TangledVirus games.

This was first posted in my Patreon back in January. So if you would like to see posts like this and support me at the same time why not join my Patreon? Right here.

Before I start, let me explain what this is. For 2026 I want to blog more, and I think the best way to do this is by creating a routine around it so for that I will try to make one blog post a month. In theory they will all be on games I played and finished. These aren’t reviews nor critiques because I am not a reviewer or an academic to know how to critique stuff. These are just my thoughts on games I like, games I didn’t really like but kinda of appreciate a thing or two about them and etc.

I want to make twelve of these this year, one per month. So let’s see how it goes. This will be available exclusively on Patreon for a month before I post it on my blog.

I don’t call myself a fan of roguelikes, I like some. Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Nuclear Throne. I didn’t like Wizard of Legend nor Hades. I want to try the roguelike mode in Prey. But you know one I kinda of liked?

The one in Streets of Rage 4.

Being honest with you, I liked the idea, Beat ‘em Up combined with Roguelike? Call me in.

So when Guard Crush Games – one of the developers behind Streets of Rage 4 – announced their new game Absolum and that it was a Beat ‘em Up Roguelike I was not excited but hoping it was good.

Then I played the Demo.

Fuck that was a good Demo.

But what is Absolum?

As I said, the game is a Beat ‘em Up Roguelike set in a Sword and Sorcery setting of Talamh where the SUN KING AZRA rules with an iron fist! He has outlawed magic and declared that any wizard or magical creature must be genocided. And I don’t use that word lightly, there’s an entire race that’s in that process, they are being hunted down. The player characters are wizards that are fighting against Azra. Their plan is to destroy his army, the Crimson Order, and then kill the big man himself in his throne room. It might seem impossible, the Crimson Order is huge, they have many people, but the protagonists have an ace in their sleeve. Their leader, the Root Mother Uchawi who can bring them back from death, so they can fight another day.

That’s quite the set up, and one thing that helps is one of the co-developers of the game, the animation studio Supamonks. Their artists there were able to bring in such a cool look for the setting, it feels straight out of a French comic. Talamh and its four different regions feel distinct, yes it’s a very typical fantasy setting with dwarfs, elves, humans but it has personality. Each region with its inhabitants, its bosses, its mounts all feel very distinct.

Visually it’s all very good.

But the visuals are not why I was interested in Absolum so much. I knew what I wanted from the Demo. I needed to know.

Did it play good?

Bruh.

It so did.

If you played Streets of Rage 4 you will find a lot similar to Absolum, so keep that in mind.

Once you start playing you need to pick a character. There’s Galandra the Warrior, Karl the Alchemist, Cinder the Thief and Brome the Wizard. There’s a few differences between each of them, it’s not just visuals.

Essentially all characters have a normal attack, a strong attack, they can dash, they can attack off their dash, they can jump and attack from their jump. However these will change for each character, as Cinder for example has the best air attacks out of everyone in the cast, it’s perfectly possible to stay in air as Cinder for some time, all the while they attack enemies and beat them down. Karl on the other hand doesn’t have the best air moves.

What the characters also have are magical attacks. Now these are special attacks exclusive for each character, they aren’t just cool they actually add in your combos and do some good damage. They can’t be used often as they require you to have enough mana to cast them, but as you go along in your runs you are able to get a bigger mana bar.

The best example of how good magical attacks are is with Brome. His default magical attack, Wrath Beam is a horizontal magical beam that hits anything in its path and does quite a lot of damage, it’s a great crowd control tool and a pretty good way to finish off some stronger enemies after beating them down with normal moves.

The last attack move the characters have is their star moves, these are the strongest moves they have. Most of the cast, and by that I mean Galandra, Karl and Cinder have damage moves, Brome on the other hand clones himself. So any move he does his clones do too, normals, dash attacks, jump attacks, magical attacks. This turns Brome into a damage machine, trust me, the guy is strong.

All of these moves help contribute to the combo system of the game where repeating the same move over and over doesn’t work, enemies get overpressured and become invincible for a few seconds. What you need to do to extend your combos is to vary your moves, normals into dash attacks into jump attacks into strong attacks, into specials you understand. But why do that? What matters? You see the game has a combo counter that helps increase your score, the bigger the combo is the bigger will be your reward. This score is your XP that leads you into the meta progression of the game.

Every time you finish a run, either by defeating the final boss or by being defeated your score is turned into XP, this XP grants you levels that are there to give you rewards in the form of one of three currencies.

Gems or crystals: That can also be gained through runs, they are used to buy passive upgrades such as recovering more health at checkpoints, high critical damage, more health for mounts and allies. You can also use Gems in the secret room where all the items you found are stored, that way you can start runs with these items. Each item grants some bonus, like more damage in aerial attacks, or faster mana recovery.

Seeds: That are used to buy new magic moves.

And Heart flowers that are used to upgrade the elemental passives you get during your runs.

You use these currencies in your base before every run so you are stronger. Once you have upgraded something, or maybe even changed character you start a new run. Once you are about to start you can pick a new magic attack to use, and one of them will give you a bonus of 25% EXP.

Then head out and start the run.

Every time you start a run you are given an elemental passive, these are going to be the main passives you’ll want to get as they offer very strong passive abilities. Fire can be damage over time, or huge bursts of damage for example. You unlock new ones as you go along in your runs. From the bramble passives that can create throwable items or small turrets that can damage enemies in an area.

These aren’t your only rewards, as I said before you can also get passive items that will add nice bonuses to your damage, your skills, and your mana regeneration. And then you have the rewards you get by defeating bosses. Every boss gives you an upgrade, these can go from changing Galandra’s strong attack into a three hit combo, to allowing Cinder to throw multiple items at the same time, to Brome’s spells doing more damage at a mana cost increase.

It’s all great stuff, it makes experimenting and trying new things in game very interesting. It’s like finding new items in The Bidding of Isaac and seeing what new things happens, sometimes they mix well, sometimes they don’t. In Absolum you try to find the same sort of magical passive, and then the items that give you the most bonuses you want and try to make the most broken character. It’s fun.

But as much as it’s fun to break the game, having a particularly strong set of passives doesn't replace skill. No, I’m not going to say this is a case of “get good”, but Absolum is totally a game where practice and understanding of how to deal with different enemies and situations help. I’m not only talking about combat here, yes, knowing how the combat works, some good combo routes, is good and it helps but so does knowing what paths to take, what items work for what you are doing or not, what passives have synergy and things like that. There’s only so much that a broken build can do, and with Absolum asking you to 1CC the game you will need to learn.

And that’s the awesome part, because learning how the game worked was really damn cool! It all started with learning some combo routes with Cinder, Galandra and Brome, then it came to learn some bosses patterns, then learning the paths with most resources, the areas that are easier for me, some combo route for the bosses and which bosses I can do better at, how the magic passives work and which characters work better for them – Cinder with Brambles is pretty strong – how to utilize the characters magical moves, all of that was pretty cool. It made me play Absolum for a month non stop, from the day it was released to the day I felt I was done with it, I was doing one or two runs every day and I could see myself getting closer and closer, it was a blast!

With each run I was learning more and more about the game I could see myself getting it, there were lore revelations, fun character moments and interactions and some surprises that just made it better for me. I don’t want to spoil them, play the game and find out just trust me that this is some real good Sword and Sorcery stuff.

The developers announced an update to the game that will come live this year, so I’m excited to get back into it soon. And I hope it does well enough to not only so that Guard Crush Games can keep it’s devs employed but also so that they can make new games and maybe like with Streets of Rage 4 a DLC that adds a couple new things including characters.

-- Hey. Tangled here. The update already came, patch 1.1, and boy. What a doozy. I won't go into detail because the update is a rework of the post game but here's what you'll see. You will get Ordeals, these are challenges that increase the game's difficulty in some way. For example the Legion Ordeal adds more enemies to each room in the game but they have less health. This might sound easy but try to fight several copies of those shielded enemies and then come talk to me. Another addition is the Corrupted areas, basically these are areas that will have elite enemies and enemies from different areas all together. The difficult is high but the rewards are increased.

This adds a new layer of difficulty to the game but one that still requires the player to know what challenges and what paths to take. I think this patch has been great and I really want to see Guard Crush games to do a big DLC expansion for the game with a couple new characters and a new zone just to make Absolum the best game possible. Anyway, back to the me from the past.--

I would really like to play a character that takes stuff from the Crimson Brigade, like someone that took the kool aid was betrayed, realized that all of this is fucked and joined the Wizards. Another I would like is a spoiler so play the game, talk to me and you’ll see the vision.

But yeah, I think that’s where I’ll end things though, I don’t want to spoil much and I want these to be short reads.

I recommend Absolum 100%, it’s a great Beat em’ Up, it uses the Roguelite genre well, it has an awesome aesthetic and the game just has surprise after surprise that makes it feel fresh for a good while.

And that final boss. Fuck.

I thought Azra was cool but the final boss? Damn.

Great game.

This was first posted in my Patreon back in April. So if you would like to see posts like this and support me at the same time why not join my Patreon? Right here.

In May, 2022 I read the first issue of an Image Comics mini series called Bolero. This comic which was written by Wyatt Kennedy and drawn by Luana Vecchio was about…

It wasn’t about the multiverse as Wyatt Kennedy said in the last issue. It was not about talking cats. Nor was it about a deadly dominatrix who would kill her subs live on the dark web, that is in fact another comic, Lovesick by Bolero’s artist Luana Vecchio. It’s pretty good.

Bolero is about dealing with Alcoholism and mental illness. It’s about how mental illness can fuck up your life. It’s about accepting yourself warts and all. It’s about being good to yourself by trying to heal and see what you can do to heal. It was not about going to multiple dimensions looking for the right one where everything is perfect and how that would fix your life. Okay, it was a bit about that but not entirely. It was about Alcoholism and mental illness and healing and moving on. And that was fucking awesome. Bolero is my favorite comic from 2022. It’s one of my favorites in general.

Now why am I talking about Wyatt Kennedy’s Bolero in an essay about Wyatt Kennedy’s Nights? Great question, the answer is simpler than it might seem!

In Bolero’s final issue Wyatt does a small… I’ll call it goodbye letter for Bolero. In there he explains what led to him writing the comic, his struggle with alcoholism and his life in general, how he thinks that Devyn beat her illness like he did even if most don’t think she did, how Brandon Granham of King City/Multiple Warheads/Prophet fame helped him – because it’s fucking tough to try and beat addiction alone. He then says that he will never write something like Bolero ever again. Which is awesome. The final issue of Bolero has two short stories, only a few pages long. One for Luana Vecchio’s own comic Lovesick, and then for Wyatt Kennedy’s next comic Nights. That was very cool to see.

Tangled, where do you want to get with this? Good question, consider two things.
One – Bolero wasn’t about the multiverse.
Two – Brandon Granham.
Now you get it.

I don’t actually.
Consider this.

King City and Multiple Warheads were both science fiction comics with a strong focus on using odd and fantastical stuff in it to tell a character-centric story of personal growth, personal change, and even personal discovery. Prophet was more like a huge epic legend about the end of an era and the start of another.

Bolero’s universe hopping shenanigans was about a woman trying to deal with her self destructive urges. About how she ruined her own life, her own relationships with her girlfriend and friends. How she was making things worse for herself. All in the guise of a story about the multiverse. This is a small essay on hiding the themes of your story, it’s also about how one person can find them in a story even if that might not be what the author originally planned.

In October 2023 I read the first issue of Image Comics ongoing series called Nights. This comic which is written by Wyatt Kennedy and drawn by Luigi Formisano is about…

It’s about a teenager moving to Florida. It’s about living with your cool cousin and his friends. It’s about having a crush on a cool girl who’s a bit older than you. It’s about dying your hair. It’s also an urban fantasy where Florida is owned by Spain, the USA only has thirty-one states, the internet is still in its infancy and irrelevancy and supernatural creatures are common and known by people.

Vince just moved to Florida after the death of his mother. His cool cousin Ivory is a hit man and his friends are Matt the ghost of an indie game developer and Gray a German vampire. Vince has a crush on said German Vampire. He dyes his hair eventually. Remember what I said about Brandon Granham and Bolero?

Nights is straightforward. It’s an urban fantasy with a strong horror influence, it has a nostalgia for the early aughts, it likes anime but not in a – we are coping anime without understanding it more like in a we use manga as a visual add to Night’s own art identity. Also Vince does the Akira slide, we cannot escape that.

But Nights is also – in my point of view – about the end of one period in one’s life and the start of another. When we first meet Vince he’s just arriving in Florida, he just lost his mother and he’s now moving in with his cousin and his roommates. He’ll start in a new school, get used to a new city full of odd fantastical things, meet new people. We as the reader will also do that as we follow Vince.

The first issue of Nights has a time skip of five years, it’s later half being dedicated to the day of Vince’s seventeenth birthday. It’s also about the start of the end of this period in his life. You see, Vince wants to move to New York for college, he wants to study film making. This is small but it’s an important moment that to me at least leads to the core of the comic.

Things change and some changes are okay, they are good, others aren’t. In the five years Vince has lived in Florida he came to develop a crush on Gray. This is good, normal everyday stuff. There’s a star-nosed mole that racially stereotypes Vince who tells him that not only is he divorced but he also got a girlfriend recently. He tells him that because you never know what life will bring. His divorce was the end but also the beginning of a new period of his life, him getting a girlfriend is also the start of a new period of his life.

In these same five years Matt has died and turned into a ghost. This isn’t good and it brings him a lot of pain because… None of his friends get it. He’s alone, he’s actually depressed to the point that he broke things off with his girlfriend and boyfriend. And Ivory is avoiding him for some reason. Things can also fall in place and stay like that for a very long time and that’s also can be good, it can also be very bad.

It all depends on how you deal with these changes. The comic communicates this in a very subtle way, it never tells you directly about changes or stagnation, it never talks about this, it’s just there mixed with the urban fantasy and the horror and the anime and game references. It’s simply a theme that the reader can pick and prod and think about. It also might not be what Wyatt Kennedy had intended for the story, it might be something else entirely it is many other things other than this theme I found or think I found, it’s about friendship, it’s about it’s characters, it’s about this little odd world it’s set in. It’s many things.

Yet I still cling to this theme of change and stagnation because I see it there! And I resonate with it! I like it. But the comic is more than that.

Ivory is not in a good place when we meet him in the first issue, many things are happening and that is pushing him away from his friends. Gray is looking for something about her past. About what turned her into a vampire. Matt is dead and he only has so many years for him to make peace with what killed him. Vince is thinking about moving to New York. All of these threads are charming, interesting, odd, and curious. I want to see where the comic goes with them. I want to know more about the world, more about Florida. I want to see these characters well and happy.

Now where do I want to get with all of this? Why am I writing all of this? Because I like comics, games, anime, TV shows, books. Things that tells stories and often times stories have themes, sometimes a story likes to hit you in the head very violently with it’s themes other times a story only reveals it’s themes when you are really deep in it and then some just have them in a very subtle way. Nights is being subtle, Bolero was subtle, but again I might be reading way too much into Nights. It might be that I like this comic and I found in it a theme that might not be intended by the authors of it but it applies to me and I like that.

And that’s okay. Nights doesn’t need to be about change and stagnation. It can be about not hiding things from the people you love, about being honest with them no matter the cost, about how hiding things from the people you love will bite you in the ass and it won’t be pretty. It also can be straight forward, it can be about a group of friends and their adventures and where these take them and that’s okay because I like that!

I like Wyatt Kennedy’s Nights, not in the same euphoric way I liked Wyatt Kennedy’s Bolero because those are two different comics but I took from them things that I like. Bolero is visceral and euphoric to me. Nights is the sort of thing I like to write, it’s the same brand of madness as me but more refined, maybe that’s why I like it so much and why it shines to me. It inspires me not in the same way Bolero did but Bolero isn’t Nights. It’s not supposed to be.

In January 2025 I read the twelfth issue of Image Comics ongoing series called Nights. This comic which is written by Wyatt Kennedy and drawn by Luigi Formisano is the season one finale of Nights and a huge change of the Status Quo. After this issue nothing is the same, things changed, the plan was for them to change in a good manner. With Vince and Gray moving to New York, with Ivory and Molly moving to California, with Matt moving to Japan to work at Nokami(Yup), things were going to be okay. Then a ton of stuff happens! Read it for yourself it’s good stuff! Things aren’t the same as planed but it all changed for the worst. Life is like that sometimes bad things happens and we have to deal with that and try to do that in the best way possible. I’m excited to see what the characters will do, what things will happen, what more of the world we will see.

I’m not sure what Nights is about. I found in it a theme that I like and see it through the comic but I’m not sure if this is me doing a Pepe Silva or me seeing something that was to be seen, either way I don’t think it matters. When you read a comic, play a game, watch a show and you are invested in the story you will notice themes sometimes, maybe these themes are actually there maybe they aren’t but you will notice them. How these affect you is all dependent on who you are as a person, on what you been through and what’s important to you.

Or maybe not. I don’t know you.

In 2010 I found a comic in a book store, it was a compiled release of both Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life and Scott Pilgrim vs The World that was being sold as Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim vs The World volume one out of three. I read the damn thing while going back home on the bus. But at the time I didn’t find any theme in it, the story was straightforward. Scott had to defeat Ramona’s seven evil ex-boyfriends, simple as that. In the first two books ,we meet two of them already Matthew Pattel and Lucas Lee. Simple. Straight forward.

But as I read the other volumes I came to realize what the series was about, how you need to accept your past mistakes and learn from them so you don’t hurt the people in your life again – Both Scott and Ramona left a lot of people hurt they are trying to not do that again. That was the case of me not seeing anything to call it a theme and go from it, it was a case of me slowly seeing what the author had intended. Which is pretty damn cool.

Why are you mentioning Scott Pilgrim? Just as an example. I like examples.

What do I want to get with all of this? As I said before. Stories can and most have themes. If we realize what they are or not is up to us. And if we find a new theme that wasn’t there is also up to us, no one really knows how something will resonate with you not even yourself. The same way Vince didn’t expect any of the crazy and wild things that happened to him when he arrived in Florida.

That’s just how things go.

In May, 2022 I read the first issue of an Image Comics mini-series called Bolero. This comic which was written by Wyatt Kennedy and art by Luana Vecchio. In it I found one of my favorite comics of all time, one that resonates with me still.

In October, 2023 I read both Wyatt Kennedy’s Nights and Luana Vecchio’s Lovesick, two comics that left me with a lot to think about about the idea of moving on, of consent, on why people like gore, on vulnerability, on trying to be better, on being honest. And that’s pretty awesome.

Thanks for reading.

Recommended reading:
Nights Vol.1(Issues 1 to 6.)
Bolero.
Lovesick.
Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life.
Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

Dev Log 01.

Well hello and welcome this is the first dev log for what I’m giving the temporary name of Project Arsodanm.

So before we start here’s a question and an answer: “What is this game?”

Project Arsodanm is a Boomer Shooter with some light RPG elements set in a Science Fantasy world of Elves that’s being invaded by a more technologically advanced species. Humans. In the game you will take control of a Dark Elf named Arsodanm who’s the leader of the Citizen’s Militia of the town of Regret as she goes on to fight what she firstly assumes to be a group of brigands that’s been hijacking transports coming and going from the town. The truth turns out to be more dangerous than just some brigands.

Another question you might have in mind is: “How big of a project is this?”

My plan is for this to be a short game and a test bed for a bigger game. What I want the most is to be able to make a FPS in Unreal Engine 4 and get it out on Itch, so that I can use the opinion of playtesters and people that got the game once it was finished so I can improve on it for a potential sequel that would be much larger.

In other words. Project Arsodanm is going to be the base where I will build a larger FPS. This future FPS would be a sequel of sorts, still starring Arsodanm and in the same setting.

So what will we have? Five levels. Three normal FPS levels, with one of them having a boss at the end. A secret level. And a final level that’s just a boss fight. The order would be. Normal level, level with a boss at the end, normal level, the secret level if you found it, final level.

There would also be Four ranged weapons, three melee weapons, and three magical spells. A couple of characters to talk to as well. That’s the plan at least.

Anyway with that done what have I done since I started developing the game?

Well… I made a working playable character, and made some very basic weapons to test out what I want, these weapons will be replaced as development goes. Besides that I’ve made a second playable character and was able to figure out how to make a character selection screen that works, so there’s that. This is useless for Project Arsodanm BUT it’s going to be useful in the future.

A lot of this project is me learning Unreal Engine 4, my previous experience was in making Visual Novels in Renpy, which I have quite a few, and trying and failing to learn how make a game on both Godot and Unity. It’s been a struggle. But now with Project Arsodanm this is the furthest I ever got into making a game, I want to finish this, I want to make something good.

There it is then. All I did so far was make a couple of playable characters, a functional gun system, and a few basic guns and that’s it really. I’m now going to focus on a dialogue system and then on making enemies, very basic ones just to learn how to make them. After that, a weapon unlock system and some movement mechanics, namely a jump and a dash. I feel having a dash would be good.

So for now that’s it. I hope soon I can tell more of what I’ve made and that you are interested in what’s coming next.

Have a good night.

Suggested media.

Music: Tyler, The Creator's CHROMAKOPIA.

Anime: Shadow Skill.

Games: The demo for COVEN and They Speak from the Abyss: Zenith.

Well... Where do I start? As the song goes, I'm just a Latin American game dev without money on the bank, it's probably that.

Jokes aside. Hi, I'm TangledVirus, I'm a game developer, writer and artist from Brazil. This blog here will essentially be my web front for people to have a easy place to find when looking for me online.

So, what you will find here? First of all if you go to the "About" section you will find a small summary of who I am, the tools I use and where else to find me online.

Then in the "Works" section you'll find a list of most of my games with small blurbs and links to where to buy/download them. Do be aware that while I have paid games I also have a good collection of free games to play.

And on the "Blog" section you will find a mix of announcements, dev logs, and my own blogs where I talk about things I'm thinking about.

Well I think that's it for the most part. I'll call this a successful first post. I hope you enjoy what you find here, have a good day and thanks for reading.