Kid has gotten into level editing.

Some games in this one. Hades II, Borderlands 4, Slay the Spire 2, Astro Bot, and PUBG.


I finally jumped on the Hades train, you know the game that ships directly into every Steam Deck owner's brewery conversations. I considered starting with the first one but gestures at game backlog.


The main character is Melinoë, daughter of Hades and her job is this game is to escape Chronos's time loop (aka the lore explaining the roguelike). The greek mythology thing is fun and reminiscent of freshman literature.


The gameplay is top-down action/bullet hell. You have two weapon attacks and can drop an AOE that typically halts enemies. With a half dozen weapons to choose from and ways to buff those weapons, you need to learn a few different tactical approaches. For garbage players such as myself, the tactical approach is to level the two weps that are strong at range.


Nobody on Olympus is particularly happy with Chronos, so throughout a run the other greek gods and goddesses offer attack/defense/loot abilities that have rarity and level. As you finish runs and unlock passives you see fewer white boons and more blue, purp, and orange. Eventually you get access to boons that are collabos between two olympians and can be pretty powerful.

Left door: upgrade a boon, get a fire boon, get a smithing boon. Right door: increase hit points, get money, increase magic points.

In most cases, you can choose which olympian will provide a reward for clearing the next room.


There's a fishing minigame because of course there is.


To finish the story you need to beat Chronos in the underworld eight times and Typhon, the final boss of the overworld, four-ish times. Maybe it's nine time for Chronos counting the final showdown, I'm not there yet.

I hit a brief period of frustration when I reached Chronos a few times and didn't last very long, having not had much opportunity to learn his attacks. I felt no remorse about looking his battle mechanics up online, though probably normal character progression helped as much as anything else.

The game is a fun, lightweight action title with cool art and dialogue I don't really care about. The unlockables and ability to not get demolished ramp very steadily. This is normally pretty good for a roguelike - it's nice for the learning curve and adds freshness and variety to each run. Hades II unlocks weirdly feel extremely artificial due to the lack of a clear cause/effect for the unlock and because some of the things are like, "now you can plant multiple crops with one button press" and "now you can select a favorite equippable". The feeling of strangeness wears off when you start a new run.

During my birthday BL4 sess I encountered my second-ever pearlescent. More on that in a sec.

Since my last Kairospost, Me and J leveled up to UVHM 5. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the BL4 UVHM format (side activities culminating with a story mission re-run) beats the full replay required in BL2. We might do UVHM 6 before we start the DLC, depends on how hard Bloomreaper is with a duo.


Quest mop-up has been a highlight. Some of the side quests are quite extensive and, as usual, introduce characters whose eccentricity isn't confined by the relative seriousness of the main plot. Looking at you, Professor Ambreleigh.


We hadn't finished any of the vault fragment -> vault sidequests until this mop-up/UVHM-up phase. The pre-boss section of the vaults were fairly challenging. The guardian bosses weren't too bad and made for a scenic fight. I don't think we missed out on too much in not previously having the passive buff granted by each guardian.


It was nice to see (back in December) that even Kairos celebrates Mercenary Day (with a mini-DLC).


I've played a lot of Borderlands. Like a lot. Only once have I come across a pearlescent. And unlike the Tunguska, Herald is almost max level and perfect for my Gravitar radiation build. Plus it's reminds me of the days of Grog Nozzle + Unkempt Harold.

BL4 apparently has a couple of high drop-rate pearls from a specific map activity but since they aren't in the same pool as the world drops, it only cheapens the brand a bit.

Some of my StS2 runs have a quite a lot of card removal.

I checked back in with early access StS2, there appears to be steady progress but nothing yet worth another binge.

Kid did it.

I gave the final two Astro Bot challenge levels a few more tries but if I'm going to beat them it won't be with a five year old in attendance. A few screenshots that were hanging out on my PS5:



Taego's bridges tend to get a lot of vehicle traffic but the most exciting barricades happen on the incomplete bridge. The long, narrow ramp ensures that you only need a few boats, vehicles, and concrete blocks to ensare another team.


We gave the Payday arcade mode a run. It suffers from the same core issue that Payday does: once you exit stealth you're confronted with a nonstop flood of law enforcement. They really need The Director.


Bait packs are fun now that the Lynx is back. The squad always totes cover flares and folding shields for rooftop and butte-top fortifications.


The Vikendi gondolas are great for transporting vehicles.

Hardwear.io was a pretty good, small conference.

	Fuck Big Smoke.	�
	From Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (pic unrelated)