As per usual, let’s start with a look behind the curtain: I made a trailer for my blog. The motivation for this was simple: my ko-fi page was looking a little bland, and I thought having a short video trailer would help to dress it up. It took me about a week to stitch together (because video editing is not my strong suit), but I’m fairly happy with how the trailer turned out. There are a couple instances where I managed to perfectly time the footage with the background music, and that makes the whole thing come together really nicely.

Other than the trailer, there’s not much else to report for May. It was fairly standard all things considered, though I did finally manage to put a dent in my backlog by tackling some of the longer titles I had in reserve.

Speaking of, here’s what I was playing throughout May:

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves

I know I typically leave fighting games for the end of these posts, but fighting games made up the bulk of my gaming time throughout the first few weeks of May. Part of the reason for this was the late-April release of a new Fatal Fury game: City of the Wolves.

City of the Wolves is exactly what you’d expect from a 2D fighting game, though I’m not the biggest fan of the combo system. I think that mostly stems from how complex it is to input fairly basic combos. Just as an example: to combo off of a light attack with Preecha, you’ll need to hit confirm into a 623 input, press break after the first hit of the special move, and then quickly perform your next special move (with a very tight buffer). That’s a lot of button presses for something basic, especially when you compare it against other games where normals (your  basic single button attacks) play a much bigger role in combos.

I’m certainly capable of learning more complex stuff, though it’ll take a lot more time to practice. Time which I haven’t yet given City of the Wolves because I’m not actually sure where my long-term aspirations sit with it. It’s fun enough to play casually with folks at locals, but I don’t know if I want to put the time into learning to play a little more seriously. Doubly so since City of the Wolves features explosive damage where you can realistically lose after 2 botched interactions.

Street Fighter 6

Where do I even start with this…

I guess the easiest place is from the beginning: there was an in-person tournament hosted in my city of residence during the first weekend of May. Most of the larger, and smaller events are hosted in Toronto, which makes them a little less accessible for me. There’s just a lot more of a logistical challenge when it comes to getting my butt to Toronto than there is when I can bum a ride off someone to an event within the city.

Either way, 2 folks from our local scene organized a huge event, invited some of the folks from Toronto, and we made a whole big thing of it. It was great to meet the Toronto folks, and play a ton of games in-person. It might sound a bit corny, but there’s just a different vibe when you’ve gotta pay an entrance fee, and there’s some cash on the line for the winners of a bracket.

Unfortunately, the only game that I have any acumen in that was being played at the event was Street Fighter 6. I hadn’t really touched it for all of 2025, so I had to spend the week leading up to the event practicing. In the process of cleaning all of the rust off, I remembered that I really enjoy playing Street Fighter, so I continued playing it after the event too.

For what it’s worth, I top cut the tournament bracket tying for 5th. Admittedly, there weren’t many competitors for Street Fighter. I also ran into the same wall that I usually do with locals: I could decisively beat everyone who doesn’t take the game seriously. I was later described by someone at the event as “the most competitive casual player in the scene,” which I thought was an apt description. So much so that I’ve continued to use the phrasing myself.

Either way, the event was a ton of fun, and I’m glad I made time for both it and Street Fighter throughout the month of May.

Dark Deity 2

I had originally planned to write something about Dark Deity 2 in May. I didn’t know exactly what at the time, but that wasn’t important. I just needed to make a decision about which game to tackle next from my backlog, and I decided on Dark Deity 2 because of the strong impression that its demo left during Steam Next Fest.

For those not in the know, Dark Deity 2 is a Turn-Based Tactics game in a similar vein to Fire Emblem. You move your units around what is ostensibly a chess board, trying to complete some sort of objective through defeating enemy units, and controlling space. Along the way, your different units will level-up becoming stronger, and gaining new abilities which increase the number of options that players have for solving the challenges posed by each of the game’s levels.

While I enjoyed the sequel more than the original, I still fell off Dark Deity 2 partway through the campaign. Apparently I’m about 2/3s of the way through it, but my interest in finishing it has completely evaporated. There’s not really anything wrong with it per se. It’s more that the game’s hook ran short, so I bounced off of it around where I’d have liked to see the game conclude.

For me, the most interesting part of this sort of game is figuring out how you want to develop your characters. It’s fun to assess what role is best suited for a character based on their base stats, class availability, and which skills they have access to. Then you get to execute your plans, and see how well each of your units turns out.

Dark Deity 2 has an element of this sort of design built into its character customization, but you get access to your endgame classes by around the midpoint of the campaign. This meant that I had nothing to look forward to as all of my units (effectively) stopped growing well before the end of the game. As such, I quickly lost interest in finishing Dark Deity 2, and moved onto other titles.

To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with this kind of design. There can be fun in absolutely steamrolling through several levels back-to-back with an overpowered endgame build. Heck, the later chapters of Dark Deity 2 might even be balanced around having all of these overpowered combinations at your disposal. Baldur’s Gate 3 did something similar within its third act, and that game was widely praised as a masterpiece.

It’s just, for me, this sort of design doesn’t really work. I only need a few levels of feeling powerful with my creations, and then I’m ready to move onto something new. That’s probably why Deck-Building games work so well for me now that I think about it.

And I didn’t find the overarching story to be all that compelling either. Each arc is completely self-contained in a way where it feels like you could shuffle around the order, and the game would still play out as expected. I don’t actually know if that’s part of the randomizer mode, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

Either way, Dark Deity 2 is decidedly ok. I liked it more than the first, but it wasn’t quite my cup of tea. It might be good for folks who are less susceptible to boredom once they’ve hit the apex of the game’s power curve though.

Blue Prince

I think I already mentioned it in the article that I wrote last week, but I dropped Blue Prince shortly after starting it. In said article, I wrote about the lack of an in-game way to record notes, which was driving me absolutely bonkers. That was a symptom of a much wider issue, which is the actual reason I stopped playing Blue Prince: it doesn’t give a shit about your time.

Before I get into why I hold that opinion, let me first explain what Blue Prince is because my mom reads my articles (love you too, mom).

Blue Prince is a Puzzle game where most of the game’s puzzles are hidden from the player. You’ll explore a mysterious manor where several puzzles, and clues for how to solve said puzzles are hidden in plain sight. It’s your job to mull over the environment, pull out hidden details, and piece together the solution. In that regard, the game has a lot in common with the likes of Tunic, Outer Wilds, or Animal Well.

Where Blue Prince differs from those aforementioned games is in its structure: it’s also a Roguelike. Every in-game day, the manor that you’re exploring will have a different floor layout. And this is where the source of my problem lies with Blue Prince.

You know what’s fun? Making a connection between a random piece of information, and the puzzle that it’s related to. Doubly so when you immediately put that connection to the test, and verify that your conclusion is correct.

You know what’s a lot less fun? Making that same sort of connection, and having to wait upwards of 2 hours to verify it because the damn game won’t let you access the appropriate room to verify your solution. Or, god forbid, you need several rooms to verify whatever your brain is currently trying to untangle.

I didn’t even get that far into Blue Prince, and already started running into walls where I could not for the life of me find the 1 room that I needed. I suppose that’s my fault for not being able to juggle several threads simultaneously, but then I already wrote an entire article lamenting the lack of an in-game notebook for this exact reason.

It all made me very bitter, very quickly, and I stopped playing when Mir (correctly) pointed out that I wasn’t having any fun with Blue Prince.

In hindsight, I wish I’d read the excellent article by drmabian covering this exact problem within Blue Prince’s design before I started the game. Then I might’ve known that it wasn’t going to be my cup of tea without needing to slog through several hours of frustration beforehand.

Either way, if you liked Blue Prince then more power to you. It just…was very much not the kind of thing I could get into.

Monster Train 2

I played this game for 60 hours in 2 weeks.

Please send help.

Anyway, thank you for reading if you made it this far. 

As far as upcoming articles are concerned, I know that there is a Steam Next Fest starting next week so look forward to some demo impressions. Otherwise, there’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for another instalment in The Path to Improvement (yes, I haven’t forgotten about that series), and a Demo Dive for something that I’ve already played through. I also have another free space (aka: do whatever you want), so we’ll see how that shakes out.

Again, thank you for your support, and I hope to see you in the next one.

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