121 min readJust now

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death stranding 2. as usual, unless stated otherwise, all screenshots are ones i took

Man. 2025, huh? I had some pretty big, bad things happen, which earned me a lot of burnout. My health is deteriorating, and I can’t afford care I need. People have tried to make it worse for me when they really did not need to.

People I loved died.

But it’s not all bad. I’ve got this big giga-project I’ve been writing since 2024 that’s getting there, slowly. I’ve been thinking about writing a complete history of Adios, with a bunch of logs and screencaps to show you what that was like and where the ideas came from.

There’s some big stuff I can’t talk about, some good, some utterly devastating. One day, I’ll be able to talk about all of it, and a bunch of you are going to ask me how the fuck I’m still alive.

Well, video games were a big part of what kept me going. You — the people who help with my tip jar and allow me to cover medical costs — were another big part.

Waifu Death Squad — that’s the tongue-in-cheek codename for my upcoming game — is in full swing, buuuuuuuut I may have another few side projects spinning up. If you want to work together, and you’re cool with doing spec work with me, my DMs on bluesky are open.

But, because my health was dogshit, I was limited in my ability to fly more rockets or get out to the Kansas City Zoo and all the other things I wanted to do. I did manage to get to the library more, which was one of my goals for the year. However, because my health is so dogshit, that meant I got to play a lot of games, because games are a great way to get outside of your body when it’s trapped in disability like mine is.

As I write about the games I played in 2025, I’m reminded of how intensely I love this fuckin medium. I love being able to write about these games, talk about them, learn about the people who made them and admire the brilliant craftsmanship that went into making them. Games are a beautiful, amazing, deeply human thing, and it’s so wonderful that I get to be here, playing them, connecting with the people who made them.

Thank you, game developers, for making cool shit.

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So! This is my favorite article every year. I always have pieces I love writing every year, but this is the one I can reliably look forward each January. It helps me re-center myself; I’m reminded of what I wanted to play, whether I did or didn’t and why, and it’s when I set my agenda for the coming year.

What about the games I was looking forward to? Well, in the last article I posted a massive list, and I’ve removed some that didn’t release — Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, for instance — but beyond that? How’d I do? Bolded games are the ones I didn’t get to.

1. Super Mario RPG — Finished!
2. Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle — Finished!
3. Gunman Chronicles — Finished!
4. Monster Hunter Stories — Finished!
5. Like a Dragon: Ishin! — Finished!
6. **Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE **— I didn’t quite get Hundred Line finished in time to play another Kodaka joint. At the time of this current edit, which is January 31, 2026, I am on Day 91 of the game out of 100 (not counting alternate endings).
7. Metaphor: ReFantazio — Finished!
8. Star Wars Outlaws — Finished!
9. Starfield — Haha, it’s still my background noise game.
10. **Deathloop **— Okay, so, I would’ve actually finished in 2025, but when I realized I could probably hit a funny number of games, I set it aside to go ahead and get through a couple shorter ones I had on my backlog, hehe. 2026.
11. **Final Fantasy IX or XII **— Weirdly, I decided to play Star Ocean, but I _did get Final Fantasy IX set back up and am going to get started on it soonish.
12. **Etrian Odyssey — **Finally got into the groove! But it’s long. So it will likely be finished early this year. Probably February.
13. Battletech — Finished!
14. Fuga: Melodies of Steel — Didn’t get around to this one!
15. Hitman trilogy — Didn’t get around to this one! These three?
16. Various Daylife — Finished! And it sucked! More on that later in this article.
17. Remnant 2 — scheduling to co-op with friends didn’t work out.
18. **The Saboteur **— Lost my saves, demoralized, will start over.
19. **Threshold **— I lost my save and meant to go back and haven’t yet. 2026, for sure.
20. Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi — Chipping away at it, but once I got into the Etrian Groove, I started focusing on it.
21. The Thaumaturge — Didn’t get it started.
22. **Phoenix Wright 3 **— Maybe 2026.
23. **1000xRESIST **— Definitely 2026.
24. Akimbot — I’m thinking 2026, right after I finish Ratchet & Clank 3, while I wait for my new PS3 controllers to arrive in March. It seems to run pretty good on my Steam deck, which is neat.
25. **Amnesia: The Bunker **— 2026.
26. **Bravely Default II **— 2026.
27. **Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster **— Recently picked it back up. Finding my groove. 2026?
28. **Diofield Chronicle **— Started this recently. It’s really cool.
29. **Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes **— 2026 or later. I think I want to play Suikoden first.
30. **Lorn’s Lure **— didn’t get to it!
31. **Marvel’s Midnight Suns **— oh yeah, that’s like 80 hours of 2026.
32. **The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy **— MAN, I GOT CLOSE!
33. Death Stranding 2 — Finished! This is probably my GOTY.
34. Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap — Didn’t get it. Wasn’t as much of a sequel to the first two as I’d like, so I heard.
35. **Assassin’s Creed Shadows — **For my Samurai games article, I played Ghost of Tsushima and the DLC again — more on that below — and Rise of the Ronin. I did not finish Shadows, but I did finish Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Bordeaux is… definitely not Ubisoft’s flagship studio, that’s for sure. Kinda soured me on trying more Assassin’s Creed for a bit.
36. Avowed — Finished!
37. **Monster Hunter Wilds **— Been waiting for the PC patch for CPU stuff.
38. **Suikoden I **— Not there yet.
39. Suikoden II Remaster — ditto.
40. **Anno 117: Pax Romana **— They released this with some AI art, which soured my interest in it.
41. **Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 **— Nope, not done yet. Not loving it so far, but not far enough in for a verdict. If you’re a die-hard fan…there’s still hope!
42. Dragon Quest I HD-2D Remake — Been busy, but I’ll start with III, which is apparently the ‘first’ game and should be played first.
43. **Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake **— Ditto
44. **Elden Ring: Nightrein **— didn’t get around to it. Ultimately the focus on the multiplayer thing just didn’t appeal to me.
45. **Ghost of Yotei **— A friend just sent me a copy and I’ve been having a wonderful time.
46. Mafia: The Old Country — Finished!
47. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond — I should play 2 and 3 first, huh? Good thing I got my Wii set up. :)
48. **The Outer Worlds 2 **— Just got gifted a copy!
49. South of Midnight — Finished it right before writing this section, if you can believe it.

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So, 49 games on the list that I could have chosen to play and finish. Some, I did play, but not finish, meaning I only got through 13 of them! Not… great, but also, I mean, I did finish a *lot *of games this year, and I’m *really *close on a few more games on the list. Since I’m severely ADHD, I tend to follow the whims of my heart, and I ultimately chose to play different games as the situation called for it.

While literacy is crucial to understanding game design, never force yourself to play games; play what feels right to you. In an era of free game giveaways and subscription services that dump half a dozen games on you every month, I do this by setting up my whiteboard in a way that helps keep me completing games while allowing me a great deal of freedom.

Since people often ask me what this whiteboard strategy is, here’s how it works.

I write down a bunch of games — ten, to be precise — on a whiteboard.

Here’s an example of how it looks:

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picture taken in februrary 2025

As you can see, slot 1 and 9 are empty. I start with one color — here, it was a burgundy color. Then, as I finished a game, I’d replace it with a new color — in this case, turquoise. Now, the list is entirely green and blue. Who knows what color I’ll pick next?

This let me instantly see that hey, okay, while I do have 8 games I’m actively playing, and I’ve got turquoise and burgundy; the burgundy ones are the older color on the list. This way, I can see what’s been on the list the longest, and kinda bump it up in priority, and I’m not just running in circles asking “what game do I want to play tonight?” I’m going “I can play any of these, but I really oughtta try to get the older ones out of the way.”

I keep my choices limited, allowing me to focus a game down rather than jump around at random.

Here’s what it looked like at the beginning of the year; let’s see how I did?

• Dragon’s Dogma 2 — Finished!
• Planescape: Torment — Finished!
• Persona 5: Tactica — Finished!
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth — Finished!
• Project Wingman — Finished!
• Iron Harvest — Finished!
• Granblue Fantasy Relink — Finished!
• Indiana Jones and The Great Circle — Finished! But now there’s DLC!
• Battletech — Finished!
• Axon TD — Finished!

Nice! Contrasted with the list of “hopeful games to get through,” it appears when I get a game on the whiteboard, my chances of finishing it skyrocket.

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I have a lot of games on my backlog. I will follow the currents of my heart.

Personally, I love tracking “what I thought I’d get to” and “what I chose to go with instead,” so what can look like a failure to reach one’s goals is actually marking a change in priority. Who am I? What did I feel like? How did the year shape me?

In 2025, I really started craving first person shooters and played through several, which surprised me; that wasn’t what I started thinking I’d want to do, but I ended up not just playing a bunch, but writing several articles on the topic. Crazy, right?

Here’s all the previous yearly roundups!

• 2016: 52 games completed, 6 DLC completed, 100 games abandoned
• 2017 (unwritten. i didn’t write it in 2025 because i forgot, so 2026, for sure): 52 games completed, 8 DLC completed, 180 games abandoned
• 2018: 65 games completed, 12 DLC finished, 235 games abandoned
• 2019: 57 games completed, 0 DLC finished, 227 games abandoned
• 2020: 73 games completed, 11 DLC finished, 55 games abandoned
• 2021: 79 games completed, 3 DLC finished, 0 games abandoned, 1 game SHIPPED
• 2022: 74 games completed, 0 DLC finished, 1 game abandoned
• 2023: 39 games completed, 3 DLC finished, 2 games abandoned
• 2024: 42 games completed, 6 DLC finished, 6 games abandoned
• 2025: 70 games completed, 5 DLC finished, 0 games abandoned

Last year, we started adding hours, which are based on the Steam timer and aren’t always the most accurate (like if I accidentally forgot to close a game upon going to bed), but they give you a good approximation of how long a game was for me. This year, I’m breaking things up by month and adding DLC to the mix as well.

Let’s begin.

BEFORE WE CONTINUE, SORRY, BUT I GOTTA RATTLE THIS TIP JAR:

So it turns out that Jeffrey Epstein helped bankroll Peter Thiel’s lawsuit against Gawker, which ultimately resulted in me not getting paid as much to write as frequently as I had before the lawsuit, which means I lost about $7200 thanks to Epstein personally. Crazy. If you want to tell Jeffrey Epstein to go fuck himself, well, lmao, tip me instead. Okay, while true, that’s not the serious reason I need your help; I’m disabled as shit and need help with that.

Just 250 people tipping $20 each would help me make a deep cut into my medically-induced debt. If you thought this article was worth your time, I’d be grateful for a tip. I’m a lot closer to my goal than I was last month thanks to some extraordinarily kind people, but still got a ways to go. If you tip me over $1000, I’ll try to cover a game you’d like me to cover (singleplayer only, with a few restrictions; e.g. i will not cover any games made by industry abusers or people like JK Rowling); it may take me a LONG time to do.

I, personally, can only write these articles and distribute them for free with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.

So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access to education materials like this. Thank you.

paypal.me/stompsite* (this is the best way to help me out right now)*

@forgetamnesia on venmo (this is the second-best way to help me out right now)

ko-fi.com/stompsite* (this is the slowest way to help, but it works. i sometimes forget to send thanks on ko-fi so if you want a thank you, venmo is the easiest and i generally always try to get to paypal)*

$docseuss on cashapp (this works pretty quick, but the only thanks I can send is an emoji)

Let’s start!

January

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as usual, all screenshots are ones i took unless mentioned otherwise or i forget

1. **Persona 3 Reload **(PC — 144.7 hours)

“What is Persona?”

Difficult question, but we can simplify a bit: for most of its life, Persona has been a series of games about a group of high schoolers taking on godlike beings who try to destroy the world. Persona 3 defined the ongoing style of the series twenty (oh god) years ago, and Persona 4, Persona 5, and Metaphor: ReFantazio all follow that same overall structure (narratively, Metaphor changes things up), which happens to be one I like.

You play as someone attending a new school (it’s always someone attending a new school), acclimating to the city you’re in, meeting a weird little guy called Igor who tells you that you’ve got the power to carry multiple ‘demons’ — magical beings that come from human mythology — with you, and use them to cast magical abilities. You might waltz into a room with a party of Thor, Zeus, and Baal, for instance, with party members who have Robin Hood and Carmen (from Bizet’s hit opera Carmen) for instance. You’re the “wild card” character, so you can carry multiple; your friends each carry one.

Each game has a series of slice of life activities that take place over the course of various days. Maybe you wanna go hang out with a friend at a bookshop, or go catch bugs in a forest. As you do things, they take up chunks of time, your day progresses, and so does the story. Smartly managing what to do in a given day allows you to raise your friendship with teammates and supporters, giving you increased combat abilities as you go into the series’ dungeons — or, in Persona 3’s case, a single dungeon with hundreds of floors — and level up your personas, advancing the main plot of the game.

Basically, live life as a teenager somewhere in Japan, do slice of life stuff — not life sim stuff, where you raise physical stats to improve combat abilities, but personal traits, such as Charm or Guts, which unlock various relationships with other characters as you go.

I like this focus — rather than “improve my usual tabletop-style physical characteristics,” the game’s stats are more about _{who you are} as a person, and you can raise them — changing yourself as a result — through your relationships with other people. So if you want to date Mitsuru, you have to study really hard, because she’s not interested in you if you aren’t a genius.

What I like about this is that it’s focusing the players on the right thing — this isn’t just “the character will fall in love with me if I max out their friendship meter with gifts,” like in Dragon Age: Origins or something, it’s “hey, I actually have to work on myself to be worth caring about.”

Tonally, this is my favorite Persona entry, of the three main series entries I’ve played so far (meaning that, at the time of writing, there are only three Persona games left to play — Persona, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, and Persona 2: Innocent Sin). I was so close to finishing Persona in 2024, but it was not to be, and I limped over the finish line just a hair into 2025.

Reload is a remake, but it tries to be largely faithful to the narrative and structure of the original game, so there’s a lot they don’t change — for instance, in Shin Megami Tensei, the series Persona evolved from, players have the ability to negotiate with the various demons they summon. So you might kick Jack Frost’s ass, he might go “hee ho, wait a second, do you want something from me?” and then you tell him you want him to join your party, and he chooses or doesn’t.

Persona 5 has this negotiation mechanic. Persona 3 and 4 do not, and Reload does not introduce it to the game. The dungeons in Persona 5 are all very different, often having puzzles or gimmicks the player contends with to progress. They’re also very story focused. Persona 3 continues with randomized dungeon layouts that feel too simplistic to ever have to think about.

(good level design is mentally stimulating level design; if a player can just run around a series of randomized connected rooms until they fumble their way to the exit, it’s not that interesting, in my opinion)

Persona 3 has a great story, a fantastic cast of characters, gorgeous art, and the really satisfying slice of life story you’d expect if, like me, you’d been playing the series backwards — Persona 5, then 4, then 3 (I was going to go back and play 3 on my PSP, but then Persona 4 for PC was announced, and while I was playing it, Persona 3’s remake was announced, so it just kinda happened).

…buuuuuut…

How do I say this…

The dungeon is so much of the game, and it sucks so bad, that it’s hard to wholly recommend one of the best slice of life games of all time.

You just run around and engage in random battles in boring level design. The only sense of ‘progression’ is that the biomes change. This made it a bit more of a slog than I would’ve liked, and by the end, once combat just… did nothing for me at all (and remember, I’ve played and finished a lot of SMT games over the past few years — check out earlier articles for me discussing Nocturne, V, Vengeance, Tokyo Mirage Sessions, Persona 5 Royal, and Persona 4… suffice it to say, I’m VERY familiar with the intricacies of these systems), I actually turned on some cheats just to get through fights faster.

It’s a fantastic story with great characters, music, and style, with the best horror vibes of any of the Persona games, still very much Shin Megami Tensei in tone, but without the dungeon variety or depth of systems that made Persona 5 Royal as fun as it was in comparison.

I really liked it, but the actual dungeons you had to explore suuuuuuucked.

This means that, like Persona 4, I’d spend all my time playing the actual game, and then try to get through as much of a dungeon as I possibly could in a single run, opting to spend my daily choices doing anything other than dungeons.

This means Persona 3 is a game I’m extremely fond of in a lot of ways… I just didn’t like, y’know, most of the actual combat sections; thankfully, it was made a bit more fun by Atlus’ turn-based system, which is always a little different every game they make, but is more interesting than the average, because it’s about controlling the turn economy through enemy weaknesses.

You try to hit those to build up things like an “all-out attack,” where your whole party attacks a stunned enemy party for massive damage, or a “one more,” where you knock down an enemy to gain the ability to switch to another character who can hit a different enemy weakness, stuff like that. It feels more thoughtful than just “hit a guy’s weakness until he dies.” The goal is to control both the board and maximize your actions in a turn.

So here’s a game I really like, because I like so much about it; the way it looks, the way it plays, the way the story unfolds, the cast of characters, the way mechanics are slowly folded in over time to keep things feeling fresh.

But man, if it had demon negotiation and fixed, interesting, deliberate level design, it’d be a lot more fun.

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2. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (PC — 121.7 hours)

This is what I said in my 2020 review of Like a Dragon.

I love this game. I loved this game so much that while I didn’t 100% it — my save ended at 69 hours — I did do every. single. sidequest. I view myself as saving a bunch of it for later, like when I save my pizza and toss it in the fridge so it’ll be cold and tasty tomorrow morning. Yakuza 7 is an excellent game, a deviation from what you’d expect out of a Yakuza game, because it’s a turn-based Dragon Quest-like somehow… but it works! It works so. dang. well!!

Five years later, we got a sequel, and I’ve played a lot more Yakuza games — 0, Kiwami, Kiwami 2, 6, Man Who Erased His Name, Judgement, and Lost Judgement — since.

I don’t like it as much, and there are two reasons for that. First, Hawaii itself looks like a downgrade, even from Yakuza 6. It’s… the lighting just isn’t there, a problem which continues in Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, but more on that later.

Secondly… the story isn’t as good. Don’t get me wrong: it ends strong. In fact, Ichiban is the protagonist I identify most with in the series.

I had to put the game down a bit in 2024, because it hurt a lot to play. What Ichiban went through in the early stages of the game is something I went through, and it was too close to home, too traumatic, to talk about. Every year, I’ve thought about what I want to say to one of the people who participated, and how much I miss him and wish I could forgive him. So that ending… man, it hit me. I loved it. It was the best possible ending to a story like that, and Ichiban handles it with strength and courage that I hope I will have, if I ever have the opportunity to forgive.

But… Yakuza is also a series that passes in real time, which means that as the Yakuza lose power in Japan, and it becomes harder for them to do the things the series was known for, it becomes harder to tell stories about them.

…which is why this is a story about a child who somehow holds the secret to an island, and there’s a guy who for some reason looks 60 but might be over 100 years old, and he runs a cult, and also there’s a plot to make the Yakuza work on disposing of toxic waste, which is a way of getting them out of Japan, and just… I don’t know. It’s not good. It’s not a good *plot, *and a lot of the story itself is… definitely weaker than the Nagoshi-led entries.

You have a game that’s pretty fun to play with some great systems (I put dozens of hours into Dondoko Island, which is as fun as everyone says), but… other than Ichiban’s story of betrayal and forgiveness… the main plot just wasn’t as good or believable or as interesting as the series’ earlier, more grounded “here is how someone wants to commit crimes using the legal system.”

It’s still a turn-based series, and it’s still deeply fun… but yeah. It wasn’t as good.

Also, the guy they got to voice act Kiryu in English sounds way too young and about an octave too high. Kiryu needs a butter-smooth voice with a little bass to it. I played the first Ichiban game in English, and wanted to do so here, but felt like Kiryu’s horribly miscast.

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DLC 1: Alan Wake 2:** The Lake House** (PC, not sure how long)

This was a fun, gorgeous expansion on the already-wonderful Alan Wake 2. I’m not a big Control guy — the Dylan story just isn’t that interesting to me, and then half way through the game kinda just tells you how the interdimensional aliens known as the Hiss got here without really telling you what they are or want. It just kinda peters out. Cool vibes, but not Remedy’s most interesting story.

“There’s an organization inspired by the internet fan-wiki called SCP, which Doc was actually recruited for around 2010 or so, but refused because they weren’t paying him, as well as things like House of Leaves, and you fly around their base because you get superpowers in a game that is sort of a fantastic 3d Metroidvania” is like… I mean, I liked it, but it’s definitely closer to the bottom of the list than Max Payne 1 and 2, which, coincidentally, I’ll be reviewing in this very article.

The DLC is Alan Wake 2, so it plays like Alan Wake 2, and I like that a lot. You descend into a base, you learn that a couple agents were fighting for dominance over a program where they were studying the mysterious Dark Presence that Alan Wake was dealing with in his games (which I like way more than Control), eventually you face off with the final boss (which is kinda frustrating), and then it’s over.

I liked it, it was worth my time, I’m not trying to spoil much. It was the right kind of horror vibes for me. Definitely get it.

Thanks, Epic, for funding Alan Wake 2’s development, and huge thanks to Remedy for making something unique and creepy like this.

February

3. Iron Harvest (PC — 23.5 hours)

DLC 2: Iron Harvest: Operation Eagle

I’m reviewing these side by side, cause I didn’t actually realize I’d finished Iron Harvest when I did, and just played right through into the DLC until a mission or two in, when I realized I was now playing the DLC. The store page will get you both.

Iron Harvest is okay.

Company of Heroes fans will probably love this game; it’s a real time strategy game where you mostly just focus on skirmishing with the enemy, taking various command points, and, sometimes, building enemy types.

So, there’s a weird thing about me: Real Time Strategy is my jam, but I prefer the Age of Empires style “build your economy and do research and yeah sure sometimes there’s combat, but not always” RTS to the pure combat-focused style of RTS. Company of Heroes, despite being objectively good at what it’s trying to do, is my least favorite RTS as a result. Think of this as me being a person who loves to play Tekken but doesn’t really vibe with Street Fighter, or who loves Team Ninja style combat and therefore doesn’t love Ninja Theory games quite so much. It’s not their failing, it’s my own personal preference here.

Tactics-focused RTS games (some would say “real time tactics,” but I think that should remain reserved for games where you’re playing in isometric perspective and controlling a few individual units in real time, such as Partisans 1941) are just… not my jam. I don’t care about micro, and they’re kinda all about micro. I prefer that middle ground between a game that’s focused on macro stuff, like econ and reserach, but still is real-time enough to keep my brain occupied.

I often find myself stressed and annoyed as I lose units, and in maps where you’re stuck with a fixed number of units, things can get frustrating. The story’s kind of a generic “you play as lots of factions and the real bad guy is actually a mysterious final faction” plot. Voice acting’s all over the place.

If this is your preferred style of game, I’ll bet you’ll love it. It wasn’t my kind of game, so I didn’t love it all that much.

The story’s… alright. The art’s kinda cool. Weirdly, I can’t find my screenshots anywhere, and I know I took a few!!! So, oh well, I linked a trailer.

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4. Dragon’s Dogma 2 (PC — 55.8 hours)

There was this moment where I found myself stuck on a road at night. Some goblins were attacking me from a ridge, so I climbed up to attack them. My pawn came right up behind me and proceeded to slam her sword down on the nearest explosive barrel, tossing me back off the ridge I’d just climbed up. When I landed, I had one HP left. I coulda fuckin died! “Perfect,” she said, “Exactly as planned!”

These kinds of systemic interactions are what make Dragon’s Dogma 2 so fucking neat.

I fucking love this game, but make sure you’ve got a beefy rig to run it, because just like Monster Hunter’s latest entry, it has some… serious performance issues on a bad rig. Luckily for me, my machine good as hell, so the experience was butter-smooth.

It’s a fantastic, fascinating game that does all sorts of utterly weird shit. Do I wish the story was a bit better? Yes. Absolutely. Was it fun as shit to play, with fascinating systems that all come together in a uniquely bonkers way? You betcha. Is the character creator as good at creating muscular women as the last one? No. No it is not.

…and then there’s the part that quite a few people miss.

When you start the game, you will see a wonderful title drop. That title drop says, specifically, “Dragon’s Dogma.”

You’ll know you’re actually playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 when you see the title drop that says “Dragon’s Dogma II.” Everything else is prelude.

“But I made it to the credits and didn’t — “

Yeah. You did make it to the credits without seeing that title drop. :)

You know how Nier Automata works? Well, Dragon’s Dogma II does not work exactly like that — that is, you don’t begin a ‘new game,’ to access the actual game. Instead, when you’re sitting on your throne at the end of the game, see what else you can do. Then, when you get back into the fight with the Dragon… well, you’re gonna wanna do something else. ;)

Excellent, excellent, excellent game. Take it on its own terms, fuck around with the systems. One of my favorite features: if a person dies, their body will eventually be taken to the morgue. Yes, you can revive them there, no matter who they are. But if you wait a few days, it might be too late, so just… check the morgue on occasion.

God, I fuckin loved it.

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okay im annoyed that when taking a screenshot of the game, the steam screenshot icon popped up. i always try to turn this feature off on steam, but sometimes I forget, and it will take too much work to dig up a better screenshot from my unsorted screenshots folder, so sorry about that

5. Granblue Fantasy: Relink (PC — 21.8 hours)

This was a fun little game. Hideo Minaba, the guy who art directed stuff like Final Fantasy IX and XII, was also a lead on this game, and I think it shows. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is one of the best-looking anime games I’ve ever played, in part cause they avoided the cheap-looking plasticky cel-shading that most ‘anime’ games have.

It’s fun to get the characters, unlock them, and do cool stuff. I wasn’t hot on the story; it’s got your generic soft-spoken super special anime girl who is dependent on your protagonist to save them so they can use their magical power to do some big shit. And also there’s a mysterious guy who’s super edgy and has a mysterious secret going on.

Of course, it’s also got your cool determined protagonist who’s lacking in personality because of a mistaken belief that you can’t identify with anything other than a blank slate, and that makes it really hard to fully buy into the story.

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6. **Battletech **(PC — 61.6hours)

I remember seeing the cover of MechWarrior 2 and trying to play it at a Gateway Computers store in the late 90s. Before that, our main computer was an AST, but I wanted to play some games — Apache Longbow and iF-22, but our hard drive stored less than one gigabyte, and Dad had to upgrade it. He was getting a bit frustrated with the AST computer too, so we went shopping for a new computers. We went to Office Max, Circuit City where I played a demo of Age of Empires (the employee who’d been playing before me had some upgraded catapults and he let me use them to squish some people), and a few other places. One of those was the Gateway Computers store in Wichita in the Bradley Fair shopping center at 13th and Rock.

Gateway was basically a brand of stores that did the Apple store thing but for Windows PCs made by Gateway. Kinda a silly idea when a Best Buy or Circuit City could offer more brands of equally good computers, like a Compaq or Emachines rig, but whatever: they had a cow theme, and that was kinda neat. I think this was still at a time where you couldn’t buy Dells in stores and had to order them from the company, too.

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gateway computers were cow-themed for some reason

Anyways, I’ve always loved the Mad Cat/Timberwolf mech ever since, despite not really playing nearly enough MechWarrior — I was forbidden to actually play games by my parents (technically, I’m still forbidden, but I’m an adult and can do what I want) — so I never actually got around to playing the old MechWarrior games. I played a little MechAssault at a CompUSA kiosk in 2003 or so, even have the lanyard some guy gave me back then in a box somewhere, I think.

But Battletech was my first time playing all the way through a game in that universe and… I didn’t like it. The missions get a bit boring, I found dealing with heat management and stuff not to be really fun, and the game has literally zero flow. I mean zero. Sometimes you’ll just sit there while nothing happens, with no idea of what’s going on. Buuuut… hey, I’d started it, I wanted to at least finish one, and I did.

It is, as I understand it, a faithful adaptation of the tabletop games, and I do not like tabletop games. My brain simply isn’t built for them; they’re much too slow and extremely boring to me. I’m distracted easily. This is probably a severe ADHD thing, and, once again, I don’t want to blame the game for my own unique tastes not matching it.

I do think that turns should be snappier in tactics games, which is why if you look at my old Twitter profile, you can see me talking about shit like ‘speed tactics.’ This game is ridiculously slow.

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7. **Naissance **(PC — 2.6 hours)

I got lost a few times, and some moments of platforming were annoyingly difficult, but traveling through this strange and wonderful alien megastructure led to some truly jawdropping moments. I think with a bit more polish and a bit less annoying puzzles or light platforming, especially when those things can kill you so quickly that they fuck up your pacing, Naissance would’ve become one of my favorite games of all time. As it is, I find it worth my time as an academic study, but didn’t love the act of play enough to want to go back and replay it or anything.

It’s telling that I would go without playing it for a significant length of time — the last time I’d played it was before February 2024, because a dear friend passed away that month, and I had been playing it while chatting with her about Horse Game and some of the plants we were thinking of having in the game (long story). I just… kinda stopped playing Naissance, and didn’t find the drive to get back to it until way later. Sometimes, your life just gets thrown off track a bit, and returning to where you were can be a challenge.

Grief is a hard thing to carry, and I carry a lot.

If you think you might be interested, you should play it. I found it to be an art gallery I really liked, but occasionally more frustrating than I wanted.

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8. **Bulletstorm **(PC — 13.1 hours)

I rarely replay games; I need the gameplay to be really really really fun for me to want to go back, and even then, I’ll still often prefer a new game over an old one. Bulletstorm, though? Nah, I played this explicitly because after Naissance, Battletech, and Iron Harvest, I really wanted to play something super tight and exciting, but not as long as the Persona 3 Reloads and Dragons Dogma IIs of the world. So I played this old staple, but this time with Duke Nukem as the player character (it’s because Gearbox published the rerelease instead of original publisher EA, and Gearbox owns Duke).

Fuck yeah, it ruled. It always rules. It’s one of the most fun shooters ever made, and its only downside is the lack of a jump.

I’ll replay this one again. You know I will.

Funnily enough, Bulletstorm was a massive influence on my understanding of shooter design, and shows up in some of my design documents as early as 2014. A guy I used to work with stole those design documents, contracted some people and crunched them, and made ‘his’ version of the game. It’s his most successful game ever, and it’s nowhere near as good as it should’ve been. One day, you’ll get to play the real deal. We hinted at it in Adios, during the scene ‘The Way.’

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9. Silent Hill 2 (PC — 21 hours)

Most horror games suck shit because they’re about guilt. Someone did something bad, he feels bad about it, he’s maybe even forgotten he did it, and the gameplay experience is all just a dream. He’s being punished. That’s why it’s okay to watch him going through the bad times.

Too many people say: “this is all in your head because we are too afraid of actually letting the monsters be real and we have to have some twist that this isn’t really happening because you’d probably think we were silly if we actually told a story about monsters. It’s a METAPHOR, we’re being ARTISTIC!” A real artist would just make the monster be real and let the feelings of dealing with something scary be the thing the audience relates to.

A blatant example of this is basically everything prior to Silent Hill 2 in Bloober Team’s ouevre. But… I was assured that Silent Hill was overseen by people at Konami, including Masahiro Ito, the art director for the series so… I checked it out.

WONDERFUL NEWS! I really liked it.

Bloober tried to expand Silent Hill 2 — a game I’ve played before, but it was 2008 so it’s been a while — and they did a legitimately good job, and the game makes a few changes that imply heavily that James has actually been repeating the game over and over nonstop since the original release, including a ton of the corpses just straight up looking like James.

It’s a remake that’s a commentary on the original, and I think it works.

Silent Hill 2 was never quite the masterpiece people make it out to be; go back and play it. It’s rough, the combat sucks and some of the puzzles aren’t great. Contemporary reviews comment on a lot of its shortcomings, where modern reviews are more in the context of Silent Hill 2’s *legacy, *rather than its actual execution.

Over the years, many fans tried to argue that the bad controls made it scarier, but this was, and remains, always bullshit. If you have to make your game feel like shit for it to be scary, it means your actual scares weren’t good enough. Silent Hill 2 had some excellent scares.

This remake keeps up with those, but, to remain scary, it can’t just be a fresh new coat of paint, so it does a bunch of things, and most of them work. They expand a few sequences (the prison, the labyrinth) in ways that end up being a biiiiiit less fun than I’d like, but hey, 20 hours at a $60 price point’s a pretty good deal.

The new voice actor is way better than the weirdo multimillionaire guy who thinks 5G will make you go crazy that played James the last time, and somehow believes he owns the character. Yes. That’s a whole thing. Look it up.

Silent Hill 2 is the game that a lot of people just blindly copy, going after the In Water ending, which is interpreted, through Edgar Allen Poe (whose characters were often tormented by their own guilt) as a completely nonsensical “Silent Hill is either a force that redeems you through suffering,” or “this was all in James’ head.” Neither is really true; James doesn’t even feel guilty about killing his wife, and we can see that other people in Silent Hill are there because, well… it’s not even their fault.

Angela’s being tortured by Silent Hill maliciously, for instance — she’s not guilty of anything she needs redemption from. Eddie doesn’t feel remorse at all. Everyone sees Silent Hill a little differently, which is why Angela sees it as being constantly on fire, and Eddie breathes out puffs of condensation, like the air around him is way colder than it is for James.

Silent Hill takes your fears and tortures you with them. This game seems to understand that. It is a purely malicious entity. Being there is not a good thing, and it’s not good for you, even if you can make peace with your own life upon having overcome it.

My abuser did not do me any favors, even if being able to escape that situation meant I was able to believe in myself and understand more about who I was as a person. That’s why I find it reprehensible for someone who’s never actually dealt with real, severe hostility to argue that horror is actually about a person overcoming their own shit.

What doesn’t kill you may make you stronger, but it did still try to kill you.

Sometimes, bad people want to hurt you. Tornadoes rip apart your home. You or a loved one get an illness that brings all your worst fears true. One of your best friends dies and the coroner’s report just says “natural causes.” Here one day, gone the next.

The really, truly scary stuff that horror can deal with doesn’t have to be guilt, and just trying to copy Poe while misunderstanding Silent Hill 2 will do you no favors.

Silent Hill 2 certainly wasn’t shitty, and most of the people I’ve seen act like it was bad are either understandably wary because of their past games, listening to some very shitty YouTubers who were talking a lot of shit before the game released, or just misremember — or, in a few cases I saw, hadn’t even played — the original game, and really only know it through consumption on social media.

Silent Hill 2 remake is, like Dead Space remake, a worthy successor, if not always an improvement. It was a great game.

So what did Bloober Team say about this experience?

They said they didn’t want to make any more shitty games.

Well, in September, they released Cronos, and I played that too. That review is later in this piece. We’ll see if they were right down below — maybe this was excellent just because Konami has been kicking ass with Silent Hill.

Oh. Right.

I also played Silent Hill f this year. ;)

(the weirdest thing about this? my brain legitimately refuses to believe I played silent hill 2 in february. it keeps going ‘that can’t be right’ lol)

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10. Persona 5 Tactica (PC — 36.1 hours)

I really liked Persona 5 Tactica early on… and then it just. Kept. Going.

And, since there’s no real metagame or anything, and you’re mostly just going into a mission with three characters, completing it, and moving on… it starts to wear thin, especially as it emphasizes mostly just being a puzzle game, and starts dictating specific conditions you have to complete to beat the game. This isn’t exactly a tactics game… it’s more of a puzzle game using tactics game mechanics.

I have a problem with puzzle games, which is that they’re usually about the designer creating a problem that is supposed to be solved in one way. This means that you’re rarely being creative, because the constraints of the puzzle are so limiting — such as “beat this in this number of turns,” that the game ends up being “figure out what the designer wants you to do.”

Some people love that creativity.

Other people lean the opposite way; they want total freedom. Those are the kinds of people who play Minecraft and build whatever they can think of. I’m also not that kind of person; some constraints are nice.

Why I love XCOM: Enemy Within is that while I do have to think “how do I solve this problem,” I can solve it in ways that feel suited to my creativity and expression. There are constraints, yes, but I never find myself feeling like I have to solve the puzzle exactly as the designer intended.

I like going into a mission, seeing aliens trying to kill civilians, and going “okay, I want to save as many as possible. How am I going to do it?” The problem I had with XCOM 2 was, it was clear the developers didn’t want players to play the way players wanted, so they did everything they could to try to force you to play in specific ways, which made the game feel a lot flatter and less varied as a result, even though the designers themselves were intentionally trying to create variety. An imaginative player will always find ways to do more with a less restrictive game than one that’s a bit too tight.

As Persona Tactica got more restrictive and puzzley, instead of feeling like my skills were growing, I started getting increasingly impatient.

As with a lot of Atlus games, there’s a “we made another game in this series, but it’s a spinoff, so we’ve left out a lot of stuff” element. With Persona 3 Reload, for instance, the female protagonist from the PSP version of the game was removed entirely, as well as all the FES content (though that came back in an expansion; I haven’t played it yet). They remade the vanilla game with none of the improvements you might expect. Just having demon negotiation alone would’ve made the game feel way better than fighting shadows, y’know?

Well, in Tactica, don’t expect Sumire to show up outside of a few DLC missions. I like to see series that are iterative — Pokemon having a battle tower in new versions of the game would be great, but execs expressed surprise when people wanted that, and, as I recall, argued that every Pokemon game deserves to have some ‘unique’ feature no other Pokemon game had. Why? It’s not like these games are currently legally available for purchase. I can’t just go buy a copy of a Pokemon game with the Battle Tower in it that’s distinct from another Pokemon game that’s also on the market, you know?

This is far from the only example; When GoG got Capcom to finally agree to put old Resident Evil games on GoG, they said the biggest barrier was convincing the execs that yes, even though Resident Evil 1–3 got remakes, people still wanted to play the originals.

There’s a lot that confuses me about Japanese publishing corporate culture; I’m sure someone with a lot more experience than me could explain it, but the refusal to release a definitive version of a game and also yoink the existing version of the game is deeply frustrating to me as a customer.

*(there is still no Persona 3 or Persona 3 FES release on