Human memory has been on my mind a lot. It feels like on the internet it’s almost impossible to escape talk of nostalgia. Everyone seems to want to do things that will remind them of when they were a kid. In February The Pokémon Company announced the release of minorly updated ROMs of FireRed and LeafGreen versions, games from 2004 that are themselves reconstructions of games from 1996, and that they are seriously for real genuinely charging money for them. Endlessly we watch games get remade, remastered, rereleased, reimagined. I look at this and think it must mean there’s a demand for the chance to relive the past.

I don’t really relate to feelings of nostalgia as I see them described. Replaying a game is extremely rare for me, as when I’ve tried, I’ve typically found nothing of value. Maybe my knowing what happens saps the appeal out of a game. Maybe for those ones I forget I’ve just changed so radically that I couldn’t even figure out what younger me saw in this thing. When I do replay a game, I usually find my attention is caught most by the parts I hadn’t remembered, and just how much there can be, even in only a couple years since putting a game down.

And yet I have my own ways of trying to hold on to the past. I maintain not just a backloggd account, not just a letterboxd account, not even just a Rate Your Music account, I also dutifully fill out a Google Sheets file with details on every game I have played or am currently playing, a numeric rating of what I think of the games, to reference at a glance, and the dates on which I both started and finished them, going back four years. This is not so I can write reviews, it’s because in recent years I had found myself more and more disquieted by how little I had committed to memory of the art I was experiencing. I had hoped a more active form of engagement would encourage me not to sleepwalk through my own life. I don’t want to think “what the hell was I thinking with this one,” I want to be able to recall what those thoughts might have been.

This hasn’t really worked that well. Especially with music, so many albums tucked away in my Spotify likes mystify me. When did I listen to or enjoy At the Drive-In? Apparently, I thought fondly of that one Brave Little Abacus record with the long name. Records tell me it was less than two years ago I listened to this album and liked it enough to hold on to. Couldn’t tell you what I was thinking because I don’t know what any of the songs sound like, or are about. If I pull at the foundations I uncover one thought: their vocalist sounds like SpongeBob. Very well done.

In my fervor to make my time spent living and breathing mean something, to pull feelings out of art and chew on them for longer, I have played and loved and hated quite a few titles by now. My poor, poor screenshots folder is now absolutely packed with things I wanted to keep with me. In an effort to better understand my habits, and learn to mediate with these feelings I hold, I find myself now writing a few words about a few games that, to me, did something that mattered, that stuck with me, for better or for worse.

Long Season

A few years back I played through Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 with my girlfriend, via the wonderful fan translation put out by Hilltop. We committed to syncing Boku’s life to our own, playing one day at a time, through the month of August, passing the controller back and forth each day. 

I think part of what kept the game alive in my heart was this consistency over a long period of time. Had I binged it alone, it may well have been a footnote on my backloggd account. But more so than the matter of pacing, Boku no Natsuyasumi 2, in keeping with its predecessor, is a game that encourages you to absorb it. Time only passes in game when you move between different areas, and if you want to stay somewhere a little longer, you can. Stare at the river if you like, it’s not going anywhere. 

The knowledge that time will stand still as long as you do works to discourage the player from leaving a scene unless they’re certain that’s what they want to do. You immerse yourself in the mundane because there is no penalty for doing so—only a limit on how many different things you can do in a day. I find it quite counter to a lot of other games’ philosophies. Xenoblade Chronicles was made by sick, sick people. But even something like Persona, something made to limit how much you can do in a way that comes across as a “carpe diem”—they’re still, at the end of the day, something to the effect of ten billion hours long. Those games are jammed full of Game to be Played, and while I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing, I find the Boku approach much more emotionally liberating.

Central to this, in my mind, is that our main character, Boku, also keeps a journal. Every night, just before he crawls into bed, he writes an entry about something he did that day, accompanied by a cute little drawing. On many occasions in my life, I’ve tried to take up journaling. It’s never stuck, the book will always find some forgotten crevice to sink into for years at a time, but that meant it fascinated me to have this little record of what I’d done that I could reference whenever I wanted to. I think part of what captured my heart was the game’s system for deciding what your journal entry will look like—even if you shape his overall adventure, Boku is the one deciding what he will remember. And while the game tries very hard to ensure you get an entry each day, if you do nothing it deems technically noteworthy, it tells you this:

The way that Boku cultivates deliberate slowness in the player is beautiful to me, it makes its environments truly sing. You begin to understand, and feel, someone else’s memory. If you can believe it, I was never a little Japanese boy growing up in the countryside by the sea, I never made beetles fight or anything like that. I’d never even seen a firefly until I was in my 20s. This is what I mean about creating a sense of time and place, though. Through the game I was able to be so engrossed that there wasn’t any incongruence to be felt. I could almost imagine what the sea breeze must have felt like. I grew attached to the little emotional arcs of the various characters. Towards the end, when one of them said, “I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I fell in love with this town,” I felt the game was talking right to me, the player.

Of course, these games never left Japan, not officially. I think this is also a vital consideration. The dialogue here wasn’t really written for someone like me, necessarily. If anything, Boku no Natsuyasumi is itself a deeply nostalgic work. This game had strong staying power—I even still remember what I named my first truly accomplished beetle wrestler: Red Lightning. Perhaps, then, the trick to making me feel is not tapping into my past, but rather, showing me yours.

The Summer Ends

A few months ago I played Umurangi Generation, a photography game that positions you as a courier during the end of the world, equipped with only a camera. I had expected a slam dunk; I’m very fond of my own silly little instant camera, personally. There’s an easy appeal to having a physical memento like a picture, something so much sturdier than human recollection. Having had this essay brewing in my head, and recalling the praise I’d heard for Umurangi Generation,  I booted it up and found something unexpected.

At first, I really wanted to root for it. I thought I was on board with what it was doing. You get placed into these little vignettes—a rooftop gathering, or some commotion going down at an intersection, or a vigil for someone we’ve never met—and given a list of things to find and snap photos of. I felt that by being forced to stay in one spot, I was encouraged to absorb details. I wanted to know the story of this world and the people in it; the minimalistic storytelling was really working for me. And then the game and I stepped out of sync.

After a couple of stages of contemplative stillness, the game pivots towards action shots. Battlefields with soldiers bleeding out and kaiju fighting giant robots. Suddenly I found it all tonally dissonant. I wanted it to be over with. Where once I saw a tasteful degree of restraint, I now felt I was wandering through a world that had failed to reach my heart, being asked “isn’t it so sad what’s happening?” Objectives that used to give me reason to linger in a space were now actively forcing me to search for graffiti with the word “boomer” on it while the world was meant to be ending. Maybe there’s commentary in that—the atonality of life, negotiating with yourself over your continued existence in a time of strife—but for me, it broke the spell. “There is no one right answer,” I thought to myself. “Weren’t you just telling me I won’t be told what’s right or wrong? That art is subjective?” The pictures I took ceased to have meaning when it occurred to me they would be roughly the same as the pictures everyone else took.

Even if I was sad to be fighting with this game, I still did see it through to the end, and something really interesting happened. After you complete all 8 stages, you get dropped into one final area, with no camera this time. There’s no pause menu full of objectives. I breathed a sigh of relief, that I could freely explore, take in my surroundings without being pushed any which way. I stared at the starry night overhead, lit up crimson. I thought about the game’s mascot telling me that Umurangi is a Te Reo word meaning “red sky.” I saw birds and flowers that seemed to be made of stardust. I saw something great and terrible, perched atop a mountain, blocking out the moon. The game handed me a camera again, and with irritation, I didn’t check to see how much film I had, didn’t think about making what was to be the last shot really count, and,

The game didn’t continue, didn’t chastise me for looking at the wrong thing. It showed me a mirror, and saw itself out.

The thing that I haven’t really been saying here is that part of what I wanted to find in Umurangi Generation was that special quality that I think a photograph has, that feeling of a particular moment, something normally fleeting and ephemeral, cauterized to staunch the flow of time. Even if I didn’t personally resonate with most of it, I kind of love how it ended, for me. This is a permanent symbolic impressing of my thought processes, encoded in zeroes and ones, that any computer screen can replicate. Whether or not I think Umurangi Generation is good means nothing to me—it told me something about what I value, and this final captured moment is far more interesting to me than any critiques I might have.

Fresh Flowers For All Time

This section will spoil critical plot details from Seabed. I think spoilers can work to give you a reason to enjoy a piece of art you might otherwise not have, but I also recognize that Seabed is a mystery novel. If you want to preserve your modesty, go read it and come back. I promise my words aren’t going anywhere—they will last until entropy takes them, like insects in amber.

Beginning to pull apart my feelings on Paleontology Soft’s 2016 “yuri-themed mystery visual novel” Seabed feels something like trying to split the atom with a butter knife. But we will try all the same. I’ll start with the age-old adage: women can do anything. Unfortunately, sometimes this includes suffering greatly.

Sachiko, our protagonist, is an amnesiac, unable to cope with the sudden loss of her life partner Takako. The entire visual novel traces a record of her winding path towards recognizing the symptoms of her trauma as they manifest in response to Takako’s death. In all but explicit terms, the novel is clear that she has DID, and the shock of that traumatic event destabilizes her and causes an increase in symptoms: dissociation, switching, hallucinations, and other sensory phenomena that might be classified as Not Super Normal. She realizes she had forgotten Takako was dead at all, and had lived her life talking to a ghost for years. What I want to take a look at is how she tries to cope—she flips through her old journal. Records of time spent with Takako. She hopes to find a passage that might cover her lost memories, and make it all make sense.

I will be forthcoming: it reminds me of my own experiences. Sometimes you find an old journal entry was torn out to protect you from knowledge you weren’t ready to process. Sometimes you find one you once wrote, and then later angrily scrawled out, in thick pools of ink, as if trying to measure out in millilitres your sense of disavowal for feelings you had earnestly held before. “Not even I will know what it said, when I’m done.” I may be so fixated upon journals, photographs, these physical records of life, because I know how easy it is for those memories to be stricken from the record while you’re not looking.

Seabed bills itself as a mystery, though its approach is not so direct as I think that might imply. If you ask me, I think it fits more into the iyashikei subgenre. It is Slice of Life, sharpened to a fine point, a knife’s edge to twist into your heart, and leave you feeling a little better and a lot worse when some of your humors are on the floor. 

There are dozens of scenes of mundanity. In that same way Boku asks you to contemplate, Seabed ensures it. Sachiko makes her breakfast and talks to the innkeeper about how she likes her eggs. She goes to the inn’s library and talks to a child that reminds her of her younger self. She gets pounced on by the innkeeper, drunkenly confessing her love for Sachiko, who proceeds to get up and go for a walk. Every suggestion of a fast-paced, forward-moving plot is snubbed by this novel. Prose is matter-of-fact and simplistic, and taking all of that along with the way the soundtrack will loop in these scenes, whether mundane or emotional, while the core mystery is mostly left to simmer, it works to pull you in like quicksand.

And so it really does something to me, deep in my core, when I listen to a song from the soundtrack, and it reminds me of my favourite scene in the novel. It makes me feel every bit of heartwrenching pain Sachiko does, as she discusses with her alter how she may never meet another person who could so easily understand her as Takako did, juxtaposed against the quiet of the hotel room she’s staying in, and the gentle thrum of life happening just outside her door. Scrolling through my phone’s camera roll helps me remember when and where I’ve been—but even recorded videos don’t put me into my old headspace the way this game can transport me into the heart of a grieving widow. It’s some kind of magic, to me.

But I mentioned I played through it twice. Over and over throughout my second reading I was struck by the same familiar feeling. “I don’t remember this part,” I would say to the friend I was reading alongside. “I thought this happened, like, WAY earlier.” It seemed despite my love for Seabed I still couldn’t really commit all that much of it to my mind. Not even the broad-strokes sequence of events. I had felt like I was somehow letting myself down—how can I be this bad at remembering things that matter to me?

I had to get worse before I got any better. My curious bookkeeping habit metastasized, over time, and became a need to record everything. My spreadsheet became a backlog, hundreds of titles long, paralyzing in its breadth. I dutifully held myself to finishing everything I’d started for the sake of some elusive, truer form of understanding. In this state I set so many arbitrary rules I had to follow—I would not start a new JRPG while I was on a break from Trails, because what if I came back to Trails and forgot everything? No, better to turn this hobby into homework for myself than to keep forgetting things. I hung a sword over my own head and called it discipline.

Fingernails on a Chalkboard

This leads me to my time with Final Fantasy 7. This game may have been the single worst victim of my compulsion to treat the hobby as a responsibility. When I see that something is critically acclaimed, historically important to the development of the medium, and even has Vincent Valentine in it—I’m gonna come running to see what’s going on.

At the outset, my adventurous spirit was rewarded! I still maintain that the Midgar portion of Final Fantasy 7 is great. I noticed a few little gripes—the translation in particular standing out to me—but for the most part, it was all killer, no filler. So much was new to me, too, and the novelty of my first Final Fantasy game was a big draw. The possibilities whispered to me by Materia seemed endless, the world and its concepts were all fresh, and while I may have known Cloud Strife and friends through cultural osmosis, seeing them in their game lit up my heart. I even liked that weird translation at first. This guy are sick! Tell ‘em Aerith!

The slow fading of its shine was subtle, and hard to detect, but without realizing it myself I had checked out. Something along the way broke in me. I think it’s less important that I detail what I didn’t like, and more so, that I kept trying to play. I had been playing this game for my partner, intending to go through it in chunks when she was in town. And all that time I kept guilting myself for not playing it when I had the chance. Deep down, I wanted to spend my time with someone I love on something better than Final Fantasy 7. Why was this something to guilt myself over?

Final Fantasy 7 leached out of the space between my eyes, leaving behind the suggestion of a game that I struggled to play, and yet held myself to finishing for years. The way it failed to stay present in my mind, failed to compel me to engage, began to feel like my own personal failing. It’s my fault for spacing out my playthrough so widely. I should be focused enough to know where I’m going, it shouldn’t matter that the translation is famously confusing. If I just cared a little more, I’d finish this thing. It didn’t strike me that I’m under no obligation to care about everything until my partner encouraged me to drop this game without remorse. I think I had still yet to understand what Boku might have been trying to tell me.

You Forgot It In People

Here we reach the core of it: feelings of obligation. The reason I felt so drained by Final Fantasy 7 was not just spacing out my playthrough, though that didn’t help me retain information. It was holding myself to it so ardently that really killed it for me. In the same sense, Umurangi Generation instilled a different sense of obligation. Artistic expression through photography felt stymied by a formula that produces nothing but an album of all the same photos each playthrough.

In contrast, Boku no Natsuyasumi and Seabed each remind me, through beautiful expressions of not-a-whole-lot happening, the value of deliberation and slowness in everyday life. Neither title fixed me on their own, it was and still is an ongoing process of self-discovery. But the ways they make me feel are relevant, in my opinion, to this process, and their lasting places in my heart stand as testament to their efficacy. If it wasn’t already obvious, I recommend both games wholeheartedly. You, too, should remember to slow down once in a while, and take in the art you love, rather than consume it. On another note, I haven’t remembered to update my spreadsheet in a while.

Isabelle is highly preoccupied with hype moments and aura, and the weight of human emotion. You can find more of her words on Bluesky.

The post Games About Nothing Mean Everything to Me — by Isabelle appeared first on Gamesline.

The Strip (Including Freeside)

The Strip dazzles visitors who come from far and wide like moths to a flame with its flashy neon lights, brazenly armed Securitrons who bark questions for credentials if you step near them, and shady casinos differentiated only by which flavor of crime they’ll ask you to commit. Step just outside the gates into Freeside and enjoy a more authentic local experience involving hunger, addiction, and folks who will greet you with both a smile and a knife. Together, The Strip and Freeside both offer the picture-perfect post-apocalyptic example of prime urban planning, where wealth is tersely guarded by the high rollers and poverty is for everyone else. Those who visit would do well to remember that The House Always Wins.

• An independent economy powered by gambling and quietly outsourced violence via one shadowy cabal or another
• Memorable dining experiences with unique fare
• Freeside locals are eager to relieve you of your excess caps, valuables, or blood, making your journey lighter

Black Mountain

Black Mountain serves as a scenic hike that active visitors are sure to love, staffed by enthusiastic super mutants with long-range weapons and a strong curiosity for using them on trespassers, with Black Mountain Radio ensuring that no one will mistake the experience for a peaceful hike. The climb is structured with narrow switchbacks and minimal cover, encouraging visitors to remain visible to the violent roaming patrols for the duration of their ascent. Reaching the summit is considered an achievement because it means guests are likely still breathing when they do it.

• Panoramic views victoriously earned under sustained sniper fire
• Locally managed radio station featuring first-of-its-kind shoot-first broadcasting standards
• A vertical route unlike any other designed to test endurance, tactics, and commitment to the journey

Promontory Point (Deathclaw Promontory)

In addition to a scenic capture of the rising cliffs of the Southwest, Promontory Point offers visitors a chance to interact with the Mojave Wasteland’s highest concentration of deathclaws who have claimed the area for their own. On arrival, guests can see an elevated area leading to a unified pack of motivated beasts who are eager to respond to visitors swiftly and collectively. Once spotted, guests can expect a prompt coordinated welcome, making retreat attempts both difficult and urgent. This is a popular destination for visitors seeking memorable wildlife encounters and immediate clarity about their perceived survival odds.

• Up-close impressions of wildlife conducted at full sprint
• Group-oriented residents who respond quickly to disturbances of all kinds
• Natural beauty of the Mojave Wasteland enjoyed from a safe distance

Camp Searchlight

Camp Searchlight offers visitors a softly glowing introduction to radiation exposure and long-term consequences of bad luck as a result of the NCR’s poor decisions. Formerly an NCR military installation, this camp now features open access to all the radiation exposure one could desire, in addition to a rabid roaming population of feral ghouls – mostly former NCR soldiers – who are eager to demonstrate their perception skills. Guests are encouraged to monitor their Geiger counter on their Pip Boy often and to appreciate the area’s history from as far away as they possibly can. Protective gear is strongly recommended to all, with exception to those who are interested in joining the ghoul population.

• Former soldiers now offering unscheduled encounters for morale purposes
• Opportunity to test out protective equipment
• Scenic desolation with some estimated educational value

Cottonwood Cove

Cottonwood Cove offers guests a firsthand look into the distinctive Legion culture, complete with slave pens, public punishments, a strictly adhered-to military discipline bordering on abuse. The camp’s waterside location next to the Colorado River offers scenic views and a dense population of mirelurks, thoughtfully positioned to discourage premature departures against Caesar’s wishes. As long as visitors remain useful or compliant, the chances of their heads ending up on a spike remain (somewhat) low. A short visit is recommended to first-time visitors, as longer stays can become complicated vis-à-vis NCR sanction. This location is an excellent stop for travelers curious about authoritarian regimes and their many red flags.

• Cultural misunderstandings promised to be resolved swiftly and on the spot
• Hospitality defined astonishingly narrowly
• Sightseeing is recommended to be done silently or otherwise from a considerable distance

Vault 22

Vault 22 invites guests to explore a once–cutting-edge agricultural research facility turned self-sustaining flora ecosystem, full of promising educational points and zero interest in human visitors. Travelers will find that the dense overgrowth and low visibility in rooms and hallways ensure that every encounter happens at close range and is almost never on their terms. Barely visible former residents and hostile plant life will offer sudden, intimate opportunities for guests to brush up on survival skills. The experience serves as a tour of scientific ambition and hubris, thoughtfully preserved in a state of permanent collapse.

• Overgrown hallways engineered for unique surprise encounters
• Airborne contaminants included at no charge throughout the facility
• Close-quarters combat encouraged by design from the dozens of locals who are puzzlingly still alive

The Divide

Many visitors find The Divide to be a dramatic travel destination defined by shattered highways, constant stormfronts, and have questions about if cannibalism is part of the custom practiced here. Guests are asked to navigate narrow, unstable routes while contending with unforeseen environmental hazards and residents who are eager to make friends. Occasional underground disturbances ensure no one can become too comfortable while sitting for too long, and a steady stream of recordings from a thoughtful tour guide provide insightful commentary on the history and identity of the region. It’s a popular choice for travelers who enjoy scenery, philosophical bloviating, and being overly blamed for past events they were not in control of.

• Opportunities for up-close encounters with nuclear weapons
• Locals shaped by the fractured land and are deeply committed to staying that way
• Scenic routes best enjoyed without stopping

Zion Canyon

Visitors are offered a rare opportunity in Zion Canyon to experience natural beauty primarily untouched by civilization, mostly because any sort of attempt at civilization keeps being violently interrupted. Towering red cliffs, monolithic rock formations, and lush winding rivers set a peaceful backdrop when being disrupted by ambushes and tribal warfare. Guests will swiftly encounter locals embattled within local conflicts, some of whom have very different ideas about hospitality towards visitors. This is an ideal destination for philanthropic visitors who enjoy challenging hikes and strategic outdoorsmanship, as well as constant reminders that they are a hopeless stranger in a strange land.

• Immediate cultural immersion
• Regular opportunities to practice and exercise diplomacy skills
• Trails through exceptional an landscape primed for reflection, photography, and sudden evasive maneuvers

Big MT

The Big MT welcomes visitors to its research facility where innovation once flourished and oversight has long since vanished. Upon arrival, guests will find that the staff has helpfully unburdened you of both your brain and your spine to streamline the facility experience. Enthusiastic robotic personalities will insist upon their lengthy lectures and explanations of their research while their nemesis contributes regular announcements via a jarring, echoing intercom that thunders across the entire site at inopportune moments of concentration. Autonomous property defenses and experimental lifeforms seem to continue their routines and security checks long after they should have been shut down, creating a lively atmosphere of ongoing research and education for visitors who are curious about scientific advancement.

• Mandatory complimentary removal of organic parts upon arrival
• Free educational research lectures administered at length without consent
• Active patrolling experiments operating without supervision for maximum efficiency

The Sierra Madre Resort & Casino

The Sierra Madre invites guests to experience a long-forgotten pre-war luxury establishment with their own non-negotiable complimentary explosive collar included at no charge upon arrival. Guests will be greeted by a tour guide with great detail about the location and then released into a fog of corrosive red cloud for a uniquely location-specific experience. Visitors are encouraged to savor each and every step they make and to take their time soaking in the wondrous sights of the Grand Opening as the local workforce enthusiastically roams the sites, offering a highly interactive experience for all who pass through the gates. The promise of leaving wealthier than they arrived attracts many visitors to this site, assuming they’ll be able to leave at all.

• Cutting edge wearable technology that provides a once-in-a-lifetime experience when exposed to the certain radio frequencies
• An environment that provides a refreshing break from excess, featuring near-total deprivation
• The Sierra Madre’s signature vermillion toxic cloud that helps to encourage efficient navigation and brisk sightseeing for guests

SAFETY NOTE:

By reading this article, you relinquish any right to lawsuits that may be derived from experiences at any of these sites or locations. The publishers of this article are not responsible for injury, death, or any other unwelcome circumstances guests may experience at any of the sites or locations. Visitors are assumed to travel prepared and to remember that our travel guides will never lie, but may at times omit critical safety details for better ratings.

Sarah Everett is an avid poster and Red Dead Redemption 2 player. You can find her on Twitter, Bluesky and regularly streaming on Twitch.

The post Your Ill-Advised Travel Guide to the Mojave Wasteland – by Sarah Everett appeared first on Gamesline.

These are films of varying quality. Realistically, most of them settle around a two-star rating, but maybe one of the movies on this list will create a strange and panging interest inside of your soul… If so, I implore you to sit down and watch– maybe something incredible will happen!

I should also clarify that I’m using the term “low-budget”, but I’m not looking up the budget for ANY of these movies. Low-budget is a vibe. Some of these movies were even released in-theaters, but still give a low-budget, straight to DVD energy about them. Come with me on a beautiful journey… RIGHT NOW!

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016)

What would happen if they turned H.P. Lovecraft into a pale little twiggy magic boy, and Cthulhu was his best friend? Well, what would happen is that I would watch it. I’d watch the whole trilogy, actually. Yeah… (I look away and stare at the wall for a minute.) Yeah, there’s really three of these movies. Not to mention that the movies were based on a graphic novel.

The Howard Lovecraft trilogy is a series of movies with all the visual flair of Tim Burton, Psychonauts, and a mobile game in one. They were all fine enough to watch, but the first film in the trilogy, Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom, held an iron grip on my brain for weeks after I watched it. I couldn’t stop thinking about how Howard Lovecraft and Cthulhu had a snowball fight and built a snowman together. One just can’t forget something like that!

If you’re interested and committed to watching random crap, seriously, watch these movies. They’re all free on YouTube, and it’s so fun watching them and pointing out every strange story choice, every unfinished or unrendered shot, or just clapping every time Spot (Cthulhu) is on-screen.

The Barbie Diaries (2006)

This Barbie movie looks like a PS2 game, and I wouldn’t want it ANY other way. You might be thinking to yourself “Don’t all Barbie movies kinda look like PS2 games…?” And to that I’d say… Um… Maybe? But this one looks even worse, and that’s fucking awesome. The textures are crunchy, the graphics are so specifically 2006, and everything is clipping into each other. Still not convinced to watch? Then I’ll mention that this is basically Mean Girls but with Barbie and her awesome all-girl rock band, and maybe even a little bit of… (gasp)… Magic!

There are countless animated Barbie movies, and many of them are masterpieces. If you don’t believe me, then go look at the Letterboxd ratings. THIS particular movie, however, is not a masterpiece. Still, it sticks in my mind because it’s such a strange, ugly, awesome little outlier.

Minimoni the Movie: Okashi na Daibouken! (2002)

M-I-N-I-M-O-N-I！ Minimoni, Minimoni, Minimoni です！

This is the part of the list where I try to get you into Morning Musume, a Japanese idol group that formed in 1998, with music written and produced by Tsunku♂ of Rhythm Heaven fame! Minimoni is a sub-group of Morning Musume aimed towards children, so of course I love it!

In 2002, the Minimoni movie was released! It’s a combination of live-action and CGI animation, but even the environments in the live-action segments are 3D modeled with that early 2000s goodness. It’s a fun adventure movie with music, but more importantly it has the character Beppin, voiced by Yuko Nakazawa from Morning Musume, the most sexy and beautiful obscure waifu that you’ve never heard of before and has 1 image on Google. The movie is available with English subs for free on Youtube! Go, go, go!

Life’s A Jungle: Africa’s Most Wanted (2012)

All the characters are chill as fuck and don’t care about anything, especially the main dog character. Do I remember any specific events that happened? Absolutely not, but that doesn’t matter because my nuts got slapped off and went flying across the room like a rubber band when I watched it, and I think you should watch it too.

Bratz: Fashion Pixiez (2007)

Bratz: Fashion Pixiez is a fever dream. It’s a beautiful nightmare. It’s Lynchian filmmaking for the pretty pink fashion girlies. I had the pleasure of watching this film for the second time in 2025, and was able to go in with a sense of clarity when compared to the confused, scared, bewildering, feelings I had when experiencing it blindly. My feet were firmly on the ground this time, and to be completely honest, the second watch wasn’t as good as the first. That shouldn’t matter to YOU, however, because all you really need is one watch-through of this baby to have your mind blown and your sinuses cleared.

I’m also going to take this opportunity to say that IT’S TIME to bring back pants layered under skirts. The 20-year cycle means Y2K is back, and all we need to do is stop being a bunch of pussies. If the Bratz Fashion Pixies can layer miniskirts with jeans, then so can we!

The Amazing Maurice (2022)

It might be a little disrespectful to put on this list, but can you blame me for initially thinking this movie would be average low-budget Tubi slop? Clearly, I was uninformed, as The Amazing Maurice is based on the classically witty and fantastical stories of Terry Pratchett, AKA British writing royalty. This movie is GOOD. So fun and charming, with an engaging and exciting story, a solid voice cast, and a satisfying cleverness when it comes to the writing. The only problem is that our titular Maurice is maybe a teensy little bit… ugly… I’m sorry Maurice, you’re UGLY! But I’ve learned to love you, and you’re voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, and he does a really great job. B-Cumb, you were made to play an animated cat, NOT an animated Grinch!

I know the majority of you wouldn’t pick this out for movie night, but if you’re ever left with nothing to watch and see that smug ass cat while scrolling on Tubi, maybe give it a try!

Monster High: 13 Wishes (2013)

The way that the film Monster High: 13 Wishes was released in 2013? You can only do something like that every 100 years, so I have to assume they’ve been planning this film for decades.

I actually never grew up with Monster High. It was a bit past my time, and I was more of a Bratz and Barbie girl growing up anyway, but the Monster High character designs have consistently slapped, and I’ve found myself drawn to them like a cartoon man floating towards a pie on a windowsill. I think that any of the Monster High movies are going to be a fun watch, but 13 Wishes was truly pretty incredible and strangely compelling? Also, I wish that every animated movie had voice acting like this. It’s SO peak cartoon for girls, every character has a fun and distinct voice, with a specific shoutout to Debi Derryberry’s Draculaura, that is so high-pitched and strange that it literally sounds like it was edited in post.

The Tangerine Bear: Home in Time for Christmas! (1999)

This movie may feel like a weird little outlier on this list, and that’s because it is! It’s the only traditionally-animated movie listed here, and the only Christmas movie, too. So, why is it here?

The Tangerine Bear: Home in Time for Christmas! is a movie that I watched on repeat as a kid, but before this year, it’d been over 15 years since I had seen it. Before my rewatch, I assumed it would just be an about average, cute, sweet movie to watch around Christmastime. As I was watching, I realized just how wrong I was. The Tangerine Bear is a PERFECT movie. I love every one of these sweet characters, and it’s incredibly heartwarming, fun, musical, and really charmingly animated for its supposed budget. I’ll be rewatching The Tangerine Bear again in 2026’s holiday season, and I highly recommend you do, too! It’s free on Tubi!

Top Cat Begins (2015)

Top Cat Begins was there for me in my darkest hours of 2025. Top Cat? Benny the Ball? Choo Choo? These cats are like my second family. Bad Dog? Sexy Goth German cat? Small Man holding a bag, whose mother never truly loved him? I’ve come to begrudgingly accept them as an extended, married-into family.

Also, wow! It’s so nice to watch an animated movie with voice actors in it! And noooooo, I’m not talking about Jack Black as Bowser, or Zendaya as Meechee, or even Rihanna as Smurfette. The film was produced and distributed in Mexico, so the English release had it re-dubbed with a cast of classic cartoon voice actors and anime dubbers. Charlie Adler, Diedrich Bader, Ben Diskin, Steve Blum, Grey DeLisle… these are names that warm the sweet little smiling cartoon heart that lives in the left side of my chest cavity!

Anyway, Top Cat Begins was a complete box office failure, making only $4.8 million with a budget of $8 million, but if it becomes an emotional support movie for one woman in her late twenties, then can it really be called a failure? (Yes)

I’d like to end this off by saying that I wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun watching these if I wasn’t doing it with my lovely, wonderful, and hilarious friends. The real reason why I love watching low-budget animated films isn’t to turn my brain off, or to scratch some sick itch to watch bad media, it’s to laugh and make jokes along with my friends while experiencing something new together. Will you have as good of a time watching these movies as I did? Maybe you will if you grab a few reliable friends who are just as excited about watching a random movie on Tubi as you are.

I’d like to wish everyone reading this a prosperous 2026, where you can create fond memories with the people you live, laugh, and love with! ♥

Jules is an extremely cartoony vtuber that you can follow on Bluesky and on Twitch at twitch.tv/jules.

The post Low-Budget Animated Movies That Slapped My Nuts Clean Off In 2025 – by Julesy Woolsy appeared first on Gamesline.

Inevitably there are about 20-30 games any given year that I could have or should have played, and so many of those games (sometimes up to 28 or 29) I end up whiffing on. Did I play Expedition 33 this year? No. Would it have been on this list if I had? Almost certainly! Pathologic 3 came out on January 6 of 2026, thank God, or else I’d have to wonder if it should be on this list too. 

And if that isn’t enough, I’m also a lazy connoisseur of games that simply never end. Gacha games? Well I’ve played a few. Final Fantasy XIV? Based on my “hours played,” I’m guessing it ate more than one game up this year. And I don’t apologize for that entirely, but in trying to cut back, I also end up playing and loving games I missed in previous years – Neon White and Yakuza 0 were masterpieces! That were released…a really long time ago. 

So you can see my dilemma! And yet, here we are, and here I am having been asked to give a recap of the year in gaming a half month after its ignoble death. My one saving grace is that this is unlikely to be the worst thing you’ve read in 2026 so far. …probably. On to the races!

1. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

I’ve been pretty serious about this being my number one game of 2025 with a bullet, and I’m here to say, even having not finished every last ending, that it remains my number one with a bullet. Kaz Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi have teamed up before, and World’s End Club had glimpses of what Hundred Line would become, but without a stuck landing. This game, this massive hunk of gaming experience and overwhelming scale, absolutely sticks that landing and more. I’m not entirely sure if it paid off monetarily for the studio, particularly as Kodaka and Uchikoshi are, effectively, their own studio, but if it didn’t that can easily be put down to the overwhelming and alienating style of the game. Anime, with weird sexualization of (legal god I swear they’re legal) teens, a strategy game with a VN shell, and 100 endings promised and delivered make for a game that not everyone is gonna pick up. That said, the quality and the care put into making this game work is beyond anything I could’ve expected. This is a form-defining piece of art, and if the boys are to be believed, it’s not even fully complete yet. Please dig in.

2. Blue Prince

If there was plausibly a challenger to Hundred Line for the top spot, this is it. If you had these swapped – as noted rabble rouser Sam Sheehan has in the past – I couldn’t blame you. Blue Prince is a masterpiece, and is so damned compelling and monumental, I couldn’t believe it was actually released not too long ago. The game takes up rent-free space in my head, and I can recall mysteries I bailed on and themes I left unfinished simply because the game was taking over my life. I ran through so, so, so many runs of this game and still am not remotely “complete” if rumors are to be believed. I never had Balatro become a life-ruiner for me, but I could see the vision with Blue Prince. It calls to me, with its many rooms and rogue-lite structure, like the Green Goblin mask. “COWARD. Consider the way the Boiler Room works again.”

3. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter

Yes, yes I hear you all. This isn’t new it’s a remake. And it failed to capture the spirit of the series! And you, Trevor, didn’t even finish it! BE THAT AS IT MAY. This is the game that finally clued me in to what everyone is so excited about with these Trails in the Sky games. I just stupidly decided to stream the whole thing, which made it tough to put 12 hours in and not sleep. Ultimately, the switch to 3D and active-passive dual combat made this game feel fresh and compelling while also keeping the feeling of the vast potential of the series intact. I can’t wait to finish it and continue on my journey, and it’s hard to say a remake can do better than that.

4. Hell Clock

A Brazilian Hades-like, Hell Clock is not perfect, and that’s ok. It’s clearly a labor of love from a smaller studio, it’s concepts in the narrative are fascinating, and it covers a period of time and place (late 19th century Brazil and its revolutionary struggle) that are rarely touched on by games in general. Ultimately, the game feels great to play, is a lot of fun to experience, features beautiful Portuguese voice acting, and is not the usual fare one would enjoy. Is it as good as Hades? Pretty unfair question dogg! It’s plenty good and plenty fun and let’s be honest if you’re already thinking of playing it you’ve put 400 hours into various Hades already, so a change might be good.

5. Umamusume: Pretty Derby

The horses are women! The women are horses! They’re kind of like if track stars were also racehorses! And they’re cute and there’s a kind of romantic dynamic a little bit but not much. And it’s wholesome! And there’s a school. And you’re a coach. And this should not work for me it should absolutely not work for me at all, but it absolutely flawlessly does. I didn’t play this as much as I could have, but it still left its mark on me and convinced me of the juice the Umamusume series has. There’s a clear reason this is a juggernaut in Japan and worldwide, and it’s because it has a hell of a good heart. The game itself is also very fun!

6. HORSES

Feel kind of bad ranking Horses this low, but the oft-banned, oft-talked about game is honestly kind of more than the sum of its parts and also less than the sum of its parts. A brilliant setup and execution in the Italian naturalist film approach, with truly terrifying visuals and a lot of surprising revelations, the game feels like a hellish delight while its being played. The effect fades a bit upon recollection, but it’s a game that goes for a particular and dramatic reading and lands it pretty damn well! It’s a fascinating piece, and I’ve thought about it way more than I thought I would after beating it. It’s not difficult and it’s not long and if you’re worried about either of those things, do not play it. But if you like extreme media, this is psychologically and visually chilling. Only on GOG for what it’s worth!

7. Split Fiction

Does this count even though I watched the game on YouTube and didn’t play it? Yes, obviously it does because watching people perform couch co-op is the best I can do at the moment. This game, a follow-up to the similar It Takes Two, is a really fun romp through the psyche of two writers, who each have to manage and navigate their own creative landscapes as well as their partner’s. It’s not going to blow your mind – consider this the anti-Horses that way – but it will make you rethink how games ought to work and it is fun as the dickens, even just watching it. Creative and colorful and effortlessly fun.

8. Unbeatable

This is only this low because I haven’t played the game itself yet, and I almost am in my “maybe this is honorable mention because I don’t know” bit. But the demo for this wonderful rhythm game that focuses on the trials and tribulations of a gang of misfits in a land where music has been banned got under my skin in a real way. The music is full of immediate earworms, the art is gorgeous and idiosyncratic, and the gameplay feels great. This latter point is a big deal since PC rhythm games often feel kind of chunky and bad. Unbeatable feels like it fits like a glove. Pick up the full game now!

9. Monster Hunter Wilds

Why isn’t this higher? Well, because it’s not like…a ton different than Monster Hunter World to me. It’s good though and it deserves a spot here and maybe this is the year I finally figure out how to play these games and love them, please someone help me figure out how to properly love these beautiful and difficult games!

10. Hollow Knight: Silksong

Low because I am cheating! I am cheating! I haven’t touched this game! But much like the other considered entry for this (Promise Mascot Agency), I’m absolutely thrilled this game exists. What a coup for Hollow Knight Nation that we got our sequel, and what a great and exciting thing it is that such a game – a sidescroller that is hard as hell – exists in such a pure way. It’s unique, it’s fun, it’s gripping, it satisfies. And when I do play it I’m probably gonna be mad I didn’t rank it at least third.

Dr. Trevor Strunk is host of the gaming interview podcast No Cartridge Audio as well as author of the book Story Mode. You can find him on Bluesky, on Twitter @hegelbon and support No Cartridge on Patreon.

The post Trevor Strunk’s Top 10 Games of 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

I’ve hit a threshold with video games. It’s hard to place why, but I just play them less these days. Maybe the shrinking pool of games journalism makes it harder to find what really hits for me, perhaps it’s the dour mood of watching the games industry, could be I’m just not good at playing games anymore.

It’s not cheap to love games, money or time-wise. I like to have beaten a game before I pass judgement. But thirty, fourty, one-hundred hours… It can be a lot when you’re juggling a job in labor and creative pursuits. 

But games are nothing if not a rascal of a medium. Their hurdles, quirks, and mechanics can turn the smallest detail into a whole story. How was I supposed to anticipate I would spend all of September going over my Silksong route again and again in my head? Or that a brief detour into VRChat would turn into me and a friend hosting a whole party? When games work for me, they straddle the line between escape and obsession. I can’t always handle the obsession, but I can’t deny the passion.

I also played a metric ton of Old School Runescape, but you can follow me on socials if you want to hear about that.

Part 2: Maybe Next Year

Nine out of ten times, I’m going to wait until a game is finished before I play it. I don’t want to spoil my appetite with a version of a game I will eventually lose to the development cycle. 

But the independent video game is not always a safe investment for your patience. While it was always possible an early access game would never come out, it feels like these days one must be on the lookout for next year’s hopefuls in case they get cancelled early. (Oh Dreamsettler, I would have pre-ordered a $100 deluxe edition if I had known!)

So this year I swallowed my pride and tried some games before they were completely finished. 

Endless Legend 2 was my favorite of these. The first Endless Legend turned me around on the concept of 4X games entirely, and the original ideas that made Endless Legend special are developed even further in 2. The game suffers from visual clutter and some systems (like the hero relationship system) that feel severely undercooked, but I loved digging into this game’s factions. The Necrophages especially were both visually charming and a fun, high momentum take on a militaristic 4X faction. 

Ambrosia Sky Act One had the benefit of being an “Act One.” The promise that the story would keep moving forward made my few hours with the first act feel meaningful. And I’m glad I took the chance, because this game is really special. It’s lovely and interested in dark, sad themes. I’ve written deeper thoughts here, but this quick and rough peek into the story has me really excited for the next two acts. Also Ambrosia Sky had the best looking hands in a video game this year.

Ratatan gives us a taste of a modern, roguelike take on Patapon. While I don’t think the roguelite angle is a great fit, I can’t say it’s all that far from doing missions for supplies in the original Patapon. Otherwise, the character designs are still incredibly charming and it’s easy to zone out to the rhythm mechanics. Here’s hoping they take out the mobile game-esque weapon upgrade system. 

Deadlock is definitely calling to me as a former Dota 2 player and Team Fortress 2 dabbler. I’ve played it enough to know I like the style and am really into its arcane (magically and mechanically speaking) MOBA design. Here’s hoping it comes out before they sap every female character of their butch energy.

Ena’s Dream BBQ offered some truly amazing animation at the cost of some incredibly hit or miss dialogue. It’s not exactly my thing, but I’m curious how it’ll turn out. If you’re a Newgrounds fan who also likes Slave of God, this is probably the perfect game for you. 

Also some more Deltarune chapters came out. I liked them.

Part 3: I Got the Rhythm In Me

We like rhythm games again, don’t we? Perhaps it was the explosive popularity of the free-to-play Newgrounds finger dancer Friday Night Funkin’, but this year seemed to see a small but spirited return to the genre. 

Early in the year we saw Rift of the Necrodancer, whose claim to fame was its mix of Guitar Hero and roguelike mechanics. After four years in early access, we got Rhythm Doctor, which offered challenging rhythm minigames with only one button. December saw the release of Bits & Bops and Unbeatable, the former being an independent take on Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven franchise and the latter being akin to a rhythmic One-Finger Death Punch. I haven’t played those last two as of writing this. 

I enjoyed my time with Rift of the Necrodancer and Rhythm Doctor, though undoubtedly more so with Rhythm Doctor. Rift of the Necrodancer absolutely has a ton of charm (and in my opinion the better soundtrack) but the whole experience suffers from high cognitive load.  I had my fun, but after the credits I felt so exhausted by its numerous mechanics I couldn’t really bring myself to boot it back up.

Rhythm Doctor, with its singular button, was much more chill and easy to enjoy. A flow state feels necessary for enjoying a rhythm game, and it was pretty easy to get into here, at least at the start. Near the end of the game you start to get a lot of audio cues to listen for, and while it takes longer to feel overwhelmed, it will happen. What makes it work in Rhythm Doctor is the clear intent to overwhelm: handling the stress fits the mechanics and themes of the game.

These are great games, despite how their design philosophies bump up against the way I like to play rhythm games (semi-catatonically). But there was one rhythm game that I kept coming back to this year, a rhythm game for playing dumbly and still feeling great… and that game is Fortnite Festival. 

Fortnite is admittedly in the doghouse right now because it’s doing Harry Potter skins, so when I talk about this game I want you to rest assured I did all my playing before that announcement, I have cancelled my subscription, and I don’t endorse playing it at the moment. I’m not proud that Fortnite won me over for so much of this year, but my hope in talking about its musical game mode is that we can extract what’s worth learning from it. 

Fortnite Festival is the result of Epic Games acquiring Harmonix, a studio who are very knowledgeable in music games and also fairly in touch with pop culture. I may be rightfully smeared for this opinion, but my favorite original music in a rhythm game this year was the music produced for Fortnite Festival. I genuinely enjoy some good pop music and EDM. I think Rhythm Games are sort of drowning in “gamer power metal”: fast, hype songs that aren’t really compelling outside of their energy. 

Also, for anyone familiar with Dropmix or Fuser, they put on-the-fly mashups in this game! You can go into Fortnite Jam Stage and watch DJs or make your own low-effort mixes with other players. One of my most unforgettable experiences this year was joining a lobby and finding someone who was hidden away from everyone else mixing like a god damn fiend. It was an incredible social experience that made me feel like I stumbled into an underground show.

I couldn’t talk about this game without bringing up the way it makes the controller feel. I played Festival on a Dualsense and made an incredible discovery: when you time the release of certain notes, the controller gives haptic feedback on press AND release. This is game-changing. Not only does it just increase positive feedback, but the lingering feeling of the controller still vibrating after you release creates a unique sensation, like an instrument still thrumming from your touch. It’s a good use of haptic feedback that should absolutely spread. 

Anyway don’t play Fortnite. It didn’t come out this year so it can’t go on my Game of the Year List anyway.

Part 4: Game of the Year List

This year, I’ve got five games I’d love to tell you about.

#5: Formless Star by Splendidland

Formless Star is a game about discovering animals on a weird little planet. I don’t wanna get too into this game because it’s free so… you should just go see the animals yourself. Rest assured, Splendidland is an amazing artist and well-versed appreciator of little guys, so the visual quality is certainly not up for debate. 

What may surprise you is this game’s other charms: its characters, its humor, its secret interactions. What made this game become one of my favorites is its ethos about creating art. Formless Star is a shapeless, constantly changing planet that wants to connect with you. It’ll never stop changing, but that’s what makes it so important to see for yourself. 

#4: OFF (2025 Remaster) by Mortis Ghost & Fangamer

I did not think this would be here. When I picked up OFF this year I mostly did it out of a sense of historical curiosity. I had played a bit of OFF during its first renaissance back in 2013, but I was an eighteen-year-old without much patience for puzzles or random encounters, so I never finished it. Skip to 2025 and suddenly OFF is exactly my kind of shit.

Puzzles had me breaking out the notepad. Combat encounters impressed me with their music and alarming enemy designs. And every scanned .jpeg of an old garment factory to accompany the game’s weird worldbuilding was a chef’s kiss. 

First of all, the OFF remaster is considerably more like its original form than say… Persona 3 Reload, but the differences they made are very smart. The original art that charmed me back in the day is untouched, but the user interface is greatly improved. I love the new critical hit effect especially, in which the turn you crit tells you you’re going to crit and also arrives faster than your usual action cooldown. I like that enemies get the same effect, giving you a chance to go “oh shit, here it comes” when their turn meter is on fire and filling up twice as fast. It’s not a difficult game by any means, but the combat system kept me on my toes and wiped my party a few times.

The thing about OFF that makes me feel so positive about it even now is that I genuinely just wanted to keep playing it until I beat it. Even the parts that seem super corny and dated transformed into something charming through OFF’s earnest appreciation of its ideas. Its 4th wall breaks and blunt themes are softened by the way they are balanced, it wants to impress you while still being silly. OFF’s irony is dramatic, the game’s impatience and fourth-wall breaks never felt like insecurity, rather they were novel forms of characterization. 

I like to go back and appreciate old creepypastas from time to time: the horror texts of old internet forums. Broadly, creepypastas love to shock readers through distorting the world they feel comfortable in. A common trope of the genre is a video game mascot like Sonic or Mario either being badly hurt or hurting others, often paired with graphic descriptions of violence. OFF plays in the same space, it’s about a callous and cruel protagonist with a shocking indifference to violence. My favorite creepypastas are never the bloodiest, or the most shocking, they’re the ones where the writer wanted to share something with me: their fear, their anger, their sadness. Despite OFF’s clear love of meat, smoke, trash, and other gross things, its final moments aren’t visceral, they’re empty. Your crusade doesn’t leave the world bloody, burnt, or broken, it leaves it white. When I saw the most shocking things OFF had to offer I didn’t cringe or wince, I just felt empty. I felt like I was sharing someone else’s emptiness.  

OFF hits all the same beats, without second guessing itself. Playing the bad guy in 2025 isn’t the same as playing the bad guy in 2008, but rather than lamenting my own familiarity with genre convention, I had fun slipping into a familiar role. 

#3: Hollow Knight: Silksong by Team Cherry

The gamer mantra often used in the face of adversity is “get good.” Anyone who goes into Silksong with this sort of mindset will quickly find themselves struggling against a trap designed to punish them. Silksong, with all its intensive gameplay loops, runbacks, and grinds, pushes back hard against brute force. So, in my time with Silksong, I ignored the bullheaded logic of turning bosses into loops of death, and instead taught myself how to feel zen in the face of these odds. It may sound backwards, but in its cruelty, Silksong taught me to be nicer to myself. 

I never expected to beat Silksong. I only really picked it up because it looked visually incredible and was pretty affordable. “It’ll be a miracle if I beat Act 1,” I said to myself. After spending two hours dying to the Savage Beastfly, I felt like my prediction was coming true. 

After seventy-four hours, I rolled credits on Act 3.

The early game of Silksong was probably the hardest for me. “Persistence is key,” I thought. “If I can’t beat the chumps down here, how can I expect to finish it?” It was only after giving in to my pride that I realized I was playing the game self-destructively. The region after a boss wasn’t the prize for beating it, but another challenge: how can I use the gameworld to salve the burn of its more difficult encounters?

I eventually went on to beat Sister Splinter, the Last Judge, Skarsinger, and even the game’s final boss, and while my skill improved, the thing that made it actually doable was learning not to torture myself. In contrast to Elden Ring’s Stakes of Marika, which seem to encourage as many attempts as you can stomach, Silksong’s runbacks are a built-in speedbump for these spirals. 

I no longer did the game’s side quests as soon as I got them; I made sure there was a healthy stack of content waiting for me if I ever got stuck on a boss. I stopped turning every boss into a gauntlet, but rather treated them as check-ups. I learned the bosses through little dates and used the game’s world as a distraction when they became too much. At night, sleep would reinforce muscle memory.

This was probably the most fun I’ve ever had dealing with a game that required such fine motor control. Not only did I learn to reduce my own frustration, but I got something I always wished for in a punishing game: I never got good. I was never eclipsing the bosses. I was never overwhelming myself with information or a need to practice. I got to enjoy the game as a champion masochist. I got my ass kicked and smiled. 

Silksong is a one-of-a-kind game. Maybe one of the greatest ever made. It’s beautiful, sorrowful, mechanically tight, and none of its content feels like “the bad part.” For me, the soreness with Silksong comes from it simply being very big. I played it for a month, and while I could critically say all that gameplay was good, I still wanted to go home and do something else. I am also on record saying I don’t like the ending of Act 3, I think at the final moment they turn away from their tight, character-based story into the realm of lore and self-reference. But it’s still a game I really adore. 

#2: Eternal Strands by Yellow Brick Games

While I may have gotten to the point of Silksong where I was too full to have anymore, the entire time I was playing Eternal Strands I never stopped wanting to read every bit of writing I could. I’m sure I missed some item descriptions or text somewhere, but for the most part if a character said something I sat my ass down and listened. 

Eternal Strands does not seem like my kind of thing upfront. It has that sort of young adult high-fantasy vibe of The Dragon Prince or The Stormlight Archives, so at first I thought I would bounce off this game. Months after beating it, I feel like one of its biggest fans.

Eternal Strands pulls heavily from Dragon’s Dogma and Shadow of the Colossus, but throws in some physics toys from The Force Unleashed and various Source Engine games. These procedural systems worked together in ways that let me write the encounter as the player. I had eureka moments in this game like nothing else this year: using the ice wall ability to freeze a dragon’s face to the ground while it breathed fire so I could climb on its head is what games are made of. It is honestly what I thought games would be like one day as a child.

Eternal Strands is very good about pitting you against an insanely huge dude and just letting you figure it out. The game’s spells have a wide variety of applications, and your instructions on how to use them is “have at it.” I got to enjoy figuring out the bosses with little-to-no intrusion from the game, but when I did have moments of uncertainty the game’s bestiary had the information I needed. It hit a good balance of not letting me get stuck without breathing down my neck. Even though you are getting watched remotely by your party members, they’re polite enough to not be overbearing. 

This game can also be a bit grindy; trust me when I say this excites me. It made the circumstances of the game feel dire, like I needed to be looking out for opportunities, finding ways to make myself more efficient. What makes these grinds work is that you can outsmart them. Early on you’ll be fighting every little mob one-on-one in swordfights, and they do become redundant eventually. At this point you have two options: groan that this game is such a grind OR… open your spellbook. One of the fundamental abilities in this game is picking things up and throwing them. The moment you’ve gotten all the drops you need from a generic mob, the name of the game goes from “how do I beat you with my sword?” to “where’s a hole I can throw you in?” Once you trivialize the underlings, missions get faster and you get more time to focus on the large boss monsters who drop better upgrade materials. 

The upgrade materials feed back into your elementally aligned arsenal. Defeating arcane monsters grant you the ability to telekinetically lift, push, and explode, sending yourself and enemies flying, fire monsters let you spew flames in various forms and call upon explosive minions (that you can then throw yourself), and ice enemies let you coat the level and yourself in ice. The open application of these abilities feeds back into the game’s navigation. When faced with clouds of poison gas, I could use my ice armor as a hazmat suit. Large gaps could be conquered by building bridges of ice or throwing yourself haphazardly with telekinesis. I let my explosive minions distract my foes when I needed to focus on objectives. By the end of this game, there were no enemies or obstacles I couldn’t outsmart. 

But what drives you to plunge back into this big magical city time and time again? That would be the game’s extensive cast of characters. This is where the game goes from a fun toy to something I’ll always remember. I loved the arcs these characters had, they were dramatic, well acted, messy, and felt distinct from each other. There were characters in this game who were mean, who made mistakes, who had difficult, ugly breakdowns!

And that’s what I wanna see in video games.

#1: Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector by Jump Over the Age

Citizen Sleeper was one of my favorite games of 2022, but ask anyone how they feel and they are quick to say “I liked it but it got too easy.” About six hours into my second run of Citizen Sleeper 2 I was stuck on a derelict space station, slowly starving as I scrounged for enough gas to make the jump back to society. Not only that, my computer brain was glitching out because a union uprising I had just taken part in went bad. It was one of the most stressful moments in a game I’d played this year, it was also easily my favorite. 

Citizen Sleeper 2 did eventually become easy for me, but it was only the moment I had finished one-hundred percent of its side content. While I would have liked it even harder, for about a dozen hours I had to really think about all my resources and the route I would take across the Starward Vector.

Remember when I mentioned this was my second run? That’s because the first one died. Just completely failed. I beefed it before even leaving the first area of the game. This first failed attempt acted as a sort of tutorial for the full game, but it also worked as a story in microcosm. My first run I was cagey, untrusting, and mean. And I paid the price. 

My second Sleeper was much more patient. 

When I briefly looked at the Steam reviews of Starward Vector there was a very common sentiment: “Oh, this game is fun, just follow these very specific instructions first!” Disregard all of those. Go in scared and uncertain, just don’t get too attached.

It’ll be worth it because being in this game is pure beauty. The visuals and soundtrack create an atmosphere that surrounds and crystallizes you, leaving you in the perfect emotional state for the story to wreck you. 

I think I may have teared up a bit during Silksong and Eternal Strands, but this game made me cry. I’ve heard people say they prefer the writing of the first game, and while I think the first game is a sharper narrative with fewer stumbles, the narrative of Citizen Sleeper 2 just resonated way more with me. When playing Citizen Sleeper 1 you meet a lot of characters, but you aren’t a permanent fixture to them; unless you commit to one of the game’s endings that follows that character’s storyline, you will only ever be a ship passing in the night. It’s an impactful part of the first game, but it’s also how the sequel distinguishes itself. In Citizen Sleeper 2 you are entangled in this world, people are counting on you. You have a crew who are a mix of shady characters and close allies, after running errands and high-pressure missions you start to form a bond with them, in the same way I would feel an emerging bond with an XCOM squadmate that did particularly good or bad. While Citizen Sleeper 2 is built around a singular ending as opposed to the original’s multiple, the action of ending the game felt like a more crushing commitment than picking from one of many.

While I think Citizen Sleeper 2 leans a bit too hard on rewarding “doing the right thing,” there are definitely still tough choices and times when the best thing you can do for a character is not what they want from you. It creates plenty of situations where I actually had to sit and think, “what the hell am I going to do?” Some of these choices even ended up being the tougher path, but I still stood by them and was happy I took them.  

While I had to work up the courage to give Citizen Sleeper 2 a second try, I am so glad I did, because once that second run started I played it obsessively until I saw everything I could. I still listen to the soundtrack very regularly, thinking about drifting through space on that rig and seeing the faces of the characters I ran missions with. 

I feel like I got exactly what I needed from Citizen Sleeper 2, but I am still intensely curious to see what Jump Over the Age does next.

Ava is a writer and illustrator that draws colorful robots and writes gross, visceral literature.

The post Ava’s Games of 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

Mario Kart World

During a fiscal year that had more kart racers than sense, the last appetizing meal in the buffet just so happened to be Mario Kart World: an amazing jukebox filled with some of the most beautiful renditions of Mario’s incredible auditory history. When you aren’t reminiscing about how amazing the Sherbet Land track from Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is, you’re most likely aimlessly driving around Mario Kart World‘s boring and lifeless open-world map. Sure, it’s filled to the brim with P-Switch challenges that will test your time trial skills against moderately difficult turns or give you a platforming puzzle that will make you wonder if they actually finished the wall-riding mechanic, but besides those and some “Princess Medallions” that you just need to grab a flower to get for 99% of them, there really isn’t much to do besides take a clip of you bouncing back and forth to whatever song is on and posting it on Twitter. Wait, they removed the Share functionality on Switch this year too. Never mind, just drive around the city some more.

Here’s the thing: we’re not stupid, Mario. We saw the mobile game you put out before this one that had double the characters of your previous game’s roster, all with unique outfits and animations. Porting those full-sail over to the Switch 2 and calling it a day doesn’t impress. What DOES impress is the ability to play as a Goomba — that shit is tight. But the fact that we are 6 months removed from the release of this game and there hasn’t been a single update on any future content doesn’t necessarily bode well for a game that could really use some. The Grand Prix mode wasn’t crazy, and the aforementioned open world really could have used some pizazz. Knockout Tour is where I think the game really shines, where you are racing online in a battle-royale-style course, but the 8 rallies that you left us with have a lot to be desired — all we needed was a random button and we’d be set.

I guess what I’m saying is that I want more expensive post-launch DLC filled with recycled content from older games. Where the hell is Kamek.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby

It’s almost impossible to recommend a mobile gacha game to people. As a matter of fact, it’s downright offensive to do so. “I suggest you spend your free time with the horrible reality of gambling addiction and forced sparsity that you can access anywhere at any time from the supercomputer in your pocket.” And I would never do that on a public forum such as the wonderful publication Gamesline dot Net.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby was a game that made me so happy I could cry. It’s a game with such an absolutely absurd concept that takes itself 100% seriously that it’s difficult to believe it’s even real. An alternate world where real-life racehorses are reincarnated as quirky animal girls literally sounds like a joke, but it’s sincere, clever, and historically accurate to the actual real-world statistics of these legendary horses. From the twisted perverts over at Cygames comes something that feels like it doesn’t exist and honestly kind of shouldn’t, but it somehow managed to touch the hearts of trillions of people.

It’s honestly just a Monster Rancher clone — you pump up your horse-girl’s stats in a day-to-day seasonal cycle, hoping that your dice roll is good enough to not cause a failure in training, only to face your horse-girl against other horse-girls in a race around the track. The real reward is the highly original character designs and personalities, all based on their real-life counterpart’s race history and nature towards their riders and fellow equines. There’s a horse-girl in the game named Sakura Bakushin O, a horse who, in real life, was regarded as one of the best short-distance runners of all time during their run from 1992 to 1994. Their history is filled with more losses than wins, but they had a consistent win record in the 1200m-1400m distance races. They won 11 out of the 12 short-distance races they participated in, only coming in 6th place once to another horse named Nishino Flower. In Umamusume: Pretty Derby, Sakura Bakushin O is a class representative who is constantly running at full sprint around the school, constantly shouting her own name. She is airheaded and self-centered but feels like she can be more than her aptitude at short-distance races. During her campaign, you are constantly tricking her into racing shorter and shorter races, which she easily excels in due to her stats as being an all-out sprinting powerhouse with low stamina. There are about a hundred different horse-girls in the game who all have different historically accurate stories and personalities all around the lives of these real-life racehorses. It’s absolutely hilarious.

To a T

YOU DIDN’T BUY THIS GAME, AND NOW KEITA TAKAHASHI IS SAD. IF YOU DIDN’T WANT TO PLAY THIS GAME BECAUSE IT IS SHORT, THEN YOU ARE WEAK-MINDED AND HAVE A BROKEN HEART. SHAME ON YOU.

Word Play

In a world of Balatro-likes and Rouge-ish Puzzlers, I think Word Play is one of the most “slam dunk”s out of either of those. Easiest way to sell it is that it’s Scrabble but with upgrades, and it’s kinda just perfect. Every challenge level I get to or any of the upgrades I find along my playthrough, I just think, “Oh, duh, of course.” — it’s one of those kinds of games. It’s a game that I feel would be absolutely perfect for a mobile device or one of those tablets at Chili’s that you order your food off of. It is easily recognizable and impossible to want to put down once you get a few games in.

This game was made by Mark Brown from the YouTube channel Game Maker’s Toolkit. I have no clue if he will ever read this or if anyone will catch on to what I’m writing, but Mark Brown was the administrator of a forum I went to as a child, and I used to draw funny pictures of him and other members. I feel like I kind of owe it to him for harboring a community of creatives whose reverberations are still being felt in the industry today and for being responsible for a bunch of teenagers who definitely should not have been allowed on the computer during that time. I liked your game, Mark. Thank you for everything.

Donkey Kong Bananza

This game is slop. Pejorative. It’s unfocused, bloated, and completely unintelligible as a platforming game. It’s a game that promises endless freedom of expression in the movement system and then offers you 17 poorly designed levels that basically say, “We didn’t want to actually think of where to put shit, so we threw them around the world randomly — it’s up to player agency to get them in any order!!!!!!!!!!!”. The missions are bland and repetitive, the level objectives are forced and predictable, and the moment-to-moment gameplay and combat feel like you’re wrestling an actual real-life gorilla in order to properly pull off the things it wants you to do. You could surf around the world and find the same enemy type you fought from level 1 and turn into a giant bird and do a rock-catapult move to get above it so you can drop eggs on top of it that you got from the vast upgrade tree and come down doing the Iron Man punch. Or you can hit it with a rock. Like every other enemy in the game. And every solution to every puzzle. And every boss. Just hit shit with the rock you pull out of the ground.

The music is whatever. It’s mostly low-energy ambient tracks that try too hard to be Stickerbrush Symphony. Some of the outliers are the remixed/covered tracks from Donkey Kong’s previous outings, which are few and far between. The most egregious parts of the soundtrack are the fully voice-acted songs that play whenever you use one of your upgrade abilities — and by fully voice-acted, I mean that your sidekick sings in actual gibberish instead of any understandable language. And these songs don’t really change or get any less grating. You’re going to be listening to the same gibberish from the start of the game all the way to the end. Nintendo games really love putting songs with lyrics in their games. I feel like it started with the Latin theme of Smash Bros. Brawl, but it honestly took off with Jump Up, Superstar! from Mario Odyssey. Every Nintendo game that comes out now needs a song with lyrics in it. The gimmick has overstayed its welcome, especially with Nintendo’s track record of some of the most embarrassing voice acting I’ve ever seen in video games. Poorly translated PS2 shit.

Pauline is shit. The whole way through. Just annoying and unnecessary, doesn’t help with the story or progression of the game. She’d be better as a rock. Why isn’t she wearing shoes. Her inclusion completely destroys any semblance we had of a consistent Mario lore. Why isn’t she wearing shoes.

The best part of this game is the last 3 hours. Actually some of the coolest set pieces and music from a platforming game in a very, very long time — way more interesting than anything Odyssey had to offer. But it is short-lived and never spoken of again. This game was just a shame. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat this is not!

Promise Mascot Agency

This might have been the only actual video game I played this year. This game has so much heart and soul woven into every single second of screen time that it instills some kind of inspiration I haven’t felt in a long time. A game with so much style and substance, with over-the-top characters that are so varied and different but fit so neatly together, and an incredibly heartwarming story about self-preservation and protecting your loved ones (in any form they may take) that you can’t help but cheer for it.

Promise Mascot Agency is a game about driving around in a souped-up kei truck. And when it isn’t about crashing your truck-boat-plane into a giant tanuki statue, it’s a visual novel about an ex-yakuza member (voiced by Takaya Kuroda, the voice of Kazuma Kiryu from the Yakuza series!) who took the fall for their family and does everything in their power to make things right. And when it isn’t about a crime-family drama, it’s a mascot managing simulator where you hire cartoon mascots to represent different businesses within a run-down haunted beach town. And when you aren’t desperately trying to minmax one of your employee’s work-life balance, you’re navigating the pseudo-open world to try and find upgrades, characters, cosmetics, bonus scenes, or more opportunities to learn more about the world you inhabit. Did I mention the kei truck? Promise Mascot Agency is a game about driving a souped-up kei truck.

Pinky is just straight up my favorite character from 2025. She’s a mascot who is modeled after a severed finger, who loves social media and drinking, and who hates the government. You can collect different nail designs for her to wear throughout the town, and she changes her outfit depending on if you are flying around or driving through the waves of the ocean. And by the way, she’s real — the mascots are real; they aren’t people in suits. They’re real beings. She has a father who is also a severed finger. And she also has daddy problems with said father. I love Pinky.

—

And that’s my list of new games I played in 2025! I hope you enjoyed it and agreed with all of my opinions! If you’re reading this, Scott has not killed me with a spear for being late on my submissFUCK I forgot to talk about R.E.P.O. hold on

R.E.P.O.

I think people should be okay with the term “friendslop”. I find it charming and reflective of the game in question, even if the word ‘slop’ can carry some negative connotations. I think some of the best video games ever fall into this category, and it’s a hilariously perfect descriptor to use. OH SHIT

RV There Yet?

Friendslop. It was awesome.

—

Okay, that’s it for real. Have a good rest of your year, everyone!!!

ROBBYDUDE is an internet weirdo who streams on Twitch and does lots of other stuff.

The post Five Games ROBBYDUDE Played That Just So Happened To Come Out In The Year 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

11. Star Wars Outlaws

I have a Star Wars OC. Well, two, technically. One is from when I was much younger. He was a Jedi in the style of Luke, as I’m sure many OCs were. An earnest go-gooder who sometimes struggled with the Dark Side but always took the high road in the end. He wielded two lightsabers, one blue and one green. I don’t think about him anymore.

The other is Dia V’rei. She’s a Twi’lek with dark green skin and quite a few tattoos, who in her youth eked out a living by participating in races, legal or otherwise. She got caught up in some bullshit with the Empire and now the ghost of a disgraced Sith Inquisitor is living in her head. They’re both trying to make the most of the situation. She has one lightsaber that used to be blood-orange, but now it’s teal. The focusing crystal makes a sound eerily similar to a wail of despair when she switches it on.

Star Wars Outlaws does not let you create a character. It has a very specific story to tell about a very specific protagonist. That part of it is fine. It’s a solid, enjoyable romp of which I only remember the vaguest details. What the game does best, though, is satisfy the core reason why I still sometimes think about Dia V’rei and add a little bit to the story I have for her in my head: it’s fun to imagine existing in Star Wars. The first time I touched down on Akiva–a humid, jungle world where it’s almost constantly raining–I just wandered the city streets for half an hour. I slowly weaved through the markets, admiring the lush plantlife, letting the ambient noise wash over me and imagining how the rain would feel on my skin. I wished, so badly, that I could be there.

More than anything, it’s those moments that truly sell why Kay Vess endures all the stress and life-threatening jobs. An hour from now, she’s probably going to get shot at by a rival gang again. But in this moment? Life is perfect. Let’s enjoy the rain.

10. No Man’s Sky

This year, I played No Man’s Sky for the first time since its release. It’s simultaneously a very different game and also fundamentally the same thing. I understand the growing frustrations of the purists every time a massive new update was released. There was an appeal to the simplicity and loneliness of the original game that is now forever lost to time. The game now has base-building, ship-building, a fleet mechanic, and even a dedicated multiplayer hub you can summon with a button-press. For my part, though, I enjoyed that I could pretty much ignore any of these extra systems if I didn’t care about them; and the changes I did care about ultimately made it much easier to appreciate the core of what made NMS fun in the first place: finding absurd worlds and getting yourself into situations.

NMS swept my friend group like an infection, and at one point there were at least 4 of us playing the game at the same time. We never did missions with each other, but we would chat on Discord and stream our own games to each other. On one such occasion, I was having some pretty rough luck with the planets in a new system I had just warped to. Every celestial body I landed on provided a new, unique hell to experience: constant freezing blizzards, acid rain, hostile wildlife, or an atmosphere entirely composed of toxic gas. Meanwhile, my roommate was exploring what the game itself described as a “paradise” planet. It was beautiful, had no extreme weather, peaceful wildlife, and abundant resources and water. She was still miserable, though, because the air was filled with bubbles, and they were really getting on her nerves. She hated those goddamn bubbles.

I, of course, teased her about it.

“I’m over here on literal hell worlds and you’re complaining about bubbles?”

I didn’t understand, she told me. The bubble filter was really annoying.

After calling it a day on my current planet, I got into my spaceship and sped over to the final planet in the system.

“One more chance for something nice. Maybe I’ll get bubbles this time,” I remarked.

I landed on the planet. It had a bit of a red tint and looked like a desert. Still, the ambient temperature wasn’t too bad, the alien life wasn’t hostile, and even the Sentinel activity was relaxed. It was certainly not a paradise, but I just might have a pleasant time here.

Less than a minute later, I got caught in an extreme storm. My survival suit flashed a warning message: “COMBUSTIBLE DUST.”

I burst out laughing. That’s the game, baby!

9. taking my Dark Knight girlfriend to the corner store

This was the year I started to more actively seek out sapphic stories to read. As much as I like to consider myself thoughtful and well-read, I have a very bad habit of just reading or playing whatever happens to come my way through friends’ recommendations or critical praise. This does mean I very rarely encounter anything truly terrible, but the second edge of that blade causes me to get stuck in artistic ruts. When I try to find new books, I’ll see something with a premise that’s up my alley that has a lot of very good reviews, and then get scared off after reading one 2-star review that says, “The characters never really developed beyond their starting archetypes.” Is that true? I’ll never know, because I will simply avoid trying it out of fear of “wasting” my time with something mediocre. And then I will play another Assassin’s Creed game for, like, 50 hours. It’s embarrassing.

This was the year I shoved my decision paralysis in a locker and did my best to keep it there. Dark Knight girlfriend was an important part of that process, partly because it’s very easy to just read something and see what happens if it only takes 20 minutes. I’ve read short stories in sci-fi anthologies that take longer than that. And you know what? It was a pretty nice time. It has fun with the obvious fish-out-of-water premise, and I connected strongly with the main character’s constant background-anxiety. What I loved the most, though, was that the scenes it cared most about were very mundane and domestic. It is, after all, a game where you take your girlfriend to the corner store. Then you get back home and cook for her and talk about your plans for tomorrow. There are a couple moments you could very loosely describe as action scenes, but they are over quickly and primarily exist as gags. They aren’t the point. The point is the everyday routine, and the comfort in sharing that routine with someone you love.

It did not blow my mind. It was exactly what I was hoping it would be, but in a way that helped illuminate to me what my hopes even were.

8. Life is Strange: Double Exposure

I was not expecting to play a Life is Strange game this year. I played the first game as it was coming out in 2015 and enjoyed it quite a bit. After that, I would be aware of other games in the franchise releasing and getting generally positive reviews, but I felt like I had moved on by then. A similar thing nearly happened for Double Exposure. When the first episode released, I became vaguely aware of the discourse surrounding Chloe breaking up with Max in the “saved her” timeline, and then I just didn’t think about it for an entire year. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers who worked on Double Exposure would become scapegoats for a subset of fans who wanted a target for their frustrations. Some took the layoffs that would happen just three months later as a kind of vindication. It felt weird and unsettling to see all this play out for a game that had once meant a great deal to me. When a couple of my friends later recommended the Double Exposure to me, I finally decided late into 2025 to give it a shot. I wanted to know what the game actually was, not what people were trying to turn it into. What I found was far more interesting and introspective than the early kneejerk reactions had given it credit for. My biggest problem with the first game was the infamous final decision, which made it seem like Max was being arbitrarily punished for trying to use her powers for good. Double Exposure instead makes the case that Max is perfectly capable of being her own disaster.

Double Exposure wants to talk about adventure games and the type of person who’d be a protagonist of one. Like a lot of heroes in this genre, Max is an insatiably curious snoop, and the game continually presented very standard adventure-game mechanics in a context that made me feel absolutely awful for doing them. If she senses there’s a problem or mystery she doesn’t know about, she will do whatever she can to figure out what’s going on and try to “solve” it. She will cause a distraction to snoop through someone’s briefcase for confidential legal documents. She will shift timelines to break into private offices and read emails. She will use an emotional confession told to her by someone in a state of desperation and sadness to cajole more information out of an alternate universe version of that same person. You, the player, get very little choice in the matter. You have to do it, because it’s what Max would do–what she so often justifies as something she must do–and then you will probably watch it blow up in her face later.

This is never directly stated to be the specific or even only reason Chloe broke up with her. There is no one reason. However, Chloe does express anxiety about how Max uses her powers, and whether Max would ever try to win an argument with them. Max insists she wouldn’t; but if that’s the same Max who also doesn’t think twice about rummaging through the personal lives of people she knows to fix a problem all on her own, well, I get why that might not be reassuring. There is a need in Max to control the chaos of life, to make the universe and the flow of time bend in a direction that she believes is best. It’s a desire I deeply connected with, one my teenage self also had when it seemed like so many things around me were changing in unpleasant ways. Was there something I could have said or done to make it all work out? Was I just not smart or clever enough? The difficult reality was that many things were just out of my hands. I never had a say in the first place.

7. Unnamed Space Idle

I don’t usually play idle games. When I venture into the genre, I’ll poke around at a game for two or three days and then eventually forget about it, never to return. I “played” USI for 719 hours. Maybe part of it was just that the aesthetic clicked for me. I love spaceships, and it did, at times, feel like I was pushing buttons on a control panel to eke a bit more power out of the reactor. Maybe the gameplay loop just appealed to me more than others I’ve tried. USI places a huge emphasis on doing focused progression. You very soon reach a point in the game where trying to improve all your ship’s systems at the same time becomes impossible. You have to learn to be okay with letting some stuff sit on the backburner while you catch other systems back up.

It took a while for me to acclimate to this style, but the moment I depowered my warp core, shifted all my stats into material synthing, and then saw recipes with an estimated build time of 1 year suddenly finish in 3 minutes was an incredible high. There’s not really much else to it. I still like booting it up for a few minutes a day to check on my progress and poke around for a little. I’m splicing my crew members with alien DNA now. Things are going well, I think.

6. Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery

It’s funny to me that I first learned about and played this game the same year that Uma Musume was released. Uma Musume is a very monkey’s-paw style of game to me. On the one hand, I’m happy to finally have horse-girl representation sweep through the spaces I inhabit. Cat girls and dog girls have hogged the spotlight for so long. The various Umas have fun designs and personalities, and I appreciate when artists draw them kissing each other. I, too, run because I love feeling the burn in my thighs and the wind catching my hair like a banner flying behind me.

On the other hand, I personally despise the real-life sport of horse racing. There are many inside the industry who claim to love horses. I’m sure that must be true for some portion of them. As much as I love horses, I will almost certainly never own one myself, because they are extraordinarily expensive in comparison to almost any other pet you can legally keep. I imagine that horse racing represents an opportunity for some to actually make a living interacting with the animal they adore. This does not change the fact that horse racing is an ugly sport that blatantly commodifies and exploits horses purely to engage in an entirely different type of exploitation of humans.

Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery is not explicitly about racing, but it is about sports. The stat-raising gameplay is cold, calculated, and sterile, like a simplified spreadsheet of any sports management sim you can imagine. The actual impact on your horse, though, is gross and upsetting. The abstraction of the stats represents the more tactile reality of your protagonist transforming a living creature into a horrifying flesh-mass through careful regulation of diet and injections. Your ultimate victory requires the slaughter of your only companion in the world. Congratulations! You’re officially a Horse Master, for all that matters.

I guess I appreciate the bluntness.

5. VRChat

If I end up buying a VR headset next year, it will be entirely because of VRChat. One of my favorite things to do in this world is go to a place I’ve never been before with someone. We then walk around and talk about anything that comes to mind. It is one of the greatest joys of living in a physical, material space, and it’s frustratingly hard to do when most of your friends live hundreds or thousands of miles away. VRChat’s social hangout spaces acted like a life raft to me. The life raft is never as nice as the boat it was stored on, but it’s there for you when you need it most.

The whiplash of tones you can get when visiting different environments is a big part of what made it so fun for me. After spending some time on a rooftop break room in the twilight of the early evening (where I watched my friends excitedly discover that they could use an already-lit cigarette to start another cigarette), we hopped over to a dead-mall-esque structure that appeared to be entirely dedicated to tourism vTubers. Or perhaps vTubers who were simply doing a collaboration with Japan’s various tourism organizations. We didn’t recognize any of them and had a very limited grasp of the language, so it was impossible to fully understand the context. Still, we had fun wandering around, assigning one of the vTubers to each other, and talking about the places we’d like to visit if we were on vacation. It was an experience I desperately needed.

4. The Rise of the Golden Idol

I’m still a little star-struck by the Golden Idol games. Conceptually, it’s so simple: study what’s happening on the handful of screens that show a frozen moment in time, then use a bucket of a couple dozen words to explain what’s going on. It’s remarkable how the game uses those two basic structures to find so many different ways to tell a story. One chapter will show you a zoomed out view of an entire city and ask you to piece together how the schemes of a group of scientists slowly unravel as the day progresses. Another chapter will zoom into a single apartment complex, each room showing the ripple effects of those same scientists’ callous disregard for the people they used in their experiments. It shifts effortlessly between being hilarious and bleak. It feels so damn good when, after spending half an hour staring at a scene wondering what you’re missing, you realize you completely misunderstood one detail, and now everything else clicks into place.

3. This Bed We Made

I played through This Bed We Made in two days at the very end of 2025. I only heard about it because a friend mentioned it offhand, and I’m so, so glad she did. This game is a narrative-heavy adventure where you play as a 50’s hotel maid snooping around guests’ rooms.  She soon gets wrapped up in a story of forbidden love and can eventually discover and explore her own lesbian desires. It hit me like a heat-seeking missile, and it provided a fascinating contrast to Double Exposure. Where LiS gestured toward but never quite successfully grappled with the ethical nuance of Max’s vigilante-detective routine, TBWM presents a more straightforward argument: you have a moral imperative to resist the police. Laws can be unjust, cops are lazy and incompetent, and they will absolutely use their power to persecute so-called “degenerates.” A key part of the game is using the small amount of control Sophie’s job provides her to decide what items to preserve and what to throw away, and getting a good ending depends on you, the player, exercising that power. All while that’s happening, you get frequent check-ins with your preferred supporting character, which for me played out as Sophie slowly realizing, “I think my coworker likes women. Wait, do I also like women?” The whole thing was very charming.

2. Mysterium

I’ve lived in Minneapolis since 2022, and halfway through 2025 I realized I was still just as much of a social shut-in as I was in the Arizona suburbs. I really like being around people, but I’m also very anxious about meeting new ones. There’s a part of me that always fears each new social experience will be the one I fuck up so bad that I never live it down and also reveals that no one ever liked me to begin with. This is why it took me two whole years to go to a local queer board game night that was perpetually on the “I should do this next week” agenda.

My fears, of course, were completely unfounded, and I had a delightful time. One week, I decided to bring along my copy of Mysterium. It’s a game I adore, but I’ve almost never had enough people around to play properly. The short pitch: one player is a ghost, and the (up to six) others are psychics trying to solve the ghost’s murder. The ghost hands out cards from a huge deck of abstract, surrealist art that is evocative but never too specific. The psychics must then use the cards they’re given to deduce which suspects, locations, and makeshift weapons the ghost is trying to direct them toward. The ghost cannot speak or provide any clues other than the cards. Sometimes a psychic locks in, interprets the ghost’s clue perfectly, and gets it right on the first try. When that happens, they both feel like geniuses. More often, though, the psychic gets it wrong, and they both get to laugh at how badly they messed up.

That’s the beauty of Mysterium, to me. There is technically a fail state, but “failure” is its own reward, because it’s really funny. I loved every second I spent playing Mysterium with people. I brought it three weeks in a row, and it had the whole table cackling every time. Damn me and my stupid anxieties. I could have experienced this kind of joy so much sooner.

1. Warframe

Over the last decade, I have attempted to play Warframe three times. The first couple times, I managed to stick with it for a few hours before feeling overwhelmed and putting it down to focus on something else. This year, for some reason, I decided I wanted to give it one more, fair shot. I’d watch a couple tutorials, focus on doing the questlines, and actually figure out how the thing works.

I have now played Warframe for 290 hours. It certainly helped that several friends also got hooked on it soon after, and it’s a lot of fun to regularly hang out in voice chat helping each other with one of many varieties of grind in the game. What truly shocked me, though, is how much I enjoyed the writing and story. As you play through the main questline, you can see Digital Extremes gradually understand both what type of story they want to tell and how best to tell it within the framework of the game. It starts out with simple expository voice-overs that are a little hard to pay attention to while you’re in the middle of a mission, and ends with elaborate cutscenes and a visual novel with complex branching dialogue and dating elements.

Gameplay elements that you’ve long-since taken for granted are recontextualized dozens of hours later in genuinely heartfelt plot revelations. You will meet a whole parade of fun and interesting characters and make jokes with your friends about how you imagine them interacting with each other in their off time. You will discover that a family can be an adoptive Exposition Mom, a traumatized space ninja, their girlfriend with magnetic powers who’s trapped in a timeloop, and their computer son who probably has an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. Also that war veteran who defected from his corrupt government to form a resistance movement dedicated to freeing people from mind-control slavery is basically my uncle. I am currently flirting with a nun and will eventually need to talk to my magnetic girlfriend about forming a polycule.

That all of this even exists in Warframe is remarkable. That it somehow comes together into a genuinely touching story about bodily autonomy, the daily struggle of living with trauma, and the power of communal support networks feels like a minor miracle.

Iris (she/her) loves to ramble about games, comics, and movies, especially if any swords and/or knights are involved. You can hear more of her critical work on her podcast: The Iris Archives.

The post Iris’ Top 11 Games of 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

Before sitting down to write this, I looked up a list of AAA releases from the past year because I truly could not name a single one, and it took checking Wikipedia to remind myself that I did, in fact, play Death Stranding 2 for a full 60 hours. I never would have guessed that anything could make me miss the original game’s infuriating mess of a story, but at least it was able to inspire some emotions in me, unlike its sequel. Sony barely released any other titles this year, and I didn’t even bother checking what Microsoft has put out because their ongoing support of the Palestinian genocide ensures that I’d never play their games anyway. I’m a lifelong diehard Nintendo fan and they released a brand new console this year, so I should be over the moon, but both Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza are the latest in a depressing trend of the company releasing games that manage to be much, much more boring than they ought to be, despite their gorgeous art direction and excellent gamefeel. Mario Kart was at least able to produce a few fun evenings on the couch with my wife, but a pack of playing cards could’ve managed the same for a fraction of the price. Fifteen or even five years ago, I would’ve preordered Metroid Prime 4, loaded it up at midnight and played it straight through til morning; I haven’t even bothered to buy it a month out, because I’m too worried about it disappointing. Corporate consolidation, ballooning budgets, and the pursuit of toxic trends like the constant struggle to turn every game into a Fortnite-deposing “forever game” have resulted in vanishingly few major game developers that are capable of making something that captures my heart.

Reading back the above paragraph bums me out. I sound like a grump and a whiner, and I suppose that I am. I wish I wasn’t! I wish I felt more optimistic about the state of things, I wish developers were putting out more games that sparked my curiosity and investment and joy. I wish anybody could push a game out the door in less than seven years. I wish the industry wasn’t being propped up by virtual slot machines full of guns and jpegs of anime girls. I wish I could fuck around with the Tony Hawk 3 remake without indirectly supporting the bombing and mass starvation of people halfway around the world. I wish that when I opened up my word processor to reflect on my thoughts about 2025 in video games, my first impulse wasn’t to be a big wet blanket. This is a Game of the Year piece, it’s meant to be a place to gush about great works of interactive art! I probably played enough new releases this year to flesh out a full top ten, but out of that list, I only enjoyed four of them enough to bother including here, and none of them came from a major developer.

(Shout-outs to Unbeatable and Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4, two games that I’m sure I will enjoy plenty once I make some time to sit down with them.)

Anyway, that’s enough complaining. I felt the need to explain why this list was so short, and unfortunately none of the reasons are very fun. But with all that out of the way, it’s time to stop moaning about what was bad about games this year and start celebrating what was good. The bright spots have been few and far between, but that doesn’t make them any less bright.

4. Skate Story

It is often pretty easy to get me to cry, or at least to get my eyes misting up. I got a lump in my throat just hearing the elevator pitch for Skate Story back in 2022: you are a demon made of glass, who has no choice but to skateboard through Hell to win your soul back from the Devil. It’s such a beautifully cruel concept, forcing a creature so frail and delicate to do something that famously causes injury, and it immediately got me right in the heart. I couldn’t help but imagine the game you’d build around this concept, something like Celeste by way of Tony Hawk, a brutally difficult skateboard platformer that would punish you viciously for every missed rail and failed trick, would put you through Skateboard Hell to finally give you catharsis and relief when you escape it.

So, with that vision of the game in my mind, I was surprised at first by the final product. Skate Story is not particularly difficult. Sure, you’re a glass demon that can shatter easily, exploding into fragments if you so much as approach a curb at the wrong angle. But the checkpointing is extremely generous, there are no penalties for bailing other than a few seconds of lost progress, and you can also just… slow down. Brake heavily through corners, go around a pit instead of trying to kickflip over it. Most of the time, you can even just get off your board and stroll leisurely to the end of the level. Some stages have time limits, but taking them slower is probably more efficient than going at a breakneck speed, dying and respawning over and over while the clock ticks down. Much of the game is set in wide-open hub areas that are more about roaming around and chatting with fun, quirkily-written NPCs, where there is no particular impetus to pull off risky skateboarding tricks. My initial reaction to all of this was disappointment. The gameplay felt like it was letting down the central metaphor of the premise, the difficulty much too low to make me feel like a creature made of glass and pain. The writing is fun, the soundtrack is excellent and the visuals are the most breathtaking I’ve seen in a good while, so I really couldn’t be too mad, but it just wasn’t delivering on what I had presumed to be its core promise.

But, as I kept playing, I started to respect that decision more and more. Skate Story isn’t interested in brutal difficulty. It’s not interested in wallowing in the angst of The Skater’s tortured existence. It’s not about being forced into a task that’s too dangerous for your fragile body. Instead, it’s about willingly embracing the danger, about the freedom of throwing yourself into the unknown with reckless abandon. Of course you’ll break, of course you’ll shatter, but it’s worth it for the sensation of flying through the air, kicking with practiced precision to send your deck spiraling beneath your feet. Sure, you could get off your board and walk to the next level… but why would you? Who cares if you could avoid crashing by just taking the corner slower, isn’t it more fun to figure out how to navigate the turn at full speed? In the end, Skate Story is a game about hanging out with your asshole buddies in the middle of the night in an abandoned city square. It’s about getting hassled by the cops for just trying to have a little victimless fun. It’s about the tedium of your day-to-day life and breaking it up through the joy of motion and momentum, even when you embarrass yourself by missing a jump and slamming into a concrete wall.

In other words, it’s a game about skateboarding, capturing emotional truths about it that the arcadey Tony Hawk and the technical skate. games never could. It’s not a flawless masterpiece—boss battles often start exciting and end a little one-note, and the pacing gets a bit long in the tooth in the end—but it’s a game that left me with immensely warm feelings, and it’s worth experiencing for the visuals and music alone.

3. Blue Prince

What a weird, special little thing Blue Prince is. Right from the beginning it’s not quite like anything I’ve played before, a mash-up of Myst-style adventure games and the kind of esoteric board games that only tabletop nerds like me play. It’s Betrayal at the House on the Hill, but with the ability to explore each room tile thoroughly for secrets. In many ways, it’s two games in one. The first is a story-light, mechanics-heavy roguelike where you have to explore a constantly changing mansion to find and unlock a path to the secret study at the back of the house. Exploit the effects of putting different rooms adjacent to one another, gradually earn permanent upgrades that make subsequent runs easier, make it to the end goal in a dozen or two runs, and congratulations, you’ve finished the game! Roll credits, thanks for playing!

…And then the real Blue Prince starts. Reach the final room a second time and you’ll be rewarded with a list of clues leading to a set of 8 keys, some of which you might have stumbled on already if you’ve been exploring thoroughly. Those keys open rooms with giant mechanical puzzles, which can only be solved by learning about the fictional geography of the game’s setting, and solving all of those will get you a set of postcards you can use to deduce the solution to a puzzle about the route your great uncle took on a trip around the world decades prior. Poke and prod at every corner of every room and you’ll find eight safes requiring eight different combinations. Dive deep into every scrap of hidden history and lore and you’ll learn why things seem to come in eights so often throughout the game, along with your family’s relationship to the fascist regime that’s seized control of your country. The randomized rooms of the house become completely immaterial, the board game rules of the top layer of the game bending to your will as you scour every inch of the manor for clues, and no matter how many puzzles you solve, the reward seems to always be yet another layer of puzzles. I played this game alongside my wife for over one hundred hours, trading theories, puzzling over math riddles, and cursing at the game with a smile as it endlessly revealed more and more hidden depths.

Even now, I’m only pretty sure that we’ve seen everything that Blue Prince has to offer. There’s a couple lingering tangents that we never quite figured out what to do with, but Googling any of these potential clues gets you nothing but endless threads of obsessives theorycrafting increasingly obtuse solutions to puzzles that they don’t even know exist. But, on the other hand, some of the puzzles in this game are pretty damn obtuse, so for all I know, the post I just read about crafting an electromagnet and using it on the rivets in an industrial tunnel under the mansion, since one of the unused clues is an anagram for the phrase “NO RIVETS NEEDED,” might just be onto something! 

In any case, no game this year was quite as unique as Blue Prince. It’s taking a lot of old, familiar ideas, and remixing them in exciting new ways to make something that feels wholly new and fresh. Even if you only play through to the end of the first layer of the game, I can’t recommend it enough.

2. Hollow Knight: Silksong

I just wasn’t expecting it to be so Catholic, y’know? I knew full well that Team Cherry could deliver a world-class Metroidvania; prior to this past September, I would’ve called Hollow Knight the pinnacle of the genre, and now it’s second only to its own sequel. I knew they’d make a beautiful 2D world full of endearing NPCs, vividly hand-animated monsters, and precision platforming and combat that feels better than just about anything else you could play. I didn’t know the game would be so damn big, but with how long they’ve been working on it, that’s not much of a surprise. In most respects, Silksong is exactly what I expected it to be, and since I was expecting it to be a new entry in my list of all-time favorite games, that’s fantastic news.

But what I wasn’t expecting was for it to be so Catholic, to be so much about Catholicism and the evils of organized religion. Hollow Knight’s narrative certainly has a bit of thematic heft, but in most respects it’s a pretty unapologetic riff on Dark Souls, getting a lot of juice from juxtaposing themes about light and darkness and lost civilizations with cute bugs rendered in a cartoony artstyle. Silksong has much more pointed and specific concerns, depicting a ruined kingdom of insects ruled by a religious order of spiders; the metaphor writes itself, with Grand Mother Silk luring naively devout bugs into both her literal and figurative web. The game world consists of a series of resource-depleted colonies and extinct or dying people, abandoned workshops littered with work orders to deliver more and more resources to the towering golden Citadel on the mountain above. And for all its pillaging, the Citadel now stands abandoned, covered in dust and cobwebs as its goddess puppeteers the corpses of her old congregation like marionettes, using them to search out more and more distant lands to raid to continue sustaining herself.

I never really know how to talk about writing in video games. I’ve read and listened to my fair share of games critics, people whose work I generally like and respect, move quickly to dismiss the quality of game writing. “Pick up any random book and it’s better-written than whatever game you think has a good story” is a refrain I’ve heard for years. And like… sure, I guess? I don’t know, I’ve read some pretty shitty books. I get where this comes from to a degree; when mainstream gaming culture can’t stop screaming about how mindblowingly amazing stories like The Last of Us are, I completely get the impulse to take some air out of that balloon. But at the same time… yeah, I don’t know, I think some games have pretty excellent writing! Silksong’s not exactly a James Joyce novel or whatever, it’s a story about funny little bugs that’s full of action and written at a reading level that a young teenager could get through easily. But honestly, that just demands the writing be even sharper. It’s a game that can only support elegant, efficient dialogue, because you don’t want to stand around talking for too long when you’ve got secret breakable walls to find and upgrades to unlock. The metaphors are evocative, the themes are provocative, the characters are instantly endearing and the arcs they go on are emotionally satisfying, and it accomplishes all of that with excellent pacing and economy of storytelling. I don’t know what to call all that other than good writing, and I’ve definitely read my fair share of books that can’t check all of those boxes.

Also good lord is the soundtrack full of wall-to-wall bangers. Widow’s theme has been playing off-and-on in my head for four months now and I don’t think it’s stopping anytime soon.

1. jinteki.net

Now I could just say “Netrunner” here. That would be more accurate. But I’m a stickler for rules, even and especially arbitrary rules that no one cares if I break. This is a list of my favorite video games of 2025, and that means that if I want to include a tabletop card game, I need to do it by pointing at the digital version of it. It’s the Skate Story thing; sure, I could just say “fuck you, my favorite video game this year wasn’t even a video game,” but why would I do that when I can argue a stupid little technicality? Why did I get up this morning if not to argue stupid little technicalities?!

For those who are unfamiliar: Netrunner started off as a card game designed in the late 90s by Richard Garfield, the original designer of Magic: The Gathering. It was a TCG set in the world of the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG, the same RPG that Cyberpunk 2077 is indebted to. They released two sets and then canceled it, which is what happened with about a million other TCGs during that timeframe. Over a decade later, Fantasy Flight Games licensed the rights to the game, redesigning it from the ground up. This version, called Android: Netrunner, is basically the single coolest collectible card game ever designed. Unlike Magic, the game is asymmetrical, with one player taking on the role of an evil cyberpunk corporation, and the other taking on the role of a Runner, a hacker working to pull a digital heist on the Corp’s servers. Corp decks contain about 6-10 Agenda cards, cards that represent crucial new developments in the Corp’s business strategy, and which provide them with powerful in-game effects when advanced. The Corp wants to find, play, and score seven points worth of these Agendas, while the Runner wants to steal seven points worth of them before they can. The Corp can also choose to go on the offensive, foregoing their Agendas to instead focus on murdering the Runner.

Corps are broken up into four factions, representing the four megacorp parent companies that run the world. There’s Jinteki, a bioengineering firm that has a hand in everything from medicine, to agriculture, to clone labor forces. There’s Haas-Bioroid, a robotics company who directly competes with Jinteki for control of the labor market. My personal favorite is the Weyland Consortium, a conglomerate of banks, private armies, construction companies, and deep-space exploration firms. And finally you have NBN, the corporation that controls the world’s media, doing just as much harm as the other factions by shaping culture to their liking. Runners, meanwhile, are broken up into three factions. Anarchs are angry, violent, and usually politically motivated. They want to destroy the Corps at any cost and often don’t care who gets hurt in the process, themselves included. Criminals are generally much less ideological, and are more interested in leveraging their hacking skills to make a quick buck. Finally, Shapers are just in it for the love of the game, they’re artists and computer nerds that break into corporate servers just because they can.

Netrunner is everything you could want out of this style of card game. It’s flavorful, it’s mechanically dense and strategically rich, and unlike Magic, Riftbound, and basically any game not published by Fantasy Flight, it doesn’t rely on random boosters. FFG billed Netrunner as a “Living Card Game,” and what they meant by that is that instead of buying pack after pack of trash commons to find a card you need for your deck, before just breaking down and spending a hundred bucks on it on eBay, you simply make one single purchase and get a full playset of every card in a set. The first time I bought a pack of Netrunner cards back in 2014, I immediately felt like a sucker for ever having played a collectible card game, and I’ve never gotten into a game with random boosters since then.

In 2019, FFG was making plans. Netrunner had been slowly but surely picking up momentum over the seven years since its revival, and they were gearing up to start making a big marketing push for it. And then, the wheels fell off the wagon. Wizards of the Coast refused to re-up the licensing deal that made Android: Netrunner possible. No one really knows exactly what happened, but WotC are a bunch of assholes that do a bunch of asshole bullshit all the time, so even though it was devastating news, it didn’t really come as much surprise. I’d been out of the game for a couple years at that point, the game shop I played at having closed down, but it was still an extreme bummer to see one of my all-time favorite games taken behind the woodshed like that.

But the thing is… Netrunner didn’t die. A dedicated group of fans came together to continue managing organized play events, and even began making plans to start printing new cards. At the time, I respected their enthusiasm, but I’ve been around the internet a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of fan projects fall apart. I didn’t really think it would go anywhere… but it did. Null Signal Games is a non-profit organization run almost entirely by volunteers, who have now released five complete sets of brand-new Netrunner cards, with the sixth due out in a couple months. The world championships last October was one of the biggest Netrunner events of all time, surpassing even some FFG-run events.

The buy-in to the game is even more reasonable than it was under FFG; since NSG is a non-profit, they pretty much sell the cards at-cost, or welcome you to just print your own, with proxies legal at all levels of tournament play, up to and including the grand finals table at Worlds. An awesome knock-on effect of this is that it’s created a whole little cottage industry of fan artists designing their own alternate art for cards, which are completely legal in official tournaments as long as they adhere to a few formatting rules.

Netrunner has become a success story of the kind that you just don’t usually get to see. Corporations tend to get their way in matters both serious and frivolous. Elon Musk gets clowned on a few too many times on Twitter? Great, he bought the website and ruined it. Square-Enix over-invests in Final Fantasy and it blows up in their face? Awesome, offload the blame to their western studios that put out consistently good work. Wizards of the Coast decides they’re bored of a beneficial business arrangement that helps a minor competitor to their near-monopoly of the TCG space? Well, they’ll just kill the game… nope. Not this time, assholes! Netrunner is, in so many ways, the antithesis of all the trends I was bemoaning at the top of this piece, a labor of love by a dedicated community of designers, artists, and players, to keep something alive for no reason other than the world is better when this silly little game is a part of it.

I’ve been going on and on and on here and I’ve barely even touched on how fucking fun Netrunner is. It’s a game based heavily on hidden information, with the Corp playing their cards face-down and forcing the Runner to make calculated risks about how they spend their limited resources. Is the card the Corp just set on the table a winning agenda? Or is it a trap that will both damage you by forcing you to discard cards from your hand and also leave you “tagged,” opening you up to even more damage on the Corp’s turn? Ah, it was neither, nothing but a cheap utility card they used to force you to waste one of the limited number of actions you get to take each turn. That’s fine, because you can spend the rest of your turn on a haymaker punch, hacking into their deck itself (or as it’s called in Netrunner, R&D) to see the cards they’re going to draw before they do, and stealing any Agendas they might have coming up. A-ha! you stole a Basalt Spire for 3 points! just one more point and you win… oh. Wait. That lets them retrieve a Measured Response from their discard pile, a card that will kill you unless you can pay eight credits to negate the damage. And you just spent the last of your money on that R&D run…

I only got back into Netrunner at the beginning of 2025, and in many ways it’s been an odd year to do it. In spring, NSG released a new set, Elevation, and with it they declared that they were officially retiring all cards printed before they became the stewards of the game. The pool of legal cards shrunk by more than half overnight, leaving the game in a somewhat awkward position. This is the smallest cardpool the game has had in a decade, meaning that deckbuilding options are more restricted. It’s much easier to “solve” the game at the moment, with top players all zeroing in on a pretty small number of dominant decks that are difficult to compete with. It’s a necessary growing pain that NSG were going to have to contend with sooner or later, and it’s not all bad; in some ways it’s made it a great year to learn the game, because there are much fewer cards to learn. It’s also maybe not as much of a solved meta as it would seem. After nearly a full year of people bemoaning that NBN was dead in the water until more cards got printed, the faction went on to win the world championships, using an ID from two years ago that had been completely dismissed at release. Even with a smaller field of play, Netrunner is capable of surprising even the people that dedicate the most time and mental energy thinking about it.

It’s an endlessly rewarding game, and that would be enough on its own, but getting involved with my own local Netrunner scene has been a true joy over the past year. I’m socially awkward in my best moments, I work graveyard shifts, and making friends is famously difficult the further you get into adulthood, so having this card game as an excuse to go out and meet people and enjoy the face-to-face company of others has been nothing short of a blessing. I love this game, and if you think you might love it too then you gotta give it a shot. In addition to the low cost of entry to the physical game, the link I led this section off with will take you to Jinteki, a web-based online Netrunner client where you can play with other folks completely free of charge. YouTube is full of great resources for learning the game (I recommend Metropole Grid, a terrific streamer with lots of knowledge and enthusiasm for newcomers), and if you want some more personalized coaching, the Green Level Clearance Discord server is full of folks that would love nothing more than to talk your ear off about Netrunner even more than I have here.

Luke Varner is a podcaster and tabletop game designer. Check out his RPG, EIDOLON , as well as his actual-play show Eidolon Playtest!

The post Luke Varner’s Top 4 Games of 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

Many puzzle developers view the act of creation itself as a sort of game. Rather than a typical developer-player relationship in which the developer can take any number of roles (the creator of a sandbox for the player, a narrator guiding the player through the story, etc, these features do exist within puzzle games as well yet their design pushes them towards a different role), a puzzle developer would prefer to restrain the puzzle to only the requisite parts required for the player to find its solution. Although the methods are different, they reach the same goal within the solution. Features such as alternate solutions are undesired “cheese”; unnecessary components are unhelpful “red herrings”. Many gamers call any interaction with one environment a “puzzle”, which often muddies these conventions. A two-way developer-player relationship very well could explain why puzzle games commonly, compared to other genres, have level creators. Even non-puzzle games such as Bloons Tower Defense 6 and Super Mario Maker 2‘s level creators have served as lovely homes for puzzle designers.

Such restrictive conventions would indicate a dull, emotionless genre and a lifeless developer community. After all, puzzles require logic, so a game that evokes grand emotions would seemingly clash with these conventions. On the contrary, a guided interactive experience allows the game to have dazzling, awe inspiring page-turn esque “reveals”. Reveals of information, mechanical tricks, and depth are so core to the emotions of puzzle solving experiences that designers like Adam Saltsman would once go as far as to call puzzle creators “revealologists… A good twist has nothing on a good reveal”. They are the mechanical version of a door opening to a new area, of the camera pulling back to a wide shot revealing a beautiful open landscape. Reveals impact players so much that I could argue they lead the charge in the oft-heard calls for “textless tutorials”. Yes, reveals are in anything designed, but I think nothing does them better than a great puzzle. 

I watched my girlfriend play Can of Wormholes, and in a moment of sokoban movement fidgeting she discovered a specific setup that can make your worm tilt upwards and start climbing in the third dimension towards the camera. She was aghast. The ramifications of this technique would not be revealed to her for many more levels, but it haunted her like a mechanical Chekhov’s gun. However, to quote Adam Saltsman again, reveals themselves are not mechanics. Good, inspiring design in itself is impressive and worthwhile. However, reveals are noteworthy in how they influence the design process themselves. Ramifications about interactions between simple mechanics emerge to the game creator as they playtest and continue to create their work. 

Most of the most impactful gaming moments for me in the past few years have been puzzle reveals. Some of them even involve big features going against the standard puzzle conventions I discussed earlier. Getting the bad ending in Void Stranger and discovering you need to beat the game without dying (or undoing) to progress (and then finding out I have barely scratched the surface of that colossal game), thinking I beat Bee Magic only to find out you need to cheese the game with only some of the several movement spells to unlock more… Such moments, which would otherwise seem like huge setbacks showing just how much you have left to go, lit a roaring blaze in my heart, unquenched until I discovered even more.

A smaller appeal (and a large sum of the audience being designers themselves) set the grounds for the lovely yet small puzzling community I’ve cherished lurking in. As the norm within the puzzle community is small, tightly designed games, and the roles of developer and player are blurred, it leads to some truly wonderful works of game design. Mechanical conversations slowly driven by money within the big industry contrast lightning fast developments between solo developers in these small cozy corners. I am overjoyed that some hardcore puzzle games like Blue Prince have gotten as big as they have. Watching others play Blue Prince when they are early on feels like I am watching a completely different game, silently wondering, “Do they know?”. Not just in the meta puzzles, but with small “tech” that heavily improves consistency in the roguelike aspect. I eagerly hold my breath when their eyes hold for a second too long on a noteworthy detail of a room.

I am loving puzzle games more and more lately, perhaps because so much of my thinking is occupied by game design thoughts. So many of the most wonderful puzzle games last year like Gentoo Rescue, Ooo, the lovely Confounding Calendar collection, and much more have gone greatly underappreciated compared to many of the other big indie hits. Perhaps this designer mentality I enjoy taking while puzzling shows me that, to some degree, these games appeal most to gamers with a designer’s mindset. Not every music fan wants to be a musician, not every film fan wants to be a director, so it makes sense that most gamers do not care much to take this mindset. But yet, in the words of the great Maddy Thorson:

When game gifting season came around last year, I ended up giving a lot more puzzle games than usual. I badly want to share this joy of puzzling with my peers. If you wish toTo partake in the joy of puzzling with me, I find many of these great games from showcase youtube channels like Thinky Games and Icely Puzzles. Thinky Games also hosts Thinkycon, where the developers of these very showcased games discuss their design processes. It’s a developer talk convention, so not every presentation shines, but far more of them show insight than waffling. Listening to the inspiration behind this and that (alongside showing games to your friends) is the closest I can get to wiping my memory of a puzzle game and playing it all over again. Play more puzzle games in 2026, dear reader!

Penny is an art blogger, a poster, and an anime convention panelist who enjoys gaming subculture and old stuff.

The post “I fit here”; a puzzle game love letter — by Penny appeared first on Gamesline.

The environment and the potential for horror is my favorite thing to examine. The time between beginning the walk and sighting the graveyard. The tension that’s building, the steady feeling that every second you come closer to something happening, and the infinite moments that pass lacking any sort of release from a vague dread. This is a feeling that Voices of the Void carries perfectly.

You’re in the woods, ostensibly alone. But the noises around are constant, unceasing, never quite familiar enough to become inured to. Had a pinecone not fallen right before my eyes with the accompanying sound of a twig snapping, I would’ve jumped at every sound in the night. I still jump at most of them. The noises and strange sights are the backbone of the game, everything else built upon flickering, single-frame figures and glances of things that appear at the edge of your view. The very first night in the game, as I stumbled over a barely visible road with a narrow flashlight beam failing to pierce the darkness, I saw a flash of green light at the corner of my eye, shifting between the trees and leaving me unsure if I’d seen it at all.

This is the defining experience of Voices of the Void: things don’t happen for a time, and when something does, you’re left confused, unsettled, and unsure what to do. The strange alpha state the game is currently in makes it more unclear what could simply be a physics engine causing props to interact in a strange way or what could be something else inside of your home base.

The loop is designed to make you drive the fragile ATV over the hilly landscape, encouraging you to see and engage with strange sights. In the beautifully designed map of a Swiss forest, the lowest explorable point is the center, where your research base and home are, and all powerlines across the woods lead back to it, allowing for easy navigation before you invest in duct taping a map to the ATV. Even in daylight, hurrying to finish tasks, strange events occur. Abandoned building doors get smashed in while you cower in a corner, an intimidating roar echoes across the map as you crest a hill, and the signs left by previous employees’ attempts to explore and understand the woods creep into your sight.

Tension and fear aren’t successful without the lulls, though. The breaks and the beats of peace where you feel at ease, the sunrise and powerful hum of the ATV beneath Dr. Kel, make morning runs for satellite data much less frightening than the just-past-midnight arrivals of a drone carrying the day’s supplies. The accomplishment of figuring out how to fix the oven, put together a mushroom pizza ingredient-by-ingredient, and escape from the monotony of stale MRE crackers completely washes away the struggles to reach that point. After it all, secure and confident in your home, horrors seep up once more to return the undercurrent of tension. Attempts to demystify and clean the basement of the base instead accidentally revealed a hidden room, concrete poured and a metal plate placed to stop entry. Within is an empty space, and a staircase that gradually morphs into tiling and shallow water reminiscent of the liminal pool rooms the tutorial took place within. Something alien and out of place that makes your growing knowledge and familiarity with your base suddenly feel all too small. It still haunts me whenever I stand in that stairwell again.

Despite the unending stream of horrors, everything starts to feel like home. A small bloodstain inside a satellite’s room is a reminder of you running full speed into the closed door and ragdolling to the floor. Nightly Christmas gnome visits offer a beautiful range of ways to decorate and make a space your own: furniture, nuclear waste products, and “a plush of GIR from Invader Zim but red I guess”. Figuring out the flow of the game and the way most interactions work doesn’t remove the fear, despite the gradually growing knowledge that there’s few things that could hurt you more than you can hurt yourself—by, say, running full speed into a door you’re sure you could’ve gotten through before it closed. That knowledge, instead of lessening tension, increases it, because the things that don’t involve hurting you can become much stranger and frightening. Shadowed figures, entrapment in an empty, utterly silent version of the station, warnings to not open lockers. The relief of grilling shrimp on the small balcony while savoring your temporary peace never lessens, never weakens the overall mood.

There is a beautiful strangeness in the way a growing understanding of Voices of the Void can lead to you pushing at the scares more, running at strange events instead of fleeing. Some become more benign—a frightening beam of light leads to a strange bit of exploding alien technology and a cute plushie for your bravery. But in other places the game understands how the urge to push further, to find the limitations and slip past boundaries of a space, can compel players. Warnings about lockers and censored things that crash the game upon getting too close. Skeletons appearing behind you and falling into a heap of bones at your feet. Locations reminiscent of the backrooms in their mazelike, unending nature.

After stumbling and carving my own awkward and incomplete path through the .9a update as my first experience with Voices of the Void, I finally turned to the forums of fans to find more interesting avenues to explore—and was shocked at the frequent expression that the unstable test version was a poor way to experience the game. Sure, story events and some alien encounters wouldn’t trigger, and forgetting to remove a floppy disk from a system would gradually occupy the base with massive, glowing ERROR signs, but I had been enraptured by my experience nonetheless. Playing the more recently unveiled .9b and .9c versions, which fixed these issues in a trade for introducing more, I appreciated the new events and allure of the Roadside Picnic elements added by the company of sightseeing aliens with a taste for shrimp—but even more beautiful to me was all of the little, random touches and occurrences that were different. Events I remembered defining my attitude and interactions with the systems never occurred; on a previously peaceful, quiet night, everything went dark and I caught sight of a pair of glowing eyes in the woods, separated only by the console’s blast shield—and I felt unprotected. A power outage and nighttime trek to one of the transformers brought me to a wooden upside-down cross buried in the road, taunting me with its presence upon a trail I’d walked across dozens of times.

Voices of the Void feels immense and ever-expanding, capable of being and doing just about anything it wishes, and integrating that into the whole without any struggle. Beautiful to play and enjoy the ambiance of rain and fog while keeping you on edge the entire time. Every single piece of the game, no matter how disparate and strange, feels right. Weird science and archaeological projects in all directions occupy your time and force you to brave the forests around, instead of hiding inside the base all day completing different paths of building, changing, and making the space your own. An immersive sim in the truest sense, with an incredible talent for making the world itself into a beautiful, conflicting painting that unites so many disparate feelings and events and thus feels confident and proud in everything it puts forward. Seek out the fishing rod bequeathed to you from a mysterious note in German. Crack a safe meant to remain sunken and forgotten at the bottom of a lake. Make sure to keep your shrimp in closed, refrigerated containers.

Voices of the Void is unstable, buggy, and at some points held together at the seams by duct tape and nails. It’s the best game I have played this year, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, even after playing as much as I can for a few months. Despite the horror and isolation, it’s not a lonely game—it feels more alive and more vast every time I sit down to play through a few more days. And it hasn’t ceased surprising me and putting a smile upon my face yet.

“Cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.” A Lovecraft quote, emblazoned above the massive windows you’ll spend much of your time staring out of and cleaning off—and one that encapsulates the feelings that Voices of the Void surfaces.

Now they just need to add some more meat to the apiary mechanics and it’s the perfect video game.

KB wants you to read Emptiness Effigied.

The post Ambient Dread in Voices of the Void — by KB appeared first on Gamesline.