Death Howl on Mike's Musings

January 2026 Roundup

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cover photo from The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy.

Welcome to the January 2026 Roundup, a collection of brief thoughts about the various games I’ve been playing this month. Given that a full review is a lot of work to put together, I think this is a nice compromise, almost like a game journal. I imagine this will be a bit longer than its successors, as I also wanted to talk about several games I tried during my extended vacation at the end of last year. I’ll begin with my favorite of the batch…

I'm over the moon for...

Death Howl

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

A pleasant surprise toward the end of 2025, Death Howl is a tactical deckbuilder game in which the protagonist Ro travels through a fantastical and dangerous spirit world on a journey through loss, grief, and acceptance. The build synergies are excellent, the art is eye-catching, and I highly recommend it even to those like myself who aren’t typically into deckbuilders.

I wrote a full review of Death Howl which can be read here..

I devoured...

Consume Me

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

A really great slice-of-life game that also manages to be very relatable. Consume Me is based on developer Jenny Jiao Hsia’s personal experiences in high school into college but I think it will also resonate with anyone who has ever gone on a crash diet and painstakingly counted calories in order to lose weight. The game deftly handles some pretty heavy subject material including disordered eating and an unhealthy obsession with hyperoptimizing every element of life. This is not sustainable, of course, and Consume Me does not pretend that it ever can be, showing how everything crashed down around Jenny when it all became too much to juggle. Don’t take this to mean that the game is some sort of dour cautionary tale though; the art is colorful and vibrant and its goofy animations and sharp sense of humor kept me laughing throughout. It’s a brave and risky thing to put so much of yourself into a piece of art, but it came together in a very cohesive, and enjoyable package.

I find that a lot of autobiographical games like this tend to mostly focus on telling the author’s story and are light on actual game mechanics. Consume Me is a notable exception here; practically every action in the game is associated with a WarioWare-esque minigame, whether that be folding the laundry, putting together a healthy lunch, walking the dog, or trying to keep Jenny’s wandering eyes on her assigned summer reading. All of that is assembled within the framework of a daily schedule in which you’re tasked with putting the right strings of actions together in order to balance Jenny’s energy, happiness, and hunger with getting all of her weekly tasks done. It throws some serious curveballs at you, especially in later chapters. Part of Chapter 5 seemed literally impossible at first, but the game subtly nudged me toward the power of unhealthy amounts of caffiene and extraordinarily late nights as a way of gaining near-infinite actions at the expense of Jenny’s overall health and happiness. It’s ludonarrative harmony at its best, where the mechanics reinforce the core themes of the narrative, and overall is a superb balancing act by the developers. It’s a great time, and it comes highly recommended from me.

I took a chance on...

Q-UP

Overall Score

No Recommendation

Imagine an esport in which all of consideration of balance is removed, where the RNG is always perfectly fair and everything comes down to 50/50 odds. Well Q-UP literally does this, with every round being based around two teams competing over a series of coin flips with each team winning when their selected side comes out on top after the flip. The game is a tongue-in-cheek work, poking fun at esports devs fruitlessly pursuing that unattainable moving target of Perfect Game Balance.

There are character classes to pick from as well as skill trees… Why, you ask? Because in the end this is a classic “number go up” type of game, where you tailor your selected skills to emphasize the strong points and cover the weaknesses of your selected character. It didn’t quite hit for me, but I could see this being enjoyable to people who love spending hours buildcrafting and sitting back while their chosen strategy pays off, launching their score into the stratosphere. I will say that the humor in the game’s UI, item flavor text, and fake emails from the corporation behind Q-UP is all very funny if you follow the internal workings of the games industry. It’s not quite enough of a game to keep me coming back to it, but its sharp and humorous evisceration of modern esports did have me laughing.

I plinked around in...

Nubby's Number Factory

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

The Price is Right was basically late-morning white noise in my household growing up, a pleasant distraction between the early morning news/talk shows and the afternoon soap operas ubiquitous to network TV. I think most people who saw it will remember Plinko, the game where the contestant climbed to the top of a tall pegboard and dropped a bouncy disc which would eventually settle into a cradle at the bottom corresponding to various amounts of money and prizes. I’m confident in saying that the dev behind Nubby’s Number Factory also remembers Plinko, because it marries that basic setup of a bouncy object plinking around a board with a run-based buildcrafting system. It reminds me a lot of Balatro in that way, but instead of creating poker hands you’re launching the eponymous Nubby at the pegs below, trying to create a perfect series of bounces that will rack up a boatload of points. It’s become one of those games I’ll fire up when I need to play something that doesn’t require a ton of brainpower (more common than I’d like lately) and is a fun, welcome distraction from.. Well, motions at everything. It also looks like something straight out of the 90s edutainment software aesthetic which is yet another point in its favor.

I am still savoring...

The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy

Overall Score

★

Recommended

This is an ambitious, anime-styled hybrid of a visual novel and a turn-based tactics game from the developers who brought you the Danganronpa and Zero Escape series. A group of high school students are whisked away from their normal lives to the titular Last Defense Academy and chosen to defend a secret at the heart of the school that could be the salvation or doom of humanity. The narrative is vast and branching with 100 different potential endings, and I am still working my way through some of the late-game scenarios I want to see. I’m really enjoying it overall and have a lot of thoughts, so I plan to write a full review article for this soon. Stay tuned.

I wrapped up...

Promise Mascot Agency

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

”Former Yakuza enforcer is exiled to the countryside to run a contracting agency for bizarre mascots” is one of those game pitches that sounds like it came right out of a fever dream, and ultimately was one I couldn’t pass up. This game comes from Kaizen Game Works, developers of the well-regarded murder mystery game Paradise Killer. It leans into and pokes fun at all of the typical yakuza tropes, and leans so far into this bit that they were actually able to get the japanese voice of Kazuma Kiryu, Mr. Yakuza himself Takaya Kuroda as the main character Michi AKA “The Janitor.” After disgracing himself and putting his yakuza family in financial ruin by botching a major financial transaction, Michi’s death is faked and he is sent to the rural town of Kaso-Machi to redeem himself by restarting a long-dormant mascot agency and making as much money as he can for the family.

Mascots in this world aren’t simply people in costumes, they’re supernatural life forms who take on all sorts of shapes and personalities. Michi’s main assistant and primary companion is Pinky, a brash and hilarious mascot in the shape of a giant severed fingertip. I really was not exaggerating when I called this concept a fever dream. Fortunately, the mascot and human characters you meet in Kaso-Machi are charming and often very funny. You’ll spend most of your gameplay driving around in Michi’s nigh-indestructible all-terrain kei truck, assigning mascots to jobs around the town, and unraveling the mystery surrounding a yakuza-killing curse purported to be on the town. I was struck by the quality of the narrative, the charm of the various oddball mascots (business cat Salary-Nyan and sentient foodstuff To-Fu being my favorites), and the sheer density of things to do in Kaso-Machi. This is an open-world checklist game à la Assassin’s Creed with tons of stuff to do on the map, but remarkably it is condensed into a fraction of the time any of those games take to play. I hit 100% achievements and saw most of what the game has to offer in a tight 18 hours, and I can’t help but feel like modern, bloated open-world games should take notes from it. I typically don’t play those types of game specifically because they are so overstuffed, so Promise Mascot Agency was really a breath of fresh air and made me believe they could be more focused and probably better overall for it.

I sampled...

StarRupture [EARLY ACCESS]

TBD

Overall Score

Recommendation TBD

”It’s basically Satisfactory,” say all of the reductive takes on the internet. Well, ok, they’re not completely wrong. StarRupture definitely shares the same DNA as the factory-genre giant (and personal favorite of mine), but in my brief five hours with it I found that it is trying to differentiate itself through its greater emphasis on combat with native fauna, its deeper characterization with its main cast of interstellar indentured prisoners, and of course the cycle of the nearby star erupting and the planet regenerating from its damage. I’m not sure how engaging that cycle is after the first couple of times you see it or how well-realized the characters are (the voice acting could use some work) but it’s VERY early access so I will reserve judgment. Generally my policy on early access games is that I’ll play it for a short time and then shelve it until 1.0 as long as I think it’s got potential. All the essential elements for something fun is there, so hopefully this team is able to fully develop and mesh them together over time.

I slowed down for...

Wanderstop

TBD

Overall Score

Recommendation TBD

Not much to say here yet because I’m still early on in Wanderstop, but I’m already charmed by its characters and earnest approach to the subject of burnout. The main character Alta is acutely dealing with this after her career as a gladiator takes a precipitous dive after years of being undefeated. After collapsing in the woods while looking for a legendary warrior to re-train her, Alta is forced to slow down and acknowledge that sheer effort is sometimes counterproductive. The gameplay revolves around Alta helping to run a tea shop in the woods while she recovers and heals, and is a narrative about life changes and healing. It’s charming so far and I’ve found it to be well-written and relatable. I’ll report back after I’ve seen more of what it has to offer.

Review : Death Howl [2025]

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never fully been able to put my finger on why, but using the term “deckbuilder” when describing a game has historically been a surefire way to make me immediately lose interest in it. Despite having several friends that were into Magic the Gathering and other collectible card games, I never personally got into them. I think primary hangup on these types of games might have something to do with the mental effort necessary to craft a cohesive deck out of so many options, but also from needing to juggle the mental load within a game, running the mental probabilities of getting a card from my draw pile that might make a specific tactic work. Maybe that’s not strictly necessary for casual play, but I have the type of personality where when I commit to a new hobby or game I have a deep need to be good at it.

Death Howl is one of the rare games that has been able to push past my reluctance to engage with deckbuilding games and even ended up being one I truly loved. It describes itself as a “soulslike deckbuilder,” a combination of genres that I can’t say that I’ve seen before. I’d personally describe it as a grid-based tactical deckbuilder game with soulslike elements; sometimes I do feel as if the soulslike label is simply overused as shorthand for a difficult game but I do see other parallels that I’ll touch on later.

The biggest element that got me to ignore my initial reservations is the fantastic pixel art and dark vibes of the setting. Death Howl is a story set in 6000BC Scandinavia where a mother (and budding shaman) named Ro journeys into the spirit world to bring back the soul of her deceased son Olvi, who suffered an untimely death under circumstances that are initially unclear to the player. The spirit world is beautiful but harsh, and she is beset on all sides by spirits of wild beasts and other twisted beings, hellbent on preventing her from disrupting the natural order of life and death. It effectively mixes magical elements with the grounded reality of human emotion, and is a highly affecting contemplation on death, grieving, and guilt. The aesthetic is truly excellent, with the aforementioned pixel art featuring strong character design, vibrant colors and grotesquely beautiful creature art. The sound and music is worth shouting out as well; most of the tracks are understated but thrum with latent tension and dread, kicking up the drums, shakers, and other percussive instruments when combat begins.

Death Howl’s card interactions and deckbuilding mechanics are also incredibly well designed. One very smart thing that does is that it limits the maximum size of the player’s deck to a slim 20 cards, which helped to make the mental load of calculating probabilities far more manageable for me. It also limits you to a maximum of 5 exhaust cards, which are powerful but are discarded for the remainder of the battle and will not recycle back to your draw pile. When it comes time to create your deck, you will start with Realmless cards as a base and will gradually unlock cards specific to the region you are in which synergize with its central mechanics. There are 4 main regions in the spirit world and each will ask you to play in a drastically different way and build your deck to suit one of a few playstyles specific to it.

Ro has 5 mana at the start of the battle and this recharges every on player turn. Cards have a mana cost associated with them, and playing them in various ways will charge Ro’s Overwhelmed special meter which has a different effect per region such as healing Ro, restoring her mana, et cetera. Importantly, cards from a realm different from the one you’re currently in are hit with an additional +1 mana cost. This makes it so that realm-specific cards still can be played in different realms, but you’re encouraged to create decks specifically tailored for certain zones that primarily feature cards unlocked there. This keeps the deckbuilding element fresh and interesting. In games with this many options there is a natural tendency for players to try to find one approach that works well and use it like a skeleton key to crack open the rest of the game; fortunately Death Howl avoids this pitfall and is all the better for it.

Each region has a set of central mechanics that the decks naturally synergize with. All are very engaging, and it’s hard for me to pick a favorite region because the synergies are all so strong and satisfying to use, whether that be the emphasis on high mobility and backstabbing enemies in the Realm of Hostile Plains region, or the complete opposite in the Realm of Piercing Winds which rewards you for moving as little as possible, dragging enemies to you, and tanking their hits by building up your block stat (which also fills your Overwhelmed gauge). Winning battles and acquiring crafting materials expands the array of cards available to you, and it was both delightful and agonizing to see great new cards appear and wondering what I’m going to drop from my deck to make room for them.

So as to why the developers describe this as soulslike – the game definitely brings the difficulty and intimately learning its core systems and enemy attack patterns are crucial to survival. You’ll take a lot of damage and barely scrape through battles early on in new regions, before you begin to unlock realm-specific cards. Enemies also respawn whenever you rest at a ritual circle, this game’s equivalent of bonfires. Fortunately the game does let you roam freely from realm to realm and perhaps encourages you to do so, because each area has its own specific progression tree featuring a unique buff trinket and allows you to unlock an additional trinket slot that is a permanent character upgrade. You can also freely experiment with deck creation; there are 15 unique save slots for decks that you can freely swap between and tweak between battles. Often you’ll be tasked with getting through several difficult battles in a row; tailoring your deck to the challenge, playing cautiously, and preserving your health becomes very important in these instances. Each area also features a fully unique boss encounter where the puzzle-like design of the encounters really shines. In the game’s best encounters, you may find yourself chaining together a golden set of actions that lets you rip through the enemies and end your turn with all enemies dead or otherwise unable to harm you, and these instances are so incredibly satisfying and reward strategic play. Build your deck right and you will almost never find yourself saying “I got screwed by a bad draw.” Although this is not a genre I frequently engage with, I still found the level of challenge to be well-balanced and rarely frustrating.

It’s a testament to Death Howl’s solid design and unique aesthetic that it got even an avowed deckbuilder hater like me to not just play it, but play it to 100% completion. If any of this has sounded even slightly appealing I encourage you to at least give its demo a try. It’s a triumph on so many levels, with fantastic system design and a somber, affecting atmosphere and story.

Overall Score

★ ★

Highly Recommended

Read about my rating methodology here.