• 01 Jan, 2026 *

An astoundingly shit year. Let’s talk about video games.

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2025 games I might play one day

Shine Post: Be Your Idol, Blue Prince, Promise Mascot Agency, The Hundred Line: Defence Academy, Silent Hill F (well, watch a playthrough of, anyway), Fantasy Life i, The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily, No Sleep for Kaname Date, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, Strange Antiquities, Digimon Stories: Time Stranger, Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines II, Dispatch, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Despelote, And Roger, Keep Driving, Skin Deep, Seance of Blake Manor, Mars First Logistics, Demonschool

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Patrick’s 2025 Old Game of the Year: Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown

This is a bit cheat-y because I already knew I loved ACE7, but playing it recently because of the ACE8 trailer reconfirmed: god damn do I like ACE7. It’s a perfect mix of whirling through the sky dodging missile fire and lining up shots as a radio drama barks in your ear and the sickest music known to man blares. Impeccable. I might end up working out how to play the rest of the series and see if it’s up to task.

Runner-up: Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords

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Best/second-worst gacha of the year: Umamusume: Pretty Derby

I’ve always liked the sheer ridiculousness of the franchise as an anime, and to see it translated into a pretty interesting roguelike raising sim with fairly excellent localisation was enough to hold me in its grasp for most of September to November. Pity about the godawful drop rates and, you know, the whole gacha thing. Also once you play it a few dozen times you realise it’s pretty much dice roll on dice roll on dice roll and the magic breaks.

Worst gacha of the year: Medical disasters

Something with odds of 1 in 2,000 would be classified as an exceptionally rare SSSR item that people would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars trying to pull; our luck that we managed to get an awful, earth-shakingly devastating diagnosis in one go. Fuck you, luck.

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Game that was pretty good but went on too long: Donkey Kong Bananza

Award title says it all. I still enjoyed Bananza a fair amount (though it didn’t quite make it to Odyssey levels in terms of 3D platforming), but sometimes games just overstay their welcome.

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Not Quite There Yet Award: Pokemon Z-A

Tale as old as time: new Pokemon game has interesting ideas and overhauls, but can’t sustain past a certain point. Z-A has loads of great ideas that feel like they’re at iteration one and iteration three will be killer. Having a friend squad and characters that actually turn up constantly throughout the story, the real-time battle system, ambushing people, the verticality of the map design... it all shows promise, even if it ends up being a slog to actually play.

Runner-up: Two Point Museum

I buy one of these Two Point games every few years, fiddle with it for a bit and drop it eventually. This one came closest to drawing my attention longer-term, but still didn’t quite have it.

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Game I enjoyed but which disappeared from my mind immediately after finishing: Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

Usually a Yakuza game will have something that really sticks, but Majima’s latest adventure - while fairly fun while I was actually playing it - just didn’t have enough to hang about. The brawler combat is still crap and while the performances and incidental writing are as good as ever, without a strong sense of seriousness in the story tied to the main character, the goofy hijinks don’t have enough definition to contrast against to make much of an impact. It says a lot the most interesting part of the game to me was the post-credits cutscene.

Runner-up: Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition

Playing XBX was sick af but my mind cannot grasp onto it and keep it around, probably because of the game’s MMO-esque storytelling style. Also unfortunately, I don’t want to listen to most of the soundtrack outside of the game except for Black Tar and the Overdrive song.

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The It’s Fine Award: Hades 2

A lot of people were deeply disappointed in Hades 2. I’m not among them, but it does strike me as a very safe, iterative sequel. There’s loads more content, a fair amount of changes - not all of them for the best - and so on, but at the end of the day while I liked booting it up and doing a run and getting more story and whatnot I can’t say it quite hooked me the same way the original did.

Runner-up: Hollow Knight: Silksong

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Smaller game I played this year: A Dragon’s ReQuest

This fun, horny, one-person project - about a bunch of lesbian princesses teaming up to do a Dragon Quest and save the world - is both one of the funniest and one of the most sincere games I’ve played. I highly recommend it to anyone who read that description and thinks it could be cool. Check it out on itch.io.

Runner-up: The Roottrees are Dead

I was looking for a logic puzzle game and by god I got it. My only issue with the Roottrees (besides the AI art in the jam version, thankfully removed) is that the actual story itself is not particularly enthralling or twisty in the way that, say, an Uchikoshi game would be. But it was still incredibly satisfying to solve its puzzles.

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Game of the Year: N/A

To be honest, no game I played this year really captured my imagination and maintained it in the way that I feel is needed to take out the crown. The games that came closest were...

Runners-up: Death Stranding 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong

I found DS2 to be a ruggedly satisfying experience (combat aside) for about 25 hours and then kind of tiring and empty for the final few hours. Great soundtrack though. On the other hand, once Silksong opens up in terms of tools and options, it really does feel deadly competent - but some aspects, like the RNG quests and the feeling that I might ultimately need to resort to a guide to figure out what the game wanted from me - prevented me from being fired up enough to pursue the whispered-about act 3.

#games