Save scumming [football video games, rebooting BACKLOG YEAR, Maneater, Vampirium: 1997 chat] (July 2026)
Question: What do video games and the maternal figure in your life have in common?
Answer: They’re both smooth at sixty.
Question: What do video games and the maternal figure in your life have in common?
Answer: They charge a hundred and twenty currency units for all the extras, but if you wait a few years for them to go off the boil, they’ll bung the whole lot in for a fiver.
Thank you for reading this month’s Capitalist Overlord Raccoons!
Okay no, we’re not done, I wanted to get in some stupid jokes that I thought of at 4AM, because I’m recklessly impulsive. I’m sure that the maternal figure in your life is lovely. Or deceased, in which case I haven’t libelled them and you should not write in.
THIS MONTH
It’s JULY. And I mean it is actually July as I write this so I should get a shift on. But I’ve been thinking about the structure of Capitalist Overlord Raccoons, and the premise of BACKLOG YEAR; one which is great on paper but I am yet to actually stick to, and I do want to stick to it and am working on that. Here’s a piece, and we’ll pick up after.
Blind item review (X, XXXX, X)
I bought Margaret a video game for her birthday which is not yet and also went ‘oh, that looks good’ and bought it for myself. I’m playing it a lot at the moment, so I’m in the precarious position of having to talk about it so that there’s an issue this month but doing so without being specific. I also just thought that a blind item could be fun.
This game is cozy and slow paced, with incremental goals that are always well explained, and you always know what you should be doing next.
I started going through the levels by completing the goals by any means necessary. This is before the game clicked in my head and while I was still learning the game. This meant that what I’d made in the level was an awful mess not resembling what I was supposed to be accomplishing. I was getting through the game by any means necessary, which is not how you’re supposed to engage with it. Before long, though, I was optimizing what I had built, and fixing my approach to maximize all the stats that you need to in order to progress even further. I started taking pride in what I was building. I started taking the game, a tonally unserious game, seriously. And now the hours on my Steam account are racking up and it has the true measure of a Capitalist Overlord Raccoons game in that when I’m not playing it, I’m thinking about playing it.
It has lots of content; I’ve barely made a dent in it. But it is so engrossing. I love the silly humour, I love that each level is mechanically different, I think that the introduction of features and complexity is well paced; the developers have had practice in getting that right.
There’s something satisfying about putting Humpty together again. Starting a small project and working it up into something BIG. Making it quick and dirty to start, and then making it efficient. Games that have you working towards things are not always cozy games, but cozy games have you work towards things, and that’s why they’re cozy. Work is the wrong verb. You care for a space, you optimize. I’ve used the verb ‘optimize’ in this piece already, but that’s where I find the pleasure from in this game, so I’m using it again.
It runs seamlessly on my M-chip Macbook Air, which is great, as it’s not a big telly game or a handheld game because a keyboard is good to have. The slow pace makes it a low-dexterity video game; I don’t need to be pressing buttons or clicking all of the time. I haven’t always gone for the genre of game that this is (although the game is based on one of my favorite video games of many moons hence), but this game is one of the best examples of this genre that you can buy now, today. And I think you should!! Only, I can’t tell you what it is yet.
Answers on a postcard. One chosen winner gets into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Picking up after // STOP BUYING GAMES
Right, so BACKLOG YEAR has yet to work out because I’ve been opening my Steam library to over 1500 (ONE-THOUSAND-FIVE-HUNDRED) video games, because being drawn to collecting ephemeral digital licences of no value (such that they should really be giving them away) is something pathological in me that I do not like.
It’s overwhelming to tackle it like that, and also unworkable when a good chunk of those are defunct multiplayer games, or prototypes or games that I collected in bundles of yore that I only got for one or two games specifically, so what I’ve ended up with is a whole lot of clutter that’s difficult and demoralizing to sort through.
What I like to do with music is make a playlist, stuff it with songs, listen to it until I get bored, and make a new playlist with new songs. I’ve now done something similar with my Steam library, by being honest with myself about what I’m currently in the mood to play or what looks genuinely interesting, and hiding everything else. All those bad purchasing decisions are still there in the hidden games tab, and I still made them, but now I’m being clear with myself: no more, with a renewed focus on the games that I will play, that fill me with the joy that makes a game a Capitalist Overlord Raccoons game.
In coming up with this, I had a rough plan to do reviews of indeterminate length for games in my Steam library without culling it down. This yielded some fruit, but would have also meant that the next issue of the newsletter would be out in 2050. Here is some of that fruit, mind you.
Moose Lost in the Woods (Spång Studios, 2023, PC)
A short (forty-five minutes to an hour at the most) cosy platformer where you’re a moose lost in the woods trying to find their way back to their family. It’s also free on Steam.
The highlight of this is that it’s told entirely without language; instead with comics and pictures and icons. It’s a good children’s game in that sense. You cut about collecting acorns and doing fetch quests. Fear not, these are light and intuitive, with one per level, and there are three levels.
I think it’s good that collectathon platformers where you’re an anthropomorphic animal have been democratized to this level. It’s short, sweet, and endearing. It’s so short that the game has no save points, which I discovered two levels in after thinking, ‘I’ll pick this up later’. If you’re looking for something to throw on for a bit to turn your brain off, or to entertain someone of any age, you’re well served here.
The music is calm, the platforming is straightforward, and I found it a pleasant surprise for something that I plucked at random out of my Steam library.
10 Second Ninja X (Four Circle Interactive, 2021, PC, multi-platform) mini-review
‘Hardcore sidescroller’ with levels where you earn star-rankings by clearing enemies in a stage as fast as possible. There’s fun writing in the intro cutscene that sets up the premise, with a Dr. Robotnik-type in unrequited love with his airship’s computer, but I can see myself hitting the skill ceiling on this pretty quickly with one hand and I know that it’s, by no fault of the developers, not aimed at me.
The quick restart button really helps.
Oh, I had this crash once in the overworld on my Legion Go using Proton 10-04, but it generally plays okay.
Maneater reviews (Tripwire Interactive, 2021, PC, multi-platform)
Reviews plural because I did the usual thing of doing a stream of consciousness take on my playthrough as it happened, and then went back to it afterwards for a more considered take. My opinion of this game has been all over the place, but I’m delighted to have stuck with it. But yes, have the ramble first.
Maneater is a role-playing game where you are a shark in you-infested waters. You eat fish, you spar with alligators, and you go after the hunters that killed your mother while she was pregnant with you. (It’s grim on occasion like that) The progression has grind to it, but when that grind involves tearing up some shark hunters, it doesn’t feel like grind; it’s fun.
The game’s story is laid out as a reality television show with Chris Parnell narrating. The writing is cynical about climate change and the state of the environment. It’s not wrong, but it is mean-spirited. I don’t mind it, but I’m not glowing about it either. Parnell puts in a good shift, though.
The camera control is frustrating. You’re supposed to be submerging and diving and launching yourself out of the water, dodging lunging animals and bullets from hunters, and all of that is fun, it’s just not as intuitive as it should be.
I like the upgrade system. Killing named bounty hunters after drawing them out of the woodwork unlocks evolutions; new abilities and passive upgrades that you can equip and upgrade further. It’s annoying because you have to fast-travel to a ‘grotto’ to equip or upgrade any of this, but the upgrade structure is logical; going after hunters is dangerous, but more lucrative for upgrade currencies as opposed to eating 10,000 groupers or catfish.
There are combat mechanics; you can whip your tail, and thrash things about in your jaw, but the camera disorienting me means that I mash R2 and hope for the best. That’s fine; I get by like that, but I don’t feel as in control as I would like to. I’m not a confident Maneater player.
I am playing it while I write this, and the camera is maybe, maybe, something that you can get used to; if I don’t dash around so much it’s easier to stay focussed, but then I’m supposed to be dodging around, and the game is challenging enough when I’m doing that, so not doing that is counter-intuitive.
Diving out of the water is cumbersome; trying to jump high enough to collect things seems impossible a lot of the time. There are missions where you have to go out of the water to eat ten people or whatever, but you also start to suffocate very soon after going on land, and the mission structure gets in the way of the gameplay; it makes sense that, I, a shark, don’t last long on land, so please don’t make me go on land for long. Even then, it’s too easy to be above water and accidentally submerge, or be submerged and to go above water.
I persevere with Maneater because of the novelty of the premise. It’s fun to be a man-eating shark! I love circling hunter boats and jumping up and taking a person in my jaws and racing off, devouring them, and then turning around to do it all again. The Apex Predators you can pick off take some wearing down, but are manageable, and worth going after for the rewards.
The resource-based upgrade system is a bit byzantine at first, and I’m not sure what each of the three currency units in the game do or are called, but I know that certain upgrades take each one, each one comes from different kinds of edible thing, whether fish or human, and that it’s good to stock up on all of them. Fair enough.
The combat can be punishing. There’s a lot of running away to eat some smaller fish and then coming back for the kill. I don’t find this engaging. It’s stressful. Maybe all sharks live an anxious life and they’re just like me. The payoff is the kill, and the next unlock.
It’s a good handheld game. The UI seems to scale with the resolution, so running it at 720p or 1080p via cloud streaming on a handheld works pretty well. The missions are piecemeal; go here, eat this, fight this thing, so you can parcel it out, pick it up and play it for bit, and put it down again. There is also a native Android port. Maybe I should have started playing it on that before starting the Steam version, POOP. But then Maneater wouldn’t have been a BACKLOG YEAR game for me.
I bought this at some stage, apparently, and had some memory of playing it previously, but I had no Steam playtime on it and didn’t remember finishing it elsewhere (it may have been given away as a free game on Epic), so I decided to give it more of a go. I may not finish it, but I am still playing it, so there may be more to come.
Maneater is something different, and I appreciate it for that. I’ve never played a man-eating Shark RPG, and I think this is a very good proof-on-concept for one. There should be more of them.
I’m just knocking about with this now, and cutting about just eating groupers is more engaging than you would think. I’ve busted the Legion Go out and had a few hunter fights on that as well, and it’s easier for me to maintain control of the camera, and of situations on a bigger screen.
It’s occurring to me that this is very much a ‘city goals’ game (I’m not sure if Ultimate Spider-Man (2005) pioneered this video game structure, but it’s where I first encountered it, so it gets the blame; ‘city goals’ is what they called it); you cut about doing busywork until you do enough to unlock the next bit of the story. I normally find this structure dreadful, but the novelty of Maneater does helpfully disguise the fact that of the game is a checklist. The checklist itself is only given in the pause menu, and, a lot of the time, I’m not paying attention to it, just picking off icons on the map of available things to do, because it’s fun.
I can understand why there hasn’t been another Maneater; role-playing games are a niche genre, and Maneater is occasionally rough around the edges. BUT, the unique premise of it deserves its flowers. If you took out the cynical reality television setup and tightened up some of the realism (‘nutrient caches’ for collectables, pull the other one), it could be more wholesome and commit more to teaching about marine life, but I’m satisfied with what’s here. Not enough to label it a distinctly Capitalist Overlord Raccoons game, or to buy the narrative DLC expansion, but I respect what Tripwire are going for, and the execution.
Hour nine now. I have upgraded bio-electricity powers and the dodging is that much easier. I like the variety of upgrades; there’s something to fit different playstyles, and mine is dodging around the place doing passive damage until I have a window to tear things apart with my teeth.
I wasn’t sure whether I’d be playing this near to completion, because the camera controls, truly, aren’t the best, but I can see myself getting there now. The dodging initially felt sluggish but upgrades have helped with that. I suppose whether Maneater is for you is whether you can stomach (reasonable, fun, engaging) busywork before you get to the point where the shark feels nice to control. At this point I’m dashing around multiple shark hunter boats and even dispatching them all to the point that the search for me is called off because they’re all dead.
I have a perk that increases the amount of resources I get from eating things, so the upgrades are coming quick, and in continuing to do the side content, I’m levelling up and managing threats. I’m in the third biome / district, so the difficulty may go back to being a bit much as I go on, but for now the power fantasy is working, and I’m enjoying myself very much.
And now the measured take.
I’ve now got 100% completion in the base game of Maneater over the weekend after I wrote the above stream of consciousness review, which I was not expecting. I achieved this yesterday from the perspective of when I’m writing this, which now puts me in the best place to comprehensively assess it.
The things that I wish it captured better as a shark simulation is night vision, which the game tells you is a thing that sharks have, but in going after collectables and spending a lot of time in sewer tunnels and undersea caverns, I got disoriented a fair bit due to low light. There should be more light in those places if I, a shark in this scenario, am supposed to be able to see and navigate. You do have a sonar ability to locate fish and collectables, and there is a sketched-in outline of walls and things that lingers for a moment when you activate that, but I wish that was constant; it’d be practical, and look cool.
Similarly, Maneater tells you that sharks can’t see color, but the game is blasted in vibrant, occasionally sickly color until you’re at low health. I recognize that this makes the game accessible to a wider audience, because it’s less alienating, and I get that, but as an enthusiast for brave creative decisions in games, I wish it was more of a simulation. But then the game itself is pitched as a cartoon, and you can tell that Tripwire had a lot of fun with the puddles of blood when you eat a person or the chunks of meat when you eat an animal bigger than you, so it’s not meant to be a simulation. My point is that Maneater is great as an action-driven role playing game, but there would be mileage in a game that’s a stricter shark simulation.
The cartoonish element that I love the most is the frame device of the reality show. It gets bizarre quick enough that I went through it wanting to see how bizarre and silly and dark it would go. Chris Parnell is the perfect dry narrator as TRIP WESTHAVEN (!!!, so silly from the ‘why don’t Americans have proper names’ perspective), and the little glimpses you get of his inner life, like him having an underachieving son, are fun. Now that the game is over, it’s is leaning into him having become a conspiracy theorist, and that’s, I believe, the trail for the downloadable content. They throw in the first mission of the DLC free of charge, but I haven’t done it yet because I’d rather buy and play the whole thing if I’m going to, which I probably am at this point.
The premise of the DLC, as far as I can tell, is that things being dumped in the water are mutating fish, so I’m going to guess that whatever that is altering his brain chemistry or whatever. All good games make you care about the characters, and I feel bad for the guy. Maybe I can fix him (wholesome).
The evolutions and powers distance it further from reality and any semblance of simulation, but it is more fun than I could have imagined to stack bio-electricity stun counts on orcas and bring boats carrying hunters to a grinding halt. One of the first parts of the game that I rinsed were the infamy levels, where you kill humans to gain enough notoriety to bring out hunters, and then kill enough of those to bring out named bounty hunters; something like the Grand Theft Auto vigilante system but where you’re the evil. It was great fun to tear through those, and a worthwhile pursuit, because you unlock the bio-electric evolutions and a few other organ ones that way (like Hearty, which boosts your max health by a lot at the maximum upgrade tier of 5). Maneater was good at incentivizing me to go do its busywork not just by rewarding me well, but by making a lot of it engaging, in part by adding plenty of specific narration when you collect something like a sign at a landmark spot. I did not expect to spend three additional hours going after collectables on top of the sixteen spent rolling credits on it, but I did, and I liked it. Mind you, I am one of those weirdos that likes clearing a map of its icons, and in that sense I’ve ruined game design for everyone (Watch Dogs: Legion and the Insomniac Spider-Man games are structurally similar to Maneater and also some of my favourite games to exist).
BUT, the main reason I went after the extra collectables is that I was looking up final boss strategy (more on this in a minute) and a guide was saying, ‘okay, I’m using this, this, and this evolution’, some of which I’d never encountered up to that point and that are attained by going after the collectables. I ended up beating the final boss first and doing the collectables afterwards (leading to some incongruity where characters who are dead in-narrative deliver lines after side missions, but okay), but having the extra ‘Shadow’ evolutions will put me in good stead for the Truth Quest DLC which I’ll buy on the next Steam sale. I didn’t buy it on sale for one and a half currency units because I wasn’t sure at that point if I would finish the base game, but now I have, so I will; this should mark how seriously I have now decided to take BACKLOG YEAR.
But yes, boss strategy in Maneater. It’s a light spoiler (but not really if you’re aware of the game’s basic premise) that you’re out for revenge on a specific shark hunter that that shark hunter is the final boss.
He has a big boat with two electro-magnetic pulse emitters on the bottom that you have to destroy. Because I’d already beaten the last couple of bounty hunters, I was already aware of this mechanic, but what I had done to disable them then was just rush in and take bites out of them, then run away and heal, and then repeat. It worked then. But on the final boss, this killed me basically instantly, and I had no idea how to proceed. I could bite at the boat itself, take lots of damage, run away and heal, but I wasn’t making much progress on the boat’s health bar, and was spending far too much time dodging torpedoes. So I went back to the guide, and it turns out that you’re supposed to dodge the torpedos, carry them with your teeth, and then tail-whip them at the boat. This is fun and cool, but the game doesn’t tell you that this is a mechanic at any point. It would also have made the last two bounty hunts much more straightforward.
It’s odd, because Maneater as a rule has a lot of tooltips that pop up, but the tailwhipping things at other things never comes up, even though it’s man(eater)datory to have it down in order to beat the last boss. You also need it for 100% completion, because there are gates that allow for traversal between a couple of biomes that have switches that need fish flinging at them (you can’t just tailwhip them) so that the gates open. In a world where the video game manual has died a death, the flinging mechanic not being communicated in the game itself, but also being necessary, isn’t great.
I enjoy how Maneater is at once stupid, but also is occasionally committed, in some of the narration, and how the game is structured around you controlling the population of a particular fish to draw out the apex predator of an area, in teaching players about the ocean. That’s also another thing that makes me think a more earnest shark sim could work. There are times where I thought that Maneater was trying to have its cake and eat it in being ‘irreverent’ (ick) and educational, and it’s tonally all over the shop.
BUT, this game grew on me. I had so much fun, and Steam tells me that I played it across two weeks, so that’s an endorsement even if Maneater isn’t as cohesive or as nice to control as it should be.
I like the progression and how the game is initially a struggle, and that the currency units for the evolution upgrades trickle in at first, but that putting the time into the satisfying side content means that you can tear up the ocean without fear soon enough, and have more than enough currency to max out every evolution. The evolutions look so silly, when you have electric fins and tendrils coming off of you, or you’re encased in bone, but they make you a right hard case, and the bio electricity is fun to cut about with.
Maneater is a proper Capitalist Overlord Raccoons game, in how it became a hyper-fixation for me after I bounced off it twice before for finding the controls finnicky. They’re still finnicky; it remains true no matter how far you get into the game that jumping out of water onto land is unpleasant to control, that it’s too easy to whiff biting things in the world that are marked as objectives, and that the camera is a royal pain). Still, what a RUSH. Get it down you.
140 review (Carlsen Games, 2013, PC, multi-platform)
I have no idea how this got into my library, some bundle I imagine (a lot of my Steam library will be from bundles so I will, I promise, stop making this observation).
140 is a rhythm platformer where obstacles change and respond to the beat. The visual style is minimalist and the music is synth and drum-heavy electronic.
There are four levels, but these are of considerable length even without the platforming being tricky.
For the first ten minutes, I didn’t cotton on to the game’s premise, and then I went ‘ohhhhh it’s with the musiiiic’, and at that point it stopped being the slog that every new game feels like to me and clicked. Waiting for games to click is good.
It took me an hour to beat the first level (thanks to me accidentally exiting out of the game by pressing start since there isn’t a pause menu, and saves happening after each full stage), which ends with a rhythmic boss battle. The gameplay is fun, but you have to have patience. It’s not an instant gratification game, and I respect that!
STOP BUYING GAMES CONT.
I’m going to put time and effort into the games that I own that look interesting, while also slimming down the apparent number of games that I “”””””””own”””””””” (I am increasingly miffed with digital games as a concept because of Sony phasing out discs in 2028, and even though I don’t own a Playstation it is a sign of where things are going and the true lack of value of all these digital licences that I’ve been hoarding; let’s call it what it is.)
So from NOW ON, I’m going to go with the plan of hiding games except those that I’m actively interested in, and then swapping new ones into the visible list when I’m ready to move onto them.
But then I had to go and do a dozy and get into wanting to play FOOTBALL GAMES and buying those TOO. GOSH.
Football crazy, football mad (football games)
Well. The morning of the day that this issue is going out, it’s been announced that Electronic Arts’ sale to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has cleared regulatory approval. It’s ALSO been announced that the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) is boycotting FIFA competitions as FIFA has doubled down on selling stakes in the World Cup.
When I wrote much of the below, and got excited about football (game where the foot is predominantly used) video games, none of this had happened. The controversies of the 2026 World Cup hadn’t even gone off - no Balogun, no Argentinian players fighting the Spanish ones on the pitch, whatever. Japan had just been knocked out. I was more excited about contemporary football than I presently am.
I had started to look for good football games. And they still exist! You just have to look deeper. Here are some of them.
Not featured: Active Soccer 3, which I have yet to play, and Pro Evolution 6, which I need to play more in the present day for a refresher and still think that you should play. I may revisit these.
Sensible World of Soccer ’96-’97 mini-review (Sensible Software, 1996, DOS, Amiga)
I got this off of GOG for £2, which is not bad. Then I got the SWOS 2020 mod for controller support and squad updates. It’s wild that this is being updated today by THE COMMUNITY, COMMUNITY, THE, but it’s meant to be a great of the genre.
The squad update versions are also available as part of AmigaVision for your emulator handhelds. (Reader, if you care at all about those old games they have now, AmigaVision is where it’s AT: I’m loving it on the AYN Thor.)
I like the presentation of SWOS a lot, but the game is too fast-paced for me, and I don’t feel in control of any of it. It’s super charming, but it’s odd to me that the creaky, slow realism of mainstream football games is easier to succeed in than the arcade-y SWOS. I accept that this opinion is anathema to many bald people the world over, and I am persevering with SWOS, I just don’t end up winning at all, and that’s operative in a football game. I also accept that this is an opinion of someone who physically cannot GET GOOD at a video game, so it may not be aimed at me.
Bang Average Football mini-mini review (ruari dx, 2024, PC)
I then moved onto this, very much in the same vein as SWOS, with an optional narrative RPG mode. The football might be a little bit slower, but I’m still counting it as ‘fast-paced’. There are also more controls to contend with than SWOS’ one button.
I regularly get outpaced and tackled on the ball. I think the idea is that your team is supposed to start terrible and then stat upgrades make them good. I accept that working your way up is a common thing with football games with management simulation elements. It’s part of why I like them; working towards being brilliant. But it’s also a pain to score a goal at the early ‘you are rubbish’ stage in this, or in SWOS, and I don’t know whether it’s the pace, or the controls that makes it needlessly difficult, and hard to love.
BUT, Bang Average Football has friendly modes and tournament modes and even the narrative story mode has a lot of football to be played in it; you can play many games before the story prompts you again to continue it. And it’s the easiest way to get a handheld SWOS-like experience on, so if you are of the opinion that games like Sensible Soccer are the apex of football games, it’s in that tradition.
Nutmeg! review (2026, Sumo Digital, PC)
Nutmeg is a poisonously English football management game that spruces up the spreadsheet gameplay with 80s/90s period aesthetic and turns matches into card games.
The tutorial is funny right from the off, and the little bit of character writing in the game is authentically English and for many will have a comedy of recognition about it for many, but Nutmeg takes its commitment to 80s/90s league football seriously by dousing it all in the radioactive Panini sticker / Subbuteo look.
Nutmeg has a great deal of having you be bad at the game before you are good at the game. The tutorial lets you play as Liverpool, and the card game section has you using strong cards, with players that have high ratings, but after that, you’re back down to League 4. I played a season and only just managed to avoid relegation, so it’s a long way to the top.
I came into wanting a FOOTBALL GAME thinking about games where you control players in real time, but I’ve come around to enjoying Nutmeg the most out of all of the football games that I’ve been playing recently because it’s accessible and logical. There is data to pour through about players and opposing teams, even merchandise sales, but it feels manageable, and isn’t tantamount to success.
The card game element is simple enough that success in it, and the challenge of Nutmeg, comes mostly from the players that you have, and working out how to tick off monthly manager objectives in their threes, which is hard when you have to win three matches in a row and your win percentage is 17%. Better players help! I like that Nutmeg is about spinning plates; I’m not always aware of the best way to win matches or court better players, but it doesn’t feel like the riddle of other management games. I like that Nutmeg goes for realism at a different angle. It’s irreverent, and while playing a league 2 team in other games feels like an intriguing novelty, having to start with a low league team in Nutmeg builds the struggle into the gameplay loop; it’s a game that doesn’t treat football as a spectacle. The realism is, in the best way, mundane, and transformed by the 1980s presentation. Think legally-distinct-teletext flavor text about Thatcher the Milk Snatcher between matches and you’re about there.
Nutmeg! is very special. It’s not what I initially set out to play, but I’m so happy to have played it. I put three hours in on one session and I’m going to go play it again now. If you want a new football game, I think you could enjoy playing it too!
I’ve done two full seasons now and I’ll say that not playing a card every turn is the way to go. Also investing in good players a bit at a time.
Vibing over Slay the Spire 2 (2026, Mega Crit, Steam Early Access)
There’s no point in me reviewing Slay the Spire 2; it’s not out of Early Access yet, and I’m bad at it so I haven’t seen everything that it has to offer.
I’m incapable of being impartial about these games; I have 350 hours in the first game. I have attempted, several times, to write about them, and I can’t. I just can’t. They are sprawling. They are difficult; I haven’t beaten the last boss in a run yet, and I have 14 hours in it as I write this sentence but certainly more as you read it [editors note as I proof: 20 hours and counting]. They are the ultimate power fantasy. And, delightfully, they run on anything. My AYN Thor runs it on the GameNative X86-ARM translation layer app for Android, a dedicated SteamOS partition (Armada, a fantastic project), and the fan-made StS2-Launcher, for Android.
I’m on record as not being an Early Access devotee, but I was there for Slay the Spire 2 day one, jabbing at the purchase button while the Steam servers crashed under demand for it and wouldn’t authenticate the purchase. And then... I didn’t play it for ages. I think I was burnt out on the first one. I played bits, but it’s only now that I’m playing it for longer sessions, maining the Ironclad class again. I do like the new classes that are in there, like the Necrobinder, that has a severed hand that attacks. I have the Epochs (in-game achievements that reveal a narrative) for playing games with them all. It’s important to mention that some of the epochs have placeholder art at this time, but it’s charmingly poop Microsoft Paint-tier, not generative artificial intelligence, so I love that.
What I like to do the most in the Slay the Spire games is take risks and get rewards. Sometimes that works well and I start tearing through, sometimes it massively backfires, and sometimes it falls somewhere in the middle. But I love that I can just go again and see what happens.
For existing Slay the Spire players, your favourite cards and relics are here, but there are also new cards, new relics, and card-enchanting mechanics now cover all classes. There are enemies with new mechanics to push past and build decks around countering. It is in Early Access, and I would already say the best version of Slay the Spire, and, even if you have no prior experience with Slay the Spire, certainly the best run-based deckbuilder going at the moment.
I think enough time has passed between me getting burnt out from the first game, because I woke up this morning at 5am to play it. It’s got that ‘just one more’ feel that the best games full stop get right. I made no progress in any of my runs, but it felt like a satisfying and rewarding session all the same, and I’m back to thinking about playing it when I’m not playing it, which means that it’s a deserving Capitalist Overlord Raccoons game.
The 5am session is the first time that I’ve had the sound on and paid full attention to the music and sound effects. Clark Aboud is really good at making haunting orchestral music that’s also rallying at the right moments. Slay the Spire first one is one of the few games ever to have the emotional rollercoaster of a soundtrack stay with me after the fact, so it’s on me as a fool that I haven’t had the sound on until now. The issue is that the Slay the Spires are ALSO great games to play while listening to podcasts, or during half-time in a football match on the television, because they don’t need your constant attention, and the robust save system means that you can pick up and play it whenever, in bite-sized chunks. They’re good games that fit in well with the torment of being alive.
The second game has superseded the first one for me. I want to say that the classes are more accessible; the Regent and the Necrobinder aren’t byzantine like the Watcher was, such that I never played the Watcher beyond needing to in order to get to a spoiler-rific point in the game. There are new elements, but they haven’t thrown out what worked with the first game for the sake of something being new, which is a great strength.
Given that the sequel is made in Godot as opposed to the first game’s less future-proof Java-based LibGDX, there’s a good technical reason for Slay the Spire 2 to exist, and I wonder if, and hope that, the game will have a longer life and see content beyond the 1.0 release (whenever that ends up being) because of it. Until then, I’m sold on what’s here.
Wanting to play Vampirium: 1997 (Bithell Games, TBA, PC); the interesting marketing of it, controller support in ‘immersive simulators’.
Announced yesterday from when I’m writing, this is somewhere between a text adventure and an immersive sim (in that the game is built on meticulous systems and the player having a great deal of free will; Deus Ex, Thief, System Shock, and Skin Deep being quality examples.)
I’m very much up for this combination, because, as a hemiplegic video game player, I haven’t been able to play a lot of these kinds of games, because not a lot of immersive sims have robust or even extant controller support, because executing all of those systems in real time means giving the players a lot of buttons. Plus, many of the famous im-sim series started out early on as PC games go - Thief: The Dark Project came out in 1998, for example, when there weren’t standards for implementing native controller support like now, when many games support Xbox, PlayStation and Switch controllers out of the box, and other controllers can be used alongside a game’s existing controller support with middleware like Steam Input.
Vampirium: 1997 is not, like those other immersive sims, controlled in real-time from a first-person perspective, giving it the look of a board or a turn-based tactics game. It’s very sweet that Mike Bithell makes himself laugh in the linked demo video by calling it an im-slim. I like that.
So I’m excited to be able to play a game like this, but I’m also drawn in by the premise: you’re Dracula’s hitman, in an alternate future-past (the UI is sci-fi coded, very similar to another Bithell game, Volume, all chrome and immediately parsable icons, and it all looks great and I love it) where the big man is King of England. It’s a premise that I imagine is a lot of fun for Bithell, and for me, the player, to mess around in.
I don’t have anything deeper than that to say at this time. It looks great, and as much as I bang on about Early Access not doing it for me, my trust in Bithell is up there with my trust in Mega Crit, so I’m there day one (or maybe zero, since there’s a closed alpha coming), and I’ll do regular write-ups as updates come in.
I want to play it. I woke up at 5am thinking about it. That’s a good sign.
Go listen to Vampirium 1997’s announcement on game developer and voice actor Alanah Pearce and Bithell’s co-hosted podcast Play, Watch, Listen to hear him talk thoughtfully about early access game design, how Bithell Games is getting on as an indie in the struggling games industry today, and about the myth of creative projects being driven by a central auteur figure.
AND, go listen to Cube and Rectangle to hear Bithell’s argument for working away at something you initially fail at, instead of ‘choosing not to engage with the audience’ by using generative artificial intelligence. There’s also a fun bit where the conversation leads to a new feature being added to Bithell’s to-do list. Also, in a pleasantly wonderful moment, neurodivergent recognition!
Everyone in these conversations are a delight to listen as they wax lyrical about Vampirium: 1997, the im-sims that came before it, and the madness of making a big game as a small team. (I’m avoiding ‘solo dev’ as a term, because, as Pearce points out, it’s rarely ever the case that a game is truly developed solo, with royalty-free assets, outside playtesting, and expertise gained from prior colleagues being vital to independent development. It reminds me of Chris Addison on the Rule of Three podcast - “If I ever put ‘A Chris Addison Film’ on something, punch me in the face.”
Chatting about game development, Bithell is endlessly listenable. In being so meticulous in the words that he chooses, and paying great attention to the quality of his games, Bithell is a developer that you want making an immersive sim crossed with a tabletop game. He talks to Hardcastle about being a voracious bug hunter, after the latter tried and failed to break the game during play, and to Pearce about how he’s adding features in a modular fashion so that they can compliment existing features and be implemented into levels that are further along in development. I love hearing about his process.
I’ve enjoyed Bithell’s games previously, but Vampirium: 1997 has captured my imagination to the point where I’ve dived into his podcast appearances about it to hear more, and he just seems like a swell guy, and now I’m chatting to Margaret about platonic crushes and writing ‘I’m going to put “he just seems a swell guy” in the piece’ to her.
I’ve considered asking him for an interview, but it’s like, who am I to him, there are, by my count, up to six people who I don’t know personally that have read this, and there would be no point for him. Also, accessibility issues mean that I haven’t actually played a lot of immersive sims; they’re not unheard of to me, but I could not tell you of specific moments in the early Hitman games, for example, and all of that means that I don’t have any clever questions for Bithell about the genre as they pertain to his take on it. What excites me about Vampirium: 1997 is the specificity of its dark fantasy premise and being set in a cursed year in British politics. I can’t ask Bithell about that on the VIDEO GAMES ENTHUSIASM site, and I wouldn’t want, as a stranger to a person whose work I respect, to be reduced to ‘where do you get your crazy ideas from’. Come on now.
I also saw Bithell joke about Count Binface being the only politician he would let cameo in the game, and Margaret and I have been following all of that with great pleasure. That adds to the ‘swell guy’-ometer, but also, like the year Vampirium: 1997 is set, to the commentary potentially burbling beneath the text - which, yes, is why I have gone in hard on the premise; I’m more of a politics masochist than I like to admit to myself.
I’m also enamored with the game’s announcement being cross-media, as part of The Last Portrait a short story by Bithell being released chapter by chapter. It feels Web 1.0, which is nifty. I enjoy the ambition of it. It’s also a fun story! The story coming as part of a newsletter pre-announcement, and the announcement happening right after the needle drop of the story’s plot twist, fills me with joy. This is what it’s about. It’s a great horror story, with a poetry to the dialogue and description that pitches the eeriness of the world perfectly. I can’t remember where I saw Bithell talking about Bram Stoker’s Dracula being insecure, but, in writing him, Bithell has gone for that, and it adds a whole dimension to him when he’s embarrassed about being caught feeding and trying to conceal flecks of blood on his clothes. It’s a wonderfully considered take on the character. As of writing this paragraph, it's six of eight chapters in; you should sign up to the mailing list on the site for the last couple of chapters after you’re read what’s already out there.
I’m just talking with Margaret about the cross-media-ness of Vampirium: 1997, and she’s pointed out that between this and the one-woman West End production of Dracula with Cynthia Erivo, it’s a good year for (Margaret’s words) ‘cool multimedia vampire stories’. The reviews for that failed to appreciate its multimedia, post-modern aspects (all projection screens and camera operators and make-up artists undisguised on-stage), so we hope that Bithell Games announcing its game across mediums gets the notice it deserves in the right circles. I’d love to see more prose crossover in this world from Bithell. It’s cool.
Drawing pentagrams in the air to get into the alpha. There’s a bit in Cube and Rectangle where Bithell talks about going to Comic Con somewhere with Colm Meaney also there and him being so starstruck he could only nod at him in respect. I kind of feel like that about Bithell right now; he’s is someone I enjoy hearing from about the fun things that they’re making at a remove. I would melt if I had to sound intelligent about their work in front of them.
Games we are playing or thinking about playing but aren’t writing about (yet?)
XENOTILT
(Get it up you. Still the best pinball game on Steam. I’m still no closer to getting the ‘9 balls in play’ achievement.)
Buck Up And Drive!
(What if Outrun ate my life? I promise to stop going on about this now.)
Volume (Bithell Games, 2015, PC, multi-platform)
(Level-based stealth thing, I see a lot of the UI in this inside what’s been shown of Vampirium: 1997, and there’s the parallel of Volume also being a modern take on an older story in it being Robin Hood.)
Payday 2 (Overkill Software, 2011, PC, multi-platform)
(threw this on with a friend after a couple of years of having 200 hours in it and not playing; it’s still got it.)
Retro City Rampage DX (Vblank Entertainment Inc., 2014, PC)
(A chaotic pop-culture fest stuffing an open-world sandbox into chunky pixels. A gleefully knowing parody.)
Canabalt (Adam Saltsman, 2009, PC, multi-platform)
(Cracking endless runner (that was the first game in that genre as we know it) with a brilliant dystopic graphics and color scheme. I love having this on when I’m supposed to be doing something else. I’m so bad at it. There’s a Commodore 64 version that I want to dig out; it’s cool that that exists. Also, without Canabalt, Jetpack Joyride, my favorite endless runner, wouldn’t exist.)
Marble’s Marbles (James Oliver (not that one), 2026, PC)
Difficult but delightful game in the mould of Marble Madness or Super Monkey Ball. Stylish graphics, aethereal, wistful music, and challenging physics. This deserves more of my attention, please stand by.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds (Sonic Team, 2025, PC, multi-platform)
Mopping up the last few time trial and collectable achievements and having a good time. It does my hand in after a few hours but I enjoy it so the pain is worth it. I haven’t reviewed this in full (yet?) but I did talk about the Open Network Test at the time.
Thank you for reading this month’s Capitalist Overlord Raccoons!!
On July 5, I said to Margaret (who is busy with actual work this month, booooo) that there might not be a July issue because my energy wasn’t there. And then what ended up happening is that I played and heard about so many games that I wanted to talk about in detail that I’m having trouble fitting them all in, and I think this is the longest issue of the project so far. That’s good, because clearly my energy for playing games is still there, and I do have a lot of energy for the right games.
It’s been fun starting to take BACKLOG YEAR seriously. Not all of the 1500 games in my Steam library (!!!!! goodness grief) are going to be bangers - I’m bouncing off a few - but the delight is in finding the bangers. And it’s been a delight, and it’s going to be a delight, and we’re going to get there.
See you next month!
As ever, the e-mail address to get in touch if you’d like to, and if you are Mike Bithell, is cor@fastmail.jp: I think I forgot to mention this last issue. BUT, hopefully, eventually, our inbox will become more than just invitations to follow Barack Obama on LinkedIn.