WEBFISHING 

Webfishing rules because it’s in a little box off on my other monitor and I can tab out of it without losing the sound, able to pop in and out when I catch a fish and to cast the line again. And the casual social aspect of it is nice – crowding around on a pier, chatting and showing off some monstrous fish that consumes the entire screen for a moment. For at least a few days every month I have several hours of photo editing to knock out, and Webfishing really helped maintain that momentum by giving my attention somewhere else to go other than doomscrolling tumblr or whatever. Just a little brain hack for you. 

Techno Banter 

I already wrote about it in a longer piece but Techno Banter is a standout for me. Stylish, chaotic, and funny, with a bright and dreamy visual design. It reminded me of the feeling when your neighborhood becomes your whole world and your world becomes full of people, the thoughts and feelings of whom you can’t even begin to predict. And you might say, well isn’t that everybody? but go ahead and tell me you can’t make a decent estimation on the feelings of some guy on a golf course.   

Old Skies 

Old Skies is a charming point-and-click from Wadjet Eye about time travel and love. It’s much more character-driven than focused on one big story (though it does tie a lot of the smaller stories together by the end) but these characters are dynamic and emotional. Both the time travel and 9/11 (or rather, 9/10) bits are hard to do well and land right where you want them to, but Old Skies has done it. And, as someone who has been to NYC whopping three whole times, I feel Dave Gilbert’s enduring city spirit all throughout this game. 

Immortal John Triptych

Although the fart/cock/ass jokes started to grate beyond my own personal taste occasionally, Four Last Things, The Procession to Calvary, and Death of the Reprobate were at least some of the most unique little gaming experiences I had last year. They are all very funny at times, quite weird at others. I would consider Joe Richardson like a generational iconoclast, a competent wielder of medieval and religious absurdity. The visuals are entirely made up of Renaissance paintings, which is completely fucking bonkers to me, just considering the time and attention that must take, and it turned out gorgeous. No wonder he wanted to die by the end of it. 

No Players Online 

I have a whole damn interview about it if you’re interested. Basically, I checked it out after hearing about the DMCA takedown issue, and got sucked in whole-heartedly. While it’s labeled as horror, I would describe it more as creepy and atmospheric, and I do appreciate the lack of jump scares, though at times I expected them. The narrative is deeper than it appears on the box, a lingering and lonely story about grief and preoccupation, haunted virtual spaces, with a lot of stylish visuals and a flair for nostalgic desktops. 

Until Then

Yet another Filipino banger. It reminds me of A Space for the Unbound in that way, the representation I can’t personally testify to, but I can see its natural and easy incorporation into the setting even in its most mundane details. Until Then is about repetition of grief and ultimately letting go, and the almost (here, used literally) metaphysical strength it can take to do that. There’s a way that Until Then blends the facets of catastrophe and abuse with guilt and the kind of love that would make you jump into a black hole. I also love stories that put teenagers into these roles – sometimes they’re the ones who understand love in its most chaotic and unconditional forms, for better or worse. 

Artis Impact 

God damn I wish this was longer. It’s interesting and weird, and compact in a way that reminds me of a GBA game or whatever. I love the visuals, the writing is cute and funny, the gameplay is… enough! I don’t love how rushed and aborted the ending is, or that one guy whose whole journey is being a huge misogynist, though it kind of rules that he isn’t teased with some sort of redemption and you just beat his ass instead. Also, I locked myself out of one of the main areas by not being defiant enough at the end of a scripted fight, and I’m not replaying it just for that. But that’s on me, I guess. It’s a very casual RPG, has one-note combat that’s easy to overlevel, with some sim elements that may or may not drive you crazy. I kind of liked that part though. Again, I wish Artis Impact was longer and the narrative (and world, and lore, and characters) fleshed out more, but I enjoyed it a lot and it stands out to me amongst all the other games I played this year. 

SpreadCheat 

Think spreadsheet math puzzles with 90s corporate absurdism. It’s so short I don’t know what else to say about it, but it’s good and I liked it very much. 

Kingdom Come: Deliverance (I & II) 

I’m cheating a bit because it’s hard to choose between this and the other top game – this is my favorite game that I played and was released in 2025. 

I played both of these in 2025 (technically, I’m about 80% of the way done with II, I’m taking a break to read a specific history book, and because often the best kind of satisfaction is the kind that is not immediately delivered) and after almost 200 hours my thoughts sans indulgence are pretty neatly packed. Its combat is such that once you do the things that make sense (train and get real armor) it gets way more intuitive. For a combat system that has been described frequently as “quite challenging” especially for the first game, I was surprised at myself for how well I picked it up and beat ass. It felt steady, and one-on-one fights held their weight. It’s cool. Admittedly, I have a thing for knights.   

As for the indulgence, I just really love the story. It hit me in places I thought I had covered up, especially as the child of very Christian parents, and who is queer in a couple different directions. More on that, eventually. To be honest, I only paid attention to KCD upon hearing the protagonist could have a gay romance in the second game, which was surprising considering the studio and genre. I went into the first game expecting a generic medieval bro atmosphere, and there was some of that, but it lays the foundation of a story about cycles of revenge born from love and loyalty, which isn’t exactly a new story, but it’s well done. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II only amplifies it with really interesting political intrigue and a lot of compassionate interpersonal dynamics. It’s kind and sympathetic as much as it’s bawdy and violent.

The thing about nonstandardized historical concepts like chivalry is it allows you to dream big about how the world used to be. Not in a bad way – I think looking back fondly on what people would have been like and how they moved about their lives is one of the worthwhile parts of studying history in any capacity. I’m sure I have distant ancestors back there somewhere who would be absolutely thrilled at the selection of fruits I have available to me throughout the year, or medicine, or an indoor toilet. Moving throughout the world in KCD2 is deeply immersive. I liked to ride all over the map rather than use fast travel, see the towns and find knights-errant and roving bands of mercenaries and little pockets of people doing their things medieval style. Playing these games felt like genuine escapism, which I needed a lot of this year. That world and the small, beautiful narrative moments about unconventional families and the heavy burden of honor and the ecstasy of revenge all helped to keep my head from blowing up, for sure. 

1000xRESIST

I cannot deny, this is my favorite game that I played in 2025. 

I started 1000xResist up at a LAN party in Seattle over the summer while I waited for the others to finish up a game of something else and it hooked me instantly. It’s intimate and existential. It’s cosmic and isolating. It’s like biting into something I haven’t eaten since I was a kid and walking around my old neighborhood. It’s about family and inheritance, and loneliness, and sorrow, and protest, and love, and justice, and the end of the world. Every time I put it down, I would think about it until I picked it up again. Looking back at my playtime, I’m shocked it packed so much into a game that’s only about 15 hours long, if that.   

1000xRESIST asks questions that don’t have answers, only steps toward and away from some deep intrinsic concept. It actually does the thing I think science fiction itself is best at: exploring the human condition up against otherworldly conditions, against the unfamiliar and unthinkable yet within the orbit of what is, to us, home. So close yet so far away. It goes a step further by exploring the human condition within a vessel within a closed system of one woman’s accumulated and inherited grief. Its surrealism reminds me of many other works that I call fundamental to myself as a person whose interests shape them, and perhaps that’s also why it works so well. Weaving together these chaotic sentiments that flow through and around the sprawling reality of diaspora to the isolated horror of a family torn apart by disaster is no small and graceful feat. The disjointed, unnerving, and abstract forms in which this story is told is so integral to the whole experience that I have internalized it as a prime example of how you can use the medium of video game to make a point in a specific way that couldn’t be made otherwise.

1000xRESIST is so obviously written from the personal perspectives of the authors, but it touches upon so many wounds inherent to any player, really. I cried and sat in silence by the end, feeling that catharsis and the comfort of the story of a kind of kindred spirit. It let a little steam out, brought me back down to Earth where we’re not so different, you and I. It’s a special piece of art I hope remains in conversations about extraordinary writing for many, many years to come. 

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Obviously, the Rainbow Drive on which most of Techno Banter takes place is more of a dense (gameplay convenient) microcosm of the sentiment I’m conveying here, the life of particular city streets, but it all came rushing back to me, especially at the end. It’s a neon cyberpunk-lite capitalist purgatory type place, a genre blend of stereotypes and caricatures that make the setting feel more fleshed out and alive than a lot of other games of a similar style, scale, or length. There’s an artistic mix of realistic backgrounds with neon bloom and rain droplets, 2D pixel character models, some more refined and detailed than others. You see some people as animals, depending on their vibe, including yourself. 

You play as Nil, a bouncer with a dog’s head working for a corporate asshole briefly masquerading as a down-to-earth entrepreneur for the purpose of an interview, who unceremoniously throws you out on your ass after you injure the pianist, pitch a bad product idea, and then accidentally let a pair of cultists into the party. Luckily, your froggy old boss from the Green Door – a middling dance club operating out of an old bunker – is sort of desperate to hire you back on. 

Back on the late shift, your nights (of which you get five) consist of retreating from your shitty apartment, ingratiating yourself in the community, talking to old friends, helping folks with strange errands, listening to the soup guy tell his story, observing the odd habits of the local cultists, and meeting other characters in every corner of the block. There are other clubs as well, but they’re not really your scene. It’s the working class neighborhood, where everyone is either doing what they can to make ends meet and doing what they enjoy in their spare time. 

The rest of your nights is showing up for your shift at the Green Door, carefully screening everyone who shows up at the door for red flags and bad attitudes. Techno Banter’s main gimmick is the rhetorical system it deploys as the actionable part of the game, mostly in the case of dueling insults with angry and affronted party-goers denied entry into the club, but also in a few key moments of higher stakes verbal negotiation. 

The best part of this system is at the door, where you have to shame, taunt, and disrespect angry rejected customers away from the club. It works like combat, with basic attacks, fighting insults with insults until their health bar is depleted – which loses its luster a little once you get the catch: the correct insult will always be the most obvious counter out of the bunch, in case you had the urge to try and get a little creative with it. There are more special moves, tactics designed to counter specific traits like arrogance and naivety. Then, there’s an ultimate move called Cutting Remarks which works on special characters, an unstoppable combo move that bombards them with one final insult, cutting to the core of their insecurity and sending them away, sometimes crying. 

While you work to build up the reputation of the club by letting the right ones in and sending the wrong ones away, you’re also building a continuity with these characters. Certain faces become familiar, both in good and bad ways, and how you treat them will carry over to your next encounter. This is important, because over the course of the five days, the cultists standing outside of the burger shop are gradually building a weapon of mass destruction right there in front of the dumpster and it’s about to become everyone’s problem. 

In the course of talking to people on the block and doing little quests for them, you build up a rapport that will heavily influence the final mission. Some people are easier to please than others, some will require a little more attention. For how short Techno Banter is, it’s easy enough to do pretty much everything without it feeling like a drag. It helps that the characters and the tasks are consistently charming and funny. 

In one scene, the two officers who guard the crossing between the wealthy part of the city and the part of the city that you live in – faceless, though the LED screens of their masks convey one happy face and one angry face, obviously – try to talk someone off a ledge and instantly give up hope as they find out the jumper is an artist. A writer, specifically. She cries that her life is full of cliches and she’s had enough, and you can talk her off the edge by giving her a series of thoroughly genuine and platitude-free advice.  

Another character walks around naked so as not to deprive the world of seeing his perfect abs, and he only grows to respect you if you do the same. There’s a man in a car with no wheels stranded on the sidewalk, handing out missions to you like “make sure these two people get into the club under the pretense of destiny” and “heckle this comedian doing stand up at the kink club tonight so good that he quits comedy.” Your coworker needs help avoiding the common pitfalls that comes with endlessly chasing the bag. A group of masked kids barricade the entrance to the arcade, but warm up to you if you speak to them like people – turns out, their parents know exactly where they are and are fully supportive of their adventures and creative expressions. Everyone’s motives and obstacles are real and, on some level, relatable.

The writing in Techno Banter is about rewarding you for meeting other people where they’re at. With the exception of a few distinct liars, taking everyone at face value and being flexible in your response easily gets you where you want to go, and failure to mesh with someone in a conversation is usually at least a little entertaining. Like with the special attacks, specific tactics against certain personality types, the rhetorical flow in positive or neutral conversation goes a bit more on instinct. You may not want to mock or belittle someone who is being vulnerable to you, or you may not want to be overly friendly or appeasing to someone who clearly disrespects you. It works, the writing leads to some interesting bits of dialogue and had me thinking outside of my own conversational box. 

One of the tougher challenges for me was near the end, where you get the opportunity to talk down the leader of the local cult – the Golden Butterflies – who have crashed the party you’re performing at and initiates that localized apocalypse I mentioned earlier. Their whole thing is the dwindling down of the human race, stop procreating and walk hand in hand into oblivion type of ideology, which can be tough to chew through in terms of pure debate. By using some information about the cult leader you learned from a defector, you can incriminate him in betraying his own ideals, lying to his people, and emotionally bait his bodyguard into killing him. It has the twists and turns and rationalizations and denials that you’d expect and lands well as a culmination of all the conversational exercises Techno Banter puts you through. 

By the time the Golden Butterflies have completed their bomb and activated it, you have one more evening to gather everyone in the neo-Berlin block that is Rainbow Drive and convince them to take shelter in the Green Door, the only spot on the street that can withstand the blast. Considering that everyone is trapped between a canal that separates them from the wealthy part of the city and a tunnel that’s lethal for pedestrians and leads to a desert, the Green Door is their only hope. It’s a satisfying inverse of the original premise, a sudden flip from protecting the club’s exclusivity to all but begging anyone and everyone you can to get inside.

Predictably, most neighbors are easy to convince, either because they believe you or they have nothing better to do. Some require a little more from you, some need to trust you, some are too busy – it’s not hard to save everyone, it just requires every quest explored, every person spoken with to the fullest extent. Some of those saved are even previously rejected clientele, who have grown as a result of their friction with you and are ready to be more agreeable. 

There isn’t any punishment for not saving everyone – there are even a couple endings where you save only yourself. It’s more the reward for leaning into the ambition of Techno Banter, which is to explore through communication, and the inherent consequences of interconnectedness. The ending includes a little montage of how your actions affected everyone else, who was saved and what they went on to do, who was not saved and how they died, who escaped on their own and what they’re up to, and if you’re satisfied with how it all turned out.

At first glance, Techno Banter looked like an interesting aesthetic mess, and I love mess. The clashing art styles and character designs seemed fairly harmless, and the dialogue system was enough to get me to try it out. Even with short games like this the plot can easily be lost, but the throughline of Techno Banter stays strong – worry less about what someone looks like and focus on what they’re saying, build those bridges and help your neighbor, especially in this place where class separation is in fashion as always. It all blends into an immersive backdrop to an interesting talking sim that’s evocative of so many different types of experiences, even the misspellings somehow avoid being out of place. The narrative of Techno Banter gracefully flows through everything until it feels like the distinction between hoarding and maximalism. Even the soundtrack reinforces the nostalgic-anachronistic vibe – composed of local Berlin-based DJs, it goes from sounding like late 2000s electronica (waving to drum & bass from across the room) to modern lo-fi lyrical beats to futuristic cyberpunk ambiance. Specifically, Tschoris is immortalized in the game itself as the frequently featured artist at the Green Door, and has a lot of groovy, melodic house tracks and brighter beats that feel at home in this full spectrum kind of experience.

All of the elements of Techno Banter come together in a sort of chaotic harmony despite, or maybe thanks to, its freeform style. The developer, Dexai Arts, a small yet experienced team, made a game that’s weird and interesting, evocative of their own home and background, and cared enough to do it right. Techno Banter is a succinct and charming little package, something special for these times. It not only sells a setting and story as thoughtful and concise as the name itself, but it also – for me, at least – aroused those memories of rainy nights on a bright city street, bumping music and chatter from the clubs down the street, making my ends meet and being part of a community of gays and artists and other folks doing the same in our corner of yet another glittering capitalist city. 

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