Cassette Beasts is a Pokemon inspired RPG that's all about Fusing monsters together
- By Ash
- in Indie Games
If you're in the mood for roaming the world in search of monsters to catch, and perhaps even creating a couple of your own, you might want to give Cassette Beasts a look. To put it quite simply, Cassette Beasts is a Pokemon inspired turn-based tactics game where you can fuse literally any two monsters together to amplify their abilities and hopefully get an upper hand over your opponents. Best of all, each one is fully animated, so discovering all of the combinations should be a nice bit of fun!
Besides smashing monsters together, Cassette Beasts will also task you with exploring an open world, solving puzzles, and delving trough dungeons. In true Pokemon fashion, certain monster abilities can also be used outside of combat in order to aid with exploration, so you'll definitely want to revisit old areas every once in a while in order to see what new secrets or shortcuts you can uncover.
Risk of Rain Returns is a remastered and refreshed version of the classic roguelike
- By Ash
- in Indie Games
In celebration of Risk of Rain's tenth anniversary, Hopoo Games have unleashed Risk of Rain Returns. This comprehensive remaster brings with it greatly improved visuals, three new Survivors, dozens of new stage variants, a brand new challenge mode, as well as a whole bunch of new items and enemies to mess around with.
Besides all of the new content, Risk of Rain Returns has also freshened up a bunch of the old stuff. You can look forward to a revamped multiplayer mode, alternate abilities for all of the original Survivors, extra lore to uncover, and perhaps most importantly of all, a large array of quality of life changes to make everything just a bit smoother.
The Holy Gosh Darn is humorous and time-bending adventure from the Manual Samuel team
- By Ash
- in Indie Games
If you're in the mood for a bit of puzzle-solving and general buffoonery, you might want to check out the somewhat recent The Holy Gosh Darn. Much like the team's previous games Helheim Hassle and Manual Samuel, The Holy Gosh Darn is a humorous and narrative-driven adventure that will have you go head to head with a variety of zany characters as you attempt to singlehandedly save the world from complete annihilation.
The big difference this time around, however, is that you have access to a time-traveling watch that allows you to skip to any point during the day in order to manipulate events, solve puzzles and most importantly of all, avoid awkward small talk. But enough of my rambling! Instead, have a look at the launch trailer below. That should give you a pretty good idea of what The Holy Gosh Darn is trying to go for:
Cryptmaster is a fascinating combination of typing, dungeon crawling and bone-dry humor
- By Ash
- in Indie Games
If you're in the mood for something entirely out of the ordinary, I'd highly recommend you check out Cryptmaster. It launched back in early 2024 and I'm genuinely sad it took me this long to notice it, because its combination of dungeon crawling, wordplay and dry humor is utterly captivating.
So what is Cryptmaster anyway? Well, to put it quite bluntly, it's an RPG where you fight, interact with the world and chat with its inhabitants exclusively through typing. These can be either actual words that represent the idea you're trying to convey, or a variety of spells that you'll have to assemble yourself - one letter at a time! And while you're doing all of this the titular Cryptmaster will be closely watching over you, never really skipping out on an opportunity to sass you or judge you for your dumb choices. Yet despite how mean he might come across at first, I found him and his exasperated comments to be delightful!
Crash Bandicoot 4 is truly AMAZING... if you don't try to complete it! | You Should Try
- By Ash
- in You Should Try
In order to distract myself from the hell that is the real world, I figured I'd put on my rosiest glasses and indulge in a bit of nostalgia. And since the Crash Bandicoot series represents a big part of my childhood, I finally decided to give Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time a proper bash. A Crash Bash if you will! (Though don't actually go play Crash Bash, because that one's kinda bad!) And you know what? I deeply regret not doing this before because Crash 4 is astonishingly good... as long as you don't actually try to complete it!
I'll go into more details about that nonsense later, but to begin let's answer what Crash 4 is even about. To put it simply, it's a moderately to fairly challenging action-platformer with a heavy emphasis on gathering collectibles and completing a variety of tasks in each level. If you just run through the levels ignoring all of the side objectives you can probably finish the whole thing in a couple of hours. It'll be incredibly boring and not worth your money, but you can definitely do that - the same way you can totally go to a football game purely to sample the hotdogs and then go home before the match even starts.
Two years after the original, The Last of Us Part II Remastered has now landed onto PC
- By Ash
- in News
Two years have gone by since The Last of Us Part I first arrived onto PC, and while it has been quite a excruciating wait, I'm happy to say that The Last of Us Part II Remastered has now finally landed as well in order to get the PC squad up to speed on the whole story. In terms of features the PC version brings with it HDR and ultrawide support, a variety of graphic options to mess around with, as well as the now-standard support for upscaling technology like NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 3.1, and AMD FSR 4.0.
While not particularly relevant for us on PC given that this is the only version available, the Remastered upgrade brings with it a roguelike survival mode with a bunch of different characters, an in-game tour of three early-development levels that ended up getting cut and, a personal favorite, hours of developer commentary sprinkled throughout the game for those of us that like to peek behind the curtains!
In order to clean up the balance mess left after Patch 7.38, Dota 2 has now launched Patch 7.38c
- By Ash
- in News
Despite the humble name, Dota 2's Patch 7.38 is one of the most ambitious updates the team has ever done. As you would expect, with great changes come great balance problems! So much so that even Valve, a developer that is notoriously slow and cautious, has now released three hotfixes in a relatively short amount of time in order to iron out all of the kinks.
The newest of the bunch, Patch 7.38c, brings with it a couple of changes to the Dire side of the map, as well as a plethora of rebalances for the freshly reworked neutral items. The all-powerful Mana Draught has been nerfed yet again, though I imagine it's still going to be the best item for any spellcaster, while the somewhat mediocre Pollywog Charm and Ripper's Lash have received a small yet still very relevant buff.