I’ve been averaging roughly one AAA game’s worth of spending per month but getting dozens of games in return which is a pretty sweet deal. Do I need all these games? Absolutely not, but I almost feel like I can justify it since other members of my Steam family have access to them too. I also had a couple rare single game purchases with Beat Saber and Persona 3 Reload. They have both been on my wishlist for a while and finally got worthwhile discounts (that I used Steam wallet funds for so nothing out of pocket). I was expecting Persona 3 to hit Humble Choice by now, but it hasn’t and I got impatient. If it does show up for October, I’ll still be in the return window so no big deal. That’s probably the game I’m looking forward to the most from this list, but I’m excited for Dread Delusion, MiSide, and Smash it Wild as well among others. There’s a lot of good games here!

# of Games: 72

Total Money Spent: $72.69

Price/Game: $1.01

# of Games YTD: 745

Total Money Spent YTD: $547.17

Price/Game: $0.73

Game Recaps

I managed to play five games in September, although I still didn’t get as much playtime as I did the last couple months. This is partially due to less playing time but also because I made the rare decision to 100% a game. This is something I don’t normally do due to difficulty and general lack of enthusiasm for a game, but Absolum really sucked me in for a couple weeks there. Atomfall and Sopa were the other games I mentioned leaving Game Pass, so I decided to rush through them by comparison. Lastly, my friend and I finally finished the first story arc in our co-op Tales of Destiny playthrough after 25ish hours. There was basically a whole anime episode that played after beating Greybum which presented like the end to the game with all the party members leaving one by one, but I knew we didn’t have nearly enough hours to be done. Sure enough, they teased the next arc and started off with just the main character Stahn. I’m curious to see how the party gets back together so we can be reacquainted with the people we’ve gotten used to playing with. I need my healer back! Anyway, check out all the let’s plays either released or recorded last month. After almost a year of uploads, my playthrough of Metaphor: ReFantazio has finally released in full! With that, I’ve also decided to increase my uploads to every other day instead of every third to get them out a little faster. Even with the increased number of uploads, Absolum won’t be out until November 25th, Atomfall on December 25th, and Sopa on January 8th. Maybe I’ll temporarily go back to daily uploads to catch up a little bit, but it is nice to have a buffer in case I go a few days without playing anything. 

Game Reviews

Absolum

Absolum is an interesting mashup of beat-em-ups and roguelites. I’m not usually a fan of the beat-em-up genre as I find them a bit too shallow and button-mashy, but Absolum circumvents this with the roguelite progression system, world, story, and side quests. In typical roguelite fashion, even when I failed a run and had to start over, I still felt that I made meaningful progress in the form of upgrades, story progression, and new rituals. The upgrades came at a regular pace throughout my playtime until I rolled credits the first time, but if you decide to continue your playthrough to wrap up side quests or take on the true final boss, you’ll find that they quickly dry up. That means your motivation to continue must rely on the gameplay loop and side stories, and luckily those were enough for me to keep going.

The game starts off at a hub area that introduces you to a couple side characters, a literal upgrade tree, a training dummy to practice your moves, and two of the four playable characters to pick from with their own movesets (you find the other two as part of the main quest). You pick which character you want to use and one of their special abilities and start your run. The first thing you encounter is a choice of one of the many rituals in the game that you’ve unlocked so far. These rituals are the main way to craft your build and come from one of eight families such as fire, water, necromancy, and chaos. They usually take the form of small passive abilities like creating a burning trail behind you when you dash or freezing enemies temporarily with critical hits. On their own, they don’t change the game much, but when you start combining them and leveling them up, you can create some insane builds. Even 20+ hours in, I was still surprised at how different each run could feel depending on what rituals I picked.

The world map shows all the path choices you can make. There are four distinct areas in the game of which you’ll encounter three in any given run. The first area has several branching paths, the second area has a couple, and the final area is a sort of hub area with a few rooms you can visit before fighting your way through a gauntlet of enemies in a hallway to reach the final boss. There are a few bosses along the way that you fight depending on the path you choose, including some secret bosses tied to side quests. Everything is marked on the map to make it easier to determine which path to take depending on your goal for that run, although some quests have multiple steps that take multiple runs and some luck which was a bit frustrating. Even so, discovering every area and completing every quest was a great motivator for me to play just one more run, and the ritual combinations kept the beat-em-up combat fresh as well. I would say that even if you aren’t a beat-em-up fan, I would still give this game a shot. Even with the repetition that started to set in after I discovered every area and unlocked every ritual and upgrade, the story, characters, and build variety more than made up for it and was enough for me to 100% the game. This is not normally something I go for which I think speaks to the quality of the experience.

Time to beat (Completionist) - 32h:38m
Rating – 8.5/10

Atomfall

Atomfall is what I imagine you’d get if S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Fallout had a weird little British baby. That’s certainly the weirdest intro to a game review I’ve made, but I think it fits in this case. You start the game being woken up in a mysterious underground facility by a bleeding man in a hazmat suit and quickly introduced to the dialog, inventory, and crafting systems. After searching through the starting area picking up random stuff to craft a bandage to stop the guy from bleeding out, you leave the first area and come across the first enemy in the game. You can choose to fight him, but an indicator shows he is simply wary of you instead of outright hostile and warns you to stay away. This shows that you can resolve encounters in a variety of ways and not everything has to end in a shootout. After emerging from the underground facility, you get your glimpse of the semi-open world and are greeted by a mysterious voice in a phone booth spouting nonsense that you don’t quite understand yet. A little way down you come across a couple rundown buildings and another friendly NPC who introduces you to the world, dangles a couple story threads to follow, and gives you a map to aid in exploring and sends you on your way.

I think this was an effective way to introduce the player to Atomfall. You now have all the major gameplay systems, a world to explore, and threads to follow. Threads are the Atomfall’s version of quests. Notably, with the default difficulty, these threads do not explicitly tell you where to go or mark anything on your map. Instead, you’re meant to use context clues to find your way. This encourages engaging your critical thinking skills as well as providing an opportunity to meander and scavenge while exploring anything that looks interesting. I played this way for the first few hours but realized after a while I was lost on where to go and ran back and forth across the first couple of areas in a desperate attempt to move the story forward. Eventually, I lowered the exploration difficulty which added waypoints to the map so I could progress.

I have mixed feelings about this game. I was initially impressed by the graphics, gunplay, and narrative hooks I was presented with. There were a couple areas I genuinely had fun exploring and figuring out how to effectively take out the enemies there. The amount of backtracking, repetitive combat encounters, shallow gameplay loop, and confusing progression started to wear on me after a while, however. There is a skill tree with some skills hidden until you read books about them, but the skills didn’t seem to make much of a difference. There’s a crafting system, but I found myself only ever having to craft bandages and nothing else. There are different weapon tiers ranging from rusty to pristine, but a well-placed headshot would kill most enemies with any weapon, so the weapon variety didn’t seem to matter. Stealth is present but basically worthless because enemies will spot you almost instantly with no warning and you can’t sneak up on the harder enemies to take them out silently at all. There’s nothing inherently bad about Atomfall, but nothing that really stands out either. I still think it’s worth a playthrough if you enjoy post-apocalyptic FPS games with an emphasis on exploration and an intriguing sci-fi hook. Just don’t expect to be blown away.

Time to beat (Main+Sides) - 17h:22m
Rating – 7/10

SOPA: Tale of the Stolen Potato

SOPA is a Latin-inspired 3D point-and-click adventure game about a boy helping his grandmother make soup. She asks him to fetch a potato from their pantry, but upon entering, the potato bag is stolen by a magical talking frog, and the boy is teleported to a magical world and sent on a wild goose chase to get it back. Gameplay is typical for the genre: you explore the environments talking to people, pick up seemingly random objects to put in your inventory, and using or combining those items to solve various puzzles to progress. Anybody who has played an adventure game knows what to expect here.

Admittedly, I am not a fan of point-and-click adventure games. Oftentimes the puzzle solutions will be needlessly obtuse, and I have to resort to a guide just to get through them. This happened to me a couple times in my short playthrough, but overall, the puzzles seemed to be a little more straightforward. That being said, everything about this game is a bit of a mess. The graphics are dated and there was some egregious pop-in. The animations seem limited and stilted. The camera is fixed and sometimes would get stuck in a place where you couldn’t see where you were going. The environments are large enough that the constant walking back and forth grew tiresome. Voice acting is reduced to Simlish that sounds vaguely Spanish with too many repeated sounds which made it feel haphazardly put together (except Jellyman, he’s great). And just when you think you’ve beaten the game after acquiring the titular potato, you’re sent back to the first area again to solve even more puzzles for some reason. It’s like the developers ran out of ideas but really tried to stretch the runtime past the Steam refund window.

The only positive I can really give this game is that a lot of the writing is pretty funny. I hate to give this game a negative review because it’s clearly a labor of love and spotlights South American culture, but there’s just too many rough edges for me to recommend. I see that this is StudioBando’s first paid release after coming out with a free mobile game a few years ago. I can only hope that they continue to improve their craft and release better and better games in the future. The bones of a good game are here; I think the developer may just need some more experience under their belt to pull it off.

Time to beat (Main) - 2h:56m
Rating – 5.5/10

Stats

Absolum snuck its way into my top 10 most played games of the year at #7. It didn’t seem like I played it that long, which I think goes to show how much I enjoyed it. Final Fantasy still dominates, taking half of the top 10 slots. Spending continues to be elevated, and there’s at least one bundle already out that I plan on buying at Fanatical after October’s Humble Choice is revealed. I admit it is satisfying seeing how close the green spending line is to the orange bar to indicate $1 per game purchase. You can see September is now my third straight decline in gametime and third lowest amount of gametime for the year. I’m not exactly sure what’s causing this, but I hope I can bring it back up.

Conclusion/Upcoming

September ended up being a bit of a ho-hum month unfortunately. Absolum was the exception though, that game was fantastic. It’s unfortunate that I never got to play Little Rocket Lab, it looked charming. I’ll be continuing down the Game Pass catalog regardless for October. Assuming no other games are announced as coming to or leaving the service that I care about, the next game on my list is BALL x PIT. I’ve heard great things about it, and it looks super fun. Afterwards, I’m going to tackle Crime Scene Cleaner. I admit I’m surprised by how positive the reviews are for this game. Maybe it’ll end up being a sleeper hit. If I still have time left over, I’m going to try out Starsand Island. It’s a recently released anime life/farming sim that looks like a nice cozy game, but recent Steam reviews complain about broken early access promises and undisclosed AI use. I haven’t been following development on the game so I’m curious to go in blind and see for myself. Anyway, that’s going to do it for me this month. Thank you all for reading!

Backlog total: 4,700 (+88)

Monthly Update #20: August 2026

Another month dominated by Game Pass games with an unexpected retro completion mixed in. Also back to my bundle buying spree including another itch.io charity mega bundle to further inflate my backlog, like it needs to be any bigger.

Game Acquisitions

I was so proud of myself for holding off on buying anything. I didn’t buy anything for over a month (July 9^th-August 12^th)! Alas, all good things must come to an end, and I picked up my first VR bundle in quite a while. It was on the expensive side, but VR games tend to be more expensive anyway and it was a bunch of newer games that hadn’t even come close to the bundle price so I couldn’t resist. Now I have both Arizona Sunshine and Into the Radius games to look forward to when I finally buy a headset. I proceeded to buy a few more bundles towards the end of the month including itch.io’s Game industry hardship fund to add another 54 games to my backlog for a measly $10. Can’t argue with that value, and it goes towards a good cause as usual. The rest were giveaways, Reddit trades, and Steam family purchases as usual.

# of Games: 126

Total Money Spent: $88.53

Price/Game: $0.70

# of Games YTD: 674

Total Money Spent YTD: $474.48

Price/Game: $0.70

Game Recaps

Balatro made up almost half my playtime in August. I spent much longer than I expected on it. I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to go, but I managed to beat every deck on the lowest difficulty, then beat one deck on gold stake which is the highest difficulty. I was satisfied with that and called it there as it was starting to feel repetitive. The last of the 2D Final Fantasy games took the #2 spot in playtime. I enjoyed my time with all the Final Fantasy games I’ve played so far, and I’m sad to say goodbye to that era of the franchise. The next game in the series for me will be 4 Heroes of Light for the DS which I’m not super looking forward to as it doesn’t have great reviews. After that though will be the legendary PS1 era. VIII is a bit of a black sheep of the franchise along with II, but I’m super looking forward to VII and IX when I get around to them. It’s gonna be quite a while before I get there though.

Next up on the list was Minishoot’ Adventures which was a neat little bullet hell metroidvania. I’m not usually a bullet hell fan, and there was one dungeon in particular that was very frustrating to navigate and find all the collectibles in, but it was a good game otherwise. I AM YOUR BEAST was a short and sweet FPS with a speedrunning focus similar to Neon White. It wasn’t as good as that game in my opinion, but the smooth performance, politics-heavy story, and wonderful voice acting from the main characters carried it.

I also had not one but TWO sessions of Tales of Destiny: Director’s Cut with my coop buddy. We made pretty good progress, I think. We fought our way through Moreau Castle taking out Batista which was the hardest fight in the game so far. We then made our way to Terazzi Castle and took out Tiberius which seemed to be a much easier fight. We ended our last session after getting our tragic backstory for Scary (Mary) and starting our trek to Heidelberg. Lastly, I had another unexpected game completion while going through my emulation testing. I beat one of the earliest games in the roguelike genre with Dragon Crystal. The game came out all the way back in 1990 for the Sega Master System. It’s older than I am! This also marks my first completion on a Sega console which is super exciting. Playlists of all the games I played or released in August are below. Please note that Minishoot’ Adventures won’t be up until November 22nd, I AM YOUR BEAST on December 16th, and FINAL FANTASY VI on Christmas. I’m currently uploading one video every three days to ensure a constant stream of content, at least until the FINAL FANTASY videos are done uploading which won’t be until February. After that, I might switch to every other day so there aren’t months between when I play a game and when you guys can watch it. 

Game Reviews

FINAL FANTASY VI

FINAL FANTASY VI marks the end of the SNES era for the franchise and thus the 2D entries and man did it go out with a bang. From the very beginning, you can tell they’re going all in on cinematics and storytelling. The production values were much improved over the previous games despite still originally being on the SNES console. The next thing you immediately notice is that unlike the previous games which take place in the traditional medieval fantasy setting with knights and magic, this takes place in the future with mechs and mega factories. Magic died out 1,000 years ago with some people believing it never existed at all. It’s a fascinating setting and a welcome change of pace.

Combat still used the active time battle system from IV and V but with some twists. The job system from III and V is gone unfortunately, but in its place are character-specific abilities that all 14(!) playable characters possess as well as assignable Espers or summons which provide access to certain spells as well as a unique move and stat boosts on level-up. Once you use a spell obtained through an Esper enough times, you master it and can go on to use it even when switching to a different Esper. This allowed any character that can use Espers (which is most of them) to learn any spells. On one hand, this allows very flexible character customization as you can build any party member to do anything you want. On the other hand, it caused a lot of characters to feel the same since there are some spells that are simply better than others, so you try to teach those spells to everybody. The character-specific abilities were cool too, but I felt like they didn’t evolve much and I ended up using the same ones for every fight since near the beginning of the game. All of these factors combined to make what I felt was the easiest game in the series so far, for better or worse.

What the game lacks in combat depth, it makes up for with its story. I loved that all the main characters had their own backstories and motivations. There were a lot of optional characters you can recruit which didn’t have much in the way of story, and it’s understandable that not all 14 playable characters could be fully fleshed out, but the main ones were deep enough to make up for it. I loved that the summons were actual characters in the story too. Final Fantasy IV touched on this concept a little bit with the Land of Summons, but VI took it to another level with them being one of the main plot points in the story. I loved the mid-game plot twist that led to a darker and more open second half to the game. I thought the idea of splitting up the party to navigate multiple parts of some dungeons simultaneously was a cool concept, even if they were frustrating to get around in. But most importantly, I loved the opera scene which gave me my first taste of voice acting in a Final Fantasy game. I was awestruck at that scene (if you know, you know). I was debating giving this game an 8.5, same as Final Fantasy V, due to the less exciting combat and disjointed first half. However, thinking back to the wonderful story and that scene in particular and the emotions I felt while watching it, I have to bump it up to a 9. This is the pinnacle of the series so far to me, and I’m excited to see if VII can pass it. Every RPG fan owes it to themselves to play this game.

Time to beat (Main+Extras) - 32h:42m
Rating – 9/10

Dragon Crystal

Dragon Crystal is a very early roguelike game released for the Sega Master System back in 1990. As with most games at the time, the story is basically nonexistent. It starts by showing you getting trapped in a crystal and presumably you need to get out. That’s everything shown to you in game. The manual does go into a little more detail, which was also typical at the time. You’re plopped in at level one surrounded by monsters, loot, and plants that block your path and turn every level into a maze. You must make it through 30 increasingly difficult levels to reach the exit and win the game.

Dragon Crystal does have a few things going for it. Enemies only move when you move SUPERHOT style so you can plan your way around them. Some items you pick up can’t be identified until used in battle at which point their effect is revealed which is kind of cool. Every few levels the biome changes which provides a welcome change of scenery. As is typical with roguelikes, the levels are semi-randomized, so no two runs are exactly the same. While this is commonplace now, I imagine this was a novel concept back when this game was released.

Unfortunately, the game has all the trappings reminiscent of games released at the time. Besides the lack of story as mentioned earlier, it also suffers from no tutorials and is just way too difficult. At one point in my playthrough I got stuck and had to look up a guide which told me I should be running into every wall to see if it’s actually a secret passage which is a mechanic that is never explained. If you pick up an item and equip it, there’s a random chance that item will be cursed and if you don’t have the means of removing the curse, sucks to be you. On top of that, later levels have enemies strong enough to kill you in a couple hits, especially if you haven’t been killing all the enemies up to that point to get stronger. The randomized nature of the game means there’s a good chance powerful enemies can swarm you and end your run just because you were unlucky. There’s a difference between a game being challenging and a game being unfair, and this one falls into the latter camp. I wouldn’t have gotten close to beating it if it weren’t for emulator rewinds. After I beat the game, I realized I had no strong feelings one way or another about it. Some of the mechanics are cool, but the mindless running around and punishing enemy encounters left me feeling apathetic about the whole thing. I don’t think this game is worth playing today unless you’re extremely curious about what an old roguelike looks like.

Time to beat (Main) - 1h:57m
Rating – 5/10

Balatro

Balatro is a roguelite deckbuilder where the goal is to earn enough chips through playing poker hands to beat ever-increasing blinds. Once you beat eight antes, each made up of a small blind, a big blind, and a boss, you win the run. It sounds simple on paper, but there are so many game-changing modifiers in this game, it’s ridiculous. There are 15 decks to choose from ranging from getting an extra discard every round to randomizing every card in the deck. There are also 150 jokers that all have unique effects and act as the main mechanic for earning more chips. These range from something simple like +1 hand size to something much more powerful like increasing the chip multiplier every time you add a card to your deck.

While poker lays the groundwork for playing and scoring, Balatro quickly does away with typical poker strategies. You would normally want to play a high scoring hand like a full house or four-of-a-kind, but if your deck composition, active jokers, and hand levels favor lower scoring hands, it’s totally possible and even likely that you can score way more points with something as simple as a pair over something like a royal flush. Tarot cards can allow you to add, remove, or modify cards in your deck if you want more or less of a rank or suit to make playing boosted hands easier to pull off. Money is earned by winning blinds, certain jokers, and interest on money already earned but not spent and is used to buy items in the shop between rounds. With a staggering 340 collection items that include jokers, playing cards, boss blind abilities, booster packs, vouchers, and more, as well as enhancements, editions, and seals that can be applied to those cards, the amount of depth present in Balatro is truly a sight to behold.

And yet, despite the sheer variety of cards available and the strategies you can form with them, I felt the game get repetitive after a while. Perhaps it’s because I lacked the knowledge to form truly game-breaking decks, but after a while, I found myself employing the same strategy every run and praying that luck was on my side. My preferred deck was the checkered deck which removes all clubs and diamonds, so you have 26 spades and 26 hearts instead. I would combine this with my favorite hand (the flush), which this deck made extremely easy to play. Then every round consisted of just played flushes and hoping shops provided me with the cards I needed to power up those flushes to ridiculous levels to beat ante eight. This ended up working well enough for me to beat gold stake with that deck which is the highest difficulty available. By that point, I had seen almost everything the game had to offer and there wasn’t enough variety for me to continue. Even so, I had a lot of fun getting to that point and can recommend this game to anyone with even a passing interest in roguelikes or deckbuilders.

Time to beat (Main+Extras) – 40h:41m

Rating – 8/10

Minishoot’ Adventures

Minishoot’ Adventures (apostrophe intentional) is a top-down bullet hell metroidvania that has you pilot a sentient spaceship on a mission to rescue all your ship buddies that have been frozen by a rogue ship. There are hints of a dark backstory, especially if you go for all the lore tablets and the true final boss, but this is basically all you have otherwise. There’s no dialogue in the game and all the characters are sentient ships that express their emotions through beeps, hearts, and twirls. It’s all quite charming, but it does limit the story somewhat so I wouldn’t go into this game expecting anything too deep in the story department.

The basic gameplay loop involves exploring a large overworld littered with enemies, navigating intricately-designed dungeons, and taking out bosses to unlock new powers to explore different parts of the map. The game plays like a twin-stick shooter with the left stick moving your ship and the right stick firing your bullets. There are upgrades available that are pretty standard for games like this such as better guns, faster movement speed, and more health. There is a handy map to help with navigation that points to the next story objective, although dungeon maps are notably absent. After taking out the four bosses in each of the four main dungeons, the endgame dungeon opens up to fight the final boss and beat the game.

I am not typically a bullet hell fan, but this one seems more accessible than most (I played on original difficulty which is their version of normal). Even so, expect having to read enemy patterns and dodging a ton of bullets. I enjoyed slowly upgrading my ship and unlocking new areas, but sometimes figuring out where to go was frustrating, and a lot of the bosses had way too many phases for my taste. Getting 100% of the overworld map cleared was a particular pain point for me and I had to resort to looking up a guide to clear it and unlock the true ending. Despite getting more powerful as the game goes on, I never felt like it ever evolved past the opening hour. What you see at hour one is basically the same as hour ten when I wrapped my playthrough after checking out the endgame challenges. I enjoyed my time with the game, but it never felt like a particularly deep experience. Even so, I recommend it to fans of the bullet hell or metroidvania genres.

Time to beat (Main+Extras) – 9h:47m

Rating – 7.5/10

I AM YOUR BEAST

I AM YOUR BEAST is a fast-paced first person shooter where the goal is to get through each of the 26 main levels as quickly as possible. The gameplay is similar to Neon White, albeit without the card system or fantastical environments. The objective for most of the levels is to kill all the enemies, although there are a handful that want you to use laptops scattered around or destroy radar equipment. When you beat a level, you’re graded based on how quickly you completed it, with certain kill types scoring more points than others. You also unlock bonus objectives to encourage replaying levels differently such as not killing anyone or killing people with a certain type of weapon. There were a couple times throughout the very short campaign where it was necessary for me to go back to replay an earlier level to complete more objectives, but it wasn’t anything too egregious.

I’m not a speedrunner and tend to take my time when playing games, but I must admit it was satisfying to see myself improve after playing a level enough times to the point where I was zooming through it getting headshots left and right. The gameplay loop wasn’t as addicting as Neon White though, and I found myself unmotivated to go for A-ranks as the campaign progressed. There are only a couple enemy types and one “boss fight” with a helicopter so there wasn’t a ton of variety even with the multitudes of weapons available. I think the thing that surprised me the most and helped bump my score up was the voice acting. There are only three main characters that sometimes talk to each other between levels, but they all had incredible performances that helped keep me invested in the story. The responsiveness in the controls and rock-solid performance meant the game never got in the way of me mowing through the bad guys, which is essential in games like this. There’s also a meaty set of epilogue levels, as well as super-hard challenge levels if you really want to test your skills. If you’re in the mood for a quick FPS with a surprisingly intriguing story and don’t mind the lack of variety in the gameplay, I think I AM YOUR BEAST will be worth your time.

Time to beat (Main+Extras) – 4h:40m

Rating – 8/10

Stats

The year to date pie chart is getting mighty full, perhaps this wasn’t the best way to convey this information 😅 In any case, you can see that Balatro shot up to my third most played game this year, which I wasn’t expecting at all. I stuck with it much longer than I planned to, which just goes to show how addictive it can be. Final Fantasy VI squeaks in at #6 appropriately enough. Now five of my eight most played games in 2026 are Final Fantasy games which isn’t too surprising.

August marks my second highest acquisition month in stark contrast to July. This was fueled mainly by the itch.io charity bundle I mentioned earlier. The spending subsequently shot up as well, but at least there was a good money spent to games acquired ratio. Lastly, I had my lowest recorded playtime since May and third lowest for the year. I’m not entirely sure what contributed to that, but 70 hours is still nothing to sneeze at. I’m still waiting for that magical 100-hour month, I think it’s doable!

Conclusion/Upcoming

I’m still focusing on the Game Pass catalog, with four out of five completions being through the service (Dragon Crystal being the exception). I’ve now completed all the Final Fantasy games available through it and I own most of the other games I plan on playing in the series, so it’s gonna be a while before I play another one. I didn’t see anything leaving the service in the first half of September that I would have time to beat, so next up on my list is Absolum. I’ve also got BALL x PIT and Little Rocket Lab queued up to finish out the month. I’ve been saying I’ll get to Little Rocket Lab for months now so it’s gotta happen eventually. I’m sure there will be another session or two of Tales of Destiny as well. I think we’re nearing the halfway point? Maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Anyway, that’s gonna be it for me this month. I’ll see you all when September ends. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 4,612 (+169)

Monthly Update #19: July 2026

Holy moly, July certainly was Final Fantasy month. Dimensions was way longer than I was expecting, and I decided to jump into VI immediately afterward. I’m almost done with the 2D Final Fantasy era! On another note, I think I hit the perfect balance of low spending and high game time. If only every month could be like this one.

Game Acquisitions

A ton of bundles released last month as usual, but none of them really appealed to me enough to make a purchase. I did buy a super cheap 5/$3 bundle from Fanatical at the beginning of the month but that’s the only one. I also made the rare single game purchase with Octopath Traveler. I figured since I got the sequel in Humble Choice, I’d add the original to my wishlist and it went on sale for its historical low almost immediately. Everything else was freebies. Octopath Traveler is probably the one I’m looking forward to the most, but Echo Generation is up there too.

# of Games: 30

Total Money Spent: $17.80

Price/Game: $0.59

# of Games YTD: 548

Total Money Spent YTD: $385.95

Price/Game: $0.70

Game Recaps

As you can see, Final Fantasy made up the vast majority of my playtime for July. I started Dimensions in June, but most of my time with it was last month. I played it almost everyday from July 4^th to the 23^rd so it must’ve been compelling enough to keep coming back to. I also had a couple surprise completions with Cadash and Dispatch. Cadash was a rare example of testing out one of my emulated games and it being short enough to beat in one sitting. It also marks my first TurboGrafx-16 completion so that’s exciting! The second surprise was Dispatch which subsequently marks my first completion through the Amazon Luna streaming service. I wasn’t planning on playing anything through streaming, but it was available for free through the service and I was interested in the game already, so I thought why not. The experience was definitely subpar compared to native as I suspected it would be, but the nature of the game as mostly a visual novel made that less of an issue. I had another co-op session in Tales of Destiny as well. It’s gonna take us forever to get through this game if we only play once a month. We made it through the hardest fight of the game so far with the Cave Queen. It ended up being a matter of taking out its parts with magic, then attacking the main body with physical attacks. It was straightforward enough, but it did show that my buddy still isn’t vibing with the combat system. Trying to use an arte when your CC isn’t high enough just results in moving in the direction you pressed instead which was frustrating for him. I like the idea of not having to worry about mana, but not being able to use artes whenever you want might not be worth the tradeoff. In any case, we persevered and ended our session at Moreau. Lastly, I spent the last week of the month playing Final Fantasy VI. I wasn’t vibing with it at first, but after the Opera scene and the introduction of espers (summons) as actual characters as well as combat mechanics, now I’m invested. I’m excited to see where it goes. I just got the airship in the World of Ruin and starting my quest to reunite with all my friends. Please see all my let’s plays below for anything I either played or released in July. Some of these videos have a delay before they go public. Cadash will be up August 5th, Final Fantasy Dimensions August 21st, and Final Fantasy VI waaaaay later on December 25th. The reason for that being so late is because I didn’t want to start uploading videos from VI until Dimensions finished since they’re the same series. That shouldn’t be a problem for other games. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Game Reviews

Cadash

Cadash is a platformer with RPG elements from the early 90s. The story is about your basic save the princess from the evil wizard trope and nothing to write home about. You have four classes to choose from including the fighter, mage, priestess, and ninja. I played the fighter but briefly tried out the other classes after beating the game and was surprised at how different they all felt. There is also a two-player option that I imagine could be fun with a patient friend, but I used rewind extensively in my playthrough due to the high difficulty that was common back then which wouldn’t work in a co-op scenario.

As my first completion of a TurboGrafx-16 (aka PC Engine) game, I was impressed with Cadash. It’s still basic by today’s standards, but having four unique classes, a story, NPCs to talk to, small towns littered throughout the dungeon, weapons/armor/items to buy in shops, and a leveling system I feel would escalate it above other platformers at the time. There was even a twist final boss after the supposed final boss and a brief cutscene which was a satisfying end to the game. The different environments were nice to look at too. Besides the difficulty, the other main complaint I have is how shallow the RPG elements felt. Maybe it was because I played the most basic class, but I never really felt different when I leveled up. I think your health and damage go up slightly but that’s it. You can buy healing items and antidotes in the shops, but there’s no inventory to view so you have no idea how many you have. Your appearance did change as you bought better weapons and armor though which I thought was a nice touch. There’s no save system, so you either have to make use of save states or beat the whole thing in one sitting like I did. Overall, I recommend Cadash to any retro platformer fans that never got around to it. I specify retro fans because I imagine the trappings of retro games such as the basic story/gameplay and high difficulty will turn off more casual players.

Time to beat (Main+Extras) - 1h:48m
Rating – 6.5/10

Dispatch

Dispatch is an interactive movie/visual novel with the occasional management sim and hacking minigame thrown in for good measure. You play Robert Robertson, a former superhero down on his luck after his mech suit (the only “power” he has) is destroyed in the intro. You’re recruited by Blonde Blazer, a superhero and manager at the Superhero Dispatch Network (or SDN) to work as a hero dispatcher. They agree to fix your suit so you can be a superhero again which is a proposition Robert can’t pass up. You meet a colorful cast of characters with distinct personalities and get into all kinds of wacky workplace scenarios mixed in with emotional moments and a couple romance options if you want to pursue that.

Dispatch can be broken down into three gameplay styles. The first and most prominent is the visual novel style popularized by studios such as Telltale. If you enjoyed the decision making and QTEs from Telltale games such as The Wolf Among Us or Tales from the Borderlands, you’ll likely enjoy this. One major difference is that there are no 3D environments to walk around and explore, everything plays out like a movie. The second is the hero management through your role as a dispatcher. This plays somewhat similar to games like 911 Operator, although the individual heroes have their own strengths, weaknesses, and abilities that make some heroes better suited to some calls than others. They each have their own starting stats, but you can build them out however you want throughout the game. There are even synergies between certain characters so if you send them out together, they have a better chance of succeeding on the call. The third style is the hacking minigame that you occasionally enter to help out on calls during the hero management. The gameplay here reminds me of a game called Midnight Protocol. You move a ball around cyberspace to activate nodes, avoid antiviruses, and solve puzzles. It wasn’t as in-depth as Midnight Protocol, but that didn’t make me any better at it 😜 All three styles were enjoyable and worked well together to break up the monotony while still keeping the story moving.

As with most visual novels, the story and characters are the most important aspect, and I think Dispatch nailed this. The story didn’t have amazing highs and lows or world-shattering stakes, but it balanced comedy and tragedy well. I’m not totally happy with the ambiguous, darker fate of one of the main characters, but that’s a consequence of the choices I made and not the story itself, so I’ll let it slide. The characters were the main highlight for me. I loved their personalities and the way they played off each other. The banter between might be some of the most realistic and funny I’ve seen in a game. This is helped by wonderful acting from a talented cast such as Aaron Paul, Matt Mercer, and Jeffrey Wright. I would absolutely be interested in a season 2 if AdHoc Studio decides to go for it. I should note that there is a lot of blood, swearing, and nudity in this game, although there are censorship options available to mitigate that if it’s not something you’re into. If you’re looking for a good, character-driven story, don’t have superhero fatigue, and aren’t too concerned by the minimal gameplay on offer, Dispatch is an easy recommendation from me.

Time to beat (Main) - 8h:8m
Rating – 8.5/10

FINAL FANTASY DIMENSIONS

I decided to play Final Fantasy Dimensions right after V because I heard it takes heavy inspiration from that entry in the series with the job system. Now having played through both games, I can confirm that is the case, although I don’t think it quite lives up to it. It’s still a great game though, especially for a mobile title.

As I just mentioned, the job system from Final Fantasy V makes a return here. Each of the eight (!) playable characters have a set of basic jobs they can learn such as warrior or black mage, but then there are a handful of specialized jobs that only one team can learn like the paladin for the Warriors of Light or the ninja for the Warriors of Darkness. As you level up each job, you unlock abilities specific to that job that can then be carried over to other jobs to make a character that feels uniquely suited to your playstyle. This was my favorite aspect of V but unfortunately, it doesn’t feel as well executed here. One problem I have is that most of the abilities I unlocked weren’t very exciting. They usually amount to basic stat increases like strength +20% with only the occasional ability that felt truly game-changing. The other major problem I had was the implementation of job points. Every job you unlock can be freely leveled up to level three, but then you would have to spend job points to level them up any further. You only get a handful of points at major story beats throughout the game, so they feel limited until the very end. I felt that this actively discouraged the use of mixing and matching jobs and instead railroaded each character into the choices you made at the beginning of the game whether they were good or not. That defeats the whole purpose of the job system! As you near the end of the game, you get enough points to start experimenting with other jobs, but at that point, grinding to level up those jobs becomes tedious with the high level enemies you’re facing and no longer feels worth it.

Another new wrinkle introduced in this game that sounds cool on paper are the fusion abilities. These are combinations of two abilities, usually by two different jobs, that have a chance of being unlocked when you use one ability while having the other ability equipped. For example, at level 13, the monk learns an ability called chakra which heals a small amount of health and cures one ally of some basic status effects like confusion. At level six, the dragoon learns an ability called healing breath that heals all party members for a moderate amount of health. If a character has leveled up both jobs to their respective levels, equips one of those jobs, and has the other job in their ability slot, when they use chakra as a monk or healing breath as a dragoon, there’s a chance they’ll learn a fusion ability called white wind. White wind will heal the entire party for the current health of the caster which makes it extremely powerful if put on a character with a lot of health. The fusion ability is then tied to that character, and they can use it whenever they want regardless of the jobs or abilities they have equipped. There are dozens of fusion abilities in the game, and they make up some of the most powerful abilities you can use. The problem is that there’s no way you’ll unlock any of the actually useful abilities by just experimenting like the game wants you to do, partly due to the job points limiting which jobs you’re willing to let your characters work through. No casual player is just going to happen to level one character to bard level 20 and paladin level 17, have the abilities of both jobs equipped, and get lucky enough to cast dire dirge or wide slash enough times for shock to be unlocked. The job points, grinding, and sheer luck required for that to happen are astronomically low. I only unlocked a small handful of low level fusion abilities naturally in my playthrough and had to look up a guide to unlock anything remotely useful for the endgame.

I unfortunately have a few other problems I want to bring up with this game. One is partially my fault with the order I’m playing the series in, but it’s the lack of quality of life features the pixel remasters brought. I missed being able to save whenever I want, turning off encounters on a whim, and viewing dungeon maps. These were invaluable tools that gave me more freedom to look around and grab any chests I may have missed without fear of being worn down by constant battles. The encounter rate in Final Fantasy Dimensions felt extremely high, and without a map to guide me, I eventually lost patience trying to explore every path in the ridiculously long dungeons and started beelining for the exit. I probably missed some good loot that way, but it was necessary for me to keep my sanity. Another problem I had was also partially my fault due to playing on an emulator, but it was the controls. I was playing a touchscreen game on my computer, and while I was able to map a joystick to move around the overworld, it still felt weird having to switch over to a mouse whenever I entered combat or browsed a menu. The last problem I had was how constricted the exploration felt for most of the game. This was also probably a limitation of being a mobile game, but for most of my playthrough, I felt like I was being strictly led from town to dungeon to town through very small open areas clearly marked on a minimap with little opportunity to veer off course. It wasn’t until the very end of the game that I was finally given an airship and a WORLD MAP to go wherever I wanted. That’s right, the game didn’t even give me a map to help traverse until like 50 hours in which was insane.

This review sounds like one big rant, and I actually decided to lower my score by half a point as a result of writing it, but you know what they say: fans make the harshest critics. Despite everything I said above, I still really liked this game. Some of the characters are genuinely enjoyable. I especially loved Alba and her increasingly ridiculous ways she praised herself as well as Argy, the kind-hearted if not socially awkward amnesiac robot. The story structure was also unique and well-done. The party was split between the Warriors of Light and the Warriors of Darkness in their respective worlds and you would switch between those worlds throughout the game before finally reuniting in the last chapter. Each sub-chapter introduced a new job by having a new character join the party who was already fluent with that job so you could see what it was capable of to decide if you wanted to invest job points into learning it on one of your permanent characters. This also led to most of the combat being carried out in a party of five which had only been done up to this point in Final Fantasy IV, which was a fun twist. I think I can finally say I have a grip on the ATB system introduced in that game. One of my favorite parts of long RPGs is towards the end when I feel super powerful after mastering the combat system and leveling up all the characters and this game nailed that feeling. If you aren’t put off by old-school Final Fantasy design or touchscreen controls, I wholeheartedly recommend all JRPG fans at least try this game out. It is an underrated game in the series in my opinion.

Time to beat (Main) - 72h:31m
Rating – 7.5/10

Stats

Final Fantasy Dimensions has shot up to my most played game this year, blowing Death Howl completely out of the water. I’m surprised it took this long for an RPG to take the top spot. This may end up being the longest game I play this year since I think Final Fantasy VI is a shorter experience. Moving on to purchases, you can clearly see the low activity compared to previous months. Just to reiterate, I think this is the ideal scenario. I don’t need more games, I just find it hard to ignore good bundle deals when I see them. Lastly, July marked the third straight month of gametime increase. It still didn’t quite reach the height of February, but it’s pretty darn close and is still a lot of time to spend gaming. More months like this, please!

Conclusion/Upcoming

A month with high gametime and low acquisitions is an ideal month in my book. I paused my Game Pass subscription for most of the month since Final Fantasy Dimensions isn’t part of the service, but I restarted it again towards the end to start VI. After VI, I’m going to take a break from Final Fantasy for a while. I still have plans to playthrough the series, just not anytime soon. I’ll continue playing through Game Pass games for the foreseeable future. My goal for August is to finish up Final Fantasy VI which is very doable. If a short enough game is announced to leave Game Pass in August, I’ll prioritize that. Otherwise, I think I’ll continue my Balatro playthrough and see how far I can get there. It’s been a while since I’ve played it, so I’ll be a little rusty. Once I get my fill of that game, I’ll move on to Minishoot' Adventures and then Little Rocket Lab. There will probably be another session or two of Tales of Destiny as well. Anyway, that’s all from me. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 4,443 (+70)