If you like weirdo story crap - and I do - Soulslike games might be the foremost genre. Twisty-ass stories you need to almost literally wrest from their hideous talons, even genre entries not made by The Progenitor tend to inherit a certain kind of ethos, ambient storytelling, and horror roots. I'll tell you straight up: I think I might not be buying these games anymore. Most of the fun I get out of them is . I like to make fun of myself or whatever for having had the temerity of getting old without the noble grace to die, but even at the shining zenith of my powers I wasn't gonna be accomplishing these feats. Ninja Gaiden, I could do - I made it my personality for a time. Those were fast! The New Difficult is a very peculiar, spiky kind of slow. All I want is the lore, and I can't get it! It's like I'm in a life or death fight with a book.

I have to watch others play! I need to accept this. I have to be an observer. I am not one of the anointed who can spend the kind of time I saw somebody invest on stream yesterday to defeat a single… I think it might have been a rabbit. Some kind of lightning rabbit-man. Even if I wanted to, my life simply isn't constructed in such a way that two hours of time invested can result in no progress. Gabe was talking about an optional boss he didn't know was optional yesterday, it was really funny to me so we went with it. The old saw about Atheism is that Atheists just believe in one less God than most other people. I utilize that rhetorical power now, in the service of a new age.

Dabe has emerged from the Toilfields long enough to do some streaming today, so let me jump in with him: he's gonna check out Laika: Aged Through Blood for a bit, and then just as in days of old, we're gonna play fun games with Chat. This time, in a callback to a fairly ancient ritual, we're gonna play Once upon a Galaxy - the inheritor of Storybook Brawl's functionally perfect autobattler slash card game loop. It will teach you how to play when you grab it, and all the links to download to your phone are right here. It's probably my favorite game of the year so far, and the way it streamlines the play experience is Snap-like in its cleverness. See you in there!

(CW)TB out.