Cool Stuff I Liked in June 2026
My Friendly Little Island - Super cute little Game Boy indie game with good vibes and satisfying progression. Seems like there are a ton more GB Studio games now than the last time I searched for them, so I’ve got to remember that that’s a whole other category of good games to check out and play. I really enjoyed playing this, and unlocked lots of worthwhile secrets!
Hunt A Killer: Lakeside Slaughter - Okay so when the heading of this section is “Cool Stuff I Liked Playing in June 2026”, that means physical board games go in this category, right? We celebrated Memorial Day a little late this year, and this game was something that the fam got together to solve. We’ve played a few games in this Hunt A Killer series, with I think our overall favorite being Dead Below Deck for stumping us the longest. Lakeside Slaughter had a more straightforward resolution but it still led to some great cooperative moments, such as dramatic readings of the alibi interviews, assigning different people to figure out different coded messages (one was a ROT13 cypher! shout out to doyoulikethisvideogamesong), and when we took a lunch break to eat the good stuff from the grill, the conversation about murders and motives continued while sitting on the porch outside (I wonder if any neighbors overheard? 🤔).
For these two, am I allowed to summaries of games I didn’t personally play? 🤔 I watched @wreckscalibur play these, right beside him on the couch, so we kinda enjoyed them together. The experience was there, so I’m officially proclaiming: It counts!
The Adventures of Elliot (Demo) - The full version is out although we haven’t picked it up yet, but the demo was beefy! I’m definitely intrigued by the (Radiant Historia-like?) story and the wonderful characters. The spiritual succession from the Final Fantasy Adventure/early Mana series is tangible, which is a good thing! I’m sure we’ll check out the full version before too long.
Live A Live - Rounding out the HD-2D Power Hour, my partner is playing this for the first time - I’m familiar-ish with the SNES game through the old LParchive Let’s Play. I gave the whole LP a skim and made notes of secrets and missable stuff for him (there are a lot). We still have the last couple of chapters to get through, but man, this game is so good. There’s a reason it’s been such a beloved cult favorite for all of this time, and the remake treatment is both faithful and beautiful. 🙏 My fave characters are Cube, the Earthen Heart Shifu, and [REDACTED]. 🤗
From the many game showcases and conferences this month, the Wholesome Direct was a massive highlight. My most-looked-forward-to's are Capy Castaway, Froggy Brews, Humblets, and Otterly Lost.
From Nintendo’s Direct, the strong points for me were Hello Kitty Party Land (the Premium Edition comes with a coloring book 🥺), a new Xenoblade game, and a very brief but very exciting glimpse of the Ocarina of Time remake.
Also, Yoshi & the Mysterious Book released this month. It has a very cute visual style which I love very much but sidescrolling platformer gameplay isn’t fun for me.
Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders, Vol. 2 - Vol 1 was mentioned last month, Vol 2 is the conclusion (so nice to finish something quickly!). Things wrapped up nicely, with a cute glimpse at a “How did the characters first meet and become friends?” flashback. The colorful, sparkly art is the highlight, or maybe the story emphasis on Gwen’s Mom and her sister Kale, who were once Jewel Riders themselves. Drake is redesigned to be WAY too “cool”; he should be more of a hopeless dweeb to match his role in the original cartoon. It seemed like Merlin’s out-of-character behavior was going to be an important plot point, but then the story ended and a “reason” for his lashing out was extremely briefly mentioned in the epilogue and I was just like 🤨 okay?? We’re just glossing over the casual intention to usurp the throne I guess.
Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): Tangle & Whisper - Had to read some backstory just to learn who these characters are, which involved some research into what chapters they first appeared in and which compilation volumes those ended up in (answer: it’s the end of vol. 2 and some of vol. 3). The “Eggman War” storyline was just. not interesting to me at all LOL so I skipped most of that and just started reading Tangle & Whisper. Got some cute one-off chapters at the start, including some which didn’t feature a single Tangle and/or Whisper at all for some reason (cute stories anyway though), followed by a more serious exploration into the friendship between these two and (gasp) Whisper’s tragic backstory! …Also found that they feature in a TailsTube video! How cool to have read these comics and then see them in motion, with voices! I like Whisper a lot, she is super cool. 🥷
Three Blind Mice - Needed an audiobook to listen to on a drive and picked this. Similar in premise to And Then There Were None. Very evocative writing where you can tell what some of the original stage directions were (it was a stage play before being published as a novel), and easily visualize some of the dramatic cinematography. The “other stories” are a handful of Miss Marple mysteries which we’d also recently listened to from a different collection, but also some Poirots which were new (to us). I never get tired of any of them. 😄
The Burning Page - Started reading this in April, then my library hold lapsed, got it back early this month, read a few pages, then totally forgot about it (not the book’s fault, I just super dedicated myself to art and opening up some merch stores), then my hold lapsed again. Then I got it back last week and have slowly (very slowly) been reading just a little bit at a time. Idk, the stakes are high in this volume and the main emphasis of what’s going on is a big confrontation with the big, dangerous badguy, but to me, the story was much more fun when the characters were actually participating in the premise promised by the blurb (world-hopping librarians traveling to unique alternate histories to collect rare editions of books that are only available in that world). It isn’t really this book’s fault that my interest is waning, because that whole concept of “the stakes eventually raise higher than the fun original premise” is so, SO common in EVERY media, it’s like, a staple of storytelling. Just the usual case of me liking the first book in a series the best and falling off after that.
The Fire Opal - A physical book which I’ve set aside for reading outdoors, and I spent recent months reading comics in my sunshine reading time so this one has been getting neglected, even though I’d basically already reached the end. My progress through his book has been on-hold for so long, the last time I mentioned it was in my 2025 yearly summary. Also, this is book 4 of a series I first started reading as a teenager, easily 15 years ago (or more?) - the magic system based on colors & shapes in this world is sooo cool, and don’t you LOVE the beautiful cover art by Stephanie Pui-mun Law? Anyway, now that I’m finally wrapping up the story, the important plot explanations are being discussed by the characters, and I can’t BELIEVE how badly I failed to catch on to the hints that were dropped about the real identity of the male lead from the start. I definitely was supposed to latch on to the fact that the cousin and her husband that he disapproved of were some of the main characters from book 3, and to notice the suspicious way that he smudged his name when he was signing documents… I didn’t even reread book 3 all that long ago, his name & relation to the previous heroes should have been fresh in my mind, so I don’t feel that I can blame the fact that my reading sessions were so broken up. I just wasn’t paying attention and the super obvious hints flew over my head. 😅
But also, yaaay for Ginger landing herself in a position of power just by being her sweet self 🤗 and burning to smithereens everyone that wronged her. 😊 She deserves a little vengeance inferno, as a treat.
Oh My Goddess: The Movie - I have an extremely nostalgic connection with this movie because I first watched it over a friend’s house when we had a slumber party (where we also connected our Game Boy Advances with link cables and played Four Swords!). This is such a good endpoint to finish off watching the Oh My Goddess anime series in its various incarnations, even though the actual air date of this was between the 90s OVA series and the 00s one. You need some introduction to Peorth and Chihiro and others just to know who they are, as well as get a feel for the escalation of Belldandy & Keiichi’s relationship, so it’s worth watching the 00s seasons first. Plus, the high drama going on in this movie just makes it the perfect place to wrap up the story. 🤗 (I like Celestine. hes hamdsomne)
Tokyo Mew Mew - I’m in the thick of the back half of this now, beyond what 4Kids dubbed, so I gotta watch subs now, which drastically slows down how frequently I can catch an episode. Man, 4kids really cut off right before things went off the rails in a glorious way, with Ichigo actually turning INTO a cat, and that she can talk to other cats now?! Okay!
Sherlock Hound - Have actually been watching this now and again with my partner for a long while now, but since we finished all of Oh My Goddess we filled in that space with what we haven’t seen yet of Sherlock Hound. These stories are just great. 😊 The doggy characters are soooo endearing, every episode has some manner of very exciting vehicle chase scene, and the vintage English dubbing is delightful. Very fun to see how the Sherlock Holmes stories are adapted, a similar feeling to watching anime Poirot & Marple. Genuinely shocked that even super diehard Ghibli/Miyazaki fans never seem to mention this, and it never gets mentioned in cozy/wholesome anime lists either. Is it really just the fact that absolutely no one knows that Sherlock Hound exists? Well I’m here to tell you: it does, and it’s good!
