55. Blades of Fire I think this game has a lot of great characters and funny quirky writing. I don't really like this developer's output much so this game came as a genuine surprise. The forging weapons stuff is neat, and the game is gigantic. The postgame is robust and the soundtrack isn't bad.

evergreen

I may have forgotten i even played DD2 this year

Sabrina Carpenter: Braver and more powerful than Nintendo and Microsoft combined.

i am begging game developers and musicians who are not putting your soundtracks on bandcamp/ampwall to just... do that... please... i will not be streaming your music off A Music Service. let me actually give you money.

Love Discord being like "bro you didnt complete any quests this year" yeah man I dont know what those are and I'm working really hard not to have to learn

56. This dang ass Snoopy game that my wife made me do all of her minigames for. Charlie Brown kinda deserves all the bullying he gets after this one.

55. 9 Years of Shadows Took a bit of warming up to this one, but one double jump later I can say this was one of the better search actions I've played this year. Great spritework and colors, neat traversal tools, and I dug the Rayearth-like aesthetic the protagonist has going.

visual novels with barebones gameplay always make me tired... i've come to realize that if a game is 80% vn i would usually rather it just be 100. i don't want to move with the wasd keys man just put the story in the bag

54. The Last of Us Part 2 This OTOH was my first time playing the sequel and jesus its the most vile case of misery porn I've ever seen lobbed at fans of their own game. Sacrificing every bit of goodwill to beat you over the head with the most basic morality cudgel, Druckmann shouldn't have a job.

53. The Last of Us Part 1 Played this for my wife, who "missed" it a decade ago and appreciated having the blind spot in her knowledge filled up. I've always been pretty neutral on this one: pretty alright "zombie" game story, could understand why it got that big even if I didn't quite agree.

(the ironic part is that the one character from this who everyone and their puppy seems to hate is prob the only actually properly developed one and their involvement in the inciting incident feels entirely out of character compared to them in the rest of the game)

My wife just owned me and called me a floof

71. The Last of Us Part 2 (Remastered) "Good LORD, what is happening in there?!" "Bad writing?" "Bad writing? At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized ENTIRELY within your kitchen?! May I see it?" I wish I didn't. Good lord, what a miserable time.

The modern world is just pro wrestling and a gambling addiction standing on top of a mechanical Turk.

A lot of folks seem to have forgotten sonic 3 the movie during these game of the year awards But I haven't I love sonic 3 the movie.

Blades of Fire shouldve been nominated at the TGAs and im not even kidding you The VA is good, it's just a fun, fun romp.

“You know, fair use is fair use and we need to make sure that we’re not stealing people’s intellectual property and rights but..." No! There is no "but" here! That statement ends with a period, not a "but".

51. Wattam Finally got around to this overlooked keita takashi joint, enjoyed how much it feels like a long overdue sequel to Noby Noby Boy (eating and pooping included) tho does also feel like there were one too many conflicting ideas for what to DO with the concept. What a strange game.

52. Alan Wake 2 Enjoyed this SO much more than the first game. Much prefer the more grounded, overall serious presentation of AW's quirky aesthetic, with Saga's competency being a great contrast to Alan's fuckups. Love the mixed media. Still missed Barry. I'll show you the herald of darkness ♪~

69. Alan Wake 2 Where the hell is Barry I think this game was more interesting than the first. Not everyone was my cup of tea but it's nice to see that it was really creative. Really involved everything including the kitchen sink which... worked? I think? It was fun. Where the hell is Barry

50. Silent Hill f I really wanted to like this. A visual/audio delight that's plagued by game design choices too baffling to ignore, on top of there being too many mediocre combat segments with the same handful of repeated enemy types. Getting to NG++ to "finish" the story felt like a waste of time.

Read the Neowiz IR presentation and Buried Stars writer doin an RPG with them?????

67. Hypnospace Outlaw I think this game took a tiny bit longer than I wanted to cook, but upon reflection, it needed that time to cook so you can understand why it's really cool to look at the pages you may have missed at the end. Fake internet is cooler than modern internet. The Squisherz theme 😍

66. Silent Hill f I hate saying this but this overstays its welcome. It has a great art direction and music. Even after 4 playthrus, the game felt like it needed better resolution. R07's writing style feels better in a VN since it has more wiggle-room to change. Encounter design + combat kinda suck.

I don't fucking WANT to play it my way I want a professional game designer to come up with a fun way for me to play and then I'll do that.

yep. if you don't have enough working games critics (regardless of medium -- podcasting, writing, whatever) then there aren't enough people to play a high enough volume of games for anything approaching true curation. obviously you can never have perfect curation, it's impossible. but it's worse now

still thinking about this article today. so many societal ills are caused by people white-washing what actually happens. it's awful to see games do it too. can't wait for cozy domestic violence simulator or cozy kkk simulator

"Physic" ive really gotta stop trying to write posts in the dead of night

Silent Hill f is two halves: its a really solid physic horror story centered on trauma and emotional abuse that does a lot of things I greatly enjoy in survival horror. Its also a really mediocre action game with like 4 enemy types, way too many forced combat rooms and poorly though out subsystems.

please watch movies and read books and play games and look at art, please view it with your own eyes through a lens you made yourself and not just through video essayists and ending explained videos please im begging you

The way @schalaasha.bsky.social rips the controller off my hands anytime a fox mask cutscene plays in Silent Hill f so she can press the screenshot button as many times as she can

49. Ghost of Yotei Successfully achieved the mission goal of being more Ghost of Tsushima, a game I adored a lot, but also to its own detriment since it leaves Yotei a bit lacking in self-identity. Visually stunning and aesthetically pleasing either way! Lethal mode is just as fun as ever.

48. Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound I dig the blend of linear 2d levels and The Messenger-style combat, but prob not enough to see me complete all of the secret missions and what I assume is a "true" ending. Feels very much like a score attack/perfect run kinda game.

47. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach An improvement over the first game by every measurable metric and one of the best looking games this generation on a technical level. The last 4 chapters are the most Hideo Kojima writing that Hideo Kojima has ever Hideo Kojima'd (wouldn't have it any other way).

⭐#UrbanMythDissolutionCenter NOW 20% OFF on all platforms! 🏅Japan Game Award - Excellence Award Celebration! Unravel the eerie hype that roams the game!  #Indie #JGA2025

45. Blade Chimera Team Ladybug's (Touhou Luna Nights, Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth) latest! If you've played their catalog this one will feel very familiar, though it has unique quirks to stand on its own. Greatly enjoyed both the stellar 2D art and the fast travel map warping of all things.

46. Meg's Monster Very cute, short RPG that speedruns the plot of Monster's Inc. but in video game form. Glad that it doesn't overstay its welcome.

the "why I deleted your band's promo email" tumblr but for games and I just post "roguelike deckbuilder" every day, over and over again until the end of the universe

The sale is for all platforms, so I am once again shilling for one of my top 3 games of the year

The buyout and strip for parts happening to EA right now is how AAA dying looks / will look, BTW. A bunch of them are functionally lumbering corpses. You can argue whether or not that's fair or if they are salvagable, but in our bullshit capitalism, that sorta doesn't matter, so they're toast.

It's truly insane that it's legal to go "I'm going to spend $50 billion dollars to buy this company. Do I have $50 billion dollars? No, the company I'm buying is going to take out a big loan"

reinstalled Hollow Knight again just to mess around refighting bosses and man do I just enjoy like 90% of the bosses in Silksong more than this game. just plain better movement options, better paced and hardly any "i charge from one end of the screen to the other, that's my whole gimmick!".

Hideo Kojima gets paid infinite money to just write the same game over and over again Unfortunately, its peak every time

62. Shadow Labyrinth I was rooting so hard for this game. I was like, "what the hell is a G-Host?" and got the game with my husband. It had an interesting start, but it ultimately fell short in music, visuals, and level design. I did not know about the USGF lore, which made the story confusing!

43. Hollow Knight: Silksong Seven years in the making, and boy does it show. Immaculately pretty game with tons to explore and see. I enjoyed the challenges presented overall, though there's areas that could definitely use tweaks to their difficulty (like contact damage and those awful runbacks).

Got some hot new additions to my Playlist

I think I got all the dose of metroidvania search actioning I can take done for the rest of the year