2025 Reviews: Video Games

I’ve been keeping a list of everything I’ve watched/read/played since 2019, but this is my first time doing mini reviews for them!

This is long enough that I ended up splitting it into video games and everything else, but it's been very satisfying to write. If you read both blogs, you are braver than the troops. I also included a few things that I only watched Let's Plays of (horror games, because I'm a coward), but that list is less comprehensive.

GAMES

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk [PLAYED] - aesthetically very Jet Set Radio, plot-wise not ACAB enough, gameplay-wise different than I was expecting; my pal Jess tells me it plays more like a Tony Hawk game, which took me a while to get used to. I wasn’t at all sure about it right up until I unlocked character select, around which point the mechanics started to click and become much more enjoyable (though I’m sure being able to play a girl at last had some impact; I’m too sapphic to enjoy time playing dudes). I really enjoyed the characters, and I thought the variety in the recruitment quests was really fun, though I wish I could go around the whole gang to get a reaction to the latest story development like I did in JSRF. God, I love JSRF.

Screenshot from Bomb Rush Cyberfunk of a brightly coloured cel-shaded character grinding on a curving rail above an industrial sea-based structure.

Outer Wilds [PLAYED] – Wonderful planet exploration/puzzle game, easy to see why it’s so beloved. Full review here.

Blue Prince [PLAYED] - Fantastic roguelike puzzle game. Only thing I would recommend is to take the game seriously when it suggests you take notes in a physical notebook; my sprawling MS Paint document did the trick, but it got very slow to load after a while, and I'd really have liked having a proper record of my explorations.

The Eternal Cylinder [PLAYED] - Weird and cool game about having a gang of critters and giving them special abilities to survive being pursued by an all-destroying, world-ending fascistic cylinder (it makes sense in context, I promise). Aesthetic is very ‘ugly cute’ and reminds me of Spore, and the enemy designs are downright unsettling at times. The central message being ‘we don’t need one hero, we don’t need sharp teeth, it’s our cleverness and our diversity that will help us win’ was very charming.

Screenshot from The Eternal Cylinder of five oddly and diversely-shaped aliens sitting in a circle around a glittering pool of water. The creatures mostly have two legs and a trunk on a rounded body; some have four legs, or two trunks, or are square shaped. Above them sits a much larger and more wrinkled creature of the same species.

Fields of Mistria [PLAYED] - Very satisfying improvement on the farm life simulation genre. Takes the best bits from Animal Crossing/Stardew and adds in a cast of NPCs that feel much more alive thanks to how they interact with one another, not just the player. Hitting the late game and having enough funds to properly decorate my farmhouse was deeply satisfying, because there is a delightful amount of miscellanea decoration items (dishes, pots etc) available to make the environment feel lived-in.

Pokemon Legends Z-A [PLAYED] – oh nooo I might be too old for Pokemon… This was funny and cute at times, and the gameplay was good, but for me it didn’t hit the spot like Arceus did – perhaps because the ‘Wild Zones’ felt so artificial. I liked walking around a corner and seeing a Trubbish on a stack of boxes, or noticing a Kakuna hanging from a tree, but those more natural interactions were few and far between. Fantastic dress-up simulator, though.

Citizen Sleeper [PLAYED] – In this RPG, you are an escaped construct struggling to survive its own planned obsolescence on a lawless space station. I’m not as enamoured with this as some people, partly because I am the type of person to get aggressively distracted by grammar mistakes (not something I am proud of); however, after finishing the Flux storyline, I realised I had absolutely got way more attached to this janky space station than I’d ever expected. I also found the main gameplay loop satisfying. I’ve got the sequel on my wishlist and will definitely give it a go at some point. (Maybe there will be less comma splices…?)

A screenshot from Citizen Sleeper, featuring a character labelled 'Sabine, a doctor set up in the Bright Market'. Dialogue at the side of the screen reads: 'I'm sorry,' Sabine says, and you are unsure if they mean from the cold touch of the metal or everything else. 'Emulations like you, sleepers as most people know you, aren't classified as people in any of the surrogate systems. You have no rights, no status.' They focus hard on the inspection of your arm. 'And Essen-Arp have no reason to release stabilizer into the market.'

Warhammer 40k Darktide [PLAYED] – first FPS in years, I love running around getting shot at with my fiancée. Also the NPC characters are genuinely very funny and excellently voice-acted. I love you, Hadron. (also I am a female Grendyl truther, sorry Sire Melk, the fact you’re apparently the only person to he/him them is almost more telling than if nobody did, and you are in the wrong universe to have heard of Beowulf)

Final Fantasy 14 (7.X) [PLAYED/WATCHED] – WHERE IS THE NARRATIVE’S TEETH. WTF IS ALL THIS SQUANDERED STORY POTENTIAL. ARE YOU KIDDING!!!!! UNFORTUNATELY, I MIGHT END UP GETTING OBSESSED WITH [AU RA SPOILER CHARACTER] AND DRAWN BACK IN!!!!!!!!!!!!

Soul of Sovereignty, Ch 2 & 3 [PLAYED] – In a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, a grieving father finds himself compelled into a quest to end the world a second time by an evil clown woman. Big recommendation from me, even if you are not a visual novel fan. Adult JRPG-style narrative with complicated, compelling characters. I want to rotate Loic in my brain, which is not something I usually say about male characters…

A screenshot from Soulsov, featuring a male character called Loic carrying a female character called Ysme on his back. Dialogue at the side of the screen reads: LOIC: 'All right... Off we go.' YSME: 'You know you're not fooling anybody with the fake cheer, right?' He laughs, barely. LOIC: 'You yourself warned me not to expect sympathy, Ysme. If you'd prefer I begged for it, you need only say the word.'

Mouthwashing [WATCHED] – Self-described horror adventure about a crew of a crashed spaceship. I’m late to the party on this one, but it deserves all the accolades. I’ve found myself watching a lot of horror LPs over the last few years (thanks, NightmareModeGo, whose streams also compelled me to pick up a bunch of the other games on this list), and I thought this one was brilliant, striking a perfect balance in terms of how easily the plot is to follow; the narrative isn't tricky to parse if you're paying attention (and holy shit I love a horror game which is intentional with its symbolism without being too on the nose), but it doesn't assume you're an idiot and spoon-feed you explanations either.

HALF-LIFE: ALYX [WATCHED] – This was SO much fun and definitely makes me wish I had VR (except for the more horror parts of the game). Would 100% recommend NightmareModeGo’s streams of the game if you are curious.

LUTO [WATCHED] – Psychological horror about a man who can’t leave his house. I really loved what this was doing for the vast majority of the playthrough (with only a few hiccups in my enjoyment in the late midgame) and I would wholeheartedly recommend it, insofar as I can recommend anything I’ve not played myself.

Spoilers

I absolutely loved the sleight of hand where the game makes you suspect that Samuel is the typical male horror protagonist hiding from something terrible he’s done, only to reveal in the end that he was simply consumed with guilt and self-recriminations for bereavements that were in no way his own fault. The ‘antagonist’ being someone who wanted to protect him from his grief (and the implied risk of suicide?) at the cost of any chance of moving on was a great touch. The big downside is the meta stuff: I wish they’d cut out at least half of it towards the end. They have a real gem here, and it feels they weren’t confident enough in it, or were too attached to their meta winks, which should have been saved for a different game. Keep the script stuff: it’s thematic. Lose the more extensive game dev sequences: they cost too much in terms of taking the player out of the game right when it should be building towards a climax.

A screenshot from Luto. A bedroom of a child or teenager, with posters over the walls, an old CRT computer screen and TV, and games on the shelves. The room is bathed in a late evening light coming through the open window blinds.

Routine [WATCHED] - Moon station survival horror. Really immaculate suspense-building setpieces, clever use of your equipment to build tension. While the game has the horror aspect of the gameplay and environment absolutely mastered, the downside is that the plot begins to struggle a bit in the second half, and is a little unsatisfying at the end.

Spoilers

It feels a bit like the creators never sat down to consider what it was about the story that imbued horror beyond ‘mind-control fungus’. People getting compelled to act out the plan of another being is just a plot point (and a common one at that), not a satisfying plot by itself. The people in the story don’t hurt one another, and they don’t seem scared about what is happening to them (even those who are not yet affected don’t even seem as scared as they should be). Compare equivalent stories: Amigara Fault, where everyone is terrified of the compulsion but unable to resist it or help others resist it; Dead Space, where part of the horror is in what human beings do to one another in order to make the horror happen.

And that's it for games of 2025! Assorted other media coming up next...