GAMES BEATEN IN 2026

You already know what's up. It's videogames o' clock. Please do not look at the date on the changelog and notice how late I am to videogames o' clock again. I am trying my best

We are wasting no time getting the obligatary Castlevania up in here. Okay maybe definitely we are wasting a little time, because I did beat this like three months ago and just never actually got around to talking about it, because my brain has been a piece of burnt toast for a frustratingly long time now. It's bad enough lately that I was considering just holding off on this article until the end of the year to drop it all at once, but knowing me that just means the site is dead for a year, so!! I am not doing that because I will feel bad about it. They literally announced a new Castlevania between when I started writing this and now and they never do that anymore. Listen. Listen. I am putting my hand on your shoulder. Listen. I'm gonna try so hard to finally get this stupid ADHD medicated this year,

Anyway I was watching someone play through Aria and it put the bug in me again, so it only felt natural to hop straight into that game's direct sequel. Dawn of Sorrow for the DS is currently the final game in the series' chronology, set a year afterwards; Soma, in a now Dracula-free world, has a run-in with a cult who would very much like him dead so that someone else can step up and inherit the role of Dark Lord. The justification they explicitly provide here is that they think there needs to be an equally great evil in the world for God's goodness to mean anything, which you could probably read into as some sort of commentary on the state of religion that's just as relevant now at it was when it was written twenty years ago. You know, if you wanted to. I mean, surely it doesn't mean anything that the cult trying to make the world a worse place on purpose is doing it for ostensibly Christian reasons. That would be ridiculous. Nothing like that has ever happened.

Regardless, since the titular Castlevania is still sealed inside the eclipse from last time, we can't go there. So instead, Soma decides to ignore actual government official Arikado's advice to stay out of the situation to go investigate the suspiciously similar non-Dracula castle that the cult has set up as their base of operations. (Of course Death is also here, don't worry about it too much. Or the whole area lifted straight from Castlevania 1. All castles have that.) Soma might be acting impulsive and actively complicating things and being 19 years old, but somehow he balances out as squarely in the middle of the maturity spectrum between the four grown-ass adults also returning from Aria. Arikado (who's definitely not Alucard what are you talking about) and Julius are handling this like the professionals they are while Hammer and Yoko are over in the far corner of the map having a very insecure unrequited crush subplot like they're in a mediocre high school sitcom. You just kind of have to feel embarrassed for them, really.

This game is also the first of what are known as the "animevanias", owing to its artstyle shift that happened because they were concerned Ayami Kojima's gorgeous painted illustrations wouldn't appeal as much to the younger demographic they were aiming for on the DS. This was a divisive choice, and it's obviously not better because Kojima's work is incredible (and I think about it daily and aspire to it as a personal aesthetic and), but I don't hate what they've done with this style at all. I like the fact that it does just straight up look exactly like an animation cel with no extra frills, which isn't actually something you see a lot in games. The characters are still drawn with decently realistic faces instead of going for a more overtly Anime (Derogatory) artstyle where the girls look more like some type of bug. Its greatest offense is just being different and following an act that's hard to top. I won't fault it for that.

Gameplay-wise, it's more of Aria with a couple new systems thrown in. The DS gimmick comes of course in the form of drawing things on the touch screen, which in practice amounts to a signature field for the save file instead of text-based name entry (I just drew a spider), some ice blocks you can break in maybe half a dozen rooms total, and a mechanic that nobody really likes where you have to draw a magic seal when you beat a boss to successfully defeat them, or else it'll heal a bit and you have to keep going. Full disclosure: I emulated this and knew it would suck to attempt to interface with this mechanic with a mouse, so I did use a cheat code that automates the seals after you draw the first line. For what it's worth, I did get a taste of the vanilla experience anyway because it took me until the literal last area to understand I couldn't let go of the touchscreen early or the automation wouldn't work consistently. The "what do you mean that doesn't count" effect lives on. I wasted so much goddamn time on Abaddon, man.

The other major addition is Yoko's shop, which gives you an actual use for all of the duplicate monster souls you'll inevitably accumulate by allowing you to create stronger weapons through synthesis. This establishes sort of an extra rhythm to the gameplay loop, because as you explore and find warp rooms you've got an excuse to swing back around to the start to see what you can make with whatever new stuff you've acquired. The game clearly also expects you to be doing this constantly because Yoko has so much dialogue that she was constantly bringing up things I did hours ago as if they were new developments. She apparently has to go through all of them in order instead of skipping to the one that happened most recently, for some reason. And then after a while she just stops even though the plot keeps going? It's weird.

Despite that, this game overall feels a lot less focused on its weapons compared to its predecessor. Pretty much every decent weapon is locked behind this system barring super rare enemy drops, so there's basically none actually hidden in the castle for you to stumble across when you explore, and it's balanced in such a way that I was able to get my hands on a very good weapon in the early-midgame and it carried me all the way to the end because nothing else I could make ever outclassed it. Also, pretty much every weapon in the game has a noticeable amount of startup or ending lag that just does not feel very good. I got used to it with my greatsword's overhead swing, where it feels pretty natural to have that and covers good range, which is less than I can say for the way that you lock in place for a solid half second to re-sheathe a katana after every swing. The standard mobility-for-damage tradeoff is kinda meaningless here because all of the lighter weapons still feel way too stiff and sluggish to be worth the damage loss. The only way to make them feel like they used to is by doing this awkward tech where you do a little short-hop just before hitting the attack button every single time, so you're at least not constantly getting your momentum halted. It's a very strange decision.

Once you adjust to the weird feel of the weapons and find something that feels decent enough to you, though, it is just more good Igavania design. Duplicate souls now having a purpose outside of link-cable trading makes finding them feel a lot more rewarding and worth caring about, and the secrets feel more engagingly hidden than they were in Aria. Figuring out how to get the best ending is nice and intuitive and makes you feel real cool in the moment and requires you to go off the beaten path to fight a boss with a really sick design and an awesome gimmick (shoutouts to Paranoia). I'm gonna be so honest though it's been like months since I started writing this and I have largely forgotten if there was anything else I wanted to write about this. It's good! It's a good game! I liked it!! Castlevania!!

As is now tradition, Julius mode returns from Aria as a NG+ option to give you an alternate playstyle, which in this case is actually three playstyles because you can swap him out with Yoko and later Alucard (not in disguise anymore, just a straight port of his SotN sprite) to take advantage of their unique abilities and get through mobility gates that Julius can't do himself. This mode is set after one of the bad endings and has a special final boss fight against Soma himself, who has fallen to the thrall of darkness. To be totally real the other reason this took five hundred years to write is that I just kinda lost interest partway through this mode and didn't actually beat it, which is also what happened to me with Aria's Julius mode even though it's significantly shorter than the main game. I dunno what it is! It's neat that they're integrating these modes more believably with the story now, but it's just less compelling to me compared to how much of SotN's original Richter mode is a comically technical and flagrantly noncanon navigational puzzle about gaining infinite height with flying uppercuts. I find it more endearing when the game is willing to be openly ridiculous and wants you to play with it like a toy. That was my favorite thing about Symphony.

Anyway while I am not dumping the whole article at the end of the year I have ended up sitting on this for long enough that I do have another game to talk about today. So everybody give us a round of applause for

The Fromsoftathon is back! It's trundling along as a snail's pace, but this is very fast for me. I promise. The rhythm that I am taking with these has consistently been playing a chunk of it while riding the high of the previous game, thinking the changes are weird to adjust to and taking a break for a few months, and then coming back to it and suddenly being unable to put it down. As long as it gets the job done it's fine by me. It is frankly miraculous that I've finished this many of these now.

Shadow Tower is From's fourth dungeon crawler after the PS1 King's Field trilogy, released two years later while their yearly cycle brought us the original Armored Core and its prequel in the intervening time. (I may circle back around to these games later, but right now this is enough of a commitment as-is and I'm honestly shocked I've gotten as far as I have.) This game has actually been in the back of my mind as something I've been meaning to play for years, and the whole time I've known basically nothing about it, so now having the context for what it is has made me kinda glad I held off on it until I'd played its predecessors. This game is unconventional and uncompromising and I don't think I would have really been able to appreciate it if I'd come at it totally blind back when I first learned about it. But now? Oh Baby. Even still, all I really knew about it going in is that it's more overtly horror-fantasy themed and it did not review well, and it was up to me to find out why.

So anyway the first impression the game leaves does kind of make it immediately easy to understand why reviewers did not gel with it, because one of the major creative choices on its part is that there is No music. Nothing. You boot up the game and there's a CG intro video with a song, and then the title screen has an ominous sting play over it, and the opening cutscene plays a little classical string tune while it gives us a brief overview of the plot that amounts to "there is an evil tower". And then it is dead silent for the rest of the game until the ending cutscene. You've got the echoes of your footsteps and the sounds of any monsters that are nearby and that's largely it. Later on you encounter more stuff that makes ambient noise and fills out the soundscape a little more, but at first blush the emptiness of it all makes the game almost feel unfinished, like you're playing a prototype. Likewise, there is also no map, so you just have to commit the maze of claustrophobic corridors to memory. It's kind of fascinating to see this type of purposeful omission used as an artistic decision in a medium normally so restricted by this invisible list of expectations and "don'ts". This is in no way a game for everyone, nor is it trying to be. It is for me, though.

The core gameplay is more of what you've come to expect with some extra systems and complexity added onto it; this game notably introduces the equipment weight and durability mechanics, along with the beginnings of the modular stat-leveling system that was eventually a core part of the Souls games. Your stats will increase passively as you kill things, but you can also find Soul Pods out in the wild that allow you to allocate points to your liking into things like health, speed, balance, and different damage types, as well as their magical equivalents that are cryptically-named enough that I had to pull up the game's manual to understand what they actually meant. Which, hey, first time I've had to consult the manual in one of these games! This game also adds a dedicated block button where the magic button formerly was, and the latter now requires a specific two-button combo to cast depending on which hand you currently have the spell equipped on, allowing for you to pick two spells concurrently. The game doesn't tell you what these combos are either, so this was another thing I had to check the manual for because it is extremely important to know. I'm pretty sure this was also a quality certain weapons let you do at least as far back as King's Field 3 because I remember doing it by accident one whole time and when I looked up how to cast spells in this game I had a moment of "oh THAT'S what that was".

The manual also gives us a slightly more helpful idea of the plot: there was once a kingdom that fell to ruin practically overnight because of a terrible crown said to be capable of granting any wish. This crown was sealed away in the tower, and everything was just fine until eventually all of its bad vibes hit critical mass and sank the tower into the depths of the earth like a vortex, reducing the town around it to rubble and consuming the souls of everyone who lived there. This random mercenary named Ruus (or Russ, or Ruth, depending on your translation) happens to pick the worst possible time to stop by and visit this nice granny who lived there, finds nothing left, and meets an old man who immediately mistakes him for someone else and sends him off into the tower to recover the crown and save these lost souls before it's too late for them. So like! Good luck dude, I guess!!

Very little of this ever comes up in the game itself, which really doesn't care much to tell you anything at all. There's a few NPCs around to give you a little bit of guidance about what's going on, but they also imply a lot of things that are just never elaborated on. It's kind of like the way Fromsoft has continued to do their dialogue but without all of the additional lore packed into the item descriptions to help you piece together the bigger picture. The game is perfectly content to just be kind of confusing. It wants to disorient you. There's a lot of little variables reliant on RNG that exist primarily to mess with your head; creepy sounds that can just play at random intervals (but especially like to trigger when you close your menu), rare enemies that have a small chance of spawning in an empty room that you've passed through a dozen times. It wants to get into your brain and freak you out with things that are slightly off. There are equipment effects that change the lighting and it took me several days to suss out why the lights kept turning on and off, because it is so in character for the game to be inscrutable and mess with you using unadvertised state change conditions that I figured it wouldn't be something I was in control of.

Structurally the game initially plays at being more on the linear end; it consists of a number of "worlds" which each have about three to five individual areas, which frequently link to each other but don't tend to interconnect between worlds. Instead, as you descend deeper down, you routinely return to a central hub (the titular Shadow Tower) that consists of narrow stone walkways connecting doors over a dark pit. If you align yourself correctly you can make one-way drops down to visible lower levels, and you can find headstones capable of warping you back up to previous locations in the tower, so you're never actually stuck after you commit to a drop. The bulk of the game does away with the linearity and will have you regularly traversing five out of the six worlds, and the only real reason that you're not returning to the beginning of the game too is that there's a mandatory path you need to pass through to progress where the entire floor is just poison.

As is tradition by now, you eventually unlock a fountain that gives you free full heals, and fully exploring the adjacent world gives you access to a shop relatively nearby where you spend HP in exhange for restoring your equipment's durability, so much of the gameplay loop for me consisted of returning to the fountain and walking over to the shop to repair my stuff after expeditions into the more dangerous lower worlds. It definitely marks a shift where the difficulty finally starts to tilt in your favor, because the ordeal of reaching that shop and unlocking the shortcut to it is a culmination of how much more brutal the game is compared to what came before it, and is something you could probably point to as the emergence of the learn-by-dying runback that is now emblematic of Soulslike level design. This world has numerous points of progress that require you to squeeze your way past enemies that will absolutely melt through your health and are clearly intended as an obstacle; at least one of them will immediately respawn if you go out of your way to kill it, followed by a second completely unique enemy if you kill that one too. You are not meant to fight your way through this, but the game doesn't technically stop you if you wanna chug half your potions trying.

On the topic of the enemies, their AI has been enhanced from the King's Fields to no longer be effortlessly outsmarted by the powerful strategy of "strafe in the opposite direction from where they're turning", but they're not exactly more difficult for the most part because they are instead eminently cheeseable by way of "stand outside of their leash radius on the edge of the room and pick them off while they can't reach you", or, failing that, "stand behind some geometry that blocks all of their projectiles but not yours". To balance this, many of them do a metric ton of damage whenever they hit you, and the final boss fight is conspicuously in an endless corridor with no other geometry so you can't do either of these things to him. It's definitely more difficult to deal with them on average, especially when a lot of them spawn when you've already walked partway through their room, but once you've got yourself set up with good equipment and don't have to worry about your stuff constantly being on the verge of breaking then it's no major issue to deal with most things.

More importantly though. Visually? Their designs are absolutely fantastic. After the previous two games have been progressively branching out from typical sword-and-sorcery ghoulies into weirder and more unique monsters, this is where the floodgates really open up in terms of nonstop excellent creature design; this game marks a massive graphical upgrade from King's Field 3 and all of that extra fidelity has gone straight into rendering more than a hundred of the most bizarre freaks you've ever seen as lovingly as possible. They are easily the star of the show and the devs are clearly rightfully proud of them, to the point that encountering all of the monsters in the game is one of the three things it tracks for completion, along with items and money. They're what originally put this game on my radar thanks to this Bogleech article that covers barely a fifth of the bestiary. This game is ultimately a creature design delivery vehicle and I love it for that. That's like half of the reason I'm here. Every time a rare thing I've never seen before spawns it is a new and delightful treat for me.

Once you've defeated the designated "Lord" of each world, you unlock access to the final boss fight, and upon beating the game you unlock a sort of pseudo-NG+ that resets your position back to the start of the game and seemingly doesn't change anything else about the file save for the final boss now being recorded in the bestiary, and exists entirely for completion cleanup purposes. (Notably, it does not reset the state of the one thing that is capable of permanently locking you out of an optional area if you do something wrong. Ask me how I know!) Going for full completion in this game sounds like the realm of the insane, though, specifically because of all of the possible rare spawns that show up in random empty rooms maybe 5-10% of the time. There's still a solid twenty monsters I have not seen at all in this game, which is way more than a single missing area accounts for. I see this less as an obligation to go grind those out and more as another way for the game to surprise me on potential future replays. Keeps it fresh! Sometimes the completionist mindset is to a game's detriment.

What the bestiary is materially used for is the game's multiplayer mode, which lets a second person insert their memory card with their own file into the system and you can do PVP battles against each other playing as a team of the monsters you've personally seen. I do not have the means to play this at the moment and it makes me very sad because this sounds sick. They were so confident in these creature designs that they just let you do Pokemon with them. I think Fromsoft should bring this IP back to just have an entire game of this.

This marks the end of the PS1 leg of this marathon, and there was originally only one game to go before I got to the fourth and final King's Field, but I may have possibly added another game to the queue before we get there, because I'm admittedly kind of fascinated by a certain creative choice it makes and it has the Moonlight Sword in it anyway so I can say it counts. Both of these games are apparently fairly short, so I'd say they won't take long to get through but knowing how these things go I know this is a lie. I will be back in another few months, more realistically. Probably.