Mister Jack

The first Nioh is definitely the hardest. I actually think it gets progressively easier as the series goes along. The best tip I can give you is not to try to play it like Dark Souls. Dodging is possible but blocking is your friend.

Bosses with kill counters in online games. Nioh 3 has a thing where the spirits of dead players coalesce into a tough as nails boss that spawns randomly in the open world and drops really good loot if you manage to kill it. That's already neat but something I got a kick out of was that it displays how many players it kills until someone eventually takes it down. I managed to take one down earlier with a player kill count of over 61,000. Is it completely cosmetic? Yeah. Did it feel cool as hell to be the one who ended his reign of terror? Hell yeah.

Nioh 3 Boy, I really binged this one. 43 hours over six days to beat the main story, which for me is a lot. So yeah, I liked this one. Nioh 2 is one of my favorite action games ever and this one went in a pretty different direction, though a lot of the familiar series staples are there. Yokai transformations from 2 are gone since your character isn't a half-breed, which means the soul cores are used for summons and magic spells rather than transformations. The living weapon mode from Nioh 1 is back to make up for it. The two biggest changes, however, have got to be the ninja style and the open world. Older Nioh games had ninja abilities, but they were a specific subclass you had to devote points into leveling and the ninja items were consumable. It could be pretty powerful if you devoted yourself to it but I never really did much with it outside of a few ninja tools that were useful for my playstyle. This time around, you shift between ninja style and samurai style at the push of a button. Each style gets its own weapons and equipment and, importantly, ninja items recharge while you're in samurai style rather than being used up until you get to a shrine. Ninja style doesn't have the stance system samurai weapons get and you take more damage while in ninja style, but it has a better dodge and you do double damage with any back attacks you land. Swapping styles is also how you parry heavy attacks so you'll be switching between them frequently no matter what. Technically you can also parry with your guardian spirit attacks, but those need to be charged up by doing damage so you can't guarantee you'll always have one available when a heavy attack is coming your way. Putting together both a ninja and a samurai build is mandatory. Losing a few weapons to ninja style stings a bit since you only get one stance as a ninja, but you can now equip four melee weapons at once so that helps make up for it a bit. I might slightly prefer the yokai shift abilities from 2 but I also gotta admit that they were pretty overpowered once you mastered them. The samurai/ninja swapping feels a bit more balanced. Either way I appreciate that it's not just doing the same thing again and both games have their own distinct feel. This game also feels easier to me than 2 but I don't know how much of that is the open world design allowing you to overlevel and how much of it is me having played Nioh 2 for hundreds of hours. The open world was a change I wasn't sure I'd like but it actually worked out fairly well. It's nothing mind blowing, this isn't Elden Ring, but the world is just large enough to feel dense and full of things to find while not being so huge that it feels bloated or padded. The amount of collectibles and side activities here is generous without being overwhelming and the map size reflects that. It feels more like a Metroidvania than a Ghost of Tsushima to me and I'm perfectly fine with that. It's as big as it needed to be and no more. Plus, hey, we get a jump button now! It's fine for platforming but also opens up a whole new set of strategies for combat so that's nice. I gotta ding one aspect though and that's the PC performance. Don't get me wrong, the game works. I could run it at 60 FPS, but I could run Nioh 2 at 120 FPS and this game really doesn't look that different from 2. Yeah, I know it has an open world, but it's not like it's a visually stunning open world. It just felt like this game is a lot more demanding on my CPU than it needed to be. I have a midrange CPU (Ryzen 5 5600X) but I still don't think this should be the game that makes it struggle. I've seen worse ports, it only crashed once, but I've certainly seen better. I'm on the fence about whether I like 2 or 3 more but this one at least feels on par with 2 in its own way. I can easily see myself playing it for hundreds of hours just like its predecessor.

Absolutely obsessed with Nioh 3 right now, which is no surprise since it's one of my favorite game series of all time. They made it open world this time so all those people complaining about the mission based structure of the last two games can finally quit bitching about it. It kinda feels more like a Metroidvania than an Assassin's Creed or a Ghost of Tsushima because the map has a good bit of platforming as well as areas you can't access until you acquire the right spirit guardian to help you through.

One of the more tedious parts of Soulslike games is using consumable resources to top off however much exp you need to level up, especially in the early days when you had to use these items one at a time. Nioh 3 finally streamlined that process. When you're at the level up screen you can hit a single button and it will ask if you want to use however many items you need to reach your next level up. You hit yes and you're DONE. Can every soulslike do this from now on, please?

Was there ever any doubt?

I've been playing a lot of Witchfire recently. It's kind of an interesting hybrid of genres and people seem to have differing opinions on just what it is. It's definitely at least partly a souslike FPS game. You collect witchfire from enemies to level up and you drop it when you die and have to go back to try and collect it. I've also heard it called an extraction shooter by some in that you go into the maps to collect resources and if you die before you can find an exit portal then you drop everything, though you can go back and pick it up on your next life along with your dropped witchfire. I don't know a lot about extraction shooters and this is strictly a single player game but I guess it could technically count? I hesitate to call it a roguelike because the maps aren't procedurally generated and the bosses spawn in the same place every time, but I guess there are still random events during a mission. What I really like about this game is the gunplay and the feeling of progression. The story takes place in an alternate history where witches are real and the church has witch hunters to wipe them out. The time period is kind of hard to pin down but based on the guns you get I'd guess it's equivalent to maybe the WWII era? Your guns are all magically enhanced so it's a little hard to tell but you won't be finding any modern military weapons here. The most advanced gun I've gotten so far looks like an old Browning rifle that spawns angel wings while aiming down the sights to block incoming fire. I like the old-timey designs of the arsenal, though. Feels weighty and bulky in a good way. It feels powerful. Speaking of which, these guns are great and get better as you go. Every gun has four levels, starting at 0. At level 0 they just shoot normal bullets like ordinary guns but once you get 25 kills and hit level 1 every gun unlocks a special ability. Use that ability enough times and you get a level 2 ability. Use that enough times to unlock the final and fully upgraded level 3 ability. These aren't just passive buffs either. These are very unique and useful abilities. I already mentioned the angel wing shield but you also have things like a sniper rifle that ignites enemies while you look through the scope, a revolver that lodges bullets in enemies and detonates them when you reload, a crossbow with bolts that zip in between targets like Yondu's arrow, and lots more. I honestly haven't seen an arsenal this unique since Resistance on the PS3. It doesn't hurt that you also get a loadout of magic spells to choose from on top of that. The game is still in early access and there are some balance issues that need to be ironed out in my opinion but I think when this hits 1.0 it's going to become a sleeper hit.

I freaking love Dynamite Headdy. Used to play that all the time.

Cultic: Chapter 2 I feel bad about this. I can tell that Jason Smith worked his ass off on this game and he lovingly crafted these huge, sprawling maps with tons of attention to detail. This game is his baby and I respect the hell out of what he accomplished mostly by himself. However, I gotta say that chapter 2 feels like a step down from chapter 1. There's a massive difficulty spike with the new enemies and level design. Whether that's an issue for you is up to personal preference, I suppose, but even if I'm okay with the game being harder it has one other major issue that really started to affect my enjoyment: these levels are too big. I almost feel guilty complaining about it. Like I said, this game was made by one guy and I can't imagine the amount of time it took for him to make these gigantic areas to explore. One level in this game can be nearly as big as the entire mansion in Resident Evil. You could fit three or four Doom levels in one Cultic Chapter 2 level. It's extremely impressive on a technical level and they're laid out in a way that make them feel like real places instead of mere video game levels. Unfortunately, when actually playing it's also extremely easy to get very lost looking for your next objective. There is an auto-map that fills out while you explore but it only helps so much. There are times when the path forward is practically a secret area. I spent over an hour on a single level at one point and didn't run into a single enemy for half of that time because I was so confused about where to go. I know people like to be snobs about objective markers and compasses but this game really needed it. I had to consult Youtube more than once just to know where the hell I was supposed to go. Maybe that's partly my fault for wanting to do a whole level in one sitting but come on. It's a boomer shooter. That's how they're meant to be played. There's also several atmospheric setpiece moments where you'll be trapped in the dark somewhere, just waiting for something to come at you out of nowhere while you're stumbling around with your lighter. This can be effective in theory, but since I got lost several times this also meant long stretches where I didn't run into any enemies at all because I didn't know where I was supposed to go to trigger the next encounter. I'm willing to accept partial responsibility for it since this is hardly the first time I've gotten lost while playing a game and struggled to figure out what I was supposed to do, but it happened to me enough times while playing this that I started to feel like I couldn't possibly be this inept. Most boomer shooters will have you looking for, at most, 3 keys or key items per level. This one can have you hunting for up to 8 or more depending on the level. It's rough. Maybe I'll have a change of heart on a replay since I know what to do in the levels now but I'm not ready for that yet. I need a break from this one. Shame really because the gunplay feels great as always.

Nightmare Reaper What a pleasant, addictive surprise this turned out to be. I thought it was a roguelike because of procedurally generated levels but it really isn't despite what the store page claims. You don't lose progress when you die other than dropping your currently carried guns and having to start the current level over, so you'll never drop your hard earned coins for the upgrade shop or get sent all the way to the beginning. Good thing too because this game has roughly 90 levels. They all take maybe 5 to 10 minutes to beat, not counting the battle arenas that you do on the side for arena coins. My final playtime when I finally put it down clocked in at 33 hours. The real star of the show here is the guns. Yes, the game uses sprite and voxel graphics so the guns aren't super detailed but the sound design on them is immaculate and enemies explode into showers of blood and gore so pretty much all of them feel great to shoot and there's a ton of variety to boot. I actually lost count of how many weapon types there are, though they all fall into the melee, light, heavy, or magic category. It's not just your typical pistol, shotgun, sniper, smg rotation either. Those are all in there, sure, but then you get things like spell books, a scepter that summons meteors, pirate cannons, a scrap cannon, a howitzer, a black hole gun, a railroad spike launcher, a mini nuke, a god damn orbital laser, and much much more than I can possibly list here. The store page on steam claims there's 80 weapons and I have no reason to doubt that. On top of already having 80 weapons, each one you pick up comes with modifiers so they'll function differently. It's kind of like Borderlands in that sense, but the modifiers aren't just passive stat increases and they can wildly change how two versions of the same gun feel to use. I found all kinds of crazy combos. My go-to starter gun in the second half of the game was a magnum that fired electric stun bullets and had 675% knockback, but the most memorable gun I found was probably the smg that fired flaming, explosive piles of poo with every shot. You just never know what you'll get. As if that wasn't enough, your character gets a lot of upgrades too. You'll start off fairly weak and squishy but by the end I was double jumping, grappling, air dashing, and even kicking back enemy projectiles. It's a ton of fun. My only real criticisms are the ending (at least the one I got) is pretty anticlimactic and sometimes I got lost in a level for several minutes trying to find the key I needed to progress. These levels can be full of big, open spaces sometimes and keys aren't marked on the map so you have to hunt down their little glowing sprites which can sometimes feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. Other than that, this was fantastic. I'm already starting NG+.

I almost put Dispatch but if I'm being honest with myself this is the game I obsessed over the most in 2025. I loved the tactical combat and with 100 endings to find among wildly different routes, I ended up playing this for a stupid amount of time in my obsession with getting the golden ending. There aren't really any lazy fade to black text over a blank screen endings in here that I could find either. They all have their own art and scenes and were interesting enough to motivate me to keep going to find the next one. I still haven't found all 100 of them, though I imagine someday I'll go back to get the rest.

I've been on a huge boomer shooter kick recently. Played through all of Blood: Refreshed Supply and Duke Nukem 3D. I picked up Selaco and Rise of the Triad and Dark Forces Remastered on the steam sale. The most interesting one I got, however, turned out to be Nightmare Reaper. You play as a mental patient going through procedurally generated levels in her dreams (so I assume since you go to bed in her cell in between levels). The randomized layouts do mean the levels aren't super complex but it makes up for it with the guns. There's an enormous variety to pick up and they all have modifiers kind of like Borderlands. After each floor you also have to sell every gun you're carrying except for one level 1 gun you're allowed to take with you, which sounds annoying but it keeps you from clinging to the same weapon for the whole game and you get new guns pretty quickly on the next floor anyway and most of them feel pretty good to shoot. You can only equip four guns at a time but you can carry dozens of them in your inventory on each floor and can swap them out anytime you want to try new loadouts. I've been looking for that endlessly replayable old school shooter that never runs out of stuff to do and I may have found it with this one.

Good to finally have a definitive modern port built from the original source code

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Streets of Rage 2 and 4 (Probably my top recommendation) Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Absolum TMNT: The Arcade Game The Simpsons Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara River City Ransom Castle Crashers Comix Zone Splatterhouse 3

I got my eye on that controller. I use my steam deck docked to my tv most of the time, and while the DS5 works well enough for the most part there are always those few games in the backlog that don't gel super well with it. I really like how the deck feels in portable mode so if this controller is basically just the steam deck with the screen chopped off then it would be perfect.