Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I played some more Dune Awakening and spent a good chunk of the evening running from Sandworms. I’ve crossed the gap from Hagga Basin South into the Eastern Vermillius Gap, signifying a shift from Copper-based crafting to Iron-based crafting. I am not sure if this is true, but every time I have ever crossed the gap… I end up summoning a worm. Since I made several crosses yesterday to truck resources to the north, that means I spent quite a bit of time running like hell from sandworms. I also had the bad luck of triggering a sandworm when coming back from the Anvil as well, and then on one of my runs, got clipped by a Sardaukar stun beam thingy, thankfully did not have a worm on my ass… and was able to just run like hell once it unfroze me. I tried the build base from template thing, but it was a bit too fiddly for my tastes, and I just built a new design.
I am way happier with the placement of my Vermillius base than I was with the previous start at the launch of the game, and I have ready access to plenty of Iron just within easy distance of my base. The big problem once you cross the gap, however, becomes that every bandit camp has folks with a Holtzman shield and seems to deal way the hell more damage than before. I find myself constantly struggling to get enough water, because once you move into the Iron tier… refinding metal starts to take copious amounts of water. There is a small bandit camp across the way from my base, and I kept going over there to bleed them dry so I could keep my water reserves stocked. I desperately need a dew reaper, but I have no way of getting flour sand other than randomly looting it off baddies. I have gotten enough to craft one block of silicon, but I need four to make my reaper. I might just go over to The Anvil and see if they have one for sale.
One of the things that annoys me about Dune Awakening is how strictly you have to align with the quests. For example, when I got the quest to cross into the Vermillius gap, I had to craft bike parts… even though I already had a bike. I also had to demolish part of my base so that I could place down an advanced doohickey. It also forced me to abandon my base in the south… but I did so by going back down there, demolishing the base gadget, and then placing another one right back there. I have been maintaining that base so that Ace can come raid my stores and use it as a temporary location when they get to the point where they have to do the Imperial Testing facility. I just hate how much the main quest sequence is dictating my actions, and I wish there were a way to opt out of specific steps. However, you can’t really do that because the crafting sequence is hard-gated based on your progression. There was a bunch of useful stuff gated behind abandoning that base… so I had to do it in spite of not wanting to in the least. The south is still way easier to farm fremen materials than anything up in the north.
I was able to make a bunch of upgrades, including my first Holtzman Shield, which is wild because I swear last time playing this game, I had an MK1 one much earlier. It makes me wonder what quest I unintentionally skipped. I also outfitted myself in a full Kirab Stillsuit, which I prefer to use over the more protective armors. As part of this, I upgraded my power pack again and cutterray, and crafted my very first handheld resource scanner. I did not make one of these the last time I was playing, and ultimately waited until I had a dune buggy with a scanner before even playing with this functionality. Seeing how limited the range is… I question if this is even worth researching. I can easily see all of the resources it is pointing out for me, so I am not really sure what the idea behind this gadget is. Maybe it is for folks who are bad at discerning what a resource is from what is just a set decoration greeble?
I might hold off a bit from playing and let Ace catch up with me. I think a lot of the larger camps in Vermillius Gap would be way more enjoyable to farm with another person. Hopefully, I can connect up with them this weekend or one of the other AggroChat folks playing on this server. There is also supposedly a Welcome Back cache, and I sent a note to support about that, and they asked me a bunch of questions. My character seems to have poofed from the last time I played, so I am going to have to feed them the information about that character. Apparently, with Tam, they flooded him in resources, so here is hoping that I can get a similar carepackage because if nothing else, it will ease the transition for some of the other folks just starting out. I was harvesting Cobalt when I last played, so if I can get some of those resources, it would be amazing.
Good Morning Folks. Tuesday nights are often what we refer to as “Sibling Time,” where my sib Ace and I get together and either play Destiny Rising or just hang out and chat while doing our own thing. Since we are both somewhat down on Destiny Rising at the moment, we are trying to branch out and play some other things. Initially, I thought we might be able to do Dune Awakening, but they were just too new, and if I carried them… they would likely bounce from the game entirely. I did, however, figure out that I can easily retrofit my sandbike to have a booster seat on the back instead of storage. So when the time comes for them to go do some of the stuff in the area of Hagga South, I have built my base, I can zip over and pick them up. Hopefully, a weekend of piddling around in-game will give them the basis of being able to do group content together. I’ve largely finished Hagga South, and am about ready to transition to the zone just North, but I plan on leaving the base largely intact so that Ace can potentially claim it when they are ready to start doing stuff in the northern area of the zone. That is one thing that I wish you could do more easily: transition a base to another player rather than demolishing the control panel and then letting them place one instead.
We have been loosely shopping for other games to play, and one of them that we both enjoyed greatly is Enshrouded. So last night I logged into my level 25 geared out character that I have not played since launch… and tried to figure out how the hell to join a game with each other. Hint… you must be online in Steam in order to see each other in the game, so as two perpetually “Show as Offline” introverted goblins… we had to both show online for a moment while we joined up on Ace’s world. It was at this point that I saw their highly optimized base layout… and also might have given them more than a little bit of shit about not having walls. One of these days we will join my world, and they can give me abundant crap over the severe level of overbuilding that I do on my bases… which are extremely NOT optimized. Real talk, though, coming back last night has made me want to play more, and I am probably going to do so on the level 25 character since I don’t really feel like gearing out another one. Guild Wars 2 has kind of made me wish all games allowed you to reach a point of “forever gear” quickly and then just get to do the fun stuff.
For a while now, Ace had been telling me about all of the updates in-game, in part trying to coax me back to wanting to play it again. One of the feature drops specifically was something called Hollow Halls. These are a series of what can best be described as “Raids” in the MMORPG context, that were patched in with 0.7.1.0 from March 2024. I had done plenty of the more dungeon-like content in Enshrouded, and they were really fun, but also really short, and mostly focused around rushing to a boss and then taking it down and collecting the trophy. Hollow Halls are way more detailed than this, and to start off you have to begin a quest which grants you your key to the first one, and then completing each one unlocks the next Hollow Hall in sequence. Last night we did the Nomad Highlands one, which is the third of four Hollow Halls in sequence.
There are technically mini-boss style encounters scattered throughout the large sweeping dungeon, but the real challenge is the environmental effects, mob spawners buried in frustrating to get to places, and this whole mini game that focuses on finding a bunch of runestones, which then unlock the door to the next area of the place. The huge positive about this place is that effectively each “floor” has a spawner, so that if you die, you can get right back into the action rather quickly. There were a lot of puzzles that involved very careful gliding, and I happened to die on the lava… which was unfortunate because even though Ace was able to resurrect me, I died again before I got control over my character. Due to the spawners, though, I was able to bip right back down to where we were in a matter of seconds. We were playing on their world at the lowest difficulty settings, and even then, it still took us about two hours to complete this place.
One of the really neat things about these massive dungeons is that they have special block types that you can only get by finding chests in them. What was nice, though, was that just by looting the chest, it unlocked the block for everyone in the party. They also had their world set so that each boss dropped a trophy for every party member, which meant that we walked away with multiple trophies by defeating all of the mini-bosses contained within. I dinged level 26 while I was in the dungeon, and I believe when I last played this game, the level cap was 25… so it will be interesting to see how much deeper this rabbit hole goes. I am probably going to run around on my geared character for a while and then build out a world from the start so that I can see all of the content I might have missed along the way. I had a freaking blast last night, and I figure we will probably be doing more of these Enshrouded nights.
Another game that I have been wanting to play again is No Man’s Sky, and it turns out they have also been playing around a bit. So after concluding our Enshrouded time together, I popped over into NMS and started a new, relaxed character. I made it through the initial sequence of getting my ship up and running and am on the second planet. There are tons of games that we both enjoy playing; we just need to set the focus on actually playing them together. I also think that I might have convinced Ace to give Path of Exile another shot with the upcoming 3.28 league, so that will be fun as well. Sibling Time is one of those sacred rituals in my life, and especially after the passing of my partner, I have needed it more and more as a stabilizing force. A few hours doing dumb things with Ace, cures many ills… and there is so much of me that wishes that we had actually gotten the chance to grow up together, rather than being adopted siblings.
If you’ve not played Enshrouded in a while, I highly suggest checking in on the game again.
Sometimes things happen really quickly. We had been commenting recently that, at some point, we wanted to give Dune Awakening another go. For me, it landed at exactly the wrong time… right before a Path of Exile league. One of the big turn-offs was the real-world upkeep aspect of the game, and the fact that I needed to log in periodically to refill the power packs on my base so that it would not deteriorate. All of that said, I had a lot of fun while I was playing it and learned a lot of things about the game itself that would make a restart feel so much better. Saturday night, after the podcast, I logged pretty quickly, and then when I got up Sunday morning to edit said podcast… I noticed a chain of messages in our games of the moment channel. Essentially, Tam had made good on the plans and reactivated our private server, and as such, Sunday morning after posting the show, I was back in the character creator building a new desert dweller.
This time around, I went with a Swordmaster and landed on a look that felt more “me”. While I generally play fairly lily-white characters in games, I can’t bring myself to do so in the Dune universe. It is just too unrealistic that anyone who has spent any amount of time in the desert would not have a lovely bronze complexion. I went Swordmaster because it has this bum rush type ability that seemed like it might be really useful early in the game. I was a Mentat previously, and the whole floating turret thing was cool, but felt like it took too much planning and setup for it to really be useful for very long. Swordmaster, on the other hand, has a ton of perks that improve how well you can survive in harsh conditions, which seemed like something I care way more about. Ironically, though I find myself using a rifle way more often than I am using a blade, because if I can keep things at ranged I can generally whittle them down pretty quickly. I desperately need a shield belt, though, so I need to stop stalling and do the quests that I believe unlock it.
One of the huge benefits of playing this already… is that I understand the flow of the early game a bit better. Nothing that I do in the first two zones is likely to have any permanence. I am already on base number three, and instead of building grand constructions… I am building essentially what is needed. I am also not too torn up about leaving resources behind, and carrying only the things that are actually more challenging to acquire, like the fremen materials. Right now, I have a small base situated vaguely between the Imperial Testing Station and the shipwreck, so that I can comfortably farm both of those. My first goal was to gather up enough blue materials to craft a Sandbike, because ultimately, I will need that to transition up into the next zone and start mining iron. I do want to finish doing the various contracts I have before moving upwards, though, because it is not like I am in an extreme rush. Thinking about Dune Awakening characters like Minecraft, or even ARPG characters, helps immensely because I know I will probably reroll again at some point in the future and wipe the slate clean again.
Another thing that I have noticed this time around is that I am way more willing to move around during the daytime. I think during my first playthrough, I was scared to death of being stranded out in the sun for any length of time, and as such, I spent too much time waiting for nightfall, where I felt like I could move around more freely. There are always shadows about, and you can get to the safety of them pretty quickly. It is highly unlikely that you will ever truly be stranded, and in a worst-case scenario, you build a temp base. I’ve even gotten way more comfortable crossing expanses of open desert during the day if I can figure out a way to hop between shadows. Daytime has become the time I farm resources that are easy to get, and Nighttime is when I set out on more serious adventures, like crossing between complexes of rock. When I play next, I plan on heading over to the ship wreck and farming some materials there, and maybe pushing past that to knock out the kill quest for the Trooper at the first city.
The highlight of yesterday was that I have my sandbike ready to roll, which is going to make finishing up everything that I want to do in Hagga South that much easier. Essentially, once I get ready to make the migration to the next area, I will load up some basic materials and then find a safe place to cross the gap. I really should have put in a proper two-wide door into this base instead of having to try to navigate my bike out of a normal door. It works for now, but is more fiddly than I would have liked it. Oh well, these are things that I can fix in the next base, because I know I will be starting over once again just around the corner. Essentailly I am building these 2×3 foundation block huts that have a second story. It gives me plenty of room to put a few power generators down on the bottom floor and all of the necessary machines on the top floor. They are not architectural marvels, but they are efficient… which feels like is way more important while you are still roaming around the map prior to getting your ornithopter. I know Tam already has a decent base in Aluminum territory, so once I get up there, I can rely on that somewhat. I think it will be important that we build bases in decent spots so that we can each utilize the other bases as a bit of a network.
The thing that I marvel at most about this game is its sound design. Moving around the desert feels amazing because you are constantly aware of the sounds and movement of the worms below you. Additionally, combat noises feel really good, and the ever-present threat of the Sardaukar at night keeps you on your toes. It feels like the world is the real enemy that you are fighting against, though, and it is living and breathing and always waiting for you to slip up. All of that said… I am starting to get to the point where I am willing to take more risks because the worst thing that can happen is that I have to start over. Progression goes much faster once you know what you are doing, so the idea of losing everything is no longer as daunting as it once was. Sure, there are some key progression moments… first sandbike, first dune buggy, first ornithopter… but those are also things that other players can help you with. I am sure if I got desperate, I could get someone to craft me Sandbike bits again.
The other big thing that I noticed is that it feels like the world has way more resources than it used to. Even the patch that just dropped seems to have added a bunch of nodes that were not there yesterday. For example, my current base did not really have much copper around it, but this morning when I logged in, there were four nodes in the same valley that I built the base in. Essentially, it seems like the game is way more forgiving than it was at launch, which only serves to make me willing to be a bit more reckless with resources. It felt like, at launch, I spent a lot more time struggling to reach a point of sustainability, and I am not having any of those issues now. So I am not sure if they eased up on how fast you lose water, but that definitely feels a bit easier than it was before. Maybe I just rushed my way to the stillsuit faster this time.
Essentially, I am enjoying my time back in Dune Awakening, and we will see how far I can get before Path of Exile 3.28 drops.
Good Morning Folks! After giving you updates on my life… it is time to roll on into the rest of my year in review topics. I legitimately do not know how many of these I have, but I have stalled long enough. This morning I am going to talk about the games that were important to me during the last year in either a good way or a bad way. This list is not going to look anything like most 2025 in review lists, because I do not play a ton of new games. I play an awful lot of ARPGs and treat each season as though it were a game launch. This wildly skews the sort of results that I have in this scenario. I am also this time sort of loosely grouping the list into less important to more important, but not necessarily a strict order.
Path of Exile II: The Last of the Druids
This is probably the most recent of the games I am going to talk about it, and I am still more or less playing it. On December 12th, Path of Exile II released a big update that launched the Last of the Druids and Fate of the Vaal league. In it they gave us access to the first of the Int/Str hybrid classes the Druid which has ascendancies for Shaman and Oracle. More important than that, they gave us access to the primal ability tree and the talisman weapon that allow us to turn into a Bear, Wolf, or Wyvern. I’ve been deeply critical of Path of Exile II up until this point, seeing it as a bit of a mechanically worse version of Path of Exile that just happens to have better graphics and a better user interface. Playing Bear Druid, and specifically Demon Bear Shaman is what really pushed me over the edge to truly enjoying this game. It is fun as heck to hop around the map causing big explosions with my fat bear ass. The game still has problems… and will continue to have problems for a very long time… but this gameplay got me hooked.
Slormancer
Slormancer is a little 2D sorta isometric view roguelike arpglike game that is a heck of a lot of fun. I did not play this game anywhere near as much as I should have, but I hope to remedy that in 2026. I did play it enough however to want to talk about it. The mechanics of this game are just really fun, and it reminds me of what if you took Rogue Legacy and turned it into an ARPG. I mostly played the knight character, but the archer was pretty fun as well. This really wants to be played with a controller though, and is ideal for television gaming. Once I get off my ass and figure out what I want to use as a proper Steam in the Livingroom setup, I will probably be playing more of this. If you have not checked it out and like any of the types of games that I eluded to in this post… check it out. It’s a heck of a lot of fun for $20.
Dune Awakening
I have such wildly mixed feelings about Dune Awakening. This is going to be a game that goes in my disappointments of the year pile. The AggroChat folks and friends decided to play together on a private server that Tam rented for us as we all got started, and I feel like that is the correct way to play this game. It is unfortunate that it requires someone shelling out for a server, and it is even more unfortunate that it does not grant you private access to the shared open world pvp deep desert. What killed this game for me though… was upkeep. You are required to play a certain amount of this per week in order to generate enough fuel to keep the shield on your base active, or your base slowly disintegrates over time. This feels really fucking bad. Namely because I got busy with various events while playing this game… and then had the death of a spouse which knocked me even further out of whack with ever getting back in. Once I lost everything, there was no point in me going back. I would love to see a pure PVE sandbox version of this game that allows you to set custom rules on a server by server basis for things like upkeep. The game itself has gone from a peak concurrency of not quite 200k players to an average of 8k…. so I think maybe it did not work quite right for a lot of players.
Hellclock
So what if I told you there was a game… loosely based on the real world events surrounding Brazil’s War of Canudos… that took place in the aftermath of the abolishment of slavery, but also somehow involves exploring dungeons and killing zombies and shit? Hellclock is a deeply odd and stylistic roguelike ARPG where you have a fixed amount of time to explore on each run, and once you run out of time everything winds back and you get to keep any powerups that you purchased during the previous run. The cyclical nature of the game is deeply satisfying and you get various tools to extend your runs as you get better. I did not play anywhere near enough of this game but again I think it is prime fodder for once I sort out my Steam in the Livingroom setup. I have to solve my wireless network woes before I really do that unfortunately because I have my old gaming rig hooked up in the livingroom, the connectivity speeds are complete ass. I’ve also not really figured out a good keyboard and mouse option, and there will be games that I don’t necessarily want to play with a controller. Anyways NONE of that is about Hellclock, which is just a universally interesting game.
Titan’s Quest II
Titan’s Quest II had quite a number of updates throughout the year and I spent several days really getting into the game and checking out what it had to offer. I landed on the decision that I do not really enjoy playing a melee class in the game, but dig the heck out of playing ranged. I played a sort of icicle archer thing that worked really well, and honestly the game itself is just gorgeous. The fights are pretty interesting, and this is very much a worthy successor to the first game, which in itself was a worthy successor to Diablo II. If you like ARPGs in general or you were ever a fan of TItan’s Quest, then I suggest checking it out. They are continuing to release updates for the game as it is still in development so if you would rather play it once it is finished, then this might be a game to put a pin in and check back when the 1.0 release finally happens.
Abyssus
This game is a heck of a lot of fun to play with a friend, and Ace and I spent a bit of time playing this game and should probably at some point return to it. I think Destiny Rising more or less stole the place in our gaming lives that this took up for a bit. Essentially Abyssus is a wave based arena shooter rogue-like… about exploring the depths of an underwater dungeon. You and your friends take on waves of monsters, get loot, and work your way down to fixed boss fights at specific floors. The deeper you go the harder it gets and the more varied the environments become. Big Nautical-punk vibes with this game because you are both wearing these diving suits while you wield your big damned guns and kill things. The further you go the more points you get to configure your build and control your weapon load-outs, but a lot of options unlock symmetrically as you reach certain floors giving you a mix of guaranteed upgrades and choice based upgrades. I am not sure this game would be fun solo, but it was a blast with someone hanging out on voice chat.
Path of Exile – Mercenaries of Trarthus
Mercenaries of Trarthus was a challenge league that ran in Path of Exile from June 13th to October 27th and represented the first new content we had gotten in almost a year since the launch of Settlers of Kalguur the previous year. First it was just amazing to get some new content in the game, but more than that it introduced Mercenaries and I have always loved those sorts of mechanics in ARPGs. One of my favorite aspects of Diablo III was building out my companion to buff the things that were weak in my build, and that is largely what players did in order to make some truly busted builds. The real meta of the league was doing some sort of build that could apply large amounts of Lightning damage, and then using Doryani’s Prototype on your mercenary, to debuff all of the mobs in your presence to have large amounts of negative lighting resistance. I think the build that I ran as my second in the league managed to get close to -300% Lightning Resistance while dealing a ton of damage with Storm Brand of Indecision. It was thoroughly busted but lord did I have a lot of fun playing this league.
Monster Hunter Wilds
There will be some of you who do not remember just how much I got into Monster Hunter World when it released in 2018 both on the original PS4 release, and later when it came out on PC in August of that same year. I had never really mainlined a Monster Hunter game despite trying to dabble in them on the mobile platforms, but this game sucked me in and stole so much of my time. Monster Hunter Wilds was a return to the same style of game as Worlds and when it launched I had a heck of a lot of fun playing it. Sadly I did not really stick around as much as I thought I might, but that does not discount the fact that I had an awful lot of fun playing it. I probably would have played it more but every time Ammo, Sita and I tried to group up I started having network problems. Capcom… has some of the shittiest grouping systems ever, and if they got someone from a western live service game to come unfuck their game interface… I think folks would be around far longer. I only put in around 60 hours, but it was 60 hours well spent.
Last Epoch – Beneath Ancient Skies
On August 21st Last Epoch dropped a pretty signfiicant update with Beneath Ancient Skies which added a whole new chapter to the game and a new league mechanic hunting down primal monsters and chosing to evolve them making them more difficult and rewarding. I had a really fun league with this game, but ultimately I burned through it pretty quickly. I played a Fire Minions Necromancer build and then ultimately hopped on the Thorns damage train for quite possibly the stupidest build I have ever played in any game where I am just nuking the entire screen with thorns damage. The new act was a lot of fun and it is probably the best content they have added into the game to date. The primal league mechanic was also a lot of fun, and each time this game expands it keeps getting better. I think the challenge for me is that I “finish” with the game way faster than I do with Path of Exile. I reach a point with my builds where I have seen everything that I really want to see and really pushing to the true pinnacle content of the game requires more hours than I really want to dump into it. That is not a failing of the game and more a case that it still needs more years to cook before it will be as rich of an experience as Path of Exile has.
Path of Exile – Legacy of Phrecia Event
Earlier when I talked about Mercenaries of Trarthus, part of the reason why that league was so damned much fun is that it had been a literal year since we last got a new league in the game. So much of GGG’s time was being devoted to the care and feeding of the fledgling Path of Exile II, that the POE core felt ignored. That is not to say things were not happening, we had a few fun private leagues like the Pohx League event, but there was one thing that probably took the cake. Almost as a shadow drop, Grinding Gear Games gave us the Legacy of Phrecia alternative ruleset event where every single one of the 19 Ascendancy classe were replaced. It was wild to play through this and I played a Righteous Fire Scavenger… which is the alternative version of the Scion. It was so much fun, and now this game mode exists as an alternate ruleset that you can use to create custom leagues. There is part of me though that wishes at some point all of the Phrecia ascendancies go core and become just alternate options allowing us 38 different ascendancy choices in the game.
Destiny Rising
Destiny Rising is essentially my game of the year…. but it does not get the top slot for reasons I will talk about later. This is a gacha game from Net Ease that remixes the tried and true Destiny format, but also makes it a heck of a lot more enjoyable in the process. There is no reason why I should be loving a Gacha game as much as I am, because I thought Genshin Impact broke me of that. However… Destiny Rising is shockingly fair when it comes to its Gacha mechanics. I have 3 accounts, 2 of which I have spent zero money on… and they both feel like I have plenty of things to do without having spent a dime. The whole three acccouints thing is largely because I am trying to maintain a guild when there are really only two or three of us that are actively playing. That is a whole other discussion. If you ever loved Destiny at any point in the past, you owe it to yourself to check out Destiny Rising. It is so damned much fun and really streamlines what made that game great. If you DO end up playing… hit me up because we certainly can use some more active players in our guild to do dailies.
Guild Wars 2 Fractal Incursion Event
My “Game of the Year” really goes to more specifically an event of the year. In September, Guild Wars 2 shadow dropped an event called the Fractal Incursion. This added a new feature to the game which allowed you to randomly queue for Fractals, giving the game what it needed so badly… a more modern group finder. Not only did they do this… they bribed the fuck out of us to run tons of them by providing a path to a piece of legendary armor, and also giving you a pathway to get said armor for every single weight class in the game. The end result was that Lion’s Arch specifically around the Mists portal was busier than at any point I have ever seen in this game’s history. The above screenshot was taken one morning when I was working on my blog post… so completely off peak hours for either EU or NA and it was STILL packed. Better yet we are going to be getting a version of this same group finder for a combined version of Raids and Strikes later this year. This has breathed so much new life into Guild Wars 2, and prompted us to have some really fun Thursday night fractal groups as we all chain ran them trying to get through the achievements. Absolutely the highlight of my gaming year, and on the 13th I believe we are getting a return of the Fractal Rush event so looking forward to that as well.
Those were my games and gaming events of the year. I am sure it looks pretty different than the lists for most people. I did not really play much in the way of single player experiences this year. I hope to remedy that in 2026, but who knows where that will go. My happy place tends to be listening to an audiobook while plugging away at a mechanically interesting but narratively devoid experience. Even for this coming year my games list will be the games that I played, not necessarily the games that came out so at some point when I finally do get around to beating Clair Obscur it will probably make a list. Anyways. Were there any unusual games that made your personal Games of the Year list? Drop me a line below.
