Happy New Year, Gamesline! My name is Solon and I was a contributor here about two years ago, before I left to go get a masters degree in library science. Now I hear you saying: Solon, you’ve been deep in scholarship, surely you could not have had time to sit around playing videogames? And while it’s true that developing video games as research papers and theorizing new Fighting Game taxonomies at PAX is “a lot” of “real science” that I’m told “matters to the scholarly community”, I have also made sure to stay on top of the trends from this year, in order to become a strong and seasoned games librarian. Of course, it helps when the Twitch community does my homework and Gamesline does my research for me.
Thanks to all this shared lifting, I’ve been able to manage this last year honing Masters-level scholarship techniques and have found for you all today that there’s a new way of complaining that makes you sound really smart, and everyone is doing it. Instead of saying, “This gameplay sucks ass and I hate it” you can more constructively and insufferably say: “I see that the choices made in design are at Tension.” In sensemaking, Tension generally means that two concepts in conversation with one another may have a natural friction that can be negotiated with an experiment—or in our case: designed around within the bounds of a videogame. That frictional force between two or more aligned concepts is known as ‘tension’. There is tension inherent to any shooter game since the player can solve their problems with a well-aimed button press, thus every shooter will design weapons, armor, sightlines, tracking systems, enemy patterns, etc. that don’t “solve” this problem but negotiate these tensions inherent to being a game about shooting targets. And you can basically just throw that word ‘tension’ around anywhere and professors will give you an A. It’s a little cheat you can use to sound smart that should work well for all of us for the next year or so… At least until it becomes as overused as “Transformative”, “To what extent”, or “Subscribe to my Substack”.
With that explanation out of the way, welcome to Solon’s list of the Best Design Tensions of 2025:
Open World vs Narrative — Promise Mascot Agency
Can Kiryu Talk Too Much?
Here is a tension as old as Adventure (its not a duck), but thanks to AI-slop this year we’ve gotten to see just how much both design schools are mercilessly shit on by executive ‘free-thinkers’ who believe narrative design and open world design are spun up by magical frustum culling programmer elves. One of my favorite memes from 2025, “Easy, M” Super Mario RTX – Unreal Engine 5, highlights this perfectly:
I had no idea AAA Mario would be so popular. I had to make some more. 🍄
— Ryan Stewart (@RyanStewartVO) December 21, 2025
ft. @ArielHck as Peach https://t.co/p3YMlF5rEn pic.twitter.com/ggarxptMuZ
I’m imagining a games executive taking all the wrong lessons from this, but also hiring Ryan Stewart and Ariel Hack.
Open world designs require the designer to build scaffolding that guide a player or players to a destination—this is known as wayfinding. Playtonic redesigned Yooka-Replaylee this year in order to give the player more wayfinding tools and it made the original Yooka-Laylee go from being mocked mercilessly to merely misunderstood. A modern day miracle! Narrative designs can often align well with open world games as a wayfinding tool to very simply tell the player with words what the current state of the world is or where they should go to progress the plot. Everyone’s favorite fairy Navi, from Ocarina of Time, is a foremost example of this: the name being short for ‘navigator’ evokes a wayfinding tool. So much so, that I can summarize a major tension between open worlds and narrative by saying “Hey, Listen!” So the wider games audience knows all too well that when you use a character for game cues, that will reduce that character to being the player’s nanny. This takes the player (and even the character they are playing) out of the role they are playing within an adventure game.
This isn’t a negative though, story is great at taking attention away from the player doing other tasks. This can be constructive for breaking up players’ various tasks, or for onboarding/offboarding quests. Of course, it can be a double-edged sword when the player is trying to do something and is suddenly being bombarded with information, which is essentially the joke of Mario (4K) over-explaining things the player is in the middle of doing. (This tension also comes up when presenting games for an audience like the old E3 stage demos—[show] & [tell] are literally in conflict with each other even though both must happen!)
So what if I told you that we’ve solved this conflict that is so core to games? I know as scientists we’re not supposed to ‘solve’ tensions but rather explore what effects those tensions create but we’ll get to that later in the list! Kaizen Game Works really did SOLVE the Navi problem! Promise Mascot Agency is an open world game that uses a management simulator to bridge their story and their world. You play the role of Literally Kiryu from Yakuza, and you take care of misfit mascots in a haunted town by employing them all to serve the community and make it a better place. Every 30 minutes or so, new jobs open up and you can make money by sending the right mascots to each individual job, and while they work the jobs you collect power-ups for your car, items to keep your mascots hydrated, and chat with community members to find and enhance your relationships with clients. It is extremely similar to Kaizen’s previous game Paradise Killer. Except, instead of spilling tea with dying gods who have all the time in heaven, you have timers ticking in the background ushering you towards different parts of the town. Normally, this would add anxiety to a situation that is reliant on the player keeping many plates spinning at once, but I’m telling you They Solved It! It’s just Simpsons Hit & Run!
The secret is: the player always has to hit a button to swap between various narrative, management, and driving modes. The timers ticking can suggest increasingly urgent moves to make, but control is never taken away from the player until/unless they decide to change the mode themselves through button activation. It’s incredibly subtle, but whenever a mascot needs relief, they flash a big loud prompt on the UI that says “Please Help in 5 Minutes!” and then the player is granted agency to manage a stopping point from map exploration within that time frame—or you can just let your mascot drown and take the hit on the money, like a real boss. This turns what should be an annoying obligation into player agency! The only exception Promise Mascot Agency makes is when assassins call you on the phone to say “We will come kill you if you don’t send the family one million yen right now.”—which, fair.
Kaizen Game Works has a deep respect for visual novel design and because of that Promise Mascot Agency is full of design blueprints like this that bridge pitfalls which other larger games constantly fall into. I believe the lessons from this game can be easily adapted to other projects that want to use varied storytelling techniques while navigating a player’s task and attention economy. It might not be as fun to others as it is to me, but I think Promise Mascot Agency is an incredible design textbook that everyone would be better for playing.
Rhythm Game vs Adventure — Unbeatable
High School Musical Needed Quick Time Events
The mad lads really went for it. It took eight years of incredibly tough grinding on a moonshot dream that I still believe might be impossible: and as Maverick explained in his task-taking review, it comes with a lot of asterisks!
Combining most anything with rhythm games is a nightmare. We’ve done this for decades and the hypnotic effects of rhythm games always manage to overtake all human body functions, leaving room for little else—they systemically hate sharing the stage with anything. Guitar Hero 6 used its dying breath to try to unravel just a few of these tensions, and barely eked out a bizarre one-of-a-kind rhythm/resource management game. I’ve seen countless indie games die at this altar, and even after a miracle Dungeon Crawler/Rhythm hybrid in Crypt of the NecroDancer, Brace Yourself Games still went for the impossible dream of a story/rhythm hybrid in Rift of the NecroDancer to mixed success. Outside of that, 2025 saw Everhood 2 and Rhythm Doctor continue to aim for the very specific dream of telling a story through a rhythm game. But it’s Unbeatable that slams its shin into more lessons than anyone, and the way it bleeds out on stage is both undeniably punk as fuck and extremely fucking useful for studying.
Unbeatable puts you in story mode for fifteen minutes, and then you fail a rhythm game for two minutes before being thrust into fifteen more minutes of story that seems a bit pissed that you interrupted it. It did successfully feel like I’d gotten beaten up by cops when this happened, and it also felt awful and annoying! This is exemplary of how fast-twitch rhythm sections are in deep design strife with much slower-digesting storyweaving in so many ways. And Unbeatable tries nearly everything: interrupting songs with story beat cutscenes, intertwining rhythm game modes between charts and Rhythm Heaven-type minigames as a ludic leitmotif, making full freeplay charts for ambient background music moments, massive 3D action setpieces inspired by 3D Sonic games where you grind and parkour to the beat, even explaining the rhythm game’s diegesis like a musical explaining why everyone is singing and dancing—nothing was taken for granted or left aside other than PaRappa the Rapper style sounds-as-button input—and I’m SURE that got tested (and discarded) at some point!
There is a cost to this kind of everything-goes shotgun approach, and it shows up in the finale of the game when the game has to very briefly stop mid-song to load up and unload various sections and mini-games. It chooses to have as little on-board and off-load as possible, leading to the player kinda just guessing whenever a mode switch happens. Guitar Hero 6 ran into this cost and their solution was splitting Rush’s 2116 into six distinct rhythm tracks which allowed them the freedom to make distinct ‘levels’ for each section to help tell the story. These aren’t ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ choices, they are results to experiments that we can record. I don’t think Unbeatable is the best rhythm/story game of this year (Rhythm Doctor is made by powerful percussion perverts with applied math degrees), but I do think everyone should play it if they want to see a veritable buffet of functional ways to develop the Rhythm Game/Adventure Game hybrid. This is going to sound weird, but it’s for the dream: I don’t want a sequel to the story of Unbeatable, those kids should take a well-earned rest. What I need is a sequel to the ENGINE of Unbeatable. 2-button rhythm game with full 3D environments and a multi-format story engine?? That truly is the road to being Unbeatable.
Videogames vs Nonfiction — Despelote
That Footwerk Was Factual
I have great news for all the Despelote fans. Not only is Soccer real, but Ecuador is as well.
gained some insight today into why gamers never seem to know what they're talking about
— Punchy (@punchystream.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 6:27 PM
[image or embed]
I was going to leave this entry as just this post because it really does speak volumes, but I think it’s actually fair to think through why a gamer would think Nioh is “nonfiction” and it’ll explain the uphill battle that Despelote has—this isn’t systemic tension or genre-tension or mechanic tension or narrative tension, this is something rooted in videogames as media classification. If we are making play spaces with rules guiding the play, how do we capture historical play? We emulate it into a spoken or written form of broadcast and that is our substitute for play. In order for developer and main-character Julián Cordero to make Despelote, a second round of emulation has to happen on top of the broadcasted soccer footage heavily used for the game. You have to emulate the feeling of soccer, the feeling of Quito, the feeling of being a kid, everything. Is Madden nonfiction? Possibly! Players can obviously use the game to simulate classic football games play-for-play, but that doesn’t mean the game itself is nonfiction. And Breaking Madden did happen in real life, we all saw it. The N64’s Quarterback Club franchise has a game mode that simulates each individual Super Bowl’s most dire moment and asks “what would you do?”, which is solid historical fiction. But to BE a nonfiction game is to create play spaces that also allow space for real events to happen around you that you probably can’t directly play with because they need to stay static.
The Cat and the Coup uses NYT headlines to outline the assassination of the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and juxtaposes those with metaphorical puzzles based on Iranian art where you play as a rather aggressive cat. One way I read this is as a depiction of Iranians’ lack of agency over their political situation. That Dragon, Cancer is an autobiographical game that also depicts a lack of agency over the death of a son. Of course, compared to those examples, Despelote is much lighter, but it takes the hardest road possible to capture the feeling of Ecuador qualifying for the 2002 World Cup. By letting the player participate in various childhood life events, we gain insight into how these events were impacted by World Cup Fever taking hold in Quito. In young Julián’s world, a bottle is a ball, a stick is a ball-grabbing tool, a dog is a goalie, and you are the greatest soccer player in history booting balls into orbit with your mega-foot. This kind of magical realism seems well-suited for nonfiction games, despite how ironic that is, but that’s the magic of games. All three of these examples of nonfiction games prove how worthwhile it is to capture a historical period in games, because playing videogames can make that thing overwhelmingly important. And to a kid? What’s more important than your country in the World Cup??
Kaizo vs Adventure Games — Baby Steps
Wanna Play QWOP For Thirteen Hours?
Oh! Hard game vs Easy game, one of play’s favorite tensions! No. Grow up. Fall over right now. Ignore these reactionary subjectivities, we are talking about two things that are fundamentally similar: every Kaizo game is an adventure in skill acquisition and every Adventure game is deeply in touch with failure affordance. One is always born in conversation to the other like the two sides of a funhouse mirror, and Baby Steps tries to impossibly combine those mirror dimensions into one place, so we should be precise and delicate about discussing its design.
How long can you withstand a game taking the piss? How much piss will you afford to have taken from you? Can you last pissless for ten hours of adventure gaming? It’s easy to be ridiculed when it’s a shell-jump into a damage-boosted spin jump section. But this is Walking. We are walking. We are struggling to walk. With legs. Like a baby. You are a grown baby for over ten hours. I Wanna Be The Guy is a kaizo game that is about the length of a Naughty Dog or Insomniac-esque adventure game, but it constantly mixes up its tone and styling to keep the player feeling like some authorial hand is out there urging them on. Lego Star Wars is an adventure game that takes the piss, lampooning anything it can for up to forty hours, but it can so easily afford that because it’s grounded within the structure of a hearty sci-fi franchise made unserious for children.
Baby Steps has one single giggle before putting an hour of abstracted climbing in front of you; you are alone with only the stone-faced mountain and your waning sanity for company. And the reward for not giving up and advancing against adversity? One giggle, more mountain. You have to love the mountain. So there’s this tension in tone that Baby Steps explores that makes most game development styles cringe in discomfort, but especially Kaizo/Adventure games: just leaving the player alone. No power-ups, no Collectible Get, and very few narrative check-ins to help orient the player—which for an adventure game is unthinkable. And because of this it can afford some novel level design flourishes: paths that guide the player in circles, towers of no-regard, and dozens of remarkably unremarkable unmapped vistas commonly found by stopping climbing and turning around.
I’d argue the largest design difference between Kaizos and Adventure games is the scale at which short term and long term goals are presented. An hour spent trying to master one single section within the context of a three-or-four minute long level is a similar kind of progression to an hour spent tackling a large set-piece within an adventure game, after which it will tell you where your next objective lies. Celeste is a soft example of a Kaizo/Adventure hybrid approaching this tension in how it uses strawberries as an icon for reliably resetting a player’s short-term goals, and then cordons off distinct zones to re-evaluate the player’s progress up the mountain. Baby Steps similarly uses a level-structure with short opening and closing cutscenes to transition the player to various stages up the mountain. But instead of a map or UI tool to allow the player to reorient themselves, it solely relies on long mountainous sightlines to show the player how close or far they are from the next checkpoint. The player must trust that the mountain will guide them where they need to go as long as they remain vigilant and observant, which helps reinforce themes of self-sufficiency. But what about the Kaizo-sized micro goals and self-improvement? Well, baby steps now. I’m sure you can find how this part of the tension was explored on your own.
Myst vs Roguelike — Blue Prince
Draw Five Red Pages, Do Not Draw Five Blue Pages
I think this is the last of these five ‘complex games with extremely long dev timelines and very few people working on it that leads to experimental answers to brilliant questions’—this is exactly why we Indie. I already know Balatro works. I already know Vampire Survivors works. I know that Ball x Pit and CloverPit and Nubby’s Number Factory and all these fucking Roguelikes+classic game work. In 2026 some Dig Dug Roguelike will do insane numbers. Blue Prince doesn’t work! It obviously can’t work! I’ve uninstalled and re-installed this game three times this year and it still doesn’t work! I fucking despise every run I’ve ever done in Blue Prince, advancing nothing, gaining nothing, learning nothing. Resetting days as I draw three L-turns into another dead end for the fifth time in a row. It’s infuriating! So anyways, I did my PAX panel on librarianship about Blue Prince and I’m gonna write more words about Blue Prince right now! I can’t stop thinking about what is effectively a very plain game.
goes to re-install Blue Prince… you know, for screenshot
And who writes about games they LIKED in 2025 anyways? Why would you want to remember what was good about that year? We should be remembering the pain so that we never come back here again! Right? Am I right?? Alright enough bluster, let’s get into it.
Blue Prince is such a good pun. I hope the amount of ink that the shambling corpse of games journalism spilled for Blue Prince commented enough on how great a name it is. It’s exquisite.
You can not put Myst and Roguelikes together! There are so many tensions you have to account for! The play-cycles are different—BP chose the somewhat more obvious Roguelike structure in a Myst super-structure, but the opposite would be wild too. The goal setting is different—BP eased this tension by Roguelike runs being a constant primary goal with the wider mystery being an ever-radiating secondary goal in the background to be approached once the Roguelike parts are fully settled. I think the story is the only element where both genres can find purchase together as the Roguelike cycles obscure the Myst-style puzzle components, but easing that tension comes at the cost that puzzle pieces show up in randomized pools, meaning a player could possibly just never see a crucial puzzle piece if they never draw a certain room (or if they think a certain room is ‘bad’ and avoid ever using it over all other pieces). All of these tensions come with giant game-killing chasms. Unlike other Roguelikes where progress is predictably progressive, you can have a run that regresses your states if you use materials that you stocked on previous runs in places that end up not gaining you forward progress like you’d hoped. That is just not a design consideration that Slots & Daggers, a somehow comparatively normal game, ever had to make.
The most fascinating design tension Blue Prince weighed its soul on is how to show interactable and important objects. They don’t! Most information-load goes towards the Myst side of leaving all objects undecorated within a naturally lit style wherever they lie, and the player is left to figure out if they are important, or of what use they are. This is the opposite of contemporary Roguelike stylings which are extremely verbose or build iconography to lead the player through wholly knowing that a thing exists and what it will do. While this leads to the moment-to-moment frustration of searching every room for known objects, it also leverages all of the Roguelike strengths of needing every little advantage towards a player’s general ‘observation palette’. New room: Do I have exits? Does this room have an immediate function? Anything hidden in a usual spot? Has anything I’ve done so far affected other rooms? Has any information in here developed for me? Go to next room? That’s all Roguelike stuff feeding directly into the observational tendencies of a Myst-styled game, and it just works! Blue Prince actually works?? This is the exact feeling that got this concept beyond prototyping and I’m so grateful for it—this is why we Indie!
Franchising Katamari — Once Upon A Katamari
Can Katamari Slop?
Up to this point, one of videogames’ greatest contributions to humanity, Katamari Damacy, has periodically gotten new releases to keep up with new console generations before transitioning to simply remaking older releases so that they exist on PC. This was all we ever needed and not a drop more was ever necessary, however, the money printing machine marches onward. Katamari puts food on our tables and clothes on our children—before quickly rolling it up from our tables, heading to the wardrobe, and rolling up the children of course. But there’s a component to this that will naturally affect the design of an entire game: if there is now an expectation for new, future Katamari, what shape can that take? We already roll up everything in the universe in every game and we always will—how can you expand on Everything? In a word: Curation.
[gets real close to the microphone to make sure the people in the back can hear the single most important word a librarian can give you as panacea for our overwhelming information age]
C U R A T I O N
We can curate everything into eras. Once Upon A Katamari curates all of its levels into different eras of civilization. A future game can curate all of its levels into art histories, or Malaysian islands and cultures, folk festivals of North America, frames of velocity, the life of John Candy, ocean tides, chemical properties (imagine a vinegar level where you start your roll with a antacid tab), multiverses, Getting Over It with My FoddyMari,
We do deserve an ode-to-videogames inspired Katamari game. 9-Volt Katamari.
Wait, an open source Katamari could do this…
Once Upon a Katamari made some wise and specific design choices to set them up for further successful franchising in ways that I would have thought Katamari was heavily resistant to. I know it’s annoying to take a game of pure whimsy and be like: wanna see how the meat is made? But check out the king’s meat.
Solon Katamari Safety Tip: In case you are ever in a real-life Katamari attack, always keep kids around you as they will be your last possible sign to activate one of these new fancy mid-level cutscenes to get the hell outta there. Also get on a shelf! Katamaris always struggle with things on the second or third shelf of a cabinet.
The biggest change they made to the core of Katamari was adding powerups that can be rolled over and activated to make your Katamari move faster or hoover up objects really quickly. It’s delightfully Namco to default your design’s tertiary objectives to ZOOOOM BUTTON, but hey it’s a classic device for a reason. Katamari has previously been a very ‘pure’ experience; lacking in any distraction from the primary objective of any given level. But this classic kart-racer design tool always works to give the player moments of control and power that purposefully break up the flow of rolling. Equally classic ‘Namco’ design is the addition of collectible crown-shaped tokens in each level which serve two very practical purposes: get players to explore the level at various sizes, and give players a metaprogression tool that feeds them into a bunch of customization menus. The other core change to how the game is played is simplifying the controls so that you no longer need to hold both sticks to move the Katamari in a direction, and so that The Prince’s dash is simply on the trigger instead of alternating the sticks. These are very clinical design choices that remove friction and take away from the whimsy, but after 20 years of Katamari, it is kinda nice to see it grow up and put on the suit and tie.
Further professionalizing Katamari is the addition of a few new modes. Online multiplayer mode KatamariBall is designed about as subtly as a brick, and it combines with surprisingly robust Cousin customization to make the bedrock of what will become staples of all future Katamari games. It’s good to see them keeping this ‘simple’ and not overthinking or getting cute with things that feel less ‘inspired’ and more ‘the union has negotiated this into their contract to secure the bag for upcoming sequels’—which, oh shit! We can talk about that now!
Shouts to all the union workers now in the games industry, the incredible organizing of GWU has been bearing fruit all year and currently half of all games industry workers are looking to unionize in 2026. They are securing contracts with health care, parental leave, reducing crunch—and we can start talking about phase two: modality initiatives to secure the bag for asset artists and networking teams. Once you’ve got online modes and character customization? You gotta have it in the sequel too! Systems that make a game stronger and more franchisable can absolutely be a part of these union negotiations! It legitimately helps companies see past a release and into their next decade. So look forward to some strangely specific games system becoming a political battleground in 2026—probably a relationship system, as admins try and fail to get the labor offloaded onto AI practices. And when that inevitably crashes because people hate dating the robot lady in the self-checkout line, we’ll need great union-strong games writers to pick up that slack!
Look, I’m so excited to be writing anything about a Katamari game and that means you get me at my worst behavior. We’re going to dig into some really fucking nerdy design minutae—the stuff I think about when the lights are off and nobody is around to hear me… Did you notice the loading screens are there, but they are super fast and it’s kinda weird? The quirky loading screen behaviors synonymous with Namco-Bandai’s PS2 era are quickly becoming vestigial. Where are they going? Something has gotta get loaded, right? Well kinda, they are getting hidden into the various onboarding devices after level-selection. So when the player goes to see the King of the Cosmos, the computer is spinning that initial state of the level up (segmented by size-based gates that make the world larger as you progress) and when you are Royal Rainbow-ing at the end of levels the system begins streaming the level results section and queues up the main overworld. These are primary concerns of a game’s flow that developers are constantly thinking about even though they are something the player very rarely has to think about unless something has gone wrong (or in the case of Final Fantasy XVI, way too right) I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a rash of fake load-times/loading screens coming up in games just to give the player better buffer between modes. So Katamari is now in a position where it might have to rethink its overall menu flow in ‘future releases’ (again, a phrase that we couldn’t really say a year ago). The default order of level select -> King’s debrief -> loading screen -> level explanation is becoming more cruff than substance as computers have gotten really good at object proliferation. We have to re-balance player onboarding and the cognitive load that comes with it alongside these absurdly fast loading times, not that The King Of The Cosmos has any interest in these things—but brother you ARE on the chopping block! You know who else has this problem? The king of this very specific shit: Masahiro Sakurai. I’ve only gotten to see and play a tiny bit of Kirby Air Riders, but the king of menus and load-flow is back, and some of those menus are super chunky. Friction-filled gnarly character and vehicle select menus that are hiding a lot of fun processing in the background. If you are interested in this field of menu flow, Sakurai’s the guy to look at, especially Kid Icarus: Uprising.
I believe this is the only time I’ve published any thoughts around Katamari, so it’s about time for the full monty. There is this peculiar structural problem with Katamari games that some day I dream of fixing complicating. You know how your Katamari gets ranked by what it is made up of? The results screen gleefully tells you your ball is quite ‘Partition-y’ or some such nonsense. I’ve always found this so unsatisfying, when you could really easily be getting into the meat of summarizing what all was rolled up! It’s 2026 now and I demand Katamari Classification systems! I know I’m the only person who has ever dug into the full item glossary that every game has, but they could be so much more robust with stronger object tagging behaviors. That’s right, I’m suggesting a taxonomy audit of objects in Katamari games. Real sicko librarian shit. We know objects have mass and size, sometimes they have other properties in certain modes like making the Katamari more ‘hot’ or ‘sweet’ depending on the level requirements. But they only have a single level classification system where objects are only collocated by genre. Each object could have various tags that help better describe each rolling journey the player undergoes. The resulting planet’s Core could be an object genre based on the quality of what was rolled up in the first half of a level and then the Crust could be a descriptor genre based on the second half of the level. In the saloon level you start by rolling up small beverages, and by the end you are rolling up large tumbleweeds and cowboys—call that planet Dusty Sipper and there you go! Yep, that looks dusty alright! But it goes further than just making more fitting descriptions. Once tagged, objects can exhibit behaviors based on reading the tags of proximal objects and boom! Now you’ve got semantic triples! The Katamari can exhibit life mid-rolling as objects can now sense one another on the ball. If you want 22nd century Katamari today, send in a data scientist to inject linked data structure and theory into this children’s video game franchise. The possibilities are endless, and it starts with giving reverence to the object classification system. It’s just curation!
We’ve got more modern design trends to try to twist our brains on, but it felt so nice this year to see Katamari growing up alongside me. It was this strange PS2 cult hit for such a long time that I didn’t think it would break out of that status, and even if it did that it would be stripped of its soul along the way. Once Upon a Katamari does make some sacrifice, but this entry permanently enshrines The Prince as one of the canonical game characters of all time now that he’s gotten to shine for a new generation of players.
My son is rolling up underwater creatures in Katamari and he found a mollusk and was confused by it and he said “maybe it’s a ghost in the shell” and now I’m extremely confused and trying to figure out where that came from. Who is exposing my child to anime???
— Jeff Gerstmann (@jeffgerstmann.com) October 22, 2025 at 7:39 PM
LucasArts vs The 21st Century — The Drifter
This Shit’ll Turn Your DNA Australian
So you want to be nostalgic and modern at the same time, huh? In art we’re always synthesizing our inspirations in a way that walks this line trying to find out how much ‘homage’ you can get away with before you are seen as fraudulent. This is magnified in videogames where systemic expression often has so much developmental distance from aesthetic expression, despite how much they inform each other throughout development. Because of how much technical heavy lifting this all is, the LucasArts styled Point-and-click has seen very little development since Grim Fandango in 1998. This effect is most notable within Ron Gilbert’s Thimbleweed Park, a very well crafted story that is nevertheless held back by the trappings inherent to the style: Clunky interface, world is too large, overwhelming options. And none of these make Thimbleweed Park bad, I heartily recommend it actually (the DLC is still the best dollar you can spend on Steam) but it always felt like we were so close to seeing a new generation of point-and-click games on the horizon and nostalgia has felt like the only thing holding it back.
But that’s not really the whole story here, because we’ve had loads of point-and-click games over the last fifteen years, building from distinctly non-LucasArts traditions. These are built inside of engines capable of creating a wide array of point-and-click styles, but inevitably they’ve all run into the same tensions: the more action/verbiage your game uses, the harder it is for players to keep up. The more beautifully ornamented your graphics are, the harder it is for players to find what to click on. Unique abstractions can surprise the player and push them to think wider (oh, I guess I trade peanut butter for 500 ants, sure), but it can also confuse and frustrate just as many other players. These are all things that The Drifter has taken a novel approach towards: By developing new controller support options, it is much easier to play on controller than any other P&C I’ve played. This does mean there aren’t any designed pixel hunts (which have long been a pariah of the genre, but they can have a place). This also lets them get away with making much more robust and ornamented screens—but still not too ornamented because The Drifter realizes some people are still using a normal mouse-and-keyboard interface.
Does this mean they ‘fixed’ the Point-and-Click? Why don’t we always do it like this? Well, let’s look at a tradeoff. So if controller becomes faster and easier (in a genre we currently call ‘Point and Click’), could there be a pacing issue between interfaces? Could that pacing difference be seen as controller being ‘easy mode’? These types of design questions are way more ‘figured out’ in how we see pacing in other game genres, like Visual Novels, Gachas, and SHMUPs, but this is a genre that gets to be run largely by narrative design pacing like a mystery author would use.
(Design Tangent: pacing design becomes a very practical P&C issue in Escape Room style P&Cs like those from the Flash era because the player can focus on operating each little puzzle box. Anyways, go play every Rusty Lake game and every Amanita Design game. They are all so good. It will not take long, I promise!)
So with all this Point-and-Click design theory in mind, imagine with me: what if Maniac Mansion on the NES used a cursor that locks on to hotspots instead of a mouse-style cursor? This entire genre would be incredibly different-shaped from that design decision. That’s why, while it might be easy to say “The Drifter fixed pixel hunting in P&Cs”, we should recognize there’s something lost from this design methodology.
But also… THE DRIFTER FIXED THAT SHIT! IT’S INCREDIBLE! The pacing is generally controlled by the episodic design. The UI for controller support is intuitive and even helpful for mouse controls. The divide between items and conversation topics is clear and helps guide the player instead of overwhelming them. And even aside from that, all of the fundamentals come so easy to The Drifter, it’s unfair. I’m playing this game and just thinking about how cracked out Australia’s design fundamentals are. How are they like this? How is the ANZ region more popular on this list than anywhere else in the world? I’m realizing that y’all have won a very peculiar award by landing right here as the most tension-exploring games region, but thank you and please keep doing whatever the hell y’all are doing! The Drifter is exploring new futures for how we design P&Cs and I hope a lot of people are taking notes.
Supergiant Games vs Sequels — Hades II
Two torches are not a weapon. They are a cry for help.
C’mon guys… Guys… Com—no like come on though? We know you don’t make sequels but like, when you make a sequel it doesn’t have to be Exactly The Same as the previous one but with more steps. 555-COME-ON-NOW this is a copy-paste. I’m sorry. That’s a damning design criticism but like, the signs are all there: I do not have to play this game any differently from the last. There are no choices within Hades II’s rooms or boons that would affect the outcomes of my runs any differently, but there sure are More choices! A God from Mount Olympus has bequeathed upon me +5% charge speed? Well Zeus better kept that fuggin receipt, I gain +5% charge speed whenever I clench my butt. I know this is a copy-paste because instead of building myth and telling tale, every character just talks about mechanics of the game. I don’t CARE how much the scythe of stankonia’s faster hit arc reminds you of my quest to “kill Chronos”, Odysseus! Get a hobby! No wonder Melinoë needed to run away, she’s trying to get away from all of you talking about whatever weird powers she is manifesting. God forbid a witch do anything around here without having to read through three levels of tool-tips to understand what things do.
Melinoë’s cool though.
Anyways, there isn’t a cool design tension to learn about here, if there was I wouldn’t be this mad. They made a perfectly balanced and tensionless sequel to their previous huge breakthrough game, isn’t. that.. 😀 😀 justtsofucking,,. 😀 great?.?. D: D:< itsCozy EVEN!.f,1ad -aaaanyways, I just wanted to rant a bit before making my main point that Supergiant Games should not make any more sequels ever again … unless it is Transistor 2 of course, obvious exemption—or Pyre 2 cuz that’s GOTTA go somewhere. Yeah no okay ok or Bastion 2? but like if it was inspired by Hades?? That would fuck though. Fine fine you’re totally right, hey Supergiant? You cool. Do what you do. I’m still a little miffed by the blandest barely hand-holdey yuri that I’ve ever seen in my life not that it matters since your Greek Easy-Pass to classics-approved bisexual horny town got hella scooped by a much hornier superhero coworker romance novel game, but like, hey—already bygones—we know you aren’t usually Mr. Play It Safe but, look… the numbers? The numbers were way too good to pass up. I hear that’s what playing with the devil will get ya’. Make that Hades 3 money if you gotta, brother. We’ll see you at the crossroads either way~
Anyways, we’ve learned nothing here, but even still I can’t say the time was wasted, it was just spent playing videogames.
Failure To Plan vs Plan That Fails — Metal Gear Solid V
Doesn’t Matter If We Suck, Because Huey Sucks More!
All rise for our favorite online pastime: discussing the spectacle of hypermasculinity. Watch as these boys self-destruct under their own futile self-glorification and myth building while missionrotting under the desert sun. I desperately wish for a Diamond Dogs situation to happen to every libertarian in the white house and every ICE officer ever employed. The ultimate glory of Big Boss is a story about a bunch of gay bitches who think they are putting together a new world order but end up building a suicide cult out of prisoners of war… Well, that would be the story… Except they do fight over an absurdly super-sized robot with sexy thighs, they do have multiple global-level health infestations, their enemies do have freaky psychic powers, and so they are technically saving the world actually. At every turn, this game bends over backwards just to justify what the Diamond Dogs fight for, even though watching them simply destroy themselves in cutscenes styled after 00s TV drama 24 is more rewarding and justified.
The core themes around severed limbs and dopplegangers are wholly undercut when we can point to the very real pain in all of our asses that is Huey. The game overall doesn’t have a fraction of the guts it takes to commit. If only there was some simple and convenient way to delegitimize everything that happens inside of it as if it were non-canon. Oh perfect, Big Boss isn’t the real Venom Snake, he’s out having other adventures while we rot for PMC clout. The jarhead sucker who the player plays as is supposed to be holding the mirror up to the player, but that trick only really works if the player is a jarhead-shaped dude? There’s very little point to discuss what it would be like if this game were finished, or what Kojima’s contributions to it really were, because it’s just overall too non-committal for anything to stick, and too embarrassingly bare-bones to try to advocate for the things that do land. (Rooting through every soldier profile to eliminate soldiers speaking a specific language would be interesting as a critique on military administration, if it had any impact at all on your forces impact or morale.) And the most frustrating part is that, that’s what Metal Gear Solid V is proud to be! It does not strive for anything greater than having the player replay the opening mission again hoping that they come to some new conclusion seeing everything again. It’s not nihilism, it’s just empty. And to replace fantasy with a redundant gritty realism as an excuse to justify all this vaguely retro-aesthetic paramilitary global conflict packed inside of a generic glossy spy thriller reminds me of when Daniel Craig did it in Quantum of Solace.
I spent all of 2025 playing every Metal Gear game, and while I trudged through some real stinkers for the first time—we abandoned Metal Gear PoOps as soon as Superman Snake fought his second Regular Tank with hundreds of bazookas and grenades—there were wonderful little moments at the periphery of the main MGS1+2+3+4 lineup that I really enjoyed! Metal Gear 2 still manages to command a lot of power through its simple and effective interface while establishing tons of charming set pieces that become mainstays for the franchise. Even Peace Walker earns a truly insane climax that I didn’t expect. But then I finally hit the game I’d spent a decade avoiding: Venom Snake Horse Adventures. And let me tell ya, Venom Snake Horse Adventures makes a lot less sense outside of the context of 2015. To make an open world game in the MGS universe for the PS3 meant punting at every possible design conflict: won’t the player recognize that every African outpost is just individual ‘levels’ strung together by lonely desert paths they can skip by helicopter? Should the player have a constant companion that can’t be harmed and generally makes the player more comfortable? Sure. Whatever’s most fun. And thank goodness for that because it is the one thing that this game believes in above anything else: the Venom Snake Horse Adventure section should be Fun!
The best part of MGSV is choosing the giant robot fight again, sticking your own mix-tape into Snake’s ears, getting on your horse, and running away from Sahelanthropus while giggling as MGS‘s soundscape interrupts Sabrina Carpenter break up songs. Or whatever you want to imagine Snake’s guilty pleasures would be. It’s even worth going back to—the way it has been cared for post launch has been substantial! It helps that MGSV‘s entirety takes up 12GB less space than this year’s Dragon Quest 1+2 and 3 HD-2D remakes combined. (WHY ARE THEY 20GB EACH?) It is very easy to play this game without having to interact with any of the story, narrative, or characters mucking up your Afghani Cowboy Fulton Funtime.
I can’t claim to know anything about what happens in Konami as an organization, however like everyone else I’m incredibly tempted to divine meaning from their relationship with this game. It feels like so much craft and care was put into the multiplayer and in the photograph system in the cockpit of your travel helicopter. The farther you get from any parts with voice acting, the more beautiful the game gets, and so I am left struggling with these crumbling pieces trying to figure out if Konami Can’t Cook or if Konami Won’t Cook. It’s the same authorial struggle that happens when watching WWE wrestling where you’re like: I know this performer doesn’t suck, but they sure do suck here! And it’s not a death by committee type thing or a Kojima left the project thing or an overwhelmed-by-open-world design type thing because all of these systems were thoroughly pre-tested within Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes. The entire process to make da game juices good was thoroughly undertaken. I’ve seen Konami’s dev teams when they phone it in and this wasn’t that. At the end of the day, all I can really point to is that this game was made by Diamond Dogs: they can deny any failure by pointing at their plan’s fail points and say “see, all according to our specsheet” as they continue to devour their own.
Some day these AAA video games are gonna recognize that their ‘long tail’ is actually the players’ ‘long tail’. But it starts with recognizing that Konami’s best design decision for MGSV was when they got Duran Duran to release Invisible for MGSV. Source: it’s pinned on my Bsky.
Stupid Friends vs Stupid Games — Peak
If All Your Friends Jumped Off A Bridge, Was It For Content?
Alright, enough op-ed posting, lets get back to science. Twenty Twenty Five was the year of Friendslop, which is a classification category so robust that we here at The Institution That Names Genres (A place I do genuinely work at right now) had to have major discussions about it between lectures. Usually we ignore the discourse because it comes up with weird things like “hypercasual” or “survivorslike” which are clearly not settled design phenomena (although Horde Survival is pretty solid). But Friendslop! Oooh man what a can of taxonomical worms that is! So we know that games are just better across the board with friends and we also know that you can basically give players a tin can of beans and some string and if two players are in the space together they’ll just make up a game about it themselves. You don’t have to DO all that much as a designer to keep jingling keys when the players can bounce things off of one another and generally enjoy themselves. Does that make multiplayer gaming its own genre? Does that make multiplayer games their own form of expression separate from single player gaming? Is multiplayer gaming a different medium altogether? In the same way that improv and stand-up are entirely different mediums even though improv is just multiplayer stand-up? These are the things that have kept designers up at night for decades. Ever since those British bastards at Rare exposed the whole game by saying they slapped Goldeneye multiplayer together as an ‘afterthought’. Like, YEAH but you don’t have to SAY IT like that!
Peak came out real fast from Aggro Crab and it’s not like it is better or worse than R.E.P.O. or Lethal Company or Content Warning, but it has a lot more design constraints than those. Rather than throwing players in randomized rooms with toys and monsters, Peak says: here’s the mountain we generated for you today, can you and your friends climb it? Much of the easy low-hanging fruit of friendslop comes from how easy it is to subvert a game’s limitations or expectations by getting goofy, since play is so easy to come by when you have friends. Conversely, Peak’s design is centered around keeping all the players contained as much as possible. Everyone has to color inside the lines together for the best outcome. So this is one of the tensions when designing friendslop: Should the systems of a multiplayer game get more rigid as play progresses, or should it start rigid and then loosen up? Should the game be stupid so your friends can be smart, or should the game be smart so your friends can be stupid?
When you start up Peak you are in an airport terminal waiting to set the stage and rules for your group’s ascent—it’s a loading zone for you and your friends. It’s a fantastic place to get all the silliez out and is full of toys to mess around with that help everyone practice the mechanics. This zone is the scaffolding for what I call ‘The Board Game Paradox’: you wanna play games with friends so you buy a new board game but then when your friends come over you find out they have no interest in learning a new board game. This happened all year this year where people were like: “wanna play [friendslop] with me?” “I don’t have that” “Well I’ll get it for you” “Okay but I’ll probably only play it once” “That’s fine, it’s cheap!” and then I only play it once and now it just sits there on the shelf… The purpose of the game is for making memories with friends, yet my main memory of the game becomes ‘I think I played that once?’ And that’s a really tough thing because getting friends together for a game night can be very difficult! Add on mods and versioning differences and all the other quirks of modern computer gaming and it can be a much rougher experience than expected—thus Peak’s hang out and tutorial zone that every month after launch kept getting new toys like basketball hoops and a photo booth, but this toybox space is a mere shadow of something larger and everyone in the room knows it. So once your party is truly ready, eventually the pressure gets put on to the host to start the ascent. After choosing settings for your climb, you ceremoniously crash land at the base of the mountain and you and all your friends get to bask in the enormity of your shared task. For the next 40min to an hour and a half you have to color inside of Aggro Crab’s lines. And if everything goes horribly wrong? Well hey, we go back to the airport terminal, play on the conveyer belts and take selfies together!
To imagine this tension being served in the opposite direction, it would be like if Fall Guys had a loading zone where you could train drills with your little bean friends on various common obstacles. And then when you get to the real thing, everything spills over into that classic Fall Guys chaos and nothing goes to plan! Then you zip back and get to practice again in a training room like it’s a fighting game’s online mode. Both can totally work, but it was so impressive to me how well Peak serves Aggro Crab as a continuation of their design concept that when you express control over your systems, players will respect that regardless of genre, tone, or style. Games that earn being silly because they take the player (and players plural!) seriously.
Multiplayer Perception vs The Setpiece — Abiotic Factor
Are You Seeing What I’m Seeing?
It is insane to me that The Unfortunate Spacemen team could watch Wayne Radio TV introducing the Half-Life Roleplay Renaissance to the world, and then three years later produce a full immersive multiplayer simulation ready for early access all centered around roleplaying the kooky Half-Life Scientist. Abiotic Factor is a stunning roleplay game for tons of reasons, but there is one specific tension I want to drill down into that is inherent to the multiplayer immersive sim. Which now that I’ve written that is not really a thing that exists. So we’re exploring the cutting edge here—brand new tension just dropped! If you are busy working on tasks, and your science buddy in the Discord call triggers an event that dramatically changes the world state, how do you know? Abiotic Factor chooses to let this tension hang in a way that ends up simulating exactly what it was like for most of the scientists at Black Mesa when Gordon Freeman opened that portal. It’s also what I can only assume is a perfect roleplay of being MasterGir in HLVRAI desperately trying to usher all their dingus friends through the plot points of Half-Life.
Now that we can identify this tension exists, we can imagine other directions this can go. Imagine an open world where everyone is doing little tasks and the main goal is always in plain view, perhaps if the immersive sim took place on an O’Neill Cylinder and all players could always look up to see various state changes. Or the inverse, everyone is mining into a sphere and the sphere has state changes that inform players of various conflicts to their tasks. I’ve been playing Elite Dangerous this year, and wrapping my head around the cosmic infinite with an MMO-volume of players feels like such a drop in an infinite ocean, but it gets close to this feeling. We built a space base at the edge of space (come hang at Beer Legacy, we’ve got the best hyperdrives and now no more slavery! [war is ongoing]) and then it immediately started serving other players reaching out to their own further edge of space.
Abiotic Factor does not have Elite Dangerous’s galaxy-sized data spreadsheets of player behavior, so they have to use other methods for corralling players. The base-building features have a deep time and resource sink to them, especially if your group of players want to personalize the space. With respect to this, there are certain parts of the tech tree that get unlocked to streamline those features (larger inventory boxes, better multi-tools, weapons with abilities to handle more specific situations, portal toilet) and whenever those would unlock, it was usually around the same time that we’d been eyeing a relocation to a spot that is deeper in our Black Mesa science facility. Although, we were always window shopping for the obvious ‘safe’ rooms: lots of power outlets, naturally occurring furniture, low enemy spawns—all the things a young polycule of homeowners is looking for. Building ‘forward bases’ as we called them would usually result in all of us resetting our goals and catching our bearings. All of us were constantly at different levels of understanding the map, the game logic, and various silly intricacies of the game—like, we would take walks together to make sure we knew how to get between all of our bases in case anything went horribly wrong and a player got stranded back a the original spawn point (<3 u Coffee Base). These were the player misalignments that we could manage as a group, but there is still the issue of when the game needs to take over with a big setpiece that changes the state of the world.
Syncing up events in an online space with a first-person perspective is probably the hardest programming struggle possible, and for an unknowable reason New Zealand’s Deep Field Games has decided to make it their entire thing. We’ve done this for a long time in games, but it is still a mount Everest for the craft to get two computers to send the amount of data an FPS requires. Driving a vehicle in Abiotic Factor with your friends in it is about as stable as it was in Halo 3. So it’s not. But hey, we’ve figured out fighting game netcode and that seemed impossible too for the longest time. But we’ve mostly worked on this problem from the situation when players are in conflict with one another – many variables are constant in that specific situation. In a game like Abiotic Factor, our dear friend Angel could trip over an event flag while doing their tasks and suddenly a new door has opened, Will was at home base managing the supplies, Sage was there but there was a low hanging pipe in the way, and Solon was taking a shit and doesn’t really know what’s going on anyways and is largely along for the ride as an extra meat shield whenever necessary so it’s preferable to keep him in the dark in most cases anyways. How do we resolve this? Abiotic’s got two solutions, a simple solution: slap a waypoint on stuff that changes! Sure sure sure. Tried and true! But here’s the setpiece secret magic in a remote-yet-synchronous situation: Use Portals.
Abiotic Factor uses portals to transport the player between various wacky situations and hijinks—it’s a trick to extend the setting of Black Mesa so it can have a snow level—but more importantly it’s a Moment and it can be Prepared For! It’s that Squad-up moment that almost always has a comfortable staging section for everyone. And then all of the most thrilling bits of Abiotic Factor happen right as your squad exits the portal! It’s just another example of exquisite design from da goddanged ANZ. It works perfect for a slapstick comedy to have a group of people armed to the teeth stepping through a portal where they are all expecting to get pied in the face by horrible monsters just to find out they have been swept to a magical Ikea where all the toilets are functional! The game’s a heavy lift, but it has always been worth the effort to share these moments with friends, just let me know when you want to play it again.
GOTY 2025: Hey, You Made It Down Here!
THREE-WAY TIE! IT’S FUCKIN TOREE SATURN!!! GO PLAY CAPE HIDEOUS RIGHT NOW AND SMOKE SOME PIPE! FINISH WITH ENA: DREAM BBQ. YOU CAN BEAT ALL THREE IN AN AFTERNOON WITH YOUR FRIENDS IN A DISCORD CALL AND STILL HAVE PLENTY OF TIME AFTERWARDS TO GO HANG OUT WITH YOUR PET! HERE IS MY SON JUPITER, YOU DESERVE IT FOR READING ALL THE WAY DOWN HERE.
