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Aug 17th, 2026 at 10:18:45 - Absolum (PC) |
This is an arcade-style beat-em-up mixed with a roguelite. The developers clearly know both genres. The result is interesting for sure. It works for sure. But it only held my attention for about 5 hours before feelings of repetition and boredom set in. I see this as evidence that you can layer most any genre with roguelite elements, but that some genres might tend to produce deeper progression systems and more varied gameplay than others.
I am most familiar with the deckbuilding roguelite genre, wherein every run in a great game is full of strategic battles, tough decisions, varied builds, and so on. You’re thinking all the time. In this beat-em-up roguelite hybrid though, I rarely thought. Strategy goes on the back burner, while combat is foregrounded. This should be fine as long as there’s enough variation from run to run, but the combat got old, despite the developers’ attempts to make each character unique and to offer multiple paths and introduce some randomness to keep things fresh.
There are four characters who mainly differ in their special abilities (arcanas). They all have a regular 4-hit combo with the X button, a strong attack with the Y button, they can jump, grapple, etc…all similar basic moves. But then for the arcanas, the dwarf attacks with his gun in various ways, the frog uses some magic spells, and so on. More variety comes in the “rituals,” which are elemental attacks. This is part of creating a build during a run. There are six types of rituals: fire, lightning, necromancy, and so on. Fire rituals allow you to do things like set enemies to burn with your X or Y attacks, leave a burning trail behind after dashing, create a flaming wreath around you that hits enemies after you block, and so on. Lightning rituals are all about stacking “static” and discharging it with chain lightning, and creating sparks that track and zap enemies. Water rituals are all about creating tidal waves (which damage and knock back enemies) and bubbles (which allow you to launch enemies into things). Necromancy rituals are all about creating skeletons and stacking spectral armor. More advanced spells are ritual hybrids that do things using two elements.
Usually, you trigger burning or spawn skeletons or whatever—the ritual effects—by attacking, dodging, deflecting, or clashing. This is where the game draws inspiration from modern combat systems. Dodge is dodge. You move away from an attack. Deflecting is dodging into an attack. Clashing is using your strong Y attack when an enemy attacks (basically a parry). After any of these three actions, you can press X to “punish” the enemy, which initiates a counter that does extra damage. This reminded me of Space Marine 2’s free pistol shot with R2 after dodging or parrying.
So, you are doing all that, triggering all the conditions for your rituals, and by stacking rituals of the same element or that trigger on the same condition, you tend to specialize for a run. For example, you might start a run by getting a fire ritual that says “apply burn to an enemy after X combo finisher.” That means you’re going to use your X regular attack more than your Y strong attack and you’re going to look for more fire or “X” attack rituals. Then you might get a water ritual that causes a wave upon your X finisher. Okay, now you’re really going after the X attack rituals. Alternatively, you might find a lot of rituals that trigger on Y attack, or that trigger on clash, and so on, so I found myself mashing X, or mashing Y, or focusing on clashing, or whatever during each run.
Runs themselves start repeating pretty quickly. I was really, really tired of playing the first area (which I did 13 times). And there is the most path variety in that first area. In the others, there are basically like 1.5 paths. The first area has a decent amount of branching. But this is the same concept as other roguelites. You choose to go left or right, or whatever, and balance risk and reward. There might be an easier boss one way with a guaranteed ritual, but a harder boss the other way with a ritual and extra gold. I like that the game weaves quests across your runs, such that even after I beat the game, I still had a few outstanding quests to do. I got pretty far on my own, but I was getting bored and the meta-progression (spend crystals that you earn each run to start with more HP, start with more gold, increase damage in the air, etc., etc.) was starting to feel grindy, so I turned on “assist” mode, made myself invincible, then waltzed through two complete runs so that I saw most everything. Cool game, but didn’t hold my attention that long. I wish runs were more varied and strategic. I think I just prefer deckbuilding or other genres instead of beat-em-ups, so the beat-em-up / roguelite hybrid, while novel, didn’t suck me in.
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Aug 17th, 2026 at 10:12:16 - The Alters (PC) |
Just finished. What a ride. The Alters is one of the more creative games I’ve played in a long time. It felt a bit like Subnautica in that it’s a survival/crafting game, which I usually dislike, but its oppressive atmosphere and philosophical sci-fi narrative are excellent. It also felt a bit like one of those “timeline” games, like Eternal Threads, although you aren’t technically manipulating an existing timeline; rather, you create “alters,” real versions of yourself that exist in alternate timelines.
Here’s the story: You are Jan Dolsky, a “builder” on a space mission to find rapidium, an element that can solve serious earthly problems like food shortages and save humanity from itself. Upon nearing a planet, there’s an accident on the ship and everyone dies except you. The quantum computer (the ship’s big super brain) could only choose one life to save, and it calculated that you had the best odds of survival. You wake up and, to save yourself, the base, the mission, and possibly all of humanity, you embark on a biological project to clone yourself. A bunch of times. This is…highly illegal.
Yet here are your alters: Scientist Jan, Technician Jan, Botanist Jan, Miner Jan, and so on, maybe like 10 of them. They are all distinctly you, but in different timelines as calculated by the quantum computer. And yet they are not you. They are aspects of your self, yet are their own unique selves, while sharing core memories. Their memories branch from yours at various points in your life (lives). For example, several might stay with your abused mother instead of leaving to go to college. One of those who stays might confront your abusive father, while another leaves for a job abroad. One who goes to college might not finish. A few meet a woman and fall in love. One meets a man and falls in love. Worker Jan becomes a union leader. Miner Jan loses an arm in a mining accident. Botanist Jan never develops a strained relationship with your wife, whereas she left you and some of the other alters, and so on. They all have their own values and life goals and their own lessons to impart based on their unique life experiences, and these lessons—working with your alters to accomplish your mission—help you become the best version of Jan you can be.
I think that you are required to have some alters, like the Scientist (the only one who can research things) and the Technician (who plays a key role in the story and whose skill is quickly fixing things around the base). Others, it seems like you can pick and choose. For example, I never created the doctor, the guard, or the shrink. Actually, these last three, I realized at the end of the game that I could have made them in Act 3, but I just wasn’t thinking straight. So actually, I completed Act 3 with half the alters I could have had. Oops! There was another part of the game where I was supposed to have four different alters, but I didn’t realize that I could make a fifth until I could make a sixth, so I spent like 10 in-game hours with one less alter. This led to a funny error on my part. In the beginning of the game, the Technician is grumpy from sleeping on the floor and asks you to build a dormitory. He’s happy when he has a bed. The dormitory has 4 beds for 4 alters. By the time I got more than 4 alters, a big chunk of the game had gone by, and I forgot that the dormitory only held 4 alters when I created my fifth and sixth ones. After I created my fifth and sixth ones, my alters started getting in really bad moods! I couldn’t figure out why. Then, one day, the Technician tells me he’s tired of sleeping on the floor and when am I going to get him a bed. I was like, dude, what are you talking about? You have a bed. I built a dormitory forever ago. Then I realized the dormitory only holds 4 alters, so after I went to 6 alters, 2 were sleeping on the floor somewhere. Then I laughed because the Technician was the first or second alter I created, and he got one of the first beds. Why would he not have a bed later? Why wouldn’t one of the NEW alters not have a bed? It’s like they kicked him out of the dorm, haha. Of course, it’s just that complaining about the lack of beds was Technician dialogue, and so once I fell short of beds again, he was going to complain about it again.
Here’s another story related to the tough decisions about resource management and task prioritization. One time, I had agreed with the Worker (who was a big union leader in his timeline) not to make my alters work overtime for five days. Easy enough. I had only imposed overtime once or twice the whole game. Then I had another request from another alter during a dispute resolution to stockpile 10 radiation filters within five days. I was coming down to the wire on being able to produce the radiation filters, so I made my alters work overtime. But I forgot about my agreement with the Worker. Not only did the Worker get pissed off at me, but I missed the radiation filter deadline by just a few hours. So I failed both requests! The complexity of the interactions between all the alters led to numerous funny, odd, confusing, and/or stressful moments like these.
Anyway, you need your alters to mine elements, grow food, make repairs, create items—all those survival game tasks. YOU, though, regular Jan, you don a space suit and explore the environment, searching for mineral deposits, discovering and neutralizing anomalies, and doing various tasks relating to getting the hell off this planet (because the sun is coming and it will fry you all to death). This is a major part of the game, which is basically split between exploring the planet and managing the base/alters. The exploration part happens in the morning/daytime/evening. You’ll run around, map out the area (in each act, the base gets stuck in a new area), find mineral deposits, build mining outposts, connect the mining outposts to your base via a network of pylons, kill anomalies, do other mission-critical tasks, and you can assign your alters various tasks in the base (growing food, prepping food, researching, repairing, creating items in the workshop, etc.) and outside the base (mining). At 8pm, you get “tired” and your work efficiency is cut in half. Then when the sun goes down, the planet is bathed in radiation, too much of which will kill you. Time to return to base. At 11pm, you become “exhausted” and will wake up later the next morning for every additional minute you stay awake. This very much mirrors my own sleep schedule, haha.
Your alters also have defined work hours based on their moods, which you must manage. Extremely pissed off alters will only work 4 hours per day. Extremely happy alters will work 12 hours per day. Mostly happy or slightly bummed alters will work 9 and 7 hours, respectively. You can affect their moods by talking to them, giving them mementos you find, fulfilling their requests, preventing/curing their radiation sickness and injuries, sending them to the therapist, playing beer pong with them (silly minigame), watching movies with them, and so on. Their mood worsens due to a variety of factors as well.
There is a lot to manage here, but it’s all handled really well. I haven’t even mentioned the electrical storms, the base weight management, and any story bits that you have to deal with, often relating to ethical decisions. There is a larger story here about the corporation whose mission you were on. They want rapidium. A rogue scientist wants your alters. You’ll occasionally talk to them, and they’ll both be trying to help you get off the planet to serve their own interests. There are several different endings depending on a variety of choices you make. I got the “good” ending, which isn’t really “good” per se, but most of us survived.
In the end, like I said, the game is really unique. It’s philosophical, funny, nerve-wracking, charming, and strategic. I liked all the alters that I created. I often thought they were annoying at first (looking at the Scientist, who comes off as superior to the other alters and likes to tell them how to do their jobs, which pisses them off, and the Miner, who is severely depressed and causes significant problems when created until you help him resolve his issues). Strongly, strongly recommend.
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Aug 17th, 2026 at 10:06:26 - Returnal (PS5) |
After working on this for the third time on a PS Plus subscription, I’m gonna give it up. Hours 18-23. Re-familiarize myself with the game. Die, die, die. Make it to the Act 1 boss, Phrike. Die. Quit.
The longer I play, the more I die and start over, the more grindy and repetitive it gets. See, I opened up a path straight to Act 3 after my one excellent run the last time I played (nearly a year ago), but if you go straight to Act 3, you’ll be severely under-powered. You have to at least sprint through Acts 1 and 2 to try and get health upgrades, some good parasites, find a nice weapon, etc. And you so easily die and end your run. Again, I find myself doing this at the end of my PS Plus subscription. It’s got several more days on it. I don’t think I’ll have time to beat this (if I even wanted to anymore), I don’t have time to beat God of War: Ragnarok. So I’m left with just a couple short games.
Update: I’m going to buy this and try to learn it again, and try to play co-op with Joey.
Update: I have purchased a physical disc. I will go slower with it and enlist Joey for assistance! I won't let Returnal defeat me!
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Aug 17th, 2026 at 10:03:12 - Dispatch (PC) |
I was a little unsure about Dispatch because I typically don’t care for superhero media and because I doubted that it would be much different than other Telltale Games games (which had long since peaked). Luckily, my hesitation was unfounded. Dispatch is incredible, the best Telltale Games style game since peak Telltale era, even surpassing The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us in some areas. The writing is smart, funny, and it’s more adult than I imagined, also with more dick jokes than I imagined. I loved the extremely creative characters, their relationships, the voice acting, music, animations, gameplay mechanics, everything. It stumbled a little when some choices didn't seem to matter. For example, sometimes the game really wants to keep alive dialogue options that I didn't choose. Other characters will refer to something I didn’t say, not necessarily as if I said it, but as if I wanted to say it. And I had some issues playing this on Luna (choppy, lagging, freezing, and even crashed on the last boss fight) and with a controller (input lag, which was Luna’s fault, and it kept switching to keyboard input, possibly because of Luna lagging, all of which was very annoying during dispatch, hacking, and QTEs). Luckily, a narrative game is still playable with those issues. Thank goodness it wasn’t a soulslike or something!
The main difference between this and older Telltale games is the addition of the “dispatch” gameplay. The story (basically) goes that you are a superhero forced into a temporary hiatus, and you go to work as a dispatcher for a larger superhero organization. You get a roster of heroes whom you manage, upgrade, and send on missions from your office computer. The heroes have five or six character stats, plus a couple special abilities, and as they level up, you allocate points in character stats in order to have a well-rounded team. So, for some heroes, you’ll want to dump points into strength and vigor, while for others, you might choose intelligence and charisma.
Each stat is useful for a range of scenarios in missions. You don’t necessarily know what stats (and therefore which characters) will be ideal for each mission, so you try to figure it out by interpreting key words in the mission description. For example, a mission might say that there is a hostage situation and that you should send heroes to protect innocent civilians, reason with the attackers, and convince them to release the hostages. “Protect,” “reason,” and “convince” might be bolded in the description, which means they are key words that associate with character stats. If you ever need to “protect” people, keep people safe, defend, withstand an assault, that kind of thing, then you’re looking at the vigor stat. If you need to do anything that requires thinking, logic, reasoning, figuring stuff out, and so on, you are dealing with the intelligence stat. Persuading, convincing, making a good impression, being suave, that kind of stuff is the charisma stat. And so on. It’s not always obvious. Key words sometimes seem like they could be multiple stats. Part of the fun is getting better and better at figuring out which kinds of actions each stat covers. Anyway, you have 1-4 hero slots per mission, and after missions, characters have to return to base and rest. So, you have to use all your characters, and this part of the game really becomes about resource utilization.
Sometimes during dispatch, you have to hack security cameras and stuff. This minigame was pretty fun and has several challenging elements, such as “viruses” that kill you if they touch you, locked ports that require you to find and memorize key codes, etc. Hacking isn’t a really big part of the game, but you will occasionally have to do it. My main critique of the hacking minigame is that I would really like to be able to scroll and see the whole hacking map. Later on though, the game used "not being able to see ahead" as a challenge, which I appreciated, but sometimes it was annoying not to be able to see what was ahead. Also, that was the main part of the game that sucked with Luna’s issues, because you are moving around this grid and there are viruses chasing you and time limits. So the game lagging, or the input switching to keyboard, messed me up a couple times.
The verdict on Dispatch is that it’s a must-play. I’ve been recommending it to everyone. If you’re an Amazon Prime member, it’s available for free on Luna right now. Take advantage of it!
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