I will say that I like Marathon's presentation. There's a lot of heavy WipEout influence in the "company" logo and graphics, and it does look nice.
It just feels like a waste and makes me wish Bungie would make campaign/story games again.
I feel like Exoprimal had the right idea when it came to story, and there are traces of that in Marathon through engagement with contracts, but it doesn't feel like any kind of story or mystery exists from what I've seen.
I understand the appeal of extraction shooters like Marathon and Arc Raiders but it feels like such a lazy model for a game with bigger potential. You go in, get loot, you leave, and there's objectives and some lore text. This repeats forever with infinite different experiences until the game dies.
Shuten Order finished.
43 hours clocked. The longest amount of time I've spent with a visual novel with Japanese language dialog.
Kodaka's Torture
Kodaka's Killing Game
Kodaka's Giant Wall of Text
Kodaka's Carrot and Stick
I hear it and yeah I'm thinkin it's time to solve some EFFin mysteries
"Deduction Denouement the Q" from Rain Code is still Masafumi Takada's best work. The bass is unbelievable. youtu.be/qyZiH1kyVzs?...
Four hours into it and I think there's been maybe three auto-saves.
Kodaka's Punishment.
Manual saving disabled on the last stretch of Shuten Order.
Kodaka's Trick.
daily track:-
Dead Poet Society // Uto
#TotD2026
youtu.be/qFHoG1nNO-M?...
Nearly finished Shuten Order. It's been a blast, but the stealth horror section was ultra janky, in a "game progression blocking" way (critical doors not opening). Decent attempt at unnerving horror though.
this snuck up on me real quick
I'll look at it
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpWy...
Best of luck eating a Big Arch discreetly
You will fail, and there will be sauce
me after one entire pizza
oh also, currently on sale!
there's also a Switch 2 version
www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/...
After reaching the fifth route I've realised that while key info is revealed about other routes, it should be known that some routes are meatier than others in terms of context, and you're probably better off doing them in the order in sequence as presented, rather than selecting them at random.
I didn't miss Bandcamp Friday!
harmcannon.bandcamp.com
The "dating sim" route in Shuten Order is torture and hell but I really do like how they still manage to envelop pieces of lore and world-building through optional dialog.
daily track
Men I Trust // Tailwhip
#TotD2026
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC6w...
Let it Die getting an offline version sometime this year, possibly on PS5 considering the wording of the announcement.
That's cool.
Shame about the sequel.
Why did I order the parts myself and not leave it for the landlord?
Because I wasn't sure if the plumber would show up that evening, so I wanted to make an attempt at it myself, which, COULD HAVE BEEN AN EXTINCTION EVENT.
Plumber showed up with new parts, replaced the fill and flush valves
The same parts I ordered and that arrived an hour earlier at the wrong address
🙃
I did manage to fix it, and reassemble it with the missing piece in the right place, and now it works fine.
Turns out it's a tiny little inexpensive rubber thing that's causing the problem.
So, a productive day after all. Just not in the musical sense.
During the panic, I think I pressed the flush button so hard, it broke.. or a little piece of plastic fell out into the flush valve.
So I completely disassembled it. Due to the valve being probably more than ten years old, I think I broke maybe half of the clips on it.
I gear up to do something productive and something happens that causes immense stress that cripples my brain for the rest of the day
Was prepared for a day of productivity, had breakfast and a shower
Toilet cistern overflows, water everywhere
Panic
Entire day derailed by toilet
This is my life
I'm enjoying how, depending on what order you play the scenarios in (31 possible combinations), you unravel key information about the other ministers and the state of the world that gives additional context to the other scenarios.
Shuten Order getting really good. The genre-bending is merely glazing over the insane amount of world-building going on, like a thousand piece puzzle unravelling the mystery of Shuten. I'm at the "visual-novel" bit, and it plays like 428: Shibuya Scramble with Bad-Ends and locked scenarios.
me at a wedding
