Gaming Round-Up: What Horrors Await

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

Time for another rundown of what I’ve played over the last few weeks. By purest happenstance, a lot (though not all) of this has been games that are at least horror adjacent.

Path of Exile:

I did finally get around to finishing the story in Path of Exile. My final judgment is that playing PoE on ruthless mode felt about equal in difficulty to my first playthrough of Diablo III on normal difficulty. I only really struggled on the final bosses of acts five and ten, mirroring D3, where I only struggled with Belial and Diablo. I’ll also note again the act five boss was mostly so hard because it was bugged out when I did it. The statues I was supposed to hide behind never spawned.

I only briefly sampled PoE’s endgame offerings, doing one “map.” It was a complete faceroll until I got to the final boss, at which point I was one-shot halfway through the fight by I have no idea what. The whole thing felt like the perfect microcosm of the PoE experience, and I decided I’d had more than enough at that point.

Some will say I haven’t really experienced PoE without getting into its endgame properly, but if you think you can’t form a fair opinion of a game after finishing a fifty hour story campaign, I think you’re a silly person.

Scars Above:

This is a horrorish sci-fi shooter I picked up for 90% off on Steam. Scars Above is pretty much your standard 7/10 AA jankfest, and I do mean that as a compliment.

Pretty much every part of the game is rough to some degree or another, but overall I had a lot of fun with it. I quite enjoyed the main character, Kate, who felt like a great example of competence porn. She shows enough vulnerability to feel human while also meeting every challenge with courage and wit.

There’s an interesting combo system around elemental status effects that can be triggered by both your weapons and the environment. It’s simple, but satisfying, and it helps strengthen the fantasy of Kate as a character who fights smarter, not harder.

The game’s greatest flaw is probably its difficulty. I’d read in the Steam reviews it was a very hard game, so I played on easy, but even so I almost gave up in the first hour because it was such a slog. However, once I leveled up a few times and unlocked some perks, it became a pretty effortless journey.

I was also a bit disappointed the final boss is just a buffed up version of a standard mob you’ve been fighting throughout the game, but otherwise, Scars Above was a good time. Given its apparent lack of recognition, I doubt a sequel is forthcoming, but I’d probably buy one if it does get made.

The Chant:

Another low to mid budget horror title I got for 90% off, but a less impressive one. I found the character movement, animations, and combat all felt painfully sluggish. Maybe authentic to the classic Resident Evil style experience they were going for, but certainly not for me, and the story was also less compelling than I’d hoped, so I bounced off after about an hour.

Amsterdam 1666 and other Summer Game Fest news:

One of the previews that most impressed me during the Summer Game Fest show was Amsterdam 1666. When they said it already had a demo live, I downloaded it immediately.

Unfortunately the demo ratcheted down my hype for the game considerably. The camera and character movement felt extremely awkward. That might be fixed before launch, but even more concerningly, the story didn’t seem that good. I kind of checked out when the father’s letter to his daughter started waxing poetic about his weird freaky BDSM sexscapades. Awkward…

It’s also concerning how little actual gameplay was in the demo. From the trailers, there will be combat in the main game, but the demo had none, which feels like a bit of a red flag.

Aside from that, there were a few other trailers at SGF that caught my eye, but nothing that immediately blew me away, more just things that might be worth keeping an eye on. Crossfire, Last Harbor, Haex…

I thought that the trailer for the Stellar Blade sequel looked really cool until I realized it was a Stellar Blade sequel, and now I just feel deeply conflicted and slightly gross.

Aion 2 setting a Western release date was probably the biggest news for me. Given my long history of bouncing off Korean games, my expectations are fairly managed, but it’s still probably the game I’m most anticipating, at least in the near future.

While not part of the main SGF show, around this time we also got news of the next expansion for Age of Empires IV, Raiders of the North. I’m disappointed by campaigns being neglected once again, but the expanded Crucible mode at least means there’s something for single-player, and I do think both the new civilizations look fun. It’s frustrating they’re calling them “Vikings” instead of something more accurate, but otherwise what we’ve seen so far seems like a fairly accurate and historical depiction.

Overall I’m looking forward to the DLC. I’m definitely rioting if the next civilizations aren’t from Africa or America, though. Those are way overdue for more representation.

Tides of Tomorrow:

I’ve already covered this on Massively, so I’m just adding it for completionism’s sake. I mostly enjoyed Tides of Tomorrow, and I would recommend it, but it wasn’t as special as Road 96, and I did have an issue with the ending (spoiler-filled elaboration on reddit for those interested).

New World:

I dipped back into New World a little bit. I made yet another alt, as I wanted to replay Monarch’s Bluffs (thankfully the game cooperated and landed me there). Since I feel like my time in New World has contributed to my success with Brigitte in Overwatch, I decided to make a character modeled after her. Made her look as similar as I could and gave her a flail/lifestaff build.

Funny thing: New World’s character limit for names isn’t big enough to fit “Brigitte Lindholm.” It cut me off at “Brigitte Lindho.”

WELCOME
LINDHO

I ended up going with “Brigitte Lind.”

Had a lot of fun revisiting Monarch’s Bluffs, but wasn’t sure what to do after that. I do want to play more New World while I still can, but I’ve always struggled to motivate myself in games without clear goals to chase. I’ve already done all the stories in the game, often at least twice, and I don’t really need better gear on my high level characters, especially with the shut down looming.

The Secret World:

My returns to TSW are becoming ever shorter and less frequent, but I did pop in for a couple hours recently. The Dragon alt I have been very slowly leveling since the maintenance mode announcement is closing in on the end of Transylvania. She’s already super OP from all my GM perks, so I’ve started skipping most missions outside the main story.

I did have to do Last Dance of the Padurii. Wasting a gear manager slot on a hinder build you literally only use for one mission is an essential part of the TSW experience.

When the maintenance mode news first came down, I thought the servers would be shuttered before too long, and for whatever reason one of the things that made me saddest was the thought this character would never see Tokyo. I’m now within striking distance of achieving that goal at long last, which feels kind of surreal. There’s still a decent chunk of Transylvania left, but maybe one day soon.

World of Warcraft:

I wasn’t planning to be back in WoW until the next major content patch, but I really wanted the May and June Trading Post stuff, so I ended up burning a WoW Token. I’m not treating it as my main game, though. As this post attests, I’m still playing lots of other things.

There just isn’t much for me to do in WoW right now. I’ve done all current content, and I don’t like most of the tier sets this time around, so there’s not much transmog to chase. I am still enjoying my characters at least. Rogue, monk, and paladin all feel great right now.

Once again I lament WoW’s forced subscription. I honestly quite like having it as a background game I can just pop into now and then, but with the sub it’s just not financially justifiable long term.

Overwatch:

I continue my love/hate relationship with Overwatch. My problem is I really do love the setting and the character design (in all respects — lore, visuals, gameplay), but I’m just not much for competitive games. I don’t really mind losing as long as I don’t feel like I’m the main cause of the loss… but I very often am.

It’s especially frustrating that most of my favourite characters are the ones I’m bad at. After a strong start, Ramattra seems to have turned out to be another character I’m no good with, with my win rate on him having fallen below 50%.

The weird thing is unlike other characters I’ve struggled with, I don’t feel like I’m doing badly when I play Ram. I get lots of kills, don’t die that much, am frequently the MVP by Stadium cash, and get PotG often. The other day I hit 80K cash by round five, which is by far the best I’ve ever done with any character and near double what most of my teammates had (we still lost). By every metric other than the win rate, I’m doing great with Ram, but I guess the win rate is all that matters.

Weirdly I have the opposite issue with Vendetta. I feel like I do nothing but flail and die when I play her, but I have a win rate well above 50% with her… though admittedly I haven’t played her enough to have a strong sample size of matches.

I may still try a few more matches with Ram to see if I can turn things around, but I’m not optimistic.

I’m still over 65% win rate with Brigitte after around 150 games, which seems absolutely insane to me. I never had anywhere near a win rate that high after so many games on any character in Heroes of the Storm. I usually settled around 52-55% for my mains.

As much as I like Brig, though, I don’t want to be stuck just playing her. I do have good win rates on a few others, but they’re usually characters I’m just not super passionate about. It’s fun playing Sigma now and then, but I’d much rather be D.Va or Ramattra if I’m going to tank. Doesn’t seem fair to my teammates, though, when I have win rates around 48% with those two but over 60% with Sigma.

Het universum zingt voor mij, I guess.

You’d think after a year I’d be getting better at this game, but no. It’s hard to get excited about new characters when it’s so unlikely I’ll be any good at them. Shion looks awesome, but gods know when she’ll make it to Stadium, and when she does I’ll probably just suck at her, too.

At least I’ve still got faithful Brigitte. If no one got me, I know mace to the face got me.

Fan Fiction: Infinite Paths

Posted on May 22, 2026 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

We’re now coming to the conclusion (at least for now) of my project to do at least one piece of fan fiction exploring all of my favourite World of Warcraft characters.

Ironically, despite her being my most played character by far and my mascot in the digital realm, Mai the rogue was the hardest to come up with something for. As much as I love her, she is frankly not the most exciting character. She loves her country, and she’s good at her job, and there’s just not much else to say about her.

But in the end I did manage to scrounge together a little something that should give you a bit of insight into what makes this master assassin tick.

———————————

Infinite Paths

Above her, the sky roiled and twisted, reality eating itself alive before her very eyes.

Mai yawned.

She pulled her thick salt and pepper hair free from its pony tail and laid back in her bedroll, which lay upon hard rock in a Ren’dorei camp within the Voidstorm. Bedtime was one of the few times she ever let her hair down, in any sense of the term. She was a forty-something woman with a fit build and red-brown eyes that were always darting about, on the search for danger… or targets. Her massive swords lay on the ground next to her.

It had been a long day of scouting the surrounding landscape, the tedium broken only by a brief and violent encounter with an unlucky Domanaar. She felt the long miles of walking in her aching soles and tired bones, and unwelcoming though it was, this still wasn’t the worst place she’d camped in her time. In moments, she was asleep.

* * *

She awoke sometime later to the sound of a child’s laughter. She sat up, scanning the camp. It appeared almost emptied of people, the Ren’dorei guards nowhere in sight. The only other soul in sight was a raven-haired little girl, maybe seven years old, who ran off out of sight.

Mai narrowed her eyes. That wasn’t any little girl. That was her, or something that looked like her, as she would have appeared a little under forty years ago.

She was dreaming, of course, and giving her current location there was a pretty significant chance this was no ordinary dream, but the attempt by some malicious entity to influence her thoughts. Such things were one of the many hazards she’d been trained to combat, and that training had been put to use before.

Her efforts to will herself to wakefulness proved fruitless, though, and while Mai was a very cautious woman, she wouldn’t have ended up in her line of work if she didn’t also have a curious streak, so she decided to play along, for now. She slid out of her bedroll, put her boots back on, and strapped on her swords. She wasn’t sure if such things would be of any use in the dreamscape, but habits were habits. At least she didn’t feel so tired now she was asleep.

She looked around, and couldn’t find the girl wearing her face. That wasn’t entirely surprising. She had always been a little too good at hide and seek back in the day.

If I were me, where I would be hiding? In one of the tents? No, too obvious. There, that cluster of rocks. There was just enough space between them for a little girl to slip in.

Mai crept up to the stones in question and peered into the gap between them. A little girl with red-brown eyes smiled up at her, then darted off into a nearby canyon, giggling merrily.

The girl moved faster than should have been possible, and Mai lost sight of her again. No choice but to follow her into the canyon. She noted it was an ideal spot for an ambush, but if something was already in her head, why would it need to physically corner her? She trudged off, her mind on long ago games of hide and seek.

It had been a while since she had given much thought to her childhood in Elwynn Forest. “Idyllic” would not have been an exaggeration. Those first ten years or so had been well after the Second War, but before the Third, and life had been quite peaceful.

She had grown up in an immigrant family, her mother a paladin of Lordaeron and her father a humble carpenter from Gilneas, and they had always impressed upon her how lucky they were that the people of Stormwind had welcomed them so warmly, a lesson that hit home all too hard when the Third War broke out and Lordaeron fell to the Scourge, taking many of their relatives with it. While she was proud of her heritage, Mai had always considered herself a citizen of Stormwind first, and with the fierce of love her country that only a migrant can possess, she had chosen to serve it as soon as she had been old enough to enlist.

Almost immediately her instructors had noticed she was special. Mai still wasn’t entirely convinced her mother hadn’t given them secret instructions to keep an eye on her. There had always been questions about how Mai was able to hide so well, even when she was little.

There had been tests, exams. She had been determined to possess a talent for magic. Its strength was not enough that sending her off to train as a mage would have made sense, but it could be honed in other ways. She could meld with the shadows, walk without leaving tracks, sense a blow before it fell, and move faster than a normal person should. Before long she had ceased training with the standard cadets and begun more specialized instruction under the auspices of Stormwind Intelligence, an agency she served to this day.

The canyon fanned out into many small, twisting, winding forks. Mai looked down one to her right and saw herself again, but older now. This Mai was a young adult, practising sword forms with other recruits. This would have been before her transfer to SI:7.

The grinding of a saw caught her attention, and she turned to her left. That fork of the canyon showed another vision of her teenage self, but this one was in her father’s workshop, helping him to craft a set of cabinets. Instead of a sword, she held a saw.

She frowned. That wasn’t right. This vision had never happened. She’d loved her father, but she had never taken any interest in his work. She certainly hadn’t become his apprentice.

She crept on, passing more of the narrow canyons, each containing its own vision. There was one she recognized; a training exchange program where she’d received unarmed combat instruction from a Night Elf woman named Nisa Oakfist. But the others were unfamiliar once more.

She saw herself picnicking beneath a tree with a handsome young man. She blinked, and they were standing in Northshire Abby, being married. Blinked again, and the man was watching over two raven-haired young children in a cozy living room while Mai carried in a freshly baked pie.

Another vision showed Mai training in the blade once more, but not with soldiers in the barracks. She was outside the Cathedral of the Light in Stormwind, wearing a tabard of the Silver Hand. Blink, and now this version of her was striding across the battlefield on a radiant charger, the legendary Ashbringer in her hand. Blink again, and the paladin Mai knelt before the Sunwell, sweating in pain as she channelled Light to combat the Voidstorm.

The visions kept coming. She saw herself a cultist of the Twilight’s Blade, bringing a dagger down into the chest of a terrified prisoner. She saw herself on a gilded throne atop a pile of gold, red-masked members of the Defias Brotherhood kneeling at her feet. She saw herself as a toothless drunk, singing without tune but smiling all the same.

She remembered something she’d heard one of the Void Elves say. “The Light sees only one path, and views all else as lies. The Void sees every possible path, and believes they are all equally true.”

That was what Mai was seeing, she realized. She was being confronted with all the equally valid things she could have been if she had not become the person she was. The sinner, the saint, the mother, the lover, the harlot, the beggar, the hero, the villain.

This was the Void’s attempt to influence her, but it was not trying to hijack her mind with force. It was simply trying to undermine her resolve by showing her all the experience she had missed out on by being so devout in her duty to Stormwind.

The frustrating thing was that it was working. It was true that she had missed out an incredible amount of her life. She had spent nearly every day travelling to far off lands, sneaking through forbidden places, and fighting horrifying creatures. She’d had almost no opportunity for intimate relationships, barely even friendships. She had no family of her own, no chance to recreate the warmth and comfort she’d known in childhood. She had seen multiple worlds and done wondrous things most people had never dreamed of, but she also couldn’t remember the last time she’d had an apple pie. She had hardly ever let herself simply be a person; she was merely a weapon to be wielded by her superiors.

She wouldn’t change it. She would not abandon her duty now, nor would she choose a different path if some reckless Bronze Dragon were to appear and give her the opportunity.

But now, having seen firsthand all the other things that might have been, she could not honestly say she had no regrets.

She awoke, for real this time, upon whatever passed for morning in the shadowy hellscape of the Voidstorm. She strapped on her boots and her blades – for real this time – and prepared for another day of serving king and country.

She was so very tired.

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: Warcraft

Gaming Round-Up: What Horrors Await

Fan Fiction: Infinite Paths

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