boxkeith

[boxkeith]

my dream drakengard gaming setup..

[boxkeith]

ITS DONE. Another nine sols animatic for my AU that I started months ago that i got some friends to do the voices for. Wanted to play around with Yi and Goumang's dynamic, post-landing on earth. Yi is @arcanilumia Goumang is @nye-eclipsion

[boxkeith]

[boxkeith]

Video Games I Played in July 2025

I kept up my streak from June of trying more than 20 different games, though that wasn’t a number I was consciously aiming for nor a rate that I really feel is sustainable. It’s a natural consequence of my increasing prioritization of niche experiences that are usually shorter in length or I’m quicker to bounce off of, but I’m also sure that sooner or later I’ll find a 40 hour monolith to eat up most of my bandwidth. Expedition 33 will probably do that once I get around to it.

Satisfactory – I tried this back in May but only really got it working/had time to devote to it starting in June. The game’s still good. The graphical fidelity, breadth of scope with exploration and automation, and map scale is second-to-none within its niche. Factorio never clicked for me but Satisfactory always has, though I’m definitely starting to feel the strain as the combat is overtuned and too much of the game is pulled between providing challenges through resource constraints and architecture (though sky platforms really lessen that burden) vs. challenge through sheer number of enemies and environmental DoTs. The other wrinkle is the pocket dimension where items can be uploaded to the cloud, and although there’s serious logistical hurdles and caps you’re still able to pretty trivially keep yourself fully supplied on the things that matter regardless of location which is riding the razor’s edge between Quality of Life and Missing the Point. Satisfactory wouldn’t be compelling with a Creative mode, and the easier it gets to operate at scale with blueprints and resource doubling and downloading virtual concrete the easier it is to peel behind the curtain and see that this is cookie clicker with extra steps.

Ex Vitro – When it comes to metroidvanias, it’s usually palpable if the devs started to make a metroidvania because they liked SotN/AoS, because they liked Super Metroid, or, within the past decade, because they liked Hollow Knight. This is a game whose influence starts and ends with Super Metroid, and never really attempts to do or be anything more than that. However, it feels like a shallow imitation and more of a character study or a student sketching a copy of a painting. The lines are rougher, there’s odd decisions throughout, but it has the earnestness of an amateur play rather than the tired profiteering of a rehashed bootleg.

Sheepo – Kyle Thompson has made essentially the same game three times, and this is the first one. I broadly prefer Islets the most, but all three are charming. It’s a little rough, the platforming is messy despite its simplicity and some of the areas are a real hassle to get to if you’re a completionist, but there’s a real charm to the worldbuilding and dialogue that’s hard not to appreciate. Any time you go into an artist’s older works it’s easy to only see the weaknesses they’ve improved later, but you can also see the throughlines of their strengths. I do wish the transformation gimmick had a bit more oomph like in Biomorph or Shantae but I get keeping it simple.

Jivana – The more student projects I play the more fascinated I get in the way various teams design their games in various orders; levels, graphics, character design, animation, etc. This game is short and half its length is fully voice-acted cutscenes with varying levels of animation, but the main character is Katara with the serial number filed off and there’s only two levels. Some games need an editor but many more need a project manager who says ‘hey before you do that for a week we need to plan what we’re going to do in total’.

Afterplace – It’s rare, with the number of games I play, for one to grab me by the collar and throttle me. Indeed, nothing in Afterplace is something I hadn’t seen before; mechanically it’s a simple dialogue heavy isometric adventure game, the map has some neat non-euclidian twists but isn’t more complex than Hyper Light Drifter or Fountains, the characters and writing are above average but fairly by-the-book. I was only drawn to it in my library after getting a dozen games in the summer sale because I was going in alphabetical order. Despite that, this game enraptured me. Even in retrospect I can’t really describe why, but if I were to try I’d say if playing a game by a solo dev is a chance to have a conversation with them, this was a conversation with a stranger on a train that you remember for the rest of your life. Also a sarcastic bunny girl with a floating axe the size of her body does things for me.

Creepy Castle – I did not know going into this that Creepy Castle was a relatively early kickstarter title, back in the era when getting $8k from strangers was a runaway success. I mostly bring that up because it has a veneer of the hyperspecific “I’m making an X clone please finance this” campaigns for Xbox games you’ve never heard of, except I presume this is for an Atari game I’ve never heard of. It’s mechanically stiff, gameplay is a war of attrition with health management and healing item sequencing taking priority over any other gameplay, and in that way it feels more similar to a puzzle game than a platformer. I hope whoever this was made for loved it because I bounced off it in under a half-hour.

Elephantasy – I think this was recommended to me in the same post that recommended Creepy Castle and either they have more patience than me for NES platformers or they have more patience AND more nostalgia. Movement is sluggish and progression comes not in what items are available (you start with access to almost all of them) but in how many you can carry simultaneously. This makes it all but assured you get somewhere, double back to the start to get the right items, progress a little, then realize you need an additional item and are wasting your time. It also means the decision space shrinks as you get access to more items, as soon there are fewer choices of what to leave behind than there were of what to take. I do begrudgingly respect the game recommending you increase the clock speed of the game if you felt it was slow, but playing at a speed that made movement feel brisk made the ice area and boss fight unplayable.

Copy Kitty – This is someone’s favorite game. It’s a bizarre time-attack megaman/Kirby hybrid with levels comprising of only a few rooms with destructible terrain, and most of the levels boil down to killing enemies to get their powerups to make a gun that kills everything, then you kill everything while zipping around before it ends 30 seconds later. Then you do it again. The closest I’ve come to playing something else like this was newgrounds flash games, even if most of them were like Interactive Buddy.

Gravity Castle – I bustered out of Metro Gravity because its bosses were kicking my ass, but was in the mood for some more gravity puzzles and this looked interesting. It was certainly “interesting”. Barely functional between glitches and poorly telegraphed mechanics, what puzzles existed were all the sort that took multiple steps with precise timing and often took multiple steps to reset after a failed attempt. On the plus side, steam’s ability to dynamically remap controller inputs to keyboard buttons meant that playing it was fairly straightforward even with its wack controls, even if I ultimately bailed quickly.

INAYAH – Life After Gods – I need to trust my gut more when it says that a game won’t be my speed or if it needs more development time. I’d held off on this on release because something about it didn’t pass muster, and then picked it up despite that in the summer sale. I bought it because I love big dumb gauntlets and the main character has them. The big dumb gauntlets feature heavily in the story. I finally get through the tutorial that features not one but two dead father figures and unlock my weapon – for some reason there are three choices, and the worst one is the gauntlets. You can have gauntlets that lock you in place to attack in a game where every enemy and boss is hypermobile, a large flail that swings slowly with the aforementioned speedy enemies, or a sword with quick attacks, a parry, a pogo, and several combos. This isn’t to say the sword feels good to use or is fun, it is merely bad as opposed to offensive. I didn’t give up until the game gave me a drone companion that was going to be yet more visual noise and yet more insipid dialogue, and the only real takeaway for me was the question whether being this kind of straight-up mediocre was better or worse than the frustration of missed potential.

Rabi-Ribi – For the past goddamn decade every time I looked at a list of recommended metroidvanias Rabi-Ribi was somewhere in the top 20. I finally caved. I don’t get it. I’m the first to admit that I don’t like bullet hell and Touhou doesn’t do it for me, and by 2016 standards this is a fairly good map, but it’s just so tiring to play. Your movement is slow relative to the size of the levels, every character has the same look and personality so telling them apart is impossible, town eventually fills up with them and you can’t tell who is selling you a temporary buff, who has a sidequest, and who is going to teleport you to a boss fight. Maybe it’s more compelling at higher difficulties where spamming lasers to build combo and then hammering the shit out of enemies doesn’t get the job done, but I also had zero interest in trying to actually dodge most of the bullshit bosses were putting out. I did beat the game, which is more than I can say for a lot of these.

Everdeep Aurora – I wanted to love this game. It’s aesthetically beautiful, the character is cute and has a big drill, and I felt like Steamworld Dig 2 left meat on the bone in the minetroidvania space; dig out tunnels being careful to mind your traversal, and as your traversal improves you can mine more aggressively. This has hints of that, but unfortunately it makes some damning mistakes. Instead of being smart about its level design to prevent softlocks, there’s a button to summon an NPC to rescue you. Your drill takes fuel, but it’s so abundant as to be effectively infinite and not inform play. Drilling through the map to create your own tunnels should help you forge a sense of place, except every time you visit a save station the terrain resets. Sidequests in theory advance your interactions with NPCs and give the world texture, but saving the game also advances the in-game date and reaching various unmarked depths will progress story flags and lock you out of sidequests. I constantly felt punished for attempting to care about the game and explore, whereas if I’d just beelined straight down and ignored all the systems I likely would’ve beaten it in 3-4 hours. The frustration is bittersweet.

Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking – This is by the same devs as Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, a game that I wish was the sort I liked to play because it looks interesting but if I was going to do that I’d need to play Citizen Sleeper 1 and 2, Kentucky Route Zero, and Disco Elysium first. I don’t think of myself as a mechanics-first lunkhead who doesn’t care about story but one could be forgiven or thinking otherwise. This, meanwhile, is purely mechanics, as it is a curated reproduction of the lockpicking minigames from several dozen video games. As an act of study and preservation it’s genuinely fascinating and I hope it’s something that has sequels because this sort of historiography is gravely lacking within the entire archetype of interactive entertainment. What a shame that the reproductions themselves are clumsy and full of glitches, and the placards are full of editorializing and far from neutral descriptions. 10/10 concept, 5/10 execution. That still averages out to 7.5/10 and Cs get degrees.

The Vagrant – I’m still trying to find the ur-game for … Sorry, I had to look up that prefix and apparently I just internalized that 15 years ago back when I spent entirely too much time on TVTropes. That explains a lot. Does Tumblr support footnotes? I’m going to make a blog site just to abuse footnotes like a fucking Bartimaeus book. Regardless. The progenitor for this style of Chinese hack-and-slash metroidvania-ish thing. Vigil, Afterimage, Awaken, and dozens more are all in this same mold of very specifically strange animation and level design. (Additional aside, I should probably play Dragon’s Crown at some point, I’ve got a hacked PS3 and everything). Part of the reason I’m so distractable here is the game’s got nothing going on. Combat’s fine if underwhelming, areas are fine if underwhelming, I eventually just straight up got bored and realized there was nothing mechanically or thematically to look forward to so I bailed.

Insect Adventure – This is the sort of game that vindicates me when I try playing things with 20 reviews that I find god knows where. It plays like a YouTubePoop of a normal metroidvania; your speed is delusionally fast, combat is mashy with constant sound effects, enemies go flying on death, and everything has a frantic weight that is infectious. Your combo count is also a damage multiplier, so one I got the ability to throw out multiple boomerangs damn near everything melted. There’s some pockets of frustration with the nastier speedbooster sections and I’m sure a few rooms were gear checks that I failed to understand, but overall this was an incredibly unique gameplay experience with enough going for it to muscle through the flaws.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds – A Link to the Past is one of my favorite games of all time, if not my favorite period. For better or worse, the Zelda series has not had a meaningful improvement on it in 30 years other than briefly including Midna. A Link Between Worlds was their attempt to re-enter the 2D sphere after Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks were both divisive due to their odd controls and generally low quality, and as such it is nostalgia pandering of the highest degree. It’s damn near 1:1 with ALttP’s map, everything is a motif to the secrets and structure of the original, and it’s left with precious little space of its own even with its wall merging gimmick. What really damns ALBW is its baffling choice to provide all the items to the player as rentals which are returned on death, and then making them available for purchase (This prevents them from being reclaimed on death and allows them to be upgraded, though the collectable to upgrade them only appears when you go to a specific cave, bomb it open, and start a sidequest. If you miss that cave then get bent.) When every item is available, the progression curve goes out the window. When the game doesn’t know what item or items the player has even after completing a dungeon centered on that item, it mangles the progression further because you can’t have a lone bombable wall or a one-off hookshot target, every area is either laden with literal signposts of what item you need or is otherwise doable with the sword alone. The joy of a Zelda dungeon is the layers of discovery leading down to the dungeon item, and the ways it recontextualizes all the previous areas and puzzles on your way through the rest of the dungeon. This skips the first half and as a result has the potential to be more intricate and complex but rarely lives up to that expectation, especially because the tools can never be layered on each other even in this game’s equivalent of Ganon’s Tower. In a world where Echoes of Wisdom showed how to use this map, expand on it, and meaningfully alter how its encountered, ALBW is left feeling rather rote.

Hexcells – Polimines 2 is one of the best puzzle games I’ve played and after I finally got to the end of Proverbs I wanted more shapes to click on. This one is very clearly where Polimines got most of its ideas but I think the hex grid leads to some really hard to read diagonals and the game’s UI is rough in general. Polimines 1 was also just an extended tutorial for 2 so I expect similar progression here.

Dust: An Elysian Tail – I bought this game back in July 2013, back when being on Steam was enough to get an indie game attention and every one of them felt like part of a club. I came back to it a decade later to see if it held up or if I was just holding a torch for Fidget. I’m shocked at the degree to which the game still feels incredible. The combat and platforming are smooth even if the tornado ability is hard to control. The writing and voice acting are a bit corny but charmingly earnest. The map has some rough aspects but is still very well-structured with good use of vertical space. The crafting system is a bit tacked on with numbers on gear that get silly, but the game also isn’t intending to be very difficult. More than anything else what stands out to me is the degree to which this is clearly a metroidvania made before Hollow Knight and whose lineage heavily takes from JRPGs like Ys. I feel like there’s space for more elaborate sidequests and stories in the metroidvania sphere in the same way as Phoenotopia tried, to the point that I feel like there’s almost assuredly some subgenre I just have managed to miss entirely.

Hexcells Plus – As expected, the kid gloves are coming off. I’m having a good time with these but still feel like Polimines had a bit more oomph and a bit more QoL polish. Good games to zone out to a podcast to all the same.

Donkey Kong Bananza – I hadn’t really intended to get a Switch 2 with any particular urgency. To me it’s a $700 tax for playing Pokemon ZAZA with a playable framerate, and I’m only playing Pokemon so I can fuck around in Le Gai Paris with my gay Lucario. That being said, when I got the email saying my purchase slot I’d applied for months prior was up, I figured I may as well. Odyssey was the first Switch game I got and Bananza is Odyssey 2 in all but name. I don’t have any particular affinity for Donkey Kong outside of Donkey Konga and Jungle Beat, so when the nostalgic motifs play my first thought is usually Super Smash Bros rather than DKC or the like, but that makes it all the stranger when so much of this game feels more aligned with Splatoon in its musical stings and graphical presentation. The first level also has the same composition, terrain colors, and skydiving presentation as the sky islands in Tears of the Kingdom. It’s not going for a full ensemble series representation so I can’t tell if it’s a strange coincidence or what exactly is causing this. The game itself is pretty fun but it’s a little too easy to just burrow through terrain and beeline from objective to objective while skipping the puzzles. I imagine that’ll get less prominent as time goes on, but I have no complaints overall. I need to replay Ape Out.

Descenders Next – I liked the first Descenders well enough conceptually, though that concept started and ended with “it’s a roguebike – you bike down randomly generated hills and there’s permadeath” and even then I only played for about a half-hour. This one has a less fun portmanteau and a less fun set of mechanics, but it’s hard to say how much of that is me not knowing the genre conventions for controls in a snowboarding/skateboarding game and how much is this game going through a rough early access. Whatever it may be, they clearly prioritized the always-online elements and rendering other players who are on the same slope as you before things such as ‘clearly telegraphing the player’s height when falling rapidly towards a white slope with no depth perception’ and ‘making sure the player doesn’t get sent to the moon by physics when trying to grind poorly’.

Wheel World – Sable is a beautiful and wonderful game, at once evoking the confusing nascency of one’s adolescence, the improvisational joy of a road trip where every place is a new home and every stranger a new compatriot, and the bittersweet love you can pour into something that’s yours to experience but not yours to own or control. I, foolishly, yearningly, hoped for this to evoke even a fraction of that same emotion. Instead this put me into the most insufferable town full of yuppie transplants I’ve seen since Dungeons of Hinterberg and unlike Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 I can’t brain them with my bike when running on foot. Riding the bike feels like ass, the characters suck, the artstyle I can only describe as Corporate Moebius, and they manage to make a flaming skull lame as hell. It would not take much to turn this into an interesting video game, even if it would take quite a bit to turn it into a good one, but I’m not going to ride a bike in a circle a few times to get slightly less shitty handlebars from a dude that looks like he’s shoplifted kombucha.  

[boxkeith]

We here at Sylph Co. are proud to announce the opening of an official tumblr account. By manufacturing and distributing Pokéballs and Trainer Acessories, we're not just selling supplies, we're selling connections between people and pokémon

[boxkeith]

wearing my "the first silent hill is genuinely my favourite, although I can acknowledge the second is a better game, and I don't care for anything past those" shirt even as I demonstrate clear knowledge that I keep fucking playing the games past those and finding I don't like them, exactly as expected, like repeatedly touching a sharp rock in the brickwork to confirm ad nauseam that it's capable of hurting the skin until it tears through

[boxkeith]

what did the evil shrimp say to the shrimp police

you gotta stop me before i krill again

[boxkeith]

Wait, you mean I have to POST my art? I can't just draw it and forget???? crazy

[boxkeith]

Video Games I Played in June 2025

Near the start of June I got a check from the state saying that they’d found an account in escrow that was rightfully mine. Likely it was a last paycheck that was never sent or something similar, but it ended up being $180 of fun money that I went out of my way to blow on games. The result was me blitzing through 22 different games, and while I dropped several of them and/or still need to finish them in the coming month that’s a huge number compared to my already aggressive baseline of consumption. Turns out when I don’t have a game eating 30+ hours of my month I have time for a half-dozen 5 hour games.

Doom: The Dark Ages – I am resolutely immune to the siren song of “schmoovement”. 2D, 3D, first-person, third-person, it does not matter. The joy of momentum and graceful flow does not sing to me. I’m not sure that’s the reason I bounced off the newest Doom before even finishing the tutorial, but the increasingly earnest embrace of Quake-style movement (to say nothing of Quake-style overwrought bombast) certainly drives a wedge in. I won’t say this didn’t learn any lessons from Eternal, but I feel like it made some of the right moves for the wrong reasons. I’m all for a series being willing to introspect and abandon sacred cows in pursuit of what the true core actually is and how it can be recontextualized; but rather than transformative this feels aimlessly reductive. Movement absolves the need for positioning, resource loops remove any tension of attrition, color and light and spectacle replace structured level design. The result isn’t “bad” by any reasonable metric, but it’s resoundingly not for me.

Tomb of the Treacherous Toad – From the lauded creator of indie darlings Port Madrone and PewPew comes the latest certified hood classic. Its epic labyrinths and devious puzzles are matched in scope only by the depth and passion of the narrative woven through them. We live in inspired times, and even someone such as myself that shies away from VNs was smitten. (My partner made a cute 15-minute VN in Ren’Py, check it out - https://haleybellart.itch.io/tomb-of-the-treacherous-toad )

Plague of Yamorn – I first tried this last year but got my save corrupted by a glitch stemming from a death in the tutorial. I came back after the dev made a few patches, and I’d only lost 15 minutes or so of progress on a restart. My record for biting my tongue and replaying a game is ~2 hours for Tales of Kenzera: ZAU after I locked myself in gay baby jail by walljumping out of a level and getting autosaved in an area where the collision was loaded but the path out wasn’t. Rough start aside, despite being transparently inspired by Bloodborne (though it took me longer than I’d like to admit to notice the Yamorn/Yarnom connection) it’s doing its own thing with the setting and lore. Like a lot of metroidvanias from small teams or solo devs there’s some odd one-offs to the design where things that could’ve been major mechanics are only used once, and the entire crafting system was a bit tacked-on. I still found it well above average, though I didn’t have the patience to pixelhunt through every room looking for the true ending. The writing was a particular high point with several jokes being worth the price of admission on their own.

Trinity Fusion – It took me a while to realize I don’t actually like roguelikes, and I’m not sure if that’s genre fatigue or the fact I’m good enough at the triad of mystery dungeon, isometric action, and metroidvanias that I can typically get far enough on raw skill to be stat-checked by deliberately lopsided balance and forced into the metaprogression meat grinder. Trinity Fusion was definitely one where I would’ve been interested in its setting and gameplay loop if it was just a normal metroidvania, but I wasn’t going to slog through the early game dozens of times just to explore the systems at their apex. Giving the three versions of the protag their own drop pool that you could spend currency in the run to merge together was novel at least, though I don’t think it did much more than emphasize how shallow that pool was even in aggregate.

Cauldron – I wanted to make number go up and Cauldron certainly promised that. It’s a collection of minigame modes spread across an overworld you clear through turn-based combat against set enemy arrangements. The main perk is that you can upgrade each minigame and each party member through several layers of overlapping systems. Some of these were genuinely inspired like the apple-catching minigame growing and evolving with larger baskets and 2D flight until you were playing a bullet hell shmup, or the mining minigame getting increasingly elaborate tools and powerups so the focus became chaining multipliers through the whole level rather than focusing on counting steps. The issue is that most of the game just became shallow and frustrating, and when all the systems are interlaced any one failure bricks the entire mechanism. Similar to Swords & Souls I had a good time fucking about in some flash-tier games and stopped when I got bored. That’s not a fail state for a game.

BURGGEIST – What if Team ICO made a tower defense game about a mage with a borrowed arm throwing fireballs from the back of a cannon-laden homunculus? If that question at all piques your interest, nothing else I say could change your opinion. If that question doesn’t pique your interest, there’s nothing else TO be said. I don’t even know if I like this game, because for the third time I have fallen for the Brutal Legend gambit, but I love this game.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo – This game is a lock for my top 10 of the year. It’s the best 2D Zelda since Oracle of Seasons with endlessly clever puzzle design, incredibly unique combat, and a top-notch aesthetic. I could take or leave the Saturday-morning-cartoon tone but the rest of what’s on offer more than makes up for it. I have no idea how this didn’t explode in popularity because it’s absolutely top-notch.

Clay Beats – I’m at a loss as to how this got into my library but I sincerely hope it wasn’t by paying money. Co-op meandering on an animal crossing island and making pottery by playing DDR rhythm games sounded like a good time but this game was just straight up unfinished. Terrible sound mixing, dodgy detection for the DDR, and glitchy NPCs galore, though the masterstroke was a raccoon whose black face marking had its height tied to the player’s location so it gracefully fell onto his eyes from heaven like a 2010s Deal With It meme.

Laika: Aged Through Blood – This sat on my wishlist for over a year with me always assuming I wouldn’t quite like it. Eventually gave it a go. Didn’t like it. You die in one hit, whether that’s from bullets or eating shit on concrete. You have to manage motorcycle flips to reload and refresh your parry ability. The twinstick aiming isn’t bad but for someone already not keen on it doing so while riding a bike was unpleasant. The fact the tone was needlessly brutal and sadistic didn’t help; opening on a character being vivisected and crucified with their own intestines isn’t really my speed.

After Death – Fuck this game rules. You are a skeleton who punches other skeletons, and every boss is more covered with bones and spikes than the last. The fire/ice powers being used for a variety of water melting puzzles didn’t exactly gel with the vibe but they were certainly inventive and used cleverly. Similar to Plague of Yamorn I didn’t have the patience to put up with the room-by-room scouring required for the secret ending, but I enjoyed my time overall. The music was pretty solid too.

The Auto Sort Is Broken – I’m one of the freaks that thought the inventory management in Kingdom Hearts: 358 Days/2 was fun, so I’m always curious about these sorts of games. Save Room was short but cute, Backpack Hero was amazing but got overcooked in early access, and while there’s slivers of what I’m after in games like Dredge nothing has scratched the itch. This definitely isn’t it though, the puzzles repeat often and the drag-and-drop inventory UI is godawful, particularly for a game where that is the entire game.

Lost in Random: The Eternal Die – Lost in Random was a game I liked more than I expected and think back on with quite a bit of fondness. I was hoping this action roguelike would have elements of the unique combat rhythm; throw the die as a projectile, get resources from the number rolled, spend those resources on cards drawn from a deck, rinse repeat while using basic melee attacks to maintain positioning. Sadly they instead elected for “bad Hades” and if I was going to pour time into an action roguelike I don’t enjoy as much as Hades, Hades II had a major content update on the same day this came out. I poked around for a few hours but there’s not much reason to play other than killing time.

Nocturnal – In addition to 6/10 metroidvanias I dabble in 6/10 platformers. Mechanically this was fairly paint-by-numbers but the aesthetics were phenomenal. I’ve never seen fire look as good in a game as this, the light seeps through the darkness like water on oil and the resulting effect is something utterly unique. The devs are making a sequel so I’m very interested to see what this becomes.

Awita: Journey of Hope – It’s rare for a game to be so generic and so lacking in ambition that it pisses me off, but this one crossed that threshold. I’m happy to see games keep tight control of their scope, but in a metroidvania every single room is a tool to be used by the designer to communicate something to the player. Awita was 90% empty hallways with switchbacks and blind jumps over spike pits, and what little structure existed mostly wasted the players time pinballing them to and fro across the pitifully small map. This feels like the tech demo that scopes out how it feels to move and traverse, but it’s sold as the whole game and has clumsy timewasters like a pitiful stamina bar and inventory limits when potions don’t stack.

Metro Gravity – This is another lock for top 10. Such an insane game. The usage of gravity-switching is constantly applied in clever ways for combat, traversal, and puzzle design. The atmosphere is inventive and charming, movement and exploration is incredibly unique, and the environment design is both evocative and ethereal in the way only low-poly 3D can manage. Interestingly, bosses are explicitly rhythm games where you parry to increase your multiplier and attack to increase score. You just need to survive to win, and their every attack is scripted on the beat. I knew within a half-hour I was going to love this game and I’m taking my time savoring it.

Dave the Diver – I just wanted to click on some fish. At the time of release, I was shocked this won indie game awards because it was made by a Nexon subsidiary. Now I’m shocked this won game awards at all because the game’s not very good. The three things you do are dive, catch fish, and run a fish shop. All three of those things feel like ass to play, and are filled with constant frustrations and interruptions. I get there’s a lot of systems so you can be 2 hours in and still doing tutorials. I get a lot of those frustrations are deliberate friction to make upgrades feel good. None of that is going to fix the fact that swimming isn’t fun in a game where you spend a whole hell of a lot of time swimming.

The Mobius Machine – The cardinal sin of a game isn’t being bad, but being just good enough that I sit mired in its badness rather than bouncing off immediately. If “The Morbius Machine” had tighter pacing and was better at directing the player, it could’ve been really solid and inventive; the devs went out of their way to avoid basic double-jump/air dash style mobility opting for a glider and rockets that launch you from the tops of ladders. The trouble is the map is far too large and full of tunnels that don’t get faster to traverse, and enemies are HP sponges that often drop clones on death. What really killed me was the insistence on hiding boss arenas under crumple blocks meaning at best they take you by surprise and at worst you don’t even notice them and meander for multiple hours with no chance of progression. The blueprint system where every upgrade required finding collectables in triplicate also widened the gap between instances of progress, which was especially dire given the wildcard blueprints which were rare and capable of being spent incorrectly. The lesson here is that games should fail fast and hard rather than be just below average for 15 hours.

Princess Pomu and the 5 Moons – Part of riding the razor’s edge of jank, particularly for games produced by small teams or solo devs, is you can see where ambition is bursting at the seams of their ability. Sometimes that comes across as a strained cry with a cracked voice and blood-soaked spittle, and sometimes it’s a faltering whimper from a dying animal. What was intended here was a story-heavy game with the lore giving a sense of weight to the beat-em-up combat and the moral choice of how to finish off enemies. What came out was cutscenes that jumped from topic to topic with no narrative glue and bosses who do 30+ seconds of invulnerable attacks before glowing with giant symbols saying “please juggle me with a 0-to-death combo”. It’s endearing in the same way as a little cousin trying to explain his D&D campaign to you, but that doesn’t make up for the fact it’s not solvent as a game. I’d play a dozen of this before another Awita if I had the choice though.

Xanthiom Zero – This is why I go hunting for random games with low review counts because you get high purity weird stuff when you do. The level design here is fairly rote but what makes this Metroid-clone (there is zero ‘vania here) is the gun customization; there’s four different types of gun parts to find and three different firing modes, with multiple puzzles themed around finding a specific combination to hit all the targets simultaneously whether that’s through a long range 5-pellet wave, a quick-firing high accuracy blaster, or an omnidirectional blast of shrapnel. It feels like building your own Borderlands legendary weapon with every bit of overpowered synergy feeling like a reward rather than something that takes away from the challenge. The game’s short enough that progression comes at a constant clip, and it ends right when it needs to. Phenomenal little game.

Slain: Back from Hell – I feel like I should like this sort of game. I tried Valfaris years ago and it didn’t quite click for me, but I picked this up after liking After Death and wanting more of the bone zone. Despite the stellar aesthetics there’s no getting around the fact the game is needlessly punishing and has no real structure or skill expression beyond not taking damage as the only way to heal is checkpoints. The combat has a rhythm to it but the enemies don’t, leading to a lot of chip damage on top of instadeaths from platforming. I get the idea, but it’s not for me.

Angel’s Gear – This game has maybe the single most striking 100 seconds in any piece of media I have ever encountered. A platoon of soldiers sails in a U-boat as the commander warns about the Moon Cult and the soldiers lament the state of the war. On the beach, the camera shows a cathedral wrapped in machine gun pillboxes, with barbed wire and corpses surrounding them. As the last soldier drags himself from the boat the camera pans to the moon, where cracks appear before bursting with a deep thrum pierced by the supersonic flight of a shining speck which rockets from the moon at impossible speed, crashing into the cathedral. As the dust settles, a dragon perches on the ruins of the castle, its red eyes glowing as it opens its mouth in an impossible scream. A bass-boosted roar tears the screen with chromatic aberration as the sky gives way to gears the size of cities on the horizon. It screams again and explosions tear apart the sea. An angel appears and beckons the dragon leave, before turning to face the lone soldier, who collapses. The game itself is nigh unplayable with poor controller integration, stiff movement, glitched room transitions, and a save system which somehow only loads your penultimate save. But what an entrance.

Core Keeper – I’ve played Terraria. This is Terraria but 2D in the other direction, and worse for it. I played for 4 hours one day, 8 hours the next day, then uninstalled it because after the first three bosses the game just gets more tedious. The crafting loop is a baseline level of enjoyable but the mechanics of the game itself were pretty lackluster as far as isometric dungeon crawling goes, and ultimately a game does need to lean on its gameplay to survive. Also the game was directionless enough that I encountered the bosses in reverse order, had to look up mechanics constantly, and am still unsure if I missed something about how basebuilding is supposed to work. The pillbug livestock are cute at least.

[boxkeith]

Old Fakir art from 2022 that I still love… Princess Tutu is one of my favorite anime of all time, but I don’t really draw a lot of art for it- I should fix that honestly.

[boxkeith]

TOMB OF THE TREACHEROUS TOAD - NOW LIVE!

The free visual novel game I've been working on is now LIVE for you to play!

Some highlights include:

Three endings

Full Soundtrack 

Sliding block puzzle

Approximately 15 minutes total playtime

Accessibility options available

Play it now! Currently available on the PC, mouse and keyboard required to play.

[boxkeith]

Look it's very funny how both Hornet and Lace have cannibalism songs in their playlists. Lace has a softer, more metaphor-y song that's clearly about love and lust whereas Hornet is just. Straight up tearing someone apart and eating them.

[boxkeith]

TOMB OF THE TREACHEROUS TOAD

That's right! I've been working hard on a visual novel, and it will finally launch TOMORROW!

It will be available for download on Itch.io, and free to play! Stay tuned for when the game goes live tomorrow!

[boxkeith]

Dwbi AU Goumang and Shennong plus some others. I think they should be friends.

[boxkeith]

IT'S DONE. HAPPY ANNIVERSARY NINE SOLS. AND HAPPY PRIDE.

[boxkeith]

Video Games I Played in May 2025

I have a bad habit when looking at the month to “round up” and consider things closed early. The 21st is basically the end, and it’s easy to see the last third as dregs rather than just as large as either half of what had come before. Maybe that’s just the natural ebb and flow of things to chunk time up and discard it flippantly, but I need to be more proactive about trying things or starting new projects without needing a clean dividing line. If nothing else I need to stop giving myself shit for only having done half as much as a typical month when I’m halfway through the month.

Trine 5 – Trine as a series reminds me a lot of Shantae in that damn near all of them are 6/10 unremarkable timewasters, but I keep fucking playing them. Someone could play the first Trine five times and have an experience about on par with running the gamut. That being said, this is definitely the most polished and refined the experience has ever been of tri-character puzzle platforming with physics objects, though they still haven’t solved the issue that “summon plank as wizard, move with telekinesis, grapple to plank as thief” will get you past 90% of puzzles. Maybe it’s more of an endeavor in multiplayer.

Sudokuvania: Digits of Despair – I’m trying to give more small games a shot, and I’ve been on a tile puzzle kick lately with all the picross and minesweeper. What this really taught me is that I’m dogshit at sudoku. I can do a decent job of running through the counterfactuals to derive fractional information and iterate that way, but even then I was faltering rapidly. It didn’t help the site’s UI was clearly not designed for a game of this complexity, and a standalone release with its own engine (and clearer rules text) would definitely pique my interest. Link - https://sudokupad.app/qq3kyjvu5q?setting-nogrid=1&setting-largepuzzle=1

Cosmobreeder Yiffai – I swear I bought this game entirely on its merits as a challenging metroidvania that’s taking heavily from Metroid 1 and Metal Gear in its level design and mechanics. Pay no attention to the several dozen GB of furry porn I’ve been steadily accruing over the past 15 years. I played with the NSFW patch provided by the creator, but even the base game is far from subtle in its lewd overtones. It’s a rare cross-section that’s both willing to navigate that tone and also its backbreaking precision platforming, but it’s a refreshingly novel experience that I recommend highly. That being said I’m not reviewing it on Steam because my uncle is friends with me and although I know he read Heavy Metal religiously in his 20s I don’t think he’s THAT down to party.

Hatsune Miku Logic Paint S – I miss Khimera: Puzzle Island. It’s hard to fuck up picross but somehow this game managed it, and moreover it primarily failed in the music and sound design. It’s a Miku game! Miku is right there! Why does the music suck? Why does ever tile make a click when you mouse over it so it’s a constant overstimulating jackhammer? Questions abound.

Kingdom Hearts III + Re:Mind – As I write this review “Crawling” by Linkin Park is blasting from my speakers. It is 1AM. I cannot and will not pretend to have truly moved beyond 2006. Kingdom Hearts is a subject about which I could write a sizeable book, and if one were to sum all the conversations, 4chan arguments, and ephemera I’ve had on the subject it’d probably dwarf most other topics. Despite that, I cannot particularly pin down how I feel about KH3. This is my first time playing it since release, and it runs beautifully on my PC. I’ve put 50 hours into the damn thing in under a month, and I can’t tell if my reticence to finish it is burnout, a desire to explore every iota of its world and systems, or dread for the endless overwrought cutscenes and shattered pacing that faces me in the Keyblade Graveyard. I could spend another ten hours level grinding further and trying to get ultima weapon, or I could spend that time playing three new indie games and encountering new ideas. I still need to replay TWEWY.

Proverbs – In much the same way that a museum curator’s control of gallery layout, lighting, and framing can either enhance or ruin a piece, the real majesty of a puzzle game is in its menu. Some are a muted level select screen, perhaps with light motifs that echo the puzzles themselves like Polimines displaying levels cleared with mistakes with the same shade of green as a clicked mine. Others such as Talos Principle make the level select a part of a metapuzzle, freely borrowing elements that transcend their assumed boundaries. Proverbs would be unremarkable as a series of a hundred or so minesweeper maps, but woven as they are into an overarching painting gives them a sense of scale and progress that is deliciously tangible. The satisfying click of tile colors and the flow from a lack of true failstates also helps.

Revenge of the Savage Planet – Academically I understand why there’s very few FPS metroidvanias. A genre that is defined primarily in the feeling of “you cannot do that, YET” needs to be hyperaware of what information is available to the player and conveying that in a 3D environment in first person is begging for a player to miss out on something. To this extent, I’m glad that this team took another bite at the apple after Journey to the Savage Planet, which was merely fine. I respected its willingness to steal the Metroid Prime scan visor, but everything in the first game was shallow mechanically and its story/setting were overly reliant on Spumco-style grossout humor and hypercommerical satire. The sequel doesn’t really elevate or evolve anything presented in the first game, and so I got bored after a few hours.

Satisfactory – I only “played” an hour of this in my latest replay, so I’ll mostly take this as an opportunity to bitch about Nvidia’s absolutely godawful drivers. I’m okay with the occasional crash for a complex game with robust autosaves, but this was crashing every couple seconds despite running like a dream a year ago on the same PC. I’m going to come back to this because many of the 1.0 changes are very interesting, but for now my experience was far from satisfactory.

The Siege and the Sandfox – I have a lot of fondness for the Sands of Time trilogy. I’ve played them extensively and think about them often. When I saw a new metroidvania that was drinking heavily from that well, I was intrigued. Sadly the result was abysmal, for a variety of reasons that ultimately come down to lack of willingness to commit to a style of play. As a platformer, it fails due to its clumsy and imprecise controls, lack of player tools for meaningfully correcting mistakes (no dagger to bail you out here), and atrocious checkpoint placement. As a stealth game it also suffers from all of these but also poor enemy AI with frequent glitches and dodgy hitboxes for detection and sneak attacks. What really twisted the knife was the narration which was clearly intended as an homage to Scheherazade but instead comes across as someone breathlessly doing a Farah impression with wooden delivery, played on repeat as dying resets every voiceline that you’d triggered since the last checkpoint. Maybe if I hadn’t had a phenomenal time with The Lost Crown recently I’d be less dour, but I don’t think anything short of a full redesign would save this.

Enshrouded – I’m not terribly keen on openworldsurvivalcraft as a genre but it’s slim pickings looking for things with online co-op that are literally anything else. The emphasis on structured content and NPC quests is interesting, but the inconsistency of what accomplishments are shared across co-op and which ones require player proximity makes it very frustrating to divide and conquer. Overall I think I prefer it slightly to Valheim, but I’ve also played it a third as much so we’ll see how stale it is in 30 hours.

Dragonsweeper – Another small free game ( https://danielben.itch.io/dragonsweeper ). Clever minesweeper with a variety of complex and unspoken rules about monster placement and tendencies. I’m still not sure to what degree luck is required to beat the game and it definitely felt rather prescribed in what solutions were available for any given seed, but it was a fun afternoon poking at it and discussing it with other people I linked it to.

Janosik – I’m genuinely not sure how I find these. I think I ran into the sequel while trawling for metroidvanias and was charmed by its presentation, and decided to play this one first. It’s a short free platformer and while I wouldn’t say it won my heart in the same way as Khimera: Destroy All Monstergirls I enjoyed jumping around hitting people with a sword.

Janosik 2 – It’s got a 2 on the end which means it’s twice as long. I’m not the biggest fan of character-swapping games as opposed to consolidating the abilities, especially when the party never splits and the game never forces you to use one subset of tools over another. Moonlight Pulse was especially good about asking the player interesting questions about how their toolkits intersected, whereas this is a fairly straightforward romp the entire way through. There’s some light backtracking through levels for completionists but nothing about the game is particularly difficult. It’s a charming and inexpensive platformer that doesn’t overstay its welcome, and that’s more than enough to be worth my time.

Cursed to Golf – I don’t particularly like golf games, and I won’t pretend I gave this a fair shake. I got this because steam sale weirdness meant it was cheaper to buy a game I actually wanted alongside it rather than buy that game directly. I didn’t make it out of the tutorial because they introduced a card resource that I could use to modify my shot in various ways. I was moderately interested in a golf-based Jump King, but I don’t need resource mechanics and other chaff on top of that when I’m feeling borderline already.

[boxkeith]

Huh? What's this???? Could it be....a brand new game I've been working on?

I sure hope there's more details soon.....Or maybe, even a release date soon? That'd be crazy...