2026 has started like one of those drag racing cars that burst into flames at the starting block. I’m even somewhat impressed by how much of a fucking shitshow 2026 already is while not even clearing the two-week mark. Well, instead of dwelling on the present, let’s dwell on the past, shall we?

Steam Sale Haul

With the end of the year means the end of the year Steam sale was upon us and as is with most PC gamers I got myself quite the little haul of games to fill out my already overstuff library of games. So here’s what I bought and some brief thoughts on why I bought it.

Dragon Age Collection (Origins, 2, Inquisition)

So I actually already own all of these games on different platforms but A) I don’t own them all on the same platform and B) this will allow me to play them on my Steam Deck. Now I am not the biggest Dragon Age fan, especially compared to the much better Mass Effect series, but I had played all of them and enjoyed… most of them. Inquisition ran out of steam well before the end of the game and Veilguard started with no steam with how dull and boring it is. Still, I liked Origins and 2 so decided to pick them up.

Zero Escape: The Nonary Games

I have played and beaten these games before but it was on GamePass and I liked 999 enough but good lord do I hate Virtue’s Last Reward. I just remember finishing it and getting more and more annoyed at the bullshit it was throwing at me. It still baffles me that they decided to have every single possible plot twist you could have in a mystery story and do all of them in the span of about 90 minutes. To be honest I bought this for 999 and not VLR. I already own the third game Zero Time Dilemma, but I’ve heard that game is even worse. Apparently, it was because of some snail? I should try that sometime.

Resident Evil Revelation 2

This was the only mainline Resident Evil game that I did not own on Steam. That’s the only reason why I bought it. I doubt I will ever even boot this game let alone finish it. But… I have to complete the collection, you know?

It Takes Two

When I bought these games I gave myself a budget and once all was said and done I still had a little bit of money left so I filtered the Steam sale by that amount and sort by Steam reviews and this was at the top. I do want to play it but have yet to find another person to play it with me. Here’s hoping I can convince one of stupid friends to play it with me.

Alan Wake 2

Okay so technically not part of the Steam sales and I technically didn’t actually pay for it but it was the only Epic Games exclusive I have even a remote interest in. See I had spent some money on Fortnite last year buying a lot of Simpsons skins which left me with over $25 of Epic Rewards and guess what happened to be exactly that during the EGS winter sales? I played Alan Wake when it came out and really did not care for it even if I enjoyed it enough. I tried playing Control but that didn’t stick with me. I’m interested in trying Alan Wake 2 not just as a benchmark for my new GPU but as a survival horror fan. Unfortunately my stupid brain requires me to play both Alan Wake 1 with its DLCs and Control with its DLCs before I can play Alan Wake 2.

Now I actually bought three more games but I am going to talk about them in the next sections.

What I Have Been Playing

Dispatch

My big Christmas game and what a game it was. I love Dispatch. It just was the perfect game for someone coming home from long days at work who just wanted to watch a superhero television show pretending to be a video game. All the characters are delightful and interesting while at the same time avoiding the common tropes that most superhero stories tend to fall into. There is not quippy douchebag, brooding edgelord or manic pixie girl. Just a bunch of weird little freaks that I adore. I don’t think there is one single character in this game that I would describe as boring. All of the have their own personalities, feelings, opinions and quirks. It also helps that the game features some of the best voice acting I’ve heard in years and from people you wouldn’t expect. Aaron Paul is fabulous as Mecha-Man, Jeffrey Wright as Chase was probably the best performance of last year, even the YouTubers are good, jacksepticeye was fantastic as Punch Up. I haven’t enjoyed one of these Telltale style games in a very long time.

Arc Raiders

I was hoping for this to be the big multiplayer game I sunk a bunch of hours into before Midnight releases in a few months and it was so close to being that. Probably 90% of the way there but it just ever so slightly missed the mark. Don’t get me wrong, it is a very well-made video game, but it just has a few things that wiggle me wrong. The progression feels so slow. I have basically been rocking the same loadout in the last few hours as I was in the first few hours. Enemy variety is lacking. All the Arcs are either drones or walking tanks with the occasional rolling ball. Most of the players I’ve interacted with were way too nice. I am not normally a shoot on sight guy but even I was surprised by how chill everyone has been. I’ve played probably 50 to 60 games, and I’ve only ever been in a player vs player fight twice. What is supposed to be a tense ‘will they, won’t they’ encounter is almost always just a ‘hello, goodbye’ and you’re on your way. Because of that every time I enter the zone it just feels like I am playing the same game over and over. I just wish there was a bit more to it. It’s still good but not the game I sink dozen of hours into.

Baby Steps

This has been the game for me over the last few weeks; I have basically been playing nothing but Baby Steps despite my normal aversion to these sorts of rage bait games. I like games that entertain and thrill me, not frustrate me. But so many people have been spewing praise for this game that I had to try it and they were right. Baby Steps is just one of those little obsessions you get every once in a while, where all you want to do is play more of it. There were several times where I would fall down, lose a bunch of progress and just quit the game in frustration only to wait 10 minutes kust to boot the game up again. It hits that perfect spot of being stupidly hard but not impossible and I think that the main cause of is the controls. With something like ‘Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy’ the difficultly comes mostly from the controls. It is completely unwieldly and unnatural. There are times it moves in ways you weren’t intending, and you never want that in your game. Baby Steps is different because the controls in this game are pitch perfect. Yeah it might be awkward to walk each individual legs at the start of the game but once you got use to it then it became second nature. It is perhaps the most impressive thing about the game is how precise the controls are. The game often requires you to play Nate’s feet in very small, very difficult spaces to progress and I was always able to place his feet exactly where I wanted them to go. If Nate fell over it was always because of poor feet placement, or awkward balance. It was never the controls. How the controls were expertly designed and implemented became crystal clear during one of the most difficult sections of a game I think I ever had to play…

The Manbreaker Broken

The Manbreaker is a section of Baby Steps and it is one of the most fucked psychological things that a game has ever done to me. The “premise” if you can even call it that is you eventually happen upon a giant cliff face with two possible paths. The first is a spiral staircase that practically goes straight up. Even the most uncoordinated player could fly up these stairs with zero issues. The second is a harrowing cliffside that zigzags up the cliff, the titular Manbreaker. When you first arrive a character named Jim essentially tells you to just take the stairs but Nate, the player character, more of less says he is going to go up the Manbreaker. Jim, somewhat offended by this, basically dares you to go up the Manbreaker. Now keep in mind the player has no input into this; this is what the game tells you. So, after all that the game gives you the choice: do what you said you were going to do and go up the Manbreaker or chicken out and go up the stairs. Now you can go up the stairs with no negative consequence. You don’t get a bad ending, you don’t get blocked off from any part of the game, in fact you get an achievement taking the stairs, something you do not get going up the Manbreaker. But the game said I couldn’t do it and fuck the game, I am going to do it. The game goads you into taking the Manbreaker because they know there is a subset of people that will bash their head against out of sheer stubbornness. Unfortunately, I was one of those people.

Jim and his fucking stairs

For well over ten hours I banged my head on the Manbreaker and at certain times it definitely broke me. The way the Manbreaker is designed is that unless you are extremely lucky, you make one wrong step and you fall all the way down to the start regardless of where you were. The Manbreaker isn’t a short section either. Even when I got confident enough to speedrun most of it it still took me 10 minutes to get near the end, and that was after my attempts slowly and carefully going up it. I wasn’t keeping track but I must have fallen off the Manbreaker at least a 100 times. There were times I fell in the first few steps and there was times where I fell when I was a few steps away from the top. As you continue to climb the Manbreaker it begins to fuck with you a bit. A careful placed banana peel, a pizza box hanging off a necessary ledge, there is numerous times where the have to walk over gaps in the rock face. Naturally, the most difficult part of the entire thing is right at the end where you’re standing on the tiniest platforms before trying to run up rock faces with zero grip.

It doesn't look it, but this rock is a nightmare

I’ll be honest, the Manbreaker nearly broke me, every fall just brought me closer and closer to just saying fuck it and taking the stairs. It was always in sight, always an option, there were even a couple of times where I fell on the staircase, but I never let that deter me. After countless attempts and near emotional breakdowns I broke the Manbreaker, I got to the top and gloated in Jim’s stupid face.

You sure fucking are Nate!

But the thing with the Manbreaker is that the challenge is entirely self-made and lacks any sort of reward. Besides a different cutscene you don’t get an achievement or a cool hat or anything that tells the world ‘I am a self-loathing lunatic who completed the Manbreaker’, you are in the exact same position you were if you had taken the stairs. That’s what I think is the most genius part of Baby Steps, it completely understands the type of person who plays these games, the kind of person who always goes for the harder option not because of some reward or admiration but because you told them they couldn’t, because you gave them the option, because they wanted to prove to themselves that they could. The game psychologically understands the player better than any horror game I’ve played. It called me out on my bullshit and instead of defying their expectations I did exactly what they expected I would do. It knew me that well and that’s something that’s gonna stick with me for a long time.

Can you tell where the Manbreaker is?

All I can say for those who are like me and want to give Baby Steps a try, take the fucking stairs.

What Father Gaben Brought Me For Christmas, What Games I've Been Playing and How A Man Breaks The Manbreaker - The Cleanup 10/01/26