Shadowman Sucks

 

I managed to knock yet another game off the endless stream request list and it was such a slog to play through that I feel compelled to write a thing about it.  Shadowman was released in 1999 for N64, PS1 and PC with a Dreamcast port also coming out a few months after the initial release.  It's a massive piece of shit that a decent number of people seem to have played but seemingly very few people have actually finished and after finally beating it for myself its extremely easy to understand why.  

The plot of the game is that Jack the Ripper is helping some asshole build a big fuck off castle in the land of the dead and this going to cause an apocolypse so you, playing as Shadowman, have to go and collect "dark souls" and shoot some guys in the face with a gun in order to save the day.  If you thought a game with such a simple plot would be a simple experience then you are quite mistaken.

From some of the footage I had seen prior to playing I had expected the game to be a generic 3rd person action shooter but instead Shadowman turned out to be a weird Metroid-like.  You start the game and make your way into "Deadside" where you are being blocked at almost every turn by soul gates or environmental obstacles that you do not have the skills to get past.  As you slog through you'll collect dark souls to unlock the gates which will unlock more areas which will contain items and skills that allow you to get to more areas to get more dark souls.  Standard stuff.  Part of the issue though is that none of the items or skills you get are interesting at all.  For example, in Metroid when you get the ice beam a number of core things about the game are changed all at once and suddenly you have a lot more options.  The gun is stronger which is satisfying and now you can use enemies to make platforms so your brain might light up as you remember some out of reach areas you might have seen previously.  In Shadowman, I slog through some boring ass beige dungeon to find a knife that lets me use teleporters.  I find about 3 of the fucking things and then the knife sits in my inventory for the rest of the game just as unused and unloved as I imagine Micheal LeRoi to be outside of his time as Shadowman.  The other major things you find, Shadowmans version of finding the Varia Suit, are tattoos that grant you certain abilities such as being able to walk on fire or swim in lava.  Two out of the four of these upgrades, which are a real pain in the ass to get, are only used briefly in very specific sections of the game,  so while in Metroid the varia suit is only useful in a few rooms, at least it has the knock on effect of reducing your incoming damage as well.  The toucher ability in Shadowman, for example, does nothing outside of its stated using and practically speaking it means that you push about 4 cubes and can shimmy across one ledge.  What a fucking waste.  

Maybe none of this would be an issue if it was fun to explore but that sucks massive shit too.  The levels have 2 themes, beige looking caverns or rust colored interiors.  That is the only thing you'll be looking at for the majority of your playthrough.  This isn't just visually boring to look at but causes an issue because this game is labyrinthine as fuck and doesn't give you a map at any point so the samey looking environments just cause constant confusion.  There was one level near the end of the game where there were 3 rooms in a loop and I didn't know I was looping because every corridor looked like the previous one so it was only when I hit the entrance again after about 30 minutes of exploring did I realize that I had double backed on myself.  This then led to another 30 minutes of scanning the muddy graphics for a hole in a wall that I had missed.  Maybe if any effort at all had gone into the visuals or a map button had been implemented maybe so much of my life wouldn't have been wasted.  

Then there's the combat and like every other aspect of this title, it sucks massive dicks.  Your main weapon is a pistol that shoots blue blobs and is the only thing that can kill monsters in Deadside.  You do get a regular pistol, shotgun and machine gun but I don't think I used them a single time since they can't actually deliver the killing blow.  I THINK the idea is that you equip one "real" gun in one hand and your soul pistol in the other and then weaken then enemy with bullets before killing them with shadow-powers.  That still doesn't make any fucking sense though because you also find shadow weapons in Deadside that can kill monsters in exchange for the use of some MP or some shit.  All of these weapons are hot dogshit and I got some use out of ONE of them against the games singular large enemy type but otherwise, total waste.  The pistol powers up as your soul meter goes up and allows for a charge shot so there's basically no reason to use anything else.  When the weapons aren't out here being ass though, the combat itself, along with the rest of the controls are basically unusable.  Most of the enemies in the game will just stand in place and shoot at you or run at you in a straight line so you don't feel just how bad it is but every so often a boss will turn up that is significantly more mobile than you and things get real miserable real fast.  Shadowman controls a bit like a tank which is fine for the most part.  Like I said, most enemies just stand and shoot so controlling like a S.T.A.R.S. member with broken legs is manageable.  But then you get some enemies that are fucking Dragon Ball Z teleporting around the arena on you and shooting your from all angles and you just have to sit there and impotently watch your life bar decrease as Shadowman takes 4 business days just to turn 180 degrees.  The final boss in particular is flying around a giant arena while shooting homing missles at you from directions that the camera can't see so good fucking luck with that.  Thankfully, if the final boss kills you, instead of returning to a check point you just get a bad ending and after I saw what I was up against I just threw up my hands and let the world end.  

The thing that really killed my enjoyment of the game though, despite all of its awful design, was the bugs and technical issues.  If I had a dollar for every time I got stuck on some level geometry and was unable to move then I could provide the Alzheimer's charity that we are raising money for here a pretty significant research grant.  Then there's certain enemies that look like they should be just minor annoyances but can kill you in seconds because Shadow Man doesn't get any I-Frames on hit.  Tiny fish in bodies of water and dogs, enemies that seem like they are designed to harrass you and deal minor damage while a bigger threat leads a big attack are actually the most dangerous thing in the game as they can drain your HP from full to zero in a matter of frames.  The worst technical problem, though, came in the form of a wall in the final temple en route to the upgrade that lets you swim in lava.  In that temple there is a wall of rotating blades.  The blades move slow and you have to shimmy across a ledge suspended above a death pit to reach the other side.  It's a pathetically easy trap to avoid but due to the gaps in the ledge the game just bugs the fuck out and Shadow Man gets stuck between the two ledges.  Being locked in places means you cant avoid the blade and then the blade knocks you into the death pit.  SOMETIMES the bug doesn't occcur and you can just shimmy through but its basically a dice roll every time and there's a easy but lengthy platforming section you have to restart from EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. the bug kills you.  When the environment isn't killing you then sometimes bosses or enemies might push your shit in because the targetting system just decides to take a day off in the middle of a fight.  It happens mostly with flying enemies  where Shadow Man just gives up on the fight because I guess he has chronic neck pain.  Maybe these complaints aren't true for the Dreamcast and PS1 versions but I'm sure as shit not suffering this crap game again just to find out 

What blows my fucking mind is that this piece of trash got a remaster.  Who the fuck was out there wishing they could replay Shadow Man again with beefed up graphics and a morsel of extra content.  Weirdos, that's who.  If this game ever gets requested on my stream again you can catch my ass taking a voluntary trip to Deadside

Weird Games Getting Weird Sequels

 

I live for weird niche shit.  I don't care if I need to dig through Steam suggestion queues for hours on end or digging through the aisles of a retro game store, I love filling my game libraries with weird crap that no ones played and no one cares about other than me and a few other weirdos.  So imagine my surprise when I'm going through my Steam suggestions only to find that a curio game from my earlier years or something I never hear anyone talking about ever gets a new release in the current year.  I want to shine a light on these newer games so that hopefully I can convince a few more people to try the same weird shit that I like, here we go 

1. Radirgy Swag

Radirgy is a arcade shmup from 2005 that made its way to the Dreamcast and the Gamecube later down the line.  It was Japan only but its built up a bit of a following with shmup fans thanks to its unique artstyle, bangin' OST and interesting gameplay loop that involves slicing things up like its 2am in central London.  

Surprisingly, it got a couple of sequels which I think are both on the Nintendo Switch although if my understanding is correct, the English version of Swag got delisted due to license issue.  I was pretty shocked, then, to find that on the 4th of March 2026, Swag got released to Steam and for 10 bucks and even you can play it right now.  Radirgy 2 is still MIA on PC but apparently you can get it on Switch and PS4.  I'm not sure if thats true for places that aren't Japan but if it is, go check that out too

This is the most normal one of the games I'm about to cover since the original was a shmup and its sequels are also shmups.  Good games too, I'd suggest playing the first one on and emulator for either DC or Gamecube to see if you gel with it and then dropping some support for this game on Steam if you do.  

2. Slave Zero X 

Slave Zero is a 3rd person shooter from 1999 where you control a big ass robot shooting other big ass robots.  This is one I never finished myself since I only ever had the Dreamcast demo of the thing but there's a user on YouTube called pmcTRILOGY who has done speedruns of it that I've enjoyed watching.  One I need to bump up the backlog priority list for sure.  It's a game that I think very few people are actually aware of.  I can maybe think of one other person that I know who is aware of what Slave Zero is and I'm not certain he's actually played it for himself, like he just knows it exists

So then in 2024 it got a weird followup game called Slave Zero X.  X is not another 3rd person shooter about big ass robots like you might expect but instead a 2D side scrolling sprite based character action game.  Inspirations for its designed cited on the store page are Devil May Cry, Strider and Guilty Gear.  Guilty Gear.  Funnily enough, when I saw the Steam page for this first time around its launch the first thing my brain went to was Blazblue because the main character is a dead ringer for Hakumen from that game. 

I can't speak to its quality since I've not played it for myself but it honestly looks really cool.  If you're into that style of game then it might be worth checking out.  Its price tag is a little high at 20.99 which is why I have not purchased it for myself yet but hardcore character action fans looking for a fix might be willing to drop that.  I'm personally gonna either wait for a sale or a significantly reduced backlog and I'm certain the former will come first.  

3. Baroque: Become A Meta Being: Revive

Baroque is a strange game originally released in 1998 for the Sega Saturn exclusively in Japan and is probably one of my favorite games on the system.  It got a remake that actually released in the west for the PS2 and Wii but it's quite different from the original version and just not quite as good.  So with that combo of Japan only game on an obscure system along side a sub standard remake that got mixed reviews, Baroque was doomed to the curio dimension.  

So when I was going through my steam discovery queue one evening imagine how hard my jaw hit the fucking floor when I saw Baroque: Become a Meta Being crossed my path being a game that apprently released in December of 202 mother fucking 5. 

If you have not seen or heard of Baroque then the quick description is that it's a sort of first person real time dungeon crawling roguelike kind of like mystery dungeon but not really.  That's not a good description but at the very least you can get a vague idea of what I'm on about.  So what kind of game do you think this is?  If you said "oh, another dungeon crawler of course" then you lose 10 points and get bonked on the head because its a fucking FROGGER CLONE.  This isn't close to the first time the series has had a spinoff that's out of left field like this but man, all I want is more weird dungeon crawling and instead I get this shit.  

Actually, having not played it I can't say for certain that its shit.  I don't actually like Frogger all that much but I'm such a slut for Baroque that I'm basically forced to at least give it a go.  I'll go in with an open mind and maybe I too can hop my way into becoming a Meta Being. 

---

All of this makes me wonder if there are other weird curio games from my past that have recent or semi-recent sequels or spinoffs just hiding out there on Steam or some other storefront somewhere.  Is there are Jade Cocoon 3 or something extremely similar hiding away somewhere?  Maybe a modern Mohawk and Headphone Jack I don't know about?  Or fuck it, after seeing that Baroque game there could be typing tutor based on The Granstream Saga for all I know.  I need to do more digging and I need to try these games and so do you.    

The Strange State of YouTube Gaming Content

 

While I'm at my office I like to put on long form YouTube videos about video games.  Reviews, retrospectives or just long ramblings about some game that the user enjoys, its nice background noise to break up the monotony of putting together road infrastucture and recreating bits of Japan in Blender.  I have my usual suspects that I like to rotate through, just comfy listening while I work but sometimes my brain craves some fresh blood and I go clicking around the suggested videos to see if I can find a new creator whos channel I can ransack with my ears.  While occasionally I do find some new stuff that I find interesting, I've started to notice something worrying about the YouTube video game video essay and if its starting to infect this genre of content I'm sure its probably way worse in other places

Before I start ranting though, let me put some usernames out there for people that I think are cool.  At time of writing I've just finished re-binging most of the videos of ThorHighHeels, a guy who covers various video game oddities and has a very chill, very positive outlook on the medium that may inspire you to look at some games a bit differently than you usually would.  Then there's a user called KBash who I quite like.  Again, he covers various oddities in a sort of review format.  I discovered him when he did a video on fucking Red Ninja of all things.  That alone didn't get me to hit the subscribe button but then he did a MASSIVE video on JUST Ys 1 which is an undertaking I would never be willing to take on myself and I respect the effort put in to a game that only a small number of people give a shit about.  I've also been quite fond of a user called ZERO who does challenge videos for the Resident Evil games.  His video where he beat Resident Evil 7 without running is extremely cool and this man has an iron will when it comes to bullshit Resident Evil challenges.  One final suggestion is Civvie11 who does review style content almost exclusively for boomer shooters.  He's pretty funny, clearly is steeped in the ancient texts of the genre and through his channel I've tried a number of games that I've ended up really enjoying.  There's plenty more users than this whos content I enjoy but if I was to go through every YouTuber I liked then I'd be here all fucking day and that's not what I'm here to yap about.

What I'm not here to complain about is just people I don't gel with.  For example there's a guy I can't stand called Jacob Geller but I'm not concieted enough to put him on blast for being shit.  He's not shit and clearly puts a lot of effort into his stuff, I just don't like it.  The users that I'm about to talk about I'm not going to name because 1) I don't have proof of what I think they are doing and 2) if they are doing it, I don't want people giving them any views but I have run these videos by a few people I know and we all are suspecting the same thing.  

So I hope we're all on the same page about generative AI being complete fucking bullshit right?  Not that I'm a complete AI hater, I can see there being use cases for such a thing existing but the majority of people using it are doing it for bad purposes; generating shit that can then be easily packaged in the form of an article or video that can then be served onto a social media platform for the purpose of generating clicks and therefore generating money.  "Slop", the kids these days tend to call it.   

What I've noticed in the last few weeks when clicking around and looking for new content is that there are a lot of videos out there with human voice over but that sound like the scripts have been generated by AI.  Weird sentences, information that's incorrect or missing important points, delivery that sounds like a high school student reading a presentation where they Ctrl C Ctrl V'd a wikipedia page.  Not so subtle hints that these users are just going to GPT and asking a vague question to the machine rather than going out and engaging with gaming and then forming opinions on their own.  The one other big hint I have that AI is being used in this way is that I had one user in my discord (username related to Lovecraft, for the regulars) who was begging for info on a game from the General channel because GPT wasn't giving him enough to work with.

Another bit of evidence I have to indicate that this is going on is that I found one video about "disturbing video games" and I clicked out of the video about 15 minutes in because the things the guy were saying sounded just sort of...off? its hard to describe.  So when I started writing this post I went to ChatGPT and asked it about disturbing video games and the result I got not only matched his list, but the bullet points I got for each game matched pretty closely the things he was saying in his script.  A real "copy my homework but change it a little bit" ass moment.  

I've got too much going on in my life to get mad about this kind of thing but it is annoying to find a video on a topic I think is going to be cool only for the delivery to sound like its being delivered by a robot thats been through the trash compactor once or twice.  Is this really what people want? To just listen to a guy rattle off the result of a GPT prompt? you don't want something a little more from your media than that?  Maybe hearing the experiences and opinions of people who are interested in the same or similar things to you?  I love, for example, hearing people talk about the Megami Tensei games because which ones we consider to be the best and how we approach each game is interesting to hear about.  It would be considerably less interesting if someone just went "What is the best MegaTen" on GPT and then every video was some monotone fuck head going "Nocturne, Persona 4 and RONDE" every video for hours and hours at a time.

 Demand more out of your media diet.  Find things to inspire or give you new perspective or something.  Something that might get you to try something new and expand your horizons.  Put the fucking skibidi toilet, italian brainrot, 30 second shorts of fat old americans talking about how much they like Chrono Trigger videos down, and pick up something that's even just SLIGHTLY deeper.   Also if you get a whiff of AI, just fuckin close it out, fuck anyone who would use that shit.   

Can't Stop Flippin'

 

When I heard about Unfair Flips I honestly thought it was a joke game, one of those stupid titles that you gift a friend where they play with it for 5 minutes and then it sits in their Steam library unplayed for the rest of time.  For £1.69 on Steam though I had to at least go and give it a look and I was honestly quite surprised at how much I enjoyed it.  

 The premise of the game is extremely simple.  You are given a coin that has a base 20% chance to flip heads when you click it.  When you land a heads you are given a few in-game cents to buy upgrades with and the game ends when you flip heads 10 times in a row.  Flipping heads with a 20% chance each click sounds insane, and it is, so the game allows the player to buy an upgrade to heads chance in 5% increments so you can slowly turn things in your favor although the game likes to emphasize that it is entirely possible for a person to never win.  The chance upgrade will cap out before 100% as well so in a way they really aren't kidding.  On top of that you can upgrade the value of the coins heads result so you can get your upgrades faster and, what is probably the most important upgrade, the speed of the flipping animation so you can do more flips in less time.  

What makes this game really funny is that when you hit your 9th heads combo, the UI falls away and your next flip has a fixed chance to get a certain ending.  You can what these probabilties are in the Steam achievements with the chance to hit a full 10 in a row locked at a pitiful 20%.   Thankfully it's not the only ending there is so I suppose its not really a flat 20% to just "win" but the game can end in a number of ways that don't involve the 10th head.  What makes it even funnier is that what ending you get is chosen at random so if you're REALLY intent on getting that 10th flip then multiple playthroughs are going to be required.

What's surprising about this whole thing is how strangely exhilarating the whole thing is.  When I was clicking after a chain of tails flips and then the counter would start building up and up I could feel myself leaning into my monitor.  Then you hit a 7 or 8 chain when you get a heads and all the tension rushes out of you, it's a weirdly enjoyable feeling.  I think maybe this is how gambling addicts are formed.

While Unfair Flips didn't turn me into an addict, I stopped after a single successful run, it is a game interesting enough where it sits prominently in my memory.  It's one of those games I can see myself coming back to every so often to fiddle with and see which ending I can get this time.  One of the few games in my steam account where I might actually give a shit about getting all the achievements since there is one for each ending

It's a tough game to suggest that people should actually go out and play but if you're open minded and enjoy games of nothing but pure chance then Unfair Flips is a great title to pick up.  Put on an album or a podcast or something and get to flipping, enjoy the thrill when you get your 10 piece.  Worth every penny  

The Plan for 2026

The end of the year approaches once again.  The game awards have crawled out of the sewer to suck the dick of industry shareholders and to affirm the undercooked opinions of the gaming masses.  The end of year sales are churning so that idiots like me can buy stuff 50 to 90% off and then have it rot in the backlog for 2 to 30 years.  Various platforms give us our end of year snapshots to fill our email inboxes with redundant information that serves no purpose to anyone.  A sort of irritating time of year but it’s cozy. 

My plan for 2025 was, at first, to try and finish 365 games within the year.  The idea being I would recreate the October 31 game horror challenge but for every month.  This was then instantly scuppered by finding out my wife was pregnant in mid January and instead of picking games that I could finish quickly, I just played whatever.  Not all bad since I played some cool shit but my best and worst is best kept for another post.  So now I’m thinking how I’m going to approach my 2026 in gaming and I think it’s about high time I tackled something that’s been looming over me for a long time. 

A while ago indie game repository and storefront Itch.io gave away 2 absolutely huge packs of games.  One was around the time of the George Floyd incident and the other when the war in Ukraine started with money raised from these packs used for charitable causes related to these events.  I forget what the exact number of titles were in these packs but it was north of 500 both times and in an instant my already quad digit backlog of games ballooned even harder.   I picked them up because each pack had one game that I wanted and then all the others were a nice bonus. 

These packs have gone mostly untouched since I bought them so I have decided that 2026 will be the year that I rectify that.  Not all of the titles in these packs are video games with some of the entries being table top things or resources for game devs but even with that in mind how many I’ll be able to actually get through is up in the air.  There are many short experiences in there but there’s also some more involved titles too that may eat up decent chunks of my time. 

That said though I think if the only thing I played all year was pc indie games I might go mental so as a secondary goal I think I also want to explore the library of the GBA.  A system I adored in my younger days, a system that has a ton of great games and yet I feel that I’ve only scratched the surface with it.  Plenty of curios on my radar, plenty of titles I’m sure I’ll discover as I dig, I’m excited to revisit this absolute powerhouse of a handheld in the coming year

Of course, not 100% set in stone.  I want to leave myself open to try the new games that come out in the year and maybe pepper in titles from other systems that tickle my fancy in a given month but in terms of a general focus, Itch and the GBA will be dominating my to do lists.  If I can beat my 2025 clear count of around 150 that would be an extra bonus

Here to a good year of good gaming!

The Worst Thing In Japan

My time living in Japan is getting quite long.  At time of writing I’m pushing 15 years and for the most part it’s been incredible.  It’s the very least significantly better than living in my home country of the UK.  For reasons too long to go into here, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to get on a plane back to Manchester or get shot, you would watch me die on the spot. 

That said though, no place is perfect and Japan obviously has its problems, no place in the world could ever be perfect, after all.  For example a pretty serious problem I have here is that as a filthy gaijin, despite having my paychecks drained month to month with all the bullshit taxes and national health insurance, despite having children and owning property, I’m completely disallowed from voting.  Contributing yet having no say in where my tax yennies go is very annoying.  A less serious issue is also Japanse obsession with seasonal or time limited food items.  The day to day stuff is obviously pretty good, Japan is a place known for its cuisine but every so often there will be a thing in a store/restaurant/super market that will be absolutely LIFE CHANGING.  Then you look at the packet or the menu and I see the dreaded 期間限定 and my souls sinks through the floor and into the abyss.  Just make the good shit be forever, there’s no reason why Chocolate Mint Parm is only available some years in summer only, fuck off with that

But the absolute worst thing, by far the biggest bane in my life after living here so long is the company known as Open House, I fucking HATE these guys more than anything in the known universe.  You may think my anger is misplaced, how can I hate a real estate agent? I already own house, surely I don’t have any reason to interact with them? Well you’re right, I don’t, but they are constantly coming to me.  Not just me either, if you’re unlucky enough, native or foreign resident, to be walking down the street and one of their mobile salesmen see you, you’re in for some shit.  When every other salesman in the street sees you they might be like “excuse me, can I have a moment of your time to talk about solar panels?” And you say “no thanks” and they go “ok fine thank you very much”.  But the Open House guys are like, “are you sure?” And then when you say no again they start making small talk while FOLLOWING YOU DOWN THE STREET hoping to steer the conversation back to real estate, the absolute fucking worst.

Here’s an exchange between me and an Open House employee the previous day of writing that inspired this post.  Unless specified with [EN] at the start, the conversation was done in Japanese and while constantly moving down the street

OH: Excise me do you have a moment?

Me [EN]: No thanks (answering in English to hopefully deter the guy from continuing, this has never worked)

OH: Are you interested in purchasing property in this area?

Me: No sorry, I really don’t have the time right now

OH: *shimmying directly into my path, pushing a clipboard into my view and pulling out a pen and offering it to me* So how old is your son? (he was in a carrier on my chest)

Me [EN]: Oh my god can you FUCK OFF?!

OH [EN]: I’m sorry?

Me: Get lost!

OH: It’ll only take a little time!

To which we then reached the supermarket I was walking to and I ignored that last comment and he thankfully didn’t follow me inside.  If I talked to any other salesmen like that I’d feel bad, but with these guys I almost regret not throwing out personal insults or resorting to fists. 

Now you can argue that “they are just doing their jobs, it’s probably their bosses probably telling them to be like that” but I honestly do not fucking care.  Japan is a country where you can literally pay a company like 30 bucks and they will find a selection of jobs FOR YOU, they are choosing to work at a company where their approach to sales is to push as hard as possible and waste as much time as possible.  If the job market was fucked like it is in some other places I’d be more understanding but it’s not, so get fucked.  Encounters like this have happened to me countless times around Nagoya and I’m fucking sick of it.  My example above isn’t even the worst one, I had a woman try to drag me into their offices and sit down for a consultation despite saying no and she DID follow me into a department store up to an escalator.  She got lucky though because at that point I’d only had the Open House harassment like 8 times and the sub 10 count made me less prone to rage

This is the only company in the country to act like this.  It’s happened to me and I’ve seen people being chased around by these guys looking extremely uncomfortable.  Doesn’t matter if you’re in a rush, with kids, bleeding out in the street, the open house guys are coming and they will not rest until they have sold you a property you don’t need at a significantly higher price than other properties in the area.  Even the cell phone plan salesman in AEON malls who can be a bit annoying aren’t this bad.  FUCK OPEN HOUSE, GO BANKRUPT NOW.
 

Return of the King('s Field)

 

A long time ago, before From Software was a household name churning out the massively popular Souls games, they made a series called Kings Field for the PlayStation.  A series of first person person real time dungeon crawlers with a unique vibe that despite looking worse than the Windows95 maze screen saver, really dug its claws into anyone who got their hands on it, including me.  Its a fairly expansive series with games all the way up to the PS2 that also has spin offs like Shadow Tower (PS1) or Eternal Ring (PS2) but it’s a style of game that has been long, LONG dead.  Looking at it you may think it similar to something like Elder Scrolls but you’d be way off base.  If you haven’t played any of them just stop reading this post, go play one and then come back, it’s something worth just seeing for yourself rather than having it described to you. 

Like I said though, it’s a style of game that’s been long dead.  I remember playing Eternal Ring on the PS2 when it was new-ish and then basically nothing in that style for many years. But then in 2023 Lunacid hit the scene, a game very openly inspired by Shadow Tower and Kings Field made by the person who gave us Lost in Vivo.  That combo made me drop everything, buy it instantly and play it immediately rather than letting it sit in the backlog for years.  It’s obviously a modern take on the idea being a lot more fluid than any of the KF games ever were but I enjoyed every minute that I spent with it. Then a free to play sequel (prequel?) was released that I haven’t had the time to play yet but that’s so faithful to the concept that the developer made it on the Sword of Moonlight engine, the Kings Field editor that FromSoft made publicly available back in the day and it’s still usable even in current year.  But I thought that was going to be it.  A fringe enthusiast of esoteric bullshit makes something specifically for my tastes and then the genre goes back to sleep, how wrong I seem to be

I’ve noticed, in the last year or two that there’s been an uptick in games on Steam that are using that old Kings Field style and running with it.  Not QUITE clones, but wearing the inspiration so clearly that unless you have no idea what KF is you can see what these developers are doing.  Games like Monomyth, Verho, Flyknight, Labyrinth of the Demon King and the game that inspired this post at time of writing, Queens Domain (har har).  All games that I’m jumping at the chance to play in the near future simply for just being inspired by the niche yet legendary Kings Field.  I don’t know what started the mini-trend of Field-likes but I’m extremely grateful for it happening. 

So if you’re reading this post and you’ve never played a Kings Field game, the first step is to go fix that and play one.  Buy it, emulate it, I don’t give a fuck what you do, I’m ordering you to go play it.  Then when you’re done with that and you’re now addicted, go support some of these folks trying to start a genre revival and help bring the legacy of Kings Field out from under the shadow of Dark Souls.  Now all I need is one indie dev to rip off Baroque and I can die happy