From bizarre fantasy worlds, gritty shooters, and meta-RPG adventures to chaotic multiplayer showdowns, May delivered a wildly varied lineup of games for Gamebox 2.0. This month, we explored the strange steampunk world of Clockwork Ambrosia, questioned reality in The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG Ever Made, walked a path of revenge in Better than Dead, and more. Here’s a look at the games we played in May 2026.
Better Than Dead (Chris): Inspired by the bullet-flying action of Hong Kong cinema and the shaky bodycam aesthetic of someone capturing their own desperate survival, Better Than Dead is a raw, uncompromising FPS developed by Monte Gallo and published by MicroProse Software. Where most action shooters put players in the boots of a seasoned marksman, Better Than Dead follows an untrained, vengeful killer. An unnamed female protagonist wakes up in a cell after being trafficked by gangsters and shoots her way out in a daring escape. But her freedom isn’t complete, and she goes on a one-woman hunt through the underbelly of Hong Kong to find every person responsible and make them answer for what they did.
On the surface, the gameplay in Better Than Dead looks like one of the many trendy bodycam FPS titles that have appeared over the last few years, but there’s a deliberate stiffness to the shooting mechanics that adds an interesting twist. There is a jankiness in how the character aims and moves that purposely dampens the player’s sense of comfort with the gun. Instead of a fearless action hero with muscle memory from years of experience, the controls mimic the feel of someone who has never trained for combat. Each shot bounces the gun around, making it hard to group the next shot on a target. The gun sways when moving, also adding a slight lag to re-aim again. The shooting mechanics do take some adjustment to get a sense of control and aim. Shooting from a distance often results in misses, and aiming for anything other than center mass won’t put down an enemy. This rough, raw feel of the game nicely simulates the sensation of someone running on sheer nerves and anger. Armed with just a single pistol and enough luck to focus her aim on the right targets, and pull the trigger.
Every level is designed to be a raid against an enemy target, leading the protagonist to shoot their way in and out. These levels offer some variety, showcasing cramped hallways, kitchen backrooms, and neon-drenched nightclub floors where you’ll go guns blazing. A slide mechanic triggers a brief moment of bullet time that will give you a better window of time to aim and unleash a spray of bullets to one or more targets. It’s brief and needs recharging over time, so it’s not a completely reliable method for back-to-back shootouts. Thankfully, the gun has unlimited ammo, so spray-and-pray can go a long way. However, hitting innocent targets doesn’t exactly punish the player; it does increase the chances of missing shots and seems to make enemies more aggressive, likely making their attacks kill shots.
Better Than Dead is not a game for everyone, and it knows it. For the right players who can stomach the discomfort of its unsteady aim and treat every cleared room as a hard-earned victory, it delivers a fun, raw action experience unlike most in the genre. It strips away the excess to focus entirely on reaction and survival, with short, unforgiving encounters that waste no time. Better Than Dead is a lean, tense shooter that plays like a heroic bloodshed 90s Hong Kong flick. What it lacks in polish it more than makes up for in scrappy spirit. It was released on Steam on May 12th, and if Monte Gallo continues to build on this foundation, the full release could be something unique.
Clockwork Ambrosia (Zach): Developed by Realmsoft and published by OI Games, Clockwork Ambrosia is a fantastic throwback to classic games like Mega Man and Metroid. You play as Iris, an airship pilot who crash-lands on the island of Aspida. She finds the island under attack by the mechanical creations that used to help its residents, and she has to gather equipment and weaponry to fight back and find a way off the island.
The game plays like an old-school run-and-gun shooter like Mega Man, with mechanics like a charge shot if you hold down the main fire button and wall jumping and dashing like you’d find in Mega Man X. The combat feels great, and one of the game’s strongest aspects is the amount of customization you have with your weapons. As you explore the world, you’ll uncover various mods for your weapons, which you can then mix and match however you see fit. You can affect the type of projectile, add different effects, and change the rate of fire, for example. You can really customize things to your liking or constantly switch things up to suit the situation, as the mods are always a button press away and can be swapped at any time.
The game is also a Metroidvania where you need to explore different areas and find gadgets and equipment that will let you progress further or return to previous areas that were previously inaccessible. You can bring up a Metroid-style map that shows where you’ve explored so far, and you can mark rooms with different icons to help you remember what was there, as the only map marker is where you have discovered save points. There’s a great variety of locations you explore, from abandoned mine shafts to the snowy peaks of the island’s main mountain, and there are lots of fun environmental puzzles to solve alongside trying to find the equipment you need to progress. There’s a nice variety of enemies, and each has a unique attack or quirk you need to figure out and counter to take them out. There are some fantastic bosses to take on throughout the game, and they really highlight the game’s overall excellent pixel art. Everything in the game looks fantastic and animates extremely well, giving the characters lots of personality and detail. The music is great as well and really diverse, going from hard-rocking, high-energy tracks to really chill/Spanish guitar-led tracks.
If you’re a fan of Metroidvanias, Clockwork Ambrosia is an excellent new addition to the genre. It has all the features you’d expect, while introducing new mechanics like weapon mods that add a fresh, unique spin on the genre. It’s out now on Steam.
The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time (Zach): Developed and published by Coin Drop Games, The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is a new mind-bending meta puzzle game. You are jumping into the world of a classic 90s RPG, which has been remade in 3D. You are starting with a save file at the end of the game, with tons of items and maxed-out characters, but you have no idea what anything is or what it does. As you move around and explore the RPG world, you’ll find pages from the game’s manual, developer commentary tracks, and clips from a behind-the-scenes documentary that will either give you a clue about how a game mechanic works or what you should be doing next. For instance, you’ll face a random encounter with a group of enemies, but until you piece together the manual enough to know the enemies’ weaknesses and what attacks exploit that weakness, you’ll be blind to how you can progress. This makes the game more of a puzzle game, as you have to put together the clues you gather and use deductive reasoning to figure out what to do and how to progress, but there is also plenty of experimentation as well, like trying every item in your inventory to see if it unlocks a treasure chest.
The actual RPG does have some fun and unique gameplay mechanics, though, especially the combat system, which lets you choose up to six actions and, if you use the actions in a certain order, you’ll use a special combo attack that is the key to defeating some of the enemies. It also has a fun cast of characters that you learn about via collecting the manual pages or in the segments of the game you are actually playing, but in the meta of the game, whoever made this save file has spent hours with these characters. There’s a skeleton pirate, a vampire, and a robot in addition to your classic Chrono Trigger-style JRPG hero.
The game has another layer, as you can “log off” from the main RPG, and you’ll find yourself in a bizarre, Backroomsesque liminal space that you explore in first-person. Here you can find more manual pages and documentary clips by breaking down walls and using knowledge from the manual, like the combo to defeat a certain enemy, to unlock new areas. You can bring up the manual pages and watch the documentary clips at any time by accessing the game’s menu, which is a major convenience, as you can pull up the clues at any time and compare them to the puzzle you are currently working on. You even need to use items like a red decoder to look at things in a certain way and find environmental clues. You’ll have to deal with the game seemingly getting corrupted at times, exploiting “bugs” in the game’s code, and entering areas you normally aren’t supposed to enter to progress through and learn more about this mysterious game, and what is the “Greatest RPG of All Time.”
The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is an extremely unique experience that turns a 90s-style RPG into a mystery that you need to solve. It does a great job of laying out the clues while not holding your hand so that you get to use your deduction skills to figure out how the new piece of information you received will help you progress through the experience. Don’t go in if you’re looking for an old-school RPG experience, but if you want a more meta and sometimes surreal experience, then definitely check out the game on Steam.
R-Type Dimensions III (Chris): Developed by KRITZELKRATZ 3000 and published by ININ Games, R-Type Dimensions III reimagines R-Type III: The Third Lightning with a host of modern features. Similar to recent R-Type releases, Dimensions III isn’t just a port of the original but a remade title from the ground up. Every stage, enemy, and power-up pattern has been restyled with 3D assets. Transforming classic pixel graphics into polygons is no easy feat, especially when you can toggle between the retro and remake visuals. This neat visual change is a carryover from the previous Dimensions installment and does alter the player’s experience, for better or worse.
Bounty Brawl: Most Wanted (Zach): Hunt down bounties alone or with up to three friends in the new action roguelite, Bounty Brawl: Most Wanted. Developed by Nanuq and published by Infini Fun, Bounty Brawl: Most Wanted is set in a galaxy where bounty hunters are competing to hunt down the eight most wanted criminals for huge rewards. It’s not easy, as all eight of the fugitives are some of the most dangerous beings in the universe. You can select from a roster of colorful bounty hunters, who all have a unique attack style and different play styles. There’s the gunslinger Kyle, who is probably the easiest character to start with, and the one you play through the tutorial with, but other characters get more complex, like Jaz, who is most effective if you attack with the beat of the music.
There’s a mix of ranged and melee-based characters along with the varying playstyles, so there is sure to be one of the characters that suits how you want to play. The game is a full twin-stick action game, not a Survivors/Bullet Heaven-style game where your character auto-attacks. You’ll need to do all the aiming and attacking along with dashing out of the way and using your special abilities. Each character has a lasso, which is used for both traversal and dealing large amounts of damage to larger enemies if you are able to get them into a staggered state.
You have a choice of going after any of the eight bounties, with them being located on one of four different planets. The planets offer up unique challenges along with the enemies, including a toxic planet where you’ll have to constantly try to flush out the toxic waste to progress, or an icy planet where you need to find heaters to absorb thermal energy or risk getting frozen. The game is extremely challenging between the environmental hazards and the enemies, who throw out bullet hellesque patterns at times when attacking and you’ll really need to master your characters weapons and abilities to progress and teaming up with some friends can help you get further. The bosses, especially, have screen-filling attacks and complex patterns that are the true test of each stage. If you and your friends do manage to take down one of the bosses, you’ll have to battle it out in the “brawl phase” to see who actually gets the money, as there’s no splitting the rewards in this universe.
When you die, you’ll earn some experience and currency that you can use at the Black Market in the hub to level up your character’s weapons and unlock and purchase upgrades that can help you survive longer and progress further in the next run. The stages change each time you start a new run, and there will be a new selection of in-level upgrades and loadouts to discover. The game has a really fun art style that feels like a mix of anime and old-school Saturday-morning cartoons, and all the characters and bosses are unique and cool. The music is also fantastic, all of it high-energy and complementing the chaotic action on each stage.
Bounty Brawl: Most Wanted is a challenging but fun action roguelite that should be a good time for anyone looking to go solo or assemble a crew to take down intergalactic criminals. The art style and characters are interesting and cool, and the mix of gameplay styles for each character sets it apart and is almost like a fighting game where you can figure out which character best suits your playstyle and skills. The game is out now on Steam.
