Rundown (5/03/2026) Vampire Crawling to My Grave…

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Vampire Crawling to My Grave…
• The Pokémon Remake Dilemma (Because All I Think About These Days is Re-Whatevers, lol)
• Spiders is DEAD (And It’s All Nacon’s Fault)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Vampire Crawling to My Grave…

My vice this past week— or I suppose two weeks— has been Vampire Crawlers, the spin-off follow-up to the 2022 indie hit, Vampire Survivors. I’ve spent over 25 hours with the game hit credits, got all the achievements, and am firmly done with it for now. However, rather than review a game that is bound to receive an utter deluge of updates, I’m just going to write an overly wordy preamble about my thoughts on it. But first, because I am pretentious like that, a bit of backstory.

I played Vampire Survivors for a fair bit, enough to get the central hook, treat it as a podcast or second screen game for, uh, 50 hours. However, Survivors always struck me as a bit too depersonalized and long-in-the-tooth to be a deeply compelling game. Simply put, the game is largely about walking through a large map, searching for doodads, choosing upgrades, killing swaths of enemies, and gradually amassing power.

It’s a great recipe for a number game, but movement is slow, combat is heavily driven by automated kiting, and the upgrade process, after a while, becomes a bit too routine. Every run, you have some sort of central mission or goal, but later levels are structured more as opaque puzzles where you either need to explore and gradually figure things out or consult a walkthrough. Some call it a bullet heaven title, but I think the term that’s taken off in Japan, mowing game, is apt. Because the game captures the fun of mowing things away, and after enough runs, the mundanity of the action.

Vampire Crawlers, by comparison, looks at the rise in indie roguelike deckbuilders— a genre pioneered by one of the most influential games of the 2010s, Slay the Spire, and taken to new heights by the sicko poker trip that is Balatro. I’ve tried out both of these games, and uninstalled them out of fear, but I was never able to fully get into them. They make success too difficult to grasp with ease, requiring the player to work towards it, while lacking many progression elements.

Or, in other words, they are roguelikes, not roguelites, and I prefer roguelites, as I like my games to either be number-rich or numberless. Also, it is literally impossible for the broader gaming culture to EVER never recognize the distinction between roguelikes and roguelites, as gamers can’t spell. THey don’t even know a rougelike from a roguelike.

Spire and Balatro are both games designed around maintaining a cool head in a chaotic environment that the player has limited control over, playing the cards they’ve been dealt to minimize short-term losses and maximize long-term viability. Your deck is your everything, you want to draw the right cards at the right time, upgrade your best ones, get rid of your crap, and manage your number-based resources. It’s 20% luck, 30% skill, 25% determination, 25% a burgeoning desire for success that leads someone to say “just one more round” at 2 in the morning.

Now, how does a genre like this mesh with Vampire Survivors, a game whose central gimmick is a mixture of character building and preposterous carnage? Well, rather than make a Slay the Spire like with stupid numbers, they made a turbocharged reinvention of what roguelike deckbuilders can be, infusing Vampire Survivors’ signature love of hyperbolic attacks that make enemies explode into colorful gems. It’s a deckbuilder with its own flavor of strategy, but a ravenous love of dealing cards, infusing buffs, gaining permanent upgrades, and wrecking so much carnage that the player will become a degenerate goblin, hellbent on trivializing every system before them.

The player started each one with a handful of cards determined by their selected character, accumulating new cards either by bashing intractables or bashing baddies to level up and get a choice of cards. Cards are played in exchange for spending mana, with stronger cards have higher mana costs, but rather than just throw out their highest damage cards right away, or even focus on damage at all, players are encouraged to play card combos. Starting with a 0 mana card will cause a 1 mana card to grow in power, kicking off a combo that can be carried with a 2 mana card, then a 3 mana card, and using special cards, known as wild cards, to carry combo count into double digits, each combo multiplying the effect of the card played.

Vampire Crawlers is a game where you want to draw as many cards as possible, play as many as possible, and do so in a deliberate sequence with the goal of empowering your character and demolishing enemies. You might think that getting more weapons is the key, but as anyone who played a dozen hours of Vampire Survivors will tell you, the actual key to power is often in the effects.

Crawlers has a LOT of effects that, ultimately, function as tools to improve the players’ damage output. You have the amounts of projectiles, might of attacks, area of attacks, health healed after each battle, modifiers to how many cards are drawn when a drawn effect is triggered, and hand size. All of these are temporary encounter-based buffs that cannot be decreased, incentivizing the player to accumulate as many buffs as possible. Though, they are considerably less valuable than the run-based buffs to EXP, gold yield, and luck which boosts critical hits and general DPS or something. I dunno. Increasing these three run-based stats is an understated goal, as more EXP means more opportunities to get more cards and more gold means more permanent upgrades.

Permanent upgrades were an important feature in the initial loop of Vampire Survivors, giving the player the oomph needed to start clearing stages, but they are given FAR greater importance in Vampire Crawlers. Through upgrading, the player can more than triple their effective power, improve every starting stat by a non-immaterial amount. However, it’s more than just stats. Cards themselves can be upgraded, gaining slots for enhancing gems, while gems can be shuffled in rarity in exchange for money. It is a shockingly deep well of upgrades that gives the game legs, gives sickos (affectionate) something to strive for, and lets the player influence runs in a way that I think is unprecedented for the genre.

…But before players can focus on ANY of that, they need to deal with the enemies that are in front of them, ready to take a firm bite out of their stringy mid-section. Every encounter has enemies line up in a series of incremental rows, generally just attacking the player at the end of every turn, and the player’s goal each round is to destroy or debilitate them. If the player fully or partially clears out a row of enemies, more enemies will push forward to be dispatched, and the player must repeat this cycle. But they won’t be able to take on these enemies unless they get fortunate combos or accumulate buffs during the interim, often needing to take hits in exchange for boosting stats.

Health does not replenish much after encounters. Healing turkeys are relatively rare, with turkey vendors being even rarer. Health upgrades are only available via single-use cards— which I found kind of useless. Armor was transformed from a standard defense buff to a temporary shield that only lasts until the end of each turn, where it is eaten away by enemy attacks, and functions as your primary form of damage mitigation. Early on, maintaining enough health is very much a concern— upgrade your regen and armor— and it continues to be a challenge in boss battles, which very much break the rules of combat to deliver a higher, yet fair, level of challenge.

Navigation is structured as a 2.5D blobber (first-person dungeon crawler) with static enemies and simplistic randomized tile-based layouts with a few points of interest— things to break or pick up, and enemies lying in wait before the boss of each floor, with dungeons having 4 to 6 floors each. There are mechanical reasons and texture for this decision, but I would argue that this blobber structure is mostly to give the experience the shape of a dungeon crawler. It’s telling that some of the game’s stages are just bridges with interactable pickups strewn along the sides, and it functionally does not change the experience all that much. You can choose to not pick things up, and choose not to battle enemies, but they never struck me as obstacles to be avoided— they are full of EXP and money. So, from a certain perspective, the game could just be a linear string of encounters, no crawling required.

Combat really is the core to everything in this game, and the key to combat is accumulating a good deck. Getting lucky with the right spread of randomly distributed cards, making due with what you can get, and investing in the right resources. Certain card combos can be fused into stronger, better, and higher cost cards. Certain cards simply have good synergy with one another, by virtue of their effects or costs. And the player needs to balance a broad deck full of useful cards versus a smaller more focused deck, with the complications compounding with the subject of gems.

While gems can be augmented into cards, giving them secondary effects. They can double their power, give them passive effects of other cards, change their mana cost, change when and how they can be played, trigger an effect, and so forth. There are dozens of these things that can completely transform how a player’s deck is organized, letting them turn certain cards into degenerate (affectionate) setup tools that give them functionally infinite resources for a given battle. Being able to repeatedly play a card that gives the player extra mana, or expands their hand, can do wonders to expand the sheer breadth of damage they can do in a given turn. While being starved of either cards or mana leaves them as a sitting duck, vulnerable to whatever punishment the enemies have in mind.

This is very much the ideal end state for Vampire Crawlers, accumulating a deck full of these tactics that leave your enemies functionally unable to play the game. They become a bouncing ground for the player to style on them, harvesting as much gold as they can from them, before moving onto the next victim. Start with a bracer that boosts your hand size by one, chain to a tome that gives them 4 mana, returns, giving them another mana, lets them string together two buff cards, throw down some holy water that damages foes at the end of each turn, use a wing wild card to chain the combo to a 0 mana card that costs -1 mana now, get a 5x effect boost, and continue through another chain, clearing out your hand with some doves that also deliver damage over time and clear out two rows in their initial attack.

This is what I affectionately call a degenerate strategy, and I just love it. I love how the game’s systems encourage what feels like abuse, that they let players turn enemies into glorified toys and moneybags where they can rack up triple digits combos if they are really dedicated. Achieving this state, earning this power, and being able to maintain this mathematical dominance as the game bursts in a cacophony of visual effects, that is Vampire Crawlers in its purest form. It is something different from a regular roguelike deckbuilder, too hyperbolic and unhinged to be part of the same genre as something “mechanically pure” like Slay the Spire. And what’s there is so extreme, so much fun that I am eager to see how both it evolves and how it feeds into the cross-pollinated genetic soup of modern indie gaming.

I appreciate Vampire Crawlers from a design perspective, and have clearly fallen victim to the engrossing tendrils of its gameplay loop. I will assuredly return to it after a series of updates are released in the subsequent months— it’s just that kind of game— but I’d be remiss if I didn’t air some of my petty grievances.

One, there is no way to sort the cards in your hand, or even manually move them, which can be a problem when you have SO MANY cards in your hand if you are playing the game properly. Having a button or option to sort cards by mana cost would be a massive boon, lessening the organization burden and letting me play more cards at a faster pace.

Two, there is no way to view your full card collection when choosing an upgrade. In a run-based game like this, it is trivially easy to forget what cards you are running, and when the game asks me what cards I wanted, I often screwed up, grabbed a duplicate of a card I already had, or skipped out on a useful card that I thought I already had. Sure, shame on me for relying on the game to hold this cognitive load for me, but in a game designed around such goblin-like degeneracy, this seems like a needed feature.

Three, there is nothing in the UI that tells you if you have a pair of cards that can be fused into one of the game’s fusions. This is something Vampire Survivors did after you discovered a fusion once, and saved the need to have a fusion guide, or sticky note, to consult while playing the game.

Four, you can only fuse cards through a few avenues in each dungeon, and I don’t like that. Fusion cards are incredibly powerful, useful, and are always worth the investment. (Except for the daggers.) However, you cannot always control if you have the cards needed to fuse what you want at a given time, and even in the longest dungeons, there are only maybe seven opportunities to possibly get a fusion. The game is restricting the amount of upgrading the player can do, in a game all about empowering the player to frankly obscene degrees.

Fortunately, none of theses are particularly drastic changes— except for the fusion thing, which irks me because I want MAXIMUM POWER— and I hope they are added to the game in due time. And if not, they are at least petty annoyances.

In conclusion, don’t play Vampire Crawlers if you value your time, but do play it if you want to spend 20+ hours delving into peak number goblin degeneracy. 8.5/10.

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The Pokémon Remake Dilemma
(Because All I Think About These Days is Re-Whatevers, lol)

This was going to be the headline topic for this week’s Rundown, but I’m prioritizing the new hotness over my umpteenth tangent about the nature of re-whatevers.

There is no other series where more people clamor for remakes than Pokémon. It is a series where remakes are expected, anticipated, hyped up, and people complain about needing to wait so long for a remake. This tend in and of itself is not anything new— people like and want remakes, especially in long-running Japanese game series. But the drive and clamor for Pokémon remakes is rather unique in a way I feel like verbalizing, if only for myself, because Pokémon is… Pokémon, and everything about Pokémon is complicated.

Pokémon, over the years, has received a couple remakes. FireRed and LeafGreen (2004), HeartGold and SoulSilver (2010), Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire (2014), Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee (2018), Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl (2021). Remakes for this series are not a new thing, and according to many who I have examined from afar, there simply are not enough of them.

So, this begs the question of why people want these games to be remade.

Reason 1: Mechanical Updates

On a mechanical level, Pokémon is one of the few RPG series to undergo a strictly iterative design process. Every game aims to add more, every game builds on top of what came before, and while availability of certain elements comes and goes, while the past 13 years of games have featured game-specific gimmicks, the series has relied on mechanical consistency. The core mechanics were all largely solidified around the 2006 titles: abilities, held items, the physical/special move split, the nature, EV, and IV systems. Subsequent titles built upon these concepts with tertiary abilities, the fairy type, free move relearners, hundreds of new moves, oodles of new items, hundreds of new Pokémon, and party-wide EXP distribution. The more time elapses and the more changes are made, the easier it is to accept these changes as normal, facts of life, the way things are and, implicitly, have always been.

There are niches of people who prefer the way these games worked before certain complexities were added. But with an intellectual property as large as Pokémon, there are going to be subsets enamored with just about every facet. The broader majority, however, tends to err on the side of favoring the modern system and prefer using it, as it is what defines Pokémon in a broader context. The modern systems are the systems in the games that tens of millions of people bought, if not played. People largely either prefer the newest system, or they are just used to it.

This can lead to a certain friction when going back to older games, as players need to effectively unlearn the game of modern Pokémon and relearn the standards used by these older titles. This means adjusting back to a world where all Ghost type moves are physical, TMs are limited by playthrough, inventory space is limited, EXP is scarce, and using a full party of six Pokémon is the mechanically incorrect way to play the game. The core mechanics, systems, progression, and identifiable elements are still there. A Pokémon battle broadly looks the same irrespective of which mainline title one is referring to, remake or otherwise. Yet what a player does, and what they can do, vary drastically when comparing earlier titles to more modern ones.

I would compare the adjustment to using an old operating system after getting used to a modern one. Yes, Windows XP is not too different from Windows 10 on a broad level. Yet there would be a curve related to getting acclimated with the system, the process might not be pleasant, and it might suck for someone who never used Windows XP before. (Yes, there are people who have not used Windows XP. Get over yourself, grandma.)

So, one reason why there is a surge that wants to see Pokémon games remade is because they want the mechanics to be updated to modern Pokémon standards. This is how every previous remake worked, barring the cloned albino sheep that is Let’s Go, and I don’t think that’s crazy. Having gone through Pokémon Black (2010) and Pokémon Y (2013) this past year, I can definitely see why people would not want to deal with these older mechanics and would prefer newer systems. Hell, most of what I produced about Pokémon Black was about how many little things about the mechanics, distribution, and learnsets annoyed the crap out of me.

In fact, you could even say Pokémon balancing something of a fixation of mine, as if you could not tell by how I ranked the entire roster of Pokémon Black and White based on how useful they are in the context of a playthrough. …Or how I have been poking away at a dumb spreadsheet project where I normalize all stats, all learnsets, and attempt to buff every Pokémon while culling away many of the learnset eccentricities and mechanical uniqueness of Pokémon. I believe that this mechanical friction annoyance is a factor that leads some to want remakes, but it is far from the only one.

Reason 2: They’re All Different Versions of the Same Game*

Unlike most other game series, RPG or otherwise, the mainline Pokémon games do not have a particularly variable structural identity, let alone an immediate hook that allows a game to stand out from one another. While RPG series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy have shared iconography, systems, and themes, every game is its own entity due to unique mechanics, worlds, monsters, and characters. The premises are all different, and the journey is different.

With Pokémon, the entire series has been built around the format of badges, rivals, the elite four, routes, and so forth that it would not be wrong to view the games are being different takes of the same damn thing. The Pokémon and region are different, but the structure has not been meaningfully changed across the 10 main games and their derivatives. Yes, even Scarlet and Violet fall into this camp, just with fewer barriers and a pants-on-head stupid intended progression sequence. The structure is easier to break than it is to follow, but if you follow it, it is not too different from any other title.

This standardization in structure makes it harder to view each game as its own distinct entity, and makes them part of a series of repeated verbs, concepts, and cliches, meant to be systematized and organized into a series of standards and archetypes. The games are so similar that it would “make sense” if they are even more similar and further homogenized until they are effectively different campaigns for the same title.

This desire for homogenization is actually somewhat supported by the games’ very names. If you look at the English names of the games released from 1996 to 2012, they are called versions. When most other games call themselves versions, it is because they are an expanded or different version of another title. Naturally, Pokémon Gold Version and Pokémon White 2 Version are not the same game, but they are notably iterative sequels for the second and sixth games in a series. The shared elements make it easier to possible to view Pokémon as a singular game with various permutations, and with the recent rise in competitive Pokémon as itself a “game,” I only see this interpretation growing in prominence.

Reason 3: The Nostalgia Factor

The nostalgia factor is another element that is, at this point, baked into the DNA of Pokémon as a cultural institution. It is a multi-generational series, but pretty much every person who got into it will have a fondness for their first Pokémon game, or the first one they really got into. This is not a phenomenon unique to Pokémon, however, everyone I know who likes Pokémon has a favorite generation based on the multimedia environment of the series during their formative childhood years. Basically, your favorite Pokémon generation is based on what was most relevant when you were, like, 7 to 10, with some reasonable wiggle room. I’d graph it if I could, but I ain’t got the time budget to collect a biased pool of data.

People who grew up with or have an especially strong connection with Black and White dearly want Black and White remakes, because those are the versions they have the greatest connection to. How obvious. But if they have a strong connection with this title, why would they want it to change? Well, because they want to feel like a kid again. They want the thing they liked as a kid to be relevant again, to spread across another generation, or micro-generation, and see the thing they liked as a kid updated and improved using the power of modern technology. It’s ultimately a very basic sentiment, a desire for regained relevance, a rebirth of childhood wonder, and the opportunity to earnestly revisit something they had not fully experienced in years without the risk of ruining their illusion. Without the risk of raping their memories through reassessment.

Even if the IP never went anywhere, a specific game, a specific setting, can have just as much, paradoxically even more, appeal than any broader franchise or IP. I’d explain in more detail, but just saying “they wanna cop the vibes of their fave, man” seems sufficiency succinct.

Reason 4: Potential to be MORE

Looking at it broadly, I think that HeartGold and SoulSilver were the games that truly gave Pokémon fans a strong fixation on remakes due to how they were, in many ways, the platonic ideal of a remake. They addressed shortcomings of the original, largely added new content, expanded what was there, and incorporated features, like Following Pokémon and the PokéWalker, that fundamentally changed how people engaged with the games. With any remake, there exists a hope that it will turn out like HGSS, that it will become the best and most feature-rich version with the best qualities on all fronts, the preferred way to play.

Pokémon fans were, in a sense, spoiled by this remake, and arguably FireRed and LeafGreen, yet were comparatively burned by later remakes, which eschewed features fans anticipated. Emerald content was by in large absent from Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, including areas, events, and the beloved Battle Frontier, née Grind City. Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee effectively broke online Pokémon discourse with how much they screwed up, and I will carry a share of the blame for that. While Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were simply faithful to a fault— a rare example of a game that was bad by design.

This track record should, in a sense, shy fans away from remakes, and the last three have betrayed expectations and failed to be the superior dream games that are effortless to imagine. However, that is not really the case, as expressed by fans’ demonstrated disappointment that a Black and White remake will likely not be released for several years. There is an infinite amount of hope for these remakes to be better, even if that hope is based entirely on dreams and cope.

Reason 5: Graphic Lust

My final, and thorniest, reason is because the old Pokémon games look old, and were inherently limited by both the technology of the time and resources of its developer. As handheld games, the titles were basically operating under a decade deficit in regards to fidelity— and arguably still are— leading the games to look older than they actually are and leading to the spike in expectations from 2016 to 2018/2019. Remakes have the opportunity to “advance” the graphics and presentations of a given game to modern standards, allowing people to avoid the need to adjust their standards and feel like they are playing a modern video game. Like they are with it, relevant, and not compromising with the old and decrepit.

This is an operating rationale I have for why people want remakes— because they think old games look old and bad. However, this has always been a somewhat shaky stance due to the fact that this is not a universal belief, and the fascination with graphical advancement has always been set with some pushback.

The ultimate reason for this childsome lust of graphical advancement stems partially from general technical advancement, but eventually morphed into a marketing gimmick, a way to sell games by virtue of their graphics, and sell hardware based on graphical capabilities. This in turn led gaming culture to broadly associate graphical quality with game quality, when that has not and never will be the case. One of the objectively greatest video games ever created, Tetris, can run on a mono-color graphing calculator. Yet there are definitely large subsets of the world of gaming who stand by old segment-based review scores and video graphics as just as important as gameplay, if not more important, because everybody sees a game, not everybody plays it.

So yes— people want Pokémon remakes because they want these games to look better is a pretty obvious statement. But it’s also more complicated than that, as few series has had a more complicated relationship with graphics than Pokémon.

The underwhelming fidelity of Sword and Shield and Scarlet and Violet in particular has fed a persistent industry of online outrage merchants and decidedly “apolitical” reactionaries who gas up the presentation of older games in order to make more modern games look worse, often using hyperbolic language or generally bad faith comparison, for engagement and/or profit. I basically called them liars and scumbags there— but they do have a certain point, often highlighting the power of a simpler presentation and how it can make someone feel something by being more deliberate, bold, or consistent. …But I would imagine that these people represent a minority while the majority of people prefer things that have higher fidelity, despite the fact that I do not necessarily have much proof of that, especially these days.

However, if the sales figures are anything to go by, people don’t actually care about the graphics, or at least not enough to avoid purchasing them outright. Anecdotal outliers don’t count, are not real, but can hurt you. Which, in turn, leads me to question the conventional wisdom that better graphics sell games, and the target game buyer cares about graphics because the industry has trained them to care about graphics over the past 40+ years.

Truthfully, there has been ebbing waves of pushback to this idea that “better graphics make games better” since the first big retro boom of the late 2000s. This perspective has been enhanced through the rise of emulation machines, the wide accessibility of low-end hardware across the world, and the rapid increase in price of gaming hardware post-pandemic. There is an argument that the graphical arms race is over, that it died with the diminishing return threshold of, I dunno, the PlayStation 5 Pro, and people no longer care about graphical fidelity. We have reached the peak of how good a game can look on a phone screen. Looking at some of the biggest games in the world, Minecraft, Roblox, and Grand Theft Auto V (2013), there is a compelling argument to make there.

How video game graphics are perceived by different populations of people is something of a curiosity to me, and I would love to read an in-depth study on how preferences vary based on age, region, class, and terminal online-ness. I’ve stumbled upon a lot of characters with their own skewed graphical tastes, so this is more me shooting in the dark, unsure of what the mainstream consensus is in this world:

• People in their twenties who are firmly more interested in old PC games that came out before they were even alive.
• People who state they “cannot play” games with pre-PS4 graphics because they look too old for them to tolerate.
• People who, after playing primarily 2D games on old family computers via emulation, never want to play 2D games again, as it makes them feel poor and less White, despite being, categorically, not White.
• People who largely play mobile games and use games like Grand Theft Auto V and Genshin Impact as a baseline for acceptable conventional graphics.
• People in their late 30s and early 40s who seemingly, do not bother with anything that looks sufficiently modern and only play retro stuff and retro derivatives.
• Kids who were weened on Minecraft and Roblox, two games with the graphical fidelity of a wet clam, and simply do not care about graphical fidelity, at all.
• People who are heavily critical of any modern game’s visual shortcomings and animations while being overly generous to older games for their use of tweening and paper doll animation, genuinely believing they look better.
• People who claim to not care about graphics, but care intently on performance, and will also bemoan a game for having a presentation not up to their standards.

Look, I’ve seen a lot of characters, but I don’t know how big these groups are. I’ve buried myself into too many holes to know what color the sun is anymore.

However, regardless of what people actually think in their hearts and minds, I can say that everyone is a product of a gaming culture where good graphics are used as a key marketing element of games. People have integrated, on some level, that good games, successful games, and profitable games should, on some proportional level, look good. And a remake, even if it has worse art direction, should, at a minimum, have better graphics.

…Yeah, I went off the rails on that one. OH WELL! The poison has been released! Onto the one bit of real news I wanna bump!

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Spiders is DEAD
(And It’s All Nacon’s Fault)

A month ago, I was late to the party in reporting on the precarious state of publisher Nacon, formerly Big Ben interactive. They’re a B-tier European publisher that went on an acquisition spree during the pandemic, but as the industry stagnated, they suffered major financial losses, lacking any big hit savior to help them push through the storm. This was very bad news for every studio under their ownership, as it meant closures were on the table— especially after a lot of these studios just shipped major releases.

This is one of the main problems with putting all of one’s eggs, i.e., developers, into one basket, i.e., publisher. While a publisher can shield less successful studios and share the successes among them, if the publisher is floundering, then everything is at risk of breaking out in flames. And if a game publisher is at the risk of going under, it is almost always the game publisher’s fault. (Blame UP, stupid.)

With this in mind, it is not particularly surprising that Nacon subsidiary Spiders, developer of GreedFall (2019), Steelrising (2022), and hood classics like Mars: War Logs (2013), is shutting down. After shipping their latest title, GreedFall 2: The Dying World (2026), the company is now being liquidated. Assets are being sold, their office is being closed, and while they are going to develop the planned DLC for GreedFall 2, that will mark the end for them.

There’s a silver lining here is that they actually got to ship their game, finish the DLC, and will hopefully put out a final patch— not every studio is quite so lucky. However, this is still a very sad turn of events, as while Spiders was never the most prestigious of developers, they were a peddler of 7/10 banger Eurojank RPGs, which I have a personal soft spot for. While not always great and often unpolished, the games produced by Spiders and their genre of developers make gaming a more interesting place. They are testing grounds for unique ideas that cannot get pushed through in a AAA environment, and are too ambitious for an indie game’s scale, while doubling as a proving grounds for the types of people who go on to lead within AAA environments.

Indie games are a constant battle of scope versus budget, AAA games need to balance mass appeal with hundreds of developers. While middle-shelf game teams are the sweet spot, as they have the human resources needed to do stuff, thrive on experimentation, and can produce something that can stand next to a AAA title in most cases.

Mid-scale, or AA, game development is also a better way to spread multi-disciplinary skills among workers, accumulate institutional knowledge, and create people with the experience and skillset needed to lead AAA productions. Simply put, people could not have delivered titles like The Witcher III, Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate III, or even Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 without AA studios. Because all of these developers are or were AA at some point, and I know for a fact that many developers directly benefitted from working at studios like Spiders.

On its own, this is just another door closing, but closures like this combined with the institutionalized layoffs go to paint a deeply dire picture for the future of the games industry. A place where institutional knowledge is left to drain into a ditch. Where the best and most interesting games are made by a car-full of people with five years and a million bucks. Where AAA games are designed by committee, as nobody is allowed to get the experience, let alone confidence, needed to do something different for the tune of $300 million. Where the only exceptions to this are the relative handful of companies who still value institutional knowledge and don’t view humans are gristle. And where the only growth sectors are shit like Roblox and the growing Chinese middle-class.

The games industry is dying, has been for the past 20 years, and so has everything else in the world, including you.

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Progress Report 2026-05-03

So, uh, I’m trying not to focus too much on these Rundowns as I’m striving to actually get Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 Act III done on time. The problem is that I keep distracting myself on things that seem fun, that were not planned, but I want to do on some level, because I am a deeply flawed humanoid critter. I’ll talk more about my latest exploration into this time-wasting… next week! But for now, know that I spent much of my free time this past week ALSO doing Continuing Professional Education, as I wanna keep my license, and like doing all 24 hours in one week.

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2026-04-26: I really wanted to crank out another segment today with VD2.0 CH 7-14… Unfortunately, I had to take care of some work, started in the afternoon, and quickly got sidetracked by an accounting project for my sister that are up two hours. I also had issues writing certain segments, and had to scrap them entirely as my outline had unnecessary elements and ones that just did not work with how the story was progressing. Doing stuff like redesigning characters are you first introduce them adds up SO MUCH time, same with cutting like 500 words after realizing that a gag character is well and truly pointless. Sorry Akarin and Ggerg, you were not meant to be. …Oh, I still did well, writing 6,000 words. That ain’t bad. And if it is in your book… fuck you.

2026-04-27: Long boring day at work, finished Vampire Crawlers, wrote 4,300 words for this week’s Rundown preamble and second segment.

2026-04-28: Wrote 700 words to tie out the Vampire Crawlers bit. FULLY finished Vampire Crawlers for real-reals. Last run kind of killed my enthusiasm for this game because of how degenerate it got. Wrote 3,700 words for VD2.0 CH 7-14, starting off the encounter I teased back in 2024 in Psycho Shatter 1988. Yes, I planned a dumb crossover between my novels because I saw a cartoon do it once and thought it was neat.

2026-04-29: Fuck me. I tricked myself into playing Never to Everest, when it is all the same as any of these other Genshin-likes. Right down to the damn UX. Only wrote 1,700 words for VD2.0 CH 7-14, and finishing the crossover while also having best girl beat the shit out of a space Nazi. That’s fun!

2026-04-30: Uh… Played too much more of Never to Everest— Wait, no, it’s Neverness to Everness. My name is better. Wrapped up VD2.0 CH 7-14 with 600 words after revising my plans AGAIN. Got distracted by crap. Did some CPE studying, as it’s that time of year and I wanna avoid paying $100 in corporate money.

2026-05-01: Did work for my mother in the morning, did CPE in the afternoon, worked on my NTE preamble, did 10 hours of CPE, played some more NTE because I like crack. Then I wrote 4,800 words, mostly shitting on the game, and uninstalled it after happening upon that terrible hospital section. Game SUCKS!

2026-05-02: So, I had the house to myself today, wanted to do a BUNCH of writing, but instead found myself kind of listless. I tried altering my schedule around writing in a single big chunk from 18:00 to 01:00, but I got bouts of tiredness, had some creative fatigue after finishing a major 40k word storyline, and I find it harder to get into the creative groove after watching three hours of anime with friends in the morning. Oh, and I was suffering from video game withdrawal after uninstalling NTE. Still wrote 3,900 words for VD2.0 CH 7-07, getting like 60% through the second segment. Oh, and wrote 600 word to finish my NTE bit draft, which is just a first impressions review, but fuck making that its own post.

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Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report

Current Word Count: 197,982

Estimated Word Count: 250,000

Words Edited: 0

Total Segments: 29

Segments Outlined: 29

Segments Drafted: 21

Segments Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 59

I SWEAR it is not as bad as it looks guys! I am making progress, I promise! Aaaaahhhh!