Fear not - the grim spectre of continuity will not long darken our doorway. In fact, continuity just put on its hat and coat and is even now walking out the door. Good riddance! Hope that's the last we see of him for a while. But Pokopia is from the team that co-did Dragon Quest Builders 2, which is a game that bored through both our skulls and laid a clutch of glistening eggs. They didn't end up hatching, but still. And I think they might have dried out. When I walk down the steps I sound like a huge maraca.

I played Slay the Spire 2 in co-op with a friend for a couple hours, conceding the desire to play another round, and then went to bed. It's a process that requires exfoliation - not just of the head, but also the thorax. Like any magic ritual, it requires a certain number of turns to complete. I got into bed. I then got a text from the person I was playing with that he was playing with another one of our friends and I got out of bed, got dressed, and went downstairs to play again. Slay the Spire II is a disease and the vector is already installed. Mewgenics is outta here. Fuck them cats.

This seems like an incredibly scary time to be a developer of games that cost two hundred and fifty million dollars. The return of the demo, like the Return of The Mack, heralds a sea change. "Indie" games are cheaper to buy, you can play them forever, and the level of craft has never been higher with teams dropping sequels to their own modern classics that frankly require new power laws to even understand. I think of Hades II as virtually mainstream, and in my circles it is. Slay the Spire II nearly quadrupled its highest concurrency - in a cave. With a box of scraps!

There is a famous diagram of a fish that is eating a smaller fish, but there is a fish even larger than him that's gonna eat him, and so on. This is like a smaller fish eating a fish physically larger than itself; physicality loses utility even as a metaphor. There is a lot of hay being made about the fact that Marathon is getting lapped by the same kinds of numbers, but both of these games are really good. That's the thing that is scary to me. Time is, once again, the ur-currency. I recognize that these two combatants are operating in radically different genres, but it doesn't matter because they live on the same food source. The lithe guerilla force outmaneuvering the established power is not without precedent.

(CW)TB out.