If pressed, I don’t think I could name you a single video game character I like more than Leon S. Kennedy. He’s the best!

I am a huge fan of Capcom. Out of all the years I have been playing video games, I can scarcely think of a better year for genre titles. Big-budget games that thrive on unique themes, genre trappings, or niches have never been more in vogue than this year. There is a particularity to the games that have hit it big, and it’s great to see so much variety in an industry so accustomed to not taking chances. Companies are generally averse to risk because of the reality of a hit-driven business. Why try something new when something old and tried and true has been successful?

Chiefly, the standouts for me in 2026 have been from the prolific and acclaimed Japanese developer and publisher Capcom. This year, they have been killing it. They have felt like one of the only companies that have truly toed the line between commercial success and reinvention, and have made it work for them, while also balancing development timelines and development intricacies successfully. Not only do they innovate in their titles, they also set the standard for how a company should operate in this new, increasingly volatile industry landscape.

I reviewed Pragmata this spring (you should read that review too, by the way), and I loved it. Now, with the release of Resident Evil: Requiem, Capcom has inexplicably struck gold twice in one year, and they even have a new Onimusha coming out in September!! It’s shaping up to be the Year of Capcom, and I think that’s a real testament to prioritizing teams and personnel, rather than on auteurs or big-time directing talent.

At its core, Capcom is the prime example of what you get when you mix primarily two things. The first is a constant, successful innovation of beloved, storied IP (all while retaining key, top talent), and the careful stewardship of said franchises with world-class development pipelines to ensure smoother and easier development environments. No one does it like Capcom, and no one tries! Why not? Investing in your company’s future by making video games when you are a maker of video games just makes sense, right? Capcom thinks so, and it’s executing perfectly, putting every big third-party publisher to shame. They’re just better at what they do, and it’s because they prioritize seasoned developers making classic franchises with a reasonable scope. They make bigger, better games, more smartly and more cost-effectively than other companies in the industry.

Recently, we have been getting a lot of Resident Evil remakes. Which is good, because I love Resident Evil, and I love Capcom. More games from them is good, but particularly in the Resident Evil franchise. Capcom has prioritized delivering a release cadence that satisfies. They’ve been remaking classic games in the franchise, and releasing brand new games in the series, one after the other. It’s a ‘you go, I go’ approach between new and old that has kept getting better and better with every title. This cadence started back almost a decade ago with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a huge success for the company. Ever since then, in 2017, almost every year and a half, like clockwork, we have gotten a Resident Evil game, be it a remake or a new entry, in alternating fashion.

It’s been surprising their cadence, not just for how quickly they come out with new games, but just how high-quality each new or remade title is when they hit storefronts. The highest mark they’ve hit as of late, in my opinion, has been with their RE4 remake, itself released in 2023. Their least liked one came just a couple of years before it, with the likes of the RE3 remake (itself a fine game but not as beloved as other projects in their pipeline). But every game they’ve released during this period could be evaluated as a baseline of solid to great titles, though, and the bar of quality for the series has never been higher, as a result. It’s all just clicking.

Actually, since Resident Evil 4 (2023) has come out, the three-year wait between it and the newest entry in the mainline series, Resident Evil: Requiem (itself the ninth mainline title in the numbered entries), is the longest wait between games in this new release cadence since 2017. The last numbered entry was all the way back in 2021, with the release of Resident Evil: Village, the eighth mainline entry in the series (and second part of the primarily first-person Winters’ Duology, coming after RE7). So it’s been a while since the last numbered entry. As a digression, the titles have started becoming cheekier about the hidden numbers in each subtitle, which is a clever thing, I think [“Requiem”: (q/9), Village: (VIII/8, Biohazard: Z/7, for example]. Regardless, it has been a bit of a longer wait between wholly new entries in the franchise. (Also, the announcement to release was under a year from beginning to end; more games need to do this!)

As mentioned in my previous review of Resident Evil 4 (2023), this franchise is my favorite type of video game. Replayable, primarily focused on single-player, of high quality, and damn fun to play. I am pleased to say, then, that Requiem is just as good as the RE4 remake in many ways (if not better in some others), it reinvents the template of the franchise that is Resident Evil, masterfully, 30 years in. Capcom has successfully reinvented their best franchise yet again, all while delivering on years of established lore and storylines. Some of which go all the way back to Resident Evil 2. It’s an out-of-the-park home run of a video game for me and is one of my favorite entries in the series to date.

It’s a bona fide, stone-cold classic of a game that I will hold loftily up high for years to come. It’s some of the most fun I have had with a video game in 2026 and the past couple of years, to boot. Parts of it can be viewed as a bit of fan service, sure— but collectively, given the perfect pacing, impeccable game design, and pitch-perfect campy tone, it’s more than the sum of its eclectic parts. It’s much more, in fact. Dare I say, it is a complete reinvention of the franchise, writ large, 30 years in. It’s a contender for my personal Game of the Generation, itself still held tightly (if not slipping a bit) by 2024’s Metaphor: Re Fantazio, Atlus’ brilliant JRPG epic. Requiem is of a quality barely touched by other triple-A video games of its type, and I shall be gushing about it for months and years to come. It’s like a video game made exclusively for me.

So what’s so good about it? What’s the fuss about, you ask? Well, it’s a big fuss because of just how much gameplay variety there is to be found here. The big thing here that makes this game so special is how it blends the distinct gameplay disciplines of Resident Evil under one roof and how expertly each is balanced against the other. By default, you have two ways you can play this game, with the default being chosen by the developers.

You play as two characters in Requiem (itself not a new feature of the series), with each character’s perspective being tailored by default to an individual play style. You play as both Grace Ashcroft, a new character to the series, and the returning fan-favorite dreamboat: the statuesque ex-cop Leon S. Kennedy (himself more rugged and seasoned after all his years of offing scads of the undead). Grace, primarily by default, plays in first-person, with her segments being the more terrifying portions of the shared adventure (her gameplay is geared to more of the newer style of gameplay found in both RE7 and RE8), and Leon plays normally in a third-person view since he is more tailored towards action and cathartic combat (like gameplay found primarily in both RE2 and RE4).

Capcom balances each gameplay style and discipline perfectly, with each character feeling right at home even when the perspective shifts between default viewpoints. You can, of course, change each character’s perspective in the menus, but personally, why would you? I believe the devs set them as default for a reason, so I never deigned to change them in my playthrough; as I played, it felt more and more like the right choice to stick with the default settings. The game works better that way, even though initially it could feel jarring. But somehow, someway it works, and feels just right.

Another big addition to this new entry is the added behaviors of the enemy types you face throughout the campaign. Every zombie you encounter in the early game sections of the campaign feels new, different, and way scarier. See, the biggest change that Capcom made to these units is making each creature of the dead feel more wholly bespoke and unique in its behavior. Every enemy you encounter in the early game environments feels unique, because they all seem to cling to some vestige of their previous lives. There are shambling nurse orderlies, dutiful undead maids, lumbering butchers stumbling around rotting, and there is even a female zombie that was a beautiful lounge singer in her former life; all these professions and their vocational quirks stick around long after death. Not only does this add flavor to your stock-standard enemies from the afterlife, but it also changes how they move, attack, and gurgle out their creaky dialogue in combat encounters.

Grace is the overwhelmed, underprepared audience surrogate this go around, and while she is resourceful and whip-smart, she is initially woefully ill-suited to take on these new horrors. The early game of RE9 is by far when the game is at its best, and most horrific. You spend the beginning hours of your sections with Grace, sneaking around dimly lit hallways, picking up crafting materials, bits of ammo, unlocking doors, and dodging shambling corpses as you do so. If it weren’t scary enough, every zombie utters unique creepy dialogue depending on their station. The following is an example of a unique situation with a zombie that I encountered during my playthrough as Grace.

During this first Grace section, I encountered a clinic attendant zombie enemy waddling around near a pair of elevators. Here I had two options: attempt to sneak past him while he was muttering about the elevator to himself, down the right path which led to another area of the clinic, or continue down the same hallway to my left into a storage room where I might find resources that I could use to craft useful items. I chose the path to the left, but the only way to make it past without the attendant noticing me was to turn off the light in the hallway, masking my escape into the next chamber. I turned off the light, and to my amazement— the zombie lurched to his immediate right, in my direction. The rotting attendant grumbled to himself, “LIGHTS OUTTT…” and then started walking TOWARDS me, as I crouched helplessly in the dark.

It was terrifying!! It’s by far one of the scariest moments I have ever had playing a game. I shouted: “OH SHIT!” and booked it straight for the room at the end of the hallway. In that moment, I felt a mix of being terrified and being excited. It was thrilling to be scared by a game again once again. I am a seasoned gamer who plays all of the popular, mainstream horror games that I can since it’s my favorite genre, so I have built up a significant tolerance for the routine scares. But here? It really got me! This segment was so well done. I hadn’t even thought the zombie would go and turn the light back on! Because games don’t do that! It’s mechanically complex to do, and most devs don’t even think to do it! Having the zombie react to a choice I made felt incredible. What an amazing innovation on the part of the developers to make the familiar feel new again.

Scary games or horror games do not normally move me in general. I’m rarely scared. I have an iron will when it comes to scary movies too, since I have a very strong constitution when it comes to horror media. I think a lot of it has to do with my experience playing a bunch of horror video games on the regular. When you are wading through hell fighting off or running from denizens of the underworld, merely watching it happen just isn’t nearly as scary. I’ve covered wars, you know? (Frank West, shout out. Capcom, please pay me.)

The Grace segments are the scariest parts of this game, and the beginning might be the most terrifying descent into hell I can remember in a horror game. It’s also filled with moments just like the previous one I mentioned with the attendant. All kinds of unique zombies react in specific ways. I want Capcom to continue making these choices to include elaborate routines and behaviors in their enemy types. Because if they do, and they continue to make each encounter mechanically interesting and aesthetically terrifying in the games that follow, I think it will be to RE’s benefit. The Grace sequences are wonderful and tense. It’s the slow build-up in these segments that leads to the catharsis of the Leon segments. You putter around for hours scrounging up resources and escaping from horrific enemies with Grace, and when you finally head into the next section of the game with her, it cuts back to Leon Kennedy in the clinic, for his turn at clean-up duty. From there, it’s a release of all the pent-up tension that has been building, with Leon’s segments acting as a sort of release valve. He’s here to whoop ass, quip a ton, and look good doing it. This stuff rocks!

Leon plays as good, if not better, here than he ever had in RE4. He may be in his late 40s, but damn if he doesn’t handle as dextrously and as brutishly as he ever has. Leon, at his core, is Resident Evil’s proverbial main character after all— and after years of fighting against hordes of the undead and the various victims of plague, he has learned more than enough tricks to still be worthy of top billing as the capable leading man that he is. Leon is, for all intents and purposes, Capcom’s “Grim Reaper” in everything but name. This man knows how to kill, and how to do it with a style and flair that would make even Dante from Devil May Cry blush. (Hell, why not just give Leon a letter grade while you’re at it?) Leon mutilates, breaks, rips, and stylishly tears apart the army of the undead (and even a handful of Umbrella’s science experiments) in his sections, and he does it with a flair and panache that would even make the Doom Slayer turn several shades of hellish red out of jealousy.

The new tool at Leon’s disposal to accomplish his goal of clean-up duty is his combat axe (or tactical hatchet if you’re being pedantic). This functions similarly to the knife parry in RE4, where you can block melee attacks from enemies if they get too close, turning the tables back in your favor during encounters. It gets hectic at times, too. These undead cronies don’t courteously wait for an opportunity to take a snap at you. So using the axe to stave off these aggressive baddies is extremely useful. Just like the knife in RE2 and RE4, your axe has a durability meter that, when low, needs to get repaired; you do so by sharpening said implement with a big-ass whetstone of all things.

It tickled me to no end to use the axe on an enemy, lower its durability, take a step back, sharpen the axe again, and then take a couple of more hacks at a zombie. It’s incredibly funny to watch in practice, given how impractical the whole act seems in the heat of battle, but this particular thing made me giggle every time it happened. Leon uses the axe a lot in tight situations, so getting a sharpening in between bouts with an undead always looks amusing when it happens.

The game is split into these two disciplines: Grace’s slow-burn classic horror segments, and Leon’s combat arena clean-up sections. There are points where the two deviate from going through the same areas in the middle to late game, but there are points where both inhabit the same spaces at different times. The old mechanic of leaving items for the next person returns here from the original dual protagonist adventures in Resident Evil’s history, and leaving items for Leon as Grace is useful when he is busy doing the sweeping up of whatever Grace left behind. If Grace has picked up damn near every resource, Leon still has specific ways to get items for his parts, with the appearance of locked cabinets that can only be opened with his axe. Grace can’t open these cabinets, which ensures that even if Grace has picked the clinic clean, Leon still has some stuff to use on his side of the adventure. It’s a nice way to ensure that Leon has what he needs regardless of resource crunches in Grace’s segments.

The balance of the resources, the two characters’ viewpoints, and their gameplay differences keep the whole adventure feeling varied and exciting throughout. I liked switching back and forth, and despite how different each segment feels, it all works remarkably well given how different each character’s experience can feel. It’s another successful, well-paced jaunt through yet another dimly-lit house of horrors.

While Resident Evil Requiem is a game that’s good at so many things, it’s especially great at keeping things feeling fresh throughout, which is ironic given the subject matter of decaying corpses and shambling science experiments. Like Leon Kennedy, the series just gets better with time. From start to finish, it’s a raucous, exciting, and thrilling romp that more than keeps your attention for its runtime. My 12-hour campaign felt like it flew by in a flash, and that’s a credit to the stellar direction of the game, how breezy it feels to play, and how engrossing its world and the characters that reside in it can be. It’s one of the very best games in the series, and can stand almost toe to toe with the heights of the storied franchise. Resident Evil doesn’t get much better than this… but damn if I don’t want to see them try.

Thanks for reading.

This very well may be my favorite “Resident Evil” all told. I don’t think there is a bad part of this game, and playing it 4 times in a row has cemented that for me. What an incredible accomplishment. Somehow they made RE4 even better???

Resident Evil 4 is a masterpiece. The first one, that is. Not only is it considered far and away quality-wise the finest game in the franchise, but it’s also by far the series’ most beloved entry. I adore the original version of the game. The first time I ever played it was on the PS4 around 2018, and just before the Resident Evil 2 remake came out for that generation of consoles. I wanted to see what the fuss was about around the franchise, and as I am wont to do sometimes when I am not sure about a game or a series— I’ll simply jump into what is considered the best one, and go from there, intended order be damned.

What I found was a pitch-perfect game. “Bliss”, in video game form you could call it (as this article’s title suggests). It’s just about as good as the medium gets for me. There is just a special sauce to the particulars of Resident Evil 4 that no other game has topped. It’s a pristine, unadulterated diamond of perfect game design that has been often imitated, and rarely surpassed, if ever. It’s phenomenal.

The systems are the real winner in base Resident Evil 4, and with such a strong foundation, anything you’d do to it for a re-release or remake would have an impeccable basis to improve upon. I remember pre-release people being a bit tepid on the announcement of the remake. After the mild reception to Resident Evil 3’s remake (I liked it…), some folks were worried that a remake of the greatest game in the series with 4 would be lackluster because of the efforts of the last attempt.

How could a perfect game like 4 even be improved upon?? Resident Evil 4 played a bit stiffly, sure— and you still couldn’t freely move and shoot like in other 3rd-person action games inspired by it, but regardless, a lot of people were a bit pessimistic on if Capcom could, for a second time, overhaul a beloved game in the franchise. as they did with Resident Evil 2, which was a huge success for the company. If Capcom could recapture the same success in remaking 4 as they did in 2, that would truly be a feat.

Would you know what?? They did. They fucking nailed it, too. Not only is Resident Evil 4 (2023) better in every conceivable way than the original, it surpasses every metric of success for one of these complete, big-budget remakes. The previous bar of success I had with one of these things was with Dead Space (2023), which was a remake of the first game in its series. In that game, not only did EA Motive (the developer on that remake) accentuate and add to the original game’s particulars— they fixed core design issues with the original effort, crafting a better-paced and executed remake. They fixed the worst parts of that game, made those pain points better, and even made some key changes about how the game flowed end to end. In this remake of 4, Capcom did a similar facelift, updating the cruft of the mid-game sections that people didn’t like (Ashley’s sections), and fixed all the issues with escorting and protecting NPCs (but mainly Ashley) through the game’s missions, making for a much improved campaign experience for players.

I can’t understate how big these changes are. While the original 4 is not a perfect game by any means (in fact, due to its age it can be quite flawed in some fit and finish aspects), reworking core systems for the remake makes the whole thing flow better, as a result. The issues of the first game persist throughout its runtime. The biggest criticism people had about the original was: Ashley’s segments were terrible, and the whole game felt like a souped-up escort mission (which is reductive, I think, but I understand the sentiment). So fixing these key issues makes the game feel even better to play through.

The quality-of-life improvements of this remake extend past its bone structure too; the whole game looks incredible, visually as well. Capcom has been using a proprietary engine colloquially known as the “Reach for the Moon” Engine (RE Engine; the logo is a hand grabbing at a silver moon), ever since Monster Hunter World, and the powerful engine makes every game they make look so, so, so good. One of my favorite things about the game is just how all the characters look in motion. Each main character glides across the screen, with nary a hair out of place. Capcom already made hot characters, but now? Good Lord…

The characters get new, fresher looks, and thanks to the power of the RE Engine, they look more beautiful than ever. I’ll be damned if I can’t almost physically tally the thread-count of Ada Wong’s new, red tactical ‘dress’. It’s that clear of a picture, and just as pretty too. Main character Leon Kennedy is our favorite, sexy, baby-faced special agent, and dammit if Capcom isn’t gonna pull his updated design off with panache. Leon is the main protagonist after all, so he gets extra special treatment. He looks like if Leonardo DiCaprio was a star roughing it in the special forces. The best at what he does, and man does he look good doing it. What?… The man is put together, alright?? I know I am not alone. I’ve seen your search history…

In many ways, Leon is the trend-setter for the tone of this remake, and as he moves and shakes his way from beginning to end, so too do the themes, tones, and atmosphere of this game move in kind. Admittedly, Leon is a big old, blonde-haired goober. He is an impetuous, extremely capable agent of the American government, powered by corny one-liners and pithy quotes, all prepped and ready for any wacky situation he finds himself in; Leon is nothing if prepared for the task at hand. The tone stays unserious and goofy just like the original, albeit with a bit more bite. Original RE4 is more high-grade B-movie schlock than a terrifying descent into purgatory, and the remake carries aspects of the original’s flavor while lending a bit more fright to the experience. It’s a good deal more frightful than the original.

The original RE4 is “Cornball City” with all the dumb one-liners you want from an 80’s action movie, and the remake is that and even more, with sometimes more ridiculous quotes being uttered. Leon is nothing if not well-timed in his insults, after all. To boot, the villains are big, bombastic, and brash, and Leon saves his best quotes for the baddies he finds himself up against. The remake keeps this core aspect of Leon intact, while making all the situations a bit darker and more high fidelity to add a spookier flair to the proceedings. I love how silly the game can get, and while Leon is playing it straight, you can almost detect a slight hint of damn near imperceptible glee turning the corners of his lips as he throws out rude dialogue during the heat of battle.

Like Leon, the other members of RE4’s cast get a facelift too, with the whole set also getting recast for this new remake. All the new voices are great too, except for Ada, who comes off as a tad flat, for me. I think she is played by a different actress from the RE2 remake, and the change is evident. Not bad, but she is just a bit lacking in personality compared to the previous actress. A highlight of the new cast is also the Merchant, who is a fan-favorite of the original, and interacting with him has never been better. Took me a while to get used to his new voice since I am so used to the original version, but by the time I finished it for the first time, I had totally given myself over to the new direction. He might be the best shopkeeper in gaming. He probably is??

The rest of the cast is spectacularly good, however, with Leon’s voice actor, Nick Apostolides, being a particular bright spot, even amongst a mostly strong cast. In RE4, Leon is a bit older and more seasoned— not quite the burgeoning rookie sweetheart from his first adventure in RE2, and Apostolides deftly infuses the character of Leon with a tad bit more gruffness than his previous outing. Little character decisions like that really shine from game to game, and seeing his performance from entry to entry change with the age of the protagonist is a great little bit of detail added in these remake projects. Apostolides is the lifeblood of the Leon games, and he is a strong, confident presence to inhabit the character. High marks, there.

While tweaks and changes like casting and gameplay have fundamentally changed, the core experience of playing RE4 hasn’t. If it ain’t broke, why change it?? The core formula of balancing resources like ammo, health, currency, and key items in your briefcase returns, and the act of fitting them all like Tetrinimos in storage is just as satisfying as it was all the way back in 2005. You can move a lot quicker and can freely strafe around while aiming your gun, a feature added to the remake, and you can still stagger enemies and use finishers on them— but the biggest addition to the core gameplay mechanics is parrying with your combat knife.

You can parry everything pretty much (within reason). I think I even parried a missile?? Throughout the game, you have many encounters with aggressive enemies, and given your enhanced movement capabilities and added maneuvers like a dodge and parry, the enemies you face also have added moves and mechanics with which to flank and attack you. This is where the knife primarily comes into play; like in RE2 Remake, it’s a “get out of jail free card when you get a little too careless in close quarters, and a zombie takes a bite at you. You can choose to fight off said foe, or use a pip of durability with either your main knife or disposable knife (the main knife can be repaired at the merchant), to get a quick stab into your assailant, freeing you up for a recovery item or a quick escape. It was a good addition in RE2, but adding a knife with which you can parry affords you even more options for Leon when the chips are down. It’s maybe my favorite addition to already an awesome game that feels great to play.

Now that I have beaten it 4 times (once normally, once with an infinite magnum, once with an infinite rocket launcher, and once on hardcore with no extras), I think it’s safe to say I will be doing all the challenges and getting all the trophies one day. The game keeps incentivizing you to return to it, even hours after the initial campaign run. The gameplay loop and feel of the controls are so addicting, it’s just hard to put it down. That’s not even mentioning “The Mercenaries” mode (which is Resident Evil 4’s version of a ‘horde’ mode where you try to get high scores and new rewards) and even the “Separate Ways” DLC for Ada Wong (a returning feature from the original game) to play through once youy’ve done everything in the base game, all of which has their own challenge tiers, and reward tracks to attain as well.

It’s a game with a staggering amount of content, and the hours I’ve spent playing already could even double or triple depending on what I want to accomplish on my return trips to it. It’s the rare game that will keep me coming back for years to come, I imagine. Just because it’s so much fucking fun. In my mind, it is the perfect video game. It’s my ideal video game at the very least. It’s a riotously fun, addictive, single-player action romp with great characters, a fun story, and more than enough replay value to keep you coming back for more. It’s everything I like about video games.

I played this game 4 times back to back to back. Each time doing something new. Initially it wasn’t even for a platinum trophy— it was purely just for the love of the game, if I am honest. I just love it that much. I was already a fan of the original, but this remake has completely taken me over. I adore it. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, I think. Where it ranks, I am not quite sure to be honest, but it’s up there. Definitely in my top 20 favorite video games I’ve ever played. Everyone should play this game, and if you don’t like it, you just hate a good time. Pretty succinct, if you ask me. I highly recommend it, and hell, if I had to score it, it would be a 5 outta 5. I never do that, but people like a number. So yeah, I’ll do it here.

Keep drifting, kemosabes. Thanks for reading.

This game doesn’t work if Bond isn’t perfect. I am happy to say that not only is he perfectly cast— He might be the best iteration yet of the iconic character. Bravo, Patrick Gibson. What a performance! Go ahead and make him the new Bond, Villeneuve!

Whew!! What a ride!! 007: First Light is the new game from IO Interactive, the acclaimed studio responsible for the stellar Hitman series, one of my very favorite franchises in all of gaming. Their recent trilogy of Hitman games, released between 2016-2021, is a triumph of amazing level design, fantastic exotic setpieces, thematic globe-trotting world-building, and clock-work puzzle action gameplay. The complete work of all three games is housed under one package these days, known as “World of Assassination” by IOI, and is a neat, tidy way to experience the whole trilogy (and oodles of other modes) under one roof. For my money, I think it’s pound for pound the most consistently excellent trilogy of games we have had this millennium, and possibly one of the greatest combined digital works we have ever seen in the medium.

You ask me on a given day what my favorite game series is, and Hitman: World of Assassination may just be my answer. It’s that good. It’s honestly a toss-up for me between that trilogy, the From Software catalogue of ‘souls’ games, and id Software’s recent, incredible trio of DOOM reboots for my favorite arcs of new and returning franchises in the past decade or so. But if I had to pick a winner, it would most certainly still be Hitman taking home the prize.

So, given their recent track record— in my estimation, IOI had a lot to live up to for me when the news of them working on a new 007 game hit the news cycle. In my eyes, it was a perfect fit. In many ways, the Hitman series shared similar themes and analogues to things found in the Bond franchise, and given IOI’s pedigree for crafting sexy, often campy, high-tension video game thrillers, they were the perfect stewards to usher the character of James Bond into the modern era. It was a match made in Heaven.

Not only am I thrilled to say that IOI has knocked it out of the park with their first effort— I dare say that 007: First Light is one of the greatest debuts for a new franchise we have seen in years. In many ways, it reminds me of Respawn’s smash hit Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, from 2019. A game from a familiar IP, stewarded by an incredibly talented studio, that nailed it in one. But it’s not enough to just nail making a great game; you have to give the license enough care to do it justice, and in both cases, both IOI and Respawn met that lofty mark. 007: First Light is one of the greatest licensed games we have ever gotten from a studio, period. It’s that good.

I got a unique feeling playing through this game. It reminded me of my time playing through Naughty Dog’s 2016 banger Uncharted 4 (my personal favorite of the series). That was a game that, while I was playing it, I felt like I was playing a new classic of the genre. So too did I feel the same when I played through First Light this year. It’s a tightly-paced, brilliantly designed third-person action romp, the likes of which we rarely see these days. Shrinking budgets, rampant game industry layoffs, and tenuous gaming trends have contributed to the big-budget blockbuster game falling out of favor in recent years, so it’s nice to see one of this quality perform well and be so beloved amidst all the turbulence of the modern game industry. It’s a real reminder that if a talented team is allowed to make a great game, and given the budget to do so— it pays dividends.

So far this year, First Light is one of the highest-selling games of 2026. Which shows me that there is a real appetite out there for games like this, from folks who are willing to pay for it. Premium experiences, costing a premium price, can work if the game is good, it turns out. In a world where, more than ever, gamers are being nickel-and-dimed for their investments in the medium, and are being wrung dry by companies looking to pull more from their most dedicated customers, it’s such a relief to see a single-player, linear action game do so well, and be rewarded by a base of players that have an appetite for it.

At its core, the pitch of First Light is a simple premise: you play as a young, dashing Bond looking to “earn the number” (the double-0 in question). Bond starts the adventure as a military man who ends up being in the wrong place at the right time. As a reward for his quick thinking and bravery in the field as a talented prospect, MI6 assigns him as a new agent in “His Majesty’s Secret Service” (not used to the whole ‘King’ thing yet, if I’m honest). From there, Bond trains to become the newest spy in training for MI6 and, after a brief (extremely good) tutorial, makes the cut. What follows is an international tale of intrigue, amazing action setpieces, and a fantastic tale that stands alongside the best of Bond’s cinematic outings. It’s one of the greatest adventures he has had yet, I’d wager. It’s an excellent origin story, for one of pop culture’s greatest characters.

Not to get into specifics, but the plot is prescient, forward-thinking, and intelligent without coming across as preachy or overbearing. It talks about the dangers of new technology and what would happen if the wrong people got their hands on it (timely, no?), but it’s done in a clever way that feels as much of a piece of the series as it is a scathing take on current events. It’s the rare game that sees the future (now our present), and offers a progressive take on the vector point between politics and technology, and how those two can be used and abused by people in power, in different ways. It’s superb work, and they walk a narrative tightrope expertly, in a way that many developers simply wouldn’t even attempt.

The characters are the heartbeat of the story. In many ways, it’s more character-driven than even plot-driven, which is different from most Bond media, where usually the story takes center stage, and the characters are more set-dressing to the actual mechanics of the plot. It’s a nice reversal here, then, that Bond, his allies, and the villains are so core to what makes the narrative sing.

Bond is excellent here, played expertly by the brilliant Patrick Gibson (and as alluded to in the blurb below the header)— if Bond doesn’t work, the game fails as a result. Good thing, then, that Gibson is so magnificent in the role, and so effortlessly charming as Bond; I don’t just see why you don’t go ahead and cast him as Daniel Craig’s heir apparent in the new Amazon era of Bond. It’d be good synergy too! Companies love that!

He’s irresistibly sexy, and would sweet-talk you right out of your shorts. He isn’t a manic, cold operator like Brosnan’s Bond, or a swarthy, brutish hellion like Connery’s classic template. He isn’t even close to the dour, depressed executioner that Craig’s Bond used to be, far from it, I’d say. Patrick Gibson carves a new niche for Bond that is hypnotically magnetic without being sexually pestilent, and isn’t quippy or overdoes the cheese as Brosnan’s depiction did. Gibson’s take lies somewhere in the middle of every interpretation of Bond, while still being modern and classy to fit in our era. Bond is always a product of the era he is depicted in, and this new tone and interpretation fits seamlessly in the technological modernity of the current times. He’s a brash picture of complete confidence, with just the right touch of arrogance, and this version of a young Bond is perfect. In some ways, he’s just a “little shit”, and I love him for it. Gibson is hands down my favorite Bond, and I hope we see this version of the character for another entry, if not two, at least (get your shit together, Amazon).

Chiefly, Bond is the star of the show, but the new character of Greenway is no slouch either. In the pantheon of sidekicks in the Bond franchise, Greenway may be one of the best. In many ways, Greenway is the secondary character for large swathes of the game, and Lennie James’ stalwart, comically deadpan performance gives the new character amazing depth for the times he is on screen. He’s Bond’s handler after all, and James is somewhat of a “handful”, shall we say. Between cheeky barbs and pointed digs at each other, there is mutual respect and appreciation between the two of them that grows with each mission. The final mission with the two of them is a highlight, especially. Greenway is a great character and adds further to the long list of iconic Bond characters. He’s no Felix Leiter… He’s even better!

The locales you visit are the best part of the game. You are going from place to place in search of your goals, and if you know IOI, every location is a character unto itself. That remains true here, too. You go from a thumping club investigation during your training sequence (very similar to the one found in Hitman 3), to an alpine mansion holding a chess tournament (which leads to a huge action-setpiece involving chasing a runaway cargo plane), to a black-market bazaar in search of Lenny Kravitz (bad performance but cool looking dude), to a luxury resort in Vietnam with all the sun-kissed dames and dangerous drug lords you can shake a martini glass at. It’s a game with a lot of variety in tones, aesthetics, and climates.

It really feels like you are running around the world during the story, and IOI’s visual accomplishments cannot be understated. Everything looks fantastic, and expensive, as just a game about secret agents should be, and it’s all at a scale that feels like a big, pricey video game should look and feel. You see the money on screen at all times, here, and it’s a stunning assemblage of artistic and technological prowess that is rare in its execution. It’s an objectively impressive video game to experience.

The best thing about arriving in a new location is exploring it, and that’s the main thing you do in each new place you go to. Similarly to Hitman, knowledge is power in 007, where gleaning and acting on information you gather is the key to success. It all funnels you down a similar path in the game, sure, and it’s far less mechanical than the cogs and routines of the Hitman games— but even so, exploring and sussing out your surroundings is a satisfying thing to do every time you get the opportunity. Every level has a variety of new things to see even upon replaying them, where you can track down different avenues to further the mission.

It keeps the variety up so no two playthroughs are the same in these zones when you replay them too. It’s a feast for the discerning gamer, talking to NPCs, finding notes hidden in bureau drawers, and eavesdropping on conversations at a nearby bar; it adds to the flavor of the whole endeavor, these moments, and makes the adventure feel like a more dynamic, spontaneous exploration as a result. You feel like you are a detective in these segments, and exploring every space is a supreme delight. I wrenched dry all I could from every locale during my 15-hour playthrough, and by the end I had a hankering for more,

The locales are spectacular, but so too are the visuals. It’s a feast for the eyes. It’s a sumptuously sexy, stylish-looking video game. This particular brand’s world of spycraft has never looked so alluring as it does here. The same can be said for the gameplay, which is the highlight of the adventure. The combat designer from Rocksteady (the studio responsible for the Batman: Arkham series) led the design of the fighting system in 007, and it shows. Bond is a master of improvisational combat. He uses gadgets and improvised environmental takedowns to whittle down his foes, and just like in the Arkham games, Bond can string together a plethora of tools and brawn to accomplish his goals. Often you are surrounded by anywhere between 3 and 15 enemies at any time in battle, so it’s key to think on your feet to survive. Melee combat encounters bring to mind the beginning of Casino Royale, and the bathroom fight in Mission: Impossible- Fallout. Combat is diverse, brutal, and improvised, and Bond is more than up to the task at hand every time.

The main draw of combat in 007 is comboing strikes, kicks, throws, and shoulder-charges to move enemies around or near obstacles to finish them off. For instance, you can parry an attacker, shoulder charge them into a desk, enact a finishing move on them with the desk, throw a coffee mug from the desk at an enemy in waiting (staggering them), then you can zap another enemy in turn with the laser from your high-tech watch (blinding them), and finally combo execute both of them to end the encounter in style. This is just an example of the options you have in hand-to-hand combat, and it’s a fresh, unique take on well-known digital fisticuffs that feels awesome to pull off. It’s so much fun to run into a hallway of enemies, string together long combos, and take them all on with a hammer, “Oldboy” style. It feels good every time.

The gun combat, I am slightly mixed on, but on the whole, it’s good. You can’t pull out your service weapon until provoked to do so, which thematically is in keeping with Bond’s “License to Kill” mandate. You can’t pull a gun on someone until it’s a last resort, and that resort comes more than you think it will. In Hitman, it was a very, very bad idea to fail stealth, get caught, and get into a firefight, because for one: the gunplay was a tad unwieldy, and two: Agent 47 was a glass cannon of a character where he could dole out untold damage, but in turn could collapse under a hail of gunfire. The latter remains mostly true here, but the former is better.

Bond is a competent marksman, and the actual gunplay feels a lot better here than in the Hitman games. The guns feel better to use, and can be comboed in close-quarters more effectively here than in Hitman. A key feature of the gunplay, too, is that when you run out of magazines for the gun you are using, you can toss said empty weapon at enemies. From there, you can pick up dropped weapons and use them to your advantage. Just like melee combat, you can combo shooting, throwing objects, and hand-to-hand combat to allow for a dynamic suite of options at your disposal. One of my favorite tidbits of fighting in these situations is that, like Uncharted 4, you can disarm foes mid-combat, taking their weapon to replace yours. It’s great fun to get into a tussle and come out with a reward. It never gets old! You always have enough options to make it out of a scrape with foes, and puzzling your way towards victory is extremely satisfying.

The pros are almost endless for me. I love this game. There are some minor detractions, though. The secondary villain (you’ll know which) is a bit too mustache-twirling and evil for the sake of it for my taste. He has an incredible mask, though. It almost makes up for it! If I had any qualms about the game by the end, I’d say it slightly runs out of steam. Especially in the last boss fight, which I think is just straight up kinda bad. But it’s a faint blemish on an almost pristine work of brilliance.

When the adventure wraps, there is even more you can do after the credits roll. In keeping with the Hitman DNA that can be found throughout the game, there are extra combat-centric Escalations and other missions you can try to finish in the secondary menus once the adventure wraps, and having more incentive to play an already awesome game is just a cherry on top, for me. I imagine I will be playing as much of this game as IOI allows me to. They support the crap out of their games, with the “World of Assassination” package being proof-positive of this excellent post-launch support. I hope they do the same with 007: First Light, because I will play as much of this game as I can get.

007: First Light is a resounding triumph for IO Interactive, the Bond franchise, and video games as a medium. It’s the rare stroke of absolute, immediate genius that we just don’t see often enough these days in modern video games, and I will be thinking, talking, and gushing about this game for a long, long time. It’s a bona fide classic in every sense, and should be played by everyone interested in the medium.

It will be high up in my Game of the Year rankings by season’s end, and I expect it to contend for the top prize by the time the dust has settled. It’s among one of the very best video games I have played in years, and is a testament that amazing games can and will come about if talented teams are allowed to make them, and are given every resource to do so. IOI has crafted a new masterpiece, and we have a new, exciting franchise on our hands to look forward to, I expect.

As always, keep drifting.

In this game, you spend your time trying to suss out the quirks of all the unique creatures contained in each biome. It’s a super novel game, where you are constantly surprised by the ideas displayed in gameplay. Glubbit rocks too!

Throughout my roughly 7-8 hour playtime of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, I was routinely surprised and delighted at the sheer imagination on offer. It is a supremely enjoyable experience that completely shocked me in more ways than one. The first way I was taken aback was my slow realization of: “Wow! They finally made a good video game with Yoshi in it!!” Yes, I truly do believe this. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island should not be a mainline Mario game. Sue me!!!

The second realization that hit me was: “Man, this game is far deeper than I ever expected!” The intricate design of the game is apparent immediately, as you slowly uncover quirks about the creatures you are discovering and logging in your encyclopedia. There are a ton of interesting, novel ideas at play here in Yoshi and the Mysterious Book. A pure delight!

I love ‘idea games’. Games that stuff their innards with a plethora of interesting interactions and clever tricks. This game, more than a lot of other things I have played this year, is that, and more. It’s a true “Dark Horse” candidate to make a spot on my personal Top 10 Games of the Year list for 2026. It surprised me in many ways. I didn’t expect that! It’s very nice to stumble on a gem like this, because it makes taking a leap of faith and trying something you normally wouldn’t, more satisfying. I’m very pleased with how it’s all turned out.

So let’s talk structure. A group of Yoshis on an island (funnily enough) discover an old, weathered, leather-bound sentient book called “Mr. E” (for encyclopedia, I imagine), and are tasked with uncovering the peculiar secrets of the various creatures that appear between the mustachioed book’s pages. There are initially 6 biomes to explore, each with around 6 to 7 creatures in each biome to identify. You hop from biome to biome, cataloguing all the animals and minerals you find therein, optionally giving each of them names as you close out a level, and registering each subject’s personality quirks and mechanics underneath their newly written entry in the mysterious book. The goal here is to find an elusive mythical bird hiding in the pages called “The Bewilder Bird”. The bird in question is, by extension, Mr. E’s encyclopedic ‘white whale’, so to speak, and he wants you to find that magical technicolor avian, catalogue it, and find out all there is to know about it. The premise is simple enough, and engaging throughout.

One of the things I like best about this game is the pacing. It’s cozy, without being boring, and directed without handholding the player too much. It’s a relaxing game to take part in, and interacting with the local wildlife on your own terms is a fun endeavor, especially since you don’t feel rushed to do it in a certain time limit. You also can’t die very easily, either. Even when you fall in the inevitable pit, or deep hole, Yoshi will magically spring up just like new, immediately after a tumble. It feels tailor-made for families who want to de-stress and enjoy a relaxing time looking at fun, virtual animals together. It’s almost like digital sightseeing at the zoo with your kids. The sightseeing is a highlight here too, because this game looks absolutely gorgeous. I adore the art style here. The visuals are top-notch throughout the adventure. The painterly, storybook theming and delightfully playful animation kept my eyes locked to the screen, waiting for the next crazy and colorful thing to dance across my view. It’s a beautiful tapestry of Nintendo’s patented whimsy, and I adored looking at it.

My daughter and I played this together, and seeing her little 3-year-old eyes light up when Yoshi found a new little creature to be friends with was just magic. Nintendo magic. It was a very cool moment to see that click with her. She took the initiative (with a little help from her dad) to seek out a Glubbit (the bubble-frog guys) and have him climb on her back. The reward for doing so was that the Glubbit would shoot out bubbles as Yoshi ran (which can be used as platforms), and sussing out that interaction with minimal help other than assistance with the controls (3-year-olds aren’t the most coordinated humans around) was an extremely satisfying moment for her. Seeing the gears all turn in the right ways was a moment where it all worked. There were a few instances after that moment that also clicked, but this was the first time it felt like something had shifted in her brain when it came to playing a video game. Proud dad moment, here!

The game is full of authored mechanics that feel bespoke, and every level you complete is proof of that, since every stage, in the Nintendo tradition, primarily deals with one or two mechanics. Each stage has its own gimmick and way of interacting with it, and while those mechanics pop up in other levels, each time you enter a new place, the theme is completely different depending on the creature you are cataloguing. The hidden depth of the mechanics, though, is seeing just how many ways each creature can interact with other lifeforms, and how the animals all react to each other when their quirks collide with one another. A fun mechanical moment came as I was playing during one of my longer sessions. I asked myself: “What would happen if I bumped one creature into another? Let’s find out...” In keeping with the exploratory nature of the game, if you think you can do it, more often than not, it turns out it’ll work. It’s nice to see how much thought went into how everything situationally intermingles with other factors. Mixing the characteristics between creatures and biomes makes every page feel lively with its variety.

The environment can change creatures’ behaviors and abilities too. Since we have used Glubbit as an example before, I’ll do it again here with a few mechanics. When Glubbit gets covered in a bunch of honey, he and his bubbles turn golden, and the bubbles he spits out won’t rise like before. If he eats an apple, his bubbles get bigger, and when he gets covered in mud, the bubbles he spits out actually fall to the ground! There are lots of simple environmental changes that each creature can take on that will change their behaviors and capabilities, and finding out what each is and how all those factors relate directly to the stages and to even other creatures is something that gives the game the very deep systemic intricacies that make it so unique. I truly haven’t played a game quite like this. It feels wholly fresh and new as a result of its willingness to be something different.

The deep exploration of these systems, paired with the premise of cataloguing creatures in the mysterious book, incentivizes a completionist mentality in me that drives me to keep coming back to it. I want to do everything in this game, and the game pushes you gently toward that goal, if you indeed intend to pursue it. I love it when games interweave the completion aspect of it into the very fabric of its premise. By the end of the first 6 biomes, I found about half of all the stuff in the pages just organically, and by the time the credits roll and you are sent back to the book for the endgame cleanup, the book offers up 4 more new biomes to explore at the end. It’s a game that is chock full of satisfying content, and I imagine taking the time to get all the boxes checked will more than double my playtime by the time I am finished. I’m excited to keep playing!

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a genuine hidden gem that more people need to play! It’s shockingly well-realized and leagues deeper than I ever could have expected. If you are willing to take a leap of faith, like I was, you will be rewarded with one of the very best Nintendo games of the last decade. It’s really surprising just how much game is here, and how complex it all is. It all works marvelously well, and sounds, looks, and plays fantastically. It works in every way for me.

If you have kids, this is a must-own game for the family. Especially if you have little ones who are curious about video games. This is a perfect first game for Pre-K kiddos looking to investigate the world of early childhood gaming. The game is gentle, slower-paced, and less frenetic than other games, and is just right for developing minds who are interested in the medium. For adults looking for a relaxing game, this also fits the bill. It works completely for adults with short attention spans, and is chill enough to get you through after a stressful day at the office. It’s brilliant. I cannot say enough good things about this one. A pure joy and constant delight.

Thanks as always, and keep drifting!

In this edition of “CMD”, I will be talking LOT about games! I finished a boatload this quarter! My recent quarterly escapades run the gamut of the gaming universe. Lots to unpack in this article! It’s a doozy. Maybe my most productive season of gaming yet?

Ah, at last it’s… Summer.
Ugh. Actually? I hate summertime. I hate almost everything about it. It’s my least favorite part of the year, honestly. My birthday is in June too. Why did I have to be born amidst the least interesting time of year? Eh, I won’t get into specifics, but from April to June, with rare exception, it’s the doldrums of late spring and early summer. Not much is going on… Yet, anyway.

June has been okay for new looks at video games, though, what with the summer gaming conferences passing by recently to give us just a taste of the new products coming our way in the near to mid-term. Mere morsels, but appreciated nonetheless. Welp, I have been keeping busy. Regardless of new or old video games, I have been playing them. More than ever, it turns out!

This past spring was shit hot for new video games, and I played a ton of awesome stuff this quarter. Capcom has chiefly been on a hot streak, as of late. I can’t wait to recap the things I enjoyed besides their recent output as well. Been a great early part of the year for triple-A video games, and I may have a frontrunner or two for my top spot already. Maybe too early? Who knows? I go by feel these days. So! Without further ado, let’s get into it. Lots of work to get to. I’m sure my fingers will be aching after this one. It’s gonna be beefy, folks. Gird your loins.

Just like last time, 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.

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GAMES FINISHED APR-JUN 2026:
Cuphead (PlayStation 5)
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip (PlayStation 5)
Yume Nikki (PC)
Super Mario Galaxy (Switch)
Half-Life (PC)
Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Switch)
Super Mario Sunshine (Switch)
Donkey Kong Country Returns (Switch)
Pragmata (PlayStation 5)
Battle Chef Brigade (Switch)
Lego Star Wars (PC - PS2 Emulation)
Saros (PlayStation 5)
Star Fox 64 (Switch - NSO)
Mixtape (PlayStation 5)
VA-11-HALL-A (Switch)
007: First Light (PlayStation 5)
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book (Switch 2)
Pokemon Pokopia (Switch 2)
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch) - (Golden Deer Route)
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The Drifter Dabbled: Recent Games I’ve Been Playing
Persona 5 Royal (Playing on PlayStation 5)

Now that it’s June, we have hit sort of a mini-lull in the new release calendar, so I finally took it upon myself to finally start picking away at the lauded JRPG monstrosity that is Persona 5 Royal. This will be the 4th time I have attempted to get into this game, and I think on this most recent try, I have finally identified why it’s taken me repeated attempts. The beginning is… not great?

That’s not to say it’s not engaging visually or addictive sonically, because those are the two strongest things about the game in general, in my early estimation. The visuals, music, and all-around vibes are killer here. Not bucking the consensus opinion here, I think. For me, it’s really the pacing that kills it. It’s slow. Too slow, and by extension, it builds up far too slowly for the time investment it asks of you as a player, at least in the early bits. The first dungeon arc involving Kamoshida took close to 11 hours to resolve, and by that point, it felt more like a tutorial than anything.

A few more qualms. Your party is not great. The weak characterization of your party in the early game (with Ryuji’s Social Link story being downright bad) is really disappointing to me. There is also an ‘edgelord’ flavor to the whole endeavor, and I find that irritating. Seems like these are kids learning to cuss for the first time, and it’s frankly pretty embarrassing when it comes to the clunky dialogue that is littered throughout the initial storyline.

The most grievous issue I have, though, is just how much tasteless fan service surrounds the party character Ann. That stuff is peppered throughout the early hours of Royal, and it really rubs me the wrong way in the beginning stages of the journey. Ann, in general, is constantly sexualized, and it becomes pretty distracting even into the second palace arc. It’s really Atlus at its most ‘ecchi’ and shameless when it comes to their checkered history of dealing with underage characters in the Persona series, and this is no different. It’s just far more pronounced. They lean into their worst behaviors with the character of Ann, and it’s extremely disappointing to see how objectified she is, no matter their attempts to ultimately empower her as a person with agency in the story. How can we call Kamoshida the bad guy when it’s Atlus who are the ones shamelessly ogling Ann and talking out of both sides of their mouth about mistreating the character? Lame.

To cap it off, it’s a game that wants to be a million things, but I feel is far too spread out for its own good, and the amount of choices in how to spend your time is straight up paralyzing at times. It’s… a lot. I like that it’s kind of a big ol’ JRPG titanic mess of a game, but it doesn’t make its shortcomings that much better.

I’ll keep playing it. I am around 15 hours in as it stands, with a whole bunch more to go. I’ll update periodically as I go, I imagine. I am a huge Persona fan, given my love for both Persona 3 Reload and Persona 4 Golden, so I will eventually see it through before Persona 4 Revival hits next spring.
Rough start, though.
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Dosa Divas (Playing on PlayStation 5)

So, gonna be honest about this one— I already put it down. I just don’t think this game has enough juice to warrant another squeeze, if I am frank. I wanted to really get into it, but as it stands, I find it pretty underwhelming.

I’m not expecting a ton, though, to be fair, because I have never really played an Outer Loop game besides this one, even though Thirsty Suitors from a couple of years back piqued my interest. Outer Loop makes games with narratives that shine a light on cultures that are underrepresented in the games industry, and for that, I applaud them. It’s very cool that they want to do that sort of thing. My contention isn’t with that company ethos, it’s really more that I just don’t really like the game they have made. I find the whole package pretty lacking for what should be a diverse, interesting indie role-playing game.

For one, it’s a narrative-heavy game, with lots of dialogue throughout. The issue I have with that is that none of the characters thus far have gripped me in a way to spur me on to see more of the tale they want to tell. It’s just pretty meh. I hate feeling that way about games. Be good, be bad, don’t be boring, is like my main motto when it comes to games, but unfortunately, this is just that: boring. The character designs are good and diverse, but their actual character traits and roles they play in the story come off as pretty generic to me.

The turn-based combat doesn’t move me either. It attempts to trade in the counter-based command prompt turn-order format of the Paper Mario series, but it doesn’t do enough with that format, and lacks the panache you need to stand out in a genre of its peers. The enemy variety is severely lacking; also, you will fight the same stock-standard groups of 2 to 4 baddies for the first couple of hours, and it gets extremely repetitive. Fighting them all is cake, too, because you can beat anyone just by hammering the regular attack, and the buff and debuff system for enhancing your party and de-powering your foes doesn’t feel fleshed out enough to make a mark in the combat, either. It’s just that the execution leaves a lot to be desired, and the devs left a lot on the table in the early game when it comes to the gameplay ideas, too.

I’m bummed out by Dosa Divas, if I am honest. I wanted to really get into it and like it, because I am predisposed to enjoying indie games like this— but this one just doesn’t do it for me. Good luck to Outer Loop, though; they seem to have a nice goal in mind with their creative stuff. I just wish the game they made pulled me in more. I won’t be returning to it, most likely.
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Grand Theft Auto IV (Playing on Xbox 360)

So I’ve never been a Grand Theft Auto ‘enjoyer’, historically speaking. I like aspects of the series, and I am a big fan of Rockstar Games’ other works, like the Red Dead Redemption series and Bully, but I just haven’t clicked with the Grand Theft Auto series for one reason or another. A bit of that has to do with upbringing: I grew up in a Christian household, and M-rated games (no matter the content) were highly frowned upon by my parents, so I just never really had any exposure to the series outside of my childhood friend talking about them (San Andreas was his favorite).

So with the impending release this Winter of perhaps the “Biggest Video Game of All Time” in Grand Theft Auto VI, I am attempting to make up some of this deficit by playing the whole series (or at least attempting to) in its totality. From GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, GTA IV, and GTA V. I just sort of feel a little left out, you know? I wanna understand why the series is what it is, and what people find so attractive about the franchise, I guess. I also just haven’t played pretty much any of them, so it’s a series I am attempting to see through. I wanna be there for the zeitgeist!

Concerning the game in question here with GTA IV, I am around 18 hours into my journey with Niko Bellic, and I gotta say— I am really enjoying myself. The thing I didn’t quite get with the series is really how well-written it is. At least with the IV, anyway, so maybe that’s the exception— but I am pretty gobsmacked just how genuine and earnest the characters and writing can be when they aren’t acting in certain ways that give the series the edgelord rap it has in discourse.

At its roots, GTA IV is a lampooning of the “American Dream”, and that is depicted with all the patented Rockstar goofiness I’ve heard about when I have encountered folks talking about the game in passing, but what I didn’t get is just how earnest the characters can be. GTA has a penchant, it seems, for larger-than-life cartoonish characters that can be a little much to handle. A little goes a long way with all the psychos you’re dealing with on a normal mission or two in a GTA game.

This distinct, heightened climate that defines a GTA game seems to rub folks the wrong way when it comes to how they depict their characters and stories. Being new to the series, I don’t have a ton of exposure to the particulars of the games. Still, as a new participant in the franchise, after hearing all the negatives about the characterization and humor of the games, it’s nice to see just how incorrect at times the discourse can be about how IV actually is. Niko and the characters in the story are well-rounded people all struggling to make it in the world of Liberty City, and while not without their immense character flaws, each is given a lot of pathos in the telling. It’s really good so far. I am glad this is my first GTA game. I will absolutely be finishing this one. As for order? I think I am going to play IV, V, III, San Andreas, Vice City (since the new one returns to that last game’s setting, I want that to be freshest in my mind). I’m looking forward to seeing it through as a longer project of mine.

However, I will also echo a sentiment I have seen about this game: the cars do drive like boats, and you know what?? I kinda like that. If I’m wrong, I don’t want to be right! Maybe it’s just the contrarian in me…———————————————————————————————
Romeo is a Dead Man (Playing on PlayStation)

Not much to say here, but my early time with this in the spring was positive! I am not a Suda51 guy by any means, but I admire his stuff. He is a very quirky, particular individual, and that sort of auteur spirit comes across in the weird, wild, and wacky games he makes with Grasshopper Manufacture. The one Grasshopper game I have really played besides this was Shadows of the Damned: the Shinji Mikami, Suda51 brainchild of the 360 era, that tied together a lot of harebrained ideas with an actually competent and enjoyable game. I have yet to play his other stuff, such as classics like Killer7, the No More Heroes series, Killer is Dead, and Lollipop Chainsaw. (I also want to play his visual novel The Silver Case, which I hear is excellent.)

That’s the real dig I hear around about Suda games: they are great idea games. The playing of them, though?? Leaves a lot to be desired by all accounts. I honestly am okay with janky and unreliable gameplay if it’s servicable enough to convey wacky thoughts. The game industry is better when games are weird, and Suda51 is proof positive of that.

As it comes to Romeo is a Dead Man (amazing name), it’s a whole lot of that, honestly. Some jank here to be found, but ultimately the ideas are what make this little gem shine all the brighter. As a video game, it isn’t really too much to write home about, but the potent mix of a great, bold, and brash presentation united with a humorous premise and populated by likeable, fascinating characters with funny names (Kimberley Goldfish has gotta be an all-timer and maybe not even the best of them), Romeo is a Dead Man is the rare video game that keeps me guessing. I am extremely amused to do so as well. It’s been a delight!

There is also a really dumb and fun zombie-growing mini-game included in the main hub that plays like a farming sim by way of Pokémon’s monster collecting, with a whiff of Persona’s fusion mechanic that is so inspired it’s almost worth playing just to interact with and see. What an awesome thing. I will definitely see this one through to the end in the catch-up part of my year this year.

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Esoteric Ebb (Playing on PC)

This is a new game I’ve been picking at that has been quite the marvel. Esoteric Ebb is a Disco Elysium-like, for lack of a better term. A Baldur’s Gate III, in indie spirit, I’d say. I guess if I were to attempt the proper nomenclature, though, I would lean toward calling it: an expressive narrative RPG. A game that can play out entirely differently, depending on the specific avenues, choices, and skills you decide to go with throughout the narrative. It’s a dense, richly detailed DND-like world that is filled with so many bits of quirky dialogue, amazing characters, and interesting choices, it’s a game tailor-made for me and my brand of bullshit. I am so into what this game is doing. It’s small-scale in scope while being extremely deep about that small slice of life you are living in.

Just to mention a couple of funny things that happened to me while playing it. The first was a conversation I had with a blue gynosphynx that led me to peering down a deep, dark well adjacent to me, which ended with me deciding to jump into it in hopes of finding some lost secret, but in actuality, it ended humorously with me plummeting down into the depths to my painfully ironic death.

The game just let me do that. The dialogue didn’t lead me astray either. It allowed me to inspect the well, and in keeping with the Disco-like nature of the internal dialogue mechanics of the game, offered me some really amusing mental musings about jumping down said well, while ultimately allowing me to have the authorship to make a dumb decision to execute on my really bad idea. It was glorious. What followed was a death screen and seguing comedically, then, to my mental faculties, musing how dumb it was that I just did that. Was I hoping to get somewhere? I just jumped into a fucking hole for god's sake. What’s wrong with me?? Shit like that gets me, man. It's hard for video games to be funny, but allowing me to participate so actively in the humor is so kino.

Another funny bit is in the opening scenes of the game, where you wake up in a morgue. I noticed a bucket on the ground beside a pile of apples, and the game let me put it on my character’s head in place of a helmet. Now every time I talk to an NPC, they remark about the bucket on my head, and I respond by acting like I have no clue at all as to what they are talking about. It’s such a good bit, too. I won’t change that headpiece if it kills me. What a great video game. I absolutely adore what I have played of it. ———————————————————————————————

Silent Hill (Playing on PS1 via Emulation)

Took a little bit of a detour this quarter to play some old video games, and among those that I played, I also touched the cult-favorite PS1 retro horror classic: Silent Hill. I’m honestly astounded how well it has held up! It’s a classic-style horror game with all the familiar trappings you’re used to from the era. It’s rather a comforting experience for me, given the long history I have with consuming copious amounts of horror-themed media.

I love the vibes here. It’s spooky and creepy in a quaint way that reminds me of the era. I am a new fan of Silent Hill as a franchise, after I played both the Silent Hill 2 remake (which is an incredible game, and the my review coincidentally was the first post I published to this Substack), and the underrated Silent Hill f, so I decided to reach back to the beginning since Bloober Team (SH2 Remake’s developers) got the greenlight to remake the original game. Going back to the first game has been a very enlightening affair, ironically (given the dreary setting).

The foggy and mysterious setting of the dreamlike town of Silent Hill is teeming with the twitchy pink and white nightmares that go bump in the night, and every step you take is another step on your long descent into the hellish terrors lying behind every corner. It’s a fun puzzle, balancing your slim resources to survive in the game, and I am really digging a lot of the early stuff. It’s around 8-10 hours, and I am maybe halfway through? Not sure. A ways to go yet, but I’ll be picking it up again as the year rolls on for sure. It’s fun to try old things! ———————————————————————————————
Mina the Hollower (Playing on Switch 2)

As much as I hate to say this… I think I actively dislike Mina the Hollower. That’s not to say I won’t change my mind as I return to it in the future, but the 3 hours I spent attempting to play it were supremely frustrating. I have a few issues with this one, but let’s get the positives out first since we should counter-balance the negatives.

The look is incredible. Very few games have attempted to treat the Game Boy Color aesthetic from yesterday quite like this, and at this scale. This game seems big, complex, and a huge endeavor by every stretch of the imagination, visually. It’s very impressive to see just how well they captured the era of the handheld they were inspired by. It truly seems like a labor of love on behalf of the developers, in that regard.

The music is also top-notch. Now, I am a huge Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove fan, and while nothing I have heard has quite met the mettle of the banger track that is “Strike the Earth” from the original Shovel of Hope campaign from that package, Yacht Club has more than outdone themselves with the tracks in the early game. Just a really sick chiptune soundtrack. Just talking about it makes me wanna pull up YouTube and start listening to it (Track 7 is where it’s at, baby).

My issues start with how it plays. By default, the character of Mina (a mouse) only moves in 4 directions. Not usually a big deal, right? Welp, it is when you have a ton of enemies around. Especially when said enemies can move way faster than you, and can move in 8 directions, to your meager 4. So that’s not great.

Also, the health system is actually just bullshit to deal with. You have only 3 vials at the beginning to use when healing up, and to use any of them, you have to build up a meter by damaging enemies, to use said vials on Mina to heal her. It’s not good at all. Enemies are aggressive and hit like trucks. To top that off, bosses also hit hard, so it’s easy to die instantly in bigger encounters, and they attack quickly when they do, so you almost have no time to heal up.

Usually, it’s 3 strikes, and you are donezo. Then, when you are hit, your health vial meter is reset to nothing. It’s a nice idea, this system, but the design of it is just awful, in my opinion. Mina is like a glass cannon who… actually doesn’t hit hard. She’s mostly just glass. If you aren’t careful, you will go down fast, and you'd better hope you have a checkpoint nearby that you saved at (which can be missed if you aren’t paying attention).

Some of the movement design issues can be mitigated by the use of the ‘burrowing’ mechanic in the game, where Mina dives underground for a few seconds, then pops up into the air like a jump. It’s pretty cool, except your invincibility frames seem wayyyy too short to facilitate any aerial combat you need to do against flying enemies. Time after time, I have shot myself up in the air just to get hit mid-flight because the I-frames dwindled for just a split second too long. That feels bad. The mechanic is fun, but that part kills it for me.

Finally, the most heinous of issues I have with the game is that there is no early-game map. At least not from what I can tell, anyway. That seems like actual sacrilege. Like, where am I going? It’s a huge world, too, with over 100 screens within. How do you expect me to find my way around? It’s pretty much a cardinal sin, that. I put the game down out of frustration because of one too many times where I lost progress after bumbling around and taking damage from the really dangerous enemies lying around to kick some ass in some random hole in the ground.

It’s a game that wants to do too much. It really needed to be focus-tested more, I believe, because this is stuff that could easily be fixed with some design tweaks and consistent patches. The game isn’t broken, but it is very, very, flawed. Hopefully, they introduce some quality of life changes to it because, as it stands, I am not a fan of the game in its current state. Maybe it isn’t for me, too? I dunno. I want to like it so badly, but at every turn and every inconvenience, it gets tougher and tougher for me to engage with it on reasonable terms.

There are sliders you can move around in the settings to help make the game more accessible, but I honestly wish the game were just better designed so I wouldn’t feel the urge to tweak it. I respect the confidence they have in their game in some way, but when I see sliders in the settings, I am of two minds about it. It makes me wonder if they aren’t worried that people might drop it had they not included some options to change the more difficult parts of the experience. That doesn’t seem that confident to me.

I dunno. I am kinda bummed about my time with this game. Who knows when I will return to it? In the meantime, I have better stuff to play for the time being. Wish I liked this thing more.
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The Drifter Triumphed: Highlights of Some Games I Finished or Completed
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Played on Switch 2)

Finally got to this one after many years of putting it off. Boy… What a game!
This is the first Fire Emblem game that I have finished, but I’ve played bits of the series over the years. I am kinda mad at myself that it took me so long to play this one, because I think that behind both The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Odyssey, this slots in with those as a top 3 original Switch game. It’s SO good. On the advice of a friend, I played through the Golden Deer route for the main campaign and really adored almost every aspect of my time playing through it. Took me around 35 hours to finish the route, and I did damn near everything I could do in that playthrough. I did all the missions, all the side quests, all the support conversations, and even random musings that were littered around the monastery. I did everything.
I was really satisfied with the total package. It’s brilliant.

For any minor criticisms I would have toward the game, it’s counter-balanced by how much I enjoyed it. Minor stuff like running around the monastery can get tedious fast, the inventory screens are a little fidgety for my liking, the items in the inventory screen can be kind of a pain to manage, and weapons are all slightly more expensive to repair than I would like, but all in all, these issues pale in comparison to how much I deeply enjoyed the game.

The tactics and turn-based combat are rock-solid, the characters are fantastic and well-written, and the voice acting is phenomenal, with a lot of bespoke voice talent used for single characters rather than doing double or triple duty VO work like most games do. The visuals haven’t aged perfectly, but the game’s style remains top-notch.

I really loved the character of Claude, the ‘face’ of the route I chose. I loved him as my house leader, and the longer I played, the decision to pick Golden Deer looked wiser and wiser as I went. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is just a great game. I can’t wait to replay it again with the Blue Lions and the Black Eagles. Very excited to do so when I get to another slow period. I am looking forward to the new entry this September, and will most definitely be getting it day one. Fire Emblem! It’s good!! ———————————————————————————————
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip (Played on PlayStation 5)

At the top of the year, I was busy finishing some 2025 RPGs I had been saving for my personal gaming podcast’s February Game of the Year discussion. Played around 85-90 hours between two hefty games this past winter, so I went looking for a palate-cleanser to reset myself. This little gem was perfect for that.

In its essence, Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a GTA-inspired 3D open-world collect-a-thon. The attractive thing about it is that it doesn’t take itself seriously at all, and that’s why I love it. Also, it takes like 4 hours to see through and double that to complete it all, so what more could you ask for in a little indie game that’s easy to complete? It was a really enjoyable weekend, starting it up, playing it through, getting all the stuff, and 100% completing it. What a blast!

It’s a very simple game. You spend time running around doing odd jobs in a small seaside town, meeting wild individuals along the way, collecting hats and bits of junk to… well… collect them, and you accomplish fun tasks given to you in a handy quest log. It’s simple, it’s awesome, it’s Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip. One of the most satisfying indie games you can play, and it’s a hoot and a half. I highly recommend this little nugget to anyone who likes a good time and has a free weekend. Play this one!!———————————————————————————————
Donkey Kong Country Returns HD (Played on Switch 2)

I love the character of Donkey Kong. More than any of the storied characters in Nintendo’s vast history, he is my favorite. Why? I couldn’t really tell you. Going on vibes, I think Donkey Kong just seems like a cool ass dude to hang out with. He has a tie! But he is a Gorilla!!! Sign me up for that fun time! I loved Donkey Kong Bananza from last summer, and I adored the redesign he got from Nintendo for his new outing, but there is something about that Rare original that speaks to me…

Anyway, I have played both Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2, and have dabbled with Donkey Kong (‘94) on the Game Boy, and a bit of the Retro Studios games, but I had never completed any of those latter games mentioned before. So I strove to do so this year on a whim, and finished Donkey Kong Country Returns HD on the Switch 2. It was a delight.

I can’t believe how long I had gone without playing through this thing! It was so good! I have also heard great things about its sequel, Tropical Freeze, so I will attempt to finish that this year, too. Returns, though?? So, so good. It’s also really difficult??? I struggled with some of the minecart and rocket levels, especially. But it was all super fun! What an underrated platformer. It hearkens back to the SNES entries with its format and collectibles, but it adds a few tweaks that I appreciated. It also looks and plays fantastic on Switch 2.

God, I loved that game. Can’t wait to get to the sequel, and I hope they make another one in the series! Why did it take me so damn long to play it???? Hating on past me for this error….
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Battle Chef Brigade (Played on Switch 2)

This year, I made it one of my long-term goals to not only play more old, and more diverse video games— I wanted to also chip away at the growing pile of visual novel-style narrative games that I have been accruing over the years. Battle Chef Brigade may just be my longest backlogged game, all told. Kinda crazy it took me this long to get to it. I remember distinctly getting it for my Switch when it hit the EShop day one, and I waited a long time to finally get to it.

Another instance of me being bummed I came late to the party because this game rules! It’s essentially a match-3 puzzle narrative game, but it’s so much more than that. By the end, I feel like they stretched the concept of a match-3 as far as it could go, and it was very satisfying learning the right combos to increase my gem score when I had to apron up and start cooking in the competitions.

It reminds me of the Delicious in Dungeon series, where they thematically balance a medieval setting with a cooking motif, and it’s a very cozy, inviting place. Trinket Studios also has an amazing art team. All the races, characters, and environments are varied and gorgeously drawn and colored, and that’s a big deal because most of the game is voiced, still-life drawings of characters that talk to each other. It looks great, and the voice acting is top-notch too. It’s a very high-quality indie gem that I recommend without reservation. It’s also pretty beefy too: it took me around 10 hours to see it through, and I was never once bored the whole time. Very worth it. It’s also on sale all the time, so check it out! I really like it! ———————————————————————————————
VA-11-HALL-A (Played on Switch 2)

On a recommendation from my friend I do my podcast with, I started this up in my quest to play more narrative games. This may just be my favorite of the bunch I have played this year. VA-11-HALL-A is a modern classic of the genre. I adored every frame of this painting. It’s really phenomenal. I don’t want to get into it really because I think it benefits from going in blind, meeting a bunch of fun characters, and mixing a ton of cool drinks. It’s so unique. There is nothing quite like VA-11-HALL-A. I hope I get to play that spiritual sequel they’ve been working on soon!

Also, it looks so… so… so… good. I love the pixel art here. The CRT filter here is killer, too. I played this game only using that filter, and when you see it in action, it’s like peanut butter and chocolate, baby. The whole game just sings because of it. It’s cozy, it’s inviting, it’s so worth playing. Cannot sing higher praises about this thing than that. Everyone needs to check this gem out! Mix drinks, and save lives, people!! ———————————————————————————————
Half-Life (Played on PC)

I dunno what got into me, but yeah, I finally played through the original Half-Life on Steam this year, and boy was I surprised how well it holds up. The gunplay still feels phenomenal, even almost 30 years since release. Valve really nailed it in one, didn’t they?

What could I possibly say about this game that people haven’t said already? It’s a landmark title in the industry, and it has aged beautifully. Can’t believe how ambitious this game is even still. No one was doing real-time cutscenes or cinematic setpieces at the time. Just an astounding feat for its era. I also think it has some of the very best shooter levels ever made in a video game, even to this modern day. Surface Tension?? Are you fucking kidding me??? Absolutely sublime. Turns out game design ages gracefully when it’s absolutely timeless.
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All in all, a very productive month for me. I am very happy I got so much done in just a short amount of time. I think I am past the halfway point already for how many games I beat in 2025, so the fact I am surpassing my previous pace is really exciting to me.

Now, for stuff I am looking forward to!
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The Drifter’s Backlog: Games from The Dreaded Backlog (A Priority Shortlist of Backlog Stuff I’m Interested In)
Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster (PlayStation 5)
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles (Switch 2)
Disco Elysium (Switch 2)
Crow Country (Switch 2)
Yakuza Kiwami 2 (PlayStation 5)
Night in the Woods (PlayStation 5)
AI: The Somnium Files (Switch 2)
Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo (Switch 2)
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The Drifter’s Future: New Games I’d like to Play
Star Fox (2026)
Beast of Reincarnation
Control Resonant
Halo: Campaign Evolved
Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls
Marvel’s Wolverine
Onimusha: Way of the Sword
Silent Hill: Townfall
Splatoon Raiders
Star Wars: Zero Company
Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced
Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2
Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter ———————————————————————————————

Games I Would Like to Review: (New this Edition!)
Added this CMD! These are games I have finished that I would love to review. Maybe some will get done, maybe some won’t. It’s all really a matter of how much free time I have, you know? Here are the games I’d like to talk more about at some point, since they are not included in the recaps. I just have way more to say on these, and I feel like they deserve their own reviews.
These are the eligible games I’d like to review:

007: First Light
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book
Pokemon Pokopia
Resident Evil 4 (2023)
Resident Evil Requiem

Spoilers: 007 and Requiem are both tied, neck-and-neck for my current Game of the Year. They are brilliant games… with so much on the horizon its going to be insane to see which new title will challenge those incredible feats. I wanna review these games soon. I hope I can make some time to do so. They’re all so good!

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Games I Reviewed Last Quarter: (New this Edition! Links Below!)

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Another CMD in the Bammer. Slammer?

Whatever. It’s done. I’m happy.
That’s all she wrote for this recap! I will be back in… September? Feels so far away and close at the same time. This is honestly a great time to dip into the backlog before the big game mess heads our way this Fall.
Did you know they’re putting out another GTA this Fall? That’s crazy!

Shuffle through the mess with me next time on CMD. It’s been a pleasure to serve up my thoughts on a platter for you. Stay classy!… and as always, as the great sports journo and podcaster Dave Dameshek says: “It’s been a little slice of Heaven.”

I’ll give credit where it is due: “Mixtape” is one of the best directed, paced, and most visually pleasing narrative indie games I have played in a bit. This shopping cart sequence is a highlight, especially.

Mixtape is a lot of things. The first thing is that it’s not a game for just anyone. There has been a certain degree of pointed ire thrown its way from a small section of the gaming populace (the usual dregs of digital society, like the Gamergaters, and recurring Twitter gaming fiends— assholes, really), about Mixtape, and they all say the same things about it. “It’s barely a video game”… “it’s cringe and misses the mark”… “it’s shitty nostalgia bait…”— the list goes on and on from these people. Most of it I dismiss out of hand, due to it being the ‘flavor of the month’ targeted gaming hit campaign these folks launch into on the regular. But there is a feeling of unrest here that I want to understand. It’s also fascinating to see how it’s resonated with the games media, who have all roundly praised this game: giving it high scores like 9’s and 10’s from all around the industry. I am less interested in why they liked it all so much. I am more interested in hearing why and how it’s repulsed so many people.

Like a roving band of low-IQ bandits, these folks emerge from their digital bunkers to levy harsh criticism at video games they have no intention of playing so that they can participate in the ‘fight against woke media’. It’s all a bit tiresome, but the very crux of the feeling I get from these people is that they all fundamentally hate the same thing about Mixtape, at its core: They hate feeling pandered to, and offered nostalgia for an era they have no fondness for.

This last bit I can understand. While I don’t agree with them weaponizing their shitty opinions, I can relate to this sentiment when it comes to some media that uses specific periods of time and the items of the era to relay a certain dated mood or feeling. ‘Nostalgia bait' is a term we often see in our current media landscape, and it’s usually a label placed at the feet of the worst offenders of these habits.

Franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, Stranger Things, and the like are chief offenders of the most heinous modern crime of seeding their well-worn universes with cheap tricks to woo longtime fans, in hopes of currying some lost favor with them. It reeks of series, stories, and creators who don’t have many new things to offer, so they peddle their old ideas and sell reliable, popular iconography to lure back stubborn minds who appreciate more of ‘how it was back then’. I can get how it feels to have your favorite series run out of ideas, show you the old shit, and talk about ‘how good it was’. It gets old. It gets annoying. I get the sentiment here.

The issue with how folks view Mixtape, in my opinion, is that they are missing the point of it. It’s not really a game that is trying to bait you. I think it’s more than that. Mixtape is trying to capture a specific time and place for a small group of people on the brink of adulthood. Now, how well you think an Australian studio (Beethoven and Dinosaur) has captured a slice of America in the 1990’s is another thing entirely. It’s not period accurate, representative, or consistent with its era, really, but that’s not a bad thing. Mixtape leans into the fantastical in its narrative, and using the ‘90s as a guide rather than a rulebook for its aesthetics makes it feel more genuine to the story it’s telling. It deviates from the truth. That’s okay, though. It’s more interested in making the ‘90s a place represented by the characters of the time depicted, rather than being slavishly accurate to the time period itself. The '90s are just set dressing here. Let’s not get too hung up on that choice.

It can feel pandering at times, but I do think this game has its heart in the right place, mostly— cringe as some of the aspects of the total journey can feel, admittedly. I also think some of the ire directed at this game has to do with how some of the main cast are portrayed here, as well. It’s a specific trio of archetypes that the developer is attempting to display here, which is not for everyone. I think inherently, pretention comes with the subject matter here, and that, as a result, pisses some people off. It’s not always fun to engage with a piece of media that contains depictions of people with personalities you can’t or don’t relate to. I think attacking the makers of the game for its particulars, however cringe the content may seem, is just in bad faith, though. I feel as if the characters in the game are deeply misunderstood, given the contextless nature of social media, and grifters, hellbent on mischaracterizing aspects of a game they won’t play. I welcome media that challenges me and depicts an era that even I can’t relate to. That’s interesting. I am more interested in a discourse that wants to talk about that. But let’s get to the actual game.

The premise of the game is this: you play as Stacey Rockford, a self-proclaimed musical connoisseur (or “know-it-all”), obsessed with all things to do with symphonic arrangement, and the particulars of the medium. She is on the verge of assembling the magnum opus of her current moment: a curated mixtape, which is the impetus for the events of the game, and marks the further happenings of the story with full melodic style. The structure of Mixtape is ordered just so, like a curated order of events. Every single moment that happens in the game is punctuated by some licensed song and set piece moment with the selected song that Stacey has included, to imbue the time spent in the experience with some sort of higher meaning or infuse the situation with just the right flavor of a backing soundtrack.

Rockford is obviously a very driven gal, full of vim and vigor, in pursuit of her goals. She wants to become a ‘music supervisor’: an occupation that curates music and arranges each song in a specific order. She is a music snob, really, and deigns to get paid for her taste. She is a person who has a lot of opinions about her favorite genres, musicians, bands, and the like. At her core, I find Stacey deeply unserious and pretentious, even as she desperately seeks recognition and approval of her tastes and choices of music. All she wants is to be understood, and to recommend to you the best song you had no idea existed. She finds herself so serious that it is laughable at times. I admire her zeal, but her insistence upon herself and her ‘correct opinions’ is amusing. She speaks in fact and labels all her opinions as such.

The character of Stacey is the gamer’s lens into viewing this snapshot of a suburban life, and I can understand why people find her cringey. She is all about herself, her opinions, and her goals. She is written like a character who thinks she’s got it all figured out, and her depiction in the game has polarized people. She is very unlikable to start, and out of context, if you misunderstand her whole deal, it can come off as off-putting, especially since she is the main protagonist of the tale, but that’s why I find her and the rest of the main cast of the game so fascinating. They are all trying to be both their own people and move into adulthood with a better grasp of themselves. Vocalizing that transitional aspect, at times, is extremely cringey as a result.

The fact is: teenagers are… embarrassing. It’s a transitional period of life, and with so much change comes discomfort. The cast all latch onto bad catchphrases, act unruly and childlike, and they all have a rebellious streak to them that is deeply felt throughout the story. They’re all trying to push the envelope in their own way, and I think showing their trials and tribulations can come off as extremely cringey. But that’s okay.

I think the most fascinating aspect of Mixtape’s characters and their personalities is that they all share the same issues. They are all dreading the same shared inflection point of latter adolescence (that is slowly inching closer to them by the day), and they each pretend to be more of the archetypes or characters they are understood as being (or labeled as being), rather than being their own people. The times they lean away from their understood roles of being: the snob, the goody-two-shoes, and the loser burnout, are when the characters start becoming more relatable. They all have a certain pathos of genuine personhood hiding beneath their respective facades.

When they aren’t pretending to be character types, Rockford, Cassandra, and Slater share real, genuine moments of what it’s like to be human, and especially a teenager in that moment in time, and the essence of that dynamic is the real strength of Mixtape, thematically. The characters love each other. They love hanging out with each other too. They muse about dumb shit, they get deep and introspective, they become deathly serious about unserious topics— all of the writing and conversations in Mixtape between its cast are the true heart of the story. When they aren’t pretending and get real, that’s when great dialogue happens. The writing isn’t perfect, or even good, some of the time, but when genuine moments like these happen, sincerity abounds.

The actual plot of Mixtape is simple. The last big party of high school is about to happen, and to make an impression, the trio of Rockford, Slater, and Cassandra make up their minds to furnish the shindig with alcohol, to curry some favor with the older crowd, and be seen as more ‘cool’. The particulars are the interesting bits. It’s more character-centric than plot-oriented, and having the simple setup is a big strength of the game. Along the way, the trio reminisce about the situations that have marked their friendship up until that point, and that’s where the gamey part of Mixtape crops up. At its core, Mixtape is a game about mood, music, and set pieces.

The whole thing is masterfully paced and edited, as well. I can’t remember a better flowing indie game in terms of structure, design, and fluidity in its narrative, all while juggling so many tones and gameplay quirks. In no particular order, you go from bounding and flying across a lush forest prairie to dodging the cops after a teen party and driving recklessly around town in a supermarket shopping cart to drunkenly stumbling around an old video store in search of new releases (my favorite part of the game for sure), all in the span of 3 to 4 hours.

The pace of the journey is breakneck, yet considered, and you never feel bored because of how often they shake up the small bits of gameplay they include. At its core, for the gameplay, it’s an ideas game. You play little bits of the game in different ways. All in the span of a few hours, you stay busy: skipping rocks across a shallow pond, sweeping leaves at your forest hideout (charging it up as you go), you jump and levitate across wide swathes of land cinematically, and you even simulate the act of ‘French kissing’ in a deeply inspired interstitial flashback that was incredibly funny. It’s all very, very inspired. The gameplay set pieces are of a slightly dreamy quality, where the fantastical blends with the real, and some of the choices the developers make to heighten the events in the game may be seen as odd, for some, but I feel as though it works most of the time.

There are many instances of fantasy laced throughout remembered moments in the story, and the way the game shows off Stacey’s dreamlike projections is inspired. You blow up trash cans, cars, and fire hydrants with a well-timed middle finger, yelling ‘fuck you!’ while riding on a skateboard and ‘bombing’ a hill, you levitate in a monochromatic sequence of ennui: rewinding backwards past the downtown square of your local town, bumping into objects as you go, and you cinematically stomp like a fearsome kaiju attacking a diorama of a small Polynesian archipelago in an abandoned dinosaur theme park, crushing minature dinos as you go. It’s all really clever execution on the dreaming and projections of the protagonist. It’s like the last vestiges of playing make-believe as a child, manifested into video game form. I really have played nothing like these moments, and I appreciate how fresh it all feels.

The developers Beethoven and Dinosaur execute many fun, bite-sized ideas that never outstay their welcome. I understand the gripes of those who just say it’s a ‘movie’, but in truth, it’s more of a lightly interactive narrative experience that constantly varies up the journey as you play. It’s wacky, extremely inspired, and great fun to play in these segments, and the whole affair is deeply memorable as a result.

It’s a huge step up in every way from their previous effort, too, for Beethoven and Dinosaur. The Artful Escape is their previous musical adventure, and I really like that game. You see the shared DNA between that game and Mixtape if you have played both, and seeing just how much they have leveled up as developers is satisfying. It’s more than incremental, too. It’s graphically impressive, musically inspiring, and most of all, engaging to play. I think if Mixtape were to be just an animated movie, it wouldn’t be nearly as impactful as it is as a game. I think the real achievement of the title lies in the fantastic direction, editing, and pacing of the game, especially. The whole game is just a triumph of a developer that knew what they wanted to make, and did just what they set out to do, with a style all their own.

I could take or leave some of the actual music, but the soundtrack, full of licensed songs, is all good for the moments they appear in the game. I will admit, the music selection is a bit of a generational divide for me. I am not a fan of bands like DEVO, the Smashing Pumpkins, or Lush, and I don’t pretend to be. But in context and situation, all the music works beautifully. It’s the point of the game, anyway; if the music were to be bad, it would kind of cause the whole thing to go up in smoke, right? They nail that aspect here, though, I am glad to say.

There is a lot to say about Mixtape, but I will end my review like this. It is by no means a game for everyone. I recommend it with some caveats. If you are disturbed by bold narrative choices and cringey writing, this is not the game for you. In fact, stay far away from it. But if you spend some time understanding what the game is trying to do, there is a deep meaning behind the veneer of assumed ‘nostalgia bait’ that gets at what it means to be a teenager in a specific time and place. That really resonated with me, even if the people depicted do not, for one reason or another. It’s a challenging game full of wonderful ideas and great execution, and I am very happy I saw it through. Beethoven and Dinosaur are true artists and auteurs in their own right, and I commend them as such. I think I see what the fuss was all about in the discourse, but the whole thing seems like much ado about nothing. It’s a great, memorable time that I will remember.

“It’s been a thin slice of Heaven.” Shoutout, Shek.

Not going to lie, pretty tired of hearing about this “Yellow King” guy everyone keeps yammering on about. Take a vacation to a real beach, instead of painting about one, yeah? Quit talking in riddles!!!

Saros is one of the crispest and most playable video games I’ve played in a fair bit. It’s so instantly engaging and kinetic, you just can’t help but fall in love with its extensive language of gameplay verbs. It’s a real thrill to play, from the moment you take control of Arjun Devraj, the main character of Saros.

You are a whirlwind of death, here. Very few games both give you the tools to empower you and then go out and challenge you to use all your tools to conquer their combat puzzles, as Housemarque does with this game. If you aren’t moving in a battle, you’re dead, and Housemarque, the developers of Saros and its spiritual ancestor, Returnal, has supplied the player with more than enough powerful tools and dextrous movement to pull off the large hurdles they set before you throughout Saros’ 15-20 hour campaign. That time is dependent on how skilled you are as a player, of course. But unfortunately, I am pretty mixed on Saros. I really like a lot of core things about the way it handles, how it rewards skillful play, the visuals, and the sound design, but I was consistently bummed out by the narrative, dialogue, and characters throughout my time with it.

Presentationally, it’s exceptional. There were many times, as I moved throughout the sepia-toned biomes of Carcosa, that I gazed in awe at the sheer brilliance of visual design on display. The unifying thematic and visual motif of Saros has to do with the Sun and solar eclipses, and that bonding agent ties the entire game cohesively in its visuals. It’s a stupendous feat of character design, enemy design, and environmental art all coming together to pull off one of the greatest-looking games on the market. Every part of the way the game looks presentationally comes together beautifully to paint the picture of a fallen world in need of saving. There isn’t much out there in games that looks or sounds quite like Saros, and that makes the whole affair feel fresh and new as a result. It’s gorgeous to look at.

Avoiding spoilers, the final boss encounter of this game, along with the accompanying cutscene showing off the big bad in all his yellow glory, is cinematically arresting. I can’t remember being as gobsmacked looking at a video game artistically since maybe Metaphor: Re Fantazio from a couple of years back. Remember the old Gamespot review system from back in the day, where they would grade games on the metrics of both ‘graphics technical’ and ‘graphics artistic’?? If those metrics were used today, Saros would take home the gold for both. It’s artistically and technologically one of the most impressive video games out there.

It wouldn’t mean much, though, if it were only pretty to look at. The real victory of the encounter design is that all the fights are actually legible. All the fiery assaults of color-coded pellets being flung your way by enemies are completely readable, and parsing the ever-evolving combat puzzle is the true highlight of Saros. You dash, strike, and shield yourself against the ever-advancing hordes of Carcosa’s alien foes, and doing so is such a joy. The pure act of simply playing Saros is fantastic.

To talk about the structure of this game, you kinda have to talk about Returnal to compare, I think. Returnal is Housemarque’s spiritual ancestor to Saros, in almost every way. It’s similar in so many ways that you’d be forgiven for wondering why it isn’t just Returnal 2. It is Returnal. But it’s easier Returnal. The main focus of Saros is to navigate the ever-changing biomes of Carcosa, beating stage bosses along the way to mark your progress. You have an upgrade tree that caps out at locked intervals, gated by your progress of beating said bosses. You can’t ever truly overlevel in Saros, at least not with the permanent upgrades. But the whole game is simply easier than Returnal, given the things that stay with you run to run.

Returnal is different in that way, where there are some permanent upgrades to be had, but you are really picking up items to take with you on a long run back to a boss, and that is the main issue with that game: the runs are way too long. Returnal is more of a roguelike than Saros is, but in some way, the hyper-focused intensity of the true random chance that Returnal deals in is just more honest of a structure than Saros is. Housemarque wanted to correct the gripes that people had with Returnal, which were: getting killed on a long run being a huge buzz-kill, and the game was really hard. Striking that forward momentum down so frequently actively pushed gamers away from Returnal. Housemarque corrects these issues here in Saros, but they do so at the cost of drilling down on the roguelike nature of the affair. It’s a flawed genre, and the ones that do it right do it well, but Saros seems more concerned about appeasing the many that bounced off Returnal, rather than enhancing the roguelike nature of their first effort.

The structure is stage-based in Saros, while in Returnal, it’s more checkpoint-based. You had to scramble through a part of each biome in Returnal without dying to get back to the last spot you died in. One of the enemies in that stage would, like a Souls-like enemy, have your previous run’s currency stored inside of them, so that when you killed them in an act of vengeance, you would re-gather your lost currency. In Saros, you simply have a teleporter that is used to warp back to specific biomes rather than have the tall task of trying to stay alive, getting right back to where you were, and you have some amount of permanent currency called Lucenite, (the somewhat ‘MacGuffin’ of Saros) and Halcyon (high-value drops of currency to be used in the skill tree) that you bring back between runs.

Given the more friendly nature of the leveling system and the permanent currency, it’s sometimes more advantageous to simply farm for materials in previous biomes, to increase Arjun’s skills, rather than hoof it to a boss and die. The bosses in Saros aren’t as difficult as the ones in Returnal, where if you die on one, you go all the way back to the beginning of a run; Saros is a game far more concerned with you finishing it. More than anything, that is the truth. It’s a game that was made to assist the player, more than ever, in finishing it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the modifiers that Housemarque gives you to alter your stage-based runs. It’s a sort of balance sheet here, that for every boon you give yourself, you must take a detrimental debuff to counteract that advantage. That system is a good idea, but in practice, it makes an already mild game far easier. Mild in comparison to Returnal, that is anyway. It’s still very challenging at times, dependent on the obstacle. But I had a pretty easy time finishing it.

Saros is a game sort of ashamed to be a roguelike, and that feeling shows throughout the adventure. Every concession they have made in the gameplay structure betrays a sense of inherent frustration on behalf of the developers. I think Returnal was the game they wanted to make, while Saros is the game they had to make to allow more people to engage with Returnal’s ideas. It’s a jack of all trades situation here. Not being able to drill down on any core system, because you are allowing for a more inviting experience, does ultimately file down the teeth of a great idea.

I think the only thing I would have changed between the two games would be fast travelling. I would have the teleport be available, and that’s it. I simply wanted to get back in the fight more quickly instead of retreading my steps to build myself up. I am more interested in the encounters, not the ‘stuff’ as it were, but Returnal made the constant resetting of the game feel like a chore after a while. This must be a frustrating thing for a developer, I imagine. They fixed all the issues people had with Saros, added ease of travel and offered difficulty modifiers, and people like me still complain that it was better in some way before. That kinda sucks, I’ll admit.

I do think it may be proof positive that sometimes the gamer just isn’t always right. I thought having these changes would be beneficial, but in actuality, the game becomes sort of a cakewalk given those alterations. It echoes in a similar way to me the issues people had with DOOM Eternal, and as a response to that criticism, id Software gave us DOOM: The Dark Ages. A better video game with less friction, but less impact as a result. There isn’t any winning when devs kowtow to players who are inherently a finicky bunch like myself. I know I am the problem here!

The visuals and the gameplay are great. It also sounds awesome. Lots of good, bassy notes in the gameplay. The music is sorta forgettable, with it all blending for me into a sort of loud, cacophony of synths and robotic bass. It’s not bad, just nothing to write home about.

Some of the systems and structures have made finishing it far easier, which comes at the cost of sanding off the more interesting friction of the game as a result. While it isn’t a brutal task to finish Saros, it is a far easier game to see through, clocking it at roughly half the time of what it takes to finish the previous game, Returnal. This isn’t a bad thing, because as a man with limited time, I appreciate my time not being wasted for the sake of padding its runtime. But the whole affair is a bit of a blur, as a result.

So far, there are a lot of positives. The reasons I am so mixed on Saros have everything to do with the story, the characters, and the dialogue. When you are playing Saros, you kinda don’t care what’s going on, and I prefer it that way. I would be invested in the yarn Housemarque is spinning if the writing were maybe better? The biggest issues I have with this game, besides some of the sanded-off gameplay structure, are the writing and the price of admission to play the game.

First off: the writing in Saros is not just mediocre, I’d go as far as to say it is outright bad. It is a bad story, filled with unlikable characters, going through a confusing plot, lined with some of the worst dialogue I’ve had to sit through in a triple-A game recently. Everyone in this game at some interval is losing their mind, and that fact becomes extremely apparent when any character affected starts doing the same damn thing: they all start talking in riddles, yakking about some eldritch aspiration they are influenced by. It’s terrible, and as the game continues on, it becomes more prevalent, and the game is worse because of it. I’d like to ignore it, but I want to give actual criticism of the parts of the game, so I had to endure it for the full duration. Arjun is not the problem here, but he isn’t great either. He seems to be surrounded by members of a cult, all with their own manic, inside jokes, and that gives the narrative a feeling of obliqueness in an annoying way, not in a mysterious way like the game wants it to feel. It’s just awful. If I have to hear about the ‘Sun that was promised!’ one more fucking time, I may just commit an actual crime. In some ways, the cast’s loss of their sanity contributed to me also feeling crazed as well by the end.

It’s not just the dialogue; the characters are bad. There are a lot of characters in this game, too. The whole retinue of the Echelon program has either died or lost their marbles, and even as things become clearer in the story between Arjun and his long-lost love, it becomes more evident how much of a piece of shit he is. Not even Rahul Kohli can save the proceedings either, with his gruff, aloof shooter-man dialogue failing to reach deaf ears at the best of times in the narrative. It’s a shame, too, because I like the actor! He just doesn’t get a lot of help delivering a poor script. They never give him as an actor the avenue to show off his natural charisma, and that’s a big bummer. They make Arjun feel like a pissed-off ape of a soldier in search of a lost possession rather than seeking out a loved one, and the delivery of bad dialogue on behalf of Arjun is just sort of a shame, to me. He had all the potential to be a cool character, especially given how good the main protagonist of Returnal, Selene, was. The story was actually great there, too. They do the same tricks here in Saros, just worse. It’s a big bummer. Not delivering on the narrative is one of the biggest disappointments I have with the game. I get that it kinda isn’t the point of the thing, but if you’re going to include the story, make sure to make it at least palatable?

The only character I kind of liked in Saros was the AI robot Primary, who at least commits to the slow insanity bit in an interesting way, given his position as an artificial being. He dryly muses regularly about the same things the other characters in Saros do; he just delivers it better, and there is a degree of pathos to his performance I appreciate. Besides his actual gameplay function of being the main hub’s navigation menu and level-up screen, Primary is pretty much the secondary character in Saros, and he is by far the best of a bad bunch. The game stumbles so often narratively that it’s hard to see past it sometimes, and I want to play the game. If the given impetus sucks, why would I want to engage with the specifics? I was usually able to delineate the quality between the narrative and the gameplay while I played, but at many times it was really rough.

The game feels so good to play, but it is constantly punctuated by terrible dialogue, characters, and story; it’s hard to ignore it. It has all the makings of a prestige, Sony-published triple-A video game, but with none of the execution or care given to the story as the gameplay. It’s a frustrating Jekyll and Hyde of a game. It wants to be seen like a game of its peers, like a Naughty Dog game, a Guerrilla project, or a Santa Monica title, in terms of renown— but it just doesn’t have the narrative dexterity that those games do, and it’s lesser for it. In some ways, it’s kind of an imposter to the prestige Sony game, given its price tag.

It’s a $70 video game, and for that price, it better be damn worth the ask, but I just don’t think it is. $50 seems to be a top-out scale for an ‘agreed upon’ price for any one of these games in the roguelike genre. Exceeding that already steep price tag seems to be a big ask for anyone who even likes roguelikes. Everyone seems to be in the same boat here: 70 bucks for a roguelike is too much. Sony is bucking that idea by kicking up the price of admission 20 bucks past that $50 top-out for most people, because they feel they have a prestige title, and I think that is going to adversely affect its sales.

Everyone playing this game understands its value except for the publisher, here, and that’s going to be a problem for Housemarque if they look to do this sort of thing again. From the looks of it, I don’t think they’ll get another bite of the apple because of this steep ask, which isn’t their fault, unfortunately. It’s a good game, and great at times, but I believe it’s just not worth the high ask if I am honest.

All told, I feel a certain way about Saros. As the title of this post says, it’s a “Total Eclipse, with No Heart”. The game is gorgeous to look at and listen to, and sets the standard for shooter gameplay in roguelikes, but the impetus to do so is an active annoyance to me while playing it, given its numerous narrative mishaps. It’s a game with no soul. Saros is a good game that could have been great if more care had been given to the other particulars outside of the gameplay and presentation. High marks to the artists and designers of the game, though. Housemarque’s visual splendor, technical brilliance, and mechanical prowess as a developer have never been better than they are here.

I recommend this game, but not at $70. Please wait for a sale, and if you can stomach the game’s narrative issues, what you will find is a big-budget arcade shooter that looks and plays so good, you’ll have to see it to believe it. I wanted to like more than I did, but I have to be honest about these things.

As always, “It’s been a thin slice of Heaven.” Shout out, Dave Dameshek.

Diana steals the show here. She has a manic, gremlin-like energy that is perfect for her role and her diminutive stature in “Pragmata”.

Pragmata is a hit, both critically and commercially, for Capcom, and for good reason. It’s a great game that does just about everything right. It’s a wonder that Capcom has nailed it so well this first go ‘round, I can’t think of too many issues that hampered my enjoyment while playing through it. I think it’s a credit to the company that made it that Pragmata is as good as it is, despite the 6 to 8-year development time. It was revealed at “The Future of Gaming” Sony State of Play show all the way back in 2020. It debuted alongside the likes of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Bugsnax, and Horizon: Forbidden West in that show, so to say it’s been a long time coming is a bit of an understatement. For some companies, long development times can mean projects that are in deep crisis, mothballed, or worse. But for the select few, these long, slow developments can yield fantastic results, and we see proof positive of that latter outcome with the success of Pragmata.

It makes sense that it took as long as it did, but if you look around and see what they have made, forgetting its runtime? It feels like a brand-new idea. A genre unto itself at points, even. I enjoyed seeing the familiar notes of stock-standard third-person shooting altered in fun ways with this added degree of complexity to the gameplay. The maze-running grid minigame Diana does to hack bots, along with Hugh’s standard shooting gameplay, gives a familiar format some much-needed life. It feels like just enough complexity has been installed to keep the plate-spinning in the combat that much more engaging. Once you get the hang of it, it kind of becomes some odd ‘zen-action’ gameplay. You sorta go into a hyper-focused trance attempting to ‘juggle the balls up in the air’, as it were, and that feeling doesn’t wear out its welcome throughout once you can harness your combat abilities.

While some mechanics get on the side of outstaying their welcome, like the large arena battles where you fight scads of metallic white baddies in round-based entanglements, the act of simply playing as Hugh and Diana never gets old. Capcom has done well to make the mere act of moving through “The Cradle” (the Moon base that you are exploring in Pragmata) a thoroughly enjoyable experience that switches it up just enough to keep you engaged for the full duration of its 8-12-hour campaign.

It’s great fun to jet around as Hugh especially— because with the added mobility of a snappy double-jump as well as a crisp and clean multi-directional dash move, you feel as though you can surmount any physical obstacle or geometric impediment that the game throws at you. I dare say it’s some of the best-feeling locomotion and perhaps one of the best movesets for a playable character I have encountered in an action game in quite a bit. Everything you want to do, you can do, and the game honors your inputs every time. I appreciate it when I can trust a game to let me pull off the movement I am attempting with very little pushback.

The moveset rocks, the combat is extremely solid, and the interplay between Hugh and Diana (the robotic “Pragmata” in… Pragmata) is very entertaining. Their conversations and interactions are the heart of the game, after all, and I believe it’d be a lesser experience without the two. The mechanics are one thing, but if you don’t have the characterization to motivate the gameplay, it would be a far worse game for it.

Good thing, then, that Diana is one of the best sidekicks Capcom has made yet. Every little character moment with her, like the bits of funny dialogue she has when commenting on the state of the world (or how she sees it), fun interactions with Diana at home base, in-depth conversations with Hugh throughout their journey, and just the overall sweetness she brings to the table with her adorable gremlin-like presence, is great. She is a well-rounded, extremely entertaining, childlike being. She has a genuine pathos that we don’t see very often in triple-A games when it comes to children, too. More games should do more work to show children as inquisitive, sensitive creatures, rather than annoying, belligerent nuisances, like we usually see. Diana is the exception, not the rule, and I wish more games would take notes from her character going forward. By the end, I found myself wanting to see even more of her in a sequel, and that’s a great feeling to have about a brand-new character. Diana is great, and she is perhaps the best part of Pragmata, all told.

Of the two main protagonists, Hugh is the one I like the least, which makes sense, given just how strong Diana is as a character, but I couldn’t help but feel like I wanted more from him. He feels like a spin on the generic ‘white savior’ or ‘gunman on the box’ archetype to me, and maybe that’s a bit unfair given that Hugh has more going on than the faceless military protags of the past 20 years in games, but the feeling remains. At the end of the day, Hugh is kind of a naive, lovable dope, and that’s very much okay, given Diana’s dynamism. He is a good vessel to convey a regular ‘degular’ average Joe’s experience working for an Earth mega-corporation, and his inclusion in the story is really to be the cipher for the player and be the audience stand-in to field Diana’s numerous inquiries. He gets the job done, but let’s just say his lights are on, but sometimes… no one is home. Sometimes. He is fine, really! I don’t hate the guy!

The two’s relationship blossoms into more of a brother and young sister relationship rather than a generic sad dad and misguided offspring tale, and the eschewing of the regular ‘lone wolf and cub’ trope for more of this refreshing twist of familial regard is something I welcomed greatly. They get along and bicker like siblings, after all, and instead of the authoritative tenor of parental guidance these older protagonists usually have when addressing their younger counterparts, Hugh and Diana have a mutual respect and understanding of each other as equals in the tale.

I like that spin on things, and their dynamic is extremely successful in making the game work on multiple levels. If their relationship isn’t nearly as good, I truly believe this game falls apart. There was clearly a lot of care put into how gamers would perceive the two of them throughout, and many specific choices were obviously made to endear the two to players of the game, I believe. Pragmata is successful because its two main characters genuinely like each other, and while maybe that isn’t the sole reason for the game’s victories— I do believe it’s a large reason why it has done so well for itself and Capcom.

The positives are aplenty in Pragmata. After you wrap up the game, you have the option to tackle any collectibles (REMS you can bring back to base for Diana), VR missions (tasks to earn powerful upgrades and weapons), and even new challenges that unlock the true ending of the game. While I have yet to do everything, I am confident that I eventually will. If there is one thing that Capcom does the best, it’s offering continued reasons to play its games, be it by incentivizing multiple playthroughs like in the recent Resident Evil remakes and newer entries, as well as tackling harder challenges like those found in the Devil May Cry series. Pragmata has a lot of added stuff to do after the credits roll, and I commend Capcom for keeping with their previous IPs’ traditions of added reasons to play after a playthrough.

The story itself may be the weakest part of the game, if I had a minor gripe, however. Besides the characters interacting, I didn’t really get that much out of the main thrust of the narrative or its particulars. Sure, it’s fine and workable, but the villain is terribly middling and not very interesting, and that may be the biggest issue I have with the game. It’s small potatoes all told, but I digress. For all the positives I have with Pragmata and its particulars, having one or two small issues doesn’t spoil the pot in the slightest. Great final boss fight, though. I felt particularly stretched for resources in the final encounter, and that’s a good thing. It felt like the culmination of the combat puzzle for me, and I like that quite a bit.

Pragmata is somewhat of a marvel in this modern video game landscape. A single-player third-person action shooter with puzzle mechanics in another era would scream ‘flop’ to me, but in the deft, reliable hands of the greatest third-party publisher working today, Capcom, they delivered an absolute triumph for a freshman effort. Bravo! Not every day a new IP works out, but given the time, care, and execution in its development, it’s not hard to see why it is a big win.

I highly recommend Pragmata. I would be shocked if it doesn’t make it on my year-end Game of the Year list by the time we wrap this calendar year, and I hope that if you read this, you will spend the money to find out for yourself. It’s well worth the purchase.

Thanks as always for reading, and as great sports scribe Dave Dameshek always says, “It’s been a thin slice of Heaven”.

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!!

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??
    
    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.
    
    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.)
    
    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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?
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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.