I’m not sure I’d have released a game in 2025 about a sentient AI that comes to question its creators. It’s impossible to take the premise seriously at a point in time when the height of AI technology is used to tell people to add glue to pizza.

That aside, my first big problem with Memory Lost was figuring out if it was actually flawed or if I was just having a hard time wrapping my brain around it. It’s a splatterpunk twin-stick shooter with a unique rhythm, where you rapidly possess and discard the bodies of your enemies over the course of a typical fight. After a few hours, I concluded that it does have a few issues, the first of which is that it might’ve been rushed to release.

In Memory Lost, you play as N.N., for “Neural Network,” an artificial intelligence created by the Redsky Corporation. You first become self-aware in the tunnels beneath the city of Detraxis, where you’ve been sent to wipe out a local cult.

N.N.’s major asset is that, in this cyberpunk future, almost everyone has neural implants, even sewer-dwelling religious maniacs. She can hijack those implants to instantly take control of a person, then turn them against their allies. Once her current host is near death, N.N. must jump free to another suitable implant within line of sight, or she’ll die alongside her victim.

That sets up a layered sort of challenge. In addition to dealing with fast-paced combat, where enemies can come at you from any direction and tend to attack in suicidal waves, you also have to micromanage your own health bar. You’re just as fragile as most of your opponents, since you are most of your opponents, and it’s easy to drop dead to an unexpected wave of reinforcements or explosive trap. Rapidly shifting between bodies is both an offensive and a defensive tactic.

If you try to play Memory Lost like you would any other twin-stick shooter, it gets frustrating fast. You’re meant to deal with each wave of enemies by effectively turning them against one another, rather than simply circle-strafing to victory.

It’s a great hook for an action game, and when it works, it’s impressive. The problem I’m having, aside from just wrapping my brain around the mechanics, is an overall lack of polish. Memory Lost feels like it was released a version or two early, with a half-baked translation, a lot of jokes that simply don’t land, voice actors that all sound like they learned their lines phonetically, and a few simple presentation problems, like text that overflows its message box.

Its biggest issue, however, is simple inconsistency. To successfully hop into a new body, you have to either burn a charge from your Ultimate ability or weaken an opponent without killing them outright. In the latter case, that means many of the best weapons in the game are also the last ones you actually want to use, as they often land a one-hit kill.

Sure, it’s fun to wade into a crowd of oncoming enemies as one of the katana-wielding ninjas or the chainsaw guys, but anyone you dismember or decapitate is no longer a suitable host body. (One of the reasons I love this job is that sometimes I get to write some really crazy sentences.) As such, it’s easy to die because a new wave of reinforcements showed up and I’d already murdered everybody that I could’ve possessed.

Even when I’m not using one of the big weapons, it seems random whether an enemy just dies on the spot or becomes a valid target for a body swap. A cultist who drops to small-arms fire or a baseball bat to the dome might get killed on the spot or spend a few seconds as a potential new body before he expires. There’s no way of knowing which you’ll get until it happens.

When I die in Memory Lost, it’s typically because the game’s decided for no particular reason that I’m out of swap targets. In a game where my success or failure is usually determined by when and how I can possess people, I only have one reliable way to do so, it has to recharge between uses, and I can’t use it if I’m already on the verge of death.

The general concept behind Memory Lost is sound and the presentation’s decent, but it’s a couple of iterations away from the best version of itself. The overall experience reminds me of the zero-budget end of Xbox Live Arcade in the ‘00s, where you could find a reliable bumper crop of games from all over the world that might not have been playtested at all before release.

With another couple of patches and some mechanical tweaks, there could be something special here. If you’ve got a high jank tolerance and you like the idea of a grimy, violent cyberpunk shooter, you might have some fun with this, but Memory Lost feels like a beta test disguised as a full release.

[Memory Lost, developed by Magic Hazard and published by ESDigital Games, is now available for PC via Steam for $19.99, with console versions coming later in the year. This column was written using a Steam code for the game sent to Hard Drive by a Magic Hazard representative.]

Sometimes my plans don’t work out. My first candidate for this week’s column, due to transoceanic communication breakdown, turned out to just be a demo, while my second is embargoed for another 3 weeks. As a last resort, I went ahead and played the cheap digging game.

This was only a hail-Mary because A Game About Digging A Hole is already fairly well-known. It’s been out for a month, has over 9,200 reviews and a Very Positive rating on Steam, and seems to have strong word of mouth, as that’s how I heard about it in the first place. As previously noted, one of my goals with this column is to highlight games that ordinarily wouldn’t get much hype, but AGADAH is already on track to be one of this year’s designated indie sleeper hits.

It does feel like it’s the pilot for a bigger project, however. AGADAH is short, simple, and cheap, and treats those qualities like they’re features; its Steam page repeatedly notes that, at a starting price of $4.99, it costs less than a fancy coffee. From the jump, AGADAH’s developers are careful to manage your expectations.

You play AGADAH as an anonymous person who happens across an ad tacked to a billboard: someone is selling a house in your neighborhood for only $10,000 and there’s a treasure hidden in its back yard. It then makes a hard cut to you, a newly broke idiot, standing outside your new house with a shovel and a dream.

Your goal is to dig into your back yard until you find the treasure in question. For some reason, you’re equipped with an electric-powered shovel that runs off a portable battery. If the battery’s power ever runs to zero, it explodes, which drops you back at ground level with minimal health and battery life.

However, you can find mineral deposits in the soil as you go which can be sold online via the computer in your new garage. The money is used to recharge the shovel, treat your wounds, and gradually accumulate upgrades to your battery life, shovel efficiency, and carrying capacity. You can also buy a jetpack, which becomes necessary early on to both escape your own hole and safely descend to where you left off.

The systems do end up puncturing the game’s sole plot element. Once you get far enough down, you start reliably finding gold, platinum, and diamond deposits, which made me wonder if the treasure you’re after really was all the ore you mined along the way. There was a point early on where I’d have been happy to settle for the quarter-ton of precious metals, the functioning jetpack, and what appears to be a small house in a decent neighborhood.

As it turns out, there is a last-minute plot twist, but it’s a little crazier than that. Once you’ve reached AGADAH’s conclusion, which took me just under 3 hours, you can immediately start over with some bonus objectives to complete its achievement list.

For most of its running time, AGADAH is a calming experience that taps into some of the same meditative vibes as Hardspace: Shipbreaker or Powerwash Simulator. You have a job to do and are largely left alone to do it. It’s the sort of game that exists to help you work through your podcast backlog.

It does start getting more complicated as you get further underground. Lava rocks can damage your character on contact, you’ll need to bring dynamite to destroy certain obstacles, and it’s not hard to accidentally fall to your death. Once you get about 20 meters underground, it also adds a sort of ticking-clock element where you need to save enough battery for the end of each run to be able to escape from your own tunnel.

AGADAH also has a strange issue with its lack of physics, as disconnected chunks of dirt or rock end up suspended in mid-air unless you carefully destroy them all. I could look up from the bottom of my excavation and see concentric rings of debris floating in space, which created the impression that I was the only thing in this universe who was subject to gravity.

The most crucial problem with AGADAH is that you have to click a lot. You initially have to dig out each shovelful of earth by “hand,” which leads to a lot of repetitive motion. The fourth shovel upgrade does turn it into a sort of vacuum drill, which finally allows you to hold down the button and blow away all the earth in your path, but my wrist was already feeling the strain by that point. If you’ve got a gamepad with a turbo feature or some other workaround (i.e. a younger relative or offspring who hasn’t wrecked their body yet), it’s worth using for AGADAH.

While A Game About Digging A Hole lasts, it’s a decent project simulator with a simple but absorbing core loop. Most of my criticisms boil down to either quality-of-life issues or requested additions, and quite a few people seem really mad about the ending, but it’s a decent, short time-waster. In a perfect world, this is simply the teaser for a more elaborate, somewhat crazier Another Game About Digging A Hole, with better physics and an auto-shovel system.

[A Game About Digging A Hole, developed by Cyberwave and published by Drillhounds, is now available on PC via Steam. This column was written using a copy of the game purchased by Hard Drive.]