All the Games I Played in 2025

Probably…I think…mostly…

What the fuck, am I right? 2025 Is finally over. I want to say the year flew by but like…it fucking didn’t. Still, it amazes me how fast the holiday season is upon and then beyond you. For us it was six weeks of celebrations and birthdays and family gatherings. Then it was over. A steady tempo, a metronome, followed by a silence. New Year’s Day was gray, silent. The moments after finishing the Stranger Things finale were…well…strange. Joy and relief muddled with this sudden and deep vacuousness. The holidays were over, Stranger Things was over, a new year had begun. With DJO’s “End of Beginning” playing on repeat in my new headphones I felt and still feel this immense pull to 2016. Before everything started. I hadn’t had any kids yet, I was still living in an apartment, I had just bought my first digital full price game (Overwatch). Now, three kids, two houses, and a full digital library later, there I was, here I am, wondering constantly about the value of it all.

The last year was hard. Kids progressed through and into emotional milestones. They argue with us more, feel things more, want things more. The house is a steady source of tasks and list items. I stopped podcasting in March. I think a part of me hoped a lot of people would reach out and complain that the content had stopped. But I’ve always been convinced there is just too much going on for people to really take notice. I didn’t even really hear anything from my former cohosts. Nothing against them, life gets busy, but a part of me has been clawing itself bloody to get back out. So I guess, as the new year trudges forward, foreign leader renditions aside, there’s no better time to…I don’t know…restart?

I dread the idea of starting something I’ve done before over again. I once returned to work at Apple a year after my first foray and, while sitting in the training room realized I didn’t need to take notes. The notepad I had from the last time had all the notes from my first training, in the same order. I remember looking back and forth at the filled notebook and the empty one, digesting the concept I had just reset the timer on a thing I had done once before. Brains are prone to overreacting to things, but when I say an ominous dread started to fill my head, I can’t be clear enough, it impacted me physically. So…this isn’t a restart. It’s just me finally getting out of my own way. No more waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect conditions. I played a lot of games last year and I have thoughts about all of them. So here’s my list, in no particular order, probably.

Herdling

I have a lot more to say about Herdling than I am going to put here. There will be a standalone write up for this coming soon or already out. The short version is, I love how well Okomotive can drum up emotions in their players in short windows. Herdling felt like an experience in parenting. One that stresses you out the first go round, because you have no clue if you’re doing the right thing, but that evolves on repeat playthroughs, as you start to understand your flock and your limitations better. It’s serene, beautiful, and evokes a tremendous amount of emotion for a game best enjoyed in a couple sit downs. Set aside three hours and do it at once. Preferably when it’s raining.

The Alters

This was the first game I played in 2025 that made me stop playing other things. I’m a big fan of logistically heavy games, I remember the moment I saw the base in XCOM it dawned on me. Queue the dean from Community muttering “I hope this doesn’t awaken something in meeee…” But The Alters takes the base building formula that 11 Bit Studios honed in Frostpunk 1 and 2 and the emotional storytelling of the gripping This War of Mine, and squished it into a perfect little clone filled package.

You take on the role of Jan Dolski, a builder on an extrasolar excursion in search of a miracle mineral called Rapidium. You wake having wrecked on an alien planet, find your entire crew dead, and struggle to put together a mobile base to survive in. When the rubber hits the pavement you discover Rapidium and with the help of the on-board Quantum Computer, you use the Rapidium to rapidly clone yourself using projected branches off of your own life history. What if you stayed home and stood up to your abusive father instead of fleeing for engineering school? What if you took care of your dying mother instead of going into engineering? What if, after taking care of your mother you went on to become a humanitarian aid worker? What if you got so into medicine that you saved your mother and became a doctor? Each question produces a clone of Jan with simulated memories of entirely different lives. So your task evolves from survival to crew management. But you have to break it to the crew that their entire life of memories is a simulation, you have to brief them on the situation at hand, and then you get to solve the numerous fallouts and troubles inevitably rising from those revelations.

There is a tremendous amount of really excellent writing stuffed into The Alters. Also, Alex Jordan gets to play more than half a dozen different versions of himself and the performance is just perfect. Each Jan has a distinct personality, each raises logical and difficult questions, and by the time the game ends I had very strong feelings about how they should be allowed to exist in a world where the company responsible for the technology may not want their secrets getting out.

I am almost positive I got the best ending. Just an altogether excellent and unique experience. Deeply deeply love this title.

South of Midnight

I played this right after The Alters, despite its release being a few months prior. South of Midnight is one of the best told short stories in a game I can remember. There are bigger, more expensive, longer, deeper experiences out there, sure. But what South of Midnight does in about ten hours is significant. I will say, the combat is nothing to write home about. Every instance of combat is largely differing configurations of the same three or four enemy types. There is a bit of a puzzle to solve in these conflicts, but there is only a bit, never more. Despite this, I burned through this game because the story it tells is so compelling and rich. Southern Gothic folklore is so sorely missed in modern fiction. South of Midnight takes up the responsibility of evoking those themes and nails the landing. The setting is incredibly well researched, the music is fantastic, the story beats are strong and the game ends with one of the most heartbreaking choices by a villain character I have ever seen. Truly, left me speechless in my office through the entire credit scroll. Just an amazing stab at a often overlooked part of American culture. I want so much more, but I am so happy with what we got.

Rematch

I am a huge fan of playing, but not completing, Sloclap games. I loved Absolver and played it for probably 25 hours. I completed one full run (the game is a rogue-lite) and was so pleased with myself I barely returned. Sifu gets my highest praises, despite the boss with the chain-whip-blade-thingy being the most aggravating fucking thing I have ever experienced (I am being told it’s called a Sansetsukon, sue me for not remembering that). No game gives me the John Wick/Matrix Kung Fu vibes like Sifu. It’s Keanu Reeves as fuck. When I found out Sloclap was making a soccer game I was immediately sold. Big fan of Shaolin Soccer over here. While the game is admittedly much less kung fu than it is soccer, the roots are all there. Acrobatic bicycle kicks drip with martial arts finesse. Sloclap also carried over its distinct, angular style for character models, adding an additional layer of steez. The player outfit customization is great, the dynamics of play are phenomenal. It’s an easy substitute for FIFA or FC(insert number) or whatever it is now. Framing a footie game around being a player sim, rather than a soccer sim, works for me. My teammates and I consistently found victory by being better versed in how the game of soccer is played, rather than having the technical prowess a game like Rocket League eventually requires.

ARC Raiders

There is surely a bigger write up about this game coming down the pipeline. Lots of very complex thoughts about ARC Raiders and the social experiment it induces in every match. I’ve never had a game steal my brain quite like ARC did. I caught myself dreaming about it. It’s also one of those titles that seems to get better as time passes. As I learn the ins and outs of each map I find myself enjoying the movement as much as the gunplay. Good traversal awareness often tilts the scales in combat anyway, and out flanking an enemy because you know the map better feels great in any game. Though I will say it feels especially good if you get to pick the carcass of your kill immediately after.

I also have some feelings about Embark using text-to-speech AI to generate the character barks. They paid voice actors to record repositories specifically for this use case. Does that make it better? Perhaps? Perhaps not? What I will say is, it feels a little strange this usage of “AI” is held in the same disdain as generated art or lines of code. This instance lacks theft to me, and also sounds like a late argument against Siri. I can understand the argument, but the counter argument feels more nuanced. I will say, the CEO of Nexon (Embark parent and publisher) blabbing about AI being necessary in everything going forward is more than a little icky. I think the customers will have a strong sway on the use of “AI” going forward. Exactly which direction we see the sway go still feels muddy. I’m sure big companies are betting on the lack of clarity and understanding to further their plans. Gonna have to remain diligent on this one.

Battlefield 6

This one feels a little bittersweet a few weeks after the passing of Vince Zampella. I have been a fan of Battlefield since Bad Company 2 and a steadfast player of every game since. I stuck it out through 2042. To see Battlefield surge as strongly as it did when 6 released, to see it return to its roots, to feel like I’m playing Battlefield 4 or even 3 again, truly is something else. Moment to moment play in this series has always hinged on feeling like the most immersive warfare sim it can while still being approachable. From sound design to gunplay Battlefield 6 executes on every front. Deeply and genuinely pleased to have such a good game to return to over the next year or so and just blow my socks off with pulse pounding action. The fact that Vince Zampella led the teams that made Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2, effectively cementing Call of Duty as a year-to-year best seller is crazy. The new fact that Battlefield has a chance to have sold better than Call of Duty with a cadre of dev teams again led by Zampella, potentially dethroning Call of Duty’s reign as number 1 since 2006 (a stat Zampella is at least a little responsible for) is poetic and one of those stories you love to see. His passing is tragic, and the competitive FPS genre owes a huge debt of gratitude to his contribution over the last 20 years.

Borderlands 4

Borderlands 4 is on this list because I played it. But that’s about all I did. And I didn’t play it for all that long. About 4 hours in I realized I’ve kinda played this game before. Also ARC, Battlefield 6, and Rematch were all begging for my time aaaaand I couldn’t deny them, so Borderlands 4 fell to the side. I bought it though. So someday I’ll return. Likely only to slowly dabble but, at this point, my relationship with Borderlands has long been label-able as a dalliance. So perhaps it was always only going to be this way. I will say, the introduction of the game sold me more than any other Borderlands game has. Well great…now I’m thinking about it again…

Duskpunk

I bought Duskpunk exclusively because Citizen Sleeper creator Gareth Damian Martin compared the title to their own games. I’m an easy sell if you say the right things. If it’s the right person, you don’t even have to say the right things. In this case it was both the right person and the right things. There are slight deviations from the exact Citizen Sleeper formula, but Duskpunk gets the crux of the sonder-core genre Gareth and I coined during our last podcast session. The game puts you in the middle of a city roiling with political and economical strife and asks you to choose which scales to place your thumb on. It does feel a little bit like a Forrest Gump situation, you are present and in the center of every important moment if you choose to be, but in the end I felt really good about the way things built, climaxed, and resolved. Unlike either Citizen Sleeper game, I wasn’t able to make everyone happy in Duskpunk, which felt a bit more grounded than I was expecting. A really solid title I absolutely devoured. Happy to lead a Marxist workers rebellion against an imperial state any time, please make more games like this!

Slots & Daggers

Short, sweet, devilishly fashionable, crunchy, funny, and downright addictive. Friedemann Allmenröder has a knack for making games I come across and think, “This is exactly my shit.” Slots & Daggers is the third time he’s done it to me. Like ISLANDERS and SUMMERHOUSE before, I found Slots & Daggers on accident (or because the Steam algorithm knows me or something) and scooped it up immediately. A deck-building, slot machine, boss rush rogue-lite? Fuckin…yup. I recently completed the entire campaign pathway and unlocked Arena mode. While I haven’t dived into that portion just yet, the main path was just so damn satisfying. It’s simple UI design. Everything shakes, bangs, plings, and plonks just right. Happy I have this to go to and no desire to find my way to a casino, because if this is any indication, I would spend way too much time fucking around with levers and my meager bank account.

Gray Zone Warfare

This game didn’t exactly come out in 2025 but my friend group had a hot and heavy affair with it over the summer. An open world extraction shooter with HEAVY milsim influence, Gray Zone Warfare is kind of exactly the kind of game I want to play a lot of. It’s currently in early access, which generally means I play a few hours and then keep my distance until full release. Extraction shooters do have the habit of being in early access for eons though, so we grabbed a few friends, convinced them to buy in, and put about 40 hours into it across two separate updates. The updates serve as community account wipes, so we got the full experience out so far. Nothing compares to the feeling you get when you and a squad of buddies move through and clear a small village or series of city blocks with no issues. You feel surgical. Like true wetwork specialists. Even if feeling like you are actually that lethal is the obvious power fantasy. The update we encountered sought to fix some omniscient AI behaviors and did so pretty well. There’s also something strang going on in that world they are building up to. Copies of Roadside Picnic, the 1972 Russian sci-fi thriller written by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, can be found all over the place. Roadside Picnic is why we have S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, hell its kinda why the extraction shooter genre exists at all. Gray Zone Warfare has a big anomaly zone in the center of the map, there are weird sounds in the night, some of the documents you come across suggest some fishy dealings going on. I’m excited to see what they decide to reveal someday. Fully prepared to wait a decade for it though…haha…ha…

Is This Seat Taken

On the list of little bitty games I find and have a fucking blast with, Is This Seat Taken is a little puzzle game about placing people in seats or spots based on small lists of desires and requirements attached to each little shape. The little bits of writing are cheeky, the little people all being different shapes is cute, the puzzles are tricky, and honestly, it just kinda makes me smile. That’s what little games like this are for. Finding a person to sit next to the stinky child with flies swarming around them while finding another place for the square that hates big smells and wants to read is quirky and creative. Great for waking the brain up or, alternatively, helping your tired brain realize it’s too tired to be doing this. A dual function medicine. Gotta love it.

Whisper Mountain Outbreak

Another early access rogue-lite/like? What? No way! This title is made by the same Malaysian production house that put out the fantastic Coffee Talk games (looking forward to the sequel still!). But rather than a cutesy coffee shop sim you are thrust into a postapocalyptic world full of zombies, monsters, and occult horrors and given a baseball bat and a pat on the back. You move through a linear mission selection screen and gather up whatever loot you can find along the way and then on one mission you make a single mistake, everyone dies, you resurrect back at base and one of three lanterns shatter. Immediately usurping the “Oh cool, I get to keep my shit” feeling of seeing yourself alive again with the “oh shit, I can only die a couple more times…cool.” The most interesting bit about the game is you have no fucking clue what’s going on, so each little excursion is fresh and kinda terrifying. If you put the Umbrella Corp logo anywhere in this game it would make a tone of sense. All teh Resident Evil vibes, great pixel art, much fun! Interested to see where they go with it and what they add before its full release. Also, fun fact, the game currently comes with a friend code, so grab it and share it and have a good ass time.

Tavern Keeper

More than ten years ago, and a lot since then, I spent a tremendous amount of time playing Game Dev Tycoon, a game dev business sim made by a small team of developers called Greenheart games. They announced they were working on Tavern Keeper like…eight years ago. It finally launched in early access! Woo! It’s really fucking good! Woo! It’s also extremely complex and will make you stress out about so many things!

…woo!?

I love what I’ve played of Tavern Keeper. It’s not just a Diner Dash copy, instead you are tasked with not only staffing and running a bar, but eventually adding a kitchen, figuring out how to order and stock food, designing dishes to be made, scheduling your employees, cleaning and maintaining your equipment, and participating in local festivals. It rips. Also it makes my brain itch while also scratching itches in my brain. I’ve played through the swamp introduction and the halfling map. I think im good until full release, even though I do have one more zone. Maybe I’ll pop back in for each update before then. This feels a bit like the first Hades to me: a few hours in I put that game down until full release. No contact whatsoever. Sometimes you just know you’re going to love something. Sometimes you also know you don’t have the mental capacity to engage with such a deep sim during the holiday rush of logistics and interfamilial dynamics. You know….life shit. Great sim though. Very excited to keep an ear out for development updates.

Hades II

Oh hey Hades II, I was just talking about you. This game pisses me off, but in the best way. Supergiant has this back for making games I love aesthetically and experientially. Their music has literally always been on fucking point, their art design is always slick and sexy (despite my beef they let Dionysus be a BIG BOI), and each game feels extremely good to play. I touched Hades in early access and then let that dog lie until it was ready to be born. Absolutely loved it upon release. What a solid experience. So, as you can imagine, when they announced their first sequel to a game they have ever made, I was thrilled it was Hades. But the fear started to creep in. How the fuck do you make a sequel to a game that was borderline perfect without diluting the broth too much. Well…I’m happy(?) to tell you…Hades II is fucking great. It’s genuinely mystifying how the hell they figure out how to make “Hades but again” better. But like…they did! The music is reimagined with synth drip and electronic momentum. The combat is different and varied and fresh and feels like returning to something despite being, you know, unique. It’s mesmerizing honestly. Supergiant needs to be debuffed as a studio. You can’t be this good at making games. Jk you can please don’t stop!

Star Birds

Oh boy! Another early access game! Star Birds is the love child of Kurzgesagt, a quirky German animation and design studio, and the creators of Dorfromantik, Toukana Interactive. I played the hell out of Dorfromantik, a random deck-based, hex-tile, chill citybuilder/puzzle game. Yeesh that’s a mouthful. Star Birds puts you on a colony ship full of sentient birds exploring the galaxy. You’re tasked with establishing little mining outposts on tiny little planets and creating a logistical system wherein you can extract the stuff you need to carry on your journey. It’s a hair complex, but a good balance of brain stress and happy “thing go click and brr and I’m so good at this!” Played it for about 4 hours and decided to wait to see what updates bring to the table. But I dig it!

Easy Delivery Co.

Man…if there is any game on this list that I took a look at and immediately said, I’m gonna dig this, Easy Delivery Co. is definitely one of the quicker pick ups. I’ve only dabbled in this game but it’s weeeeeeeeird. In like, the best ways. You’re a little cat, you drive a little white pickup truck, and you deliver things. Sounds simple right? And then I died of frostbite, woke up in an endless maze of gray concrete tunnels, and eventually found my way back to the world of the living. At least they explained what just happened when I got out…just kidding, they definitely didn’t. There is something going on in this game, I just know it. Add this to the list of games I’ve bought this year that I know aren’t very long, and yet, I haven’t made the time to go back and finish them. I’m so intrigued though!

Hyper Light Breaker

This one is a bit of a sad story for me. I absolutely loved Heart Machine’s first game Hyper Light Drifter. Ate it up. I skipped Solar Ash, mostly because it was a Playstation exclusive for a while there. But Hyper Light Breaker, a game interested in answering the question, “What if Hyper Light Drifter but also Risk of Rain 2” felt like it was going to be a no brainer. Rogue-lite games are all the rage right now (obviously, look at my list), I dig them a lot (ahem…the list), and it’s in the HLD universe? Fuck yeah. It plays pretty well too. I have done a dozen or so runs and had a really good time figuring out characters, how the overworld behaves, and fighting bosses. Theeeeeennnnnn Heart Machine announced they were ending development on it back in October. Chalk this one up as the victim of the ever devolving state of funding and publishing in the industry. To quote the team’s verbiage: “While this path will include a conclusion on the project, it reflects broader forces beyond our control, including shifts in funding, corporate consolidation and the uncertain environment many small studios like us are navigating today.” Yeah, cool…that checks out. Fuckin’ sucks though. Was looking forward to what they were going to add to it.

Keep Driving

Keep Driving is one of the most unique takes to an RPG(?) I think I have come across in the last few years. It’s a road trip simulator, anchoring its gameplay loop on route planning, resource management, crew (hitchhiker) abilities, and turn-based, roadborne obstacle combat. It’s a wild experience. But the vibes are all here. You find mixtapes out and about, these add songs to your selection for playlists in the car, you can go on little explorations at towns that allow you to find all sorts of things, from car parts to…drugs…and you have to do all of this while ensuring you have enough fuel, food, and cigarettes. Y/CJ/Y games is small, two guys: Josef Martinovsky and Christopher Andreasson. They also made Sea Salt, a game I did not play but heard really good things about. I live for this shit. Small, accessible, full of character. These are the games we need to support. These are the games that keep the industry on its toes.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Ok…this came out last year…and by last year I mean 2024. Sometimes you get to a game a bit later and think, damn, this would have landed on my list if I had been paying attention. What’s worse? I participated in the closed testing for this game prior to its release, absolutely adored it, and then forgot about it immediately after buying it at launch. Tactical Breach Wizards is a turn-based tactics puzzle game about spec-ops wizards and shit, fighting people and throwing them out of windows. Seriously. This game rounds out the Defenestration Trilogy, a trio of games by Suspicious Developments, a study run by the endlessly witty Tom Francis. The prior two games, as one would imagine, heavily feature defenestration, or the act of throwing someone from a window. So think XCOM, but your pushback abilities have a very specific goal in mind. I didn’t play Heat Signature or Gunpoint, but Tactical Breach Wizards is the clear culmination of those games. It’s witty, creative, and pushes you to solve each room like a puzzle far more than most any other TBT game I have personally engaged with. I vow to play this through this year. Perhaps I can even make good on that promise.

Neongarten

Keeping on theme with the small and quirky, Neongarten is a fun little puzzle game wherein you build cyberpunk city stacks in a limited space. Each building has a category and draw or give bonuses based on their proximity to other buildings. You build through a handful of points thresholds until you complete that particular puzzle. The music is a vibe, the art style is minimalist, the lighting on your little stack dazzles, and each run can be done in about 15-20 minutes. I don’t know what it is, something about building things to chill ass tunes makes my heart flutter. I rotated between this and Tiny Glade and Dystopika and SUMMERHOUSE all year. If I had a few minutes to spare, pre or post gaming sesh, winding down with Neongarten was always a delight.

Jump Space

This is literally here to serve as a reminder to myself to play this game soon. Played the beta, fell in love, bought it on release, never opened it once. For shame…for shame…

Door Kickers 2

So I have been playing Door Kickers 2 for a couple years now. This year it reached its 1.0 launch. I had given it about eight months of rest at the time of release. When my buddies and I dove into the full release we were all immediately very pleased. It’s a dense tactical experience. Oodles of levels, each of them playing out in any number of ways once you start the action. We play this game as a semi-turn-based tactical game, sometimes we do it all in real time, but my absolute favorite has to be planning the entire operation before hitting start and just watching it go. I love the puzzle presented to me, the player, by a tactical game. There’s a spec-ops nerd deep in my bones that absolutely loves executing a well thought out and efficient plan. Honestly the only thing I dislike about this entire game, as an experience, is the setting. I get it, we’ve been at war in the Middle East for decades, but I can’t help but feel there is a more creative way to make these games. A way of creating a fictional conflict without evoking one of the more mindless atrocities this country has been the author of. Fucking robots. Make the enemies robots. There. Fixed it. Great game though. Really solid structure for player expression.

FragPunk

I played this for about a week with my buddy Ryan. I have the itch constantly to dive into Valorant, I just lack the hyper competitive friend group to really commit to a game in the genre. FragPunk feels like NetEase asked the simple question, “what if CounterStrike gunplay felt as good as Call of Duty?” It’s the same basic match format as a CS: GO or Valorant, but like…shooting feels good. Which simultaneously sounds like a childish observation and perhaps the most obvious. I don’t think the other games of this variety are flawed, I just can’t get into the mechanics of firing the weapons in those games. They all feel very “Old PC” and FragPunk deftly eschews the same assessment by making everything actually feel good to do. Deeply interested in the ongoing effects of Chinese development studios taking more cracks at established genre conventions and just trying them out slightly altered. Marvel Rivals has had great success basically ripping off Overwatch. I think the FPS space could use some inspired alterations. Maybe FragPunk isn’t the exact game to get the ball rolling, but it feels like the snowball is approaching a more interesting velocity.

Star Wars Outlaws DLC

Fuck people who didn’t like this game. I would say it doesn’t make any sense, but sadly, it makes perfect sense. Star Wars Outlaws fell victim to the age old, “this main protagonist isn’t the most perfect piece of fuckable meat” mind rot so prevalent on social media nowadays. And yes, the end of that sentence may have made me sound like a boomer, but it’s also correct. Kay Vess is a bad ass, a trait that is hot on its own. But, uhm…also…why is the fuckability of a protagonist a measuring stick for the success of a game at all? There were complaints of repetitiveness and poor mission structure when Outlaws first released. I didn’t see it. Knock out animations might be a little repetitive, but the lack of variety felt like a gameplay choice. I could guarantee how long a KO would take and plan my movement around a given area by timing said animations. As an aside, an open-world Star Wars game by the studio responsible for The Division deserves more respect. The Division franchise has some of the most beautifully realized spaces in recent memory. For Star Wars to get the same treatment felt like eating my cake and having it too. An absolutely gorgeous simulation of the “Galaxy Far, Far Away…”

The two large story DLCs released for Outlaws were a blast. Admittedly, at least in part, some of the fun came from just being able to return to the same space with something new to do. Still, to take a game about a smuggler and first give her a mission to infiltrate a casino ship to compete in a Sabaac tournament with LAndo Calrissian? Fucking stellar choice. Following that up with an adventure featuring one of the most famous pirates in Star Wars, Hondo Ohnaka, felt like absolute peak shit. Star Wars has had a few stabs at the pirate side of the universe and honestly, between this second DLC and Skeleton Crew, I’m sold. Give me a new Star Wars pirate-themed thing every year or so please. The setting is so perfect for it, and the writers they have found thus far deeply understand the Treasure Island brand of backstabbing swashbucklery. I want Outlaws to live forever. It’s a damn shame it got killed by people unwilling to enjoy a game for what it is, rather than what they wished it had been (I am also looking at you Stranger Things Conformity Gate-ers). There’s a lot of entitlement in the consumer space. I wish companies felt less of a need to acquiesce to their feverish demands.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

I love Gareth Damian Martin’s games. There is just something about them. Something able to pry open even the most dry rotted shutters and let light flood the room. If the first Citizen Sleeper was about resilience through community building and resistance, Citizen Sleeper 2 is a plea to its players to remember, no task is impossible if you lean on the people around you. The changes to the dice system and opening the universe up for planetary exploration just felt so damn good. Furthermore, where the first Citizen Sleeper left me in a snotty shambles because of the little community I built and the love I had for everyone in it, the second game somehow managed to evoke an even larger response from me. The games, as well as their creator, have always been deeply interested in mortality and how it impacts us. Our minds, our bodies, our families. Starward Vector in its closing hours, starts to turn its ever-vigilant eyes inward, asking the player to come to peace with the state of what mortality means to your Sleeper. It only makes sense players would feel those eyes boring into their souls. I don’t have any desire to spoil this game. Not yet. Perhaps in a longer write up. The reaction Ben Croshaw had to this game in his Fully Ramblomatic (formerly Zero Punctuation) moves me to tears every single fucking time. And it sums up my feelings so well.

Fuck me…fuck you Gareth…just kidding. I love you. But, fuuuuuuuhk.

All in all, I really enjoyed most everything I played in 2025. I have a pretty discerning eye when it comes to the things I decide to purchase and devote my time to. Still, the density and consistency of real bangers this year was a pleasant surprise. Indie reigns supreme, perhaps it always will, but even titles like Battlefield and ARC Raiders sopped up a bunch of my time. In a year marred by the need to look away from everything, games provided a really excellent escape. As always, I guess. More than once however, it specifically asked me to look closer actually. To stop trying to hide and, instead, contemplate what I would mean to be a part of the change. What it would look like to sit idly by while the dumpster fire spills over to the forests. What it would mean to no longer be afraid of the fight. This is why games are art. So cheers to you 2025, you were the worst fucking year to be alive and intelligent, but god damn did you house a lot of good fucking art.