The rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated.
Hi. Hello! Yes, I am still alive. June was…well it was certainly something.
The short version is that my Grandfather’s 98 year run finally finished. Thankfully, he passed relatively quickly in the end, which is something I’m becoming increasingly grateful for. It’s just…nice when you can think to yourself that your loved ones passed away peacefully.
Then a few days later I turned 32. And I spent a weekend up at my buddy’s cottage by the lake, which has got to be the most quintessentially Ontarian thing to do in the Summer.
Either way, I decided to deliberately take things slow in June as a result of everything. I trimmed down my Steam Next Fest coverage into a single post (which you can read here), and my only major article for the month, about Hades 2, was written several weeks prior to when I published it. Though, I did publish it a few days after the most recent Early Access content drop for Hades 2, which was some nice coincidental timing.
Anyway, here’s what little I played throughout June:
Control
Back during the Steam Winter Sale for 2024, my buddy Thomas bought me a copy of Control. It’s a game I’d been kind of curious about both because of all the positive praise that he’d heaped onto it, and I think Jacob Geller also made a video essay about it (though my memory is a little hazy on that front).
Either way, there were at least a few compelling reasons to finally check out Control.
Now, some of you might be wondering why it took me 6 months to finally play it.
Well citizen, that’s an excellent question, and I thank you for it. I think it’s great that we live in a town where you can ask questions because without questions we just have answers. And an answer without a question is a statement.
Anyway, I started Control, and made it about 2 chapters in before I fell off the wagon. I think that’s entirely because of the more video game-y elements to the game. As an example, I was heading to the next area for the story, but I received an in-game alert about some time-limited mission in another section of the map. I headed over to see what was up, only to find it was an optional combat arena akin to something you’d find in Assassin’s Creed.
Let the record show that is not a compliment. I despise this sort of thing in games, and it’s a big part of the reason why I avoid playing so many mainstream titles.
Regardless, I think I can just ignore all of this nothing-burger side content, which will make Control a lot more fun for me. Besides, the skill-tree, and weapon upgrades feel fairly insubstantial, so I’m not entirely sure that I’ll actually need many of them to actually finish the game. Ergo, I’m probably good even if I do skip the side content.
Misgivings about the side content aside, I thought the rest of Control seemed neat. The telekinetic powers were a huge stand-out though. There’s nothing quite like throwing a hunk of concrete into a dude, and watching him ragdoll across the screen.
I also keep laughing at all of the random physics objects that are scattered throughout the environment. You can really tell that the folks at Remedy were excited about the extra processing power of the, at the time, new consoles. Every single washroom in the game has no less than 15 aimlessly stacked rolls of toilet paper for the sole purpose of demonstrating how individual objects can be rendered. It’s the kind of thing that screams, “This is a PS4 game!” At least, to me it does.
Monster Train 2
Part of me wanted to phone this in again like I did last month, but I think I owe the game a few more words than that.
At time of writing, Monster Train 2 is probably my front-runner for Game of the Year. I’ve put a frankly disgusting amount of time into it since launch, and am only now starting to get tired of it as I wrap up a very long gameplay guide that I’ve been writing for it.
More or less everything that I stated in my Demo Dive about Monster Train 2 still holds true having played the full release. All 5 newly added clans are extremely fun to play as thanks to the bevy of new keywords, and how they interact with the existing keywords from the original game. This sent me down a rabbit hole finding tons of new card combos to split the game open, and win numerous runs in a decisive fashion.
Spoiler warning for the remainder of this section.
If that wasn’t enough, the folks on the development team also brought back all 5 of the original game’s clans too. This means that there are even more potential clan combinations, and card synergies to experiment, and play around. There’s so much variety, in fact, that I’ve had numerous runs where I use the same clan combo, but finish with completely different strategies in tow. And for my money, that’s the mark of a really good deck-builder.
The other thing that I really like about Monster Train 2 is that any card has the potential to be the star of the show. I know some people say that’s true in games like Slay the Spire, but I call bullshit. It’s only true on StS’s lower difficulties. It becomes a lot more obvious what’s good, and what isn’t once you hit higher Ascension levels, and can no longer afford to bring along cards that struggle to contribute without the proper supporting cards.
By contrast, Monster Train 2’s flexible upgrade system continues to enable basically every card in the game to shine regardless of which Covenant level you’re playing on. Some of the rarer cards still require the kind of specificity that something like Slay the Spire (or any other card game really) require, but when you actually key into those combos the results are explosive in a way that other deck-builders fail to be.
If you’ll indulge me for a second, I’d like to share 1 of my favourite decks to illustrate exactly what I mean.
The deck was built around 2 cards: Morel Mistress, and Lava Flow.
The former is a Unit that applies 8 stacks of Decay (basically poison) onto all enemies on a floor whenever a (Consume) card is played, and removed from your deck for the duration of combat.
The latter is a card that applies 4 Pyregel to all foes, which increases all damage received by 4, and then removes itself from your deck for the duration of combat.
At a basic level, these 2 cards work great together. Morel Mistress’ ability is triggered by playing Lava Flow, and Lava Flow increases the amount of damage that enemy units take from Decay’s passive damaging effect.
Things got a little crazy though when I started upgrading my cards. I put Spellchain onto Lava Flow, which gave me a second copy of it whenever I played it. This allowed me to trigger Morel Mistress twice whenever I drew Lava Flow.
Furthermore, I also upgraded Laval Flow with the rare event upgrade Entropic Stone which triples the effects of the cards. This increased the amount of Pyregel applied to 12, which further increased the value of the card.
For context, those 2 upgrades increased the damage output of this combo from 28 damage per turn to 72 damage per turn.
This only got more ridiculous when I duplicated Morel Mistress later in the run, so I could trigger the effect twice, once for each Morel Mistress.
I also found the Twin Minds Artifact, which permanently duplicated the first Consume card that I played each turn. Thanks to this, I had 6 copies of Lava Flow by the end of my run, meaning I could stack 240 Decay, and 144 Pyregel onto the final boss, which does 864 damage per turn.
For what it’s worth, this sort of ridiculous multiplicative damage is required to successfully win runs while playing on the highest difficulty. Though I did manage to kill the final boss of a standard run 2 turns early, and the secret final boss 3 turns early so this particular deck might have been overkill.
Maths aside, that sort of ridiculousness is what makes Monster Train 2 so special to me. There’s so many runs that I’ve played now where I’ve seen different cards become the lynchpin for my whole strategy. That’s really refreshing, when there are so many games that actively reward players for using the same tired, and tested methods without ever challenging them to experiment.
Obviously, Monster Train 2 comes highly recommended. My only misgiving about it is that you don’t really need to play the original anymore because it’s the kind of sequel that replaces its predecessor. That’s a fairly benign complaint though, and you absolutely need to check this out if card games are your sort of thing.
Okay. That’ll do it for June.
I’m not really going to commit to anything for July. I know I did that last month, but I didn’t end up delivering on even half of what I wanted to because of circumstances that were mostly out of my control.
Having said that, thank you for your patience with me, and your support of my work. It means the world that anyone has any interest in reading anything that I’ve written. And that goes double for the few folks who’ve chosen to support me financially via Ko-fi. Y’all are great.
Thank you (again), and I hope to see you in the next one.
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Frostilyte Writes 