With Game of the Year coverage out of the way, the gang sits down to finish it all off for a topical discussion of the year in games. Scott is joined by Spencer, Crystal, Elvie, and Lorelai to go over as many topics as they could in 12 20-40 minute segments.

Part 1: Friend-Type Games – Crystal
Part 2: Dynasty Warriors – Lorelai
Part 3: Silksong – Spencer
Part 4: Blue Prince – Scott
Part 5: The New Age of Handhelds – Crystal
Part 6: The Remastering of the Classics – Lorelai
Part 7: Final Fantasy Tactics asks us What is a remake? – Scott and Lorelai
Part 8: We have to talk about Rematch – Scott
Part 9: Unique Artstyles and Designs of 2025 – Elvie
Part 10: Nightreign – Scott
Part 11: Questions – Everyone
Finale: What do we want out of 2026? – Lorelai

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, Scott, Lorelai, Crystal, Spencer, and Elvie.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai and Produced by Lorelai, Crystal, Elvie, and Scott

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 81: Game of the Year Special Edition appeared first on Gamesline.

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. 🍄
ft. @ArielHck as Peach https://t.co/p3YMlF5rEn pic.twitter.com/ggarxptMuZ

— Ryan Stewart (@RyanStewartVO) December 21, 2025

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

[image or embed]

— Punchy (@punchystream.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 6:27 PM

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.

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Honorable Mention: dirtbag MAHJONG

This came out of nowhere for me. I missed the Kickstarter and only ended up buying it because my fellow Bluesky Mahjong freaks started posting about it on release. dirtbag MAHJONG is a combination of mahjong with a visual novel story that had me rolling with laughter from the jump. The humor is crass and stupid in all of the best ways. It’s a game about a bunch of complete assholes playing mahjong together with HP pools, attacks you can build up to, and so many dumb ways to play. It’s a genuine delight that does a pretty good job tutorializing Mahjong. The game is exactly what the title says it is: a bunch of complete dirtbags playing Mahjong. A goofy mess of pure fun from start to finish.

Honorable Mention: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

I think it’s a phenomenal game that everyone should play if they have the ability to. Clair Obscur is carried by some incredible performances and some phenomenal art design. The background details of every area shine. It’s a fantastic game that lives up to the legacies of the games that inspired it, but it falls on its face for me in the end. I can pretty much guarantee that if I had beaten the game without doing some of the Chapter 3 sidequests, this would have been in my top five. But one of the main character’s sidequests contradicting the way she acts in the finale completely ruined it for me. The more I think about that decision, the less I liked the game, until it fell off my list.

Honorable Mention: Assassin’s Creed: Shadows

Hey, they made a great Assassin’s Creed game. This spot was bouncing between Ghost of Yotei and this, both games I greatly enjoyed my time with, but one just slightly edging out the other. I am a sucker for open world collectathon checklist podcast games and this one just really did it for me. I think part of it is me just being really into this era of Japanese historical fiction. Being the Nioh/Samurai Warriors freak that I am, it’s fun to go, “I KNOW THAT GUY” every once and a while. All and all it ended up being far more enjoyable than I expected and I don’t regret the 87 hours I spent with it at all. Being able to stealth through the game as Naoe or just barrel in as Yasuke gave me two play styles for whatever mood I was in, and that really tickled my fancy.

10. Octopath Traveler 0

Hey, did you know that if you just have one narrative throughline and more linear storytelling, the Octopath formula works a lot better? I thought they did a lot towards improving their storytelling with Octopath Traveler 2, but this is a much better story that flows from beat to beat rather than being multiple stories that don’t really feel connected. I was someone who did play Champions of the Continent and liked the story they were trying to tell, so it was great to see it put out in a form everyone could enjoy. Its biggest issue is that it is based on a gacha game that brings in everyone from the series, which does make some of the character moments feel lacking while its overall story shines. I would rather have somewhat weaker characters to go with fun turn-based action than great characters with a weaker overall narrative. I’m hoping they do DLC to take a look at some of the other stories that the mobile game has told because there’s some really great stuff in there.

9. Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail

I honestly didn’t think I was going to be writing about this game at all this year. I was burned out, I watched its community be destroyed by grifters, and I was pretty close to uninstalling and being done after finding a lot of the patch story to be lackluster. But then the 7.4 patch came out, and suddenly I was back! I’m enjoying the game more now than I have in a long time. No more burnout, I’m enjoying the game on its merits rather than logging in every day out of some daily necessity. These days I log in to work on pointless achievements and spend time with friends, and it’s been a healing experience. I went from averaging 20+ hours a week to four, and it’s completely rekindled my love of the game and the time I spend on it. I didn’t think I’d ever be an achievement hunter in the game, but playing with a casual purpose is such a relaxing time. Hanging out in space and macro crafting as second screen material while I work is just a nice diversion. I’m making progress towards something, but it’s also relaxing listening to the sounds of crafting while I’m playing other games on my Steam Deck or second monitor.

7.4 came with something I sorely needed, the final raid series, and god damn is it a good one. Finally a raid with no bad fights and all bangers. Seriously, the biggest advancement in Dawntrail has been in the quality of their fight design, and the Heavyweight tier has been incredible to grind out my weekly clears. Do I wish we spent more time in Tuliyollal instead of the cyberpunk city? Oh god yes I do, but what we got this patch was so much better than I expected and has me hooked for what’s coming.

8. Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To

There are two games on my list this year that I think are important for the same reason: experiencing things from a different culture than my own. The game is dripping with the queerness and the Arabic culture of the people who made it, and it’s a genuine delight from start to finish. The main story fleshes out all of the characters, their world, their culture, and the way magic works. It’s a fascinating way to immerse myself in something different. My only complaint is that after you finish the story, the dating sim fully starts and there is a lot less of the match-3 puzzle gameplay. To this day, my morning routine has been to load up a game on Endless Mode, and play until I lose. It’s a zen start to my day, listening to great chill music while I swap tiles to make lines to make things disappear until I lose after around 10 minutes.

7. Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake

I probably wouldn’t have gotten this if I hadn’t gotten a little preview at PAX. I thought it looked good and didn’t fall into the HD-2D trap of muddied visuals from everything needing to have the same fidelity. The demo challenge of an underleveled party going into midgame dungeons was a lot of fun, and led to me snagging the release version for myself. Needless to say, it was a great decision. If you’re going to do a remake while keeping the core of the original intact, this was a pretty incredible way to do it. Not to mention, Dragon Quest II getting an entire extra game worth of stuff added to it that is not only challenging and fun, but surprisingly well written, building up a true end to the trilogy and providing a new experience for someone who had played the originals before, is super fun to see.

6. Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma

When I played Rune Factory 5, I called it a promising start for a new team of developers that had to figure the series out. I was hopeful for the future of the franchise, even while I took major issues with the game. I don’t think they have it 100%, but Guardians of Azuma gives me great hope for the future of the franchise. They gave me a fantastic game with fun town building as well as fun action. The action is where it needs to be for a game like this—the real thing they still need to work on is farming. I found the farming to be relatively boring, and the town management a little lackluster as well. Still, an incredibly charming cast of characters and an overall story that left me very content made this one of my most played games this year, and it’s still one I come back to when I just want to chill out and grind a little.

5. Coral Island

Last time I talked about Coral Island, I spent a significant amount of time gushing about its core while still lamenting the fact that it was not a true 1.0. This year we got two major patches which brought it to a place where I can fully say it feels like a real and complete game. Not only did we get a massive update that adds an underwater farm, and the initially introduced mermaids finally getting characterization, we also got a fantastic online co-op mode that has made the game more than worth revisiting. Coral Island is also steeped in Southeast Asian culture, being developed by Indonesian studio Stairway Games, and it really does make it so much better than just “Stardew Valley in 3D”. If you like the farming style games, this is not only a great one, it might actually be the best of them.

4. Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

When they announced this, I didn’t have a lot of hope. Previews left me feeling skeptical, and the state of Level-5 as a company makes Fantasy Life i feel like a complete miracle. I was worried it was going to be a game that lacked what I loved about the original, and never have I been happier to be wrong. While I would have loved more varied crafting between all the different crafters, every single craft is fun to pull off, every combat style feels great and has some incredibly fun abilities to play with. Every party member that can join you adds something to the game, whether it’s a crafter who sometimes attacks or regularly throws out buffs and debuffs or the fighting class characters who do a surprising amount of damage while being competent elsewhere. Your crafters can also aid in crafting, and gathering friends can help you by chopping trees to make farming materials so much faster. When you factor in the procedural dungeons, a procedural open world dungeon, and more content than you could play through in a reasonable amount of time, there is something to constantly do and unlock. I thought I was done when I finished the main story, but I keep coming back because there is still something new for me to do after 200 hours.

3. Warriors: Abyss

Who would have thought that a repetitive Dynasty Warriors roguelike would have been one of my most played games of the year? Look, I don’t have a lot to say about this game: the localization is bad, multiple abilities are incredibly confusing to understand, and there is no story to care about at all. But there  is an incredibly fun and rewarding gameplay loop where every character feels different, every stage is fun to blast through, and it goes fast enough that it never feels like it’s wasting your time. It’s been updated multiple times with DLC from the Atelier series, Ninja Gaiden, and more. Every new character they add has been a blast to play with. Is this the best Roguelike of the year? Probably not, but god damn it’s the most fun I’ve had with one in a very, very long time.

2. Dynasty Warriors: Origins

Dynasty Warriors is back! After the disaster of Dynasty Warriors 9 and the sales failure of Samurai Warriors 5, I thought they were done with Musou. But this year they really came back with a vengeance. They finally hit the right formula with deeper movesets and more varied combat, alongside numbers so big that past games wish they could see a KO count that high. Having a big map to run around with multiple sidequest opportunities, along with an emphasis on telling a single story of one person acting as a mercenary, leads to a much meatier story that allows character personality to shine through a lot of visual novel style cutscenes—with a ton of “so bad it’s good” voice acting that filled me with delight. Seriously, the English dub is a thing of beauty with some absolutely hilarious line delivery that captures the magic of the early games while still being something a little more directed. My only issue is the game has gender counterparts that do nothing to change the story, other than making the gayest Lu Bu straight if you were to be able to play as the female character. 

1A. Game of the Year: Unbeatable

I’m not a rhythm gamer, but Unbeatable grabbed me in a way I didn’t expect, and I’ve even been bopping through the arcade mode every morning for a song shortly after I wake up. The story is where this game shines. I keep going back to Chapters 3 and 5 which are where the whole point of the game solidifies. If you go into this wanting a game where music is illegal and you do crimes, you can play Chapter 2, but the chapters where they were going through the actual story they were telling, those hit me hard in the feels. It’s like the writer held a mirror up to my face and said you, this is you. I’ve never felt so seen. There is so much to chew on with the story they told, and while it definitely has some messy transitions and pacing, all of that fits the vibe and truly hit me. The main thesis of the story really is about someone who was lost finding themselves and regaining the will to live through both music and fighting for the people around her.

“I don’t know who I am right now. But I am better than who I was before. I am seven years different. And I am seven years better. And I refuse to be worse than who I was before.”

1B. Game of the Year: Suikoden I&II HD Remaster Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars

You all knew this was coming. Suikoden was one of the most formative games for me growing up. It’s lived rent free in my head since I played it on release. It was a franchise where I had finally accepted that it was dead and gone and the only way we’d ever see anything like it was through spiritual successors like Eiyuden Chronicle. And then after that game had an incredibly successful Kickstarter, suddenly a remaster for the original was announced. You had an active social media presence, you had Konami interacting with fans for a few weeks and then…

Radio silence.

Suikoden was dead again. There was no news, no updates, the social media that was so active went completely silent and whenever they got asked, they refused to say anything. I was sure it wasn’t going to happen. I was back to being mad that they got my hopes up, that my long dead franchise was still dead. Konami was just faking coming back to being a gaming company. All that hope that myself and the other Suikoden freaks felt had become a lie from a company who was only pretending to care about games again.

Then the release date reveal happened… 

My hope was restored. Literal tears on the podcast as I felt an overwhelming wave of joy that I would be able to share this thing I love so much with friends who would never have the chance without shelling out hundreds of dollars on original discs. Something I could share on every system. Then TGS came around and not only were we getting the remasters, we’re getting a stage show, an anime, and a mobile game. Not only was my favorite franchise alive, they seemed to be making the series a core component in their return to video games. I have cried tears of joy more than once over the past year as they continue to show that they care and are acting like they want Suikoden to be one of their tentpole franchises. I don’t know about corporate, but the people on the team sure feel like they have a real passion for everything.

But what about the game you ask? Well, there are two ways to do a remake: you can do the HD-2D thing like Dragon Quest or you can upscale the backgrounds and keep the original work as close as you can. They went with that second option for this one and they nailed it; even going back to address complaints that the fanbase had about background details. There are two games in this world where I would be angry if they remade the spritework: Suikoden and Chrono Trigger. I’m happy to say that the character sprites weren’t touched at all. In some ways the high resolution backgrounds with the original sprites can feel a little off, but the spritework is such a huge part of the charm and personality of these games that if they had messed with it I would have been sent into a violent seething rage.

All of the jank from the original releases is still there. Inventory management in Suikoden 1 is genuinely terrible and always was, but it also was the first RPG released on the Playstation, coming weeks before Final Fantasy 7 completely changed the environment. The story is quick and to the point, with my first playthrough of the remaster being about 20 hours to get everything while going out of my way to talk to every single NPC. The localization of Suikoden 1 sands some edges off, sometimes to its detriment, but is an overall improvement over the original release. If you don’t have the nostalgia for some of the sloppy editing, you’re getting a better version now than you did before. 

Suikoden 2 got the biggest upgrade in this release though. I think it goes to show the power of the story they were telling that it’s still considered one of the best RPGs of all time despite having an absolutely horrendous translation. The translation errors of the original were so numerous, with some NPCs having lines of code in their text boxes. This was a lot less charming than the “All this killing in front of a children” moments from Suikoden 1. With the translation fixed, it’s far easier to appreciate the rest of Suikoden 2’s strengths. Tons of minigames to waste your time with, tons of characters, incredible villains, and sprites that do fit in a lot better with the upscaled backgrounds. This release of Suikoden 2 is by far the definitive version of the game. I wish they could have put the inventory management from 2 into 1 to make it a smoother experience, but overall both games are an incredible experience that I think everyone who wants a great JRPG should pick up. Meet these characters I’ve been obsessed with for the last 30 years of my life, and the woman I named myself after!

The post Lorelai’s Top 10 Games of 2025 That Aren’t Game of the Generation Nioh 2 appeared first on Gamesline.

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

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

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

1. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

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

2. Blue Prince

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

3. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter

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

4. Hell Clock

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

5. Umamusume: Pretty Derby

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

6. HORSES

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

7. Split Fiction

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

8. Unbeatable

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

9. Monster Hunter Wilds

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

10. Hollow Knight: Silksong

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

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

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

5. UNBEATABLE

For all the gripes I have with the narrative, I still think everyone should go play D-Cell’s hot new rhythm game. The soundtrack rules and the character designs are fun as hell! I didn’t mention it in my review, but the voice cast is also a lot of fun, a mix between people new to the VO scene and some seasoned actors giving fun performances. It’s also been a catalyst for getting me back into my rhythm game fascination as of late, especially thinking about the ways rhythm games handle their own systems of making the player interact with a song beyond solely listening. 

4. Dispatch 

I feel like the older I get the less and less I’m eyeing release calendars. Things that get announced at a Keighley sanctioned event can show up in my radar, but it’s not like I’ll sit there and mark everything that I’ll be eager to see once it’s out, especially now that concerts and games are costing the same and I usually know which one wins out for my tastes and wallet. It wasn’t until Jackson was playing this game on stream where I went “oh yeah this was shown off a year ago” and got a little intrigued to pick the game up. Turns out it’s pretty damn good as well! As a team management sim, the game is fun to engage with and I had a great time sorting my heroes for a day’s worth of missions and obstacles. It’s simple, but in a way that makes the guessing of which stats to prioritize for a request fun by having to guess through the writing. I also had a pretty good time with the story! Aaron Paul’s performance as Mecha Man is subtle but still a lot of fun, as is the rest of the cast. The romance side of the narrative is definitely the weakest which makes its prominence a little jarring, but all the chances I got to hang with the Z-Team made those stumbles just another part to experience overall. Whatever the plans for a next game look like, the massive success this game has had should hopefully allow for a vision that can take a few more risks while still keeping this newly found core of what makes a superhero narrative work in games. 

3. Umamusume: Pretty Derby

I am not a gacha gamer. I have next to no experience with gacha games and don’t really plan too. Outside of the moral decay that comes with everyone going for a loot box, as games they never really interest me and I never get deep enough to warrant that hook in. Even with friends who talk to me about the narrative in games like Arknights or Honkai Impact and Honkai StarRail, the act of playing through the game just never appealed to me and would make me not care enough to get through the developing plot. All of this to say the horse girls got me, they got me good, dog. Umamusume: Pretty Derby is something I knew little about in the years prior to its global release. At most, I watched an episode of season 3 of the anime while getting ready in my Japan trip last year. As news came about the impending global release in June, I didn’t anticipate what a tidal wave of adoration was coming in the months to come. The game itself is a raising sim akin to Monster Rancher or Princess Maker where you train a young Umamusume during the three years of her racing career at Tracen Academy. Build her stats correctly and you ensure she’s prepared to take on the obstacles ahead of her. The simplicity makes the game pretty easy to hop in which I appreciate, a full gameplay loop taking about 20-30 minutes. On top of that I just had a lot of fun with each character and how their real life horse racing career correlates to the gijinka being shown off on screen. The music is also really fun to listen to, which makes the various remixes I’ve heard at raves all the more fun. Seeing the way multiple people have built out smaller communities through art and music based on this game has been very interesting to see, and is something I do feel positive about as we go through an ever expansive wave of gambling on everything. 

2. DELTARUNE Chapters 3+4

2025 marked 10 years of Toby Fox’s Undertale, and also marked the release of the next installments in his current game Deltarune. I’ve been a fan of Fox’s work for some time now, and these current releases have definitely kept the anticipation for the full game well satiated. Chapter 3 felt light when it came to its story, but was still fun to get through and have these character moments crop up between Kris, Ralsei, and Susie. Chapter 4 in turn had a huge focus on where to take the next beats of the story as we get past the halfway point of this game. It’s interesting to follow the path Deltarune has taken since its initial release in 2017 and how the addition of more people to the team has allowed Toby to iterate more on what this story can be. Chapter 5 releases the very next year and I wait excitedly for whenever the next installment of the game will be available. But never forget, until there is an actually slated day of release, any day can be Deltarune Tomorrow. 

1. Skate Story

Skate Story and Unbeatable are games about the process of making things, and both of these games released in a year where I felt the least creatively tapped in to my writing. It’s appropriate then that they bookend this list given how much I still think about Skate Story’s approach to rekindling a desire to create. I spoke about the game at length already, but it really is something to be felt and experienced on its own. I actually got to talk with Sam Eng at MAGFest, and something that was interesting to learn was the inclusion of Blood Cultures’ music into the game and how it came about. This game had been in development for some time and as both Eng and the band are creative pen pals of sorts, it would lead to some songs released before the game having this focus on the moon or of fragility through metaphors of glass. In turn, the game and levels become built around songs and also led to further discussion around albums, Eng being a fellow album enjoyer and the importance of tracklisting when it comes to putting a series of songs together beyond just a concept album. I think that’s what makes Skate Story so compelling to me, that its focus and ideas exist beyond the inherent artifice of the game. Its music is what I listen to when I cross the Manhattan Bridge to work, and while I might not be heading down to Zumiez to pick up a board, I do look at 2026 as an opportunity for more, regardless of how that more takes shape. 

The post Maverick’s Top Five Games of 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a new year, which means the Gamesline Podcast is back from our break. This week, Scott takes over as host and is joined by Nikolas, Lorelai, and Jackson. Jackson’s been digging into The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, and Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker. Lorelai is just ahead of him there digging into the newest patch of Dawntrail when she isn’t obsessing about Unbeatable. Scott’s been digging into a bunch of different stuff while Nikolas has them all beat with Fire Emblem: Blazing Blade and Three Houses, Mother 3, Patrick’s Parabox, and Caveman World: Mountains of Unga Boonga. He also found a mysterious 3DS in his house. In the news, Swen Vickne really loves sticking his foot in his mouth and Limited Run Games co-founder Josh Fairhurst is leaving the company soon.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, Scott, Lorelai, Jackson, and Nikolas.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai and Produced by Scott

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 79: New Year, New Houses appeared first on Gamesline.

Before I’m a fan of video games, first and foremost I’m a fan of music. I love listening to music, I love the chances I’ve had playing music, and I love experiencing music in levels beyond just the audio experience. One of my first concerts was now over a decade ago; I still remember seeing CHVRCHES months after my first breakup and all of us in attendance getting caught in a downpour as soon as the drop in “Clearest Blue” hit. Between my friendships, my travels, and just the way I view so much of the world now, I owe a lot of my current self to the kid who would sit at the car radio flipping through stations to find sounds that resonated, regardless of their release date or genre.

It’s also the initial love of music that led to my appreciation of TV, film, and eventually video games. Katamari Damacy is one of my favorite games partially due to its eclectic soundtrack, as are a majority of the games I look at in the ever rotating top ten list that I know exists for myself, but have never put to paper. So often for me, a game that can lack in tactile prowess can make up for it by having an effective soundtrack. Conversely, one of the things that’s kept me from going back to Street Fighter 6 for practice in this current season is the fact the core soundtrack disappointingly lacks any sort of punch that Capcom as a gaming music juggernaut is known for. Still fun to watch, but any attempts to lab it will require me adding my own soundtrack so I don’t have to hear “SURVIVALIST. HUNGRY LIKE A TIGER IS” any time I hit character select. 

Rhythm games know all too well about how much the curation of sound is vital to their existence, next to the mechanical feel of “playing” the music chosen. From ParRappa the Rapper to Guitar Hero to Chuunithm, the genre has been able to solidify the key components of success: music that’s worth listening to and a gameplay that intuits the feel of being “part” of the song.

D-Cell’s UNBEATABLE is a rhythm game where music is illegal and you do crime. In this game you play as Beat, a young woman who sings in the band UNBEATABLE alongside the preteen Quaver on guitar, the explosive Clef on drums, and her reserved twin brother Treble on keyboard. The soundtrack is a wholly original collection of rock songs along with inclusions from other artists in the music and games sphere like Jamie Paige and 2mello. The rhythm gameplay itself is pretty simple: enemies, dubbed Silence, will approach Beat on a track from the outside of the screen towards the center. These enemies move in time to the music and are either on a top or bottom lane. Hit your button when the Silence arrives at a designated circle to beat them up and hit as many as possible to get through the song! Some notes require some kind of tap, others will need you to hold the button and release on time to register. Too many missed notes will result in a game over, so feel the beat and keep on trying!

There are options to set your controls to a variety of keystrokes aligned with the various approaches to rhythm gaming through a controller or keyboard; my layout maps the top lane notes to the triggers of my DualSense and the bottom lane notes to the face buttons and d-pad, similar to what I usually use for Taiko no Tatsujin. The higher difficulty beatmaps can be physically exhausting, so it’s nice to have the immediate option to try out layouts that can make subdivided notes a little easier to manage. 

I do want to highlight the team in charge of structuring the various beatmaps for the game: Chi Xu, Cheryl, and TaroNuke show their love of the genre on their sleeves with the layouts of these songs. The only time I’ve ever heard rock in a rhythm game has been either in Guitar Hero or tap rhythm games like Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! and its Western sibling Elite Beat Agents. There’s nothing that outright differentiates the genre from being included in other rhythm games, but there’s a lot of care in place to effectively highlight the feel of each song. “Empty Diary” is one of my favorite tracks and the higher difficulties do a good job of providing challenge without being a grueling test of endurance or fast track to arthritis. There are tracks that definitely lean into that Rhythm Pervert (affectionate?) mentality of playstyle, but it’s not something expected of you in normal gameplay. 

The soundtrack has also been something that’s stuck with me for the better part of the last four years. Peak Divide, the in-studio band made up of composers Clara Maddux and Vasily Nikoleav with vocals from other members including producer Rachel Lake, have cultivated a sound that is so evocative of people getting into a garage and making music as a means of escape and expression. The song I had mentioned before, “Empty Diary,” opens with a strong guitar arpeggio followed by the tapping on a cymbal leading into the rest of the band. It’s the kind of intro I’ve heard at many a bar venue or music hall from a band I hadn’t heard until then and getting to figure out for the first time. The Pillows are an immediate inspiration gleaned from this production, as is apparent in the rest of the game and its ties to FLCL. The rest of the soundtrack continues to deliver hard hitting bangers like “Waiting” and “Sleeping In,” and the game also includes various remixes of these songs or nondiegetic tunes in the Arcade mode like the Tutorial song Proper Rhythm that uses a pretty funky groove with samples from a typing instructional video that also acts as a nod to the keyboard warriors keeping their hands on the home row. 

The audio has been a core feature of what makes UNBEATABLE so charming, but alongside that is the actual visuals which are so essential to the vibe. The game is unabashedly inspired by anime, its primary aesthetics most evocative of current Studio Trigger works to draw an immediate contemporary. Every character stands out in some way, be it Beat’s rough and tumble jumpsuit look with bright pink hair or Quaver’s distinct blue and white palette in both hair and dress. The additional characters come alive with their own visual personalities and are a blast to see sprinkled throughout the environments of the game. Environments are fully realized 3D spaces which creates a Paper Mario-esque storybook feel as you see your characters run around the space. The scenes themselves take heavy Japanese influence, at one point full on recreating a train station in Inaba, and the lighting becomes such a fun thing to notice throughout your time in the Story Mode. There can be a stillness captured in some scenes which is nice to sit in for a while. Unbeatable knows what it wants to sound like and look like, and there’s no hesitation in getting those pieces aligned when put in motion. 

SIDE B – Spoilers for the story mode to UNBEATABLE

When you boot up the game for the first time, there’s a special introduction screen where the game asks about your own familiarity with rhythm games. Do you like them, do you feel skilled at them, and then calibrate the rhythm offset for you along with the flashiness of the on screen effects. The last few words in this opening scene are “THIS IS A STORY ABOUT LOSING YOUR WAY. IT’S NOT A LOVE STORY. NOT LIKE YOU’D THINK ANYWAY […] ALL STORIES ARE KIND OF LOVE STORIES. AT LEAST THE GOOD ONES ARE.” This initial introduction I felt was really well done. I can’t speak on the direct references that this game pulls on in terms of what might be in the team’s specific game bible, but since the first trailer I’ve been aware that UNBEATABLE has shades of FLCL and Scott Pilgrim in its palette. Two series that I had experienced at age twelve, a vulnerable age where the stories someone becomes really fascinated by and even passionate about take deep roots and compel that audience member to ask, “well what else?” A bit of an extrapolation, but that was about the age where I realized liking cartoons and video games wasn’t something I needed to give up at a security checkpoint before passing into adolescence. Suffice to say UNBEATABLE is a game that I felt primed to take in, enjoy, and fully engross myself in. To allow something so joyous about art and its process, warts and all, to move me to tears. That was not the experience I had with the Story Mode by its end. 

UNBEATABLE’s Story Mode starts with Eve, the vocalist for the band One More Final, taking the stage for the last time. We then cut to Beat waking up beside a tree and running up to meet Quaver, unaware of who she or anyone else is. Beat has no recollection of what she was doing and proceeds to accompany Quaver who eventually goes to the abandoned concert hall her mother played her last show at. Performing for Beat, Quaver’s guitar strums bring forth the Silence, beast-like creatures who are drawn to music and are the reason used to outlaw music in its entirety in this world. Beat proceeds to follow Quaver along as they decide to rescue Treble and Clef from prison, and the eventual breakout leads to them forming a band and starting to tour across the local area. Eventually this trips the alert of HARM, the police force cracking down on any and all cases of sound-related crime, who start upping the ante on what it will take to cut UNBEATABLE down.

I need to take a minute to talk about Tenchi Muyo! More specifically, the overall franchise of media that Tenchi Muyo! has become over time. The core frame of the narrative is about a young man named Tenchi who becomes involved in the lives of various outer space women as they bring him along for adventures and shenanigans. This summary is concise not because of a lack of depth around the series, but because the idea is extrapolated on in nearly 30 years’ worth of OVAs, TV anime, drama CDs, and movies. For the Toonami faithful, you were most likely exposed to the original 6 episode OVA also known as Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki, the 26 episode series Tenchi Universe, and other series like Tenchi in Tokyo. All of these are part of the overall franchise, but key differences that can come up mainly lie in the characterization or overall atmosphere of what you’re watching. To what degree is Ryoko Hakubi an all powerful space pirate, is Tenchi himself a hapless hero caught in between the turmoil of the women he’s helping, those kinds of things. As Youtuber Hazel highlights in her video of the series, the level to which everyone is actually related to one another becomes different depending on what you’re watching. End of the day, the series is still capturing the hearts and minds of many fans regardless of what interpretation you manage to catch.

UNBEATABLE, as a narrative, feels caught in an issue of creating multiple interpretations, but all in one package rather than these separate iterations. The demo, UNBEATABLE [white label], came out years ago as the prelude to what this game would eventually be. Many of the songs in the game had these cutscenes introducing and concluding the rhythm sections, detailing parts of Beat’s inspirations for writing. The sparsity in this case was evocative and compelling to the structure. In the main game, it’s never fully explored that Beat writes her own music. Clef in Episode Four comments on her songwriting but at no point is it really brought up prior to that. These songs we hear in the action segments and in bigger setpieces of the game aren’t really brought up as to why they’re here, which isn’t out of the ordinary in most narrative rhythm games. PaRappa never takes a second to say “LeMmE JusT jot THIS doWn” after he raps with Cheap Cheap the Cooking Chicken, nor do most musicals actually title the music in-universe since the expression of emotion through song is understood as this natural occurrence in the laws of that world.

Overall I realized that the feeling of what this story was supposed to be got superseded by other ideas butting in and clogging each other up. This story wants to be about creation, it wants to be about losing yourself, it wants to fight the power. These are things that I love that come up in so much of the art I adore! Here though, I keep finding myself asking “why” or “how come” more often than I’m able to allow myself to run with the narrative. As someone who’s also a big pro wrestling fan, that feeling of being pulled out from the illusion sucks, and that moment hit me hard by the end of Chapter 4. After Chapter 3, we meet our heroes in a larger cityscape. At this point the band has started to gain notoriety and after playing some shows, are in the process of creating an album. Penny, one of the inmates from the prison in Chapter 2 who helps the crew escape, runs into Beat and offers to help with the production of the album. For the next four days, Beat ghosts the band, gets worse in practice, and is consumed at the idea of finishing this record. Clef has a heart to heart with her in the local batting cages using this Rhythm Heaven style minigame to get her point across. 

I thought the idea was cool and I appreciate Clef as a headstrong character also knocking sense into the other headstrong character, but so much of that dialogue was tuned out because I tried to focus on the minigame. There’s parts of the game where if you fail a rhythm section, you will just get sent to the next part of the story with no option to retry the segment you just failed. It sucks! I hate the feeling that I can’t pick myself up after eating shit, something that I loved so dearly in the last game I reviewed where failure was applauded as much as succeeding! So rather than take in the narrative heft of whether the product or the process is the thing that matters most in the act of creation, I tapped circle to make sure I didn’t get a game over and skip that anyway. Then I fought some more cops, and our studio got blown up. Cut to chapter 5.

At its core, UNBEATABLE is proudly anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist. The only real interaction you have with police in this game is through fighting them, and the forces at HARM are also constantly reminded to be the villains without question. Beat, in every single interaction that she was with a member of authority, consistently reminds us that they are pieces of shit and horrible human beings. That part’s all well and fine, shoutout the cop slide. What ends up taking shape is this persecution complex, for a lack of a better word. Everything is against Beat, and since we only have Beat’s interpretation of the world she’s interacting with, then it’s easy to take that hostility at face value. People can be upset by her, but rarely, like in that batting cage segment, do we have anyone really push Beat on how she views the world. Again, this isn’t a plea to have Beat feel bad about The One Good Cop, but more having a curiosity as to why things are the way they are. Beat is thrown into this story with next to no knowledge of what’s going on, much like we are as the player, but then I felt like I had more questions about the world than Beat did and the frustrations came around the “why” of everything. Even if there were no concrete answer, to then at least have the “why” through the distorted lens of authority and scrutinize whether it was an explanation that people did feel complacent to uphold. 

Seven years is a lot of time to work on something. In that time ideas can change, be reworked, be given new life, be dead in the water after an epiphany. This focus and obsession of time passing comes up several times throughout the game. At times it feels a little tongue in cheek, but there’s an earnestness to the fact this team spent so damn long crafting this idea. The fact this game is out at all is a miracle, let it be known. But the flaws I feel I keep running into about how this story is, what the focus is, the overall premise of UNBEATABLE, I hit this point where those frustrations feel less like me wanting to sit in critique and more eager to sit in with the staff  to draw up stories. That I want to make a game that dedicates more time towards providing outlets to those who do harm. A story around a pain felt by everyone but spoken about by no one. o go out and craft something rather than say why this game isn’t evocative of the vision in my head. This isn’t my game though, and the time I sat with Beat and the others really reminded me of that by the end. 

As I work through my feelings about this game, I do feel compelled to think about the students I work with, young people of color who are very well aware of how the world hates them but who have been brought up with just enough acceptance of the status quo that to resist authority requires teaching both the intrinsic moral and the practical application of unplugging, disconnecting, and reconvening. It’s the way that even with my lack of strict cybersecurity routine I’ll shoo away a discord reply asking me to join a test server because that doesn’t sit right. The core message of rebellion and doing what you love is something I want others to take on and love passionately as well. I think this game can be profound if you’re learning what adversity feels like for the first time. If the world looks full of enemies more than it does friends, then I can see someone resonating a lot with Beat. 

I just can’t help but feel like I’m staring at a window, the lights on and the music inside just audible enough from the outside. “They must be having a good time,” I think to myself as I walk to my destination and look up the song playing because it’s by an artist I recognize or a band that I already listen to. I look at the staff, the inspirations, all of these separate pieces of the process to make this game and am so proud of what’s been created at the end in terms of the effort put in to create it. Why then, do I feel like this story lands flat? My initial draft of this review was caustic even, much more an open letter to RJ Lake and Andrew Tsai asking why couldn’t I understand this, even though I can see the blueprints and appreciate them? It sucks to have something that you’ve waited on, even put money into (two dollars, but in 2021 those were two of the maybe ten dollars I had to my name total), and get a product you like most of, but not all of. It’s not to say that RJ and Andrew are untalented either, if anything that’s refuted by the song credits and visual direction and every other piece of the game that they take a stake on. I don’t feel right calling RJ a bad writer for this story, when their expressions of isolation, worry, and perseverance in “Empty Diary” and “Mirror” are still rolling around in my head.

UNBEATABLE is something that reminded me I do like rhythm games. Its sound is one that’s been around with me ever since I listened to The Dream is Over by PUP for the first time back in 2017. It’s been in the periphery of my young adulthood, and its message of losing yourself and finding your voice has been in the back of my head for every job I got fired from, every friend I’ve had to lose, every night where I felt like the person I saw in the mirror was not the person I wanted to wake up the next morning. I think having this game a year before I enter my 30s, well traveled in my career, having an ever-growing group of friends this past year alone and now facing the reality of being a new uncle, feels like getting a gift you had just aged out of but still appreciating the thought that’s there. I’ll most likely be playing Arcade mode still, and as soon as I get that beatmap editor I’ll be making the New York Indie Rock scene every other person’s problem in the leaderboards. One of the final passages in the credits is from lead programmer Reyah Koehler, saying 

thank you so much for seeing this game to the end. we all worked really hard on the game. i hope you loved or hated it, and enough so that something about it sticks with you for a while. Thank you for believing in us and giving us the opportunity to try and make something special for you.

There’s a lot to love about UNBEATABLE, there’s a lot I’ve learned to hate. The game has a beautiful soundtrack, the rhythm sections in story mode will just be skipped over if you fail them. The character designs are fun to see, the other minigames in the narrative are clunky and don’t feel as engaging as the core rhythm game despite the artistic direction. I’ll probably be thinking about this game for a while, and to those of the team who read this I will still probably dap you up when I see you at Magfest and highlight the things I did enjoy. I think that’s what sticks the most at the end. Stories about losing your way feel different once you’ve finally started to get a handle on things, FLCL becoming less this revelation of everything I thought was true and more a fun nostalgic look at when small things mattered so much. They’re precious because of the flaws. For now, I am a little heartbroken as I collect these thoughts that feel so different to the preview I beamed about in 2021. It’ll heal, and luckily I’ve got a great soundtrack for that healing.

The post It’s A Good Sound, Just Not My Sound – UNBEATABLE (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

7. UNBEATABLE

You make a rhythm game with in-house tunes inspired by garage rock and power pop, with an anime aesthetic that skews super close to Studio TRIGGER’s line of work, and you’ve basically got me at the door. UNBEATABLE is studio D-cell Games’s first project and the dedication is apparent from the get-go. So far the game is limited to an early access demo but it was more than enough to get me onboard for their Kickstarter. The tunes whip, the gameplay feels fantastic in a way that makes me consider going back to Muse Dash, and here’s hoping that I can make the case for it in future deliberations once it fully releases in the near future.

6. Yakuza: Like A Dragon

2020 had a lot of me starting and stopping games since, you know, focusing on stuff was kinda hard. That being said, 2021 was a great time for my JRPG laundry list to get sorted and a prime example was actually being able to finish Like A Dragon. Let the record show I’m not the kindest to Dragon Quest in presentation or gameplay, but Like A Dragon manages to make its homage to that tried and true RPG format engaging and worthwhile. It says a lot when what was supposed to be an April Fools’ Day gag ends up being the new mission statement for games in the series going forward. It also helps that Ichiban Kasuga is such a fun character and completely different in attitude from the long standing face of the franchise Kazuma Kiryu. Making a character whose demeanor is as out there and upbeat as the lighter sections of fan favorite Yakuza 0 but with the same level of pluck as an anime protagonist makes the more serious nature of the narrative poignant for newcomers to the series to experience. Job switches and a notable section devoted to level grinding definitely show the age of the game mechanically in its attempt to be a Dragon Quest homage, but overall I’m so glad I found the time to explore Yokohama, and got to see just how unyielding the Yakuza can be.

5. Hot Wheels Unleashed

So I bought this game in the middle of a podcast after hearing about its gameplay and wow what a fantastic impulse buy. Hot Wheels Unleashed is a capital A Arcade racer, and is unabashed in letting you know that. You do time trials, CPU races, and explore all sorts of tracks created by other users online. Boosts are good, drifts are good, and your little plastic speed machine can fly off the track from whipping too much ass so you might have to use a heftier clunker with multiple boosts to compensate. You don’t always see kid logic applied to video games in a way that feels authentic, which is the key reason it ends up being a mainstay in my rotation of games whenever I need something to unwind with. 

4. Tales of Berseria

What if Guts Berserk was a hot lady? Tales of Berseria takes that pitch and then runs with it to accidentally create one of the more biting JRPGs with a cast that is so undeniably queer. Velvet Crowe is a fantastic main character for a story not just about revenge but about refuting the complacency of neoliberalism. Yes you attack and dethrone God, but you do it so you can remind people that the protection the church buys for them is finite. You gotta reach out and bolster that community so you can achieve an actual sense of strength and power. Also all the spells are just combos that you can chain together to proc a move that extends your combo, which is just batshit as you get deeper into the game. This ultimately became blueprint for Arise’s also good, if not better, gameplay, although that unfortunately trades in the nuance and readable representation of the plot for a baseball bat that reads “HEY SLAVERY IS BAD ALSO THE MEN IN THE PARTY LOVE THE WOMEN IN THE PARTY” that the game hits you over the head with a few times. Regardless, Berseria was a fun ride and I definitely recommend others to seek it out if you’re curious about a JRPG that has a little more kinetics to its gameplay.

3. Psychonauts 2

I really liked the writing of Psychonauts and was really excited to keep playing more in the form of this sequel. I didn’t expect to get kicked in the head with themes of generational trauma, processing guilt and regret, and figuring out what it means to heal and move forward. Now does this mean Psychonauts 2 is an overall serious game? No, it just means that it recognizes what it wants to talk about while also knowing how to have fun with its ideas. Richard Horvitz delivers such a great performance as Raz who feels so alive not just as a character, but as a real personification of someone so young getting a front row exposure to the way being human is equal parts amazing and so much hard work. The platforming is solid and the new powers add to both the combat and maneuverability of each world you navigate. Above all else the game just continues to be funny, which helps so much with balancing the depths that it reaches, really driving a positive message about how your circle of communication helps to weather even the worst ways we can view ourselves. 

2. NEO: The World Ends With You

I love this game.

 I can’t think of any other way I can talk about this game at this point without just praising it outright. An OST of bangers, characters that feel so vibrant in a way that shows how being a teen has changed from the original game’s time back in 2005, gameplay that’s equal parts frantic and focused… I literally can’t think of what I haven’t talked about when it comes to this game. It’s cool that Tetsuya Nomura included his friend’s actual fashion line as a store in one section of Shibuya. When you go through all the restaurants it’s fun to pick on the little nuances of everyone’s food preferences; if you order at Justice Burger Nagi is all in on the multi-pattied Cheesy Champion while Fret opts for the Fearless Fishwich and Rindo’s all set with an order of fries. The pin affinities lend themselves to a lot of fun with the game mechanics as you figure out what combination of ailments and effects lead to optimal game flow, and make the number go up for your ultimate group attack. It’s not a perfect game by all means but holy hell they did the thing and did the damn thing well. 

1. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III

So back in 2020 I started playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. It took me about the whole year to power through the game and immediately started the sequel motivated by a game doing familiar things in a way I just hadn’t seen in a modern JRPG at that time. That momentum got me all the way to the third installment of the series which ended up as another playthrough spent scrambling to hit end credits just hours before the new year. The gameplay is refreshing as a turn based JRPG system that focuses on map placement and turn order advantage while never feeling too much in terms of all the mechanics that follow suit. Cold Steel 3 ushers in a new cast of characters alongside our protagonist Rean, and they handled this the best way possible by making each new member of Class VII a foil to some aspect of him, be it his own views in regard to his swordsmanship,  his loyalty to the country he works for, or the bubbling anger that results from being a weapon of the state. It’s a bit unfair to call this my number one since I’m kind of considering the series as a whole, but also this is my list so I make the rules. 

I think the best part of this year was the fact I was able to collaborate with folks on Chooch between writing and being on the podcast. I’ll be the first to admit I usually spring for single player experiences, but half the fun is telling someone else about every encounter or boss fight that made you care just a little more about the characters and world you were inhabiting. I’m stoked for what’s coming out of the woodwork soon and to continue doing something that I’ve genuinely come to love with a group of people I respect and am so grateful to work alongside. 

The post Maverick’s Top 7 Games of 2021 appeared first on Gamesline.

Axiom Verge 2
Thomas Happ Games

Toem: A Photo Adventure
Something We Made

Phantom Abyss
Team WIBY

Garden Story
picogram via Rose City Games

Soup Pot
Chikon Club

A Musical Story
Glee-Cheese Studio

Vokabulantis
Wired Fly Stop Motion/Kong Orange/Morten Søndergaard

Road 96
Digixart

The Wandering Village
Stray Fawn Studio

Unbeatable
D-Cell Games

Death’s Door
Acid Nerve

Behind the Frame
Silver Lining Studio

Moonglow Bay
Coatsink

Lootriver
straka.studio

Despelote
Julián Cordero & Sebastián Valbuena

Last Stop
Variable State

And one more thing! A micro-round up of micro-proportions by Asobu Games:

Asobu is a content-production and publishing team that is brand new bridging Japanese developers to the west which is something we always need more of. And for this event, they put together multiple games that all look really neat! For this, I think I’ll let Christine’s expert note-taking do the talking for this section because she summed my thoughts up completely:

Elec head by NamaTakahashi – “gettin vvvvibes”
demolition robots kk by Takaaki Ichijo – “looks like gundam rampage”
Walk by Kazumi Games – “look fucking weird as shit fmv silent hill school girl what the fuck”

AND THAT’S DAY OF THE DEVS, PEOPLE! We did it! 19 games in about an a blistering 70 minutes! I’m utterly exhausted now. Normally during press conferences I can chill during boring games, but LOOK AT THAT LIST! When was I supposed to chill? During the 3D dungeon crawler that deletes itself? Or while a game promised 148,268 different routes? Just an utterly ridiculous way to cap off the -1th day of E3 2021. The curation put together here blew me away and I think I can speak for all of us after watching two hours of Geoff Keighley, that we needed it. I hope you enjoyed the recap and good luck with the rest of the game presentations this week!

The post E3 2021 Day 1 – Day of the Devs Roundup appeared first on Gamesline.

The news hasn’t slowed down either! IGN’s whole situation is kind of a mess right now, the Epic v. Apple case continues to be a disaster leaking some redacted info about Nintendo, Genshin and Honkai Impact are having a crossover, Twitch officially states that being sexy is not a crime, Ubisoft’s employees are now starting trial against the company following many workplace abuse allegations, a new Dragon Quest themepark has opened while the series is expecting some big news hitting its 35th anniversary, Blizzard continues to be in a rough spot with few active projects and several high profile resignations, and we remember the influential Berserk mangaka Kentaro Miura, who unfortunately passed away.

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