In a nutshell | January 2026

Of Cult of the Lamb and Network Effect

It feels weird writing 2026 in the title. What do you mean that we are already in 2026, and January is already over? Where does time go?

As most of you already know, I moved to Spain this month, and as chaotic as it has been, I’m getting more and more used to it. Aside from the occasional language mishaps here and there (e.g., ordering a cold brew and a hot americano instead of just one ice americano), it has been great! The city is absolutely lovely. The weather has been occasionally rainy, but it’s not cold, and it’s been really fun to just walk around and explore the streets. Randomly coming across flamenco dancers putting on great shows in the middle of the streets has definitely been a highlight.

My husband doesn’t drink coffee, so I had to drink both of them on my own. Both were very good, though, so not a bad mistake at all.

As you can imagine, I didn’t have much time to play games or read stuff this month because of this, but let’s see what I managed to play or read!

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Games

Cult of the Lamb

The January game for the Good Game Lobby Club was Undertale. As I already watched countless playthroughs of the game and know most of its secrets by heart now, I decided to opt out of playing it, but it’s been very interesting to see everyone’s reactions to the game. Join the club if you would like to discuss it with us!

Cult of the Lamb is the game for February, but since I already skipped Undertale, I thought I could just start playing it early on. I had already played a good deal of Cult of the Lamb and already written about it in a roundup post before. But the great thing about this game is that you don’t really run out of things to do.

And with the whole moving to another country thing, I wanted to fall into the comfort of playing a familiar game, so this one was a no-brainer to play this month.

I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I can say that I have beaten most of the main bosses and will try to beat the ultimate (I think) boss - though I’m really in no rush to do so. For now, I’m just focusing on growing my camp, getting more Followers and doing occasional dungeon runs to farm resources.

I would love to play the new Woolhaven DLC when I get the chance, but I need to just finish the base game first.

Books

Network Effect

As I mentioned before in my November post, I’ve been going through the Murderbot Diaries. I had listened to them in audiobook format before, but now I’ve been reading them on my Kindle.

As the first full-length novel in the Murderbot Diaries, Network Effect takes us on a journey full of action, drama, friendship, and a lot of heartwarming and tear-jerking moments. I love taking notes of my reactions on my Kindle as I read through books. I usually try not to filter myself and just write my heartfelt reaction to the scene, which is very fun when I reread the book later and see my reaction from back when I first read it. I’ve been doing the same thing for this series on this reread.

Looking back at the notes I took for Network Effect, you can tell that I was going through some emotions throughout the whole book. I apparently took 25 notes (most of which include a variety of ‘‘this is cute’’ and ‘‘this is heartbreaking’’), and highlighted even more stuff. I was very invested in the story, and I was glad to see that it was as fun as I remembered it being.

Next up in the series is System Collapse, which I just started reading. I was sad about my reread coming to an end, but apparently, the new book, Platform Decay, is coming out on May 5, so I’m looking forward to that.

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And that’s basically it for this month! It’s not much, and it’s already stuff that I was familiar with before, but sometimes it helps to take comfort in forms of art that you’ve already seen before if your mind is busy.

I’m hoping that after the dust settles in February, I can start a big new game. Currently, I’m trying to decide between Baldur’s Gate 3, Nier: Automata, and Disco Elysium. Which one do you think I should go with?

Of course, I’ll continue playing smaller indie games alongside this big game. The current lineup is: Return of the Obra Dinn, Citizen Sleeper, and probably Lil’ Guardsman but it is not set in stone. I only have my Steam Deck with me, as we had to leave my PC and our PS5 behind, but I think that the Steam Deck is more than enough for these games.

How was your January?