Games I Played In 2026 And Whether Or Not I Thought They Were Good (1/?)
(2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025)
Listen! I play a lot of videogames! And I have a lot of opinions on videogames! If you're following me, you're just gonna have to live with that. Every year I gab about all the stuff I've played, and confer information upon you pursuant to the title of this post.
You may notice that 2026 is not over yet! I find that when I do my big end-of-year reviews posts, I tend to have trouble remembering all the stuff I wanted to say about games I played earlier in the year, when they're less fresh in my mind. So I'm gonna try doing these bad boys biannually, instead.
This thing? This thing is adorable. It's this little open-world collectathon about little kids pretending to go on a Zelda-style fantasy adventure, sort of a Breath of the Wild meets A Short Hike meets Craig of the Creek situation. It's funny and oozes charm out of every pore- but it's also just a blast to play.
Lil Gator Game just keeps giving you movement options, is the thing. The devs were like "Huh, yeah, it would be fun if the player could surf on their shield to build up speed. I'll put that in. And how about a special shield that lets you bounce around? Or an item that lets you ragdoll at will to make your physics go wacky? Or a balloon that lets you float into the air? Or a sticky hand to swing from? Yes, all of that, why not?"
It's chock full of toys, is the thing. Everything you do rewards you with a new toy to play with, and while some are clearly better and more efficient than others, they all feel great to use. It's especially fun in the DLC, which takes place in a big cave system, and which turns all the weapons into movement options too. And gives you PS2 Spiderman powers too because why not? It's just joyful all the time. It's easy as hell because of all the busted tools they give you, but like, it's never the kind of easy that's not fun. This is a game you can give to a small child and they'll be able to beat it, which is I'm pretty sure the intention.
Oh and it's got this really heartwarming story about sibling connection and growing up and the generation gap that made me cry too. That is also a thing. It kinda works on every level.
Meet the new thing that's been devouring my time. It's an autobattler, wherein you manage a team of little guys with different stats and abilities, and they line up in front of another team of little guys and deterministically smack each other until only one is left standing. You don't control the battles, but you do control your build, at least as long as the random-rolled shop pets and buff foods are cooperating.
And it's just real good. It's "I have 100%'d the game" good, and then I kept playing after 100%ing it and 100%'d it again on hard mode. It's this deviously calibrated mix of chance and strategy that gets its hooks in your brain and feels rewarding to play every time. I've gotten kind of obsessed and even uhhhh maybe done a project related to it that will be revealed Eventually, when the fates permit.
My biggest nitpick is the progression system. There's hundreds of pets in this game and the only real progression is collecting ribbons for your pets. You get a ribbon if you beat a run with that pet on your team at level 3. You level a pet up by buying copies of it in the shop and merging them together, and the shop is randomized between rounds and when you pay a gold to reroll it. And, notably, if you win ten rounds you win the run and it's over. So you can't just do well- you have to do well slowly, shooting for ties and throwing games to buy time for enough copies of the motherfucker you're trying to ribbon to randomly show up in the shop. It makes winning into a lose condition!
In fact, when I said I 100%'d it on hard mode- that was actually way easier than the base game, because to get a hard mode ribbon you only need a level 2 pet at the end. This requires half as many copies to spawn, so it's almost never an issue- you can just focus on making your build good and trying to win. Nothing hard mode throws at you is harder to deal with than "winning is actually a lose condition for the thing you care about", so it took like a third of the time it took to beat it normally.
Monster Train 2: Destiny of the Railforged
This was the old thing that was devouring my time. I reviewed it last year. They did a DLC for it. It adds two new factions (okay, one new faction and the DLC faction from the previous game) and also a whole new game mode that's pretty fun and opens up some really busted interactions. I spent another 200 hours on it. That Is Too Many. I will not say anything else about it. The game is very good and you Should Not Play It. I have declined to include a link because you Should Not Play It.
The original Grounded was this really cool open world survival crafting game whose premise was "hey, do you remember Honey I Shrunk The Kids? we do!" and it turned out that premise was enough to carry the entire game even though I felt like a lot of its survival crafting mechanics were frustrating and underbaked. It's just an incredibly fun setting to explore, in how it turns familiar things into larger-than-life videogame obstacles just by shrinking you down.
Grounded 2 iterates on this formula by...
...okay, it doesn't. Like at all. They just copy-pasted every single mechanic, item, and enemy from the first game completely unchanged into a new map. The one big new thing is "Buggies", i.e. a mounts system that admittedly is pretty fun but doesn't meaningfully change the core gameplay loop. The exact same frustrating thirst mechanic that requires you to scramble for dewdrops every morning is back, the exact same kinda janky building system that's overreliant on materials that only spawn in one particular area of the map such that base-building in remote locations is functionally impossible is back, the repetitive resource-hogging gear grinding system is back, the giant HP sponge raid bosses are back... they had a chance to revisit and refine these mechanics and then just didn't.
(Except the dandelion thing. Now you automatically use dandelion tufts from anywhere in your inventory so that the accessory slot is usable for anything else at all ever, rather than being reserved for the single most important mechanic in the game which is Not Dying When You Fall Off A Huge Thing, which you need all the time.)
(...my accessory slot is still reserved for the trinket that makes dandelions never run out of durability. Womp womp.)
It is currently in Early Access- but my group is through all the content so far, and their roadmap doesn't look too encouraging. Next content update is going to be the water area! And yes: it's going to be the exact same water area with the exact same giant unkillable monster koi that punishes you for engaging with the water mechanics! Hooray!
This game is so goddamn cool.
So- you're some hooded whosit. You don't know why you're here or what you're doing, but it kinda seems like it's a good idea to get to the top of this here big tower. You wander around and run into... people!
And you don't speak their language. Whoops.
So alright. You gotta learn their language! You have a notebook where you write down the various glyphs of their language and what they mean, and you eavesdrop on people and compare what they're saying in different contexts, and you figure out that this squiggly shape means this concept, and that squiggly shape means that concept! And you figure out how they're put together, and how the grammar works, until you can read the language and understand what you're supposed to be doing to progress!
Then you get higher in the tower and you meet new people. Who speak a new language. And you have to start all over again. And then start translating between them, to overcome language barriers between characters and understand these elaborate factional conflicts and weird fantasy societies.
This game is so goddamn cool. If you liked Tunic and/or Heaven's Vault, this is a must-play.
(If I have a nitpick: I would say the final area was a little underbaked. It had this really cool glyph-compositing system that I bet would've been so interesting to figure out organically and wrestle with the ambiguity of, but they kinda speed you through it with a bunch of cheat sheets.)
(If I have a second nitpick it's that I hate stealth segments and they keep doing stealth segments to break up the translation gameplay. They're not bad stealth segments but I didn't even want the translation gameplay broken up because it was cool.)
Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane
A few years back, there was an Indiegogo for a wizard-based murder mystery game that was about to fall short of its goal. I dropped a thousand dollars on it to get it over the line, because for mysterious reasons I have an interest in wizard murder mystery games existing. It got made, and then I didn't get around to playing it for a few years because I was busy with other stuff.
It turned out to be really really good actually.
I will say it didn't make a strong first impression- the game is fully ripping off every single thing from Ace Attorney. Like, down to the menus and navigation and stuff. The courtroom is laid out the same, they have OBJECTION! voice lines, there's a hardscrabble police guy who gives the first testimony in most cases working for a hoity-toity prosecutor with a heart of gold, you got someone who can read combinations of four different color-coded emotions from people, you got a Mia, you got a Maya, you got parts where you have to submit the photo of the banana instead of the banana- it's all extremely by the numbers in the first case. Kinda felt asleep at the wheel at first.
But there's worse models to rip off! It had pretty strong mystery fundamentals and intrigued me enough to keep going. And I gotta say, it paid off. Once it takes the Ace Attorney training wheels off and starts doing its own thing, it's pretty fascinating. The fantasy worldbuilding has a lot of interesting details going on, and the way they're woven into the cases is really pretty clever a lot of the time. They do some really smart stuff with the magic system to keep it legible for a murder mystery, and it all works pretty well.
And it keeps ramping up! Every successive case is better than the last one! Things get more and more complex, you get some really cool and scary antagonists, and it all culminates in a finale that really uses all the little details it set up to incredible effect. There's even an Umineko red truth duel in it!
(I think I experienced the version of the story that benefited from extensive editing- there were a couple cases in the middle where I had to look up a walkthrough a couple times, and found a walkthrough for a completely rewritten old version of the case instead. I think case 3 especially suffers a little bit from, like, a ton of little details being irrelevant because they got written out in the second pass. It's the chapter-based mystery games curse......)
Last Train Outta' Wormtown
This one's just fun. It's an asymmetrical multiplayer co-op/PVP the-floor-is-lava game, where a bunch of cowboys pardners are trying to repair and prepare a train to escape a ruined town by running around the map completing various objectives.
However, there is a worm. One player is a giant Dune-style sandworm that wants to eat all the pardners. The catch? They can't see. Their vision is based on sound, and they can only see you when you're walking without rhythm on the sand. So you've got to scramble around the map repairing tracks and getting fuel and whatnot without touching the ground- something the map design doesn't allow you to always do. You've got to coordinate with your pardners to distract, mislead, and escape the worm as you do all this stuff, and it's just a really great time. Here's a fun video where you can see it in action.
Only real problem is... the game's kinda dead. Really hard to find a public lobby, so you've got to have a friend group to play it with. I've been lucky since Jello's been playing it whenever he gets a chance and I've wormed my way into his usual playgroup, but you'll have to find like, five or so other people to play it with. (Luckily, only one person needs to own the game to host, and everyone else can play for free.)
Gonna do another batch of these soon, and then do the rest at the end of the year.
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