“Arms Dealer” opens with a quote from Andrew Niccol’s 2005 film “Lord of War.”

“There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?”

In the years since that film’s release, the quoted figure has ballooned to over 1 billion, according to a 2017 study conducted by the Small Arms Survey. The ratio of guns to people has accordingly risen from 1:12 to about 1:8. The Stockholm Intentional Peace Research Institute estimated the revenue of the top 100 global arms producers to be $679 billion in 2025.

After two hours of gameplay, my net worth in Koro Pixel Studio’s economic strategy game reached just over $21 million.

Gotta pump those numbers up.

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In “Arms Dealer,” you play as, well, an arms dealer. Starting with nothing but a market board of knives, pistols, shotguns, and rifles, plus the contact information of several loan sharks, you’re then tasked with purchasing stocks of weaponry, then selling them when their market price has increased. The deadly cargo attracts criminal and police attention alike, forcing the player to bribe or fight their way out of entanglements. If only there was some high-powered weaponry laying around…

With a few savvy loans and moves on the market, smaller sales can turn into bulk shipments and deals on fancier toys. Profits can also be put toward upgrades enhancing purchasing power and reducing the danger of hostile encounters. Achieving a high enough net worth extends your run, and your balance at the end of the trading period unlocks new weapon categories and other permanent boons.

Though “Arms Dealer’s” Steam page boasts of deep strategic simulation and market manipulation, the gameplay really just boils down to buying as much as possible of whatever’s cheapest and then selling when it increases in value. There is some slight strategy in the leveraging and paying off of loans, but the game offers no real means of manipulating the market. As I wrote in my previews of “Meaningless Random Numbers” and “Sir, We Have an Orc Problem,” incremental and economic games offer a certain delight in watching profits soar, in seeing numbers multiply from thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions. “Arms Dealer” is no different from those, but its mathematical pleasures are, at least to my eye, completely left to chance. The game is only in the play-testing stage right now, so additional features and strategic elements could be added, but such changes are yet to be revealed by the developers.

What “Arms Dealer” does capture is the grimy glee of trading in weapons. The game features a dark, muted aesthetic of staticky pixels, shadowed silhouettes, and gritty typefacing. As the player progresses, they gain access to more devastating weapons offering even thicker margins than plain old pistols and rifles, lending a sense of escalation to the player’s actions. One could claim a sliver of plausible deniability when the offerings were merely AK-47s. Some of those sales might have even been legal! Trading in nerve gas and bioweapons, in contrast, is more difficult to explain. At one point during a game, I exclaimed aloud to myself: “Oh! Nuclear warheads are on sale!”

At the end of each run of “Arms Dealer,” the player is greeted with a statistics screen showing them their final net worth, how many weapons they sold, and how many people they killed. This final number only counts the cops and criminals the player fended off during their run, but I was left wondering about the no doubt hundreds of thousands gunned down as a result of my virtual trades.

They count too, don’t they?

“Greatness consists in bringing all Manner of Mischief on Mankind,” — Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild

H.P. Lovecraft describes the impossible metropolis of the Elder Things like so:

“The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie.” — At the Mountains of Madness

Lovecraft would have described at least a portion of “STRAFTAT’s” over 350 maps similarly.

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Even though it came out less than two years ago, “STRAFTAT” is a game from a bygone era — the time of “Unreal Tournament” and other arena shooter games. The game is completely non-contextual. You’re dropped into a random map littered with random weapons and 1-3 random people to kill. Rounds unfold at ludicrous speeds, with the vast majority terminating in just a few seconds. Run. Jump. Slide. Shoot. Die. Repeat. The grotesque, perpetually cigarette-chewing characters contort and warp as the players puppet them at maximum momentum. The laws of physics are mostly notional. Some of the many guns are replicas of real-world firearms, while others are completely fantastical. “STRAFTAT” encourages live-wire experimentation, that is, point this unholy monstrosity at your opponent and see what happens.

“STRAFTAT” is a party game for psychos. The ideal player would be virtually spat at in casual lobbies of other games, called a “try-hard,” a “no-lifer,” or a “sweat.” When you only have a few seconds to be mad about being no-scoped from across the map or outgunned by someone who’s been bhopping and walljumping out of the womb, though, does the imbalance really matter?

The answer is no, because you’re too busy trying out the next map, picking up a new gun. Maybe this is the one to give you an edge over that insane guy who’s won the last six games in a row. Oh, he vaporized you with a non-Euclidean laser rifle? “STRAFTAT” giveth, “STRAFTAT” taketh away.

The gameplay of “STRAFTAT” is about as simple as it could possibly be, minus the esoteric movement techniques the sickos use. You play “STRAFTAT” when you and your friends have 30 minutes to kill, or on one side of a boring Zoom meeting. The game is free, and for that price, you get a staggering amount of variety. Investing five bucks gets you even more guns, maps, and cosmetics. The game expects no commitment, but it proffers a dark bargain: To become good at “STRAFTAT” is to become an Elder Thing, an unspeakable monstrosity terrorizing random lobbies and compelling ragequits left and right. Beware.

But enough of that. Let us return to where we began: architecture.

“STRAFTAT” is set in hundreds of spaces. Maps have titles like “Arena_03,” “Bazaar_01,” and “Chateux_11.” Permeating each is a sense of liminality. Many of the maps look old and decayed, with rusty machinery and barren facades and broken-down cars. Others are empty gardens and Grecian temples decorated with marble columns and trimmed greenery. Yet the player also understands that these spaces have no history. They are literally floating in a void, popping out of existence as soon as the last ragdoll hits the pavement. If one were to enter one of these maps alone, they’d be greeted with hollow shops bartering no wares, apartments with no tenants, factories that produce nothing. The grubbiness recalls City 17 from “Half-Life 2” and the decrepit industrial hellscape of “Tetsuo: the Iron Man.” Brown, gray, beige is the color palette of “STRAFTAT,” plus the dark crimson of early aughts blood. The developers of “STRAFTAT” previously made a game called “BABBDI,” about exploring a city with the same eeriness of “STRAFTAT.” That game didn’t have the guns, though.

Bullet holes and blood splatters are an easy way to add character to space. To make it feel lived in.

Yesterday, I wrote about the incremental game “Meaningless Random Numbers,” the demo of which I played as part of the latest Steam Next Fest. That game features a slick, chaotic aesthetic befitting its narrative of hubristic horror.

The Thief-Taker General

Demon and Dice

Here’s a thought: What if probability is one of the divine’s checks on humanity? We can’t be trusted with certainty, so we invented games of chance. The house edge has never kept a gambler from the felt of the table. But what if we could cheat on a scale that would affront even God…

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a month ago · 1 like · Conner Dejecacion

“Sir, We Have an Orc Problem” is also an incremental game, but in the opposite mode. The visuals of the latter game are primitive, to say the least. “Sir” is also a game about making numbers go down instead of up: driving the horde of titular creatures from the tens of thousands to zero, with all the firepower one can muster.

This level is violence is only eclipsed perhaps by grand strategy games.

If “Meaningless Random Numbers” was incremental + horror, “Sir” is incremental + tower defense. Presented with a linear course, orcs enter from one end and exit through the other. If they make it through, your base loses health. In between, machine gun nests, mortar emplacements, cannons and flamethrowers fire away, reducing orcs into red paste on automated kill orders.

At first, your base will be overrun almost immediately, but upgrades increase the efficiency of the slaughter until the tide ebbs back in your favor. Clearing a map perfectly feels great, at least until presented with a new course where the number of orcs has increased tenfold, they come from two apertures instead of one and have double the health.

“Sir” elevates the incremental loop with tower placement strategy. Orc-piercing cannons work best in long lanes, flamethrowers decimate choke points, mortars thin out open areas and machine guns mop up the stragglers. Once you figure out optimal placement, “Sir” becomes a game of sitting and watching the carnage unfold. The orc horde moves like a liquid, jostling along in streams, stepping over the bloody patches where hundreds of their fellows were just mowed down moments ago. Towers fire in predictable, adjustable arcs, resulting in hypnotic cones of death. The game is sort of like “Helldivers,” except you’re the one on the command bridge of the orbiting cruiser, loosing impersonal strategic death from above.

And yet, “Sir’s” simplistic presentation obscures an unsettling core. Other incremental games are about the efficiency of production: of money, of paperclips, of cookies. “Sir” prioritizes the efficiency of destruction: How can I kill as many of these beings as possible? And they are beings — zoom in close enough and you see little tusked faces and pumping legs. The developers at Mumpitz Games could have made “Sir” about repelling invading germs, or bugs, for they might as well be, zoomed out, little green specks flowing like water across the screen. But no, the enemy is another kind of vermin. At least, that’s what decades of fantasy would have you think.

“Greatness consists in bringing all Manner of Mischief on Mankind,” — Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild

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Here’s a thought: What if probability is one of the divine’s checks on humanity? We can’t be trusted with certainty, so we invented games of chance. The house edge has never kept a gambler from the felt of the table. But what if we could cheat on a scale that would affront even God?

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Nikko Nikko, the developers of “Meaningless Random Numbers” call it an “incremental horror" game. The incremental part comes from the gameplay — the term is an evolution of the often pejorative “clicker” or “idle” monikers given to games about virtual scale. Incremental games start players from 0 and don’t end until numbers in many times excess of the number of atoms in the known universe have graced the screen, exponential growth achieved from the intervention, but really patience, of the player. Incremental games are usually short and sweet, experimenting with thematic and visual forms as a way to bolster simple gameplay.

The numbers in “Meaningless Random Numbers” are generated by dice rolls. Click on your dice, and earn money for poker-style combinations. Profits can be invested in upgrades like money multipliers, additional dice, and rerolls. Power like this comes with a cost, though, namely: The Devil’s Due. Every so often, the Devil asks for an ever-increasing cut, forcing you to get creative in your accounting. Set up a few automatic dice rollers to earn cash on the side. Sacrifice progress to unlock permanent upgrades. Roll threes-of-a-kind to earn bullets, which can be expended on profit-multiplying murders.

THOU SHALT NOT KILL.

Oh, yeah. God’s a fish, and you’re probably going to have to kill him.

The pleasure of “Meaningless Random Numbers” lies in its abrasive aesthetic. Taking inspiration from games like “Persona,” the game’s user interface is a chaotic array of all-caps text and grotesque imagery. Screeching audio cues, flashing visuals, and riotous hues of red, green, and black dare one to stop, to look away, but this isn’t the kind of game you can walk away from. As the numbers get mindbogglingly larger and the dice rolls get faster, the screen shakes so much, one would not be faulted for assuming Armageddon is just around the corner. As with many incremental games, automated inputs quickly eclipse the human ones, though the satisfaction of throwing five dice and raking in the profits is too good to pass up. Maybe this is what sitting at a slot machine feels like.

“Meaningless Random Numbers” is in the demo stage right now, though a full release is scheduled for this year. If you want to engage with art that burns a little — something like “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” keep an unblinking fish eye open for this game. Unlike the sleek minimalism of other incremental games, “Meaningless Random Numbers” is a game of serrated edges and sensory overload. The abstract story of sin and profit is intriguing, and the demo has a few tricks up its sleeve leaving one eager to know what kind of unholy miracles might be performed in the full game.

The next time you think about cheating at cards or playing craps with loaded dice, remember:

GOD IS WATCHING.

“Greatness consists in bringing all Manner of Mischief on Mankind,” — Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild

Generation Loss is the principle by which copies degrade in quality as they are created. Copies of copies of copies, each one losing bits and pieces of the original until they become unrecognizable. Imagine an old film photograph rotting away over the course of a century — the same will eventually happen to our digital creations, pixelated smiles slowly smudging away into mere static.

That’s entropy.

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Kane Parsons’ new film “Backrooms” centers the concept of generation loss (though it never names it as such, no matter how cool it sounds), yet ironically presents itself as a metatextual narrative where the reverse process has taken place. “Backrooms” is based by Parsons’ own YouTube short film series, itself based on the 2019 4chan post introducing the concept of the Backrooms to the Internet, where it quickly cemented itself as an all-timer bit of online folklore, now so iconic the understanding that it surfaced less than a decade ago produces a flashbang of cognitive dissonance in those who assumed the Backrooms to be a concept since the dawn of online creepypastas at the turn of the century.

Here’s the original post, by the way, or rather appropriately, a screenshot of it from Reddit:

This screenshot is too high-quality. One expects the Backrooms to be presented at the resolution of a ‘90s camcorder. Kane Parsons’ new film begins with a terrific found-footage segment leaning into the horror of squinting into graininess and seeing nothing, or, seeing the edge of something, or is that just static? After this opening, though, the film resolves into a superbly-realized A24 production. Entropy goes in the wrong direction: Watching the original short film series forces one to concede that this “found footage” is animated. High-quality animation, yes, but recognizable in its form. “Backrooms” makes no such compromises. Eerie set design and effects demonstrate the alluring possibility of making the jump from scrappy YouTube animation to genuine Hollywood production. The question that remains is if “Backrooms” is the beginning of a reverse entropy chain or the pinnacle preceding an endless abyss into generation loss.

The story of “Backrooms” is thin on the ground. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a down-on-his-luck furniture store manager who stumbles, literally, upon the titular space. Room upon yellow room, some littered with furniture, some decor sticking halfway into walls and floors, yawning on and on and on like an architect’s cat parked itself on “Ctrl-V” on the keyboard. Clark isn’t alone, however: others stalk the endless halls. And they aren’t human.

The characters and narrative of “Backrooms” take a backseat to the setting. Ejiofor does a hell of a job as a man driven insane by self-loathing, but Parsons is smart to let the camera linger on the uncanny spaces of unholy design. A24 built over 30,000 square feet of “Backrooms,” and Parsons effortlessly convinces viewers there really is an infinite sub-reality lurking between the cracks. The film constructs a perverse sort of wonder as it sweeps across new rooms and floors, giving viewers glimpses of new forms of weird while leaving them eager for more. What does the “pool room” look like? What’s going on with the red and green lights? Where are the other entrances and exits? Next time, send a drone.

Also compelling are the entities inhabiting the Backrooms. Parsons only shows viewers a few, but they too follow the generation loss principle: humanoids put together not quite right, with too many eyes and fingers and not built with flesh but some indescribable stuff conferring no feeling, only an approximation of existence. Clark describes them as memories of real people, half-faded. Screeching, flailing about, these entities are just as inscrutable as the space they inhabit. Can they be killed? Are they alive?

“Backrooms” is a dream come true for its 20-year-old creator: a realization of a passion project by one of the hottest studios on the planet. One has to wonder if “Backrooms” follow-ups will be able to retain the eerie magic of the freshman effort, or devolve into copies of copies overburdened by “lore,” as the film teases in places. On its own, though, “Backrooms” is best understood as a kind of evil version of “House Hunters,” where the pleasure is derived from seeing and exploring a space from afar one will never see in person.

At least, one hopes.

“Greatness consists in bringing all Manner of Mischief on Mankind,” — Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild

The word “kill” leaves her vocabulary. The pamphlet, tucked between pulp sci-fi and self-help books, teaches her a new word: wang. Verb. To obliterate the opposition, totally and irrevocably, probably with two nine millimeter slugs to the back of the head. Hershel Wilk, communist spy, cryptonym “CASCADE,” learns how to make a homemade gun, but she also learns The Way of Wang. “State-sanctioned violence” is not congruent with The Way. From here on out, she's wanging fools left and right.

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The Way is just one of the many thoughts Hershel can internalize during “Zero Parades.” In this spy thriller from ZA/UM, which last released one of the best games of all time, “Disco Elysium,” seven years ago, the player must not only grapple with a web of conspiracy and deceit from external enemies but also grapple with the intrusive neuroses of a damaged espionage operative. ZA/UM’s darkly comedic, yet superb writing makes its return in this thrilling, yet thoughtful follow-up that’s as if John le Carré tried out Hunter S. Thompson’s drug regimen for a day.

“Zero Parades” takes place in the city-state of Portofiro, a backwater still barking the scars of it's long-exiled tyrant. Amidst a cultural assault launched by the “technofascist” Luzian empire, disgraced communist operant Hershel Wilk is dispatched to Portofiro for her comeback mission, only to find her partner catatonic and pantsless in her safehouse. With no mission briefing to speak of, it's up to Hershel to salvage the assignment and maybe, just maybe, her conscience.

The game throws the player into the deep end. Rather than holding the player's hand, “Zero Parades” encourages exploration and curiosity. As Hershel talks to the colorful, and dangerous people around her, she accumulates not only pieces of her mission, but pieces of herself. Skills, which Hershel uses to complete tasks in high-stakes dice rolls, represent fragments of a patchwork psyche. Instincts, Poetics and others whisper (or yell) in Hershel's mind, nudging her hunches or just providing kooky commentary. Some interruptions are helpful, others not. Every interaction feels alive, conversations not merely information delivery mechanisms but opportunities for unpredictable human expression. Combined with the aforementioned Thoughts - worldviews that can be internalized for gameplay benefits while introducing even more narrative curve balls - Hershel's character is both satisfyingly moldable and excitingly dynamic. The player technically has final say, but controlling Hershel's thoughts and actions sometimes feels like riding a bucking bronco in the best of ways.

ZA/UM’s writing team seamlessly blends political and psychological themes. “Disco Elysium” players will recognize much of that game in “Zero Parades,” stylistically and thematically. Both games feature fuckups desperately seeking absolution in “one last job.” “Zero Parades” feels more accessible; content with keeping the world building background sketchy, the game disburdens the player from reading up on political philosophy before they play. “Zero Parades” homes its interest on the entanglement of culture and politics, the allure of the capitalist status quo, and the tension between enacting lasting change in a world at the “end of history.” It would not be absurd to consider the game alongside academic works; “Zero Parades’” engages serious topics with serious consideration. Eat your heart out, Francis Fukuyama.

“Zero Parades” is one of the few video games that feels truly literary. The writing and dialogue is so engrossing, one hardly realizes how simple it's loop of “walk and talk” is. At the same time, it's impossible to extract the language of the game from it's form. The player decides where the story goes next, and the game reacts with almost eerie understanding. Without batting an eye, the story acknowledges even the most obscure of actions, from painstakingly collecting a marching set of clothes to completing tasks in obtuse ways (though the game doesn't shy away from poking fun). The narration feels almost live, with its quirks and idiosyncrasies shining throughout the text. One can't help but hope ZA/UM is able to follow this up with more, just to give players more of their special narrative sauce.

The week after “Zero Parades” came out, IO Interactive’s hotly anticipated “007: First Light” game released. Bombastic action, car chases, unflappable, sexy confidence -- “Zero Parades” has none of those. ZA/UM’s game is about paranoid losers engaging in morally ambiguous work with only the slightest understanding of the consequences of their actions. Both visions of spy craft can exist, but “Zero Parades’” bleak world of espionage feels better suited to the current moment, where our states act with violent impunity and deserve all the scrutiny they can get. Perhaps we're not at the end of history quite yet.

“Greatness consists in bringing all Manner of Mischief on Mankind,” — Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild

The knife plunges into the competitor’s chest. Their hands grasp at mercy that never comes. Why would they be spared? They have something of value, something to be taken—nothing personal.

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This is the ethos of “Marathon,” the new game from Bungie, famed for its sci-fi shooters “Halo” and “Destiny.” The game, a continuation of a series begun in 1994, is a different beast from Bungie’s heroic, space-opera sagas. It’s a ruthless, dog-eat-dog shooter with an addicting, sadomasochistic gameplay loop enhanced by smart narrative grounding and a sleek aesthetic.

Set in the ruins of a failed interstellar colony on Tau Ceti IV, “Marathon” casts players as Runners, cyborg mercenaries employed by shady megacorporations and other competing factions. Alone or in squads, players scavenge for valuables and secrets littered amongst the detritus of humanity’s extraplanetary hubris.

“Marathon” is an “extraction shooter,” a relatively new genre that’s gained popularity in recent years. In other multiplayer shooters, goals may be as simple as “be the last one standing.” Extraction shooters, including contemporaries like Embark Studios’ 2025 hit “Arc Raiders” and genre originator “Escape from Tarkov,” task players with acquisition—scavenging or stealing as much as one can and surviving long enough to exit, or extract, from a match. Crucially, these gathered items persist across matches, and can be lost as easily as they are found. In “Marathon,” everything has a value proposition. With this in mind, every match is a gamble: Does one budget for death, bringing only the bare necessities, or go all out, bringing valuable items in the hope they give one an edge on the competition? Losing a crop of high-tier items feels like being punched, while absconding with a treasure trove after starting with mediocre gear is like hitting a jackpot.

This cycle of feast and famine is largely driven by rival players, aka The Competition. The mentality is shoot first, ask questions never—bullets speak louder than words. After a pitched firefight with “Marathon’s” punchy, fearsome sci-fi weaponry,a mad scramble ensues to see what goodies got knocked from the cyborg piñata. Maybe they had nothing of worth, but at least you stopped them from stealing your stuff. The doctrine of “what’s yours is mine” fits perfectly with “Marathon’s” story of corporate intrigue. Dehumanization is a selling point here: One early narrative beat reassures players that any conflicts of interest between factions are negligible. Someone’s going to do the job, so why not you? There’s an understanding that everyone is getting the same tasks, yet the game discourages cooperation. In centering acquisition, hostility is rendered the default simply because it’s the most effective mode of getting what one wants. Many games cast players as ruthless mercenaries, but “Marathon” elevates the stock setup into a perverse fantasy of greed and ambition. When death is merely a setback, there’s no point in mourning. You’ll get the next sonofabitch who stands in your way, and their gear. Maybe it was personal after all, but in “Marathon,” executing on a grudge is just standard procedure—and rewarding gameplay.

“Marathon” confronts players with riotous neon visuals blurring the line between the artificial and the biological. One cinematic shows a new Runner being woven from silkworms, a line of them tracing the contours of a body designed to kill. Blocky designs and cold, robotic voiceovers hint at the mass-produced, 3D-printed reality corporations have built for the 29th century. Menus in a retro, black-and-green terminal style recall classic sci-fi works like “Alien.” The end result is an aesthetic identity prioritizing immersion—the player might be only experiencing the game through a screen in 2026, but the game does a lot of work trying to make them feel as though their consciousness really is being transplanted thousands of light-years away into an artificial shell. The far-future universe Bungie has crafted is underpinned by recognizably human motives—profit, control, resistance, violence. “Marathon” is an out-of-body experience worth dying, and dying, and dying for.

“Greatness consists in bringing all Manner of Mischief on Mankind,” — Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild

Dogpile is a game that makes you happy. Even if you lose, it just means you became overwhelmed with a prodigious preponderance of pooches and your yard got too full of fluff to manage.

And nobody except maybe Cruella de Vil said no to more dogs.

Dogpile’s got tiny chihuahuas, smiley golden retrievers and my favorite, the corgi, peering back at us from between his legs, giving us an eyeful of butt. It’s a game about turning smaller dogs into bigger ones, ascending up the ladder to the King — the St. Bernard — who signals victory. You drop dogs into the yard like a reverse claw machine game, hoping they, for their weird and unwieldy shapes, find a match as they roll and bounce around. You aren’t micromanaging your dogs like a pedigree breeder, no, this is the rough and tumble dog park.

Merging dogs gives you bones and cash — the former used to meet an ever-increasing quota (failing which, you get a discipline debuff), the latter used to purchase upgrades from a store that shows up every few hands.

You might have played a game like Dogpile on your phone, probably as part of an interactive ad that intrigued you just enough to tap, though then, you were likely merging fruits. I like dogs better.

Dogpile also elevates its mobile game origins by going the Balatro route — dogs are drawn from a deck and are modified by purchasing game-warping tags or through meeting quotas. Pretty soon, the strategy of placing dogs gives way to watching them zoom around the yard independently of your control as the effects of tags and upgrades combine to create chaotic results.

For example, barking dogs push other dogs away. The Supersonic tag makes these barks stronger. The Jupiter tag turns off gravity in the yard, causing dogs to float languidly instead of pooling at the bottom. Add a bark, and suddenly you’re sending pugs to orbit!

Like Balatro, the chaos is the goal — but rather than watching a brain-meltingly large number go up, you watch dogs combine faster than you can process what’s happening, bones and coins popping from the screen like popcorn. Once things get going, you can go hands-off and watch the barks fly.

It’s basically nuclear fusion, only with dogs.

The physics-based chaos of Dogpile means it doesn’t reach the depth of Balatro or some other roguelike deckbuilders, but it’s far and beyond the most adorable, wholesome and cute game I’ve played in a long time. And it’s the perfect game to open during an idle moment or boring lecture (oops…). For completionists, there are multiple dog decks to try, tons of tag combinations and the obligatory endless mode. I might not bury myself in Dogpile, but treats where treats are due — Dogpile is a simple game with a great theme, a great look and just enough to engage the gamer part of my game.

And plenty of good boys.

The Thief-Taker General lives!

I haven’t written anything in over a month (employment will do that to you), but I’m back for all my subscribers itching to know what I’ve been playing and seeing. When I’ve not been chasing elementary kids around classrooms, I've been playing Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, the latest offering from the Trese Brothers, known for their hardcore strategy games. I haven’t played Star Traders, their most well-known game, but was eager to try Cyber Knights after learning it combines two of my favorite things: Cyberpunk and heists.

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It’s a natural pairing — cyberpunk stories are so often heist stories (Neuromancer comes to mind, also the blockbuster opening of Cyberpunk 2077), but no game has attempted to deliver a definitive futuristic heist experience. The upcoming Den of Wolves might prove to be that game, but until then, Cyber Knights will sit comfortably on that coveted throne. Very comfortably, in fact.

In Cyber Knights, you, the titular cybernetic warrior, lead a mercenary strike force in a world where AI has been banned but environmental and corporate depredation have left the masses huddled underground in one of just over a hundred cities left on Earth. Standard cyberpunk dystopia stuff — the core narrative is pretty thin on the ground, but what’s lost in choreographed bombast (like in 2077), the Trese brothers make up for with an impressive level of immersive modularity. What I mean by this is each of Cyber Knight’s many factions and power players interact with each other and have their own quirks and stats. For example, a new megacorporation moving into town opens up a whole swath of job opportunities, for and against them. A contact might offer a big score to advance their own position within a faction, empowering any favor they might owe you but also attracting the ire of rivals. One of your mercs might refuse to do work for a specific faction, or be hunted down by assassins from another.

The Trese brothers have delivered on an underrated aspect of the cyberpunk fantasy — that of being a small-to-mid-sized fish in an ocean full of sharks, each scheming against one another and using you as a pawn in their power games. While heist jobs come in a variety of flavors — hack, hit and run, assassination, rescue,and so forth — each job gets a unique title and narrative background that keeps you engaged in the moment-to-moment storytelling. One memorable mission was actually three: A tripartite prison break that had me infiltrating into a compound to rescue a syndicate stooge, then using them as bait for a hit job followed by an escape under police pursuit. While the gameplay of these missions didn’t change, the narrative framework was clever and thrilling.

Speaking of gameplay: Like X-Com and others in this genre, Cyber Knights gameplay is roughly split and two. The meat and potatoes are gridless tactical missions where up to four mercs infiltrate a guarded location with some kind of heisty goal, then escape with the loot. The second part is the team management portion I’ve mostly described up until now, which also includes upgrading an underground base and working contracts for access to weapons, cybernetic implants, etc.

The tactical layer is complex, with a steep learning curve, but a generous save policy means mistakes are never too punishing. Each mission begins with stealth — avoiding guard patrols, evading cameras, picking off isolated goons — but inevitably someone gets spotted or a dead body is found, which is when the big guns come out and it becomes a game of cover, suppressive fire, and overwatch. What’s so brilliant about Cyber Knights is that moving from stealth to combat never feels like a failure, nor is punished by the game as such, but is rather a natural transition that’s exciting and engaging. This also leads to some fun emergent narrative moments where a perfectly-planned infiltration gives way to a messy extraction under fire, which is super cool and super cyberpunk. The versatility of each mercenary type’s abilities mean everyone has something to contribute during all stages of gameplay. Genre veterans will approve at the Soldier and Sniper classes’ powerful Overwatch abilities that allow them to fire out of turn, while unique classes like the Cyber Knight and Vanguard offer opportunities for clever plays in stealth and in combat.

Like many tactical games, Cyber Knights is difficult, but fair. Hits are percentage-based, of course, with a variety of factors determining whether a bullet hits or misses. There are so many ways to mess with the calculus though, so it never feels unfairly random. Your mercs are always outnumbered, but most basic guards will go down in one or two hits, and your characters always have the option to delay their actions, leaving plenty of options open. It’s so satisfying when a multi-stage attack plan comes to fruition, leaving a whole squad of guards on the ground thanks to careful planning and just a little luck.

If I have one complaint about Cyber Knights, it’s that it’s not a looker. I’ve been spoiled by the gorgeous graphics of Cyberpunk 2077, so the janky animations and not-quite-beautiful character designs of Cyber Knights took some getting used to. Beneath a somewhat crude exterior, however, lies an addicting tactical heist sandbox that delivers on gameplay experiences I only thought I’d be able to have on a tabletop. As a bonus, the Trese Brothers are constantly adding new content, even after a successful stint in Early Access. This isn’t just bug squashing, either — the brothers are busy with new enemies (Hover Tanks!), missions, and more. Their reputation as busy bee devs precedes them, but it’s impressive to see this level of dedication to a game.

It doesn’t take an advanced cyberbrain to know Cyber Knights will be a mainstay in the genre space for a very long time — I hesitate to use words like “definitive” but the game is what it claims to be, simple as that. If you want to do heists and want to do them under the haze of neon and corporate plausible deniability, Cyber Knights is for you.

One of my first posts on this Substack was about my childhood favorite video game: Need for Speed: Most Wanted. I’ve spent countless hours playing that game — I’m able to recall the most minute sound effect and could probably sketch a map of Rockport from memory. Sliding into a close second for my childhood attentions, however, was Heroes of Might and Magic V (HoMM V).

The strategy game, with its iconic asymmetric strategy, epic orchestral soundtrack, and unique gameplay loop, captivated me (after a brief period where I thought the game’s undead units were too scary, though they now are my favorite to command). I can fondly recall family battles waged in-game between my undead hordes, the forces of nature commanded by my mother and sister, and the infernal armies led by my father.

Many, including Dad, consider the series’ third entry its best, though I remain staunchly allied to the fifth. Our family briefly dabbled in the seventh entry, but it didn’t stick. After a long stretch in dormancy, the series is back, however, and in a big way. With new developers and a new publisher, Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era aims to unite HoMM III and HoMM V fans under a new banner, and from what I’ve played of the demo, the new game is a worthy successor.

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Heroes of Might and Magic isn’t like other strategy games. It has the bird’s-eye view of Civilization, but combat not unlike X-Com, yet neither concerns itself with the multifarious management systems of the former nor the nitty gritty of combat like the latter. Battles involve hundreds, if not thousands of combatants, but every loss still feels painful. There’s resource management, budget balancing, and, perhaps its most bewildering feature: Monday is the best day of the week (it’s when you get to bolster your armies with new recruits)!

No wonder a fair few imitators have come for the old king’s crown — Songs of Conquest and Songs of Silence both sang a siren’s song for HoMM fans, but while both have their supporters, they lack the IP. Olden Era is a true heir to the throne, both by blood and by deed.

Let’s start with what’s returned. Familiar patterns of overworld exploration, town development, and tactical skirmishes make their storied comeback. I slipped into playing Olden Era as if it were an old glove. The core gameplay is just that good. Asymmetric factions, another staple, also appear, though are slightly remixed from previous entries. Old favorites like Necropolis and Dungeon are still here, but are joined by newcomers like the Schism faction, which is comprised of Lovecraftian horrors and their corrupted elvish thralls. The developers at Unfrozen have wisely decided not to go too radical with the tried and true Heroes formula, instead focusing on refreshing some elements and introducing new quality-of-life improvements, like auto-battle previews and dual upgrade paths for all creatures, previously introduced in an expansion to HoMM V. Also making a comeback is some fantastic music. Can’t go wrong with an orchestra for your video game!

Unfrozen’s most robust mechanical experiments lie in innovations to combat, notably introducing a new “Focus” gauge that powers up special abilities tied to units in the player’s army. It took me a bit to get to grips with the addition of dozens of new activated abilities, but I like how they make units more tactically impactful beyond their attacks and passive abilities. HoMM V players will also note the reversion of Hero actions to taking place during other creatures’ turns, rather than having their own separate turn. HoMM III players will also rejoice at a hex-based grid and units coming in only one size.

Also new is “Arena” mode, which allows players to draft heroes, artifacts, and armies for a one-off climactic battle. This is a smart addition, as classic games of Heroes can take hours. Arena mode delivers a satisfying Heroes experience in mere minutes.

I’m mixed on some of the aesthetic choices. While I think series die-hards who are decrying the game’s art style as “mobile game-esque” are overreacting, I agree that some UI elements aren’t so easy on the eyes, and some of the unit designs, particularly in the Schism and Hive factions, aren’t very distinct from one another. My main complaint is in the overworld map, which Unfrozen has jammed pack with stuff — not just resource producing buildings and enemy encounters but pile upon pile of loose resources, stat increasing buildings, artifacts, one-off “building encounters,” and more. There’s so much clutter in the overworld that it becomes trivial to leave useful items behind either because they are difficult to see, or one just can’t be bothered to expend effort getting them when there is so much other stuff to collect.

With all that being said, Unfrozen have displayed a large degree of not only technical craft and just good game development, but also an understanding of what worked about franchise entries from 20 and even 30 years ago and how to polish those defining qualities for modern audiences. I expected nothing less from the developers of the excellent Iratus, but unlike so many new-blood developers given the daunting task of rebooting a beloved franchise, Unfrozen has taken their challenge in stride and developed a game that deserves sit alongside mainline entries like HoMM III and V, rather than being relegated to forgotten spin-off territory.

Goethe, the German intellectual responsible for major contributions to literature, political theory, and philosophy from the mid-18th to 19th centuries, once purported to see his doppelgänger, or double. The incident is accounted in his autobiography.

“I saw, not with the eyes of the body, but with those of the mind, my own figure coming toward me, on horseback, and on the same road, attired in a dress which I had never worn…”

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An encounter with one’s reflection is nothing to worry about, unless you’re a dog or a cat, but to see one’s double in the flesh is no doubt an unsettling experience at best. Indeed, most encounters of this kind in science fiction end with one of them dead. Which one? In It Has My Face, that’s entirely up to you.

The premise of It Has My Face is simple enough to be a playground game. Dropped into a crowd, you’re tasked with picking out one face among them — your own. That clone wants to kill you, so you have to kill it first. With very few moving pieces, the developers at NightByte Games have created an addicting gameplay loop that demands quick thinking bolstered by a healthy dose of paranoia. “Hold on, that guy has the same color hair as me! Better check him out. Oh, his pants are different — wait, who’s that behind me?”

You have to be careful — very careful. Weapons are scattered across the map in briefcases, but take time to open. Each one has its quirks, and nearly all of them come with only one attack. Guards will attack if they see you brandish an illegal weapon, and environmental hazards like smoke and landmines add to the confusion. Clones also have abilities that make it even harder to pick them out of the crowd and eliminate them. All this builds excellent tension that keeps players hooked level after level.

The game is also a roguelike. Each run brings a new set of mutators and challenges to contend with, ranging from relatively simple (everyone is bald, making it harder to differentiate between innocents and clones) to devastating (you have one weapon with one shot). Killing clones and completing optional challenges awards DNA points spent on permanent progression upgrades to individual weapons and the player character. These systems are a nice addition that add to replayability and ensure the game changes significantly as one plays.

It Has My Face is set in a bleak futuristic world where the masses struggle and die in smog-ridden industrial slums, kept in their place by omnipresent enforcers and the complicity of the ruling class. Audio logs found in the levels detail struggles with oppression and fear. The protagonist is the clone of a government scientist tasked with studying and developing countermeasures to the clones, who are of alien nature. Throughout the story, you learn more about the war in the shadows and are dared to pick a side.

Just released in Steam Early Access, It Has My Face currently includes six story chapters, a challenging “Invasion Mode” unlocked after beating story content, and local/online multiplayer. I beat the story content in bout three hours, and have spent some time in Invasion Mode. I haven’t tried multiplayer yet because it doesn’t have matchmaking functionality (you can only play with Steam friends), but I’m sure it’s just as, if not even more nail-biting of an experience.

With this game, what you see is what you get. The concept is the game — kill your clone before it kills you. Everything else is gravy. If you like the idea of playing “Guess Who” with guns, It Has My Face is for you. If you want more mechanical and narrative complexity from your roguelikes, this game might not be for you. I’m certainly keeping my eye on this one as it goes through Early Access.

Now, did I write this, or was it my clone?

Central to Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, are the consequences of identity. How people shape individual and collective belief systems, how oppressors exploit, diminish and flatten identity to make it easy for jackboots to stomp all over it, and how revolutionaries celebrate their own and society’s potential in the face of an insidious status quo. The film has been called timely — this cannot be understated. One Battle is a screaming alarm clock of a film.

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The film opens with a thrilling heist sequence. Masked, armed men and women of the group known as the French 75 abscond not with cash or jewels, but with people: immigrants herded and locked in a detention camp on the border. Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) leads this group of noble thieves, packing firepower in her voice and manner even her Beretta can’t hope to match. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Pat, a bomber and Perfidia’s right hand and lover. The pair have a lust for one another only exceeded by their lust for the cause. Naturally, Perfidia soon bears a daughter, but while Pat easily transitions into fatherhood, even a child can’t extinguish Perfidia’s revolutionary spark.

Neither can Steven Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn in a performance that puts the buff in buffoonery. Fanatical, gruff, and perverted, Lockjaw pursues The French 75 (and more specifically, Perfidia) with all the might of the federal government at his back. He catches her after a botched bank robbery and gives her a choice: go to prison, or rat out her comrades. Perfidia chooses the latter, earning Lockjaw a promotion and an introduction to the Christmas Adventurers, a white supremacist group that balances on the perfect knife’s edge of menacing and ridiculous.

Meanwhile, Pat escapes to a new life with his daughter, and 16 years later they’ve settled in as Bob, addled by drugs and alcohol, and Willa, a headstrong teen more of a parent to her father than the reverse. But Lockjaw catches up with them, leading to a frantic chase through the desert hills as the forces of fascism and revolution collide. On one side: Camouflaged brutes whose uniforms say “Police” but whose methods mark them as the anonymous enforcers of an authoritarian status quo. On the other side: People, as diverse as America prides itself on being, working, living, and when necessary, fighting for their right to exist. None of them are perfect, but together they bring the verve to bear against the tear gas and riot shields of their oppressors. It is the great conflict of our time.

The movie I thought of most while watching One Battle was Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful Army of Shadows, which catalogues the struggles of the French Resistance against the Nazis in Vichy-era France. Both films pit seasoned revolutionaries against the forces of the status quo, highlighting the near-impossible odds of the good fight while also underscoring just how necessary the good fight is. Where the films diverge is in tone: Melville’s film is painted with the same icy brush as his gangster masterpieces Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge. Melville shows us how paranoia and sacrifice permeate revolutionary struggle, how fragile hope is, and how lonely resistance can be. His protagonists are pragmatic, hardened, even numbed by their commitment to the cause. In contrast, One Battle is strikingly warm: The French 75 is one enormous family, one that grows with every act of resistance and every feat of kindness. The revolutionaries barely acknowledge the long odds they face, even as the powers that be deploy their most brutal tactics and fight as dirty as they can. The love between Bob and Willa, even though they spend most of the film apart, is more palpable than that of any on-screen parent-child pairing of recent memory. Anderson wants to show us how love flourishes in the fight, and how love is a more powerful weapon than any machine gun or explosive (though you might need a few of those, too).

What marks One Battle as a true masterpiece is how Anderson is able to wrap such an emotionally and politically dense film in a bewilderingly fun action thriller. What might have been a ponderous 160 minutes flies by in what seems like no time at all, propelled by exhilarating chase sequences, tense interrogations, and the best car chase of the past decade. At points, the film is laugh-out-loud funny, mostly stemming from Bob’s issues with drugs and his conflict with the ultra-woke revolutionaries of 2025. Anderson isn’t afraid to poke a little fun at his heroes — not even the most noble of movements is immune to the mores shaped by the Internet and personal vainglory.

All this is supported by One Battle’s technical achievement. I’d never heard of VistaVision before, but now I can’t go back. I can’t describe its effect very well, but I simply came away from One Battle wondering how what I saw wasn’t real. The environments are crammed with detail, the characters look and feel like people I could reach out and touch. The action is as punchy as something from the Coens or Sheridan, but never overshadows the narrative. The music is excellent as well — I’ll highlight a sinister rendition of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” as a personal favorite from the film.

I think it would be hard to come away from One Battle without being at least a little radicalized. I harbor no illusions that everyone who watches the film is destined to become a dedicated anti-fascist (though shouldn’t we all be?), but Anderson is able to illustrate modern revolutionary struggle so well, I hope audiences come away from the film more thoughtful and critical of society’s construction. Where Melville was tinged with cynicism, Anderson remains staunchly committed to hope, a position that I think is not just morally admirable but also more artistically powerful. One Battle is a film about now: Now, more than ever, is the time to fight for ourselves and each other, arm in arm.

Among the most powerful emotions we have access to is revulsion. Evolutionarily, it’s pretty helpful: Don’t eat that rotten fruit. Don’t hang around dead things. Avoid touching the detritus in the sink at all costs. Pigface is a game about detritus. About rolling around in the muck and exploring places one wouldn’t step five miles within in real life. It’s revolting, but in the dinginess developer titolovesyou displays real craft, both in gameplay and narrative design.

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In Pigface, you play as Exit, a career criminal conscripted by a voice on a phone called Caesar to massacre gangsters at the various underworld hideouts. Caesar has leverage over Exit in the form of a bomb implanted at the base of her skull, but Exit doesn’t need that kind of extrinsic motivation to murder. As Caesar remarks after one mission, Exit enjoys this kind of work. And so, perversely, do we. Pigface is working in the same narrative space as games like Hotline Miami, which greet us with spectacles of violence, but also highlight the monstrousness of corrupted humans who engage in such gory feats.

Pigface makes no illusions about the goals of Exit and her employer. There’s no righteous crusade being pursued through despicable methods. The game doesn’t even make us choose between shades of moral gray — it’s a game about shadows attacking and consuming one another, because it’s in their nature.

The game is a FPS set in large, sandbox-style levels resembling those of Hitman, though not quite as large or as living. These aren’t glamorous international locales full of crowds to blend into and disguises to don — these are ruins on the outskirts of an industrial hellscape, dilapidated hovels where gangsters ply drugs and guns under the leaking and rusted pipes of a failed economy. Pigface’s environments are made for violence, where the blast of a shotgun or the crack of a rifle would barely register. All the better for Exit, because she has a lot of triggers to pull.

At the beginning of each level, players choose from a selection of weapons and equipment, are given a number of goals that involve collecting hidden items, destroying caches of drugs and weapons, and killing people. Lots of killing people. Exit can do it quiet or she can do it loud, with pipes or pistols, with landmines or machine guns. Enemies scream in pain and their heads comically spurt blood when shot. Their limp bodies flop around when they take a shotgun blast or baseball bat to the chest. Meanwhile, Exit chuckles as she conducts her violent work with glee.

Early on, Pigface seems a bit easy, but when the levels begin to open up and are filled with armored enemies equipped with assault rifles, sniper rifles, and shotguns, the difficulty definitely ramps up. The combat is frantic and fun, with guns kicking wildly and generally feeling as dangerous as they should be. Melee weapons are also used, but ammo is so plentiful I found myself never really switching to them unless I ran out of bullets at an inopportune time. Furthermore, the enemy AI is a bit dumb, running around wildly and not reacting much to what’s going on around them. Because Pigface is in Steam Early Access, balancing changes and the fleshing out of the combat systems are sure to come with feedback from players and additional development time.

Perhaps Pigface’s biggest strengths are its aesthetics and atmosphere. Taking inspiration from early 2000’s shooters, the game’s graphics are as grungy as its setting. With smeared textures and horrifying facial models, Pigface reinforces its gritty aesthetic at every turn. While I wouldn’t call the game revolutionary in any main area, it is, so far, a project singular in its vision that expertly pursues a specific tone and executes this competently.

Burglars across America know to beware the baseball bat under the bed. The last line of home-defense for the gun-averse, the bat is, nonetheless, a brutal, blunt instrument. Stick some nails in the end and you’ve got an A-grade zombie killer. Even in its stock configuration, a bat in the hands of someone with a halfway decent swing can put an unwitting home invader in the hospital — or worse. Robert de Niro shows us the brutal power of the baseball bat in The Untouchables, splattering the brains of a hapless subordinate across the dinner table. Austin Butler plays a washed up baseball player in Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, Caught Stealing, and while he’s got the swing, Caught Stealing doesn’t have enough savagery behind it to stand out from its contemporaries.

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Caught Stealing is a crime caper in the Ritchian format. Hank (Butler) is cat-sitting for his neighbor from across the pond, Russ, when two Russian gangsters make a house call. Hank is brutally beaten, and discovers that it’s about a certain $4 million in drug money owed to not just one but four criminal parties — none evidently patient enough for a man with a dying father in London. Hank finds, then promptly loses, the key to the cash in a bender while still fresh off kidney surgery, leading to a lot of running around, reckless driving, and automatic gunfire. Hank has a bum knee and a bum conscience after a car wreck totaled his baseball career and killed his best friend, but is able to evade his pursuers well enough, if not his personal demons.

Aronofsky puts the ingredients together: an eye-watering amount of money just out of reach, ethnically-diverse criminals all jockeying for the cash and not fucking around, guns, booze, and a handsome loser caught in the middle of it all. However, Caught Stealing just doesn’t have enough spice.

We see glimpses of the edginess the movie needed to pop: The aforementioned beating is bold, and followed up by an eye-watering scene featuring fresh sutures. Hank’s traumatic past is also well-realized, with the requisite “waking up from nightmare” moments hitting home using sound effects that mix a baseball bat making contact with the crunch of a car wrapping around a pole at high speed. However, the meat of the film feels sedate: the violence on screen is believable, but Hank’s adversaries feel toothless when carnage isn’t actively unfolding. Hank takes serious punishment over a brisk 107 minutes, but Butler never quite lets us feel it through him. Caught Stealing is a bloody movie, yet feels remarkably bloodless.

Hank’s neighbor is a grungy British rocker with a spiky mohawk, a closet full of dark jackets and a penchant for rapid profanity. His character’s energy, and the energy of the music composed by British punk band The Idles for the film, is the kind of energy that Caught Stealing needed an infusion of. The film wants to show us chaos, but narratively plays it safe. There’s not enough style on display to compete with films like Snatch or Collateral. Aronofsky seems to want to invoke New York City’s everything-and-more atmosphere but doesn’t leverage its chaotic reputation to its maximum potential, keeping his characters on fairly strict guide rails and hitting predictable beats on the way.

I can imagine a version of Caught Stealing with the dials turned up: more vicious humor, conflict with more bite, characters with more ruthlessness and savagery — even our protagonist. The film’s antagonists peg Hank as a softie, not a killer, but what if Aronofksy let the leash slack a bit? What if Hank put the bat of his to good use, preferably to the rhythm some thrashing drums? I don’t know if this version of the film would be better, but I think it would at least get the blood pumping a little bit more.

As the press circuit for Caught Stealing has borne out, the true star of the movie is Tonic, who plays Bud the cat, who Hank nearly gets shot to death for on multiple occasions. He’s fluffy, he has the face of an angel, I want him for my own. Hank tells us he’s a biter, and he nips at the bad guys a few times, but we know he’s truly a softy. Tonic is regal and playful, like all the best cats, but I wonder if the film would have been better served by an alley Tom, a scarred thing liberal with tooth and claw. With a little more edge, with a little more bite, Caught Stealing could have sat at the caper table with Ritchie and Mann and the Coen brothers. As it stands, though, the film is a fun ride with missed potential — a respectable double, if not a home run.

The world will never be the same.

This week, I tried out the demos for two upcoming roguelike deckbuilders: Demon Bluff and The Royal Writ. They couldn’t be more dissimilar — the former is a singleplayer take on Werewolf while the latter is a deviously clever lane-based strategy game about sending cute anthropomorphic animal soldiers to their inevitable demise. Actually, now that I think about it, both games ask you to make terrible sacrifices that, unfortunately for the sacrifices, they are quite satisfying to enact.

Both also make my head hurt, but in a fun way.

Demon Bluff

I’ve played my fair share of social deduction games, but my experience with classic Werewolf is limited to its lightning-quick “One Night” version. The premise of the original game and its brethren generally boils down into “some of you are evil, figure out who.” Cue pointing and yelling. Social deduction games work because they are enjoyed with a group, preferably of people you know well enough to not take offense if you call them a treacherous sneak. Demon Bluff decides friends are overrated and instead casts you as a village head tasked with executing Demons and their Minions who have disguised themselves as innocent Villagers. Each round, you are presented with a circle of characters, each offering different information or activated abilities. These start simple: The Hunter tells you how far away the closest Evil character is, the Lover narcs on her neighbors, the Slayer lets you test another Villager for evilness. With enough overlapping information, it becomes a simple matter to deduce who are the wolves and who are the sheep…Except some of the information is false.

Demons and Minions lie, and to make matters worse, may corrupt innocent Villagers to make them lie too! There are also the Outcasts, who aren’t evil but have detrimental abilities…Thus the question of whose head to lop off becomes a complicated one. Of course, there are methods of catching the Evil characters in their lies, which makes one feel quite clever indeed. “You claim both your neighbors to be Evil, yet this contradicts the testimony of the Jester, who I know to vouch true from the testimony of the Judge… Begone, foul beast!” Moments like these — where the web of lies unravels and loyalties become clear — are what make Demon Bluff sing. And I didn’t have to raise by voice or alienate my friends once!

A few frustrations do make for scarlet letters in this village. Sometimes, you draw a crappy village that offers mostly useless information, turning a round into pure guesswork. The demo was also absent of roguelike elements that promise the upgrading of trusted Villagers and the removal of bad ones. Overall, however, Demon Bluff smartly replicates the tension of social deduction in a compelling singleplayer package.

Demon Bluff releases on Steam in Q1 2026.

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The Royal Writ

The Royal Writ looks cute, but is anything but. This anthropomorphic animal kingdom has a severe case of Evil Vizier Syndrome, and we’re the duped king on a suspiciously-long warpath at the behest of our most trusted advisors. To eliminate the threats to our kingdom, we deploy a colorful cast of soldiers to march across a lane-based battlefield. When they reach the end of the line, they, uh, die.

OK, if I’m going to be honest, I don’t quite understand The Royal Writ’s form of warfare. Where are the enemy armies? Why am I deploying nuns and bankers to the front? What’s up with all these goddamn streams? The Royal Writ seems to take its cues from Cole Wehrle’s Root, hiding devilishly-complex mechanics underneath a deceptive woodland aesthetic. Luckily, even a tactless tactician like myself can understand a little basic arithmetic, that is, chips—I mean, strength— and mult. Each unit card in The Royal Writ either contributes strength or multiplier to your total, which chips at the health of the enemy defenses each turn. Units get stronger as they move across the battlefield, but also closer to their dooms. Furthermore, environmental hazards, equipment, and relics complicate things further. That’s not even getting into boss abilities (your turn lasts only as long as the music? Clever, yet infuriating) and the various vendors and minigames present in the game’s branching overworld.

I sense The Royal Writ will be a poster child for the “easy to learn, hard to master” crowd. In the demo, I was pleased by the depth of strategy I was able to glean from the interactions between various cards, but got overwhelmed by the sheer number of interlocking systems at play both in and outside of combat. The game’s cute style and charming humor more than make up for these initial hurdles, however, and I can’t wait to see what the full game looks like when it releases in just over a week.

The Royal Writ releases on Steam August 7.

Ethan and Joel Coen have made 20 films together, and I’ve seen just over a quarter of them: Fargo, Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men, Miller’s Crossing, Burn After Reading, and most recently, O Brother, Where Art Thou? I wouldn’t call myself a Coen expert by any means, but I find myself drawn to the pair’s penchant for directing crime films that are both funny and fierce.

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No Coen caper is alike, yet they share a powerful style — varying in tone and setting, but singular in their depiction of morality’s messiness. Protagonists like H.I. McDunnough, Llewelyn Moss, and Ulysses Everett McGill chase after glittering rewards always just out of grasp while being chased in turn by terrifying and sinister forces that seem beyond human. Some are stupid, some are clever, all are determined to get what they want by any means necessary and almost always do but never keep it for very long, because men like Anton Chigurh always come to collect.

The Coen brothers love to play in the sandbox of the American Dream, building up a sandcastle of ease earned after a hard life and then kicking it down. That baby has a bounty on its head. That suitcase of money has a tracker in it. There was no treasure. It was a set up. She doesn’t love you. The Coens dangle in front of their protagonists objects they see as their salvation but only brings them doom. But that doesn’t stop them for fighting for the American Dream, and it doesn’t stop us for rooting for them even if we know on some level their efforts will end in tragedy. The Coen brothers make us want to want it, too, bringing us tantalizingly close to the dream before waking us up from it, usually through shocking and sudden outbursts of violence.

The Coens are uniquely attached to another American institution — the 2nd Amendment. It’s not unreasonable to assume that any character who appears on screen in a Coen crime film is armed, visibly or otherwise. Of course the pimply convenience store cashier in Raising Arizona carries a ridiculous .44 Magnum. H.I. himself carries no fewer than three guns on his person during the film’s climax. More often than not, characters in Coen movies turn to guns to solve their problems. The John Wick films these are not, however — the gunplay in Coen movies is never quite as cool as it is in films of that caliber. Sometimes it’s farcical, other times it’s brutal, and occasionally it’s both. Coen brothers use violence as a way to create instantaneous tragedy and to heighten the fallout of very human conflicts. A gun in a Coen movie is a catalyst to turn a conflict into a vendetta and a mistake into a disaster.

Coen movies are deeply, tragically, American.

The Coens film in desolate places where poverty and opportunity powerfully combine. From the wintry expanses of Fargo to the liminal forest killing ground of Miller’s Crossing, the Coens present us with haunting settings that make us feel like we can get away with anything. Regular people scramble to survive in these breeding grounds for crime and violence, and those who keep their head down more often than not pulled into the crossfire of those who try to claw their way out of the pit. These are not grand stages for epic conflicts, but squalid rat dens where it’s eat or be eaten.

If the Brothers Coen are the second coming of the Brothers Grimm, they also manage to sprinkle whimsy and humor across the bloody and the brutal. Even No Country, perhaps the darkest of them all, dips into absurdity when a bruised and battered Josh Brolin is serenaded by a mariachi band. The Coens are masters of black comedy, infusing slapstick humor and genuine wit into gritty stories of crime and failure (often, it’s the crime and the failure that is funny to begin with). Even something as dark as a kidnapper fed into a wood-chipper or a triple homicide spiraling out from a botched traffic stop become vehicles for nervous chuckles in spite of ourselves. We see both the darkest and dumbest sides of humanity in Coen movies, and that’s the double-edge that gives them their comic bite.

It’s no wonder the Coens have their fair share of imitators. Recent films like The Last Stop in Yuma County and Emily the Criminal reach for the heights of the duo’s oeuvre but don’t quite stick the landing. I find these films put a lot of effort into replicating the slickness or the rat-a-tat-tat pace of Coen films but don’t execute the thematic throughline with the brothers’ poise or confidence. It’s easy for a film to be cynical, bloody, or funny, but making a film that’s all three and blends these elements cohesively is an elusive task indeed.

I’ll be watching more Coen films for sure — The Big Lebowski is next, likely followed by the brothers’ first, Blood Simple. I highly recommend Fargo, and No Country for Old Men is almost a perfect film. Raising Arizona is hilarious, Miller’s Crossing is mostly excellent but a little confusing, O Brother is a comedic epic, and Burn After Reading is the only one that didn’t really click with me. If you want to laugh, gasp, and hold your breath all during the same film, give any of these a watch.

Rules of a Coen Brothers Film

1. Someone, somewhere, has a plan.

2. It’s wildly ambitious and involves a large sum of money, real or imagined.

3. It’s a bad plan.

4. It will be a success.

5. Success is the worst thing that could have happened.

6. Everyone is armed.

7. Someone’s getting shot.

8. Nobody’s getting the money.

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Sunderfolk is both a visionary in a new field of gaming and a member of what’s been seen as a dying breed for some time. Sunderfolk is not just a slickly-produced, phone-connected coich co-op game, but also a highly-accessible introduction to roleplaying, especially for families like mine, who have mixed gaming and RPG experience. While the game prioritizes approachability, Sunderfolk’s RPG-like elements and tactical combat had enough depth to keep a roleplaying veteran thoroughly entertained — if hungry for more.

In Sunderfolk, up to four players control one of six anthropomorphic animal characters assigned classes that determine their playstyle — I played Dirk the Rogue, an ex-assassin weasel specialized in devastating hit-and-run tactics. The others in my party included Stormcrow the corvid Arcanist, Toasty the axolotl Pyromancer, and Legolaaas the Ranger. You begin, of course, in a tavern in Arden, an underground city of animalfolk kept safe from subterrenean terrors by the Life Tree. The city is threatened, however, when a mysterious corruption befalls the tree, and it’s up to the players to safeguard Arden from ogres, undead, and other hostile creatures while trying to restore the Life Tree.

The narrative is standard fantasy fare, and while the writing doesn’t meet the heights of its epic contemporaries, Sunderfolk manages to deliver excitement and charm. The game is fully-voiced by Anjali Bhimani, who you might know best as the voice of Symmetra from Blizzard’s Overwatch, replicating the feel of playing Dungeons & Dragons with a passionate dungeonmaster who comes equipped with voices for every character. Some of those voices might be a little grating, but Bhimani’s gusto for the role keeps eye-rolling to a minimum. The narrative is also developed through conversations with Arden’s citizenry, who engage with players as story events unfold. Depending on their choices in these chats, players can make friends or enemies, receive gifts, and flesh out their backstory.

As someone with plenty of RPG experience, including Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3, I was most excited for Sunderfolk’s turn-based tactical combat, which is the meat of gameplay. Combat takes place on a hexagonal grid scattered with environmental features like treasure chests, barriers, and bottomless pits. Each turn, players select from one of their Skill Cards, determining their actions for that turn. Each skill card generally features some combination of moving, attacking, or performing special actions like summoning decoys to confuse enemies. Actions must be performed in the order they appear on the card, which creates interesting tactical considerations.

RPG veterans might be relieved or disappointed, depending on their luck, Sunderfolk does not feature dice rolls. Instead, attacks draw from a customizable deck of cards with positive, neutral, or negative outcomes that modify an attack’s damage or apply other effects. This elegant system retains some of the chanciness of dice RPGs while removing the frustration of the dreaded Crit Fail nullifying an action entirely. Enemies use the same system as players, but, excepting for boss characters, draw from a simplified deck with just one or two unique actions. A smattering of other complications include numerous buffs and debuffs, Trinkets that give players special actions used once per battle, and Weapons that do the same but can be reused when certain battle conditions are met. On the whole I felt Sunderfolk’s combat to be in a Goldilocks Zone that balanced challenge and complexity with accessibility very well.

Sunderfolk’s cooperative experience and progression mechanics are also well-implemented. Players are encouraged to find synergies between Skill Cards, and because players can act in any order they wish each round, it’s easy to set up big moves. For example, Dirk was great at teleporting into the fray and delivering strikes to multiple enemies, but often needed support to finish off weakened foes who threatened to gang up on him at the end of the round. Toasty’s Friendly Fire skill delivers an explosive blast centered around an ally, also buffing them. Outside of combat, we worked together to upgrade Arden’s buildings, putting new items up for sale and offering new permanent buffs. This between-mission break served as a great way to cool off after an intense battle while also making the combat more rewarding, allowing us to spend our new loot and chat with the NPCs we were protecting from danger.

I want to emphasize Sunderfolk’s singular attention toward accessibility. Because the game is controlled from personal devices, those unfamiliar with console controls don’t have to worry about navigating sticks, buttons, triggers, or bumpers. Gameplay mechanics, including buffs, debuffs, movement, and more are all explained in guides and tooltips accessible at the tap of a finger. While gestures were occasionally fiddly, these small hiccups never broke gameplay flow. Someone who has never played an RPG before could pick up Sunderfolk instantly, and the game’s themes and story are also suitable for most all ages.

If I have one gripe with Sunderfolk, it’s the few bugs and questionable logic I encountered in my playthrough with my family. Sometimes, an action wouldn’t work as anticipated due to some kind of mechanical inconsistency — for some actions, inanimate objects behaved as monsters did, and for others they didn’t — or a monster would behave in an unexpected way. Again, these are minor issues that don’t detract from the overall package. Sunderfolk is a refreshing take on couch co-op gaming that also keeps the highlights of what makes classic co-op games good. I’d be interested to see the Sunderfolk formula applied to other themes and genres: How about X-COM Jr. or Shadowrun Lite?

The last thing I’ll mention is the hilarious opportunities Sunderfolk gives players to name in-game entities. We had enemies like “Pew-Pews” and “Shai-Hulud,” and half the buildings in Arden were christened after their Lord of the Rings equivalents. It’s not something I’ve seen in a game before and it definitely adds to the RPG experience.

The headline of this piece is “Baby’s First Baldur’s Gate,” but I mean that in the most complementary way possible. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a beast of a game, one I’d hesitate to introduce to anyone who hasn’t played Dungeons & Dragons or is inexperienced in tactical combat. Sunderfolk, on the other hand is a game I’d introduce to practically anyone, as its depth, ease of play, and charm offer something for everyone.

Lazarus should have been good.

The Adult Swim anime series, which finished airing its first season this weekend, had the Mandate of Heaven — helmed by legendary anime director Shinichirō Watanabe, the show’s action scenes were supervised by Chad Stahelski of the John Wick series and animated by MAPPA, a studio with no shortage of hits. Furthermore, Lazarus came onto the scene with a sleek cyberpunk world, a techno-thriller plot promising Mission Impossible-esque delights, and a groovy soundtrack courtesy of Kamasi Washington, Bonobo, and Floating Points.

Despite having the deck stacked in its favor, Lazarus fails spectacularly on the narrative level, and its lush production isn’t enough to salvage an aimless plot and characters without an iota of charm, motivation, or development between them.

But if we’re falling from heaven, we have to start from the top.

Lazarus is set in the near-future, where a miracle drug called Hapna that relieves the worst pain without any immediate side-effects has taken the world by storm. The immediate part is important because it turns out Hapna’s formulation contains quite the surprise — a mutation triggered three years after being administrated resulting in a 100% fatality rate.

Häpna, translated from Swedish, means “surprise.”

The inventor of the drug, Dr. Skinner, reveals this via a viral video statement 30 days before the first Hapna patients would start to die. At this point, most of humanity has taken the drug at some point. In 30 days, the world will come to an end — unless Dr. Skinner, who’s dropped off the face of the Earth — can be found.

Cool, right? A high-stakes plot with a tight and definite conclusion with the potential for mystery, intrigue, and action — and, knowing Watanabe’s previous work, musings on societal construction, politics, and theology. A question underpinning this plot: How do we react when we’re confronted with extinction?

Lazarus picks an obvious answer: Try and stop it. Duh. That’s where our cast of rogues and operatives, handpicked by the NSA (yup, that NSA) to find and search for Dr. Skinner, come in. We’ve got Axel, a chronic prison escapee and snark machine, Chris, a femme fatale and ex-spy, Elena, a hacker who does her damnedest to convince audiences she’s secretly a robot, Leland, a literal high-schooler who happens to be OK at piloting drones, and finally Doug, a guy.

If you aren’t exactly excited to meet this team, you aren’t missing much. They do little to distinguish themselves, apart from Elena, who "hacks,” which really means “deliver plot-relevant information to her tech-illiterate teammates.” But we’ll return to Lazarus’ weak characters in a bit. For now, let’s revisit the big question Lazarus seems to pose: How will humanity cope with its end?

The show shrugs at us.

Over the course of 13 episodes, Lazarus tells us it’s business as usual. The club’s open, the market’s up, the water’s fine. Government agencies plan coverups that won’t matter in a month and ready themselves for a World War III that will be lost without firing a single shot. What could’ve been a pitched debate between pessimism and hope instead is reduced to a venue for cheap political squabbling.

In their search for Skinner, The Lazarus crew could have found themselves back against the wall, face-to-face with death, the burden of the world’s end laying on their questionably competent shoulders. In their shoes, I’d scream “Why me?! Why does nobody care but me?!” But they too, shrug. They snark. They reiterate their desire to find Skinner, because that is their purpose for existing. They talk to people, and occasionally kill them. They chase false leads and red herrings for three quarters of the show’s runtime. The protagonists spend all this time running in circles but never stop to consider the shape of their actions. Frustration at Skinner’s elusiveness is fleeting. There are no quiet moments of doubt shared between colleagues, or crises of faith whispered after being punted back to square one. The sand in the hourglass simply slips away.

The show’s seventh episode, “Almost Blue,” shows us what almost could’ve been. In it, the protagonists investigate yet another dead end — a group of sunken islands Dr. Skinner purchased before climate change returned them to the sea. They meet people indigenous to these islands whose pain-blocking genes were instrumental to the development of Hapna. Despite his apocalyptic scheme, these people are grateful for Skinner for providing them the financial windfall needed to resettle before their home was lost forever. In a quiet, introspective episode, our protagonists split up to investigate these islands, discovering scenes of abandonment, as well as tragic natural beauty. Chris wonders aloud if Dr. Skinner intended for those searching for him to discover these places, to consider the state of a world without humans. Lazarus, when the gunfire quiets and the snark is silenced, is, briefly, beautiful.

The following episodes are a dizzying parade of rescues, shootouts, and chases. Lazarus signs its soul away to the devil of action, drowning out anything that could remotely provoke thought and consideration with explosions and punching.

It’s not like juggling complex sci-fi worldbuilding, action, and heavy themes is impossible. 1995’s Ghost in the Shell and its 2002-2005 TV series Stand Alone Complex offered deep consideration of questions of identity, memory, and politics without sacrificing cool action and mystery. Watanabe’s own Cowboy Bebop, which established Adult Swim’s anime segment Toonami as a household name almost 25 years ago, is as memorable for its melancholic musings on loss and regret as its slick action and upbeat tempo. Lazarus gestures ineffectually at the highs of its predecessors.

Lazarus could have used the 30 days of its plot and the 13-episodes of its production to show us humanity’s fall from grace and the desperate attempt by a complex cast of fallen angels to return it from the dead, but instead, it wastes the time it has to deliver us a nonsensical thriller that leaves us neither in heaven or hell, rising or falling, but stuck looking on impassively at the unfulfilling salvation of an implausible future.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this first entry in my Smash & Grab review series. Smash & Grab is free, but if you like it and want to support me in continuing to write these reviews, I encourage you to subscribe!

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