We had these report cards in elementary school that, in addition to grading us on school subjects, also evaluated how we were doing on general life skills. I did pretty well in classes besides math, but the two skills I repeatedly failed were “penmanship” and “following directions.” I am simply not very good at reading and understanding explanations before I begin a task, and it’s this tendency that’s making the game Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop a bit of a nightmare for me, but also really fun.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop came out in 2024, and it’s been sitting in my Epic store library for a while before I finally decided to check it out this week. You play as Wilbur, a fox-headed dude who inherits an intergalactic mechanic’s shop and has to fix enough spaceships to make growing rent payments. There’s more plot than this– I’m only a few in-game days in, and I’ve already encountered mystical beings, thieves, meteor showers, and other hints that this isn’t just a job simulator. It’s possible to die, but the game is also a roguelike, with upgrades to your mechanic’s shop persisting between runs. But the bulk of your day is taken up by choosing from a number of repair jobs and getting them done to the customer’s satisfaction.

There are two modes to choose from: one with time pressure, where customers will get angry if you don’t fix their ships fast enough, and one that does away with the clock but makes the repairs harder and more exacting. I hate time pressure in games so opted for this more chill mode. This seems like a good way to learn the game, and especially how to come to grips with its giant, weird manual.

When you go to refill a customer’s fuel pump, for instance, you’ll see a symbol that will tell you which tab in the manual to go to, which you do by physically pulling the book out of your inventory and clicking through its pages. There, you’ll get a variety of images, brisk instructions, and references to other parts of the manual that will help you troubleshoot and solve the problem. My fuel jobs have been pretty basic–remove the fuel cell, refill it at my fuel station without filling it too far and exploding it, putting it back in. Oil is a little more complicated–in addition to the oil levels, there’s the oil quality to consider, as well as a pump, heat gauge, and other gadgets that could be busted. A recent job included both of these tasks and two new complications. There was an alarm that wouldn’t stop timing out and locking me out of the other ship modules, which had to be disarmed with a series of puzzles, and a “tomfoolery” module that required buying a new repair station to fix and then playing a whole other video game to calibrate.

The actual fixing is wonderfully tactile, with lots of buttons to press and levers to pull and bolts to unscrew. Just like in real life, you have to make sure you do all these things–I’ve lost money for forgetting to close a panel back up, or gotten stuck because I was flipping switches in the wrong order. The manual tells you all this, but it’s written like a real professional manual that assumes a certain familiarity with the objects at hand. Everything you need to know is in there, but it can be a little baffling to get your head around, especially if you’re not a great visual learner or are me, who cannot help himself from skimming the instructions before diving into a ship’s guts. In the game’s time-pressure mode, I imagine learning a new task for the first time requires an overwhelming amount of speedreading and making good choices, but in my chill mode I have no justification for not taking the time to look everything over first besides being a dumbass. I find it hard to understand the manual without experiencing the thing it’s describing, but going step-by-step often gets me stumped if a problem is deeper in the book. I’ll plunge ahead with unearned confidence, run into problems, give the manual the most cursory glance, dive back in, and get stumped again, in an absurd loop I have no one to blame for but myself.

I hate reading directions, but I do like research, so I enjoy looking stuff up in the manual even if I’m not fully digesting it. It’s hard not to get impatient to fiddle with all the strange machines, which give me some great Spaceteam vibes. The computer I’m playing Uncle Chop’s on sits next to an Ikea bookshelf I put together myself also without reading the instructions in full, and which is now listing to one side because I didn’t pay enough attention to the importance of rigorously attaching its shitty plywood back. Looking up from a game that reminds me I apparently haven’t grown at all as a person since third grade to real-world proof of the fact that I haven’t grown at all as a person since third grade is a lot, and the in-game consequences for my bad habit feel like a reminder that there will also be real-world consequences when my bookshelf inevitably collapses. At least in the game I’ll get a chance to start again, unlike my bookshelf, which will destroy everything around it when it forces me to pay for my hubris.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is available on PC and consoles.

You don’t need me to tell you that the world is a hellscape lately, but a fun thing about living in it is that it’s full of people with specific interests or niche areas of expertise, and they know all kinds of things you don’t know that you can go learn from them. Recently-released video game Morse is about Morse code, a very niche interest, and is even getting some people into telegraphy, an even more niche interest.

I feel like I’ve been hearing about Morse for years (10 years, apparently!), and it finally released in November. It’s changed quite a bit from the demo I played last year, which featured a narrative; now, you fend off growing waves of enemy ships on a grid you navigate with Morse code.

You tap out letters to move your cursor between grids and squares, all while enemy ships steadily approach from the right side of the screen. You can’t see them at first, so you need to set up mines to reveal them, or fire exploratory rounds to get a sense of what’s happening. As you move through the game, you unlock and upgrade weaponry, but things also get tougher: more ships to beat back, and more rows and columns to frantically dot-and-dash your way around.

I’ve only spent about an hour with the game, but I’ve really enjoyed its very specific mix of stressful and calm. In one way, it’s frantic; there’s way more ground to cover and problems to deal with than I feel like I can, and I’m constantly scanning the field and clicking away with my mouse to dart around. On the other hand, there’s something particularly slow about the whole thing. Tapping too fast will cause you to enter the wrong letter or nonsense instead of letters, so you need to take your time to keep from getting jumbled up. There’s a bit of a delay before you move, and shells take some time to load in. So peppered among a chaotic battle are all these micro-moments of downtime, and the whole game requires a kind of intentionality and level-headedness to succeed at that, when I pull it off, really makes me feel like I’m mastering a skill.

The ideal way to play this game, obviously, would be with an actual telegraph, which has been an option at festivals but less so at home. The Steam forums have a guide on how to get, build, or use one, and players have shown off their own versions online. It’s a game that invites weird controllers and making your own weird controllers. While I am not a controller sicko like Chris Person, I can respect people who are, and the pared-down input required for Morse seems like an approachable way to get into tinkering.

Morse code and its preservation isn’t something I’ve thought a lot about, but there’s a whole world of enthusiasts out there keeping it alive. In an email, developer Alex Johansson said he hopes to use Morse to introduce more people to a hobby with an aging population, which is an issue I have literally never considered before–what happens if there’s no one left alive who knows Morse code? I love how such a simple little game has given me a peek into a whole world I knew nothing about, with its own customs and lingo and values. Instead of doomscrolling the news, you could be learning Morse code! Maybe the world isn’t so bad.

I’m in a fight with my landlord over getting a dog, if “fight” means I texted him about it a couple times and he never answered and now I just drive myself nuts wondering if he’s purposefully not answering so that he doesn’t have to say “no” or if he just regular isn’t answering and I should harangue him. I am a person who should have a dog, and in the absence of one, I get my fix wherever I can: friends’ dogs, convincing dogs on the street to notice me and then pretending to be surprised, and video games that have dogs in them, like Dogpile.

Dogpile is a collaboration between two Australian studios, Studio Folly and Toot Games. You have a deck of dog cards, which you play to drop dogs into a yard. If two dogs of the same type touch, they merge to form a bigger dog. Those bigger dogs merge to form even bigger dogs, and you keep merging dogs until you either win by getting the biggest dog, or your dogs spill out of your yard and you have to start over. There’s also the smaller goal of earning an increasing amount of “bones” in a certain number of hands, with penalties coming into play if you don’t make the requirement.

I appreciate a game that understands that the best dog is a big dog (a problem for my own desire to have a dog, since I have a very small apartment). The game’s dogs are very charming, from tiny angry chihuahuas to greyhounds that look like they’ve been up too late doomscrolling to golden retrievers that just look happy to be included. 

Size isn’t the only quality of a dog you have to pay attention to. Dogs can have traits: friendly dogs will be drawn toward dogs of their type, while timid dogs will move away from other dogs. This can be really useful for space management, helping jostle dogs around to get them to touch. Some dogs can be unusually big or small, and dogs can also get fleas that make their traits not work. My least favorite trait is “crated,” which prevents a dog from merging for several turns. You can change dogs’ traits in an interface stylized like a dog wash, removing bad ones or adding good ones.

In the game’s pet shop, you can buy new dog cards or “tags” that modify your game, such as by making all the dogs super bouncy (I thought this would be great, but it backfired on me). The tags add a metagame over the whole thing that I’m sure will appeal to strategy nerds, but honestly I most like just dropping the dogs into the yard, watching them tumble and then pop into another kind of dog, and seeing all of them pile up in an awkward, jostling crush. 

The whole thing is bright, cute, and chill, and it ate up most of my Friday night as I said things like “get over there, butt dog” and “aah, no more puffballs” at my computer. Dogpile is out now on Steam.

I’ve finally been playing News Tower, a management game where you’re put in charge of every facet of a 1930s newspaper. Like, every facet, from which reporters cover which stories to making sure the bathroom is clean. It’s the kind of video game stuff I tend to love, but all of it taking the form of running a news outlet hits a little too close to home.

One of the last freelance pieces I wrote before starting as managing editor of Kotaku in 2016 was a review of The Westport Independent, an indie newspaper management game that was mostly focused on the editorial end of things. I remember finding both the game and writing the review emotional, making me think about what my editing career had been up to that point and what it would look like in my new role. And while being managing editor involved, well, both managing and editing, there were still big chunks of the business that were firmly other people’s problems.

Not so now, and not so in News Tower. In the game, you inherit a struggling paper and, most crucially, the building it’s housed in. The newsgathering is pretty simple: your telegraph operators find news across the city and globe, and then you send a reporter to cover it based on their strength in its subject area, such as sports, crime, politics, or economy. When a reporter is done they hand their story off to be typeset and assembled, and at the end of the week, you arrange your stories onto the pages of a newspaper and print it off to be sold. All of this takes in-game time; you have to juggle how long stories take to report to make sure you have enough to fill your pages, and I’ve spent a lot of the game’s Sunday evenings muttering “come on, come on” as the assembly person’s progress bar slowly filled and the clock ticked down.

But you play as the publisher, not the editor-in-chief. Beyond the work of the paper itself, there are all kinds of other things to oversee. You lay out your newsroom, buying and placing everything from reporters’ desks to lamps to trash cans. The printing press takes up a ton of space, and it’s also hot and noisy, which saw me sequestering it to its own floor and then desperately arranging acoustic panels and tiny fans around it. You need paper, someplace to store the paper, and someone to carry the paper where it needs to go. Your employees get hungry and thirsty, so you need a water cooler and food for them. They need to use the bathroom, so you need air vents to keep the bathroom from stinking and an employee to keep it clean. Things break, so you need a repairperson to fix them. 

Employees will get uncomfortable if their physical needs aren’t met, slowing them down. I’m early in my first run with the game, and my person in charge of stocking supplies is unhappy with everything: it’s too dark at his desk, the printer is too loud and hot when he has to put paper in it, the bathroom is too stinky when he has to go in it. I’ve literally carried out his duties for him, using my mouse to drag boxes of paper from outside the news office up to the shelves as he meandered up and down the stairs, all while bemoaning our lack of paper. 

I’d like to give him another lamp or more fans or some help, but I currently have barely enough money to keep us in business. I’ve refused to take out a loan, even though I’ve been making extra money by doing deals for the mafia instead. I’ve sold off odds and ends to scrape together handfuls of dollars for something I need more urgently, swiping up reporters’ potted plants and clustering their desks around a single light bulb, swearing I’ll fix things later if we can just sell enough papers this week. This money stress has made me unkind to my virtual employees; I swung from making my reporters a lovely little newsroom to snapping “You wouldn’t complain about the lighting if you were out reporting” within a handful of in-game time.  

News Tower is paced such that none of this is too stressful mechanically. Since the reporting largely happens on its own once you set it ticking, you have plenty of time for this day-to-day management, and you can move and re-do your layout easily. The game gives you plenty of clues to what’s wrong, if you have the means to fix it. But emotionally, I’m finding it a lot. It feels like there’s so much to handle, and so much of it relies on money I don’t have, and I still want to make everyone happy and not fire anyone. On top of all that, I still really want to make a good, honest paper that highlights the most important news, even as I promise the mafia I’ll do the opposite. There’s so much to do and so few resources to do all of it perfectly, but I’m still so certain I can, even as this commitment just digs me deeper into an early-game hole.

I’ve never really had the experience of a management game not feeling fun because it’s too similar to my real life. A game like Frostpunk is a harsh setting I’ll never find myself in; Stardew Valley is a lovely escape that sands all the rough edges off actual farming. I usually love little chores in games like this, but all the little chores in News Tower are just pinging all my brain cells attuned to my real life chores. I recently got access to the game’s financial reports, and I’ll be honest I can barely look at them without thinking about my own real-life financial reports and all the responsibilities they entail. 

I’m drawn to the game because it’s about journalism, but maybe I’m not in a place to play a journalism management game right now. This might be praise for News Tower: It definitely feels like running a news outlet, or at least running a news outlet if you’re me, someone with an over-developed sense of responsibility and a self-imposed mandate to do everything perfectly that I should probably work out in therapy instead of in a video game. There’s definitely a lesson in here about priorities and time management that I badly need to learn. At least my real life news outlet is doing a lot better than my virtual one, and at least the only bathroom I have to deal with there is my own. (Which is also currently dirty, oh no.) 

The baffling trailer for There Are No Ghosts At The Grand, some kind of supernatural mystery/ home renovation/ musical game, has stuck with me since I saw it back in June. The game has a Steam demo out now, and though it’s just a brief look, I was pleasantly surprised by how well all those disparate genres fit together.  

You play as a man named Chris David, who inherits a hotel called The Grand from his missing father. During the day you renovate the hotel, and at night you investigate a mystery involving monsters, a talking cat, and different characters with connections to different rooms of the hotel. In addition to all that, characters sometimes break into song, with your dialogue choices becoming part of the lyrics. 

I did not, alas, see the hot priest from the trailer above in the demo, but I did get a sense of how all the game’s different bits play. When the demo opens, you use a gun-like tool to fix up a room of the hotel: vacuuming debris, righting furniture, and blasting off wallpaper and replacing it with paint. The renovation mechanic isn’t super-detailed–you only have to paint a bit of a wall before it gets fully coated, for instance–but it felt nicely forgiving after how much time I’ve spent painstakingly blasting nooks and crannies in Power Wash Simulator 2 lately.

Your renovations get interrupted by a woman named Maddie, who wants your help investigating some black slime that’s washed up on the town’s beach. Here your renovation tool serves a different function, letting you move pieces around to repair a boat. Once we set sail, as I followed waypoints toward an abandoned island, I noticed the soundtrack had gotten unusually loud. When I turned my head, I realized the music was coming from Maddie, who was singing an upbeat pop number about the situation in town.

I don’t know if there’s some moment in the full game that explains why characters spontaneously burst into song, but the whole thing was so disarmingly weird that I forgot all about steering the boat while I gaped. Like the trailer song, Maddie’s song was super-catchy; at the end of it, I chose between dialogue options to add a funk-inflected verse sung by Chris that included the lyric “I’m not some venture capitalist.” Creative director Anil Glendinning told Polygon There Are No Ghosts At The Grand becoming a musical was “a little bit unexpected…  as it was just because of the music we were listening to at the time,” which included “[a] lot of music from the British scene around the late ‘80s, early ‘90s.” As a musical theater nerd, the idea that the game is a musical just because sounds great to me, and while what I experienced of it was definitely jarring, I was totally delighted by it.

On the island, the supernatural stuff kicks in, and while I won’t spoil it, it was both an interesting mystery and mechanically appropriate to the idea of home renovation. Your renovation tool has different functions, such as switching the mode on the vacuum to fire stuff back out in order to repair things or place objects. Everything being done through your tool helps the game’s different pieces feel connected and keeps the demo from feeling too busy. The challenges and puzzles I faced on the island were pretty basic, and at times things even felt a little too hand-holdy, but I appreciated the guidance when being dropped in the middle of the game. 

The demo lasts about 40 minutes, and it basically feels like that reveal trailer: an interesting kind of weird, but one that hasn’t come down on the side of good weird or bad weird yet. I wasn’t completely sold on the demo’s humor, which could feel a little try-hard, but the whole thing felt surprisingly cohesive and very charming. I’m psyched that it’s a musical because everything should be musicals, and I’m really curious to see if that part holds up. There Are No Ghosts At The Grand is set to release for PC and Xbox in 2026.

Back when I wrote about CloverPit, a bunch of readers said “Oh, this is just Buckshot Roulette,” a game I hadn’t heard of. Over the weekend, while piling my Steam library with games I was excited to play once I stopped building a new website, I tossed Buckshot Roulette in there. I finally got the chance to play a bit, and yeah, it definitely presses some of those same dark, complicated brain buttons as CloverPit.

Buckshot Roulette is a 2023 Itch.io game that came to Steam in 2024. In single-player mode, you’re sat across from a dealer in a grimy room. The dealer loads a variety of live or blank shotgun shells into a gun, and you take turns passing it back and forth deciding whether to shoot yourself or your opponent. Shooting yourself with a blank gives you another turn; shooting the other person (or shooting yourself) takes a point off health. The game progresses over rounds, with your health refilling in the first two before the third goes into “sudden death;” if you die here, you lose and start over.

You get items before some rounds, which can help you craft whatever passes for a strategy in this game. The magnifying glass will tell you whether a live or blank is in the chamber, the handcuffs force your opponent to skip a turn, and the knife increases the gun’s damage. Your opponent, of course, also gets items, and in my single-player games I’ve found there to be a wonderful sense of dread as I watch the dealer busy themselves with theirs, knowing something bad is about to happen to me but being unable to stop it.

Beating single-player for the first time unlocks an endless mode, and there’s also a multiplayer mode that I haven’t been able to check out yet but have enjoyed watching YouTube videos of. Playing the game with friends seems like a fun/terrible social experience, where playing solo has, like CloverPit, exposed all the grossest wiring of my brain when it comes to the appeal of gambling and chance. 

Both games lay bare the fantasy of making your own luck and precisely where strategy lies when it comes to gambling. They both have strategy; I’d posit Buckshot Roulette’s is a bit easier to employ than CloverPit, given your more limited options and the math that undergirds it. But at the end of the day, you’re still at the mercy of chance in both games–and in both games, I am absolutely certain that I can be totally in control, that I’m on a streak or that the odds hate me, that everything is laden with meaning and portents and that way more is going on than just me sitting alone in whatever dismal virtual room clicking buttons. 

Both games’ aesthetics seem to want to highlight how gross this all is, with their jagged art styles and abrasive music. But at the same time, they fully indulge in the thing they’re criticizing. Playing them both, I ask myself if I’m really playing them ironically or from a distance, if I’m engaging in some kind of intellectual exercise or just mashing the same buttons that led to loot box regulation or dunks on sports betting. And given that neither game is actually gambling, does that make it better–can you have the pleasure without the pain?--or does that make it worse–with none of the consequences of real gambling to stop me, am I just training neural pathways that could lead me down those roads? 

Neither CloverPit or Buckshot Roulette necessarily want to answer those questions, putting themselves out there for you to wrestle with. They’re interesting experiments, finding me at a time where other developers are playing with similar ideas of how we engage with randomness and what it does to our heads. They’re also both really fun, even if what that fun is unsettles me if I look at it too closely. I'm impressed that such a little game has so much going on, that it lets me bring so much of myself to it. Thanks for the moral crisis, readers.   

Everybody loved Blue Prince, and at this point it feels like everybody has finished (or, “finished”) Blue Prince, but I’m still here thinking “boy, I really should get back to Blue Prince” while knowing there’s a good chance I won’t. As much as I liked what I played, it just didn’t get its hooks in my brain the way it did with others, and it’s the kind of game that needs passion to see it through. But I have finally found my sicko mode, “can’t stop thinking about it and need to talk to everyone about it” puzzle game: The Seance of Blake Manor.

The Seance of Blake Manor casts you as Declan Ward, a detective in 1890s Ireland who’s been called to a mysterious manor hotel to investigate the disappearance of a woman named Evelyn Deane. A diverse crew of guests has gathered at the manor to attend a seance, and it quickly becomes clear that they all have their reasons to wish Deane harm. You have the weekend to figure out what happened to Deane and who’s responsible before the seance occurs on Sunday night.

The time limit can feel pressuring, but time only passes when you undertake certain clearly-marked actions, such as examining objects, questioning guests, and attending events like meals and lectures. An important first step in solving the mystery is filling your timetable with the weekend’s activities and guests’ schedules, so you’ll know who will or won’t be where every hour. The latter is particularly helpful; one fruitful avenue of investigation is to break into everyone’s rooms and go through their stuff, and you definitely don’t want to get caught. Ask me how I know.

Every guest and staff of the hotel has a backstory, motive, and relationships with other characters. And they’re not just cursory stuff for atmosphere; I almost immediately forgot about the game’s central mystery as I dug into secret love affairs, thwarted career ambitions, cryptic plots, mystical societies, class and race tensions, failed romances, and people struggling to square their faiths with a changing Ireland and with the popularity of Spiritualism, a 19th and early 20th century movement to communicate with the dead that threatened much of society’s status quo. (Spiritualism is one of my top niche interests, and I’m also currently learning the Irish language; the fact that there’s a game about both is very exciting for me specifically.) To add to the plot stuff, the game is also full of things to learn about the history of the manor, Chrisitian gnosticism, and Irish folklore, politics, and history–a lot of this information is kept in the manor’s library, where you can research plot-essential stuff, but also browse the shelves for more detail on a topic. I’ve spent way more time doing this than I have actually trying to figure out what happened to Deane; I’m currently just before Saturday dinner and feel like I have no hope of solving her mystery and preventing whatever horrors it’s hinted will happen at Sunday night’s seance. With over 20 characters to learn about and whose problems to solve, I’m constantly panicking about the time limit, though players who’ve beaten the game tell me not to worry and that they ended things with time to spare.

The game has a robust set of menus to help you keep track of all this and figure out what to do next. When you talk to characters, available topics are represented by icons to choose from, and while characters will only talk about certain topics so you don’t fritter away your time too badly, not all of them are essential for your investigations. Discovering more about the topics that are important places those topics on a mind map/ conspiracy board that shows how they’re connected and paints an overall picture of a character and their story. (I’d show you images, but they would be full of spoilers; you can see a glimpse of this in the trailer above.) When you’ve connected enough bits of information, you’re given a Mad Libs-style screen in which to create a hypothesis by filling in words from your conspiracy board, and then you can confront that particular character about it. I found these Mad Libs a little fiddly on occasion to express my hypothesis exactly how the game wanted me to, but it’s a fun mechanic with a lot of guardrails to make sure you know what’s going on. So far, some of my confrontations have wrapped up a character’s story, while others have introduced actions I need to take to fully resolve things, which means more investigating.

The game menus do their best to keep everything organized for you and to nudge you about where to go next, but I haven’t always found it to be quite enough, so I also keep a notebook beside me while I play. Occasionally I’ve been frustrated when I feel like I know enough to confront a character but haven’t discovered all the things to let the game know I know them, but those instances have been pretty rare. My main problem is that everything is so interesting that I’m constantly getting off track, suddenly remembering that time is ticking down and I’m no closer to putting my top priorities to bed.

For me, The Seance of Blake Manor echoes Blue Prince’s interlocking mysteries and sense of place without having to contend with its life-eating RNG and open-endedness (I’ve also seen some players compare the two game’s art styles.). There’s some Lorelei and the Laser Eyes vibes too (a game I actually did finish!), and I’ve wrestled with wanting to start again to introduce the game to the friend I played Lorelei with, and not wanting anything to come between me and seeing its end. But at the same time, I’m tempted to start again just so there’ll be more game to play, even though I have a full in-game day and evening left; like a good book, I both want to know what happens in the end and to never be done with it.

It sucks to be writing about Blake Manor on a Monday morning because now I want to be playing it but a whole work day stands in the way. There is just so much in this game, all of it given so much detail and attention that I’m thoroughly lost in it, while still providing enough guidance to keep me from getting totally washed away. It’s captured the obsession and passion of all those puzzle games I couldn’t get into this year, while still being a constrained experience I can actually tackle, with that time limit bringing a tension that feels essential to the game’s story and atmosphere. There’s a free demo on Steam if you want to get a feel for it first; you should do this not just because the game is good, but because then I’ll have more people playing alongside me to talk about it with.