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June Update – oh Sony!, you bunch of idiots!

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Play

Prey (PS5) - Completed 

I've mainly been distracted by the World Cup but I did manage to complete Prey, the ending sequence is tense and has you making some big choices. 

 

I still hate Mimics!

Seas of Stars (PS5)

A shame, see bin

Like A Dragon:Pirate Yakuza (PS5)

A full game with nothing but Majima! I've completed chapter one and unlocked the ship, I need to understand the mechanics of sailing around the opening area to develop my skill/experience.

A RGG game is like your favourite blanket

Animal Busters (Android)

Still playing but I'm getting bored of it so will bin it soon.

Rogue Legend (Android)

This is much more enjoyable than Animal Busters & has regular updates with new content.


2026 Gaming Resolutions Update

1. Purchase no more physical games, yes this resolution is even tougher now!

Another good month, nothing purchased.


2. Focus on PS+ Extra Backlog

I got annoyed with the Sony news and decided to start a physical game instead in Pirate Majima.


3. No more PSN Credit!

Not keen to give Sony any more money given their recent news.


Backlog

PS+ Extra (12) - Cleared out a lot of titles that I have lost interest in playing

Digital Games (46) - Another month with no further additions

PS+ Monthly (13) - Nothing new added

Physical Games (12) - Again, no more purchases

Total = 83 Games


Shopping

2026 Target is spend less than £100 - Total spent £66.00  

No change, nothing purchased
 

Want

Added Momento & Calame to my wishlist.


Bin

Where do I start?

Sony - The death of physical games 

Let's go with Sony news of the end of physical media in 2028.

My initial reaction was what a bunch of idiots! & I still feel angry.

My game shopping process since forever is to buy physical media over digital for all AAA game releases. I don't keep games; I play them and then sell them on to buy the next game.

Digital game shopping started with the Xbox 360 and indie games (my first purchased games were Marble Blast Ultra, Puzzle Quest & Geometry Wars). I don't think I purchased anything on the PS3, and on the PS4 I continued to buy indie titles but did purchase AAA games when they were on sale. To date, Red Dead Redemption 2 was the only game I purchased fully digital on release because I knew I would play it forever. 

So how will not having physical games change my gaming habits?

For now, it doesn't. I have a massive backlog of physical/digital games to enjoy. I'm not buying any more physical or digital games, but going forward I'll continue to purchase older titles on my wishlist on physical media and everything else when it is on sale digitally.

I will be reducing my PS+ subscription down to essentials from premium, mainly because too much choice is dangerous!

After 2028, when AAA games will go fully digital, I will set myself a budget and stick to that; currently, for physical games, that is £25 (occasionally I break this). For digital, I'll probably set the limit lower, like £15 & wait until they are on sale.

I've been a PlayStation gamer (slight blip with the 360 but I ended up finishing that generation on the PS3) since my first JAP imported console, so I'll probably purchase a PS6 console at some point, but if the astronomical figures of £1000! is true, then my day one PS5 console is going to be serving me a lot longer.

 

Sea of Stars (PS5)

A lovely "old school" JRPG with beautiful visuals and a lovely soundtrack but an old school save system that resulted in me losing about 3 hours gameplay because I went exploring and ended up down a cavern surrounded by ant bruisers who kept on re-spawning & eventually died.

For now I've not gone back to the game because to combat this save system I will just end up grinding levels to be over-levelled to ensure I don't die and lose gameplay time.

The Darkside Detective (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this in my library (in multiple libraries, in fact) and thought, ooh yeah, I’ll play that… just not right now. Tens of times. Finally, its time came!

The Darkside Detective is a point and click adventure game with big chunky pixel graphics and silly puzzles and characters. The premise is that you’re a police detective, but your cases mainly revolve around ghosts and the occult. Spooky occurrences, portals to the Darkside, a sentient toilet, Santa working in a greasy spoon, and a sidekick who is an idiot. And your non-ghost-case detective rival who always gets the kudos.

It’s funny and pleasantly surreal, and the puzzles stay away from rubber-chicken-pulley territory so they’re pretty much all logically solvable. A very enjoyable game, and almost always incredibly cheap (or free!) so if you like the genre there’s no excuse to pass it up.

Citizen Sleeper (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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I really wasn’t expecting this sort of game from the description. I know Citizen Sleeper is considered a good game, and I knew it was cyberpunky and set in space, but I thought it was going to be like Syndicate or an isometric Deus Ex or something. I was way off.

What it actually is, is a sort of visual novel with dice rolls. Playing it, I was reminded of the gameplay of Sunless Sea, albeit without the combat. Or the boats. Or the creeping dread. Or the deathloop. It was more the feeling, you know? The talking to people and “spending” various accumulated materials to further progress with particular people or events. Oh, and there was a bit of creeping dread, actually, just in the cyberspace hacking bit.

That doesn’t really tell you much about the game though, does it. It opens with you, a Sleeper, arriving smuggled onto a beaten up old space station. A Sleeper is someone who has had their consciousness transferred into a synthetic body, a body which is owned by a massive corporation and as you’ve done a runner, they want it – you – back. Your daily cycle involves talking to people, hacking to gain information, earning money, and eating. You might be effectively a robot, but if you don’t eat you still die. Each day you get some dice (three to start, you can expand to more), which are pre-rolled to give you numbers you “spend” on challenges. The higher the number you use, the higher your changes of the challenge, which could be a conversation, or resource gathering, or a hacking attempt. Failing a challenge can mean you lose energy, other resources, or some other negative effect.

I hated it. Relying on luck in a time limited, in a Persona-ish way, game? Anxiety inducing gameplay. At first. Then it clicked, and I found you could augment your chances of “winning”, which more dice, re-rolls or permanent +1 or +2 to each score. I also found if you roll some low numbers, then that day go for more low-risk events, the stress dissipates. Also, you likely can’t do everything available in the time limits so don’t try.

It seems that there are a few different possible endings, depending on where your focus is spent, but I completed stories including “deal with the hitman who has come to claim me”, “help the guy and his not-daughter escape to a better life”, and “rebuild the gardens”, whereas the “help the rebels stuck in the blockade” fell by the wayside. It seemed that was quite an important thing to miss, but I read later that it’s a DLC story so wasn’t essential for the main game anyway. My ending was, I think, good, but pretty open-ended. I’d be interested to know how the sequel links to this if there’s several possible outcomes.

So, I’ve been a bit vague regarding specifics in Citizen Sleeper because it’s really necessary to play it for yourself and make your own choices, learning the world and your character’s situation in your own way. Do that, but don’t go into it expecting the sort of game I did! Oh, one last thing – some of the text on a Steam Deck is pretty tiny, so if you’ve something bigger to play it on, maybe do that.

Raccoin (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Yes! Another incremental clicker game with Luck Be A Landlord/Balatro nods! This one isn’t anything to do with cards or trees though. No, it’s all set around a penny falls machine.

You put coins into it, that pushes coins out. Coins that come out earn you money. Somehow, you make money out of this – unlike a real one – because you have special coins that can be bought between rounds, are stored in an expandable clip, and do magic things. So you can get coins that are rabbits and then fox coins hunt them and increase your score. Or you can electrify coins, or have giant coins, or all sorts.

There’s also a combo meter, which builds as you push coins off the edge and is cancelled if you spend too long between doing so. Build it enough and you trigger a bonus wheel to spin, with “prizes” like more coins or massive towers of coins.

Like other games of this sort, it’s getting the right combination of special coins, a bit of timing, and a lot of luck that allows you to get higher and higher scores on each run. And, like other games of this sort, it’s pretty addictive. Raccoin isn’t as good as Luck Be A Landlord or Balatro, but it is decent enough.

PowerWash Simulator 2 (Steam 2): COMPLETED!

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You’d be hard-pressed, from the screenshots, to see that PowerWash Simulator 2 is actually a different game to PowerWash Simulator 1. And the gameplay too, in fact. After all, there are only so many different ways washing dirty stuff can be presented. Why, then, is this a whole new game and not just another pile of DLC for the original? Money? It’s probably money. Right?

There are differences, if you look closely. Perhaps the biggest, in terms of “gameplay” at least, is how they’ve done away with all the different types of soap. In the first game, different surface types required the purchase and use of specific detergents, so you’d need one for stone and one for metal and one for plastic and so on. Well, not only is there only one soap type now, it’s free and unlimited. Well, you can only have so much splashed on surfaces at any one time, but rinsing it off magically refills it to your washer so it is effectively infinite. This might not sound like much of a change but, in a game with very few possible changes, it’s a game, uh, changer.

I almost completely avoided using soap in the original, because of the cost and fiddly swapping it out and stuff, so cleaning took more “passes” than it could have done. Now, I foamed up everything with gay abandon. Game changer.

Another change is the addition of a new piece of equipment – the swing. You hang it from the top of a flat surface, and sit in it – giving you mostly free movement up, down, left and right to squirt much more easily than you would with ladders or the scaffolding. Both those, and the hilariously useless step-stool, return, but on specific levels the swing is an excellent new bit of kit. Could have really done with that on the tower at the fire station in the original.

There’s also a new plot. The dodgy Mayor is being dodgy, and the gems you recovered in the previous game that were required to keep the volcano in check have been stolen, but ultimately this just manifests as a reason to clean stuff, same as before.

The final change, which may well have been there before but I didn’t make use of it, was single console split screen co-op. I played on the Switch 2 so was disappointed it didn’t support the game share method of giving player 2 a Switch of their own to stream to, but it was still fun and, as you’d expect, halved the time it took to complete levels.

That’s all there is to say, really – it’s more of the same with a few quality of life improvements. Could it have been DLC? Probably. Should it? Well, chances are it’d have been about the same price anyway (I paid £15 for it, but the eShop price is £20) so it doesn’t really matter. It’s more relaxing zen washing, and it’s worth the entry fee, so I don’t actually care. Oh yeah, and there’s a toilet to wash. Winner.