exp.

Subscribe

Tag: 2026

  • Dragon Quest Heroes: Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon -Classic HD- (Square Enix, 2026)

    Dragon Quest Heroes: Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon -Classic HD- (Square Enix, 2026)

    Developed/Published by: Square Enix
    Released: 09/09/2026
    Completed: 15/09/2026
    Completion: Returned to the surface with the Chest of Cheer!

    On the 9th September I stuck on the Nintendo Direct, which isn’t something I always do (if I remember I’ll put it on in the background) and one thing caught my eye: a re-release of Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon, the first game in Chunsoft’s beloved Mystery Dungeon franchise. Chunsoft has their own original IP for the franchise, Shiren The Wanderer, and the series has also seen instalments in the Final Fantasy and Pokemon franchises… in fact even the Etrian Odyssey and The Tower of Druaga franchises! It’s a game design that’s got legs, obviously, having been directly inspired by Rogue (so a true Roguelike) but it all started here.

    I’m not sure why I got so particularly excited by this that I picked it up on the same day. I mean I’ve got Shiren the Wanderer for DS and I’ve never finished it, along with countless other Roguelike and Roguelike-likes either abandoned or on the docket. Maybe I was just looking for the excuse to be excited about something, and, honestly, as you know by now, I love starting franchises at the beginning, and with no official release of Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon until now…

    And yet, I’ve really struggled with if I should write about this one. Shortly after its release–and after I’d played it for at least six hours–John Harris posted a new instalment of his @play Roguelike article where he provided a lot of tips that will be particularly helpful to people playing any version of Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon for the first time, but also noted:

    “I note that the credits to this game have a section for AI content. I don’t think that necessarily means it was used to make this game.”

    This, obviously, made me pause. It was hardly conclusive (though I did post about it on Bluesky to let people know) so I had to decide: do I keep playing this version, which I was already finding a bit flawed? Or was that just a sunk cost fallacy?

    I looked for the game credits to see if I could confirm the information. But.

    You can’t see the credits unless you finish the game–which in this case, means trekking down to the 27th floor, getting the “Chest of Cheer” and trekking back up. And this is a Roguelike. And I’ve never beaten Shiren the Wanderer, so…

    Well, you know I had to do it to ‘em. There weren’t any long play videos online to look up to try and see the credits, so I just thought–let’s do it.

    I’ll say this. Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is a good “first” proper Roguelike, because while it’s not easy–in fact, it absolutely doesn’t help the player in any way, when it says randomly generated, it means it–the game has less stuff in it than a lot of later games, meaning that there’s only so much you need to know. And it’s a true Roguelike, in that if you get lucky, you can finish it on your first go–there’s absolutely no requirement here that you grind up unlocks to get to the point where you can actually finish it. It’s random, but it’s “fair.”

    So I got a bit lucky and was able to finish Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon, an extremely satisfying thing to do. And then there it was. The entire segment of the credits that credited the people that worked on “AI and Engine Development.”

    I have to say… it’s not looking good. The obvious rationalisation you might want to make is “well, when they say AI, they might mean enemy AI.” But Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is a Roguelike, and it’s a very simple one, where every enemy apart from a few (that move randomly) just move directly towards Torneko by the quickest route they can manage. Even characters that, say, steal from Torneko and then flee seem to just be moving randomly unless they are a square or two away from Torneko, at which point they flee again.

    I could program this, and I’m not even a coder. No team is required. And that it says “AI and Engine Development” implies–or at least, I am inferring–that AI was involved in creating the engine for this HD remake.

    Now, does that mean that this is a complete vibe coded botch job? Well, not absolutely. But as many people including Harris have pointed out, the version launched had some frustrating issues, with laggy inputs and frustratingly slow, unskippable dialogue boxes in battles, which smell a bit… vibey.1

    I approached Square Enix for comment and (unsurprisingly) got nothing, so I can’t say for sure. However, the thing about Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is that it’s a great, great game, and even if the HD remake wasn’t vibe coded, it’s really not the best way to play it. 

    To review this version: It’s fine. The new 2.5D style is hardly HD2D (although I know everyone is getting sick of that style by now) really just replicating the original simple graphics but a bit 3D, and that’s… about it for actual differences. Otherwise it’s just the same, so really all you’re getting is the graphics tilted slightly and a bit of a lighting effect. The game’s major addition is the “Streaming Up a Storm: My Dungeon, Your Rules (β)” DLC which adds audience participation if you’re streaming the game–I love the idea, but haven’t tried it and wouldn’t call it a major selling point.

    If you don’t want to stream the game, the best way to play the game is almost certainly going to be the original version. If you’re willing to put up with Japanese, you can pick up a cart only copy of the game for less than this new HD version goes for, and there’s a fan translation available. The only thing you might miss from the remake is the cute papercraft intro, but you can look that up online so you’re fine.

    There really is no reason to not play the version that looks like this.

    To be honest, Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon -Classic HD- is a bit of a sad situation. This is a truly fucking great game, and you should want to support it, considering there are two more Torneko sequels out there that it’d be cool to see out there in English. But, frankly, not like this. It’s a no-win situation. You buy this version and support it and Square Enix think: well, slopping out a crappy port is all we need to do! And you don’t support it and they think: making old games available isn’t worth our time.

    When all they really need to do was to show a tiny bit of care.

    So we’re back at square [“Enix?”–Ed.] one, really: no one is going to care for game history but us. Keep circulating the tapes.

    Will I ever play it again? Unless Square Enix get back to me and unequivocally state they didn’t touch AI while developing this, no, never. As much as when this was released I got stars in my eyes imagining my new career streaming this.

    Final Thought: And for everything that I’ve said, I really do want to state: Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is a great introduction to true Roguelikes. It’s very manageable and you can learn the game’s techniques as you go and understand why it’s so captivating. I was reminded how great these games are at creating diegetic stories. My very first game where I was 19 floors deep(!) found myself in a monster den, read the scroll of sanctuary that would have saved me (because I didn’t grasp I needed to just drop it) and immediately died. The following game where I didn’t find a weapon for 13 levels, arrived in a monster den, cast bang twice, killed everyone, excitedly moved towards a weapon and… fell through the floor. Or my winning run, where I had to resort to throwing herbs at dragons just to get past them, and then the terrifying climb back up through the dangerous levels I’d just experienced with almost no items to hand. Thank god for the sustaining ring. If you know, you know.

    1. There has since been a patch, but this came in just after I finished the game, annoyingly. I can’t speak to how much the game has been improved or not. ↩︎
  • Mouse: P.I. For Hire (Fumi Games, 2026)

    Mouse: P.I. For Hire (Fumi Games, 2026)

    Developed/Published by: Fumi Games / Playside Studio
    Released: 16/04/2026
    Completed: 08/09/2026
    Completion: Finished it.

    Quake was in the news recently, what with it being the 30th Anniversary and that, and seeing all that hot Quake action got me in the mood to play a shooter of the boomer persuasion. I considered revisiting Quake, but to be honest, I was never that hot on it. I’ve always preferred my shooters to have more of a sense of place (I was more of a Duke Nukem 3D guy when it came to level design.) So nosing around I remembered Mouse: P.I. For Hire had come out this year, and thought I’d give it a shot, considering the obvious effort put into the world.

    Really wish I’d played Quake, to be honest. I’m beginning to realise that my intention with this site–to generally try and write about indies when I’m not writing about retro–isn’t doing me any favours. That’s three new games in a row now that I found initially interesting but which ground me down into despair. I said it with Denshattack, but developers, please, dear god, less is more. I was surprised to discover that I’d played this for “only” just over thirteen hours, because it felt endless. Really much like Denshattack, Mouse: P.I. For Hire would have been an entertaining trifle at half (or hopefully less) the time. I don’t give scores, but if I did, I could feel the score tick down as the hours went by. “Well, you know, it’s a solid six, almost a seven but it didn’t quite have the spark…. Ach, it’s a five, there really isn’t that much to it… four, I’m not sure what I saw in it to begin with…”

    I think much like Denshattack, what makes writing these articles seems sort of bitter and counterproductive, considering I’d really like the games industry to survive (to the point where it could rehire me???) is that I can see that this was a game with a lot of love and effort lavished on it. But it’s also, simply, unsuccessful at what it’s trying to do.

    First up: it’s a take on a noir. Good! It’s a fun genre, there are lots of tropes to pull from, and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But I’m going to explain something and I think it’s going to make really clear how wrong Mouse P.I. get it.

    In my playthrough, it took four and a half hours for the femme fatale to show up.

    After playing this, I saw that Game Developer’s Bryant Francis had written up a pretty nice analysis of the game’s narrative, and it reflects a studio that was just trying to cram everything in that they loved, every idea that they had, but as a result they ended up with, well, a mess. I suppose it’s (sort of) funny that at the end of the game the clue board you’ve been building is a Pepe Silvia that you can’t parse, but there absolutely came a point where I stopped following the narrative because much like Denshattack (again) it felt like all plot and no character (once the femme fatale shows up she just… stands around in your office, for example.) I appreciate, as Francis does, that the game is trying to make big swings; but I was already bored by the time I was killing demons in hell with a cartoon chainsaw and absolutely thinking “why am I doing any of this?”

    (Francis is far more charitable than me in general, but I particularly agree with him highlighting the messy use of “fantastic racism” via the treatment of shrews as second-class citizens to mice. It’s something that I really cringed at—it is rough when the voodoo priestess shows up—and which I suspect speaks to the limits of experience of the team.)

    The weighting of the team’s priorities just seems wildly out of wack. There’s so much narrative, and the game generally looks great, but the core shooting play feels almost vestigial despite being the main way you interact with the world. There are what feels like four enemy types (normal guys that shoot at you, wee guys that run at you, big bullet sponges that run at you, and wee guys that fly and shoot at you) with minor variations, and every encounter is just “run around in a small arena trying not to get trapped or hitscanned to death using whatever your strongest weapon is.”

    The game hands out weapons on a glacially slow pace and the weapons it does hand out don’t offer much in the way of variety. Once you’ve unlocked the “devarnisher” (sort of a grenade launcher) and the James gun (a machine gun, and I see what they did there) there’s really no reason to switch unless you’re out of ammo, because most everything else is underwhelming (the shotguns, in particular, feel slow and totally underpowered, even when upgraded.)

    It’s like they’ve missed what the point of a variety of enemies and weapons are: the combinations are supposed to create interesting encounters! There’s no sense here that enemies synergise either with other enemies or the level designs, and if there is a reason to set enemies on fire or whatever outside of just trying to do raw damage I don’t see it. Once you’ve played the first couple of levels, there’s really no more to it, outside of (frankly) annoying, bullet-sponge bosses with phases that just seem to drag on and on.

    There’s a lot of “well, this is a thing games have in it” here, really. A perfect example is that throughout the game the hero unlocks new traversal abilities. All the usual Metroidvaniaey things: double jump, wall run, that sort of thing. Remember how everyone loved the wallrun in Titanfall 2? Well, here it shows up late in the game, and you can use it on specifically marked wallrun panels, which are rare. 

    Indeed, none of these abilities are there to–for example–open up new areas in levels you’ve previously been to (the classic reason you do this) and nor do they really show up much after they’ve been introduced (in fact, you’ll definitely forget some of them, like being able to float.) The levels are pretty and they’ve got a great sense of place, but it’s naive game design: you’ve put the things in you think games need, without interrogating if your game needs it, and then once it’s there, you don’t even really do anything with it!

    Mouse P.I. is a facade, and I mean that in the architectural sense: if you look at it straight on, it looks amazing, but if you even slightly investigate it, you can see there’s nothing behind it and it’s just being held up with some wonky support beams. I don’t doubt that this team could create something incredible, but I think they’d need to drill further down on what they actually like when playing games and make that. It’s so easy to get tied up in the thing you’re making than the thing you would actually want to make. A little more focus, a little stronger authorial, design-minded vision, a little harder on the edit… they’ve probably got something.

    Will I ever play it again? They’re doing DLC, and hopefully they’ll have had some time to think about what worked and what didn’t with Mouse P.I., but I’m good.

    Final Thought: I suppose if I was looking for some modern-but-not-modern Quakey fun maybe I should have waited for Sprawl Zero. Looking at that, however, will have to wait, because I excitedly downloaded Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon HD as soon as it came out like a huge idiot and have spent far too long playing that.

  • Denshattack! (Undercoders, 2026)

    Denshattack! (Undercoders, 2026)

    Developed/Published by: Undercoders / Fireshine Games
    Released: 15/07/2026
    Completed: 18/08/2026
    Completion: Finished it.

    Are video games still… cool? I was trying to think about this. Being old, I remember the 90s and the era of the PlayStation, all Lara Croft on the cover of The Face and Wipeout demo kiosks at clubs, and when I think about it, the era of video games being actively cool feels like it ended with the Dreamcast. Maybe it’s a limited way of looking at things–connecting video games to youth and music culture via games like Rez and Jet Set Radio–but once you get into the PS3 and Xbox era… doesn’t it all feel a bit less organic, more corporate? 

    I know, I know. “Cool” is so completely undefinable, and so completely subjective and contextual. And it’s not like Sega weren’t a huge corporation (certainly Sony’s “cool” was a marketing effort.) But when I look at Jet Set Radio, I just see something that’s… cool. It makes it look effortless. 

    Denshattack! wants to reclaim that cool. 

    The thing about Jet Set Radio is that it’s… not actually that great? In fact, when I played it a few years ago on PlayStation Vita I was struck by how close it skirts to “actively bad.” The stiff, awkward controls. The horrible camera. The overall clumsiness. Awful enemies and boss battles. You never get to feel mastery, you never reach flow; ironically, you never ever feel cool playing it.

    But the overall package is so incredible that it never tips you over into complete rejection (at least for me, anyway.) It’s perhaps the peak of style over substance, and therefore a valid swan song to the era of games being cool. It gets away with it.

    Denshattack! does not.

    Now, don’t get me wrong. Denshattack!–apart from some issues I had getting comfortable with the controls–has none of the rough edges you find with Jet Set Radio. It’s an incredibly efficient and focused bit of game design, really determined to give you all of the heights of mastery and pleasure with as little friction as possible. But it’s too focused, too efficient, and in slathering on a particular style of cool it comes across as pastiche. Denshattack! can never live up to the Jet Set Radio we have in our minds, because… how could it?

    The design sounds good. Denshattack!’s core is, rather than Jet Set Radio, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, just that instead of being a skater in a skate park, you’re a train on a track, with the (silly, intentionally unexplained but completely accepted) ability to jump in the air and do tricks. Levels are a mix of A to B courses, levels where you have objectives and have to loop them till you’re done, race courses, trick courses (the closest in style to Tony Hawks’ skate parks) and boss battles. It’s a lot of variety!

    The problem is that… and it sounds sort of stupidly obvious to say this… you’re a train on a track. You’re propelling forward at all times, and you don’t have many “interesting decisions” to make. Yes, you can switch tracks here and there, but there is none of the immediate, constant decision making in Tony Hawk’s; where to move next, which trick to pull, how to actually manufacture a long chain. Here, the track always flows towards you, and the level furniture that flows in your direction are the sum of your options.

    It’s obvious that the developers know this, so the game–which is astonishingly long, with over sixty levels–introduces new mechanics throughout. The game doesn’t honestly feel that much like Tony Hawk’s once you’re a little way into it, instead feeling much more like a cross between a rhythm action game and the more dexterity-testing style of Metroidvania; it’s not “chain tricks” but “chain abilities, and trick between them.”

    Like the worst examples of the Metroidvania, however, the problem is that you end up with what feels like forty things to do spread all across the controller, clicking shoulder buttons here and pushing other things elsewhere in rapid succession or you fail. This doesn’t create interesting situations or interactions, just lists of things to do in order. At least in a Metroidvania the abilities are there to be used on things you saw earlier, or traversal you have to work out; here again it’s more like a rhythm action game. It comes towards you. Do the move. Now this one.

    Denshattack!, as a result, never transcends “fine.” There’s a few hours, I think, where after the controls click, it’s actively fun! But before long it feels very rote; rather than the sense you’re on a train to adventure, it feels more like you’ve clocked in at the video game factory and you’re stood at a conveyor belt, having to perform a set, pre-arranged actions as they flows towards you.

    With the game as long as it is, Denshattack! is not so much “too much of a good thing” as “too much of a… thing.” There are many, many sicknesses in the video games industry now but the requirement that games be stuffed with content is absolutely one of them. I understand the impetus. Publishers want big numbers; players want as much bang for their buck as they can get, and Steam and other platforms absolutely incentivise high hour counts.

    But in a game like Denshattack!, where the core design is slight, and the games it references are shorter with levels built around replayability… it feels like a completely wrong assumption was made by the team here. Every level has a bunch of stuff to do, to collect, and medals to get for either doing it as fast as possible, or with the highest score, but it’s just not that interesting to go back to do it! You can’t make a beeline to a particular item you missed, or find a favourite part of the level and trick that… even the micro decisions of movement you’d make in a track-based racing game are all missing. I still kept thinking, “Oh, I could go back to gold medal earlier levels with all my new skills” but there’s no particularly strong reason to do so–there’s so much content that you’re far better pushing forward.

    Long, and I mean long before I was done with this I was bored out of my mind. It doesn’t help that there’s a lot of setting and narrative layered on that is simply not compelling either. There’s a good heart here–a cheerful anime protagonist gets together a rag-tag group of gangs to take down a corporation that’s been exploiting Japan–but much like the game’s design, it’s a fine enough idea without enough meat to actually support an actual… story.

    I hate to be all Robert McKee here but a story needs, you know… characters with wants and needs in conflict, and scenes need to reflect that. In Denshattack!, nothing happens! Characters stand around and spout platitudes at each other in every cutscene. It’s all plot and no story, and it’s simply very dull. It feels so egregious because I can feel the game’s certainty that actually really amazing stuff happens. During the levels there are big moments (explosions, kaiju battles, all sorts) and there’s this drive towards a huge, powerful climax that really put me in mind of the climax of Hi-Fi Rush–everyone coming together in this beautiful, moving moment… but it’s completely flat because the characters were just… well, they were about as deep as the billboards you’d fly past on a train.

    I think after attempting to beat Titanium Court to death for what it did to me, you might say I’m just being cruel now. That I’m punishing Denshattack! for simply offering too much, and for not nailing every aspect. And, well, maybe that’s fair. Denshattack! is… fine, and it’s only that it goes on for so long that made it such a miserable slog. 

    But I think game developers have got to learn to edit. Denshattack! is a perfectly fine experience if it’s four or six hours and I can go back and replay the levels if I want; I think I’d have come out overall positive on it, even. So if there’s one lesson from this I want to impress: cut what you’re making down to a diamond. No one wants the rest of the rock!!!

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: I mentioned the controls needing to click; if you think you’re the kind of person who could play this and stop before you’re tired of it, it’s worth saying that I found the controls utterly frustrating when I started. Rather than go for a classic Tony Hawks’ style system–d-pad, buttons–it goes with double analogues and triggers, and there’s a learning curve because of the issue of track switching: you have to tap left or right on the left thumbstick to switch tracks, but meanwhile when tricking you’re moving the right thumbstick left and right, and at least for my brain it felt like I should have been switching tracks during tricks but you’re not. 

    In something like Tony Hawks’ you’re initiating a “state change” via button presses (e.g. ”I am holding trick button, so pushing left means trick; when I release trick button, pushing left means move left”) and here you don’t have that anchor, so I was constantly messing up at first. It does become normal after a point, so it’s not something I can exactly ding the game for any more than I already have, but I was really close to giving this up at the point when it started to click.

  • Toxic (2026)

    Toxic (2026)

    Uh.

    For real though, where to begin. Indian cinema is one that features almost exclusively supermen, by which I mean in the classic DC Superman mould: invincible heroes for whom it is almost hard to find a genuine threat for. The best films, of course, layer the threat on via more than just the potential of bodily harm to the hero–and to be honest, in the very best ones the heroes can still get hurt–but the worst are those that reward the viewer with little thrill or tension and instead only endless aura-farming.

    I mean, you can already tell which Toxic is. Toxic, if anything, put me in mind of a Steven Segal movie. You know how in a Steven Segal movie he doesn’t even ever get hit? Sure, there are funny examples of this–I cry laughing at some of the ADR in On Deadly Ground–but there’s usually only so much naked ego you can take.

    Rockstar Yash makes Steven Segal look like the humblest man on earth. No, I understand how impossible that sentence sounds. The ego on display here is so completely out of proportion it’s genuinely confusing. Yash plays Raya, an abandoned street kid who becomes India’s most unstoppable gangster as the coolest man that has ever existed, introduced by, and this is not a joke, fucking a woman so well that it blows up a graveyard. When he leaps out and starts to kill dudes, he literally does things like rip their arms off almost without noticing. He’s just. that. powerful.

    The reason this is confusing is because Toxic is clearly meant to be Yash’s Scarface. If KGF 2 was his Godfather: Part II taken to 11, this doesn’t so much take Scarface to some absurd number but create a buffer overflow that breaks the calculator. Like Tony Montana, Raya is supposed to ultimately be a tragic figure, someone who destroys not only himself in his ruthless ambition but everyone around him. But he also has to seem like the coolest dude in the world at all times… and he also has to be ruthless and a badass.

    This, obviously, does not work. But it does not work on such a heightened level that it’s beyond any cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced before even in Indian cinema (and I’ve watched some absolute nonsense like Indian 2.) I mean, this film literally opens with the woman he supposedly loves blowing herself up in terror with a grenade so he won’t see her. Then he takes the child they had together and throws him off a cliff!1

    So that we’re supposed to later invest in his love story with said woman seems… insane? Also, and I have to stress this, during said love story, he, out of nowhere, with no connection to basically anything else in the film, fights a gang of nuns who reveal themselves to be dominatrices (almost exactly like that famously controversial Hitman Absolution trailer) and kills them even more violently than Agent 47 (in fact implying fellatio with his gun as he blows one of their heads off.)

    And this was, ostensibly, directed by a woman!2

    Oh, and he kills like a hundred clowns at one point.

    As with a lot of Indian films, when I mention all the insane stuff that happens, you might think “ha, sounds amazing!” but I have never felt more sick in a theatre than when my buddy Justin Decloux leaned over and said to me “this is three hours and twelve minutes long.” Because even if this is shot in a relentlessly slick, trailer-ready fashion, almost nothing interesting or exciting happens as Raya swans about, sleeping with a couple of different women and engaging in minor gang intrigue. It’s extremely telling that the trailer that got me interested in seeing this is only the first action sequence, because once you’ve seen that, you’ve seen basically every trick this movie has.

    Stunt choreographer J.J Perry pulls a lot from his work on John Wick, but it’s flat and uninspired because Wick is constantly getting hurt, which Yash will not allow! Even in the fight he loses, he technically wins it first, only losing it because he won’t kill his opponent!

    And that entire fight’s a cheat, anyway, because the film, after noodling around pointlessly for over two hours descends into complete incoherence. The climax doesn’t work on any level, as flails around attempting to claw back any of the pathos that was clearly intended at the script stage (assuming it had one.)

    Toxic is an absolutely demoralising time at the cinema. A pounding, miserable exercise in ego and hubris. For once, Indian reviewers–famously harsh–were absolutely justified in their vitriol.

    (Not least because I suspect that at least a number of establishing shots in this are AI slop, which gave me some pause on covering it at all. I certainly didn’t know going in, but consider it yet another reason to not even think about watching this.)

    1. Now, technically the film does try and make this look a bit ambiguous, the car slides off the cliff because it’s raining or whatever, but not until later! ↩︎
    2. Although the production was obviously so troubled, and Yash must be so clearly impossible to work with, god knows what she actually got to do.  ↩︎
  • Titanium Court (Thomson, 2026)

    Titanium Court (Thomson, 2026)

    Developed/Published by: AP Thomson / Fellow Traveller
    Released: 23/04/2026
    Completed: 26/07/2026
    Completion: I left.

    In a weird sort of way, Titanium Court might be the most hyped game I’ve played in the last couple of years. Before AP Thomson even picked up his historic second Seumas McNally Grand Prize in a row I saw so many developers posting about an incredible game they couldn’t talk about, and then (once it was announced) posting that the incredible game that they previously couldn’t talk about was Titanium Court (and we should all be very jealous that they got to play it and/or be generally hype.) I was so intrigued that I decided to play Fortune-499, Thomson’s previous, visually similar game, and as a result of that was noticed and gifted a bunch of codes by Titanium Court publisher Fellow Traveller for the game’s demo to give away–which I’ll admit I thought might help exp. ride some of the wave of hype. Yep, I was pretty primed to play Titanium Court.

    Whelp!

    Do you know this feeling? You probably know this feeling. You’ve gone to see a movie, or maybe a play, that’s famously critically acclaimed. A piece of real art. Maybe it’s a satire, let’s say. You watch it, and, you know,  it’s good! You’re following it, and you see what it’s doing. You appreciate it. But the audience is acting… weird. Everyone around you is laughing uproariously at jokes that you get, but aren’t, you know… funny. There’s something so performative about everyone around you. Like they’re all shouting “I get it! I get it! I’m at the level of the work I am viewing!”

    When you leave, you wonder… wait, was that actually good? Or was it just something that made the audience feel good because it was “clever” and they understood it?

    Titanium Court invites this comparison because I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game that’s more aggressively smug from the moment it opens, intentionally flowery in dialogue, and intentionally unclear on its game mechanics. It’s trying to confuse and bedazzle you so that once you get it, you feel sooo good for understanding it. 

    It’s a little patronising (at best) because Titanium Court is actually quite simple mechanically–the kind of idea that’s really “clever” if, I think, ultimately limited. 

    It’s a two-phase game.  In one phase, you’re playing a classic match-3. In the second phase, you’re playing a set-and-go tower defence/real-time strategy. As I said above, it’s poorly explained, because “that’s the joke” and there’s a fair amount of meta dressing around this simple one-two: the idea is that you’re trapped in a faerie court that is currently engaged in a war, and every day you must try and win the day’s battles across a shifting landscape (yep, it’s a roguelike-like.) You can choose your “career” which affects your court’s abilities and/or win conditions, and then you play a number of rounds before a boss.

    In each round, first you play the match-3. The aim of this segment is to make matches that gain you resources, remove enemy courts and, hopefully, place your court in an advantageous position, because the match-3 board is actually the map for the second phase. If you are surrounded by water or mountains, for example, no land enemies can reach you.

    The intended tension in this section is that, generally, the most powerful strategy is to defend your court via the terrain, but, because you have to complete a set number of matches to get to the next stage–and match chains give you more moves–you can find yourself in a perfect position, but if you want or need more resources you might make a match and ruin your own position without enough moves to fix it.

    In the second phase, you spend your resources to buy units that then spawn in a real-time battle. You can see the entire timeline, so your goal is to send out your harvester units (to get more resources) and then, if you need to engage in battle (and in almost all cases, you’re aiming to avoid it) send out enough units to defend your court or destroy the other courts. It’s not (especially) deep, being largely a numbers game as you can’t affect anything once things are in motion.

    Around all of this are the machinations of the court, which you play via a simple top-down exploration game (it’s not unlike Fortune-499.) You wander around, choose who to talk to, and gradually unravel the mystery of the court and what you actually have to do to escape it properly (or not.)

    Titanium Court is extremely, blatantly Shakespeare coded (A Midsummer Night’s Dream particularly) but even if there’s a character directly called Puck here it’s like if the play was populated by nothing but Pucks: annoying. If you go in blind, you wouldn’t grasp what I’ve explained about the game’s mechanics until you’ve been through several runs, and it’s not like the game is doing anything clever to “teach” you the mechanics as you go. It’s simply too in love with what it’s doing.

    In Titanium Court’s favour, however, I do think the mechanical core, once you get it, has something compelling about it. The base mechanics are not especially interesting–honestly, it’s quite repetitive–but there’s enough variety layered on via careers and bosses and quirky things to find or do on certain runs (or across several runs) that  there is–for a while–a reason to keep playing, even if every time you return to the court it’s like being at the world’s most irritating house party (wandering from room to room, getting involved in conversations with utter wanks.)

    But the design simply does not hold up for as long as you’re expected to play it. It’s simply too easy to “solve” even with the roguelike-like design intending to provide enough moment-to-moment spice. Realistically, with almost all the careers you can steamroller runs by simply getting your court into the right position in the match-3 phase and just wobbling it back and forth till you run out of moves, and depending on the career you choose you can also massively abuse the game’s trading economy (or just select the correct units that match an optimum strategy and walk it.)

    Titanium Court somewhat admits this (though I don’t think it’s as clever as the game thinks to do so) by allowing you to completely skip the actual “game” part of the game past a certain point, and from early on lets you skip the bosses to instead see AP Thomson perform his “We’ve got The Mountain Goats at home” shtick by playing entire songs, which is pleasant enough, but (honestly) it feels like you’re still at a horrible house party and someone’s pulled out a fucking acoustic guitar. Like, he’s good! But you still feel yourself cringing.

    So Titanium Court–I suppose much like Fortune-499–hits the limits of the core design quickly, but unlike Fortune-499 it doesn’t choose to be short and authored around that. Instead Titanium Court takes being annoyingly smug to a level beyond what you could imagine (and it is genuinely hard to imagine it being more annoying and smug than it is at the beginning.) The middle bit of the game–when you’ve understood the game’s mechanics, and you’re having a jolly enough time doing runs, ticking off tasks, removing the “curses” that you’ve been told afflict the court and collecting the keys that you’ve been told will allow you to leave Titanium Court and complete the game… well that was all just to get you to realise…

    Alright everyone, we’re going to spoiler town. If you think you might play Titanium Court and you don’t want to read on, my conclusion on the game is that it’s [rolls eyes, makes wanking motion with hand.] Do with that information what you will.

    It’s all there to make you realise… to complete the game you just have to stop playing it.

    This is, in my opinion, complete fucking drivel. I’m not the first person to say this (Willa Rowe’s piece, The Player’s The Thing talks about the mistaken nature of this twist in, frankly, a far more educated fashion than I’m going to) but the extent to which Titanium Court gets things backwards is, I think, remarkable.

    I absolutely get the concept. Titanium Court’s core “idea” is based on the experience of playing old RPGs. You know when you visit a town, and characters have a few things they can say, and then when you exhaust what they have to say, they just repeat the last thing they said, forever? 

    Well, in Titanium Court, this is called “going stale” and it’s an affliction that affects the faeries of the court. As you (the player) exhaust them, they are trapped in this state, and to the other faeries, it’s a tragedy. Ultimately, their aim is to get rid of you as quickly as possible. Just Walk Out. You Can Leave!!!

    Except, of course, you can’t. You have to collect keys to leave. And Titanium Court is an authored work. It’s not, like… a real place you’re visiting. Titanium Court is not like… like imagine you went to, uh… that Star Wars Disney hotel, right? When it was running. And everyone was given an exact script to say to you. And when you exhausted the script, they hauled off the actor and shot them in the head.

    But you could leave at any point.

    Now that’s a dilemma!

    I mean, it’s not. You’d just leave, but the point is: these fairies aren’t real, and AP Thomson wrote them, and he’s created something where the tension, I guess, is supposed to be that we want to complete games and see the content he’s created versus not wanting a bunch of imaginary fairies to die, but he created the situation! He wrote all the beats!!!

    The player isn’t causing any of this, they’re just playing their role. Now, I get that Thomson lampshades this by setting the game on a stage and actively telling the player they are playing a role, but then we face the idea that he’s expecting the player to engage with the story as told while also having an ironic detachment. This is a really advanced attempt to have his cake and eat it, and I guess I salute the chutzpah, but it’s ridiculous. It feels like he’s really trying to get you to just turn off the game, stop playing without resolution to make his point, because otherwise Titanium Court plays tricks to keep you playing: as soon as I collected my keys, I went to leave, but the script said something along the lines of “you feel there are things unresolved” so I thought “oh, I guess I’m not supposed to leave right away?” played a few more days, got increasingly bored, and then went to leave and… had all the keys stolen and had to re-earn them, practically doubling the amount of time I had to play [“You didn’t have to…”–AP Thomson] to actually leave and finish the game.

    I haven’t been as fucked off with a game in years the way I was fucked off with this when all the keys got stolen, considering the plot is literally telling you “you are hurting these people with your presence.” I suspect there are more ways around to play this game–maybe you can just leave in the first place, maybe there are other ways to leave, maybe there’s something interesting that happens if you see the game to the very end and let everyone go stale–but Titanium Court also, intentionally, doesn’t let you play it again1 with the idea that you’re just supposed to share with others what happened to you and compare. I don’t hate that kind of thing–at least, I like games that try and offer a “this was your experience, others may have experienced something different” possibility space. But this aspect feels like another couched in an attempt to just be very, very clever.

    I simply cannot see what people see in this game other than something that offers them just enough resistance that they feel big and clever for getting it. But “getting it” isn’t enough: what you’re getting has to offer you something meaningful. Titanium Court doesn’t. I don’t think its point even makes sense! I left and I didn’t look back; I only caused a few faeries to go stale. But the other ones? There’s no one there to hear what they have to say, no one there to prompt them. Isn’t that worse? To have something left to say and go unheard?

    Will I ever play it again? I’m glad I can’t.

    Final Thought: You know what? What they had to say was probably fucking annoying.

    1. Well, I assume you can easily on a full reinstall or whatever. ↩︎
  • The Odyssey (2026)

    The Odyssey (2026)

    No one needs another lengthy essay on The Odyssey… is something I’m sure students have been saying since around the 3rd century BC, but, well, here I am. To be honest, the discourse around Nolan’s attempt to grapple with one of the oldest surviving works of literature has done nothing but depress me. We started with a chud revolt over the perceived “realism” of people of colour in a work that features cyclopes and witches, and as soon as the film was released–and was tremendously successful–the war of consensus began, where fandom (as it tends to) rushed to defend a work from any and all criticism, aggrieved over the idea that an interpretation might be interpreted itself and seen wanting.

    Both wars, of course, are a disturbing continuation of the rejection of critical thinking and experts1. It is ironic, I think, that it should be considered unacceptable for an adaptation of a work that has been debated since at least the time of Plato to be criticised by a classicist (Emily Wilson) who has translated The Odyssey once (and in the process of doing so again) because she wasn’t sufficiently courteous. That she dared to write with a little zing and took a little pleasure in a takedown. The edges of everything must be sanded off, every bite must be palatable, give us nothing to chew on, let our teeth become vestigial.

    Perhaps the most has been made of Wilson saying that she’d be “ashamed to have written any part” of The Odyssey, which I (personally) can’t completely sign off on. But I would have been ashamed to have written the many, many times characters in The Odyssey drop thudding clumps of exposition, or just straight up say the themes of the movie out loud. “Our civilisation is collapsing” characters say with the kind of tone you might have if you were blandly noting a restaurant you never saw anyone in was closing down.

    Consider: Christopher Nolan finally gives a woman close to a decent role with Penelope, a woman trapped behind a veil, fighting for stalemate. Anne Hathaway does what she can, but we never get to sense Penelope’s frustration with sitting next to an empty throne as little more than a prize; she instead screams almost directly into the camera that her abilities are worth less than the hair on a man’s chin, obliterating what was hardly very subtle to begin with. Of course, this is all conveniently forgotten as soon as Odysseus returns, heavily bearded, to take said throne, Penelope reduced to a weeping damsel.2

    Indeed, what stands out about Nolan’s Odyssey–outside of his own preoccupations, which really colour every part of the film–is how much the original text’s ambiguities have been flattened into the Hollywood paste. Honestly, I’m surprised. Every addition is intended to make the work go down smoother yet diminishes it. Robert Pattinson’s isn’t just a dick who is abusing xenia (described as “Zeus’s Law” in the film, a patronising simplification3) but actually a shameful draft dodger. Agamemnon becomes Darth Vader (albeit one where George Lucas let David Prowse voice him) willing to kill his child in order to secure… trade routes. Fucking trade routes!!! I’m sorry, George!!!

    These elaborate back stories, added to show why characters are baddies or goodies, so we can boo them or cheer them on at the appropriate moments are just thematically confusing if you think about them too long (war is bad… but draft dodging is also bad…) The Odyssey is practically a direct sequel (well, prequel) to Oppenheimer and Nolan, obsessed with the idea of what great men must do, what it costs them, and what these fated actions mean for the future, ties himself in knots.

    In many ways, The Odyssey’s sins begin with Sinon. We’re getting several layers of irony deep (here based on the pronunciation of Sinon) but as much as the decision to include a thread from the Aeneid, Roman poet Virgil’s epic that sees Odysseus as a duplicitous baddie could be seen as an attempt to offer balance, it really just sets up Nolan’s Odyssey as another paean to the feelings of the oppressor.

    It is important, I think, that although in Nolan’s Odyssey we do get a single Trojan character, they are a symbol, not an embodied actor in the story, and that every enemy soldier is faceless. Because it speaks to that focus.

    If Nolan was interested in a wider view of the Trojan War, it seems strange that he used the Aeneid rather than The Iliad. Let’s put aside the question of authorship (which gets especially thorny with the section of The Iliad I’m going to discuss) but why not use the Doloneia as an example of Odysseus’s sins? Odysseus commits an act of espionage, captures a (terrified) scout, extracts information at the promise of their survival, and then lets his companion execute them. 

    It possible that Nolan is just such a dork that he doesn’t believe that section belongs in the Iliad, but this one-sided concentration on Odysseus’ feelings above all–we see the sack of Troy reflected in his sad eyes almost exclusively–has an awkward fit that lives (as Nolan’s far more conservative Batman movies did) in the aftermath of a war on terror built on lies big and small, and now during the continued genocide of the Palestinian people and the morass of a war with Iran. In these wars it is not honest regret that is shared, but consent manufactured. Think of the sadness in the eyes of Israeli soldiers, depressed about shooting children’s legs off because it took them away from rifling through women’s underwear drawers.

    It’s sad, they say, because you made us do it to you.4

    But alright. Odysseus’ sin has to be lying for the “right” reasons; he is the hero after all.  But isn’t it just so neat for a man, broken by his realisation that his abuse of xenia via the Trojan Horse apparently the original sin of the bronze age5 can come home and… kill everyone in his house for abusing xenia? While I understand the ending of the original Odyssey is hardly going to satisfy a modern audience (the families of the slaughtered show up to kill Odysseus and Athena appears and goes “listen guys, they were dicks. Let it go”) the themes collapse into anticlimax.

    Ultimately, Nolan has latched onto xenia as a theme and made what I can only describe as a “Liberal boomer doomer” movie. A film that says “Modern civilisation is ending because we stopped having the neighbours over for dinner.”

    “We’ll die soon enough, though, so hopefully the next generation (Tom Holland in a headband) can sort it out. Bye!”

    This is, frankly, the kind of message I would be ashamed to put my name behind, so maybe I do fully agree with Wilson. It reminds me of the similarly feeble “maybe the kids will sort it out” denouement of One Battle After Another (though at least without that film’s smug detachment.) I just don’t think it’s that meaningful to be telling stories where the takeaway is “oh shit… damn… yeah… I guess that sucks. Oh well, what are you going to do?” in the face of climate and societal collapse.

    In each of our homes, we live with suitors we seem powerless to evict. No longer embodied in our space, but making a banquet of our wealth remotely. They lay us off and take huge bonuses. They raise prices on our groceries and pocket the difference. They rip the wire from the walls of the stores on our high streets and then, once they’ve taken everything they can, leave them boarded up and empty. They hollow out everything we used to have, our third spaces, our communities, our environment, our homes, because they think it is their right to take what we have. 

    The rage we should feel is legitimate. The decades we have been at sea while this has happened should not have dulled it, no lotus flowers, no siren songs should be enough. If we’re on the beach, I want us to start building the raft, and it’s not to sail off into the sunset.

    I’m not asking The Odyssey to be a polemic, but it’s depressing to see Nolan attempt to grapple with big themes using an icon of the Western canon and devolve into the easy non-answer of the Hollywood ending.

    Look. If you really ask me to take it as it is, to put up with it being thematically muddled and full of blatant exposition it’s… fine. The design of the palace–with a physical screen used as a “veil” I thought was clever. The body horror section was intriguingly unusual for Nolan (and goes on so much longer than you expect). Leguizamo better be picking up some statues (to make up for all the ones he didn’t get for his role as The Pest). The redrafting of Odysseus revealing his identity to Telemachus until he saw his dog worked for me (I’m not made of stone.) Pattinson enjoys himself, and I enjoy that he’s enjoying himself. But that fight at the end is absolutely garbage and probably more embarrassing than anything else. Come on Nolan, you don’t want to hire anyone who can choreograph and shoot action? No?

    In the end, The Odyssey is more interesting in what it says about Nolan than what it says about The Odyssey, though the discourse on that is, hopefully, not going to last another three thousand years. I apologise for adding to it, but you know what Athena’s like, always inspiring us to battle. Well… actually, if you’ve only seen The Odyssey you don’t know what she’s like.

    1. Of which I am not one. I’m just some prick waffling online, so if this article annoys you, consider it a learning experience where you can go “well, I didn’t agree with that” and move on with your life. ↩︎
    2. I say “close” to a decent role, because Nolan removes two things that enrich Penelope’s character. Her dream, which expresses complicated, ambiguous feelings about Odysseus’s return, and her later test of Odysseus. I think Nolan plays the idea that Penelope clocks Odysseus early well, but it’s sad that she doesn’t get a grace note showing that maybe she’s the clever one. ↩︎
    3. As an aside–it’s frustrating that the main (only?) explanation of xenia given is that it’s done in case a guest is a god in disguise (especially as the gods are not, exactly, seen here.) While that’s true, it’s much more interesting as a symptom of the currency-free palace economies that The Odyssey represents, where visitors would often have little to barter with; without it, travel and diplomacy would be near impossible, it was reciprocal, and it was not just given in fear of divine punishment. ↩︎
    4. Consider Helen, given a miserable fate here yet still explicitly taking the blame. ↩︎
    5. I mean technically in the source Paris abducted Helen while he was a guest of Menelaus, itself breaking xenia. Sorry if I’m getting too into the weeds here but “yeah but I did it via the form of a big wooden horse” doesn’t seem like that big a step up unless, like Nolan, you’re attracted to the idea that “wooden horse” equals “nuclear weapons”. [“Who’s making the gross simplifications now?”–Ed.] ↩︎
  • Find Your Words (Capy, 2026)

    Find Your Words (Capy, 2026)

    Developed/Published by: Capy
    Released: 08/04/2026
    Completed: 10/07/2026
    Completion: Made all the friends!

    Feel like I’ve been going pretty hard on articles recently so let’s have a nice easy one this week, eh? I’m a fan and acquaintance of Capy–I think I’ve played everything they’ve released, I worked in their offices while working on Sound Shapes–so I’m not going to argue from any position of objectivity (though if you’re new here, I never do) but I think Find Your Words is adorable, worthy, and worth anyone’s time considering it’s free. 

    To be honest, it being free is almost an… issue? While it doesn’t quite grind my gears like Evil Egg–the freeness of which still seems completely wrong–that it’s free makes it feel a bit churlish to complain about Find Your Words. But the problem is that I think there’s just so much more they could do!

    Inspired by designers Jon Maur and Vic Ngyuen’s experience as the parents of non-verbal children, Find Your Words casts you as a non-verbal child going to summer camp for the first time, and takes you through the experience of making friends via AAC, or “augmentative and alternative communication.” 

    The fun thing here–and it must have at least partially been the genesis of the project–is that communication books, a form of AAC, are perfect as a communication tool in a video game. With a communication book, you have a limited number of symbols and can combine them to make simple sentences: you could select “where” and “beach” let’s say, show it to someone, and they’d know quite simply that you’re asking where the beach is. 

    When trying to create a “natural” form of communication for a video game, this so… elegant. There’s none of the problems of having the full freedom of text input, and there’s similarly none of the strict, “that isn’t quite what I wish I could say” of pre-selected statements. 

    Yes, the more options you have, the more difficult it is to ensure that you hit a sensible answer for each possibility–meaning you have to keep your context small. I do think that’s why Find Your Words is limited to a single day at a summer camp (and there are still situations where combinations that you think would work lead to unsatisfyingly generic answers.)

    However… I think it’s ripe for further exploration. I know systems like this have existed before–even something like Ultima’s original “Name, job, bye” system has similarities–but I think I like it particularly here because I feel like we’ve gotten so stuck in the mindset of strict dialogue trees. Playing Find Your Words I could see, like, a detective game starring a non-verbal hero (a silent protagonist, as it were…) using this quite easily.

    Honestly, it’s my main criticism of Find Your Words. It’s delightful, and I think meaningful. But I wish they’d got a little bit more… designery with the actual game. The communication tool isn’t particularly important to the game’s puzzles: you mostly make friends by finding them and saying the same simple things in different locations. I suppose for that reason it’d be a great game for a kid, or to play with a kid–though I did struggle to find all the birds, I guess because it doesn’t really use the game’s main mechanic.

    That said, it doesn’t take that long and you can be done with this game in an hour and change; possibly why they chose to make it free (better to sell a supporter pack to fewer people than face many a steam refund from jerks?) and I certainly didn’t feel like I wasted my time. I just… do more with this! Please!!!

    Will I ever play it again? There really isn’t any reason to, sadly–there’s no branching or anything as far as I can tell. It’s sweet, but it is simple.

    Final Thought: At the very least, if they’re not going to do any more with this concept they should make some plushies of the bird designs. I love them!!! (Even if they were annoying to actually find in the game.)

  • NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    Developed/Published by: Sumo Digital, Sumo Digital Academy / Secret Mode
    Released: 26/03/2026
    Completed: 06/07/2026
    Completion: Won the Egg Cup with Carlisle!

    The World Cup grinding on finally gave me a reason to give my time to this, Sumo Digital’s “Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager” because I was, at least in the group stages, going to have a lot of games on that I didn’t exactly feel I needed to give my full attention (but I still wanted to see the goals and that.)

    Now, I’m not someone who really bothers with football manager games, but I like deckbuilders and I really loved the theming of this, chock-full of the kind of maximalist skeuomorphism that hasn’t really been seen in games since the likes of Yes, Prime Minister (and which does really feel like a very “British games” kind of thing.) It was definitely enough to make me get over the main issue I have: that I love football, but I just don’t care about club football at all.

    Love a game that gives you a desk: Yes, Prime Minister (Oxford Digital, 1987) vs. Nutmeg!

    I suspect that’s an unbelievably unusual opinion, but if you’re going to feel that way, growing up in Scotland is probably what’s going to do it. Which I suppose makes it somewhat ironic that probably the most major issue I have with Nutmeg! is that it’s limited to the English leagues, which I care about even less. I get it: they’re recreating 20 years of football history right down to the real transfers happening at the right time, and that’s a lot of data entry (I suspect Sumo Digital Academy had to take on quite a bit of grunt work) and it’s probably the most famous and popular league in the world, but I hope that they’ll be able to add the Scottish leagues in future, so players can try and desperately make the top flight of Scottish football in the era even slightly interesting (sorry.)

    But still, don’t say I don’t persevere. I simply picked the most northern teams I could get–first York, which I got to the second division–and then Carlisle, the most northern English football team you can get.1

    In general, however, one of the nice things about Nutmeg! is that I don’t think you have to be a locked-in  football fan to enjoy it. Thanks to setting itself to an era and going for a more abstracted take on the sport, Nutmeg! does manage to split the difference between being a “themed video game” and a “football manager” and that makes it worth playing even if you just think it looks interesting but you only know the barest about football.

    Despite that, I do think the tutorial doesn’t explain the game as well as it should, which is why I’ve written an entire guide for it. However, in short, the thing that needs to be understood about Nutmeg! is that it’s not a deckbuilder about building a “perfect engine” that you use across the game, but instead a game about percentages. Nutmeg! is more like a streamlined, card-based XCOM than it is a football-themed Slay The Spire. 

    The majority of your time is spent actually being a football manager: you’re trying to build the best team of players you can, and to do that you’ll need to make money–selling merch and improving your stadium to sell more tickets–and hire the best staff to train and support them. The loop, really, boils down to acquiring the best players you can to win matches which allows you to make more money to buy even better players. Unless you chose to play in marathon mode, you aren’t going to play every game–meaning that you mostly go into games with a straight percentage chance of winning or drawing, and only a little leeway to affect that by choosing your team’s tactics and formation.

    So quickly you learn: you can’t win every game, unless you want to engage in brutal, repetitive save scumming.2 You have to pick your battles–and the trick here is that’s where the deckbuilding game kicks in, with card-based matches.

    I really love the matches. The system isn’t entirely elegant, but it does a great job of representing the highs and lows of a football match. Football matches are 90+ minutes and they tell stories that boil down easily into highlights, and this is how Nutmeg! works. Again, you can’t expect to simply build a perfect deck and win. First of all, any cards you use in a match get burned off, so your deck is constantly changing. Secondly, every action is that XCOM-like battle of percentages that you try to bend in your favour with your hand of cards. Want to score a goal? Well, if the goalie is incredible and your striker… not, you’ll have to spend the best attacking card you have and still not guarantee the goal.

    Everything in Nutmeg! is a gamble, and that simply feels right for what they’re trying to do. Strong teams are better than weak teams, but absolutely unlikely things can happen… about as often as unlikely things happen. You won’t get a division 5 team beating a first division team, but underdogs can still win the day with the right cards, and there’s a real thrill in having saved a powerful card until you absolutely need it, like in a cup knockout game, knowing that if you lose it, you’re probably out till next year. 

    But there’s always next year.

    Nutmeg! is a really nice “casual” take on football and management sims. How good players are is very clear–you really don’t have to pour over the stats–and the matches you play matter. But it’s not perfect. There are no issues that ruin it, exactly, but there’s definitely a culmination of niggles that could turn you off.

    First, that UI. It’s charming, and I love that it evolves across the years, but it’s also really busy, overcomplicated, and slow to navigate. It feel like they’ve created a lot of redundancy to try and make it simpler to do more things, but it’s confusing, and made worse by the fact that the way they highlight what you’re selecting is far too subtle. And then when you actually switch screens there are animations, zooms… I’m aware that if they cut this down the game would feel very static, but especially as the game settles into a loop where you’re doing the same things flicking between screens over and over, you’re going to get very tired of it (and a bit dizzy, frankly.)

    Then there are the weak points of the game’s loop. Ensuring players keep their skills trained up is just tedious busywork; I get the idea (you can’t keep all your players at their full potential) but couldn’t the game just… switch players at max out for me? They already ensure players change which skill they’re training when they max them out, so it’s not totally out of pocket to ask.

    There are some subtler issues, too. Early in the game as you’re building up your team, the cards you’ll be getting usually work with the recipes you have. But with a well trained team, you might be getting only the top-tier “basic” cards, meaning that the recipes you want, which often use lower-ranked basics, you can’t make! I want the 50% goal card, not the 60% goal card that might fail, but if I never see a 20% attack card I can’t make it. It’s a strange–and probably not easily solved–design issue. Maybe give players the ability to split cards?

    And ultimately, there’s a limit to how long you’re going to want to play Nutmeg! as there’s only the four divisions and the Egg Cup. The game offers twenty years of seasons and having played it for not quite half that, there’s a feeling of diminishing returns as the game starts to feel like it boils down to just waiting to make enough money to snipe the best players from other teams even if they cost millions and millions of pounds. There aren’t quite enough events or stories to be told once you’re topping the league unless you just want to start over with a different club. You know, adding the Scottish leagues would give players new things to aim for…

    All that said, I had a blast in my time with this, as it somehow scratches the football itch, the deckbuilder itch, and even the XCOM itch. It’s not perfect, but it does exactly what it sets out to do and you really can’t say fairer than that.

    Will I ever play it again? Although I led my team to a win in the Egg Cup, they haven’t lifted the first division trophy. I could be convinced to attempt such a feat if there are any future updates to the game. Like if they added Scottish leagues. Just worth mentioning. Again.

    Final Thought: Of course, Nutmeg! Isn’t the only football manager to explore the XCOM concept, there’s also Football, Tactics & Glory, which also recently put out a World Cup update. I’m eager to compare and contrast at some point in the future, but I am a bit footballed out now–I played this for like 30 hours!

    1. I could, if I was absolutely dedicated, have attempted to stuff my teams with Scottish players, but they don’t include nationality in the stats and the ones I recognised instantly were all knocking on a bit, even if it would have been pretty funny to field Frank “Wherza Burds?” McAvennie (sorry, I know this post is getting extremely regional.) ↩︎
    2. You can choose to play the game seeded so you can make it impossible to save scum. I recommend this–but you’ll regret it every time you lose a match or fail to attract a new player, so be warned. ↩︎
  • How To Play NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    How To Play NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    I’ve been playing Nutmeg! Sumo Digital’s “Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager” during the World Cup and enjoying it a great deal, but I found it difficult to get into originally due to a tutorial I didn’t quite get and the game’s extreme (if charming) skeuomorphic UI. The game actually has quite a simple rhythm to it and the actual deckbuilder—once you understand what it’s doing—is fun rather than frustratingly random, so I thought rather than just post up a review of it I could immediately recommend it and explain how to play it rather than have you waste half a season not sure what you’re doing. Of course, working that out might be part of the fun for you—I might be making it too easy for you here—but this is a solid foundation to play the game from, I think.

    The Management Bit

    So, the thing about Nutmeg! is that even though it’s a deckbuilder, it’s not really what you’re going to spend most of your time doing. You will, ultimately, be doing a lot of managing a football team, trying to manage costs, buy and train players, and give yourself the best chance of winning as many games as possible as you only play one card game out of five matches.

    (If you like you can play every match by choosing “marathon mode” but one of the most important things you need to understand is that you just aren’t going to win every match, and especially in the early game while you’re slopping about in the fourth division that’s going to be quite deflating. You want to choose the games where you think playing will give you the edge.)

    The game is played on a month-to-month basis. Each month you’ll play five games–possibly a sixth if the Egg Cup is on–and you can see your “edge” in each match, so you can work out which games you can delegate because you’ll probably win, or delegate because it’s a “scheduled loss” or play to win.

    At the start of each and every month, you’ve got a lot of housekeeping to do. First, check your “To-Do” list (the highlighter on the board.)

    • This has a few things you need to do in order to get a free booster pack of cards. You want this booster pack, especially if you’re trying to drag a crap team up. The things it asks are pretty simple, and if you follow this guide you’ll know how to do them. Some, like winning games, are sadly a bit of luck unless you want to save-scum, but the main one you have to watch out for are the media interview requirements: you’re more likely to get them when you win games by a lot of goals, so you might want to broadcast some games you’re favoured in.

    Now you want to go straight to the magazine on the table.

    • You want to check if you have the best staff possible. The game has three kinds of staff: coaches, support and office.
      • All staff can provide “recipes” which are necessary for the deckbuilding portion of the game. In my opinion this is a major priority: you want as many of the right recipes as possible. You may wish to keep a slightly weaker staff member for the recipe(s) they offer.
      • Coaches train players and ensure you have the right kind of cards for the deckbuilding game: defence, control, attack, goalkeeping, and stamina.
      • Support includes assistant coaches, which you want a lot of as soon as you have any players who have skills, as they are the only way to train those skills. There are scouts, who find players and give you their information. Other support include psychologists and nutritionists and things like that, who help with morale, provide half-time boosts and may need to be unlocked by building facilities.
      • Office staff are things like accountants and recruiters who help with your budget or help find better coaches and other staff. A good recruiter seems very worth the money.
      • There’s no downside to firing staff and hiring new staff on a month-to-month basis, so just always have the best staff you can!
    • You want to check the transfer market. Use your scout to scope out any player that catches your eye that you can afford (you can’t go into debt buying players) and hope they have some skills. You want players with skills!
      • When buying a player you need to make an offer, with a percentage chance of it succeeding. You only get one chance, so work out how much you want them. You may wish to make promise like playing in the first eleven or training to snag them–and when you’re poor, that will be necessary. But it becomes a ball ache later when the player simply isn’t good enough any more because you’ve gone up a division–you’re at the mercy of the market if you have to shift a player and they can hang around and cause morale issues. 
      • Don’t forget to list players for sale that you don’t need, too. Obviously, just pick the ones with the lowest numbers, but be aware that some seemingly crap players have high potential, so you might want to hold on to certain younger players and hope they train up fast.
    • If you need to, check the front page of the magazine to see if you’ve still got a sponsor or not. If you don’t, hop on the phone, call the commercial director, and take a sponsor.
      • Sponsors largely have a negative effect on player, fan and board morale. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but it doesn’t particularly matter because you’re wanting to build that up by playing well, and you need money. Football is a money game even at the lowest tier.
    • Speaking of: go to the computer and check your merchandise. You want to try and match your merch to the season/how well things are going. To be honest, this doesn’t seem like it matters a ton, but if it’s winter, you want to be selling wooly hats. Summer, caps. As soon as you can, buy the merch facility because it allows you to sell four pieces of merch, meaning you can largely set this and forget it.

    Phew! Now you have to do something every week:

    • Check your skills training. At first, this is going to be fine, because you’re going to have like one or two skill training slots and maybe a couple of players with skills. But you’ll end up with six slots and entire team of skilled players. Skills degrade, so you will have to juggle players around these slots constantly. Is this boring and annoying? Yes. But it’s also something you’ll want to do, because skills give you “crits” and the percentages can be high (like 50%) giving you situations where players automatically succeed passes and even at scoring goals.

    Meanwhile, play or delegate the game each week.

    • When delegating, use your judgement on what positioning to use but be prepared for the percentages to go against you no matter what you choose. Injuries are really common in Nutmeg! so you’ll probably constantly have to shuffle players around–don’t think you can sell all your subs to save money. You’ll want a minimum of a couple of players spare for every position–this can be an issue definitely with forwards, because the game doesn’t have any formations like 5-4-1 so if you’re down to one forward you’re stuck playing a midfielder out of position.

    Before the last game of the month, go back to the computer and check attendance. If you’re filling your stadium, go to the blueprints and buy an upgrade (if you can afford it) or plan to do so as soon as you can. It’ll get built immediately at the start of the following month.

    You can buy facilities at any point as soon as you can afford them, because they get built instantly. You want the ones that make money or allow you to hire new staff. Past a certain point, it makes sense to leave a facility space open for sponsor facilities, which are free and make you the big bucks.

    Playing Games

    Before you choose to broadcast any match, go to training and make sure you’re chosen a coach to “focus”. One of Nutmeg!’s biggest issues it that you can’t see the hand of cards you hold already1 so you’ll have to remember if you are–for example–completely lacking any goalkeeping cards and so you want to focus on the coach that provides them. Once you’ve done that, choose to broadcast the match.

    • Before you actually play the game, you will open a “booster pack” of cards that you can add to your hand. But what you really want to do is to have a bunch of recipes–thanks to your staff, or players who also can provide them–allowing you to combine cards into much more powerful ones. You don’t want a basic Sidewinder card (+30% to saving a goal.) You want to merge that with another Sidewinder to get the “Penalty King” card, giving you +60%.
    • You always want to come into matches with some goalkeeping cards. You can never draw them from the tactics deck.
    • Frankly, I don’t know if formation really makes any difference in this game–in every delegated match 4-4-2 seemed to be the best option, so I never changed it. The classics are classic for a reason, I guess.
    • However, your positioning–to either drop back, push up or hold shape–absolutely matters, and you can change this between every game event if you wish. This is important because during a game you will be aware of what cards you have in your hand: if you have no attacking cards, but lots of defensive cards, you can “push up” to try and draw more attacking cards from the tactical deck, which are “free” cards you draw if your hand isn’t full. If you just want to try and park the bus after a few goals, “drop back.”
    • IMPORTANT: before playing games, you can look at your opponents players, and if any of them take your fancy, “headhunt” them using a scout action and have them show up for transfer the next month. This is an important way of growing your squad with better players–don’t forget to do it!

    The way games are played is a match is boiled down to a series of runs. I’ll be honest–I don’t know quite what the system is that decides when in the game and how an event is chosen during runs–but if you watch the pitch map that gets drawn on the side of the screen, it might be fairly complex (or all smoke and mirrors.) In each run, you’re either defending or attacking, and a series of events are played until the run ends via an event that ends it (a goal, or a tackle, for example.)

    •  Every time you can play a card, you are trying to affect the percentages of the cards on screen in your favour. Generally, there are three cards available per event during a run: one that benefits your opponent, one that’s neutral(-ish) and one that benefits you. You want to increase the percentage of “goal” over “miss” or “save” (to give the most obvious example) by playing the best attack card (so a Goal Rush card, that gives you +30%, is what you want to play.)
    • You can only play the kind of cards that match the event. So if you’re all out of defensive cards, you are at the mercy of the quality of your defenders. This can go wrong fast.
    • The most important thing to understand is that Nutmeg! is sort of… card-based football X-COM. You are going to get screwed by the percentages, and it’s going to feel even more unfair if you’ve just spent a bunch of cards to get to goal and your opponent crits and automatically saves your shot. The entire game is about putting yourself in the position to win–not guaranteeing your win. It is amazingly accurate to football in that way.
    • If you score a goal, you get momentum, which means you get cards back in your hand–so there is a benefit to spending your expensive cards chasing the win. 

    The most important thing about a match, however, is that you keep the cards you don’t play for future games (apart from any free cards from the tactical deck you draw during the game.) This means that you have incentive to burn tactical deck cards and also to play conservatively when you can. Momentum is important here. If you’ve scored a goal and are winning, you might not want to burn new cards to score another–but you’ll lose the cards you’ve played even if they go back to your hand (where amusingly they look tarnished) so you can play them again. Similarly, if you’ve scored a bunch of goals, you might want to hold off on spending expensive defensive cards unless you’re facing an equaliser.

    After a game, sometimes you’ll get called by the press to comment. This can’t go wrong, so just praise whichever stakeholder needs the boost unless your to-do list requires you praise someone specific.

    Anyway, that’s basically Nutmeg! Have fun!

    1. If you can see this somewhere I couldn’t find it, which I think is on the game, not me. ↩︎

  • Alpha (2026)

    Alpha (2026)

    The YRF Spy Universe has produced a couple of my favourite films ever in War and (in particular) the criminally unsuccessful War 2 (my favourite film of last year!) but it is, let’s say… patchy. I mean… several of the films star a very bad man–just look at his absurdly long controversies entry on Wikipedia–but I’ve been willing to give the franchise the benefit of the doubt because I’m such a sucker for Hrithik Roshan’s beautiful eyes. 

    Christ you could drown in them.

    For a shared universe that only decided it was one three film in, Alpha–unfortunately–has taken the wrong lessons from the already burst Marvel/DC bubble and decided what the franchise needs is films that are exposition-stuffed origin stories that feel more like set-up for future cameos than they are, you know, enjoyable movies in their own right.

    This is a real “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” of a film, and it’s one that constantly teases a fireworks factory before just… not showing you it. I’m not sure if it was the first time feature director Shiv Rawail1 just not being up to the job–the film was postponed for reshoots, apparently–but if you compare the film to War 2: that movie opens with an action sequence that would be the climax in any other movie, and Alpha opens by introducing a bad-ass group of super-soldiers who… take part in a training exercise where they don’t do anything cool, that we mostly watch from a board room.

    Because really we’re only here to learn all about the R&AW chief’s struggle to have a child. 

    My favourite example of this–if you’ll allow me to skip ahead a bit–is that before the intermission, we see our heroes, seemingly trapped in an impossible situation, all primed to kick ass. “Finally,” you think, “we’re going to get a truly balls to the wall action sequence.”

    When the film returns from intermission the two action stars are told by their dad to run away, which they proceed to do. They tee us up, make us anticipate, and then nothing cool happens.

    (Our heroes literally spend most of the movie on a fun bonding road trip to a safehouse.)

    There’s a real sense that they just didn’t have any idea what to do with this film. My suspicion is that this exists because someone noticed that maybe the War sub-series is just a teensy bit homoerotic and said “we gotta get some hot ladies up in this.” 

    It was decided, of course, that ladies are weak and meek, so they need to have a reason why they could be the equal of any man (super serum) but even then the film just doesn’t really do anything with our stars. I like Alia Bhatt, but it seems like they kind of shrugged and went, “I dunno… kind of make her look like Letty from Fast & Furious” and that was about as many ideas as they had. If you need an idea of how badly served Bhatt and her co-star Sharvari are, the film’s big cameo is (spoiler?) Hrithik Roshan, and he is already cooler than them sitting still and doing nothing. When he actually gets up to fight, he does three cool things immediately that are more awesome than anything Bhatt, the ostensible star of this film does at any point. And he’s just supposed to be a normal guy!!!

    If there’s an elephant in this room, though, it’s that the YRF Spy Universe already does have a kick-ass female protagonist, Katrina Khaif’s Zoya from the Tiger movies, but she’s from Pakistan, and Alpha absolutely represents Indian cinema’s increasingly histrionic nationalism. Long gone are any calls for mutual understanding, and there’s a sense that even “there are some good ones” is beyond the pale. This isn’t the worst example of it I’ve seen in a while (Fighter, *shudder*) but it absolutely casts a pallor over the climax.

    Not that the climax is that great anyway. I mean… it’s fine, I suppose. By the time you get to it, the movie has led you to not expect much, and when it doesn’t give you very much, it doesn’t really feel that worth complaining about.

    A flop and a let down, then, and I’d think it’d likely be a nail in the coffin for this stumbling franchise but I suspect they’ll push through on a future Paathan movie. Indian men in their [checks notes] 60s are allowed to do cool stuff on screen so that one will probably work. Lord knows I’ll show up for it.

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.

    1. A long time assistant director, has done a TV show, and a nepo baby, but the last one is basically a prerequisite for being in Indian cinema, so it’s not like we can hold that against him any more than usual. ↩︎