Like some of the game’s designers, Mario is fast asleep while on the job.

Uh, so let’s get the tagline of this one out of the way? I’ll explain myself, I suppose, at the very least, and at length I promise… Super Mario Sunshine is a game that I like parts of. I am heavily caveating here. I like a lot of things about it. I think it looks great, sounds great, and has a lot of really well-made components in its makeup.

It’s one of the best vibes of its era: with the game’s setting, the dolphin-shaped archipelago, Isle Defino, offering one of the best settings you can explore on a GameCube console. Every inch of this gorgeous tropical paradise is teeming with lots of great characters, marvels with stunning island vistas, and is punctuated by the enticing goal of collecting the numerous Shine Sprites littered across the many biomes of the island. There is a ‘blue sky’ canvas feel to the proceedings that feels squarely of its era; like Sonic Adventure, and Jet Set Radio, were for SEGA’s Dreamcast, and games like Wave Race 64, Super Mario 64, and Banjo-Kazooie were for the Nintendo 64— so too are games like Super Mario Sunshine beacons of aesthetic positivity for their console’s stable of vibrant, creative titles.

There's just a verve, vim, and vigor to everything about Super Mario Sunshine; it’s hard to knock the flavor of any part of its visual appeal. It’s all just that: extremely appealing. Especially to me. I could go on and on about how much I enjoy running around the Isle, collecting Shine Sprites along the way. It’s not just the visuals— the music is enchanting as well, with more maracas, accordions, drums, and other oceanic-inspired orchestrations than you can shake a palm frond at. It’s one of the best-sounding games in the Mario series, if you ask me. I like pretty much everything about this package from a presentation level. (Aside from the sub-par voice acting, which is a minor quibble, as there is little spoken dialogue in the game from actual Mario characters.)

The thing that isn’t great about Super Mario Sunshine? Well… um… a lot of things, I guess. But chiefly? The… uh… playing of it. It kinda plays like shit?? It also falls apart on you frequently. It’s a whole thing.

Now, now, put your pitchforks away, I’m getting to the core of it, I promise. I know you wanna take up arms to defend your favorite Mario game, dear reader… Why else would you click this article? Surely it can’t be because you willingly want to hear me grouse about a topic such as this? You want to defend your little gem, don’t you? I see right through you!!!

I think this game, while I like a lot of things about it, I feel like the entire product is compromised at a basic level. What do I mean by this? Oh, I shall get into it. The game is rumored to have been made on a truncated time-schedule; reportedly, 18-20 months, and it feels rushed as a result. That’s a good deal less time than a lot of triple-A video games of the time had in the oven, and this sped-up timeline seems to have made the developers of this game cut a few corners along the way. A few too many corners, if you ask me. I think the concessions Nintendo made along the way while developing Super Mario Sunshine are extremely evident upon playing it. It is frequently a frustrating, janky, messy experience.

The largest and most grand issue I have with it? Super Mario Sunshine is one of the least polished Mario games in the series, and one of the most broken games I can remember playing from Nintendo. Sometimes it barely functions at a basic mechanical level, with glitching and hitching galore. It’s an extremely frustrating ordeal at the worst of times, and mildly tedious and annoying at others. I have rarely had such a love/hate relationship with a game I actually like as with this. I am incredibly mixed on it.

My main issues with the game stem from this problem. It just feels like the game is bound to fly apart on you at any given time, so there was a sort of anxiousness I felt while playing it that I just didn’t enjoy. I felt like I was walking on eggshells around the game, trying to be as careful as I could while getting around, because the game straight up has a different set of rules from every other Mario game in the series. It’s the ‘black sheep’ of the series for that reason.

Let’s break down these rules, maybe? These are the rules I’ve identified, anyway, in my time with it.

———————————————————————————————————————————————Rule 1: Always Use F.L.U.D.D.: This is the most obvious change in the game compared to the other titles. At least initially. Mario’s moveset is very pared down to the other 3D entries, and it’s not too much of a nuisance at the outset. It takes a bit of getting used to, say, not having a ‘long jump’, which was a very useful mechanic in both previous entries, Super Mario 64, and every game after, but FLUDD makes up for it in some interesting ways, even if I do prefer having increased movement options like that iconic leap from the other games.

FLUDD is a gimmick item at the end of the day, but that doesn’t make it not useful. It’s great in a pinch, if you’ve overshot your high jump and you’re likely to miss a platform— you can use FLUDD to catch you before you take a tumble into the abyss, and it will slowly assist in guiding you back to where you intended to go. I could do without the dumb voice acting in the game in general and especially with FLUDD, but again, it is a minor quibble given how little characters speak. FLUDD is an interesting idea, and for it being a gimmick, the game focuses on it and its capabilities, constantly allowing for many interesting gameplay opportunities. ‘Interesting’, being the keyword here, not ‘good’. There are some major design issues I have with the game that involve FLUDD.

Just interesting ideas executed poorly, like Corona Mountain’s boat segment, where FLUDD is used to propel you forward over lava and around obstacles. The mechanics of propulsion, tied with some of the most bizarre-feeling boat physics I’ve encountered in a game, make this a great example of poor execution in the game when it comes to FLUDD. There are more instances of this, too, but we don’t need to get into all of it. Great ideas abound, but shoddy execution follows regularly.

Rule 2: Calamity Comes: This should be Rule 1. This is the ‘modus operandi’ of Super Mario Sunshine as a game. Sometimes, no matter what you do, whether you have executed a perfect series of jumps, taken all the necessary precautions, and delivered on every criterion of a sequence, the game will betray you. Sometimes, and very frequently in fact, the game will refuse to honor your gameplay.

I had so many instances of pulling off perfect jumps over long crevasses, completing excellent chains of wall-jumping, and even sticking perfect landings while platforming, and even still, the game just completely whiffed on me. So many examples of this… I can count on 3 to 4 hands how many times I clipped through geometry during a wall jump and fell to my death, glitched through physics while attempting to collect red coins for a Sprite, and even fell through the world while just running around collecting items in a level. It’s crazy how fundamentally broken this game still is to this day. It’s just baffling, frankly.

There is a different ethos that this game has compared to every other title in the series. It falls apart frequently and looks at you to blame for its fuck-ups. I should be able to trust Nintendo of all companies and developers to allow me to execute in their games. They have a reputation for quality and fun, which they usually hit in their titles, and especially in the Mario series. It’s a bar of quality I’ve come to expect from their games, that Sunshine just doesn’t even come close to. For every great level I played through, 2 to 3 bad, horribly executed episodes were sure to follow. It’s so frustrating. I was extremely disappointed by large swathes of it. The levels are frequently a pain in the ass to complete, by extension with lots of dumb design decisions dragging down, again, interesting ideas.

‘TOO BAD!’ It’ll say as you plummet yet again for the umpteenth time, this time, because your Yoshi mount fell too far down, and because of that, the game won’t trigger a recovery flutter-jump to save yourself. The things that should work in every other game, DON’T HERE. This isn’t an interesting thing. It’s just bad game execution. Every neat idea, cool presentational piece, and interesting bit of design is handicapped by all-around bad execution, in my eyes.

Rule 3: DON’T TRUST ANYTHING!: Aside from graphical glitches and gameplay quirks, it wouldn’t be so bad if Mario routinely did what I wanted him to. In Sunshine, he is by far his most ‘squirrely’ feeling. There is an inherent skittishness to the character of 3D Mario that is shared throughout the series. He usually does just that, skitter— tippy-tapping to and fro in a direction to gain momentum for a jump. But in Sunshine? He has a penchant for being completely unwieldy to control at best and totally manic and volatile at the very worst of times. That’s the biggest issue with the game. The worst thing about it. The physics of Super Mario Sunshine are BAD.

The physics compromise every aspect of this game. From timing traversal, dealing with environmental hazards, to executing the platforming, and interacting with physical space in levels— every part of this game has a lively, rolling churn to it just beneath the surface. I mean that. It feels like every piece of solid-looking ground, wall, or piece of geometry is actually deceptively liquid in nature, pliably giving way for you to clip through it when you desperately need its purchase. Every bit of platform in this game feels like there is a slow boil just beneath. Vertices and geometry constantly stay in flux here, and Mario moves with the motion of that ocean. Out of nowhere, you could be standing in one place, and the platforms move beneath you, so you have to constantly adjust your position to time your next move, and that moving of the goalposts is so frustrating to have to juggle as situations in a level constantly change.

I was once on a rotating platform and was sitting squarely on a flat part of it when the platform rolled to its right. I randomly slipped as I was making it to the next part of the rotation, and I fell to my death. This happened so many times, specifically on this level. The game expects you to replay level after level after that to get a minimum amount of Shines to progress the campaign, so sometimes you are doing these platforming challenges A LOT.

It’s so... So…. So frustrating, especially when you do EVERYTHING right. It’s why this game is so low in my eyes. You can’t rely on it. You can’t trust anything about playing the game. The game commits cardinal platformer sins so frequently its astonishing. If I can’t bank on anything, what do I have to hold on to? It’s a broken, unpolished game with the worst-feeling physics in the series. I am baffled by it. Don’t even get me started on the PLINKO PLATFORMING RED COIN SHINE SPRITE LEVEL THAT NEVER FUCKING WORKS!

———————————————————————————————————————————I believe Mario games to be experiential adventures centered primarily on gameplay: games that have more to do with mechanical specificity and feeling than actual narrative substance. When you talk about Mario, you talk about how a game in the series plays and how said gameplay, per title, makes you feel. I really like Mario games, especially those in 3D. If those feelings are betrayed? You get a game like Super Mario Sunshine, a supremely flawed game with myriad issues, and a presentation and setting that almost make up for it.

I wish I liked it more, but I don’t. It was very disappointing to me. I am glad I played it, though, and got that proverbial ‘monkey off my back’, as it were, because I have tried to get through this game a ton over the years. It’s just a shame? That’s kinda how I feel about it. It is severely lacking in so many key areas that it’s hard to elevate it to anything higher than I would rank it on my personal list. It’s the least good 3D Mario game by a wide margin.

Why don’t we rank them next? That sounds fun. First, a little history of my time with the series, and my new goal to complete them all (despite my misgivings).

Recently, I played both of the Super Mario Galaxy games and now Sunshine after watching the newest Mario movie this year (I even played through the original Star Fox 64 for reasons), since I was in a Mario mood. My favorite in the series is far and away Super Mario Odyssey, though. Even in 2017, a year dominated by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Persona 5, I preferred Super Mario Odyssey over any game that came out that year. It’s one of the best games ever, absolutely the best Mario game, and one of my personal favorite games of all time. I got every gatherable Moon collectible, every costume, and even turned my spaceship’s hot air balloon to gold (a signifier I maxed out every Moon you could attain in the game), and I even participated in the Balloon Luigi activity that came out post-launch (kinda fun!).

I adore Odyssey, and I loved completing it. So, as a long-term goal, and being in a Mario ‘mood’ as it were, I am interested in completing the other 3D entries in the series. Getting all the ‘stuff’, that is. With the release of the new movie, and Nintendo re-marketing the Galaxy games as a co-promotion of said movie, I decided now was as good a time as any to dive in.

Maybe I’ll talk about the Galaxy games at length another time, but in short, they are wonderful games. I prefer the first entry to the second, but both have very strong pacing, imaginative level design, boast lovely orchestral soundtracks, and contain fantastic gameplay ideas. They’re brilliant video games. If I had to rank the 3D games in total, though? It would go something like this (ask me on a different day, and they may be totally changed aside from the top pick):

1. Super Mario Odyssey

2. Super Mario Galaxy

3. Super Mario 64

4. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury

5. Super Mario Galaxy 2

6. Super Mario 3D Land

7. Super Mario Sunshine

Yep. That looks right to me. Sunshine is at the very bottom (surprising no one who has read this so far), and there is no way it won’t stay there at the very pit. Now, don’t get me wrong, even if it is by far the least ‘good’ 3D Mario, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a bad game in totality. It has a lot of merit. I like so many parts of it, actually. The bad outweighs the good, unfortunately, and that’s a major detriment to my feelings concerning it. That’s why I am so upset and frustrated by how I feel about it. There is SOMETHING there. I can’t help but feel like this is a missed opportunity. At the end of the day, even a mid to low-tier Mario game is far better than a lot of your stock-standard video games.

To wrap up this whole complaining sesh, I guess I can’t recommend it. It’s an old ass game, but if you are going to play any Mario game, don’t make this the first one you play. You might swear off the series! I’d save it for last so you can compare the whole series to it and see for yourself how out of step it is. I wish I liked it more, but I see Super Mario Sunshine as mostly a miss: an interesting, tropical sophomore sojourn for the 3D Mario flavor of games that is consistently bogged down by bad physics, shoddy level design, and unreliable gameplay. It’s just a shame… I really wanted to finally love it this time. Oh well, I tried.

Stay classy, and “It’s been a thin slice of Heaven, folks.”

Let’s get this out of the way from the jump: Marathon is really fucking good. I might go as far as to say I think it’s great already. Everything about this game fires on all cylinders. It feels incredible to play, it looks absolutely stellar with the art and visual design language feeling fresh, and singular all to itself, and on a story and lore basis, I think Bungie is doing perhaps their strongest work here since at least their (in my opinion) best Destiny 2 expansion, Forsaken.

I am not just enamored with it so far, 8 hours in (which I know, for a game like this is nothing), I am transfixed by it completely. I walk around thinking about this game in my day-to-day. I feel a way about this thing that I feel about very few video games these days. I have been put under a spell, and you know what? I am a willing captive here. Marathon feels special.

The art design, I think, is perhaps Marathon’s most striking feature right from the start. I’ve heard the look of Marathon described using fun terms like ‘health goth’ and ‘cyber runway’, and each descriptor I hear sounds more apt than the last. Those terms are evocative while also still not getting to the core of what Marathon looks like, truly. In some ways, we may have to make new descriptors for it. It’s that unique, I believe.

It’s incredibly one-of-one. I can’t think of another game I have seen that looks remotely like it. The best way I can think of describing Marathon is that it feels like a Coca-Cola bottle (stay with me…). There is a stark, eye-catching neon aesthetic base backing a timeless elegance to the typeface for scripts on every bit of Marathon that makes it feel like a grounded, cohesive world that a bunch of greedy mega-corporations would share. CyAc, NuCal, Traxus, Arachne, Sekiguchi, and Mida all feel like distinct, bespoke organizations, all with their own capitalistic ends, but each faction keeps with the extensive neon color wheel that Marathon uses for its visual palette, making the whole package look visually tied together in a bold, unique way. It borders on garish at times, too, but the pops of color that dot the biomes of Tau Ceti lend a welcome freshness to every frame.

This is _gantry. He is not really all “there”, let’s say. Mida wouldn’t be the same without him, though.

Bungie thought a lot about the look of Marathon, and it really shows. Maybe this will embolden studios to take more risks with their art design in the future. I liken the feeling I get from looking at Marathon to the phenomenon that was the visual boldness of that first Spider-Verse movie, where, after the fact, you saw more animation studios in the film industry taking more bold artistic risks with bigger-budget animated projects. I hope Marathon inspires that same innovation in the video game industry. It’s so cool. I think it’s just so, so cool to look at. I applaud their effort. Bungie really knows what they’re doing over there. Pay those artists anything they want!

In Tau Ceti, you must become one with your environment. Becoming a predator, in search of meek prey. Be careful, though, for there are always larger beasts stalking you, in kind.

So, the game, at its core, is an extraction shooter. You search for loot, accept quests for folks, and by the end of a round, you hopefully get away with some permanent gear (until you lose it, which you will)— rinse and repeat. Not usually my cup of tea. I didn’t really get into Arc Raiders last year, either, though, which is the ‘one of these’ that seemed to really hit with people. I liked it okay, but I was pretty mixed on a lot of aspects of its game design. There were too many vendors to interact with, far too many systems and loot to cycle through every match, and the random scavenging they would ask you to do to further your upgrade loops was tedious to say the least.

The other thing that seemed like a positive initially was the social dynamics involved, with proximity chat being enabled by default, allowing you to interact with opposing players. It’s a nice idea, I’ll say, but soon everything just went the way it always does with these prox chat games, where people get filthy good at the game, then shoot first and ‘tea-bag’ you, taking your hard-earned shit in the process. Not really into that whole aspect of it.

The thing Marathon gets right off the rip is that there is no talking. No gray areas. You see a Runner? You murder that fool, right there. No fucking games. I like that Bungie made this hardcore in that specific way, where there is no wiggle room to fuck around with the people opposing you. No, I have this knife, I am fucking hustling over to you, and I’m gonna stab you in your goddamn throat. I’m not here to party. I’m here to blow out your candles. I appreciate how to the point it all is. I’m down to wipe out anyone standing in my way.

I had a very funny altercation last night with a rando where I saw him vault over a short wall in the distance while playing Dire Marsh, solo. I was playing ‘Destroyer’, the ‘Titan'-like’ Destiny equivalent in Marathon, for those familiar, so I zoomed in using the short-burst jet dash he has to close the gap, got the jump in his flank, knifed him once, and then put him down with my SMG. As he was going down, I heard him shout, “Curse you! Curse you!!! I curse you forever!” as I reached down to kill him with a finishing move. I ended his run yelling back: “GET FUCKED BUDDY!” and finished him off. Now that interaction, I liked. I didn’t have to tap dance with the guy; I won, he lost, and after all that, I took his shit. That was the end of it.

I’ve been down a lot, for sure, but that’s the price for making a mistake. That’s just it, every time I die, I know I made a mistake. An error that is easily erased with a fresh new run every time. It takes the guesswork, the tedium, and the all-around minutiae out of dreading the loss of your gear, your time, and your patience, out of it. You get knocked out, try again, buddy. You may have lost it this time, but you’ll be damned if you aren’t jumping in again to get your ‘get back’.

The PvP is hardcore for sure, but the NPC enemies are no push-overs either. The UESC forces that are trying to keep you from fulfilling your contractual obligations in Marathon are just as lethal as other players. They move and behave similarly to real humans in some cases. They can cloak, flank you, pop large shields, and throw explosives your way just like a person can, and it’s a credit to Bungie and their very smart AI enemies that each encounter feels dangerous and satisfying every time.

Keep your eyes peeled and your guns at the ready. These bots don’t mess around.

Bungie is known for this sort of thing, too; both Halo and Destiny have very smart enemies, smarter than your average stock-standard baddie in shooters, and that intelligence and complexity in design are apparent whenever you stumble upon an enemy encampment. There are bosses and elite soldiers, who can also yield great loot upon elimination, as well. There is a certain number of exfil zones to extract at any given time, too, with some even being guarded by enemies once the beacon has been lit to return to the colony ship. The PvE portions are just as well-designed as the PvP encounters, here. Every time you are fighting an enemy, be it human or AI, it feels gratifying because of all the systems at work under the hood, all working in concert to create one of the best shooters in the genre. It’s so much fun to keep going and going and going, until soon, you’ve lost track of time altogether.

That’s the cyclical nature of Marathon. That’s why it’s so addicting. You have quests, and they are usually not contingent on exfilling (but in some cases they are), which is nice, because when you finish a contract for a corporation, anything else you do in a match is gravy on top of that feeling, satisfying, and contributing to a successful run. The best thing about the design of Marathon is that it cuts to the bone. It shears all the cruft and the fat off the idea of the extraction shooter. It makes every gunfight brief, violent, and brutal, and along the way, provides just the amount of incentive to return for another go once you either get out or ‘get got’. I think objectively it’s truly one of the most elegantly designed games we’ve had in recent years on the multiplayer front.

This is just a little post talking about my time with the game. It’s really great so far, and I hope that it continues to be exciting the more I play it. Bungie released some ‘endgame content’ recently with a new area called the ‘Cryo Archive’, which only allows the best and most prepared Runners to participate. You have to have a certain value for your vault to even be considered to enter this new zone, and you have to assemble keys gathered from the various other maps in the game to even get to the final boss of the zone. That’s not even getting into getting out of the zone to exfiltrate, which is hidden to all team members save for one. It takes a lot of resources and coordination to do, and it sounds daunting, but I am really looking forward to checking it out soon. It’s Marathon’s version of a Destiny raid, and I hope I can get enough experience to take part one day. I am incredibly curious about it.

Destiny raids were always my favorite content in those games, and I hope I can get into this place one day. Like… what is going on in there, right? I gotta know!

For now, I am deeply in love with this game, and I hope to keep playing it for a very long time. I was hoping this game would be good, but never could I have expected that it would already be one of my favorites of the year, and the biggest surprise of 2026, so far, for me. It’s awesome that Bungie pulled it off.

This isn’t really a review; it’s more of an impressions piece. Maybe I’ll do another one of these down the road? Who knows! Having played a significant amount of it, as of now, I feel like I can highly recommend it based on what I have played. It’s one of the best shooters in years, looks unlike anything else out there, and feels incredible to play. I adore Marathon. Take my word for it. It’s $40 bucks. Get in there, and thank me later! (I’m also looking for other Runners too, so if you are interested, please hit me up! I’d love to play with you.)

Like Dave Dameshek always says, “It’s been a little slice of heaven.”

In this edition of “CMD”, I’ll be chatting about the stuff I have been playing from January through mid-March of 2026. Playing fast and loose, here. Look for more tightly formatted game criticism here going forward!

Ah, I feel loose. Loose as a goose.
I am looking to talk about some video games today, and I am gonna do it like so: I have a couple of games I have finished this past month, some games I have touched, and I wanna mention some games I wanna check out the rest of the year. I’m gonna throw it all here, in this nice, neat bucket I’ve made for myself. Hope that’s cool? Gonna try to do these things quarterly.

Let’s start with the games I’ve beaten, then we will get to what I’ve messed around with. I won’t talk about every game I’ve finished—just some highlights.
———————————————————————————————————————————
GAMES FINISHED JAN-MAR 2026:
The Outer Worlds 2 (PlayStation 5)
Resident Evil 4 (2023) (PlayStation 5)
Trails in the Sky: 1st Chapter (PlayStation 5)
Big Hops (Switch)
Cairn (PlayStation 5)
Final Fantasy IX (Switch)
Dredge (PlayStation 5)
Resident Evil Requiem (PlayStation 5)
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The Drifter Dabbled: Recent Games I’ve Been Playing
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake (Playing on PlayStation 5)

Just played a few hours of this, but I am really digging it so far!
It’s a good bit of fun to just sink into a bit of some old school JRPG stuff now and then. My history with Dragon Quest is scant, to be frank with you. Haven’t really played much of them since I grew up mostly interested in the ‘other’ “Squenix” RPG series of the late 90s and early 2000s, like Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts. So, I decided that with Dragon Quest VII getting a remake this past February, I would check out the HD-2D remakes that have come out in recent years to get a feel for the series’ beginnings.

The premise is simple: You are a hero destined for greatness. You gather a party at your local tavern, you fight random mobs to increase you and your party members’ levels, and you all gear up to continue the fight. Very simple one of these games, to be sure. I like that about it, though. It doesn’t feel like it needs to be anything else but that.

Honestly, the best part about it so far is the aesthetics and character designs, for me anyway. Akira Toriyama (RIP) was one of the best artists ever to do it, if you ask me. His art is some of the greatest ever, and for good reason. There is that sort of iconic, patented Toriyama style you get with his stuff that feels like a warm blanket. Must be the Dragon Ball fan in me still that finds the Dragon Quest series so comforting to take in. Looking to play more of this soon, for sure.
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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona (Playing on PSP through Retroarch)

I love Persona. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Persona 4 Golden fan, especially, and I platinumed Persona 3 Reload just last year, on PlayStation. Adored my time with Reload as well. Maybe has the best story in the series?? Anyhoo, I wanted to get deeper. I wanted to see the series’ roots because I loved 3 and 4 so much. So, on a whim, I decided last year after finishing Reload to start this up. I did some research beforehand and saw that this was very different immediately.

The turn-based action is now isometric; hell, the whole game is isometric until you get to the dungeons, which are in first-person, like its parent series Shin Megami Tensei was for a few of its entries. It takes a good bit of getting used to, to be sure. It’s very difficult, too.

This is a revision of the original PS1 game Revelations: Persona, with all the cut or altered content from the Japanese version restored to the North American release. Famously, the North American release of the original game was a mess. Thematically, lots of names, imagery, and story were butchered to align more with Western tastes, and I can’t believe how badly it was carved up to satisfy the American market. There is also a character, Mark, who is straight-up a racist caricature that is in unbelievably poor taste. They basically race-swapped a Japanese character and did the worst art pass you could think of to make the character black. It’s frankly absurd. Different times, I guess??

It’s an interesting history lesson, this PSP revision. It is streamlined from the original, with some quality-of-life additions, such as a soft fast-forward function getting added in this new revision to speed up battles. Still, the core content of the original Japanese game is there, just retranslated into English for a second time. If you’re gonna play this game, the PSP game is the way to do it. Until they inevitably remake or remaster it, that is.

The combat is solid, the encounters are both random and plentiful, and the difficulty is ball-crushing at times, but I am enjoying it. I am about 15 hours in and almost finished with the main SEBEC campaign (the original game had two unique routes, SEBEC and Snow Queen, both with wildly different storylines), and I am quite enjoying the ride.

A couple of interesting quirks about it, though. One of the party members I sought out (because you can only select from a couple of optional members, each with their own requirements to attain them), Reiji, has maybe the most convoluted path to get a party member I have ever seen in a JRPG. It’s wild the steps you have to take to get him (he’s fine, I guess).

The second is the Persona Interrogation. It’s not as convoluted as the previous steps to get Reiji, but it’s still esoteric and extremely hard to get a handle on. You have to talk to Personas to gain their cards and use their strength in battle in this one, and to do that in here is weird. Each party member can talk differently or use different prompts when talking to Personas. Each Persona requires a different combo of prompts to lend you their strength, but it’s not clear which combo to use for each Persona because they also have temperaments you have to use that are weak or strong to a certain prompt from a character. It’s basically a battle system within a battle system here, where you are having language battles with monsters, which is a cool idea, but it can get frustrating pretty fast.

Very weird game. But I like it. I should be finishing up the first route soonish. I just play it here and there when I feel like it.
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Fallout: New Vegas (Playing on PC)

So, I got the hankering to play this game again after I finished the most recent season of Fallout on Prime, and I decided I was going to get everything in it this time. All the Steam Achievements, that is. Hopefully, I can get them all unlocked. Gonna have to be strategic about who I link up with storywise for the faction achievements. I’m really taking my time this time to see everything I can.

This is my second time playing through this game, and I am loving it again even more this time through. Every place unfurls more story, deeper quests, and more interesting characters. Just recently, I got all the companions in the game. The last guy I met was Raul. Cool Ghoul. For ease of access, I sent all of the party members to the Lucky 38 so I could get at them more easily, but I think a couple got lost on the way. I couldn’t find Rex from The Kings, or Lilly from Jacobstown, to save my life, so I had to dismiss all of them again by terminal and then use PC console commands to summon them to my person just outside the building instead (which was a godsend).

Obsidian just makes damn good video games. Why the hell aren’t they making another Fallout game already?? Microsoft is out of its mind. More on this as I keep playing it. I’m about 17 hours in again with no end in sight!
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Pentiment (Playing on Switch 2)

Finally getting back around to this. One of my early goals for 2026 is to play more narrative games like this, Disco Elysium, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, et cetera, and this is my first push into doing that. I started it up a couple of years ago when I had my Series S and Game Pass, but I fell off for one reason or another. It’s a great game, and I like a lot of what I’ve played so far. I think the Switch’s portability will help me chip away at it more easily. It’s my before-bed type of wind-down game, and it’s really good for that.

Not much to say other than that, really, just that I’ve started it up and I am playing it when I can. I love reading, but I play too many games to make a ton of time for it. This is a happy medium I can strike that satisfies both urges. This is also another Obsidian game, god bless them. They are really doing the Lord’s work these days.
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Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition (Playing on PlayStation 5)

Started this back up recently.
I adore Devil May Cry. It’s a series I hold close to my heart, but my favorite one in the series has gotta be Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening. It’s my favorite PlayStation 2 game; it is immaculately designed, extremely replayable, and is tied with… maybe Sekiro, for the best damn action game ever made?? It’s up there, man. I adore that game. Hell, I wanna play it right now, as I write this. I documented my feelings pretty concisely in my The Dreaded Backlog 2025 write-up around Game of the Year time this winter (linked at the bottom of this segment!), so check it out there!

I had a hankering recently to get back to playing DMC4 again, this year. I did some cursory research on how folks felt about 4 upon release, and it is mostly well-liked, if not as cherished as DMC3 was upon its release. Good game, though, from what I could gather. I knew nothing about Nero or Gloria or any other character in here at all when I started up the fourth game, and it’s kind of a rare thing for me to go in as blind as I did for this one, because I usually over-research and over-analyze any game I am interested in. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but I dunno. Just how I am wired, I guess.

I do know a major spoiler about Nero’s parentage from DMC5, unfortunately, though. The truth is— I watched too many “Bury the Light” edits on TikTok… flew a bit too close to the sun on that one, I’ll admit. Someone hit me with a white lawn chair! Capcom just makes cool dudes doin’ cool stuff, huh?

Anyway, I’m far afield here— so getting back to the game itself: it’s very fun. Still getting a lot of combo moves doled out to me at a quick pace, getting my head around how Nero’s sword works (he revs it like a motorcycle… Capcom, you’re so saucy for that for real), and I like the grapple you get in the early game. Same DMC camera problems exist here, too, though. I don’t know what possesses them to have fixed camera angles for an action game throughout the series, but it’s a trend they don’t get away from till 5, it looks like. Crazy. Anyway, I’m chipping away at it and really enjoying it. Seems a bit more serious than 1 and 3, but not as deathly serious as say, DMC2 is, thank god. More updates on this in one of these CMD’s later, I expect.

(Check out my DMC3 thoughts here!)
https://nukatronic.substack.com/p/the-dreaded-backlog-2025-edition)
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Pokemon Pokopia (Playing on Switch 2)

So, sounds like everyone is playing this, huh?
I certainly am. It’s become something of a phenomenon lately, at least in the gaming circles I frequent. Seems like a lot of gamers were like me this past month, where some folks picked this up right after playing through Resident Evil Requiem. It’s definitely a huge tonal shift, to say the least. I have probably put about 8-10 hours into this so far, and have found it just delightful.

Pokopia has all the hallmarks of what you’d expect from your normal Animal Crossing grade life sim, but with a Pokémon theme and characters, normal Nintendo restrictions loosened, and injected with short, entertaining quests to incentivize players more to build their own virtual town of dreams for the Pokémon they meet.

It’s very well made, looks nice, and is breezy and light while being structured enough to make you want to interact with all its systems. It’s fantastic so far. Might be a sleeper hit for the year on Switch 2, and I expect it will do so well that it may just sell a few consoles on its own. It’s also a native Switch 2 game only, so no original handcuffs to the original Switch can be found here. I loved my Switch, and they did sell a lot of them to be sure, but it’s time to move on. It’s been almost a decade, Nintendo. Let’s move to the new one, yeah?

Gonna keep playing this as my evening chill game after rounds of Marathon, I think. It’s been a great way to decompress from getting murdered in space while running contracts for Bungie’s “SC Johnson” corporate equivalent, “NuCaloric”. Which brings me to my next game…
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Marathon (Playing on PlayStation 5)

Okay… now I know what you are thinking.
If you have read some of my recent write-ups, you know that I don’t play a ton of multiplayer things, so why would I be playing this? It’s very simple… It feels SO FUCKING GOOD. Bungie is back? Have they ever not been back?? I dunno… but I do know that Marathon is the game I can’t stop thinking about, playing, or researching right now. It took over my entire Sunday this past week, because I was just running solos all day on Dire Marsh. It’s FUCKING AWESOME.

Marathon might be the biggest surprise of 2026 for me so far. Bungie has always made great games, to be sure, but I will admit I was very skeptical about this one. For one, it’s been a long time since they have made a new game not named Destiny this past decade, second, it’s been even longer since they have even made a Marathon game, so I kinda didn’t know what to expect, and lastly, I am not really a multiplayer guy, let alone an extraction shooter ‘enjoyer’ at all, so this game had many things going against it in my book. But I trusted Bungie, paid the 40 simoleons, and I haven’t looked back since. It’s been an incredible time so far.

The thing I love about it the most? The brutality of it. It’s very difficult to extract with your loot. I love the creeping dread that lies around every neon-splashed corner of its dilapidated sci-fi complexes, the robotic chirping of enemy NPCs patrolling just beyond sight, and the horrific cries of surprise from your shell when you inevitably get shanked by an opposing player who got the drop on you when you weren’t paying attention. It’s hardcore and demands your attention during every moment of a match. It’s so much more engaging than Arc Raiders was for me. I can’t wait to play more of it this weekend. For someone who hasn’t played many modern multiplayer games, this one has its hooks into me, and I don’t see any signs that I will be set free from its thrall any time soon.

Buy this game.
It’s good solo, with a pair or a group. They nailed it, man. It’s so so good. At risk of sounding trite or even cringeworthy… Bungie ‘cooked’ here.
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That’s a few of the games I’ve been looking into lately. Every one of these, I will attempt to mention my progress if I feel the urge. Now, let’s talk about a couple of games I beat during the last few months!
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The Drifter Triumphed: Highlights of Some Games I Finished or Completed
Final Fantasy IX (Played on Switch 2)

I actually finished this recently for the first time, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I played it casually off and on, on Switch 2 (it’s an original Switch game, however), this last month, and I really enjoyed it. Took me around 30 hours just playing casually, and sometimes using the speed options the game offers you. Not sure where it ranks for me on the Final Fantasy Pantheon yet (I’ll probably rank each mainline, non-MMO game one day when I finish them), but it’s probably top 3 besides Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VI for the best so far. I kinda don’t count the VII remakes, because they kinda fit under a best Final Fantasy VII series ranking to itself, I think… But anyway, IX is very good. One of the best ones I have played thus far in the series.

I don’t have many qualms with it necessarily. It did feel very easy at times, and sometimes it felt like the game was more interested in the cutscenes, the presentations, and the characterization than the actual gameplay, which is fine. It’s maybe one of the most cinematic of the series I have played (excepting the VII remakes of course, which are opulent and bombastic in a huge way) and I really love how they ‘go for it’ in the epicness and scale in some of the moments during the story.

I like the cast. The favorite here for me has gotta be Vivi. He isn’t dumb, just a bit clumsy and over his skeez, sometimes— but dammit if he doesn’t have chutzpah when it counts, though. You can rely on that black mage for damn near anything. Just don’t ask him to whack away at any enemies (he can be a weak attacker when out of magic). Out of the party members, I liked Steiner, Eiko, Quina, and Vivi the most.

How they handle Quina’s gender is interesting to me. They say s/he for almost every descriptor involving them in the story, since they appear to be genderless beings, but I dunno, the translation may have been better served with ‘they/them’ pronouns? It’s tough. Keeping the flavor of the original would be the goal, I suppose. I just think that can be handled differently. It’s not irritating, necessarily. I just think there is a more efficient way to describe them. But, alas.

I liked Dagger and Freya a little less than the others, for sure, but they were fine. Freya has a cool backstory and character arc with the Burmecians that I think is pretty strong, but I didn’t get much from Dagger. She’s good, really, and pretty inoffensive. Good character just didn’t move me in many ways. The exception to this is her moment with the Queen on the beach. Great scene. Wish there was more of that.

The weakest character for me was Amarant, by far. Not an interesting character to me at all. I don’t think he grows at all during the game either, as he constantly berates Zidane and the crew when he doesn’t get his way, and he has a holier-than-thou attitude to the whole party. It’s just lame. They attempt to make him more likable with the Zidane rescue part, but then they go back on it and make him act like an asshole again. Fuck Amarant, actually though. His design sucks, too.
Not a fan of his whole deal.

Zidane is great, though. He toes the line between a Tidus and a Cloud pretty well, I’d say. Not too overly saccharine or annoying like Tidus can be, and not brooding as much as Cloud, but just as capable. I like how singular he feels as a Final Fantasy protagonist. His best moment for sure is the “You’re Never Alone” moment, though. Great stuff. All in all, the villain Kuja, the story, the Eidolons as summons, and the characters are all top-notch, for the most part. Great world, characters, and story. Just an awesome game. So glad I finally got around to it. With these games, I like to play through them once casually, then play them again and get all the stuff, so I plan to return to this on PlayStation, hopefully later this year, and start getting some trophies. Here’s hoping!
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Resident Evil: Requiem (Played on PlayStation 5)

Oh my god. This game. This is one of the big ones.
Now, at the risk of speaking in hyperbole, I’m gonna make a bold claim. This game, already… is a “Game of the Generation” contender for me. Now, having said that, I need to be honest and admit that I know I cannot claim the new winner over my current champ (Metaphor: Re Fantazio) quite yet, given how new this entry is… but dammit if this isn’t the closest I’ve felt a game could take the crown from the incumbent, yet. It’s so fucking good. I think it’s by far the best Resident Evil game, full stop.

Listen, Death Stranding 2 was my Game of the Year last year, and Resident Evil: Requiem blows that out of the water, in my estimation. I would be shocked if it didn’t contend or flat-out top the list for me this year by the time it wraps up. Time will tell… but I know myself. It’s gonna be hard for another game to exceed the heights that this one hit. Gonna keep it short and sweet right there. I might just review it once I clean up some trophies, so stay tuned on that…

If you get this game, chances are you are also going to love it. It’s everything I love in video games. Capcom straight up made the best Resident Evil game 30 years into the series. Incredible. More coverage to come on this, soon. So look for it here when the time comes!
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Games are good! I’m really excited to see what’s next for big releases as we press on in 2026. This next bit, I’ll mention some stuff I’m looking forward to!
Read on, would you?
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The Drifter’s Backlog: Games from The Dreaded Backlog
Persona 5 Royal (PlayStation 5)
Final Fantasy X (PlayStation 5 or Switch 2)
Disco Elysium (Switch 2)
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (Switch 2)
Crow Country (Switch 2)
Yakuza Kiwami 2 (PlayStation 5)
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The Drifter’s Future: New Games I’d like to Play
Crisol: Theater of Idols (PlayStation 5)
Esoteric Ebb (PC)
Mewgenics (PC)
Romeo is A Dead Man (PlayStation 5)
Saros (PlayStation 5)
Pragmata (PlayStation 5)
007: First Light (PlayStation 5)
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That pretty much wraps up the recap! I should be doing another one of these quarterly-ish if possible, so stay tuned to the next CMD for more best-laid plans, progress on current games from me, new and old, and even more positivity! Thanks as always!

As always, as the great sports journo and podcaster Dave Dameshek says: “It’s been a little slice of Heaven.”

The elements are nature’s standing army, and the mountain is the persistent foe… But the true battle here is within yourself.

Cairn is the first great game of 2026. It’s not just that, it’s one of my favorite indie games of the past few years, I think, as well. I put it up there with the hits of last year, games like Hades II, Hollow Knight: Silksong, as well as games like Celeste and Balatro from years past, as a high watermark for the type of game that it is: “independently developed triumphs”. Cairn is full of intricate, bespoke game mechanics that never cease to impress, and it routinely displays frequent game design brilliance on behalf of the developers who crafted it. The Game Bakers have always been one of one. Not just with their games, but also as a studio. Rather than iterate on one or two ideas in their titles or work on sequels to capitalize on their previous efforts, they constantly switch it up, with every game in their development history being something completely different and distinct from the other.

Furi, Haven, and Cairn are all anomalies in the independent gaming development scene. They are each from the same developer, but are all different games in every way. It’s a fascinating thing that they do, making each game totally different from each other. I commend the dev team for taking risks. Their games are so different that, in fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking each game in their stable was made by different studios. But if you look closer, the innovation that carries to each title is the very thing that ties them all together at the hip.

It’s an intentional choice by The Game Bakers to make different projects. Maybe it’s so they challenge themselves? Maybe it’s because they get bored easily? Whatever the case, each one of their games is a breath of fresh air in its own way. Furi was an action-packed boss-rush game at its essence, and that’s way different than their following game, Haven, which was a visual-novel light RPG with relationship mechanics. In turn, Haven is a completely different game from Cairn, which is a patient, rock-climbing, movement-based game. But in some ways, that isn’t a good descriptor either. Maybe a ‘dramatic platformer’ works better? I dunno. In some ways, this game defies description. The point is, they try different things as a studio constantly, and that’s their superpower. I love that about them.

No matter the case, The Game Bakers have proven to be a versatile, accomplished developer in many ways. I’m thrilled to say then that I think Cairn is by far their best game and delivers on every level. It’s a fascinating, daunting, frustrating, towering epic of an indie climber that may just well contend for my top prize in my top 10 by the time this year has wrapped. I am that confident about my feelings about Cairn. It’s a genuine masterpiece, and I can say that even with the slight technical shortcomings that crop up from time to time throughout the game.

It’s not perfect, hell its even messy, but the messy details are what make this journey feel unique all on its own. Cairn has a lot to say, and the way it goes about conveying its themes is one of a kind. I doubt any other game I’ll play this year will be as revolutionary in its mechanical specificity as Cairn will be for me by the time we reach season’s end. This game feels like it’ll be your favorite developer’s next inspiration. I predict that Cairn could very well influence many more games going forward. It does so much, so well, so consistently, it’s shocking just how many new mechanical things they introduce in the gameplay that completely deliver on their stated goals. Cairn is phenomenal.

High praises to start, but let’s get into it properly now. The game revolves entirely around the character you play: Aava. She is a veteran mountain climber who is in pursuit of the one mountain no one has summited before: Mt. Kami. Aava is an isolationist by choice, choosing to remove herself from society and preferring to distance herself from her various relationships to instead focus on existing in the wild and make attempts at climbing really tall rocks. As a character, she has depth (the bulk of which can only be gotten into in a spoiler fashion since I have some pretty long thoughts on her as a person), but on a base level, Aava seems like the distant type. This is a bit off-putting at the start, but the more Cairn’s story rolls on, the more you get a peek into her psyche as an obsessed athlete driven mad by a desire to conquer a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. As stated previously, I have some thoughts about Aava that I will share a bit later.

On the menu, you have three options of difficulty to pick from. ‘Explorer’ is the easier setting, which offers more assists to the experience, such as more forgiving climbing, a de-emphasizing of the survival aspects of the mechanics (such as the necessity of needing to maintain your temperature, your hunger level, and your thirst meter), as well as other easier options if you prefer to play the game without as much hardship. The next difficulty, ‘Alpinist’, is the intended way Cairn expects you to play it, where all the survival systems are set to their default difficulty, and it seems like the best way to go about playing through the game for the first time. At least for me, it was. Having these mechanics push against you is crucial to the experience, and de-emphasizing these systems makes the game seem too easy for your first climb.

The joy is in the struggle, after all. It can be difficult, but I always found a way to make it, even if at times it can seem impossible. Harder still, then is the hardest mode: ‘Free Solo’, the hardest difficulty of Cairn, where everything is ratcheted up a notch: you can no longer save at bivouac checkpoints, and every slip or fall could mean a permanent end for Aava on her Mt. Kami climb, with permadeath being added here. Sounds brutal… It’d be fun one day to challenge myself and attempt to do that mode, but the idea is too daunting for me as it stands, currently. Fun idea though!

The game begins with an open-ended climbing tutorial where the game teaches you the ropes with different grades of difficulty for practice climbs, to properly prepare you for the tough mountain climb ahead. It’s a good taste of what’s to come, but even with the knowledge on how to perform higher grade climbs, I was not prepared for the sheer (and I do mean sheer) difficulty of some of the climbs you are asked to engage in on your ascent to the top of Kami.

Once you crest your first mountain wall, you are hit with the full breadth of the immovable enemy that is Kami, standing tall in the distance, a granite fortress intimidating in both its size and its brutalist jagged face. The full scale of the terrain in this scene is captured so well at the beginning of the game. Just taking in the view took my breath away. As I slowly made my way over the winding, low mountain path to the towering cliff face, I allowed myself to be swept away in awe of what I was experiencing. This was Kami. If I were a soldier on the front lines, and the battlefield was the mountain itself, this would be a slow war, indeed.

That’s one of the best things about Cairn. The game lays out your path so well, and with so much panache, you can’t help but get swept away in the spectacle. Wonderment then leads to anxiety, as you are then asked to climb up said paths and sheer mountain faces, with very few tools at your disposal to do so. Climbing up Kami looks kind of messy, and it’s the most unrealistic thing about the game. But it’s so engaging, you just won’t care.

The game’s climbing plays simply: you, as the player, have the option of either selecting a limb to move with the top right bumper on the gamepad (I played on PlayStation 5), or have the game auto-select for you which limb should move to the next small outcropping or crack in the mountain as you climb. Having the option to pick which arm or leg you wish to control for your next move is a useful tool in jams, but for the most part, the auto-selected limbic system works pretty well to get you where you need to go. It all takes a bit of getting used to, but I reveled in learning all the technical intricacies I could about it, as the knowledge I learned early in the adventure was incredibly beneficial to the later, more arduous climbs you take part in towards the end of the game. It’s difficult, surely, because as you climb, Aava’s body will wear down slowly as you keep ascending, and the more you move without attending to her status, the harder the climb will get.

The worse a spot you are in can cause some stress, as limbs will start to shake from the strain of the positions they’re in, and if not changed to more sound handholds or footing, will cause Aava to fall off the mountain, and to her death. There are brief respites along your ascent, however, with mountain pitons being essential to your climb, as hooking up to them offers some much-needed relief to Aava, and allows for the replenishment of resources to attend to the various status meters you have to keep an eye on for Aava’s constitution. These systems keep the whole game feeling tense and considered. I never felt like I had enough things to keep me alive on the climb, but I also never felt like I ran out of resources to restore myself. Kami provides as much as she takes in my opinion, and take, she does.

As you travel up the mountain, you find food and healing items to help keep Aava alive. As stated before, Kami provides, and even if you can’t find everything to keep yourself as alive as possible, you find just enough to get you by. You scavenge materials, find notes of other climbers who also attempted the ascent, and find enough food and water to sustain yourself throughout.

Once you make it to a checkpoint, a bivouac, you set up camp. From here, you can cook stat-boosting meals and snacks to keep you upright, you can re-tape your hands to continue on your climb, sleep to restore lost life, and repair broken pitons. Each one of these systems adds to the flavor of the world, Aava as a character, as well as the themes of the game. I really enjoyed making myself gourmet hot chocolate with herbs to juice up my stats, while attending to my thirst meter, for instance. Experimenting with what foods to make to allow for multiple stacks of bonuses to hit all at once is great fun. Some of the food doesn’t look great, but beggars can’t be choosers, right? It’s all about just making it by without dying. The push-and-pull between these systems and you as a player is so engaging. You always feel a hundred percent a part of the world in these moments. I was taken aback by how many little mechanics they put into the bivouac segments, and how well they were done, too. Feels fresh and new without being too off-putting. These mechanics add to the flavor of Cairn without being too complex or esoteric.

All the resources in the world can be great, sure, but it’s the times you don’t have enough that get the blood pumping. If Aava is left alone for too long without sleeping, getting fed, and getting watered, she will wilt, like that of a mountain edelweiss, and how these issues culminate and manifest are in ‘blackouts’. You will be climbing up the mountain, and if you are on your last legs, with your health dwindling and meters empty, you will collapse mid-air, hundreds of feet up in the sky. As you blackout, you as a player lose control of Aava completely, and if by some luck you’re hooked onto a piton screwed into the rock face, you’ll hang suspended in the chilling mountain air, instead of falling. These moments are terrifying. It takes a lot out of you when these moments (inevitably) happen, because they will happen.

One time while playing, I decided to keep going after blacking out (a really risky thing to attempt, by the way), because I was so close to reaching the next checkpoint on the climb. I extended myself just to the point of breaking before reaching the place I needed to go. It’s exhilarating, stressful, and empowering in equal measure to contend with these mechanics and survive by the literal skin of your teeth. It’s incredible. Rarely can I remember a game that thoroughly challenged my skills throughout a playthrough as this game did.

In some ways, the way Cairn plays it calls to mind two games from the past decade or so, for me. Death Stranding (also the second one, but less so than the first), and last year’s Baby Steps (my personal number 10 favorite game of last year). In both games, you get the feeling you are on a grand journey. In both games, your destinations are clear, the paths you take in each experience can be difficult, and the mechanics in both Baby Steps and the Death Stranding series are finicky enough to keep each game interesting. I liken the ‘vibes’ of Cairn’s journey to be meditative and considered as Death Stranding felt, and mechanically specific and thematically strange in gameplay to feel like Baby Steps. Both games really feel like they belong in this wheelhouse: they are both experiential games where their mechanics and themes push you as a player to engage with them on their terms, and reward your hard work with small, emphatic victories both narratively and mechanically. Cairn fits neatly into this family of games. It shares the DNA and ‘theses’ of both games previously stated, at its core. I think I am starting to love these types of games, prickly as they may be.

The journey, quest, or goal ultimately feels like the ‘point’ for Aava. She, as a character, is perhaps the most polarizing and interesting thing about Cairn from a narrative perspective. I’ll get into what I mean in a moment. To demonstrate this point slightly, we have to talk about the character of Marco, who is perhaps the pivot point on which the finale rests.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE ENDINGS OF CAIRN!

Marco is the first real person you meet in the story as you climb the mountain. As a character, he seems initially like the prototypical ‘fanboy’ of a normal story, but as the tale builds, more about him becomes clear. He is driven by a need to impress Aava, once he finds her climbing on the mountain, and the more he interacts with her, the misguided fanboyism makes way for a worrying realisation, where Marco sees Aava for who she is. A selfish person, driven by either greed, isolation, or depression, and seeking the summit to ultimately die. It’s a sobering reality when faced with it, and Marco responds accordingly. Initially, it just seems like Aava is climbing to get away from it all, but as the journey lengthens and the two continue to bump into each other on the adventure, Marco identifies the core obsession Aava has in attempting to solve the obstacle before her.

The more time he spends with her, the more he becomes worried on her behalf, seeing just how this dangerous obsession with summiting Kami completely takes her over. It defies sanity even. He pleads with her not to go through with it, and to go back down with him, back down the mountain to safety. This leads into one of the endings you can choose, and this ending, I believe, is somewhat of a false ending.

In it, Aava takes up Marco on his pleading to descend, and she makes it back to the base with him. Cut to a credits montage of her and Marco visiting the many mountain dwellers that they encountered along the way. Then a final segue into Aava’s mobile home, where an off-screen female (Aava’s partner) calls her into the room to reunite with all the friends she made on her ascent, including Marco. In this scene, Aava sits motionless. Hollow. Completely without purpose and empty. Even if she is safe, I think having commitments is the real purgatory for her. She is less interested in being connected with folks in her life than in accomplishing the goal she sets out for herself.

Aava and Marco’s journeys mirror each other and interweave until the penultimate ending decision you inevitably have to make. In some ways, that previous ending of the two you can choose in some way, like a false choice to me, given how I perceive Aava. She is so completely consumed and driven to succeed in her goal that achieving the summit becomes a major detriment to her very existence by the end of the game. In fact, the close calls have been so close during the trek that it could be argued that there were many times Aava didn’t just blackout thousands of feet up in the sky— she actually died in these moments, and the further adventure is a figment of her dying brain, trying to continue the ordeal past the point of her physical ability. The euphoria of the heights she reaches, or the low oxygen instead, could be the cause for the many hallucinatory moments you stumble into, in making it up a sheer cliff face, with all your bodily functions dangerously diminished from the act of climbing up impossible heights.

Every time you make it up a portion of the mountain, you get the sense this sort of endeavor shouldn’t have been attempted. At least by a sane person. Aava’s mindset is what drives the game, ultimately, and ironically, seeing her slow descent into proper madness towards her obsession is a fascinating and frustrating exercise, all told. By the end of the game, I couldn’t stand Aava. But not in a hateful way necessarily— more like in a, I am worried for her, and I am annoyed that I am enabling her in a way.

It’s the power of video games, somewhat. You enable a character to achieve their perceived agency or even your agency in the experience. It’s an odd dissonance I felt then, to see the character I cared so much about disregard every warning issued to her to recalculate her goal. It’s a journey driven by greed, selfishness, and single-minded desire to conquer what can’t be conquered. It should be empowering, I suppose— but the ties she cuts along the way, from the people who are willing to help her, make the choices she makes so frustrating to me. The fact that I am enabling her to make bad decisions is so upsetting.

I am of two minds about it. I want her to succeed in a gameplay sense because we, in some way, are sharing in the struggle of it all. But common sense being what it is, I cannot condone the particulars, given the circumstances. What it takes to accomplish this task is far too painful for me as the player to bear. I truly felt like I was the one driving Aava to her death. Which brings me to what I feel is the ‘true ending’ of Cairn.

The second choice you can pick is to ignore Marco’s pleas to descend with him and continue… past the point of sanity, as well. Upon hearing this, Marco’s gaze falls. He knows that the ascent will be Aava’s final resting place, I think. He says, “I take it I didn’t find your cure.” He knew Aava was always going to continue without him. Marco mentions how thin the air will be, the conditions worsening, and the lack of resources further up, but to no avail. He cannot convince her.

Aava makes some excuses like “It’s not your fault… It’s just who I am…,” but Marco ignores them and asks a question that feels more like reassurance to himself than reality to Aava. “Will we ever see each other again?”
To that, Aava says, “Yes.” Falsely, I believe. There is one way that the trip goes. I believe they both know it, too. It’s hopeful in a way, but I also feel like they’re both lying to each other here. It’s a conversation that carries so much substance and meaning behind it. They are both saying what they want, without saying it. Maybe I am ascribing more meaning to it? I dunno… It just felt that way. Marco then says he will be waiting for her at the bottom, and hugs her. They say farewell. It was time. Those are the truest things they say to each other directly in this moment. It is goodbye.

It makes sense that the final climb ultimately kills Aava. It should never have been attempted. The climb itself is harrowing and tense. Many times, she should have died on the way up. Her robotic companion, the one constant on your journey besides Marco, “Climbot,” dies, and you are given another choice to drag the metal husk up the rest of the way with you, or cut it and free climb the rest of the way.

I chose to keep it. Even if it didn’t end up making it either. In some way, that choice exists as the final tie she cuts to her mortal coil. Having that choice was very powerful to me. Keep the one thing that you needed on the journey more than any other, or cut it and know there is no hope. I feel like I lied to myself here. I kept Climbot because I held out a hope against hope that I could use it to get down as I had used it going up. But it wasn’t that clean a situation, unfortunately.

This ending feels the most in keeping with Aava as a character. She reaches the summit. She screams… in sheer exhaustion and triumph, both. This is when I started crying. The entire climb then hit me all at once, and I put the controller down. From there… Aava falls asleep… and dies. She then ‘wakes up’ and climbs the stars above her in a sort of dream sequence to end the game. From there, it then fades out to the credits. I think I sat in silence for about 10 minutes after this ending. It feels like the true ending because Aava achieves her goal, but dies in the process. She ‘wins’ but her selfishness ultimately kills her in the end. Aava achieves the goal… but at the ultimate cost of her life.

I dunno. I kinda wanted to just talk about the ending? I found it so profoundly thought-provoking and mechanically exhausting. It’s one of the most singular endings to a game I have played in a long time.

Just… the finality of it. It was extremely sobering. I think I will be chasing how Cairn made me feel for a very long time. I am mixed in my emotions with it. I think that’s healthy. Rarely do games get so deep for me. In this way, anyway. I think it’s just so rich in detail, narrative depth, and psychological pathos. It is a very rare thing for video games to achieve what Cairn does here. It’s more than a game. It’s an examination of the human condition, both mental and physical, in a way that only a few games have attempted. It’s truly, truly special.

Cairn is a bona fide masterpiece. It’s the first great game of 2026, but I will admit, it isn’t for everyone. It can be brutal. It’s hard to balance the survival systems of the game with the difficulty of the climbing itself, but if you can conquer the obstacles that The Game Bakers have set before you, you will find an absolute triumph here.
It’s amazing.

That being said, I highly recommend this game. It will be on my top 10 this year by the time that Game of the Year rolls around again. I would be shocked if it weren’t in the top half, if not in the top 3. Guess we will have to see how this year shakes out, I guess.

As always, thanks for reading what I do, and as Dave Dameshek says, “It’s been a little slice of Heaven.”

Look at this little dude. How can you not love Hop? Very fun protagonist for one of these titles. I like this guy.

I hate to start a review like this, but I’ll just go ahead and say it. Big Hops is a decently good game. It is a game that has a lot of potential, and sometimes it hits marks that feel great, but sometimes it can be a tad middling. There is a better game here somewhere, and in some ways, I am still looking for it.

Which isn’t to say I don’t think it’s fun. It can be fun to play, and frequently it is. It has enough ideas to keep the adventure feeling fresh, and executes on a satisfying, at times, suite of traversal mechanics to navigate its levels. But I feel like the lack of precision in its gameplay, an interesting story marred by poor characterization of speaking NPCs throughout, with some of my least favorite level design in platformers that I can recall, and a myriad of technical bugs keep Big Hops from reaching the promised land of its genre, and by extension keep it from cracking the ‘indie platformer curse’. Now that we have some minor criticisms laid out, let’s talk about those before I skew a bit positive. I did have a good time with it, despite some major issues. Let’s start from minor to major, and then we will get some positives.

As a preamble, I think it’s important to lay out my premise. Indie developers, over the years, have attempted to crack the ‘indie platformer collect-a-thon’ over the years, to mixed success. At the mediocre end, you get a Yooka-Laylee, which has all the developer bona fides and artistic chops to give you the ‘feel’ of one of these games presentationally, but misses completely on the design and execution of the product. But on the better end, you have games like Tinykin, that pass every bar for quality set for it, and set a new standard themselves in doing so for the genre in the independent scene. I think I would grade it sort of like that, too. Tinykin is what you get with the best of these, and Yooka-Laylee is perhaps what you get as the lower end of the spectrum. Tinykin is amazing and does everything right for me. That’s why I grade it so highly and hold it in such high esteem. The collectibles are perfect, there aren’t a ton of them, it feels so good to move around in, and the story is light and fun while being pretty interesting to boot. Great game! There are other contenders for the title, too, I hear (I haven’t played A Hat in Time, for instance), but as it stands, for me, that's how I see the scale going. Big Hops is perhaps in the middle of this scale, skewing lower because of the issues I have, but the attempt they make is commendable. It’s important to line this out before we begin, I think. Now for some negatives…

Firstly, while not the point of a game like this, the story is presented as a larger factor than most platformers. It’s initially simple, but soon balloons out into an existentialist yarn about the cosmic apocalypse. Again, not new for the genre— save the universe games are a dime a dozen, after all. The narrative here is a bit more elaborate than I expected, and I think that while it’s a nice idea to add sophistication to a familiar exercise, the added complexity brings forth issues of scope and execution that I think Big Hops, as a game, isn’t capable of reaching. I know this sounds silly; it is a platformer, of course, but if they are reaching for an epic tale in their game, then I have to grade it on its merits.

Secondly, in tandem with the middling tale you take part in, I think the characters you encounter are not interesting, and their voice performances are low-grade at best. You have the occasional gem in there, but overall, the voice acting is pretty corny and bad for a lot of the game. Even the inclusion of Steve Blum, veteran industry voice actor (who most recognizably voices Wolverine in multiple X-Men projects, as well as legendary anime characters Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop, and Mugen from Samurai Champloo), can’t save it. His character, Wett, might be the most interesting of the NPCs you encounter as well. All in all, the voice acting is a big miss for me, and the only reason I even bring it up is that you can tell that they attempted to include a lot of it. It’s a very ‘talky’ game for a platformer, which usually isn’t the genre that comes to mind for a verbose experience. I think that Luckshot Games just didn’t prioritize the right things in some ways, too, which may be a bit mean to say, but that’s just how I feel. On the topic of characters, that brings me to the main foil of Big Hops… Diss. Oh boy, he is a paragraph unto himself at least.

SO… I don’t wanna tee off on this guy, but Diss sucks. He’s a terrible character, has maybe the worst voice acting in the game, and boasts perhaps my least favorite design in the game and, by extension, any game. I detest this character. I can’t really put a finger on why I feel this way either. It seems mean-spirited, perhaps, but that’s just how I feel. He’s an unlikeable, ugly, asshole.

Here: I’m gonna throw in a screenshot of this idiot.

Okay… what the fuck is going on here? Everything about the way this guy looks puts me off. It’s also completely out of step with the uniformity of the rest of the cast of characters in Big Hops, where they are all anthropomorphic animal people who can talk. He is terrible in every way, and when the story wraps, you are expected to care about him in a way that I didn’t. They shoehorn an explanation for why he kidnaps you at the start of the game, and just like the main character Hop, I was annoyed and completely put off by Diss’s whole deal. He’s gotta be one of the worst characters I can remember in a video game. He is in it a lot, too. Diss is the main vendor for badges for your backpack (charms you equip to enable certain perks for traversal), and you have to engage with him constantly. Every time you show up, he goes: “What do you want, frog??” Like bitch, you have shit I need, quit asking! Again, it’s petty and dumb, my whole beef with this guy, but I just despise him. It’s incredibly juvenile, I know, and I am sure no one else reviewing this game will care. But his inclusion detracted from my experience, so yeah. Gotta be honest about stuff like this.

A couple more negatives have to do with the precision of the platforming, as well as some of the level design throughout. The array of mechanics at your disposal is ambitious for a platformer, I’ll admit. The main mechanics consist of wall-running, jumping, diving, and building up momentum (you can equip a charm to view how many miles-per-hour you’re going, which is fun), grappling with your frog tongue, and using consumable items to traverse the vertical spaces of the game’s levels throughout. Some good things and bad things here. The movement feels great pretty consistently, and the way it felt moment to moment kept me coming back to it for the duration. There is a great sense of speed once you get going, and chaining together traversal mechanics feels very good… until it doesn’t. This game is very glitchy, so sometimes things just don’t work the way they should.

There was a time early in my playthrough where I was tackling a side level to get a collectible, and the game asked me to wall-run repeatedly to finish it. So I attempted, got the proper momentum I needed, and executed the maneuver to do so. I got to the first running juncture: a set of wooden plank walls, staggered from left and right, leading to the next landing zone— and completely clipped through the geometry of the first set of walls. I was taken aback but said, “Ok, glitches happen… let’s go again.” So I went. Similar thing; I jumped onto the wall, but instead of going across it, I completely slid down and fell to my death. Falling in Big Hops is very forgiving, thank goodness, so tumbling from a platform only costs you half a heart for making a mistake, and you can eat snacks to regain health (for context, you receive a minimum of 3 hearts to start the adventure, so you are allowed 6 tries in the early game to attempt something with no health items). But still. The third time I attempted was more of the same. I was shocked. So I pulled the ‘emergency lever’, and quit out of the game on my Switch 2. I then booted it back up, attempted the challenge again, and it all went completely smoothly and without calamity.

That example I just gave is pretty unacceptable for a game like this. Breaking the cardinal sin of platformers is a sin above any other: you must make the base platforming functional. If you betray that, what do you have for your game? The story isn’t that great, and the characters aren’t awesome either. It had to be better going forward. For some time, it was, but this early encounter I had with the bugs in Big Hops left a sour taste in my mouth throughout my 11-hour journey, and I engaged with it cautiously after that.

More bugs came as I played, too. There are some water sections of the game where you are required to swim through them to reach the next section of the level. Sometimes, the water physics just wouldn’t work, and I would fall through the world to my death, yet again. I would dive into a body of water, and it wouldn’t react like water; it would react like a pit I was jumping into. Later in the game, there are water mechanics required for some puzzles that worked, but again, I was leery about engaging with them too, for fear of the game just breaking its own rules again. There were a couple of cutscene breaks as well, specifically in a minecart escape sequence towards the end of the game. I had to hard reset the game twice to get the game to trigger the next cutscene to further the level in that case.

Maybe the funniest one was in the final main level, Shattered Mountain, where I threw a sticky oil ball (an item you can use to grapple off of in the game) onto a swinging platform on a crane. When I did that, the physics of the platform broke completely, becoming subservient to the direction of the oil ball I had thrown onto it, and then got tied to the magnetism of the oil ball’s physics rather than the platform itself— causing the whole object to glitch violently in one direction and slowly rotate around its mooring. Had to reset the game again there. This one was amusing, sure, but these issues slowly mounted for me, even if it got a bit comical at times. The game is a technical mess in these moments (I didn’t even list all the technical issues I encountered here in their entirety), and at some points, it majorly deterred me from finishing it because of these progression blocks. It got very frustrating at times, and that’s a major mark against it, for me. I am pretty forgiving when it comes to technical aspects of games, but even these issues, comical at times though they may be, I cannot in good conscience excuse them.

Finally, let’s talk level design. 3 out of 4 of the main levels are pretty good. Shattered Mountain is perhaps the best of these on a puzzle level, and will illustrate a later point I have when it comes to execution on later ideas. One in particular, though, Duster Bluffs, is pretty mediocre. Every level relies on items to get through it, but I think Duster Bluffs is the one level that is the most open zone, the most empty feeling, and the worst of the bunch. The chief issue here with the level for me is not having direction on where to go, and being given poor tools once you do find the right path.

It’s a shame, too, because I can see the ambition here, for sure. It’s the first ‘real’ level you play in the game after a long-ish tutorial world, but it requires the most effort to engage with of any of the other levels. It’s also the longest, which makes the whole thing feel like a slog. It’s a desert-y area with a lot of canyons, mountains, and side paths to cross, and while it can be fun to just haul ass across the sand, getting anywhere in this level is a major pain in the ass. The goal is to reach a tall mountain, but finding exactly where to go to do this was a major pain in the ass, as the only way to orient yourself is the compass located at the top of your HUD. That’s another thing this game needs. It needs a minimap and a full 3D map, desperately. It’s especially egregious here because you never quite know where to go at any given time. I just think it’s not well-designed, and the time it took to get through it was not worth spending. Not just those issues, but Diss talks to you a lot here and explains nothing to you, which is another detriment to the level. This fucking guy. Listen… I am not a dumbass, and I don’t need my hand held, but I have played a lot of video games. You can give me some direction, and I will allow it, but giving me nothing is a knock against it in my book. I’ll take a little help!

Not executing on the longest portion of the game is a negative. In some ways, the early portions of the game feel less polished or well-designed than the later areas. It’s odd. You’d think it’d be the opposite: most games are at their best at the start, since most developers know most gamers don’t finish games and want to make it as ship-shape as possible to retain consumers. This game’s content could’ve used another quality pass, in my opinion, in terms of content, design, and polish. It’s encouraging, however, that the latter half of the game is genuinely great and consistently more polished, save for the issues I stated previously in those specific instances. Junktown is one of my favorite platforming levels I can remember, for instance. A lot of fun can be had here, especially in the later stuff. So, I know I have skewed negative, but that’s the gripes out of the way, both major and minor. Here are some positives!

While Junktown is great, and Shattered Mountain is perhaps the best level in the game when it comes to the light puzzles in the gameplay, the final stretch after the ‘big reveal’ with Diss (again, this is lame), is an awesome, white-knuckle speedrun though altered versions of 3 of the main worlds, and it’s great. Maybe the best part of the game, even. If they had more of this in the game, I would be far more positive about it, but sadly to say, it doesn’t. It’s a case of “too little, too late”, which bums me out. But to keep it on a positive note, everything in these little bite-sized obstacle courses works, plays well, and most of all, holds up under the weight of the tech. These later levels are more complex engagements, too, so it’s very odd that they run better when the early game has more issues.

Again, it feels like as the game went along, the devs got more proficient at making it, and decided what they wanted the game to be a little later than they should’ve. Maybe a sequel will be better if they take what they learned here and apply it to a new game. I wonder. Anyway, the later levels are cool, they play well, and these parts of the game even look pretty nice too, which I can’t say for much of the game because it’s an original Switch title. It’s a little blurry and choppy visually, at points, I will say. It could really use a Switch 2 version just for the technical issues alone.

So, yeah… Big Hops is a mixed bag. Even when I try to commend it for the stuff it does do well, it is perhaps so compromised in its design and makeup that I can’t fully recommend it, given the state it’s in. It’s a promising effort, though, and I think there is a better game here than what I played. If they fix some of the technical issues, it could be a much better time. I liken Big Hops to Messhof’s Wheel World last year. I reviewed it here as well. There, I mentioned that I wanted to like it more than I did, and that the technical issues kept me from fully enjoying it the way I wanted it to, even if the bones of a good game are ultimately there. It really bums me out. Big Hops is fun enough, does enough interesting things, and is short enough that I think if you see it on sale, you should check it out. Beware of very bad bugs here, in its current state. It marred my enjoyment of it, and even though there is a far better game beneath these issues, I don’t think I can give it a recommendation at this time. Here’s to hoping they fix these problems.

At times, I wanted to just jump to the end of the levels when I had these issues. Jumping to conclusions, we’ll say. I wish I didn’t feel that way about it. I wanted to enjoy it, but just didn’t fully. It’s a decent game and at times very good! I’d personally just wait for a sale if I were you, and you’ll enjoy the game more if you get it at a lower price. I usually say to support the devs, and I stand by this— but in this instance, maybe let them fix a few issues first before you throw your hard-earned simoleons their way. Big Hops, as it stands, should be a game you ‘wait and see’ on in my opinion. I hope what I said informs your purchase!

As Dave Dameshek says, “It’s been a thin slice of heaven.”

What a year for awesome video games, huh? The sheer amount of quality games you can play right now that 2025 is over is crazy. Such a dearth of amazing titles!

Well, we made it, ya’ll. Another year in the books.

As the calendar turns, and we enter the pages of a new year and a new season, so too must we close the chapters of last year’s weathered tome. I look back at the games I played last year as a sort of passage of time for me, with each game serving as a demarcation point in my seasons of life. Each entry in my personal journal, cataloguing the games I play throughout a given year, brings reflection and introspection as the year turns to another. I had such a blast playing video games last year, and I finished more games last year than in any previous year. It felt like I made a ton of progress in how I processed the act of seeking out and playing video games.

I enjoyed the ritual of finding a game that interested me, playing through a selected title, and then finally ruminating on how I felt upon finishing it. Then I would sometimes write about said game or record a podcast on my thoughts about it. It was damn fun to set up the ‘pins’ and knock them down. I have ADHD, and in the past, it was hard to focus on just one thing when it came to playing video games. So a lot of times, I would find myself starting and half-finishing games I found interesting, until inevitably, I found something newer and shinier that would capture my attention.

The thing that changed last year is that I started keeping myself more accountable and decided to play one or two things at a time, instead of keeping five to six plates spinning at any point. The results were positive: I was burnt out less, I enjoyed things more, I spent more time with the things I played, and I finished far more things than I didn’t last year. All in all, it was a very successful year for me when it came to playing video games in a more structured way. I am so glad I decided to make a change and focus on the things I thought were important to finish last year. Playing a few things at a time was so much easier than trying to fit in every game that I wanted to check out.

So! I try to keep these short and sweet because I have games to talk about, but talking about my process maybe will give you some insight into how my top 10 games of 2025 shook out. I spent a long time figuring out which games would make it here, what to cut from this list, which games didn’t end up making it (Wanderstop, I love you so much… I’m so sorry, please forgive me), and ultimately, what order the games I finished would be ranked in. Now, another thing I wanted to do was I wanted to make this list about two things: the first thing is that I wanted it to be full of games I had finished, and the second is that I wanted to rank them in order of what I believe is the best. From 10 to 1. Every game I rank here is set in a certain way because I believe they each belong there, and that each game of a higher rank is better than the one before it. I spent hours figuring this out… Maybe too long, even. But I feel like it was worth it. Even if you don’t agree, just know each of these games is awesome, and you should play them all!

Without any more hubbub, let’s go!!
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The Drifter’s Top 10 Games of 2025:

10. Baby Steps (Played on PlayStation 5)

    

    I resent the “One Piece” slander in this game, but given that this is a learning experience, I’ll allow it… just this once!
    
    Where to even start with this one? For me, this game kind of came out of nowhere. I didn’t even have this on my radar, even upon hearing about it. I think the first time I saw it was in a Sony State of Play?? I remember thinking how bad it looked (visually, that is), and that it was another Bennett Foddy game: the guy who made Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy— maybe the most famous of the ‘QWOP'-like’ games on Steam (sort of in keeping with the viral, ambulatory physics-fuckery type of games that do well on there like: Going Up or Chained Together), and I swiftly dismissed it out of hand. I had never been into these sorts of games previously, and I didn’t expect to. The closest I got to liking one was with Mount Your Friends on XBLA back in the day, but since then, nothing has really interested me in that sort of ‘fumbly-tumbly’ movement sim milieu.
    
    I think the thing that got me to try it (well, the two things that convinced me were): 1.) it was discounted at launch on PSN, and 2.) I had been listening to Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb on their podcast yak about how much fun he was having playing it. He kept bringing it up time after time, too, in the sort of impassioned, feverish way where you try to convince someone that the thing in question is: “surprisingly good, actually.” Even with my misgivings (I did the meme of the girl in the beanie going: “What the hell, sure,”), I bought it, basically sight unseen, other than hearing about it. To my surprise, what I found (like most things), Jeff Grubb was right.
    
    Baby Steps is awesome. The visuals, also? Kinda charming! I like how shitty it looks sometimes. It adds to the flavor of it not being your usual video game. It’s Lynchian in its themes (Twin Peaks’ pale white horse isn’t here necessarily, but there are lots of donkeys instead, so the spirit is there perhaps), it’s elegant in its messaging (the story about self reliance to the point of detriment, and the pitfalls of that thinking hit home with me especially), and it’s frequently a hilarious and fantastic time moving about a space in a video game.
    
    The hook of Baby Steps is simple. You are a slovenly mid-30s loser named “Nate” who lounges around lazily in a nasty, unwashed gray onesie in your parents’ basement, watching anime all day. Also, your legs don’t work too ‘good’, either. Like at all, even. The fun of the game is the simple (or frustratingly complex) mechanics of moving through a space with a character that seems hellbent on completely collapsing at any given moment. If you can stomach a few gutpunches on the regular (I fell down soooo many fucking hills and mountains), what you’ll find in here is a game that actually has something to say about growth, navigating social circles, and the meaning of having goals in life.
    
    It’s number 10 because I think it’s one of the best games I played last year, and I really got something out of it by the time I wrapped it up. It felt like I went on a journey. Every step you take feels like a small mountain you are climbing, and I loved how the game challenged me in the minutiae of its mechanics, even if it could be a frustrating ask, from time to time. Every time you crest a hill or arrive at a point of interest, the game constantly rewards you with some funny dialogue and amusing scenes of comedy involving wacky and oddball characters. I love the small helpings of levity they dish out as you move along the paths the game sets before you. It’s a really fun time. Baby Steps is a weird game... Really weird. But hell, I think I need more of that in my life. Not everything has to make sense, you know??
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    9. Dispatch (Played on PlayStation 5)

    

    The best superhero stories are those in which the characters are rendered believably, the dialogue is modern and genuine, and there are real consequences to every situation shown throughout the story. Dispatch does all this and much, much more.
    
    I’ve heard that Dispatch is just Twilight for cis-het males. Is that true? Does this play at all for those reading??? For me, I suppose this is the case, anyway.
    
    Dispatch works on every level. It has the writing chops to deliver its larger-than-life superhero themes, has whip-smart, snappy dialogue that never becomes too “Whedon-esque” to annoy, and shows realistic depictions of its characters, all of whom are people who have their own ideas of the world they reside in, and have a firm grasp of themselves as individuals. It can be sexy when it wants to be and also extremely sincere while not being overly saccharine; it conveys the dynamics of its cast better than most team-centric superhero media I can remember.
    
    It’s adult in every way, and not only due to its content or themes. It’s adult in the right ways, where it deals with real adult issues maturely and deftly. It’s the best ‘one of these’ I have played. They outdo the old Telltale Games (which is fitting given that some of the developers come from those previous professional bona fides), and I think AdHoc Studio is a name to watch going forward for any new project they spin up, given the success of this game. It’s really good. It all works so well, too. It’s a digital feast for all five senses.
    
    The thing that brings the characters to life is the voice acting, and Dispatch has the right stuff there as well. A who’s who of television stars are here lending their voice talents, such as Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul playing the main character Robert, or (one of my personal favorite actors), Jeffrey Wright from Westworld and The Batman fame, playing the role of Chase as the reliable comic relief. (Sidebar… The best scene of the game has got to be Chase’s “Keep Up” moment. Absolutely crushed me. A character so heroic that, despite his misgivings about who he was saving, he did so anyway because it was the right thing to do. Incredible storytelling.) It’s impressive that these big actors are so good at this, which shouldn’t surprise me, but it still does. Not every actor translates well to voice work (looking at you, Michael Biehn).
    
    Besides the heavy hitters, you have veteran voice talents mainstays like Matthew Mercer, Laura Bailey, and Travis Willingham, lauded voice actors known primarily for the show Critical Role, (the TTRPG giant who was also heavily involved with the voice acting production of Dispatch), and also a promising crop of rookie voice talent, primarily populated by ‘internet folk’ such as, Alanah Pearce, Jacksepticeye, Joel Haver, and Moist Cr1TiKaL. It’s a fascinating melting pot of personalities and voices, but all these elements work in the game’s favor rather than distract or detract from the final product. All the voice acting is great, and it’s exciting to see new, talented performers get their first big break with such a big game.
    
    The ‘game’ part of Dispatch is super fun too, playing out like a superhero management sim full of light, breezy elements that all work really well. Need a cat out of a tree? Maybe call in a hero who can fly. Got some politicking to do at the local county building? Maybe enlist someone with the gift of gab for the job. All these light elements come together supremely well in the ‘dispatching’ portions of the game.
    
    Thematically, and mechanically, Dispatch works remarkably well, and by the time the 8 episodes rolled by, I felt the urge to take the ride again to see what other things I could’ve done and other choices I could’ve made instead of what I chose on my canon playthrough. I get the criticisms of “it’s more of a movie or a tv show, than a game”, but even with its light decision-making and sim mechanics, it definitely still qualifies as a game, and a great one at that. It’s my number 9 and absolutely deserves to be on this list for my favorite games of 2025.
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    8. The Outer Worlds 2 (Played on PlayStation 5)

    

    Damn shame this didn’t sell well… Looks like we won’t be getting another one. Which is a huge bummer. They figured it out in this entry.
    
    Obsidian only knows how to make good games, it seems. Everything that the developer puts out is a banger. From big sequels like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and Fallout: New Vegas, to smaller or more niche RPG offerings like the fantastic Pentiment, and the hardcore CRPG series Pillars of Eternity, they can do little wrong in my eyes. In recent years, it’s been even better with its surprise survival sim hit Grounded (and its sequel Grounded 2), and a return to the Bethesda-styled RPG type affairs similar to New Vegas, like last year’s Avowed (also part of the Pillars of Eternity series) and the first The Outer Worlds. Obsidian has been doing the Lord’s work, of late. They are a team that ships. They make games according to a schedule, they keep to it, and they send their stuff out into the world, promptly. They rarely overscope their games, and they are self-assured in their creative efforts. There is a rare confidence to their games that is just that: rare. They’re good at this whole making games thinging.
    
    I loved the first Outer Worlds game. I came to it, actually, late last year in anticipation of its sequel. What I found in the first game was all the stuff I had been missing in the Bethesda-style RPGs I so dearly love. Even the large-scale efforts like Starfield and Fallout 4 from Bethesda Game Studios didn’t feel the same in comparison. Those games are missing something that I still can’t quite put my finger on. I am not even sure what it is… The last couple of games from Bethesda have just felt lacking, to me. Not sure why. To be fair, it is a tough act to follow the likes of both Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim— even if you’re the company that made them.
    
    But felt like in some ways Obsidian “out-Bethesda’d Bethesda”, with the first Outer Worlds. It was everything I could’ve wanted and more. Great dialogue, decent to good characters (Parvati is one of the great RPG characters of the last few years, in my opinion), and solid combat paired with crunchy RPG systems to round out the affair. That first game is sweet. Even sweeter is the second game: The Outer Worlds 2, which is all that, a bag of chips, and some “Purpleberry Crunch”.
    
    It’s The Outer Worlds on steroids. Bigger, more expensive, with stronger writing, a more fleshed-out story, and a far better cast of characters than the first (except for Saza, who is terrible and should be ignored). It’s basically a double-decker helping of The Outer Worlds, just way better in every way. Technologically, stylistically, artistically— all of it and more. It’s awesome. The combat has been revamped, retooled, and redone. The same goes for the RPG systems, which allow for more options and afford you more tools to tinker around with the dynamics of the galaxy you are running around in. It’s just so much better than the first, and for that, it makes this list.
    
    Lastly… I gotta talk about my boy: Tristan Rao. The Chad. The man himself. One of the very best companions I can remember in these types of RPGs. He’s on the level of a Garrus Vakarian from Mass Effect, Astarion from Baldur’s Gate 3, or Heismay from Metaphor: Re Fantazio. He’s that good. Tristan Rao is an incredible character. He is worth playing this game for his performance and story alone. I don’t even wanna spoil it, I love that guy so much. Just a space judge with a big-ass hammer, who suffers no fools. Unique, specific, and all his own, Tristan Rao captures what makes this game so special. (Reminds me, I’ve been meaning to yap about my favorite companions in RPGs one day. It’ll happen, I’m sure!)
    
    A huge improvement over the first is this game’s cast of companions, and their individual loyalty missions (akin to the Mass Effect series), which allow you to dive deeper into each person’s stories alongside the main narrative. The factions, the side quests, and the random events that bring color to the world of The Outer Worlds 2 are all so well done. It’s just a beautiful game. To look at, to listen to (they even added a Fallout-style in-universe radio full of songs made for the game), and to play.
    
    The Outer Worlds 2 is what you get when a big company trusts a talented and consistent developer to make a game and gives them the means to accomplish it. It feels like Obsidian finally got to make a game with no limits. It’s what you dream of as a developer, I’m told. It earns my number 8 spot, no question. I will return to it one day, I’m sure, to finish all there is to do in it. I'd better enjoy it, though. They won’t make another one, sadly.
    
    Fuck Capitalism— go home. (Shout-out to Austin Walker.)
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    7. Silent Hill f (Played on PlayStation 5)

    

The Chad, Hinako

Rarely do I play games that feel like they suffocate me; that cause me to worry, and dread. But then again, there aren’t many games like Silent Hill f. I wasn’t scared, per se— but I was pretty shook by pretty much everything about the game. It’s the familiar, well-worn Silent Hill franchise trope of the rural, sleepy little regional town, overcome by fog and populated by horrors beyond your comprehension, but with the added twist of a period-era small Japanese locale rather than the usual settings of a rundown American burg that the series usually trades in. This change allows the developer NeoBards Entertainment (which, up until this game, had only done porting work and remastering for various companies in the games industry) to inject fresh ideas into the Silent Hill series. As a first effort, it’s magnificent.

The hook of this game is the story. Ryukishi07 of Higarashi: When They Cry fame worked on this game, and it shows. The visual novel aspects are here in Silent Hill f, with novel branches to the narrative and different endings that give more clarity to the story. It’s a really good tale too, heightened by brilliant writing full of pathos and existential dread. They go for it here, too. There are scenes of harsh trauma and unflinching brutality, the likes of which I can’t say I have seen in many games of its type, or even in the series. Usually, the games in the franchise haven’t been known as gore-fests or “torture porn”, for lack of better terms, but Silent Hill f manages to toe the line of shock-value and gratuity relatively deftly, even if some would argue they may go too far in their depictions of both harrowing, pain-staking violence, and self-mutilation. There is a wild cutscene in this game I haven’t seen done before in a triple-A video game, and the audacity of it alone took me back. It’s extremely gnarly and fucked up, but I do think including it is a necessary plot device to successfully convey the narrative they are attempting to depict. Viewer discretion advised, most certainly.

It wasn’t just the brutality of these scenes that shook me; it was the creeping dread and constant toxicity of Hinako’s relationships and social circles that kept me on tilt until I reached the end. It’s like ‘walking on eggshells’, the game, thematically. I always felt nervous when Hinako was talking to a character, because they would always say one thing, while their eyes said another. It looks fantastic, to boot, so you get a lot out of the motion capture in the actors’ conveyance of both the dialogue and physical performances for a scene. The performances and visuals are not quite as good as 2024’s Silent Hill 2 by Bloober Team, but they get damn close. You can’t trust anyone in this game. Not even your own family. The atmosphere is so toxic and so suffocating, yet oddly, all of these add to the experience. Its tone is so defined. As the game progressed, I sorta felt like I was Hinako in some way, seeing what she sees and slowly losing grip on my own sanity as a result of her trauma. It’s really, really distressing to play through. I love it for that, though, strangely enough…

The story is both Silent Hill’s biggest strength and its unfortunate Achilles heel, for me. There is a novel idea here: you need repeat playthroughs to see the whole story, and each subsequent playthrough affords more insight into the proceedings as a whole. Each route you take requires certain items, or paths to be taken to access said content, and while these ideas are cool and well-implemented in the game’s narrative, the reality is, I just don’t have time to play through games multiple times these days. It’s a big ask to replay something, once, let alone three or four times, if you want to see the various endings that add to the story.

It’s a nice idea, but has the time for that? I sure don’t… I appreciate it academically because it’s a nice idea to incentivize repeat playthroughs for your single-player game. It adds content without it becoming stale, and I get that, but realistically, most people (if they finished it) look up the other content and different endings on YouTube. That’s basically how it went for me, too. It’s a bummer I probably won’t see the new stuff they added (every ending has a distinct, final boss to encounter besides the new content), and it’s nice they streamlined the repeated playthroughs with some quality-of-life skipping functions and truncations, but I think the idea is flawed at its core for the way I play games. I just don’t replay that many things.

Finally, perhaps the most divisive thing about this game is the discourse regarding Silent Hill’s combat. I personally like it, but I can see why some people think it’s a bit clunky and unwieldy sometimes, too. I think thematically it works; it makes sense to me that Hinako just isn’t trained for combat, and the way the combat mechanics feel adds to that idea, for me. Not everyone thinks this, which is fine, and I can see the argument positing that I am just excusing how the combat feels, because I think it fits narratively, and it gets away with it because of that. I don’t agree, but I can see someone arguing that. The gameplay does change up about midway through, however, and becomes more of a hack-and-slash romp (at least for part of the game), and I think that does more than freshen up the mechanics as it progresses.

Turns out I had a lot to say about this one… It’s a cerebral game that encourages a lot of talk about its themes, setting, and story. I think it all works together marvellously for the most part, and the minor issues I have with seeing the whole narrative with the new content are alleviated by a quick YouTube search. It’s unfortunate, but life goes on.

Silent Hill f is one of the best entries in the series, and a novel spin on an established formula for the franchise. It’s beautiful, bold, and executed extremely well. I applaud NeoBards for their first effort here and am excited to see what else they are capable of after this. It’s my number 7, and I am happy that it made my top 10. It’s one of the best games of the year, turns out!
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6. Donkey Kong Bananza (Played on Nintendo Switch 2)

What an absolute joy to play. Definitely my favorite platformer since Super Mario Odyssey.

Donkey Kong Bananza, at its core, is a reflection of the company that made it. Both for good and bad, but mostly for good. It’s a game filled with both monumental, exhilarating highs and drastic, disappointing lows. In some ways, it encapsulates the modern state of Nintendo as a company is in, better than most games in their stable. It’s a game filled with frequent brilliance and baffling design decisions. Its proverbial ‘mind’ is in the right place, even if sometimes the ‘body’ doesn’t follow or execute the way it should. It can be frustrating because of its inconsistencies. But on the flipside, these inconsistencies make for so many fun moments that it's hard not to have one without the other, here. The game and its mechanics tend to wash over me a little bit more than I’d prefer, but I like that I can turn my brain off and go ape-shit when molding the terrain to my every whim. It’s great fun.

In many ways, Bananza is a messy game; in visual design, especially. It’s not a bad-looking game. It looks great most of the time! The fidelity of the game itself on Switch 2 is impressive. It’s very shiny, and there are a lot of particles floating around. But if you start squinting, the game is made up also of low-resolution textures for the environment and terrain, has some low-quality character models for the NPCs, and Bananza also hosts some shoddy level design between its layers, too. But when it all comes together… and the game lets you run free across these landscapes, vistas, above and below —you won’t end up caring that much in the long run.

That’s the thing about it: you can’t think too much. Be like a monkey. You see, you do, you smash. If you stop to smell the flowers, the game won’t hold up to scrutiny more often than not, but as long as you are chunk-jumping, smashing terrain, and barrel-blasting across its open zones, you just won’t care the way you would in a more precise, cultivated platformer experience like that of your typical Mario game.

In some ways, I prefer this style of free-form monkey business to the specificity of a 3D Mario adventure. It isn’t as curated, but that’s kind of its biggest strength. It can make hunting for collectibles a bit of a blur, I will admit, but it’s all still great fun to do, even if there aren’t as many bespoke encounters to get Banandium Gems. It isn’t as interesting to engage with in the endgame because of this fact, though. Some of the collecting can feel aimless at times, and some gems just seemed dropped in a spot because they needed to put something there, oddly enough. You don’t have a ton of purposeful exploration like that of a Mario title, and that is a bit disappointing. But it isn’t bad, per se. It’s just the truth. I do get burned out collecting things after a while. Smashing things just wears on me after a bit… I am not sure why. Perhaps because the screen is too busy, and there is a lot of stimuli in the endgame collection? Not sure, really, but I think that could be it.

While it isn’t as good or refined as other Nintendo games, it’s a testament to the developer’s endless creativity and playground sensibilities that the whole affair feels fresh, distinct, and all around ‘new’ feeling for the genre. There is truly nothing like Donkey Kong Bananza, and I expect there won’t be many imitators to the concept, either. What they pull off technically here on the Switch 2 is frankly incredible, even if at times, it can really drag in terms of framerate and processing speed when things get a bit hairy on the destruction front. The camera is also better than it has any right to be, given just how many compromising positions it is frequently asked to be in. In far less able hands, this game could’ve been a disaster on multiple fronts, but Nintendo proves more than capable of pulling off this type of new effort. It’s a remarkable achievement, if you ask me.

Donkey Kong Bananza is so good consistently that it had to make my list, but not good enough to reach past this spot. I’ll admit this is the lowest I have ranked it all year until now, but having thought about it, given its flaws as well as its successes, it’s perfect right here. It’s my number 6 because it’s polarizing for me. That’s okay, though, because most of the time, I was having too much fun to notice.
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5. Trails in the Sky: 1st Chapter (Played on PlayStation 5)

I can see why everyone loves this entry now. One of the best RPGs I have played in a fair bit.

I tried to play the original Trails in the Sky entry on PSP in recent years, and bounced off of it. Not because it was bad, it was pretty good! I think I put it down because I heard this was coming out, maybe? Let’s go with that. I am glad I played and finished this version of the game, though. What a treat!

This game is the pinnacle for me of what I deem to be a “cozy RPG experience”. Every bit of it, from the lovely soundtrack, the beautifully written cast of characters, to the ambience of the country of Liberl and the rural townships that make up its setting, all lend themselves to the immaculate vibes of the game. It’s just so damn warm and inviting.

It took me around 45 hours to see this through, and I loved just about every part of my time with it. The best thing about the adventuring has gotta be the sidequests, for me. In the game, you play as primarily Estelle and Joshua Bright, childhood best friends who grow up to become ‘Bracers’, regional freelancers who do odd jobs for anyone and everyone, regardless of reward. This narrative theming allows for the side missions to almost feel required to play through, given the main character’s roles. I love that about it. Everything feels essential to do.

You feel narratively incentivized to help everyone who asks, and that feeling carries throughout each chapter as you go along. You go from region to region, solving disputes, finding missing villagers, and locating lost items, and none of it feels tacked on or boring. It feels important because it is important. Having the side content feel fully integrated into the narrative makes the entire adventure feel worth doing. I did all 73 quests in the game, and I had a blast doing so. It feels right to help people! It’s by far the thing I’ll remember about it the most.

I also love that the story is a smaller-scale affair than other RPGs. There is no biohazardous muck to clean up, or eldritch horrors to contend with. You are solving local issues for regular folks, mostly. Even if by the end, the politics of the world at large begin to creep into the picture, you never feel like saving the world is the point. You make more of a difference to your community as a Bracer than in any other way. You aren’t trying to save the planet. But in a way, you are trying to do your part to assist with that. Cats need to be saved from trees sometimes, and someone has gotta be there to do it!

The thing that kept me returning to it was the gameplay. If not for another impressive RPG combat system this year, this would be my very favorite from the games on this top 10. It’s fantastic. You have the option to both hack and slash mobs in the zones between regions, or engage in turn-based fights with just the push of a button. If you wear down an opponent in the world to the point of staggering them, you will gain a tactical advantage once you change the encounter into a turn-based fight. But enemies can also do this in kind, putting you at a disadvantage. The push-pull of these styles in the battles keeps it interesting and satisfying all the way through the main story, and the side content as well. The thing that keeps the battles fresh in the game over time is the addition and subtraction of various party members who join you at select intervals throughout each chapter. Each character is good at their ‘thing’, and digging into each of their movesets and capabilities offers up a lot of depth in the gameplay, many hours in. It’s so much fun to play.

For more impatient gamers, the game affords the ability to toggle on a faster speed for regular gameplay. It makes the game run quicker, allowing for faster traversal between towns and cities, and speeds up quick battles if you are looking to grind levels in between missions, and dialogue if you wanna cut to the chase. It’s a nice thing to have, especially as the hours continue to mount, and you’re looking to grind out experience points for later encounters. I enjoy having the option there, should I need it. I think a lot of long RPGs could do with this function in their games, too, and it’d be nice to have the option there as well. Here’s to hoping that other companies take this mechanic. It’s useful!

I adored my time with Trails in the Sky: 1st Chapter. It looks amazing, plays even better, and absolutely is worth your time if you’re debating on trying it. I can see why people hold this game and this series in such high esteem. The end of this game has a teaser for the second entry, too, once you finish the main story, and I’m stoked to check that out once they finish development. It’s almost a perfect RPG. The reason it’s my number 5 only is simply this: this is a remake of an existing game. I am trying to reward newer games and experiences on the top half of this list, this year, but if I wasn’t, this damn near would be in my top 3. It’s that good. Play this game.———————————————————————————————————————————
4. Hades II (Played on Nintendo Switch 2)

“Death to Cronos.”

I’ve started to come around on ‘rogue-style’ games, be they ‘roguelikes’ or ‘roguelites’. I wrote here on this site that I wasn’t a huge fan of the genre, but with time passing and me playing some good ones, I think I am amending this opinion slightly. The best of these perfect the loops of gameplay and iterate constantly on established methods of engagement. Hades II doesn’t just succeed at this; hell, it blows past every metric qualify as perfection in every sense of the word. This is a perfect video game. It’s not my favorite of the year (I will admit this was my number 1 game for a very long time), but in terms of execution? I don’t think there is better crafted video game I played this year than this. On every front.

The only issue I think I have with Hades II is just that it’s more Hades. That’s not bad! But I have played this before! It’s all very familiar, and that’s great, but I don’t think it elevates an already good game that much. It iterates stupendously, but as for what’s new, there is a very samey feel to this game. Again, having more ice cream isn’t a bad thing. I like ice cream. But more of it can also be a slight criticism. What else would it be if not for a sequel to the first, anyway? I dunno, but still. It’s the most minor of quibbles I have with any game this year. It’s great, but in some way, I have done this sorta exercise already.

Picking nits aside, this is the most fun I had playing a video game this past year. Purely on the gameplay front. There are so many ways to beat this game, and every tool you get on a run helps with that. You can beat this game with literally any combination you can imagine. It’s that balance that makes this game so good. Supergiant is a master of this genre, but they allow you to break their game in fun ways too. I had one combination of boons, weapons, and perks that was so broken I beat a run to Olympus without dying once. When you beat a run… It’s the best feeling ever. I chased that exhilaration all year, after the fact, and no game quite got there in the end.

Hades II is a perfect game. In almost every way. The story is great (ending too), the combat is incredible, the music is god-tier, and the art design is impeccable (Jen Zee, the woman that you are…). The only reason this is my number 4… is that I have played Hades 1. Maybe that’s a dumb reason not to shower this game with the top prize, but it’s enough for me to keep it here and not in my top 3. Makes sense to me. If it doesn’t work for you, I totally get it. If I had to return to any of these games casually, I would 100 percent play this one first. It’s just so fucking fun to play.
———————————————————————————————————————————3. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Played on PlayStation 5)

I wish French people were real. Merde…

What could I possibly say about this game that hasn’t already been said??
It’s as good as people say it is, man. If you doubt this game, or don’t like it because it’s popular, I am here to tell you that you are wrong. It’s okay to be wrong, but I’m gonna judge you for it.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the best game of the year. Most people who played it agree about this, I think, right? I am speaking qualitatively, purely, here. Per capita, the people who finished this gave it their top prize, so it seems. Kinda makes me an outlier here... I think quality-wise, it may be the “Best Videogame of 2025”. It’s all killer and zero filler. But that can be the truth, and I can also enjoy, let’s say… a couple of other games more than it. Both can be true, I say. I think that it is truly a one-of-a-kind video game experience, and it deserves all the praise and bouquets thrown its way. I just liked some other games more.

I wrote about it here, so read my review. In short, I think it’s just a wonderful game, has the best soundtrack of the year, and tells an emotional, well-rendered story about grief and how we process it through art. It’s a special, special game. It also has the very best turn-based combat I’ve ever played. It’s truly astounding how good this game is, given that it’s the studio Sandfall’s first effort. Truly spectacular.
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2. Hollow Knight: Silksong (Played on Nintendo Switch 2)

A true masterpiece, this is maybe the best Metroidvania/search-action game I’ve ever played. It’s close, and time will tell… But I am pretty bullish about that. A truly can’t-miss video game.

Hollow Knight: Silksong and another game coming up on this list are how I define my year with the Switch 2. I spent so much time playing games handheld this year, but very few games captured me completely in 2025 as Silksong did. It’s a revelatory experience, and perhaps the pinnacle of its genre. It’s a watershed moment in independent games development, in my opinion, and completely delivered on all expectations set for it. It’s the rare game that meets the hype.

It’s wild just how mainstream this game is, too. It’s very difficult. It’s ball-bustingly hard at times, even. It’s a real pain to get through just casually. It seems like the antithesis of a mainstream product in some ways, because it is so anti-player in key aspects of its design. It feels in step with the From Software way of doing things, in that the hardest trials allow for the greatest exhilaration upon conquering them.

There were many times that I simply put the game down in frustration for long stretches in my weeks playing it. It rattled me quite a bit, I will admit. But I persevered, and despite constant roadblocks and the frustration I had with the difficulty, I finished it. The hardest part of the main game for me was by far the arduous gauntlet the devs throw at you on the doorstep of the final boss. Absolutely brutal, brutal sequence there. It took me hours to conquer that portion of the game, and if you’ve beaten it, you know damn well what part I mean.

The bosses and enemies you engage with are spectacular and awe-inspiring, and their animations are gorgeously drawn and animated. It’s a huge step above even the first Hollow Knight, and that was amazing to start with. Team Cherry has grown and matured since the release of the first entry, and their attention to detail and execution on the art alone is to be commended. It’s an absolutely gorgeous game. I love the artstyle especially, which can be, oddly, a sticking point for some people. It’s got a look and feel all its own. It’s absolutely mind-boggling how a team of this size (primarily two developers with assistance) could pull off a game of this size and scope.

Christopher Larkin returns from the first game, and his music is the lifeblood of the adventure. Beautifully composed, the wispy violins and the plinking of lonely pianos give this score a solitary, isolated feel to the atmosphere. You feel like you are underground and in a strange place. But when it gets time to fight a big baddie, the music meets the challenge, bringing forth all the bombast and epic scores you expect from the last game. There is a boss fight about midway through that is choreographed along with the music that is straight up an all-timer. It’s an incredible fight, too, but it’s made more memorable because of the gimmick. I think back on that segment very fondly.

It looks so good… It sounds just so otherworldly and ethereal in its music and its sound design… But the best part of Silksong? It’s gameplay. This game plays like an absolute dream. I don’t think there is a better feeling search-action game than this. 2024’s Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is an amazing game, and might have been the previous champion in the gameplay department. Silksong is just better. In every way. You have so many ways to play it, with so many permutations and styles to engage in, too. It’s brilliantly designed. Every time you have face off against a foe, you have the right tools for the job, and every time you hit a button to attack, it comes out flawlessly and looks awesome doing so. It’s so well made, this game. I have almost no criticisms about the way it plays.

The story is surprisingly interesting here, and the best part of it is the interactions you have with the various bugs and underground denizens of Pharloom. There are so many memorable bug characters you talk to here. My favorite is Sherma, by far. Such a cute little idiot. He is just trying his best! There are more personalities and interesting characters in Silksong than in any other game of its type. There is just so much heart to this assortment of quirky bugs. I love the way they react to Hornet as she makes her way through the world, and I especially love how she talks to them throughout the journey.

Hornet is direct, brooks no fools, and is to the point, always, every time. There is an economy of words with Hornet as the main character, with every word she utters feeling purposeful and valuable. It’s almost currency to her. She says just as much as she needs to, as directly as she needs to say it. Her characterization is perfect for the game, and having a voice (or speaking role) makes her a vast improvement over the silent Vessel you played in the first game. There is way more color and vibrancy to the world and characters here than in the first Hollow Knight. I applaud Team Cherry for evolving their games in this way. It makes it feel like a bigger and more complex world full of realized characters, rather than just NPCs with flavor text.

I adore Silksong. It’s damn near perfect. I don’t share the same criticism about it that I do for Hades II, because I think it is just vastly superior to the first game in every way. Hades II is great because it is iterative and executes on all fronts, but it is ultimately a few more building blocks on an established idea. I also never felt challenged in Hades II as I did here. Silksong transcends its first outing in every conceivable way. It makes the first one feel like child’s play. The only reason it is not my top game is that I was occasionally frustrated by it. It’s very tough. Despite the difficulty, nearly every aspect of this game works for me. Since we are picking nits, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Breaks my heart not to give it top billing, I will admit, though.
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1. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (Played on PlayStation 5)

This is one of the best games I have ever played. I will remember it fondly for years to come. Kojima does it again. Cue the thunderous applause!

This wins because I think it’s one of the best games I have ever played. That’s really it. It’s more than a video game to me. It’s a digital messiah. These are lofty things to say for sure, but hopefully you catch my drift (wink…).

Death Stranding 2 transcends video games. It is one of the most singular experiences I’ve had with any piece of media. There is no better-looking, sounding, or playing video game that Kojima has made than this, in my opinion. Nothing has surpassed what Kojima Productions has done here. I mentioned this in my review of DS2, but I see Kojima as an auteur, a proverbial David Lynch of his medium. A force to be reckoned with. He possesses the same goofy tones, sexy provocation, and emotional resonance in his art that Lynch used to, and I think this comparison I make between the two endears Kojima just that much more to me.

I loved the first Death Stranding, and even with its faults, I think the first game is a modern classic. I think back on my time with it fondly. Death Stranding 2 is better and more bombastic in every way. It has a better more coherent story, has amazing characters brought to life by incredible performances, and keeps the Kojima tradition alive of predicting the future, where the creators comment on the real world in the narrative. Kojima is just Nostradamus.

I think the specificity of the cutscenes is what makes the narrative shine most especially. It feels cinematic in the proper sense, where Kojima is directing the story like an actual film. It’s filled with dynamic camera techniques, specific character direction, and filmic gravitas that you see in modern movies, and that quality elevates everything about the story they tell here. Every character in the game is awesome. Even Higgs (played by Troy Baker, who turns in an astounding performance) is much improved upon from his first outing and given a larger purpose and presence here than ever before. The acting is out of this world good, and the music, oh my god— if I could only drop the whole OST here I would. Ludwig Forssell and Woodkid created an outstanding soundtrack that pumps the story full of ethereal feeling. DS2 transcends video games because when I describe it, I am also describing how well it executes on its other disciplines. It’s gobsmacking how good this game is at everything it does.

The package delivery is also better than ever, and even though it’s easier to engage with than ever before, all the new quirky systems and gadgets you get as you trek across new continents make the whole journey feel varied and full of options, as you select just how you wish to set out completing your tasks. The ‘strand’ portions of this game are better, too, with all the social elements of the asynchronous multiplayer working better than before. There is so much to interact with and do in DS2, just finding out how everything works is a pleasure and a joy.

The combat is way better here as well. In the first game, it was a very bad idea to shoot someone with a weapon, for narrative reasons. In this game, if you have a gun, it’s non-lethal most of the time, freeing up the narrative parts of the mechanics to allow for a more free-form combat style once you have to fight someone. In some ways, it feels more akin to the openness of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. You have so many tools at your disposal, and so many interesting mechanics to use to your advantage, constantly. It’s a game about systems, and you feel consistently challenged and rewarded for interacting with them.

I had so much fun with this game. The ending hours of Death Stranding 2 are a mindfuck. I don’t think I have ever seen anything as narratively audacious or downright bold in my life. It’s worth seeing how this game wraps up. It’s actually crazy that Kojima got money to put some of that stuff in here. It’s amazing. I cannot describe just how nutty the end of this game gets. It’s an incredible ride, and something I cannot see topped for me in quite a while. I think it's Kojima’s best game, and it’s not close. Every element here is perfect, every story choice is bold and out of this world insane, and the game itself is so much fun. Who knew being a mailman could be this much fun??

Death Stranding 2 is not only one of the greatest sequels ever, it’s also one of the best video games of all time. If you don’t play this game, I will think less of you. Does that clear it up? I think it’s essential reading, and I will remember it so fondly for many years to come. An absolute masterpiece from start to finish. It’s my game of the year, and from the second I finished it, it was my top pick. I toyed around with some other stuff in its place, sure, but deep in my heart, it was always the right choice. I am eager to see what else this man and his team can do. I’m blown the fuck away.
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There you have it! My Top 10 games of 2025!

Thanks for reading this, if you did, and if you like my stuff, please share it and subscribe to me for more of it. I had an awesome year playing these games, and I hope you played some of them too. Here’s to more great video games in 2026.

As Dave Dameshek says, “It’s been a little slice of heaven.”

Turns out, old games are pretty good!

I’m back again for another entry in my “end of year lists”!
Hasn’t been too long since the last one, but oh, well.

I played a lot of new video games in 2025. Most of the ones that matter anyway when it comes to the ‘discourse’ or ‘zeitgeist, I think. But I also beat some games that weren’t new. Hell, even some games that were old as hell! This is the spot to talk about those. Here we go, yet again.
Here is some stuff I crossed off the ol’ dreaded backlog this year.
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“Old Game of the Year” (Games I missed in the previous year that I finished this year):

Winner: Persona 3 Reload (Played on PS5)

I platinumed this one!
What a joy this game was. I played it twice all the way through, did all the social links, created and fused every ‘Persona’, beat all the bosses (including the Reaper multiple times, but didn’t beat the secret boss Elizabeth, who is ridiculously tough since you can’t bring your party in to fight her), and got every single trophy in the game. It was my first time playing through Persona 3 in any version, and I adored every single moment of my 100-plus hours with this remake.

It sounds phenomenal (the soundtrack is incredible, featuring some of the best music in the series), looks absolutely incredible aesthetically and artistically, and plays like a dream. The vibes are immaculate here, and while I don’t prefer this to Atlus’ other JRPG offering that came out the same year, in Metaphor: Re Fantazio, it stands side by side with it in many ways, while also elevating everything good about the original game in this lavish and well-rendered remake.

It made my top 10 in 2024, even when I hadn’t finished it, but if I had, it would’ve challenged Metaphor for the top spot on my GOTY end of year list. Not a perfect game… but pretty damn close.
Persona is awesome. Now, can we remake 1 and 2 in this style? I think that would be amazing.
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Runner-up: Star Wars Outlaws (Played on PS5)

I wrote about this game last year! It’s really good! People slept on this one.
I think Star Wars Outlaws is a total banger of a game. The unique setting, the heist-centric plot, and the great side characters give this gem a lot of energy throughout, and I think while it falters in some ways mechanically, the sense of place, the world-building, and the bite-sized open world biomes you explore more than make up for any lacking gameplay. There is a great diversity of classic Star Wars races, creeds, factions, and people here that give this rendition of the 70s retro-sci fi inspired galaxy of the movies a brand new feel while also delivering on proper nostalgic tones. All without being too cloying in the storied brand’s usually harsh tokenism of familiar iconography and rampant, real-world commercialism.
It all just works so well.

This past January, I was able to go on a trip to Disney World with my family, and we were able to go to Hollywood Studios to visit Galaxy’s Edge, and hot on the heels of that, I started this. To say it was transportative is an understatement. Playing Star Wars Outlaws felt like I was back in Galaxy’s Edge, yet again. It’s remarkable the attention to detail put into every corner of the presentation of the game. It’s a shame more people didn’t play it, because Star Wars Outlaws isn’t just a solid time in a galaxy far, far away— it’s one of the best Star Wars games, period, full stop, end of sentence.

Ubisoft can make some good games from time to time. They should keep doing that…
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Backlog Game of the Year (Old-ish Games I Finished that Deserve Recognition)

Winner: DOOM Eternal (Played and Reviewed on PS5)

You know the Drake and Josh meme where they come out of the movie theater with their hair blown back, and mouths agape? Yeah, that’s how playing DOOM: Eternal felt to me after finishing it. That meme is what I looked like after playing through it, and it’s (even more difficult) DLC. DOOM: Eternal is by no means for everyone, but for that small pocket of people that got on its ‘level’, like me, we were rewarded with one of the most intricately designed first-person shooter experiences in gaming. The more I think back on my time with this one, the more fondly I think of it, in hindsight.

I mentioned in my previous post that DOOM: The Dark Ages didn’t stick with me in the ways I wanted it to after I finished it, but that is not the case for DOOM: Eternal, however, where the more I reminisce about it, the more I like it. I wrote a whole review about this, so go read that if you want my full thoughts, but in short— I think it’s a mostly brilliant and frequently frustrating game that thrilled me more than it didn’t. It’s perhaps the most flawed entry of this recent rebooted DOOM series from id Software, but I think it is by far the most interesting of the three if I had to pick.

The version of the super shotgun in the game has a grappling hook attachment on it called a ‘Meathook’. Is that not the most DOOM-coded thing you’ve ever heard??
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Runner-up: Citizen Sleeper (Played on Switch)

One of the better-written games I can remember, Citizen Sleeper is a brilliant game about the perils of a neo-capitalistic society trying to make its living surviving in the vacuum of space. While not perfect, I think the superb narrative weaves in and out of the dynamics of the space colonists’ lives deftly and ably, while not being an overly preachy or didactic exercise in its telling.

Your journey as a sleeper (a digital mind-vessel for a real human working off corporate debt) is filled with enough intrigue, thrills, interesting conversations, and tough moral decisions to keep you engaged for the duration. I put about 10 hours into it on Switch and felt like the game honored my time. It was very worth seeing through, and paced remarkably well for being mostly a choice-based linear narrative.
I saw every ending, did the DLC they added to it post-launch, and finished every lingering main and side story thread hanging throughout my playthrough. Easy to engage with, exciting to read through, Citizen Sleeper is one of the very best narrative games you can play, and while not much can be ‘played’ per se, the experience on the whole was worth seeing through.
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Runner-up: Metroid Prime Remastered (Played on Switch)

Samus Aran. Cool-ass name. Even cooler character.
The anticipation of waiting for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was killing me, so I fired this one up and played through it in a week or so. While I am by no means the biggest fan of this game, I really enjoyed my time with it. I’d played through this once before on the GameCube back in the day, but I couldn’t remember if I had finished it or not.
While some of the old, ‘back-tracky’ design doesn’t completely hold up, the upgrades, the music, and the general vibes of Metroid Prime Remastered are just so evocative of what I really like about the series and video games on the whole. I like sci-fi. I like a moody atmosphere. I LOVE upgrading shit. Who doesn’t? This game has all that and more.

The boss fights are simple, but good, and the enemy encounters, while not being very innovative, are solid pieces to the first-person shooter puzzle. The entire package is just so damn playable. Aside from the minor issues I have with the ‘key hunt’ at the end of this game (very similar to how Wind Waker deals with its final stretch, actually), I think this game is very good. Extremely good. Maybe the best Metroid Prime game, who can say? It’s definitely better than 4… (shots fired…).

It also looks so so soooo good on Switch. It might be the best-looking original Nintendo Switch game, I think. Retro Studios outdid themselves gussying up the original game, and I really hope they finally do what we all want them to, and eventually remaster both the second and third games in the Prime series one day.

They made a fantastic game the first time around, which makes the glaring issues I have with Metroid Prime 4: Beyond seem all the more troubling, given that I played them back to back. That’s one of the most disappointing games I have played this year, by the way.

Deal with it.
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Runner-up: Unpacking (Played on Switch)

This was the last game I finished in 2025!
Unpacking is a puzzle ‘light’ narrative game about the living of everyday life through the lens of transition. You spend your time in this game doing just as the title says, unpacking.

You play as a character putting away their belongings through various stages of life, and each period that you unpack has a small story to tell about what the main character is going through in that particular portion of her life. You’ll unpack your childhood bedroom, complete with all the stuffed animals, kid alarm clocks, school book bags, and random childhood ephemera that fill the space of a simpler time. You see the transition between high school and early adulthood as you unpack your first dorm in college. You even see the interesting mechanics that shake up the regular gameplay, as you try to cram your stuff into another person’s space filled with things of their own, as you move in with a significant other, then vice versa, as you unpack back into your childhood bedroom once again after said relationship has run its course.

These little bits of storytelling are novel, silent, and most brilliantly, all tell the story without saying a single word. It’s so well done. You experience every story beat through the unpacking and placement of everyday household items, and I found the entire experience extremely uplifting by the time I rolled the credits. It’s a personal, bite-sized glimpse into a person’s life, minus the voyeurism that usually comes with this subject matter. The novelty of the format stayed fun throughout the game, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Unpacking isn’t a complex game mechanically, but it is sophisticated in its pioneering of the conveyance of its personal story, and I really dug it. One of the more memorable indie games I’ve played recently. So glad I played it on my Switch, as it was the perfect way to wind down the long winter days, as the calendar turned to a brand new year.
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Runner-up: Lil Gator Game (Played and Reviewed on PlayStation 5)

Another game I reviewed here, Lil Gator Game, is an absolute delight.
I don’t think there has been any game that has so perfectly captured the feeling of early childhood and the act of ‘play’ as this game did. It’s a special little gem of a game.

The core conceit of this game is that you are trying to impress your sister, and to do that, you recruit all your anthropomorphic wilderness friends to create a fun ‘world’ for your Big Sis to explore. It reminded me in the best ways of A Short Hike, especially in its setting, where you travel across a wide mountainous island, making new friends and chatting with old ones to set up the land of make-believe with bits and bobs of juvenile fun.

Lil Gator Game is filled with joy. Not one bit of this game is jaded or pessimistic in any way. It feels like it captures the innocence of childhood better than anything Ican remember, and the feeling of being whisked back to my personal memories of times gone by was a trip. Great game that everyone should check out!
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Runner-up: Mullet Madjack (Played and Reviewed on Xbox Series S)

Damn if this isn’t the most fun I had this year, it’s close.
Mullet MadJack is balls to the wall breackneck action manifest. It’s like Crank on ‘crank’, it’s Kung Fury by way of Super Meat Boy, and Neon White, and every bit of it is awesome. It’s kind of a lot to take in (especially since I played it in one sitting), but also the amount of pure digital video game stimuli you get injected into your ojos is just so delicious.

What a kickass game. I don’t even wanna tell you about it. Just play it. One of the best surprises of my backlog playing last year. After you play it, read my review!
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Retro GOTY (Games Considered Retro I Liked the Most):

Winner: Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening

I’ve decided. This is the best PS2 game of all time. It’s at least my favorite.
Not just that— it’s the best action game of all time. I played Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening for the first time this past year, and when I tell you I loved my time with it, that may well be a gross understatement. I adore this game.

Having said that, it isn’t perfect. The camera is a relic of a bygone era where fixed cameras and authored sights were more in vogue; the difficulty spikes are brutal and often; the controls can take a bit to get used to— but when it all comes together, every facet of this diamond just shines that much brighter. The design, the goofy, larger-than-life characters, and the awesome early 2000s wub-wub butt rock soundtrack bring together this game that feels so of its time, while also feeling fresh, new, and different in the modern era. DMC3 has maybe my favorite choices of both playstyle options and weapon arsenal in an action game, full stop. Since there are so many ways to play it, you feel emboldened to play through it again, and again to attain better ranks per mission with different skillsets, and that feeling made me come back to it over and over.

I beat this game twice, and I still get the hankering to return to it for more playthroughs. Not only that, but after beating the game, you unlock the ability to play as Vergil, Dante’s nemesis and older twin brother, with his own campaign to run through. You also have the Bloody Palace mode, which is basically horde mode in Devil May Cry, and that also has endless ways to engage with it. It’s a lot… and I love it!

There is just so much content in here, I feel like I could play it for hours and hours and not see everything. Capcom is great about making their single-player offerings replayable and engaging through multiple playthroughs of their games, and that DNA continues from this even to their new stuff like the Resident Evil reboot trilogy and their RE2, RE3, and RE4 remakes. I love everything about this game, and will probably be playing it off and on for years to come, I expect.
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Runner-up: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater HD

What is the best Metal Gear Solid game?
Most folks, if asked, say that this one is. I agree qualitatively, but personally? It’s between MGS2 and MGS4 for me. But I can see where they are coming from, because this game is just sensational. I had this game with my old PS2 fat back in the day, but between the wonky controls, some of the harsh motion blurring in the cutscenes (which kinda made me feel nauseous, not going to lie), and some of the early game stuff being a tad slow for me at the time, I never saw it through in my early teens. While that stuff put me off back then, playing it with the HD re-release on PS5 in the Metal Gear Solid Collection Vol. 1 smoothed out the rougher edges of the original game and fixed some of the odd control issues I had with it in my first attempt. When I heard that Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater was coming as a remake of MGS3, I decided to give the original another go. I am so glad I did.

Coming back to it, I saw it in a whole new light, and I am so glad I finally played it. MGS3 has by far the best cast of villains, the best story, and probably, besides MGS4, has my favorite take on Snake as a character (even if he is Big Boss in this game). The writing is off-beat, odd, and verbose, while not being too cornball to put me off. I love the Cold War era this game depicts, even if the whole affair is more anime-inspired in nature than treating historical fiction, let’s say. It’s alt-history in name only because the whole game is pretty bonkers on a story and lore front. It’s all very Kojima but tempered even more than the usual goofiness his touch usually brings to a serious-ish setting. The tone is consistent in its inconsistency, and you never believe for a second that everyone in the game isn’t playing it all with a straight face. Except for Revolver Ocelot, who may as well be the comic relief, if there ever was one in the series (meowwwww).

The stealth mechanics are at their peak in this game. While not open world and free-form like the spaces you crawl around in MGS5, the survival aspects of MGS3’s game design (like eating, drinking, and curing yourself) all really work in the game’s favor without coming across as too gimmicky. The CQC is also a fun ‘get out of jail free card’ when situations get a little more dicey, when you inevitably get spotted. All of this works in concert to orchestrate a glorious symphony of action and stealth gameplay that I believe thematically to be the peak of the series. While I prefer playing MGS5 more than this game, I think all the parts come together in a better fit here than any other entry. It’s so ahead of its time, too. I marvel just thinking about how people must have felt playing this game in 2004. It’s one of the most sophisticated, well-made games of its era, and that fact shows even upon playing it today.

I played both this and DMC3 back-to-back, and it’s something I will remember for a long time. Playing two of my favorite games of that console generation one after the other is something I will cherish. How lucky are we? So many good games, both new and old, to play at any time. There has never been a better time to play video games! (Shoutout Vinny Caravella, by the way.)

There is no doubt. Kojima has never made a bad game, folks. I stand by that. Argue with a wall!
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Runner-up: Max Payne 2 (Played on Xbox Series S via Backwards Compatibility)

I love Remedy Entertainment. There may be no studio that I vibe with their stuff more than them. Every game they make is so laser-targeted to me and my preferences in games, it’s crazy. The only game of theirs that I haven’t liked in totality is the original Alan Wake. That is objectively a good game, but I just don’t like playing it that much. The controls are a bit lacking for me and what I am looking for in their games. It’s weird too— I actually prefer Alan Wake’s American Nightmare for XBLA more than the original if I were to compare. The gunplay is just better in that entry, I think.
That said, their hit rate for me is really high on the games front. If I had to rank my top 3? Easy.
Alan Wake II.
Control.
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

When Control came out in 2019, Remedy had a crazy idea: “What if we tie all of our games together narratively, ‘MCU-style’, to link all our games up in one continuous story that we carry through all our games?” It’s genius, really— and it’s worked, too. With each entry, the RCU (Remedy Connected Universe) becomes more elaborate and ornate, filled with deep lore and a shared mythology that each game draws from and adds to, creating a unified history full of incredible characters, jaw-dropping reveals, and amazing truths that keep me coming back to each project they release. It’s incredible what they’ve done so far. The only holdouts of this large-scale idea are Quantum Break, the Microsoft-published time-travel yarn starring Shawn Ashmore (who returns in the RCU as ‘Sheriff Breaker’, wink-wink), and the Max Payne series (referenced throughout the Alan Wake series as the ‘Alex Casey’ character who is basically ‘Max Payne’ in all but name). Rockstar Games owns the publishing and IP rights of the Max Payne series, so that’s the reason that Remedy can’t use the IP in their games directly, unfortunately.

Which is a bummer. I wish they could learn to share. It’d make everything cooler. But that history aside, Max Payne 2 is incredible. I wish it tied into the main Remedy stuff these days (they’re remaking 1 and 2, so fingers crossed there is a chance Rockstar lets them include more things about their connected stuff in those), but even if it doesn’t, every bit of this game is amazing, even almost 23 years after the fact. The best part of this game? How it plays. It feels absolutely incredible to play. The bullet time mechanics return from the first entry, and every single way this game plays is pitch-perfect even today. It’s shocking how well it controls, and how Remedy just nailed it.

The story is fun, the character of Max is well-performed (voiced by Remedy mainstay, the late, great, James McCaffrey, RIP), looks cooler, and sounds cooler in Max Payne 2. Everything about the second one far surpasses the first, and I think the original is great in its own right. There is nothing like the comic-booky Frank Miller-esque style and flair of the Max Payne series in games, and I hope the remakes are just as good. God, I just want to go play 2 again.

What a game, what a series, what a studio.

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Runner-up: FFI (Reviewed and Played on PlayStation 5)

I went back to the past and finally played this. The original Final Fantasy.
I wrote about this game here on this site already this past year (go read that!), so I will be brief. It’s nice have a history lesson, right? It feels sort of like one, at least.

The game is simple, the story is simple, and it isn’t too tough to play with the Pixel Remaster’s quality of life improvements. There is no better way to play the first Final Fantasy, or even any of the other games in the series from I-VI, than in that package, so do yourself a favor and play them that way! It’s nice to play them on modern hardware, and the improvements add to the experience, enhancing each game while not taking away from any aspect of them, either.

I liked my time with the first game. The economy is broken, the combat is repetitive, and there aren’t that many enemies in the game, sure, but seeing how the genre started up between this and the first Dragon Quest, you get to see how everything came to be, and that’s cool.
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Hell of a year for old games! I had a blast digging into my bullshit and playing older games this year, and I can’t wait to see what 2026 brings my way on the old games front. I played a ton of new stuff in 2025, but I am going to endeavor to reach back a bit more in this next year and clear out the backlog a bit. It’s getting a little cluttered in there!
Join me, won’t you?

I have about 2 or 3 more things in the works for this recap of 2025, so keep sticking with me! Next up for me, I will be writing about my favorite games of 2025! I promise that it will be long, drawn out, and full of personal bias!

Thanks for sticking around with me for the duration. Here’s to more time playing video games in 2026.

So many great games this year.
These games didn’t quite make the cut, but hell— play them all anyway!

What a year!!
2025 was one of the best years in video games I can remember.
This is a continuing series where I fill you all in on the very best of 2025. Without too much preamble— let’s go!
———————————————————————————————————————————The Drifter’s 2025 Honorable Mentions

Herdling (Played on PlayStation 5)

Herdling is such a trip. What a journey it was, too!
On the surface, Herdling brings to mind a ‘walking sim’, like a Journey from the revered studio thatgamecompany or the brilliant work from developer Giant Squid, like Sword of the Sea (which shows up later!), or The Pathless, perhaps.
But Herdling as an achievement is so much more.

Okomotive, Herdling’s developer, has nailed a particular sensation of ‘locomotion’ in their games so well. It’s almost a certain “je nais se quois” that is hard to quantify. I think the worlds they build as creators and the actions they have you taking part in within these spaces are so singular and unique. Their work is so distinctive. You won’t find any other games like those made by Okomotive.
As developers, they are so proficient at creating interesting mechanics to engage in. The simple act of intentionally moving through the vast, picturesque spaces that they have created gives their games a sense of wonder and awe that hasn’t been replicated in the gaming landscape. There is a certain tactile nature to the games and the worlds they curate to contain these ideas that truly sets them apart in the industry.

Okomotive has taken what they’ve learned from their prior two efforts, FAR: Lone Sails and its sequel FAR: Changing Tides, and created something in Herdling that is not just bigger, more expansive, and more profound; it’s almost a transcendental, borderline religious experience to play through it.
I adored Herdling, and I hope others give it a shot based on my recommendation. The simple reason it didn’t make my top 10 for this year? I liked 10 games more than it, and if I had to rank it, it would be below them, but not by much. Fantastic game!
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Shotgun Cop Man (Played on Switch)

One of the most ‘playable’ video games I've touched this year, Shotgun Copman knows what it wants to be, and damn if it doesn’t punch above its weight.
It feels like one of those games I would’ve found on NewGrounds or Miniclip back in the day when I was playing browser games in my adolescence. There is something so free and juvenile about it, I can’t help but smile at its rebelliousness and pure, dumb fun simplicity. I loved the time I spent with it.

There is a sort of verve to Shotgun Copman that brings to mind the days of XBLA and early PSN games, like Super Meat Boy and Hotline Miami. Games that were balling on a budget, but executing an awesome game with a killer, immediate hook. I had such a fun weekend banging it out on my old Switch.
Just thinking about it it makes me wanna jump back in there and kill stuff again. I don’t need to explain too much about the game itself because, honestly? The name does the job just fine, I think. You have a shotgun (mostly), and you are very much a Cop… Man.
Hell yeah.
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Pippistrello and the Cursed Yoyo (Played on PlayStation 5)

If not for Hollow Knight: Silksong this year, this would be just about the best Metroidvania I have played in many years. Everything about this game, from the banging music, the gorgeous pixel art, to the quirky characters, and a surprisingly engaging story about late-stage capitalism, is top-notch. It’s perhaps my biggest surprise of the year in terms of not being aware of this game before release. Pippistrello really knocked my socks off.

I will be frank about a small gripe I have with it, however. The end of the game has a really rough difficulty spike that hits you like a bag of bricks out of nowhere, and it’s a brutal wake-up call. Kind of a shame given that until that point in the game, it’s been a fairly easygoing experience (I did die quite a lot though). That being said, the game does incentivize you to get all the stuff in the game world before getting you there to the endgame level (which is good), but it doesn’t make the fact that the difficulty is raised to pad out the game time that much better. That standout issue is possibly the only reason it didn’t make it on my top 10 this year.

Regardless of that late-game speed bump, I think the yoyo mechanics are so novel and fresh that they almost make up for that misstep, because attempting the final push to the credits is just so damn fun. Hell, playing all of the game is a blast. It’s a slight bummer that I am sorta soured by my experience with getting to its conclusion, but it doesn’t take fully away from Pippistrello and the Cursed Yoyo being one of my new faves in the genre.
Play this game!
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Sword of the Sea (Played on PlayStation 5)

No more have I felt like I had been playing a work of art (literally) than when I played Sword of the Sea this year.
As previously mentioned, this is the new joint from Giant Squid: makers of indie ‘art games’, ABZU and The Pathless, (as previously mentioned in my Herdling write-up). ‘Art Games’ as a term may be a bit of a misnomer, but I think it gets the point across of what these types of experiences trade in, somewhat. These games are art in the most literal sense, a cacophony of pure creativity and color the likes of which we don’t see in the industry too often. The DNA from those previously stated games is carried into this new venture in a particular way, with a lot of the craft and design from the two games influencing Sword of the Sea quite heavily.

It also has maybe the best-looking water tech in a game… ever? Bold claim to be sure because I dunno if you know this… Video games? They look good as hell these days. I am comfortable saying that, however, because it just floored me every time they showed off that stuff. It’s gorgeous. It somehow plays even better, still. You ride a flaming sword like a surfboard, man. It’s easy to grock and so satisfying to pull off sweet tricks too. They get the small stuff just right, especially with the controls being fine-tuned ‘just so’, to pull off what they ask of you in the more time-based trials that make up some of the short and sweet side content hidden just off the golden path in the game. The game is supremely enjoyable top to bottom, it’s easy to play, and easier even on the eyes to behold. You can also finish it in a night. I appreciate games that respect my time.

What an absolute pleasure to play it was. You like Tony Hawk, but instead of half-pipes, you've got big ass waves to pull off gnarly tricks on?? Sword of the Sea has got your back, and it’s got the visual chops to keep you around for the length of it, too. I think it’s Giant Squid’s best game. A true landmark for visual splendor in a storied medium.
Check it out!
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DOOM: The Dark Ages (Played on PlayStation 5)

If you know me, you know one thing. I like me some DOOM games.
This being the case, it may come as a surprise that this new effort from id Software didn’t make the cut for my top 10 this year. I think I am bummed out by that, honestly. I feel like I kinda just played through it, it washed over me, I got the experience in and enjoyed it, and that was really it…
The most damning thing I can say about it is that it didn’t stick with me at all.

This isn’t an indictment of this game or its particulars, I promise! It plays amazingly, looks like a heavy-metal album, and has the tone and seriousness of a heart attack (which may be a dig at it, I’ll admit…), but at its core, they reinvented the DOOM formula yet again in this trilogy— for a successful third time, even. It’s a credit to the creativity of the designers for having the confidence and the wherewithal to execute not just once but three times in innovating on a very well-understood FPS template, in the DOOM series. It’s remarkable how different each of the three games in the reboot trilogy plays and how successful each is at different aspects of a core idea. I applaud them and their efforts in that regard. While I think I enjoyed playing it the most out of the three in this new series, it didn’t engage me as much as DOOM: Eternal did with its brutal combat dance, or DOOM (2016) did with the tongue-in-cheekiness when it came to its story and extensive lore.

DOOM: The Dark Ages is a solid, well-made game that gets a bit too up its keister with the whole ‘badassness’ of the ‘Doom Slayer’ analogue, and while it’s cool to play through, it feels just more ephemeral and not as engaging as the two previous entries for the reasons I just stated.

Great game! Just not top 10 material, you know?
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Pokémon Legends Z-A (Played on Switch 2)

So… I played 70 hours of this game. That’s a lot of time to spend with something that didn’t make my top 10, but dammit, some cuts had to be made!
Pokémon Legends Z-A is one of the most engaging games I played this year because it was just that: engaging. I was completely sucked in, and didn’t venture to move on to other things until I had 100 percent completed everything the base game had to offer. I even did the extra ‘Jacinth Royale’ side mission quests, which involved a lot more grinding after I had already grinded the Z-A Royale for multiple hours. I also got ALL of the dex and the completion list done for this one. I played and saw EVERY BIT of this game before I moved on. There is also that DLC. Eh… I probably won’t play that any time soon. For the base game, I have done everything, so that’s fine by me.

One of the things I recognize about myself is that I have an addictive personality. When I like something… I don’t just like it— I obsess over it. I make it my whole ‘deal’ for a while. I become one with the thing that is the object of my passion slash affection. This has pros and cons, but mostly cons, chiefly the latter being that I feel like I had a gaming year that was pre-Legends Z-A, and post-Legends Z-A, with the time I spent in between both eras feeling like a sort of vacuous black hole filled with cloudy remembrances of monster catching and pink crystal smashing. I kinda remember things I did in between, but I would be hard-pressed to recall, because for the better part of October and into November this year, it was all Pokémon all the time.

I am not going to lie, it was a bit of a destabilizing point of my year in a way because of this obsession. The only reason it isn’t on my top 10 is that the other games are more deserving. But if I had to award this game “the most played new game award from 2025”, this game would be the winner. Pokémon Legends Z-A is fantastically fun and incredibly ‘sticky’, and innovates the established ‘Pocket Monster’ formula more than even its older sibling, Pokémon Legends Arceus, ever did. I loved the time I spent with Z-A, but if you ask me the particulars, I may just give you a glassy-eyed look of bemusement and tell you I enjoyed myself.
”Good game!!!” (*I say as I laugh heartily, whilst wrapped in a straitjacket behind asylum bars…*).
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Assassin’s Creed Shadows (Played on PlayStation 5)

Whew. Glad that’s over. Okay, I did enjoy this game, but I am thrilled to be done with it. My issues with Assassin’s Creed Shadows have more to do with the franchise’s woes at large than anything of a piece to do with the make-up of this particular entry. The ‘meta-narrative’, shall we say, of Assassin’s Creed as a franchise is a fucking mess.

In previous entries, there has been an ever-present ‘main narrative’ of Assassin’s Creed that strung together every mainline and secondary entry to the series in a continuous (albeit sloppy) way to keep the main thrust of the ‘real life’ (in-game) proceedings going. Even if it was bad, it continued, and even if it didn’t make sense, it was there in a way that you could point to it and say, “Hey, this shit is messed up and confusing as fuck, but dammit if they aren’t still trying to keep the narrative going after all these years…”; Assassin’s Creed Shadows all but dispenses with the winding meta-narrative and sorta just… gives it all up. Some could argue they gave up after Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, where they at least attempted something novel with the whole Abstergo Employee ‘adventure game’ portion of the narrative. At least that was an attempt.

Even Assassin’s Creed Origins, and its sequel Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (an awful AC game, and an even blander RPG game to boot, in my opinion— but I digress) made ‘attempts’ at furthering the narrative with ‘human savior stand-in’ Layla Hassan (the less said about her involvement, the better). But I think I prefer having those things rather than not having ANYTHING at all to gesture at to judge what they are doing with the large story they had felt so compelled to include in each game, up until now.
Having nothing is worse than it being bad. Or else, why have you asked me to care for so long?

It feels aimless, and I feel weirdly betrayed by it all? Honestly, that bit is on me because I am the sucker who continues to play these despite my own misgivings with the franchise writ large. I have let myself be the Assassin’s Creed ‘Guy’ in my life, and that’s a problem with me, full stop. I am at the point where I dunno if I can get off the train, though. I’ve come this far, and I like the series still sometimes, but I dunno.

This is maybe more of a cry for help than an honorable mention at this point, but as for the game in question, it’s a bit underwhelming, at times boring, and Naoe is fun as hell to play as. There are too many targets (I was tripping on fuckers to stab at times when I wasn’t even hunting them), and the base stuff and companions are underbaked. Yasuke surprised me by the end with how much I came around on his narrative stuff, but yeah, that’s all. The whole package is good.
Just that. ‘Functional Assassin’s Creed’.

Is that okay? Is that worth playing? To me… I don’t think it matters. I will probably continue to play them all anyway.

I… have to know… You understand, don’t you?
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Wanderstop (Played on PlayStation 5)

Cutting this one… Killed me. I think it is so brilliant. It’s my favorite indie game of the year that didn’t make my top 10.
It’s almost… an ‘anti-game’? If there is such a thing?? In so many ways, it breaks convention, yet is unconcerned with innovating in any discernible way on any part of the gameplay. It presents itself as an interactive tale, and you play it. That’s it. These are all positives, I will add.

Wanderstop doesn’t care about meters, or goals, or even progress, really. It’s a game without a ‘pace’. The meta-game ‘trophies’ are also unimportant to Wanderstop, and I think they’re only there because PlayStation mandates they be there. Every achievement or trophy is time-gated, and you unlock them as you play just by existing in the game world. Now, we can have a conversation about meta-layer level ‘trophies’ and about them being ‘real’ or if they even ‘matter’, I guess, but that’s not really the point, is it? It’s fascinating stuff! Why do we care about these things? Why do I care? Does it offer some sort of kernel of achievement during a life full of rug-pulling and disappointment?
Maybe.

Maybe it’s not about that. But that also doesn’t matter. The game struck up this conversation within myself. That’s cool. That’s important to me. Games don’t do that. Games usually don’t even venture to have these sorts of conversations. It bucks convention. Wanderstop has something to say. Boy, does it say it too.

A lot of the message of this game can come across as ‘preachy’, and I get that. But I also get the vibe that the developers were ‘weary’ when they decided to make this game. Because, ultimately, at its core, it is a game about burnout. We don’t get games that talk about that, but at some point or another, we have all been burned out by work or life. Having a game that talks about that topic, hidden beneath the guise of a ‘cozy game’ sim about making tea for travelling customers, is brilliant.
The ‘game’ part of the game is enjoyable as well, but again, the developers are not concerned about the particulars in that way. You can fail tea recipes for folks, and yet, surprisingly, the game continues with no penalty. It’s a game about life and how we try and ascribe importance and motivation to specific portions of it.

It’s a game about wanting and understanding and needing. Never have I played a game that elicits such a specific yearning in me to relax, but not knowing how to do so. It’s a fantastic game that I can’t stop thinking about. It should be on my top 10 because I feel this way, and yet, I don’t think, as a game, it’s strong enough to be up there. It’s an anti-game in some ways, like I’ve said, and that is inherently a frustrating thing for me. In a way, I like that, though.

People should play this game. It’s one of a kind. I look forward to whatever this studio Ivy Road does next. It’s one of the strongest debut indie games I can remember. I’m sorry I had to cut you, Wanderstop. You were almost there. You would win the award for ‘most likely to induce an existentialist wake-up call in me’ handily, though. The fact that it made me ask myself tough questions is uncomfortable, and I think that’s healthy. I just don’t know if I ‘liked’ that, per se. But it was definitely interesting.
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Blue Prince (Played on PlayStation 5)

I wrote about this game here! It’s frustrating and brilliant in both equal measure. If I had any more revised thoughts to give on it, I would say that it was a ‘hot and heavy’, week and a half that I played this, and for a while, it was my game of the year. But when was this? Like May? I dunno, but when it came out, it was all I could think about. Another obsession, you could say.

So why didn’t it make it? Again, I'm using that old crutch I’ve been leaning on this whole exercise: there are 10 games better than Blue Prince this year, I believe. But not many more. It would be like… my number 12. Right behind Wanderstop, the game I mentioned just a bit ago. It’s a brilliant game handicapped by its design, and you either like it or you don’t. It would be far better if some amount of reliable permanence kicked in towards the later runs, or when you needed just one more thing to get where you need to go. Not having that kills runs, and ultimately, what killed Blue Prince on the top 10 list for me this year.
It is undoubtedly a flawed masterpiece, I maintain, however, and I shall be thinking about it this year, and many years to come, I expect.
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Ball x Pit (Played on Switch 2)

Out of all the roguelike games I played this year that I dabbled with (that I didn’t see the end of), Ball x Pit was by far my favorite. There is a sort of mashy, devil-may-care attitude to the design of Ball x Pit that I really admire. It’s relatively simple as a concept: ‘Roguelike Breakout’ with increasing difficulties and multiple characters (and a town builder…? That part kinda doesn’t work for me…) to use as you play through a stage-based selection of scrolling arcade maps to reach your ultimate goal of killing a big boss at the end. Very simple idea.

The complexity comes with the ‘fusion and evolution’ mechanics of the random perks you attain, where you can mix and match certain perks’ attributes to achieve either a higher level of said perk, mix it with other perks, or evolve it into something else entirely. It keeps each run feeling fresh and breezy without causing too much frustration. Even dying isn’t really that bad, given how long each run is. When you succeed in a run at least on the normal difficulty, the time spent in each session caps out from anywhere around 15-25 minutes.

If you fail, or even if you beat a run, you are incentivized to start again, and the winnings you get from each run go toward your town center, where you build new projects to house new characters after you receive specific blueprint drops in a run, or you build resources to mine with the town residents in a pinball-esque harvesting minigame. While that aspect of the game isn’t wholly successful, I felt the push to keep playing because the whole damn game is just so fun to play. I keep returning to it off and on when I feel the urge, and the only reason I didn’t add it to my top 10 is that I just didn’t finish it. I played a lot of stuff this year, and wanted to keep my top 10 with the things I really dedicated myself toward seeing through, and I can’t quite say that I did with Ball x Pit. I imagine, however, I will be playing it for the foreseeable future, until I do.
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Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (Played on Switch 2)

Another casualty of not finishing it before I solidified my top 10 this past year. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is everything the first game is and more: which is to say it’s a visual novel narrative game with even more mechanics. Not to be reductive, even. Just descriptive.
I think while the story about another ‘sleeper’ (a robotic shell for a sleeping human working off corporate debt) living in a sci-fi capitalist future amongst the stars is good again this go round, the extra mechanics they add here are a little much for me.

Like in the first entry, you get up to 6 randomly rolled dice to use for activities on a static map— or space station/job board/space map to further your wealth, deal with hard problems in society, and deepen relationships with those you care about. The added features here come down to the depth of said dice rolls, like ‘dice health’, where you have to replenish the uses of your dice that either get damaged by poor application or get worse as you turn the page of the day. Also, on top of this new addition, you have a ‘stress’ meter that gets whittled down as hard decisions impact you and your crew while you either do jobs or encounter dangerous circumstances.

Both of these are nice ideas, but in practice are incredibly stressful to me as a player. The first game was a bit more easygoing and laissez-faire with the ‘rpg-ness’ of the mechanics, and I kinda liked it better that way, so I could see the story. Maybe I will kick down the difficulty from normal and take another bite at the apple in the new year, because for now, I am a bit put off by the friction of this new entry. I may end up liking it by the end, who knows? I adored the first one, and if they keep making these, I will be around to play them, I bet. I should get through this eventually, and I do admire what it’s going for more than I don’t.
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Shinobi: Art of Vengeance (Played on PlayStation 5)

The final game I wanted to mention here, but I didn’t finish. This game seems great. I don’t have too much to say here other than everything you do in this game is bad-ass, and it feels great. Lizardcube is coming into its own after that wonderful Wonder Boy and the Dragon’s Trap modern remake, and its next game: their extremely successful debut in the beat-em-up genre with Streets of Rage 4, a new entry in the classic video game franchise. Everything I have seen and played here has been terrific, and I am looking to play more of this in the coming months. With the return of Ninja Gaiden getting two new-ish entries (a remake and a retro throwback), this, and some other gems… It’s kinda ‘The Year of the Ninja’, huh? Great stuff, all around.


DISHONORABLE MENTIONS:
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond
This game needs to be talked about sometime. I don’t think I really liked it. It’s poorly designed (the green crystals… are you fucking kidding me?), poorly paced, has an outright bad story and villain, and Samus is mostly impotent throughout. I found it bleak, boring, and most of all a waste of my time.
That’s a damn shame. At least Miles Mackenzie was cool (genuinely).

Cronos: The New Dawn
Bummed about this one. I wanted to end up liking it more than I actually did. It’s really well paced until the very end. It’s a taut, well-designed, and crafted horror game that, despite its difficulty spikes, is a really interesting time. The story is kinda bad, which sucks because it’s a cool world with interesting characters, and the enemy faction you fight against: “The Orphans”, are disgusting and malleable in really cool ways. The end of this game is terrible, and the boss fight at the end is one of the worst encounters I can remember. Fuck that shit. Memorable game, I will say. Looks incredible on PS5.

Wheel World
Another bummer it’s here. I like this game, but it’s completely compromised technically on console. Great mechanics, quirky story, but the whole game is handicapped by how it runs and the myriad glitches I hit. I dunno if they have fixed anything since I reviewed it here, but I was sad to give it the rating I did. Bummer, dude.

Mario Kart World
Maybe the disappointment of the year?
The track design is awful. The open world is lifeless, unstructured, and a complete mess. It’s a travesty this game got shipped in the way it did. It gets overlooked with how good the actual racing is, but these are huge issues that just get missed when people talk about it. I wrote about it here, too, so give it a read for my full thoughts. Don’t get me started about the menus either. Good god, they’re terrible.
Actually, fuck this game. What the fuck, Nintendo?
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ADDENDUM: Games That Missed the Honorable Mentions
(Gonna fill you in on why these didn’t make any list for me, but are worth talking about in a footnoted capacity.)

Ninja Gaiden Ragebound
Good game, but left a lot to be desired on the platforming front. A pretty strong outing by the developers, The Game Kitchen, though. I wish the story were better, too.

Blippo+ (Played on Switch)
Not really a game, but I love the effort. ‘Deep space cable’ as an idea is hilarious, and I’m shouting it out here. Coolest idea of the year. Thank god for the Playdate. Kinda don’t wanna say more about it. If you are a child of the dial-up world or the mid to late ’90s or early 2000s, like I am, you will find a lot to like here.

Monster Hunter Wilds
A game that never really sank its fangs into me. I liked it and beat it, but found it difficult to return to. Maybe it’s just too easy, and there isn’t enough sicko shit here anymore, I dunno. Cool game, but I haven’t thought about it too much after the fact. The animation work Capcom pulls off with their monster fights is insane, though.

Is This Seat Taken?
A fun puzzle game that outstayed its welcome for me. I was going to review it on this site, but couldn’t bring myself to. Glad I played it, but I shouldn’t have completed it 100 percent. It’s a bit too much game for the idea itself.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion
I adore Tribute as a developer, and their previous beat-em-up game, TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge, is a mainstay on both my PS5 and my Switch 2. I have beaten that game like 8 times all the way through. I guess this new one didn’t stick with me the same way. That or my appetite for Marvel as a concept is waning a bit (I’m more of a DC guy anyway…). Fun game, pretty short, and very worth playing. Lots of fun, unique characters on the roster you can pick from.

DELTARUNE (Chapters: 1-4)
I like Undertale. I liked this. I like both games. They aren’t my whole personality or anything, though. There is a lot of ‘Tumblr energy’ in this game that I just straight up do not relate to. But I think the thing that is most off-putting to me about this whole series is the fandom (which is insufferable, save for my friend Slade, who is normal about it), that worships before Toby Fox’s golden loafers. He is a god above gods and a man above men to them, and it’s weird. Good games, though, good games.
It’s just my opinion, okay?
——————————————————————————————————————Lots to say here. If you stuck around to peruse, thanks! I have had an up-and-down year in my personal life, and while I attempted to write as much as I could, between playing all these games, running my side gig projects (like this here), and being a busy parent with another one on the way (crossed fingers), I have been spread pretty thin. Not to mention how busy I have been at work in my professional endeavors.

I appreciate those who have stuck around. While I appreciate the eyeballs, of course, just know that I appreciate you. I wouldn’t keep doing it if I didn’t love this medium, and although writing can be painful, I am also happy I am building a platform to do that on. For all those subscribed, and for all those who might after reading this, thank you from the deepest parts of my heart. I cherish every one of you.

Here is to a better 2026. While the world may be in shambles, we can press on knowing that games are great and we have at least one good thing to look forward to in life. Love you all. Stay tuned for my other lists coming out in the next month! I am chipping away at trying to find a place to talk about all the games I played this year in some form, as well as my overall top 10 and game of the year winner.

I feel as though I should properly introduce myself here, given that it’s a new year... I am “The Drifter”: Power Glover, and it’s been my pleasure. Yes. That is my real, birth name. Don’t wear it out, yeah?
As Dave Dameshek says, “It’s been a thin slice of heaven.”

Honestly? It’s been a hell of a year. Both in video games, in a positive sense, and in my personal life, where it has been nonstop craziness. We travelled a TON this year for family. It was nice taking a couple of vacations, as well as making a few weekend trips for some friends’ weddings this past year (to the bride I discussed Metaphor ReFantazio with at your reception— you are the REALEST). Still, all in all, it’s been one busy calendar year for me and my family. In good, wholesome ways mostly. But work has been so stressful for me.

Not to get into the particulars, but it’s the age-old issue of doing so well working for a company that refuses to rehire a position in my department. Someone who had run the warehouse I work at left after twenty-some odd years, leaving me to run a warehouse by myself, with no training, no help, and a mess of an inventory space to go through (that I am still sorting out, by the way). I picked up the slack, and now I am rewarded with more work. That’s corporate America for you. No raises either. I get tired of being jerked around.

I’d leave, you know, if anyone else would hire me, but no one seems to want to give me a job. I have an excellent work history, and I have been here in the warehouse coordinating for the better part of 3 years (this is my 2nd stint in the company after leaving once for poor management), and I have never been fired anywhere I’ve been. What gives?? Anyway, that’s a glimpse of what I have been dealing with. At least I have my own office, good insurance, and lots of PTO to use. I shall be using some of it soon for the holidays, I imagine, too. So it isn’t all bad— but it could be better, right?

What has been good are video games. They’ve been REALLY good this year, in particular, I think. I would venture to say that by the time it’s all done and dusted, this year is gonna be one we remember, along with the top years in gaming as it comes to releases. The best years in gaming vary for folks, but I think most people in the industry and abroad think that the years: 1998, 2001, 2007, 2011, 2017, (and maybe 2020) are the truly best years we have had for game releases since the medium’s inception. I really do think you can throw 2025 in that group, too, given the sheer dearth of quality games that you can play on your console or PC of choice this calendar year.

If I were to rattle off some of the best games I’ve played this year, I would put them up there with some of the very best any year had to offer, strength on strength. It’s wild how much good stuff this year has had.

SO, to tackle this recapping of the year we have had so far, I think the best way to do it is by slicing it up piecemeal, discussing the segments on the whole, or chatting about the various groupings of games that are on my mind this year. I think of putting games into ‘buckets’ when talking about them, mostly, and sorting these things out this way works for my brain... This is a check-in, so as soon as I hit publish on this thing, it’s gonna age. I think that’s okay, too. I am becoming more accustomed to change and being okay with that in my life as I get older. It can be good for opinions to ebb and weave and completely change as times roll on. I think that’s okay. In my head, while that idea isn’t the ‘neatest’ and ‘tidiest’ thing to do, I think I am just gonna ignore my brain for a moment and go with my gut. I’m gonna be a little messier this go around. I hope you enjoy.

(This is gonna be a series, I think. Gonna talk about what I have touched this year for this entry. As I move on, I will hit all the various game buckets I have placed my video games in thus far. Enjoy!)

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The Drifter Dabbled: The Games I Touched (But Didn’t Finish)

“Despelote”: (Played for 1 hour on PS5)

This is a really neat thing. I will come back to this one. It’s one of those things that is so personal, well-made, and short that I can’t pass it by completely. I like a lot about this one, but for some reason, I can’t quite bring myself to find the time to give myself over to it. In “Despelote”, you play as a little child in the year 2002, obsessed with soccer as your home country of Ecuador is going through turbulent socio-economic times, while in the background, their national soccer team attempts to make it to their first appearance in the FIFA World Cup.

This seems to be an autobiographical story-based game about the developers’ childhood in Ecuador during this time period, and I would be doing myself a disservice not to see this through. It seems very good. It’ll have to wait, though, as you’ll see with the other games on this list— I have had so much to play and so little time. Cool game!

“Deliver At All Costs”: (Played for a couple of hours on PS5)

On paper, this game should be my jam. A package delivery game with the 50’s “Red Scare”/Nuclear Family, ‘ah shucks’ vibes paired with a destruction, offroading RC Pro-Am style isometric arcadey action? Sign me the hell up!

There are some fit and finish issues I have with this thing on a purely technical level (the character models, the environments, and the UI seem to be a bit on the lower budget end of things), but the core conceit of smashing through literally an entirely destructible island is very fun. The controls are a bit too squirrelly for my liking, however. After a particularly frustrating time fighting the driving mechanics in one of my sessions with it, paired with doing a few annoying couple of delivery side quests to boot, I ultimately decided to put it down.

It’s published by Konami, weirdly enough, so I would’ve hoped that Far Out Games would’ve gotten the budget to make what they wanted at this modest scale of a game, but the experience playing this thing left me feeling pretty wanting by the time I moved on from it. It’s neat, at the very least. Not sure if I will come back to it. If I do, I won’t be this year.

“Gears of War: Reloaded”: (Played for around 4 hours on PS5)

The thing is, I’ve played this one before. Like twice, actually. I played the original on Xbox 360 and liked it, and again, when The Coalition rereleased Gears of War Ultimate Edition on the Xbox One. This is really just another refresh of that Gears Ultimate version, and while it’s good, it doesn’t seem improved enough to play through again this year. Gears 1 is a good game, but I think Gears 2, as well as 3, are vastly superior to it in many respects. If they ever remade those, I would be there in the tank for it, I imagine. Gears with no Horde mode just feels wrong, you know? That mode didn’t come around until 2, I know, but still. It’s just weird to think of a Gears game not having one now.

If I get a wild hair to play the series again from the start, though, I will be playing this version of Gears 1. I think I bought this thing for the novelty of it. Playing Xbox Studios games on other consoles is very weird for me still, and I haven’t gotten over the whole porting situation yet with Microsoft just dropping the exclusives on every competitor’s platform (but Nintendo’s, strangely enough). Now with Halo: Combat Evolved getting a full-blown remake for the Xbox Series, PS5, and PC, as well, it’s safe to say it’s just gonna feel weirder soon, I think.

“Avowed”: (Played for 5 hours on Xbox Series S)

Out of all the games I just briefly touched this year, this is the one I want to get back to the most. Everything about this game worked for me. I loved the world, the companions that I met, and the story was very engaging from what I saw of it. “Avowed” takes place in Obsidian’s “Pillars of Eternity” universe of CRPGS. Every bit of dialogue, flavor text, and customizable bit and bob of this thing seems great. I like what I have seen so far.

The best part of this game so far? Brandon Keener, the voice of Garrus Vakarian from the original “Mass Effect” series, voices one of the main companions in “Avowed”, and that’s a huge draw for me. There is something about his particular timbre that I like… he sounds very soothing. Actually, I had a jumpscare regarding him as an actor while watching HBO’s medical drama “The Pitt” the other day, seeing Keener playing a secondary character in a dramatic arc during the first season. Very odd listening to him actually talk on screen after having played those games previously.

But I digress…

You’ll sense a trend coming up in the games I haven’t finished. A lot of these titles are Xbox or PC exclusive. I sold my Series S this year to help fund the purchasing of my Switch 2— and lemme tell ya I do not regret that decision at all, so far. I do still want to play this game, but I think it’ll be once it goes elsewhere. I made the right decision. Hopefully, “Avowed” comes out on PS5 soon so I can take another crack at it, one day. Great game.

“South of Midnight”: (Played for 3 hours on Xbox Series S)

This is another game I want to get back to. When they put it on something other than an Xbox, that is. “South of Midnight” is a very thematically unique game dripping with rich Black Americana, swamp bayou brilliance, and confident music. The opening of this game is a real treat, with a set-piece that sweeps you right off your feet at the start. I really enjoyed what I played of it.

I’ve heard about the criticisms of this one, however. Combat outstays its welcome and gets tedious towards the end of the game’s short 6-8 hour runtime, but in my time with it, I haven’t had any such qualms. So far, it’s a beautifully crafted, wonderfully realized little passion project from Compulsion Games, that is lightyears ahead of their previous narrative survival game misstep, “We Happy Few”. A game that had a killer trailer, wanted to be “Pathologic” (cult classic PC game you should look up), and really let me down on all fronts.

I would like to take another stab at this one, one day.

“The Rogue Prince of Persia”: (Played 3 hours on PS5)

I think I have changed my mind largely on the roguelike genre. I used to really despise the games in that category for some reason. I’ve lamented on this Substack about this very thing, but games like “Balatro”, “Hades”, and “Slay the Spire” have disabused me of that opinion, I think. Really, the games I hate in the genre the most have gotta be “Dead Cells”, and “Returnal”. There is just a sweet spot that the genre has to have between runs that doesn’t feel so punishing as to completely turn me off from playing them.

I gotta say, while “Returnal” is fun to play, dying from an environmental hazard 90 minutes into a run from something offscreen, and being sent back to the beginning of the game is a crushing experience that soured me to no end while playing it.

“Dead Cells” issue is pacing. It’s very stop-and-go. I feel as if I am constantly being slowed down by enemies and hazards in that game. In a roguelike, I wanna haul ass. I’m sure for skilled players you can do it, but it feels akin to Sonic the Hedgehog when he loses momentum by getting hit and losing his rings, for me.

“The Rogue Prince of Persia” is more the latter than the former in these examples, but the game is very fun, well made and something I might return to. This game was developed by Evil Empire, the support team that maintained the original “Dead Cells”, and its DNA is heavily apparent in this new game. I think I dropped it ultimately because I have more games to play and even better roguelikes to chip away at this year. Fun game, but not as memorable as I would’ve liked.

“Absolum”: (Played 3 hours on PS5)

This is my kind of game. I really enjoyed what I played of this. The concept of a roguelike beat-em-up is a very unique idea, and it’s a clever twist on a mature and well-established genre. The fact that “Absolum” does so much with the trappings of a run-based, stage-by-stage beat-em-up is really refreshing, given the concept. I haven’t seen a roguelike do it quite like this, and the results are extremely satisfying, well thought-out, and endlessly engaging in terms of how varied each run could be in a mechanical sense. Of all the run-based video games I have dabbled in this year, this and “Hades II” are by far the best feeling video games to play in the genre.

“Absolum” is an absolute gem, but, unfortunately, I couldn’t consistently find matches on console to party up with like-minded players to run through the campaign reliably. It’s a bummer because if I had better luck, I probably would have played more of it this year. I’m excited to get back to it at some point, though. Maybe I will ask my wife if she’d be interested.

“Eternal Strands”: (Played 2 hours on Xbox Series S)

Another casualty of selling my Xbox. Oh, well.

“Eternal Strands” was on Xbox Game Pass when I looked into it for a bit. I am a sucker for narrative games with interesting gameplay hooks— especially from indie studios. Games like “TOEM” with their camera-based cataloguing mechanics, “The Sexy Brutale” with its time-manipulation deduction flavoring, and even this year’s “Wheel World” with its lite bike modding system, are some recent examples I can think of from independent outfits that really excel as games that have strong gameplay hooks to engage in. “Eternal Strands” carries the same philosophy of great gameplay hooks for players, but with multiple, deep gameplay systems in its makeup.

In combat, fights with large-scale monstrous enemies play out similarly to encounters found in games like “Shadow of the Colossus” or the “Monster Hunter” series of games, where you can mount foes to attack weak points in their proverbial carapaces or armor to gain an edge. There is also a robust and very fleshed-out physics-based magic system that you, as a Weaver, can use to topple enemies, subdue, inflict status ailments, and trigger environmental hazards during fights.

Both of these alone are very ambitious by themselves, but pair those mechanics with a deep narrative, impressive writing chops, and a well-rendered companion conversation tree with your NPC supporting cast, and what you’ve got here is a fascinating, dynamic potpourri of RPG-lite systems that come together shockingly well given their scope. I am aching to see more of this game, because the first impressions I had of it were great.

One day, I will get this on sale, play through it in its entirety, and I am almost certain I will like it even more.

“Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist”: (Played for 4 hours on PS5)

Do me a favor. Take a look at screenshots of this thing. It’s just GORGEOUS. Love the art style of this game. I dabbled slightly with this team’s previous game: “Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights”, but never got back to it before this recent entry hit this past spring. Everything about the way the game looks, plays, and sounds is fantastic. The setting, music, and story especially are haunting in their dreary melancholy, and I just loved every bit of this I played.

At it’s heart its a 2D ‘search-action’ game (props to game industry veteran Jeff Gerstmann for coming up with a real, descriptive genre name that isn’t ‘Metroidvania’) with ‘souls-like’ mechanics: where you move from place to place, level up your character, increase their magical capabilities (that remind me visually, and functionally of the ‘Stands’ in “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure”), and fight difficult enemy types to gain items to increase your access to the different gates of the world map, as it were. I love these games, and “Ender Magnolia” was hitting all the familiar notes when I put it down for other things. I will come back to it. It’s just a matter of time, really.

“Elden Ring: Nightreign”: (Played 5 hours on PS5)

For my last journal entry, I will admit, I just didn’t click with this one. I just did not latch onto the whole idea of this game from the jump. I think the main trouble for me was squaring my feelings of being a rabid single-player From Software fanboy, against my aversion to multiplayer games on the whole, to how I play video games these days as a matter of course. I just don’t like squadding up with my friends that much. This is very much a me problem.

I will, no problem, play 50-60 hours of an RPG by my lonesome before even wanting to dabble in a few rounds of the newest and latest multiplayer offering. I just don’t like playing video games with people. I like playing games alongside folks, but not in the multiplayer sense. Like in the way we are hanging out on Discord, talking shit while I am grinding experience in a long RPG. That’s the kind of thing I like.

I chalk this aversion up to the sheer glut of established service-based multiplayer offerings out there being mostly, completely uninteresting to me. I am not interested in grinding hundreds of hours for shallow offerings. The corporate greediness of the monetary systems in these games is also a big roadblock to my enjoyment of these types of video games. I also have played many hours back in the day of both “Overwatch” and “Destiny 2” when they were new, and I sunk far too many hours in each for my liking.

At some point, you wonder why you’re doing it, grinding for the next bit or bob that will ultimately be swapped for a newer and shinier thing. Or leveling up a character that will also be static in an odd way. Where you are raising an account level and an hour count, but you aren’t making much of a marked difference in the game on the whole, regardless. It all feels very ‘hamster-wheely’ to me. Churning out gameplay for the sake of it. I just think the idea is very played out, for me personally. Occasionally, I will partake with friends if they beg, but if I have a choice, I usually abstain from the whole ordeal. If a From Software game didn’t reel me in, I don’t know if anything will be able to, if I am honest.

Now— back to play Assassin’s Creed Shadows, a long, tedious RPG filled with many ‘checklisty’ things to do on its large map. I like slop, but I wanna pick the slop I wanna eat. I’ve eaten too much of that other food for my liking.

Not much about the game. I just don’t like these types of things these days, and that’s okay.

That’s a quick recap! I will be doing more of these as we get deeper into ‘Game of the Year’ time, I think. So stay tuned for more things like this. I am experimenting with formats, so bear with me if it isn’t the usual thing I am known for here.

I also want to give out some categorical awards for this year in games. I have a podcast I do called “Stick Drift” (check it out here: https://youtube.com/@stickdriftpodyt?si=PxkpKjw_mhml9svB) where I will be doing this very thing come February next year, once I have played all the new 2025 video games I would like to before I engage yet again in GOTY discussions.

Thank you if you read this first entry— and like Dave Dameshek likes to say: “It’s been a thin slice of heaven!”

Ghost Bike was a far better name in my opinion. Wheel World just doesn’t have great mouth-feel, y’know?

Been a while! Kept you waiting, huh? Sorry… Been playing way too much Metal Gear lately…

Anyway… I have been playing some things!

Indie games have been very, VERY, good this year, and the dearth of high-quality titles on offer everywhere is exciting. This year for games has been excellent, especially since the stuff filling in the gaps between big releases has been on par, if not sometimes better, than the big-budget games that dot the release calendar. Great time to play video games if you ask me!

So, Wheel World used to be called “Ghost Bike”, at some point in development, and you know– I think I prefer that name over the one they went with. It’s fine, you know… it just doesn’t really ‘roll off the tongue’ for me, if I am honest. Bad mouth-feel. But I will say, name aside, I really dug Wheel World.

It’s a tight, cleverly designed little game that gave me thrills just as much as chills to have to deal with regarding its myriad technical issues. At least on PS5, which is where I played it. It’s tough. I am into almost everything this game is doing. It knows what it is and what it wants to be.

The premise of the game is this. You wake up in a field outside of an industrial building, go inside it, and find a broken bike that has been inhabited by a ghost named Skully. Skully is a fun guy, and lots of his dialogue is amusing and full of weird little anecdotes about what it’s like to be a floating spirit with a skull for a body. Great guy, that Skully. He proceeds to tell you that someone jacked all of his bike’s parts and that you need to help him challenge the perpetrators to craft the ultimate legendary ghost-bike.

After that, he yaks on about going to this big mountain called Mt. Send and doing a thing to fix the spirit world, and from there, you get your bearings in a starting zone, and off you go to do video game things. It’s one of the quickest ‘get up and go’s’, I have seen in a video game, recently. I guess, except in Donkey Kong Bananza, which literally gives you controls and off you go practically.

So yeah. That’s the beginning. The game is structured like so, following that: You go around a couple of large landmasses, divided up into Reputation-gated territories where you do all the stuff. Pretty much every activity that dots the map is a race, be it a sprint or a lap-based run through the hills.

Every race has 4 objectives to complete in each to attain completion for that activity, and as a reward for beating each, you attain ‘rep’ to challenge some of the toughest competition on the island. Most bosses have a minimum rep threshold that you have to meet or exceed to even challenge them, so seeing that sort of checklist-y design pop up here, for me, is a plus. I am a big fan of games that know they are games and do video-game things. It’s just fun to do tasks!

You finish objectives in races to gain rep points. They vary race to race, but they are usually as follows: finish in the top three of racers, finish in first, finish in first while collecting ‘K-A-T’ (where you collect the letters in your character’s name, which is a similar goal to grabbing letters during courses in a Tony Hawk game), and finish under a certain time set by the developers. Rinse and repeat. It’s fun to do all those tasks every race too, with most courses having a fair bit of variety, given the different parameters, course layout, the race’s format, and the specific biome section’s terrain distinctions. Doing all the ‘stuff’ in Wheel World is breezy, chill fun.

As you speed along the various highways, winding roads, and cul-de-sacs of the island, you collect pieces to add to your bike. Each part has pluses or minuses that you add or subtract from your bike’s overall makeup. Different parts are better or worse for various activities, and assembling the right bike is crucial to getting a race done right. You can find these parts in large orange boxes hidden in various alcoves, on top of large cliffs, and tucked away in bits of foliage. Every part you add can be swapped out at will (when you aren’t actively racing), and experimenting with these parts is maybe the highlight of Wheel World for me.

I just love it when games let me fiddle with vehicle customization. ‘Mad Max’ had this, where you could build the ultimate supercar for your wasteland questing (if you haven’t played Mad Max, please do…). Even in ‘Days Gone’, they had this bit of design, where you could kit out your specialized motorcycle to cruise along the Oregon apocalypse. Wastelands and apocalyptic settings just have lots of parts lying around, huh? Guess it’s the end times, go nuts!

I love customizing vehicles in games, which is weird because I really am not a vehicle guy in real life. Is this a sign I may become one? Probably not… but maybe? Jokes aside, this is my favorite part of Wheel World by far, and getting the right bike built for the course always felt great.

The bike is built so now to talk about the music that fuels the racing, right? My verdict is… The music is just okay. I like a fair bit of it, but it is a bit too ‘lo-fi’ for the races you are doing, which can be fast and frenetic. It does add layers to a beautifully rendered and presented world, but its inclusion seems a tad out of place, genre-wise, since you are mostly racing. I am looking for more Danny Baranowsky rather than Kavinsky, let’s say. I’m pumping blood through this race, I need some tunes to super-charge my soul, baby!

Regardless, what is there is good but not mind-blowing by any metric, and I think that’s fine. Just not my cup of tea, I think. Music is one of the most subjective forms of art, in my opinion, so tastes won’t be aligned for most folks, I imagine, regarding this.

Where it does kick in, however, is in the boss races where there are actual lyrics tied to the songs playing alongside courses. Those I do like, and wish we got more of them besides where they are placed, but they’re pretty great anyway.

The look of Wheel World has this sort of pastel, washed-out, cel-shaded look, with a chill and low-key presentation that brings to mind the works of the artist Moebius. It also reminds me of that game from a couple of years back, ‘Sable’. Very similar feelings here. (I should get back to that.)

It’s nice, and when the game is running well, it all looks and sounds great! The ticks of your bike as the gears shift up and down, and the foley of your bike wheels rolling across different terrain types, add to the flavor and themes of what Messhof is going for here. When it’s running well, it’s great.

But therein lies the issue I have with Wheel World. Well, a couple of issues, I think.

It’s just not ready for primetime. At least on console.

Messhof, as a studio, has dealt mostly in 2D with their previous titles, Nidhogg and its sequel, Nidhogg 2. Wheel World is entirely in 3D and on a different scope and level of complexity than what they have done previously, so I don’t want to be cruel when I say this, since I don’t think they are accustomed to polishing these sorts of experiences yet. This game is in rough shape. I regularly hit massive frame drops when things get hectic or fast. I was routinely in the later points of the game, hitting the low ‘teens’ to single digits for frame rate. I want to give them some grace, for sure, but it started hampering my enjoyment in the back half of the game.

It’s a shame, too. Because Wheel World is great! I can even forgive the weird model glitches and texture pop-in that crop up from time to time, but when my ability to play the game at a basic level was being hindered, I couldn’t help but feel very disappointed by it when it happened. It happened a lot in the last 2-3 hours of my time with the game, too, and it’s a large, ugly blemish on what I believe is a great game design-wise that people should play.

I don’t think I can recommend this game in the state that it is in currently, which breaks my heart. Hopefully, this game gets the technical attention it needs, because what is there is truly unique and well worth people’s time. I like Wheel World a fair bit, but in the state it is in technically, I think you should wait and play this game when it has been updated with a couple of patches to fix these issues.

I so desperately wanted to cheer this game on and recommend it to folks, but I just can’t right now. It’s good fun when it works and frustrating when it doesn’t. That’s pretty much it, for a verdict from me, I think. If you can stomach these problems, by all means check Wheel World out, but in my opinion, it would be better to wait and see how these big issues get fixed, because these problems soured my time with it by the end.

Wheel World is a good game riddled with technical issues that, if solved, could turn it from just okay to a great game. Don’t let it sneak on by, though. What’s there is great. You judge it for yourself, though. I can only inform you!

As always, keep gaming, and thanks for reading.

I’ve never seen “‘Ride’ with Norman Reedus”, on AMC, and I don’t think I will seek it out… But the product placement in Death Stranding (1) was hilarious. Bring back my Monster Energy, you bastards.

I need my stamina!

Okay…

So, the thing I said about Clair Obscur a month or so ago?

About it being my game of the year?... Yeahhh about that… Between playing this and barrel-blasting through Donkey Kong Bananza, that may no longer be the case.

I think Death Stranding 2 is perhaps the single most original and prescient work of art I have experienced in video games in the last quarter-century. It is truly a spectacular game.

Lofty claims aside… I think it is perhaps the most audacious and quirky AAA game I have ever played, too.

Kojima does what other developers would not: he inserts himself into every aspect of his creation, adding a distinct, crafted feel to the entire product. Everything in DS2 is a bespoke and unique piece of Kojima’s soul, injecting each tidbit and interesting mechanic found in the game with more thought, care, and heart than most titles you can see in this space. It may just be my favorite game I have played this year, and the past few years. It’s tough, though, given that we are only halfway through the year. Seems a bit early to crown it the ‘champ’ when I haven’t fully gotten through the year of our lord 2025, right? As seen with my Clair Obscur review, that confidence has proven to be my downfall. Maybe it’s just a banger year for games??

To start, I have very few criticisms to levy at DS2, so prepare for (maybe) the most biased review I have done yet on this Substack. I love this game. I truly think it’s one of the greatest games I have ever had the pleasure of playing.

Do you ever get that sense when you are playing a truly special game, that it is one of those ‘landmark’ experiences? Like, you think outside of yourself for a moment, and scrutinize the way you feel about something you are loving so wholly and completely– arriving at that rare verdict that you have been playing one of the very best games you’ve ever played?

Yeah, that was this game for me, in a nutshell.

Kojima is in his bag here in such a way that no one would dare imitate. I believe there are a few true ‘auteurs’ left making video games these days. True visionaries and industry luminaries who push the envelope and boundaries of what people think is possible in a digital landscape.

I think Sam Lake (the creative director and writer of some of Remedy’s biggest titles, like Control and the Alan Wake series) belongs in this select few; as do industry giants like Hidetaka Miyazaki from From Software, Todd Howard from Bethesda Game Studios, and Fumito Ueda from genDesign (known most famously as being the lead creative at legendary studio Team ICO, the iconic studio behind legendary PS2 titles ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, respectively).

Hideo Kojima is perhaps the most prestigious and decorated of this group, I think. Kojima stands a full head and shoulders over these talented individuals for his myriad accomplishments in the video game industry, and he is the trendsetter for an industry that is always evolving, it seems.

When these guys make video games, the whole industry pays attention. Like directors Denis Villeneuve or Christopher Nolan making a huge blockbuster movie for theaters, so too do these developers demand attention and respect for their work. More than all others, though, all eyes are on Kojima every time he is working with his team to create a new game.

Why is this the case? Well… Kojima is just a fucking weird dude.

This is a compliment, by the way.

He is invested in his games. So much so that when he is making one, he lets you know he was a part of many aspects of its inception and creation. Usually, the credit text in both trailers, on box art, and in the final product has his name thrown around all over it for the viewer/gamer to see.

Produced, designed, written, and directed by Hideo Kojima is kinda what you’ll see these days. The man wears many hats, it seems. It is disingenuous to think that he is truly doing all of the hard work himself, but like a David Lynch or even a Spike Lee, he makes sure to tell the audience that any game with his involvement in a creative capacity is his ‘thing’. Spike Lee will throw up ‘A Spike Lee Joint’ on his stuff, and David Lynch (RIP, you beauty of a man) movies will bear his name in turn, as well. These auteurs want you to know that not only did they have a hand in making these creative endeavors, but they are their proverbial ‘babies’, for lack of a better term. They, as creatives, are a part of every fiber of their project’s makeup from inception to delivery, and when these people show off their production fully formed, each aspect bears, in some way, their ‘mark’.

Kojima is known for slinging around his name, right? If you know anything about him making games, the man has an ego. He’s slapping that bitch everywhere. This was most prevalent in the Metal Gear Solid series (and especially in MGSV), where practically you couldn’t transition cutscenes damn near without seeing that Kojima made the fucking thing you’re playing. It could come off as pretentious and annoying (it sure has bothered me in the past), but I find it more comical than anything these days. It’s just very funny to see it’s ‘A Hideo Kojima Game’, 73 times, while being airlifted to a warzone in Metal Gear Solid V to ‘fulton’ sheep for your base’s animal petting zoo.

Kojima cracks me up, man.

So, back to the task at hand. Death Stranding 2.

In truth, it is a lot like the first one, albeit tighter, more fun, and less arduous. When DS1 hit the scene in 2019, it was somewhat of an anomaly. More than any other game I can think of in its promotional cycle, Death Stranding baffled and bemused many an industry pundit as it made its way to store shelves. At its heart, it was just a uniquely weird project to understand. What was with all the babies and tar monsters? Why was Norman Reedus so….Nude?

The lead-up to launch was entertaining to say the least. Every little bit until it came out, I remember the slow trickle of trailers hitting the timeline, with more and more people being increasingly bewildered by the odd visuals and morose music accompanying each. The discourse back then was a bit more… Tame? Civil? Seems like we have lost some decency since that time. This was before COVID, mind you, in 2019— a few months before the most devastating and socially disruptive human event in decades had taken place. Seeing the way people felt and talked about the game itself during that period and upon release was fascinating. The themes of the game itself were so prescient and forward-thinking that the fact that DS1 came out before a global pandemic is nothing short of stupefying.

The themes of connection (or the lack thereof) amidst an apocalyptic world event, and eventual mending of socioeconomic dynamics between people in places of refuge was felt so clearly in the real world during this time. Its truly amazing how timely the game all was, in hindsight, as it came to its setting, story, and themes. It was so eerily similar (if it weren’t in such poor taste), you could see the world and the state America found itself in as a weirdly topical marketing tool for a game that seemed, in some ways, to have predicted a small part of the future. Or at least, the people who made it had been thinking about those themes for some time, and it was by some cruel coincidence that some aspects of their design had been made manifest by a world in turmoil. Life usually impacts art, but rarely do you see art be so prescient and damn near ‘predictive’ of a world caught in the throes of a real event in history, almost simultaneously.

The fact that Kojima Productions did this very same ‘predictive theming’, again in Death Stranding 2, is so shocking, it’s hard to call it a fluke.

Is Kojima a sage? A wise man??

Could Kojima be Nostradamus?

Kojima has done this before, as well! Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty predicted the entire 21st Century as it comes to governmental oversight, and digital information in the modern age. The idea of informational dissemination, and internet ‘enshittification’, is not a new thought. Flooding an entire connected network full of people living a digital life with junk news, alternative information, and downright governmental deception is literally the entire plot of the back half of that game. Solidus Snake lays it out for you in the fight with Raiden. It’s so clear Kojima thought about the digital age as a new frontier for malfeasance and governmental conspiracy, specifically as it came to the U.S.’s involvement in the virtual global landscape.

So the idea that Kojima hasn’t done this thing before, and has been mostly correct about core tenets of certain themes of his games, is just wrong. He has, and Death Stranding 2 is the 3rd time I can think of where his art is holding a mirror up to life and vice versa.

Once you are lucky, twice you are wise, but three times…? You may have foresight.

I loved Death Stranding. The first one, that is. It was a prickly game that pushed back at you as you played it. Sure, there were tar monsters and evil mailmen that wanted to kill you and steal your precious packages so they could get a chemical ‘high’ from the pilfering. The main antagonist in that first game, however, was the terrain. Mother Nature is an indifferent host, of course. It has no motives other than to grow and decay whilst lifeforms coexist in symbiosis with it, living and dying alongside its systems. You feel like an ant in this world, made to work and make your meager, little life better, in a world nonplussed by your existence.

In short, you are a porter. Sam Bridges, to be exact. Played with all the dull charm and cardboard fluidity of a movie standee by popular television actor Norman Reedus. He is a cipher for you to view this world and move about inside it, and that’s about it. He gets more to do and say in the second entry, but even still, he clearly feels like a player stand-in to ask the weird story-related questions on behalf of us as gamers. Norman Reedus also has a kid named Mingus. Did you know that?

His involvement is interesting as it comes to this project. He was tied to another video game with Hideo Kojima attached (even before Death Stranding), called ‘Silent Hills’. A horror revival of a popular Konami series that had been in a state of flux for years prior. Konami put out what became maybe the most iconic demo for a game ever, in ‘P.T.’, or ‘playable teaser’, as a way to promote that the game was in development with Kojima directing and producing, cinematic luminary Guillermo Del Toro involved creatively, and Reedus starring in the game. When Konami and Kojima split creatively following the release of ‘Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’, ‘Silent Hills’ was cancelled, and the three attached went their separate ways… Or so we thought.

Norman Reedus and, soon, even del Toro showed up in the trailers of Death Stranding, following the split. Seems like their creative spark still had light. It’s unclear what del Toro’s involvement is in the Death Stranding series aside from his digital likeness being used for a non-playable, story-critical character, but the fact that he was included at all made the spirit of that cancelled Silent Hill game live on in the new project, even in a small way. One thing about Kojima? He is gonna scan some folks. You can’t party with the big boys unless you show the bottoms of your feet, right? (Justice for Stephanie Joosten, by the way.)

In the most concise of explanations, Death Stranding is a package delivery game. Except you are a heavily-armored UPS man that uses blood grenades to combat tar ghosts, with a mounted baby in a jar that can detect said spirits on your person. This is just a normal video game, I promise. They’re all like this!

You spend your time working for what remains of the government in DS1, linking up places of refuge (people in bunkers, shelters, or distribution warehouses) onto what is known as ‘the chiral network’, or the ghost internet. Normal video game things, you know? You deliver packages, people, pizza… whatever folks want to get sent to them. It’s very fun! I like this aspect of the series. The rhythms of prepping for a long journey and fixing infrastructure on the way are supremely satisfying to me.

A cycle of a normal delivery goes like this. You reach a terminal with a person or thing asking you to do something for them, you examine the cargo and weight of the freight for the delivery, plot your course, select your kit and equipment (selecting any vehicles along the way), and off you go. You reach your destination, with (hopefully) your cargo intact or in good shape, you get graded for said condition, and you increase your relationship level with the recipient. Rinse, repeat.

It’s such a satisfying loop. I think I could play both games all day and not get tired. It’s so specifically my ‘type of bullshit’, I could easily sink many, many hours into the games and not get bored. I have done this very thing.

Combined between the two titles, I have well over 150 hours of gameplay time. It’s gross, I know. What can I say… I like delivering pizzas to Troy Baker, okay?

The best thing about both games is this rhythm. The movement back and forth and the interplay of the systems between. It’s such a mechanically satisfying and audio-visual feast for the discerning porter, and I can’t get enough of the simulation in both titles. The unique thing about Death Stranding (besides, well, all of it) is the social dynamism at play with other players also playing the game alongside you, albeit siloed in their bespoke worlds with their versions of ‘Sam’ making the same deliveries.

When you drop a ladder or a bridge in either game, those items can appear in other players’ games to aid them on their journey. It includes social cooperation and integration while removing toxicity and hatred from its design, leaving the positive aspects of a social circle, while getting rid of what makes its inclusion bad for your health, so to speak.

You won’t have a single bad or ‘troll-y’ experience with the ‘strand-type’ mechanics of this game because they are passively integrated seamlessly into the experience. The only time you can interface with ‘people’ is by ‘liking’ their projects or items with a button, telling that person how much you appreciate the hard work they did to make your journey that much easier. I love the ‘jolly’ cooperation of this multiplayer, and its inclusion is maybe the most ingenious implementation of social mechanics I have seen in a game yet. It’s all a positive experience, too. How many games with social additions can you say that about?

The good and the bad go hand and hand, though. In both games, the BT (‘beached things’) or ‘tar-monster’ sections are arduous and grueling affairs. DS2 doesn’t improve on it either, but it makes the encounters less frequent, which is a welcome change. When these show up, they are a slog. Always.

Sometimes you will get your odredek (ghost GPS) warning you about a BT zone, and sometimes it will just happen to you. Story-related mostly, but otherwise it sometimes just shows up to fuck your day up. Being unprepared for this eventuality will make you have a baaad time. Equipping yourself properly is the key to your continued survival. That stuff sucks, but it’s a minor con to a game full of pros, for me. Again, DS2 improves on the original in so many distinct ways, from gameplay to graphical fidelity to the soundscape, it’s easier to enjoy the sequel with them removing the cruft from the original that burdened the player initially.

I guess this whole thing is a review of Death Stranding as a whole, with both games. I came here to review the second game, but you kinda have to talk about the first one to do so, right?

DS2, like I said, is a major improvement over the first. Especially in the story.

I like the themes and characters of that first game a lot, but here, Kojima has assembled a murderer’s row of talented voice actors, iconic character models (scanned after mostly real people), crafted a resonant and emotionally somber soundtrack (mostly curated and created by French music director and composer Woodkid) with a fantastic ending to the proceedings that really hits home just what this whole world is coming to, yet again.

To spoil the very ending of this game (or the last 3-4 hours of it) would be to ruin a great surprise. Kojima, as I have alluded to, is doing ‘it’ again. Nostradamus or not, he has figured out a new way to shock, inspire, and bewilder with the germ of this story, that is, again, so prescient as to predict the state of the world we currently find ourselves in.

I am not sure how he does it…

I wanna dive even deeper… But this review is long enough. I guess this is me talking about the whole series and its overarching themes and creation more than the game, here. But that’s fine. I haven’t even talked about ‘Dollman’. Fuck. It’s fine, though. DS2 needs to be seen to be believed anyway.

It’s a monumental, towering achievement in almost every category for me, and I will be thinking about its accomplishments, I imagine, for many years to come. Until the next Kojima Productions game, I expect. I highly recommend this game and all of its facets. It's more fun, more unique, more weird, and more Kojima than even the first Death Stranding, and I think it’s fantastic.

Alexa? Play ‘To the Wilder’, by Woodkid, again, please? I’m ready to feel something again.

Keep gaming!

(Or, I am so tired of being ‘Blue Shelled’ 3 times a match– OH FUCK NOT AGAIN!! *BOOM*)

Oh, yeah, it's been a while since they made one of these things, hasn't it? Mario Kart World is the highly anticipated sequel to the beloved Nintendo exclusive arcade racing mainstay “Mario Kart 8”. “Mario Kart 8” is one of those games that just never knew when to die, you know? This is mostly a positive development, given that after its initial release on the Wii U (an infamous failure of a console generation for Nintendo), it was then re-released on the more popular hybrid home console, the Nintendo Switch, in “Mario Kart 8 Deluxe”.

The Wii U was a complicated console. While Nintendo’s first-party games for the Wii U were solid additions to the less than popular console’s library, the industry’s third-party software support never really came about to fill in the various gaps in the system’s collection consistently, making for a disappointingly meager lineup of titles that never reached the lofty heights of its popular predecessor the Nintendo Wii, or its eventual descendant: the Switch.

“Mario Kart World” is the first installment in the popular arcade racing series since the Wii U’s “Mario Kart 8”, and the fact that it has been over 11 years since that time isn’t lost on me. It is high time we got a new entry. I am thrilled to say that (for the most part), ‘Mario Kart World’ delivers satisfying, accessible racing for all ages, that contains just the right amount of depth needed to justify a new entry on the gameplay front. Just like most Nintendo games, each Mario Kart game contains one or two crucial gameplay design ‘hooks’ that keep players engaged and motivated to interact with it.

In “Mario Kart Double Dash” for the Nintendo GameCube, there were 2-player karts, where one player drove the kart on the tracks while the other player assisted in using the various items gathered from the iconic rotating ‘Question-Mark Boxes’ floating about during races. In “Mario Kart Wii”, you had the option to select “motion controls” from the menus, which allowed players to control the karts manually by tilting their Wiimotes up and down.

“Mario Kart 8” had maybe the weakest gimmick of the recent batch of home console releases, where tracks in the game had an ‘anti-gravity’ portion to the circuit that served just to shake up matches with no greater gameplay maneuverability visually. MK8 doesn’t do much to move the series forward in any interesting or exciting way on the gameplay front, and I think it may be my least favorite of the series, gameplay-wise because it lacks a sense of creativity. It seems like a kind of bland, also-ran Mario Kart potpourri that is pleasing to the eyes and nose, but over time becomes unpleasant to interact with. I have had fun with that game, but I am not a huge fan of it or anything, I would say. I have also played a lot of MK8 Deluxe, and while it’s a good time with friends, it’s been endlessly supported with new racers, new tracks, and new things to do in the past few years, I have never really enjoyed coming back to it. It was time to get a brand-new Mario Kart, I thought.

A bit of history from me, though. I never grew up with a Nintendo console. I never owned a GameCube, Wii, Wii U, or anything home console from Nintendo, ever until my late high school years. For all the Nintendo exposure, I went over to my friends' houses to play those things. I was the odd one out a lot of times because I had an Xbox and PlayStation, and no Wii or GameCube. In some ways, it was symbiosis in our friend group where each set of friends would have something the other wouldn’t have, and we would go over to each other’s houses to play with each other’s respective things. It was cool!

It was just before this time of instant convenience we now find ourselves in. You couldn’t just play any game you wanted whenever. You had a select number of games and movies that you played and watched all the time, and when you got something new to add to your collections, it was a BIG deal. Sure, the internet existed, and multiplayer gaming was a thing on PC and early Xbox during this early era for me, but it was years and years before my family decided to get internet in the house. For the better part of a decade, my siblings and I didn’t have internet access.

It wasn’t until 2014-2015 that my parents finally decided to get service in our rental after years of not having it. My parents never really understood the internet, and honestly, they’re doing a better job these days of being more tech-savvy than around 10 years ago, so I’ll give them kudos for that. But the internet in the house just wasn’t a thing for us as kids. We did have some video games, but not a ton of them, and my mother was very strict about when and how we were going to play them. It was only on weekends, and only if we got all of our homework and chores done. Then we could play for an hour on Saturdays. That was it for the whole week. A lot of work for just an hour, no? But I figured it was better than nothing.

What I was allowed to have, though, that (weirdly) wasn’t limited in playing time (for some reason), was my purple Game Boy Advance. I had like 3 or 4 games for that thing. I had a couple of bad original Game Boy games on it, and a couple of Game Boy Advance games. The two standouts for me came from the Advance side of things, with “Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 2: Bush Rescue”, a limited scope demake of the PS2 console game of a similar name, and the creme de la creme of the meager library I owned: “Mario Kart: Super Circuit” my favorite of the franchise to this day. I played countless hours of Super Circuit, powered only by Dollar Tree batteries and guided by the light of the blazing Missouri sun.

It was a glorious time. I never felt the sting of how many games I owned on it, because “Mario Kart: Super Circuit” was all I needed. I completed that game weekly for many months, doing everything I could do, and when I was done, I would wipe my save and do it all over again. I loved that game so dearly. Tragedy eventually struck when I lost my Game Boy Advance while on a long car ride with family. I think we were coming back from visiting family in Texas. I’m not sure. But it got misplaced somehow, and with it, too, unfortunately, went my coveted cartridge of “Mario Kart: Super Circuit”. I can scarcely think of a time when I have been more upset about losing a valuable item of mine in my life. I was completely distraught and continued to be for many days following.

So, besides dabbling with “Mario Kart DS”, “Mario Kart Wii”, and original MK8 at friends’ houses, I had very little exposure to Mario Kart as a franchise outside of the GBA and Switch rerelease of their games. I played a lot of MK8 Deluxe as well but ended up losing a fair amount of steam on it over time as the Switch’s library increased and the years wore on. So we find ourselves here. 11 years after the past release of “Mario Kart 8 Deluxe” comes “Mario Kart World” to take its place during the launch window of a brand new console generation. It’s an exciting time!!

With the newest game in the series, “Mario Kart World”, Nintendo has polished its base gameplay to a stellar shine, while adding even more to the core conceit of racing against its stable of iconic, whimsical characters. The roster here is great and has a lot of returning faves from previous titles, but has strangely omitted the cross-universe characters from Deluxe, like the Inkling Boy and Girl from Splatoon, and Link from The Legend of Zelda. I do expect in the future they will either re-add racers missing from the final roster of their previous games, or implement a bunch of new ones from Nintendo’s history. They’ll “Smash Bros.” this thing up, I expect.

Selecting racers is a mess, however. The menu to select both the racer you want as well as their Kart is frankly a huge step down from MK8 Deluxe. When you receive either new vehicles or new costumes (gathered during racing) for your characters, a new slot in the grid gets added for even costumed variants of characters, rather than a submenu like “Smash Bros.” has, to alter their appearance. It’s frankly awful. The fact that it made it in this state is a huge oversight, in my opinion.

The new stuff here boils down to the ‘Kart’ as a vehicle, and what it can do. You can grind rails, wall jump, and even fly to start, and all these new bits of mechanical locomotion make the driving here that much deeper and more satisfying. If you have played any Mario Kart game, you get the gist of the format of races. For normal Cups, you have 4 racing circuits, each with 3 laps apiece. The higher you place per race, the better score you will attain, which, when combined at the end of a Grand Prix, with give you your final standings and placement for the victory circle. The single-player portion of this game consists of ‘3-starring’ all of the tracks on every Cup, all on the fastest speed, 150cc, a departure from previous Mario Kart entries, with 200cc being the max speed for races. It’s unclear why that speed setting was removed here in Mario Kart World, but I digress.

There are the normal cups on the regular Grand Prix, and there is also the returning Battle Mode, where you and some friends or lowly NPCs duke it out in kart battles to pop balloons with items found in item boxes, with the last one standing claiming victory. I’ve never really been a fan of this mode, but dabbling from time to time with it can be some fun. It’s not really what I come to Mario Kart for if I am honest. The big new addition to the core modes here comes in the form of the Knockout Tour: a cross-country racing sprint end-to-end with 6 1-lap races. This mode is very cool and extremely difficult to win, given the placement parameters. The idea in this mode is to keep above the placement threshold at each checkpoint to make it to the end. Only one can win, though, and this push and pull between yourself and the 23 other racers is brilliant fun.

Herein lies one of my gripes with the game, however. Knockout Tour shines in its format as being an extra challenging ‘super-max’ version of normal Grand Prix Cups, but with the number of kart racers in a race being raised from MK8 Deluxe’s cap of 12 racers, to now 24 challengers in World, and the amount of item spam being effectively doubled from item boxes throughout races– getting end-to-end while avoiding catastrophe remains a taller task than ever here. Especially given just how much ‘item spam’ you have to be aware of in matches, be it online or single-player. I think being in first place is by far the worst place you can be for the majority of a race, given that with multiplied spawn rates for items, and more racers using those higher rates of items, you can easily go from first to worst in a matter of mere moments.

It’s akin to the reams and reams of random bullshit that is ever present in Mario Party, I think. Sometimes it can be fun, but most of the time it feels like punishment for no reason. That sort of philosophy in game design has always rubbed me the wrong way, and Nintendo, more than any other company in games, gets away with that sort of juvenile discipline. For some weird reason, they feel this need to keep their ‘party game’ players in line with arbitrary rules, archaic punishments, and all-around odd design choices to stupefy folks just looking for a good time. Mostly, I chalk this behavior up to poor design. It is consistently baffling that this happens from time to time, because Nintendo frequently has many strokes of genius in their games, but this sort of coddling or ‘faux-parental advisory’ tempers the quite brilliant choices they often do have while making video games.

In a recent match (no joke), I got blue-shelled three times while consistently getting in first. This aspect of the game feels just straight-up broken. A good balance patch could fix these issues, sure, but for now, it feels incredibly frustrating to play races amidst the high player count and random happenstance of item calamity that gets hurled your way frequently.

Nintendo often sparks the imagination with these ‘eureka’ moments of gameplay in their games. There are frequent moments of sheer brilliance displayed through Nintendo games that can scarcely be rivaled by other peers or wannabes in the industry. I find that Nintendo is, however, just as prone to fits of frustrating design and confounding ‘rules’ that bind just as much as promote player expression in their games. A lot of their titles toe the line of being ‘brand safe’ while also constantly innovating in large swathes for game design, presentation, and artistic merit. It reeks of a possibility space levied by creatives, tempered ultimately by a corporation’s mandated idea of ‘safe enjoyment’ that has been agreed upon in board rooms. You can only have so much fun with a Nintendo game until some random draconian rulekeeper comes along to drop the law down. No Nintendo game is devoid of this. Every game they make has some sort of odd shortcoming or restriction that hampers the complete enjoyment of their products for me. No more is this evident than in the biggest addition to this new Mario Kart entry: the open world.

There is a massive possibility space here, full of exciting potential. Nintendo has the right idea here, and the scope to accomplish a premise for a thrilling structure, but ultimately, they fall woefully short of delivering upon that featured promise in this setting.

There is so much they could have done here. So many interesting ideas they could’ve implemented in the open world in this game that they just don’t do. Now, this could be due to future additions to a wide playspace, like future content updates. New circuits, cups, racers, et cetera, could be (and most likely are) on the horizon, but I think I chalk up this massive oversight to mainly one thing. They don’t know what to do with it. This is heavily apparent given the type of activities they offer you in the open world. This is such a missed opportunity, in large part because this could have been their ‘Breath of the Wild Moment’ for Mario Kart as a series if they did literally anything with this portion of the game. But they don’t. Or they do the bare minimum.

So much opportunity is squandered here. Nintendo has years and years of legacy involved in this series, and while they gesture lightly at their history here in random tidbits littered all over the map, they don’t do anything with those little tokens of nostalgia in any meaningful way. What would I want from something so vague? I am not entirely sure. But that’s not my job here, either. It feels like lots of this game’s interesting parts are missing. Maybe… some attention to detail? Maybe some interesting things to do for activities? They could have done anything. It’s one of the biggest whiffs for an exciting feature I can remember seeing in a big AAA game.

What’s there on offer is slim. When you aren’t racing, you can drive around. Stay on the road, though, because the second you go off-road, your kart goes about half the speed as on a regular track. Which adds even further to this frustrating section of the game, for me. You drive around, collect very few collectibles like coins, do obstacle courses activated by ‘P’ sections of road throughout the landscape, and collect costumes for your racers that you can find in these drive-thru ‘Yoshi’ branded food trucks dotting the winding tracks. The racing to and from places remains great, but the context for why you would do anything in the open world is barely there. Why would you just drive?

This could have been Mario Kart’s version of “Burnout Paradise”, where you are racing with up to 24 other racers doing fun challenges and smashing through large Nintendo-themed billboards, for instance. They want you to exist with your buddies here, too. They gesture frequently at it basically being a huge lobby to enter into online races, but again, you could just do this at the menu, so why bother? You can also take pictures with either yourself or a friend, but this also feels very underbaked. This whole open-world area is quite frankly a mess. I wish they did more with it. It is just not enough.

So, nearing the end of this review, I am honestly pretty mixed on the final product writ large. Again, like most of Nintendo’s games, it is prone to strokes of genius in both its gameplay and presentation, but the nagging sense of the perfunctory open-world addition hangs on my brain at every juncture. This, paired with the doubling of the number of racers and the issues I have with the item box RNG for this increased player count, makes Mario Kart World often extremely frustrating to engage with. Here’s to hoping they fix these bigger issues with updates going forward because if it is anything like MK8 Deluxe, they should support this game for years to come, I imagine. The smart additions to the gameplay make this one the best-feeling game in the series yet. I like the colorful roster and the customization of racers with costumes you can find is a neat addition to the presentation. But with all the structural issues I have with its makeup, I can’t in good conscience highly recommend this game.

I can give it a recommendation with some caveats, I think, though. Chances are if you have gotten a Switch 2 or will soon, you will get this game, but I also don’t know if you should run out and get it at ‘MSRP’ if you didn’t buy it with a Switch 2 console bundle. Another large hurdle of this game is its hefty $80 price tag, the first of its kind in the industry. This practice has already emboldened other companies to follow suit as well, so we have that to look forward to shortly.

I would say even for how premium this game can look, feel, and play, I think with the mound of issues I have with it, I don’t think this game is worth that daunting cost. “Mario Kart World” is a good game, not a great one ultimately, and I think that matters. When I see what is there compared to what it could have been, I feel pretty disappointed by it. It should have been so much more.

‘Blue Shells’ need to be banned, by the way.

As always, keep gaming.

This console feels premium. I’m honestly shocked how much I love the build quality on this thing.

So I got a Switch 2!

From the sounds of it, a bunch of folks in the industry and gamers worldwide did too! There are some (unsubstantiated… so take it with a grain of salt) reports that Nintendo just had the largest single-day sales for a launch console in the industry’s history, with some sources saying the launch number of sold consoles was near 3 million(!!!).

The entire process of getting one was painless, exciting, and all-around very fun to do. I enjoyed the whole journey of getting one, even if it consumed my life for the better part of two months. So let me tell you about my experience getting one in my hands. On my birthday, no less!

This whole thing felt pretty special from the jump. When I watched the Switch 2 Direct this past April and Nintendo announced the launch day was on my birthday this year, I was thrilled. It was an exciting development! Not only was it my birthday, but a new console launch was happening the same day? It’ll be something I remember forever, that’s for damn sure. I hadn’t been this excited for a birthday of mine in as long as I could remember. It was glorious news. I like to think I am a jaded individual, somewhat, in a ‘faux-romantic’ sort of way, but I’d be lying if I weren’t honest about how I felt hearing that. I was stoked. It’s something forever tied to that day for me now!

Preordering the thing was probably the worst part of the whole deal, but luckily, it was the first thing that happened, and all in all, it only took up the better part of preorder night and the following morning to get my console secured. I was up late with my podcasting partner, recording one of our shows when preorders went live. We had both previously agreed to stop around the time this was going to happen, and each see if we could pre-order.

Like most cases on the internet for pre-orders (usually for technology these days), it was a shitshow. We had every tab up for all the relevant sites on our search engines, ready to go when the clock struck 11 pm. We both had Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and GameStop up and ready to claim our spot in each site’s respective virtual queue. My buddy, Noah, got lucky, and after a cancellation through Target, was able to get it secured through Walmart. Lucky bastard…

I, on the other hand, completed the process on both Target and Walmart, but pre-orders required a full purchase at the time of ordering. I was not about to drop half a grand immediately, that's for sure, so I backed off the idea after some consternation. I guess I didn’t think they would ask for it all at once?

Eh, whatever. GameStop had promised in-store pre-orders would officially open the following morning, so I’d try my hand there, just putting down a smaller payment to secure what I so desperately wanted. Disappointing night, overall– but there was some light at the end of the tunnel.

I figured: “Why pay for this thing when I can trade stuff in to get it? It’ll save me some money, and I am sure I have SOME stuff worth a smidge in credit towards the new console, hanging around the house. I should do that...” With that, I rounded up some old Xbox 360 games, a couple of choice PS1 games, my Animal Crossing Switch and it’s accessories, my Xbox Series S (which was covered in a thick layer of dust by this point), its controller and cord, and a few other odds and ends.

I did a cursory tally with GameStop’s value credit aggregate on the site and got a figure in trade-ins valued around the price of a Switch 2 bundle with Mario Kart and an extra Switch 2 Pro controller. Around 500 dollars worth, I recall. So the next day, I ventured out into the wilderness to lock up that coveted preorder in a retail store. I loaded up my backpack with some games, a couple of older game consoles (the Series S and my old Switch), stuffed them into my bag, and set it aside for the following day.

Lucky for me, I thought ahead. I had to do some big boy errands that had to get done in the morning the following day, so I took a half day off of work with some paid time off (corporate workplaces have some perks, I suppose), to get the stuff I needed to get done. I used the early morning to tag my car at the local courthouse, buy some wiper blades from Autozone (since mine were shot), and get some air in my tires. Productive morning, I figured, and it was still early by the time I was done with my errands. So, like I had planned, I squeezed in a visit to my local GameStop in our small-town Kansas mall.

I had called ahead to see if pre-orders were still available, and the manager attending happily said there were plenty to be had by the time I called that morning. At that point, it was around 10:30 AM, I wanna say? Plenty of time to get what I needed done. When I showed up, the store was completely empty. Not a single solitary soul in sight. An ideal situation to pre-order in.

A single employee, the manager, was on duty, so let’s call him GameStop G. That sounds good. GameStop G greeted me warmly and asked if I needed help ‘finding anything’. I said yes, and that I was there to pre-order the new Switch console, and additionally had many ‘things’ to trade towards it. GameStop G, not breaking a stride, smiled tactically at my response and sighed lightly at my mention, slightly betraying his true reaction to the task lying before him. “Sure! Let’s knock it out for ya, amigo!” he cheerily remarked. It wasn’t completely genuine, I think, but you know, I get it. It’s probably not a ‘good time’ to facilitate other people’s stuff they don’t want anymore.

I’m sure accepting trade-ins is a real pain in the ass for GameStop. Sure, they’re not offering much, but I would imagine, not knowing the condition of the stuff you’re accepting is relatively stressful, especially with the amount of hardware and software I was looking to bring to the counter. But GameStop G happily processed all the things I brought to the register. I had thought ahead of time and wiped both consoles and factory reset all my info from each one, to save time for this transaction. I had a large stack of assorted games, multiple controllers, two consoles, and a handful of peripherals to trade in.

Something I didn’t know before going in, however, was a really helpful promotion they were running in anticipation of the Switch 2’s launch. GameStop G mentioned (whilst checking in my stuff): that for every trade-in you apply towards a Switch 2 pre-order, GameStop includes a bonus percentage of whatever is traded in automatically to the subtotal. So whatever you trade in, GameStop chips in a bit more, adding to whatever is left to pay up until launch.

“Very handy…” I thought. “So why not see how far we can get with what we have lying around? After all, the dollar doesn’t stretch as far as it used to, right? Let’s try being frugal for once and getting rid of some things we never play with anymore. At least the wife will be happy!” I mused to myself. Once we had processed all my stuff, tested all the hardware I brought in (It was all in very good condition, I am proud to say), applied discounts, and finalized the total, the remainder out of pocket I was asked to pay was a mere $58.30.

Wow. For a Switch 2? I was shocked. It felt like I was robbing them. I mean, I had two consoles with all their stuff, sure, but the games I brought in weren’t special, or anything. The highest value items games-wise I traded to them were: ‘Metal Gear Solid Collection’ for the PS3 (love that package but I beat them all and owned the majority of them in the remasters on PS5), ‘Left 4 Dead 2’ (a game that fetched a higher trade-in than I expected– almost 20 bucks!), and a few Switch games I had finished on cart, or was finished with (‘Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition’, ‘Pokemon Shining Pearl’, and ‘Fire Emblem: Three Houses’). Well worth it, though.

The slight catch to pre-ordering at GameStop was the requirement to sign up for their ‘PRO’ level subscription tier for the year, but this was also applied to my subtotal, so it also got absorbed in the cost. With all that done, I pre-ordered the Mario Kart World Switch 2 Console Bundle with a Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller. That’s all I needed. I didn’t need games, because I had so many digitally waiting for me to return to them; with some of them receiving boosts or upgrades to performance and technical shortcomings from their Switch 1 base versions. It was simple (for me), and once I paid the final total, I went back to work, having gotten all the things I needed to get done finished for the day.

That was one of the most productive days I’ve had in a while, come to think of it. Shows you how much time we waste while working for other people, you know? With the console pre-ordered, paid off, and ready to go, it was just the wait left to surmount. That dreadful wait. Only a week or so, mind you, but for something like this, that could be an eternity. It’s also far more annoying when life gets in the way while you’re anticipating something fun on the horizon. When work gets to be a hassle during these periods of life, everything feels like you’re being conspired against. Nothing went right that week at work, and it made that long (not so long) wait even more painful.

But somehow, I persevered and made it through. I even had a shorter week at work because I used some time off for the ‘big birthday launch’. Who wants to work on their birthday anyway? If we gotta work every fucking day shouldn’t we treat some special days like they should be celebrated? I worked on my birthday a couple of years ago after taking it off ever since I started working, and hated it. Never again!

Soon enough, the night before launch day, June 4th, rolled around, and I was standing on the precipice of ecstasy. By that point, it was all I could think about, all I could dream of, all I could be excited for. The novelty hadn’t worn off yet that it was happening on my birthday, even still, and the closer I got, the more excited I became. Sleeping that night was tough! I’m not sure how I did it, to be honest with you. I was WIRED.

But sleep I did, and my birthday arrived, finally, after so many months of waiting. It was finally launch day for the Switch 2. It was a magical day, and something I will never forget.

I had taken the day off as previously stated, and I had my daughter, Audrey, with me for the day, since I was home and off work. Sharing that day with her was super special. She’s 2, but each day she keeps learning and growing, talking even more with every passing day.

It’s so cool, being a dad. It’s endlessly rewarding to raise a little child who’s filled with wonder. The whole time we waited in line, she was curiously asking ‘What’s that, dadda?” at the various signage lining the windows of the GameStop facade we waited outside of while in the pre-order line. She’s too cute. I tried fielding her questions to her satisfaction, but she asks quite a lot of things now. Very curious cruiser, that one.

We arrived at GameStop on launch day at around 9:45 AM. There had been midnight launches around the country, but with our particular GameStop, since it was housed in our local mall, they were denied the chance to be open past closing by the mall’s owner. GameStop corporate sounds like they got involved (according to the manager, GameStop G), with the corporate overlords even going so far as to offer to fund a private police force to help curb any ‘ne’er-do-wells’, past regular mall hours. Still, the owner held steadfast with a firm ‘no’, it sounds like– so launch day it was.

The last launch event I remember going to was close to a decade ago in Missouri. Myself and a couple of friends were getting ‘Fallout 4’ at my hometown GameStop at a midnight launch, and that was the last time I did anything close to this. It’d been so long, I’d forgotten how much fun it all was: talking to like-minded gamers and excited employees, all with the same enthusiasm for a united event. This time was even better, since I got to share it with my little one.

We met some kind people in the preorder line, all with different goals and dreams regarding their Switch 2 purchase. Some folks were excited for the launch ports, like ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ and ‘Split Fiction’, to play with their significant other, while other folks of the more niche persuasion were excited to nab a copy of the new ‘Bravely Default’ remaster that was launching alongside the new console.

Resoundingly, just about every person there that I talked to was getting the new ‘Mario Kart World’ game, with only a couple of folks uninterested in purchasing said title. It was very cool to see people out and about, waiting with bated breath for their chance to pick up the Switch 2, all united in their interests for one big game. I talked to folks in line, introduced my daughter to them (happily distracted by the very helpful 24/7 running ‘Bluey’ YouTube video playing on my phone,) who was sitting happily in the stroller she was seated in while we waited in line. We didn’t have to wait long either.

Soon enough, after all the walk-in folks got their Switch 2s in their launch day queue, we ‘pre-order elites’ got to pick up ours, in turn, since they were already secured. I had paid for mine already with my trade-in transaction a week earlier, and was raring to go by this point. It was so close… The future was waiting just steps ahead of me. I finished up my light banter and friendly conversations with the folks behind me in line, and I stepped up to the counter.

Random aside, I think when I left we were talking about ‘Dynasty Warriors’, I think…?Not sure how we got there… I think we started remarking about a game one of their trio behind me was trading in: ‘Hyrule Warriors’. We got on the topic of Omega Force, and their games that way, I recall… We were joking about the ‘Yellow Turban Army’ when it was my turn to grab my console. Good times!

It was a cinch. I had brought a backpack just in case I needed to slip my new darling purchase into it, just in case things were crazy, but it was a casual and very calm atmosphere, so I figured it was fine. I’m still a tad cagey about going out, ever since COVID. It still feels like, since the world has changed, people have changed with it, leaving their manners by the wayside. Especially in movie theaters. So, I figured if we had any rude folk, I’d have a way to hide the expensive item just in case. It might seem silly, but my kid was there too. Didn’t wanna take any chances.

Anyhow, we got the Switch 2 and the controller (from GameStop G, who checked me out at the register), and away we went. We waved goodbye to the folks in line we met and went on our way. I couldn’t get home fast enough. It felt like a bomb was in my car… a bomb filled with pixels and potentiality. A system to satisfy my cravings for new experiences and better ways to play my older stuff. It was so great, that drive home. I savored every moment of anticipation until I reached my doorstep.

I did the requisite ‘fatherly’ things before I could engage with my new console. I got the kid in the house, took the dogs out, the trash to the curb, the dishes done (y’know, ‘the chores’), so I could spend the rest of the day playing video games with my new console. Nothing better than having nothing to do but sit and veg out playing video games, no matter what people will tell you!

I gotta say… This console feels premium. The build quality is very high, and a major upgrade in almost every way to the original Switch. It’s quite an impressive piece of kit, affording newer, better ways of playing the games I already own in my library, while allowing for higher fidelity games with larger scopes to be played on the go and at home. It feels like a Switch ‘Pro’, I would say. But that’s kinda all I wanted? Something that doesn’t chug but with a similar form factor is ideal for me when I am playing things handheld.

The UI has been redone, the sounds on the console are different, and the layout of the Joy-Cons with their magnetic clicks is new and fresh. It’s so exciting getting that new console look and feel, here, while keeping the stuff that worked previously, like the subscription tier game libraries and perks for paying customers. Everything about the Switch 2 is a huge improvement over the first iteration. It’s amazing how well everything runs on it. Pretty much every game in my library either runs better, was given a technical patch, or got a Switch 2 Edition with higher fidelity and framerate, or has one on the way.

I am in love with this thing. I cannot stop playing it! Which is weirdly making me a bit sad? I love my PS5, even though the exclusives are few and far between. I (for some reason) started playing the first ‘The Outer Worlds, on PS5 while waiting for the Switch 2 to hit store shelves, and I miss playing that. The Switch 2 has gobbled up ALL my gaming time.

I feel guilty for not playing what I started (even if it was dumb to start it in the first place with the Switch 2 around the corner), but I would also feel guilty not playing the new console I got, too. It’s tricky! What a good problem to have. Not to mention, I have a bunch of games from this year, waiting in my library for me to come pick them up and play them, like ‘Assassin’s Creed: Shadows’, ‘Split Fiction’, and some backlog stuff, and the aforementioned ‘The Outer Worlds’ to play. I even started ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ this year (which I have yet to finish… don’t laugh). I’m drowning in video games right now.

On top of all that, the big summer game showcases just hit this month, and with more titles on the horizon, I can’t keep up! There are so many good games still coming out this year, I just hope I can play some stuff where I can, and hope I don’t miss anything! Fingers crossed…

We don’t even know the fall and winter releases for the Switch 2! After Donkey Kong: Bananza in mid-July, it’s all question marks as far as the eye can see for the Switch’s launch year. ‘Metroid Prime 4: Beyond’ has gotta be an October or November game, right?

There has NEVER been a better time to be a gamer. I am spoiled for choice. I am just drowning in opportunity and amazing vibes right now, and it’s been a memorable period of talking about, playing, and thinking about games this year for me. What a stellar year for the industry on the games front, but not so much in game development or in games media. We may see a shortening of bigger games in the years to follow, with the contraction of talented individuals making games and talking about them in the industry… but right now, this very minute? There has never been a better time to be a gamer.

So far on my Switch 2, I have played around 20 hours of ‘Mario Kart World’, started up that ‘Bravely Default’ remaster, dabbled with the ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’ Switch 2 Edition stuff (trying to 100 percent that bad boy), and even started a new run of ‘Dark Souls Remastered’ with my buddy, Noah (we are even using GameChat as short-hand for seeing each other’s progress– it’s pretty cool!). All that is just for this console. I’m not even bringing up all the stuff on the way, and currently,y I will be returning to it on my PS5 this year.

It’s a lot. But I love this industry, this medium, and the like-minded folks I can share my enthusiasm with. Without this escape, my life would be poorer for it, I imagine. I am so grateful to and for video games for enriching my life and giving me that outlet to enjoy the wonders of creativity, amidst the horrors and frustrations of AI slop, and corporate meddling we see in this current entertainment landscape. Even still, I’m gonna keep gaming, and you should too!

If you finished this, send me your Switch friend code and we can play some ‘Mario Kart World’ together! I’m looking for the best of the best!

“Look at me! I am the captain now!”

Id Software has done it, yet again.

They’ve reinvented DOOM for a third consecutive game, and DOOM: The Dark Ages might be my favorite playing game in terms of combat loop, in this reboot series of titles.

So my history with DOOM as a franchise goes back a bit. I have played every game in the mainline series and finished every game to completion, save for “DOOM 64” and “DOOM 3”. I love this series. They’re kind of what I go to for comfort in the world of gaming. They’re like ‘shooter soul food’ to my gaming appetite. Every time I play a game in the series, either returning to previous titles I’ve finished or playing through the ones I haven't gone through yet, I get into a sort of relaxing ‘flow-state’ with them. It’s a haven for me in the world of video games, where I know the breadth and the depth of each game relatively intimately. It’s a certain security I feel in playing this franchise, I don’t get with many others while playing games.

My favorite of the whole series has to be “DOOM” (2016), the first of the reboots, and even with the subsequent releases of both “DOOM Eternal” and the third and most recent game, “DOOM: The Dark Ages”, this remains the case. There is just something about that game that captivates me to this day.

It’s something that I can’t quite quantify… But I think the whole package of that first game has yet to be matched in terms of sheer quality all the way through its main campaign. From the irreverent tone, the goofy personality of the Doom Slayer, the surprising amount of lore hidden in the codices of the game, to the unbelievable and unrelenting industrial heavy-metal soundtrack by certifiable genius composer Mick Gordon, everything about that first entry just hits for me. Upon the release of “DOOM” (2016), it went from an uncertainty as a product to an undeniable bar for quality in the first-person shooter genre. It’s still great to look at, runs beautifully on whatever platform it plays on, it has some of the best sound design in the medium, and plays buttery-smooth. It’s maybe my pick for the best shooter I have ever played.

My time with “DOOM Eternal” is well-documented here on this Substack, so I will keep it brief. It’s a lightning-fast rollercoaster of hellacious wonderment that left me exhausted by the end of both the main campaign and its DLC. It’s a triumph for a cultivated style of gameplay that remains the very best constructed of the series, at the expense of player expression as a result. If you can endure the game’s brand of demonic tango, you can become a formidable dance partner in its alluring neon-tinged style of choreography.

I love “DOOM Eternal”, but it’s not for everyone.

“DOOM” (2016) remains my personal favorite, but “DOOM: The Dark Ages” might be right alongside it, in terms of my sheer enjoyment. It’s so good immediately, and only gets better the longer you play it. I’m not trying to diminish Eternal, don’t get me wrong. I think that while the previous game is successful at what it sets out to do, I prefer playing “DOOM: The Dark Ages” more. Id Software has drilled down on specific points of the gameplay to lower the skill ceiling needed to interact with it, and I think the smart changes, mechanical choices, and thematic decisions they decided to make for this new game are for the better.

In some ways, every game in this reboot series is a reaction to the last iteration. Id Software, at its core as a studio, is an iterative company in terms of its game design fundamentals. They learn and take the things that worked and didn’t from each game, and drastically change and alter the core gameplay loop each time. It’s kinda cool there are different flavors of “DOOM”, all with specific changes that work in their separate ways.

Each game in this new series feels different, looks different, and sounds different, all while retaining the core design language, thematic tenets, and original philosophy of “DOOM” as a franchise. It’s pretty mind-boggling how different and how good each game is when compared to the others in its series. I think every game exists on its own remarkably well, but also lives alongside each other in conversation with each other. You can see a design through-line here in these last three games that feels reactionary. What do I mean by this?

Id Software put out the first game in 2016 as a confident statement. “We are here, ‘DOOM’ is back, and it’s better than ever.”

“DOOM Eternal” builds upon that game with deep mechanical complexity, changing the format in the process. Every weapon and mechanical interaction in both the combat and puzzles is a sort of “key” that fits specific locks in the game’s design. Every enemy has a weakness, and each gun has a specific function in its kit to expose that enemy type in order to take advantage of the combat puzzle, for instance. This raises the game’s skill ceiling inherently, given that they have many ‘keys’ for these ‘locks’, but it makes for a rewarding and consistently thrilling dance of gameplay if you can grasp and execute on it.

“DOOM: The Dark Ages” pulls back on the mechanical complexity of this ‘weak-point key-into-lock’ arsenal system, and creates a sort of ‘all-purpose’ tool in the Slayer’s Sentinel Shield, to interact with the game’s design, instead. Paring down these systems does a lot of good for the legibility and execution of that same idea introduced in Eternal, but this time, in a more digestible and accessible way without sacrificing the fun of the game’s combat.

The Shield is the big new addition in this game, and after having used it, I never want a “DOOM” game to not have one again. It feels incredible to use. It’s even better than the Super Shotgun’s grappling-hook implement in “DOOM Eternal”, which I had previously dubbed the ‘best feeling mechanic in video games’. It’s even better, does way more, and feels incredible in combat. It’s one of the best feeling tools and weapons ever devised for a first-person shooter.

They built the entire game around the Shield this time, and I just love the way it interacts with every part of the world and setting in the campaign. You use it primarily, of course, for combat. But also puzzles, and tricky solves for bonus items hidden throughout the nooks and crannies of The Dark Ages’ holo-map.

The Shield is used in so many novel ways, with too many to list here. The tagline for this game is ‘Stand and Fight’, and that’s exactly what you do. You are encouraged to take cover behind your shield while distant groups of enemies hurl pulsing neon volleys of plasma across the battlefield, in your direction. You can use your shield to parry, block, and even throw it into enemies with the Saw upgrade, which can stun, stagger, and all around put your enemy on the back foot. It’s vital you use this for harder fights too, as tougher enemies have more ways to fight you with different movesets. Gaining the upper hand is essential to winning tougher battles. When you are at your best, you feel like a brutal and aggressive Warhammer 40K ‘Captain America’, bashing, smashing, and crushing your foes, relying on your trusty shield to do so. It feels great.

Encounters in the Dark Ages have been flattened, and your movement has been changed to account for this difference. The Doom Slayer feels heavy in this game, with every movement feeling weighty as a result. Gone are your aerial maneuvers from Eternal, with the double-jump and dash being removed from your locomotion. In its place is a brand new, ‘boots on the ground’ feel to the gameplay that, while different, works just as well, if not better, in some ways than Eternal’s high-flying combat.

The name of the game this time around is strafing. You are tethered to the Earth, for the most part, and the new loop of encounters takes place on the mortal coil. You aren’t jumping and pirouetting here like you were in the previous two games, but you also aren’t a lumbering doofus with a gun, either. It’s a good balance of the two, that while a bit slower, is still a wonderful time. You bob and weave between enemy attacks this time around. It’s sort of like a considered and weighty ‘bullet-hell’ at times in the combat. Green waves of energy coming your way can be parried by your shield and set back into the enemy’s direction, which never got old for me. You are dodging back and forth, and up and down in your foes’ directions, and the give and take of the space in between feels tactical and satisfying. It feels like you are trying to suss out each encounter, giving and taking land between you and the enemy you’re fighting. Getting up close, right in a demon’s face, and blasting the shit out of them with the Super Shotgun feels so good here.

When you get up close, you have the opportunity to punch an enemy in its face, similar to the other games. But this time, your melee weapon can be selected as you play through the game, with different types of close-encounter implements able to be located in metallic weapon caches found during level exploration. You can select between a crushing gauntlet, a spiky flail, and a bony mace once you find them all, and each does different amounts of damage depending on what you choose to use. My personal favorite of these was the flail. Whipping the hell out of my opponents felt great, as there is a lot of heft to each melee option. Each melee implement is governed by ‘charges’, which functionally can be replenished by ammo on the ground as you play. Either you can pick up ammo for the melee, or it can recharge on a cooldown.

This goes hand in hand with the removal of the ‘glory-kill’ limb-specific execution mechanic from the previous games, which was vital to the flow of combat. In its place is a more free-flowing open finisher melee execution that doesn’t lock you into place while you fight. It’s a curious change, as I think I prefer how it used to be, but the change isn’t that different from how it was initially. It just doesn’t take as long to execute a kill when the purple indicator shows up on an enemy, as compared to the cinematic flair of the previous system. It’s fine? I think I liked how it was, to be honest.

There are breaks in the combat with two gimmicky modes of gameplay in the Dragon flight sections, and the rock-em sock-em Atlan segments of the game that divide the action up and keep it all varied. They’re perfunctory mostly, and kinda middling at the best of times, but the change-up in gameplay is welcome. Each plays akin to “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!” in these bits of diversion, where you rely on pattern recognition to solve easy encounters. They’re low-stakes, cinematically charged setpieces that are relatively fun for what they are.

All in all, this version of DOOM’s combat is excellent, and it may be the best in this new series of games. It’s for sure my favorite type of gameplay in the series. The combat is well-made, responsive, hefty, and sounds so damn good. I love pretty much every aspect of the way the game plays. The fact that the core gameplay loop has been reimagined again, and that it’s even better, is staggering to me. Sure, this will divide the fanbase on who prefers what, but in my opinion, having options for what you like is rare and pretty cool. Not many series get the chance to reinvent themselves this many times, and be good in each way they do it.

The number of enemies on screen in battles is truly staggering. You need to keep your head on a swivel at all times, here. If you don’t pay attention, on harder difficulties, you can easily get swarmed and die in an instant, if you are not careful. There are larger ‘leader’ enemies in “DOOM: The Dark Ages”, which are essentially akin to mini-boss characters you encounter in the larger-scale fights. The leaders have a health bar at the top of the screen that is protected by a shield, which can only be lowered if their enemy force has been whittled down. Once that has been done, you can fight them, and as a reward for killing them, they can give an upgrade to your basic abilities or skills, like ammo, health, shield, et cetera. Each one of these fights gets hairy, but I loved doing them, even as the game went along.

There are optional fights here that, when conquered, can yield optional rewards like collectibles or currency, too, if you want to get all of the ‘stuff’ on the map. It’s good fun to treasure hunt! In keeping with the previous two games in the reboot series, there are lots of collectible toys and golden currency spots to find on the map, the latter of which you use to upgrade your weapons in the menus. Id has slimmed down the amount of currencies you are juggling to just a standard ‘gold’ currency for chests that you can collect to fund your weapon modding habits. Busting open chests you find hidden throughout the levels always felt satisfying, as you are showered with golden coins for doing so. This game feels hefty in its myriad interactions, and breaking golden chests feels crunchy. I liked doing that a fair bit.

Getting gold allows you to level up your weapons, kitting them out with modifiers, different functionalities, chaining perks, et cetera. Your arsenal is expansive here, even more so than the previous two games in the reboot series. Instead of having multiple functions for every gun like in 2016 and Eternal, you instead just collect a second version of the type of firearm you can equip, and they do a variant of the first kind’s firing capability. For instance, you’ll get an energy gun that, when you collect its second version, becomes more powerful and deadly. It’s very cool to have almost two revolving armories of deadly weapons to enact your holy revenge on the demonic hordes infesting the land.

The types of weapons here fit well with the themes of The Dark Ages’ story. There are all manner of wacky guns to collect that are all visually distinct, feel unique in their gameplay, and sound muscular when you fire them. Some of my personal favorites of the bunch are, the ‘Pulverizer’, a gun that grinds up human skulls to spit out bone ammo flak in a wide arc at enemies (I’m dead serious), the ‘Chainshot’, a medieval ball-and-chain cannon that when shot, can retract back to its barrel and be charged up for larger, more devastating attacks, and of course the Super Shotgun, made even better in this game, somehow. There are even more guns to shoot, too, but these are just my favorites. They also included the ‘BFC’, or “Big Fucking Crossbow”, the cheeky, medieval-themed version of the beloved ‘BFG’ from the series’ past entries. The designers had a lot of fun making these weapons, I bet. I sure had fun using them.

“DOOM: The Dark Ages” is a prequel to the events of “DOOM” (2016), but it’s not really that important, I think. The story is fun, albeit pretty self-serious, and not very engaging. It’s a twist on the character of the Doom Slayer to initially be presented as this sort of ‘nuclear option’ for the Maykr race (first shown in Eternal), to be used when the going gets tough. It’s pretty cool to see just how dangerous the Doom Slayer is here. He literally gets launched from low orbit as a nuke, practically, when needed.

I think the tone and the story are not nearly as irreverent or as good as 2016’s is. I think I prefer how goofy and tongue-in-cheek the character of Doomguy is in the first reboot as compared to here and Eternal, where he is more reserved and serious. I miss the personality of that game and the character of the Doomguy as shown in the first one. Eternal and The Dark Ages double down on the lore and the dead-serious nature of the story. I think everyone in the main cast of characters just needs to lighten up a bit and hack away at some demons. Sure, it’s a serious sitch, but come onnnn have some fun, guys!!

The story has never been the series’ strong suit, but making elaborate cutscenes, getting deep into the details on the backstory of the Sentinels, the Maykrs, and the state of the world also feels like a bridge too far, as well, in my opinion. I hope they bring it back a little bit in the tone department to being a little bit silly. I think id Software needs to poke more at how silly the whole franchise is. That’s in keeping with the fun Easter Eggs and little bits of humor strewn about the original games, after all. “DOOM” 2016 felt looser, and more fun because of that tone, and a return to that flavor would be a welcome change for me.

The last bit of this game I wanted to touch on will be brief. The music. I found it pretty disappointing overall. This is the only one in the new series so far not done by Mick Gordon, the composer of the first two games, and it shows. This time it’s done by the company “Finishing Move”, which seems to be a contract house to finish music for games, TV, and films. I don’t know too much about them, but I think that the entire soundtrack here is a bland mix of middling to bad, in the music department. Which is a shame, given how much I love the first game’s music. It’s an all-time soundtrack for me. I have mentioned this before on this Substack, but the mark of a great soundtrack for me is if I listen to it outside the piece of media it is in. 2016’s soundtrack is fantastic, so that most definitely fits that bill for me. It’s soooo good. I was unmoved by the soundtrack here. The sound effects are good, so I mainly focused on that aspect of the audio, but the songs here just seem boring. They’re various mixes of heavy metal drivel, from what I could hear.

The most damning thing I can say about it, is that it’s boring. The quality of things is important to me in media. Be good, be bad, but please… never be boring in your makeup. The worst you can be is unremarkable. The music may be my biggest issue with the game, I think.

“DOOM: The Dark Ages” is a brilliantly made and expertly crafted first-person shooter. It’s got everything you could want in an FPS video game, and it’s an excellent addition to the franchise. It’s the best of the reboot series of games in the gameplay department, has an amazing addition to the combat and puzzles with the Sentinel Shield, and is the most fun game to play through in the entire franchise. As a trilogy, you can’t go wrong with any of these games, but this most recent title is one of the very best. While not as landmark as “DOOM” (2016), I think it is one of the greatest FPS experiences you can have, with one of the best main campaigns ever made for a triple-A shooter. It’s so good, I started it again on a higher difficulty, right after finishing it.

I highly recommend this game to all players, regardless of skill, to experience one of the very best shooters ever. It’s brilliant. Well done, id. If this is the end of modern DOOM, this batch of games is a legendary trilogy to place on the shelf. I loved this game.

As always, I appreciate your time, and don’t ever forget… KEEP GAMING!!

So little cash, so many things to fund.

Games Media, as we know it, is over.

Corporately owned video game media sites have declined over the past few years, and for good reason: no one knows how to monetize them properly, and people are getting their informational needs met in different ways.

This is a new challenge for the industry as a whole. In some ways, it has always been an issue, but not until the last decade or so have we seen the decline of the traditional, corporate-backed, high-headcount outlets that have been the norm since the early adolescence of the internet and the nascent online discourse about video games on the web.

Back in the late nineties and early oughts, the three great unifiers of culture in media and entertainment were: television, print media, and the internet. With the sudden rise of social media and the significant adoption rate of smartphones by regular consumers, we have been slowly witnessing the death of the entertainment “monoculture” we were raised in. Times have changed drastically since the turn of the century.

Niche culture is here, and it’s here to stay. Gone are the days where everyone gathers around the same TV set to watch ‘appointment’ or ‘event-based’ television made for the masses. This new landscape of splintered interests for short attention spans has come to supplant the old ways of enjoying media. You don’t have that one television show to look forward to that you can’t readily watch at any given time now. Instant gratification for media has never been more prevalent than it is these days.

Television has had a difficult transition with the changing times. Rates for paying creators and artists to make higher-budget media have been rising, with costs for film, TV, and video game production in the States and abroad skyrocketing with inflation, as a result.

The SAG-AFTRA actor’s union strikes from the past couple of years have been proof of a rocky relationship with the creative forces behind the film and TV entertainment we enjoy, and the studios that are financing them.

New collective bargaining between the two has been agreed upon, but even still, concessions had to be made. For some, that fight is not over, with some folks still fighting for the protections they need. In recent months, a cottage industry filled with burgeoning AI and generative machine learning programs with hefty corporate backing has been used by studios to automate the artistic merit vital to the making of their entertainment products. AI art and generated media have been popping up in mainstream television shows, TV commercials, cartoons, music videos, and recently, feature films. It’s an evolving situation, but my heart goes out to all the actors, the creators, and the artists affected by this recent avalanche of plagiarism, and AI ‘slop’ flooding their creative mediums. AI is the scourge of modern creativity, in my humble opinion. It cannot create something from nothing, and is unable to be inspired by art it witnesses. It only knows what is fed to it, and like the machines they are, they churn out only imitations or remixes of the types of art that it has been given. Relying on these learning models to create art we enjoy is a fool’s errand.

AI, and creative automation as a whole, should only be used to make easier the tasks artists and creatives don’t want to do, not take the place of those talented individuals. Corporate greed has taken root in the creativity of artistic endeavors, to deleterious effects. Art is, in many ways, the reflection of the human condition and a physical representation of the ‘soul’. It is an outward expression of inward feelings, ideas, and creative opportunity. AI, not having a ‘soul’ to speak of, cannot inherently tap into the same things as people can for this very reason. AI art and generated media, by its very definition, is a soulless and empty imitation of humanity’s artistic achievements and their unlimited potential. Remixing and shitting out cheap imitations of better work from real humans, is not art. It is plagiarism, flat out. It’s a tangent, for sure, and I digress. But this issue affects all the media we enjoy in our daily lives.

Print media has also flown the coop and gone mostly digital in the past decade or so, especially in the video game media space. Sites that ran editorial and review coverage in print magazines have either pivoted out of physical production and distribution of their products and have gone digital, or they have straight up ceased operation due to high expenses to keep the lights on and the quality high for their print magazines.

Gone are the days when we had access to high-quality information from people who professionally cover the industry, with the glut of AI misinformation and poor SEO algorithms burying essential voices that cover the space.

When I was growing up, we had a lot to choose from in this realm. Electronic Gaming Monthly, Official Xbox Magazine, Nintendo, Game Pro, PC Gamer, and Game Informer, to name a few.

Now? Only one of those publications mentioned is still in print currently, and that’s after being shut down in the past year by their corporate parent, then getting revived by a game developer purchasing them.

That company? Game Informer.

The fact that they’re around to do that work is baffling to say the least, given the trials and tribulations they have gone through as of late.

They’re still doing it.

The old guard may not be there anymore, for the most part, like Andy McNamara, Andrew Reiner, and Ben Reeves, who have each gone into either game development or game publishing, after many years working at the company. Some of those guys I mentioned were essential editorial staff who were working at GI when I was reading the magazine back in the day, and not having them there to guide its new iteration just feels odd to me, but I digress.

From what I can tell, it seems like they are still doing good work over there and have fired up the printing presses again to churn out more print coverage of video games.

They’re the only site in town doing that work, and I gotta say, getting a physical thing in your hand to read every month containing a look at the newest and hottest video games never gets old, for me. Print mags historically get long lead times for product reveals, and early coverage for new video games, because of the production pipeline they have to keep to, to keep it all running smoothly.

12 months with an issue released every month is a tall task, but the folks at GI have been doing it for so long, how could you balk at their track record of continued consistency?

It’s kind of a marvel that they still are doing it at all, given that it’s pretty much a miracle they are around to do the work after the trauma GameStop as a corporate parent put them through. Seems like all the staff who were let go at the end have since been hired back too, which is a lovely turn of events, in my opinion.

Anyways, print media outlets for video game coverage have either contracted into small pockets of boutique a la carte magazines, or have died out completely. The reason for that is simple, I think. The internet.

The initial symbiosis of the consistency of the print magazine and the immediacy of the information at hand for the internet was good at first. But as the years went on, people’s attention shifted to the web for the instant breaking news you could only get from the internet.

Print mags had one flaw after all, and it’s that they age immediately upon their release. If you think about it, each magazine printed is like a time capsule for the moment and month it is sent out to readers.

The one boon to the privilege of the format was the inside scoop on unreleased video games, but as access to companies and the developers behind their products became more widespread, and more in-depth on the internet, the need for print media with dated information fell out of fashion.

Why wait for a magazine when you can go find exactly what you need whenever you need it? That specific perk of the immediacy of the Internet’s informational convenience trumped journalistic quality in this regard, and more people were going to more sites for their news instead of waiting for bits of information to be doled out to them in a physical way.

So what’s left?

After the winding down of the television ‘boom’ at the end of the century (followed by the beginning and end of the proverbial ‘golden age’ of prestige landmark TV shows from the oughts), and ‘the fall of print media’ (the advent and collapse of physical publications printing issues containing information about the entertainment industry), you only had one place to turn to.

The Internet.

Sure, TV and print are still a thing, but the time of each medium being the place to go to stay up to date with the entertainment and current happenings of the world has long since passed. Ratings for basic cable and television providers have never been lower, and most media conglomerates have turned to the internet and ‘streaming’ services to offer their services and products to people on the move from traditional models of viewership.

The last holdout to move entirely over to this new frontier of streaming content for paying subscribers in the traditional television market is sports entertainment. Slowly but surely, however, this is changing too, with the NFL, NBA, NHL, and to a small degree, the MLB turning to streaming in small doses to test out the market. There is a symbiosis of relationships between sports and television advertising that hasn’t quite caught on in this new streaming landscape, but with money to be made, you can be sure it will be harnessed and sussed out.

Every year, more games are played internationally and are more widely available on streaming platforms around the globe, with some sports even leveraging low-risk, free platforms, like Tubi and YouTube, to spread the word that they are willing to do business for the proper ad spend.

The internet, in some ways, is still the wild, wild west.

It morphs, changes, and grows with each calendar year, and with all those happenings, so too does content ebb and flow on the web, year to year. Trends come and go like the wind, news stories pass by quickly, and politics are as prescient as ever with this new and instant way to hear about current events.

So too, has games media changed on the internet, and this time it may be for good.

For the longest time, you had folks making their way in the world and carving little niches for themselves in the ecosystem. Back in the day, there seemed to be just as many games media outlets starting up as there were new video games releasing every year. Everyone and their mother wanted a piece of the pie.

You had sites like IGN and Gamespot, two of the giants of this industry, making their hay back then, with other smaller publications trying to co-exist alongside these larger outlets. Newspapers and entertainment magazines, like Variety and the Washington Post, created digital safe havens to replicate the coverage they had in print form, on the internet.

Where advertising money goes, so too do the publications that need that funding to operate.

For a long time, it seemed like corporate parent companies that owned games news outlets and news publications were just content enough to fund the coverage of the industry in this structured sort of way. Advertising agencies bought space on your site to sell something, and the company offering that aforementioned space used those funds to run the site, pay for essential expenses, and pay its staff. For a good part of 30 or some odd years, this was the case, it seemed. From the early 90s to the mid-2020s, this was the way the ‘bread’ was ‘buttered’.

Nothing was perfect, of course (and I am sure I am missing a few things…), but for a long while, things were stable. As stable as things could be, that is. For many years, sites like IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, and Polygon (to name a few) were sustainable business ventures with mostly reliable reporting on industry news and good reputations. This period between the late 90s to the mid-2010s is what I think should be considered as “The Golden Age of Games Media”: where you knew where you could go all the time to get your needs met as it came to the video game industry. Every site was good at a different thing, but each site’s content was of a ‘quality’ for the most part, so as not to lead their loyal followers astray.

This was also the height of the games industry writ large, with huge leaps in console technology being achieved each generation, the rise in popularity of personal computing and gaming on PC coming into fashion in general, and industry events like E3 reaching a fever pitch with audiences tuning in on the internet in record numbers to see the newest products the industry had to peddle.
The big games media sites back then would cover these events, and write about them in large articles, previews, and sneak peeks at unreleased video games. Each site’s editorial and production staff were mandated to cover the industry in person at these big events, to let their audience know what was going on.
From the early 90s to the late 2010’s the industry was a mix of old and new media, fighting it out for the same pieces of the video game pie. A monolithic media war of epic proportions to cover the industry and all its happenings, backed up by greedy corporate interests to cover the hefty costs of doing business.

For the longest time, this was the case. Until the bottom dropped out of the industry with the biggest global shakeup we as humans had experienced in the modern era. COVID happened.

The pandemic was merely the quickening of the beginning of the end. The end of the ‘corporatization’ of the mainstream games media outlet, as we know it. Algorithms in search engines were changing, and the advertising powering the main pillars of the internet had been slowly changing too. Coverage of products and new coverage of games had gone primarily to streamers and ‘influencers’, with viewers latching onto personalities rather than the faceless gaming sites of old.

Brand loyalty changed in the game industry, with the rise of streaming and subscriber-supported, personality-driven coverage. An early adopter of this idea was Giant Bomb. When the creator of that site, Jeff Gerstmann, was fired unethically for scoring the first “Kane and Lynch” low on Gamespot during a featured ad-spend for it on the site, he broke out and founded Giant Bomb with ex-staff from the previous site wanting to create an ‘anti-Gamespot’. It’s a fascinating tale, and maybe some day we will hear more than just anecdotes about it from former staff.

The Giant Bomb story is still being written, and Jeff has long since left, but the creation of Giant Bomb as a personality-driven outlet sparked this new phenomenon of subscriber-backed support in corporate games media.

As the industry as a whole retreated into the safety of its abode, everything changed. The way people interacted with one another had been irrevocably altered, with people moving out of corporate offices and into their homes.

This happened throughout the industry, from game development, game publishing, to media coverage, the entire structure of the industry had been completely shaken to its core.

The rise of subscriber-backed coverage of video games is not a new thing, but with the contraction of games media after the events of COVID, more and more kinds of these sites and independent publications have sprouted up, with Patreon being a key player in the landscape to house them.

Companies like Kinda Funny, Last Stand Media, MinnMax, Nextlander, and Remap have come about in recent years, with many key members from those sites leaving positions at traditional outlets to embark on these independent subscriber-backed endeavors to cover the industry, away from corporate meddling.

Hell, even Giant Bomb recently went independent!

Both Giant Bomb and Polygon got gutted on the same day, in a cruel twist of fate, and that felt like the death knell for the traditional ways games are covered in the corporate world. Giant Bomb ended up being okay, it seems, but Polygon has since had its entire staff of union workers let go amidst negotiations with its former corporate parent, Vox Media.

Vox Media, in a gross and underhanded deal, sold the entire company to Valnet, a mysterious enigma of an entity with a shadowy history of corporate ownership with various companies. The entire site had changed overnight with the new owners. Expectations are that Polygon will now become a ‘guides’ mill and AI content farm as a result of these changes.

It’s a sad state of affairs for what was once one of the most reliable places to go to read quality game journalism on the internet.

Giant Bomb, as I said, not without its bumps and bruises, seems to have come out of this whole situation unscathed for the most part. After years of corporate ownership and being passed around, an opportunity presented itself in the wake of several key members leaving the site. The last parent company, Fandom, made an offer to sell the site back to its former staff: Jeff Grubb and Jeff Bakalar, in a move that still baffles me even as I write. This sort of thing doesn’t happen!

It’s a miracle, honestly, but I am very happy it came about.

Giant Bomb is in many ways the example to use when talking about the nature of games media and how it ebbs it flows.

Its entire history as a site is a reflection of the environment the industry has been in over the years, in my opinion.

These are just two of the recent things that have happened in this new frontier of games media. Over the years, many sites have come and gone, however. The Washington Post’s “Launcher” vertical for games was shuttered, leaving only one journalist covering the industry for the publication, Gene Park. While he covers the industry and makes appearances on the Last Stand Media family of podcasts on Patreon, he is the only one still doing it at the Washington Post. Also, a reboot of the popular gaming news and review show G4 came and went quickly after years of not being on the air, and in a similar situation to the Giant Bomb news of recent weeks, Vice shut down their “Waypoint” vertical for games, and sold it back to the former editor in chief of the staff, Patrick Klepek (also formerly of Giant Bomb). Since then, Waypoint has been renamed to “Remap” and has gone completely independent, relying solely on subscribers to fund the work they are doing.

It’s a wild and ever-changing landscape of sites doing this line of work, with the two big industry institutions, IGN and Gamespot, still leading the charge for the old guard.

The entire industry has been whittled down to the sharpest point, with many veterans of the media either starting things for themselves independently, joining the game development scene, or even leaving the industry altogether. It’s never been a more uncertain time in this space, and here’s hoping that once the dust has settled, we as the gaming populace are better for it.

So, where does that leave us?

For me, it’s supporting the outlets and people I trust and care to listen to, monetarily. Putting my money where my mouth is and backing independent sites doing good work is the way of the future, and I want to support the good folks doing the hard work on their own. The work still needs to be done after all, but it’s harder than ever to figure out who still can do it. It’s crazy given that games themselves are better than ever, and the industry desperately needs the right folks to cover them.

We are on the precipice of both a new console launch in the Switch 2 and the release of Grand Theft Auto VI in a year or so, as of the time of this writing, so it’s not like the industry is slowing down!

The costs of doing business in game media have always been expensive, but it seems like corporations have just lost interest in supporting the people who are doing the work. They would rather automate it or completely shut down quality work they deem as unimportant or unnecessary, rather than pay for the vital services those talented folks can render.

I spend a large portion of my disposable income supporting the people in media I want to see succeed, and I think you should too. The only way through is to persevere, and a lot of fine folks are making it only with the help of a loyal few.

The internet is a wonderful and awful place, at the same time. As misinformation and change have become the reality of the web, so too must we arm ourselves with critical thinking and a better understanding of the world around us, in the digital realms we frequent. AI ‘slop’ and generated sources of information are sprouting up everywhere, so we must seek out the few bastions of good information we can find and support those pillars of optimism amidst the raging sea of negativity and low-quality content being generated on the internet.

The ‘enshittification’ of the internet is only beginning. Soon, it will become harder and harder to distinguish between our reality and the AI-generated misinformation on the web, as time passes.

This is a long, messy post that may or may not be correct in some ways, so I implore you to take my words with a grain of salt and seek clarification on the topics I spoke about.

I tried to do my best to speak from the heart, but even I can fall short in both correctness and recollection.

In short, be the change you want to see and vote with your wallet. If you support what you believe in, put your dollar where your mouth is.

Support the creators’ voices you want to succeed, hold on tight to your proverbial ‘anchors’, and as always…

Keep Gaming.

Thank you for your time!

“Jack? Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time…”

“Final Fantasy”.

It’s an ironic name for a franchise, given the interminable number of entries in its series.

A couple of years ago, Square Enix, both publisher and primary developer of the “Final Fantasy” franchise of video games, re-released the first six entries of its mainline series, in the “Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster”, for current-gen consoles and PC.

It was the first time those games had been brought forward for new audiences in totality, with the majority of the latter half of the series making their way to the newer generation of consoles through either new games or uprezzed standalone re-releases of their own. Now that the entire series (with the exceptions of “Final Fantasy XIII and its sequel games, as well as “Final Fantasy XI”) has been brought forward, there has never been a better time to dive into the series from the beginning.

So, I resolved to do just that, playing all the games available in whatever order I please. I realized that I hadn’t finished many “Final Fantasy” games, but I started pretty much every single one in the mainline series. I have played all of them, to some extent, but my completion percentage for the series remains lackluster.

So far, I have beaten: I, VI, VII, XV, and XVI, so there is a fair number of games in the series I have never seen through to the end. Of the ones I have yet to complete, I have played: II, VIII, IX, and X, extensively. I just never got around to finishing them. I wanted to make it a long-term goal to change that fact and chip away at one of the most iconic series in gaming. This is the start of that journey!

Final Fantasy I is a good game, not a great one.

It feels like the first effort at making a role-playing game that wasn’t “Dragon Warrior”, and it shows.

The game is a very short romp, which can last as long as 4-6 hours if you know where to go, what to do, and how to do it. It’s a very small game, with a small bestiary of monsters to encounter, sparse options at your behest to interact with when it comes to party composition, their tools, and their capabilities, and one of the easiest game economies to exploit that I have ever encountered. It can be good fun to mess around with the broken economy, but your mileage can vary in that regard, once the barrier to entry in shops has been made trivial, and your coffers are overflowing with gil.

Buying what you want from weapon vendors, magic shops, and item stores at any point in the game cheapens the experience of the adventure and skews the balance of the game to being comically easy. It’s very unbalanced in the player’s favor when it comes to the difficulty. Even in the toughest boss fights of the game, you will be more than able to tackle them with no issues, I expect. It’s their first crack at this formula, I understand, but it makes the game feel easy to manipulate. Wishing you could afford everything at any time in games is great, but in practice, seeing that be possible isn’t as fun as you think it would be.

This issue is my main gripe with the game. Having a broken economy trivializes the entire game. You will have no issues beating this game, and beating it quickly, because there are no barriers to you doing so. I don’t even think my party got wiped once until the final boss. As you fight monsters in the overworld and dungeons, you encounter little bits of story and treasures along the way. Playing with a guide here seems like the way to go, especially given that this game came out nearly half a century ago on the NES.

I can’t imagine how it must’ve been for people playing this back in the day, with no direction. This game doesn’t even hold your hand one iota, and expects you to always know where to go with no hints. It’s a relic of old game design that comes with the territory of interacting with past media. As entries were developed, the quality of life for these games got better and better. Things were streamlined more effectively, and the narrative was guided better in the world through NPCs and signage, over time. Playing the Pixel Remaster version of this game smoothes out some of the rougher edges of its presentation, orchestration, and setting options, yet the fundamentals of the game remain, regardless of improvement.

At its core, “Final Fantasy I” is an interesting prototype for a beloved series that would get better after its first few entries. The story in here is minimal, at best, but a few essential things are here that can be seen in the DNA of the series in future games. There is a party of medieval-esque heroes, there are crystals, and there is a world-ending situation that threatens all life on earth and the cosmos at large.

There aren’t bespoke characters in “Final Fantasy I”, but you can pick character classes and name them. They are basic template characters that are more blank slates than people, who are proficient in different combat styles and magic usage. You have your standard “Dungeons and Dragons”-esque classes here to pick from. Once you hit a certain level, your class gets promoted to a higher version of its class with a new name and new abilities, so you are rewarded for investing in your classes.

The ‘Fighter’ is your primary physical damage dealer, who isn’t able to learn many of the magic spells other classes can. This class is used to beat people up, mostly, but gains access to low-level white magic as they level. They become the ‘Knight’ for their later class name.

Then you have the ‘Black Belt’, what’s considered a ‘Monk’ in later entries of the series, who is proficient in hand-to-hand combat. You can equip weapons on them, but you shouldn’t. They kinda suck in the early goings, but if you stick with them long enough, they become powerful in the latter stages of the game. They transition classes into ‘Grand Master’, which makes some notably more fierce and powerful in combat.

Next, you have the ‘Thief’ class, another “Final Fantasy” staple. Like the black belt, their early levels are limited at start, but as you grind with them to their next class, they become a fast and deadly killing machine. They change into the ‘Ninja” class, and can learn even more magic than the previous two classes I mentioned, making them one of the best classes to choose in your party of four.

Lastly, you have the Red Mage, the Black Mage, and the White Mage classes. The Red Mage can do almost anything you ask him to. He wears most equipment, learn a fair amount of magic, and can wield the most weapons of any party member, but is a ‘jack-of-all-trades’, and a master of none. He turns into the ‘Red Wizard’ class later, which affords him a wider assortment of things in the previously mentioned categories. He can also learn both Black and White magic, which is cool.

The White Mage is considered the only must-have class since it specializes in all white magic spells, which are status boosting spells, healing, and buffing spells for the party. Not having a white mage means you’re gonna have a bad time, even if the game is easy. Later, they change into the ‘White Wizard’ class (yikes), which lets them learn more powerful versions of white magic spells.

Finally, the Black Mage is like the White Mage, where it can learn all black magic and has the most powerful sets of multi-attack offensive spells to melt the opposition. They’re one of the best damage dealers in the game, and they level into the ‘Black Wizard’ class as you play.

Once you decide the classes you’re playing, you engage in standard classic “Final Fantasy” combat. Your team takes a turn, then the opposing side. Rinse and repeat. It’s good fun, but it’s nice that you can auto-battle or fast forward animations for mob fights in the remaster if you want to do that. I did that when I was trophy hunting for the Platinum, but not much besides that instance. It’s nice at the very least to have a history lesson on how it used to be, even if it hasn’t all been figured out yet. I’m glad I saw it through, for sure.

The story of “Final Fantasy I” is barely there. It’s not even really fleshed out. Your selected classes of four heroes are known as “The Warriors of Light”, and you have been tasked to cleanse four elemental crystals from around the realm, to restore peace to the kingdom. You know, ‘medieval stuff’. As you play through the game, you see the generic biomes every RPG has, you fight a lot of iconic FF monsters, and you make your way to the past to kill ‘Chaos’, the final boss of the game, who happens to also be the fallen hero of legend ‘Garland’.

You find out (spoilers), the bad guys you have been tasked with defeating, sent the hero Garland back in time, who in turn sends the Four Fiends (paradoxically) to the present, creating a time loop in which Garland could be immortal and live forever. It makes zero sense, but what the hell, sure. He is the bad guy, he looks cool, and he is ‘Chaos’, so he’s gotta die. It’s a tough boss fight if you aren’t leveled well, I will grant it, but once you figure out the best way to take him on, the encounter is cake. Then the credits roll. The Warriors of Light destroy the loop, and the people of the world forget them. Kinda, sad right? But basically, the legend of your merry band of blank slate heroes is passed down like a myth to the people so they can recall in some small way that the merry band of heroes sacrificed themselves for the world. The End.

Like I said, beating this game didn’t take long, so I decided to just get all the trophies on the PS4 copy I played on. That was also very easy. There were trophies for getting all the legendary weapons, opening all the chests, talking to ‘Bahamut’ (the iconic dragon summon in later entries), for your leveling classes, and so forth. You’re required to beat all the enemies in the game at least once for the bestiary, and it was pretty easy to get that done as well. Besides the superboss ‘War Mech’, getting all the enemies to show up was a piece of cake. War Mech has a low appearance rate to show up, and given that there are a lot of random encounters, you just have to grind out walking over a bridge a million times before it decides to show up. Besides that minor annoyance, the trophy hunting was a cinch. It was pretty fun to do, for the most part. Once I got that boss beaten, the shiny Platinum trophy appeared in the trophy list, and my journey with FFI was complete.

So that’s “Final Fantasy I”. It’s a fun history lesson to see where the series started. It’s a mostly easy game with some minor annoyances, but it’s solid in its battle mechanics, pretty well designed in its enemy encounters, and has just enough story to see it through for a playthrough. I had a good time with it, even though it’s not really like a ‘good’ game, I suppose. I recommend platinuming it or 100 percenting it if you play it to get your mileage out of it, because it’s very easy to do so. It took me around 16-17 hours to do everything, beating all the bosses, seeing all the enemies, and getting all of the stuff.

I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone but series veterans, because of the minor gripes I had, but it’s more than worth your time if you want to interact with it in a cool, modern way. I appreciate Square Enix for bringing this game and the others in the compilation forward in an easy-to-understand, legible, and modern way, while not changing the game. More old games need to be preserved in new ways, and I think this is a good template for that sort of exercise.

Anyways! I appreciate the eyeballs, and you know what to do, fellow gamers…. Keep gaming, always.

God, just look at this cover art.

“Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” is not just a special game– it’s an essential one. It’s already one of the greatest RPGs, if not games, I have ever played, I think.

Talking about the wonderful time I had with this game puts me at risk of going on at significant length about every detail of its inner workings. It’s hard to know how to keep it brief while still being in-depth enough to describe the underlying ‘stuff’ about this game, in particular.

I am still trying to figure out a balance of these sorts of things with my reviews on this site. I am discovering my voice as a critic and writer, as well as finding out what I want to talk about when I do this sort of coverage about a game.

Having said all of this, I can’t help but admit that I will be doing a fair amount of gushing when talking about this title.

Now, to just say it. I may be crazy for this, but who cares? I think “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” will be my game of the year, when it’s all said and done.

At the time of this writing, we are reaching the end of May, but I am so confident that this game will stay at the top of my Game of the Year personal “top 10” at the end, I am very comfortable making this claim, even as this year’s releases continue to come out.

This game is so good, it might even make it to the higher ranks of the ‘All-Time Favorite Games Ever’, list I keep current in a NotesApp column saved to my phone. I loved this game that much.

It’s in contention with Metaphor: Re Fantazio, Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy VII, VII Remake, and Fallout 3, for my favorite RPG ever. I think of this game that highly.

It’s truly an unforgettable masterpiece– and a landmark title in the genre for its innovative battle system, a truly audacious story with beautifully rendered, acted, and designed characters, wonderfully composed and played music, and finally, fantastic design and depth in it’s main and side content to rival all other titles in the genre for it’s sheer quality of content.

It’s truly a spectacle to behold what Sandfall Interactive has accomplished with this game (their first as a studio).

I am in awe.

“Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” starts with you playing as Gustave, a resident of the fractured Parisian metropolis, Lumiere: a decaying wreck of a city deep in the throes of a veritable world-altering apocalypse.

Gustave is the closest thing to being a mix between a scholar, scribe, and inventor all in one, for Lumiere. He is constantly creating and notating all of the particular implements, history, and inventions of and for society in the decrepit city-state.

You start your adventure with Gustave on the day of “The Gommage”: an event brought on annually by the somber deity of the world (known only as “The Paintress), who wipes away any living beings in Lumiere over a certain age. Each year, The Paintress writes a new number on a slab in the distance, corresponding to the new age limit imposed on all humans living in Lumiere.

After each time the Gommage happens, a group of Expeditioners tasked with killing The Paintress sets out across the sea to locate her and end the vicious cycle of death.

It’s one of the best opening acts for any game I have ever played.

The prologue of Expedition 33 is captivating, heart-wrenching, and anger-inducing, all in equal measure. You talk to many NPC’s each affected by the Gommage in the opening hour of the prologue.

Everyone in Lumiere is grappling with the Gommage.

Either they know someone who will gommage or they are someone who will be gommaged, and both are shouldering the generational trauma of this broken world in different ways.

It was eye-opening to see how different people in Lumiere react to the happenings of the day and how they do or don’t cope with the Gommage. Exploring Lumiere and talking to its citizens in the early goings of the game is fantastic. It is brilliant world-building that has no problem taking its time showing you the state of the world, and the people who are living in it.

It’s remarkable how quickly I gave myself over to the game after witnessing the Gommage in its entirety, and seeing the complicated social dynamic between Gustave and an ex-lover doomed to pass in the 34’s vanishing.

It’s a messy, lovely, and brilliant start to a video game. I can’t remember the beginning of a game capturing me so wholly and completely like this. I cannot extol the virtues of this prologue’s sequences enough. It’s an all-time moment in video game stories for me. The acting is immaculately voiced and performed, with the writing in particular here being especially sublime in its quality.

Once the Gommage happens, the Expedition mourns for a night, kisses their loved ones goodbye, and sets off the following day. All the participants in the newest squad each wear a golden sash, tied to their bicep, with the number of the current team’s oldest members: ‘33’, a number signifying the new limit of age imposed by the godlike being in the distance. There is now a ticking clock. A year left to kill The Paintress.

The entire first Act of Expedition 33 is in a class all its own for its execution of ideas and the brilliant writing used to flesh out the proceedings. As you play, you find different party members, all of whom have survived the initial landfall of reaching the Paintress's domain, with each having their role to play in the story.

You start with the shoeless mage and intellectual, Lune: the inquisitive primary magic-user of the party, who glides over the landscape with relative ease, aided by her significant arsenal of magic. She is the conscience and direction for the party throughout the story, and she is the greatest asset and sometimes, most constant opponent to the character of Gustave, in the early hours of 33’s main narrative.

The second is the spritely youth, Maelle: the youngest of the group, at only 16, who plays the largest part in the later hours of 33’s story-related events. She is the ‘glass cannon’ of the party, whose penchant for dealing high amounts of damage with her burning rapier is only tempered by her lower health pool in combat. Balancing the two is the key to succeeding early in the difficult fights you engage in with the enemies of Expedition 33.

Third, is Sciel: the buffing and damage-dealer of the party, armed with a deadly, double-ended scythe. Sciel is the most intriguing and complex of the initial group, only divulging her deepest secrets to her closest confidants. If you are loyal to her, she will become your fiercest ally, and she was my personal favorite of the party when it came to her gameplay. She has a sort of ‘sun and moon’ card stacking mechanic that layers cards on enemies to either deal high amounts of damage or heal multiple pips of lifebar, in more dangerous skirmishes.

As you continue, you meet two more party members, the buoyant ‘gestral’: Monoco, and the mysterious expeditioner: Verso, with the latter being one of the biggest players in the narrative of the game, by its end.

Each of these characters, with their distinct and novel movesets, personalities, and stories, makes up one of the most diverse, engaging, and well-rounded RPG casts in recent memory. The roster of unique people that make up the main cast of the game rivals that of Mass Effect 2’s assemblage of diverse galaxy inhabitants, Baldur’s Gate 3’s DnD flavored miscreants, Metaphor: Re Fantazio’s merry band of royal misfits, and even Final Fantasy VII’s group of timeless party members, for me.

Sandfall Interactive has created real, living characters with as much heart and intellectual pathos as any of the characters from the games I listed– and I will not be forgetting Expedition 33’s main cast any time soon. They are a special group of people, cultivated by a talented studio, with remarkable care and craft in their creation.

Story and characterization in Clair Obscur are two of the strongest features about it, but even better still is the turn-based action-oriented battle system. It takes the best mechanics, stylization, and implementations from turn-based JRPGs and smashes them together to create one of the best feeling combat loops I have ever played. It might very well be the best system of combat I have ever interacted with in a turn-based game, or games as a medium.

Sandfall liberally borrows from classic JRPG franchises like “Final Fantasy”, and “Persona”, to create this sort of mish-mash of different systems and real-time mechanics that when married, work beautifully in concert with one another.

It takes elements of the sort of: “I go, you go,” and “Press Turn” systems of those previously mentioned franchises and blends them together to create it’s own look, feel, and flow for combat.

In combat, you can have up to 3 initial main party members to choose from when you engage the enemy. Each party member has different combat styles, abilities, health pools, and damage outputs. In a novel spin on the availability of party members in longer, more drawn-out fights– when all 3 of your main crew goes down for one reason or another, the remaining 2 party members can optionally be called to the front lines, in a sort of ‘last stand’ for your expedition; which works both narratively and design-wise for the gameplay to afford the rest of your group a chance to take down a formidable foe or group of enemies. It’s an awesome addition to the mechanics of combat to allow you to keep going even when your crack team has bitten the dust. It also keeps each difficult engagement exciting to know you will have a great shot every time to get the task at hand done.

Your characters all matter, and outfitting them with their gear is vital to your success.

The character equipment is shockingly customizable here. Every weapon you receive can be upgraded, every skill can be learned by every party member, and different synergies and skills between characters and builds can stack and coordinate with other characters in a round, if done correctly.

It’s frankly quite an exploitable system if you know what build you want to craft. The exploits of the ‘build-crafting’ for characters seem intentional on behalf of the developers, and you get the feeling that they are encouraging experimentation in their game to reward inquisitive players.

Once you set your party, their builds, and put on a cool costume or two, you engage in turn-based combat.

These turns are a mix of the standard turn systems from “Final Fantasy”, where each side goes through their team’s rounds of combat in order (usually), and the “Persona”, advantage style system of combat: where higher-skilled players are afforded more opportunities to attack the enemy in a given round.

You have stats for each character that govern how quickly they attack, how much damage they deal, how lucky you are for critical attack chances, and how much damage they take, for instance. Raising or lowering these stats is a matter of allocating the proper points at a checkpoint, and can be redone at any time with the ‘recoat’ currency gathered throughout the adventure.

These stats differ for each character’s proficiencies and weapon scaling, and different weapons work better with different stats on characters.

Furthermore, you are afforded the use of ‘Pictos’ in the game, which affords buffs, debuffs, and unique combat expression when used. After successfully making it through 4 rounds of combat without dying, these ‘Pictos’ can be equipped on any character, so mixing and matching different abilities makes for even deeper ‘build-crafting’.

The amount of minute modifications and gritty detail hiding deep in the stats, equipment, and abilities menus of “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33”, makes for one of the most flexible and well-designed games, I can remember. It’s truly remarkable a first time studio accomplished this breadth of player expression, in their debut game. It’s astonishing.

When you attack in this game, it feels fluid and impactful. You have many options at your disposal when battles happen, and knowing which order to do each in is crucial to getting a fight over with just as quickly as it started.

First off, you have your basic attack. It’s a move that costs nothing to do, and if you are lacking in action points for higher damage moves, it’s a good default to do a bit of damage and build that currency up for larger attack strings. Each weapon additionally has an elemental affinity that can also be used to attack enemy weaknesses, once identified. The best way to find out what enemies are weak to is by experimenting with your tools. Using skills and weapons tied to specific elemental affinities can be used to identify their weaknesses of, displayed on screen above an enemy once they’ve been hit.

You also have a ‘free aim’ function, where you aim your gun, magic blast, or wooden staff at foes to exploit weak points on them, or to attack flying enemies in fights that will dodge normal physical attacks. It’s very akin to the “Persona” series, where you have a very similar mechanic, albeit not being able to freely aim your gun. This mechanic mostly brought to mind “Valkyria Chronicles”, for the aiming, where the difference in maneuverability is that you are rooted to the ground for fights in Clair Obscur, while “Valkyria Chronicles” has you running from cover to cover and freely shooting when in an attacking phase. It’s a system I haven’t seen in a traditional JRPG-style combat system, and it’s a very novel implementation of a familiar mechanic, I think.

Lastly, there are ‘Skills’ you can use when a certain amount of ‘action points’ (or AP) have been stored per character. As you level your characters and allocate stats, you can use leveling currency to unlock nodes on a skill tree at checkpoints, which grants the use of different skills in battle. You can slot up to 6 skills per party member, and unlocking and utilizing these skills well can be the difference in more intense rounds of combat.

Your banked AP can be cashed in for these skills, with each selected skill having an aforementioned elemental affinity that can be used on enemies’ weaknesses. This sort of investigating and identifying of weaknesses is again, inspired by “Persona”, and having this kind of range of options to choose from when you are fighting, makes for thrilling gameplay.

Selecting all these functions is stylish, and also brings to mind that distinct, ‘Atlus’ style flair for menus. Clair Obscur’s onyx and gold color palette for both its menu and default character aesthetic theming is gorgeous looking. It’s well designed and just looks fantastic while you’re interacting with it. HUD elements float mid-air, as if they are extensions of your characters’ psyche or spiritual potential, and hitting a function to enact an action looks and feels spectacular, here.

Between the attacking, free aiming, and skill usage you can do on offense, there is another dynamic of engagement that you are doing that may be the most important in Clair Obscur’s combat dance: countering.

When baddies attack, they hit hard. Even on the standard difficulty, I was routinely getting ‘worked’ by enemies when they were dealing damage, with some fights even ending with me getting ‘one-shot’ by a particularly wily attacker.

It can be brutal if you are unskilled and unprepared. It’s a matter of learning how and when to counter and dodge effectively. Mostly, it’s about learning how and when to parry attacks from enemies, what sound they make when they’re vulnerable to be countered, and when to dodge when you know you can’t parry effectively. It’s a matter of listening to the little indicators before an attack lands, but identifying and executing parries based on that is another matter entirely.

The countering system is quite simply the best part of the game on a purely gameplay level, for me. It was so engaging to learn enemies’ attack strings, complex combos, and various quirks to their style of offense. For skilled players who can properly identify what needs to be done, a good defense can become the best offense, even if you are down to one party member.

This calls to mind a time in combat, where I was down all the members in my party, except for Lune. I had been caught off guard by my opponents and had paid the price dearly for my unpreparedness. By the time she was left, I was down to a sliver of health with no AP to spend on healing myself or resurrecting my party.

My saving grace here, however, is that I had finally learned the combat strings my enemies had been doing up to now. As you counter attacks, you build up AP as a reward for doing so effectively. So, armed with the knowledge of their attacks, I focused on just parrying and counter-attacking my enemies, whilst banking AP to increase my action potential.

Locking in, I executed each counter perfectly.

Building up my AP just by parrying and counter-attacking, I was able to heal myself up completely with my AP, resurrect all my party members that had been downed, and destroy the remaining enemies with relative ease.

This was the moment the combat loop clicked for me.

Finally, I had gotten it. Learning the give and take of the mechanics was both exhilarating and exhausting, but it was winning that fight that taught me the correct way to win, even when I was down to my last party member. It was a rush to get through that fight, and that’s why I think it’s my favorite battle system in any RPG game.

Sandfall has done brilliant work here, and I cannot extol the virtues of this combat loop enough.

This type of ‘defensive offense’ differs wildly from the games that Clair Obscur borrows from so heavily, and its implementation feels like one of the freshest and newest mechanical additions to the genre in years. It’s not a new idea to be able to mitigate damage from enemies in an RPG, but it’s how you’re able to go about executing on said mechanic that remains the most interesting piece to the combat puzzle.

Countering and actively defending reminds me of “Paper Mario”, where you are incentivized to time button presses to mitigate incoming volleys of attacks from enemies. The same principles are here, with the main core difference being that if you counter each attack perfectly, you can unleash a cinematic counter-attack that does devastating damage to the enemy during their combat round.

It’s the most useful way to climb your way back into fights, and its inclusion is the key to going hitless in tougher battles, which awards higher bonuses to XP at the result tally screen.

Balancing all of your offensive and defensive capabilities is the name of the game in “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33”, and the mix of abilities at your fingertips makes the entire adventure a blast to play all the way through. By the time I reached the end, I was parrying full strings of attacks, dodging with ease, and countering with my full party’s force for ‘Expedition Counters’, a mechanic that happens once every attack string for every party member has been successfully deflected in a defensive round.

There are these single counters, party counters, and finally, flashy sepia-toned wave attacks called: Gradient Attacks and Gradient Counters, that are more powerful sets of previous types of moves. You build a sort of ‘super’ meter while you fight that adds to a 3-section bar over your skills overlay, that when filled, allows you to unleash a slew of unique, overpowered attacks onto your enemies before you, at no cost to your action points.

So, for a fluid turn, you can gradient attack super, shoot a weakness, and enact a skill all in one round with a character. If your build is right, and you choose your action carefully, you can one-turn fights, and wipe away the opposition in one go, if you’re skilled enough.

The same can be said for the enemy attackers, though, where you have to counter gradient attacks from their side with gradient counters, that when parried precisely, throws back the damage being dealt.

It’s these capabilities in the battle systems, mixed with the countering tools, that make this my favorite turn-based combat in gaming. I never once got tired of interacting with it, and I constantly learned new things while I played, all the way up to the end of the story.

Again, it’s unbelievable that this is Sandfall’s first release, because the confidence of this game jumps off the screen in almost every facet of the finished product. It is nothing short of incredible what the team has managed to do here with their first game.

By the end, I had more than enough side things to do in the overworld, and it’ll take me another 20 or 30-some odd hours I imagine to clean up all of the side quests, arena battles, various collectibles, and tougher ‘chromatic’ bosses that the world has to offer, after the end of the campaign. In all, it took me around 25 hours to reach the end of the main narrative in Clair Obscur, and by the end, I was left forever changed.

It’s an unparalleled triumph in its genre. It has the best combat I have ever played in a turn-based game, an unforgettable story about grief and persistence, with fantastically realized characters and an indelible world and setting, that I will simply never forget.

I have almost no issues with this game. It’s simply remarkable that a game developed at this scale can run as well as it can, while looking as magnificent as it does, sounds as fantastic as it does, whilst delivering on quality the way no game in its genre has, save for a select few. It left me gobsmacked for most of its duration, and that’s something I can rarely say about any other title in the medium.

It’s a game that is all killer with zero filler, and it is much better for it. There is not a moment you could trim, a side task you could cut, or an encounter you could remove that would make this game better. It’s the best version it could ever be right out of the box, on a content level.

This game is the new gold standard of quality in the RPG genre, full stop. JRPGs,and narrative based games have a new champion to look up to, and “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33”, is that new high watermark for the genre, and video games as a whole.

I adored everything about this video game.

It’s a rare thing that is the case for me. Even as positive a person as I am, I have some hang-ups about even the best of products.

I highly recommend this game and all the content within, wholeheartedly and without reservation. You will be doing yourself a disservice if you miss out on this game, I truly think.

It is one of the greatest games I have ever had the privilege of playing, and it is by far the game to beat for me this calendar year.

As the year shuffles on, “We continue.”

I leave this review now for you, and: “for those who come after…”

For those reading this, thank you! I appreciate your time, and as always– Keep Gaming!!

Pictured: Me shouting “Kobe”, from the safety of my abode whilst hucking a DualSense controller into a garbage can.

God, I despise the DualSense.

I just wanted to complain a bit in this post.

(Disclaimer: This is an effort to kind of write more, and in shorter bursts, while certain topics are on the brain. I am certainly going to keep posting my thoughts on video games and reviewing new and old stuff, but this is my first attempt at a topical post that isn’t focused exclusively on a video game or series of games. Maybe I'll name these things something else one day? Who knows…)

I think PlayStation, and Sony as their corporate parent, to a larger extent, are now in the business of making luxury hardware for folks who have disposable income. They have sort of leaned slowly into the direction of selling more expensive consoles and peripherals to an ‘upper-class’ type of clientele that has the financial maneuverability to be able to purchase their higher-cost offerings.

It’s an unfortunate reality that we are all living in. The cost of goods and services has gone up dramatically year over year, with companies and individuals in the current economic climate charging more for their products, which is due in large part to the political landscape we find ourselves in as Americans.

These decisions have caused strain in the global trade and business relationships between our country and the rest of the world.

How can you negotiate with a madman?

Do you just tax him back??

The main fact you should take away from the current economic situation is this: trade wars are good for no one. When we play that game, everyone loses. It’s a silly way to tear down all the political and financial goodwill America as a country has worked so hard to cultivate with its neighboring countries and leaders around the world.

Starting a fight with our country’s friends and neighbors is the wrong thing to do if we want to truly “Make America Great Again”, like the orange man gestures so heavily towards, in his unfortunate rhetoric.

Let’s keep the main thing, the main thing, though. It’s easy to careen into despair when talking about things like this that cost money.

Gaming is, after all, a hobby to be enjoyed.

In the grand scheme of things, there are more important things to take care of in life before attending to the buying and playing of video games.

Gaming isn’t inessential, but when it comes to living daily life, our daily needs and financial responsibilities ultimately come first, once we decide where we need to allocate our funds in a given pay period. I wish this weren’t the case, but putting food on the table is a bit more important than playing that hot new game that just came out.

You can’t eat a digital license, now, can you?

More people are being shrewd about where and when they spend money. The costs of doing business are rising rapidly, while people’s wages are not. The rising tide is sinking all of the ships that can’t stay afloat. We are in the middle of the ‘widening’-- a gap between classes that gets larger, and more concerning, by the day. The rich are getting richer, while the poor people are getting priced out of the bare necessities of life. Being hungry, though, doesn’t allow you to “eat the rich”. Maybe taxing wealthy folks more for making more money would alleviate this problem?? Wild thought, I know.

When you’re starving, buying that big screen television just isn’t as important, you know?

I am lucky to have some disposable income to use for buying things I want (within reason of course).

I bought a Switch 2 recently, for instance, and I am anxiously awaiting its impending release (on my birthday of all things!). I swapped out my dusty, old, and abandoned Xbox Series S to help with the price of a Switch 2 preorder cost and I was very glad I did so. Once the Switch 2 hits and I pick it up, I may just write about my whole experience with purchasing one at my local store, a GameStop location in my town’s shopping mall.

To be determined!

My most recent gaming hardware purchase, though, was this past weekend, where I picked up a couple of DualSense controllers from Target.

When I brought in my Series S to GameStop, I also traded in my original white DualSense that was giving me trouble.

For some reason, the launch PS5 hardware was not as good as future skews of the same product.

The launch version of the PS5 console was prone to have faulty disc drives that crapped out shortly after release, and what’s more, the battery life on a launch PS5 DualSense remote had a very slim life of around 2-3 hours a charge. Turns out I got all the bad luck in the world in this case, because I have both a faulty drive and shitty battery life in my controllers. Great, I thought, now I gotta pony up big for some accessories, and I needed to do it fast because costs are rising rapidly for gaming hardware and add-ons.

Note: (As of the time of this writing, Sony has not raised prices of their hardware and accessories in the United States, but with Microsoft ripping the proverbial ‘band-aid’ off and raising the prices of all their Xbox products in every territory, it’s really just a matter of time before Sony follows suit and does the same thing with their products in the PlayStation family.)

This was after months of just dealing with myriad issues with my remotes. I had two different colors of DualSense: white and hot pink, with both being launch window remotes with battery life issues. I know you can technically replace the batteries in each (breaking the warranty), but I didn’t think I was brave enough to try.

I despised using these controllers, let me tell you.

I was charging them all of the time, it felt like. I would play an hour to an hour and a half of a game before the low battery notification would display on my PlayStation overlay.

The buttons also got stuck to the remote incredibly easily. No matter how many times you would clean out little bits of detritus from between the button housing and the joysticks, both input locations would just continue to keep sticking, in various ways.

The touchpad was also overly sensitive to even the slightest touch. In some games, the touchpad is used for either menuing or guideposts, like in “Ghost of Tsushima,” where you can flick the pad, and a cool breeze will appear to guide you to your selected objective.

It was a horrible feeling to literally fight the controller in my hands daily. The PS5 is my most used console, and having to deal with so much bullshit to play my games was infuriating.

I considered just throwing them away and being done with them, buying new ones to replace the ones I discarded.

I didn’t, but the idea crossed my mind.

The launch remotes just felt ‘chintzy’ and cheap, in comparison to newer controllers. Maybe the assembling and sourcing of parts became more quality as time went on, or perhaps when COVID hit, it made production even harder when it came to putting hardware together?

It’s unclear the reason, but at launch, the quality seemed low for the manufacturing end of the console and its peripherals.

The last straw with these remotes came while I was playing “Split Fiction” (the newest Hazelight game) with my wife, Alex. The battery issues had gotten so bad, we couldn’t get a single level finished in the game before the remotes died and needed to be charged. I had had enough.

We went to Target the next morning.

I decided to bite the bullet and get two since both of the controllers were having issues. So, I got a silver one, and my wife picked out a baby blue one (just a horrific shade of that color, let me tell you).

The price for both after tax was just shy of 200 dollars.

Holy shit. For two remotes?? This is the economy we are in???

I did the thing that dads do when they have to put money down on what they deem as expensive. I was flabbergasted— but I managed to remark, (to my lovely wife’s chagrin), “What? Geez, are you serious? Can’t be that expensive, right?? That can’t be how much you’re charging.”

My poor wife turned many shades of red out of embarrassment at my utterance, and best believe I heard about that on our way to the car.

My father made this move all the time, growing up. It was one of his favorite things to say to someone at the cash register, I found. I guess this sort of sticker shock just rubbed off on me…

My dad hates spending money when he has to. He isn’t a frugal person necessarily, but he LOVES griping about something he thinks is too expensive. It’s not a money issue usually either because he has always had enough money to get what he wants, but for some reason he always had a habit of grousing about the price of things at the checkout counter. Like he had just heard about the price right then and there.

Growing up, I learned that if you don’t like something pricey, you can complain about it, and I guess I just do that now. I don’t think it’s right, but— hell, you can’t change things now, I am getting set in my ways in my late twenties.

Anyways, yeah… That’s the story.

Shit is expensive, and I hate that damn controller.

The new ones are better in almost every way, but the memories of those old ones sticks to the sides of my brain even still, after purchasing replacements.

I still even have the hot pink one. That fucker.

I scoff every time I look at that thing now, because I have brand new ones I can use.

“I don’t need your ass, anymore,” I sneer viciously behind bared teeth, “You’re the BACKUP CONTROLLER!!! I hope you rot and get covered in dust mites!!!”

I keep that bastard as a reminder that the DualSense is terrible and I hate using it. It’s just a matter of time before these new ones go, I imagine, but at least things are better…

….For now.

Thanks for reading this, and keep gaming!!

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“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”

- Han Solo, “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope”-

More people should play Star Wars Outlaws, I think.

I thoroughly enjoyed it!

A lot of folks missed out on playing it amidst the late fall release calendar of video games that hit this past year, and I think that’s a shame. While it’s by no means like ‘revolutionary’ or even at all trailblazing in its assemblage of design, I think it is a very good, well ‘put-together’ game.

I think the mark of a good game is: are the parts of it ‘good’ by themselves, regardless of the whole, and how are those parts when they are put together, when it comes to a congruous experience you play?

In this case, I do think that the segments of the game are well made, and I think the stitching together of said parts is more seamless than other Ubisoft fare I have played recently.

Ubisoft has a penchant for ‘kitchen-sink’ design.

Everything they make on a grand scale in their bigger games can be seen as an attempt at workshopping new ideas for other products. Kind of like a gestation pod or incubation station for new ideas.

Like, for instance, they will implement new systems in their open-world Assassin’s Creed games to test out their functionality, even if it doesn’t always work when you throw it in just any game. The new Assassin’s Creed game, AC Shadows does this same thing with the ‘dark/light meter’ on the heads-up display, a callback to their classic series of stealth games, “Splinter Cell”, where your visibility to enemies or cameras in a level is governed by a meter of how much you can be seen by everyone.

With rumors of another Splinter Cell being worked on in the bowels of Ubisoft as of the time of this writing, it’s interesting at the very least to see a mechanic normally used for that other series of stealth games be re-implemented and ‘re-jiggered’ for a new game while the original series is on the back burner.

It’s this example, along with many other instances in Ubisoft games, where they work on specific mechanics in their other games and share them with various titles being worked on internally.

Star Wars Outlaws uses this philosophy while also tinkering with different ‘social’ mechanics amongst quest givers and NPCS to bring about a mix of both the familiar and the new.

Faction and reputation systems are not a new concept in games.

Especially in Ubisoft games. “Far Cry 4”, another open-world Ubisoft game in the long-running “Far Cry” series of first-person open-world shooters, has you making story decisions between two story-critical NPCs, and leads you down somewhat different paths of narrative in the campaign, before ultimately circling back for a normal ‘golden path ending.

(There is also a secret hidden ending you can get at the very beginning of Far Cry 4 that is very funny. It’s a humorous thing when games add these sorts of joke endings to long games for the heck of it.)

So, Ubisoft is no stranger to these systems and ideas of social reputation being added to their games. The difference here is that it’s a bit more core to the gameplay loop than a gimmicky alternate version of a normal campaign.

A big addition to Star Wars Outlaws’ gameplay is the inclusion of “Reputation”.

You are a Bounty Hunter, after all. Your loyalty is to the almighty ‘credit’, and you’ll be damned if anyone can be quick enough to double-cross you before you scoop up a score.

This system plays out specifically with the various crime syndicates that play a role in the goings-on of the story.

There are (in no particular order) the following crime syndicates you will be taking jobs for while you make your bones in The Outer Rim.

The Hutt Cartel, helmed by the notorious gangster, Jabba the Hutt, the iconic slug-like alien villain from the film series; The Pyke Syndicate, a race of fish-like humanoids relatively new to the Star Wars franchise, (with most of their recent appearances coming from the Disney+ slate of shows); Crimson Dawn, a dangerous underground crime ring run by Qi’ra, (as seen in the underrated spinoff film “Solo: A Star Wars Story”); The Ashiga Clan, a group of destabalized criminals running operations out of Kijimi, (last seen in the afore-mentioned “Rise of Skywalker”); and finally the new players in the galaxy and the main antagonists of the game Zerek Besh, led by the slimy and gutless Sliro Barsha, a rich financier from Corellia who is the main villain of Outlaws.

Besides Zerek Besh, you will be taking many odd jobs from these factions, building up your ‘cred’ as you do so. The more jobs you run, the more respected you will be with a given faction. There isn’t a ton of nuance to this system besides screwing over a faction for another at the cost of loyalty with them.

You are sometimes given a choice to choose something that will either raise or lower your reputation with a syndicate, but that’s about it. While it isn’t the deepest system in the world, it’s fun to have a sort of rapport with virtual social hierarchies, even if it can be gamefied to earn back that hard-fought reputation.

If you lose standing with a faction, it’s only a matter of running more quests with the faction affected, so you can raise that level for different rewards, displayed in a sort of tiered, ‘battle-pass’ sort of way. Most of the rewards here are clothes and item appearance options for your main character, Kay Vess, so I didn’t feel quite led to engage with it all.

It’s a novel system that I would like to see expounded upon in future Ubisoft games. It fits very well here with the IP and the story. The functionality of the reputation feature works well, while not being the most innovative thing about the game. It’s the core of the mission loop that the entire game is centered around, so its inclusion is very much welcome to the normal mission structure of: “walk up to a terminal/npc/thing, interact with thing, and be on your way”. Gussying up the presentation here goes a long way to making this system work, in my opinion.

While the rep system is the impetus for your excursions throughout the galaxy, it’s the open world hubs that allow you to engage with the setting, and worlds of Star Wars, and what it means to carve your little niche in the galaxy.

You play as Kay Vess, a bounty hunter on the run, who, with her sidekick, pet merqaal companion Nix, is on the run from the crime syndicate Zerek Besh, after a heist gone wrong.

You know the drill by now, with these stories.

As the story progresses, you are getting together a team to go crack open Sliro’s vault on Canto Bight (since it went so well the first time), and that goal takes you to every corner of the galaxy to accomplish that. You see lots of beautiful locales, like lush forests, frigid mountains, and rolling prairies, as you take in the sights of the places you visit.

That’s one thing that Ubisoft has always done very well with their games, I will say.

The art design and attention to detail of all the worlds and the towns that dot the landscape are fantastic. In the Assassin’s Creed series, that is the one constant, even if the games that take place in these settings aren’t always the best.

The worlds they create are well-realized and busy with detail, and I think Outlaws might be as expertly crafted a game on the visual front as I have seen from Ubisoft.

You can tell that it was a labor of love to get all the small details just right.

The denizens that populate the small towns, markets, and cantinas of Outlaws also have a lot of attention paid to them. If they make a Star Wars film, chances are they have a cantina scene in it. It’s an iconic piece of Star Wars filmmaking that carries on to now.

Getting that feeling of walking into a bar while an alien band plays ‘jizz’ (you heard me) on a strange set of instruments is captured perfectly in Outlaws. There is always a cantina or bar on every planet, and walking into one and just witnessing the ‘club lifestyle’ of Star Wars never grew old on me.

They struck a perfect tone with these scenes and captured that feeling of walking into a strange place, filled with odd people, doing normal things. It’s maybe my favorite part of the game.

Cantinas are the social centers, the places you visit in Star Wars Outlaws. Quest givers, rumor mills, racing bets, and even Sabaac matches can be found in places like these. It all adds to the impeccable flavor of the game, and it’s really what makes it so Star Wars. It is the best encapsulation of what it looks like to be a normal person with a life in a fantastical, off-kilter place, in Star Wars.

I loved the little touches that Ubisoft included in the cantinas, especially. It’s a visual feast for those who love the series, and even for those who don’t. They knocked this aspect of the game out of the park.

One aspect of the game Ubisoft does not knock out of the park, however, has to be the stealth portion of the combat.

The issues I have with Outlaws primarily lie with the stealth you have to partake in at some points in the story.

In the open world bits of the game, you can attack a situation however you would like, either by going loud and blasting your problems away, or by becoming a phantom menace (see what I did there) by creeping up on unsuspecting baddies and murdering them in cold blood.

As a rule, you never should be blasting your way through the levels in Outlaws, because Kay Vess can go down very easily if put under too much duress. She seems specifically tuned for being a bit weak in terms of her health when it comes to combat.

One to three hits is all it takes for her to go down, and bacta tanks you consume as health potions don’t seem to alleviate the damage you take, unless you carry the maximum amount of them at any time.

Because of this fact, you rely more on ‘stealthing’ your way across a level rather than shooting up fools with your trusty blaster.

Since you engage in stealth more often, the mechanics should be at least serviceable to get the job done. I hate to say that not only is the stealth not good or well implemented, but it is straight up annoying to sneak around when there are so many factors against you doing so effectively.

It just feels slightly broken, still. It’s never a matter of whether you get seen– it’s when. It happens constantly, even when you are hidden behind cover and there is no way you could’ve been seen. Far worse is the enemy AI, which is dumb as rocks. Sometimes they have eagle eyes, and sometimes they see you dead in the face and don’t even react to you being directly in front of them.

The whole exercise feels inconsistent at best, and painfully bad at worst. Not to mention the mission-critical junctures where you are required as a mission constraint not to get caught. Which, if you are (inevitably caught), it will send you back to your nearest checkpoint before it happened.

It’s tedious, underdeveloped, and all around shoddily assembled, which is ironic given how I feel about the game as a whole.

I think it’s the attention to detail in the game that gives it its charm. So, to have such an integral gameplay system like stealth be so poorly implemented while also being a mandatory part of the game to engage with makes the final result more of a mixed bag on the gameplay front than I would like.

So when stealth breaks down, you resort to shooting your way out. As I said before, it’s not the most ideal thing to do given Kay Vess’ physical fortitude, but it is very fun combat to play once shit hits the fan.

You have your handy dandy Star Wars blaster at your side, and by golly, do you use it. Blasting crooks and stormtroopers alike has never been more fun than it is here.

The blaster has a main semi-auto rate of fire that you get as soon as the game puts the gun into your hand. But as you continue, more firing modes become available through upgrades that add to your kit’s functionality.

You can outfit a full auto mode (my favorite of the bunch), a heavy shot, an explosive round mag, and you can even switch the firing mode to stun shots or even energy rounds that can incapacitate droid fodder in more diverse firefights.

All these functions are used for puzzles throughout the adventure, too, and I appreciated how much design and intricacy went into how the blaster interacts with the worlds you visit. It feels like an extension of yourself by the end.

There isn’t ammo per se, but there is a cooldown meter that pops up once you shoot for too long. It’s like the Mass Effect games with their guns, where there isn’t ammo, but they have heat sink cartridges that pop out to cool the weapon down.

It’s a very similar concept, here.

Kay Vess gets into all sorts of trouble during the story proceedings, and she has to shoot her way out of many, many situations. It was always thrilling to see what set-pieces she would run and gun through to make it to the other side of the problems she constantly faced.

You can’t have a heist without a crew, and you spend the majority of the narrative gathering up a motley crew of miscreants and malcontents from across the galaxy.

The first companion you get of course, is Nix, your little pet merqaal, and he is by far the most useful tool in your proverbial locker.

Kay can command him to distract guards, nick creds off of unsuspecting goons, blow breakers for distraction, and much more. Nix is a versatile little fella who just likes to be a people pleaser. He is more than capable of attacking a hapless lone stormtrooper while you sneak up for a finishing strike to the dome, and I found this camaraderie between him and Kay Vess very enjoyable.

It’s a tale full a swashbuckling escapades and you have your trusty first mate Nix to help swing the odds in your favor.

He doesn’t have much of a personality outside of being cute, I guess, but that’s more than enough for me, given that he is so useful in the gameplay.

When events happen in the story that take him away from Vess, you do feel his absence in the mechanics, and I appreciated Nix even more when I was able to rescue him from the ne’er-do-wells that nabbed him.

The last bit of mechanical goings on I want to remark upon is how fucking good your vehicle is in this game.

Your speeder, the Trailblazer, is at your disposal whenever you wanna do some old-fashioned open-world checklist-y stuff that dot the holo-map of Outlaws.

It gets you around in style, controls beautifully, and has a sick jump you can get during the story. As you glide across the various stunning landscapes of Outlaws, there are many rocky ramps, dune drifts, and expanses of water, and the Trailblazer can handle all the terrain you can throw its way.

The latter of those previously mentioned, the water traversal, is SO crisp. I just love how it feels to skim the water with your speeder. It looks and sounds so, so good. I was damn near looking for puddles in the environment to skim through because it felt so good to do.

That’s one of my favorite things about Outlaws, for sure.

I do wish there was a function to shoot while on your speeder though. Sort of like the drive-by shooting mechanic from the “Grand Theft Auto” series. There is a ‘mark and execute’ function when you can hit both sticks in (on console) and tag baddies, though, which almost makes up for it.

That is yet another mechanic taken from their other games, as well, in “Splinter Cell: Conviction”, there is also a mechanic to tag and execute enemies in quick succession.

It’s a novel thing to include forward in their new games when it had been implemented in past titles. It’s like Ubisoft’s gameplay design and DNA are being shared back and forth between its history, and I think that’s pretty cool.

The story is very well-told and acted, with Kay Vess being the highlight of the whole tale.

Humberly Gonzalez does a stellar job making the character unique and different from similar archetypes in the series, and I grew to appreciate the distinct personality she had. She is constantly on the run and always having to figure her way out of problems. She is a character full of verbs, who acts before she thinks, for good and bad. Kay is a very interesting, well-written character with a troubled past, but that stereotypical backstory doesn’t make her feel generic at all, with Gonzalez lending her so much originality and life.

It’s really strength of the property and the material that does the majority of the heavy lifting here, but Kay Vess only makes those two ingredients better with her inclusion. She is a really great protagonist that is elevated by a fantastic acting performance, by Gonzalez.

I’d like to see Kay is more Star Wars stuff.

Perhaps a sequel, or a show on Disney+? I would watch a lot more of her story given that she is such an interesting, well-established, and well-written character.

The last character I want to highlight is the assassin droid ND5, and he was by far my favorite party member in the game.

He’s just so damn cool. He’s got a sick-ass trench coat. Enough said.

No, but seriously, he plays a larger part in the story than I thought he would. Once the main antagonist threat has been taken care of, ND5 takes center stage at the very end in a way I didn’t expect.

I think he is one of the best Star Wars guys I have seen in any part of the franchise. Just a cool ass dude making his way in the galaxy.

ND5 is quick-witted, has an amazing voice, is dangerously capable when needed, and has a sick-ass trench coat. AGAIN, THE ROBOT MAN HAS A COOL COAT. Sign me the hell up!

Some folks have asked, and yes: droids can be sexy.

ND5 is a sex symbol, and I don’t care who knows it. Who needs a Twi’Lek stripper when you have a bad motherfuckin’ droid with a cool outfit and a restraining bolt?

His story is one of the best parts of Outlaws’ main narrative, and once he was part of my team, it felt like we had a complete crew.

I want there to be a sequel to this game, because I need more ND5 in my life. Hell, let me play as him next!

Say what you will about Star Wars, because there has been a lot of it lately– but I think there is more ‘Good’ Star Wars than there is ‘Bad’ Star Wars. What do I mean by this?

I think at the very least, the quality of Star Wars has been at a consistent level of at least ‘good’ recently, with the extreme exception being “Rise of Skywalker” (woof), which is by all measures agreed upon as being a hilariously bad movie, if not misguided at the very least.

From the recent canon books I have read, I can tell they’re serviceable to good, while the shows have varied in quality for years.

“The Mandalorian” show started well but has sorta petered out in its most recent season. I’m hoping that the movie spinoff “The Mandalorian and Grogu” will end that series satisfyingly and completely. (It’ll probably be good.)

Andor has been a complete revelation, with Tony Gilroy (famed writer/director of the legal thriller classic, “Michael Clayton”) masterfully writing and directing some of the very best Star Wars epics of the last quarter century. The trials and tribulations of Cassian Andor, who first appeared in the spinoff flick “Rogue One”, is a brilliant and fantastically crafted look into what it looks like to be under the thumb of the Empire, at its peak powers. It’s insane how fucking good that show is.

The Star Wars video games in recent years have been stellar. After the license exclusivity wasn’t renewed with Electronic Arts after the “Star Wars Battlefront” reboots, and “Star Wars Squadrons” from EA Motive, the property rights were divvied up more generously with different developers, to cultivate new and exciting experiences from other places.

Respawn, the makers of the “Titanfall”, and “Apex Legends” games, took the property and made a pair of brilliant 3rd-person action games in the vein of “Dark Souls”, and “Uncharted”, called “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order”, and “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor”. So far, there have been two of those, and they have been excellent. (The first one in particular is a favorite of mine.)

Ubisoft also struck a deal to have their team, Ubisoft Massive, developers of the popular 3rd-person narrative multiplayer shooter, “The Division”, make this game, Star Wars Outlaws.

They knocked about 80 percent of the game out of the park in my opinion. I liked this game.

Star Wars has been good for a long time is my point, and most of the stuff we are getting now has been better than ever, (except don’t watch “Obi-Wan”... It’s pretty bad).

I guess this is how I feel: Star Wars is like pizza, for me. It’s hard to fuck it up.

If the pizza is bad, then oh well. Pizza is pizza. I like pizza.

This may be an unpopular take for a Star Wars fan, but I just like seeing different stories take place in my favorite universe.

Star Wars Outlaws is just one of the many stories I have experienced in the Star Wars universe, but I think it’s well worth a playthrough.

Again, it’s a shame it got missed last year because if I had finished it last fall, it would most definitely be in the top 10 of my favorite things of 2024.

It’s solid in its mechanics (mostly), competent in its design, and enthralling in its details.

The setting is beautifully rendered and remarkably assembled. The music is that good ol’ Star Wars sound you love and appreciate, and the menus and logos hearken back to a simpler time with a more analog look and feel to it.

I think, if you see it on sale at your retailer or storefront of choice, just buy it. You will be happy you did so!

I recommend this game, and if you can get past the bad stealth and quirky technical hiccups that crop up from time to time, you will have more than a good time with it.

I appreciate your time, “May the Force be with You”, and keep gaming!