2025 Retrospective: Games

It has been another hideous year for the game industry, and tech in general. And the world. It’s difficult to muster much enthusiasm for a shambling zombie industry, its priority product the sludge dribbling from its rotting, slackened lips.

Did I Play Any Games This Year?

I spent too much time trying to do real things this year, and so to be honest I didn’t play many games. As always, gathering together friends to play analog games was exceedingly difficult and finding time to play solo games was not much easier. But when I managed it, it was lovely.

I played six digital games at any meaningful length this year.

Two of them were sharp, engaging puzzle games: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Rise of the Golden Idol. Lorelei knocked me out, and not just because I’m terrible at math. I loved the twisty, spooky atmosphere and how it intensified my fear/obsession with the puzzles. I haven’t finished them all yet, but I must. I will! If I do enough middle school math and pattern-matching, I will understand the nature of art…

Rise of the Golden Idol isn’t, to be clear, as good as Case of the Golden Idol, but that’s like saying a delicious sundae I made at home isn’t as good as the gold-leaf-encrusted rose-flavored panna cotta I had at the omakase service where they handed you every individual nigiri with narration. If you get to have one gold-leaf rose panna cotta ever, you’re very lucky. Similarly, while Rise doesn’t have the same brilliant slow-burn story illuminating the venality and cravenness of men’s souls, it does have a fun, engaging mystery and some new mechanical flourishes. I slept on Case for a long time because of the gonked-out artstyle, but when it arrived for me, it arrived. Rise did not ever arrive, but it was delightful and amusing the whole time. I continue to creep pleasurably through the DLC, one puzzle at a time.

I played three big 3D action-adventure games this year. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is a game not without its controversies. The guy in charge of it is a batshit crazy right-winger, for example. But what’s really weird about the game is that it…isn’t necessarily batshit right-wing propaganda. There are many arguments to made, and which have been made, about whether we can ever adventure around medieval Europe pastorally and have it not be right-wing. But pretending to be a knight is fun and cool; seeing the world in another time is fun and cool; being an ancillary little witness to history that’s new to me is fun and cool. I would like us to someday come up with some lefty things that are fun (besides trying to post your way to having the biggest dick on Bluesky) but until then I am capable of filtering out light Czech nationalist propaganda for myself while bounding about the fields of 1400s Bohemia getting my skull staved in by rival knights. KC: DII is this year’s Cyberpunk 2077: the hill upon which I am prepared to die, because it lets me run around in the skin of a naive and bumbling dude and love another world (as well as my in-game boy best friend).

Speaking of best friends, I completed a Baldur’s Gate 3 co-op run with my most loyal compatriot this year. Playing BG3 in co-op mode is mainly hella silly. I have confronted this game with a number of fine associates, and every time we got silly. This run was no different, and as much as it highlighted some of the game’s genuine flaws (Larian, fellas, I love you, but Act 3 is flaccid. I know an underemployed interactive narrative specialist who could help you out on the next one…), it also reinforced my confidence in the elements of the game that really, really work. Despite our treating the whole run as a meme, when my friend and I saved Astarion from Cazador and helped him to realize that killing thousands is bad, we both experienced genuine pathos. Wig!

I also played Avowed, but I want to do a detailed analysis post on that game, so I won’t say much here. It wasn’t as bad as I feared. I had fun with it. However, leaving Xbox/Microsoft behind seems more urgent by the day. We’ll talk it out later in 2026.

Percentage of My Life Spent Playing The Sims 2

They rereleased The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 this year, presumably on wee hidden emulators so you can play them on current hardware. Yes, I bought them. I bought them the day they came out. You think I have this blog only to indulge my chronic pretension and haterism, but I too am Piggy and I bustled up to EA’s trough when they rang my bell.

I am 29 years old. I’ve lived for about 254,000 hours. I suspect I’ve spent about 1% of my life playing Sims games and over half of that would be on The Sims 2. It still hit so hard when I finally booted it up again in 2025. I loved it. I think the key to The Sims 2, and what it keys into for the people who like it, is that it’s the best Game in The Sims franchise. Not the best Life Simulator, which I will happily concede is The Sims 3, but the best Game: a goals-driven, cyclical, inconsistently rewarding machine for story-production.

Nostalgia is the mental disease of our time, and I too am headed for the asylum.

Analog Games

I struggle continually to gather my brethren around me and actually play analog games. But when I did manage this, it was consistently great fun. I played multiple forms and modes of Good Society, which is a delightful game, as long as you have prosocial gaming partners. I’m very #blessed to have several, even if it’s hard to find time for them to meet.

I also had the distinct pleasure of introducing some friends to For The Queen, the best storytelling card game to have in your pocket for every occasion. It is fun over Zoom, it is fun in the car, I suspect it would even be fun waiting at the DMV. Do yourself a favor and pick up For The Queen. Then make your own hack; I want to play it!

Solo games are having a mad naissance these past few years, which is probably a recession indicator but is also a lot of fun if, like me, you live in an isolated hermitage (your parents’ house in the Midwest) because of your spiritual commitments (unemployed). The best of these from my 2025 play was Koriko: A Magical Year. Koriko seeks to replicate the mood and journey of a Ghibli coming-of-age story like Kiki’s Delivery Service, but in doing so through the first-person frame of the journaling game creates such a tender emotional space that you may never be the same. Growing/changing/loving/exploring: Koriko will remind you why you want to do these things, so long as you have room on your desk to maintain some carefully-shuffled Tarot decks and a stack of dice for six to sixteen weeks.

What’s Actually Important to Me About Games?

For real: what matters about games? What’s worth keeping?

I went to a number of physical game stores this year, places where people who actually love tabletop games curate what’s on shelves and hang out with each other. I got to see the secret behind-the-counter wares. I put money on said counter to keep those stores in business. That mattered.

I loved traveling to imaginary and impossible virtual worlds in a deliciously sensorially stimulating way. It lessened the pressure of isolation and economic and neurological constraint. That mattered.

For all the time I didn’t spend playing games this year, I spent a lot of time with my friends and colleagues in the North American game design community. I worked with them on conference organizing, I hung out with them around the conference, I memed and schemed with them over Discord. They helped me in job-searching, skill-grinding, and life in general. I hope I helped them too. That mattered.

I enjoyed the possibility spaces of the games I played, the opportunity to test my own ideas and explore how systems operate in simulated fields, and above all the surprise generated by the other interactor, whether that was my friend, my computer, or humble chance. That mattered.

I played games with my friends and family, and we experienced delight. The work done by sometimes one and sometimes hundreds of designers produced a magical mental location where I and my associates could go and have a good time. In a very hard time, that mattered.

Does any of that belong to the game industry? Absolutely not. If anything, the game industry is intent on debasing all these values via the pursuit of hack content at minimal financial cost and maximum human cost.

We, the little gnomes and gremlins suspended within the quicksand of said industry, are systems engineers and narrative designers. We like to explore possibility states with more relentless granularity than anyone else on Earth. We need only build the door to the next world before we can step through it. Let us be thankful for our friends, colleagues, and neighbors who are leading the way in constructing said door. Let us get crafting. It’s crunch time.