2025 is nearly behind us, and it's been among my lowest-income years to date. Rather than whinge on about why that is (it's stories you've probably heard a lot from a lot of other people), I'm going to go on about 50 good games I've played this year. Are they indie? Mostly, but not always. Did they come out this year? Potentially not, but you really have to understand it's hard to stay current without Funding. (This is not me begging for money. Not this month, anyway.) The list begins, in order from most recent to least, because I'm building this out of my Steam Recently Played list and a deep scouring of my Bluesky timeline for the words "game," "playing," and "complete." Can't expect me to remember what the hell I did all year.
Nubby's Number Factory
Taking the Games Industry's latest obsessions - rogue-lite deckbuilders, games of chance, and making numbers go up - and administering a coat of surrealistic 1995 3D ClipArt Gallery window dressing, Nubby really lives and dies by one truly defining trait: there is, really, no such thing as Game Balance. You will have runs in which you might not even pass the first five rounds, because you just plain cannot get Nubby to bounce off the right pegs, run out of coins, and fail to get the shop to roll you any items you can afford. And then, once in a while, you'll get a run where you accidentally discover one of many ways you can break the game. Literally; scoring high enough over the round goal prompts the message "You Broke The Game" and an absurd 10,000x board restock, immediately filling your wallet as full as it gets, while your supervisor (one of 10 or so different people all named Tony) makes "WOW!" movements in his little window. Your items of the trade are crudely 3D-rendered everyday objects and animals, like lobster claws, two-headed turtles, or... Poop Butt. It feels like Edutainment media, like maybe a twisted Sonic's Schoolhouse, except that you will probably not learn anything from playing Nubby. And hell, maybe that's the kind of experience you're after. I ain't judgin'.
SULFUR
I've been enamored with the concept of an Extraction Shooter for a while, since Escape From Tarkov entered beta, but I've always felt a bit left-out about it. Nearly everything in the genre is built around persistent world multiplayer, which generally means I'm going to have a rotten time with it (online games and I have a rather poor history together). Along comes Sulfur, which entered early access last year, a rogue-lite FPS with a sort of twisted Little Golden Book aesthetic, and an arsenal of wonderfully impractical weapons to find, with all the risk-reward of an extraction shooter and none of the online players to ruin the experience. A year onward, Sulfur has very nearly traversed the entirety of its development roadmap, and there's always more fun combinations of weapon parts and magical oils to experiment with. Me? I'm just happy that there is a pistol disguised as a cigarette lighter, and if you (somehow) slap a sniper scope and a barrel extension on it, they inexplicably still fit under the lid. It is in no way a practical weapon. But I'm just glad it's there.
Assorted weapon-assembly-based nonsense can be witnessed in this thread I started last year.
Nuclear Throne
Some years old, this is, but it's a game I've been rediscovering by way of my Steam Deck and an update that Vlambeer pushed literally this month. Quick-fire chaos, in bite-sized sessions. Sure, I'll probably never Get Good enough to get past the sewers, but it's always fun to try. Also, I have a fondness for games that work in bizarre mouth and guttural noises. It's those kinds of games that I'm convinced their developers had a lot of fun making.
RICO
Now wait a second. Didn't I just write that post about cops being bastards, a few months ago on here? Yes, in fact, I did; here's that post. So why am I playing a game where Police Work entails kicking down every door in the building, shooting everybody, and snatching every money-filled briefcase in view, in the name of Evidence? ...Because some days, I just have to leave my principles at the front desk and attempt to have fun with something. There may be some jank to RICO, as a Unity Engine game on a budget. But at least it doesn't manage to be extremely racist (not directly anyway), and only barely addresses Current Events. I mean. I'd honestly play previous year favorite Anger Foot again to truly satisfy my urges to open every door with my shoe, because RICO's door-kicking doesn't always land on the right foot (cough), but I dunno. It was like a buck and a half at the time.
Trepang2
I seem to recall I was given this as a gift at some point. I remembered the old alpha demo being quite fun, evoking shades of the late Monolith Productions' F.E.A.R., even if not quite hitting the highest highs that game did. Well, it's a full and finished game now, and happenstance dictated I finally try it out. It has a slightly different flavor, since your character has access to both slow motion and an ability to cloak at will, but blasting my way through the first mission left me feeling like the platonic ideal of Batman, in a way. Not, like, the crime-fighting, no-killing World's Greatest Detective, so much as the guy that can pacify an entire room of heavily armed goons in such a way as to drive them increasingly paranoid as their numbers thin out. ...and I'm not honestly sure if Trepang2 even has that as a game mechanic, or if it just feels that way. More of a mood than a straight review. But yeah - recommended for the FPSer who wants to be John Wick with the added bonus of going Poof when the time is right.
Puzzle Depot (demo)
This game's been in development for Years, I'm told, and I'd only somehow become aware of it some months ago. From the creator of the MegaZeux game, Bernard the Bard, comes a puzzler that is just as much about pushing crates as it is about using available resources and objects cleverly. I can't be spending money on new games lately, but the demo was great, with some beautiful pixel work and plenty of time to make its hook known. I very much want to give my money to this effort though. I probably will, as soon as I can justify it.
Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip
This one was sold to me as a somewhat more family friendly Grand Theft Auto, but that definitely undersells what TTTT really does. Right from the get-go, Terry (you!) makes his intentions known: Get a car. Go to space. The city of Spranklewater has no crime, mostly because it has no laws. Nobody really gives much of a shit if you hop in their car while they're driving; Terry doesn't kick them out or anything, just rides in the passenger seat, but you are still given full control of it to drive as recklessly as you want. But a normal car isn't going to get you into space, so everything you do in this game leads into you getting enough junk to make Your Car go faster, so you can eventually - actually - drive it into space. It is a very understatedly silly game. It is not long. Spranklewater really isn't that big of a city. But it's exactly as long and big as it needs to be. It kind of carries the energy of a PlayStation 2 collect-a-thon game, like a Lego Star Wars or something, just without any of the death. (Apart from one stubborn, and unfortunate, sunbather.)
House of Necrosis
I paid the money for this during a moment of weakness, but I don't regret that. You will probably not be surprised to learn that I highly enjoy games that are Randomized. I grew up on NetHack and Dungeon Hack. So I enjoy seeing new takes on Procedurally Generated Levels, with randomized and hidden effects on items or enemies, especially when that comes with a mash-up of another popular genre. House of Necrosis is pretty plainly influenced by Resident Evil, but most of its gameplay DNA comes by way of the Mystery Dungeon games, with enough original flair to make it still feel like its own game. What I most like about it, weirdly, is that the health bar does not refill on its own. So many other Rogue-adjacent games let you heal by standing still. House of Necrosis forces you to actually consider using your healing items and skills. It is this way that it truly channels survival-horror gameplay.
RoboCop: Rogue City
I would say that the devs at Teyon completely understood the assignment they were given, as Rogue City gives us what is probably the first Actually Good RoboCop FPS game. There are so many nods to the movies, the acting is pretty much as good as it needs to be here (which is to say, not going to win awards, but it barely matters), and the Auto 9 is undisputably the best gun in the game even though you start with it. You can upgrade RoboCop's armor to the point that enemies will accidentally bounce bullets off of him and back at themselves. The Auto 9 can be made into a fully automatic, never-reloading laser beam. The power fantasy is realized, as is the social commentary that I'm absolutely certain a bunch of players missed (or willfully ignored).
FlyKnight
I nearly ignored this one upon hearing of it feeling like King's Field and other early From Software titles. Frankly, I've never gotten along with the From Software back-catalog. FlyKnight, though, has not yet irked me enough to give it up entirely. I may yet go revisit it, in all of its stylistically low-poly glory, because it feels unusual enough that maybe it'd scratch that first-person dungeon crawler itch I've been having lately. This is notwithstanding that it takes on the polar opposite of Hollow Knight's insectoid aesthetic: FlyKnight's bugs are definitely not meant to be cute.
ROGUE-FP (demo)
Another first-person dungeon crawler suggested to me some time ago, with the clever twist that it more or less acts like classic Rogue through the contrivance of a first-person perspective, retaining the genre staple of time only moving when you move. It surprises me how much a change of camera angle can make a game feel entirely different. More genres should experiment with that, I think. They also form all of their wall and floor textures out of ASCII characters, which I admire so much. This one's going to have to get bought eventually.
A Little to the Left
Coming to me by way of my mom's Steam library is this cute little organization puzzler. Playing it reminds me a bit of Double Fine Productions' Stacking, which even though that's a completely different kind of game, has an emphasis on there (almost) always being multiple ways to solve a puzzle. What ALTTL does differently, though, is that it does not guide you towards any solution in particular. The goal is to Organize and Sort. A bookshelf, perhaps, will have books in all colors of the rainbow, but also of different heights, or have letters inscribed on the spines, so you can choose to sort them by any of those things. It's a fairly low-stakes game, even if it does occasionally prompt me to look at my own shelves and bins and cubbies and wonder if I shouldn't just be doing that in real life.
We Love Katamari REROLL+ Royal Reverie
We Love Katamari may be one of the best video games of all time. It was certainly one of the best games on its native PlayStation 2 platform; Namco's follow-up to the surprise hit Katamari Damacy escalated everything great about its predecessor, up to and including the hair-pullingly frustrating "cow" and "bear" levels (now combined into one "bear-cow" stage, with even more edge-case items that somehow count as bears or cows). REROLL+ Royal Reverie, then, remasters the classic (and I don't use that word lightly) into a screen-resolution agnostic, framerate-uncapped game of silky smoothness. On top of that, it adds several new challenge stages, framed as flashbacks to the childhood of the King of All Cosmos, reminiscing about the strictness of his own father. It is hard to go back to this game after so many years, not because it has aged in any way whatsoever (it has not), but because I know the music will get stuck in my head for a week. Baby Universe may be The Best Song In The Game, but damn, some times I want something else floating between the eardrums, y'know? (Like, say, the credit-roll anthem, A Song for the King of Kings, in all its ostentatious glory.)
Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate
I was deep into another binge of dungeoning when House of Necrosis launched; this is the game I played before I finally decided I could afford that. What is technically an updated-port of an updated-port (Shiren 5 was originally a Nintendo DS game, in Japan, before it was enhanced and localized on the PlayStation Vita of all things), this game commits to a wide-scale expansion of everything the Mystery Dungeon series had done to that point. Plenty of optional gimmick dungeons to tackle (including one that behaves like Minesweeper), a handful of extra party members you can randomly find and join on each run, plenty of items and enemies that can randomly make your life difficult (or easy!). Maybe it's also a bit too much. There's a lot of mechanics going on in this game, which only becomes clearer when you start doing the Statue Cave puzzles, a majority of which depend on your knowledge of obscure item interactions and effects (like stepping on traps on purpose to shove things around, manipulating monster movements, or the dozens of ways you can cause huge explosions). I see people refer to Mystery Dungeon games as Rogue-lites; I'd argue they're about as close as you can get to a proper traditional Rogue-like as it is possible to get while also having graphics and an approachable gamepad control scheme. Really, pick up any of the Shiren games, you cannot go wrong with them.
Little Kitty, Big City
This game was already in last year's strictly informal Weasel Awards (a bluesky post I wrote largely facetiously). I'd attempted to coin the phrase, "Shenanigames"; games in which the goal is just to get into various shenanigans. Games like Untitled Goose Game, Jazzpunk, and Thank Goodness You're Here! really exemplify the spirit of the Shenanigame, but the concept goes back further than even these. Some of my more fond memories come about from games made in MegaZeux, like Cans 3, Snarfoogle, and Nonsense, where even if there is an overarching goal or a primary objective, the majority of the game is spent goofing around, bumping in to all of the jokes, experimenting with your inventory items in search of more jokes, or attempting to shoot and/or bomb everything to provoke even more jokes.
Little Kitty, Big City carries a somewhat more freeform mentality, where even if you're given defined Goals to accomplish, a lot of your time is spent goofing around with interactions; as a kitty, your primary means of interacting involve jumping on things, swiping with your paws, or meowing, so a goal like "catch 5 birds" may entail smacking a lunch-breaking salaryman to force him to drop his sandwich, then dragging the bread somewhere to lure in unsuspecting pigeons before making good your attack. Or hiding in a conveniently placed cardboard box until the time is right. By contrast to Stray, where the feline player character is largely an unusual viewpoint to a story of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, Little Kitty's gameplay is much more focused on you being A Cat, and doing Cat Stuff. And speaking as the kind of person who frequently opens up my YouTube playlist entitled "Awwwww" to stave off my all-too-frequent bouts of melancholy, Little Kitty helps. A lot.
Squeakross: Home Squeak Home
I love Picross games. Alternately called "nonograms" after their creator, Non Ishida, they were made popular in video game form by Jupiter Corporation's Game Boy game, Mario's Picross, though they failed to make an impression in the US until 2007's Picross DS. While, after that point, Jupiter have made a point of localizing (almost) all of their follow-ups (like the absurd amount of Picross S titles for Switch), there are a lot of "unofficial" games for other platforms as well, some with meta-game gimmicks, some just straight puzzling. Squeakross has a gimmick. Every puzzle you solve out of the Home Squeak Home catalog corresponds to a piece of furniture that you can then place in your customizable rodent's tiny house. Solve the "challenge" version of that furniture, and you unlock multiple color schemes for it, and the ability to place as many as you want. On top of the gimmick, though, you have just a really well-tempered Picross interface, with a very good "logic assist" system to help with the longer number strings. Also, you receive plenty of in-game emails full of "rodent content" - photographs of playtesters' pet mice, rats, hamsters, and guinea pigs. The best possible kind of bonus content.
Corpus Edax (demo)
The Latin title of this game belies an intent for this game to be Deus Ex, but that might give you a bit of the wrong idea about what this game truly has to offer. Sure, it is a first-person RPG of sorts, where situations have multiple approaches and stealth is a viable option. But rather unlike Deus Ex and the rest of its ilk, Corpus Edax favors heavily improvised melee combat, feeling rather a lot like the Condemned games. You are certainly capable of fighting bare-handed, but it's not ideal if there's more than one person in the brawl, so a lot of your combat may entail finding random junk lying around. It grants more of a feeling of living off the land, which is always something I like. So, this goes firmly into the Wishlist.
ACUVAC: A Suck and Blow Adventure (demo)
Ahh, physics comedy! A genre that we haven't seen a ton of, since about a decade ago (outside of, perhaps, the VR space). Games like OctoDad: Dadliest Catch and Surgeon Simulator 2013 were built around not just physics engines being inherently funny, but around their purposely awkward control scheme that actively provokes said physics engine. ACUVAC, then, styles itself more closely to OctoDad; you play a robot vacuum cleaner, albeit not the Roomba-like disc that a contemporary reader might expect (you'd probably want 7 Nights with Vroombi there). No, the titular ACUVAC is a classic cartoon-like canister vacuum with a long prehensile hose, capable of sucking up just about anything, and anything it can't suck, it can drag or even launch by switching into "blow" mode. And your goal is to clean. The demo area is a high-rise apartment, fully furnished, and your goal is to get that room as spotless as possible, from inhaling all of the broken glass and tableware (nearly all of which you broke in the first place!), to emptying the cabinets and refrigerator, to systematically defenestrating every couch and dining room chair (and the fridge door you accidentally ripped off its hinges). Sure, maybe these games are designed for people with audiences, but I'd be fairly content to play it for my own amusement. ...Maybe I should get into streaming, I don't know. ACUVAC, though, definitely goes in the Wishlist.
The Golf Club 2019 Featuring PGA Tour - The Fumble Invitational
The servers for HB Studio's The Golf Club 2019 and PGA Tour 2K21 shut down in October of 2025; when I got a copy of the former on XBox One, I made a point of seeking out the Fumble Invitational course. Designed by the psychotic audiences of SBNation's Jon Bois and Kofie Yeboah through an awkward spreadsheet arrangement, the Fumble Invitational is possibly the most absurd and evil golf course imaginable, defying physics just as much as it defies good sense. ...I didn't even finish all 18 holes. I swore I'd get back to the final leg of the course and never did. And now I never can. But the first several holes were a golf experience that I may never forget. And if I ever do, I'll always have the screenshots I took to remind me. Or I could always go back and watch the Fumble Dimension video about it.
UFO 50
I feel like I've already gone on At Great Length about Mossmouth's years-long effort, but suppose I have the chance to say it all again in a somewhat different way. Individual parts of UFO 50 may be extremely good games on their own; I definitely feel like Party House, Rail Heist, and Bug Hunter are just unique enough to stand on their own. Where the real joy comes in on UFO 50, in my opinion, is its nature as a Compilation. Enthusiasts of bootleg consoles and multicarts, and of shareware CD-ROMs from the late 90s, can claim some shared experiences here. A lot of the joy in UFO 50 lies not just in the games included, but in the act of discovery, and digital archaeology (albeit an idealized form of it). The 50 game disks in the menu start covered in cobwebs and get blown off when first played. But there's also the untold stories behind them, the (fictional) developers being credited, and the extra layers beneath even that. It's as much a simulation of the kind of work done by video game historians (or even non-video game historians) every day, as it is just a collection of damned fine games.
Exo Rally Championship (demo)
I confess, I never actually tried to race in Exo Rally Championship. The title certainly implies that this is a game about racing, in the sense of a Sega Rally game. But the reality of Exo Rally is in extreme physical details placed on your vehicle that definitely does not exist yet. What you are driving is a highly advanced interplanetary rover, with six wheels and an array of thrusters so complicated that they make up the majority of your time spent in the game's tutorials. How to thrust, what to thrust, when to thrust, and why to thrust, are all apparently disparate disciplines. Thrusting can just as much be used to hover as correct your roll or pitch in mid-air; you may even want to thrust downwards to ensure your vehicle does not jump off of a ramp and potentially incur heavy impact damage upon landing. With this much amount of detail, it is a lot to think about as you decide to toss your vehicle up the highest slope you can possibly find and see how many pieces you'll be in once you land.
...I'm saying it's good, is what I'm saying.
Captain Forever Trilogy
I remember Warning Forever, the freeware shmup that dynamically generates boss ships based on how you fought the previous ones. I also remember Battleships Forever, a sort of fan spin-off where you build the ships from the same pieces. I sort of wonder, then, if Captain Forever was built off of the same inspiration, with the added bump of needing to Lego your ship together from discarded pieces, by dragging them out of their spatial drift with your mouse. The other two games included here carry their own spins on the formula, but I feel like you'd want to become a lot more familiar with the first game before you start messing with the others. They get quite esoteric.
System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster
System Shock 2 was always one of my favorite games, for a very long time, but would you believe I never finished it until this year? Well, there were some close calls; there was a time I was playing in co-op mode with my older sibling, and we had managed to reach the penultimate level (the Body of the Many). But multiplayer kind of breaks down in that section of the game, since there aren't respawn points to be found. So we just... never beat it. And I never went back to it, until Nightdive Studios finally made good on the Enhanced Edition they'd promised. Honestly, it was worth the wait. It gave me plenty of excuse to revisit the game. It's amazing how much it improves things to just have the weapons actually animate instead of being shifted around in the view. ...I'm underselling it. There was a lot of effort put in to finally separate this game from the layers upon layers of hacks and workarounds previously necessary to make the darned thing even start. I am happy with it. I am especially happy that I didn't even need to spend money on it; it came as a gift to backers of Nightdive's System Shock remake from a couple of years ago (which is also very good but for different reasons).
Tunic
The first thing that always comes up when people talk about Tunic is "DON'T READ ANYTHING ABOUT TUNIC, JUST PLAY IT." Which somewhat precludes actually talking about Tunic, because it's the kind of game where knowing and learning things serves as progress gating just as much as finding items or defeating bosses. Hell, the whole gimmick of the game's own instruction manual being hidden throughout the game (and written in a strange cipher) could be construed as item gating, but you don't actually need to find the pages to learn things. There's just some things about Tunic that are just unintuitive enough that you probably wouldn't stumble upon them organically. That's all well and good, and certainly is the reason I've given Tunic a mention here, but an even bigger reason is that soundtrack. Holy shit. Go put on the OST album on Bandcamp and forget about the existence of time itself.
Piczle Cross Adventure
Before I dropped money on Squeakross this year, I elected to play all the way through Piczle Cross Adventure, one of the very many games in the Piczle Cross series. They're not always as heavily polished as they can be, but they're great bargains with a lot to do. In this one, your meta-game gimmick is that each puzzle is an object in the world; in order to solve a puzzle, you must first be able to physically reach it, which means solving another puzzle nearby (or even in a totally different zone) to get a tool that you might need. PCA also attempts to have an ongoing story, though this quickly gives way to silliness, as our protagonist actively questions exactly what part of the world they're supposed to be living in (when you can walk from a snow-covered mountain to a sweltering rainforest in just three or four screens). Dedication to your purpose of Saving The World eventually gives way to the Chrono Trigger-esque developer's room, where the game's singular dev answers our hero's child-like questions in one sentence (or less).
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
The one and only Big Game I treated myself to, this year, to work myself out of a depressive slump. I've been a big booster for the Yakuza / Like a Dragon games for a very long time, so of course I wasn't planning on missing out on this one, with Goro Majima finally being given sole starring credit. As he embarks upon A Tale of Piratey Adventure (But With More Machine Guns), Majima grapples with the absurdities of life. And there are plenty of them. ...Maybe this wasn't the strongest showing of the whole series, but it scratched the itch, and kept me busy during a week when I very much needed to be busy.
Castle V Castle (demo)
I have never made a serious attempt to play a mainline Might & Magic game. I've spent countless hours on Heroes 3, even kicked some orcs into spikes in Dark Messiah. But the traditional RPG ones? Never. I literally own one in a box and haven't bothered. But way back in the day, there used to be a Flash games website called AddictingGames. And one of the titles on there was a little card-battling game called Castle Wars. It came with fairly relaxing music and minimal animations or sound effects, but it was a fairly simple game of building a castle while attempting to demolish that other castle on the other end of the screen. I wouldn't find out for years that Castle Wars was, in fact, a fan-made adaptation of a mini-game from Might & Magic VII called Arcomage, that was also released as a standalone product.
Approximately twenty years later (how the time flies!), someone else has reimplmented Arcomage, this time as the Steam game, Castle V Castle. This one comes with cartoony flourishes, like your armies being represented as medieval great-helms with feet, and a little guy that walks on to screen with a sign reading "The End Is Nigh" when someone's castle is down to its last few bricks. I'm not entirely sure where they can go from the demo. But I'd be more than happy to toss them a coin when my situation allows for it, because god I love Arcomage.
Monomyth (demo)
Towards the beginning of the year, I ached for a good first-person action dungeon crawler. When I put the call out, the demo for Monomyth was one of the suggestions that scratched the itch the most. It seems so silly that precisely the kind of game I was looking for (and still am, kind of) is so hard to find; the game in question would consist solely of the dungeon itself, with no towns, no quests, no party, lots of exploration, secrets to find, and reward the player that has an eye for detail. Ideally it'd also have good combat. Well, Monomyth came the closest to feeding those desires, which ensures that it's at least going in the wishlist at minimum.
CULTIC Chapter One
I'd failed to catch on to Monolith Productions' classic Build-engine game Blood when it was new; our family was still rather squeamish about allowing unrestricted access to violent FPS games, so I didn't think to try it until the early 2000s. What I got out of that was an experience less about the raw violence, and more about its unusual arsenal, and emphasis on careful resource management and improvisation. Blood only has (technically) three actual firearms, after all, and the rest of it is oddities like spray cans, voodoo dolls, and throwable dynamite, the latter of which became more of an arsenal staple than the shotgun.
Of all the FPS games since then that have aimed for Blood's unusual feel, its mixture of early-20th-century and pseudo-Gothic sensibilities and its firearm-deemphasized loadout, the closest I feel we've ever come has been CULTIC. Sure, there are times when CULTIC comes off as a wannabe, a pretender to the throne, but it very much carries its own flavor on top of the throwback visuals. Dynamite even carries a fun little emphasis, as it can be thrown off-hand, or even dropped un-lit to lay traps. The game pays attention to whether a weapon is one-handed or two-handed, which plays into not just your ability to throw dynamite, but whether you can wield your lighter (or eventually flashlight) in the other hand. And despite enemies being 2D sprites, head-shots count, lending you a somewhat more skill-based option for conserving your limited ammo. Couple it with upgradable weapons and killer atmosphere, and you get an FPS I'm eager to revisit very soon.
Mixolumia
This one's a neat little falling-block puzzler, with a (45-degree) twist. Your blocks are angled diagonally, so they won't sit neatly where you drop them, and they also aren't welded together, so they'll tend to separate and slide down the slopes of other blocks nearby. Match colors in lines to keep the Lumines-like dynamic music going. It hits all the hallmarks of a good action-puzzler, as the rules are simple enough to grasp without a tutorial, and just weird enough to make you think a little harder about where your blocks really ought to be going. It's kind of refreshing to see a new and original game like this in the 2020s, especially after a long binge of other falling-block games in which I was questioning whether any original ideas still existed for them.
I Am Future
Okay, okay, I'll admit I'm weak to a survival game with an interesting tech tree. I Am Future comes with the groan-worthy subtitle of "Cozy Apocalypse Survival"; a label that'd otherwise drive me off for fear of it being just another Minecraft-template build-em-up that misses the mark. A dose of humor at least keeps the game from whiffing its first impressions, while what it really does differently is strand you on the roof of a skyscraper in a flooded city, while you figure out how to reconfigure it into something livable. Said skyscraper is also being gradually overtaken by noxious weeds, so you'll have to figure out how to keep all that at bay, too. I wouldn't call I Am Future anything particularly transcendent, but it's at least different enough that didn't leave me thinking, "I could be playing Valheim instead."
Super Video Golf
On its face, a throwback to low-resolution, low-polygon PC golf games, Super Video Golf takes a lateral move away from mere mimicry. Beneath a soundtrack of OPL-like instrumentation (and wavetable drums), the golf courses are made up of several discontiguous islands that sink and surface as you progress through them. In a genre where novelty balls, clothing, and other customizables tend to cost in-game currency (or worse, real currency), Super Video Golf chooses instead to handle these things through Steam Workshop support and focus solely on making the golf game beneath it feel as good as it can. I give it props for being designed with the Steam Deck in mind, as it winds up being probably the best golf game that you can play on one of those. The OST album even contains "live instrument" versions of every song in the game, which is already like a relaxing smooth jazz.
Blade Chimera (demo)
That Record of Lodoss War game a few years back, Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, actually got me interested enough in the years-old Lodoss property to buy and read one of the books. Team Ladybug, in retrospect, did a very good job with the license, by playing up strong inspirations from the likes of Symphony of the Night and Ikaruga, on top of utter mastery of the art of creating giant 2D bosses as well animated as the Alucard-esque Deedlit. I'd go on to observe Ladybug's other licensed works, such as Shin Megami Tensei Synchronicity Prologue and Touhou Luna Nights. Clearly they have what it takes. And that skill has clearly been harnessed into their original works. The scrolling-shooter Drainus looks fantastic (though I haven't played it), as does this game, Blade Chimera, a return to their side-scrolling action style, this time set in a distant future and with a curious focus on firearms. I didn't even finish playing this demo. I wanted to buy it before I even fought the first boss.
Moonlight Pulse
Gifted to me by a long-time friend, Moonlight Pulse's character designs really shouldn't have surprised me, considering the specific friend in question. It, too, is an exploratory action platformer, with a particular emphasis on swapping characters to access different sets of attacks and mobility tools, with the thematic twist of them all living on a giant living being. It's a curious visual mixture, between the furry protagonists (some bipedal, some not, some wearing token clothing, some not), and the Fantastic Voyage-like bio-organic level theming. Your fast travel method involves literally climbing into oversized arteries and being carried around in what amounts to a bloodstream. It's less gross than it sounds. The revolving-door nature of which heroes are in your roster at a given time also works to this game's favor, as retreading familiar ground makes you think again about how you're getting around. If you don't have access to one character's wall-climbing ability, perhaps you need another character that can air-dash, or one that can slow-fall, or even both of them in quick succession using the swap button. If the furry characters initially put you off, I'd say give it a chance anyway.
Mystery Dungeon: Torneko's Big Adventure
By way of its fan translation, the original Mystery Dungeon game became a favorite of mine while ripping DVDs at my DVD-ripping computer, since my Super Famicom and retro TV are right next to it. Initially, the dungeon doesn't seem that complicated, but that's because Torneko's Big Adventure gradually introduces new game mechanics as you keep playing. By the third or fourth upgrade to your house/shop, you're able to see almost all of the usual Rogue-like trappings, plus the Vault that allows you to save particularly nice items from successful runs. And a "successful" run, in Mystery Dungeon, is any run you come home from without getting knocked out. Now, admittedly, I mute the music while playing this game. Koichi Sugiyama is not a musical god. He is fallible. And this game is proof. It just does not work for me, musically. I'd sooner mute it and put on my own soundtrack (i.e. searching my music library for the word "dungeon" and creating a shuffled playlist of the results). Even if the soundtracks to Diablo or Dungeons of Dredmor don't fit the game at all, stylistically, I'd keep that going rather than listen to yet another tune centered around Torneko's repetitive theme music.
Fatal Labyrinth
I got that desperate for a good randomized dungeon game, folks. But as much as some would complain about Sega's Fatal Labyrinth for Genesis being very unforgiving, not having a save function, or having music that just repeats over and over? That music is a groove-and-a-half. Its true Rogue-likeness comes from this effectively being an "arcade" dungeon crawler, not intended for multi-session play. You play for the high score, and the high score is your gold, because gold gets used for nothing else. (More gold literally only changes the game-over screen, by making your grave marker progressively fancier.) In this game, you will gamble on reading colored scrolls, drinking unknown potions, wearing rings with no idea what they will do. That is the essence of classic Rogue, to me: the gamble. Will you come out alive? Or will you accidentally poison yourself? With no save function, the stakes are as real as they get. Quaff away, what have you to lose but a few hundred gold pieces and an inventory full of swords? Maybe one of those will be a potion of experience, granting you that much-needed stats bump to take on the annoying Sleep-spamming magicians.
This game does have more than one in-game music track, by the way. You just have to reach the 11th floor.
Diablo (DevilutionX)
I am about as far from a Blizzard fan as it gets. When World of Warcraft hit, I started to pretty well despise them. I only ever played Warcraft 2 and StarCraft with the cheats enabled, and even the Diablo games were more Dad's thing than mine. Diablo 2 never clicked with me. Somehow, the original Diablo is the only one that's ever really spoken to me, and it took seeing screenshots of Diablo 3 to realize that (I still think it just looks like Warcraft 3; saturated colors in well-lit areas, and giant shoulder pads on top of that, never really seemed like they fit this series). Well, it's approaching 30 years since the original game's release, and I've finally decided to give it an earnest play, when it's roughly as difficult to run on modern hardware as anything else of its time. Save for the fact that, of course, the community have not been sitting on their collective thumbs about it.
DevilutionX is an open-source reimplementation of Diablo that adds bunches of the UI changes from its sequels, updates the network code, and most importantly, enables it to work on modern platforms. Any modern platforms. I've heard people tell me that this is available for the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS. Well, that's just fine enough to play on my Fedora Linux-equipped Desk Machine. With a gamepad, for direct movement. Because I'm like that. All in the name of playing a decent Rogue-ish dungeon game.
By the way, fuck Blizzard, fuck Activision, and especially fuck Microsoft. Go find someone's used CD-ROM (or, ahem, "used" "CD-ROM") if you want to play. Don't hand them more money. Remember we're still boycotting them.
Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2
As much as I honestly prefer the PlayStation 3 game, Out of Bounds, for strictly stylistic reasons, Open Tee 2 presents more or less the same golf. However, there's an added bonus: costume editing. Every character in the game can change their clothes, hairdo, and accessory, and the game makes zero effort to restrict articles to male or female golfers. In fact, every CPU opponent in Tournament mode uses these same characters, with randomized clothing that completely ignores any concept of gender binary. Open Tee 2 may be the most queer-inclusive golf game I've ever seen (for as much as I've been paying any actual attention to that; a thing I've been trying to get better about). Maybe I just think that Luke looks adorable in a schoolgirl uniform. I mean, hell yeah, Luke, you go with what makes you feel good about yourself. Or perhaps you'd go by Luca. I don't judge, either way.
Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies
I am so torn, about Dragon Quest, because it really should be viewed as the numbers by which all other mass-market RPGs are painted, but it is also very much its own distinct thing. It largely floats on being somewhat comical and light-hearted, and in English, it floats somewhat more lightly by the inclusion of wacky voice acting... which, as an original Nintendo DS game, Dragon Quest IX lacks. That said, it still retains its unique voice full of regional accents and speech mannerisms, albeit nowhere near as thickly as the Dragon Quest IV remake of the time. I was drawn to this specific entry because it was already on my shelf, and because I appreciate it giving me the leeway to create my entire party from scratch, out of a stable of female characters from other games (protagonist Ruby aside). ...I still haven't actually beaten it. Perhaps I'll pick it up again some time and forget where I was.
Picross 3D: Round 2
— Weasel, digital golf enjoyer of the year (@wildweasel486.bsky.social) October 21, 2024 at 11:40 AM
Is it clear enough that I love Picross already? Well, this digital-exclusive 3DS sequel to the DS Picross 3D adds an extra layer of complexity in the form of partial blocks. Which makes the interface about twice as complicated, and roughly doubles my potential of making mistakes. But like all the other Picross games, I find it an exercise in Zen that is hard to replace once I've got the mood up for it. I've owned this one for years on my 3DS and only rolled credits this year.
Chibi-Robo: Clean Sweep
I somehow didn't spend a lot of time talking about Chibi-Robo: Clean Sweep (Okaeri! Chibi-Robo! Happy Richie Ōsōji! / おかえり！ちびロボ！ハッピーリッチー大そうじ！), back when I wrote that long-ass blog post about how much Photo Finder and Zip Lash kind of sucked. It's time I talked it up a bit. So, in original Chibi-Robo, you were stationed within the household of the Sanderson family: Mom, Dad, and their little girl Jenny. In Clean Sweep (the title used by the fan translation patch), you are stationed in a much more run-down house, inhabited by an adult Jenny and her son, Keith. They clearly gave up a lot of things in life in order to live in Their Very Own House, even if the house in question is - to be charitable - kind of a shit-hole. You are tasked with not just cleaning things up, but steadily improving the house by pooling your earnings and also purchasing upgrades for yourself while everybody's asleep. Chibi can toss his plug around like a grappling hook (or a medieval flail, perhaps), enabling him to rappel up and down from high places, or just fight things. You're eventually tasked with helping Keith wish his father back from the dead, by making a bargain with the dirt ghost mafia in the attic. It goes places. I'd argue this might actually be the best Chibi-Robo game there ever was, and it was just all downhill from there. With the fan patch easily available, you might as well experience the series at its peak, even if Nintendo would never give it to us officially, and the old hands behind it are now busy with a new game in the same vein.
Tower Unite
The VRChat phenomenon is not lost on me. Frankly, neither is the Second Life phenomenon. I would highly enjoy the prospect of going into a virtual space specifically to just Hang Out, because God knows all the real-life "third places" are too cost-prohibitive anymore. Except the thing is, Second Life largely exists for a specific niche that I'm frankly not a part of, and VRChat really works best with actual VR gear (and mine doesn't work great, right now). Tower Unite, then, fills the void in a way that feels nicer. The extensive Plaza and selection of mini-games pretty much exist to give players a reason to congregate that isn't strictly user-created, but I think the most fun part of it is assembling my Condo out of furniture and decorations that I amassed from earning money playing the mini-games. Because I'm coming to realize that I don't so much like being a social butterfly (I am still cripplingly shy, among strangers), but it's occasionally nice to exist in spaces where other people exist. Especially when said strangers have no power to ruin the experience with cheats or hacks. (And there's a mute button in case they try to ruin it in other ways.) It's a fun game to go people-watching in, honestly, even if I'm not actually interacting with anybody.
Dead As Disco (demo)
Once in a while, I reinstall and goof around with AudioSurf or its sequel. There's something appealing to me about a "rhythm" game that doesn't require me to perform, or play an instrument, especially if it's a game where I can load up any music track I like. Most of these games only really benefit if you pick really intense songs with obvious time signatures, and sure, Dead as Disco isn't much different. But man, I wouldn't have ever thought about making a 3D brawler synced to the beat of the music. And maybe it is closer to the likes of Batman: Arkham Asylum in terms of the combat being largely a game of pressing the Counter button at the right time, but it is so satisfying to get into the groove of your favorite thumper of a track, where every beat is enhanced by someone getting a solid boot to the gut, like every stage is a playable recreation of Shaun of the Dead's hilarious bar-room jukebox scene. And while they're certainly encouraging the use of Disco, my first great experience with this game's demo was loading up 80s one-hit-wonder, Q-Feel, with Dancing in Heaven (Orbital Be-Bop).
Mortyr: 2093-1944
Several (short) levels into Mortyr (1999), you chance upon Adolf Hitler in this otherwise-unpopulated room, shouting at nobody. You can attempt to kill Hitler here. He will just keep getting back up, but that means you can just kill him again. And again. And again.
— Weasel, digital golf enjoyer of the year (@wildweasel486.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 4:47 PM
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Mortyr is absolutely not a good game. It isn't even really a passable game; it's quite awful, despite some level designs that look fantastic in screenshots. But I'm including it here because even a bad game about killing Nazis is still a game about killing Nazis, and Mortyr offers you an immortal, but completely defenseless, Adolf Hitler yelling at nothing, into which you are free to empty every gun you have, knocking him to the ground repeatedly. The Hitler pincushion forgives most transgressions, I find.
If you're going to play Mortyr in 2025... frankly, I don't recommend it, but if you are, you'll probably want to download the repacked version, that includes pre-configured drop-in video drivers and such. It fixes a lot of the game's nastier issues with game speed going too fast, and a few crashes besides. It doesn't fix the mis-aligned crosshair, ridiculous falling damage, or the terrible, terrible future-war section.
Project Springfield (The Simpsons: Tapped Out)
Electronic Arts were responsible for producing, as of this writing, the last ever Simpsons video game, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, a mobile-exclusive spoof of games like Farmville and Township. Homer Simpson, slacking off from his job at the power plant, is playing a Happy Little Elves game on his myPad when the whole place finally has a meltdown and explodes, scattering the whole of Springfield to the winds. Nobody dies; in fact, the whole incident has managed to bring some notably dead characters back to life, summoned forth through a line of absurd side-quests, buildings, or bought with donuts ("Mmmm, premium currency."). Rather a lot like the games Tapped Out sought to lampoon, though, Tapped Out leaned heavily on an economy of cash-purchased premium currency. Many buildings cost prohibitive amounts of in-game money, and the game is all too happy to let you spend Donuts on them instead. Characters assigned to Jobs could not be canceled out of them, and Jobs tend to last for several minutes to several hours. The only way to make those characters available to use again was to spend Donuts to rush them. Similarly, many aspects of game progression, from simply earning money, to building up enough resources to push along certain quests, could all be bypassed with Donuts, rather than grinding for literal days to afford them with normal in-game money. Presumably, this model ceased to earn Electronic Arts enough (real) money to continue operating the game, and it was brought offline a few years ago.
So why am I putting this freemium mobile game on my list now? That's easy - it's gone the way of Community Server, and ceased to cost money.
Project Springfield is how the game now identifies itself, in the interests of not violating trademarks (though, they seem less concerned over copyrights, as the game is still freely distributed). The fan-run servers have done a hell of a job, not only mimicking the full suite of online functionality from Tapped Out, but also managing to preserve nearly all of the saved cities from the game's original run, allowing lapsed veterans of the old game to import their progress. But most importantly: the new server operators refuse to accept real money. Using a tool on their website, users may freely open their game account and manually top up their Donuts by simply changing a value. No longer are Donuts considered so precious. The sky is the limit. And yet, it's somehow actually fun to consider Project Springfield to be an "idler" game in the vein of Cookie Clicker now. Just let the assets build up slowly, over time, and check on it once in a while to see what else you can afford. Maybe it's still busy-work. But maybe I, chronically unemployed person, just need exactly that kind of busy-work, in between updating my webpages and occasionally helping out around the house.
And if it means I can tap on Jasper and order him to "Practice the Lollipop Song" for an hour? I can think of worse things to busy myself with. Especially since it no longer makes its former rights-holders (at EA, Fox, and now Disney) any money.
Bit Generations: Coloris
Bit Generations Coloris is a uniquely stressful and panic inducing puzzle game. When it starts, you believe it to be nothing more than a simple puzzle game with no obvious lose condition. You just shift colors to match rows and columns, as your cursor makes tonal (but not exactly musical) notes with each button press.
And then the corruption hits.
One block turns grey with the crunch of a compressed orchestra hit. As long as that block remains colorless, you may do nothing with it. Any matches you make no longer count towards filling the goal bar. Until that block is eradicated, you cannot continue.
But failing to erase the grey block means, inevitably, the grey will spread. Like nanomachines programmed for exponential growth, the more grey remains in the board, the more it will expand when it next chooses to do so.
It chooses. Not you.
It is unclear by what mechanism the greyness decides when to expand. Idle shifts that don't cause matches? Moving the cursor around without pushing buttons? Time alone? Perhaps all three. Possibly, it's tied to an animation sequence that's difficult to perceive on the screen. A hit can occur after thirty seconds or it might occur after just two clicks of the D-pad. There is no warning.
Loss only occurs once the grey death has infected enough of the board that a match is impossible to create. Until it does, or until every last one of the infected blocks is exterminated, all the sound effects play at lower pitches.
There is almost no music in Coloris. You are left with uncomfortable quiet, made all the worse when nothing sounds the way it should.
There is nothing but the anticipation, fruitful or otherwise, of when that next hit will occur.
On more advanced stages, the colors shift between more and more distinct hues on the color spectrum, or even between all three primaries instead of just two. The colors may also be closer together on the spectrum, making it that much harder to tell how many "clicks" they'll take before they become the correct hue to match their neighbors. In stages with more than two primary colors, attempting to shift a color to another color that isn't close to it in sequence (such as trying to shift a blue color to orange) will force it to turn grey. In essence, you have contributed to the spread of the nanomachina. The inevitable grey death now stains your hands. You did this. In your momentary lapse of knowledge of the color wheel, you did this.
Coloris is a horror game.
EVO: The Search for Eden
Another console favorite that unfortunately must suffer Koichi Sugiyama's soundtrack. This one kills me the most; the early-game soundtrack is incredible, and it continues to be pretty great until you become a dinosaur... and then the music begins to be shorter and shorter loops, until the most grinding-compulsory section of the game plays a song to you that must only be ten seconds long. Y'know, it's at least fun until that point, or perhaps it's fun until you find yourself slamming into a brick wall boss like the giant frog, unable to deal meaningful damage without risking near instant death, despite having the strongest possible offense and defense at that point in the game (short of grinding for another hour or two).
I mean, I'm supposed to be celebrating these games and all I'm doing is ranting. I'd say, the first half of EVO: The Search for Eden is one of the more inspired takes on console action-role-playing of its day. It's just until you get to that unfortunate halfway-point...
Promise Mascot Agency (demo)
This is another demo that I stopped playing before it officially ended, because I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I would buy it some day. Was it Takaya Kuroda (Like a Dragon's Kazuma Kiryu) as the main character? The anthropomorphic severed finger that acts as your sidekick and manager? The fact that most of the game is played behind the wheel of a kei truck? ...Honestly, I think I was 100% sold on this game as soon as I met the feline Stationmaster, an obvious nod to Eternal Stationmaster Tama, the calico cat who was (ceremonially) appointed stationmaster to a small train station in a small town in Japan, to drum up tourism. Even I've been inspired by Tama. Really, though, Kaizen Game Works' unusual open-city mascot management sim would have appealed to me no matter what.
Shining Force II
As a gigantic fan of the original Shining Force on Sega Genesis, I'd been putting off Shining Force II for decades. I knew the soundtrack kicked ass. I knew it made all-important quality of life additions to the first game's menu systems. I just never got around to trying it, and escaping the game's first chapter, in 30 years. I made a point of finally trying to do so this year. And while I still haven't beaten the damned thing, I have been enjoying it for the most part. It gets a bit more wandery than the first game, but the unit roster is even more wild than the first game's. That might be a tall order, given the first game had a giant hamster in a helmet, a power-armored rhino man, two birdmen and a wacky inventor with a flying backpack, a spell-casting jellyfish, and a centaur with a bazooka. Well, I'm only about halfway in to Shining Force II, and my party includes a Gamera-like turtle monster, a phoenix, a wolfman, a rat ninja, and an archaeologist driving a mobile artillery cannon. I've fought battles against a giant metal warrior, and a chess set on a desktop. Shining Force II does what fantasy does best: it kindles the imagination, and says, "if something like this can happen, what else awaits me?"
Oonsoo
An X-Windows solitaire game from 1994? Absolutely. Friend-of-the-Blaugh, Zerker, gives a deeper technical profile of what Oonsoo is, but to me, it is a rare solitaire game that uses hanafuda (flower cards) instead of the typical French deck. In this instance, you arrange the cards into descending piles by month (flower), starting from the most valuable card and going down to the least (so for the Chrysanthemums, your pile begins with the Sake Cup, then the blue poetry ribbon, then the two regular cards). Not knowing very many people to play card games with, I am always eager to find ways to play by myself, and a game of Oonsoo is, sometimes, just the ticket. Especially now that the Android game no longer works and is no longer maintained. But hey - I installed it successfully on my Fedora Linux 42 machine this month, so I'm right back into it again.
Links E6: The one I didn't like
Rounding out this list is a golf sim that I am kind of disappointed by. Links is, really, one of the most legendary computer games of all time, in my book; 386 Pro sold computers nearly as well as Doom and Myst did, in its time. But as time wore on, Access Software became acquired by Microsoft, and then by Take Two (after being renamed Indie Built). Around the time of their acquisition, a part of the team spun off into a separate company, TruGolf, who would leverage the Links engine into advanced indoor golf simulators... the kind you play with real golf clubs. After 2004, when the very last Links game hit XBox, it was surmised that the Links games for regular people were no more. They wouldn't return until 2021, with a double-header. Access Software alumni at Big Finish Games had managed to reacquire the rights to classic Links games to sell on GOG.com, specifically the original Challenge of Golf, 386 Pro, and LS 1998 Edition. On the other end, TruGolf published what amounted to an all-new Links game in Links E6. Yay!...?
Not "Yay", it'd turn out. Links E6 is a free-to-play golf game supported by DLC purchases (new courses), and it turns out this game isn't really new at all - it is, in fact, an adaptation of their version of the simulator software that they'd spun off into, back in 2004. Except instead of requiring an expensive launch monitor system, drop cloth, and real set of golf clubs, a 3-click swing meter (not even Links 386 Pro's 2-click system) is swapped in, instead. Because this is simulator software originally, there is not even an on-screen golfer, and the presentation of the courses seems somewhat... low budget. It is interesting that TruGolf evidently commissioned a remix of The Challenge of Golf's opening theme song for the menus, except that the original song was actually borrowed from a 1980s stock music library, way back when. For reasons unknown, I spent part of 2025 forcing myself to at least play through each of the default courses once. It was not an experience I particularly enjoyed. Give me Links LS any day. ...If you can give it to me in a form that isn't constantly crashing.
Final remarks
I've spent almost a week trying to get this post written down somewhere, and I largely did it on a dare (something like, "don't tell me you support indie games unless you tell me 50 of them you played this year"). I didn't even meet the guideline, there, because I think I've played maybe 5 games that came out this year. Being broke kind of sucks. Suppose it doesn't have to; I could have spent this year taking in award-winning Doom WADs, or game jam games meant to run on MS-DOS computers, or actually bothering to check out those games that got fan translation patches this year (like Cookie's Bustle!).
Or I could go into shilling mode and link my tip jar or something.
Either way, I hope this overly-long Listicle enlightened you towards games you haven't played yet, or at least provided you some window into my tastes (or madness).