Hello and welcome to a new blog series! Like all good, new ideas, this one is actually just stolen; I read Aura Triolo’s “Games Aura’s Playin’” religiously. You’ll see lots of repeats from the “what we’ve been playing” section of VGBees since I mention almost every game I touch there, but here they’re written out all nicely, and with a little more thought and time.
Formless Star (itch)
The creature collector genre is a stagnant one, with most entries modeling themselves 1:1 off of Pokémon, with the occasional Digimon World or Monster Rancher nod. All of those are about making the creatures fight each other, not understanding that the real allure is in having lots of cool creatures to look at and, hopefully, befriend. Formless Star, the latest game from developer and funny guy designer splendidland, cuts all the faff from creature collecting. A trio of researches are sent to the titular Formless Star, an amorphous planet in a constant state of re-generation. Their goal is to record all 60 of the planet’s inhabitants, done by simply finding and interacting with them, at which point the alien is logged with a short description; and they’ll usually perform a little action like a dance or form change to show off their unique character, too. There’s a huge amount of variance in the aliens: creepy, cute, and cool, sometimes corresponding to the strange biomes of Formless Star, and often breaking any “rules” the group might’ve seemed to establish. As anyone who’s played the excellent RPG FRANKEN might expect, splendidland’s humor is on display here with the creatures, as well as the handful of scenes our research crewmembers share. Formless Star is short, free, and unexpectedly affecting at times, and you’d do yourself a favor to set aside a couple of hours to play it.
Type Help (itch)
After talking about Kinophobia again for the VGBees Best of 2025 episode, I remembered that there was another detective game I needed to check out: Type Help. This one has more general audience hype to it, as it’s being “remastered” with audio and visuals by the same team that spruced up The Roottrees Are Dead from its generative AI-laden concept. I’d heard good things, and if nothing else, I was curious to see how the eventual remaster would differ from the text-based original. I enjoyed my time with Type Help overall, but I didn’t and won’t finish it. As with Kinophobia, I love this approach to mystery games, which peels back as much pretense as possible. But where Type Help fell flat for me is in its story, which I don’t think works well for a detective game. The deduction and mystery falls entirely on the single-sentence high concept (“What really happened at Galley House?”) as opposed to the low concept (the micro-stories and subtleties which make up the entirety of something like Return of the Obra Dinn). Once you figure out the basics of the high concept, Type Help is effectively over. Filling in the blanks is entirely optional and can be quite tedious, because the interpersonal stories and (inter)actions aren’t terribly interesting. There’s not all that much to solve, which I found disappointing. While I do think it’ll lose something in the remaster, the addition of audio will be welcome, as Type Help is, really, an audio drama with no sound. As it stands, many passages read a bit awkwardly, since they have to pull the entire weight of exposition and setting despite being primarily written dialogue.
TR-49 (Steam)
Keeping with the “database thriller” theme, inkle hopped in this January with TR-49 in a studio/genre match made in heaven. Funnily enough, TR-49 is also an audio drama, though I thought this was the weakest aspect of the game, despite it being a much larger and more intentional part of it than Type Help. The game itself is contained entirely within the machine, TR-49, as our player character and her compatriot chat via unexplained means. Unlike Type Help, TR-49’s audio drama doesn’t contain any of the information pertinent to solving the mystery and focuses on the setting and inciting drama — probably because this audio can’t be replayed or viewed as a log anywhere. This can make it feel tacked-on at times, as it’ll regularly interrupt the actual deduction gameplay to deliver more exposition, and not always well. The dialogue for the secondary character, Liam, is horribly stilted, as he knows much more than the protagonist and is actively keeping secrets from her. This persistent caginess, alongside lead Abby’s regular questioning and a mildly subpar vocal performance, makes the real world of TR-49 feel awfully fake and inconsequential even after introducing Nazi new world order-level stakes (to the point I spent some time wondering if there was an additional conspiracy and Liam had helped to orchestrate some kind of escape room test scenario with an actor and everything…). This is the only real mark against TR-49 for me, but it makes up a large component of the game by design; and although it can sometimes be skipped, that’s a hard desire to follow on a first playthrough. But other than this (and some grievances with the tutorialization pop-ups which I believe they’ve since fixed), the game is excellent. The database feels appropriately massive and esoteric not just initially, but also progressively as you dig deeper into its inner workings and the entries hidden therein. There are plenty of interesting substories; some major, dramatic parts of the narrative and others deliciously immersive worldbuilding or enlightening character moments. Definitely a must-play for anyone who likes a good deduction game — and a good mystery.
Hermit and Pig (Steam)
Hermit and Pig was one of my more anticipated games of 2026, arriving nice and early in the first week of February. Its quirky-cute visuals and exurban Americana setting do speak to its influences; most obviously the MOTHER series as well as Mario’s various RPGs. That said, I’m pleased to report that Hermit and Pig has its own personality, and a lot of it. The character designs are of particular note, although so many of those characters are Guy In Shirt or Mosquito or Squirrel. These designs exude the same kind of charm you’ll find in Akira Toriyama’s work on Dragon Quest enemies — when you get that simple, silly face and blobby body right, stop, and make another! It’s always entertaining to see these enemies’ faces contort in a single frame as you land a strong blow, punctuated by a crashing snare, due to both sheer slapstick humor and satisfaction. Like the Mario RPGs’ various timed attack systems, Hermit and Pig has a timed input system, requiring the player to quickly select a move and then punch in its three-button code to perform the correct action. This also works with an effectiveness system more grounded in reality than the “type matchup” variety: stomp on bugs, smack venomous critters away with your cane, punch bad guys, etc. I normally tire of this active input kinda thing that games like Paper Mario have, but the combination of systems in Hermit and Pig really worked for me. Although the similar “QTE bar” blocking system did start to grate, I do appreciate the stress it and the overarching round timer introduce to what would otherwise be a little too comfortable of combat. There are a lot of combat options like the super moves, accessories, and plethora of status effects that get overriden by the power of good blocking. In particular, Hermit and Pig are truffle hunters, and you’ll naturally and quickly amass a whole vault of mushrooms which function as your heals, status heals, and thrown status inflicters (as well as a couple raw damage options). If I was rarely required to interact with these systems and use those items, then blocking may just be too dang strong. I’ll need to go on a no-blocking run and make use of some of the accessories that seem explicitly built for such a thing and report back. I wonder just how much more engaging a game I already enjoyed could be on a totally different playthrough, which is a rarity for me! I do think the game kinda falls on its ass narratively right before the final boss, but… c’est la vie. Maybe once I get to that other playthrough this one’ll get a proper review too.
MOONROT (itch, Steam)
I wrote a full review of this one!
Fragile Feelings (itch, Steam)
I was unknowingly and tangentially familiar with developer ebi-hime’s work for her veritable army of yuri visual novels. I had heard good things about the gorgeous Cage of Roses and had both it and Blackberry Honey recommended to me by Steam a number of times. But Steam recommendations mean nothing to me, so I had paid them little mind! It wasn’t until logging ebi-hime’s body of work for my Steam Curator that it truly got my attention. Evidently I was in a fluffy mood as what got my time first was Fragile Feelings, a romance about a sheltered technically-not-Catholic-schoolteacher and a gothy, big city medical professional who takes a temporary contract as the school’s nurse. It’s very sweet! The romantic relationship between our lead Ann and nurse Kohaku is of course the star of the show, but it’s the other relationships Ann has with her friend and former classmate Runa, her managing/co-teacher Miss Kayano, and her students that really bring her to life. Kohaku feels a bit underdeveloped as the love interest, even after the story’s epilogue (which is mostly, and very successfully, devoted to Runa). I don’t necessarily mind this — it does preserve Kohaku’s effortless coolness — but it can make what is on paper a slow burn romance feel thin and brisk, as we don’t spend significant time with her or her feelings until late in (and never from her point of view). The calendar timeline is slow burn, but as paced by the game? Eh, not so much. This even moreso in the free adult patch which adds explicit visual and written sex scenes to the game — one of which takes place immediately after the pair’s first kiss! But in general, the sex scenes didn’t work too well for me. Like that one, they felt disjointed from the actual plot in their eroticness (except for an early scene with only Ann).
There’s an important detail of the story I’ve avoided mentioning ‘til now to get all that other stuff done on its own: beyond being young, sheltered, and raised conservatively in a former abbey, Ann is also terminally ill and has been outlasting her given life expectancy for some time. As a result of this as well as the associated chronic pain and fatigue, she has no life plans, dreams, or finances, and friends are hard to come by given her age and position at the school, on top of everything else. While the actual writing of her fatigue and pain can be a little repetitive at times, when it hits, it hits. Individual lines about her depression and physical condition still stick with me some months later. Contrary to the many romances and adventures which use disability, illness, and injury as paltry hurt/comfort set dressing, Ann’s is integral to her being, the way others treat her, and the way she feels about that treatment. So while Fragile Feelings does waver at times, the sureness with which it handles its main character and her relationships is what carries it, and there’s plenty of drama and tension even in its bucolic setting.
Terraria (Steam)
Ah, Terraria. The first game in my Steam account, which I’d barely touched until some seven years after I got it, when a group of new friends realized we all owned it. Much like Minecraft, my interest in playing Terraria doesn’t wax and wane so much as suddenly onsets every couple of years. And, it happened again. This time, playing in a significantly smaller group has required me to learn and engage with the game’s myriad mechanics and systems on a much deeper level, as opposed to just fishing, building an underwater mansion, and only showing up to boss fights as insurance with a loadout granted to me by the real grinders. And, well, Terraria is very good, and much better this way!
I’m tempted to say that it’s not a terribly well-known fact because Terraria’s reputation is that of “sideways Minecraft,” but it’s much more of an MMO-flavored action RPG than anything else. The defining progression checkpoints are the buckwild boss fights, which usually feature giant mechanical or eldritch monsters that zip around the screen, filled with their own projectiles, as their multi-thousands health bars dwindle and they enter their second, enraged phases. They can be absolutely brutal, and require careful planning in the form of efficient grinding for materials, gold, and mob drops to outfit yourself with adequate weapons, armor, ammo, and potions. Then there’s the arena building, where you create big-and-tall, open areas full of platforms, minecart rails, or sometimes ropes to provide enough maneuvering space during the fight itself. The aforementioned gold grinding also comes in handy if you wanna build a battle room in the arena for the nurse, an NPC who can be paid to heal you to full and cleanse all debuffs instantly. This is a smart move, given that almost all healing items in Terraria give the consumer Potion Sickness, an unremovable debuff which prevents them from using another healing item for a full minute — an eternity in boss time. I’ve become the de facto potion master of our group, since my status as master fisher has me harvesting so many of the materials and paying attention to the weather and moon phases anyways. Engaging with the game so much more has also exposed me to even more of the wacky, nerdy stuff littered all throughout the game. I was already very familiar with the Megashark, a molded metal shark with a gatling gun protruding from its mouth. I had completely forgotten about the Solar Eclipse, a mid-or-later-game event which blots out the sun for an entire day and plunges it into an even more dangerous form of night. In much greater addition to the typical zombies and flying eyeballs are a cast of legally distinct horror monsters, like vampires, mummies, swamp creatures, and wall-crawling girls in need of exorcism. There’s also Pin- I mean, Nailhead, who only spawns after we defeat another boss; something I’m looking forward to, since he has a 4% chance to drop a gun that fires exploding nails. When it rains, goldfish crawl out of their ponds and start walking around on land. When it’s windy, the normal daytime slime enemies instead parachute down on balloons. Town NPCs like the nurse sometimes throw parties, but you can start one manually after purchasing an item from the Party Girl, an NPC with an uncanny resemblance to a certain pink pony. A huge, great game.
Lost and Found Co. (Steam)
This is another one of the games I was looking forward to this year and it absolutely exceeded my expectations. What I liked about Lost and Found Co. dating all the way back to its demo is, of course, the art. This is most obvious in the style — it’s got that squishy cartoonishness that’s perfect for chibis and stickers — but every facet of the art really sings when joined together by the game’s visual storytelling. In fact, my only real dig on Lost and Found Co. is that all of its dialogue segments are unnecessary (and often annoying). Many of these scenes are punctuated by short, lightly animated comic panels which do all the work of the dialogue in a much more charming way; and what can’t be conveyed there can usually be done with either objective names or by poking around the level and putting the visual cues together yourself. There are some more tangential or absurdist missions, and more confusing sequences of events and story details, but the dialogue doesn’t exactly help to clear things up there. That’s all totally forgivable with the absolute strength of everything else, but the game persistently misses the opportunity to improve its pace and let the visuals speak for themselves. It’s more confusing than anything, as if there’s one thing Lost and Found Co. is great at taking advantage of, it’s reusing assets and its limited set of animations. Even the smallest areas are chock full of stuff, like water bottles and soda cans, towels and shoes, openable trash cans and boxes, cup noodles, sauce bottles, cat toys, rolled-up posters, gems, fountain pens, remotes, and the list goes on and on and on. These items aren’t meaningless filler, but a way to flesh out the world and areas themselves with that stellar visual storytelling, and provide boundless opportunity for mostly-unstructured play. Lost and Found Co.’s world is intrinsically rewarding to observe and explore because of this. Sometimes this observance leads to tangible rewards in the form of progress of the main or optional objectives, but it also keys the player into where those objectives aren’t. Not to mention that these hidden stories and interactions are valuable just for existing; because they’re funny, or cute, or you feel good for having noticed something crafted and placed with care. There was no explicit reward for finding a woman at her work desk; nor for noticing that her desktop background is her two cats, who’re posed in a similar manner to their photo as they lovingly watch their owner work. But the game is better for their inclusion, and there are dozens of vignettes like this all over Lost and Found Co.. It’s a real treat of a game by a team with a strong eye.
Also, shoutouts to the UI/UX team. It’s noteworthy how good the volume sliders feel, not to mention this is a game built on clicking with a cursor!
Funi Raccoon Game (Steam)
If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times, but written, planned comedy is one of the hardest things to do successfully. Many games have tried, and the majority of them have failed horribly, often by working entirely in the lowly and extremely difficult forms of comedy like satire and referential comedy. Like all great comedies, Funi Raccoon Game runs the gamut of comedic styles at a mile a minute. If a gag doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. The game presents each one and moves on to another of a different kind without waiting for applause. It’s a collectathon/3D platformer about a raccoon (optioned in a variety of colors with a variety of stupid names like Asbestos) trying to catalogue the entire world of items in their home dumpster, with the help of the supercomputer that lives there. The challenge is in finding new areas and new items, by either poking around a level enough, shuffling items around, or performing the occasional fetch quest, like snatching a police officer’s sidearm and skedaddling as an army of cop cars beeline after you. There’s a core cast of memey sound effects employed with such constancy that they start to feel less like jokes and more like straightforward artistic choices; until they start feeling like jokes again, because a stock explosion or car crash will never not get some enjoyment out of me. Just about anywhere there could be a gag there is one, with barely enough “normal” text or design to let the more unexpected ones really shine; like the audio menu, which is perfectly standard except for the “Tinnitus” slider, which does exactly what you think it does; or the handbrake on the car, which will instantly stop the vehicle flat, totally disregarding any momentum or gravity that was previously affecting it. Now, explaining the joke infamously doesn’t work very well. You really do have to see these in action and, ideally, let them catch you off guard, which is why I won’t try to explain any more…
The Perfect Tower II (Steam)
I got this one straight from “Games Aura’s Playin’.” Sources and reviews for incremental games are few and far between, so her blog has been an invaluable way to get acquainted with them. The Perfect Tower II is one of the more expansive ones out there, in terms of the number of systems at play. There are a good dozen buildings, each with their own mechanic, resource, and often minigame (or multiple minigames, in some cases). There’s also a somewhat more concrete goal than other incrementals in the form of the tower defense segment for which the game is named. Tower defense being a quiet favorite of mine since I was a kid, this is what initially interested me in the game. I’ve cooled on it a bit since my initial frenzy, not only out of basic exhaustion with no-lifing a game, but also because I unlocked a lot more farming and offline efficiency, as one does. It seems I’ve firmly entered the midgame, and now leaving the game to idle and only playing actively once a week or so will be my new M.O. The tower defense portion has gotten a lot of juice to it now, as I’ve unlocked most modules (like equipment for the tower, from stat modifiers and procs to active abilities) and therefore have a lot of strategization at my disposal. This is definitely the part of the game I’ve come to enjoy the most — important, considering that that’s the whole draw! But I did foolishly make a major upgrade in favor not of the Tower but of the Factory, a building which helps generate resources while idle and has a whole crafting system to it. Hopefully I can spec into the tower defense more later, or prestige and retroactively change that decision, as it was definitely a mistake…
Lucid Blocks (Steam)
This may be the most disappointing game I’ve played thus far this year. I wanted to like it, but I really don’t. Lucid Blocks’ opening moments managed to impart a bleary nostalgia that’s quite rare for me; but that feeling was slowly replaced by a pervasive annoyance which would occasionally spike to such highs I could only roll my eyes, save, and go do something else. It’s a very, uh, online zoomer kind of game, the “liminal horror” trend lived through a sort of LSD: Dream Emulator by way of Minecraft — especially the Minecraft that first lived on the internet, full of mystery and fear and Herobrine. What first struck me negatively about Lucid Blocks (other than the beautiful but eye-searing dithering which can, mercifully, be turned down) is how much its gameplay focuses on violence. It takes obvious inspiration from a game whose primary verbs are “dig” and “make,” but the most important thing to do in Lucid Blocks after “walk” is “kill.” Not survive, but kill. Like most of the game’s proper nouns, the “apotheosis” crafting system is linguistically lofty and nothing more, and loses its luster once you realize that, despite its unique quirks, it’s just a reason to kill cool things for rare materials. Ho-hum.
The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match (Steam)
My fighting game series of choice has been having a protracted, public implosion for the last couple years with its latest entry, Tekken 8. I bought it on launch and haven’t played more than 20 hours, dropping it sometime in mid 2024. It is, unfortunately, not fun. The latest major update was initially sold as coming in to unfuck the fuckening wrought by the previous year’s and bring Tekken “back to basics,” but it’s been a disaster. The game’s cooked for the foreseeable future. The other series which has piqued my interest, Virtua Fighter, is kinda on ice until New Virtua Fighter Project gets real, which probably won’t be for another couple years. What’s a girl to do?
Well, I’m not immune to propaganda, and fell down a King of Fighters rabbit hole after coming across this video about SNK’s legendary pixel art and The King of Fighters XII and XIII’s bank-breaking art process. A few days later, the particularly well-regarded KOF 2002 Unlimited Match was on sale for $2.24 USD on both Steam and the PlayStation Store. Azalea was kind enough to nab it for me on PlayStation and I ended up liking it so much I used some of my leftover Steam Wallet funds (thanks Azalea x2!) to get it on PC as well.
I don’t like spectating, performing, learning, or being hit by long combos, and I’m not too keen on meters or limited-use mechanics in fighting games, either. This makes virtually all 2D fighters a no from me. KOF had my curiosity because it’s beautiful, but ‘02 UM got my attention because it’s so fast and fluid. There are certainly meters, complicated cancels, supers, frame traps, et al, but the game elicits that same feeling as Tekken (and maybe Smash), where you instantly feel like you’re in a real fight, frenetically trading little blows with a characteristic kind of randomness. Yet, it arrives there not by slowing things down like Tekken, but instead by going way too fast. The importance of movement — this is a game with four jumps, after all — and each character having a similar base moveset makes this as much a “movement fighter” as anything else, and synergizes well with the 3v3, no tags format, allowing you to transfer some mastery between characters with movement skills alone. And that format does well, too, to justify an enormous 66-character roster which showcases SNK’s pixel art and character design chops. It’s also so nice to play a competitive game that’s finished; no DLC fighters, no power creep, no patches, no content creator-demanded nerfs, nothing. I’m having a blast with this thing and am really looking forward to nailing down the movement and figuring out my main squad.
Flotsam (itch, Steam)
Flotsam’s a moving citybuilder that first hit my radar ages ago now, a bit before it released into early access in 2019. It reached 1.0 this past December with the help of new publisher Stray Fawn, who themselves developed another moving citybuilder, The Wandering Village. It’s set in an apocalyptic waterworld scenario, where survivors have fled to the high ground of church spires, apartment blocks, and hilly forests; and, in your case, a big ol’ boat ripe for the scaffolding. Things start off simple, with your Drifters (“villagers”) swimming out to scrounge up plastic and wood to build out, as well as seaweed to eat. Over time, things complicate into farming and restaurants, electricity and solar panels, chem labs and medicine, and more! While I’m not sure if I’d describe Flotsam as deep, it’s appealingly busy, what with the moving city and all. There’s always something to do, something to manage, something on the horizon. It’s all sold by the game’s art, beautifully rendered in a distinct European cartoon style. It’s what I imagined Pacifidlog Town from Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald to be when I was looking at that tiny GBA SP screen and letting my imagination run wild. There are shoddy wooden walkways loosely linking the town together, while the ship has an appropriately cutesy weather vane on top of its bright yellow purified water tank. Instead of hiding away in menus, items are satisfyingly stacked in precarious-but-perfect piles in open-air storage units or on salvage boats. And when your Drifters go out on those boats, you can see them row, anchor, zigzag up the hill or fire escape or what have you, and dismantle or nab whatever they’re out for. They’re pretty simple visuals, but effective ones, and a nice touch.
The campaign involves finding a Radio Technician/DJ and using his radio tower to contact other unique survivors, who unlock more build options (like the farms and chemistry labs), eventually culminating in the game’s end. When it comes to the Specialists and the campaign that hosts them, there’s a lot of bloat. The Specialists’ character designs are real cute, but there’s a Botanist and a Farmer; a Radio Technician, Electrician, Engineer, and Architect; an Aquaculturist and a Birdkeeper. They sure don’t feel special, especially considering how lacking they usually are in the way of stats. The bloat embiggens with the many buildings, several of which do conceptually identical things (such as cleaning pollution off of one type of caught fish versus removing plastic bottles from another, or the four different food producers). The game seems to deliberately lack a lot of friction, so the piling on of these quibbles doesn’t introduce difficulty so much as one of its lesser siblings: tedium. Further, I don’t think the finale questline fits thematically with anything Flotsam does, and sucks out loud on top of that. There are plenty of implications that climate change is what caused the sea levels to rise, yet Flotsam’s endgame requires an oil refinery and jet fuel. Still, I played, like, 40 hours of this in a week for good reason. It got its hooks in me bad and the first three quarters of its campaign are a great time, even if the last is a total chore.
CorgiSpace (itch, Steam)
CorgiSpace’s seemingly odd name ushers in one of the most brilliant taglines of any game ever: “a collection of games that have short legs on purpose.” All designed in the PICO-8 engine by game designer and Finji co-founder Adam Saltsman (aka Adam Atomic), the 19-strong group spans a wide range, although there’s a strong throughline of puzzle-solving that gives CorgiSpace a lot of cohesion. It can be overwhelming to take in such a huge group and choose a starting point — especially because this freakin’ guy keeps adding new games; six so far!! — but the short legs make it an enjoyable, true pick-up-and-play experience (having the games’ box arts and names initially hidden doesn’t hurt, either). The games on offer here are, intentionally and admirably, lopsided. Some were conceived and created in hours while others took weeks. Each game can be understood in seconds, and you can get a strong handle on one’s mechanics and/or finish it in an hour or less. It’s refreshingly easy to just go “ehh this ain’t the vibe” and dip; every “dud” is a matter of personal taste. It’s no surprise that I liked Kuiper Cargo, a falling block puzzler about loading a space freighter, or Dino Sort, a likes/dislikes-based positioning puzzler. But the surprise of the bunch for me is Prince of Prussia, a mini cinematic stealth platformer about escaping a Nazi prison and killin’ em all on the way out. I didn’t care much for Vampire Versus Pope Army, but it did give me the phrase “you have to drink popes and break out of jail,” so there’s a little something in every one of the games here. That’s pretty impressive.