Gaming Report Q1 2026
The “Year of the Time Sink” is continuing into 2026, apparently. Well, let’s do this (short) thing.
Mosaic of the Strange
This will be the third entry from the Mosaic series that I’ve highlighted, and represents a huge step up in scope from Mosaic of the Pharaohs. It would have been incredibly easy for the developer to pick up a niche player base and then keep cranking out the same game over and over with a fresh coat of paint each time. Instead, there’s now a story! Characters! Difficulty levels! A cool thing at the end I don’t want to spoil!
Yeah I didn’t like it.
I’m being somewhat hyperbolic, of course. I liked it okay (and I mean it, the ending was a fun surprise), but there were multiple elements that just didn’t land with me. Most notably was the theme; this time, the game was themed around things like conspiracies, unexplained phenomena, and other oddities; really, it makes no effort to hide the fact that it is love letter to The X-Files in every regard. But I’m far and away more Scully than Mulder, and a brief overview of the Dyatlov Pass incident isn’t as interesting a reward to me as, say, a lesser-known fact about daily life in ancient Egypt. The music follows suit, going for a minimalist, slightly eerie ambiance, which BOY is not fun to listen to for hours. I turned it off pretty quickly.
Lastly… part of the fun of the other games was solving a bunch of smaller pictures to make a big mural, and seeing it slowly fill in over time! That’s gone. Now each section represents a single self-contained “clue” spread out across a half-dozen locations. You’re still technically filling in parts of the scenery, but they’re isolated pieces, dotted all over the room. The driving motivator instead is the story of the two federal agents as they attempt to solve an uncanny murder in a small town. Sometimes they comment on the mysteries you read about after completing a section and speculate on how they might relate to the case, which at least is a decent way to tie these two elements together, even if much of this speculation is quickly forgotten.
I should also touch on the difficulty levels this entry added. Previously, while the game presented similarly to Minesweeper, you weren’t expected to do a lot of solving; you could really get into a rhythm of putting markers down, using this new information to put more markers down, repeat over and over. Getting stuck just meant not seeing where the next marker was supposed to go and hunting around to find it. This mode is still present here, but now there’s also a number of difficulty options to add in areas which require a bit of logic to guess where markers were to be placed. At first I thought “great, I love logic puzzles!” and set it to the maximum difficulty right away. However, I pretty quickly realized that, while I still had to hunt to figure out where to put a starting marker, spotting that location would no longer be obvious. I now needed to analyze every pattern of numbers as potentially a logic problem that may or may not get me into the flow state; but given that there might only be a single square I could start filling in, I’d be spending most of my time trying to find meaning where there wasn’t any.
…Which is keeping in with the “unsolved mysteries” theme I guess. How unintentionally fitting. I still reverted back to the old way of playing though.
Honestly, I’m impressed that the developer wanted to try all these new things and evolve their craft, and I really respect that drive. This isn’t a bad game by any means. It’s just not what I wanted, either. So it goes sometimes.
Cast n Chill
I was looking for idle games—something mildly interesting I could put on in the background on my remote days—and found this. It’s cool they give you the choice here; you can fish if you’d like, or you can sit back and let the game play itself. I did the latter; it’s mostly fine, but the AI regularly gets stuck where it’s clear the fish aren’t biting, and it never seems to want to reel in the line and try a different tactic. It’s also perfectly happy switching over the small rod all the time and catching the piddly fish when you want it to focus on lunkers to progress the game faster.
Of course, you can’t talk about this game without mentioning how nice it looks. I’ll touch on one interesting aspect I noticed: the background is made up of multiple layers and takes advantage of parallax scrolling (this is when layers scroll at different speeds to create the illusion of depth). Well, on rare occasions, a layer actually scrolls opposite the way you’d expect. The example I’m thinking of involves a mountain split up into layers for the top and base; when you move from left to right, the base moves left, but the top moves right. This changes the angle of the entire mountain, making it look like you actually went partially around it. I’d be surprised if this is the first game to do this, but it’s the first time I noticed it, and it’s a clever trick.
Oblivion: Remastered
All right, I think we’re about done with this saga. I finished the main quest, then moved on to Knights of the Nine, which is (marginally) better than I remember. Turns out paying attention to the lore helps sometimes, who knew. At this time I was still cheesing the magic system and finding new ways for my character to demonstrate her sheer power, and when it came time to fight Umaril the Unfeathered in the final confrontation, it was a complete wash. It was such a wash that I took him down with a couple casts of electric magic, which I later found out he was programmed to be completely immune to. Absolutely peak.
That put my character in a bit of a slump though, because once you’ve wiped out a demigod without breaking a sweat, what’s left? This turned out to be “switching over to my untrained hand-to-hand skill at level 30”, because the only thing more satisfying than destroying everything with magic would be destroying everything with your bare goddamn hands.
Despite being a novice at fisticuffs, with a bit of a magic boost she was still absolutely devastating as I entered into the Shivering Isles, which I’d purposefully held off doing as a sort of “save the best of last” kind of mentality. Before the remaster released, I’d told myself if I ever played Oblivion again, it would be just to experience Shivering Isles one more time. And finally, that time had come.
Anyway I did a couple quests and then decided I was finally bored and I didn’t want to play anymore.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy
I keep making the mistake of playing these games over the winter where I’m more liable in the evenings to start nodding off a few minutes after starting the game up.
It was time to jump back in and finish out the last episode of this trilogy, Spirit of Justice. And, um… boy I really started to notice some flaws. In general, it holds up about as well as previous Ace Attorney entries, although I have noticed more examples of the plot relying on dubious leaps of logic, or places where I want to argue about a piece of evidence way earlier than the story allows. I also don’t know if I’m just growing too familiar with these games or what, but I’m getting good at identifying the true culprit the moment they pop up on screen the first time. That’s probably not helping.
Still, I think the biggest offender here is that depending on how you count, we’re six titles in now, and we’ve accrued a whole bunch of fun friends that we’d love to spend some more time with, in what could be a series finale for all we know. So what do the designers decide to do? Split the party between two countries, introduce a whole bunch of new characters that eat up screen time, and then expect me to care about them when they’re intruding on the relationships I actually want to see. Hell, we finally get our OG Maya back after she’s been away for ten years, and up until the DLC content, she’s really only present for a single case! As the accused, so she’s not even around for the investigation parts! Absolutely unforgivable. Athena keeps getting sidelined when it’s time for the boys to advance The Plot™, and you can tell they just have no idea what to do with Trucy anymore because she spends most of her time off-screen “practicing magic” and literally nothing else—just like Maya, the only time she’s ever relevant is as a defendant.
Otherwise, game’s fine.
Everspace 2
Skep in 2023: “I took a break to play other games, but I want to get back into this one.” …Yikes.
Since it had been so long, I ended up starting a new game. I’m still playing it! I don’t have much more to say about it, I think; the space battles still don’t feel quite as exhilarating as I’d like, but they’re fun enough, and the team was very creative in coming up with areas to explore. And overall, a very polished experience! Hoping to wrap this up before too long.
Taria & Como
Well, now that I’m behind on Playdate reviews by a good half-dozen, it’s probably safe to admit to myself that I’m not actually going to write them. I guess I’ll start including Playdate games in the quarterly reports then.
The last few months, I’ve been picking at Taria & Como, which was included in Season 2. I’m surprised the Playdate hasn’t seen more platformers (or I’m just doing a good job of missing them). Rather than jumping around, though, the primary platforming mechanic is grappling and swinging, with the crank used to shorten or lengthen your rope. The controls feel a bit clunky to me, but I think a lot of that is just the limitation of the platform; the only improvement I would actually suggest would be letting me use the jump button to detach the grapple, instead of pressing Up.
Story-wise, it’s pretty heavy-handed in its critique of corporatized healthcare, but at least it uses this to humorous effect. It’s difficult to guess exactly how much of the game I’ve finished—maybe roughly half?—but I can definitely tell that a lot of care went into the game’s presentation, and so far they’ve done an excellent job integrating the down-to-earth characters with the unorthodox gameplay. I’m sure I’ll have more to say next time, but so far I’m quite optimistic about this one.
I know I usually have some idea what I’m going to tackle in the next quarter, but this time… man, who knows. I just started Unbeatable last night, so that. I also got Aerial_Knight’s DropShot when it released, but I haven’t spun it up yet, so I’d like to give that a go. And I’m sure folks are betting over on Polymarket about when Skep finally gets around to playing Expedition 33.