A rhetorical question, really; the answer is yes, but it’s generally harder to accomplish. Today’s word feels like an apt descriptor of…well, a lot of what’s going on lately, if you stretch it a little.
purulent, adj. – filled with, or oozing pus
Learned from: Cronos: The New Dawn (PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch 2, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S)
Developed by Bloober Team
Published by Bloober Team (2025)
People sometimes ask me why I like horror games. “What do you find so appealing about being scared?” “Do you like watching terrible things happen to people?” Etc. and so on. Being scared can be thrilling, but I’d argue it’s the perseverance over terrible situations that’s more of a draw than witnessing them on their own. But the real answer is, in horror games (the good ones at least, that give you some agency aside from running and hiding), you can face the awful things in the world and beat them to death with a two-by-four. It’s a nice contrast to real life, where it feels like all we can do is watch powerlessly as everything just gets progressively worse. And if you have any doubts about the world ending, just look at the fact that Silksong finally came out, and we got a Silent Hill sequel that isn’t absolute dog water. We just need Valve to shadow drop Half-Life 3, and the final seal will be broken.
But today, I’m not here to talk about any of those games. Cronos: The New Dawn is a really weird, and surprisingly excellent psychological/body horror game from a studio I’d nearly given up on after the clunky and disappointing Layers of Fear, and the pretty-but-shallow The Medium. You play as a Traveler from some point in the future, diving backwards through time to…acquire certain individuals present during the outbreak of a horrible mutagenic plague that destroyed the world for…uh…reasons. I don’t want to spoil anything, because experiencing this bizarre, unsettling mindfuck of a story firsthand is actually a big part of the fun. It shouldn’t come as any surprise though, that this plague is of the icky, goopy, body-deforming variety, with early medical reports tactfully describing the horrors unfolding with terms like “purulent lesions.”
I know that Silksong stole pretty much all the thunder in the gaming scene as of the time of this writing, but there are other games that have come out recently which also deserve attention if the reviews are any indication. Looking forward to trying out Hell is Us and Silent Hill f after I finish Cronos. I’ll get to Silksong eventually, so long as the “highly unusual” meeting of hundreds of generals in Virginia next week doesn’t in fact usher in World War III….
I’d almost prefer an anomalous, reality-warping plague, personally.
Earlier today, my wife and I headed out to her folks’ place to spend part of the afternoon helping her father harvest grapes, which we will later also help him crush to turn into wine. Somewhere, there’s a photo of me grinning like a maniac, with my arms stained red damn near up to my elbows, like I just murdered somebody. Good times.
Anyway, for me, this is the official start of autumn: being out there with a cool breeze blowing over us, and a beautiful view of the changing colors of the trees on the far bank of the river, foraging through dense vines and leaves, looking for clusters of grapes hidden just out of sight. Again, good times. And that brings us to today’s word.
foliage, noun – plant leaves
Learned from: Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Apple II, Mac, PC)
Developed by Sierra On-Line
Published by Sierra On-Line (1987)
I have very fond memories of the Space Quest games, despite having only played the first two of them (3 and onward never came to the Apple IIGS). Comedies seemed a lot more popular when I was a kid, growing up watching movies like Naked Gun, and Police Academy. And some games got in on the action, too, particularly adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island, which was a spoof of pirate stories, and Space Quest, which was a spoof primarily of Star Wars, but sci-fi in general. Sort of like a Temu version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: not bad necessarily, but certainly not as polished as the name brand. I used to play these a lot with my father, laughing at the ridiculous situations Roger Wilco, janitor turned reluctant hero, would get into, and puzzling over how to get out of them.
As the title of the second game suggests, Sludge Vohaul, the series’ villain, is out for revenge against Roger for foiling his plans in the first game. He has goons kidnap you in the opening of the game, and instead of killing you, he has them take you to a remote location so you can be forced to watch the downfall of galactic society at the hands of the genetically-modified insurance salesmen he’s developed. Or something along those lines; it’s been decades since I played it.
Anyway, something goes wrong with the hovercraft the goons were transporting you on, and it crashes into the dense forest of an alien world. As you look around, the narrator comments on the lush foliage–foliage you need to hide within at least once to keep from being found by Vohaul’s reinforcements, as you try to find a way off-planet to foil his latest insane scheme.
It’s an incredibly goofy game, filled with the sort of absolute moon logic that was common to adventure games of the era (e.g., I think you have to discover and mail in an order form for some kind of space-Tazmanian devil thing at one point, to solve a certain puzzle, while making sure the creature doesn’t catch and kill you in the process). But that was part of the fun. And the days of sitting around that 8-inch screen with my dad, tossing ideas back and forth about “well, what if we tried this?” are memories I will forever cherish.
I forgot the sheer Mystery Science Theater 3000 vibes, in this box art.
Recently, Merriam Webster shared a post about words you almost always seem used in pairs. Hem and haw; hither and yon (or hither and thither); pomp and circumstance, etc. Granted, it often only applies to one of the pairing, like “thither,” or “pomp,” since it’s pretty easy to find standalone usages of “hither” and “circumstance.” One of the other pairings brings us to today’s word.
beck, noun – a stream or creek
Learned from: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow (PC, Mac)
Developed by Cloak and Dagger Games
Published by Wadjet Eye Games (2022)
Granted, the “beck” in “beck and call” has a different meaning, derived I would guess from “beckon,” but MW’s post reminded me of this other definition all the same.
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is an extraordinarily slow burn horror adventure game, with a retro pixel art aesthetic, akin to something like The Last Door. You play as Thomasina Bateman, an archaeologist who receives a letter from an old man living in the remote English village of Bewlay, detailing a forgotten burial mound that she might be interested in…well, excavating. Exactly who he is, or how he learned Thomasina’s mailing address are only the first of the mysterious goings-on. Followed swiftly by his unexplained absence when Thomasina arrives, the fact that her luggage seems to have never made the trip, and the fact that everyone in Bewlay seems a little bit…off.
For being just a pixelated point & click adventure game, Hob’s Barrow does an incredible job of building atmosphere. There’s the little village, the nearby woods (complete with beck running through them), and the endless moors surrounding it all. That’s it. The game wastes no time in establishing a feeling of complete isolation and vulnerability, considering you barely have enough money on you when you arrive to pay for a room for a night at the local inn–the rest of your funds are with your luggage…wherever that is. There’s this feeling that everyone knows everyone else, and you’re constantly under scrutiny that culminates in a real sense of not knowing who to trust, what to say, when the villagers’ grudging goodwill is going to run out, or if you’re ever truly safe. Especially when I found myself stumbling across something valuable, lying to a villager and saying it’s mine so he’ll buy it so I can have enough money to keep staying at the inn until my supplies finally (hopefully) arrive–and then running into the item’s owner the next day, and the entire time worrying that these backwoods folks are going to discover what I’ve done and descend on me, Wicker Man style or something.
This is folk horror at its finest. Thomasina is very much an outsider, and throughout most of the play time, it’s an open question whether the weird things she catches glimpses of, and the deepening paranoia are all in her head, or if something truly nefarious really is going on. It’s not a very difficult game, as adventure games go, but damn does it tell a good story.
Have remote villages with hidden pasts ever been safe places to visit in fiction?
Well, as everyone and their grandmother knows, Hollow Knight: Silksong finally dropped this week. I haven’t started playing it yet, because there are other games that had release dates set for around this time (before the big announcement overshadowed everything), and I feel they deserve attention too. Currently, I’m playing Cronos: The New Dawn, but before that came out, I was actually playing another metroidvania that also released this year. And even though I haven’t played Team Cherry’s latest offering yet, I’m confident in saying this game is no Silksong. Which brings us to today’s word.
oloid, noun – a three-dimensional shape made by connecting two perpendicular circles joined at the center, with a curved surface
Learned from: Shadow Labyrinth (Nintendo Switch 1/2, PC, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S)
Developed by Bandai Namco Studios
Published by Bandai Namco Entertainment (2025)
Around a year ago, Amazon decided to fund an anthology series based around video games, called Secret Level. The selection of games was…eclectic, to say the least, ranging from Mega Man, to Spelunky, to Unreal Tournament of all things, to some Chinese mobile game that was probably only on there because Tencent helped fund the show or something. And then there was the Pac-Man episode…
Certainly the most divisive (and arguably most interesting) of the offerings, this episode reimagined Pac-Man as a weird, grimdark, post-apocalyptic tale of manipulation and survival. It was truly bizarre, and to this day I still don’t know if I could call it a “good” episode or not, because it’s so definitively notPac-Man. It’s like if they decided they wanted to make a gritty crime drama exploring the seedy underbelly of society focusing on prostitution and drug addiction, and decided to just call it Animal Crossing. So, imagine my surprise when I discovered this episode was actually a teaser for where Bandai Namco were planning to take the Pac-Man games, going forward.
Enter Shadow Labyrinth, which is somehow just as bizarre as the teaser, while simultaneously managing to be dull and unremarkable. The protagonist is still a nameless swordsman/clone(?); Pac-Man/Puck is still an untrustworthy little biomechanical horror; eating things to survive is still the focus…but it’s all wrapped up in a bland and at times nonsensical package.
It’s bland, because it really feels like a Flash game from the 2010s, with how the characters move (yet it somehow struggles to run on the Switch in handheld mode). Also, because some of the levels are way too long and same-y. Nobody needs to run through the same giant tree for that many hours, fighting the same unnamed tribesmen who rappel off of ropes from higher up over and over again.
It’s bizarre, because there’s some kind of interstellar war going on in the midst of all this, as told through epistolary format via “memories” you can collect of a character I don’t think I met during my time playing. Also, Shadow Labyrinth is I guess part of some kind of shared universe(?!) of games that Bandai Namco is trying to establish, what with a planet named Xevious, and references to other games later on. I stopped playing before I got beyond the Xevious part. Also before I got to any explanation of what the oloid is that shows up after you beat certain enemies. It seems important, and it probably gets explained later on, but the lore is so convoluted that I stopped caring. Maybe I’ll get back to it after I play Silksong, but I know it’ll feel even worse by comparison.
I figured it would probably be easier to show you one of these things, rather than try to describe it at length.
I’m reading a book right now about how a lot of the discoveries and inventions in math and science that are traditionally attributed to the ancient Greeks might very well have actually come from other parts of the world. It’s thought-provoking stuff, and the book’s called Lost Discoveries by Dick Teresi, if you’re curious. But I’m on a section about Mesopotamia right now which brought to mind today’s word.
ziggurat, noun – a stepped pyramid
Learned from: Quake (PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch, XBox One, XBox Series X/S)
Developed by id Software (Nightdive Studios for the PS4/5, Switch, and XBox One/ Series X/S)
Published by GT Interactive (1996, 2021 for modern consoles)
Quake was a game I took awhile to get any good at, namely because it was the first first-person shooter that let you look up and down. Doom and its clones never gave you that option, and at the time, I went through at least two different control schemes before landing on the now-standard keyboard & mouse. It was new territory, and I’d always played other FPSes with just a keyboard–were you supposed to bind a couple keys to look up and down? Or was there a way to somehow translate all the inputs to a joystick? (It worked for Descent.) It seems laughable to say it now, but using a mouse for looking around didn’t even seem intuitive at the time. And I barely had access to the Internet back then, so I couldn’t just Google (or Lycos, or Altavista) “how the hell do you aim in Quake?”.
As such, my early forays into Quake were…frustrating, to say the least. If you’re a PC gamer, and you think aiming on a controller is bad, imagine trying to do a rocket jump by hitting K to look down while in the air, then smacking Ctrl and the space bar at just the right time, to get it to work, and then adjusting your aim back up with I, and trying to see where you’d land. Now, imagine trying to do anything with that kind of control scheme in a secret level with about 1/4 gravity.
That was the Ziggurat Vertigo, a hidden level built around, you guessed it, a pyramid. Even a regular jump would send you soaring a good distance up the central structure, and having any idea where you’d come down using just a keyboard to look was damn near impossible. And when most of the area that isn’t pyramid is submerged in lava, well…you can guess how that went. I loved the idea of a level that messed with something as basic as gravity (Again, these were the early days of FPS games. I remember finding a fan patch later on that actually made water transparent, and it blew my mind!), but man was it an infuriating experience until I discovered the magic of mouse-aiming.
Okay, I swear this thing was taller when I played this as a teenager; a jump may have actually carried you all the way over the top. Also, the damn thing isn’t even stepped! False advertising!
We’re currently undergoing a remodel where I work, and it’s…not really going as planned. They just got all of the offices usable again, a week and a half behind schedule, the new desks they put in take up like 75% of the floor space, and one–and only one–of the offices has carpet that looks like dirty, bare concrete. It’s not mine, but I really have to wonder if the CEO just doesn’t like that particular person or something. But beyond being behind schedule, this whole project is seeming like a worse and worse idea as time goes on: We’re losing workspace on the teller line (I work in a financial institution) that we really kinda need during shift changes. No one seems to know where we’re putting the printers, since we’re losing counter space. Actually, no one seems to know what the final product is going to look like–but somehow we’re putting in a waiting area for our members…that’s going to be in the same general vicinity as the entrance to the vault. Is there going to be any sort of wall or dividing barrier between the general public and the vault door (not to mention our bathroom)?
It’s almost like nobody stopped to think this through. But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. Which brings us to today’s word.
vigesimal, adj. – base-20, as in a numeric system
Learned from: Subject 13 (Playstation 4, Mac, PC, XBox One)
Developed by Microids
Published by Microids (2015)
Subject 13 is an adventure game that came out during a time when that particular genre seemed to largely be dead, or at least forgotten. Thankfully, the genre is experiencing something of a renaissance these days, but there was a span of a good 20 years when any adventure game that actually got released was worth checking out, just for the novelty of it.
At a glance, Subject 13 paints a decent picture of itself: attractive, pre-rendered environments; a mysterious sci-fi setting; varied and creative puzzles. Seeing it in motion is…less impressive, as the animations leave something to be desired. Hearing it also doesn’t do it any favors; the sound effects feel almost public domain, and the voice acting is flat-out bad (though, I understand the developer is French, so English dubbing might’ve been lower on their budget list than the rest of it. Not every small French game studio can have the production values of the folks at Sandfall). But again, pickings were slim in those days, so any port in a storm. Speaking of…
The real issues I had with the game though, are with the console port. I played this on PS4, and in converting it for that console (and presumably the XBone), Microids made some of the most baffling decisions I’ve ever seen. Some of it’s understandable: There’s no mouse interface (and nobody programmed for that touchpad thing on the PS4 controllers). So rather than just clicking where you want your character to go, you have to stumble around the not-as-big-as-they-look pre-rendered backdrops like a drunken orangutan, trying to get your guy to go up a flight of stairs or whatever. That’s…acceptable. The baffling part is pretty much everything else.
See, a lot of the puzzles require you to manipulate objects in ways that, again, would’ve been intuitive with a mouse. But for the console release, virtually everything requires you to hold down a trigger, and then rotate a thumbstick, regardless of whether it makes any sense or not. Turning a dial? Rotate the thumbstick. Sliding a panel? Rotate the thumbstick. Trying to enter a number into a device? Rotate the damn thumbstick! And it’s even worse, because the sensitivity on this interface is all over the damn map. You could be trying to move some device one notch to the left, but have to rotate the thumbstick in the opposite direction you’d expect, only to have it whip past half a dozen notches before you can stop. It is legitimately one of the worst control schemes I’ve ever come across, and when you combine it with the awful navigation to get your guy from point A to point B, it made some of the otherwise inventive puzzles almost unplayable.
I realize I haven’t talked about the story yet, and while it’s also a bit of a mess, I should at least do broad strokes. You play as Franklin Fargo, a professor who’s tried to end his own life by driving his car off a bridge, for reasons that become clearer as the game goes on. But your plan is foiled when you find yourself waking up in a futuristic pod, with no idea of where you are, how you got there, or if you can trust the disembodied voice that starts talking to you. But the voice eventually leads you, GLADoS-style, through an abandoned research facility and into a bizarre plot involving the nature of consciousness, multiverse theory, and Mayan prophecies (heavily leaning into puzzles based on their vigesimal number system). It’s…weird. Nowhere near as unhinged as, say, Indigo Prophecy, but it really does try to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. And in an adventure this short, that’s a pretty tall order.
All in all, Subject 13 isn’t a bad game, per se, but it’s certainly rough around the edges–even without the limitations of the console versions. If you’re curious, I can only in good conscience tell you to pick it up on Steam, and avoid the awful PS4/XBox ports.
Speaking of awful, just look at this, and tell me you see anything but the concrete floor of a steel mill that’s been abandoned for years. The other carpeting jobs are nowhere near this bad.
It’s been a weird week when it comes to entertainment. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert got cancelled for “financial reasons,” which is a weird way of spelling “fear of retribution from a petty tyrant.” But then, mere days later, the same company renewed South Park for several seasons, and the first thing the creators did was spend an entire episode mercilessly mocking the toddler-king. It’s good to see Trey Parker and Matt Stone haven’t lost their edge, but it did make me nostalgic for simpler times when the show could just be silly jokes about anal probes and World of Warcraft; or even further back, to when I didn’t even know what fascism was. Which brings us to today’s word.
nazi, noun – a member of Germany’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party
Learned from: Into the Eagle’s Nest (Apple II, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, PC, ZX Spectrum)
Developed by Pandora
Published by Pandora, Mindscape, Atari Corporation (1987)
A note to kick things off: I know that the word is supposed to be capitalized, but I’m taking a page from the excellent tabletop RPG about vampires sent to kill Hitler, Eat the Reich, and refusing to give it that dignity.
With that out of the way, I was probably too young to really appreciate Into the Eagle’s Nest, when 7- or 8-year-old me plucked it off the shelf. I’d heard of WWII, at some point I’m sure, but that had been like, 40 years ago by that point, practically ancient history. Certainly something that was over and done with, and that couldn’t possibly end up being relevant in contemporary society. No, instead I saw screenshots on the back of the box that looked kinda like Gauntlet–but the guy on the front had a gun! And he was about to storm a castle, of all things! I didn’t really know what nazis were, but from the art, I went in expecting a weird fantasy/modern mashup, where a lone soldier had to save his squadmates from a Medieval castle crawling with enemy soldiers, sure–but also maybe monsters? It was a castle, after all.
Needless to say, young me was disappointed when, instead of the action-packed combat of Gauntlet, I instead found myself with my first introduction to the stealth genre. This was a slower, more methodical rescue mission that I…really didn’t know what to make of at the time. It didn’t help that the graphics on the Apple II left a lot of ambiguity as to just what it was you were looking at sometimes. Sure, long tables and crates of guns are pretty straightforward, but what about the featureless squares? Looking back after all these years, they might’ve been sandbags, but who knows. Or the green circles? Barrels, maybe? But while I seem to remember you could break them, I don’t think they exploded in classic video game fashion, so, who can say?
Suffice it to say, the presentation, and the gameplay style combined to make a frustrating and underwhelming experience that I never really went back to after I was old enough to possibly appreciate it. These days, I don’t even think it’s available on GoG, so it would be hard to revisit, even if I wanted to. And honestly? I think there’s enough wannabe-nazi bullshit going on in real life to make the prospect seem depressingly relevant.
I mean, look at this cover–dude looks like he’s about to kick down a drawbridge and shoot Dracula in the face or something!
You might be expecting me to be talking about a horror game today, with a title like that, but nope. Bit of a story behind what brought this word to mind:
So, my wife and I went to see the fireworks downtown last week. Our city is situated on a lake, so we went down to the lower harbor and found a spot to sit right by the water while we waited for it to get dark. At one point, I took them off to rub my eyes or something, and they just slipped out of my fingers, skidded across the concrete embankment, and disappeared 20+ feet underwater. I’ve been using a pair of cheaters since then (though a holiday weekend and several hundred dollars later, I do have a new pair of actual glasses ordered), but walking around with them on feels like I’m inside a fishbowl. That means, when I’m at home or work and I need to move around, I’ve relied a lot on remembering where stuff is. And in a roundabout way, that brings us to today’s word.
homing, adj. – finding one’s way to a target or location through memory or technology
Learned from: Raiden (arcade, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Turbographx-16, PC, Atari Lynx, mobile)
Developed by Seibu Kaihatsu
Published by Tecmo (1990)
Raiden, to me, is the quintessential vertical-scrolling shmup. Other games are flashier, or have deeper mechanics, or fill the screen with more bullets, but there’s something about Raiden that keeps me coming back even after all these years. The sprite work is solid, the levels all look distinct, and there’s just something to the overall gameplay that simply feels right.
I don’t even remember if there’s much of a story, but sometimes all you need is to hop into the cockpit of a red or blue jet, decide if you want lasers or a spread of bullets, dumb-fire missiles or homing ones, and mow down wave after wave of enemy tanks and planes. Raiden is an emblematic arcade experience: difficult but fun, simple but addictive; it’s one of my favorite arcade games of all time, and one of these days I’ll beat it on a single quarter.
I don’t even need my glasses to see this is a Crystal Castles arcade cabinet with the Raiden logo slapped on the side. Bizarre.
2025 has been an absolutely incredible year for games so far, which makes for a nice high point to distract us from, well…everything else. But the year’s only half-over, and we’ve already had Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (my presumptive GOTY, unless something else really floors me), Look Outside (a fantastic pixel art cosmic horror game), Blue Prince (an architectural roguelike, of all things), and the very underrated The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (a visual novel/strategy RPG from some of the creators of Danganronpa and Zero Escape). That last one brings us to today’s word.
buskin, noun – a knee-length boot
Learned from: The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (Nintendo Switch, PC)
Developed by Too Kyo Games, Media.Vision
Published by Aniplex, Xseed Games (2025)
When you go into a game with this kind of pedigree, you know you’re in for something a bit weird. Danganronpa is built around high school students getting kidnapped by a three-foot-tall, psychotic bear mascot and being forced to kill one another without being caught. The Zero Escape games are essentially escape rooms set in exotic locations, and filled with math puzzles and eccentric characters who might not be who they claim to be. Hundred Line tasks a group of unwilling highschoolers with defending a school surrounded by eternal flames, from alien(?) invaders for 100 days, because something hidden inside could doom humanity. But despite how bonkers these concepts are, the narratives they weave usually end up being surprisingly engaging.
Hundred Line has the same pedigree of quirky characters as the earlier games I mentioned, from a mascot character who doesn’t seem quite as evil as Monokuma from the Danganronpa games; to an orphan who hates the world and doesn’t care if it burns; to a thug with a heart of gold; to…someone whose initial impression can only be summed up as “Japanese Harley Quinn.”
Darumi is a clearly depressed, possibly psychotic ball of chaos, who goes into this situation fully expecting it to be a game of death (hello, fourth wall), and disappointed when she’s not expected to kill her fellow students. She has a penchant for ultra-gory horror movies, flings herself into combat with wonton abandon, and claims to not be very smart, while periodically peppering her dialog with (sometimes jumbled) philosophical references, and ten-dollar words like “phonemic” and “buskin.” At least I think it was Darumi who made some reference to a “sock and a buskin,” which it turns out are actually also terms for the classic Comedy and Tragedy masks from ancient Greek theater, since the tragic characters would wear longer boots, while comedic characters would parade around in thin tights referred to as “socks.” For a game about cartoonish space aliens, and teens with superpowers, that’s a pretty deep cut, and part of what I love about the writing from these creators.
I might be wrong in attributing that reference to Darumi, but it seems like something that would come out of her mouth.
I really wish I’d learned the word “haboob” (a dust storm) from a game, because it would be perfect, considering there’s one sweeping across Florida right now. Also, I guess I am perpetually 12 years old. But speaking of 12-year-olds, Elon Musk attested today to the worst-kept secret in the world, by saying Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. And in a roundabout way, that does bring us to today’s word.
seraglio, noun – a harem
Learned from: Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia (3DS)
Developed by Intelligent Systems
Published by Nintendo (2017)
I don’t think I need to elaborate more on the connection between this word and the Epstein files. But even in the context of the game, it seems damningly relevant.
The story takes place on the continent of Valentia, where the warlike nation of Rigel, and the peace-loving nation of Zofia find themselves at the disastrous end of a long truce. The fantasy hippies of Zofia have gotten so decadent that one villager opines that the king is “more likely to frolic in a seraglio than actually rule” (which, again, seems oddly apropos), while the warmongers of Rigel…well, they didn’t need much more reason to make their move. War is brewing, and your group of backwater youths gets caught up in the middle of it.
Echoes is one of the odd Fire Emblem entries that foregoes the “weapon wheel,” where swords beat axes, axes beat lances, and lances beat swords, making it feel a bit less like a part of the overall series than most installments. Further differentiating it from the classic Fire Emblem style, are dungeons that you can actually run around in, in real-time, finding secrets and trying to get the drop on enemies before launching into the more standard tactical battles. It’s a unique game in the series, but its differences often work to its advantage, letting it stand out from the crowd.
Oh yeah, and I guess some sort of new console from Nintendo came out today, too, or something. So, there’s that.
Brain Rot 