The Best and Worst of 2025

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This year felt like escaping limbo, perhaps by moving backwards but necessarily so. Hopefully next year holds forward steps and a greater capacity for fun and games. Here's a short playlist before getting to it. 

Best Games

A round-up from my recommendations through the year. I've thought about whether I should change my approach to this section. As-is it's mostly summary, only adding a few bonus sentences or bracketed asides, and then worst and non-games are more of a novelty (even if I did tweet about them or whatever, they won't be wholesale copies). Maybe next year I'll try to write a bit more and/or reword old feelings on highlights, at least if I have a broader selection to choose from.

1. Baba Is You (PC)

Walks such a fine line between guidance and challenge that the few times it breaks down (like Bottleneck) go to show how incredible it is as a rule. Almost always elegant, novel, streamlined, secretive yet too excited to share to hold back too much. If something seems fiddly or weird or unintuitive or gigabrain, usually it is proven with some patience and distance to be none of them. The only real problem I have is the number of bottlenecks in the endgame after so much freedom and non-linearity before it, partly because navigating around can be arduous. 

2. Hollow Knight: Silksong (PC)

Spruced-up fundamentals with a host of good changes to the action (diagonal pogo, more dynamic dash without the iframe upgrade, way better healing system), though the tools and quests aren't great. Last act is a bit messy in pacing but makes up for it with a great final boss and super charming festival (juggle>bounce>>>dodge).

3. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (PC, replay) 

The fundamental movement is appealing as ever, super nuanced with emphasis on getting a close feel of the controls. Spending extra time with it, I only grow more fond of the voiceover and gimmicks; "some tricks for the clicks of the feckless" lives rent free, and both the bucket and ice are natural extensions and subversions of obstacles that have become routine by then. 

I did try out Baby Steps hopeful, but the movement isn't nearly as chaotic or deep, and especially when you can't get much faster via skill, the open world structure felt like an inevitable hassle. Maybe there's some gem moments, I only did a level and a half.

4. Pseudoregalia (PC)

Really satisfying moveset, fun to explore and do challenges, but drags towards the end with a poor "final" (for me) major upgrade that fails to spice up backtracking and downgrades platforming. Much of it is inevitable given its structure: sequence breaking early results in unlocking new paths later that turn out to have no new content, and as you near completion the last few collectibles will be spread out and harder to find.

5. Alephant (PC)

Overwhelming state space, some really cool tricks and levels (like top right in Theox), but I can't quite keep up. Last level was so demoralizing, spending hours building out a solution that's barely not possible, then looking it up to see I understood literally nothing relevant.

6. Spelunky (PC)

Great fundamentals juggling what you're holding and navigational resources, though the items don't do much (only a few like the jetpack particularly contribute, most are negligible and getting killed because of a higher jump or sticky climbing sucks). The key quest was fun and tense, but it gets too chaotic for the harder achievements and secrets. Better at comedy than action, but probably a skill issue.

7. Dragonsweeper (Web)

Fun to figure out the little patterns, more dynamic than other sweep-'em-ups since you always have to sac hp, deviating from standard perfect strategies. The triple victory is more constrained (my win was 66%), and a misclick or misthought can end it all.

8. Dragon Blaze (Arcade, via PC)

The coolest shmup melee attack, mode switching with a dynamic cooldown, which is satisfying to play around with. Quickly becomes mandatory to one-shot enemies with it as they spawn since their bullets are so fast and oppressive, spiralling in on a linear route. I've had two approaches to the lives in shmups: restarting every credit as if I were in an actual arcade, and using save states to practice individual stages. Neither fully satisfies, so my next step in this genre is to try counting credits and seeing how that compares.

9. Awake (Web)

Delightful little adventure, the barest descriptions painting a picture through intimacy.

10. Cosmic Star Heroine (PC)

Convincing take on JRPG combat fundamentals, particularly the limited use actions ensure constant decisions. Still has occasional opaque elements and RNG (like enemy targeting), and the novelty wears a bit thin by the time party-building unlocks (~halfway through).

Worst Games

I always feel like I don't have much to fill this section and then I play something on a whim and know it will all turn out fine.

1. Demon's Souls Remake (PS5)

An unholy tech demo loaded with the worst kind of videogame-as-product hubris. I feel as in the past, all the more acutely for holding it in my own hands: "If companies couldn't butcher their history for profit, maybe they would make more of an attempt to preserve it." Every time someone disapproves of this as a project but simply must "admit" that it has "great graphics", I sigh. This is an ugly, tacky, overwrought piece of software. It has negative artistic value. There is nothing about it that dilutes my distaste.

2. Stray (PC)

The "you can play as a cat" gimmick is akin to selling Banjo-Kazooie as "you can play as a bear". Contextual canned animations don't constitute me playing anything. While the visual design of the cyberpunk setting is decent, the cats themselves are a bit uncanny and the camera is pretty bad. Below the bells and whistles is a casual adventure with contextual jumps to rob it of even the most basic platforming satisfaction.

3. Titan Souls (PC)

Walk 20 seconds to a boss, die in 5 seconds, repeat until you beat the boss in 5 seconds instead. The boss moves are decent enough and recalling the arrow leaving you vulnerable is a solid dynamic, but this is not the structure to take advantage of that, everything feels like a gimmick. The sequel goes a somewhat different direction, and I have some hope for the dev's future endeavours.

4. Alan Wake II (PC)

Like the first game, and really all the way back to Max Payne, there's a bunch of walking around with excuses to delay your progress (whether snooping for loot or needing some MacGuffin to proceed), shooting filler enemies strewn about, and now optional riddles and collectibles for your equipment and skill trees; AAA slop from a AA mouth. The combat is arguably worse than the original since its unique stunning aim is replaced by the flashlight just working like a gun - less bad in many minor ways, but no clear new virtues.

Strides have been made in technical storytelling, but its direction is questionable. While the balance is slightly shifted, it's still gesturing at the writer-in-his-own-story concept more-so than exploring it. It spends considerable time on the superficial with little resolution in the end, going back to the corner the first game wrote itself into but with a lampshade and cop-out ready this time. Pure storytelling like the Alice tapes and musical sequence are good, and make me think they should've just made a more streamlined FMV story game. Even here the simplest things obtrude, like Alan's impatient idle animation while his wife pours out her deepest feelings.

5. The Beginner's Guide (PC)

Maybe I'm biased because playing this makes me physically sick, but I didn't get a lot from it. Kind of preachy and pathetic, presenting a realistic thing in a quirky way but not granting any real insight into these kinds of relationships or justifying the meta layer. Maybe you're supposed to be a bit lost as he praises the most mundane little indie experiments as high art, but it doesn't prevent the vignettes from being underwhelming, and doubly so when it leads to something so plain. Some early bits ended up as high points (walking backwards, removing the walls), plus a moment near the end that caught me by surprise with a mysterious fourth wall break - that is, it crashed and I thought it was intentional.

Other Medium

Nothing that I watched really stands out in retrospect, and with books I've been stuck on some big ones (The Iliad, Book of the New Sun, Austenslop), so it's all up to the shortest and sweetest medium to hold the fort.

El Tigre (Poem)

Donald D. Walsh translation (and original) here. First-person violence. Common in games, but even if they try to lean into it (e.g. Spec Ops: The Line), the need for arbitrary detail and multimodality makes it hard to feel a meaningful intentionality (though maybe down to simple executionality). El Tigre's brutal enjambment of "break" alone is amazing, a chilling text that goes so hard by the end that I can rarely read through it without chills and teary eyes.

I don't understand the Spanish exactly, but I get much of the idea, am thankful that the translation can be so close, and appreciate some differences: allowing a longer line for the leap via an "entonces" verb is fascinating; disarmado vs disarmed flows nicer even before accounting for the cruzado rhyme; and the word zarpazo can't not stand out. On the other hand I feel inclined towards "relentless sentinel" over "centinela implacable" (both incredible though), and inserting an enjamb on "far" is ballsy ending up slightly preferable.

The North Ship (Poem)

Read it here. It's hard to explain why I like this so much. Contributing are subtle sea rhymes, the lilting intensity ("hunted it like a beast" into the emptier and quieter north ship, only to ambiguously escalate again), "fire-spilling star", the variety possible in its performance, and the evergreen appeal of mysterious exploration in uncaring wilds.