Category: Video Games

Adventure Quest Worlds

There are a lot of things that go into me writing about a game for the blog. Sometimes it’s a sorta desperation, when Sunday roles around and I scrounge around through anything I’ve been playing recently to find something to talk about. Most of the time, I’d prefer it was joy, when I find something exciting or new, something I want the whole world (or at least the portion of it that reads my blog!) to see. Occasionally, it’s a sort of vindictiveness, where my writing transforms into my one little jab I can make at the developer for taking my money (replaceable) and my time (not so much).

Today we’re not doing any of those, because this is something different. Ultimately, this is a post about nostalgia, and frankly, it’s probably more about me as a person then it is about Adventure Quest Worlds.

Just to be as clear as possible: If you do not want to listen to 30+ year old man ramble about a flash MMO from his childhood, now is the time to leave.

Adventure Quest Worlds is a Flash based pseudo MMO by Artix Entertainment. I call it a pseudo MMO rather then a true MMO because most zones are instanced at low player counts, but if you’ve ever played an MMO, you’ll be familiar with most of what’s present here: fairly slow combat, fetch quests, grinds, all filtered through the lens of Flash, and what’s technically capable in Flash in 2009.

Normally where I’d elaborate on mechanics, but I don’t think that’s really necessary here, because even in the context of the game itself, most mechanics can be ignored. The one thing worth touching on is the class system. Unlike most MMO’s, classes are an equipable item that can be swapped while not in combat.

In theory, this is useful because it lets you swap from tank to healer to DPS on the fly! In practice, it lets you swap from your trash clear to your boss sustain class. I quite like it, and getting new classes was my primary motivation for playing in most cases.

Now that you’re caught up, put on your rose tinted glasses, pull out your finest rage comics and le reddit memes, and step into this time machine, because we’re headed back to 2009.

Welcome to 2009

Welcome back! It’s Obama’s first term after the Bush administration, there’s literally any hope for the future, and I’m in high school. It is a better time then middle school, but still not a great time. My interest in games growing, and there’s just one problem: I never get to actually play them. My screentime limit is 20 minutes a day and the family computer is a Mac.

Enter Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s Free*. It’s engaging. And it plays in a browser, so I can play my account anywhere. Home. Library. Friends house. Relatives at Thanksgiving. Home again.

It’s this ease of access that is going to define my experience with the game. Please remember that the iPhone is only 2 years old at this point in time. I won’t even get an iPod touch until 2013. While PC gaming and many of its all time classics exist, (TF2, Myst, Doom, CoD4) they are completely out of my reach.

From this standpoint then, Adventure Quest worlds is going to define my gaming habits until I finally get a personal Mac laptop, and move on to things like Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, and other Steam offerings.

In a world controlled by parents and tech limits, it is quite literally the first time I have ever played a game like this, and unlike Runescape, the only actual competitor, it’s much simpler. Even better, it’s got weekly content drops. There is always something new, always something to do.

Glasses off, analysis on.

With the value of hindsight, there isn’t actually much that Adventure Quest World does that it hasn’t been beaten to punch by other, bigger games. Everquest has been around for a decade. Wrath of the Lich King has just released.

It’s defining feature to me, a highschooler living on a day to day basis, are its weekly updates. These incremental storylines, drip-fed advancement and progression content dropped each Friday. I’m sure that other games had things like this, but I suspect that what defines Adventure Quest Worlds was just how consistent these things were. Some were just quest chains and zones, but some were wars, events in which the community had to work together to defeat the oncoming horde or all would be lost!

As a cynical adult, I look at these and suspect that the story would continue on regardless of the communities success or engagement, but as a teenager, I wholeheartedly believed that if failed, if we faltered, the entire narrative would shift.

The defining feature then, of AQW, was that it truly optimized the live service game before we were even using that term to describe video games.

Rose Tinted Glasses Back On Now

I look at these things now as a cynic, but back then I was fully onboard. I loved the design notes, a sort of a patch update combined with lore that would be published each week with all my heart. AQW and the Artix Entertainment team is perhaps the only thing I’ve ever felt some sort of deep parasociality for. Of course, that wasn’t a word we would have used for it back then. We didn’t have that term.

But it existed! I wanted to be them so badly. They were the reason I got interested in game design. They were the reason I started to try to teach myself Flash. More then anything else, this game probably defines my taste in music, to the detriment of my friends and anyone else unfortunate enough to pass me the aux cable. Voltraire, Paul and Storm, these were things I learned about through Adventure Quest Worlds.

If you want to know how old Adventure Quest Worlds is, there is a cross-promotional area with Cntl-Alt-Delete. Not the keypress, the webcomic. That webcomic. The one loss is from.

If I had to describe how foundational this game was to my personality, it might be this: At some point in Highschool, my family took a trip out west to visit the great American national parks. Outside of glacier national park, I remember very little of it.

But I remember being in the very first PvP match of Adventure Quest Worlds, because I was matched into Artix, the owner of the company, and just being completely and utterly awestruck. I have no evidence that this is a real thing that happens. I doubt even he remembers.

From 2008-ish, to 2012, this game, the developers, the community, and everything about it was such a critical portion of my life that it remains in my heart over a decade later. A little part of my soul that cannot be taken from me.

Returning to 2026

I recovered access to my AQW account sometime month. I was thinking about the game again after a 10 year stretch because the company ran a crowd funding campaign to try to modernize it. They netted a bit over 2 million dollars for the effort, not exactly chump change, but not anything exciting enough to be in the headlines.

Disclosure: I was some of that 2 million.

I cannot really recommend playing this game as who I am now. Despite it’s update cadence, it’s surpassed in every way by other games. It’s a worse grindathon then Runescape, it’s less mechanically exciting then any other premium MMO on the market, in an era of Roblox and Fortnite it’s less interesting or accessible.

The story is at best mediocre, and at worst bad. As a weekly adventure serial, it was compelling. As a constructed story whose beats I have spent the last two weeks working through, it’s deeply underwhelming. It’s end-game hyper grinds are the sorts of things that provoked a sort of twitchy, nervous reaction from me, the sort that I get whenever I’m playing a clicker game, and I find myself opening up the AutoHotKey documentation. Or even worse, looking at Github repos of bots!

But in 2009, I can’t see any of that.

Back to the Past – 2011

This infatuation won’t last forever. In 2011, Minecraft will release. It runs on Macs, I have a personal laptop now, and college is on the horizon. Adventure Quest Worlds will fall by the wayside to modded Minecraft servers, and trying to run a server myself. I’ll try to write my own mods, but will be so overwhelmed by the complexity and community that I’ll give up.

There’s probably a true story of Adventure Quest Worlds. One that tracks the drama, the weirdness, the major players. One I’m not part of, not in any meaningful way. I was never more then a player. The game means more to me then I do to it.

Please Step Back Into Your Time Machine

This isn’t really a proper game review. In a real review, I’d break down and give examples of why the story doesn’t work (relying on parody more then anything else), I’d dissect why the games player base has cratered (failing tech stack, poor mechanics, and lower ease of access) and I’d skewer the monetization (why grind 2 weeks when I can spend $5?). If I wanted to take a positive spin, there’s probably a strong piece in considering how well the SVG art style has aged, even if the re-use of rigging for animations has not. But I’m not doing any of those things.

Here we are! 18 years of Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s still alive. You can still play it. It’s outlived better games. Fucking hell, it’s outlived actual honest to god human people I know.

But here it is. Here I am.

May 10, 2026
Sol Cesto

It’s been a strong 12 months for games about are coin flips. Unfair Flips was ultimately about taking a coin that always flipped tails and beating on it until it flipped heads. Q-Up was a game about taking a coin that could flip heads or tails, and trying to bend the world so it didn’t matter which happened.

To continue this metaphor, Sol Cesto is a game in which you want a coin to flip heads. You can manipulate reality to try to make it more likely to flips heads. But it’s necessary to plan for what happens when it flips tails 10 times in a row.

After about 12 hours, I’ve found that while I like what Sol Cesto is trying to do, I don’t know that I love how it does it.

Gameplay

The idea is simple. The sun is gone, lost at the bottom of the dungeon, and someone must get it back. That someone is likely to be one of several unfortunate souls—your first choice is the peasant, and you’ll unlock additional characters via meta-progression.

Each character is a bit different, but they generally have a set of starting consumable items, a passive ability, an active ability called a talent, and a stat score for wisdom and strength. It’s these last two that will determine how most interactions go.

You’re dropped onto a dungeon floor, and you have to visit a certain number of rooms to unlock the door to the next floor. Each floor is a 4×4 grid of tiles. Each tile is a room that contains either a monster or a treasure.

Here, then, is the coin flip. You don’t choose which room to visit. Instead you choose a row. The game then randomly drops you into one of the open rooms in that row. If it’s a treasure of some sort, great! Heal yourself, or grab some gold. If it’s a monster, it’s time for combat.

Combat is simple. You will always kill the monster in the room, but as it dies, it will inflict damage to you equal to the difference between it’s stat and your stat. If you have three strength, that means you can take out three-strength and below monsters for free. If you only have a single wisdom, every three-wisdom monster is suddenly a loss of two health. Given that most characters have six or less starting HP, damage starts to add up quickly.

The primary loop of Sol Cesto, then, is simple: look at the screen, and make the best choice to maximize your odds of keeping things going in a favorable way. Run out of health, and you die, being sent back to the surface to begin again.

And again.

Then do it again.

There are, of course, more twists to it, but they are just that: twists. As you get deeper you’ll encounter monsters that buff other monsters, monsters that get bigger as you kill other monsters, dark screens that can only be lit up by killing other monsters. There are consumable items that you can use to tilt choices in your favor. The characters’ unique talents charge up as you clear rooms, and can be used to shift choices; the wizard links two rooms together and the knight can select a column instead of a row. There are teeth to be wrenched from stone statues and jammed into your own jaw, modifying the odds at which you’ll be dropped into certain rooms.

Despite all this, I don’t find myself wanting to play more.

Metaprogression

The game that keeps coming to mind as I play Sol Cesto is Spelunky 2. It’s probably a bit of an aesthetic similarity, as both trade in some sort of sacrificial Aztec temple theme. This theme is one of the things I actually have no complaints about with Sol Cesto, as I find its unearthly wall-carvings-come-to-life art style as quite appealing.

No, the problem is gold.

Opening treasure chests gives you gold, and gold is both the currency used to both buy items from shops during a run, and they way you unlock meta progression options AFTER a run. And as you can see below, there is a LOT of metaprogression.

This is, frankly, a tension I find deeply unfun. Do I try to win and push my current run forward, or do I just cash out so I can keep unlocking more options, unlocking more abilities, and generally increase my chances of eventually succeeding? Do I take teeth that make me more powerful and tilt the odds in my favor, or do I take the ones that give me more gold?

My goal on a run of a roguelite/roguelike is to win the run. When I fail, I want to fail because I made a mistake that I need to learn from, not because I haven’t farmed enough yet. Spelunky was the king of this, because when you died in Spelunky, it was always your fault. Somewhere along the line, you made choices or took risks that resulted in your own demise. With Sol Cesto, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The other thing is the length of runs. Sol Cesto runs are not short, and if there is some sort of shortcut, I haven’t found it yet. My first run to get through 100 floors was something like 40 minutes, and I had to spend the first part of that piloting through floors of enemies I’d already seen at least a few dozen times.

I’ve already proven I can solve these, so why do I have to keep doing them again and again?

I’d be ready to put Sol Cesto down if it wasn’t for one other thing.

Secrets

Edit: 4/30 – Someone pointed out that this next section has spoilers, so if you’re playing and enjoying Sol Cesto, or decided you want to try it yourself, you may want to skip this bit.

Spoilers ahead! You have been warned.

Fairly early on in Sol Cesto, I figured out that you could grab the shopkeeper’s nose. It was a neat little visual thing; a little Super Mario 64 inspired goof.

Except then I realized that if you drag it back far enough you can launch it into his head to stun him for a few seconds and steal everything in the shop.

Then I noticed that on the pail that lets you cash out gold for use in a future run, one of the bricks in the background was a different color, and leaning out of the wall. So clicked on it until it fell out, and I found some more cash.

There’s more of these sorts of things. Some elements on the screen can be clicked on for gold when they show up. Full clearing a screen gives a single extra gold coin. You can bomb teeth statues to get buffs, and use reroll dice on most screens.

And this is why I’m hesitant to entirely give up on Sol Cesto. I keep wondering if there’s some secret that cracks this thing wide open… some trick I haven’t spotted yet. Something I’m missing that changes everything.

Maybe clicking on a specific tile secretly increases your odds of landing on that tile?

Maybe using items on the smith can let you get extra stat points?

….

Maybe this dungeon is just making me go crazy. I think I need some sunlight.

Sol Cesto is $14 on Steam.

April 26, 2026
Chico’s Rebound
I’m just kinda sitting here, staring at my screen and trying to figure out how to introduce Chico’s Rebound. You can probably tell that it’s not going great, and that I’ve been forced into meta-narration. Because otherwise I am going to sit here until the flesh rots off my bones and the sun burns out.

Chico’s Rebound is a sort of follow up to Chico and the Magic Orchards, a game I wrote about a few years ago. It’s also not really a follow up, because while the characters are the same, the core gameplay isn’t at all. Magic Orchards was a light puzzle game with some exploration elements.

Rebound instead takes its inspiration from that classic iPod¹ game breakout. If you’ve played Breakout, you know the basic deal. If you haven’t… well. It’s pretty simple. You have a ball, and at the bottom of the screen you have a paddle of some sort. You bounce the ball off the paddle, and when it hits bricks, they disappear. Get rid of all the bricks to clear the level. Pretty much just PvE pong.

I really hope we all know what Pong is?

Anyway, that’s what Chico is cribbing off of: a souped up version of Breakout with more mechanics. It also has some other mechanics, including overworld exploration and some puzzles, but the less said about these, the better. They’re not particularly fun, and I found myself struggling a fair bit with them when it felt like I shouldn’t be².

Instead, the main gameplay is the variants of Pong. There are a lot of fun ideas here. One world has fire and water powerups that interact with growing and burning down plants. Another ghost themed level lets the ball swap between corporeal and phantom states, ignoring platforms in the other modes. Another world has a set of mushrooms that swap colors when hit, and can only be destroyed by hitting a matching colored switch.

These are good, and pretty fun. Unfortunately, this is where most of my praise ends, because Chico’s Rebound is doing some really weird stuff with its controls. To explain why, we need to talk a bit more about Breakout and how progression in Chico’s Rebound works.

Most of the time in Breakout, any connection of the paddle to the ball launches the ball back up. The ball only resets if you drop it and it goes off the screen. In Chico’s Rebound, however, you can regrab the ball by just touching it. If you want to keep the ball bouncing, you have to do an input to do a tailspin. If you fail to do that input, Chico just grabs the ball, and then you can relaunch it.

This would make the game trivial; you could just clear all the blocks with no risk. Except Chico’s Rebound has a scoring system, and to cut to the chase: unlocking more levels ultimately requires beating previous levels at certain score thresholds. Getting higher scores requires high combos, and losing the ball offscreen or catching the ball both drop the combo.

The end result is that you need to do the tailspin input constantly, and if you mess up at all, even if you were in the right part of the screen…. you probably have to restart the level.

It doesn’t help that the controls feel inconsistent at times, and I found myself dropping hits I’d thought I’d done an input for. I found that the frustrating controls overwhelmed most of the enjoyment I got out of the game’s unique level mechanics.

The game also has bosses. I generally liked them, but some require you to patiently regrab the ball and wait. Those are a bit less enjoyable.

Chico’s Rebound was $8 and 4 hours long. I don’t really regret it, but I wish I could recommend it more strongly.
1. Apparently iPods are retro now. If this makes you feel old, you are welcome to join me in this shallow grave I will be digging for myself shortly. ↩︎
2. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Chico’s Rebound’s overworld, but it’s so disconnected from the game’s main mechanics. Imagine each time you wanted to play a level of Mario, you had to solve a crossword first. That’s the energy here. ↩︎
April 21, 2026
Spring Cleaning Write-up

It’s been a little bit hasn’t it? In the interest of cleaning out my backlog of unfinished work and making it so that I don’t have to look at 18 drafts every time I log into this website, here’s a bunch of stuff I played enough to have opinions on, start write-ups, and then just never finish them.

Order is going to be how good the games are, because one of is these is simply one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, some are the greatest games I played last year, and some were only marginally better than taking the money I spent on them and setting it on fire.

Without any adieu or whatever, let’s begin.

Blue Prince – The greatest puzzle game of the last 10 years.

I started a Blue Prince write-up after “beating” the game, then went back and played another 50 hours, and I have still not beaten the game.

Blue Prince is one of the greatest games in the last 10 years. It is easily the greatest puzzle game I have ever played. If you have not played it, and you like puzzle games at all, go play this. I took notes playing this game, and even with the screenshots, my Blue Prince google doc is 170 pages long. And yet the game never felt overwhelming, or extensively frustrating¹.

Blue Prince is a masterpiece. It is brilliant, and you should play it. The rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to.

UFO 50 – 50 incredible games from Derek Yu and other collaborators for a video game console that never existed.

You know what was great last year? UFO 50. I played a bunch of UFO 50, I was going to try to review it, then it turned out that was going to be too hard, so I was going to review a single game from UFO 50. That was Avianos, a dinosaur themed 4x game with action selection mechanics, and I couldn’t even get that done. So yeah. UFO 50. It’s incredible. You will find something you love in it, and that’s ignoring all the other secrets and collectibles, and a billion other things I never even touched.

High Tide – Abstract tile movement game by Marceline Leiman

I don’t know how to write a good review of an abstract ocean themed game about hexagon movement, but I’m not a full time game reviewer. Dan Thurot is, so I’m just going to link to his review, and hopefully that makes up for stealing the images from it.

One thing I do want to quickly note is that it now has a commercial release, instead of having to make some sort of eldritch deal to get one of the very limited night market copies!

Hytale – Minecraft, but not finished, but also designed by people to whom “quality of life” is not just 13 random letters in a row.

What if Minecraft was designed by someone who cared about player experience on all levels of the game, instead of keep in a perpetual state of stasis by suits at Microsoft who are so scared of ever making any adjustments to their 2 billion purchase that Roblox already ate their lunch? You’d probably get Hytale, and if the game goes and manages to actually ship all of its content instead going back to development hell, it is going to be the best one of these crafting games.

It’s a big IF though. Like a HUGE fuckin’ if.

Gundam Card Game – I keep thinking it’s spelled Gundum, but I guess that’s wrong?

It’s fine. Resource structure similar to One Piece, mostly entertaining to play, and nobody’s scalping it quite as hard as some of these other games, so that’s cool.

Donkey Kong Bananza – I keep spelling “Bonanza” correctly, which is wrong.

I was going to put Donkey Kong Bananza here, but then I realized I’d mostly already finished this writeup? And never posted it? I think because I got laid off almost immediately after getting it to 80% complete. Anyway, you can read that write up here.

Highguard – Lessons should be learned here, but they won’t be.

It lived, it died, we hardly cried. The most notable thing about Highguard to me is that it’s not the very bottom of this list, but you can’t even play it if you want to, so who cares?

Age of Darkness: Final Stand – The worst RTS I have ever played.

It is rare that I play a game that fails on every conceivable level, while still somehow making it to release. Age of Darkness is that game. It is so shockingly bad that even just thinking about it again, more then a YEAR after I last played it brings to mind a list of problems burned into my brain. Here it is!

The game’s networking is awful and it disconnects in multiplayer constantly. The game is micro intensive while requiring equally expansive macro. The units are both hard to control and incredibly dull, with no single character matching the personality of zergling, space marine, or zealot. There are no alternate build paths, the campaign difficulty is a brick wall, the game just looks bad, and as a result of all of these it just isn’t fun to play.

There is nothing redeeming, and nothing it does better than its ancestors or contemporaries. It’s not even bad in an interesting way, it’s just awful and I want my $28 back.

I’m not even going to link to it. They don’t deserve it.

April 14, 2026
Once Upon a Galaxy
Edit 3/27/2026: Quick preface: 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 about the game and slightly more caustic than 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 a 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 game’s 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, and 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 manage 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 its 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 an 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 genre’s 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 game’s 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, and 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. They’ve trimmed out a bunch of vestigial stuff that auto-battlers traditionally have like gold and level management. 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 you 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. One friend who I showed this game to immediately stopped playing after 10 minutes because of how aggravating he found the on-boarding and UI. 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 version 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. ↩︎
March 23, 2026