I liked Tormented Souls well enough that I was curious to see if the sequel would fix the first game's flaws. It helped that the developers put out a free demo of the game on the PSN, which I downloaded and played. It was surprisingly long, covering most of the first full level of the game.

The demo also did show signs of improvement over the first game. Enough so that I was motivated to buy the full game when it released (though it still took a few months to actually get around to playing it). If the sequel could maintain the positive aspects of the first game, while fixing or improving on the first game's flaws, then we could have a true gem of a traditional survival horror game on our hands.

Modernization at the cost of frustration

Almost immediately, I started noticing quality of life and gameplay improvements over the first game. Caroline is more mobile. She can move while aiming a weapon. Perhaps best of all, there's a quick inventory. It's mapped to the right stick, which is a bit clunky and imprecise, but it's fine. It's still better than having to go into the inventory every time I need to switch between the nail gun and a melee weapon, and vice versa.

Caroline can move with her weapon drawn.

Cool! They fixed the biggest problems with the original game: the archaic-feeling controls! Right?

Well, not so fast. While these are strict improvements over the original, they do come with a catch. To offset Caroline's new mobility, enemies are much faster, more aggressive, and tankier. The ability to move with the weapon drawn helps, especially in long hallways and the rare open spaces. I can backpedal and shoot instead of having to go through a cumbersome process of aim, shoot, turn around to run away, and turn back around to aim and shoot again. I can even strafe! This works well in the relatively wide halls of the opening convent level, but it stops being useful basically as soon as you leave the convent, at which point the game ambushes the player with multiple enemies or gives them the ability to hit you from further away.

The problem is that there's rarely -- if ever -- enough room to maneuver with this newfound mobility. The arenas are cramped and cluttered, the enemies completely block narrow paths, they have huge hit boxes, and their hit tracking makes it almost impossible to run around them. The camera angles constantly hide enemies off-screen, making it impossible for me to judge distance or know if I have a clear shot until the enemy is right up in my face, and close enough for them to get a couple cheap shots in. Regardless of whether I was using "tank" controls or analog movement, if I did try moving around during combat, I was constantly running into tables and chairs in the middle of rooms, or I was getting stuck on geometry along the periphery of combat arenas (often at the edge of the screen). The small rooms mean that camera changes are frequent. Every time the camera changed, I would lose a step because the character would turn the wrong direction or run into another obstacle.

There rarely seems to be enough room to use Caroline's newfound mobility.

On top of all this, the game seems to be stingier with supplies (at least early on). The first boss ate through all of my remaining ammo after getting through the first level. I had to finish her off with melee in her final phase. This forced me to have to burn through all my healing items as well, since she has a close-range area-of-effect ground smash attack that I wasn't able to avoid at that close range.

In only the second game of the 2026 UFL season, a new rule was already tested. D.C. Defenders kicker Matt Crane kicked the league's first 4-point field goal. This season, the league is taking a page out of fantasy football scoring systems and implementing a new rule in which field goals of 60 yards or longer are worth 4 points instead of the normal 3.

© ESPN.

DC Defenders' kicker Matt Crane was the first to convert a 60-yard 4-point field goal in the UFL.

The idea is that a longer field goal is much harder to make, and therefore it should be worth more points. OK, well scoring a touchdown from further away is also significantly harder, so why aren't teams awarded with extra points for 50-yard touchdown plays?

I do not like this 4-point field goal rule. I do not like that the rules are codifying an explicit reward for being further away from the goal. In my opinion, this goes against the spirit of the game, in which the goal is supposed to be to drive as close to the goal as possible, and hopefully cross the goal line. Getting more points for being further away from the goal should not, in my opinion, be in the rules.

A counter-argument would be that there are already situations in which teams chose to be further from the end zone in order to get better results. I can think of 2 common examples off the top of my head.

The first is a series of QB kneel downs to run out the clock. A team chooses to take a small loss because, in that situation, the second on the clock are more valuable than a few feet of field position.

Another common example is a team deliberately taking a Delay of Game penalty for a punt on the opponent's side of the 50. This is done to give the punter more room to land the punt inside the 10 yard line without as much risk of putting the ball into the endzone for a touchback.

I don't have a problem with either of these scenarios.

The core difference is that in the examples of the QB kneel and punt, the teams are making a strategic decision to give up short-term field position in exchange for an indirect long-term benefit. These scenarios are not codified in the actual rules. But in the case of the 4-point field goal, it is the rules giving an explicit and immediate reward for losing field position. I could be forgetting some edge case, but I suspect that in most (if not all) examples that you can find of a football team giving up field position in exchange for some benefit, the benefit is not explicitly granted by the rules.

To be more specific, the 4-point field goal rule is more analogous to a touchback rule that says "a punt kicked from the 50 yard line or further that crosses the goal line shall result in a Touchback of only 10 yards instead of 20 yards."

Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown got a lot of criticism (and sometimes praise) at its release for how difficult it is. This actually caught me off-guard when I played, because I played the demo back in November or December, and I thought the demo was really easy. Boy did that demo not do justice to the challenge of the actual game!

I struggled a lot and had to restart the game multiple times, and save-scum sectors over and over again, in order to learn how best to approach the game's challenges. Without giving away any specific spoilers, I particularly struggled to get through sectors 4 and 5 without running out of Deuterium. These sectors are, in my opinion, the peak of the game's difficulty. If you can get through sectors 4 and 5, I think the rest of the game should be mostly downhill. That isn't to say that the remaining game is easy. It will still require careful and methodical play. But if you get past sectors 4 and 5 in relatively good condition, then you should have developed the infrastructure and techniques to give yourself enough buffer for sub-optimal play that the rest of the game will feel a lot less stressful.

With that in mind, I want to coalesce my experience with the game and offer some tips to help new players get through sectors 1 through 5, without having to necessarily go through all the trial-and-error that I had to go through. These tips will be specifically focused on the early game, and I'm going to try to avoid any specific spoilers, as this post is intended for people who are stuck in the early sectors of the game, or people who have not played the game yet, but are considering doing so. Also, please check out the full review.

Across The Unknown can be unforgiving and difficult.

I played the demo for Across the Unknown back in November or December. I was not impressed. The demo felt like little more than a dumbed-down mobile game that breezes through Wikipedia summaries of Star Trek: Voyager episodes. The demo was pitifully easy to play through, and the decisions didn't seem very impactful. The fact that you can choose to use the Caretaker's Array to go back home and end the game before it even starts seemed like a silly novelty at the time. I doubted that the actual in-game decisions could prove to be as meaningful.

But the game released, and I'm a sucker for Star Trek games. So I went ahead and bought it (it was discounted on release!). And I'll be damned if I didn't end up being just a tiny bit impressed!

Being able to use the Caretaker to go home and end the game prematurely
is the only major deviation from the show's overarching plot.

The platonic ideal of a mobile game?

Now, when I say "impressed", that comes with some huge asterisks and qualifiers! Remember, based on pre-release marketing and the demo, I was going into this game expecting a PC port of a mobile game along the lines of Star Trek: Fleet Command or Trexels. That was the measuring stick by which I was judging this game. I wasn't expecting it to be Birth of the Federation or A Final Unity.

Yes, Across the Unknown is a mobile game that was released for consoles and PC. It's like a combination of Star Trek: Fleet Command and Fallout: Shelters, except that it isn't a mobile game. Mechanically, it's almost the same, but it completely lacks any of the time and money-wasting pay-to-play grind that mobile games are built around. Yes, you do collect resources and wait for rooms on Voyager to be built. But those rooms don't take real-life hours or days to build; they take just a few in-game "cycles" (it's unclear if a "cycle" represents hours or days in the game), and are done in a matter of seconds or minutes of real time. And there are no "premium currencies" that ask you to shell out a credit card number if you don't feel like waiting for days to grind. Dilithium definitely seems like it could have been a premium currency, as it acts as a gate for higher tier technologies and room upgrades. There's no daily login bonuses. No ads. No "limited time only" promotions. It's just the raw game, stripped of everything that makes mobile gaming so obnoxious and predatory.

The blend of resource-collection and base-building will be familiar to anyone who's played a mobile game.

This is kind of the best possible version of what mobile games were promised to be, before they were completely co-opted by greedy corporations. This is not thoughtless shovel-ware designed by soulless corporations to prey on people who will compulsively through money at it. The player is constantly engaged with things to do and decisions to make. And those decisions occasionally have weight and consequence. And it all comes together to tell the coherent story of the entire Star Trek: Voyager TV show! Yeah, the individual encounters are abridged Cliff's Notes summaries of Voyager episodes, but they come together to tell an overarching story that adds up to slightly more than the sum of its parts.

For a few months in 2025, I had started thinking about making my own football board game. I was even thinking of maybe trying my hand at a Kickstarter.

I was envisioning a game board modeled after a football field, with a little football token and a little 1st down marker. The 2 players would play competing cards against each other that represented play calls, and then roll dice to determine the outcome of the play. I hadn't quite figured out how the length of a game would be determined, or the specifics of how the different play cards would play off of each other. I also had vague visions of a team-building aspect in which each player could draft a selection of "star" players on the team, who could be optionally invoked at specific times to swing a play in that team's favor.

It was all very early and conceptual.

But as far as I knew, there weren't any football board games on the market. Oh sure, there were football-themed skins of legacy board games. You know, NFL Monopoly (or the more generic NFL-Opoly), NFL-themed chess and checkers sets, and stuff like that. But I wasn't aware of any board games that were about modeling or simulating the sport of football. Well, not entirely. I did have an old VHS-based football board game, and I remember playing a pen-and-paper football game with a family friend when I was young. And of course, I was aware of Blood Bowl. But there weren't any "real", modern football board games, that I knew of. At least, I had never seen one on the shelves of any board game stores I had ever visited.

So imagine my surprise, when I was holiday shopping at Target, and I saw this game, NFL Gameday on the shelf!

I was contemplating making my own football board game before I knew these games existed.

I looked at the back of the box, and the board looked almost exactly like what I had envisioned for my hypothetical football board game. The ball and 1st down marker are even magnetic to prevent them from accidentally shifting too much during play! That's a good idea that I hadn't come up with! And low and behold, the players are playing opposing offensive and defensive play cards against each other. This looked like a simple, and possibly even more elegant version of what I was dreaming in my head. Someone had already beaten me to it.

But, as I read the rules, I realized that this game was far simpler than what I would want from a football board game. So maybe my dream game didn't quite exist yet? Or maybe it does, because while researching information about this game, I stumbled onto another game that I had never heard of before, called 1st & Goal (review coming soon!). And that game, looked like a more sophisticated version of NFL Gameday, and closer to my vision of a hypothetical dream football game.

I just had to play this game, and also try to track down a copy of 1st & Goal to see if a football board game would actually work.