The Punished Backlog

Somewhere above a smoldering caboose carcass, roughly a quarter of the way into my playthrough of Denshattack!, I paused to jot in my game journal, in whimsical, facetiously looped capital letters: M A R X       V E R S U S       T H E        M O N O R A I L Did I expect a game described in part as “Flip, trick and grind your train in a fast-paced, off-the-rails ride through a colourful Japanese dystopia” to be relatively straightforward? I did.

Video game remakes often raise the same question: Is this actually better than the original? I prefer to ask myself a different question: What exactly is the point of this? Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, a remake of Ubisoft’s open-world action-adventure title Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, is in no uncertain terms superior to its 2013 namesake. The graphics are sharper and more realistic. The game runs at a fairly consistent 60 frames per second.

I love cute lil’ mice guys doing things. As a kid, I often reread the Redwall series, The Tale of Despereaux, and The Rats of NIMH. One of my favorite films is Ratatouille. When I heard about Mouse P.I. For Hire on The Punished Podcast (here at 1:22:05), I started to cry with joy until I realized it wasn’t the mouse mystery game of my dreams (I’m still gonna play it, though).

Last week, the trailer dropped for Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender. Slick action, funny lines, familiar characters — it looked fantastic. I had no idea it was going to be coming out so soon. I pulled out my phone mid-trailer to look up movie tickets, but then the dreaded final screen appeared: Releasing on Paramount+. Ugh. Originally announced in February 2021, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender was scheduled for a full theatrical release in October 2026.

I don’t like dungeon crawlers. I don’t like environmental puzzles. I don’t like hearing people trying to convince me these games are good. I get that they’re good for other people; they’re just not usually good for me. And YET, years ago, fellow writer-editors David Silbert and Sam Martinelli told me many times that Dungeons of Hinterberg, developed by Microbird Games and released in 2024, was excellent and that I should give it a try.

We here at The Punished Backlog have written previously about our shared histories with the “Big Three” of 2000s anime: Naruto, One Piece, and, most importantly to me, Bleach. Each helped carry anime out of the doldrums of the ‘90s and into the Hot Topics of 2005, with prime-time television slots and good-to-pretty-okay-I-guess dubs. In time, each settled into its cultural touchstone: Naruto ended and transitioned into a lackluster sequel series that is now more filler than content.

We’ve seen a dizzying number of great roguelikes in recent years. From escaping (or breaking back into) the depths of hell, to traversing a labyrinthine manor, to assembling killer hands in poker, these experiences have been wildly complex and endlessly creative. Roguelikes get a bad rap for being formulaic, but that generalization belies the genre’s true, inner beauty.

It’s been a little over a month since Yacht Club Games released its hotly-anticipated 2D action-adventure title Mina the Hollower. The game, which features heavy influences from The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, and Bloodborne, released to rave reviews, even garnering a 90 score on Metacritic. Sure, those reviews are all fairly positive. But what do the fine folks at The Punished Backlog think about it?

One of the more uniquely satisfying things video games can give to players is the feeling of being indestructible, powerful beyond all others even in the face of seemingly endless hordes of supernatural beings whose sole purpose is to try to kill you. So-called “boomer shooters” — first-person experiences such as DOOM and Wolfenstein — embody this feeling particularly well, as do roguelike games (at times).

Heading into Capcom’s Onimusha: Way of the Sword demo, released June 2, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Onimusha is a notoriously systems-intensive series, with strong difficulty options to boot, so a short slice had the potential to be an overwhelming or flat-out frustrating affair. Even with my general excitement toward this new entry, I questioned whether a demo was really the best selling point. I should not have worried.