Two things to kick off August’s “how’re things going” post.

Firstly, if you’re participating in Blaugust then Happy Blaugust!

For those not in the know, Blaugust is a month-long event all about blogging. The intent behind the event is to celebrate blogs, and help to provide a springboard for folks to get into the hobby. Whether you’re a first timer, a regular blogger, or someone who has let their posting lapse, Blaugust is a time to remember why you got into blogging, and revitalize your interest in the hobby.

I won’t be participating myself, but I run in the same circles as some of the event’s organizers, which is why I wanted to give Blaugust a shout-out here.

If this is your first time hearing about Blaugust, and you’re interested in participating, then it isn’t too late to sign up. I believe this is the 2026 sign-up form, and you can find additional details on Krikket’s blog.

Also, my thoughts go out to everyone who was close to Mark Temple (Belghast), the event’s original organizer. Sadly, Bel passed away this past July. However, several of his friends have taken up the mantle of organizing, and hosting Blaugust this year in his honour. Things won’t be the same without him, but I’d like to think that memorializing Bel by way of Blaugust will help to continue spreading the same passion that he clearly had for blogging.

Shifting gears, the other thing I wanted to do was thank everyone, new and old, who has kept up with my writing this year. Throughout July I received a number of very kind comments about my written work (both privately, and publicly), and I also surpassed my total views for 2025. Views are a fickle metric to gauge success by, but there’s no mistaking the kind words that I’ve received. I know it can seem silly, but it does mean the world to me when I read that someone overcame a challenging boss by using 1 of my guides, or that my work is comparable to what you’d find on professional websites. Accolades aren’t why I started writing, but it’s still nice to see that my work is appreciated.

With that sorted, onto the highlights from July.

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Titanium Court

 Holy Santa Clause shit. What an amazing game.

If you weren’t already aware of it, Titanium Court is a combination Match 3, and Strategy game made by one of the co-developers of last year’s Consume Me. In it, you’ll take over as the Queen of the titular Titanium Court, and will lead Faeries in the act of war. This is done through a 2 phase system. During the first phase, you play Match 3. During the second phase, you’ll deploy units that will resolve combat automatically like they would in an Auto-Battler.

That said, the game is a little more involved than I let on. You see, during the first phase, you’re playing Match 3 on the battlefield that you’ll be playing upon during the second phase. As such, you have the opportunity to alter the field to suit your strategic needs before you actually engage in any Faerie warfare. For example, if you want to bolster your defensive position then you could attempt to strategically surround the Titanium Court with bodies of water, thus creating a makeshift moat. Alternatively, the map may have 2 warring factions on it, so you shuffle tiles such that they end up doing battle with one another, while leaving your keep totally unmolested.

This twisting of Match 3, and Auto-Battler Strategy was intensely interesting, and made for quite a compelling twist on typical genre conventions. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other games that tackle things in quite the same way, which made Titanium Court’s various skirmishes a real joy to play through.

However, the part where Titanium Court really comes into its own is with the writing. Without saying too much, the whole game is in conversation with the player about why, and how they choose to play video games. If you’re willing to have that conversation then there’s a lot more that you can get out of Titanium Court beyond its engaging twist on strategy skirmishes.

I don’t want to say anymore than that because, annoyingly, this is a game that works better when you don’t already know the twists and turns of its narrative ahead of time. Regardless, I’d encourage everyone to give Titanium Court a look because it has firmly cemented itself as one of 2026’s best indie games. I had every confidence that I’ll be writing about my time as the presiding Queen again sometime in the future.

Demon Tides

I’m sorry Big Hops. You were my favourite 3D Platformer of 2026, but you have been unceremoniously dethroned now that I’ve played through Demon Tides.

Having said that, I do think that comparing the 2 helps with highlighting exactly why I was so enamoured with Demon Tides. In a word, Big Hops is a theme park, to Demon Tides’ jungle gym. By that I mean that Big Hops is constantly throwing new ideas, and mechanics at the player to help keep them engaged. It’s a game that never dwells on any idea for too long before presenting something new to help maintain the player’s interest.

By contrast, Demon Tides doesn’t explore as much variety, but gives players a much more verbose moveset to work with. As such, the fun comes from learning how to better leverage the full suite of abilities at your disposal, which naturally happens as you build familiarity with them across your journey. Hence, the jungle gym comparison. It’s not unlike how you’d start using Monkey Bars normally, but begin swinging, and climbing all over them as you become more comfortable playing on them. The same journey of mastery happens across Demon Tides, and I love that about it.

To be clear, I don’t think either of these approaches is “more correct” when designing a game. However, I enjoyed the complexity of Demon Tides’ movement more than the variety of Big Hops. Though, I must stress, I think both are great games. I simply enjoyed them for different reasons despite the obvious surface level similarities that can be made between the 2 thanks to their shared genre.

As far as comparison-free opinions about the title are concerned, there were 2 other features of Demon Tides that I really liked. The first was the ability for the player to set their own checkpoints, and thus control some facets of the game’s difficulty. You can set a checkpoint pretty well anytime you’re not airborne. Ergo, you end up having a lot of control over how punishing Demon Tides is when you make a mistake. Personally, I slapped checkpoints all over the place, which encouraged me to play far more riskily. This ended up being far more fun for me in the long run, than simply relying on safe, and simple jumps the whole time.

Secondly, outfits. Holy mother of pearl does this game have a ton of character customization. There are several unlockable hair styles, and additional outfits littered throughout the game as rewards for completing quests. There’s also alternative versions of every item, so there is a deluge of potential if you enjoy playing dress-up with your character.

Plus, none of the character customization is tied to micro-transactions. Demon Tides is out here reminding folks what it used to be like to play games back in the early aughts in all of the right ways.

Pokémon Silver Version

I already mentioned it in my last post, but I decided to do a retro replay of Pokémon Silver. And I’m assuming everyone already knows what a Pokémon is, so I don’t need to elaborate on that further here.

What I will say is that I still really enjoy mucking about with the older games. Specifically, I find it way more interesting to cobble together a party when I don’t have access to a host of strong options. For example, I spent most of my playthrough using Rollout on Quilava. That’s something I wouldn’t even consider in a modern game, but Rollout was a fairly compelling early game option that gave Quilava a ton of (potential) power to compensate for its total lack of a decent Fire type attack until it evolved.

Plus, Rollout ended up sweeping through Morty, and Pryce while also chunking down half of Lance’s team. Evidently, Whitney was onto something with her Rollout spamming strategies in the third gym.

I was also struck by how much less annoying the older games are to navigate. I’m someone who firmly believes that Pokémon was better when it was 2D, though I’ve never been able to articulate exactly why the 3D games don’t feel as good to play. I’m convinced now that part of that feeling might stem from how much larger the newer games are compared to the older ones. It only takes about 10m to walk from 1 side of Johto to the other. The same can not be said for newer games where the sprawling environments are cluttered with far more vestigial background elements to sell the illusion of scale.

Maybe I’m reaching with this one, but there’s something to be said for games where it only takes 60 seconds to walk to your destination. Especially when the game in question isn’t built around the joys of exploring a tightly designed movement system like the aforementioned Demon Tides.

Regardless, stay posted for updates on my Low-Tier run of Silver as I’ll begin trickling those articles out in short order following this one.

Review Round-up

Quick bit of clarification from last month: I said that I would be reviewing Annihilated, but that obviously didn’t happen. The reason for this is quite simple: it was delayed into Q4. Fingers crossed I’ll have more to say on this in the future, but for now I’ll have to wait for the developers to finish cooking.

The Incident at Galley House

As far as reviews I was able to write go, we can start with Galley House, which I rather enjoyed. The total visual overhaul, new story additions, and musical stings really helps to offer up a meaningfully different experience from the original Type Help, which Galley House is a remaster of. It’s also just a compelling mystery to untangle, and that’s exactly what I want from a Detective game.

Echoes From Ciudadela

Unfortunately, I don’t have as many good things to say about Echoes From Ciudadela, which released a few weeks later. It has good bones, but the puzzle design falls short, which ultimately holds the rest of the package back.

Indie Spotlight

After the absolute madhouse that was July, I’m thankful that August seems a little more sparsely populated. Hopefully that’ll give me a few weeks to continue catching up before Valheim, and No Rest for the Wicked drop in September.

Also, this month’s Spotlight is brought to you by my wife. She’s very keen on both Fields of Mistria and Doloc Town, and has been eagerly awaiting their eventual 1.0 releases. As such, I asked her about both games, and will be paraphrasing the wealth of information she shared since this is normally a “tell people why a game is interesting in 100 words or less” sort of dealio, instead of a full blown review.

Fields of Mistria

Whenever a new farming game releases, I’m always left wondering the same thing: why should I play this instead of replaying Stardew? In Mistria’s case, the answer is simple: the game’s writing. Even in Early Access, Mistria had a wealth of dialogue, and very little of it repeated. This means that basically every interaction you’re going to have will help to meaningfully flesh out the character you’re speaking with, which is a rarity within this genre. 

Other than that, Mistria is basically a greatest hits album of genre staples that delivers a very refined Farming Game experience.

The crunchy pixel art is also a nice nostalgic touch.

Doloc Town

The other spotlight for August is Doloc Town, which is a game where you’ll be farming in the post-apocalypse. As such, the seasons are unconventional (ex. acid rainy season, instead of a typical rainy season), and there is a much greater focus on exploration as you try to discover remnants of the fallen civilization while building up your farming empire.

It’s also worth noting that all of the farming is done vertically, which presents logistical challenges when compared with the near unlimited landscape you’re normally given in other similar games.

Both games are planning massive content drops to coincide with their 1.0 launch, so give them a look if either sounds interesting. I think I might give Mistria a look myself, provided Mir isn’t busy using our shared copy of it.

And that’ll do it for July in Review. Thank you for reading if you made it this far, and I hope to see you in the next one.

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