The Highlights of 2025
It is that time once more. With 2025 behind us, this is a great moment to reflect on the year that preceded us and what we might learn from it, or improve upon in the year to follow.
For me, this was something of a transformational year. I filed for my passport for international travel. I started reading more books, like Hugo Jackson’s Resonator Tetralogy. I once more began my fitness journey, taking up kickboxing and going on nearly daily strolls around the neighborhood as a way to get active.
And in the middle of that, I still found time to play video games. Though I don’t have numbers for how much game time I had this year compared to prior years, I can safely say that my quality of game time has gone up, as about halfway through 2025 I started deliberately moving away from unfocused “content mills” and more towards focused experiences that weren’t farming for “engagement time”. (In general, not as an absolute.)
Which brings us to this: Presented, as always, in a random order, my highlights of 2025 are.
2XKO
Those who know me are aware that I’ve had a fraught relationship with fighting games over the past several years. In summation, most of my friends are the type of people who dedicate more time than I do to playing them online, and thus the skill gap between them and I widens to a point that I simply don’t enjoy playing against them. I’m also not the type of person who can easily find the fun in taking loss after loss with no discernible path to improvement. Combined, those two facts create a vicious cycle that has been the cause of great frustration.
So imagine my surprise to find that I am somehow still playing 2KXO months after it was released. The skill gap is still there, and I recognize it within myself. My opponents are much more adept at performing combos and taking advantage of my openings, but I am still able to hold my own, reaching as high as Platinum rank.
I suspect that the free-to-play structure is part of it. Like most other F2P games, 2KXO gives out daily quests for Season Pass XP. Unlike most F2P games, those dailies can be completed in one or two sets, giving me a concrete stopping point that allows me to play a few rounds per day without growing tired. If I have a great session, I can stop on a high note once my dailies are complete. If I have a terrible session where I can’t seem to win a match, then at least I can say that I finished my dailies and leave with a consolation. Either way, by playing just a little each day, I’m able to avoid the risk of growing bored or burning out the way I have so many times before.
I may not be able to tell you about all the different combo routes, nor am I great at incorporating grabs or assists into my kit, but I have found a game that I am at least willing to stick to.
Thank Warwick for that. (He’s my main.)
Various Furry Visual Novels
This was a strange year as far as AAA gaming goes. Not as much caught my interest in terms of major releases, so I spent a great deal of time reading through many of the visual novels that had been released by my fellow creatives within the furry fandom. It is difficult to categorize them because so many of them exist in an incomplete state, and it is highly likely most of them will remain incomplete in the years to come.
Nonetheless, there were many gems within the works I read through, most (but not all) of them free on itch.io. Remember the Flowers holds the distinction of being written by a fellow asexual, telling a compelling sci-fi story through that lens. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Burrows explores sexuality with time-warping eldritch horror. Dragon Detective does a great impression of an Ace Attorney game. Mars Vice adds a third-dimension to its own mystery story. The Use of Life takes the concept and blends it with a more traditional turn-based RPG.
There are two big takeaways that have stuck with me the more I delve with this genre. The first is that I have begun to grow more comfortable with the idea of interacting with works that are incomplete, and appreciating them for what they bring to the table despite knowing their creators may one day be forced to shelve the project because they can no longer afford to work on it. There’s a sense of beauty in that.
Additionally, it has me toying with the idea of making a visual novel of my own, using my own cast of characters. Whether I actually give it a shot has yet to be determined, but seeing so many of my peers give it their best effort encourages me to join them.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I don’t honestly know what more I could personally say about E33 that hasn’t already been said by people far smarter than I. I have shared god knows just how much material on it with anyone who is willing to listen. And doubtless I will share much more as even now, there’s plenty of discourse to be had in the wake of its performance at the Game Awards.
As a game, it borrowed from many of my favorites, like Dark Souls, Devil May Cry, Final Fantasy, and Super Mario RPG, pilfering and remixing elements from them to create something that had its own flair to it. As a work of art and literature, it has more respect for its audience than many other tales told in this medium. And it makes use of this medium in ways that simply would not be as effective outside of gaming.
It is difficult to delve into specifics because so much of the depth of how gameplay and story interweave into a complete, synergistic package is dependent upon spoilers. Beyond that, I will say that almost every individual element is polished to a mirror shine.
I felt the desperation of the Expeditioners as they came together to fight impossible odds, and the jubilation as their struggle yielded victory after countless defeats. It’s rare for a JRPG to have such verisimilitude between the written script and the moment-to-moment, and that’s a large part of what made Clair Obscur special.
It’s also very, very French. And France is right up there with Ivalice as far as my favorite fictional counties are concerned.
Elden Ring: Nightreign
Had you told me at the tail end of 2024 that I would be going to bat for “What if Elden Ring but Fortnite?”, I would have doubted you. If you had told me that I would say it is one of my favorite games of 2025, I would have called you a liar.
And yet, here we are. Not only is it a great game, but it’s a great excuse to hop onto Discord on a Saturday afternoon and rope some of my old buddies into carrying me all the way to the final boss. At least, until I was good enough at the game to hold my own and start carrying others.
This has been my experience playing Nightreign. With the clock ticking, and the circle shrinking, the game puts just enough pressure on us to make our choices matter without feeling like one single mistake can end an entire run. And as our knowledge of the map and the bosses/obstacles in it grew, we learned which fights we could afford to take on and which were best left avoided. (My advice: You are almost never ready to take on the Bell-Bearing Hunter.)
They’ve also made a number of clever concessions to further alleviate the time pressure, like a dash that allows players to sprint rapidly from objective to objective, pre-set characters and classes that have their own stat allocations on level up, and removing fall damage so that players don’t have to worry about a few mistimed jumps ruining a run. Despite this, it feels like a proper From Software game in the moment-to-moment, as our team of three heroes fights to defeat the terrors of the night.
It’s become one of those games I keep installed on my PC just in case the occasion arises to play a few matches, and it’s rarely more than a few weeks between sessions.
Mafia: The Old Country
I have had no direct experience with the Mafia franchise prior to playing The Old Country. Obviously I’ve heard of it, but back in its heyday I avoided pretty much every game that resembled Grand Theft Auto. (This is also why I have next to no experience with Saint’s Row.)
I had some idea of what it was, and for the most part my expectations were right on the money. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that it is anything but a pulpy, tropey tale of a young man turned, through circumstance, into a cold-blooded mafioso too quickly to realize what he was doing or who he was becoming. It’s a classic genre story that most people with a grounding in cinema should know by heart.
What did surprise me was just how well-executed that premise was, from scripting and character performance to the way the open world compliments the story without detracting from its pacing. What it lacks in originality it makes up for in spades as far as execution is concerned, crafting an extremely focused and deliberate adventure through the countryside of 1900s Sicily.
Honestly, in a world where big budget open world games are littered with hours of filler nonsense to pad out “engagement time”, a tight 10-15 hour linear experience told inside the format of an open world game is its own appeal. There was nothing, from beginning to end, that interrupted the flow from mission to mission, as protagonist Enzo finds himself embroiled into a life that is difficult to escape.
It’s sometimes the simple pleasures that stick with you.
Dispatch
To this day, I carry with me fond memories of the Telltale era that started with their first season of The Walking Dead video games. Though they began to decline in quality as management stretched their limited sources thin across far too many projects, they produced a ton of excellent Adventure Games like The Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands, the only good Borderlands game I’ve ever played.
Dispatch brought me straight back into that era, with an incredible cast of superheroes and villains that feel like real people despite the comic book trappings. Every single performer involved turned in an incredible performance, and each one of them stood out in their own way over the course of the eight episode adventure.
Though all eight episodes are now out, there is something to be said for the staggered release schedule, two episodes per week for a month. It gave Dispatch a feeling not all that dissimilar to an episodic TV show (which it was originally pitched as, to my understanding). It became less of a game and more of a special event, where after each new set of episodes, one could go on BlueSky to see all the excitement pour out in the form of fanart of Sonar and Malevola. There were also some people comparing what choices they made and what changes came from those choices, but really my memory consists mostly of a deluge of Sonar and Malevola fanart. (Not that I’m complaining.)
People are rightfully critical of the episodic model. We have lived experience from Telltale, Dontnod, and a few other developers in that space, of stretches of time between episode drops that are so long that they detract from the experience. And yet, I hold a fondness in my heart for them. I remember how happy I was to find out a new episode of Hitman 2016 dropped, and I would once more have a reason to jump back into it. I remember how the game sat with me over the course of that year, always floating fondly in the back of my mind.
Dispatch gave me a compressed version of that, and I didn’t realize how much I missed having something like it.
The Darkest Files
In most circumstances, I wouldn’t have much to say about an 8-hour detective game with only two cases in it, but The Darkest Files is a unique subject that warrants calling attention to, if for no other reason than its willingness to address extremely heavy subject matter.
The Darkest Files has us assume the role of a prosecutor in 1950s Germany, volunteering to work on a special task force dedicated to prosecuting Nazi war crimes. Though the names and identities of almost every character are fictionalized, the cases themselves are based on real events that occurred during World War 2. While that is impressive, it alone would not be enough to warrant too much discussion. We all know that the Nazis were evil, and committed countless atrocities. It’s such an obvious and accepted fact that it’s hardly worth repeating.
What really elevates The Darkest Files in my mind is that it sells both how difficult it would have been for a prosecutor to successfully bring charges against former Nazi soldiers during this time, and how thankless that job would have been for those same prosecutors.
The sheer nature of the task means investigating without ever having access to a crime scene. Like a cold case, witness testimony and old documentation are all that we have access to while building our case. Even worse, the former is unreliable, as the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities have good reason to lie about what they did even without the specter of prosecution looming over them. Separating fact from fiction involves combing through whatever paperwork, clippings, and data we can find, proving our deductions beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And even if we succeed (which is not a guarantee), then we’re greeted with open hostility in the background. The game impresses, more than anything else, the idea that the German population was ready to move on after the end of the war. Refusing to do so, and actively trudging up the past, wasn’t “polite” or “acceptable”, and those who did the job of prosecuting those crimes were acceptable targets.
At the time of writing this, I prepare to face the next day with the ever looming threat of a fascist ruler and a feckless government with no desire to stop him. I think about The Darkest Files, and what it has to say about justice in the aftermath of such openly deplorable regimes and the willingness of the powerful to let the perpetrators return to normalcy, and I wonder if we learned anything from our history.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
I had to double check this to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind, but Fallout 4 was released in 2015 and Skyrim in 2011. Depending on one’s opinion of Fallout 4, this means that it has been either fifteen or ten years since the last good Bethesda game. (Starfield was 2023, but it sucked so it doesn’t count.) There is an Oblivion-shaped hole in my heart waiting to be filled by something, for nothing else but the simple lack of new entries in this genre…
…is what I would say if it wasn’t bizarrely the year of smaller studios taking on the challenge of crafting something in that mold. Out of the three I played, Tainted Grail is the most successful of them. From start to finish, I felt exactly as if I had entered a grim, darker version of The Elder Scrolls games that I had come to adore in my teenage years.
It has certain limitations owing to its limited budget and resources: No small dev studio would be capable of making a map as sprawling as Skyrim’s. But in the moment-to-moment I was settling into the old routine of grabbing a bow and sniping as many opponents as I could in stealth before finishing off the stragglers with my sword. (I don’t care if the stealth/archer is a “bland” playstyle. It’s the one I like and I refuse to deviate.)
I also appreciated its approach to Arthurian legend and Gaelic lore, bringing them together for a refreshingly unique take on both. (I would later learn this was based on a board game, but that’s immaterial to the point.) It was familiar enough that I had a solid grounding, yet just distinct and alien from what I know of both myths to whet my curiosity.
While not perfect, as the ending doesn’t quite hit the mark and the progression system in general probably needs a second pass, I wasn’t looking for perfection. No one who likes Oblivion or Skyrim truly wants perfection. What they want is a game like this, that encourages the player to go out and see what they can find.
Back to the Dawn
Occasionally, when I see my fellow furries making fanart of something, I like to look into where they came from. Often, this hits a dead end. Either the source work is disappointingly bland or the work is sound but the “popular fanart character” is one of the least interesting parts of the whole piece. Often, but not always. Sometimes I have to admit that my fellow furries have something approaching taste, and an ability to interact with media on slightly more than a surface level. Back to the Dawn was one of those times.
Back to the Dawn is an RPG Maker game where the player takes the role of one of two inmates in a prison filled with anthropomorphic animal prisoners, both placed there under false pretenses. While each character has their own separate campaign and list of objectives, both of them will require the player to secure an escape route and break their way out.
This is a well worn premise used countless times in video games, but what sets Back to the Dawn apart is the execution. For story reasons, both characters are under a time pressure that requires them to complete their mission and escape within a certain number of weeks. And in addition, the player needs to manage their daily needs and relationships with the rest of the inmates (and guards) at the same time. In many ways, this is as much a prison-life simulator as it is a prison break RPG.
And that is where the game does its best work, making every action (and inaction) feel like some form of risk. Acting like a model prisoner and building the kind of relationships needed to make life easier helps, but doing that consumes time that could be better spent digging a hole behind the sink of your cell to escape at night. Every single minute and every single choice comes with it a form of opportunity cost that needs to be factored into each decision. Even on the easiest difficulty, it can be brutal, and it is entirely possible to fail. I had to abandon my first playthrough at about the halfway point because I realized too late that I wasted too much time and needed to rethink how I approached the entire game.
That could have easily been frustrating enough to uninstall the game, but instead I was more than happy to begin again. Having learned from my previously botched playthrough, I would go on to have a far easier (but by no means easy) time with my second attempt. Writing this, and thinking about the game once more, I’m tempted to go for yet another run to see what other escape methods and alternate endings I could uncover in New Game+.
I went in with almost no expectations, and came out ready to recommend this for anyone looking to play something with both novelty and originality.
The Rogue: Prince of Persia
When Motion Twin finished work on the original 1.0 release of Dead Cells, there was a schism within the team. Some chose to move on to work on new projects, taking the studio name with them. Others chose to stay with Dead Cells to work on it post-release with patches and DLC content. This group would be known as “Evil Empire”.
Simply working within the space of game development is a risk, especially these days. There’s always the threat of the money running dry and the studio shutting down. But within that understanding, the impulse to stay on and work on a game that was already successful is a “safe” choice when compared to the impulse to do something new.
And “safe” is probably the best word I have to describe The Rogue Prince of Persia, as it feels very much like an extension of Dead Cells, but in equally familiar Prince of Persia wrappings. It’s not doing anything that hasn’t already been done before.
But it does marry both of those games with finesse and grace, creating a package that I was more than happy to play through to 100% completion, unlocking every possible item and costume for The Prince. I enjoyed it enough to run it again for a Let’s Play afterwards, where I chewed on my thoughts about the game in front of an audience.
That “safety” is often something we all need: A game that we know we’re going to like so that we can enjoy the free time we have. I’m no different, and The Rogue Prince of Persia was exactly what I needed.
The Roottrees are Dead
I am of the generation that grew up in the early years of the internet. I remember chatting with my school friends over AOL Instant Messenger, looking up walkthroughs on GameFAQs for games I needed help with, the advent of Google and the search engine, and so on. Even in a world where I wasn’t convinced social media was slowly poisoning our collective unconscious, I was always going to have nostalgia for the HTTP 1.0 / Flash era.
Not only does The Roottrees are Dead harken back to that time, but it does so under the guise of doing some detective work using the late 90s World Wide Web. However, instead of investigating a murder, we’re tracing a family’s ancestry, specifically the Roottree family, after its patriarch and his immediate children die in a tragic plane crash. The rules of their will state that the fortune is to be divided among all living blood relatives. By tracing newspaper articles, magazine clippings, internet searches, and whatever else we can get our hands on, our goal is to compile the complete family Roottree.
Like any mystery game, it’s difficult to talk about details without spoiling the very thing that makes it so fun. However, as a fan of games like The Return of the Obra Dinn and The Curse of the Golden Idol, this games fits very neatly into the niche. It requires the player to pay attention to every little detail available to them, and be willing to pursue hunches and speculation.
Using an approximation of the early internet furthers this feeling. I remember typing up searches because I had some vague ideas of possible connections, only to delve deep into a rabbit hole wholly unconnected to my initial search, but important to the end goal all the same. In that sense, a bit of the DNA from Saw Barlow’s Her Story makes its way into The Roottrees Are Dead as well.
It didn’t take me too long to finish it, about a single weekend, but it was a good weekend of mystery solving.
The Seance of Blake Manor
It wouldn’t be one of my lists unless there were multiple mystery/detective games on it, and The Seance of Blake Manor is an excellent detective game. A mysterious young lady has disappeared from the premises of the titular Blake Manor, a few days before the guests were set to perform a Grand Seance to awaken the spirits of the dead. It is our job to discover what happened, and we have a sinking feeling that we only have until the Grand Seance.
The key mechanic is time management. With only a few days to investigate the case, every single action we take around the manor consumes a few minutes of time, from sifting through mail to inspecting under the bed after breaking into another guest’s room. And with each guest following their own schedule, moving from one room to another with each passing hour, The Seance of Blake Manor sells the fantasy of actually doing detective work.
I felt the tension of having to wait until one of my suspects was out of their room before breaking in and ransacking the place for clues. Even when I was in the room, I needed to be deathly aware of how much time I was spending, else someone might plop outside the door and witness my exit at the coming of the next hour.
The actual puzzling isn’t too difficult because the game keeps track of every clue I found in a handy journal, but the act of having to manually sift for clues, aware of the clock looming over me, was something I never really experienced from a game before this.
With luck, someone will be inspired to refine this formula and make a few more mysteries in this vein.
Hades 2
It’s hard to argue with the fact that I’ve logged a combined 140 hours on Hades 2, with the vast majority of that playtime on my Steam Deck. It’s especially hard to argue since even after beating the game and its epilogue, I went on to get every possible achievement, and fully upgrade every aspect of every weapon.
As I loosely touched on last year, Melinoe, the protagonist of this game, plays differently than her brother did in the first. This meant there was a bit of a learning curve, as I had to unlearn habits developed in Hades so I could relearn new, better habits here. Once I did, I started to appreciate that contrast between both characters, each capable in their own unique way. Unlocking her other weapons, and their hidden alternative aspects, only strengthened my connection. I found myself particularly gravitating towards the flames, which I affectionately called the “Maracas” for the manner in which Melinoe held and swung them in combat.
I also adore a lot of the interpretations and creative liberties taken with Greek mythology as it got adapted into Hades 2. For example, turning Scylla and the Sirens into a hypnotic rock band that lures sailors to their doom with thumping bangers like “I Am Gonna Claw (Out Your Eyes, And Drown You To Death)” is one of the most inspired and unique choices I’ve seen with mythological monsters. And since they sing during the boss fight, it’s fun that there’s a scripted dialogue players can get for having the music muted in the conversation leading up to it.
It’s moments like that, where I’m either working the boons and upgrades I find mid-run to create as strong a build as I can muster, or enjoying the adaptation of myth and legend, that Hades 2 shines brightest, sometimes more than the original did.
It’s what kept me coming back long after I wrapped up. I still keep it installed on my Steam Deck in case I’m ever in the mood for another run.
And with that, we’ve finished with the Highlights of 2025, but don’t worry. We aren’t finished yet. With the good comes the bad, and next week we can discuss the Disappointments of 2025.
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