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 5th and Inscryption won’t be up until June 19th. Sorry about the delay! The last Expedition 33 video will finally be up on May 18th 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)
