Windrose is a lot better, and more original, than I thought it would be.

My girlfriend and I play a lot of survival crafting games. She really likes them, and I get a kick out of building bases.

I count myself among the group of gamers that get a distinct glaze over their eyes whenever I see a listing on steam with the tags:

That’s not to say I think any of these games are “bad.” It’s simply that there are only so many new settings of Romeo and Juliet I can tolerate before I decide I’ve had my fill.

I suppose my weakness, like many another gamer, is pirates… for some reason. Sure you have “Pirates of the Caribbean” which I’ve been told transformed pirates from carnival caricatures to something a little more “savvy.”

There is an allure to pirate games that very few have been able to pull off successfully.

Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag came out of nowhere and managed to cement itself in gaming history not through it’s copy-and-pasted combat but through the surprisingly thorough sailing. You board and fight on your ship like you would expect. Your crew sings sea shanties, and it’s overall a great time.

Sea of Thieves is the second game that comes to mind. A fun multiplayer experience focusing on coordination on-ship and treasure hunting off-ship. It’s a game that is exceptionally fun while fresh, but lasts about as long as a home-made baguette.

See my essay on Sea of Thieves Here:

The connection between the two is plainly obvious. You need to have compelling gameplay on boat, and seamless transition off-boat. The two modes of transportation make for compelling contrast. You can emphasize this contrast even more by including a dingy.

I’m here to say that Windrose does a good job of nailing this contrast. The boat combat is lightweight, but fun (sea shanties included). The ground combat is difficult, and extremely frustrating at times but still visceral enough to be compelling. The addition of survival-crafting elements work more as a means to pad the game out, but I tend to appreciate these mechanics when they are done well.

The game has three biomes, and after about 24 hours we’ve just managed to hit the second one at a whopping lvl 8. That progression might be slow for some people, but I never really seem to notice.

I’d like to take a second to talk about systems in survival crafting that I like, because Windrose has almost everything on my wishlist. Namely having all chests act as a single base stockpile when you build or craft so you don’t have to take stuff out manually.

Your ship is summonable by hotkey, and adding teleport markers across the map is easy. It may be a little overpowered to be able to teleport to any location from your ship, but it does cut out much of the tedium. There’s plenty of sailing to be done regardless of how much you want to sail between places you’ve already been to.

So far I have two main gripes with the game:

The first one being the combat poise mechanics which are inconsistent and always tailored against the player. There is no combat turn-taking so if you get swarmed everyone attacks you whenever they feel like. If you swing mid-attack there is no attack cancel, and hitting an enemy during their animation does not stop their attack.

Second, is that the game advertises recruiting followers to your base. You can do that, but the followers are nothing more than upgrades to specific building types. They don’t actually do anything for you other than walk around.

I have been really enjoying Windrose, and if you’re interested its well worth picking up!

Thanks so much for reading!

SEO Garbo:

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For the unaware, recently Rocket League reached a new all time high player count; passing it’s previous record after going free to play.

This is wild news because as a long time Rocket League fan I’ve watched the game remain mostly static for the majority of its life cycle. It’s kept it’s brand alive by attaching itself to Fortnite, and selling stickers to any major brand willing to toss a few dollars it’s way.

There has been some speculation as to the source of the resurgence, but the elephant in the room is Jynxzi. Jynxzi is one of the biggest online content creators in the world who was previously known for Rainbow Six Siege. Recently for whatever reason he’s been hooked on the long time digital soccer successor.

I do mean for whatever reason because it seems he actually just picked it up.

Thus begging the question:

Is Rocket League Worth Playing in 2026?

The answer is less cut and dry than other games. Depending on your particular background with the game the answer differs.

Usually these types of articles are lead by:

• OOH NEW UPDATE

• COMPLETE GAME OVERHAUL

• Some other third thing

What’s fascinating is that none of these are the case.

Why Should you Listen to Me?

What you might not expect about me is that I’ve been a long time Rocket League player and fan. I found out about the game pre-launch and fell in love at first sight. I played the alpha, beta, and day one.

I kept on playing through the years, hit Grand Champion a few times, and go through phases of playing on and off. It’s one of the few games that has me actively swearing at myself for mistakes.

What is Rocket League

Call it reductionist, but Rocket League (to me) is known for it’s commitment to staying completely unchanged. I do mean completely. Unlike it’s sister game Fortnite, new game modes, stories, and events do not happen. It had some new game modes in the first couple years, and a couple experimental ones after its free to play launch, but those are the exception and remain as non-serious side modes (except for hoops arguably).

See, for example, the first video I ever saw about Rocket League:

As a long time fan I’ve loved watching competitive flourish, but also accepted watching the casual game languish on life support. Rocket League’s commitment to consistency caused it to struggle with player retention, and such was its fate. Unlike it’s competitive peers it would fail to pull in a gen z or alpha audience who it needed to act as life-blood for the games relevance.

Why Now?

At the bottom of a dusty box covered in random hats, cars, and cosmetics is a fantastic game. Rocket League has always been a fantastic game, and the lack of change reinforces the idea that any alteration would have been detrimental.

All Rocket League needed was for someone to pull it out of that old dusty box and brush it off. That’s exactly what Jynxzi did.

Should you Play it?

Have you Played it Before?

What you have to understand is that Rocket League has not and will not change. If you played Rocket League before it is still the same game (the exact same). Maybe a resurgence in players is enough to re-ignite some interest left inside you, but don’t expect anything new.

If the game is totally new to you: you have thousands of hours of gameplay at your fingertips just waiting for your mastery.

Why Rocket League is so Good (and so Hard)?

The thing you have to understand is that Rocket League is what I like to call “The Great Equalizer.” There is not a single other game that plays like it. All of your gaming skills need to be completely retrained from scratch to have a shot of being effective in a game.

Rocket League is the closest to any actual real life sport any e-sport has ever come. Many games are made up of fixed, developer created, interactions and binary states.

Think of games like FIFA. You have the ball or you don’t. You do a trick shot because a developer programmed it into the game, animated it, and wrote a button combo for it. Real soccer is not like that. FIFA is a skill fantasy designed to make you feel good. Rocket league is a real sport which requires thousands of hours of practice to feel better than a toddler. There is no power fantasy here.

You can hear my (mental) scream in this video.

The flip side to this token is that the skill ceiling is massive. Unlike in American Football where the person catching the ball has to be registered with the DMV months in advance, everything in Rocket League is fluid. Even the concept of ball control is nebulous and highly dependent on the skill of the individual players.

Pro players are people who have spent so much time practicing the game that it seems like they control the physics, rather than the other way around. The developers have no say in how good these players can be or what they can do as long as it fits within the walls of the stadium.

Conclusion

It’s worth giving it a few hours if you haven’t already. Perhaps a few new players is a good enough reason to try the game. Though Rocket League’s difficulty is enough to push away a lot of early players, anyone who sticks around is going to find something very addicting that you can put thousands of hours in. Just don’t expect the game to change… at all.

That’s all from me this week. I hope you enjoyed it.

As always if you liked the article make sure you give it a like, share it somewhere, and even subscribe for free if you’re feeling up to it.

Interested in sharing your game or sponsoring an article?

Reach out to bitsnpixelsnews@gmail.com

Pre-Launch Hype

If you follow gaming you will no doubt have heard about the Cyberpunk 2077 disaster. If you haven’t, or you’ve forgotten you can start here.

I’ll set you up.

Imagine you are CD Projekt Red. You’re a small company from Poland who is known for many things. You created the second most popular gaming store that is not Steam: GOG.com. GOG is special because it has no digital security on its games. When you buy a game you own the entire thing. Meaning you can copy the files, give them to someone else, and the program can never be taken away.

You’ve also created a gaming arm which worked it’s way up over many games to creating The Witcher 3, one of the greatest open world games of all time. The Witcher is a sleeper hit. It may not have been the most popular at launch, but it’s sales continued to grow over time buffed by a Netflix series starring Henry Cavil.

Your next game, with the right amount of love, is guaranteed to be a smash hit.

So you put out this trailer on Jan 10th, 2013

People went nuts.

A cyberpunk game based on the TTRPG (Table Top Role Playing Game) Cyberpunk 2020 by Mike Pondsmith

Years pass, Cyberpunk gets closer to release, and you reveal that your lead actor is Keanu Reeves. Keanu also mints his status as the most wholesome celebrity on the internet.

Speaking from personal experience, I could not wait for this game to come out.

How it Launched

Early reviews for the game started trickling in, and as the sun rose the red sky revealed itself.

Cyberpunk was… undercooked, and fans were not about to tolerate such a mess from a highly regarded developer such as CD Projekt Red.

Personally I didn’t care much. Sure the game ran awful, and was really buggy, but as we all have learned I love bugs and glitches so I was having a great time.

See my article about breaking games here:

I completed the game and even went back for a second playthrough. My opinion of the game and it’s story was positive, but that’s not without the obvious caveats.

Features were missing, such as the metro, and the game ran extremely poorly.

After the smoke settled CD Projekt emerged from the wreckage committed to changing their game for the better.

Between then and now the game has seen small resurgences of players during key updates, and from the Cyberpunk: Edgrunners Anime which was also great!

Cyberpunk’s State in 2026

Cutting to the chase here: 2026 is absolutely the best year to pick up Cyberpunk.

With the release of the recent 2.3 update Cyberpunk finally has enough features to meet it’s original expectations.

Now you can:

• Ride the metro

• Buy apartments

• Customize your car

• Run the game

• Drive cars (without getting catapulted across the map)

• Engage autopilot

Ray tracing and path tracing greatly improve the games visual quality far beyond what was possible at launch.

Additionally the entire skill tree has been overhauled to make combat strategies more engaging. Personally I’ve been using the crap out of the mantis blades.

The story for the game has not changed much, and that’s largely ok. The original story was solid, and Keanu’s performance is very Keanu.

Phantom Liberty DLC

What I’ve yet to mention is Cyberpunk’s only paid DLC Phantom Liberty.

Phantom Liberty is the game that Cyberpunk wished it could be. The developers have all the experience from fixing the base game, and learning from what worked about their original storytelling.

Not to mention the inclusion of a new celebrity cameo Idris Elba. I love Keanu’s performance in Cyberpunk, don’t get me wrong, but he can be kinda… one note.

Idris Elba brings such depth and complexity to his character that I genuinely haven’t seen in a game before. Its breathtaking.

His character has motivation, regret, sadness, remorse, but also a cold hearted government spy side that he uses to cover up all the other emotions when he needs to.

The DLC is a huge reason to pick up the game on it’s own.

See a snippet (spoilers) from one of my favorite conversations here:

People Watching

I’ve recently discovered a term that speaks to me. A genre for games that I’ve yet to hear until not, but it makes so much sense.

Digital Loitering

It perfectly describes how I play games, and what I love to do in Cyberpunk. I can hardly complete the main story because I get too distracted wandering around, and role playing living in the city. I take public transit, I walk, and I take in the sights and sounds of the different districts.

This effect is helped even more by the recent inclusion of autopilot on cars. I’ll set the destination to the other side of the map and enjoy my digital road trip wallpaper. It’s great.

Essential Mods for Immersion

It wouldn’t be a Cyberpunk review if I wasn’t talking about mods. Mods take the base game from something fun and interesting to next level immersive. Add more clothes, more apartments, more cars, reduce the amount of repeating npc’s and many more.

Some Mods I Recommend

I won’t go into the nitty gritty of how to install or all the little utilities these mods require. I just want to highlight some of my favorite feature mods.

• Auto Loot

  • Looting is cumbersome with the amount of things you need to loot. Trust me.

• Improved Autopilot

  • Better driving AI

• Say Something Dammit

  • Adds more immersive dialogue to V when entering and leaving stores

• Immersive Food Vendors

• Fighting Gangs Allowed

  • Stops cops from attacking you when fighting gang activity

• Map Search

• Metro Guide

• Vendor Search

• Immersive Time-skip

Among many hundreds of others

In Conclusion

Cyberpunk is alum to the prestigious club of most complete and engaging interactive worlds. cough IMMERSIVE cough. I can’t physically beg you to pick up the game, but I can get on my knees and say, “You should give it another shot.”

That’s all from me this week. I hope you enjoyed it.

As always if you liked the article make sure you give it a like, share it somewhere, and even subscribe for free if you’re feeling up to it.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Interested in sharing your game or sponsoring an article?

Reach out to bitsnpixelsnews@gmail.com

Arc Raiders Group PvP Keeps it Fun

Arc Raiders continues to be consistently captivating especially when playing with friends. I struggle to maintain interest when playing solo, mostly because at this point I’ve finished all of the content until the next wipe. My grind being over means that most of the fun is now coming from PvP with a group.

The group PvP is still very fun I must admit. The combat is so satisfying that just jumping into a round and dying is fun albeit a little frustrating.

Skate Story Early Impressions - It’s Really Good

I’ve been working on getting through my most anticipated game this year Skate Story.

The game is steadily meeting my expectations through it’s use of imagery, metaphor, and poetry. I also couldn’t help but keep myself from breaking out of the games maps and finding certain sequence breaks that could be used in speed-running. Unlike some others being able to find under-baked sections in a game only increases my enjoyment of a game.

So that’s been fun.

Note: I haven’t gotten far enough into Skate Story to put out a review. That will definitely come some time in the future, but not right now.

Ball X Pit is on the Docket

The only other game I’ve been playing in my spare time is Ball X Pit. I’m not sure if I want to put out a whole review for the game. The short version is that I’ve been enjoying it, but I’m not sure I like the meta-progression mechanics. Either way it’s a fun pass-time.

PR Outreach Responses

Additionally I’ve had some PR teams reach out to me asking to take a look at their games. I’m very interested in giving these games a shot and will do my best to give them the time they deserve. Unfortunately I’m not made of time or money, so some of these games will slip through the cracks.

Namely:

• Cell To Singularity

• Cult of the Yellow King

• Swarmdustry

If you’re interested in reaching out to me for reviews/sponsorships send me an email at Bitsnpixelsnews@gmail.com

That’s all I’ve got for this week. Thank you so much for reading and consider supporting Bits N Pixels by subscribing for free, or sending me a couple bucks a month.

My unexpected smash hit of the year. The team that brought us The Finals and Star Wars Battlefront II showed up in style with Arc Raiders. The movement is fluid, the sound design is masterful, and the gunplay is magical. Arc Raiders not only knocked my socks off, but it came into my house and destroyed all of my other socks as well.

Arc Raiders on Steam

Shapez 2

One of the first games released this year. Shapez 2 strutted out confidently and nailed the landing. Shapez 2 is the best factory game ever made in my opinion and will be the title I go back to whenever I get the urge to make a maze of conveyor belts.

Shapez 2 on Steam

Lumines Arise

For the uninitiated: Lumines is a puzzle franchise built off of music. Inspired by Tetris, the game has you stacking shapes into squares rather than lines. I was hesitant to give it a shot. Its puzzle looked much harder than Tetris, but I trusted the team behind Tetris Effect to deliver an amazing experience anyway. I was not disappointed.

Lumines Arise on Steam

Dune Awakening

Dune Awakening was one of my most anticipated games to come out this year. I begged and pleaded with the developers for a review copy—with no success. I still bought the game of course, and I was delighted with how “Dune” everything felt. I got to live out my movie fantasy while dodging sandworms and building bases with my friends.

Dune Awakening on Steam

Rift of the Necrodancer

Another game on my “most anticipated” list is Rift of the Necrodancer. I love rhythm games, especially those that don’t heavily feature anime characters. The team that made this started off strong with Crypt of the Necrodancer, then went on to parnter with Nintendo of all companies to make Cadence of Hyrule. This game combines rhythm mechanics and puzzle elements for a very satisfying rhythm pie.

Rift of the Necrodancer on Steam

Split Fiction

If you’re looking for a solid co-op experience to play with someone close, there’s no better option than Split Fiction. The story is not the most original, especially not compared to the studio’s last game It Takes Two. The game makes up for it however, through sheer spectacle. The variety of worlds and gameplay is light enough to chat while enjoying the game, but just challenging enough for the best players to die a few times.

Split Fiction on Steam

The Precinct

While we wait for GTA 6 to release, like trying to catch the end of a rainbow, you should definitely try The Precinct. The Precinct adopts the aesthetic from the original GTA games, with their birds-eye perspective of the world. What sets this game apart is playing as a cop. It still retains the arcade nature of GTA with fun driving and shooting, but with the added bonus of getting to pull people over and give them speeding tickets.

The Precinct on Steam

Skate Story (Honorable Mention)

My honorable mention for this year is Skate Story. I’ve been waiting for ages to get my hands on this grunge skate kaleidoscope. The Demo released about a month ago and I loved every second of it. Skate Story tragically hasn’t come out yet, but I’m sure it will end up on this list when it finally releases.

*Ok so the game came out while editing this article, but I haven’t had time to play it yet so it still gets to be an honorable mention.

Skate Story on Steam

Its October spooky time and that means I’m out here looking for spooky games to play. My girlfriend and I looked around the store meticulously for something co-op we haven’t already played.

After much searching we decided on a game called Death in Unison a two player co-op game where communication is key.

I really do mean that. You both are split up into different rooms in a prison facility and your only means of communication is through walkie-talkies.

The game takes a lot of inspiration from other titles like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes or one of my favorites Spaceteam for mobile devices. The former being a bomb defusal game where one person has the bomb and the other person has the manual, and the latter being a spaceship game where everyone has unique spaceship controls but commands are issued randomly to each player.

The common thread in these games is priority management and a lot of screaming, but mostly screaming.

Death in Unison is the horror version of these games, but with some noteable changes that make the experience unique and interesting.

The game asks can you collaborate on frantic tasks, while also being hunted down by the prison’s many supernatural inmates a-la Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Take for example “Chains.” This asshole is deaf and nearly blind, but is hell-bent on murdering anyone his mediocre sensory system can identify. For the player this means: if you hear the sound of chains, for the love of all that is holy turn off the lights.

The issue being that only one of you has a light switch. That’s just one example, and there are plenty of other enemies the game throws at you which you manage all at once while… still trying to do your job. Try explaining over radio how to spell Aruukashki Pravitar while being chased by a murderer.

You may think that’s where the game stops, and if it were any other multiplayer slop game you might be right. Not in this game though.

In-between rounds you get messages on your computer that slowly reveal ways of hacking into the system and learning more about the dark history of the facility. Mind you this is a totally miss-able system, but I’d say a good half of my playtime was spent figuring out some of these passwords. It’s good.

Granted even with all of this info I’m pretty sure I still got the bad ending. It warrants a re-play, but to be honest I’m not sure how replayable the game is. There are a limited number of enemies and I’d say the game lasts about the perfect length.

After all this praise I’d say I only have one problem with the game. The gameplay for both players being extremely intertwined is extremely well implemented. The one place this isn’t good is when your teammate gets killed leaving you alone. Even if you’re playing in immersed mode, meaning we use the in-game walkie-talkies, its quite obvious to tell when your partner is dead.

When you partner is dead you are stranded and practically useless. I can see how the “You don’t know if they’re dead or not” mechanic could be fun and interesting, but in a game like this when your partner dies there is literally nothing to do and the game grinds to a halt.

We ended up just killing ourselves when one of us died so we could start over which ruined the tension if only a little bit.

I think Death in Unison is a fantastic game and provided you have a friend to hop in with you could do a lot worse.

Get Death in Unison on Steam

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Thanks everyone for reading and I’ll see you in the next one!

Today we’ll be talking about a strange obsession of mine for the last month or so. I want you to imagine an MMO game like runescape but all the towns are user generated and the world is fully customizeable.

Those of you who are particularly MMO savvy will think of something like Albion Online. You would be mostly correct as well. Albion online has many of those core aspects, but it lacks truly user generated content.

I’m not hating on Albion Online. I put plenty of time into that game and I enjoyed it for a while. Lately I’ve found something that scratches more of that long-term MMO itch without the restriction of being a deeply entrenched decade old game.

Today’s game is Bitcraft Online.

It touts itself as:

and yeah I’d say that hits the nail on the head. So lets talk about it.

Firstly I’d like to talk about what confused me the most: How is the game an idle-style experience?

This didn’t make sense to me in a fully explorable 3d world. Especially since I’ve also been playing Melvor Idle which is just Runescape distilled down into an idle game.

See where I talk about it here:

What separates Bitcraft Online’s idling from other games is twofold.

One: You have to be logged in to idle.

Two: You can only idle for as much stamina as you have.

I have to say, as frustrating as these systems seem on the surface level, I’ve ended up really enjoying the game because of them.

Having to be logged in mimics more traditional gaming instead of something that I can just forget about.

The stamina system is definitely frustrating at first as well, but it provides good motivation to continue upgrading your gear and progressing through the story. These guide you to interacting with other systems either through crafting or through the market which I’ll talk about a little later.

So how does the game work you may ask?

You’re dropped in on a random spot in a random continent in a large world. The current world is made up of 9 continents each with its own server. You can travel freely between them at any point using teleport points (which regenerate passively) or by sailing the distance yourself.

As you might expect the game revolves around training skills and crafting. It really is as simple as clicking on the resource and collecting it. Taking it back to a crafting station and refining it until you reached a finished product.

Each of these actions require a specific amount of effort to complete, excluding gathering, and the amount of effort you can exert in one sitting is based on your tool and the amount of stamina you have.

While working on a task, you don’t have to interact with the game at all until the project is done or you run out of stamina. If you run out of stamina the task can easily be continued once your stamina is recovered.

The game world is made up of distinct biomes which host a large variety of different tier resources. This means that travel is required to gather all the resources you need in your journey for higher level gear, at least… a little later on.

This also leads into towns. You’re gonna need somewhere to put your stuff away, rest, and craft all your future clothes and tools. Fortunately for you the world is filled with player made towns of all shapes and sizes. Towns level up in a similar fashion to the way players do except they take significantly more resources and effort to level.

Often times you’ll see towns list huge crafting jobs they need help working on, or resources they want to buy from you. When it comes to shared crafting jobs these allow you afk xp training with the tradeoff that you don’t receive any of the goods when the job is finished.

Each town is also outfitted with a teleporter and a market (if they’ve made one) where people can put up buy and sell orders on tools, resources, clothing, and other items.

If you need something specific the game has a global market search where you can see what every town in the game is offering. Feel free to seek out the best deal possible… that is… if you’re willing to travel to get it.

On the positive side, I really like the way that the market works and the system for crafting. It’s the perfect combo of afk and active that allows you to have something to do regardless of if its planned or not.

On the negative side, the crafting recipes are overwhelmingly convoluted at first. Rest assured there is a pattern to crafting, and I did eventually figure it out, but it did not stop me from crying a little bit on the inside while learning.

I do highly recommend Bitcraft, but only for a specific kind of person who is looking for a game with an intense grind. The game is also updated extremely frequently which makes it fun to be along for the ride, but some of you may prefer to wait.

Finally Bitcraft is going to launch free to play, but the early access version costs money.

I still recommend giving Bitcraft a shot.

Here: Bitcraft Online

Thank you everyone and I’ll see you in the next one!

Well… kind of.

Take my hand as I transport you back in time three years to when I first saw the trailer for a little game called Skate Story by Sam Eng published by Devolver Digital.

The gritty, VHS-punk visuals captured me immediately. The tortured demon skater made of glass and pain is so evocative; capturing the feeling of skating not just as a sport, or an individual, but as an entire culture.

Skating is a dangerous thrill seeking activity performed by delicate squishy meat people. Society targets skaters as social deviants, but they skate nonetheless. They skate because they love it, because it’s the only thing that allows a disgruntled youth to take their mind off the rapidly deteriorating state of society.

The hypnotizing visuals aren’t the only thing that captured me about this trailer. The teaser music by Blood Cultures is magnetic. A cool, catchy song, about taking your dreams and setting them on fire.

The presentation of Skate Story says more about skating than entire franchises dedicated to skateboarding. Games like the Tony Hawk and Skate series pull their inspiration from the chaotic whimsy of something like Jackass. This is one aspect of skateboarding and the naivety that comes with hormones and an underdeveloped pre frontal cortex, but there is far more of the sport to explore.

The demon in Skate Story is trapped in hell, and the only way from them to escape is seemingly to do the impossible. Swallow the entire moon.

Symbolically we can understand what this means, and I think it’s just so genius. A skater trapped at the lowest of lows using what they know to escape their situation. So they skate. They skate towards an impossible goal as it seems the only tangible way to release them from the shackles of their current existence. Is it even achievable? Does it really matter? It gives the skater hope and so they skate on.

To my delight, out of nowhere, a demo for the game released on Steam. I saw it in an email after work. The demo dropped along with a release date.

I downloaded the demo and played it.

What did I think?

After three years of buildup could the game possibly deliver in a way that felt satisfying?

Absolutely! The demo is what can only be described as “Fucking awesome!”

Pardon my French.

The demo is only the first chapter of the game, but it delivers exactly what I was hoping for. The tone, the vibe, the music, the feeling of skating. I could not have hoped for more, and I can’t recommend the demo enough.

Please go give it a shot.

Link to the Steam page: Skate Story

Thanks for reading!

This week I'm going over idle games, a request from my former roommate who commented on the reader feedback poll. Shoutout Muug.

As always WOW continues to be disqualified since I can’t get myself to sit through the tutorial.

I digress.

Idle Games and Clicker Games

If you're not familiar with what an idle game is:

An idle game plays itself. It's a game whose main motif is not the act of interaction, but the time between interaction. In this article we're going to talk about clicker games and idle games.

So, what’s the difference?

Clicker Games

Clicker games are idle games where the goal is to have a number increasingly go up as high as possible. Generally, this happens through the buying of upgrades which then automate your accumulation of said number. So, let's go ahead and get started.

Cookie Clicker

It would be remiss of me not to mention the progenitor and namesake of the genre, Cookie Clicker. Cookie Clicker tantalizes you on launch with a large appetizing looking cookie. Every time you click on the cookie you gain... one cookie. As you acquire cookies, they can be spent on bribing others to make more cookies for you. You start with your lovely grandma, and the grandmas of others presumably. Your cookie creation rate is measured in cps or cookies per second. The goal is to get your cookies per second up so large that your quantity of cookies outnumbers the number of atoms in the universe.

Despite being the first game in the genre, Cookie Clicker was not above subverting itself. Depending on your actions, you alter the fabric of reality in either good or bad ways. The end result is truly up to you, the cookie collector.

Melvor Idle and Melvor Idle 2

Oftentimes the line between regular games and idle games is blurred. This is especially true for MMO's, where your character tends to perform actions much longer than you yourself are interacting with it.

A fantastic example of this is the game Old School RuneScape. A multitude of activities in Old School RuneScape happen on their own, requiring no user input whatsoever. Certain activities, sand crabs, can happen for up to a half an hour long without requiring user input.

Melvor Idol asks... what if you took all that out? It turns RuneScape entirely into a clicker idle game, and to be honest it's probably one of the best in the entire genre. I've gotten early access to the sequel, Melvor Idol 2, and while I don't think I can talk too much about it, I can say that it pushes the game a long way in terms of quality and polish, and I think that it's really great. You can wishlist it on steam and I’m under the impression that it’s coming out ... soooon.

Faceminer

There's a reputation behind clicker games that they should last forever (most clicker games nowadays actually have an ending I realized when editing this, but I still think this is relevant). Metaphorically, this makes sense. Idle games are inherently capitalistic in their ethos of endless accumulation of wealth. See: Venture Capitalist

Just like in real life it really only stops when you decide it stops… or when you run out of supply. Either way, in clicker games, supply is usually not the issue and so the game tends to go on forever. That's why I appreciate games like Face Miner.

In Face Miner you play as somebody who signed up for a gig website that pays you to train an AI by distinguishing between faces and non faces. There are huge datasets of faces and all you have to do is sort through real ones and not real ones.

The narrative of Face Miner is about what happens as your operation expands from a home grown business to a fully-fledged corporate operation.

Your computer becomes a compound, you reroute rivers for cooling and pay off environmental tax credits for the rise in global temperature you yourself caused.

It takes on this idea of something that continues to grow without stopping and treats it more like what it is, a cancer. Then at the end it asks you that question, what if you stopped? How could you go back? If you're looking for a short clicker game, I definitely recommend Face Miner. It's really good and the aesthetic is awesome.

Idle Colony

Another clicker game I found myself really enjoying was a game called Idle Colony. The draw for idle games can come from many things. For some people it's about variety of gameplay. For other people it's about prestige and what you can get the longer you play. I am drawn to interesting concepts and unique visuals. Idle Colony ticked those boxes for me.

In Idle Colony your job is to run a small colony of fruit farmers that toss fruit into a big wok. When two of the same fruits end up in the wok they combine and become a bigger fruit. Your goal is to get the highest tier fruit possible. The upgrades in the game are unique, the art style is fun, and watching the fruits evolve over the course of the game is extremely satisfying.

Idle Games

If I may, I'd like to separate idle games from clicker games because I do feel that they are different in experience. I tend to think of idle games more as a simulation that you watch for fun as opposed to a clicker game where you're just trying to make a number go up. That's why I'd really like to separate the two into different lists.

I’ve loved idle games for as long as I can remember. I’d classify an idle game as a program where you set up initial conditions for a simulation and watch the resulting complexity unfold. I would call them simulation games, but that genre has become more about cars and construction. You can interact with the simulation sometimes as it runs, but most of the time you just enjoy watching it play out.

The first game on this list I want to mention is the oldest one by far.

Progress Quest

Progress Quest is a really old satire game about EverQuest that seems to question that line between MMO and Idle game I mentioned earlier. In progress quest you make an RPG character similar to any other MMO then hit start. The rest of the experience happens on its own.

Progress quest uses the aesthetic of a windows 95 installer begging the question if tasks you perform in Everquest, MMO’s or games at large, is any more than just watching loading bars go up.

As the game runs, your character does quests on their own, defeats monsters on their own and chooses their own upgrades. Outside of the obvious satire, I think the game does have its own staying power just in the fact that you accrue progress over time and the timeline of events indicates a narrative about the digital person running on your machine.

World Box

Another category of idle games that I really like are world simulation / god games. There aren't very many of these because I imagine they're very hard to make. The number one world simulation game out there is Dwarf Fortress, but let's be real, I'm not going to recommend that. And you can't even really watch the world simulation happen without wanting to read through days of Excel text. In lieu of that, I would recommend something called Worldbox.

World Box is a simulation idle style game where you generate a world and watch little things happen. You can watch civilizations run, you can have creatures evolve over time. You can watch great heroes create great weapons, and then when they die, those weapons get passed down. It's a very complicated system and it's a lot of fun to watch.

Final thoughts

I wanted to end this article with a statement on my thoughts of the genre. As interesting as these kinds of games are, I do feel like they've also been a problem. For example, management games like the old Lemonade Stand have had to compete with idle or clicker up games because they both satisfy the same kind of economic fantasy fulfillment. As a result, clicker games have almost completely absorbed management games like that. Secondly, the idle/world simulation game has had to compete heavily with clicker games as well which makes them harder to find. That’s not to say there aren’t great games being made in each genre, but I do wish there was a clearer distinction between the two.

Overall, though, I really like these genres and these games, and I think that the world of gaming benefits from having games where you can just sit down and watch progress happen, regardless of your flavor. I can't tell you how many hours I've left my computer running to see what happens on a game where basically nothing happens.

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Why aren’t more people playing Realm of the Mad God.

Please.

This might just be a way to yell at my friends for not giving the game a shot, but I don’t really care.

Realm of the Mad God

Realm of the Mad God is the most unique MMO I’ve ever played. There is nothing else like it and I can’t wait to share with all of you why you should play it.

ROTMG is a roguelike co-operative bullet hell mmorpg.

What does that mean?

That means that ROTMG is a game about dodging bullets in a world filled with other people, and when you die you start all over.

There are 18 classes to play and *most* of them are really fun. My personal favorites are Summoner and Trickster.

Core Mechanics

It sound extremely punishing, and to be honest it is.

The extreme punishment is balanced out with the most lenient escape mechanic in any game. Whenever you tap the R button you immediately teleport to safety. No delay…

*Poof* gone.

So you get to live but you forfeit your loot.

This makes ROTMG one large game of chicken. Will you leave for safety or indulge your hubris for the reward?

The rewards are not to be ignored either. Due to the games extreme punishment each item is a significant upgrade. There are only 14 tiers of weapon upgrade available so sticking around for a loot drop is highly worth it.

On top of that there are ultra rare items which drop from the resplendent white bag. The most coveted drop in the whole game. Seeing the glorious white pixelated bag on the ground can only be compared to finding a hundred dollar bill on the ground. It really does feel that good.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Co-Op Mechanics and Meta-Progression

The other really engaging aspect of Realm’s gameplay is the way that co-op works. The social system as well as many of the other systems have had total reworks since the original days of 2011.

If you join a party when your friend finds a dungeon you can simply teleport to them to join. Organizing parties has never been easier.

Over the years ROTMG has taken steps to make dying feel easier. I think these changes are necessary to reward players who put in the time.

Most recently they added account levels which permanently buff your starting gear level on every character reducing the grind.

End-Game

So what’s the end-game?

8 out of 8 and Exalts

The end game revolves around getting 8/8 on a character and completing exalt dungeons as well as hunting for shiny items.

When playing ROTMG you get to max level in about 5 minutes at level 20. Beyond that you have to drink stat pop upgrades to boost your characters individual stats. You have 8 stats to max and each max stat gets you closer to 8/8 maxed.

Once you’re 8/8 you can complete the hardest dungeons in the game for permanent stat upgrades for that class and when you start completing on other classes you get permanent stat and loot boosts for every character on your account.

Shiny Hunting

Shiny hunting is also a huge part of the game right now. It’s just like Pokémon where the shiny version of an item is extremely rare. You’re gonna have to do a lot of grinding to get one. You’d better not die with it. My brother and I are run organizers on the Shiny Hunting discord group and we have a blast hunting for shinies with them.

Conclusion

If you want to give the game a shot with me download it and send “Shocks” (case sensitive) a friend request!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/200210/Realm_of_the_Mad_God_Exalt/

Oh yeah the game’s servers suck dookie but work well enough to play once you get over the hassle. Sorry about that in advance.

Thanks for reading. Subscribe for free to support my work!

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

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Are you someone who plays city building games but has more fun just building the town and watching the citizens go about their daily lives.

I certainly am. I started this gameplay style all the way back with a game called Stronghold Crusader. The game was an RTS with intense castle on castle combat between dueling rulers. I loved the game for a different reason though. Compared to other RTS games of the time Stronghold Crusader had a strange fascination with simulating the peasants in your castle.

Farmers would take their crops by hand to the stockpile. Millers picked up their own wheat for grinding, and the resulting flower had to be delivered by the same miller. Likewise, each profession had its own lovingly crafted 3D animation featuring each worker doing their job.

I spent afternoons watching my townspeople going about their business navigating the crazy streets I had designed for them.

I loved the simulation, but I also enjoyed the feeling of building my own creation artistically without the pressure of strict game mechanics forcing me to conform to a style of play.

Whether or not that qualifies as a game is open for debate, but what we can all agree on is that there is something fun about building a digital diorama for the sake of creation itself.

A genre has begun to form around the aforementioned ethos, and luckily there’s a ton of options for every flavor of universe you can imagine. Some with very light goals, and some with no goals other than creation itself.

Here’s my list of the top Aesthetic City Building Game that you can play.

Cloud Gardens

Admittedly I haven’t played this one, but it’s been on my wishlist for a long time. This is more of a plant growing simulator than a city builder, but the visual aesthetics are a real treat. I definitely recommend giving it a shot.

Tiny Glade

No list of chill city builders would be complete without Tiny Glade. Tiny Glade is the most popular and polished chill city builder on the market right now. It features a procedural generation system for buildings that makes every piece fit perfectly. This system also spices things up by having building pieces change visually depending on their location, size, and proximity to other pieces. There are a ton of customizations to find simply by messing around, and you could spend hours building your dream castle.

Dystopika

Similar to Tiny Glade, Dystopika is cut from the same cloth with a cyberpunk twist. The game has amazing visuals and a fantastic soundtrack to create the perfect dystopia to vibe to. The game doesn’t quite give you the same level of deep customization, but it’s still fun nonetheless.

Islanders

The first entry on the with a discreet goal. Islanders when compared to Tiny Glade and Dystopika is more of a puzzle game. The idea is built around building little towns that satisfy a points system which allows you to keep building. Still very chill, and a lot of fun buildings to mess around with and discover.

SUMMERHOUSE

Summerhouse is a 2D pixel art version of Tiny Glade or Dystopika. If there’s a theme with all these games, it’s that they all have amazing visuals. Summer House doesn't let us down here with some of the best pixel art I’ve seen in a while. It has all the same mechanics that I mentioned in Tiny Glade and is a fantastic town diorama builder.

Townscaper

Townscaper gets a special mention because it created the genre. Townscaper was indeed the first modern game to fully take advantage of creation for creation sake. It pioneered the use of procedural generation for complexity that every game uses up until now. In townscaper you are only allowed to put down and delete ground or buildings. Thanks to the complex system of interactions the more creative you are with these simple mechanics the more unique buildings piece you will discover.

Terra Nil

Terra Nil is another game closer to puzzle than straight city builder. In Terra Nil you have to bring a dead polluted back to life by filling in rivers, plants, and wildlife. Reaching each terraforming milestone gives you access to more tools for cleaning the landscape. It has different difficulties, that determine how carefully you need to think about building placement. I prefer to play on the mode where you don’t have to worry about resources at all and simply solve the problem of bringing back nature as a benevolent deity.

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles

The developer on this game would literally publicly shame me for calling this game chill, and therefore I won’t. Bulwark takes place in a unique fantasy universe in which your goal is to do... something. The game has active simulation elements, factions, trade routes, and combat but you as a player are more... adjacent to all this than forced directly into it. It has the same roots from Townscaper, but leans ever so slightly into resource city building. There are actually only three resources in the game, and you either have them or not based on proximity to the extraction site. The rest of the game is freeform building just like in townscaper, or any of the other games mentioned. The civilizations you can create are beautiful and complex, and they change depending on your faction alignment as well. The best thing is that Bulwark is actually free on steam because the demo IS the full game. Buying it strictly supports the dev.

Introduction

(Apologies for the audio on many of the videos. Steam replay was didn’t pick up the game for whatever reason.)

So today I'm writing a review for Dune Awakening. I've been waiting for this game a long time. As a matter of fact, it's been top of my wishlist for what must be four or five years now. Since I started bits and pixels, I have been reaching out to the developers monthly to try to get an early copy of the game. unfortunately, that never materialized but now the game is out and I’m hooked.

Gameplay Experience

I put about 20 hours into the game so far and, amazingly, I don't think I've made it to the mid-game yet. I've been taking my time with it, enjoying the game, and just appreciating the systems, and the harsh reality of surviving on the hostile world of Arrakis.

Initial Impressions

First off, I'd like to say that initially, the presentation of the game is fantastic. There's nothing about the game I don't like. The fact that at the beginning you choose a backstory for your character implies that there's some level of alternate playthroughs available where the paths your character takes are different based on the backstory you chose, which I really like.

Survival Mechanics

The game is a survival game but with only one repeating draining mechanic. In survival crafting games like Subnautica or other games I reviewed recently (see the review for Runescape Dragon Wilds), you not only have to deal with your health but also with constantly depleting resources such as food and water. These resources often become tedious, especially when systems automate them for you. I appreciate when games circumvent this and allow these mechanics to incorporate into the settings without exploitation.

Dune Awakening feels inspired by the methodology of *Doom 2016*, where healing and ammo replenishment occur through direct combat actions like glory kills, making you feel like a badass. Similarly, in Dune, the major currency resource to manage is water due to the planet's hostile environment. Water is primarily obtained by killing scav NPCs, draining their blood, and refining it into water. This visceral system encourages exploration and combat, rewarding players with essential resources.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Combat

The combat in Dune Awakening feels really good. Initially, it felt a little janky, but as I’ve gotten the hang of it, I’ve learned to enjoy it—especially since I picked the soldier class, which offers many combat options. Other classes also look cool, and I’ve envied their abilities.

Crafting System

The crafting system is very intuitive. Unlike No Man’s Sky, where crafting resources are derived from the same core materials, Dune Awakening uses specific relics from diverse groups of people on Dune.

For example:

· To craft a Fremen water suit, you must find relic spots, usually located in caves.

· For a modern Holtzman shield (the blue thing from the movie), you loot from scientific abandoned sites.

· Military equipment requires raiding military ships.

This approach encourages exploration and combat while intuitively guiding you toward materials.

Exploration

Exploration in Dune Awakening is fantastic. Players must stick to shadows during the day to avoid heat stroke—an engaging mechanic that aligns with the game's theme without being overly intrusive. Crossing open areas and facing sandworms adds thrilling tension. The sandworms provide dramatic spectacles while warning players of danger, offering a balance between immersion and gameplay.

Missed Opportunities

The absence of sandwalk techniques from the books and movies is noticeable. Although lore-wise, your character probably wouldn’t know them, their inclusion could have added an interesting mechanic.

Story and Worldbuilding

The game’s story unfolds in an alternate reality where Paul Atreides was never born, leading to the Fremen being wiped out. This is disappointing for me as the Fremen were my favorite cultural group in the original books. Their absence makes the world feel somewhat hollow, as the overworld factions (like House Harkonnen and House Atreides) lack the depth Fremen brought to Dune’s universe.

House Building System

Building houses is fun, offering creative possibilities despite occasional restrictions. Seeing other players’ houses scattered across the world in this server-based MMO is particularly enjoyable.

Co-op and MMO Features

The game feels more like a co-op survival experience than a traditional MMO until the late-game. Playing solo or with my girlfriend has been equally fun, maintaining consistent difficulty regardless of player count. Resource sharing in co-op can add minor challenges.

Vehicles

Vehicles are impressive, and I’m eager to access more as I progress.

User Experience Improvements

The user experience needs refinement in several areas:

· Switching to the blood sucker after killing enemies is tedious.

· Building mode feels overly complicated and should have a hotkey.

· The building menu and controls are unnecessarily complex.

Although these issues are frustrating, the overall launch of the MMO has been the best I’ve ever seen.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Conclusion

If you’re a fan of Dune and want to immerse yourself in its world, I highly recommend Dune Awakening. The game offers a generous amount of gameplay time and an authentic experience that captures the essence of the Dune universe. Despite minor flaws, the sound effects and immersive elements make it a fantastic game. I look forward to discovering more and sharing additional thoughts in the future. Let me know what you think of the game if you’ve played it or if this review inspires you to try it. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Find it on steam along with all of my other recommendations here: Dune Awakening

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Introduction

Today, we're talking about a little game that I've been playing lately called 9 Kings. After the explosion in popularity of Balatro, the poker manipulating game, we’ve seen boatloads of imitators. What’s nice is that if counting cards isn’t your thing, now you have other options to choose from.

Other Games in the Genre

Of course, more recently I talked about a fantastic game called Clover Pit, which remixes the formula through slot machine motifs and a retro PS1-style horror aesthetic.
See that review here:

I also have another huge shoutout to the game Runeborn for being the first media correspondence I’ve ever gotten. They have a demo available now, and they’ll be featured on Steam Next Fest. Their game is also a remix on Balatro, combining slot machines and Yahtzee with a visual aesthetic reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon and a little bit of Hades. I definitely recommend giving the game a shot.

About 9 Kings

The main thing we’re here to talk about today is another fantastic iteration of the Balatro lineage called 9 Kings. 9 Kings borrows and remixes elements from at least three different genres. Obviously, the first is Balatro-style cards. It also uses grid based adjacency buffs and buildings to change the way systems interact with each other, as well as a gameplay structure more reminiscent of auto-battlers like TFT.

The Auto-Battler Connection

If you’ve never played an auto-battler before, it’s a game focused primarily on building a team. All you do is build a team on a grid, and your team automatically fights against another team. What’s special is the way the characters interact with each other to make your team better or worse.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Gameplay Mechanics

In 9 Kings, you place down buildings and units. The buildings buff each other and the units adjacent to them, and then they go out and fight a king who’s attacking you. Obviously, the game revolves around the 9 Kings, of which, right now, there are only 7 since the game is in early access. Each king has a set of unique cards. Each game, you’re drawn 2 kings to fight against randomly, and you receive a random pick of their cards after the battle. Combining your cards with their cards allows you to create really powerful builds and combos. 9 Kings does a fantastic job of making you feel extremely smart very quickly.

Exhilarating Combos

Games like these live or die on their power-up combos, and what I can say right now is that 9 Kings has exhilarating combos that get your heart pumping the moment you think of them. When finally executed, they give you a hit of dopamine similar to what I can only think is like a shot of heroin—though without the negative side effects.

Downsides

The game struggles to stay interesting for longer playtimes. Once you play it enough, you will start to recognize a slight lack of content due to the fact that the number of cards available is fairly limited, especially right now with only seven of the 9 Kings.

Additionally, I just feel personally like the shops don’t come around enough. There have been numerous times where I am trying to finish a build and I just keep rerolling over and over, not getting the card that I need.

Conclusion

In conclusion, 9 Kings is a game that I’ve been having a fantastic time with. If you’re looking for another game to pick up and play on your Steam Deck or just something solo that is low-key and fun, I recommend picking up 9 Kings.

Check it out as well as the other games I’ve reviewed here:

Bits N Pixels Review List

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Thank you so much for reading. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I’ll see you all in the next one. If you liked it, don’t forget to subscribe for free!

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Let's talk about one of my favorite games of all time Dying Light and answer the question, is Dying Light playable in 2025? Now of course my answer is going to be biased, but I think you should give it a chance.

So why should you play it?

To give a summary of why I love Dying Light so much, if you read my article called The Art of Breaking Games and that kind of stuff interests you. You'll find that Dying Light is one of the easiest games to break and is part of the reason I love just playing the base game. Sure, I'll talk about the DLC. But for many years since the game came out in 2014, I never even considered trying it. I have been so satisfied with just playing the base game that I've never even thought to change my experience with the DLC. My brother and I have played through the main campaign dozens of times. We came up with our own challenges ourselves to spice up the gameplay and make it even harder.

• Completing the game on the hardest difficulty.

• Completing the game on the hardest difficulty only at nighttime.

• I streamed playing the game with the attack button unbound, only using kicks and throwables to beat the game.

So, what is Dying Light?

I must give credit to my brother for saying that Dying Light came out in what is perhaps the golden age for parkour zombie games. If it came out at any other time, I don't think that there's a chance that this game could exist. It's nearly impossible to argue that Dying Light occurred in the Goldilocks zone of zombie games and had low chance for success but managed to eke out a little bit anyways. I remember seeing the trailer for it in probably 2013 and falling in love at first sight. Unfortunately the game seemed to fall under the radar of much of the public (probably due to the stiff competition), but I adored it.

The Games B movie narrative gave it a special edge compared to the competition, which seemed to try too hard to have an engaging story in a game where you just wanted to beat the crap out of some zombies.

Dying Light’s story that allows it to stick out like a shining ray of light in a cloud of zombie games for a few reasons.

Firstly, the game takes place in a non-American setting where the majority of the characters are also non-American.

Disappointingly the story boils down to an American dropped from the heavens fighting alone against the force of a vaguely ethnic man, and a pseudo American corrupt rescue initiative to rescue the natives from a force beyond their control. BUTTT that part of the story kind of sucks anyway.

Second, Dying Lights cast of characters are extremely memorable. Including my brother and I's favorite scene where Brecon (an Australian parkour instructor, and leader of a society of refugees held up in a skyscraper) decides to punch a fully functional TV, their only source of news in the zombie apocalypse, because he's mad. Our other favorite character includes Ghazi, who has the most famous line in the game:

“If Mama ain't happy, nobody happy.”

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

What makes Dying Light unique in 2025?

There are many systems to Dying Light that I believe help it stand out to this day. Dying Light's closest competitor is a game called Dead Island, which was without a doubt more popular. One could call them close cousins. You can think of them as different breeds of the same game. As a matter of fact, they are made by the same developer. I'm not here to hate on the Dead Island franchise. The difference to me is that Dead Island has a strong focus on deliberate extreme combat, violence, and RPG leveling.

One of the saddest, yet also most emblematic symbols of the period is the deluxe edition for Dead Island. It excitedly advertised itself as a headless, well-endowed bust of a zombie woman in an American flag bikini top. This was too much, even for its time.

In contrast, Dying Light is a game that gives the player a lot of freedom. In Dying Light, the name of the game is parkour, climbing, and traversal. It's just as easy to play the game without any combat, assuming you can find the right way around the city. Though admittedly this gets harder the further on you go in the game.

Old Town

This may be a bit of a spoiler, but Dying Light includes a second city (old town), which is a considerable improvement from drop off point. If the first city just has you on your training wheels with some easy jumps and mostly on the ground game play, the second city turns it up a notch to a full European parkour experience. You're traversing over long multi story buildings packed tightly together as if made for you to run on. Suddenly you have this extremely clear difference between the top of the city and the bottom. The ground is littered with zombies, secrets and tough enemies to fight while the top is very light on enemies and easy to traverse. Old town is emblematic of the kind of place Dying Light was meant to be in, and it’s a joy every playthrough to finally get there.

Dying Lights’ Many Secrets

Nothing makes the game feel more complete than being littered with secrets for the player to find. Dying Light is not afraid to break the 4th wall and loves to make references outside of what you’d expect.

For example, one of my favorite secrets in the game is finding a green Mario pipe and going underground to play Mario 1-1 in first person stomping on zombies. If you do manage to complete the level, you unlock a wingsuit that lets you fly around in the game that is not obtainable in any other way. This is extremely rewarding.

The greatest mechanic in any game ever.

I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that Dying Light contains the single greatest mechanic in any videogame ever. Dying light has the greatest dropkick ever created by man.

The secret sauce on this burger is the second upgrade that makes your dropkick even more powerful. After this upgrade, your drop kick acts like a sledgehammer hit to the chest, launching an enemy off whatever building they're standing on. If you do it to an enemy on the ground, they go flying, colliding with cars and other zombies, clearing the path for you.

It goes without saying, in a game that involves fighting zombies and running around rooftops, the opportunity to dropkick a zombie four stories down to the floor below, rag dolling like they've just been hit with a Wrecking Ball is one of the greatest things that's ever been created for a video game,

I dare you to open the game and try.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

What are the problems with playing Dying Light in 2025?

This game is old and not only that, this game is also not coded well. It's buggy.

While there are many opportunities for you to play the game in a way that's fun for you and many other opportunities to practice breaking games. The game’s poor programming can mess with your computer in ways that you might not otherwise have intended.

For example, it sometimes just breaks your ability to click on things on your computer. You'll find after playing the game for a while that invariably when you leave the game, you will not be able to touch anything with your mouse. Anything you click on will just not respond to you.

Now, I don't know why this happens, and I don't know the technical reason for how to fix it, but after many hours of messing around with the game I found that just mashing right click anywhere else on the screen gets you out quickly.

The other feature that doesn't quite work, but for technical issues, is the zombie invasion mode. Not only does this not work now, but to be honest, it didn't really work at the game’s release either.

The zombie invasion mode is an interesting gameplay option that never really seemed to take off. As much as I love the idea of asymmetrical gameplay as seen in many other articles. The adrenaline inducing gameplay of playing one of the strongest zombies in the game doesn't quite hit home simply because there were so few opportunities to do so.

Yes, my generous reader, you can only play as an invading zombie during somebody else’s nighttime gameplay. That very much limits the amount of time that you have to invade other players. Not to mention the fact that most people just sleep and skip the night anyway

Almost inevitably, this led to the mode dying pretty much immediately after the game launched.

Now it's 2025. I don't think I would get my hopes up in thinking that anybody will be around to invade your game as you play it. I don't think it's worth it to even try.

Final thoughts.

In my opinion, Dying Light is absolutely worth the purchase anytime in 2025 or the foreseeable future. The game consistently goes on sale almost all the time, and you can grab the deluxe edition for probably $10. The game is up to four players Co-op, and while I've only ever played it with up to two players, it's a blast solo or I'm sure with as many players as you can get to hop on. Though it's worth noting that you're not allowed to play together for the first couple of missions.

Thank you so much for reading. I very much appreciate your support. Don't forget to subscribe for more game reviews and updates and I will see you on the next article. I recommend reading this one next, and don't forget to subscribe.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Check Out These Article Too!

Dying Light 2025 review, play Dying Light in 2025, anniversary events, Old Town parkour, dropkick mechanic, co-op zombie game, 10-year retrospective, Techland updates, Dying Light: The Beast connection, budget gaming under $10

The Precinct Review

Introduction

Well, this will be an interesting review.

Originally this was going to be a review for the demo of the game The Precinct. However, I played the demo all the way through and loved it so much that I immediately picked it up. Since then, I've been playing the game religiously and I have a lot to say about it.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Initial Impressions

What do I think of The Precinct?

Unfortunately, as my time with the game grew, my opinion fell. Not because the game got bad, but because I felt it overstayed its welcome.

The premise of the precinct is: what if old school GTA but instead of playing the criminal you play the police. The Precinct is a fantastic blend of simulation, and action that blends the Papers Please + GTA vibe that a police simulation game should.

Gameplay and Systems

Tutorial

The game starts out on the first day of your job. You find out through dialogue that, unfortunately, your father is dead. Your father was the head of the local precinct, who struck in all the gangs and criminals in the area. With him gone, you have big shoes to fill, but your colleagues are hopeful that you'll be able to get the job done. You go out on your first day of training with your partner, officer Kelly. He shows you how to give traffic tickets, how to apprehend people, and the basics of what to arrest them for versus just issuing a fine. Following this you're taken on a helicopter tutorial where you fly a police helicopter offering surveillance and call outs from the sky. After your first day, you're set free to do any of these that you want. You can either choose recommended missions or create your own.

Long Term Progression

From that day forward, you patrol the city and stop crime. At the end of the day, you turn in any evidence you’ve collected and learn more about the gangs ruling the city. You also level up and get upgrade points that allow you to choose new abilities for your cop. As you level up, you also get access to new cars, new guns, and harder, more difficult beats that involve more violent crimes.

I love this system. The progression system does a great job introducing players to the world of being a cop. Many of the systems the game uses are compelling.

Assigning Offenses

After you have apprehended A perp, you have the choice to manually add offenses based off of what the person has done. For example, the lowest offense someone can do is littering. If you see someone littering, all you have to do is stop them, check their ID, search them, and then issue a fine.

Wait a minute, did I just say stop them, check their ID and search them? Yes, I did, in this universe stop and frisk is OK, as well as cops driving around doing practically whatever they want. In this world, you get to play kind of a dirty cop. With that being said, you don't get to arrest innocent civilians, but your powers to find wanted criminals are what I would call... unconstitutional.

The most interesting system to me is the ability, like I said, to manually add offences based off what you’ve seen. This can be done automatically if you’re not interested, but you get more XP for doing it yourself.

For example:

• If they're littering, you can just add littering to the list of offenses.

• If they've run away, then you add evading arrest.

• If they then fight back, that's assault.

Finally, if they're carrying any weapons, then you add possession of unlicensed weapons to that list.

If the offense is more than issuing a fine, which it more often is, then you arrest the perp and you can either call another cop to take the perp back to the precinct, or you can bring them back yourself for more XP.

Crime Encounters and Backup

Another system I like is the fact that perps have both a health meter and an intimidation meter. As you chase the perp and call them out, they will slowly lose willpower, and if you do that for long enough, they may eventually give up and turn themselves in. This is especially important in situations where you're dealing with violent offenders who are armed. Sure, you can just outright kill them all and that is totally legal and will successfully complete the mission. However, you get more XP for taking them in alive, so you're encouraged to. Continue to yell at them, get their health down low and actually shoot near them but don't hit them in order to bring their willpower down enough that they give U. Of course, this is easier said than done because oftentimes in gang fights, you're fighting against five to seven people. O if you're doing really well, you're lucky to get maybe four of those people alive.

Like I said, picking up evidence such as weapons and other contraband gives you an insight into the criminal underworld. Collecting enough evidence will give you a tip on where the criminals are. Each gang has three people in their hierarchy who you have to hunt down, and if you've collected enough evidence on each person, you start a raid in which you hunt that person down and eventually arrest them.

One of my favorite systems in the game is the ability to call and. Backup. As you're chasing down a perp, you gain kind of a backup meter, which once filled, you're able to call in different levels of backup, including other officers, other cars, and more advanced things as you go along. This pairs well, as oftentimes you'll be chasing perps through high speed chases. Long on foot chases and sometimes through violent gang encounters like I said before.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Side Stories and Content

Additionally, there's also a murder mystery happening at the same time where you're trying to find somebody who has been brutally murdering people around the town and leaving clues.

There's also a wealth of side content to do in the game. There are plaques and messages that lead to mysteries of finding secret items that were lost from the museum. There are optional races, jumps, and hidden vehicles to find that you can commandeer.

So, does that sound fun to you? If the answer is yes, then great, you'll probably like the game.

The Precinct’s Weaknesses

Now let me give you some reasons you might not like the game.

Crime Frequency

First off, crimes happen way too much.

Say you're on a beat where all you're supposed to do is hand out traffic tickets. Nearby, somebody litters and all of a sudden, your focus changes to catching that person who littered. Then, as you're chasing that person who littered, you'll spot a robbery. So now your focus is on deciding whether or not you want to follow the person who littered or chasing the robbery. Then, while chasing the perp who stole the goods from the store, you'll spot a mugging. And so, you have to decide whether or not you'd like to stop the mugging or the person who just robbed the store. Then while you're chasing the person who's mugging, you'll spot someone littering and you'll get a full alert and to have to decide whether or not you want to chase the person who's littering or continue chasing the mugger. This happens so constantly it kind of breaks the immersion of the game. If I'm on a beat where I'm supposed to be handing out parking tickets, I think it's a little unreasonable to also have me doing all these other events that I am basically not signed up for.

Even more frustrating is that sometimes it will automatically accept one of the new events that happens. So, I could be in the middle of chasing a violent offender when all of a sudden someone litters and now I just have to stop and issue them a fine. I think there needs to be some sort of priority listing here so that if I'm doing something where there's a violent offender, I don't get bothered by all the lesser crimes that are happening around me.

Speaking of lesser crimes, it feels like the game was not designed for the player to do those for very long. One of the first things you do in your tutorial for the beat cop is to check traffic meters to make sure that people have paid their parking meter. However, what you'll find throughout the game is as you do this in different spots of the world, there is no spot similar to the place you did it in the tutorial. In the tutorial, there's a parking spot with four meters that you walk by. There was practically no other spot in the game with meters. You will just constantly be handing out parking tickets for cars the wrong way and cars that are parked on the sidewalk. That is assuming you don't get distracted by something else anyway. So yeah, that's kind of a bummer.

Ally AI

Next, let's talk about the ally cop AI. The cops that you work out with are very dumb. One of the most common examples of this is when you have a street fight going on. Obviously, there's two people for you to catch. This is very difficult. You have a partner whose name is Kelly, but Kelly only really helps out 25% of the time when he feels like it. So, you'll get out of the car, chase one of the perps, and Kelly will just kind of follow behind you, letting the other guy get away. Or alternatively. Say you catch 1 criminal really easily. You put them in cuffs and then you turn your attention to catching the other criminal. The other criminal will run kind of far away from the first guy, and since Kelly sometimes decides to just follow you instead of saying with the criminal that you've apprehended you. End up losing the guy who you handcuffed because you're so far away from him.

I find this extremely infuriating. A lot of my early game encounters had one or both people get away. The solution to this is calling in another cop to keep an eye on one or both of the perps, but again, the chances of this working are a little bit better than Kelly, but still not 100%.

World Lacking Agency

As I said before, as you level up through the story, you drop gang higher ups and seemingly make a change to the world. Except not really. As I've played, I have gotten most of the way through both of the bosses, and despite doing well, I don't really notice much of a change in the world in some sort of tangible way.

Let's talk a little bit more about Kelly, your AI companion. Along with Kelly being kind of incompetent, Kelly is also extremely annoying and doesn't shut up. Initially his dialogue is fun, but I think he talks too much, and he doesn't have. Enough lines to really make it worthwhile over a long playtime.

Lack of Variety

With all that. Being said, I think the biggest thing for this game is just that it seems to get too repetitive after playing it for a while, and I think that unfortunately that happens just before you finish the game, so it does kind of run out of steam.

Final Thoughts

My final thoughts on the game are this. There is a really solid foundation for this game and if the developers put in a little work to fix these problems and add a few more events and make the. Lesser extreme events, more interesting. There's a very compelling experience here, and frankly I love it the way it is. But the way it is currently can be frustrating and needs some work. I think if you're interested in this, it's totally worth it to give it a shot. But. Again, like, it's also gonna be worth it to wait for a while for the developers to seem like they're fixing it, because it seems like they're actively updating the game as we go.

This will seem contradictory, but as it stands right now, the game is actually one of the best police sims out there. I have a hard time telling you not to play it because I truly think that this game will be great and is currently really really good. But with that being said. You're there's some jank that you’re going to have to be OK with.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading, if you liked the review, don't forget to help me out and subscribe for free and check out the game on Steam. If you're looking to get into another game early, I also recommend checking out my review on Wild Gate.

Thank you so much for reading and have a great week.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

The Precinct game review, police simulation game, GTA style police game, cop simulator 2024, crime fighting game, law enforcement simulator, police action game, indie police game, steam police simulator, The Precinct gameplay, police beat patrol game, criminal apprehension game, gang takedown simulator, police procedural game, cop RPG elements

Boy, do I have a recommendation for you! Over this last weekend, my girlfriend and I got into the community preview for a game called WildGate. At first, when I saw this, I wasn’t too interested. But upon seeing there was a way to get into it early, I jumped on it (I always jump on things early, and I honestly can’t resist the prospect of an open beta).

What got me interested was looking a little closer at what the game was. The game looked to be a four-player Sea of Thieves-like experience—except you’re on a spaceship looking for loot, and the game is PVP.

Gameplay Overview

What do I mean by that? Sure, Sea of Thieves is PVP, but Sea of Thieves is an open-world, “level up yourself” kind of experience. WildGate takes Sea of Thieves combat and combines it with the combat of something like Overwatch or Hunt: Showdown.

Five teams of four people spawn into the map. You complete objectives to power up your ship, get ready for combat, and then engage in combat similar to Sea of Thieves—but, in my opinion, the combat here is much better.

To tie all of this together (and complete the comparison to Hunt: Showdown), there’s a MacGuffin you have to collect and get to the extraction point—generally in the middle of the map—to win the round. Instead of the open nature of Hunt: Showdown, you actually have a shared, single-winner objective. The other way to win is to be the last ship standing, which means you could just focus on PVP and destroy all enemies.

I find this system to be a really good middle ground for open, five-team PVP combat. The MacGuffin-style extraction system works well to encourage teams not to play too cautiously. Most games I’ve played end with one team standing, but occasionally, if teams are overly cautious, a team will collect an artifact (the MacGuffin) and extract through the WildGate before anyone can catch them.

Combat Mechanics

So, how’s the combat? In my opinion, it’s pretty good. While I don’t think all the guns are effective or interesting, the general feel of them—and the feedback you get for attacking enemies—is very satisfying. I didn’t try all the weapons, but most seemed underpowered compared to the default assault rifle. For the future, I’d like to see that changed to make more weapons viable.

Ship-to-Ship Combat

Let’s talk about ship-to-ship combat. The ship guns (even the starter ones) are extremely fun. This system shines compared to Sea of Thieves, where cannons are satisfying but difficult to use.

Another interesting aspect is that ships operate on a fixed plane. You can strafe up and down, but you can’t rotate freely (no “six degrees of freedom” like in Eve Online). This simplifies movement, making combat feel more like piloting a tank—a smart choice for accessibility.

However, the inability to strafe left/right is a mixed bag. It balances combat (you can’t endlessly face enemies), but maneuvering around obstacles can be frustrating. Crashing into asteroids or platforms happens often, and unsticking your ship is ridiculously hard. Real spaceships could use side thrusters—WildGate could benefit from that!

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Boarding Mechanics

Boarding is another highlight. Pressing C instantly teleports you back to your ship, encouraging exploration and risky boarding attempts. That said, affecting enemy ships beyond killing their crew feels limited.

You can:

1. Remove support buffs to weaken their ship.

2. Steal advanced weapons to reduce their firepower.

3. Overload their engine (triggering a timed explosion).

These actions are dramatic but situational. For example, during electrical storms, disabling anti-electricity modules matters—but most losses came from straight-up PVP failures, not sabotage.

Character Abilities

WildGate’s characters resemble hero shooters but lack unique active abilities. Instead, passives define them, while active abilities (grenades, shields, traps) are shared across all characters.

The standout? The robot character. It ignores oxygen management and auto-refills abilities by teleporting to the ship. Other characters require constant oxygen refills and ability restocks, making the robot way more convenient. My girlfriend and I both gravitated back to it every time.

AI Encounters

Fighting AI monsters is fun but tough solo—it requires teamwork. The only bad encounter? One that drains oxygen rapidly. Playing as oxygen-dependent characters here is *annoying* (you pause every 10–15 seconds), but the robot trivializes it. Otherwise, these battles are a blast.

Sound & Art Style

The sound design is phenomenal—it clearly signals events and actions. The art style, while similar to other hero shooters, ensures characters and interactables pop against environments. It’s vibrant, readable, and harmlessly familiar.

UI Critique

The main menu UI needs work. Buttons for loadouts, customization, and characters look too similar. I often got lost trying to equip weapons vs. gadgets vs. skins. Other hero shooters handle this better.

Conclusion & Final Recommendation

WildGate’s preview shows huge potential. The ship combat is addictive, the extraction objective creates tension, and the robot character is a QoL godsend. Some tweaks—better weapon balance, strafing options, UI clarity—would polish it further.

Sign up for future community previews! You get three keys for friends, and it’s a blast even now. I can’t wait for the full release to dive in without weekend restrictions.

Thanks for reading—have a wonderful week!

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

WildGate review 2025, space PvP extraction game, ship-to-ship combat mechanics, Sea of Thieves in space, boarding mechanics WildGate, Dreamhaven multiplayer shooter, robot character oxygen management, WildGate community preview, MacGuffin extraction objective, Hunt: Showdown space comparison

Are you someone who always wanted to take a stab at creative writing? Are you someone who loves Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPG’s) but find the live action role playing difficult?

If you identify with some of those, all of those, or none of those, I have a proposition for you. What if you could create the story of a vampire who’s life spans decades. What if a book held your hand along the way to give you interesting ideas. What if you could play this game with other people, but without real-time social interaction.

I present to you: Thousand Year Old Vampire a journaling game by Tim Hutchings.

I cannot describe to you how much I love this game, and I hope by the end of this article you’ll be foaming at the mouth to give it a shot yourself.

What is Thousand Year Old Vampire?

Thousand Year Old Vampire was put on my radar by Quinns, the legendary board game reviewer for Shut Up & Sit Down, a journalist for People Make Games, and the showrunner for Quinns Quest a show about TTRPG’s. Quinns is responsible for much of my paycheck transforming into cardboard and wood trinkets.

Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV) is a journaling game where you chronicle the centuries long life of a vampire you create.

Thousand Year Old Vampire starts, like all other great TTPRG’s, with a book, a character sheet and some dice. That’s where the similarities end however. Firstly, TYOV can be played solitary.

As someone who used to sit in his room pretending to play board games with other people, it’s nice to get to play it for real.

In TYOV you get to create a person who, through good luck or bad, gets turned into a vampire. A medieval knight, the pope, a corrupt cop, the options are only limited by your imagination.

Your instructions are simple.

• Create a person in a time period

• Who do they know?

• What do they have?

• What can they do?

Then it gets more interesting.

• Who turned them?

• How did that irreparably scar them?

Now your game starts. I love that the game starts you at the good part. I wouldn’t want to role play the person before they become a vampire waiting for the game to get interesting. The setup time takes about an hour your first time, then about a half an hour after that.

Its extremely refreshing when compared to something like DnD which takes an entire session just to build a character.

After that the game throws you right into the action.

Game Systems

Like the rest of the game what I really like about TYOV is how simple and elegant the game systems are.

The story of your vampire starts with the simple roll of two dice. The majority of the content of the beautifully designed book are prompts that you, as the player, must answer.

“You killed someone close to you. Why? Lose a character.”

Often times that is as much detail as you get, but the game also encourages you to be brief. It doesn’t want you spending too much time worrying about the specifics. You’ll have more fun playing quick and imaginatively.

What’s even more interesting is that it’s possible to roll backwards through the prompts as well. If you land on a prompt multiple times you get asked a follow up question which continues the thread of action and consequence.

A character you’ve victimized comes to you in a dream. Do they curse or forgive you?

Additionally the game encourages you to play non-chronologically. I’ve still yet to fully take advantage of this system, but it does provide help in the storytelling.

Your character has access to five memories total each of which is made up of three events. When you draw a new prompt it can either append it to the details of an existing event. Make it the next event in a memory with an open event slot, forcing you to continue the story of that memory rather than just creating a new plotline.

When you have filled up all your Memories with three events, or you draw a prompt that doesn’t fit into any memories you can create a new memory at the cost of forgetting an old memory.

Your character lives a long time. It’s impossible for someone immortal to remember all the details of their lives, and this system creates more interesting interactions where memories dear to them can be held on to at the cost of hold more of your recent experiences.

The way this is implemented is ultimately up to the player —you’re the one telling the story. Having a character who’s forgotten something adds additional detail to an event that might otherwise be mundane.

The game ends when you face an encounter that you can’t overcome using your skills, characters, or resources, and you are ultimately defeated.

Final Thoughts

It goes without saying that I love Thousand Year Old Vampire. I have to pull myself away from the book because my mind is racing with the possibilities of what secrets just one more prompt might hold in the slowly unraveling tapestry that is my vampire.

How can you play?

Here: Thousand Year Old Vampire

There is a download online for the PDF which you can buy for $20. That’s frankly a steal for such an amazing journaling game. Alternatively you can get the lusciously designed physical copy of the game. The physical print is Lovecraftian eye-candy and I would pay the price just have it on my coffee table —if I had one.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Thousand Year Old Vampire review 2025, solo journaling RPG, Tim Hutchings vampire game, creative writing TTRPG, memory mechanics RPG, Quinns SU&SD recommendation, TYOV physical edition, vampire storytelling game, indieCade-nominated RPG, TYOV sequel 2025

This is a review I’ve been dreading to make. Mind you, this is not going to be a negative review. Aneurism is my favorite multiplayer game in the last year and quite possibly in the last decade.

I’ve dreaded making this review because I’ve been afraid I couldn’t do the game justice.

Strap in everyone, because I’m going to spend this article gushing about a game most of you may never play.

What is Anuerism IV?

The simplest description I can think of is one that I used for my Steam Curator.

I get it. That description is daunting, it feels like asking your normal friends to join you for an evening of VR Chat, but I promise it’s far more interesting than that. Plus, the GTA RP scene is thriving, and drives in huge numbers of views.

Art is made for an increasingly small number of people and you’d better believe it feels like this was made for me.

I have, and always will, believe that the width of your target audience is inversely proportional to how connected to it they are. Feel free to disagree.

Believe me, Dystopian GTA RP is not something I expected to hit me so hard, but the bruise it left I can’t seem to get rid of. I recorded a review of Aneruism which I’ll post it here because you can see my reaction change over time.

Secondhand Happiness

Life in Aneurism is temporary. You start your legacy as a Prole —The grunt and primary laborer. You spend every waking moment of your life slaving away for pennies on the dollar.

Life in Aneurism is also fragile. There is not enough food to go around, and the water fountains are riddled with parasites.

Sure, the government rations help, but they don’t prevent a slow death from starvation.

War

Every prole performs their desolate job hoping for war to rescue them from their miserable existence. Not because they die, though MANY MANY will.

Speakers blare, announcing the start of the war. Sirens scream, and propaganda floods your thoughts. Bombs rain from the sky, threatening immediate obliteration. The streets become barren, devoid of life.

Granted, the streets aren’t barren because of the danger. Everyone is Anuerism is ready to die at any moment. The streets are barren because everyone has rushed to the bomb factory. The country is at war, and the government is paying top dollar for anyone who contributes to the creation of bombs.

A single war is capable of moving the lowest prole up multiple social brackets if they work hard enough. Just ignore the fact that the bombs peppering the streets are the same ones you’re building.

Legacy & Fates

Aneurism as a game is about more than just one life. A single life in the city is disposable. The game’s depth comes from living lives in many other shoes.

Any money you earn in one life can be transferred to another life through Bankers, other players who you can deposit and withdraw money for a small fee.

Having money on the mind isn’t the only priority for the denizens of Anuerism. A second currency, a spiritual one, exists that quantifies your karma in the afterlife determining who you will be next: amnescytes.

The other lives, called ‘Fates,’ are where the depth of Aneruism’s gameplay comes from. A city requires many people to function. Sewer workers are needed to handle waste just as much as musicians are to entertain them. Aneurism is no different.

• Proles get work done.

• Liquidators clean and repair the streets.

• Dealers make sure people’s needs are met.

• Corpsemen supply drugs and keep people healthy.

What’s unique is that every fate has it’s own goals and motivations. None is directly contributing to the other through shared common goal, but through selfish necessity of their own goals.

This is what separates Corpsemen from healers in Overwatch, or Marvel Rivals. Their allegiance is not to “the team” but to their own personal advancement.

Asymmetric Gameplay

This is a concept called Asymmetrical Gameplay, and is literally my favorite mechanic in multiplayer games. Here’s a super quick example.

Chess is an example of a symmetrical competitive game. Both players have the same starting conditions and the same goal [Though there is asymmetry in who is taking their turn first].

Dead by Daylight, a horror movie competitive game, is totally asymmetrically competitive because it’s a team of four human survivors vs a single powerful demon.

Things get more interesting with Root. Root is asymmetrical with incidental conflict. Each animal has diffferent goals and the combat between them comes from friction in completing goals rather than direct competition.

Aneurism lies just beyond all of these because its asymetric in its fates. Some are incidentally cooperative, others are in conflict, and some can be totally ambiguous. The social element introduces complexities to the lives of seemingly cooperative fates. You are both in cooperation and competition with your peers and must judge each individual accordingly.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Factions

What you might not expect from what I’ve been describing is that the core of Anuerism is rooted in asymmetric competitive combat.

The world of Aneurism has three factions:

• The Cotex: Those who are loyal to Anuerism and maintain status quo

• Neutral: Proles and other classes who live in Anuerism but may not be loyal to it

• Scum: Those who oppose The Cortex and aim to bring it down

Everything I’ve talked about up until now only applies to Cortex and Neutral aligned fates as they are the only ones allowed above ground.

The third faction, Scum, exists entirely in their own underground sewer system. Anyone who enters the sewers is immediately marked for execution or “Limited.” Scum are born below ground, and are only safe when surrounded by their peers.

Scum only emerge from underground to cause chaos. The weaker ones, known as Scumbags, use cunning and stealth to destroy utilities and spread rot.

Stronger Scum known as Zealots steal bodies of the cortex and use them to perform horrific rituals.Rituals that cause temporary status effects on the world enabling mass destruction and death.

Should The Scum destroy anuerism the server is reset, and any progress anyone has made is deleted (outside of cosmetics). The metaphorical implications align with the physical consequences.

Those who fight for The Cortex fight to maintain the status quo as awful as it may be in order to keep their own progress and the progress of others safe.

Meanwhile Scum may only ever fight as a means to oppose The Cortex.

Each class choice is up to the player and they can change at any time if they have the amnesytes. I’ve had my own personal interesting stories of changing sides for one reason or another.

My Story

One server I joined as a founding member of the server. I owned expensive property and worked as the highest officer under the Cortex. I did a good job too. However the city grew stale and desolate. I struggled to secure food for myself and wondered how I was going to survive. Then in one fatal battle with a Zealot I lost my life.

Seeking that power I changed sides, and found pleasure in destroying the same infrastructure I worked so hard to protect. It had failed me, and so it had no reason to exist. I fought to bring down the Cortex and restore the server.

Final Thoughts

What I’ve described is just the tip of the iceberg. The game is updated by its developers roughly every two weeks with new content adding more gameplay opportunities and complexity. There are many fates that didn’t make it into this review because this was already getting out of hand.

I love Aneurism IV and I think you might too!

Check it out on Steam: Anuerism IV

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Aneurism IV review, dystopian GTA RP game, asymmetric multiplayer chaos, Cortex vs Scum factions, server reset consequences, karma-driven afterlife gameplay, niche multiplayer gem, Dead by Daylight inspired roles, social class conflict simulator, bi-weekly content updates

I have a dark secret I want to share. I absolutely love early 90’s janky arcade games. One of my favorites is Sega Racing Classic 2.

It has all the things I love about early arcade games:

• EXTREME attract-screen

• Multiple RAD fonts

• Confusing drifting mechanics

Its great!

Parking Garage Rally Circuit

Parking Garage Rally Circuit (PGRC) is that plus Mario Kart.

Fun fact: Parking Garage Rally Circuit is from the developer behind the legendary Jellycar, Walaber Entertainment LLC.

The game sports beautiful maps rendered in all their Nintendo 64 glory. The environments are varied and take you to locations ranging from beaches to snowy mountains, and rocky peaks.

Complimenting the main course is the finest recreation of 1990’s ska (music genre) the ever graced a saxophone. The Holophonics did a fantastic job with the soundtrack, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for them! Go ahead and play an article from their Bandcamp to set the mood.

Let’s talk about the most important aspect of PGRC: the cars.

The cars in PGRC are phenomenal-looking. Each car is customizable with 5 liveries, a custom number, and custom color paletts.

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

The game sports three different weight classes: from a hatchback, to a NASCAR-style racecar, to a heavyweight rallycar.

The cars control very well, and are a blast to drive. My only issue with the car physics is that it doesn’t take much for them to go haywire and screw up your entire race by flinging you into the air. Despite the game’s awesome feel most of the time, these instances are extremely frustrating.

However none of that takes away from what I consider a massive success from Walaber. The game nails everything I think the developer was trying to do and is absolutely worth playing, especially on Steam Deck!

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you all on the next track!

Check it out on steam here: Parking Garage Rally Circuit

Bits N' Pixels

Gaming news, development, and writing.

By Nick Pasta

Parking Garage Rally Circuit review, Walaber Entertainment racing game, 90s arcade jank nostalgia, N64-style racing games, retro ska soundtrack games, chaotic car physics simulator, Steam Deck racing gems, Jellycar developer new game, customizable arcade racers, Mario Kart meets Sega Racing

Hi. I’m very late on creating any article for this week. Since I’m already behind I want to save the articles I’m working on for next weeks schedule.

Luckily my favorite YouTuber and essayist, Jacob Geller, released a new video about digging holes. It’s as fantastic as everything else they put out; therefore, I am doing my due diligence by putting it on your radar!