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)

Monthly Update #13: January 2026

I’m back! You can’t get rid of me that easily. I said I’d try maintaining the blog monthly and by God that’s what I’m gonna do. I also decided to change up the format a little bit. It won’t be as noticeable here, but I want to include a running year-to-date tally of all my stats. That means that come February, I should have my usual game acquisitions, money spent, and gametime for the month as well as graphs showing the year-to-date numbers. That way it’ll be easier to see how each month compares. Let’s move on to game acquisitions.

Game Acquisitions

Already out the gate with some big purchases. Hopefully this isn’t indicative of the year to come. Both Humble Bundle and Fanatical had good bundles last month that I didn’t want to pass up. This is already rivaling my high spend months from 2025, but there are a lot of solid titles here as a result. I also had quite a few successful Reddit trades and a handful of freebies from Amazon and Steam family purchases.

# of Games: 52

Total Money Spent: $44.48

Price/Game: $0.91

Game Recaps

Expedition 33 decided to sneak its way into 2026 with the release of the free Verso’s Drafts DLC. I was rusty but still managed to complete the new area. The new enemies in the Endless Tower however, absolutely not. I tried for a couple hours before giving up. I’m happy enough knowing I 100% complete the base game and am still looking forward to their next project. My friend and I also agreed that four playthroughs of Monster Prom 2 was enough. It was getting a little repetitive for me and we have plenty of other games to get to. We started the third installment as well but decided to play a quick horror game first as a sort of palate cleanser. We hadn’t played one of those in a while. For my first streams, I decided to play through Neon White. I played 20 hours over the course of four days to beat it before it left Game Pass, including a seven and a half hour stretch on the last day. Fun game, but I wouldn’t recommend neglecting your sleep schedule to beat a game as fast as possible 😅 A couple recent additions to the Game Pass catalog are the original two Final Fantasy games. I’m already planning on playing through the series, and the Pixel Remasters are some of the few I still haven’t purchased yet. I’m glad they decided to go with the first ones since they’re the first games I was planning on playing anyway according to my play order collection. I hope this means future entries will come to the service. I managed to complete the first game, and the second just released. I completed the first one and after I finish my Archipelago randomizer of The Messenger with the HLTB community, I’ll move on to Final Fantasy II. Lastly, I managed to complete Citizen Sleeper 2 right before midnight on the 31^st when it was scheduled to leave Game Pass. I technically beat the first game too, but I wanted to keep playing that one to get more endings since I wasn't in a rush with that one. As always, have some playlists of anything I played and recorded in January. As part of my streaming push, reducing editing times, and because I have a video backlog months long, I’ve decided to forgo the hour-long video length and just upload the entire session at once. Please note that the first Final Fantasy video is going up on February 10th, Citizen Sleeper 1 on February 19^th, and Citizen Sleeper 2 on March 21st. Now that I’m increasing the length of the videos, their frequency will eventually reduce and be made public much closer to when they are recorded. I'll also throw up the playlist for Metaphor: ReFantazio since those videos are still trickling out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Game Reviews 

Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp

This is a party game/visual novel where the goal is to court one of several humanoid monsters (ghost, witch, demon, etc.) and eventually ask them out on a date to a meteor shower at the end. The gameplay consists mostly of reading through absurd scenarios involving the player character, love interests, and many side characters, then making one of the two decisions that you think the love interest will like. Each player (up to four) gets two scenarios per week with the number of weeks determined by which length game you decided to play (short is two, medium is three, and full is five). At the end of the two scenarios, everyone gets to choose someone to sit next to at a campfire to have another chat, then pick an alcoholic drink that affects the game in different ways like changing your stats or unlocking new scenarios. At the end of the last week, instead of the fireside chat and drinking, each player chooses who they want to ask to the meteor shower and is either successful or rejected based on how well they did. Player order at the beginning of each week is determined by the game telling you to do something like think of an animal, say the animal out loud, then deliberate amongst everyone on which animal would be the most dangerous if given opposable thumbs.

The game is very raunchy, with curse words and sexual references everywhere. This is certainly not made to be played around children, although there are options in the menu to dial it back. While I enjoyed every scenario the game presented, the repetition set in pretty quickly. For reference, I played one full, one medium, and two short games. At the beginning of your turn, you pick one of only five locations to go to, read the scenario presented to you, and make one of two choices. The same scenarios popped up more than once, and the minigame to decide who goes first only seemed to have less than a dozen variants. On top of that, everyone has five different stats that go up or down depending on the choices you make and the drinks you drink (smarts, boldness, creativity, charm, and fun). However, not only is it usually not possible to know which choice is the correct one to woo your love interest, but the stats themselves didn’t seem to make any difference. I’m sure they affect the endings somewhat, but I couldn’t tell how. This led to a fairly shallow experience filled with a little too much randomness.

Monster Prom 2 is clearly designed to be played multiple times. After all, a party game wouldn’t provide much value if you could only play it once before having to move on to something else. As such, it provides several scenarios including 25 secret endings and 1,196 total outcomes! In the four games I played, I found three of the secret endings and saw 60 outcomes. Given the randomness mentioned earlier, combined with how long each game takes to play, I don’t know how it’s possible for anyone to get every outcome. Even if there was a guide somewhere on every correct decision, the amount of time it would take to see everything would far exceed the amount of time before boredom sets in. I was ready to call it quits after the four games I played, and it would take at least hundreds to see everything. As such, I recommend going into this game with the only goal being having fun with friends and throw the completionist mindset out the window. I did have fun with this game and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys making dirty jokes with their friends, but don’t expect anything deeper than that.

Time to beat (Main+Sides) - 9h:11m
Rating – 6/10

Neon White

Neon White is a fast-paced first-person shooter/platformer where the goal in each level is to kill all the demons and make it to the end as quickly as possible. The setup is there are a class of people called Neons that were sent to Hell for being sinners in life but have been called upon to Heaven by the Believers to eradicate a growing demonic threat in the form of a competition. As a reward, the top competitors get to temporarily enjoy Heaven’s amenities before being sent back to try again next year. You are one such Neon, the titular Neon White, and you meet up with your old companions in life Red, Yellow, Violet, and Green. You wake up in Heaven with no memory and over the course of the story slowly remember your old life, your companions, how you were all killed, and why you were sent to Hell in the first place.

The game follows a mission-based structure. Each mission consists of a set of similarly themed levels that must be completed in order before moving on to the next one. Once you complete a mission, you’re taken to a hub area where you get your next mission assignment, converse with your companions, and complete side quests with them if you found their optional gift collectible in the levels. When you’re in a level, you are equipped with weapons called soul cards. Each soul card has a primary ability (the gun part) and a secondary ability (a movement ability). You can have two soul card types equipped at a time, with up to a stack of three of each type. When you fire the gun, the ammo goes down by one until you run out, then the card is removed. However, when you discard a card manually, you activate the movement ability. For example, you can use a standard handgun card to fire low damage handgun rounds, but discarding the card immediately performs a double jump. Soul cards are found throughout each level and nothing carries over from level to level. You must use a combination of ammo and movement abilities to quickly dispatch the enemies and make it to the end as fast as possible. You are awarded a bronze, silver, gold, or apex medal depending on your time, and higher medals further increase your Neon rank (necessary to progress the main story) and reveal secrets such as the aforementioned gift collectibles and hints on how to achieve faster times.

As you can tell, this game was designed to be a speedrunner’s dream. I normally don’t care at all about speedrunning and am happy to meet the minimum requirements to proceed in a game, but I admit the game hooked me enough to want to achieve the gold or apex medals on every level. The gameplay loop is addicting, and being able to memorize each level after a few attempts and zooming through them at breakneck speed was always satisfying. The closest games I can compare this to are Mirror’s Edge or more recently Mullet Madjack. I liked the aesthetics of Mullet Madjack much more than Neon White, as the art style/graphics of the latter are nothing to write home about. Furthermore, there were some cringy and/or fanservicey cutscenes that I felt took away from the somewhat serious story the game was trying to tell. That being said, I still enjoyed the overall story and a handful of characters. The music was catchy as well, and the sound design was on point. And of course, most importantly, the game is very fun to play. If you can get past the anime style and lackluster story delivery and enjoy first person shooters or platformers, I think this game is well worth picking up.

Time to beat (Main+Sides) - 20h:27m
Rating – 8.5/10

Code Alkonost: Awakening of Evil

This is the worst game I’ve reviewed yet! Code Alkonost is a horror game with puzzle elements that draws heavily from Slavic mythology. You play a woman who is tasked with finding her sister after she goes missing while the two of them are making their regular offering to an idol. You quickly find yourself pursued by a soldier in full armor who mistakes you for a demon and punches you twice in the head and stabs you. You’re fine though somehow and wake up in the soldier’s house where he explains that he’s possessed when he leaves the house and will always mistake you for an enemy and try to kill you. You’re given an amulet that turns you invisible for a few seconds and sent on your way through six different areas where you must avoid a couple monsters (one of which is only encountered during a very short sequence), solve a couple puzzles, and fight the same boss a couple times where the mechanics/strategy don’t change at all.

In case it wasn’t clear, this game is very bad. The graphics are bad, especially for an Unreal Engine 5 game. The tutorial menu spoils scenes in the game because each one is hyper specific to the scenario the mechanic pops up in instead of being generalized. The music decides to randomly cut out for no reason. The voiceover is possibly the worst I’ve ever heard in a game, and the developers state that at least some of them are AI generated, which is obvious. The sound levels aren’t consistent at all, with some voices being muffled one sentence while much louder and clearer the next. The story makes very little sense and suddenly ends with a cliffhanger which may or may not ever be resolved. The enemy, puzzle, item, and environmental variety are all lacking. Sometimes the sprint straight up doesn’t work or will stop working even when there is plenty of stamina bar left. It employs cheap jumpscares instead of proper horror. The only positive things I can say about this game are that it ran fine, the skull puzzle was kinda fun to solve, and the two identical boss battles were slightly engaging and a much-needed break in the monotony of just walking around trying to figure out where I was supposed to be going. Avoid this at all costs, there are no redeeming qualities here.

Time to beat (Main+Sides) - 2h:45m
Rating – 2.5/10

FINAL FANTASY

I don’t think Final Fantasy needs any introduction, it is one of the most well-known and longest running JRPG series around. I’ve never played a proper Final Fantasy game before so I’m unable to compare it to other entries. On its own, I found it to be a competent if dated game which makes sense given the original came out all the way back in 1987. I played the Pixel Remaster version released in 2021 with some much-needed modern quality of life improvements. The graphical enhancements are nice of course, but there are also now maps for every area for easier navigation, up to 4X XP and money boosts to lessen or eliminate the grind (which I didn’t utilize), quick saving anywhere, and the option to turn encounters off and on whenever you want. I thought these all did a good job to make the nearly 40-year-old game palatable for modern audiences, but it didn’t solve everything.

The biggest issue I have with this game is that it’s still obscure about where it wants you to go and what to do next. I found myself multiple times looking up a guide to figure out the next step, even after sailing around the entire world trying to figure it out myself. Almost every time, the answer was not something I recall ever reading about while playing which makes me wonder how I could’ve come to it otherwise. The story is my next biggest gripe in the sense that it’s basically non-existent. This was again typical for the time, and the fact that there was any story at all still places it above most other games back then. It’s just unfortunate that it was almost all told in an exposition dump in a text crawl at the end after defeating the final boss. The combat was a mixed bag. I struggled a little bit at the beginning which was fine while I was coming to grips with how it works. However, most of the game was stupidly easy and I found myself mindlessly fast-forwarding through most fights using just the basic attack. Then, the final boss suddenly appeared (I didn’t know I was already at the end) and completely wrecked me. The difficulty spike is insane and just like that, I was unprepared. A more gradual difficulty curve would’ve been appreciated.

Despite these negatives, I still overall enjoyed my time with the game. The combat, while simplistic, was still enjoyable to partake in and highlighted each classes’ strengths and weaknesses well. I was always intrigued whenever a new monster popped up so I could see how it fights. The world, while barren and not fully fleshed out, was still interesting to explore in spots. I liked the mini stories each town had to tell. I can see how the game laid the groundwork for future entries, and I’m excited to watch the series evolve as I slowly work my way through. I recommend this to any turn-based RPG lover who isn’t immediately put off by some of the more dated elements of an otherwise good game. I think the Pixel Remaster version of Final Fantasy I is a valid starting point for getting into the series.

Time to beat (Completionist) - 16h:50m
Rating – 6.5/10

Citizen Sleeper 2

Citizen Sleeper 2 is an interesting RPG/visual novel hybrid about an android with an emulated human mind (known as a sleeper) who is woken up prematurely from a reboot and immediately goes on the run from their evil former employer who caused the interruption. Unlike the first game which takes place on a single space station, the sequel allows you to jump from station to station and even go on contracts to asteroids and old shipwrecks. 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 depending on where you are but typically involve working for money (called cryo), reducing stress, or completing a sequence of events to finish a contract. The higher number die you decide to use to complete an action, the higher your chance of success. There is a whole resource management aspect to the game as well which involves managing fuel for travel, energy which can increase stress when depleted, stress itself which can break dice slots while on a contract, and supplies which dictate how many cycles you get while on a contract and act as a backup energy source.

This all might sound complicated at first, but most of the game is just reading. You start on one station and explore everything you can do on that station, slot your dice next to any action you want to take, read what the results of that action are, complete the contract around that station if you want, then move on to the next station and repeat. Despite having played the first game, I was confused by the stress mechanic and breaking dice since they are new additions, as well as the multitude of items you can collect like scrap and engine components. By the end of the game though, I was able to zoom from station to station basically at will and was able to get through cycles very quickly. Another neat addition to this game are the crewmates that you can take with you on contracts that have two of their own dice each that you can make use of. You and your crewmates make use of five different skills (endure, engineer, interface, engage, and intuit). Depending on which class you pick at the start of the game (out of three options), you will have one skill that is boosted +1, two that are +0, one that is -2, and one that is locked off from upgrading completely which gives a permanent -2. Each crewmate will have either two skills that are +0 or one skill that is +1 which makes you think about party composition when deciding who you want to take with you to complete contracts.

Speaking of, I have a problem with how contracts work in this game. While they are a fun addition, they never stopped being stressful. I ended up dying on the first contract of the game because I didn’t understand how the stress and broken dice systems worked. Failing actions on a contract will increase you stress level. Depending on how high your stress is, certain dice rolls will cause that die to take damage every time they’re rolled. When a die takes three points of damage, it breaks, effectively reducing the number of actions you can take per cycle by one. When all your dice break, you die. When you die, you earn a permanent glitch which guarantees that one of your dice will only have a 20% chance of success. This is a pretty egregious handicap that can snowball, and one I held for most of the game due to a poor explanation of the game mechanics. Even in the latter half of the game when my character was mostly upgraded and I had a firm grasp on how everything worked, there were still some contracts I failed either because they were near-impossible without perfect strategy or I just had bad RNG. I was still able to complete the game so contracts weren’t strictly mandatory, but failing missions never feels good, especially when it’s out of your hands.

Despite my misgivings about some of the new mechanics, I still enjoyed my time with the game. The story and characters continued to be the main draw of the experience. Meeting new characters and learning about their personalities and struggles was always the highlight of visiting any new station. Music and sound design were minimal, but I felt that only added to the sense of loneliness in the vastness of empty space. Getting a bunch of good dice rolls at the beginning of a cycle always felt great, and even getting bad rolls wasn’t necessarily a failure once I got some upgrades. If you enjoy reading a good sci-fi story, I think I can recommend this one. While not strictly necessary, I recommend playing the first game first. The mechanics are simpler to understand and it establishes the world and lore. There are even some returning characters and a couple references to the original.

Time to beat (Main+Sides) - 16h:32m
Rating – 8/10

Conclusion/Upcoming

As you can see, I removed the TV and movie recap section from my posts. I felt that it only detracted from the gaming focus of the blog, and I didn’t feel as “qualified” to talk about them if that makes any sense. I still enjoy TV and movies and watch them regularly, but gaming is my main hobby and I feel that I have more to say about them. I also had the idea while writing this that I could tweak the thumbnails I use for YouTube to make specialized blog review pictures, but I unfortunately deleted a couple photoshop files before I had the chance to do it with everything. I'll try to be more consistent with the pictures next month. With that out of the way, I just wanted to say that it’s nice that I can already mark some completions for the year. There were several months in 2025 where I didn’t beat anything and I would rather not repeat that. My backlog will never go down otherwise. It doesn’t help that my time played for the month was the lowest since September, but I was busy setting up streaming stuff and took an unexpected mini-vacation so I have some excuse. My plan for February as mentioned in the game recap section is to finish up The Messenger randomizer and play through Final Fantasy II. If I manage that before Final Fantasy III comes to Game Pass (if it ever does), I’ll move on to the highest rated Game Pass title on my list which is Little Rocket Lab. I imagine Final Fantasy II and Little Rocket Lab together will take me more than a month to get through. Hooray longer games! Thanks for coming back to my newly renovated and now monthly blog. See you all again next month!

Backlog total: 3,856 (+51)