Category: Video Games

Once Upon a Galaxy

Edit 3/27/2026: For various reasons, I would like to quickly elaborate that I think Once Upon a Galaxy is a good game, and you should play it. It’s cool. I don’t intend to change my actual writeup, but uh, rereading this today, I think it comes across a little less enthusiastic on it, and slightly more caustic then I actually feel.

We all remember Storybook Brawl, right? It was a cool card based auto-battler with a fairy tale theme by way of Shrek meets Grim. In 2022 it sold to scrappy little company called FTX, and in 2023 it was shut down when everyone involved in FTX was being prosecuted for 16 billion dollars in fraud.

As far as I can tell, at least some of the people in Good Luck Games went on to make Once Upon a Galaxy. It’s a cool little card based auto-battler with a fairy tale theme by way of pop culture references meet Grimm.

Write what you know I guess.

Making a game, getting it popular, selling it to a Crypto company1, then making a new company to make a new game that is pretty much just a better copy of your old game is a bold strategy. It seems to have mostly worked out for Matthew Place and the team at Million Dream Games, presumably because everyone who might be upset about them doing this is currently in prison2.

But I’m not here to recount the one time in the last 20 years that financial criminals were held even remotely responsible for their actions. I’m here to talk about Once Upon a Galaxy.

I’m gonna be honest, I feel like I should put an in-depth explanation of the games mechanics here, but I’d just be rewriting paragraphs 3 through 5 of my Storybook Brawl write up, so just go read those real quick. We can pretend I put them here.

It’s actually a little tricky to find good images of Once Upon a Galaxy, because the combat screen and shop screen look pretty much the same to anyone who hasn’t played the game. Anyway, please appreciate my 23k Snapping Hydra.

There’s a lot of things in Once Upon a Galaxy that were copied over from Storybook Brawl. The core conceit is pretty much the same: Pick a captain3/leader card, build a team of units, have them fight each other, stay alive the longest to win. But there’s also a lot of fat trimming going on here, places where Once Upon a Galaxy looks at Storybook Brawl and goes “No, I don’t think we need that.”

Most notable is probably board size and reserve. Storybook Brawl had 7 combat slots, and 3 reserve slots. Once Upon a Galaxy has 5 slots. There’s no gold to managed for buying units either, instead every shop is just a 4-pick-1 rogue-lite style set of choices.

Of course, there’s also a fair amount of stuff I haven’t seen before, or things that are tweaks from existing mechanics. Treasures existed in Storybook Brawl, but they were limited to a max of 3 per player, requiring you to throw one away when you got your fourth. In Once Upon a Galaxy, they are no longer locked down in that way, opening up a whole bunch of interesting space, such as dragons that care about creating them, and get buffs based on the number, to characters that manipulate the stat buffs they grant.

I could probably write multiple paragraphs about Candy, a cross card type mechanic that influences a global “Sweetness” value, and is used as both a modifier of spells and card abilities. It’s also a good example of how the game creates glue for it’s archetypes, with various candy cards adding the Candy type to non-candy cards, allowing them to be slotted into an archetype they otherwise might fall out of.

Generally speaking, the game feels fun to play even if a few strategies feel over represented, or good across multiple captains.

This was supposed to be an image of a Animals comp, but then I got this CRAZY Paul Bunyan/Echoing Fae synergy combo off, and I had to see what happened, and then I realized I needed to stop playing if I wanted to actually finish this article.

Probably the biggest mechanic (or the one I will attempt steal at some point) is slot buffs, where buffs can be applied to a slot, and not the characters in the slot, so that you can replace them without losing the picks spent on those buffs. And of course, some characters interact in a cool way with those buffs!

One of the genres core mechanics has also been adjusted in a pretty clever way. Most auto-battlers have a mechanic where drafting multiple copies of the same unit powers that unit up, usually three copies. This could put you in a difficult place if you got the first two, but never found a third. Once Upon a Galaxy, banishes this, instead making each copy after the first a promotion, first to silver, then gold. Picking a silver unit gives an extra shop, and picking a gold unit gives a treasure.

There are some things that are just copied, like the Slay4 keyword, which has been renamed to Hunt. I’m okay with that. I think it’s fine to copy your own mechanics.

Then there’s the things they copied that I wish they didn’t.

I have a limited number of complaints about Once Upon a Galaxy. Many of them are small to medium sized annoyances, like how some Captains have a single line of voice acting, and others don’t.

The games UI is clunky5, and signing in to make an account has been the biggest stumbling block to actually playing. Every time I press the launch button, there’s a 2/3 chance that Steam doesn’t actually launch the app. I’ve gotten a few bugs where the games just kinda… crashes out a bit, and shows me a card named “404 Shop Not Found”.

But none of these quite compare with the monetization.

The monetization is “hmm”. I dunno even know that it’s bad, in a traditional way? I am a sucker for garbage6. Despite the fact that I’ve played 15+ hours of Once Upon a Galaxy in three days, I’m uninspired to buy anything it. Partly because it feels like a bit of a bad deal, with characters/decks running for about five to six bucks each. Partly because it feels a bit pay to win.

It just feels kind of off.

Most of these are small things. The monetization isn’t even egregious. There’s no gacha, the battlepass is easy to farm, so while there is some FOMO, there’s no limited daily progression. Still, I wish it was a bit better.

I generally like Once Upon a Galaxy. It gives me the play experience that other people get from Balatro, that of just sinking into a small math puzzle of upgrades, builds, strategies and signposts.

I do think there’s a bunch of cool stuff here as well. A bunch of vestigial stuff that Autobattlers have involving things liked gold/level management has been cut. There are neat new mechanics.

So yeah. Go play it before it turns out Million Dreams Games hasn’t figured out how to monetize the genre yet, and they have to sell themselves to an AI company, then remake this game a third time.

Also, if two of your use my pyramid scheme referral link here7, I can get 500 more gems total.

I would like the gems.

  1. Good Luck Games was sold to FTX in 2022. ↩︎
  2. Or maybe not? Sure, Sam is still in prison, but some of these people only got 2 years. They say crime doesn’t pay, but apparently it does if you’re white collar enough about it. ↩︎
  3. Captains grant some sort of permanent build around passive or trigger-able ability. ↩︎
  4. Slay/Hunt is a trigger-able keyword that occurs whenever the unit attacks and kills another unit. The important bit here is “Attacks.” If a unit with slay is attacked, and kills the other unit on the defense, that doesn’t trigger the keyword. Using slay effectively means either gambling that your unit will get the first attack, or buffing it high enough to be able to take a hit, and smash back. ↩︎
  5. I had one friend who I showed this game to, who immediately stopped playing after 10 minutes because of how aggravating he found the on-boarding/UI to be. Knowing it was his sort of game, I persuaded him to give it one more shot.

    He proceeded to play for literally 12 hours in a row. I went to bed, woke back up, and he was still playing. The game is that good, and the UI is that bad.     ↩︎
  6. I spent $50 on an arcade versions of Minecraft Dungeons yesterday, because it spat out collectible trading cards. The bright side to being an unemployed miser is that I now have a lot more free time to spend the money I spent the last 10 years shoving into a pile. ↩︎
  7. This is the only referral link in the article. All the other links are normal ones, and will just link to the Steam page. Figured I’d just put that disclosure out there. ↩︎

Super Battle Golf

I’ve never really played sports games, but I’ve played a fair amount of golf games. This is because golf is not a sport. It’s an activity, like lawn darts or bowling. Golf in the real world is reserved exclusively for rich assholes: the sort of people who will ban Michael Jordan from their country club because he’s wearing the wrong pants, a real thing that actually happened.

Part of the problem, I think, is that golf is often a deeply unsatisfying activity. Every time I’ve ever picked up a club, there’s a little voice inside me screaming that it would be far more satisfying to give someone a good smack across the ankles with it than it would to hit some dinky little ball into a hole. This voice only grows louder with each missed putt as my score careens higher and higher, further and further out of actual contention.

Super Battle Golf is not the first golf game to recognize this primal urge. Golf With Your Friends had collisions on by default. Fore Score’s key mechanic was impeding other players with obstacles.

The difference, though, is that Super Battle Golf is the first game to recognize that tension, and then design key systems around it.

The core system of Super Battle Golf is a fairly simple golf game. You have a club, you have a ball, and there is a hole. You need to get the ball into the hole to win. There is only a single type of club, and you can adjust the angle of your shot, and control the power by holding and releasing. Standard stuff, the chips in a metaphorical golf nachos. But the toppings are where everything gets interesting.

The first difference you might notice is that after hitting a ball, unlike many golf games, you do not follow the ball, or teleport to its resting spot to take another shot. Instead, you must walk there on your own, golf club in hand. Additionally, while there bonus are points for finishing under par, the majority of the scoring rewards being the FIRST person to reach the hole.

One way to be the first person to finish is, after taking your first swing, to turn and give the next closest golfer a swift thwack across the ankles, knocking them down, and setting you up for a second swing that can send them flying and ragdolling.

Alternately, if you time your first shot perfectly, you’ll get a boost of speed to start, often giving you the edge to rush forward and be the first to claim one of the game’s Mario Kart style item boxes. Players can hold up to 3 items, and unused items will be carried over to the next hole. Items generally fall into two categories: travel or combat, with my personal favorite, the elephant gun sitting neatly in both.

The secret sauce, the thing that really makes Super Battle Golf work, though, has to do with the boost system, and a special type of hit called a homing shot. First, the boost system.

When you hit another player in Super Battle Golf with an item box weapon, golf club, ball, or running them over in a golf cart, you get a temporary boost of movement speed. This speed is the key to pulling ahead of other players, because while everyone can be reasonably good at the golf part of the game, it’s more important to reach your ball as quickly as possible for the next stroke.

Critically, if you are losing, choosing to grief or attack other players around and in front of you isn’t kingmaking. Instead, it’s the mechanic by which you gain ground.

The same is true of homing shots. Without going into too much detail, you can hit shots so that they will track a player in front of you like a heat seeking missile. If it connects, it will knock that player down, giving you the aforementioned speed boost, while forcing them to wait out the knockdown.

This is what really differentiates Super Battle Golf from every other lite multiplayer golf game. It rewards and encourages combat, as opposed to just making it possible. And while it’s not the deepest combat ever, there is a fair amount of strategic decision making, politicking, and routing.

If I have any complaints, or reservations, it might be the map pool, and the always online voice chat. There are 27 holes, which doesn’t quite feel like enough. On the flip side, I find the always online voice chat incredibly funny, but that’s quite possibly because I have a deeply broken sense of humor.

Some “highlights” of the voice chat include:
1. The entire lobby grouping up to repeatedly pummel someone screaming a racial slur in a Russian accent.
2. Hearing “get Kirked” moments before being shot by someone with a dueling pistol.
3. A discussion about how shooting up schools is a real “white person” activity.

If you don’t find early XBox Live level (read: fucking cesspool) of interaction and voice chat funny, you will not have a good time online, and should probably stick to playing with your friends, or immediately mute everyone when you join a public lobby.

On the other hand, I find something deeply satisfying in using a rocket launcher on someone calling me a series of both inaccurate and offensive racial slurs.

Your personal mileage may vary.

Super Battle Golf is $7. It’s pretty great, but given that public lobbies are cesspools, I highly suggest getting it if you have 4-5 more friends you can play with. The game is best about 5-8 players, and while I wish there were more maps, the ones that do exist justify the price.

Q-Up

Q-Up is a lot of different things. It’s a incremental game. It’s a competitive coin-flipping eSport. It’s a weird satire of live service games and tech startups. Oh, and it has a really cool grid based node engine building system, and slightly less interesting, but still compelling item system. Finally, it’s a game that I feel weirdly conflicted about.

Before I go any further, I want to note that I do recommend Q-Up. It’s a weird one, but if you like incremental games/engine building experiences, and enjoy strangeness, you’ll probably have a good time. And if you’re on the fence because of that “incremental game” element, Q-Up generally respects the player’s time. It took me about 6.5 hours to reach the “end” of the game, and I suspect it would have been closer to the expected 8-10 hours if I hadn’t played a lot of the demo to get familiar with mechanics beforehand.

If you’re the sort of person who really loves incremental games… well, there are some absolutely busted end-game builds, and semi-competitive ladders, and the folks on the game’s discord seem to be having a good time.

A lot of what I’m going to be talking about here, I already covered in my writeup on Q-Up’s demo. If you want a spoiler free discussion of the game, I suggest you go read that instead.

Q-Side

The premise of Q-Up is simple: it’s the hottest new competitive game on the market. Games are 4v4, and after queuing up, and getting placed in a match, you’ll either be put on Q-Side or Up-Side. A coin will be flipped. If it lands on Q, Q-Side team gets a point. If it lands on Up, Upside team gets a point. First team to 3 points wins.

And yes, this does mean that you as a player have zero agency over who wins or loses any given game of Q-Up. That’s the point. Something something comedy, something something frog.

But just because you can’t influence the outcome doesn’t mean you can’t change the results. After all, it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting as much stuff as possible.

Oh The Stuff You Can Get

Q-Up has four main resources: Q, experience, gold, and gems. Lets start with Q.

After each flip in match, you’ll gain or lose Q. Winning the flip starts you out with a positive amount of Q, losing with a negative amount. Q determines your rank, with higher ranks giving more Q, and lower ranks give less.

This amount, however, will be adjusted by your character’s skills and items, which is as good a place as any to talk about experience and gold.

Experience points are… experience points. You get enough of them, you level up. When you level up, you unlock skills and skill points to use on the skill grid.

This is the engine building part of Q-Up. The skill grid is a set of interconnected trigger-able nodes. Nodes can trigger when you win, lose, or always. They can do a variety of things, including triggering other nodes. Nodes also have activation stock: a maximum number of times that they can be triggered during a given flip.

It will start out reasonable, and it will rapidly turn into something that is very much not that.

It’s a very fun and unique system, with each of the game’s eight characters having their own nodes and builds. Some want high numbers of combos, others generate Q by spending gold, or clone items.

Which brings us to gold and items. There’s a shop, you buy items in it. Then you equip those items.

They’re mechanically impactful, and very functional, but there’s nothing here that makes it different from any other item shop.

Which means it’s time to talk about gems! You get gems by ranking up, and recycling unwanted items. They’re used to unlock meta-progression-y style stuff, like the ability to stop shop items from rotating out, and extra item slots, and other things.

And this is the core loop of Q-Up. Play a match, get resources. Spend those resources to improve your build. Rinse, repeat. Often, in the middle to late portions of the game, that’ll involve reworking your build to generate a specific resource you might want, such as gems or experience points, or tweaking to maximize getting as much Q as possible.

So I’ve talked about the mechanics. I’ve talked about the theme. Which leaves the narrative.

Narrative

From here on out we’re talking spoilers. If you want to play Q-Up, this is a good time to leave.

Q-Up trades in a lot of different fields/themes. Fortunately for me, I think I recognize most of them, as they’re related to my job and interests.

This narrative starts out as one poking fun at what I’d generally group as “Live Service Games”, perhaps more specifically the “single match” live service game. League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, CS:GO, that sort of thing. This is where the game stays mechanically, but narratively, it’s going to become Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride real fast.

The writing is very good. I wish there was more of it.

I can’t think of a better way to dissect the narrative and the struggles I had with it, without laying the full structure, so here we go.

After you start playing Q-Up, at some point you’ll either get a 3-0 loss, or 0-3 win. This introduces you to Alice and Bob. Alice is the head of a quantum computing company and Bob is the head of the company running Q-Up. Alice and Bob are at least somewhat fighting over the company Bob is running.

This opens the second part of narrative, which is mostly about conflict between Alice and Bob. Notably, it’s also not told in any straightforward way, and most of the information you get given is filtered through the lens of “You just joined this project, and everyone is using terms you don’t understand, and acronyms no one’s explained” sort of energy.

Fortunately, I work in a tech company. I have LIVED this exact experience. Multiple times. So again, I was pretty in my element for this bit.

This is the sort of thing I think you can only write if you actually have worked at one of these tech companies.

Anyway, this culminates with Alice attempting a hostile takeover, and Bob using you, the player, to stop it by proving that Q-Up is a game of skill, and not a game of gambling. You enter the Q-Up championships, and attempt to win your way to novice rank.

Then things get odd.

I have a hard time summarizing what exactly happens next, because I’m pretty sure this is where the game starts playing around in the space of Information Theory. I don’t know anything about Information Theory.

Anyway, after you get banned from Q-Up by Alice, a sentient artificial intelligence intervenes in order to get you unbanned, and also to use you to free itself. At the same time, the server room for running Q-Up seems to start to collapse, because… again. I think something Information Theory related.

This leads to the finale of the game, where a pair of cosmic intelligences attempt to restart the universe.

It’s this last tenth or so of the game where Q-Up completely lost me. Not because it was bad, but more so because I was just incredibly confused. The sentient AI part is mostly fine, and foreshadowed pretty hard, but it’s also not really paid off to the extent I would like. The same is true of the cosmic intelligences. To me, they just come out of absolutely nowhere, but I suspect that the writers may be trading in themes or ideas that I’m simply not familiar with.

It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, because the rest of the game is actually fairly interesting. I was much more invested in Alice and Bob of all things than I was in any of the “wacky hijinks” at the end. And in the last moments of the game, that story got pushed to the wayside for cosmic strangeness.

It also doesn’t help that this last section of the game feels very short and sudden. Things are escalating, escalating, getting exciting… and then it’s all over.

Putting on the introspective critic hat for a moment

Given that Q-Up is already trading in a bunch of specific themes in its aesthetic and narrative, I think that what is actually happening here is that I am just out of the loop for the joke. This last portion of the game probably isn’t “random wacky hijinks,” but is instead Who’s On First for quantum computing or information theory, or perhaps some third thing I’m completely unaware of.

Maximum insider baseball that I am no longer an insider for.

But it was incredibly jarring, because I had been an insider for the rest of it, and the result was that a narrative I cared about, that I was curious and excited about, suddenly felt like it pulled a Fish Guys.

It just left me feeling really weird about a game that I had, until that point, really enjoyed.

Hat is off, back to final thoughts

I like 90% of Q-Up. I like its mechanics, I love the theming and UI, and I love most of the story.

It’s the suddenness with which the story ends that really bummed me out more than the weirdness, if I’m being honest. Everything felt like it wrapped up too quickly. Q-Up is not a very long game narrative. The majority of the game takes place across 70 or so emails, and the finale across another 30. And that’s probably overcounting a bit.

Q-Up was $9. I think I got my money’s worth. But I wish I felt different about the ending.

I wish I could call the game a masterpiece, instead of just very good.

P.S. This is not my finest write-up. If it feels stitched together, that’s because, well, it is. I wrote 3-4 different versions of this, and none of them were exactly what I wanted. So instead, you get this mess. Sorry about that.

Have some gems.

Also.

Ball X Pit

Ball X Pit is Breakout X Vampire Survivors. There are a lot of things it does that I like, and it executes well on a most of its mechanics. Despite all that, I’m not sure that I want to recommend it, because I don’t really feel like I’m having fun with it. More on that later.

The Basics

Ball X Pit is easiest to describe in terms of just listing off all the games it’s cribbing features from. We’ve got the standard roguelike formula of incremental runs, complete with a 3-pick-1 system. The items in question are a set of brick breaker balls with special powers, and some side items. Balls can poison enemies, shock them in an AoE, split into more balls, etc. These get bounced off enemies to deal damage, enemies drop EXP when the die, and the pressure is killing enemies before they meander their way to the bottom of the screen, at which point they punch you in the face.

Where Ball X Pit innovates is its fusion system, letting you take two balls and combine them. Grab an Earthquake Ball, fuse it with Ghost, and suddenly you have a ball that pierces enemies while hitting them all with a massive AOE. There are also evolutions, combining specific balls to fuse into new, stronger balls, but these are a bit less novel, as both Vampire Survivors and Holocure had similar systems.

At the end of a run, you’ll be kicked back to the hub screen: a small city builder with a twist that’s actually quite novel. Instead of being your standard Farmville setup, you harvest resources by playing more brick breaker, launching your inhabitants into the village, bouncing off buildings to finish their construction, and across wheat fields to harvest them. These resources can be used to construct new buildings, and generally engage in meta-progression.

Then you’ll jump back into a run, perhaps with a new set of characters, better equipped for the given challenge. Rinse, repeat. Clear a level with enough different characters, and you’ll unlock another level.

It’s probably worth spending at least a bit of time talking about characters. At the start of a run, you’ll pick a character to bring into the run. They bring a starting ball, some stats, and some sort of twist modifier (later, you’ll unlock the ability to bring a second to set up interesting synergies!). These are interesting, running the gauntlet from “shooting faster, but less accurately” to the one I’m using while I’m doing this writeup, that auto-plays the game completely on their on own.

That character brings me to my main problems with the game: it’s really compelling, but around hour 5, I found that I wasn’t really having much fun anymore. I’m mostly ripping off a friend here when I say this, but the game feels kinda like looking at TikTok: there’s a point where you’re just a bit zoned out, but still present enough to keep going. After you stop though, you start finding yourself wondering what you just did for the last several hours.

It’s a shame because all the little things in Ball X Pit are pretty great. I love the low-poly aesthetic, the sound and music are good, and if you don’t like them, they’re easy enough to turn off. Because unlike some things I’ve played over the last few weeks, the game has a proper options menu.

It just keeps going

I had a different friend ask why I’d play 20+ hours of this if I’m not having fun, and I think I have two answers. The first is that early on, as the game is unfolding, showing off new systems, new characters, and new ideas, there’s this hope that it’s going to turn into something more than it currently is. I kept hoping that I’d unlock some subsystem that would crack the whole thing open. It’s also during the first few hours that you’re constantly unlocking things, finding new balls, new evolution and fusions with them, and just generally being entertained.

But this whole process slows down later on. Progression tapers off. There are no more twists, and the enemies, while having variety, don’t really require you to play any differently. The game turns into a chore.

The second reason I played that much was to make sure that before I did this writeup, I’d really given the game a chance. Seen all it had to offer. And I feel fairly confident of that at this point.

I haven’t even beaten the last boss myself. Instead, I plugged in that character I mentioned above who plays on their own, and just let them do it. I bet there’s some sort of secret if I beat the final level with all 21 characters, maybe a bonus level, or secret 21st character, but at this point I’m just so bored, and frankly, don’t really want to.

Ball X Pit is $15. It’s not the worst $15 I’ve spent this week, but it’s not the best either. It’s an absorbing experience with clever ideas, but ultimately a slightly empty one.

Q-UP Demo

Okay. We’re back. I may have lost it a little talking about Unfair Flips earlier in the week, but now it’s time to talk about Q-Up, another game about flipping coins.

I really liked the Q-Up Demo. I actually played until I couldn’t anymore, because the demo stopped me. I thought it was great.

You may notice a slight tonal shift here between Unfair Flips and Q-Up, despite the fact that they’re both pseudo-incremental games about coin flips. This is because Q-Up is doing everything that Unfair Flips wasn’t.

I’ve mentioned before that I somewhat dislike idle/incremental games because if I’m not careful, they eat my time like a blackhole. I also don’t necessarily have any fun with them. To quote myself:

I resent idle games because for whatever reason, they work on me. I am entirely capable of looking at them, understanding how the mechanics work, and what they are going to make me do, why they are exploitive, and then I play them anyway.

Unfortunately for me, Q-Up has it’s hooks in me already, which means escape options are limited. Perhaps this writeup will be one of them.

There’s a lot of different layers to Q-Up, and I don’t think I’m even going to identify all of them, let alone write about them. The game is framed as a competitive e-Sport, with all the trappings of such, including ranks, stats, an in-game shop, skins, and a fake TOS that has to be agreed to on launching the game.

The team bit isn’t a joke by the way. You can in fact play the coin flip with your friends, and make synergistic builds. It’s incredible.

The E-Sport in question of course, is just a coin flip. But what a coin flip it is! Complete with matchmaking, exciting animations, and being put on either the Q or Up side. (Fun note: while playing with a friend, he audibly groaned when we got into a game, and were Up side, as he “prefers being Q side”. In a game that’s a literal coin flip.)

Of course, the faux esport/live service game feels like it’s just the tip of the iceberg in a sense. There’s also an in-game mail client where as you play, you end up somewhat accidentally agreeing to “work” for the fictional company making the game in question. I don’t think I can spoil too much from the demo, but even what I saw there seemed to get really weird quite fast, with a weird sci-fi narrative around corporate sabotage.

Oh, and I haven’t even talked about the gameplay! Because yes, there is gameplay. It’s not just a coin-flipper. Instead, fairly early on, you unlock a node based skill grid, different for each of the available characters. This grid is a set of triggers and chaining activation, and by moving nodes around, you can build sets of synergies to make it so that even when you lose, you still win!

I’d say something about my build, but I actually just realized looking at it that it’s a tad bit awful.

Look, it makes more sense if you play the demo, maybe just do that.

Oh, and there are items! To be honest, they’re probably the most standard part of the game, being constructed in such a way that you can build item sets and collections in order to grant yourself additional bonuses. What’s less standard is the incredible weird item shop upgrades, which at one point gave me gems instead of costing them?

Ah yes, the ability to roll for a 5-Star character with a zero percent chance of getting them. And the customer of the year is a whale. It’s all so perfect.

Q-Up, like Unfair Flips, is a game about coin flips. But unlike Unfair Flips, it’s not really about flipping coins. Instead, it seems to be a weird satire on live service games at every level, from the design, the development, and the weird nature of E-Sports.

And it absolutely nails the tone. Probably my favorite part so far was this message, with that absolutely perfect “Exec typing things into ChatGPT to summarize them” energy.

It’s just an incredibly fun and weird experience. I only stopped because I hit the level cap on the available characters.

In short: the Q-Up Demo is great, I hope the full game is just as weird, and has even more twists. I’m going to go see if I can get a code to cover it before it comes out, but I highly doubt that will work, in which case I’ll just have to buy it when it does release.