Category: Played

Entertainment, recreation, or otherwise game.

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Played

Games of 2025

2025 was a pretty awful year in the life sense, but an oddly great year for games – enough that after five years without, I’ve got a list to share. 

“Oddly great” feels apt when the industry is imploding daily. Studios are dying. Hardware is more expensive than ever. Executives acting like AI slop being everywhere should just be accepted as a rational evolution of the industry.

But there’s still joy to be found in the margins. Plenty of small games and passion projects left a mark on me this year.

Honorable mentions: Cauldron, Dispatch, Expedition 33, the Simpsons mini-season of Fortnite, Idle Inc., Hades 2, Lumines Arise, REMATCH, Tokyo Xtreme Racer.

List in alphabetical order because they’re all good games worth your time.

I’ve always had a love of full-motion video in gaming, and the words “weird FMV game” have perhaps never applied more than they do to Blippo+. You can have that weird sense of discovery as you flip through a list of unfamiliar and slightly foreign TV channels any time! No surprise at all it’s from Panic, a think tank of gaming weirdos previously disguised as a Mac shareware company.

“Extraction shooter” always felt like code for “It’s a shooter, but we added a bunch of Souls-like nonsense to make you hate it”. But Escape from Duckov ticked a lot of boxes – a constant sense of progression, no online PvP to spare me from people who live in the game, and combat easy enough to handle but just sweaty enough to make it fights feel like they have stakes. Price point is great too.

I’ve long appreciated the Animal Crossing series but often wished there was more focus on quality of life and not torturing the player. (YOU CAN STACK FRUIT?!) Someone answered my plea, and weirdly, it was…Sanrio? Hello Kitty Island Adventure is the best Animal Crossing game I’ve ever played.

The Hundred Line –Last Defense Academy– takes an insane conceit – “what if you lived underground but then were transported to a school in an abandoned wasteland constantly attacked by monsters and if you fail to defend it for 100 days humanity ends oh and death isn’t usually permanent anyhow good luck” – and manages to make it about 100x more insane as you work through the plot.

And then (spoilers, I guess?) you finish the game and you travel back in time and now there’s 100 different branching ways to see the story through. I finished the first run in 2025; we’ll see if I have the endurance to find my way through all 100 endings in 2026. (I actually don’t love the combat!)

Kaizen Game Works was responsible for Paradise Killer, one of my favorites from 2020. Their follow-up, Promise Mascot Agency, is not what I expected but exactly what I needed. The best card-battle Burnout-Paradise-adjacent business-management-sim cursed-fetch-quest deviant Yakuza-like you’ll probably ever play.

Q-Up is…well…you kind of flip a coin, it comes up heads, it comes up tails…it’s different every time.

No game had more to say about the state of gaming, of what it even means to play a game anymore, and of the world around those games. Added bonus: soundtrack of the year.

The vibes are immaculate in Skate Story, a thinky little skateboard game from Devolver where you’re just trying to eat the moon, no big deal. A killer soundtrack by Blood Cultures got them into heavy rotation in my Apple Music library just from the demo version.

You’ve chased perfection for as long as you can remember, but the burnout overwhelms you. A strange man tells you it’s okay and perhaps you’d like to make some tea. People come and go.

Wanderstop is beautiful, cozy, reflective and I’m not sure I can bring myself to play it for any length of time because I worry I’m going to break down crying when I do. I’m sure I will get back to Alta and Boro soon, but…again, 2025 was a lot.

Burnout Paradise finally has an heir; for better or for worse, I think it had the baby with Codemaster’s Fuel. But I loved both of those games, so Wreckreation is my ideal open world racing thing. I just hope it finds a player base and survives with the recent dire studio news.

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Played Reflected

Games of 2020: Kentucky Route Zero

In a year without travel, a game about the road.

I’m not sure what triggered the original thought that the best way to end the year was to try and write about video games. I’m not sure why I continue to try.

When I was a younger and higher energy blogger, staging twenty-five sequential posts to run throughout December was fairly effortless. Now, even with just five titles on my list this year, I’ve stretched the exercise into the second month of 2021.

In 2013, as I rushed to wrap my thoughts, I gave all of a half-paragraph on the first chapter of an episodic game I had spent a quiet evening with:

And, in an experience that isn’t over yet, Kentucky Route Zero (PC/Mac) helped re-invent the point and click adventure. (The way to best enjoy KRZ: pour a glass of iced tea, add a shot of whiskey, turn out the lights, and let the game take it from there.)

I would not play much more of KRZ after 2013. I have a vague memory of getting a little into Act II and deciding that, perhaps I’d just wait for the release to finish.

KRZ was meant to release at a fairly regular clip, with five planned acts. But the road stretched longer than I anticipated: Act V would not emerge until January 28th, 2020.

This blog first formed when I was 19 years old. Dropping the big “WELCOME TO MY VERY MOODY HOMEPAGE” energy of my teenage years for a date-organized format seemed the most efficient way to communicate about my college experience.

From there, the path has meandered. The tone shifts gradually but sometimes abruptly, steering into absurdity or surreal moments.

Characters drift in and out – most remain familiar, though some I haven’t spoken to in years. Some names don’t ring a bell without staring at them for a while.

Framing devices change; a few posts are written as a play, while another (about an attempt to get tech support) is written as a text adventure.

There’s a routine deference to the power of music at poignant moments. Music has always helped me say the things I can’t find the words for.

There is love and there is loss.

Kentucky Route Zero started in 2013 with a man named Conway trying to make a delivery to 5 Dogwood Drive. He stops at a gas station to ask for directions, because he is lost.

Over five acts and four intermissions, the story has meandered. The tone shifts gradually but sometimes abruptly, steering into absurdity (I recall bears in a conference room?) and dream logic (the titular road must be uniquely navigated).

Yup. Bears in a conference room.

Characters drift in and out, some being completely skippable and others leaving the core group with little notice.

Framing devices change: one intermission is a play with audience, while a middle portion of Act III plays out as a text adventure.

There’s a routine deference to the power of music at poignant moments: the performance at the Lower Depths bar; the funeral in Act V.

There is love and there is loss.

What makes Kentucky Route Zero stand out – even after a nine year lifecycle (the Kickstarter campaign was in 2011!) – is that you will catch reflections of your life in it. At the risk of imbuing it with a level of magical thinking, you will see what it wants to show you.

Alex Navarro wrote that it “radiates a kind of sympathy that isn’t like much else I’ve played“. That sympathy makes its moments, big and small, resonate and form into their own constellation of personal meaning. Austin Walker connected his reflections to a story about his tooth. Scott Benson connected his reflections to the passing of his cat.

I have been through a lot of life since I started this very self-indulgent blog. (My hair has gone to what I have been told is a very tasteful shade of grey; “salt and pepper”, they say.) I am over twice the age I was when this site came together. My photo archives stretch back nearly as long as the site, and I’ve been looking at both a lot lately.

I consider my two decades of adult life and I feel, well, old. I can still feel every quiet moment of togetherness with friends I can no longer regularly see. I can taste the pain of loss in every post I chose to lead with “This is the latest in the continuing series of me saying goodbye to the things I love.”

And I see the thread of pressing on, to rebuild when facing adversity, to find 5 Dogwood Drive. I don’t quite know where the path forward is going to take me. But I know I must keep going.

Kentucky Route Zero is about the roads we travel and the journeys we take together. Get a drink, turn down the lights, and let the game take it from there. I hope you love it as much as I did.

Kentucky Route Zero is available on PC, Mac, Switch, Playstation, and Xbox One. I spent ten hours with it in 2020.

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Played

Games of 2020: Umurangi Generation

In a year of unrest, a game about documenting it.

Umurangi Generation is a first person game where you explore a near-future world through the lens of a camera. There are gameplay elements, but they are secondary to the act of trying to understand the world around you.

When I first moved to NYC, it was through the lens of a camera that I was able to contextualize the city’s shape and heartbeat. That sense of anxious discovery and witness comes across strong throughout Umurangi.

It is impossible to ignore the profound societal challenges of 2020. Umurangi – released in May, with an expansion released in November – may be the game that best reflects the state of the world in its release year.

Umurangi Generation (and the expansion Umurangi Generation Macro) is available on Steam, with a Switch release in the works. I logged around 6 hours.