August 2026 Roundup

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from Big Walk

Hello dear readers, happy August (and ragweed season, ick) to you. It’s been hot, damn hot here lately so I’ve been spending lots of time in our very temperate and newly-remodeled basement, from which I’m penning this.

I’ve been thinking, and I’ve reached a point where I’ve got to be more realistic with myself when it comes to my gaming habits — because of my ADHD tendencies I’ve made a habit of forcing myself to finish games before picking up another due to my tendency of getting distracted by the new shiny object and ultimately finishing none of them. This kind of effort has been healthy for me before (and in other parts of my life), but I think I also need to be reasonable and allow myself to drop a game now and then, even if I’m mostly enjoying it. Any game left unfinished has led to a persistent open tab in the back of my brain which doesn’t feel great, and I’m feeling the need to shift my mindset. When it comes to the blog, I feel guilty about giving a game a score if I haven’t hit end credits on it yet, so in effect that leaves some games in perpetual limbo, even games I mostly liked (looking at you, Mewgenics). I think there’s got to be a happy medium where I feel like I’ve seen enough to pass judgment. I dunno, I’ll figure out what works for me eventually.

If nothing else, allowing myself to drop some titles will afford me the space to start new games — like Star Wars : Zero Company, a game that came completely out of nowhere and has really scratched a tactical itch I’ve had for a while without being fully conscious of it. Expect some impressions in a month or two from now. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here’s my slate of finished games from August which were uniformly pretty great, with two even reaching all-timer status! Starting off with a legitimate game of the year contender…

It really is about the journey, in this case.

Big Walk

Overall Score

★ ★ ★

Must-Play

Some games are simultaneously both easy and difficult to describe. Such is the case for Big Walk, the newest co-op sensation recently released by House House, the Australian developer responsible for the goofy and chaotic Untitled Goose Game — a perfect interactive representation of the “go, do a crime” meme. Big Walk is quite different from their previous endeavor though, aiming for less goose-based shenanigans and more nature-trekking and puzzle-solving, creating a singular and unique experience that you can play through with a handful of friends (or perfect strangers!). It’s pretty unassuming at first look though, and takes some explaining to really reveal what’s special about it.

The term “friendslop” has recently become a mainstay of the gaming lexicon. It sounds derogatory, but is more of a good-natured ribbing of games with short development cycles that focus on a core loop of doing some kind of activity with a small group of friends. Examples are the excellent PEAK, a light-hearted game about being stranded on an island and having to cooperatively ascend a dangerous mountain in order to call for help, and last year’s R.E.P.O., which has you and your buds controlling a bunch of gabbin’ robots who are trying to extract valuables from haunted places full of bizarre and sometimes terrifying creatures. The common throughline is that these games focus on a relatively simple core loop but with enough randomization (or escalating levels of difficulty) that it makes it interesting for your group to come back to repeatedly. They also tend to be priced quite affordably (I again refer you to the PEAK dev’s famous spiel) to the point where grabbing it for a few fun, memorable sessions with your buds is well worthwhile.

Big Walk is also available at an affordable price point (About $20), but where it differs greatly is its central premise. The repeatable, randomized core loop of the friendslop genre isn’t present here; instead what you’ll find is a huge, detailed island wilderness full of unique puzzles that test your ability to communicate and coordinate with a group of friends. You can play Big Walk with as few as two people or as many as 12, but the puzzles are designed to scale for 2, 3, or 4+ players. I played through with two good friends of mine who I used to do Savage-tier raids in Final Fantasy XIV with, but I also had an experience playing with a group of 6 which was both uniquely fun and more chaotic. The puzzles never change between playthroughs aside from scaling for the number of players, so expect this to be more of a one-time experience to savor.

It must be said that good communication is the key to success in Big Walk, and it cleverly utilizes an in-game proximity voice chat that quickly falls off in volume as you get farther away from your friends. Most of the puzzles you find are based around this limitation, forcing you to use various hand signals or other ways of conveying your intent. Other puzzles will limit you in other ways like physically blocking your line of sight, restricting your movement or vision in some way, or even just slapping a pane of sound-proof glass between you that you have to account for. The puzzles start easy in the initial area but quickly get subtly devious and challenging as you progress, though the many years of talking through raid strategies with my friends definitely gave us a leg up. The cleverness and complexity ramps up and made for a lot of fun surprises, and I also need to point out that this game can be so damn funny at times. The odd limitations it places on you makes for some natural comedic moments, and the one goofball in your friend group will inevitably also find many, many ways to make you laugh through game mechanics.

It’s also just kind of a beautiful game? It fosters a light-hearted atmosphere with its antlike player characters whose mouths go noot-noot as the player talks, and the approach of putting bright primary-colored puzzle areas against a lush, detailed wilderness environment (designed in the image of Australian national parks) makes for a unique visual style that also makes the island easy to navigate. There is a day-night cycle, and it gets so dark at night that all you can see of your friends is the glow of their eyeballs, and in the darkness you may just have to hunker down and wait for the (gorgeous) sunrise if you didn’t plan ahead and bring a light. The sound design also deserves accolades, the whooshing sound effects when you make hand signals and the pitter-patter of your feet against the various surfaces you’ll walk across are very satisfying. Voices will reverberate in enclosed spaces and may carry farther than you think based on the area’s acoustic profile. You can be very objective-driven through Big Walk, but I still found that it gave a lot of natural breaks to slow down, enjoy the sights, and to just chat with your friends and catch up on what’s happening in their lives.

And that, I believe, is the biggest draw and differentiator between Big Walk and other similar games. It ends up feeling like a chill journey with your friends, and is a memorable trip at that. I’m fortunate enough to have a group of friends I regularly game with, but I’ve also seen anecdotes of others who found strangers to play with through LFG threads in Discord and came out the other side having had an absolute blast (and in some instances, with new friends). It’s hard not to get emotional at the end of the game, seeing the journey coming to its natural conclusion and walking off into the proverbial sunset. It’s thematically beautiful, a feast for the eyes and ears, and also incredibly accessible even to people who don’t play a ton of games. It comes with my highest recommendation, and is one of the best games I’ve played so far in 2026. Walk on!

🎶We're knights of the round table, our shows are for-mid-able🎶

Sovereign Tower

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Ah yes, the “Choices Matter” genre, one that is like an irresistible catnip to me. I love it when a game drops a serious moral dilemma into my lap, especially if my choice will have huge ramifications for how the following events play out. Sovereign Tower by Wild Wits Games wasn’t on my radar until it was practically ready to launch, but when I saw it in my Steam release calendar I knew it was going to be worth a play. I’d totally missed out on royal management sim Yes, Your Grace and… wait, they already made a sequel to that game, just last year. Ugh. My backlog is already a dragon I will never slay, so I think it doesn’t need to be any longer. My apologies, your Grace.

Anyhow. Sovereign Tower! You play the role of a lowly leper who narrowly escapes an attack on their village by the Empire of Angelor and then is unexpectedly judged worthy to open the titular tower of legend, thus becoming its Sovereign. The tower is enchanted with powerful magic, giving its Sovereign reign over the surrounding lands of Brizh as well as giving the knights that serve its round table capabilities beyond ordinary mortals. Your ascension inevitably attracts attention from the surrounding lands, for better or worse, and you must build up your retinue of advisors and knights in order to confront the challenges that will come your way.

I made the comparison to Yes, Your Grace earlier because most of what you’ll be doing here is taking audiences with petitioners from the lands of Brizh and beyond, hearing of their plight, and making decisions on how address all of these various problems which fall anywhere between petty disputes between nobles and potentially kingdom-destroying conspiracies. The other main portion of this game consists of assigning your knights to embark beyond the tower walls on quests to solve these problems. This part actually reminds me of last year’s excellent Dispatch, specifically in that in both games your success is based on the core stats of who you send forth to see that your will be done. Your knights have six stats : Strength, Agility, Charisma, Luck, Magic, and Wit. Beyond that, your knights also have distinct personalities and character traits which could affect their performance on missions, cause unexpected outcomes, or cause them to rebel or leave your service if the tasks they’re put on are frequently distasteful to them. Unlike Dispatch, however, there is no random element to their success or failure; it is determined solely by a points system that takes into account their stats, their gear, and their unique traits (which I appreciate). For example, send kind-hearted animal-loving knight Angelica on a quest to slay a great forest wolf terrorizing a village and she may instead just come back to the tower with a new friend in tow.

This highly incentivizes reading the quest text closely and doing your best to match the most suitable knight(s) to the task at hand. They will often drop hints to their unique quirks in conversation, or you can also just assign your attendant (and shameless gossip) Alwena to investigate rumors about them. Since you will spend so much time conversing with your knights and the people of Brizh, it’s a pleasure for me to report that the writing is uniformly excellent. The lovable idiots at your round table have specific strengths, quirks, and vices and will often offer unique quests when you reach a certain level of trust with them. There are also unique synergies between knights assigned to quests together, or hidden attributes that only reveal themselves under certain circumstances. This encourages experimentation and bolsters replayability, though it’s inevitable that you’ll make at least a few bad calls and be confronted with the loss of a knight or another painful consequence.

But you can always go back. In the deepest depths of the tower dungeon is an imprisoned demon who will offer you the ability to turn back the hands of time and rectify your mistakes, or even simply to see an alternative conclusion to a storyline. Time travel, baby! This is where I think Sovereign Tower really distinguishes itself; you can actually take all that knowledge back with you in a concrete way. Unlike a game like Outer Wilds where you take literally nothing back with you but an understanding of how that world works, your Sovereign actually retains their core attributes and can also use their foreknowledge of events as a game mechanic; you will actually get new dialogue options that inevitably freak out your petitioners and advisors with your penchant for somehow knowing exactly what is to come. With your retained Sovereign attributes — the four statistics of Audacity, Wisdom, Tyranny, and Kindness — you also gain access to choices only available when those attributes reach a certain threshold. The choice is yours when it comes to how you want to rule and if/when to use the demon’s power. Even if you decide to avoid using it, the fact that it is constantly whispering “you could have prevented this outcome” into your ear adds additional weight to your decisions. It also adds a level of replayability that is more accessible without starting the entire game from square one again. Aside from a few minor continuity issues that I saw after a rewind, they mostly pulled off this herculean juggling act (subsequent patches have also helped). Thinking about how many intertwined variables they are probably tracking behind the curtain makes the programmer part of me want to lay down and cover my head. Seriously, it’s impressive.

With its beautiful ripped-from-a-storybook aesthetic, compelling and frequently funny character writing, meaningful decisions, and surprising depth, Sovereign Tower is an easy recommendation from me. There is a ton to enjoy here, and it’s obvious that its development team enjoyed creating it as well. Can’t wait to see what they do next.

A PC-98 throwback with modern sensibilities

Stories From Sol: The Gun-Dog [2025]

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

The Visual Novel genre has always been a bit of an odd bird. I’m one who really loves long, detailed narratives, but when playing a VN often wonder to myself if the story being told would have been better suited to being expanded within a physical text. I’m definitely not a hater or gameplay purist, there are some traditional VNs that I love (still begging everyone to play The House in Fata Morgana), but the medium of games is ripe for stories that let the player guide them to some extent.

Stories from Sol - The Gun-Dog initially drew me in with its eye-catching, detailed pixel work, but held onto me by presenting a great story with memorable characters and a deceptive amount of player choice. The visual stylings evoke the era of PC-98 adventure games and feature some really great technical art. It’s set against the backdrop of a war that has engulfed the solar system, with humans who have colonized the outer planets (Mars and the moons of Jupiter) pitted against Earth forces. The main character, who you name, is a recently-recruited Armored Frame (read: mobile suit) pilot in the Jovian military, set to launch on their first mission during the final battle in Earth orbit… Only, when the launch order comes, nothing happens. The ship’s suit docking collar jams and will not release the Frame, so our protagonist is forced to sit there helplessly and listen to the panicked comms of their squadron as they are ambushed and picked off one-by-one.

This trauma sits with them even 4 years later, long after an armistice is signed and they have been promoted to Lieutenant and assigned to be the security officer of the JFS Gun-Dog, a fast-response gunboat ship. Their paramour Cassie has pulled some strings to get them reassigned to the Gun-Dog alongside her, where she is second-in-command. After a brief introduction to the ship and the various strong personalities that make up its crew, the Gun-Dog is hit by an unknown energy pulse that completely knocks out the ship’s power and communications, and results in both the Captain and Cassie being incapacitated. Within this leadership vacuum, you must take action to re-enable power and life support and thus save the ship’s crew, and then figure out who (or what) disabled the Gun-Dog and ravaged the other Jovian military ship that you were scheduled to rendezvous with.

The major story beats are mostly set in stone, but there are a surprising number of choices you can make along the way (some not even readily apparent) that determine the fate of several supporting characters and what attitudes they hold toward you. The script is quite well-written and features some delicious conflict between your character and other crewmembers, the most notable among them being Hansen Crwys, the only other survivor of your AF squad that was decimated in the last battle above earth. Hansen constantly needles and torments the protagonist and unfairly blames them for the death of their comrades, and it’s largely up to the player whether you decide to take the high road and try to change his opinion of you, let the comments slide, or give in and decide to antagonize him right back. After the game ends you’re shown a story graph with all the major choices you could have made, and I was surprised to see just how many there were. After finishing the game I looked up what some of the other potential routes were and was surprised to see that the death of a supporting character I experienced in my playthrough was not set in stone, one or more of the crew may lose their lives or survive based on your choices.

Stories from Sol impressed me; it’s a solid sci-fi visual novel with some meaningful player influence on the course of the story, boosted by some great animations and technical design. It comes in at a relatively tight 5 to 6 hours of gameplay and is great on a portable device like a Steam Deck, so I highly recommend giving it a whirl if this is your style of game. It apparently sold fairly well and may end up getting a sequel, and if it does, it’ll be a day 1 play for me.

Danger, danger! High voltage!

ElecHead [2021]

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Whoops, Mike-wearing-editor-hat here with a late addition to the post. Here’s another bite-sized puzzle game from Nama Takahashi, the developer that created the excellent puzzle game Öoo, which I reviewed back in March. The two games share a lot in common, both are puzzle games built around one central mechanic. In this one, you’re a little robot dude deployed to a moon facility to determine why the power is out, and if possible, to get it back online. Due to its short length (and the fact that I played it on the Steam Deck while our basement was being worked on), I nearly forgot to include it on this month’s list! That’d have been a real shame, because there’s a lot to love about ElecHead.

Where Öoo had you strategically placing bombs to solve puzzles, ElecHead is about using the power within your battery-like character to complete circuits and power different areas of rooms. Within the screenshots you’ll notice that some platforms are lit up yellow, this means that they are energized and with the circuit completed, will trigger platforms to move (or traps to trigger). Not far into the game, your character gains the ability to throw their head (which is the power source) in a cardinal direction, which allows you to more carefully manipulate what is and is not powered at a given time. After throwing your head you have 10 seconds to move your body to rejoin it, else your battery boi perishes. It’s a really interesting mechanic and Takahashi deploys it well in the back half of the game; some of the later puzzles are trickier than you might think given how simple the basic mechanics are.

It’s definitely worth a play, and can easily be completed within a handful of hours. Both it and its spiritual successor Öoo are great little games, but if I had to choose between the two I’d give ElecHead a slight edge for how clever the lategame puzzles are.

Big Walk on Mike's Musings

August 2026 Roundup