I dunno. This is the first time in months where I’ve written, and edited an entire post without writing anything for an introduction. I just don’t have a lot to say this month. I posted a few articles, but have otherwise been taking things easier over the summer months.

What can I say? This is the 1 time of year where everyone comes out of their hidey hole.

Anyway, here are the highlights from July:

Monster Train 2

I mean, I don’t really have anything more to say about Monster Train 2. It overwhelmingly dominated my game playing, and writing time last month. I’m fairly happy with how both the guide, and a written piece about the game’s design turned out. The guide probably isn’t a great read unless you’re looking to crack into the game’s higher difficulty, but – I believe – I wrote the other article in a way where it can be understood by everyone. Go check it out if you haven’t already.

Having said that, I think after finishing 91 of the available 180 deck types on the highest difficulty, I’m finally done. At least, for now. Developer Shiny Shoe released a content roadmap several weeks back, and I’m sure I’ll want to dive back in when additional cards, and balance updates are dropped. For now I’m more than satisfied, and ready to move onto all of the other games that have been piling up in my backlog.

Nurikabe World

Next up, is Nurikabe World.

Like so many other titles that I’ve covered in Month in Review, Nurikabe World is a game I originally found during a Steam Next Fest. I decided to pick it up during the Steam Summer Sale, and was slowly working through a few puzzles every day until I finished it about a week ago.

Originally, I’d described Nurikabe as being Sudoku adjacent, but I showed it to my wife (who really likes Sudoku – she plays Cracking the Cryptic boards) and she said it looked more like Minesweeper. In my mind those are 2 sides of the same coin, but, obviously, to Sudoku diehards that’s not the case.

Either way, if you can envision either of those games then you’ll have the gist of Nurikabe World’s brand of logic puzzles. There’s a board, it has numbers, you follow the game’s rules to fill it in. A winner is you!

As far as recommendations go, Nurikabe World gets a thumbs up from me. It’s fun in the same way that other logic puzzles are. If you’re into that sort of thing then you’ll probably enjoy it too.

Though, I will say, I think Nurikabe World is on the easier side of things. I don’t consider myself particularly adept at logic puzzles, but I was able to clear the entire game instead of dipping out about two-thirds of the way through.

At 13 dollars (CAD) though, I think it’s worth the price of admission regardless of how many puzzles you do, or don’t finish.

ANTONBLAST

Honestly, I think I can best describe ANTONBLAST with an image I drew for my friend Alex after finishing the game. He thought it was hilarious, so here’s hoping you do too.

You may remember Alex from May’s Month in Review. He recommended Mouthwashing to me, and I’d mentioned how I really enjoyed chatting with him about it afterwards. In fact, that discussion was a fairly large part of what made playing Mouthwashing so interesting. It’s the kind of art that you get more out of when you choose to actively engage with it on a deeper level.

Anyway, ANTONBLAST is another of Alex’s recommendations, which is why he wanted my post-mortem on it. It’s a platformer in the vein of Wario Land, not unlike 2023’s hit indie Pizza Tower. Though, I feel like ANTONBLAST leans a lot more into Wario Land’s more exploratory elements, where Pizza Tower felt more about speed and precision.

Regardless, you can probably surmise from the included image that I have mixed feelings about it.

To start with the good, there are a lot of great levels in ANTONBLAST. I think the game really hits its stride by the third level. That’s kind of when the training wheels come off, and you’re free to experience everything the game has to offer completely unmolested. There’s a whole host of different platforming mechanics stuffed into each level, which keeps things moving at a really nice pace. Plus, the focus on radically differentiating levels makes them well worth revisiting.

There’s even a couple puzzle-y levels, which I really enjoyed. Both as a palette cleanser, and because they were really good levels. The haunted locker room (The Big Bath according to Google) is so creepy, and almost feels like it’s from a completely different game. However, it’s sandwiched between 2 of the game’s more bombastic levels, so it really helps to level out the experience in a way that let’s player fully appreciate everything ANTONBLAST has to offer.

Also, holy shit the music in this game.

Having said that, I completely lost my patience with ANTONBLAST in its last level, and final boss fight.

You can call me a scrub for this – that’s fine – I found the final level to be way too massive of a difficulty spike in an otherwise, relatively unchallenging game. I didn’t need to move quickly through any of the other levels, so finishing the game with a level where I was constantly rushing felt super out of place.

I could say the same thing for the lack of checkpoints in the final level too. I found 1 about a third of the way through the level, while every other level in the game had checkpoints so often I didn’t even think about them.

I suppose what I’m really trying to say is that it felt like I’d gone from playing 1 game to a completely different game for exactly 1 level right at the end. It was jarring, and not in a good way.

Also, the further into ANTONBLAST I got, the more often I got annoyed by how the camera insists on keeping Anton centered. When you’re running at full speed, especially during the end of each level, it’d be nice if the camera panned so you could actually see upcoming obstacles. That’s something that I found annoying even back on the Genesis with Sonic the Hedgehog, and I still think it’s annoying now.

All said, ANTONBLAST was a bit of a mixed bag. I would tentatively recommend it to platforming fans, though I don’t know that I’d recommend finishing it. Your mileage may vary, but I thought the middle of the game was its best bits. There’s a lot of really good stuff in there.

Just…you know…don’t force yourself to finish it like I did.

Monster Hunter: World

Finally, I reinstalled Monster Hunter: World for a weekend because I wanted to play some more Monster Hunter. This came despite having a mountain of other games that I should be playing instead. Sometimes you just need a quick pick-me-up of comfort food gaming.

Though, some of you might be wondering: why not play Wilds instead?

The short answer is that my computer can’t run Wilds, and I don’t have the memory of a goldfish.

The long answer is that I remember how poorly World ran at launch. The game would stutter constantly, and drop frames whenever huge amounts of particle effects appeared on screen. This happened even on hardware that well exceeded the recommended specs, and wasn’t fixed until years after the fact. As such, I didn’t have high hopes for Wilds, especially once I found out that Capcom was relying on frame generation to get the game to even run on consoles.

And it’s not like I’ve upgraded my machine recently, so there wasn’t a fart’s chance in a hurricane of this shitshow running for me.

Sure enough, the game’s demo barely ran on my machine. I don’t even know if my hardware was the primary bottleneck because the forced multiplayer elements seemed to be tweeking out worse than anything else. Other players would teleport all over the place, which resulted in some very strange onscreen behaviour, especially from the monsters.

If my experience with the demo wasn’t already enough to keep me away, the very visible ongoing disaster on Steam has really cemented my position. For those who aren’t aware, the most recent patch, which aimed to address the game’s poor PC performance, has, allegedly, done the opposite. Many players who were able to play the game before the patch, have found that they no longer can. This has resulted in an influx of negative reviews to the tune of 10000 over the past month.

It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? Doubly so with an over 100 dollar asking price (in my regional currency + taxation).

Anyway, that’s why no Monster Hunter Wilds, and this will likely be the last time I mention the game until I can actually play it. Though, it does feel good to finally share some of the impressions, negative as they are, that I had after playing the demo.

So…uh…Monster Hunter: World.

I…didn’t do a whole lot in my brief weekend playing World. I spent most of it relearning the game’s final fight, Fatalis, and scored an additional half-dozen kills to accompany my existing 18. Notably, I used the Hammer, Great Sword, Lance, and Sword & Shield this time to score those additional kills. Previously, I’d only beaten Fatalis with the Hunting Horn, so it was nice to score some additional kills using the remaining menagerie of weapons that I’m comfortable with. 

All said, I’ve gotten my fix of Monster Hunter. There’s not much of anything left for me to do in World, what with being able to kill Fatalis while fighting alone, so I guess I’ll go back into hibernation for now.

Okay – that’s enough of that.

As far as what you can look forward to in the coming weeks: if I’m being perfectly transparent, I don’t really want to commit to anything that I haven’t already started writing. I just…haven’t been able to keep my motivation where I’d like it to be.

That said, I have 1 post drafted which delves into why I started attending in-person meet-ups for Fighting games every week. I really hope that it’s something everyone will find interesting because it is very personal, and I sometimes struggle to be like that while writing.

Otherwise, I’ve started Grounded 2 with Mir, so maybe I’ll have something to say on that front.

Either way, keep your eyes peeled to ko-fi, or sign-up for notifications so you’ll be made aware whenever my next article goes live.

Thank you as always for reading, and I hope to see you in the next one.

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