| Game Engine: RPG Developer Bakin 
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
KUMASAMA is another in a long line of doujin games by Lu/UNCHIFIREFLY, this time centering on a sex worker named Michuru. Due to a series of debts accrued by her late mother, Michuru is forced to turn to the oldest profession to make ends meet, and there's also a series of bear attacks happening throughout the area...if we're being perfectly honest, the structure of the game will become fairly obvious after a few minutes of play, but there's just something endearing about the world KUMASAMA conjures up in the style of game this usually represents. Sure, you're in a dark moment of your life and there's a killer bear running around, but you've got a rapport with the cute lady running the convieience store and there's a dog as big as a house just chilling out. Perhaps you might even find true love in all this mess, who knows? Short and sweet!
January 3rd 2026 - At 2 AM local time, the United States launched multiple missile strikes at the city of Caracas to supress Venezuelan air defense while abducting the sitting president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. United States Congress was not given advance notice of this operation and has been widely decried as an overt kidnapping under the guise of 'preventing narcoterrorism'. Coincidentally, Venezuela has the world's largest supply of oil with Saudi Arabia as a close second.
| Game Engine: Godot 
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
A very pleasant putt golf simulator from Potomax! Presented in the promotional material as a reference to Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting, The Joy of Putting is refreshingly straightforward. You play one of (currently) three distinct putting courses, eighteen holes each. The game is a top-down affair and so getting aces on most holes is a question of figuring out the geometry and using it to your advantage. The music has a modular quality that becomes more boisterious the better you're doing, while becoming more quiet for times when you need to concentrate. You also have a practice section to get a better idea of how much strength actually goes into your putts, along with a Random and Daily course for those looking for leaderboard aspirations. It's pretty good!
Steam | GOG | Humble Store
| Game Engine: Unreal 
Lovely, lovely game we've got here by the talented duo Ryan Kitner and Daniel Whitworth! Escape from Ever After is a kid friendly critique of capitalism as you fill the roles of storybook enemies Flynt Buckler and Tinder, whose typical story is forcibly upended by the machinations of a corporation from the Real World, Ever After Inc. It turns out said corporation has been 'recruiting' characters from all across the world of fiction, and your role in the company is to jump into storybooks and do their bidding. You begin to gather a ragtag roster of compatriots during these adventures that will become vitally important both in a battle and narrative sense, The game is stylistically and mechanically very similar to Paper Mario but with a degree of work that makes it clear they tried to learn the right lessons from what could be improved upon. Flynt's buckler ability is difficult to get to work for the purposes of initiating combat sometimes but it also helps to force a push-and-pull dynamic where you're not always guaranteed to open every encounter with advantage. In addition, most enemies will have shields that need to be broken or weapons that have to be disarmed to actually land a hit, which is where having a varied roster of allies becomes a necessity to deal with certain enemy patterns. Of course, the main thing tying everything together is the music, which lends the entire game a relaxed jazz fusion tempo with a boisterous horn section led by Whitworth.
| Game Engine: Godot
The creeping existential dread that appears in the context of incremental games where the primary goal is to make a host of numbers go up or down is not one that gets brought up in their discussion. In this sense, Horripilant is a breath of fresh air. Presenting the story of a knight in full armor awakening within a strange underground chamber with a host of inhabitants including the head in a hole calling himself God. The incremental segments are twofold - you send the knight down a staircase to fight a host of rats, skeletons and other Dungeons and Dragons inspired foes, in a series of battles that never appear to have a predetermined end. The second option is to chop and mine raw materials to improve said excursions, and hiring the eldritch enemies you've been slaying and putting them to work in your service. At the end of all these things, when you finally get tired of it all, you can beseech 'God' to spend weird stones called Hemalith on being reborn into a better (read: more efficent) run. The horror in Horripilant isn't just the knowledge that the game is actively wasting your time, it's knowing that the thing keeping you going is the promise of a victory point or a predetermined end. Indeed, there appears to be sections of the game where the goal is to unlock a 'true ending' by solving esoteric puzzles. Is there a real ending? Is the persistance for such a thing all in vain? Are you prepared to find out?
February 28th 2026 - A joint operation between the US and Israel was an unauthorized battery of missile strikes along the Pasteur district of Iran, with the stated intent to kill major personnel within Iran's political structure. In addition to striking the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School for Girls and killing upwards of 140 people (mostly schoolchildren), the operation also murdered the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as well as his wife and kids. The response from Iran has been to primarily attack US and Israeli interests in surrounding countries, with Hezbollah also making strikes on Israel. On a sobering note, the war crime profiteering app Polymarket has seen an uptick in betting on the likelihood of a nuclear strike within the year.