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The Disappointments of 2025

It’s been a while since I’ve played a truly awful video game. Conceding that point, that doesn’t mean everything I play is flawless. Far from it.

Sometimes a game can only be labeled a “disappointment”. This year, these games carry that distinction, even if they may not be necessarily bad.

And as always, these are presented in random order.

Blue Prince

Every year, I have one or two games that end up both on the highlights and disappointments list, and I expected Blue Prince to be one of those games when I first sat down to write these lists. However, as I grow more distant from it, talking more with people who are genuine fans of it, my own opinion has begun to gradually sour.

There is a hypothetical world out there where I have a glowing impression of Blue Prince, continuing well past the point where I opened Room 46 and “beat the game”. Between my own brain power and looking up walkthroughs when I get stumped, this version of me would have loved learning about the lore of the world built to support the roguelike puzzle game before me.

But the version of me who exists here, in this reality, isn’t that person. The version of me that played Blue Prince is the version that got annoyed as RNG repeatedly frustrated my attempts to “solve” puzzles I already knew the answers and solutions to, specifically the Boiler Room and the Pump Room (if you know, you know). This version of me didn’t manage to find the numerous ways to massage the RNG that allegedly exist. He reached Room 46 for the first time, and while attempting to gather the rest of the Red Envelopes that he missed, he realized that he had no further patience for the game and let it go.

My time with Blue Prince is marked by a conflict between the part that wants to be in conversation with roguelikes, and one that wants to be a true brain teaser. The former actively gets in the way of the latter, in a manner that dragged the whole game down for me. 

While I would love to reconcile the discrepancy between both of these understandings of Blue Prince, I am unable to. As much as I love the hypothetical version of Blue Prince that people I know were able to experience, it exists in stark contrast to my own. Through some combination of luck, skill, and brain chemistry, they were able to push through blockers that I couldn’t. 

I can only judge based on my own time with the game. It was a time that left me wanting. I am glad it exists because I have never played anything like it before, and I hope that someone else is able to make a version of this that addresses my critiques of that game, but only time will tell if that will ever happen.

TMNT: Tactical Takedown

I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting when I heard about a turn-based tactics game based on TMNT. I’ve noticed that between this, the upcoming Magic set, the 2D beat-em up Shredder’s Revenge from a few years ago, and the Hades-inspired roguelike Splintered Fate, there’s been an odd resurgence of TMNT games and gaming projects in recent years. While I assume that’s because of a new TV series or comic book, I don’t know if that’s true and I don’t really care.

What I do know, from playing them, was that both Shredder’s Revenge and Splintered Fate were good video games that adapted the license well into their respective genres. Although each of them was made by a separate developer, their combined track record and my love of Tactics games compelled me to give this one a chance. Unfortunately, not every game can be a winner.

There are two major design decisions that define the entire experience, and both of them completely baffle me. The first is that the player only plays as a single one of the turtles at any given time in this tactical game. The second is that as each level progresses, older portions of it will collapse, instantly killing anyone on those tiles, to load in the next chunk of it.

Combined, this creates a game where the goal is to control the spacing and positioning, both of the player and their enemies, so that minimizing damage as they run from the start of the level to the end while eliminating as many foes as they can. It technically fits the definition of a Tactics game, and there are doubtless people who like what this does to the genre, but it didn’t work for me personally.

There just wasn’t enough for me to sink my teeth into, and I slowly began to grow bored with it. Even though it’s only about a six hour game, I didn’t finish it. My interest wasn’t able to carry me through to the end.

Assassin’s Creed: Shadows

This was the year where I finally admitted to myself that I loathe the direction Assassin’s Creed is going, and I have no further interest in going along with them for the ride. Between skipping out on Valhalla completely, and genuinely having a good time with the more compact 20-hour Mirage, I had tricked myself into believing there was a chance the franchise could get back on track. It is a mistake I will not repeat a second time.

What was especially eye-opening for me was playing Shadows in my spare time while I was in the middle of doing my Let’s Play of Assassin’s Creed 3 on stream. It was one thing to have an idea of how much the series has changed in the time since the Desmond era, and quite another to have that juxtaposition violently thrust upon me by a quirk of the schedules.

Shadows is less a video game and more of a mill, upon which content must be churned and churned out. Not because any of it is truly fun, but because it does exactly enough to trick the brain into thinking it is being entertained without actually leaving the player satisfied. It is a mountain of video game junk food. While I’m not against video game junk food, (Mafia: The Old Country is right there on my Highlights list) I do expect some flavor out of it. In the year 2025, we were still somehow climbing towers and capturing outposts as if that was new and novel.

To top it all off, the game I finished didn’t even have a complete story to go with it. I have a vivid memory of saying “Wait, that’s it!?” as credits rolled and the game told me I had finished the main campaign. I would later come to understand that the practice of expanding on the story in post-game DLC expansions was a new trend among games in the series, starting with Odyssey (whose DLC I didn’t play) and extending into Valhalla. I find this practice both galling and presumptuous. If the story of the base game feels vapid and incomplete, why should I trust that the expansions to that story would be anything but?

Once upon a time, I would’ve been excited to play the next entry in the Assassin’s Creed series, but that time has passed. I believed Ubisoft when they said they were taking steps to make Shadows more like the Assassin’s Creed games I remembered, and I was a fool to do so.

Death Stranding 2

There’s an endless debate within the circles of game designers and critics on the use of friction as a tool in game design. How much should a game fight the player in order to keep things interesting? How does it keep them on their toes so that they still need to be active and attentive, thinking about their next moves? For whatever faults the original Death Stranding had, this was something it did almost perfectly. Most deliveries had just enough difficulty that I needed to lock in and engage with the game’s core mechanics to make sure that my cargo was safe and secure. Unfortunately, the sequel makes a critical mistake in this regard.

Very early on, players are given the ability to create and drive all-terrain trucks, capable of safely storing massive amounts of cargo for transport. Once they make use of this feature, any and all difficulty flies straight out the window. The Australian outback is home to mostly flat, featureless terrain that the truck effortlessly clears. No matter how heavy the haul, it is unlikely that it won’t fit inside the truck. Thus, with the sole exception of optional timed deliveries, there is almost no reason not to spend almost all of your time driving the truck.

This crystal needs to stay frozen as you transport it across the desert? No problem, the temperature-controlled storage compartment of the truck will make sure that we don’t need to worry about keeping it out of the sun for a long trek. Pizza needs to stay hot and ready while you deliver it? No problem, the temperature-controlled compartment can also keep it nice and warm as you make the trip. Need to move cargo through ghost-infested territory? No worries, just mount a machine gun auto-turret to your truck to eliminate them with all-purpose bullets. Bandit territory? No worries, because that same turret will automatically switch to non-lethal fire to avoid creating any dead bodies.

Snowy mountain? Hmm. We might need to think about this one. The truck isn’t so great at driving up steep slo- Wait. Nevermind. We’re almost immediately granted spiked tires to improve the traction on our truck, allowing us to effortlessly climb the mountain with it.

There’s a truck-shaped hole that every peg seamlessly fits into. On the big final push to complete the network, against an army of death machines, I effortlessly drove my beautiful truck all the way to a mediocre gunfight at the end that, while thankfully not truck-related, also wasn’t particularly challenging either.

Death Stranding 2 is a good game, but it lacks the bite of the first game, which means it ultimately wasn’t as fun.

Horses

Of course, hearing the story of how Valve and Epic both chose to toss Horses off of their storefronts for reasons that remain fairly nebulous to me, I was curious enough to get it on itch.io and see what all the fuss was about for myself.

I went in expecting something extremely graphic or at the very least controversial. Something had to be in Horses that was beyond the pale, something that eclipses the very real hate speech and pornography actively sold on Steam. Otherwise, there simply wouldn’t be a reason to reject it from the Steam store.

Instead, the game I played was… fine. The average, uninformed lay person might find this shocking. As a media critic though, I have seen far worse, both in terms of sex and violence, from games that were sold to ordinary consumers for $70. Hell, I’ve seen far worse on prime time television and in theaters, or on the local news.

As Patrick Kelpek said while talking about it on Remap, “If this game wasn’t banned on Steam, no one would be talking about it.” In that respect, my disappointment lies partially on the game but mostly on Steam and Epic for choosing to draw a line here of all places, for what I can only assume are deeply cowardly reasons.

While we’re at it, fuck Paypal, Visa, and Mastercard because I’d bet they’re part of it, even if I can’t prove it.

Avowed

This was another one of the Elder Scrolls-likes that I played this year, and as far as that’s concerned the bones are where they need to be. Though the world is more static than what I’d expect from a game in this genre, that’s not really an issue. I’m still exploring large cities and sprawling landscapes, completing the quests and dungeons therein. That fundamental core is strong.

Unfortunately, that’s about where the strengths end. The leveling curve always made me feel as if I was one or two levels behind where I was “supposed to be” at all times despite doing almost every quest I came across and upgrading my weapons whenever I was able. When I was avoiding enemies that outranked me in a zone I was supposedly on level for, the ones I could fight were too tanky, neither doing enough damage to be a threat nor taking enough to avoid being a slog.

And I knew I was on par with my enemies because Avowed uses a system of tiered loot, one of my least favorite mechanics in modern RPGs. While they handle this system differently, by allowing the player to upgrade their existing equipment to higher tiers with upgrade materials, this comes with its own problems. Early on in the game, I found a flintlock pistol which meshed with my playstyle. Because I was able to continuously upgrade it, I carried it with me for the entire game, largely ignoring all of the other interesting uniques because they didn’t jive with my build in quite the same way. Since I was also fighting versions of the same enemies for most of the game, with the same weapon, almost every fight felt identical.

I might be able to forgive that if the story and writing were up to the quality bar I set for Obsidian, but unfortunately that doesn’t land the mark either. Often, when I was compelled to make moral choices, I felt as if reasonable alternatives to the options presented often went ignored in favor of truly insane and strange choices that didn’t fit my conception of the character I was given. And several of my companion characters had stances and attitudes that I couldn’t truly make sense of given the full context of their histories and backstories. Well before I had gotten to the end, I had grown alienated from this world that I was supposedly qualified to make bold, world-changing decisions for.

It’s not like Obsidian to misfire quite like this, but that’s my experience playing Avowed. By the end, I was playing more out of obligation than enjoyment.

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. And yet, here we are. I suppose it was inevitable that one game this year would be both a highlight and a disappointment, and Hades 2 just happens to be the one.

Back when I called Hades 2 one of my highlights of 2024, I explicitly said that I was excited to see Supergiant tackle the darker elements of Greek myth. Many of the characters brought into the story, including Pandora, Arachne, Echo, and Prometheus, all have legitimate grievances against the Greek pantheon. If you’re familiar with mythology, you do not need me to explain that to you. Seeing these characters come in, with their stories faithfully carried over, I placed my trust in Supergiant. I assumed that there was a good reason for delving into these more tragic stories. Doubly so since Melinoe is the perfect character to explore them, both being a god without being “of the gods”, raised in secret and separated from her family for most of her life.

Without delving into spoilers, I was absolutely shocked that nothing comes from any of that. Worse, my jaw was on the floor when I saw how they chose to resolve the central conflict between Melinoe and Chronos, the arch villain of the entire game. As I’ve told others who discussed this with me, it feels almost like Supergiant got cold feet. It feels, from an outside perspective, that they set out embracing the messy gray area of Greek myth, and as they were laying down the track something spooked them so bad they felt compelled to pivot. They took a wonderful, metaphorical and slightly bitter brew of coffee and added so much sugar it gave me a contact cavity.

Obviously I don’t hate Hades 2, since I invested so much of my time into it, but that comes with the caveat that it is one of the worst stories I have played this year.

And I do not believe that it is a coincidence that Supergiant’s worst script comes from its first true sequel.

Microsoft

I don’t have a better place to say this, but you’ve probably noticed that while a few Microsoft games snuck their way into these lists, in general there is a dearth of games on here that were published by Microsoft or studios that were acquired by them.

This is because I have been observing, to the best of my ability, the Boycott/Divest/Sanction (BDS) Boycott of Xbox and related properties, in solidarity with the people of Palestine. And outside of their blatant support of genocidal regimes, Microsoft’s acquisition and subsequent dismantling of large segments of western game dev have done considerable damage to the industry as a whole, but specifically to the lives of those impacted by the untold number of layoffs this year.

The company has left a very sour taste in my mouth, and even without a formal boycott in place I don’t know if I could stomach supporting them any more than I have to.

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And there we have it: My list of disappointments from games released in 2025. One more list to go, as we discuss the games I played in 2025 that did not come out in 2025.