Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 6 – Hadez II Hangman

October 2, 2025October 2, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

This is the second week in a row that I’ve released this on Thursday instead of Wednesday, but unlike last week, I purposely delayed this one because I wanted to compare my original thoughts when I wrote this on Monday to what I thought after AEW Dynamite‘s 6th Anniversary episode. If you get the reference from the title, congratulations, you’re old like me.

Games – Hades II

Hollow Knight Silksong and Hades 2 are probably going to be talked about together a lot, despite being very different games. Metroidvanias and Roguelikes share some common ground in that they often have a high difficulty scale, they’re both sequels to successful games in the series, and they’re both developed by independent studios. After twenty hours of Hades II, I have to say I, as in me personally, find it more difficult than Hollow Knight Silksong. The thing about Silksong‘s difficulty, to me, is that it is the same level of difficulty as the first game and requires a skill I had to remember in the process of playing it: patience. Most of the time when I would lose to a boss, it was because of two reasons: first, I didn’t have all the information about the boss’s attacks, and second, I would grow impatient and get too greedy with attacks, hoping to end the fight. With Hades II, you get better at it the more you play it. You develop a muscle memory for the attacks, just like with Silksong, but it requires me a lot more luck, hence the fun of roguelike, and a lot more awareness, which I don’t seem to have. Sometimes I’ll take damage in Hades II, and I do not know why.

Let me back up, though, because I don’t want you to get the impression that I dislike this game. I absolutely love this game. Not once has a run made me feel like I’ve wasted my time. No matter how far I’ve gotten, there has always been something, some kind of resource, some kind of story beat, some kind of future unlockable that I didn’t have before. While I miss aspects of the first one, I am absolutely having a ball with the second one. Without any spoilers, I have had five successful runs so far, four going down and one going up (the first chance you get to go up, you should go up), and the weapon I’ve been most successful with is the Sister Blades, but goddamn do I love the Umbral Flames and the Moonstone Axe. I love all but one of the bosses, not because of any difficulty or anything, but I just find them kind of annoying and uninteresting. The stakes of this game are much higher than those of the first Hades, but it has enough callbacks to the first game that it’ll satisfy returning players. It feels like they both upped the ante of the first game while streamlining so much of it. The fact that doors will tell me if that is where I need to go to get the resources I need is a godsend. If this were any other year but the year Silksong came out, this would probably be my game of the year. Currently, I have it third after Donkey Kong Bananza, but I think it’ll quickly rise to second before too long.

This coming out so soon after Silksong has only one little ember of an idea growing in my mind: Supergiant needs to make a Metroidvania. That’s how I know Silksong is my game of the year, because when I’m playing other games that are also great, whether it’s Hades II, Trails of the Sky 1st Chapter remake, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or whatever else, I’m still thinking about how I want to play more Silksong.

I’ve been removing and redownloading TikTok on my phone a lot this year. Mostly because I will open, and my time blindness will activate, and I’ll lose hours to scrolling videos. Recently, I’ve seen a lot of people reacting to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I have to say I feel quite envious of the people who love this game. It could be with some of these content creators that they’re being entirely performative but from the ones I’ve seen, I doubt it. I just don’t love the story, especially now that I’m in Act 3, where it feels like, without spoilers, too much Clair Obscur and not enough Expedition 33. It feels to me like two stories duct-taped together in a way that isn’t quite working for me, but I still find the battles so amazing. It just doesn’t move me in that way, but then I realized at work what hits me similarly that I can compare it to. What they’re feeling is what I feel in the climax of the Pacifist Run of Undertale and, more specifically, this year’s Chapter 4 of Deltarune. The story, the music, the characters all hit me right in the gut, where I keep my feelings, and I can say I may not feel the same way about E33, but I understand that feeling.

Wrestling – Hangman’s WrestleDream Opponent before and after AEW Dynamite’s 6th Anniversary

Today, Hangman Adam Page is teaming up with two members of the Opps, Samoa Joe and Powerhouse Hobbs, to take on the Death Riders after Daniel Garcia took out Katsuyori Shibata. I imagine Hangman’s championship defense will develop out of this, and I am worried it’ll be a turning heel Samoa Joe. A lot of the people available to be top heels in AEW are either out injured or have already faced Hangman. Don’t get me wrong, in my opinion, Samoa Joe versus Hangman Adam Page will be a fantastic match, but the setup for Joe’s turn feels like shit, we’ve got no one else right now, rather than organic in any way. What reason does he have to turn besides wanting the Men’s World Championship and being Samoa Joe? I’d much prefer Joe just be like “You know, Hangman, you’re right, I did help you win that belt at All In so do me the favor of facing me at WrestleDream.” I hope they make it work either way.

However, while not as high profile, I’d much rather it be someone else. I don’t like fantasy booking, really, because if it doesn’t happen, people tend to be disappointed when an event that was never going to happen doesn’t happen. Still, I’m going to do it here. The Bastard PAC returned to AEW at All Out to the Death Riders with a fresh, shortened haircut and a shirt on his back, unusual for him, but PAC and Hangman were one of the original feuds in AEW, both of them wanting to be the first person to be All Elite Wrestling’s Men’s World Champion. Today’s episode of Dynamite is the 6th Anniversary, so why not run it back? PAC may not be the top guy we wanted him to be when AEW started due to injuries and the pandemic hampering his momentum, but he’s still an extraordinary wrestler, and Hangman, who was already a great wrestler, has only improved since AEW started. That is what I’d like to see at WrestleDream: The Bastard PAC vs. Hangman Adam Page for the Men’s World Championship. It’s probably not going to happen, so I write it here just to get it out of my head. I will not set myself up for disappointment but find joy in what they’ll actually give me.

So, this is me, post-Dynamite, and I have to say I did like the setup for Hangman vs. Joe at WrestleDream. The setup for this was slightly silly, but to be honest, it was completely realistic in how some people act. A more senior employee feels like they’ve been disrespected by their younger colleague, who maybe has been given a bit more, and suddenly they go off the deep end and completely overreact because deep down they’re envious that the younger colleague has something they want. Essentially, and don’t take this as a comment on Joe because Joe rules, but in this specific scenario, he’s got boomer energy going on. So in a way, I found this quite funny, but I’ve also been on short-form video platforms enough to know people can act like this and be harboring this negative energy that they’ll unleash real quick. Safe to say, I thought AEW Dynamite‘s 6th Anniversary was awesome, and WrestleDream is turning out to be a must-see PPV, and so quickly after All Out? FUCK.

Credit to JJ Williams for this photograph.

Anyway, this is starting to get wordy, but having Hangman Page and Kris Statlander as my AEW World Champions, two of my favorite wrestlers, is amazing. I love Kris’s new gear, which she debuted tonight. The one bummer of the show was how many times ICE was advertised on HBO Max, and I’m not the only one unhappy with it. I left my feedback asking for them to no longer show these advertisements, and you can too in the link below in Hangman’s Bluesky post.

Books – Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan and Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

I’m seventy percent of the way through Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan, and I can already see in my head where the story is going, and I’m excited to see how Ryan subverts those ideas by doing something completely different or going in a direction I didn’t expect. The character Ruhlin is in such an interesting spot as someone who never thought of himself as a leader and has been forced to be one. In fact, now that I think about it, all the point-of-view characters are in that position to some extent. I can see the thread of plot that will lead these individual storylines to interweave where they are forced into an alliance against a common foe, just like in John Gwynne’s The Bloodsworn Saga, another high fantasy series from the past few years that I love.

After getting those fancy hardcover editions of Fonda Lee’s The Green Bone Saga, I have the itch to delve back into that series with a highlighter and a pencil for a close reading of my previous copies. I love both a close reading and a reread, which is probably why I like doing my podcast so much.

I’ve also been reading Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders, and the way it plays with grief, magic, and the kind of academia I wanted to be a part of at one time is really hitting me in a good way. It has been a while since I’ve lost time to reading this year, probably since Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent or Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils in the spring.

Speaking of books, the latest episode of the book podcast I’m on, No Page Unturned, is out now. We’re currently covering The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, up to the second book, Harrow the Ninth but we’ve also done all our A Chorus of Dragons by Jenn Lyons, which you can go back to and listen to.

Also check out my co-host Christina Ladd’s review of Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan.

Daedalus Is Dead Review: No Gods, No Monsters

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 3 – The One About Hollow Knight Silksong.

September 10, 2025September 10, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

Hey, it’s my website, I’m changing the order this week with Silksong as the main event.

Books – Green Bone Saga Gold Edition by Fonda Lee

I’m still reading through those two Anthony Ryan books from last week. I won’t like, I’ve only had Silksong on the brain since it released.

Not only that, but I will say, I splurged a bit and bought these fancy hardcover editions of Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga that just came out. Jade City was a book I’ve owned since it came out, but kept putting it off to my to-be-read pile until, I recall, 2021, when the final book in the series, Jade Legacy, came out. Urban Fantasy is not usually the flavor of fantasy I’m into, but this is one of those series, like A Chorus of Dragons, The Murderbot Diaries, or The First Law, that instantly clicked, and I knew instinctively, “Oh, this is going to be one of my favorite series ever after this.”

It’s a family crime drama with magical Jade that gives you superhuman abilities that result in some of my favorite fight scenes in fiction. The characters are beyond flawed, to put it more bluntly, they’re fucked up, and you’ll love them even when you hate them or the decision they make.

Wrestling – Third Stretch is the Charm for Kenny Omega

All the complaints about the closing angle for Kenny Omega this week on AEW Dynamite, I read, were fairly on point about not having good payoffs. The Elite sent him home last year, with Jack Perry bragging about it. Kenny returns and doesn’t immediately retaliate against the Elite. Jack Perry is also nowhere to be found. Okada and Don Callis attack him again before their match at All In brutally, with blood coming out of his mouth, Kenny ends up losing and taking about a month and a half off. Last week, it was hype city for a Hangman and Kenny reunion. Now, the Don Callis family, namely Kyle Fletcher, beat the shit out of him, and he’s stretchered off with Hangman distraught. I am unsure of where this is leading for Kenny Omega, and yet, I must admit, I still remain invested in this one, probably because Hangman was involved, to be honest. Will it have a proper payoff? I’m not sure, but if All Out ends up being AEW World Champion Hangman Adam Page vs TNT Champion Kyle Fletcher, it’d be a funny little parallel to last year’s AEW World Champion Bryan Danielson vs. TNT Champion Jack Perry. I think, if they had set this up maybe a week or two before the reaction, it might have been better because more time for Hangman and Kenny to really be seen together, maybe more than one match with some talking segments, whether backstage or in the ring, would really have had people on the hook. If Kenny comes back and does not interact with Hangman upon his return, I’ll likely be more critical of this whole scenario. We will see.

Games – Hollow Knight Silksong

It’s finally arrived, Hollow Knight Silksong is real, it’s finished, it’s released, it’s everything I wanted from a sequel to Hollow Knight, and it’s difficult as hell. I thought, hey, I’ve played a fuck ton of Hollow Knight, how hard could the sequel be? The beginning of the game does not ease you in but throws you into the deep end. I really don’t want to go on and on about the difficulty, because that is what so many people are talking about. Act I is difficult because you start with basically nothing, but you get new upgrades and new abilities and learn the patterns of the enemies as well as your own combat. It’s kind of like learning a fighting game in that way. Bosses doing double damage, something only late-stage Hollow Knight bosses did in the first one, was rough, as well as those rooms that were basically a gauntlet of dudes. In fact, I find those gauntlet rooms far tougher than the bosses. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s my horrible eyesight, but I’ve always had trouble seeing the whole screen. It’s why I have such trouble with that piano mini-game in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Wait, no, it’s probably not an issue of seeing the whole screen but having to be closer to the screen because my vision is not great. The platforming, though, specifically the red flowers in Hunter’s March, that’s the kind of thing in Hollow Knight that I loved. Sure, you might mess up and die, but once you find the rhythm, especially with Hornet’s diagonal down attack, it’s really fun. I’ll tell you now, you’d better learn to do it because you’re going to be doing it a lot and in far more treacherous areas than Hunter’s March.

“This is probably my game of the year,” he says about Silksong, like he said about Deltarune Chapters 3+4, Donkey Kong Bananza, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. The First Berserker: Khazan, Monster Hunter Wilds. I probably would have said it about Shinobi: Art of Vengeance too, if I hadn’t already known SIlksong was coming out. However, I will say, more than any other game I’ve just mentioned, except for maybe Donkey Kong Bananza, Silksong has caused me to lose time in the joy of playing it. I’ll sit down and be like, I’ll just play for an hour, and suddenly the sun has gone down, and my stomach is rumbling for some reason. People hate this, but like Dark Souls, both Hollow Knights have this atmosphere of melancholy and a society decaying that draws you in, but the bugs are all so joyful, cute, and bring a smile to your face plus, and I love the stories of FromSoftware games don’t get me wrong, the stories of both games are much more straightforward with all this lore underneath you can choose to what level you want to engage in. Silksong‘s plot is basically Hornet gets kidnapped, taken to this far-off land called Pharloom, and has to find out who and why by ascending to the Citadel above. It’s much more complicated than that, but that’s basically all you need to know to start the game. The NPCs in this game, I love them, all these little bug friends of mine, especially Sherma, whom I just want to make all their dreams come true. His little song for the gate I will never forget.

Metroidvanias (No, I will not nor will I ever call them Search Action games) have to be one of the best genres of video games, top 5 easily. The satisfaction of finding a secret, beating a boss, getting a new upgrade, discovering new areas you didn’t know about before, and going back to areas with secrets you couldn’t get before is one of the most satisfying things in video games. Games are all about the illusion of achievement, and Metroidvanias nail that to a T. I know that now that I said Hollow Knight: Silksong is my game of the year, I just know Supergiant Games is going to announce Hades 2 is coming out of Early Access and into version 1.0 before the year ends. Still, I think, as of right now, Hollow Knight Silksong might be one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. No doubt, I will still be playing it and talking about it next week.

If you want to see my current Games of the Year + games of 2025 I want to play, you can check out my full Backlogged list here. My Top 10 is as follows

Hollow Knight: Silksong
Donkey Kong Bananza
Deltarune: Chapter 3+4
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
Doom: The Dark Ages
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
The First Berserker: Khazan
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 2 – The Ryan, The Joe, and the Bandido

September 3, 2025September 3, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

Before we jump straight into it, I will say while this will focus on my main hobbies, Books, Games, and Wrestling, I do have other interests that I will comment on from time to time, like TTRPGs, Music, NBA, and Anime in much shorter comments at the end, but very briefly.

Books – An Anthony Ryan double-whammy, The Feeding and Born of an Iron Storm

I’m delving into two Anthony Ryan books recently that could not be more different. I’m still early in The Feeding, and I purposely didn’t read the description, so I have no idea what the Feeding actually is, but from what I surmise, this is a post-Zombie-like apocalypse set behind what may be the last human settlement fortified by walls that keep out the feeders. The remains of humankind seem desperately low on resources, but are trying to survive. They send out people to trade with other remaining settlements to trade for supplies, which hasn’t been going well. I can feel the desperation of everyone living in the settlement and the rising tension of hearing the people who go outside the walls not coming back with supplies. The horror of the feeders has not quite hit yet, but the way the setup for the plot is going, it looks like the main character, Layla, will be going out into the remains of the world soon. I’m looking forward to it.

Now, Born of an Iron Storm, I’m much further in. Ryan is so good at jumping straight back into where he leaves off in the previous book, and this follow-up to A Tide of Black Steel jumps right into it. I won’t spoil what happens, but my favorite, I don’t know what you would call it, a trope, concept, recurring story idea? Anyway, I love it in a fantasy book with multiple Point of View characters is when the branches of the story start all separate but then as the series goes on the branches begin to converge like for example a side character of one POV character in the first book has something happen to them only to end up in POV chapters of another character in second book. This is starting to emerge in Born of an Iron Storm and I’m loving it.

My review for Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is out now, so be sure to check it out. Automatic Noodle Review – Robots, Rights, and Restaurant

Games – Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, plus others.

I have never played a Shinobi game ever, but I saw the art style for this game and saw someone describe the combat as made for people who love fighting games, and I had to have it. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is so much fun. The combat is simple but has the capacity for a ton of combos that only expand as you play through the story, unlock new abilities, and buy new attacks. The platforming is not as complex as the game it’s going to be compared to the most, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, but still robust enough for in between bouts of combat. To 100% it you’ll definitely have to revisit stages as you gain abilities, but the different fights and stages you reach with those new abilities feel worth revisiting earlier stages. The bosses are so much fun, challenging the first time and fun to just destroy when you figure out their patterns the second time, especially as you learn to juggle and chain combos. I’m a sucker for skins, so having multiple colors for Joe Musashi rules, but in my opinion, every game that has skins should count how many they have and add four or five more. Once more, I have to say the art, the backgrounds, the details of the characters, and the music are outstanding. This is a great game to play right before Silksong comes out. I want to take my time with it, but I also want to beat it before Hollow Knight: Silksong comes out, since I know that will completely take over my brain.

There are some other games I’ve been playing alongside Shinobi. I tried the Lost Soul Aside demo and did not care for it. It looks pretty, but the gameplay feels floaty, and the combat is not for me. I’m nearing the end of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I find this game difficult to talk about. I like it a lot, especially the combat, but I find the characters and story kind of flat and sometimes frustrating. It’s wild to say I both feel like this is one of the best games of the year and also largely overrated. It has a lot of flaws, I feel like they aren’t acknowledged, but also the game rules. It’s a bit of a conundrum for me. Thanks to getting a new PC, I’m finally playing DOOM: The Dark Ages. Between the gameplay involving the shield, the weapons, and the melee, like the flair, the game is so much fun, but who told id Software that we wanted more story from DOOM? I’m enjoying it, but it’s a bit much, and the story is not why anyone plays DOOM. Lastly, so many games deemed as cozy usually are not in fact cozy at all, especially ones that simulate labor. Tiny Bookshop, however, is actually cozy. You drive a bookmobile to a location, you suggest books to customers, you buy more books to sell, you decorate your bookmobile. I play it a lot before bed and it is fact, quite cozy.

Wrestling – Bandido vs. Hechicero is must see.

Ring of Honor’s Death Before Dishonor was last Friday, unfortunately, during my D&D game, so I did not get to see most of it live, but our session did end just in time to see the first half of Bandido vs. Hechicero for the Ring of Honor Men’s World Heavyweight Title. I knew it was going to be great, but I was sure that before the show, they had wrestled one-on-one before this, which was incorrect. Coming into it, I had no doubt of the outcome, but Hechicero did a great job of countering Bandido’s offense in the early parts of the match that sold the idea of him and his manager, Don Callis, having the champion scouted out.

Despite Hechicero’s size, Bandido was able to show impressive feats of strength against his opponent and, combined with his agility, displayed technical prowess to counter the submissions and holds Hechicero was more of an expert in. Likewise, despite his larger size and focus on technical wrestling, Hechicero was not intimidated by Bandido’s high-flying maneuvers. There is a sequence where the challenger ducks and weaves out of Bandido’s handspring backflip, only to be caught in a hurricanrana that he immediately flips out from and onto his feet. Spots like this resulted in Bandido not only needing to escalate his offense, but also the amount of risks he needed to take to retain his title. The crowd didn’t like it when Bandido returned the favor, beginning to pull on Hechicero’s mask, but I do believe in babyfaces who sometimes reach a limit of what they’ll take from their heel opponents. The suplex on the barricade was genuinely brutal (positive), and a lot of Bandido’s offense that led to the ending was like fuck-yous in wrestling move form. In the end, this is definitely one of my matches of the year, and I believe I loved it more than the match with Konosuke Takeshita, which was also amazing and worth seeking out.

Due to a problem with the stream on Ring of Honor’s website, Tony decided to put the show up for free on YouTube so you can check out the match for yourself, which I have time-stamped here.

AEW Dynamite was great, AEW Collision was good, yeah yeah yeah. What I want to end this with is this week on AEW Dynamite, I was hooting and hollering for one reason and one reason only, The AEW Men’s World Heavyweight Champion Hangman Adam Page reunited with his former tag team partner and faction member of the Elite, another former world champion, the Best Bout Machine himself, Kenny Omega. That’s all I thought about all episode UNTIL they announced they’d be reuniting not just in a segment but in a match that airs TODAY on AEW Dynamite. Insert more hooting and hollering.

Music I’m currently listening to: The Beaches’ new album No Hard Feelings, just came out and I’m really digging it, especially the single Last Girls at the Party and Did I Say Too Much

Anime I’m watching: I must confess that I love romance anime, and Season 2 of My Dress-Up Darling is escalating the rising romantic tension between Marin and Gojo so sweetly and nicely. I really want to watch The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity, but goddamn, a Netflix subscription is so expensive now. I don’t regret canceling it a year ago, but letting the money go when I had an active subscription was easier than joining now at the current price point. It just doesn’t seem worth it.