u/an_altar_of_plagues

I took a day of PTO last week to get Brainard Lake reservations and tick off the Niwot Ridge traverse, which I'd been curious about for a bit. An unranked 13er in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, almost all trip reports recommend going up Airplane Gully and combine it with an ascent of nearby Navajo Peak. But that means you only do a lil errant *doop* of a summit, eliding the terrain that makes up the body of the ridge. I'm curious about holes in guidebooks, so I figured I'd check it out while looking at some stephabegg photos.

Thunder storms were forecasted for 12PM, so I started around 6AM and headed up the broad open country of Niwot Mountain (a tiny 11er at the easternmost start of the ridge). I then made my way west up the ridge, which is primarily rolling tundra that steadily narrows until around the 12.4K foot mark when the rocky talus becomes the dominant terrain. The views along the ridge incredible, especially for some rarely-seen views of the north side of Kiowa (within the Boulder Watershed), north side of Arikaree Peak, and the pleasure side of the Kasparov Traverse via the Chessmen.

The direct rock is the best, as usual. If you peel off the ridge then you can keep the traverse Class 3, but that both bypasses the meat/exciting bits and also puts you on much crappier rock. Going straight has huge blocks with awesome crimps and cracks to stay steady. I don't think I'd recommend the 4-ish miles of tundra walking from Niwot Mountain, but there are a couple trails that cut it off about halfway. The major notch was by far the most interesting point crux-wise (the first photo here) as on first glance the pinnacles look far too sharp to find a way without dropping majorly to the south. But it's there!

I wanted to hit Navajo Peak, but things took longer than expected, so I skedaddled down Airplane Gully (which absolutely blows - I can't believe this is considered a "classic" route, but no doubt it's much better with snow). Crossing the loose talus and large boulders back to the Lake Isabelle Trail also took more time than expected, but thankfully I made it back to my car right when thunder and rain started going hard at around 130PM. Hopefully the tens of people I passed along the way back didn't get too screwed by the rain.

Nice little adventure, and halfway through my IPW peakbagging goal.

It's that time of the year where I'm starting to get Very Stoked Indeed for fall and mixed conditions - especially while it's still burning lava hot outside.

Here are some photos from the Pawnee Peak East Ridge that I did from Brainard Lake on November 1, 2025. This is an excellent mini-scrambling adventure that's super accessible and rarely done except by those doing the Blue Lakes Traverse. Also relatively low mileage - it's as simple as starting from the Mitchell Lake TH and turning off a couple miles down the trail to head up the ridgeline. You have some rolling moors giving way to a steadily sharpening ridgeline that then undulates surprisingly amazing rock spires for about a half mile.

The Gerry Roach Indian Peaks Wilderness guidebook puts it at Class 3. That might be true if you bypass every difficulty perfectly, but I think it's much better to expect Class 4 upclimbs and downclimbs with relatively significant exposure throughout the traverse. Sustained Class 3 at the points without it. There are, of course, many ways to make things harder - and if you're a competent alpine/trad climber, then go for it. A bit of snow this go made it even more fun (and probably helped to freeze/consolidate some of the scree!).

In late March, I broke my tibia and fibula while bouldering in the Buttermilks of California. And of course it wasn't one of the infamous highballs - it was my warm-up! Ah well, so it goes.

Over the last four months I haven't exactly been able to do long days or hard climbs, which inspired me to check out my backyard a bit more via the Indian Peaks Wilderness. I'd done a few things in the area before (Blue Lakes Traverse, Mt. Neva north ridge, Arapaho Traverse), but little else. Not out of a lack of interest, simply a side effect of their being so much to do throughout the State. Since I can't really do some of the 14er linkups I've had in mind for a while, I've had to look elsewhere.

Turned out that the IPW is pretty much the perfect place through this recovery. Short-to-moderate approaches, tons of scrambling, lots of adventure, trailheads I don't have to be there at 5AM to get a spot (especially on the west side), and plenty of peaks that are rarely climbed with little beta on routes. It's actually inspired me to make a list of named, prominent, and otherwise interesting peaks and routes throughout the Wilderness to tick off as the recovery process continues: from Dicker's Peck to Thunderbolt Peak to Mt. Bancroft's east ridge. By my count, I'm at 30/77.

It's also been fun to explore some highly uncommonly ascended routes (like Audubon's southeast ridge) or ones without any beta whatsoever but look like they go (like Sprint Peak's east ridge). Sometimes you get a hidden gem, sometimes you get a cat turd covered in vomit. Either way, it's a unique experience.

The story so far:

• July 5: Sprint Peak, Beacon Peak, Mt. Epworth, Heartbeat Peak (via Sprint Peak east ridge to CDT, appx. Class 3/4 bypassing 5.easy choss)
• July 9: Mt. Audubon and Notabon via Audubon east ridge (Class 3 downscramble)
• July 18: Satanta Peak, Mt. Neva, Peak 11810, Peak 11789 via Neva north ridge from Junco Lake TH (Class 4, other peaks are variously Class 2-3 depending on route)
• July 19: Mt. Flora, Breckinridge Peak (fourth time up Flora)
• July 25: Fox Mountain and Kingston peak (Class 2-3 depending on route for Fox; Kingston is tundra walking)
• July 26: Peak 12059 and Mt. Jasper -> Jasper SE ridge ascent (loose Class 3/4 at times, wouldn't recommend), Jasper NE ridge descent to Xanadu Lake (Class 3, pretty fun)

I feel like stock market charts and graphs are cheating, but this quickie I found today struck me as being particularly funny.

There were only two price targets (4.00 and 8.00), so it's not like there were a bunch of targets on one end of the number line.

Bingo card is here.

Oh this is a late write-up, but what the hell - it's a Sunday and it's fun to write about anything in particular.

I've always liked gaming, especially in how much of it is about exploring new worlds - I half-joke that RuneScape is the small domino to me getting into alpinism. I've been more or less playing games since I was a mid-single digit age, getting my SNES in 1997 or 1998 and inheriting my nerdiness from my World War II veteran grandfather who was extremely into Final Fantasy. Though for most of the 2010s and 2020s, I've had a somewhat ungrounded life that's taken me to some cool places but made it hard to establish anything permanent, much less keep up with video games.

In 2024, my wife and I finally got a Switch, and last year I upgraded my laptop from a 2019 base model Windows machine I got in grad school to something with a little more power. So, I decided last July to use the r/fantasy 2025 bingo to explore the Steam games I've haphazardly saved up through sales over the last decade but couldn't play on my cheapo boy, as well as play some Switch games and Switch Online emulations to catch up. It was an excellent way to explore my library and guide my gaming as opposed to getting choice paralysis from hundreds of unplayed titles.

Overall? Immensely entertaining, including the games I didn't really care for were at least fun to experience. Even more so for finding ways to get things to count for "High Fashion" or "Epistolary". I'd initially started writing up discrete posts per game, but that took too much time. I'd almost not gone through with this challenge until I broke my leg in mid-March of this year, upon which I had a lot more free time. So long as I heal properly, I intend to do the same thing again and maybe also do a version that's outdoors-focused.

So, with that out of the way.... here's 2025 bingo via video gaming.

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Knights/Paladins: Shovel Knight: Shovel of Hope by Yacht Club Games

• Release Year: 2014
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Action-platformer
• Appeal rating: 4.5/5

Shovel Knight was part of the initial wave of Kickstarter retro-inspired video games that burst onto the scene in the mid-2010s. You play as the titular Shovel Knight who defeats eight other themed knights on his quest to defeat the evil Enchantress and seek out your disappeared friend Shield Knight. The best way to describe Shovel Knight is like a goofy fantasy take on the original NES Mega Man games, and with just as banger of a soundtrack. While having your weapon be a literal shovel might seem like it falls on the cloying side of "whimsical", the game perfectly threads that needle to never be annoying in its humor. I'd played this originally around 2017 or 2018, but it'd been long enough that I'd forgotten most of it. And now there's four other game modes to explore - which I'll get to eventually. Excellent action-platformer, still worth the hype today among that wave o games.

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Hidden Gem: The Eternal Castle by Leonard Menchiari

• Release Year: 2019
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Cinematic platformer
• Appeal rating: 2.5/5

The Eternal Castle uses my favorite trope in media: that of a "lost game" only recently rediscovered and revamped for modern players. Like UFO 50, that's not literally true here, but you'd be hard-pressed to tell otherwise. The Eternal Castle is strongly inspired by the OG cinematic PC platformers of the mid/late 1980s like Another World, and the deaths of you are similarly legion. The aesthetic is a triumph, with a blue/black/pink scan line-esque art style and a complete banger of a synth soundtrack. Unfortunately, I found the gameplay often tedious, with what felt to me like the most haphazard checkpoint placement I've experienced in a game in a while. If you've played cinematic platformers before, you'd know that the visceral imagery is the focus more so than quick reflexes, and I often felt like the latter was expected of me. The story is told in breadcrumbs, but it falls on the wrong side of the "40/70" rule of puzzle box narrative: when you only have 40 percent of the story, too often does it feel like random stuff happening as opposed to something I can actually put together.

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Published in the 80s: Castlevania by Konami

• Release Year: 1987 (North America)
• Platform played: NES
• Genre: Action platformer
• Appeal rating: 4/5

That's right, after 16 years of owning this, I've finally beaten the original Castlevania. This was one of three long-form write-ups I did. Check it out here.

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High Fashion: Squirrel Stapler by David Szymanski

• Release Year: 2023
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: First-person shooter/hunting game
• Appeal rating: 3.5/5

The darkest possible interpretation of this square. Squirrel Stapler is a sardonic take on both educational games and hunting games, developed and published by the master of short-form horror and retro FPS David Szymanski (Iron Lung, DUSK, among others). Here, you play a cheap-looking PSX-style FPS in which you are a hunter living a in cabin in the woods, and the love of your life has asked you for a new fur coat. The love of your life happens to be a rotting corpse, and you want to cover her body in the fur of squirrels since her skin has sloughed off. Great! Oh by the way, the one commandment of the forest is that thou shalt not hunt squirrels. If you're with me so far, you can imagine the horrific surrealism on display. The game is only a couple hours long, but it's pretty much all you need - in a good way. Quibbles with the way the stealth hunting of the squirrels works, but that's not anything I would dissuade someone from "experiencing" this.

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Down with the System: Salt & Sacrifice by Devoured Studios

• Release Year: 2022
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Monster Hunter-like + action platformer
• Appeal rating: 2.5/5

Another game I did a long-form review. Check it out here. TL;DR: Loved the first third or so, then quickly I found that every boss is more or less the same.

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Impossible Places: Mouthwashing by Wrong Orange

• Release Year: 2024
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Walking simulator + narrative game
• Appeal rating: 2/5

A surprising dislike, given the aesthetic and concept are fascinating. If you're not familiar with Mouthwashing, you should be on those two basis alone. Another PSX-styled game (probably my favorite current aesthetic now that we can take advantage of how surreal PSX graphics can be), Mouthwashing follows the crew of a spaceship that has been deliberately crashed and is now aimlessly floating through space while all they have to keep them company is themselves... and their enormous payload of mouthwash. The story is exceptional; the gameplay is kind of awful. Mouthwashing is a good example of a walking simulator where it falls apart when it tries to be a "game". There's a few parts in particular that aren't spoilers but those who have played will know: the invisible horse and the centipede-baby. The level of visual horror this game imparts is amazing, but I couldn't help but find any of the actual interactive moments quite unfun to actually play, and not in a Spec Ops: The Line kind of way where my unfun experience is the point. Still, I would absolutely watch Mouthwashing: The TV Series.

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A Book Game In Parts: World of Horror by pantasz

• Release Year: 2023
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Adventure game + roguelike + horror
• Appeal rating: 4/5

A game that could easily be rated higher once the final expansion comes out this year. World of Horror is a game by solo developer pantasz that takes the aesthetic of 2-bit PC games from the late 80s... as well as a copious amount of Junji Ito, HP Lovecraft, and William Hope Hodgson. The basic game loop is this: you play as one of several young adults in a coastal Japanese town that is being influenced by one of several old gods. You play a point-and-click adventure game that takes you around the town solving five different mysteries, one at a time (hence "a book in parts"!). Along the way you might fight all kinds of fucked-up creatures, cultists, etc., and all mysteries have at least one (sometimes as many as four) alternate endings. While it's easy to start finding the most optimal path and eliding the flavor as you get a handle on the game, the roguelike characteristics and unlockables make it more than worthwhile.

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Gods/Pantheons: Hollow Knight by Team Cherry

• Release Year: 2017
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Metroidvania
• Appeal rating: 4.5/5

I love this game. I'd played it for about a month straight back in summer 2020 while between public health jobs. Hollow Knight is a master class in game design, aesthetics, sound design, and worldbuilding, and there's little I can add that hasn't already been said. But I'll try with two. First, I feel like this game has a sort of 90s Tim Burton-esque art style before it became hackneyed, and it's perfect for that. Second, this game gets a certain "soulslike" aspect more than almost any other soulslike: the concept of encouraging a player to push on the boundaries of the world to open up new things, and often new entire areas. As stated in the Bonfireside Chat podcast, there's a level of developer confidence on display there where players who aren't using guides may very well "finish" the game without ever experiencing 40 percent of it, much like how the Painted World of Ariamis in the first Dark Souls game is not mandatory for beating it. Yes, internet guides exist, but for those who don't use them, there's nothing like the "oh wow that actually worked??!?!" feeling of knocking on those walls and seeing an entire side of the house you didn't know existed.

The only reason this is a 4.5/5 is that I kinda hate the Pantheon challenges. This game is so much more than boss fights, which is something too many soulslikes forget. The Pantheon is, to me, fairly boring and not what I go to these kinds of games for. I don't want perfect precision boss fights, I want your grandiose world. Luckily, I don't have to engage with them to functionally complete the game, and I like that I have that option.

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Last in a Series: Metroid Dread by MercurySteam

• Release Year: 2021
• Platform played: Switch
• Genre: Metroidvania
• Appeal rating: 3/5

Another game I'd previously written up before; see here. Overall, lots of issues with this game's narrative and aesthetic, but boy do those speed booster puzzles rule.

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Book Game Club: Cryptmaster by Akupara Games

• Release Year: 2024
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Typing game
• Appeal rating: 3.5/5

Cryptmaster is a very cool take on typing games where you play as four undead heroes flopping around in the underground before being resurrected by the demonic-but-great Cryptmaster himself. The amount of commands you can type for your heroes to do is nothing less than marvelous. Combat takes place by you typing various actions you steadily uncover in the game as you collect letters to spell out the next word for you to discover. If there's any issue I had with it, it's that I think the game pretty much shows you all there is to do and see by the first couple of hours, and therefore it rewards dipping in and out for 30-45 minutes at a time rather than longer play sessions like I did. But, I'm willing to believe that's just my fault.

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Parents: Devotion by Red Candle Games

• Release Year: 2019
• Platform played: PC
• Genre: Walking simulator + narrative game
• Appeal rating: 3.5/5

Here's a secret about me: I'm a huge weenie. Horror is simultaneously anathema and thrill, and boy does a game like Devotion bring out the weenie. This walking simulator game has you explore a surreal apartment in different time periods of 1980s-1990s Taiwan as you try to find out what happened to your daughter. And you know that you know what happened. Along the way, you are haunted by the ghost of... someone... and whatever occurred in this apartment has sunk into its very fabric much like Silent Hill 2. Saying anything more is spoilers, but suffice to say like Squirrel Stapler for High Fashion, this is an extremely dark interpretation of the Parents square (but that's what I'm into, kiddos). My issues with this game mostly have to do with the preponderance of jump scares (always the weakest points of the game) and the occasional long walking sequence where I was no longer scared but certainly feeling a bit of Get On With It.

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Epistolary: Crow Country by SFB Games

• Release Year: 2024
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Third-person survival horror
• Appeal rating: 4/5

Another PSX-styled game, but this time with the bulbous polygons akin to the original Final Fantasy 7. Crow Country follows a young FBI agent who comes to the abandoned amusement park of Crow Country located in north Georgia. Along the way, she finds strange zombie-like creatures and deformed crawling monsters that latch onto her. Another game with some similarities to Silent Hill, though this time in puzzle design - and another good example of a game inspired by those puzzles that makes them more interesting and engaging.

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Published in 2025: Trench Face by Pulse Blue

• Release Year: 2025
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Survival horror + turn-based RPG
• Appeal rating: 3/5

One of my other favorite narrative tropes is World War I. With how much World War II and the Vietnam War are in the western zeitgeist, I feel like the horror of WWI is often forgotten - at least, that's my experience as a USA resident. The more I learn of it, the more unimaginable it is. I recall learning about "lost generations" of men in France where whole villages and towns simply wouldn't have any men born between 1895 and 1900 because all of them were killed in this war. Trench Face attempts some of that horror, and it's mostly successful in flavor if not always in gameplay. You play an unknown soldier with a surgically-attached gas mask within a surreal series of trenches in which you are constantly stalked by other soldiers (and, occasionally, weirder creatures) controlled by ropes hanging to them from the clouds. Your goal is first to survive, later to take off the mask. The difficulty curve is highly uneven (and I wasn't a fan of the atmospheric black metal battle soundtrack), but if you can get past that, the aforementioned flavor alone is worth the small pricetag.

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Author of Color: Lost in Vivo by Kira

• Release Year: 2018
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: First-person survival horror
• Appeal rating: 3.5/5

Solo developer Kira is secretly one of the more influential indie developers of the last decade. You might know them for their later games Spooky's House of Jump Scares and Lunacid. Lost in Vivo is an earlier game that I only knew about from an indie horror bundle with Iron Lung, The Convenience Store, and others. It's a first-person survival horror game where you play a claustrophobe who needs to explore a series of sewers after your service dog is washed down a storm drain. (You guessed it - we've got another Silent Hill kind of game, too.) While not as strong as Lunacid, Lost in Vivo remains a great 4-5 hour experience that is easy to bust out in a couple sitting and works immaculately well for dark days. The game is a a bit weaker toward the end (with the final "boss" particularly annoying), but as with Trench Face it is worth the price of entry.

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Self Published: Strange Horticulture by Bad Viking

• Release Year: 2022
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Puzzle game
• Appeal rating: 3/5

Strange Horticulture was the first game I played for this little challenge. You are the owner of a botanical store where plants have strange properties to them, be they helping someone sleep at night or things more dangerous. Each day, customers come to your store asking for certain plants, and it's your responsibility to properly identify the plant for them. Along the way, you explore a map of the broader region, find new plants, and slowly get involved in a macro-plot regarding a local cult who might have made some mistakes recently. I found that part a bit dull, even cliche - I would've much preferred Strange Horticulture to focus exclusively on the plans and identification part, with any mystery being a bonus rather than the main event.

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Biopunk: Endoparasitic by Deep Root Interactive

• Release Year: 2022
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Survival horror
• Appeal rating: 3/5

I'm in a phase where I prefer shorter games. Perhaps it's just due to where I am in life that longer games often take more time than I can give, and I just don't really find myself interested in biting into 30-hour RPGs anymore, let alone anything longer. I read a lot of novellas in 2025, and I also played a lot of game equivalent. Endoparasitic is a 3-ish hour survival horror experience with a unique twist: you have lost three of your limbs after a science experiment gone wrong, and every action you do (from moving to reloading your gun) is simulated using the mouse as if you only have that one limb. This makes for gameplay that is often perfectly frustrating, but when it misses, it misses hard.

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Elves/Dwarves: Age of Mythology: Retold by World's Edge

• Release Year: 2002/2024
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Real-time strategy
• Appeal rating: 4.5/5

The original Age of Mythology was one of my favorite games as a young teenager. Somewhere in my storage unit lives the original disc. Age of Mythology: Retold is a remaster of the original that updates the graphics and retools some mechanics. The original game as beautiful, but this is gorgeous. Just look at those water graphics! Shit, man. I adored going through this game again earlier this spring. I have no desire to play online; the story alone is exactly what I want, and it held up maybe even better than when I was younger now that I actually know how to play these kinds of games. I was a little disappointed in the new voice acting as I find the original so iconic, but at least we still have Arkantos.

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LGBTQIA: Lucah: Born of a Dream by melessthanthree

• Release Year: 2018
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Cinematic action-adventure
• Appeal rating: 3/5

I'm highly interested in video games with idiosyncratic art, and Lucah: Born of a Dream is at the top of the pack there. For those unfamiliar, Lucah has a garish, neon-encrusted aesthetic where everything is harshly drawn and curved lines don't exist. It's a soulslike adventure where you play as a young kid implied to be a fallen angel as they fight their way through a decrepit world that uses and abuses children in service of a messianic religion. (It's as subtle as a sledgehammer on that front.) The game is well-known for its Neir-like storytelling in which your second playthrough is remarkably different from the first that recontextualizes all of the unknowns of the first game. Unfortunately, this didn't work for me in the slightest. In addition to the narrative being so heavy-handed as to lapse into cloying (acknowledging that the developer has said it is very personal to them), the gameplay changes in the second runthrough become a bit obnoxious. It opens up with what I can only describe as a 10-minute long visual novel that utterly interrupts the gameplay, and even if what's happening is topically heartbreaking, I couldn't get past my feeling of "jesus when is this gonna be over lol".

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Short Stories: Dread X Collection

• Release Year: 2020
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: various
• Appeal rating: 2.5/5

The Dread X Collection is a series of multipart games that collection ten different games from ten different developers with the idea of them creating the "PT of their dreams". And that's basically what we have here: a collection of ten horror demos from developers as diverse as David Szymanski and Aidorf of FAITH fame. Like many anthologies, the success of each game is haphazard, though the good ones are really good, and several became fully-fledged games on their own (like Szymanski's The Pony Factory). Shout-out in particular to Airdorf's submission, which somehow made a Tiger Electronic handhold game scary.

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Foreigner: Divers by Mossmouth (from UFO 50)

• Release Year: 2024
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Turn-based RPG
• Appeal rating: 3.5/5

Divers is one of the fifty games in Mossmouth's UFO 50 multicart, and it's often rated lowly by fans of the collection. It's like an esoteric take on the original Dragon Quest games on the NES: you play as three lizard creatures as they explore the sunken ruins beneath their home, battling various aquatic creatures as you descend further into the depths. Like Dragon Quest, difficulty is entirely based on harder creatures being further from your home. You beat them enough until you can survive against creatures further down - rinse and repeat. In long games, this is tedious to the extreme, but Divers is only 4-5 hours long, and the world and secrets are just plain weird enough to keep me coming.

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Recycle a Bingo: Infernax by Berzerk Studio

• Release Year: 2021
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Action-platformer
• Appeal rating: 4.5/5

I like this crop of contemporary games that are like the fully-realized versions of imperfect NES/SNES games, and Infernax is that for Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. You play as a templar exhausted of war coming home to find his land infested by dark creatures seeking to bring out demons from hell - and boy does that pixel art NOT skimp on the designs. Infernax is an amazing game for so many reasons, one of the best of which being how much control you have over the story. You don't have to be a good guy - if you're interested in partying with the cultists, then go ahead and see where that takes you. Shout-out to the achievements all being named after metal songs.

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Cozy SFF: Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion by Snoozy Kazoo

• Release Year: 2021
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Action-adventure
• Appeal rating: 3.5/5

Another great short game, this one being maybe 3-ish hours to get the "best" ending. You play turnip boy, and shit if you're gonna pay any taxes on your house! In this mini top-down Zelda-like adventure, you go through a world of animate vegetables finding various documents to rip up and seeking ways to get your house back after it's repossessed by the mayor. Cozy without being saccharine, and a boss fight worthy of Dark Souls.

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Generic Title: Shadows Over Loathing by Asymmetric Games

• Release Year: 2022
• Platform played: Steam/PC
• Genre: Action-adventure + turn-based RPG
• Appeal rating: 3.5/5

The Loathing series includes West of Loathing and Kingdom of Loathing, and they're some of the funniest games around. Shadows Over Loathing is a spoof of Lovecraftian and detective media, in which your hapless stick figure must uncover the mystery of what happened to your uncle as all kinds of mysterious goings-on go on around you. You explore various landscapes by "wandering" and uncovering new locations that are all like mini-quests themselves as the macro plot expands in the background. I've played West of Loathing, and like that game, I did feel a little exhausted by the end and felt like it could have been 20 percent shorter.

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Not a Book Game: Vermis II: Of Mists and Mirrors by plastiboo

What? That's not a game! Yep, but it's a book about an imaginary game! I love the Vermis series of art books by the pseudonymous artist plastiboo, whose takes on dark fantasy are strongly inspired by early 90s CRPGs. Check it out, you'll know immediately if the art is for you.

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Pirates: Old School RuneScape's Sailing Skill by Jagex

• Release Year: 2025 (kinda?)
• Platform played: PC
• Genre: MMO
• Appeal rating: 5/5

I've been playing RuneScape in some capacity since 2003. For a while, I had an unhealthy relationship with this game in simply playing it too much, eschewing it for a while and telling my friends that me getting back into it is a recession indicator. Nowadays, I have a much chiller relationship with it, and I think it's evolved into a legitimately good game as opposed to just being an addictive MMO for bad-brain reasons. The Sailing skill finally came out in November 2025, and I more or less had a blast with it. As I said before, I love games based on exploration, and Sailing was all about that. Yes, that 5/5 is hyperbolic, but I'm just a little guy.

• Title: The Highlands Burn
• Author: Joseph Kassabian
• Length: 504 pages (ebook)
• Publishing Date: May 29, 2026
• Series: Book One of the Foundling Brigade Saga
• Subgenres: Flintlock fantasy, military fantasy
• FFO: Joe Abercrombie, Django Wexler
• Bingo Squares: Self-Published/Small Press, Published in 2026, Cat Squasher, Politics/Court Intrigue
• Content Warnings: War, violence, genocide, sexual assault
• Copy received directly from the author.

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TL;DR: The Highlands Burn is a military fantasy novel taking place in a low-magic world. The book follows young Sayat after the destruction of his village within the Highlands area that's becoming a nexus of imperial struggle. He joins the Foundling Brigade in his desire for revenge, sweeping him up in the larger conflict between nations in which this mercenary company is only one player in a sea of chess pieces augmented by the horrific magic of the Etheri.

Strong recommendation for readers who want military fantasy written by someone with actual military experience and a professional background in genocide studies, specifically Armenian history. Some critiques regarding how world and political information is conveyed to the reader, but that didn't detract from my overall enjoyment and I'll definitely get the next book.

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> "You need to understand. Brigade life isn't easy. Fires, it's not even accepted by normal people. Every nation will eventually hire us. Each person in the realm will eventually be conquered or liberated, killed or saved by a Free Company, or know someone who has been. They need us, but they hate us. People will refuse to serve us, rent rooms to us, some won't even speak to us. And that is when we have the full power and backing of the Brigade."

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Summary/Sound Bite: Sayat is a young man in a village deep within the steppe-like Highlands of the Confederation. He's used to a hard but not violent life, one in which he soon expects to be married off and leave his village for another. One evening while standing watch, his home is attacked and razed by the Free Rifles - one of many mercenary brigades hired out in open secret by the technically-at-peace member states and empires surrounding the Highlands. Escaping by sheer fortune at the hands of another company - the Foundling Brigade - he joins them and swears revenge. But first, he needs to learn how to be a soldier - and all that might entail. And in this world, wars are fought with more than low-quality rifles for newly enlisted men. On the borders of every conflict are the Etheri: mages of various stripes and abilities whose actions can not only influence the tides of battle but the world around them to horrific results.

Background: The Highlands Burn is the first book of the Foundling Brigade Saga by author Joseph Kassabian, an Afghan war vet and Armenian-American currently living in the Netherlands. He's most known in the literary world for writing The Hooligans of Kandahar ("not all war stories are heroic"), but others might know him as the founder and main host of the Lions Led By Donkeys podcast - a leftist military history podcast that can best be described as 80 percent the weirdest people/incidents in military history and 20 percent five-part series on Stalingrad and the Rape of Nanking.

To put it simply: I enthusiastically enjoyed The Highlands Burn and would happily recommend it to anyone interested in military fantasy. If you're familiar with my activity on this sub, you probably know that I'm primarily a reader of magical realism and experimental fantasy; this book was a great way both to get out of my comfort zone and read military fantasy book written by someone with a deep love of history, and not just the pretty parts. Also recommended for fans of u/djangowexler, whom Kassabian has mentioned as being a big fan of his work and an inspiration for his writing.

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Military Fantasy by Military Veterans: One of my biggest gripes with fantasy and sci-fi is the amount of authors who write fights or battles and clearly have no experience in combat or survival situations whatsoever. All too often I'll read books that describe battles as if they're a dance with predefined movements, and they utterly fail to capture the chaotic and time-wonky nature of battle. Additionally, a lot of these authors inherently impart some sort of glory in war; there might be some acknowledgment of the price paid by soldier, civilian, and land, but the battle is nonetheless written glamorously and I'm encouraged to be excited that it's happening. I don't really want a battle to make me feel like a vicarious badass; there are very few Smedley Butlers out there. Your first kill isn't something to be celebrated like a notch on a sniper rifle - it's a life-altering event that nobody can predict how it will impact them. (Note: not a military veteran myself, but I have a background in alpine search and rescue and have been in some nasty situations.)

Kassabian's writing utterly elides this. War is not beautiful - it sucks, it's horrific, and everyone is impacted by it. Not to grimdark levels, but to a more grounded take on the horrors of war. MASH put it well: "War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse." In The Highlands Burn, those who enjoy battles are treated as sick in the head, and anyone who feels like war could lead to something honorable or courageous are shown to be highly ignorant at best. Each battle has weight, and there's a true "anyone can die" feeling that feels earned rather than callous or a cheap play for emotion. There are few heroes, if any; the focus is on broken people and how they get there. Nobody is conscripted into the Foundlings, and the book goes out of its way to remind you that the characters you're reading about willingly joined up. At the end of the day, the military is just a job, and frequently that job absolutely sucks.

History and Mystery: This is further emphasized by Kassabian's strong background in military history. In addition to the nigh-decade of the LLBD podcast, Kassabian is a genocide historian with a master's degree in history. He has lived for some time in Armenia and runs a sister show to LLBD specifically on Armenian history. The Highlands Burn is strongly influenced by this background, especially in how Caucuses nations (and smaller countries like them) are caught in a crossfire between other fires that all but consider them collateral. The destruction of Sayat's village and attempted genocide of his peoples is not necessarily the goal in and of itself; it's more a Tuesday for the imperial powers and their ultimate machinations. The mystery behind it all is alluded to by various characters, but it's clear people are operating on imperfect information, so what you might read is very much not necessarily the truth behind it all.

In line with this, a lot of The Highlands Burn will appeal to readers with a moderate background in military history and media. Most notably, there's a battle in the middle of the book that feels strongly inspired by the Battle of Stalingrad. Kassabian spares no details in just how destructive a prolonged battle or siege can be, especially on the civilian population. Kindness is haphazardly rewarded. You may, in fact, have to slaughter some horses to stay alive, though thankfully eating shoe leather is only referenced. There's also a sex scene that serves both as a reminder humans are human even in war and also a bit of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge to anyone who might've seen Enemy at the Gates. I found these references more like bonuses for people familiar with 20th century military history and media than something that would meaningfully detract from someone's experience who is less so inclined.

Human Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Confederation is primarily a low-magic world. The main standout is the Etheri: mages whose contact with the Ether allows them to wield extremely destructive magic that significantly influences war and politics (are those two so different?). Discussing the exact workings of the Etheri would be a spoiler, but this is not: the Etheri are not considered wonderful beings. They are frequently the worst people in any army, any brigade. The main Etheri we spend time with is Genkos, a blood Etheri who mutilates himself using barbed wire to use his blood as magic projectiles, wards, and explosions. Genkos is heavily disliked by everyone in the Foundlings. He's a huge asshole and drug addict, and you'll find that this is not the worst thing that could happen, especially for an Etheri at wartime. Those interested in fucked-up magic will find plenty to enjoy here.

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Some Critiques: My main critique is that I feel the book gets better as it goes on, both in writing and in plot. You are thrown into the world pretty strongly in the beginning, and there's a few paragraphs throughout the first couple of chapters that just spend time defining the world. I feel like this could have been done a bit more naturally, and ironically I think Kassabian gets more comfortable with his world as he writes, especially in introducing the religious order. There's a bit of exposition dumping in the beginning, whereas later in the book, he more effectively brings up concepts with just enough context clues for the reader to figure out what's going on themselves. Sayat starts out a bit of a blank slate driven purely by revenge, but over time his characterization improves and we see more of who he is outside of simple anger.

Additionally, the main character's home is destroyed very quickly (it is no spoiler to say this at all), and I didn't feel like I had the context for its importance since I spent so little time with it before it was gone. The Highlands Burn is already a fairly long book, but I wouldn't have minded a few more chapters in the beginning to show me what is at stake so I better intuit the cultural differences within the Confederation that become the heart of the conflict. I want to know how Sayat's culture operates so when it is destroyed, erased, and supplanted by a more "enlightened" dominant culture, I know what has been lost. Though again, as the book goes on I had a better understanding of the religious differences between cultures and the highlands' status as a seemingly insignificant land in the midst of a larger struggle.

I have a good feeling that these issues will be expounded upon as the series goes on, especially the religious-cultural differences that form a backbone to the book's macro-plot. By no means did these issues take away from my enjoyment, they simply stood out as I got started and gradually lessened as I went on.

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Pick up a preorder copy! And if you're kinda interested but unsure and don't mind some light-to-moderate spoilers, then check out Kassabian's interview about the book on the What A Hell Of A Way To Dad podcast here.