Sulfur
What a weird game. Sulfur is kind of a Roguelite, extraction boomer-shooter with a clean and appealingly simple art style. Depending on how bad you are at it (like me, until I started playing on Steam Deck with gyro aim), you might be fooled into underestimating the scope of the game. Once you make it through the starting area, it really opens up, with each new zone bringing new challenges and deadlier enemies. It’s a tough game with extremely harsh and deflating punishments at times; you really, really need to learn the cooking recipes and be properly geared up and prepared for the later levels. But I keep coming back to it in hopes of overcoming its abuse. It’s a really fantastic game if you vibe with its trappings, and I don’t really hear much buzz about it. At the time of writing, it’s one of the headliners on a Humble Bundle offering, so it could be a great time to check it out.
Primal Planet
I finally finished it. It started to finally pull me in February and March, like I hoped it would. I mentioned wanting to get immersed in it in my 2025 Wrap-Up, and it finally happened. The incremental progress builds up, and you can really vibe with its simple and unique brand of exploration. It has a very player-driven progression system that's very different from most Search Action games. It’s a very enjoyable little title with excellent theming, so long as you're willing to adapt to its quirks and play it on its terms.
River Tails: Stronger Together
A fun, asymmetric co-op platformer starring a cat and a fish working together. My wife and I have had a great time jumping in for a couple of levels at a time, playing until we’re tuckered out or until the edibles hit too hard to overcome its surprisingly tricky challenges at times. The cutesy art style belies some tricky segments that require a lot of coordination at times.
Shovel Knight Dig / Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon
Roguelikes and Roguelites are some of my favorites genres, and that hankering flares up pretty regularly. This time, I got pretty addicted to both of these highly re-playable Shovel Knight spin-offs. I owned them both for some time, but had set them down after my initial time with them. I finally went back and finished Pocket Dungeon with more of the knights and unlocked all of the playable characters. I love an elegantly simple game, and Pocket Dungeon strikes a very fair balance.
I played a lot of Shovel Knight Dig when it was released, and have never been great at it. Jumping back in, it’s a consistently fun, if punishing, time. I’m glad that the character has a game that’s actually about digging into the ground; that’s what shovels are for, ya silly goose, not just for smacking shit. It’s not as open and vast a feeling of a 2D platformer Roguelike like Spelunky, but it offers enough variation and surprises to remain interesting and keep me coming back.
Resident Evil Requiem
This was incredibly fun; I had a blast the whole way through, and both playstyles are great in their own ways. It's basically two games mashed together, but it works surprisingly well. Grace's sections play like RE7, while Leon is straight out of the RE4 remake (cheesy one-liners and all), complete with their own inventory, health, and crafting systems pulled from those respective titles. I played the recommended way, with Grace in 1st-person and Leon in 3rd-person. The fact that the cutscenes are always in 3rd-person at least means that the game is not nearly as mean to Grace's hands as the last two were to Ethan Winters'. And it really feels like an evolution of the zombie interactions, since most of them still retain some fragments of their past life and behave accordingly. Some of the zombies also take a cue from Gremlins to up their threat level. How do you make a monster more dangerous? You give it a fucking gun, that’s how.
It strikes a nice balance of giving us new things to experience and revisiting older elements of the series. This was the first Resident Evil game I ever played at launch, and I had a great time all the way through. I’m excited for potential DLC. Hopefully it gets another Mercenaries mode update at some point like the previous games, because I’d love to revisit Leon’s over-the-top combat.
Resident Evil Revelations
I don’t know how to describe the feeling of playing this, other than that it feels like a portable game, but kind of in a good way? There's a strange, appealing novelty to experiencing a game clearly designed for the 3DS, doubly so when playing it with a controller on a TV. Given the original target hardware, portable games tend to feel a few years behind their time of release when compared to contemporary console games; playing one is like experiencing a much older game from an alternate timeline. Like some lost PS2-era RE game. It's fun and charmingly quaint after experiencing the polish and refinement of the recent mainline RE games.. There’s kind of a slippery, looseness to the gameplay; I’m not knocking it, it just has a very different feel to it than the other games. I started it over after reaching episode 5 in my last attempt a little over a year ago, since I wanted to refresh my memory about the plot and retry the earlier sections after having more experience with the tropes of the series. It’s definitely far simpler and more streamlined when coming off of Requiem, but the change of pace is working for me right now. After this, I’ll dive into Revelations 2.
Original Model PS3
My dad scored an original model PS3 in an auction early in the year and was kind enough to sell it to me. I had been regretting giving away my old PS3 Slim, so this was an amazing find. There are so many games from this generation and this console in particular that are not readily available elsewhere. I had a hankering to play some of these orphaned titles, and original hardware is the most straightforward way to do that. I had a few games still tied to my PSN account that I was able to re-download and use, and started picking up a few discs as well. Good lord, the downloads are painfully slow compared to modern devices, but it was worth waiting for them.
Infamous 2 / Festival of Blood
This was the single game I missed the most being without a PS3. After a full replay (Good Karma, obviously), it still holds up, despite looking a bit uglier than I remembered. Despite its flaws and jank, it's still one of my favorite games of all time. I had never played Festival of Blood before, and it ended up being a short and sweet spin-off that condensed a lot of the fun into a brisk and thematic side romp. It only takes a couple of hours to experience everything it has to offer, but the new vampire powers and theming are certainly a novel twist on the traditional gameplay.
Peter Jackson's King Kong
The fact that I can run PS2 discs on the original model PS3 opened up another world of otherwise unavailable games for me. As long as I can track down physical copies, I now have access to all 5 generations of PlayStation consoles. The first PS2 disc I picked up was the 2005 video game adaptation of that year’s King Kong film. It was an unexpectedly great game at the time of release, especially for a movie game, and it still holds up reasonably well today. Back in the day, I had copies for both PS2 and Xbox 360. The PS2 version obviously has a pretty low resolution and some muddy textures, but rocked surprisingly decent character models for the era and generally good voicework from the movie’s cast. The dynamic creature behaviors are still pretty interactive and lively, even by modern standards. The bulk of the game being a survival FPS scratches that dinosaur-blasting itch that sickos like me tend to get now and then.
SSX
It might be sacrilege to long-time fans of the series, but the 2013 SSX was the first and so far only SSX game I’ve ever played—barring the GBA version of SSX Tricky. I have a lot of nostalgia for this game, and it still feels so fluid, with a ridiculously smooth trick system and a fantastic sense of momentum. The focus on online play and competing with friends does take away from the single-player offerings, but I think it still holds up pretty well even playing it solo today. The gear system—the wingsuit especially—can really open up the runs for some extra challenge. It’s not a perfect game, but it was and still is a fun time every now and then.
Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions
I’m very glad I still had this delisted game on my account, as it’s a pretty good, back-to-basic Spidey game that focuses on linear levels instead of a huge open world. But if only I had Web of Shadows when it was available. Physical copies are astronomically priced, and my dipshit brother gave away the Xbox 360 copy I had years ago.
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
I dunno, man. I just don’t know if these older R&C games are for me. The 2015 Ratchet & Clank reimagining was my first proper foray into the series, and even then I felt that the gameplay was a little flat. It was consistently mildly enjoyable, but nothing ever rose to the point of “Oh, this is awesome”. It was always hovering around “Yeah, it’s kinda fun”. Rift Apart was a massive step up in that regard, with its incredibly polished set pieces and satisfying haptic feedback when firing guns with the DualSense controller. Going back to these sophomore-generation titles, Tools is not doing much for me. It ditches a lot of the scrappy, rebellious charm of the PS2 games in favor of a more grand story, and it isn’t really working for me. Everything feels just a bit unpolished and janky, and the gameplay is clearly still in an intermediate form that isn’t quite the same as the PS2 games, but still not a proper modern platformer/shooter hybrid like the PS4 and PS5 titles. I’ll keep working at it, but it’s the most “just okay” game I think I’ve played thus far this year, which is surprising for something that came from Insomniac.
Turok
This… was rough. I was always interested in it back when it was getting pre-release previews, but there’s no way my parents would have allowed me to play it at the time. Having finally experienced it, I can see why it was received so lukewarmly. Generic-yet-nonsensical story and setting, muddy textures, bad checkpointing, no subtitle options, a framerate that hovers somewhere in the mid 20s, audio compression that’s all over the map, an FOV that made me borderline nauseous at times, a creatively-lacking arsenal of weapons, obnoxious and constant screen shake, and enemies that literally knock you on your ass every 20 seconds. After playing the remasters of the first two N64 games and seeing how well they actually hold up, it’s disappointing to see a unique series’ identity siphoned away in the interest of contemporary trend chasing. The generic space marine bravado and the faceless, evil megacorp are definitely not the most interesting things to frame a story around, especially when the series was so out there and crazy in its previous incarnations. The barren jungles and generic corporate bases are a lot less interesting than the varied locales from Dinosaur Hunter and Seeds of Evil. I had some mindless fun with it, mostly because I’m a sick whore for dinosaur games, but I can see why this failed to make much of a splash in 2008. Plus, the eBay seller I bought the filthy disc and busted up case from was an absolute fucking dick. Regardless, even though this reboot resulted in a dead end, I hope Turok: Origins is able to recapture some of the series’ charm and weirdness. I’m not thrilled with the co-op focus, but I’ll reserve judgement until I can get my hands on it. Hopefully I can convince some friends to try it out as well.