It’s August 2025, and here’s what we’ve been playing, getting excited about, and tinkering with this month in video games.

All games were played on PC, and independently sourced, unless we note otherwise. All writing was done by the editor unless noted otherwise.

Want to talk about a video game you like or are looking forward to? Want to talk about a publisher you don’t like? Want to talk about accessibility, or lack thereof, in video games? Want to talk about a cool arcade? Want to publish something vaguely related that we haven’t even thought of yet? E-mail us a short paragraph or two with your idea at please@makebad.games - no experience required! Also just say hi at the same address, why not?

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What we’re playing

Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus, 2020, PC, NS, PS, XB)

The following review of Spiritfarer was written by intrepid honorary Raccoon Dr. Margaret Downs PhD., who played across PC and Nintendo Switch.

Margaret is a biochemist and casual gamer who also enjoys martial arts and food-centric adventures.

Sometimes, a piece of media enters your life at the perfect time. Spiritfarer came to me in winter 2020, when a combination of the pressures of a PhD program, the general sociopolitical landscape, and a stressful relationship had me feeling pretty hopeless, alone and generally ill-equipped for the world around me. You wouldn't think a game that’s fundamentally about death would've soothed my exhausted soul in the way it did, but it felt tailor-made for me at the time.

I've revisited it a few times over the years since, but haven't done another complete play-through. I’ve found that it’s like certain kinds of leftover meals: still good and warm and nourishing, perhaps accompanied by the noticing of new characteristics, but not quite as captivating as the first go-round.

In Spiritfarer, you play as Stella, accompanied by her fluffy yellow cat Daffodil. Your job is to guide souls as they finish their tasks on earth and move on to the afterlife, keeping them fed and happy as you ferry them to their ultimate fate on the other side of the Everdoor. To give you a sense of the kind of game this is, there's a mechanic to hug the characters and Daffodil. Each character also has their own mini-game that helps you gather resources to expand your ship, along with what you're able to collect as you sail around the map. 

The game masterfully strikes the balance of resource management mechanics against plot, and is set against soft, soothing audio and visuals. It all lended itself to exploring and building for hours on end, in a way that few other games (or honestly, pieces of media in general) have for me. I wish I could experience the low-pressure, slow pace of the game for the first time again, because I haven't found anything quite like it before or since, even on a replay. 

I don't think this is just down to knowing what's coming, but also the fact that the order in which you meet characters is random, creating experiences of varying impact each playthrough. Back in 2020, the two departures that I found most emotionally-charged coming back-to-back (sweet, grandmotherly Alice and jovial uncle Atul) resulted in the game bringing me peace, a sense of accomplishment, and closure, at a time that I badly needed it.

It’s not news that Spiritfarer, declared the Best Indie Game at the Game Awards in 2020, is good, but (and this is odd to say), maybe it’s better when the world - the personal or the exterior - is crumbling. Being a person in the world means I'm greeted with new horrors at a dizzying speed, which are only magnified by being a queer woman scientist in the US. Revisiting the game in summer 2025, I felt all of this deeply, aware of past and present horrors all at once.

Two things surprised me when I went back. First, I noticed from the title screen that my associations with the first play-through were strong; I was transported to the uncomfortable futon in my old apartment where I sat for much of my first playthrough. To ward off the tight feeling in my chest and throat that I now know to be a manifestation of the anxiety I carried with me for much of my twenties, I had to consciously remind myself that my life looks very different than it did five years ago.

Second, the game begins with the character of Charon emphasizing the weight of your responsibility; amazingly, that didn’t put me off of the game in 2020, a time when I already felt I was carrying more than I could handle in life. But, as I began the game again recently, I was struck by the support you receive, as Stella, from your passengers and other characters. Even the Capitalist Overlord Raccoons who run the stalls where you buy and sell supplies are there to help you, and the occasional grumpiness you encounter from them resolves itself into a comforting companionship. Maybe that support is another part of why Spiritfarer was so important to me at that time in my life; here was a set of tasks I could do, and people who could help me, at a time when both felt out of reach in the real world. 

I rediscovered that deep satisfaction at how the tasks flow together, one into the next, and I again loved feeling like I had agency, instead of, as in that time of my life, feeling frozen and powerless. A few months prior to my initial encounter with Spiritfarer, a similar feeling came from the 40th anniversary re-release of the children’s song “Baby Beluga” by Raffi. I grew up on that song, as many people my age and a bit older did. I notice now that the common denominator between it and Spiritfarer is that they both feel like lullabies, while still reminding me of my agency and personhood.

My gripes with the game were and are small, and may in fact be more user error than anything, mostly having to do with the occasional lack of explanation of how to operate a machine or trigger a new skill, or the fact that sometimes requests called for resources that hadn’t become available yet. I don’t find that this takes away from the overall calming experience of the game, as there’s no time pressure to complete anything. I also replayed it on a different platform, this time on Nintendo Switch instead of PC, with the only differences in the experience coming from my relative unfamiliarity with the controls. 

I'm finding myself being more of a completionist this time. Whether I’ll actually hit 100% remains to be seen, but I'm enjoying puzzling out the side quests for now. As with so much else about this game, how far you get is secondary to your overall personal experience with it; especially considering that, after a certain point (that I hit quite quickly on my replay), the player can just literally decide when to end the game.

Even though I view the game as tied to a specific time in my life, Spiritfarer is a timeless reminder that we’re in this life together, from beginning to end. Certain characters’ arcs and parting words feel more relevant at different times; in 2025, I was especially drawn to Summer, a caring earth-mother type, as she spoke about learning to live with trauma, and I acknowledged that, even now, I share Atul’s reluctance to care for himself. I wonder which characters will speak to me most in the years to come. 

Regardless of circumstances, Spiritfarer hits especially hard if you're open to letting it soothe you in ways you perhaps didn't realize you needed.

Terror of Hemosaurus review (Loren Lemcke, 2018, PC, NS, PS, XB) 

Terror of Hemasaurus is a side-scrolling beat ‘em up, but in the Rampage vein and not the Streets of Rage one. Very refreshingly, it’s a game with a laser-focus on moreish arcade-tier silly fun. There is a very sweary story mode, but even that has its reptilian tongue very much in cheek -  you play a giant dinosaur planted by a time-travelling cult into an ice cap millions of years in the past to be unleashed on idiot humanity in the present burning day. It’s full of yuks.

I beat the story mode in just under four hours. I really, really enjoyed the sledgehammer-subtle writing that’s a developer committing to their deeply held worldview, and there’s a very meta subplot that I won’t spoil but only found a smidge indulgent. I was absolutely ready for the story to end when it did, and I’m not going to revisit it anytime soon, but I got enough laughs and japes from it that I’m content to have spent time with it. I’m also not spoiling some of the best lines in it - you should play it. I had so much fun playing through the story of this, oh my gosh. 

The basic gameplay loop is bulletproof, even despite some occasionally finicky control issues when climbing up or cannonballing down buildings, because collapsing buildings into other buildings and watching civilians fall to and be crushed to their deaths is disconcertingly exhilarating. Few games have had me yelling “YESSS, FUCKING DIEEEE”, and cackling into the cold, lonely air, but this has managed it. Its brand of pixel-art rendered violence is captivating, and I love it beyond measure. In this, Terror of Hemasaurus has turned me into a context-dependent psychopath. 

So, even though the story only just overstayed its welcome, I can see myself returning to endless mode, revelling in the cold blooded flaming murder of fake pixels, possibly endlessly - at least until the men in white coats come to carry me away. It’s very more-ish, and so very much an arcade game in spirit. Endless is still stage based like the story mode, which is good for this game in particular. 

Something that I found especially interesting about the endless mode is that, if you feel a stage requires more gore and wanton destruction, you can go into the settings and spawn whatever enemies you like. This is useful misanthropic lizard brains like mine getting their dopamine, or for completing achievements, which are things like “destroy 50 police helicopters”, or completing X amount of stages of the endless mode - spawning things in will get you closer to the destruction quota you need per level much quicker.

I can imagine coming back to this a whole lot whenever I’m thinking “I’d like to play a game, but I either don’t know what or don’t have a whole lot of time”, and it’s passing what’s quickly becoming my litmus test of enjoying and being moved to write about a game - “am I thinking about this while not actually playing it.” 

I recommend this game to people who like fun and also to your Republican-voting ex-husband, just to give him an aneurysm. Also, it’s $13 even off-sale (on Steam at the very least), for an absolutely weapons-grade experience with plenty of replay value, so maybe I just recommend it to all people.

Lumines Remastered review (Resonair, 2018, NS, PC, PS, XB, Switch)

I wasn’t going to write about Lumines, because it’s just a falling blocks game, isn’t it? But then I had a dream about those falling blocks, and now I’m writing about Lumines, because ‘just a falling blocks game’ has clicked with me so much that I’m dreaming about it and my brain is calling out for more of it.

Plus, to be fair, Lumines a bit more than falling blocks - it’s a minimalist puzzle game in the vein of Tetris that exists primarily because the creator, Tetsuya Mizuguchi (also responsible for the Space Channel 5 rhythm games that I enjoy very much), couldn’t get the rights to do a version of Tetris for the Playstation Portable. Although I love Tetris, and Sega’s own Columns, Lumines is marked out as its own thing for its aesthetic - levels have different skins and music and the transition between them is seamless. If this sounds like Tetris Effect (2018), that’s because the rights issue got resolved by that point, owing to the foundation of the Tetris Company proper. 

Despite this, Lumines still deserves to exist and have a place in my heart because there is a subtle difference in how my brain feels rewarded in Tetris (where I make lines) versus Lumines (where I colour-match squares). I love making stacks in Lumines and then gradually depleting them by matching colours from underneath, and I love the chain-reaction mechanic that can, if you play your squares right, wipe out an entire colour from the map. 

It’s a vibrant, moreish experience. It’s a game that I’ve been returning to whenever I don’t feel like committing to playing anything else more taxing. I find it easy to just pick up, even if my brain has to calibrate first and I need to remind myself that I’m not playing Tetris and also that splitting squares up is often the key to having a good run. My first few runs of any playing session are essentially me remembering how to play it, and I find that I also have to adjust to the speed of the game itself, which gradually increases as you go on, as it does in these ‘minimalist falling block’ puzzle games. I start out okay on the early levels, making considered, deliberate placements, but my brain isn’t very good at making split second decisions and I fall about and lose. Despite this, and the opening skin song being about “scream[ing] in silence” (disclaimer from poor auditory processing brain: it may not be that), it’s soothing, and even though my brain isn’t wired for puzzles and I don’t think I’ll ever get that far into Lumines Remastered’s ($3 on a Steam sale, good grief) 100-level challenge mode, I keep coming back to this absolute massage for the brain. 

Having had a few days away from it but still being drawn back to thinking about it, I’d say Lumines Remastered counts as a memorable experience and a successful, actually really great video game.

Thwack review (Jon Topielski, alphons6, mafgar, 2023, Windows, Mac, Linux)

I didn’t watch Wimbledon this Summer, but I have been up-ended by Wimbledon fever. Enter Thwack, an independently-made tennis game that costs $2 (two dollars) hosted on itch.io. It’s all pixels and silly physics and suction-cup sound effects for the players’ legs and charming crowd ambience and opponents with (charming, not frustrating) gimmick powers and their own playstyles. It’s not for tennis purists - but who has the time to be one of those?

Thwack is good and you should play it, especially if you want something wholesome and with a surprising amount of replay value. There are eight opponents, three speed settings, and two conditions for clearing an opponent per each setting - winning at all and winning 40-0. There’s an additional cosmetic and end screen for total-perfecting every opponent on every speed setting, but it’s not a grind - I’m only going for those again now because I’m having so much fun. I appreciate, also, that you can instantly go back to the opponent select screen with the start button if you are doing that, end up punting the ball into the aether in the process (which you will), and need to go again. 

Despite the physics being pleasantly surreal, hitting the ball well in Thwack does take skill and precision - accuracy is based on the angle and direction at which you hit the ball, and I can still manage to get this wrong and hit the ball completely out if my concentration lapses. Sometimes a ball is counted as in when it straddles the court line and quite possibly shouldn’t, but I can forgive this - I’m having fun! The tone is fun and cute and that, plus the ‘simple to learn, hard to master’ nature of the mechanics means that it’s truly an accessible game for all ages.

Thwack costs less than things that don’t cost a lot, yet I’ve sunk more time into it than a good number of full price releases - this is actually my second time playing Thwack to completion after finding it a year or so ago. I want to spend time with Thwack because I love the philosophy behind it - here’s a small, inexpensive game that succeeds on the cohesion of mechanics and aesthetics. More people should play Thwack and Topielski and his collaborators’ way of making and pricing games should be the model for doing so all round. You don’t need to tweak settings (Thwack’s are a little barebones, but it doesn’t really matter), and you can (probably) play Thwack on any computer you have around - including the Steam Deck - without issue. 

Doom is okay, but it should be “Can it run Thwack?”, really. Port Thack to every device under the sun. Discuss Thwack with others. Thank Jon Topielski, alphons6, and Mafgar for making Thwack. Campaign for more games to exist that have the philosophy beneath Thwack. Financially support those games.

What we want to play

Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (TT Games, 2026, PC, NS2, PS, XB)

Announced at Gamescom 2025, this seems a curious mix of Arkham combat and a mature, gruff, Christopher Nolan-tier gruff-voiced Batman (including a verbatim “why so serious” bit, plus the “adopting the dark” bit, so it’s probably a retelling of the Dark Knight films), but also Matt Berry as Bane (and hamming it up as he does best - honestly, watch Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, he’s incredible in it) stepping on a block of LEGO, and just bits like a shipping container full of rubber ducks in the LEGO game comedy tradition.

It looks tonally all over the place, so it won’t be a day one purchase for me, but I’m interested in where it goes since some Arkham-like game has to pick up where Arkham Knight left off (Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League died on the way back to its home planet). Oddly, the website for the game asks for the browser’s age, which I don’t think a LEGO game has done up to this point - write in and correct me if I’m wrong, obviously.

I do have to admit to being optimistic that they’d gone back to the fully mimed LEGO games right until gruff Batman started to speak. Whatever, it’s okay. It’s fine. 

And I did just spy this article going on about it having “the largest Batman open world ever”. BIGGER! BETTER! FASTER! MORE! Fuck off and make ‘shit’ games - by Christ.

Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted (Popcap Games, October 2025)

It’s Plants vs. Zombies, but on modern systems, with a resolution bump, but also (presumably local) co-op. I didn’t need to be sold on this as a Popcap bitch (and decidedly not an Electronic Arts bitch, though amazingly the Steam page mentions nothing about the EA app or aggressive digital rights management software like Denuvo), and I fully intend to write about it here. 

Hela (Windup Games, 2026, PC, NS, PS, XB)

Logline: ‘Mouse with backpack what is a frog’. Looks wholesome and the music in the trailer is a banger. We’ll see about ‘open world’ but the platforming looks like great fun, plus there’s co-op.  I’m not the only Raccoon excited about this one and I want to write about it when it appears. 

Esoteric Ebb (Christopher Bodegård, 2026, PC, more?)

Disco Elysium (voices in your head, isometric, that movement style) crossed with Dungeons & Dragons with the serial numbers filed off. They're two properties that, as yet, I have attempted to love and only come away wanting to like them more. Still, this got some press at Gamescom and some people have already had a go on a demo of it. I'm not one of them, but it does look neat.

What we’re tinkering with

Valve’s Steam Deck OLED

Slightly oddly, I have owned three of Valve’s Steam Deck  handheld gaming computers in my life, and have sold two of them to people I know personally. In this way, I’m spreading the good word of the Lord (citation needed). I think they’re good. 

I’ve been setting up Decky, a community plugin system. I like this most for the one that lets me disable the Steam Deck’s built in controls when I plug in a controller, which for me is all the time (accessibility advocacy is very important to Capitalist Overlord Raccoons, The). The interface for reordering controllers isn’t perfect on Steam Deck (many games treat the set priority differently from each other), so the plugin makes it very easy to sidestep allocation issues in both PC and emulated games. This plugin should really be an option in the SteamOS settings, but until then, fine.

I also know when to fold and ask for help and to let others do the tinkering. Margaret of this parish also operated on my Steam Deck son to fit him with a 2TB SSD. This all involved a trip to a Micro Center to deal with a nice man who didn’t have to help us but did. Thank you, sincerely, to both of you. After this, I’ll put EmuDeck (relatively straightforward emulator setup) on my new OLED and be as happy as a pig in shit.

I take the point, as made by Ed Zitron in a semi-recent episode of his (terrific) Better Offline podcast, that something like the ROG Ally X (an Xbox-branded upgrade was also showcased at Gamescom this year, and which my brain is apparently desperate to own) is more powerful, but Valve has struck a nice balance between the performance that the Steam Deck can put out and the battery life it can give. It won’t run everything, but as an indie/emulation/tentpole game of yesteryear machine, it does well. 

The Ally X also uses Windows, less than ideal for a gaming device, and even the new Xbox-branded version of the product, which aims to cut out performance-draining services and make as much of the OS as accessible via a controller as possible, contains ‘software glitches’ pre-launch, according to Eurogamer. I want the new one, at my deepest, most cellular level, but I’m going to see whether it’s actually any good first. 

The Steam Deck, meanwhile, uses SteamOS, a version of Arch Linux, which turns out, with the Proton translation layer that allows Windows-led games to run on it without a hitch, to be a really good operating system for gaming, to the point that Lenovo have put SteamOS on its new-ish Legion Go S, making it, in the broadest sense, a Steam Deck 1.5. 

So yes, I’m tinkering with one and a dear advocate for them generally. I just think they’re neat.

Accessibility corner

This time: Microsoft’s Xbox (the company) being the enemy of accessibility, why Valve’s Steam Input makes the Steam Deck a not so bizarre purchase for a one-handed video game player, and a review on an arcade in Downtown Boston, Massachusetts.

Accessibility in video games is very important to us, from features in software through to accessible input options. We like hearing about games built with accessibility in mind, new controllers that aim to get more people into video games, and pushing back against developers that seem willfully ignorant of these things, hopefully with a view to changing some minds. Remember how Cyberpunk 2077 induced seizures in epileptics at launch? Capitalist Overlord Raccoons does. Don’t buy Cyberpunk 2077. We don’t care if they’ve turned it around. 

ANYWAY, here’s what’s on our minds regarding accessibility this month.

An idea for an accessible controller

I have the use of one hand, so not a lot of controllers do a lot of good for me. I don’t like publishers and manufacturers that look to make things harder for disabled people, and if you want to know why this site’s direct predecessor was called ‘my name is not phil spencer’, you can start here (the disabling of controller adapters was a move done entirely so Xbox could licence controller production to 8BitDo - yours truly, fuck off).

In the face of this bleak article, and not a lot of other alternatives, I'm thinking what if you took an 8BitDo Pro 3, or a FlyDigi Vader 4, and put all of the extra buttons on one surface, like the 8bitdo Lite SE, only not limited to anything other than Windows or SteamOS. It’s a bit mad and a bit “this time next year we’ll be millionaires”, but I’ve discussed it amongst the Raccoons and they don’t hate the idea. We’d have to 3D print a new base, but we wouldn’t be reprogramming buttons to do different things, it’d be cannibalising a thing and installing the bits into the new base (with everything accessible from one limb), maybe? 

It’s early days, but a fellow raccoon has a 3D printer and so we’re encouraged. First a prototype, and then the world.

Steam Input

Steam Input is Valve’s way of allowing users to remap their controllers to suit themselves. It’s fully-featured to the point of obtuseness in the hands of a lay user, but that also means that community users who actually know what they’re doing can publish their own layouts to Steam.

I’m old. At one point Steam Input only worked with games actually on Steam, which is a big part of why my Steam library has as much in it as it does. Now input layouts are just saved according to whatever the game name is, so it’s compatible with non-Steam games and services.

I’m also old enough to remember buying shonky third-party software that would map keyboard inputs to a pad and using it to play Gotham City Impostors (in our lamentations), so having Steam Input built into Steam for free shows how far input remapping (and by extension, accessible input methods) have come.

I mentioned the Steam Deck earlier, and I’ll continue to throughout this project, but here’s the thing - given that I have the use of one hand, a Steam Deck must seem like an odd purchase, because half of the buttons (more than half, really, because of the back buttons), but Steam Input has allowed me to actually use the Deck’s physical buttons, and so use the Deck itself as a handheld. It’s really cool, and a big part of why I look to Valve as opposed to Xbox and Asus, or even Nintendo for this kind of product.

Accessibility is really hard to talk about, because disabilities encompass so many different things, but Steam Input really can do a lot for those with impaired motor skills. In the case of external controller support, this partly feels accidental, because exposing a controllers’ extra buttons to Steam Input has to be done through a collaboration between Valve and the manufacturer (which is why I’m thinking to use an 8BitDo Pro 3 or a FlyDigi Vader 4 as the cannibalisation victim - the work has already been done the work and SteamOS officially supports them). 

I like that I can, with some tinkering, play Cuphead with one hand on the actual Steam Deck. That’s quite a fast-paced game with a lot of buttons, but the Steam Deck has enough buttons and pads on each individual side, and different ways to activate them from within Steam Input, that it can sometimes feel like a lifeline. My condition is such that I can often use a stock controller out of the box, but not very comfortably. As I age, I’m increasingly grateful for alternatives like Steam Input, and it may be of use to you, too. We’ll all be disabled eventually. 

Versus review (Boston, MA, August 2025)

We went to Versus multiple times in August. It’s a modest arcade downtown that charges a cover for games on free play - there are games from the 1990s (plus skeeball) to the left, modern consoles (Switch and PS5) at the (not wheelchair accessible) bar, and games from the 1980s (plus pinball machines). The arcade game selection is good! Seeing the Simpsons arcade game, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong in-situ blew me away. 

Machine reliability can vary - when we were there Crazy Taxi and the Neo Geo machines were out, and, on one occasion, we managed to put two pinball machines out of service). Playing Mario Kart in a bar is strangely a lot of fun, as is turning pinball into a co-op activity. Out of necessity for us, but absolutely a top tip for friends and couples and people who enjoy fun - a revelation.

The promotions are good - getting in for free (normally you pay a cover - games are set to free play) on Fridays if you arrive between certain times and on Tuesdays if you turn up with a partner is even better. The $1 per chicken wing promotion on Mondays could be better - boneless wings (available every day and a big accessibility boon) aren’t part of the promotion, even though Versus does serve them, and you’re buying wings in multiples of six. That’s still good, but we’d like boneless wings to also be a part of this, or for them to better indicate that they aren’t. The wings are good, and there are a variety of sauces. We enjoyed the buffalo and mango habanero.

There’s a secondary entrance with an elevator, but that entrance is locked off via keypad, requires an employee to let you in, and two narrow stairs to get there. I wish the bar and the tables were lower - wheelchair users will struggle. Even I, an ambulant but inflexible person, had a spot of trouble. There are bars under booth seats and the bar stools (that have backs on them) to help situate yourself.

The staff are lovely and accommodating. One nice lady named Paula actually thanked us for coming up and asking about the elevator, and once, when the kitchen accidentally gave us wings missing a sauce that we asked for them to be marinated in, we were allowed to keep them after our order had been corrected. Staff were helpful and attentive when we reported problems with machines.

You should go and support an independent arcade that goes out of its way to be a fun and engaging place that makes you happy. Since it can get pretty busy and we can find that overwhelming, we usually found it good for an hour or so per trip before heading out - which, for repeatedly free arcade games if you play your cards right, and really good food, is not bad.

Long live the Dr. No pinball machine. Delightful fun.

Thank you for reading this month’s Capitalist Overlord Raccoons!

As a brand-new publication, we appreciate your attention and support. We hope that, with this modest-length first issue and ‘my name is not phil spencer’; our previous, freely available blog project, already out there, you’ll stick with us as readers, subscribers, and contributors. 

A special thanks goes to Margaret Downs for her Spiritfarer review, and for being persistently (not stubbornly) wonderful.