Obsession Is Good For You: A Selection Of Games I Enjoyed In 2025 — by Isabelle

“Your first mistake was thinking I would let you live long enough to make a second.“

Before you is a quote from a Magic: the Gathering card. It’s stuck with me for a while. It’s a little inelegant, and I like that about it. More importantly, the quote really gets to the core of what I’m about. There’s something absolutely electric to me about a big ego. A villain, talking themselves up before a valiant hero laid low. A haughty quip barked in the heat of combat. A show of pride. I’ve been thinking about this little line of flavour text from a pretty-good counterspell released almost 15 years ago, as I revisit my time with R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 this year. 

Over the summer, Gamesline writer and my dear friend Crystal had agreed to a little rivalry with me. We took it seriously. I learned the curves along that seaport in Yokohama like the back of my own hand. In that, I found myself adopting a sort of persona. I was so taken with it all. Simulated sounds of tires squealing, the taillights of racers still ahead of you trailing into the night. The announcer telling you to “take care of this loser” when you’re encroaching on that coveted first place spot—is this guy playing favourites? How could I do anything but lean into it? 

“Try to keep up with me.” That was always the little jab I’d throw in when I cleared some time she’d sent me. You can imagine me wearing sunglasses and a cool bomber jacket, leaning against the hood of my car while I say it. That overconfident racecar hotshot personality I’d adopted gave me so much patience to stick out the struggle to improve at the game. That’s what I’m here to tell you about: in all pursuits, in every area of your life, you need to get more chuuni.

The Ride/The Objective

Ridge Racer Type 4 is not a game that came easy to me; my only previous experience with racing games was Mario Kart. Having to drift by taking my foot off the gas, leaning into a turn, and hammering back on while making arcane micro-adjustments to my turning angle and velocity was a challenge. Even more than that, the game hides its fastest cars behind flawless performances on the highest difficulty. You must trudge your way through failure. Even your own team’s coach will talk down to you, at best sheepishly admitting they don’t think you have a chance, but that it’d be cool for you to get second place. This game is tight; it won’t give you that fastest car for the final heat unless you place first in every race. Ridge Racer Type 4 will not concede to anything less than perfection.

Of course, this is exactly how a Souls game sets up its power fantasy. You are an undead. You will taste the sting of defeat, but you will come back as many times as it takes, and with great violence, overcome those barriers. To a player who believes in their potential and their capacity to learn, Dark Souls is a game that mostly asks for patience. Victory, I came to believe, was a natural result of my perseverance. I think this is what happened to me with Ridge Racer, too.

When you change how you see yourself, you change how you act. The games came naturally once I’d slipped into that state of mind. A boss fight I wasn’t making headway on was a dance to be learned. Can you really blame your dancing partner for staying on beat? Without ever really meaning to, I began to treat these fights as performances I was putting on. I did a bunch of grinding for a weapon I wouldn’t ever use but which would coat my character’s hand in a dark energy because it looked cool. Because the Ashen One, to me, should look cool. I ended up stopping in scenic spots to let my character rest her battered greataxe over her shoulder and take in the blood red solar eclipse.

There’s something meditative about crafting a persona here. The Chosen Undead, the Ashen One… the titles bestowed to the player seem to hold with them a great burden of duty. Dark Souls asks you to endure the struggle to be strong enough to fight tirelessly in a dying world, a world that itself has given up when you cannot. You leave behind a trail of bonfires, once sputtering, now kindled, as you travel through each corner of the world. Atop the High Wall of Lothric, there is a light that never goes out.

There’s an interesting comparison between my experiences with these two Souls games, which is in how my characters looked throughout each. Pictured above is my little Fallen Knight in Dark Souls III, but through my run of Dark Souls, I got very attached to the idea of playing a dexterity character and I really, REALLY liked the light roll. So I had to seek out, with some direction, the gear that would make that build work; I wore the Gold-Hemmed Robes and swung around the Uchigatana for most of the game. And as I trudged through the infamously disliked back half of Dark Souls wearing that ridiculous outfit that shows off the Chosen Undead’s… dark soles, I observed my patience wearing thin. 

My commitment to mastery of these systems waned when my character looked silly. Where death, to me, should feel like a provocation in these games, it started to feel like a joke I wasn’t in on. I did still think the game’s general sense of humor about some of its more “unfair” rooms was great, but the overall trend was I took Dark Souls less and less seriously, while my momentum through Dark Souls III felt boundless. It came as a shock how affecting it was, how much I needed to be sold on looking cool. Of course, maybe I should have known this would happen. 

Silhouette Dance

This feeling isn’t something I’m a stranger to. I love Monster Hunter, after all. I am at this point well acquainted with these sorts of action games in which you take down a monstrosity several orders of magnitude larger than you while dressed in your best threads. Playing so much of these games in multiplayer may have primed me to treat Dark Souls the same way. 

Through December of 2024, I’d played through Monster Hunter: World, and this year I was ready for Wilds to take me in for at least a couple scores of hours. Unfortunately, I was left disappointed by the structure of its open world. Wilds wants to make sure you’re absorbing its story, in a way that feels unusually intrusive. To me, these games exist as vehicles to explore neat little locales, fight some strange and interesting creature, do it with your friends, and of course, look cool in the process. They’re notorious for thin stories. Wilds was a shame, and I bounced off hard.

Truth be told, even Monster Hunter: World didn’t fully satisfy me. World’s iteration of the layered armor system, which allows a player to craft unique armor meant to be worn over your regular armor for cosmetic purposes, is held back until extremely late in the game. If you want to truly control your appearance, you have to finish the base game, its DLC, and work your way well into post-game content. I opted simply to disengage from optimizing my stats as a result. If I couldn’t cover up my mismatched armor sets, I decided they weren’t worth compromising my Swag, not even for best-in-slot skills. 

The darkness growing in my soul was dispelled by Dark Souls. Imagine getting to play a game with those more self-contained, discrete-yet-interwoven locales after the perfunctory open world of Wilds. Navigating the Undead Parish for the first time made me think again of learning the ins and outs of World’s Coral Highlands. That Fallen Knight armor stole my heart; I never took it off after obtaining it. We were, as the cycle dictates, So Fucking Back. I think this is why I felt so positively about these games, and about Dark Souls III in particular. It is not only tight action that matters to me. Perhaps one day I’ll have to replay Dark Souls with a strength build, to reappraise it as compared to Dark Souls III. What I found, with regards to my chuuni self-expression, was that getting the chance to look the part genuinely gave me the strength to play the part. The Nameless King never stood a chance.

Moving a couple steps to the left of Dark Souls, I also took the time this year to finish Hollow Knight. I’d tried it a long time ago, but couldn’t stick with it. I’d chalked it up to a metroidvania aversion. When Silksong’s release date was announced, I decided I’d give it one last shot to impress me. I would describe the combat of Hollow Knight as… functional. It gets the job done. Sometimes, like when fighting Nightmare King Grimm, it’s even fun! 

That’s not to say I hated Hollow Knight—I rocketed my way through roughly 107% of Hallownest in a few weeks— but my fun was had in exploration. It felt like there was always something new to see. I struggled to see the purpose in the “Soul” mechanic, whereby hitting enemies enough times fills a meter that you can expend to heal, if you commit to a few seconds of vulnerability. Outside of boss arenas, it turned almost every enemy into something tedious. Where Dark Souls made every stray hit from even the most unimportant jobber enemy important—a drain on a limited resource that you can’t restore between a bonfire and a boss fight—Hollow Knight erases that tension. Worse yet, many of the more difficult bosses solve the issue of the player having effectively unlimited healing by never giving you a window to heal! This is not a skill issue, really—I have nothing to prove to myself after beating almost everything the game had to offer outside of the last two pantheons—I just think that choosing to eschew Dark Souls inspiration by dropping estus was a mistake. 

But I’m avoiding saying what I really think. This has not been an article about how I think estus flasks are well-considered thus far. The real problem I have with Hollow Knight is that I look boring! The Vessel is cute, and this is something I will always value, but where is my flair for the dramatic? Every swing of the nail is so automatic, so instant. Minimally animated. Momentum in midair is almost perfectly controllable. My expectations for Silksong are high, because Hornet looks so fluid in combat. I was pretty jealous of her, getting to do her cocky little laugh while I quietly, expressionlessly weaved in and out of her attack range. It was bad enough to accidentally play Dark Souls in such a way that I forced myself to look bad for the efficacy of my build; perhaps worse was playing a game where I was represented by something that is visually and kinesthetically not far off from a couple of bounding boxes.

Move Me

At the absolute opposite end of the spectrum was Robot Alchemic Drive. I’ll be forthcoming: I had only a brief stint with it, streaming a decent chunk of the game for friends in a Discord server. I didn’t finish it, but I still feel I got a lot out of it. For those unfamiliar, Robot Alchemic Drive positions you as a young prodigy of a mech pilot, in charge of the operation of a top-secret superweapon built to fight off equally dangerous alien mechs that have suddenly invaded Earth. Or I suppose one specific prefecture in Tokyo, if we’re splitting hairs. 

The game actually had a boom in popularity last year, at least in my circles. People liked the awkward voice acting and silly characters. It’s true, Nanao is a treasure, but I want to talk about what interests me mechanically about it. See, this is not Armored Core. These are remote controlled mechs. The player, an individual separate from their war machine, is always vulnerable, always fighting the constraint of what their line of sight permits. You will have to reposition to the tops of tall apartment buildings to get a view of the action, and in doing so risk allowing your foes (or your own mech, if you’re not careful) to knock it out from under you. 

The way the camera doesn’t just move with the body you’re trying to control makes the game uniquely interesting to me, and then on top of that, the controls for the mech itself are clunky. You have to walk by individually commanding legs to lift, then releasing that tension to let them fall. You throw out jabs and hooks with fighting game quarter-circle and half-circle inputs on the joysticks. It takes real effort to tame the beast. It can feel like one of those funny physics games that are supposed to force you to look silly.

We know how I feel about looking silly—of course I took this as a challenge.

Because I played it for a Discord audience, I had a crowd to impress. Laying the other guy out in the dirt wasn’t all that was on my mind. The necessity to position the camera instilled a feeling in me that I was both an actor and a director. The game is equal parts execution and presentation. It really captures everything I’ve been talking about. Video games, as a medium, are subject to a degree of disconnect between a player’s mechanical inputs on a controller and the character’s motions. Button presses, joystick tilts, trigger pulls: all of these are converted into a character’s motions. This process is direct, and seamless enough that the mind can suspend disbelief. Your neural pathways learn that the B button is for rolling, and the right bumper is for your light attack. Such things become shorthand.

This process is disrupted by Robot Alchemic Drive, a game that widens the gap between player and actor. This, in place of a stern racing team coach, or a pit full of Bone Wheels, is the provocation Robot Alchemic Drive provides: a body that won’t listen. The mech’s brain lives severed from it. You could do something very impactful, thematically, with this sort of setup. This game is mostly interested in how cool kaiju battles are. RAD wants to be rad. The genius operator of a mysterious superweapon was another mask I was happy to wear for a little while.

With my challenge laid out for me, I observed how I felt playing the game. A victory was not enough. It had to be flashy. I needed a good view, and would often risk my own safety to get a little closer to the epicenter. If I saw my enemy giving off the telltale black smoke that signaled impending victory, I’d stop firing projectiles. I wanted them undone by my hand. Decisively. 

In my heart of hearts, I am a performer. I threw myself with abandon into my racing rivalry. I smirked to myself when the Vessel walked into an arena, seats crowded with bugs looking to see a good fight. Having others by my side when I would claim victory over the Capra Demon, or knock the evil mech of the week into the Pacific Ocean, was a catharsis amplifier. Even just for myself, I wanted to do things that were cool, that stirred my passions. I fell into it naturally. 

Nothing I do is really free from this urge—this article I’m writing could have been a top 10, and part of me does feel a little odd that none of my top 5 games of 2025 are even mentioned here. But I got this idea in my head and just… went for it. This was my Year of the Chuunibyou, and as a huge dweeb and a wannabe musician, I couldn’t settle for anything less than my all. If there’s anything I hope anyone takes away from this, it’s that taking yourself way too seriously, puffing out your chest, and acting like the hottest shit on planet Earth can be a lot of fun. Failure becomes less painful, and feels less permanent, when you develop a bit of a complex. It’s all part of your greater plan. Fixation on mastery and self-presentation isn’t a silver bullet for self-esteem issues, far from it. This is not a “fix your depression by repeating affirmations to yourself” article. At the risk of getting too personal, I simply think that if you’ve fought your way through hell, clawed out of it, the least you deserve is a cool sword. Failing that, a sense of pride isn’t so bad.

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