GIPTM: June 2026

This is a monthly blog post in which I reflect upon and post micro-reviews for every video game I've beaten or otherwise concluded my time with in the month of June 2026. This includes both new and old releases.

Numerical ratings are purely subjective measures of my enjoyment of the game and are conducted on a full 100-point scale in which 50 means that I enjoyed it. Roughly speaking: 0 = hated it; 10 = frustratingly little enjoyment; 20 = seeds of ideas that were not adequately delivered; 30 = some interest; 40 = respectable effort but I didn't quite enjoy it; 50 = faint positivity; 60 = good; 70 = doing something uniquely well; 80 = great; 90 = very special; 100 = legendary.

Key: 🟩 = beaten; ⬛ = not beaten, but I will not be continuing; 🔁 = replay

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Mina the Hollower 🟩

2026

Hollower knight

Genre: RPG || ARPG

Played on: Xbox Series X

When we talk about expressive flexibility in puzzle-solving, the examples that most readily come to mind make use of “analog”, open mechanics and systems. Physics systems are the prime example: if a game’s physics system is flexible enough (or able to be broken an exploited in an interesting way), it may well be possible to find creative, expressive, individually-specific solutions to problems. Stack some boxes to bypass a wall, jump off of rogue level geometry to find a creative way around an obstacle, rocket jumping, etc.

The “analog” or open nature of the systems and mechanics leaves room for finding creative use of the degrees “between” expected game states and conditions. This is in contrast to games with binary, “digital”, or closed systems and mechanics. It’s significantly harder to creatively cheat at digital chess in the same way; there’s not a lot extra that the bishop can do if positioned just right between squares.

Mina the Hollower feels like a game of “closed” mechanics. The avatar moves (mostly) in a strict grid-based pattern, the jump is a set height and distance… there’s very little room for analogue exploitation through physics trickery. Somehow, though, its gameplay feels remarkably expressive, and it’s because the developers found the alternate, harder way to approach expressivity — either give players a flexible tool that can do a great number of things, or give players a tremendous amount of inflexible tools.

Mina, presented as a top-down ARPG evocative of Game Boy Color classics like The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, fills its world with “closed” challenges — challenges structured like lock-and-key puzzles in which the use of particular items and abilities overcome obstacles by nature of their planned interaction rather than by altering the relative position or valence of the avatar in the game world.

But each challenge in the game world is reactive to multiple solutions, not because it is subject to a flexible physics system but because planned interactions are stacked deep. Not only is there an impressive cabinet of permanent and temporary items, but equippable badges oftentimes bestow entirely new and unique mechanics that either interact with other items in interesting ways or allow entirely new solutions to navigational puzzles.

It all comes together to feel remarkably expressive, despite being the kind of game that tends to lean more into puzzle-like set solutions. It’s impressively designed and planned.

Innovation the game introduces: Mina is a game that doesn’t bend to player empowerment. In fact, I would criticize the early game for being too difficult — some very demanding challenges and quite unforgiving checkpointing is presented to the player before she even has a chance to acclimatize to the way the game is to be played and the tools at her disposal, and Mina has not yet diversified her tool-set enough to provide relief in the form of the game’s broad tool affordances.

In particular, combat has an odd flow. Mina attacks straight in front of her, so you must stand surefooted and resolute looking at the enemy before attacking — there is no spraying-and-praying or swishing-and-wishing while in motion. Enemy attacks come at Mina quite quickly, and Mina has very few defensive options (if the one defense primary weapon was not picked at the beginning of the game). Mina’s best defense is burrowing underground which is not an instant action — she has to jump in the air (she is vulnerable at this point) and burrow when she lands from her jump. So, in order to avoid enemy damage, the player has to anticipate the attack with enough time to complete the jump and land underground. Enemy attacks are often faster than the period of time required to complete Mina’s jump arc, so the player has to decide to “dodge” before the attack has even been thrown. It’s an audacious demand on the player, forcing her into pattern memorization rather than reactive improvisation.

The unforgivingness of the game extends to the game’s story. The game does not have a happy ending — it’s a hard-won downer, from a story perspective. It sets up a context in which New Game+ is encouraged to resolve the mess the world is left in at the end of the campaign. I respect this dedication to telling a true horror tragedy instead of betraying narrative convictions to reward the player for hard-fought battles.

What I’d like to see from future games: If I am to criticize the game for anything, it’s the lack of navigational aids. The game world is dense with activities, secrets, and criss-crossing paths; it’s a word that resists being combed in an orderly fashion, yet it provides very little assistance for navigating the dense web of an overworld. Even finding the entrances to each respective area of the map — ostensibly the golden path — can be maddening. Identification of new routes and locations of unclaimed treasures have to be memorized; the player has to hold a tremendous amount of information in her head at all times, meaning the game is best binged — a rather hostile and borderline unethical way to demand player retention.

There is no map — only a vague drawing of the continent that can only be viewed in Mina’s underground den, accessible at checkpoints. It gives a rough sense of how the game world connects, but it is functionally useless. Any future Mina game (or even a patch for this game) could really use a proper map, and if the game gives the player the ability to drop icons and notes, even better!

Lineage and Legacy: Mina is intentionally designed to evoke the action RPGs of the Game Boy Color, even being drawn with many of the graphical and color restrictions of that hardware (though, obviously, running in widescreen, which was not a consideration on the GBC). The classic Game Boy Zelda games are the closest comparison points: The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Oracles of Seasons and Ages. Survival Kids and Final Fantasy Adventure served as points of inspiration. The underground burrowing mechanic is directly inspired by Mole Mania.

Mina would pair especially well with last year’s indie masterpiece Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, another game not only in a Game Boy (albeit Advance rather than Color) style echoing classic Zelda design but also, as Dominic Tarason pointed out, both feature mouse-like protagonists with whip-like weapons, “fighting to restore the world’s ethically-questionable electrical power source”.

If you’re in the mood for more Zelda-like, GBC-stylized puzzling, I also recommend modern indie hits Prodigal and Isles of Sea and Sky.

Score: 82

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LocoRoco Midnight Carnival 🟩

2009

More bouncing than The Bouncer

Genre: Platformer || 2D platformer

Played on: PlayStation 5

LocoRoco established a unique gameplay identity rooted in indirect control of a gaggle of pleasingly soft-body blobs, navigating through a gentle and colorful world of storybook platforming adventure. LocoRoco 2 improved upon that formula by deepening the variety of challenges in each world but maintaining a fairly consistent gameplay vocabulary with the series progenitor. Midnight Carnival is a fascinating case study in how far a series’ trademark mechanics can be stretched without breaking fundamentals of their identity in order to create a game with a different set of design priorities.

Midnight Carnival is more of a score-chasing arcade-action game than the previous LocoRocos, yet it is not a “from-scratch” spinoff carrying forward only the series’ visual and aural identities. It is very much built on top of the familiar gameplay logics and structures of the previous LocoRoco games; in fact, it can be played like a classic LocoRoco (up to the point at which engaging the new mechanics becomes necessary).

Midnight Carnival is like the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater of LocoRoco games. The addition of a new mechanic and the restructuring of challenges makes this more of an extreme sport — a test of skill and risk-taking. The “jump” mechanic (really, the LocoRocos being nudged into the air by the planet, but effectively a jump) can now be chained, and keeping a chain going gives each jump a powerful boost, sending the LocoRoco rocketing into the air. The implicit challenge is to chain the boosted jump (the BOING) throughout the entire course without ever dropping the combo.

Though the game becomes unreasonably difficult in its final chapters, this innovative twist on the mechanics feels incredibly fresh while still being respectful to the series’ origins. It surprises me that I have not encountered more games like this, about chaining hazardous leaps throughout whole stages.

Innovation the game introduces:

The BOING mechanic and the implicit challenge of keeping a combo active throughout the entire course has encouraged the developers to make courses shorter, like those of Super Meat Boy — snackable challenges that can up the difficulty while reducing the punishment for failure. It’s a smart balance.

What I’d like to see from future games:

Planning the arc of each jump ahead of time makes for a great challenge. The temptation is to make future games that follow this mechanic an auto-bouncer, but the dexterity test of pressing the button(s) with correct timing add to the experience. I would like to see the ability to do tricks in the air to increase score; anything to increase the risk-reward and perhaps get a bit more aerial control.

Lineage and Legacy:

Games specifically of this sort — about chaining together bounces — are rare. We can look at Bounder from 1985, which features a perpetually-bouncing ball which must be carefully guided through obstacle course environments, but that game is played from a bird’s eye perspective. A better early example is Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back, a side-on Castlevania-like game played as a bouncing pumpkin, or the similar Bean’s Quest and Go! Go! PogoGirl. There are vertically-oriented auto-bouncers on phone, like PapiJump and Doodle Jump. For a 3D take on the formula, we can observe Alpha Waves.

Score: 70

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ROOM.EXE 🟩

2021

Room.exe is a place where you can go. You can have a good time, you can have a bad time. It's a safe place.

Genre: Horror

Played on: PC

The game itself is a simple construct — walk from one end of a room, empty except for some stalactites and stalagmites mysteriously growing in its center, to the other. Exiting the room will load a new procedurally-generated room of similar construction. It’s pitched as a horror game, yet there’s no danger; no monsters or traps. So we would presume that the horror stems from the eeriness of our sense of presence in these identical, looping spaces.

But our presence is mediated by randomly-applied visual filters; digital psychadelia that becomes more extreme and abstract the further into the procession of rooms you venture. Though visually appealing, they create a paradoxical effect of alienation and drawing you further in, kinesthetically. They’re a perpetual reminder of the artificiality of the space, distancing you from your telepresent avatar through bright colors and odd effects, but needing to strain to look through the abstraction and perform a navigational task in the space causes and necessitates greater kinesthetic attunement with the avatar body.

It ends up creating an interesting tension — a push-and-pull between yourself and your environment. You strain to immerse further while the game resists that pull. The horror stems from the ontological tension at play in your mind.

Innovation the game introduces:

While playing, I debated whether it would have been preferable to have more involved gameplay challenge; more complex navigational demands or even puzzles to solve. ArgondevilGuiderods’ choice to keep the demands of the game simple allowed for more rapid iteration between the game’s dazzling and disorienting effects and prevented particularly strong effects from ever “soft locking” our progress through visual unclarity.

What I’d like to see from future games:

Having played Hypnogenesis at GDC, a twin-stick shooter that feeds its signal through a video synthesizer to create psychedelic video effects partially controlled by the actions of play, I would like to see these kinds of effects be not only applied to a 3D navigation game but also to be modulated and affected by the navigation of the space.

Lineage and Legacy:

This would pair nicely with The Catacombs of Solaris and Hyperbolica.

Score: 67

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fast car 🟩

2024

Is it fast enough so we can fly away?

Genre: Simulation || Plunderludic

Played on: PC

Disclosure: I am friends with developer mut/moochi. This is not intended as a consumer review, and mut has nothing to gain from a “positive” review nor lose from a “negative” review, but it’s worth saying upfront in case it informs the context in which this is read.

fast car is a plundercore / plunderludics game — a game made of component pieces of other games, which uses those connections and resonances in order to create new artistic meaning specifically from familiar elements’ recontextualization or alienation from their source texts. It is primarily composed of elements of four source games: character models are borrowed from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Mario Golf: World Tour, a vehicle model is taken from Cars 2 on the 3DS, and the environment in which gameplay takes place is from Dinosaur King. And, of course, the game — pitched in its itch.io page as a music video — sets its gameplay to a progressively-building rendition of Tracy Chapman’s timeless “Fast Car”.

The scene opens on a large, sparsely-designed desert, featuring a few hoodoos and mesas and, amusingly, isolated billboard objects textured from one side, the equivalent of Hollywood façades, giving the otherwise naturalistic space odd reminders of artificiality. The game is presented in split-screen, and the player controls two avatars simultaneously — a Splatoon Inkling and a Mii dressed as the Mario enemy Wiggler. They stand in unknown relation to one another, and each half of the screen looks, from behind its respective avatar, into the barren space in front of it. Since each keyboard command operates both avatars, the implicit challenge of “find the other and unify the split perspective” is complicated by the constantly-changing position of each avatar and the infrequency of points of reference with which to triangulate each avatar’s relative position. Can you make these two non-stationary points meet?

At the beginning, a car is made available to the Inkling. Hop in the car and drive through the desert. A rearview mirror hangs at the top of the screen at all times, reflecting the foreheads of whomever is in the car; when the Inkling drives alone, the negative space in the mirror where the passenger’s head is expected is notable; it brings with it a feeling of incompleteness begging to be resolved.

Much more mobile, the Inkling is the de-facto searcher, and the Wiggler is the lost partner. Finding the other is not easy, though. The desert is largely featureless, and there is no camera control separate from character movement. In order to look around, the avatars have to move quite extensively. The car also controls strangely — not like a typical vehicle. Its turning radius is excessively wide; when you catch a glimpse of the car from the Wiggler’s POV, it’s not easy to reorient yourself toward the POV. You’ll end up getting lost.

If you do position your Wiggler near a landmark, remember that the control of both avatars is linked — driving there will cause the Wiggler to move. I found success planting my Wiggler at a landmark (the cliffs with the bridge between them, the most distinctive feature in the desert) and trying as best as I could to wedge the Wiggler into the corner.

Alas, we finally met up. The Wiggler jumps into the car and we drive off into the sunset, in a manner of speaking. Driving around the course, we eventually clip through the floor and fall into the infinite void. It’s in the language of glitches, but, knowing mut’s other design work, a long fall beneath the world is often intentional. As we fall, the view fades to black to conclude the experience. It’s a Thelma & Louise ending, signaling the descent into nothingness isn’t so bad when there’s someone by your side.

When speaking to plunderludics creators, they’re often a bit cagey about the meaning behind the selection of particular assets from particular source games, so it might not be fruitful to read too deeply into why particular assets were chosen, but just to indulge my curiosity, let’s take a brief detour into the symbolism and semiotics at play in this particular constellation of choices. The desert setting immediately brings to mind Thelma & Louise, foreshadowing the game’s ending. Even the visual composition of the game evokes the Thelma & Louise poster, with the poster’s photograph standing in for the ever-present rearview mirror.

Thelma & Louse has a “barely counts as subtext” queer reading, which matches nicely with “Fast Car”, a song that can be argued is one of the definitive queer texts of the American 80s. I’m not sure if this synchronicity can lead further, but it’s a fun coincidence.

The Inkling and Mii are both Mario Kart drivers, but they hold an uneasy relationship with the series. Inkling is a guest character introduced in Mario Kart 8’s Switch port — a stranger in a strange land. Mii has had on-and-off inclusion in the series, most recently having been neglected from Mario Kart World. The Mii also dresses like the Wiggler enemy of the Mario series. Crucially, it’s a Mii dressed up as a Wiggler and not a Wiggler itself. It emphasizes impracticality of the costume for the desert — the feeling of being lost and unprepared. The Inkling and Mii are both Nintendo mainstays, but they are also outsiders — something about their identity is both “in” and “out” in the world of Nintendo (again mirroring Thelma & Louise).

Innovation the game introduces:

The way that the song builds is very nice. The instrumental intro loops until the Inkling gets into the car. When the characters are reunited, the song has all of its instrumental power behind it. It crescendos when we reach the faux-glitch ending.

What I’d like to see from future games:

Out of curiosity, I started the game again and made the journey on foot, never jumping in the car to begin with. The characters met but could not interact. It would be nice if there was some kind of alternate ending or acknowledgement of “completing the task” in such a cumbersome and roundabout way.

Lineage and Legacy:

Would pair nicely with other greats of the plunderludics scene, like tapestry, Oἶκοςpiel Book I, and Titanic II - Orchestra for Dying at Sea.

Score: 79