Monthly Update #16: April 2026

Thankfully, I got back to a more regular gaming routine last month. That also includes the number of games I usually get too, for better or worse. At least it was a normal month 😅

Game Acquisitions

It’s fewer games than February, but there were also no itch.io bundles so these games should be meatier. Speaking of meat, I made a pretty beefy Reddit trade for six of these by trading away 10 of my old keys I’ve had for years that I couldn’t get rid of. This also includes my first console game purchase in who knows how long, a couple more Steam family games, a lot of giveaways, and of course a couple bundles because I still can’t help myself. Lastly, I made my first Tales of purchase! The Graces f remaster from last year dropped in price quickly and my co-op partner committed to playing through the series with me. Woohoo! I’ll probably pick that for game I’m most excited about from this list, although I’m really looking forward to quite a few of these. I wish I could say I’m planning on spending less this month, but I already have two bundles lined up that I’m gonna purchase depending on what is included in the May Humble Choice. Consumerism will never fade I suppose.

# of Games: 43

Total Money Spent: $47.76

Price/Game: $1.11

# of Games YTD: 333

Total Money Spent YTD: $176.08

Price/Game: $0.53

Game Recaps

Only focused on three single-player games last month, but they’re all bangers. Death Howl weaseled its way into my GOTY so far, but Inscryption will likely surpass it when I finish that one. I also played a couple short indie horror games with my co-op friend with Static Voice and The Boba Teashop. We really liked the Boba Teashop, helped only a little by our mutual love of the drink. Static Voice on the other hand, not so much. It’s now officially the worst rating I’ve given to a game so far, a feat I didn’t think possible after the disaster that was Code Alkonost. Sorry friend. On the bright side, we’ve decided that we’re going to finally play the next game in the Tales of series! I was going to go for Eternia (Destiny II) next since it’s the only other PS1 game after Phantasia, but rumor has it that it’s going to be next in the remaster project since a rating popped up on the PEGI website a few days ago. This throws a wrench into my plans so maybe we’ll skip ahead to the PS2 era with Destiny Director’s Cut next. We once again didn’t record any footage for the co-op games, but the single-player games continue to be streamed on my Twitch channel and later uploaded to my YouTube channel. Here’s everything I either uploaded or recorded this month. Please note that the first video for Final Fantasy IV will be up on the 5^th and Inscryption won’t be up until June 19^th. Sorry about the delay! The last Expedition 33 video will finally be up on May 18^th so I should start being able to catch up quicker after that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Game Reviews

The Boba Teashop

The Boba Teashop describes itself as a cozy horror game, two genres that seem impossible to combine. At no point during my short playtime did I feel cozy though as I was always on edge due to the increasingly disturbing visuals and character interactions. If you’re looking for a cozy game, look elsewhere. What is here, though, is a competent but slightly underbaked indie horror experience. You play a girl who just opened her own tea shop which is supposedly her lifelong dream. The first couple of customers are innocent enough, but it quickly escalates when they start being demanding, insulting, flirty, and downright disrespectful. As each day passes, the store gets darker and darker. The main character has internal monologues about how she’s not feeling great but still wants to run the shop. Eventually, she seeks professional help when she starts hallucinating.

The gameplay consists of customers coming into the store one at a time and asking for a specific drink. There are several drink combinations you can make, with a handy whiteboard in the back that acts as a cheat sheet. Some customers order something very specific that can only be made one way while others might just say something vague like they want something sweet or something with strawberries in it. After making the drink and handing it to the customer, they’ll remark about something, put down their money, and walk away. Occasionally you’ll start hallucinating and have to look away to preserve your sanity before resuming filling orders. After serving a handful of customers, you close the store, clean up, and leave for the day. After one in-game week, there is a final cutscene and the game ends.

There are some things that I think this game does well, and others I felt could’ve been more fleshed out. On the positive side, I thought the art style was great. It looks like you’re playing through a VCR. I like how everything gets darker as the game goes on to show the main character spiraling. The scares were effective and infrequent enough to keep the tension high without relying on jumpscares. Making the drinks for the customers was another highlight, and I enjoyed the open-ended orders that allowed me to be a bit more creative. The story was fairly barebones, but it was enough to keep me invested despite the numerous grammatical errors.

My main gripe with the game was that the “cozy” simulator portion feels like there’s some lost potential. When a customer places an order, there is no rush to fulfill it, nor any penalty for getting the order wrong and having to start over. There’s also nothing to do with the money they give you, including having to make change. You just click on it and it goes into the register. Maybe having to make change and using profits to unlock decorations for the store or new ingredients for drinks could go a long way. If this was marketed as purely a horror game, I might’ve glossed over it, but it isn’t. Lean into it! I think there’s a competent simulator hidden under this horror game that never comes out. There is also little variation in the day-to-day gameplay, with only the last day offering much in the way of variety. This is somewhat forgiven by the short length, but it still felt repetitive enough to be worth mentioning. If you’re in the market for a short indie horror game with an unconventional gameplay loop for the genre, I think The Boba Teashop is worth looking into. Just don’t be fooled by the cozy marketing term, there’s very little coziness here.

Time to beat (Main+Sides) - 1h:16m
Rating – 7/10

Death Howl

Death Howl describes itself as a soulslike deckbuilder, and I can see where they’re coming from with that description. You collect souls (known as death howls) by defeating enemies which you can use to craft cards which act as your actions in combat. If you die, you drop your death howls on the battlefield and have to pick them up again (and win the fight) or else they’re gone permanently. There is also an oppressive atmosphere throughout the experience, another common characteristic of the genre. I wouldn’t call the gameplay itself soulslike though since the combat is turn-based with no dodging, parrying, or quick reflexes required. The deckbuilder descriptor is much more accurate though, and if you’re looking for a new deckbuilder to play, I highly recommend this one.

You play as Ro, a mother who recently lost her son in a terrible hunting accident. Stricken with grief, she travels to the spirit world to try and get him back before he moves on to the realm of death. The map is one big open world divided into five different realms that each have their own set of cards and enemy types. You craft cards by spending death howls as mentioned earlier, and as you gather materials in each realm, the more cards become available for you to be able to craft. You can use any card in any realm, but if you are in a different realm to the one the card came from, the cost to play that card increases by one mana. Mana determines how far you can move and how many cards you can play in one turn and is a limited resource. To help offset this, there are also a small selection of realmless cards that carry no penalty and are generally pretty good but not amazing. Each realm has its own gimmick for how to tackle enemies such as focusing on blocking, high movement, or poison. There are also totems you can equip that offer passive abilities such as more mana in exchange for curse cards or gaining block for every kill in a turn. All of these factors encourage crafting multiple decks and experimenting with different cards depending on the challenge and what realm you’re currently in.

I don’t have a lot of experience with deckbuilders in general and as a result, I was initially overwhelmed by the sheer number of cards available combined with the difficulty of the battles. I initially failed to reach the boss of the first realm you start in and, feeling deflated and on the verge of giving up, decided to move on to another. That one was also a struggle, but I managed to defeat the boss there after a few attempts. Equipped with newfound optimism, more combat experience, and better cards in my deck, I traveled back to the first realm and finally managed to beat the boss there as well. This is when the game finally clicked with me, and I found the remaining realms to be much more manageable. I was consistently engaged by the combat and loved learning what the gimmick was and exploiting it. Some of the side quests were cool and granted temporary powerful cards, but others were a little too vague for my liking and I ended up having to look up guides for a lot of them. The main story was fairly basic but relatable, and the ending was exceptional in my opinion. While the gauntlet of consecutive battles in the last realm was frustrating with a little too much RNG due to randomized enemies and card pulls, the final two boss fights were super fun. If you want tactical, turn-based deckbuilder with a good story and aren’t put off by the difficulty, Death Howl is a pretty easy game to recommend.

Time to beat (Completionist) - 42h:42m
Rating – 8.5/10

Static Voice

Static Voice is a small indie horror game about a factory explosion in Soviet Russia circa 1998 (yeah, try wrapping your head around that one) that released a gas on the nearby town that turns people into monsters. At least the game claims they’re monsters. There’s only one “monster” that roams the halls of the apartment complex the game takes place in, and it mostly looks like a pale human that just cries and won’t bother you if you stay out of their way. When you figure out the stealth in the game boils down to “don’t run close to them,” it almost makes you pity them which isn’t usually the intention when it comes to horror monsters.

The gameplay consists of listening to your buddy and the radio in your apartment complex about how to build an SOS device to signal the government for evacuation, then putting on a gas mask to leave and find the parts to build at a workbench. The map consists of four short hallways in the complex with very little of the rooms actually being enterable. Sometimes you’ll find an item that needs broken down at another workbench which may or may not actually contain anything you need which was an unnecessarily annoying way to pad game time. When you find enough parts, you combine them at the workbench, then listen to the radio broadcast for a small snippet of story before moving on to more searching. Eventually you build the device to signal for rescue and the big ending cutscene is instead reduced to a wall of text.

I won’t beat around the bush any longer: this game is terrible. The dialog is filled with typos and poor grammar. The worldbuilding makes no sense (Soviet Russia in 1998, seriously?) The monster that roams the halls is a complete non-threat. Even if you are careless and get caught, the only thing that happens is a jumpscare and then you’re teleported to your room. You don’t even lose any items you’re carrying which actually makes the monster a convenient teleportation option if you need to head there anyway. There’s a lot of back-and-forth trying to scour the complex for the items you need to build the device which led to repetition and annoyance when you can’t find what you’re looking for. There’s a major bug that occurs when you listen to the radio next to the workbench before the game signals for you to do so for the first time which caused a softlock that required me to restart the whole game. Looking up a walkthrough on YouTube to try to figure out how to back out of the radio showed they ran into the same issue but conveniently faded to black at that moment to try and hide it. As if this wasn’t all bad enough, the developer also admits to using AI in the creation of the game if that is an issue for you. My playtime is much longer than what it should take to beat it as I was stuck watching that same video to find whatever it is I needed to find to progress. It was often that the item was small like a key and would just randomly appear after I had already searched the room which made me think I didn’t need to go in that room again. There’s nothing of value to see here. I recommend staying far away from Static Voice.

Time to beat (Main) - 2h:45m
Rating – 2/10

FINAL FANTASY IV

The jump in quality from the NES to the SNES is noticeable in Final Fantasy IV. The graphics are improved of course, although not as much as I was expecting. This is probably the Pixel Remaster collection pushing everything up to the same level of quality. The character models look roughly the same, but environmental detail was improved. The story is also a big step up from previous entries. This time, there’s actually a full cast of characters with their own motivations and personality quirks. The biggest change, however, was to the combat system. While the first three games had a strictly turn-based system where you had all the time in the world to make your choices, IV introduced the active time battle (ATB) system.

With ATB, every character has separate gauges that count down to when they’re able to act. Faster characters will have faster gauges while slower characters have to wait longer. Once a gauge fills up, that’s when you pick an action like attacking, defending, or using an item. The gauges continue to fill up for everyone including the enemies while you decide, although thankfully everything still stops when you farther down in the spell or item menu to avoid being too overwhelmed since there are so many to choose from. Some actions take longer than others so even when you do pick an action, you might have to wait a little bit for it to happen while gauges continue to fill up which risks being interrupted by the enemy. A basic attack is performed instantaneously while a high-level meteor spell takes a few seconds which is plenty of time to be countered by something like confuse or charm to being killed outright. This wasn’t too much of a problem for most of the game, but some of the final dungeon enemies/bosses had me juggling quick, low-level spells with slow, high-level spells depending on their attack patterns which added another wrinkle.

In all honestly, I struggled with ATB for at least the first half of the game. While I was busy staring at gauges filling up and quickly trying to pick something to do, enemies wouldn’t hesitate to act on what I thought was my turn and possibly killing the character I was picking an action for. I would then have to switch to the next character and quickly rethink what to do next before it snowballed into a party wipe. It was very overwhelming and I found myself dying a lot while I got the hang of it. Thankfully, it seems like the developers thought about that because I also noticed that items in this game were way cheaper than previous entries. A phoenix down, the item that revives dead party members, only cost 100 gil whereas it was 1,000 in Final Fantasy III. As a result, I used items liberally as I fumbled my way through. I think I still prefer either strictly turn-based or strictly action, but I do admit it opens up the combat a little more.

There are other factors at play here that impacted my score. Spells were seemingly laid out haphazardly in the menu, which made it difficult to tell from a distance what level they were supposed to be. I feel like previous entries did a good job of categorizing and listing them so you could easily tell exactly how much more powerful one spell was compared to another. Here, they just looked like a jumbled mess with possibly the worst presentation out of any game so far. There were also several difficulty spikes in dungeons that ground my progress to a halt, even after I felt I had a grasp on the combat. If it weren’t for the Pixel Remaster ability to turn off encounters, I have no idea how I would’ve gotten through some of them otherwise. When you lose to the final boss, you have to sit through the entire cutscene before you can act again. I died several times and ended up timing how long it took from death to first action in combat: three and a half minutes! Excruciating. On the flip side, this game did a better job of making me care about the characters than previous entries. From the very beginning, the story is presented in a way to make me invested in what was happening. As a result, I recommend Final Fantasy IV to anyone in the market for an old school JRPG to get into.

Time to beat (Main+Extras) - 22h:53m
Rating – 7.5/10

Stats

 

A few interesting observations to be had here. First of all, I want to congratulate Death Howl for becoming my most played game of 2026 so far. Still not an RPG which is very strange. Final Fantasy IV makes it into the top five. My games acquired went back down to what is apparently considered normal for me, although I’m still not limiting my game purchases, so this continues to be a fun coincidence. I think March will continue to be an outlier due to the itch.io bundle, unless another huge one comes out or I just go insane with other bundle purchases which is unlikely. That being said, I do have a couple bundles lined up as mentioned earlier so that will get me a jumpstart in May. My spending also seems to be slowly increasing, which is a concerning trend. To put it into perspective, I spent $64.96 by this time last year and I’m averaging $44.02/month right now. Still not enough to make me destitute, but a noticeable jump regardless. Lastly, my playtime jumped back up to slightly above average for the year, which was nice. Imagine if I could game for 100 hours per month though, I’d finally start making a dent in the backlog 😅 Darn you adulthood!

Conclusion/Upcoming

Another month, another Final Fantasy game down. I’m still working on Inscryption so that may end up making it into my most played games, we’ll see. It’ll likely be topping my favorite games of the year regardless. I’ll be playing Final Fantasy V later in the month, but there are a couple shorter titles that were just announced to be leaving Game Pass soon, so I’ll try to play those first. Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo could be a fun adventure game, a genre I’m not super familiar with. The story looks really good though. Go Mecha Ball is another game leaving the service in the middle of May. It doesn’t really stand out much but could be a competent roguelike twin-stick shooter regardless. Plus it’s short so I should be able to finish it in time. On the co-op front, I’m super excited to finally get back into Tales with my friend after a string of short indie horror games. I’ll want his thoughts on which one to play next. I may skip over Tales of Eternia for now due to the rumored remaster and instead move onto the next game in my play order which is Tales of Destiny Director’s Cut. This is another Japanese-exclusive remake like PS1 Phantasia, but this time we’re moving from the PS1 to the PS2. I’m hoping this isn’t too much of a leap and will still be simple enough for him to get the hang of. On another note, you may notice my backlog increased by a lot more than my acquisitions show. I’m continuing to slowly test out emulated games whenever I don’t have quite enough time to stream but don’t want to go to bed yet. I apparently managed to test like 20 games last month which was way more than I expected. I think this strikes a nice balance between regularly playing games and not playing anything and only testing for months at a time. We’ll see if I can keep up the momentum. If I manage to beat Final Fantasy V before the end of the month, I’ll move on to the next one. You may think that would be VI, but I actually have a much more obscure entry I want to play next. You’ll have to stay tuned to find out 👀 That’s assuming of course that there aren’t other games leaving Game Pass before the end of the month that I want to quickly get through. Anyway, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading my ramblings!

Backlog total: 4,151 (+63)

Monthly Update #15: March 2026

Oh boy, my gametime really went down in March, especially compared to February. I was so worried about the retro game repository Myrient shutting down that I spent weeks getting the rest of the games I was interested in emulating downloaded so I didn’t have to take even more time perusing different websites to try to find them. I then went a step further and decided to get them all integrated into Playnite as well to make sure they’re all the correct files and ready to be played. Now all I have to do is the actual testing to make sure they work and then move them to my backlog, but I’ve decided I spent enough time on emulation stuff already, so I’ll do that later. For now, I’m shifting my focus back on Game Pass before Microsoft’s new leadership totally messes it up. Anyway, I think that’s enough doom and gloom for one blog intro. Let’s move on to the acquisitions, and it's a big one this time.

Game Acquisitions

As you can see, I got way more games than usual in March. That’s because I bought the itch.io No ICE in Minnesota charity bundle back in February and finally got around to picking out the games I was interested in playing and adding them to the HLTB database and my backlog. My Steam Family also purchased a couple games and played a bunch of free visual novels that looked interesting, so I added them to my backlog as well. I was also up to my usual shenanigans and purchased a few bundles while convincing myself not to buy even more because my backlog has reached absurd levels. Now that I can see how many retro games I want to play, I can officially say that I’ll be in the top 50 on the most backlogged list on HLTB when I finally get around to getting them added. Not exactly a milestone I wanted to reach, but it is what it is. In any case, there’s a lot of solid games here. I think I’m most looking forward to StarVaders, it looks like a really cool tactics roguelite Deckbuilder combo.

# of Games: 196

Total Money Spent: $43.59

Price/Game: $0.22

# of Games YTD: 290

Total Money Spent YTD: $128.32

Price/Game: $0.44

Game Recaps

And here we can see the monument to my gaming failure. I’m exaggerating, of course, I have no obligations or expectations to game as much as possible in any given month. After spending nearly 100 hours on my favorite hobby in February though, “only” managing to reach 38 hours in March is admittedly a little disheartening. Even with the gametime I had, I still managed four completions. I finished up the very obscure indie game Kaiju Control Force in co-op with my friend. It was unfortunately very anticlimactic due to the myriad of bugs, but I somehow still had a good time. We also went on to complete another small indie game with Dordogne. This was a much more competently produced title. Lastly, we played a super short indie horror game called Rose and Cross. It was…something. I also finally got back into single-player gaming with the continuation of my Final Fantasy journey with III. Speaking of, IV has been confirmed for Game Pass this month so now I’m confident I’ll get to play the entire Pixel Remaster collection for free. I can’t wait; I’ve heard the quality really ramps up with the SNES titles. Between III and IV though, I’m playing through a roguelike deckbuilder called Death Howl. I like everything about it except the difficulty. That’s starting to grate on me and may cause a retirement, but I want to give it more time. And last but certainly not least, I finally got to play a little bit more of Stranded Deep with my other co-op friend that I haven’t played anything with since August. Hopefully that becomes a regular thing again at some point, we used to play much more consistently than we have in the last few years. Here are playlists for everything I played and recorded in March or any videos uploaded in March. The first Final Fantasy III video will be up April 5^th and Death Howl will be April 26^th.

 

 

 

 

 

Game Reviews

Kaiju Control Force

There’s not much to be said about this little single-screen platformer. You and up to one friend have to work together to buy items at a shop to activate a handful of terminals to proceed to the next level while avoiding various types of mutant rats. Sometimes the power goes out so you have to knock out a rat and put them on a treadmill to restore the power. Killing a rat provides gears which act as the currency to buy shop items like the aforementioned terminal keys, extra lives, and planks to cover up the vents the rats spawn from. There are an impressive number of enemy types for such a small game such as battery-carrying ones that shoot electric balls at you to ones holding toxic barrels that occasionally spill stuff you have to avoid to pilots that shoot homing missiles at you. There are only six levels in the game, and the first couple are pretty easy, but you can quickly become overwhelmed if you don’t complete a level quickly enough without boarding up the vents because the spawn rate gets crazy.

While I did enjoy this basic game for what it is, it is also unfortunately riddled with bugs. Sometimes items you buy at the shop disappear from your hand and appear somewhere else. Sometimes you stop being able to pick anything up which causes you to be almost completely useless and rely on your co-op partner to finish the level. Sometimes, and most egregiously, you would start a level where your co-op partner and the enemies just don’t spawn at all which means you can’t beat the level and have to restart the whole thing. These weren’t one-off occurrences either, bugs like these happened on every single attempt. This also included a bug where after we finally beat the last level, the game just didn’t end, and we missed out on the ending cutscene. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was still looking forward to seeing it. I couldn’t find any footage of it online either as it seems nobody else recorded themselves beating the game, so my victory feels hollow as a result. I probably would’ve given the game a 7/10 if it worked properly but it almost never did. Even with all of these issues, it was still a mostly enjoyable co-op platforming experience. Just don’t set your expectations too high.

Time to beat (Main) - 4h:2m
Rating – 6/10

Dordogne

Dordogne is a short, narrative-driven adventure game about a 32-year-old woman named Mimi who visits her grandmother’s house after her death having only been there for a month 20 years prior. It’s clear there is something going on from the get-go. She receives texts from her dad telling her not to go there and to come home, which she refuses. Exploring the house, she remarks how she remembers almost nothing about it, but starts to slowly regain her memory over the course of the game. This implies that there is some deeper familial conflict going on, and a traumatic event that stopped her from remembering anything or being allowed to come back. The story is the main focus of the game, so I won’t spoil any more of it here.

Dordogne is split up into two sections across each of its eight chapters: the present-day (2002) where Mimi wanders the property while trying to recover her memory and respond to texts from her parents and friends. When she finds an object of significance, it cuts back to 1982 when she was staying at the house. While there, you still explore the house, but you also participate in a couple different minigames, talk to your grandmother, explore the surrounding area, and make a new friend. I would describe this as a walking simulator as walking and reading is most of the game, and the minigames and exploring sections have no real fail states. When you finish up whatever you remembered in the past, you make a page in your scrapbook with whatever collectibles you found in that chapter, then the chapter ends and the next one begins with you back in the present.

The big standout of this game is the art style. Everything except the characters looks like it was ripped straight from watercolor. For the most part this works, and it makes the game very pleasing to look at. However, especially at the beginning, it makes it kind of difficult to navigate since you were moving through a 3D world made up of 2D watercolor objects which sometimes threw off my perception. There were also a couple instances where the watercolor textures were wrapped around truly 3D objects which I felt clashed and highlighted the low detail of the environment. The game also got quite repetitive, even with its short runtime. Every chapter you navigate the same house, look at the same objects where Mimi might have something new to say about them, go back in time, talk to your grandma, then look at all the same stuff again. The minigames attempted to break up the monotony to mixed success. The story, while somewhat predictable and low stakes, was still enjoyable enough to carry me through the experience, and voicing the characters with my friend was fun as usual. If you’re looking for a simple narrative game with a pleasing art style and don’t think you’ll be bothered by the lack of challenge, I can safely recommend Dordogne.

Time to beat (Main+Extras) - 4h:45m
Rating – 7/10

FINAL FANTASY III

As the last Final Fantasy game to originally release on the NES, I felt that the third installment was a solid conclusion to that era of the franchise. This was one of the few entries in the series that I knew almost nothing about, and I was worried it was because the game was so bland that it would be forgettable. I’m happy to report that I didn’t find it bland at all. In fact, this might be my favorite entry yet, if only by a little.

The first thing I noticed when starting the game was that the story was once again at the forefront. I’m sure this will be common for all entries moving forward, but after the lack of one in the first game, I still feel like it’s worth mentioning. It’s still not the strongest story around, but there are a couple interesting elements. One of them occurs in the endgame so I don’t want to spoil it here. The first though was the discovery of a second world map underneath the one you start on. The world has already been mostly destroyed before the start of the game, but you bring it back from the brink and unlock a whole new world to explore which was pretty cool. There’s even technically a third map under the ocean of the second, but there are only a handful of locations and enemies there, so I don’t think it really counts. I think the biggest complaint I have about the story, and one of only two major complaints I have with the game, is that the characters you play as reverted back to the first game by having no names. This unfortunately made it so I felt no connection to them which in turn made it hard to care about the story. Story is one of the main reasons I enjoy RPGs in the first place so it’s a shame they went back to nameless protagonists after having named ones in the second game. My understanding is that this is resolved for all future entries, so I look forward to enjoying the stories again.

The second thing I noticed was the origin of the job system; a series staple I believe. You start out as a party of useless Onion Knights but slowly unlock different jobs over the course of the game. While I eventually settled into my niche of jobs and enjoyed playing to their strengths, the job system was also the source of my second major complaint with this game. There are SO MANY jobs and it’s not exactly clear which ones you should be using most of the time outside of a couple scenarios where the game outright tells you. I felt very overwhelmed as more and more jobs kept piling up and I eventually just went back to the original jobs I got after ditching the Onion Knight at the beginning. Some jobs have direct upgrades which made things a little easier and I ended up beating the game with a Knight, Ninja, Devout, and Sage. I ran with a Ranger, Dragoon, and Scholar for short bursts throughout the story but didn’t stick with them for long, and I couldn’t really find a use for the myriad of other jobs. Another unfortunate aspect of the job system is that there was a lot of equipment you could buy in shops that could only be used by one or a small number of jobs which felt like an unnecessary compartmentalization. Every time I came across a shop that only sold say geomancer or summoner gear, I felt like I was missing out and wondered if I was playing the game wrong. I didn’t want to waste money on them either in case it ended up being a job I didn’t like, nor did I want to spend the time leveling up that job in hopes that it ended up getting better than the high-level jobs I already had. As a result, there was a lot of equipment and special abilities that I just never got to experience, and I wonder if maybe I missed a key aspect of the game. It made me appreciate in the second game that every character could wield any equipment and learn any spell so you could play them exactly how you wanted.

It feels like I’m complaining a lot, but I still enjoyed my time with the game. The combat system was reminiscent of the first game, but with way more classes and interesting abilities tied to those classes. The world was the most interesting and straightforward to explore so far in the series. Most of the side characters were fun to talk to and had just enough depth to them to not feel like cardboard cutouts to deliver exposition. It’s worth mentioning that I also found this to be the easiest Final Fantasy I’ve played so far. I count this as a positive as the first two games had a handful of frustrating difficulty spikes that I didn’t experience here, which is greatly appreciated. Others might see that as a negative and want more challenge out of their games. For everyone else who wants to experience a classic turn-based RPG and is open to messing around with the rudimentary job system, I can recommend Final Fantasy III.

Time to beat (Completionist) - 18h:31m
Rating – 7/10

Rose and Cross

This is a very short horror game about a guy who goes out to a remote farm to investigate rumors of a crazy cult in the area. I’m gonna be honest, there’s not a lot to talk about here. There are only two sections to this game: the barn in the cornfield to get the crowbar to open the second area, the house. The house consists of a front room, bathroom, kitchen, and attic. The attic is where most of the plot moves forward as it has a pentagram on the ground, a picture of how the summoning circle should be set up, and instructions to gather four items around the house to recreate the ritual. After getting each item, something scary might happen like a lightbulb breaking or a monster suddenly appearing and phasing through you while making a scary noise. There are a couple notes you can collect from a previous victim of the ritual but that’s everything for collectibles. There is no voice acting, but occasionally you’ll see captions on the bottom of the screen as if the main character is silently thinking to themselves.

I have a lot of grievances with this game. The first thing I noticed is that the game employs mouse acceleration with no way to turn it off, so your view slowly comes to a stop every time you stop the mouse instead of immediately, and that makes it feel weird to control the entire time. While the ambient noises are alright, there are only a handful of them, so you’re hearing the same noises over and over again which quickly dissipates the tension they should be heightening. There are no interaction animations, when you walk over to pick something up or place something, the objects just appear and disappear as if by magic. The biggest offender in my opinion though is that it was very clear that English was not the developer’s first language. There are grammatical errors in almost every thought which is very distracting. The only positive things I can say about this game are that it did have some effective scary moments and it was mercifully short. It might be worth it for free if you want a few jumpscares, but I wouldn’t pay for this experience.

Time to beat (Completionist) - 42m
Rating – 4/10

Stats

 

It’s funny seeing the acquisition bar shoot up so much for March. This won’t be a regular occurrence since the itch.io charity bundles are few and far between. My spending seems to be pretty consistent from month to month though which is interesting. I don’t put any caps on what I spend so this is just a fun coincidence. You can also clearly see how much my playtime went down but that should also be a one-time thing due to the emulation stuff. I should be going back to a more regular schedule moving forward.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Hopefully this will be my lowest performing month this year and will only go up. My upcoming plans from the February update were completely thrown out the window in March. I didn’t get to Mythwrecked before it left Game Pass, nor did I get to Inscryption, Balatro, or Little Rocket Lab. On top of that, my Game Pass list has been shuffled a bit with fluctuating review scores and new additions to the service. As a result, I can only say with relative certainty that I will be playing Death Howl and Final Fantasy IV in April. If I manage that, the next game on my list will probably be Inscryption. Balatro and Little Rocket Lab are still relatively high on the list, but I don’t expect to get to them anytime soon. On the bright side, taking weeks off gaming will get me caught up on my YouTube uploads much quicker than I expected, especially if I continue not recording some of my playthroughs. Anyway, that’s all for now, I’m gonna get back to Death Howl. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 4,088 (+191)

Monthly Update #14: February 2026

Welcome back to my monthly blog! Despite being a shorter month, February was still my most played month since I started tracking last year. This included wrapping up the Citizen Sleeper series I started in January as well as continuing my Final Fantasy journey with the infamous second game. I also continued my way through the Game Pass catalog, beat my first randomizer, and got some more co-op gaming in. But first, let’s start with my game acquisitions.

Game Acquisitions

More decent bundles on offer last month, with a healthy dose of freebies sprinkled in. I’m especially looking forward to some of these visual novels and platformers I picked up. Still a good amount of spending happening here, but nothing egregious and still a great bang for my buck if I do say so myself. There’s another itch.io charity megabundle going on right now that I picked up, but I haven’t gotten around to cataloging the games yet so I’ll hopefully have that reflected in March. I was very tempted by a boomer shooter bundle on newcomer Digiphile’s website (former Humble Bundle employees), but the mix of price and already playing Mullet Madjack last year helped me talk myself out of it.

# of Games: 42

Total Money Spent: $40.25

Price/Game: $0.96

And here is every game I’ve gotten so far this year. It’s already starting to look like a lot. I probably won’t have a blurb here in future updates, I just wanted to explain why there are two acquisition pictures included now.

# of Games This Year: 94

Total Money Spent This Year: $84.73

Price/Game: $0.90

Game Recaps

I went back to the first Citizen Sleeper game after beating the second so I could see the rest of the endings. That’s how you know I enjoyed my time with it. What a great cyberpunk space story! My review of that is below. I also went back to one of my top games of 2024 with The Messenger to play it randomized through Archipelago with other members of the HLTB community. It was an OK time, but it reminded me why I almost never replay games. It was especially frustrating that I was constantly locked out of progression, missed most of the story beats, and didn’t fight like half the bosses. I was also never really a huge fan of the second half of the game anyway which the randomizer locks you to. I probably will not be playing any more randomizers in the future, but I hope the other HLTB people enjoyed their time.

Shortly after beating Final Fantasy I back in January, I’ve already played through II and had an even better time with it despite its reputation. Full review is below, but the story and characters were a big leap from the first game and that was enough for me. The third game has been added to Game Pass so it looks like I’ll be rolling right into that as well. I can’t wait! I don’t know anything about III, it seems like nobody talks about it. I hope that doesn’t mean it ends up being bland. I have high hopes after II though. I was planning on playing Inscryption before starting Final Fantasy III, but I just found out Myrient is shutting down soon which hosts a lot of roms I was planning on getting for my big emulation project. As a result, I’ve resumed work on that which is why this post is delayed and I haven’t gamed for a week.

Lastly, I finally had some more co-op gaming with my friend. We completed two runs of Monster Prom 3 with the first one ending in failure. The second one though was a huge success. We even got a date ending out of it! The resource management made this game much more interesting than 2 in my opinion. Full review below, but we enjoyed it enough to add the first and fourth games to our list, so that probably says something. We also played a bit of a small indie game called Kaiju Control Force. It plays a little bit like the original Donkey Kong with the platforming and avoiding things on ladders. The goal is to avoid all the different types of enemy mice while keeping the power on and buying all the items in the shop needed to boot up the terminals to advance to the next level. There are six levels in the game, and we were one terminal away from beating the fifth level. So close, but the game gets very chaotic and difficult quickly so I’m not sure if we have the skill level to beat the whole thing. Hopefully we give it another go in the future! I had an OK time and I think he enjoyed it too. Check out my playthroughs for every game I played and recorded last month, as well as Expedition 33, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Neon White which still have videos coming out. Please note that the video backlog is still pretty backed up. I’m uploading every day so I’m trying my best to catch up. As of the time of writing, the first Final Fantasy II video will be up March 6^th, the first Citizen Sleeper 2 video will be up March 27^th, and the first Nine Sols video won’t be up until April 20^th. Everything is subject to change, and I can’t really plan these videos two whole months in advance 😅

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Game Reviews

Citizen Sleeper

Citizen Sleeper is an RPG/visual novel hybrid about an android with an emulated human mind (known as a sleeper) who escapes their maker/employer on board a ship that is subsequently sent to a scrapyard on a space station known as The Eye. Unlike the sequel which takes place across a few different stations and asteroids, this one stays on just this one station. I didn’t feel like this detracted from the experience at all. If anything, it helped me grow more attached to the station and the people on it, which made several of the endings where you decide whether to stay on the station or leave that much more memorable. The gameplay loop consists of rolling six d6 dice which serve as the number of actions you can take on any given day (called cycles). Actions vary but typically involve working for money (called cryo), scouting new locations within the station, talking to NPCs to advance their storylines, and buying whatever resources you might need. There are two meters to pay attention to: energy and condition. Energy is lost or gained depending on the actions you take and always go down at the end of a cycle when you rest. Condition is the same way, but the worse your condition, the less dice you roll each cycle and thus the less actions you can take. This makes it imperative to stay on top of these things.

The game is confusing at first, trying to juggle the myriad of storylines happening at once and the various timers that sometimes affect if/when they progress. Cryo can be tight at the beginning of the game which makes resource management a more critical gameplay component, but by the mid-game, you basically have everything you need to focus on the stories taking place. Speaking of, I found most of the stories and characters to be enjoyable. I especially liked Lem and Mina, a father-daughter duo with the father trying his best to raise a little girl alone by trying to find work building a spaceship and eventually booking passage off the station on that same ship. As mentioned earlier, there are several endings to this game that usually boil down to whether you want to leave the station (which rolls credits) or stay (which also rolls credits but lets you keep playing afterwards). The Lem and Mina storyline, for example, has at least four different endings which are variations of these two possibilities. I 100% the game which let me see every ending and I thought most were good.

Citizen Sleeper is a game with many positive qualities, but also a couple neutral/negative ones that prevented me from giving it an even higher score. The writing and characters are once again the biggest highlight here. The music/sound design fit the space theme well. The graphics are average at best, although the character portraits are charming. I liked the character progression and some of the perks, even if a few seemed useless by the time you unlocked them. The main gameplay mechanic of rolling dice and slotting them into various actions to read the results is exciting at the beginning, but it can get repetitive by the end. By the mid-late game, I was running on autopilot doing the same actions over and over. I would start the cycle by buying food if energy was below three bars, use stabilizer if condition was below 60%, replenish resources, use low dice on risky actions and high dice on dangerous actions to advance the story, then rinse and repeat. At that point, I felt the dice only slowed my progress instead of enhancing my experience. Still, if you enjoy a good space story and don’t mind a game that is mostly reading, you can’t go wrong with Citizen Sleeper and I highly recommend it. It felt more personal than the sequel (and less stressful due to lack of a literal stress mechanic that breaks your dice and can permanently glitch your character). As a result, I liked this one more than the sequel, but still recommend it if you like this one.

Time to beat (Completionist) - 17h:50m
Rating – 8.5/10

FINAL FANTASY II

Only a couple weeks after my Final Fantasy I completion, I managed to complete Final Fantasy II. I haven’t played any other Final Fantasy games so I’ll only be able to compare it to the first one. In my opinion, this game is much improved compared to the original. I know this is the black sheep of the series due to the odd leveling system, but maybe the Pixel Remaster version managed to smooth it out because I didn’t really have issues with it. Unlike the first game which employs a basic system of earning XP from combat, leveling up, and getting stronger, this one doesn’t have traditional character levels or classes. Instead, each weapon type and spell has its own level for each character that can only be increased by using it in combat. Everything starts pretty weak at level one, but the more you use it, the better it gets. This allows you to make your characters however you wish because everyone has access to every spell and weapon type. I ended up making Maria (they have names now!) the sole mage with both white and black magic, with Firion and Guy having a melee focus. I was constantly rotating weapons between them which kept them well-rounded and allowed me to equip them with any new weapons I found without having to grind. I felt that this worked well throughout the game, only struggling a bit in the last dungeon when instakill and lifesteal enemies became more prominent.

The story is a much bigger focus in this game compared to the first much to my delight. The first game told most of its story in a text crawl at the end after defeating the final boss. Here, it’s present throughout the game and there are even a couple “cutscenes” rendered in-game in the remastered 8-bit style. This helped the game flow more smoothly and even helped me figure where I was supposed to go next, my biggest gripe of the original. It also helped me become more attached to the characters, since they were actually characters this time and not just class names with no personality. This alone was enough to propel this game ahead of the first for me.

Not everything was great about this game though. The weirdest thing to me is that throughout the game, there were only three primary party members despite the four-person party. This meant the fourth slot was always filled temporarily by a rotating party member who never stuck around for long and was always underleveled compared to everyone else. They almost never held their own in combat and were generally useless. I never wanted to teach them any magic because I didn’t want to waste a spell tome only for them to leave at the end of the dungeon, so the best I could do was give them any leftover weapons and armor not used by other party members and hope for the best. Speaking of combat, despite keeping enough focus to evenly level the various weapon types and spells, I still found myself fast-forwarding through most fights by the mid-game similar to the original. There wasn’t enough variety to warrant anything else, and even the annoying instakill and lifesteal enemies mentioned earlier were eventually taken down by RNG. A lot of complaints for this game say you have to grind by attacking your own party members to level up HP and defense, and that may have helped with these enemies in particular, but I never resorted to grinding and managed OK without it.

I only have a couple other minor nitpicks that detracted from this otherwise good game. They tried to add some complexity to dialog by having some characters mention key terms, which you would then have to learn and then ask other characters about those terms to advance the story. I see what they were trying to do, but it wasn’t always clear what I was supposed to say to whom or what item to present which led to a couple roadblocks to progression in the early game. I also don’t like the addition of missable enemies, locations, and chests. If you aren’t going for 100% this won’t really affect you, but as someone who unexpectedly got 100% in the first game, I thought this one would be just as easy to do so and I was wrong. I had to replay almost the entire game again (I was at 21 hours after beating the final boss the first time) just to clean up anything I missed. Word of warning: while the location and bestiary achievements can be obtained across multiple playthroughs, all chests have to be obtained in one go for it to count. As a result, I likely won’t be going for completionist in future entries which is unfortunate. Still, despite these problems, I enjoyed my time with the game. I can kind of see why some people might prefer the first game if they really vibed with that combat system, but otherwise, Final Fantasy II is an improvement in every other way. I recommend it to anyone not afraid of an early experimental RPG with modern QOL features to smooth out the bumps if necessary. I’m still excited to continue my Final Fantasy journey, so II at least accomplished that.

Time to beat (Completionist) - 29h:26m
Rating – 7/10

Monster Prom 3: Monster Roadtrip

Another entry in the criminally underserved party/visual novel/dating sim genre. I haven’t played the first game in the Monster Prom series yet, but I can compare it to the second game Monster Camp. In this game, 1-4 players take turns picking one of two locations to go to that will increase and decrease at least two of your resources (those being Hype, Magic, Mind, Money, Soul, and Stamina) depending on which choices you make at that location. They all start at 10 and the goal of the game is to raise one of them to 25 while keeping the rest above zero, otherwise it’s game over. When you reach 25, you trigger reaching the destination tied to that resource, and the ending screen showed three different destinations per resource. While the dating elements are toned down compared to the last game, you can still choose to romance one of the many characters which will trigger a special ending with them too if you successfully make it to a destination after picking the right dialog options with them.

As you can see, this game has a ton of replayability. There are a lot of locations you can choose, scenarios to read through, characters to romance, and destinations to reach. I only played two runs with a friend, with the first one ending in failure and the second leading to the Magic resource destination and romantic ending with Scott. While this was enough to be able to visit every location, it wasn’t nearly enough to see the hundreds of different scenarios. While I was pretty tired of the last game after a handful of runs (which you can’t fail unlike this game), I wouldn’t’ve been opposed to playing this some more to reach more destinations. The resource management added another layer of complexity that made it feel more like a game to me instead of just reading the same scenarios over and over again. It’s worth noting that the tone of this game is just as raunchy as ever, so I would avoid playing it around children. If the idea of a party game with a lot of reading, charming characters, pop culture references, and sexual innuendos sounds like a good time, I think you’ll like this. Just be aware that the gameplay is still mostly reading.

Time to beat (Main+Sides) - 7h:50m
Rating – 7/10

Nine Sols

Nine Sols is a Sekiro-like 2D metroidvania where you play as a cat-like alien creature called Yi on a revenge spree against the other nine members of the Sol council for dooming their species and betraying him. The reason I say Sekiro-like instead of the more common soulslike is because combat heavily revolves around parrying attacks and is faster paced. The game started off in a traditional Chinese-inspired village which led me to believe it would be taking place hundreds of years ago, but after a quick prologue, I was soon thrust onto an alien spaceship with advanced technology which completely threw me for a loop (in a good way). There are still clearly East Asian cultural influences throughout, and that juxtaposition with alien tech led to a kind of setting I don’t think I’ve seen in a game before.

I like the overall presentation of Nine Sols. The graphics are mostly in flat 2D with a pleasing art style, but there are a couple notable objects that are fully 3D which still somehow fit seamlessly into the world. The story is also delivered in a cool way, with boss fights starting and ending with a short manga strip continuing the East Asian influence. I still bemoan dialog that’s presented as text boxes with the occasional grunt from a character instead of full voice acting, but I understand that’s likely a budget constraint. I was intrigued by the story beats, and it was enough to keep me engaged and wonder what would happen next.

The combat as mentioned earlier revolves around parrying (although dodging is also an option) which gives you a Qi charge that can be planted on an enemy and detonated to do damage. There are also ability enhancement items called Jades which give small but noticeable perks like expending a Qi charge to increase the third hit of a triple slash or immediately powering up a charged attack after a successful parry. You also have a bow with three different arrow types with a small amount of ammo that either explode, pierce multiple enemies, or lock on. The bow didn’t seem to do much though and I mostly used it as a desperate finishing move if I was close to beating a boss and was about to die. One interesting feature of the combat system is that there are two different types of damage you and the enemies can take, internal and direct. If you manage to parry an attack but don’t get the timing perfect, you’ll take internal damage which is reflected as a dark red color on your health bar. This will start recovering slowly on its own after a few seconds if you don’t take more damage (or you can equip a Jade that heals internal damage by inflicting damage like I did). Failing to parry additional attacks will result in the internal damage becoming direct which can only be healed with the healing pipe or resting at a node. This once again encouraged parrying and aggressive attacks so you can heal yourself while also capitalizing on the damage you do to the enemy, and I felt that it worked well.

I do have some problems with this game though, although some people will see one of them as a positive. Like many metroidvanias, there were some moments in the story where I could not figure out how to progress. After searching literally the entire map, I had to look up where I was supposed to be going next which is never fun. Besides a couple key story moments, there were no map markers (nor any way to mark the map yourself) so the only way to know where to go was to pick up context clues. There are several collectibles in this game, and when you collect the map data chip from each area and give it to someone at home base, it will show you exactly how many collectibles you’ve gotten in each area and how many are left. However, there’s no indication of where in the area the collectible is. If you’ve already uncovered the whole area and don’t remember seeing a collectible you couldn’t reach (because once again, you can’t mark anything on the map), you either have to scour every inch of it again or consult a guide. I couldn’t be bothered to do this and unfortunately missed quite a few in my playthrough. My biggest negative, though some will see this as a positive, is that the game is just so damn difficult. The final boss is likely the hardest fight I’ve successfully beaten in a video game, and my aging hands did not approve of the button mashing required to pull off all the precise parrying required. There were a handful of bosses that took me over an hour to get through, and even some of the regular enemies could kill you if you aren’t careful. Good luck if you start getting swarmed by multiple enemies at the same time while also dodging projectiles and environmental hazards. I would also be remiss not to mention a frustrating stealth section partway through where you can’t use most of the abilities you’ve gained up to that point. All of these points led to a gameplay experience that was less smooth than I would’ve liked. Even with these negatives, the game was still quite good, and I can recommend it to anyone who likes metroidvanias and difficult combat. There is a story mode difficulty and accessibility options to make things easier if the difficulty is the thing holding you back from experiencing this.

Time to beat (Main+Sides) - 35h:35m
Rating – 8.5/10

Stats

My first monthly stats section! It’s still a relatively small dataset since we’re early in 2026, but I think what’s here is still interesting. First of all, I think it’s so weird that an RPG isn’t in the top spot for most played. I suspect that might change with the later Final Fantasies, we’ll see. For now, congrats to the metroidvania Nine Sols! 35 hours would put it at fifth most played if I played it last year for perspective. Moving on, there is actually a correlation between money spent and games acquired so far. I spent slightly less in February than January and got slightly fewer games as a result. I think these numbers will change drastically in March given I got a ton of games in the itch.io bundle for relatively little. And as mentioned earlier, February marks the most time I’ve spent gaming since I started tracking. I did have basically a week off work which definitely helped so I don’t see myself topping this. 100 hours in one month is absolutely crazy though.

Conclusion/Upcoming

I didn’t realize how packed my YouTube schedule was until I sat down and wrote out all those playlist links in the game recaps section. Starting a game in February that won’t get a video out until April is ridiculous. As I mentioned in my last post, now that I’m uploading entire play sessions instead of cutting them down to an hour each, the video backlog will slowly start going down. I’ve got Metaphor: ReFantazio and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 videos (the last of my hourlong videos) going out every three days instead of six or more like my other videos to try to get them out of the way quickly. Right now, the last Expedition 33 video is slated for May 18^th so the other game videos will be able to fill that slot and come out earlier. Good thing I consider myself an organized person and have everything tracked in a spreadsheet otherwise I have no idea how I would be able to keep it all straight.

My goal for March is to play through Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island which leaves Game Pass soon, Final Fantasy III, and Inscryption. I'm not sure if this will take up the entire month, so next on my Game Pass list is Balatro. It doesn’t really look like my kind of game, but apparently it can be pretty addictive, so we’ll see how long it keeps me entertained. If it doesn’t hook me, I’ll finally be starting Little Rocket Lab which I said I would get to last month and never did. That’s what I get for trying to make plans I guess 😅 I’m more hopeful now that Final Fantasy IV will be added to Game Pass in April since Microsoft added I-III like clockwork on a monthly basis. That will mark the switch from NES to SNES and from purely turn-based to the active time battle system so I have high expectations. That’s still a ways out though, and you saw what I just said about making plans. Before I do all of that, I’ll need to do some emergency work on my emulation project due to the rom site shutting down. Thanks everyone for reading, I’ll see you again next month!

Backlog total: 3,897 (+41)