I actually played several games in August. Most of them were smaller releases, but it was still a busier month as far as new games played.

Of course there’s the big boy Black Myth: Wukong, but there’s a variety of other games too, with a few retro-style games and some more unique things.

So let’s go and talk about them!

Black Myth: Wukong

Might as well highlight this game first because holy fuck. I kinda barely have to talk about this game because it’s so massive, being the highest peak players on Steam outside of PUBG for some reason (I never got that). It still gets over a million players concurrent every day. Everyone’s playing this.

You play not as Sun Wukong, but instead as “the Destined One”, another monkey from Wukong’s clan or something (and you’re not the first Destined One, there’s seemingly been various others that were killed by some of the characters before), and one that unfortunately never speaks. After the extremely badass intro where you do play as Wukong himself, he gets defeated and sealed in a stone. This takes place some time after Journey to the West, with many characters from that popping up. If you’re aware of the original story you’ll get a lot of the references and will probably enjoy things like interacting a bunch with Zhu Bajie… I don’t have much knowledge. I have very surface-level Wukong knowledge. As the Destined One, you’re tasked with finding what is basically the essence of Wukong (basically his sense I guess) as well as his equipment, to end up trying to revive him from his current predicament of being sealed in a rock.

The game itself is Souls-like, but I’d say easier, faster and funner. You have faster attacks, faster dodging and perfect dodges, and you get a series of spells that give you interesting combat options. The very first spell you get is insane as it allows you to immobilize enemies temporarily, but you get different defensive spells (either an invincible dash or turning into a rock to deflect attacks), a clone spell and a variety of transformations and magic objects. Some transformations let you control the character, others are just single attacks. And you can level up, which gives you skill points which can power up your basic moves, stats, spells and transformations. That semi-broken immobilize spell? You can make it hit an area instead of just one enemy. You can get your clones to also use immobilize. You can reset your build at any time if you find that you prefer focusing on different spells (maybe you prefer Cloud Step over Rock Solid). And there’s equipment too which you need to find materials to craft them.

While I’d say the game is easier than Souls, it’s still pretty challenging. Some boss battles are really tough to deal with (Yellow Loong was the roughest to me), but most of them are pretty fun. There are no clone bosses, they all have their own unique movesets and strategies to deal with them.

Overall, I thought this was very fun. It’s less annoying than Souls games, has funner combat than Souls games and it’s cooler presentation-wise. I think it’s crazy that this is the studio’s first real (see: non-mobile) game, being basically AAA-level as far as presentation and scale… except there’s actual real passion behind it unlike most AAA games. It even has cool anime-like scenes in-between chapters that are pretty interesting and well animated. It looks amazing, plays super well, has a lot of cool gameplay mechanics, and was made by a small team which I think is deserving of respect… It’s not even buggy/glitchy (from what I’ve seen, searching on youtube it seems there’s an infinite mana glitch but nothing fucked up like you see from, say, a Bethesda game… and I think this has been patched out). It’s actually hard to believe this is their first real game.

If there’s any complaints from me, it is that the performance on PC is pretty rough (5800X, 3080). For the most part I was running this at 1440p ~80fps, but it was pretty stuttery and it had several drops in the 40fps range. It definitely could’ve done with a bit more time in the oven to optimize. That said, considering this is the studio’s first game, I find this kinda excusable unlike when actual long-running AAA studios release games in broken states like Ubisoft. I do also find that some enemies are just a bit too relentless in their attacks, but that’s kind of a Soulslike thing at this point. Oh and the dragon scale is bullshitly hidden, I had to use a map on the internet to find it… and discussions of how to even break the wall it’s hidden behind because I didn’t have a specific transformation I needed (because I didn’t get the boss in that area to run into the wall to break it, and the transformation you can use disappears if you ring the 3 bells in the first chapter). This scale hides behind it several bosses and the way to get the “True Ending”, including one of the coolest bosses in the game… and there’s no good indications I found for it even existing before you get the boss fight that is the intended method to get it.

Carpathian Night Starring Bela Lugosi

I got this game because the title is funny. A game starring Bela Lugosi? A Castlevania-style game starring Bela Lugosi? Where Bela Lugosi plays Dracula? Yeah that’s exactly what that is.

It feels like a mix of the NES Castlevanias and Super Castlevania 4. It does have air control and multi-directional whipping like 4, but it still has a bit of the stiffness of the NES ones. It’s also a lot easier than any of them. There’s 2 playable characters but they don’t feel THAT different.

And yes Bela Lugosi (or at least a pixel rendition of him) does in fact show up… In a cutscene before the final boss battle. He basically shows up for 2 seconds, which I guess is enough to place him in the game’s title. Nice.

I wish I had more to say about this game but it really is “Castlevania but not quite as good”. I’d recommend on discount.

Spark the Electric Jester 3

I saw this came out on Switch and thought it looked pretty interesting. I was not super aware of this series (the first one was a 2D Sonic-style game that I never played and I missed that there was a sequel), so I didn’t realize that this actually came out in 2022 on Steam, which is where I grabbed it.

The game itself, unlike the first game, is a 3D Sonic-style game, specifically it’s very similar to the Sonic Adventure games. It’s about speed, but also combat as it has a deeper combat system with a variety of combos and parries and stuff. I don’t have much to say about this one overall.

The game controls really well and is a better 3D Sonic game than just about every 3D Sonic game (except maybe Generations and Lost World which are the only good ones). So there. Pretty cool game. I haven’t finished it yet but it’s fun.

Guardians of the Galaxy

As I was looking for stuff to play, I remembered I had this on my Epic Game Store account, because it was free at some point.

GotG is a shitty walking simulator masquerading as a… pretty meh action-shooter RPG. Like, it’s clearly just a walking simulator, but it pretends to be a real game. The gameplay lacks depth, is covered in the modern game thing of both visually telling you what to do and the characters not shutting up about what you need to do next, and the “real” core of the game itself is just… walking around and watching pretty meh cutscenes, sometimes making dialogue choices.

After a few chapters I just stopped playing. It’s kinda bad.

The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered

This is a SaGa-style JRPG, that I believe is a prequel of sorts to Alliance Alive. Combat and leveling is fine, it’s the sort of system you’d expect with random stat boosts instead of levels, and sometimes using attacks makes you learn new attacks or power them up… This is all fine.

What brought my mood to “fuck this game” is 2 of the dungeons. See, enemies are visible on the map and you can try to avoid them. This dungeon though had enemies that are flying above and you just see their shadows, and they move in a specific pattern/area so they’re technically easy to avoid… Or would be if the shadows spawned when you were far from them rather than right next to them. These enemies happen to be really strong, but if you run from a battle (which you will want to because these guys take a long time to kill) it brings you back to the entrance of the dungeon because fuck you… which also sucks! So I kept dealing with this bullshit for a long time and got really annoyed. I thought I was done dealing with this garbage, but the next dungeon I unlocked had the exact same shit. As soon as I saw these shadows again… fuck no, fuck this game… So I stopped playing it.

This is a game that is “almost good” but has one really stupid element that makes the whole experience bad. It’s possible it’s just those 2 dungeons but fuck that, I ain’t playing any more of this.

WOWOWOW KORONE BOX

This came out a few months back but I just grabbed it this month. It’s free too so that’s cool, I believe released on Steam through Hololive’s publishing agreement, like with Idol Showdown and a variety of other free indie games.

This is a very simple single-screen top-down twin-stick shooter that is inspired by another free game on Steam, Super Crate Box. Every time you grab a box you gain a point, and you change weapons randomly. The goal is to try to get a high score before you die from infinitely spawning enemies, and at specific intervals there’s boss battles.

Really a simple fun game, worth checking out because it’s free and you play as Korone.

Aotenjo (demo)

Do you like Balatro? Do you like Riichi Mahjong? Well this is a demo for a game that is not out yet that combines those things. You play mahjong sets to build a hand (each play is one set and a pair, which overrides the previous pair) and try to increase your score each time, to reach a goal score. This is actually the same concept as Balatro, pretty much. In-between hands you get upgrades that unlocks more Yaku (or powers up yakus), a gadget that can change things in gameplay (such as ways to change the value of tiles), as well as stores to buy new tiles, modify tiles, and objects that affect scoring (such as ones that give you more points if you play specific suits or numbers or something).

So far the game is pretty fun, they have been updating things in it so in a way this is a free early access release… But it’s not at the level of Balatro.

And somehow this isn’t the only Balatro-ish mahjong game I played this month, with another demo called ULTIMAHJONG which wasn’t as good as Aotenjo, and Mahjong Soul having a roguelite-style game mode right now in a new event. Weird!

Castaway

This was a game I thought looked pretty cool from the trailer. It’s a Link’s Awakening styled game where you do dungeons, find items, solve puzzles and fight bosses. The core gameplay is pretty fun. So you start the game and 30-60 minutes later, you’re done. It’s over. Very strange. This could’ve been a lot longer and deeper, but you do I think 4 dungeons and that’s that. And they’re all pretty much right next to each other. But this unlocks a new mode, a tower with 50 floors to go through which are basically 50 enemy encounters (and a few break rooms) where you find upgrades to the different items. That takes 1-2 hours to get through depending on skill.

The game has very low enemy variety so the tower mode isn’t as interesting as it could be, the main game itself is so short you’ll barely remember it once you’re done with it. The positive here is the fact that it’s 10$ in canadian currency, so it’s not too expensive… Man that used to be the base price for “big” indie games, what happened to this industry?

If you need to waste ~2 hours, this is a not-too-bad way to do it.

Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers

Speaking of Balatro-ish games… this is nothing like Balatro but the comparison does come up a lot. This is a Blackjack combat roguelite deckbuilding game. You’re going through different areas, playing blackjack against people.

It’s a unique version of blackjack where you have a starter deck and draw from it to try to play blackjack hands against another player. If you win the hand, you deal damage based on how much better your score was than the other player. If the other player busts, it’s like having no defense so you do the full damage. If you get a Blackjack and win the hand, you get special effects based on the suits you played (hearts heal you, clubs deal more damage, etc.). Whoever gets the other player to 0 HP wins. If you win, you gain new cards for your deck, some which have different effects and values. Cards worth 21, cards that move cards around, cards that destroy other cards and so on. Pokemon, YGO, Geralt from The Witcher, library cards, anything goes. Enemies are always the same when you fight them, so if you run into “The Manager”, he has the same deck each time. You do get different events each run though, such as stores, paying taxes and other such fun things. This game is hard as fuck, but it’s fun.

If I had any big complaints, it’s the lack of progression. You unlock absolutely nothing between runs, which is what makes other roguelites so interesting generally as the game evolves as you play it. D&DG does not. It also does lack variety between runs since enemies do have the same decks each time (and you fight most of the same people each time), so variety comes from what cards you find in shops or as quest rewards, rather than the actual fights themselves. There are a few starter decks to unlock, which are kind of difficulty levels (because the heart deck lets you heal more, it’s considered an easier mode).

I’d give this a mild recommendation.