📏 The Weekly Measure: 2026 W02

2026 January 09 // The Weekly Measure, Video Games

Happy New Year!! We’ve made it beyond the first full week of 2026. I spent most of the first few days of 2026 in debilitating pain due to some medical issues that I hope to get sorted this year. (More on that at a later date.) This week I’ve been feeling quite a bit better, though my sleep schedule is still destroyed from the winter holidays and spending so much of it in pain and in bed. Time for a check-in and recalibration.

Happy Hour New Year’s Eve Marathon

We spent our New Year’s Eve streaming indie games on our annual Happy Hour marathon event. We didn’t go quite as long as in previous years, but we still managed to some fun games.

Games played:

If you make it all the way to the end of the stream, you can hear us rambling about some of our goals for 2026, but which in actuality was just grumbling about the state of covering indie games these days. TL;DR: it’s exhausting and depressing trying to dig through endless slop and sift through gamedev posts gushing about the wonders of genAI. If I felt burned out in 2024, then 2025 was somehow even worse for trying to get back into the swing of things, especially with regards to updating Indie Tsushin and maintaining our weekly Happy Hour streaming schedule.

I don’t want to give in to despair, though. I want very much to keep shining a light on cool indie games I’ve found. I think giving up on an entire world of wonderful and weird art would be a damn shame. I would like to spend 2026 rediscovering my love of games, why I enjoy the medium and why I honestly just love gushing about cool stuff I found. I don’t quite know how I will navigate the minefield of an increasingly genAI-dependent field but I gotta at least try. I can’t let these soul-sucking, cynical weirdos steal my joy and love for games away from me.

To that end, we’re also going to get our Happy Hour streaming schedule back on track. 2025 was kind of a bad year for that, with weeks (sometimes months) in between streams. I cannot promise we can hit every Sunday but I am going to try.

Speaking of which, here was our (normal, non-marathon) stream from this past Sunday:

Games played:

I already have a bunch of games queued up for this Sunday as well! It feels good to have a bunch of cool games to look forward to.

Other stuff I’ve been playing

ISLANDERS: New Shores

I got ISLANDERS: New Shores on a whim and am really glad I did. It is a super minimalist city builder minus all the stress and, as far as I can tell, no real game-over state. It reminds me of stuff like Townscaper or SUMMERHOUSE, almost more toy than GAME game.

There is a certain amount of strategy needed to find the best building locations to min/max your score, island boons to further max out your points, timed and themed challenges, that kind of thing. With that said, Daikon and I have been mostly playing it as a sandbox game that frequently gives us the dopamine hit of more points and unlocks. Levels are broken up into small islands that take maybe 5-10 minutes to fill out before you’re on to the next island. (If you want. You can also stay on that island and keep building it up into the perfect little diorama if you want.) Its short sessions, low-stakes strategy, and chill vibes make it a great game to play during breaks.

Screenshot of my island that I built in ISLANDERS: New Shores. It is at night and my town is clustered among the high cliffs in the center of the island with lanterns streaming into the sky. In the top-left corner it says "Greetings from..." to make it look like a digital postcard

If you like the idea of diorama games but also need some structure to get you going, here you go. Alternatively: if you like the idea of city builders but hate having to constantly put out fires, this is perfect.

PEAK

Over the winter break, Claus was cool enough to gather some of us together on Discord to play PEAK. It is a very good time and need to play more of this soon. I tend to get quite ill when playing first-person games and PEAK is unfortunately no exception, but it is a testament to how good this game is that I want to keep playing this anyway. If you are reading this and you have PEAK, hit me up and let’s play!!

One Night Stand

At some point over the break, I loaded up Kinmoku Games’ One Night Stand and cleared it in a single sitting. I love visual novels that subtly tease out information bit by bit over the course of repeated playthroughs, and the rotoscoped animation here is cool as hell. I did cheat and use a guide to get the rest of the endings after finding several of them on my own. If you like short but dense narratives then definitely check this one out.

DuneCrawl

For decades, I have been searching for a game that iterated on the big chaotic tank battles of Rocket Slime. Daikon even made the quick jam-like game Nice Boom to try and fill that void.

<humbleBrag> It wasn’t actually for a game jam but commissioned for the Japanese comedy show Game Yobikou, hence why the characters are Japanese manzai teams Saraba Seishun no Hikari (Morita Tetsuya, Higashibukuro) and Mitorizu (Lily, Moriyama Shintarō). You can see a video of it here, starting from about 11 minutes in. </humbleBrag>

We also tried ConnecTank, which to be clear we do really enjoy. Getting to play a tank battle game in couch co-op was basically our dream. But… much like Rocket Slime itself, it’s just a bit too easy and mindless, and unlike Rocket Slime, it doesn’t have the goddamn incredible Platypunk cut scenes to fill out the run time.

And then here comes DuneCrawl. Oh my god, DuneCrawl. It is so much fun, pure chaotic action hack-n-slash and also GIANT CRAB TANK BATTLES. Some of the chaos gets kind of hard to follow sometimes especially if there are lots of items on screen, but honestly this has been such a blast to play in couch co-op. This is literally all I’ve ever wanted out of video games. PLEASE I beg you to pick this up and play it with us, PLEASE.

The mark of a good tank battle is if you can load yourself into your tank’s cannon, launch yourself over so that you can rampage through your opponent’s tank and sabotage their cannoneers, steal their good ammo, then run back to your tank and fire that shit right back at them. DuneCrawl lets you do that, and it is so good. This is peak video games to me.

Henry Time

Henry the gray cat standing on top of me as I lie on the sofa. His butt is faced towards the camera and he is looking over his shoulder and glaring at me with his yellow eyes

I have been trying to fix my sleep schedule but this butthole keeps dragging me back into nap traps. He is devious. This is what a typical exchange looks like:

Me: Hooray, I got one (1) chore done so I shall reward myself by sitting on the sofa
Henry *sits up straight and locks eyes with me Expectantly*
Me:
Henry
Me: *lies on side*
Henry *taps my foot with his forepaws*
Me: *flips to lie flat on back*
Henry *continues glaring*
Me: *pulls the blanket over self*
Henry *taps my foot again*
Me: *pulls the blanket taut the way he likes it*
Henry *stalks across my stomach and flops down, glaring the whole way as if to say "ABOUT TIME"*

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