The Light that Never Warms

I have made a "Top X Games of All Time" list a few times over the course of my life, for no particular reason beyond "it's fun for me."

The problem is that they keep making new games. And redoing the entire list over and over seems silly. But what if I kept a running list going - sorted by year - of all of the really good games? What if?

I'm starting with links to games I've written about as part of Top X Games lists over the years. Whenever a game comes along that feels special, I can write a thing and add it to this list. These are games I have loved over the years, or at least liked or found interesting enough to want to write something for them.

1981: Galaga Ms. Pac-Man

1985: Gauntlet

1986: Bubble Bobble The Legend of Zelda Dragon Warrior

1987: Mike Tyson's Punch-Out Contra

1988: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link Bionic Commando Dragon Warrior III Super Mario Bros. 2 Maniac Mansion

1989: River City Ransom Shadowgate Strider Mega Man 2

1990: Super Mario Bros. 3

1991: Tecmo Super Bowl Super Mario World

1992: Shining Force Super Mario Kart The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

1993: NHL '94

1994: Super Metroid

1995: Suikoden

1996: Super Mario 64

1997: Final Fantasy Tactics

1998: Baldur's Gate Starcraft Twisted Metal 3 Diablo

1999: Planescape: Torment Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings

2000: Diablo II Paper Mario The Sims

2001: Animal Crossing

2002: Warlords Battlecry II

2003: Culdcept Grand Theft Auto III Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

2004: Katamari Damacy Dragon Quest VIII World of Warcraft

2005: God of War Chibi-Robo!

2006: Viva Pinata Guitar Hero II The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Persona 3 Dead Rising Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime Okami

2007: BioShock Portal

2008: Castle Crashers Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 Pixeljunk Monsters

2009: Plants vs. Zombies Flower

2010: Heavy Rain

2011: Portal 2 Dungeons of Dredmor

2012: Journey Diablo III

2013: The Wolf Among Us Gone Home

2014: Transistor

2015: Life is Strange Steamworld Heist Heroes of the Storm

2016: Firewatch Stardew Valley Salt & Sanctuary Darkest Dungeon Final Fantasy XV

2017: Pyre Hollow Knight Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Slime Rancher Persona 5 SUPERHOT VR NieR: Automata Yakuza 0 Night in the Woods

2018: Monster Hunter World Florence Moss Astro Bot Rescue Mission Dead Cells

2019: Slay the Spire Resident Evil 2 Remake Days Gone River City Girls 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim Death Stranding Disco Elysium

2020: Hades Yakuza: Like a Dragon Spiritfarer Monster Train Final Fantasy 7 Remake

2021: Inscryption Bravely Default II Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Resident Evil Village Life is Strange: True Colors

2022: Triangle Strategy Citizen Sleeper Elden Ring Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope Xenoblade Chronicles 3 The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe™ Tactics Ogre: Reborn I Was a Teenage Exocolonist Marvel’s Midnight Suns

2023: Hogwarts Legacy Baldur’s Gate 3 Alan Wake II

2024: Persona 3: Reload 2025: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Dispatch

2026: Mewgenics

I often use the phrase "I love everything except the part where you play it" about games. There have been a lot of titles over the years that I am drawn to in such a way that I play them, bounce off after a couple of hours, think about them months or years later, then repeat the cycle. Control. Outer Wilds. Celeste. The Return of the Obra Dinn.

Mewgenics might be the first game for me where the inverse is true. I actively dislike just about everything about Mewgenics. Except for the part where you play it.

Mewgenics is from the creators who gave us The Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy, so I wasn't exactly surprised at the aesthetics and sensibilities of the game. I thought Binding of Isaac's art style was gross (negative) and I remember the game starring a crying baby in a world full of poops and pee and flies. It's a game I could have fallen in love with: a run-based action game with a huge catalog of items to find and randomly generated levels (I don't believe we had this language in 2011 but we now call BoI a roguelike). But the entire vibe of the game actively pushed me away. And nothing about Super Meat Boy appeals to me in any way.

The first I heard of Mewgenics was that it was a run-based tactics game about cats. So there's no way I was going to not check it out. I saw one of the developers Edmund McMillan doing some pre-release streams and I liked what I saw.*

I picked up the game when it launched, and was immediately bought in when the song Kat Fight** played over the tutorial. It's a tactics-ass tactics game where the field is a grid and all movement and abilities are tile-based. Like many of my favorite games, think "Chess but the pieces have a whole bunch of different abilities." It's a solid one of those, but more importantly it's run-based.

This means you have a home base you manage. You set out on expeditions from here and return afterward (or don't). Your characters are all disposable, so don't get attached. If this sounds familiar, I could be describing my favorite game of all time right now. Hearing Mewgenics compared to Darkest Dungeon still creates a record scratch in my brain though. Instead of managing a hamlet full of sad and deranged people trying to survive the Lovecraftian horrors that lie below your ancestral homestead, you are managing a house full of horny cats that are fighting and fucking and shitting always.

You select up to 4 cats to head out into one of the game's zones (you start with a single area and unlock others as you progress). Each cat has stats you'd expect from an RPG: strength, dexterity, intelligence, constitution, speed, luck, and charisma. You assign a class for each cat and you're off; classes are Fighter, Hunter, Mage, and Tank at first, but you end up with a total of 14 to choose from. This means you can get weird with your party compositions. Want to try having a beefy Necromancer instead of a Tank or Fighter? Go for it! A party of all Clerics? What's the worst that could happen?

The worst that could happen is that your party wipes and no one comes home. Which isn't too big of a deal since a cat that returns home cannot be dispatched again. This means the stakes are lower and the swings are smaller - whether this is a positive or negative is in the eye of the beholder. Losing a high-level character in Darkest Dungeon always feels really bad, but that means I am invested in every expedition because there are stakes. In Mewgenics, after a cat returns home, their function is to breed and maybe do battle in one of the game's events where your home is invaded. The lower stakes does make it easier to try out weird stuff, which is nice.

At the end of each day, some cats in your house will fuck or fight depending on their traits and the makeup of the room they are in. You can add decorations to your house that influence this as well as the likelihood of mutations being present in the offspring and the quality of strays that show up. This is presumably where the game gets its name: you are selecting which cats will hopefully breed - you want the ones with good stats and traits to pass those on, while the cats with harmful mutations and diseases you will want to give away to one of the town's weird denizens.

This is a potential layer of ick depending on your sensibilities. Given the current climate here in the US, you'd be excused for wanting no part of a piece of work that approaches the subject of eugenics with big floppy shoes and a flower that squirts water. Similarly in Darkest Dungeon, sometimes you get a hero with some pretty bad drawbacks. Some players would dispatch those heroes, but I never could do that. I'd always work around the problems and fix them where I could. Darkest Dungeon is a game about overcoming adversity and getting back up again and again. In Mewgenics, I have no qualms about throwing my cats away.

This brings me to the other layer of ick in the game: the theme aesthetics. I've never liked this studio's art style starting with Binding of Isaac - it's gross humor with lots of pee and poops, and a little bit of that goes a LONG way for me. There's a ton of this in Mewgenics from the need to clean up piles of shit in the house every day to cats getting "butt worms" to the boss enemy who is a skinless man who is flinging blood and puke and shit everywhere who - when he dies - shits out his intestines and tries to stuff them back in before keeling over dead. All of this serves to actively push me away from the experience.

The way the characters are written is likewise cringe-inducing in a way that I can't quite suss out. It seems self-aware - like Tink, the over-the-top flamboyantly gay man with the pencil moustache and pink shirt who only wants newborn kittens from you. Or the character who appears immediately after you lose a run and says "I saw the whole thing! HILARIOUS!" I can't imagine someone creating this and thinking it's good. It seems like it's all there to annoy or offend. Everything in this game feels like it's there to make me uncomfortable, like Mewgenics is a weird art house film. "This sucks to look at and think about. Yeah, we know."

That I put 125 hours into Mewgenics is a testament to the gameplay. You choose your cats, assign them classes, and head out to try to finish a run. There are a LOT of abilities, equipment, and traits. I was still seeing new things after 100 hours. The core gameplay is really, really satisfying. The variety in classes and abilities makes every run feel unique, and sometimes you can come up with some gamebreaking combinations. A very simple example - there is a Cleric ability that drops an item on the ground that grants the cat who picks it up invulnerability to the next source of damage. There's also an ability that says when this cat picks something up, ALL of your cats get its benefits. Every turn I was creating this pickup, walking over it, and stacking invulnerability on my entire party.

I don't remember whether I won that run or not, because Mewgenics is a hubris game - this is something I adore. You can become insanely powerful and feel unstoppable and then, somehow, you get stopped. When this is done right, it's really satisfying. Usually it's in the form of "I specialized in this one aspect but then I encountered an enemy immune to that" which just means I should have been more well-rounded. But taking one aspect and cranking it up until the dial breaks is so FUN!

Mewgenics does this sometimes. Other times, the game really fucks you over in the form of random events. On an expedition you are moving from node to node having fights, visiting shops, and triggering events. Sometimes there's a choice of where to go, but often there is not. And with events, sometimes you can choose to ignore them, but other times you cannot. You can get saddled with some stuff that alters your run in a major way.

For example, I remember triggering an event that gave my Fighter the Deja Vu disorder meaning whenever you issue that cat an order (move, attack, use an item or ability) there is a 10% chance it will simply not trigger. I headed into the next battle and told that cat to move. Nope. Okay, round 2. The cat moves and I tell them to attack. Nope. That was one of the times where I rage quit the game, considered just uninstalling it, then found myself playing it again an hour later.

Mewgenics is like 80% of the way to being one of my favorite games ever made and an easy frontrunner for my game of the year. That other 20% is so rancid that the game lands in a weird, tragic "What if?" bucket for me. Overall I enjoyed my time with it quite a bit and it will definitely be in my top 10 this year. I was hooked on this game for a couple of months solid, and the soundtrack had me doing tasks around the house and muttering "Cat fight! Cat fight!" or quietly singing "So tasty tasty legs, so tasty tasty legs" to myself.

It's memorable for that alone.

I enjoy making Top (insert number here) Games/Books/Albums/Movies of the Year/Decade/All Time lists. I am fascinated by the long view of a piece of work. Sometimes a game will hit hard for me, but it is all but gone from my memory when I look back on it in the months or years that follow. The inverse is also true.

I enjoyed Cowboy Bebop on my first viewing, but I didn't fall in love with it. I found my mind wandering back to it as the years wore on, and each rewatch has cemented it as one of my favorite series. So it is with a handful of videogames. And I keep finding myself drifting back to I Was a Teenage Exocolonist.

The excellent soundtrack is a big factor in this. The game has a sort of hopeful melancholy that is really captured by the music. I swear I could listen to this on a loop for hours (headphones are a must):

But I digress.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is part visual novel & part (simple) card game that takes place in a sci-fi future setting. You are a ten-year-old child growing up in a small colony establishing itself on a new planet with the story ending after 10 years. You will spend your time running errands, farming, going to school, training for the military, making friends...you can do any or all of those things to some extent, but you'll probably end up focusing on a couple of activities and a couple of friends.

How you spend your time determines how your skills improve and which cards end up in your deck. Your skills gate the dialogue and story choices available to you. If you want to grab a weapon and help defend the colony, you'd better have some Bravery and Combat ability. Similarly, if someone is upset and you're not sure why, you're not getting anywhere without some Empathy. Skills are grouped by color with social skills being yellow, reasoning skills being blue, and physical skills being red. Specializing makes it easier to make flushes and straight flushes in the cardplay portions of the game.

Now, as a big fan of card games in general and deckbuilders specifically, I was initially disappointed in this game. The cardplay is very simple, revolving mostly around making poker hands and matching colors. It isn't BAD, but it's not going to wow anyone.

The setting likewise doesn't tickle me. I feel similarly about science fiction the way some folks feel about high fantasy. When you start talking about spaceships and aliens, my eyes glaze over. But great writing and craftsmanship transcend genre (this belief has led me to find a lot of hidden gems and surprise favorites - and more than a few duds).

You'll meet characters who feel authentic. Some I could relate to, others I could not. They all feel like real people though. You start off as a 10-year-old who has only known life aboard the colony ship. Finding a habitable planet means their first time seeing the sky, walking on terra firma, seeing plants that weren't grown in a lab, and so on.

Your people are getting a foothold on a new planet with all the questions, debates, and dangers that come with that. As a child, you're dealing with whether to befriend the bossy girl, or try to hang out with the aloof kid who wants nothing to do with anyone, and so on. You spend your days working in the greenhouse, or attending classes where you learn about biology and tech, or playing sports with friends, or training for guard duty, or working in the nursery.

The adults sometimes seem stressed or weary, but you have your own little bubble within that world. When big, scary things happen it feels like childhood is over. Your parents try to shield you, but you can see the cracks showing in their personas. As you get older, you find yourself adjacent to conversations about how a society should operate, and how we behave in a new world. Some folks believe the planet is ours for the taking, that we should claim everything we can without regard for the world we are invading. Others want to establish a symbiotic relationship with the local fauna. It's easy (for me) to say "We shouldn't kill any animals or damage the ecosystem" but that becomes tougher when people are starving, or wildlife is endangering your citizens.

It's easy to hold beliefs when nothing is at stake.

This is a game that lives and dies by its writing. I can describe the setting and mechanisms in Exocolonist, but really it's all about the storytelling. You only care about the world if you care about the people who populate that world. This is where the game shines. I'll give you an example (with spoilers if you care about that):

Among your peer group is a red-haired girl named Anemone. She's an indomitable little ball of energy who loves to play sports and generally do anything that involves running, jumping, and/or getting dirty. Her big brother Kom is likewise athletic, optimistic, and fun-loving. He is a capable and respected member of the security group for the colony. Anemone idolizes him.

During an attack on the colony, Kom is killed. After this, Anemone's enthusiasm and joy are gone, and she becomes hardened and vengeful in a way that feels both understandable and heartbreaking. She leans into her military training and sides with the "Let's dominate this new world by force" approach. She's not a cruel and hateful person. She's wounded. She doesn't want others to go through what she went through. I can disagree with her, but I can't tell her she's wrong and I'm not sure I would feel differently in her shoes.

It's all unsettling because of how relatable much of it feels. I experienced the innocence of childhood and the loss of that innocence. Budding romances and friendships that wax and wane, and sometimes change in irrevocable ways. There's a seasonal cycle where the weather and visuals change, and a threat that comes on a regular basis. The sense of dread and fear is pervasive when the time draws near, as is the exhale after.

I loved my play of I was a Teenage Exocolonist; my ending felt pretty shocking, and the game made it clear that it was one of many potential endings. The game wedged itself into my brain in such a way that eventually decided to replay it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game acknowledges your previous plays. Some events come up and you may get new dialogue options and story choices if it's something you've experienced on a previous play. This gives you an occasional chance to be a hero or, more often, to alarm people by saying strange things and making predictions about what's going to happen. You also get the inevitable butterfly effect of unexpected consequences.

I'm tired of needing to start this way every year.

Hey, this year sucks and everything is awful but at least the games are good right?

The industry continues to be rotten with layoffs, consolidation, AI integration, remakes and sequels. All of which are in service of making the numbers go up at the expense of the wellbeing of the humans who make the games. The games being made are worse for this as well. There's room for remaking old games that are hard to access and/or held back by the technical limitations of their time, but it feels like the pendulum has swing way too far in that direction. Yes, I appreciate some sequels and remakes, but I treasure the times when I play something new I didn't know I wanted. A lot of games feel like they exist because someone pored over spreadsheets and graphs and said "we are guaranteed this profit margin if we leverage this IP in this way" and that makes me want to go live in a hole in the ground somewhere far from all of this.

Granted, it's low on the list of things that make me feel that way. But still.

I played a lot of sequels this year. Like, a LOT.

Ahem.

Hades 2 Silksong Power Wash Simulator 2 Slime Rancher 2 Citizen Sleeper 2 Monster Train 2 Strange Antiquities Death Stranding 2 Outer Worlds 2

A lot of twos. It's really hard for a sequel to light me up the way a new game can. All of these have some degree of "Oh, it's that thing I liked before, again." Sometimes I can still enjoy the thing, but often it feels like "Okay this is good and all, but I've already played this game."

In larger scheme of things, videogames are pretty low on the list of why 2025 was bad. It's been a difficult year personally, for my family and several close friends, and it generally feels like our world is sliding into hell. We've slowly climbing the track on the rollercoaster for years, and now we're on the steep descent. I know many, many people have it much harder than myself.

Find your people and take care of one another, everyone.

This year sucks and everything is awful but at least the games are good right?

10. Blue Prince

In some timeline Blue Prince is probably number 2 on this list. It's a timeline where I relish puzzle solving rather than tolerate it. It is not this one. I wish it was.

Blue Prince is part boardgame, part puzzle game. You've inherited your uncle's estate on one condition: you need to find the 46th room in his 45-room home. Oh, and the rooms seem to rearrange themselves at the start of each day. This is portrayed by giving you 3 rooms to choose from whenever you open a door. The pool of possible rooms slowly grows over time. Entering a new room costs 1 stamina, so running out of stamina will end your day. Far more often though, you'll end a day when you paint yourself into a corner in the map because you're out of keys, or your choice of rooms doesn't have a door in the right place. This could be frustrating, but it wasn't for me. I like the challenge of planning ahead and leaving myself options and seeing how far I can get. The RNG is gonna get you, but there are ways to mitigate its effects.

I love the aesthetics of the game. The house is beautiful and lonely, and full of puzzles both in the "here's a thing in this room to be solved right now" sense and the larger "I need to piece different pieces of information together across several hours of gameplay" sense. There's a larger mystery at play that I won't get into here, but you're learning about the nature of your family and their place within the world.

It's a game where you get out what you put in. It's a good idea to have a notebook and take screenshots. Things that seem innocuous will turn out to be important to you later.

My issue is that I do not enjoy banging my head against a puzzle until I sort it out - particularly when I'm not 100 certain that I have everything I need. There are puzzles with levers and power boxes and water levels and at some point you can't ass your way through them. You have to really engage and figure them out, but these usually feel like Work to me (not just in Blue Prince, speaking of puzzles in general).

I admire the hell out of Blue Prince and it was one of the best experiences I had this year. I'm not sure I've ever played a game like this, and it's not often I can say that. I feel like I failed the game, not the other way around. 9. Octopath Traveler 0

I generally try to finish a game if it's going to be on my top 10. I didn't do that a lot this year. If a game is very difficult, I'm okay with putting on a list like this. If I fell off a game for other reasons, it's hard for me to justify marking at one of the best. I didn't finish Octopath Traveler 0, but it's a 100 hour JRPG that released in December. So there's a chance it shits the bed in the back half and I regretting putting it here.

It's an old-ass turn based RPG in the best way. It has the requisite twist on combat by way of the brave system that lets your characters store up bonus actions and spend them on multiple / more powerful attacks when the time is right. Every enemy has armor that can be broken by repeated attacks from specific attack types (an enemy might have 8 armor and be vulnerable to daggers, axes, and wind magic for example). This lends combat a tactical puzzle element that I really love.

Where it differs from previous Octopath games is that it allows up to 8 party members, and a roster of many more to choose from. Characters can fight in the front line, and swap into the back to heal. Also, Octopath Traveler 0's predecessors system of "here are 8 characters each with their own story and they will converge at some point" always worked better on paper than in practice for me. It felt like I didn't have a single character to latch onto, and your characters would travel and fight together but you'd choose which character's storyline to pursue at any given time, making the experience feel disjointed.

This game lets you design a character, and you add party members as you meet them in the world. It feels more organic, and that has mattered a lot to me.

OH also, this game first existed as mobile game? Somehow? I don't feel any lingering tendrils of that though. It's weird. It's all weird.

But good!

8. Sektori

Do you want some Geometry Wars for that ass? Sektori has some Geometry Wars for that ass.

It feels immediately familiar but isn't just a clone of the 2003 classic. The playing field rearranges itself every 30 seconds or so. There's a powerup system where you bank upgrade points and decide how to spend them between speed, shields, missiles, and so on. There's also an explosive close-range dash on a short cooldown, so this all lends the game a bit of customization and "play your way". Sektori gives you tiny things to think about in the midst of the frantic, non-stop action which is a fun brand of dangerous.

It's a tough game, but I felt myself slowly improving as I continued to play it. It's the sort of game I'd sit down to play a run or two at the start of a gaming session and sometimes 1 run would turn into 12.

Sektori is a brain off game (positive) where it's a distraction because I have to play in a mindful way, I have to stay focused and cannot afford to let my mind wander for even a moment.

7. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

This game lets you play as longtime series frenemy Goro Majima. He's got amnesia and it's set in modern day and he's a pirate? Fuck it, the game strikes the usual balance between goofy and serious and it all works.

You gather a crew, upgrade your ship, and engage in naval battles to go along with the usual beat 'em up gameplay and offering of minigames. The game is more silly than serious, but it can hit the occasional touching story beat when it is called for. It doesn't reach the emotional levels of fellow Yakuza side story The Man who Erased his Name, but I'm not really looking for that here. Majima is an unhinged character, and much of the game embraces that while still giving him human moments here and there.

Everything RGG Studios makes these days is gold.

6. Two Point Museum

I thought these management sims were another genre of game I used to like, but would never engage with again. I tried Two Point Museum when it came to game pass, then bought it on Steam (so I could play it on the Steam Deck and get the devs a sale).

The game retains the British silliness of the old Bullfrog games from the 90's with the announcer making frequent quips like "Disinterested guests are reminded that not everything has to be a party, okay?" (when the entertainment level is low) or "There's no one in the camera room. this is your chance" (when the security guard on duty leaves the surveillance rom). Exhibits and guests all have a lighthearted cartoonish air about them.

The gameplay threads the needle between challenging and laid back. There are plenty of carrots for the stick with lots of expedition area to unlock, exhibits to be completed, goals to be met, and new museums to be unlocked. The game never puts you on a schedule, so you can ignore the objectives and focus on whatever has your attention at a given time. This made for a really nice "brain half on" game this year.

5. Absolum

Absolum is a run-based beat 'em up with really great visuals and music. And gameplay.

And it's tough. It's one of those games where you slowly unlock boosts and improvements that make future runs easier, but your skill also grows the more you play. It goes from "I'll never be able to beat this boss" to "I expect to get past this boss on every run" which is a satisfying feeling.

There are plenty of hidden goodies to find, and there are multiple branching paths to keep runs from getting too samey. You'll find a thing or defeat a miniboss in one part of the world and that will open something up on another path. The runs often feel similar, but crucially not the same from one to the next. The game feels like the modern evolution of the old games I grew up on like Streets of Rage or Golden Axe.

I haven't beaten the game yet, but I've gotten to the end boss. It's a great game to pick up a couple of times a week and throw myself at.

4. Hades 2

I sure don't know how to pin down my feelings on Hades 2. I feel like a teacher giving my best student's project a C+ because I know they're capable of doing better.

Hades 2 is a terrific game. Like its predecessor, it feels great to play. This time you're playing as Zagreus' sister Melinoe, with each run either making your way back down to the house of Hades or up to Mount Olympus. Your home base is the Crossroads, where your mentor resides along with a crew of chatty weirdoes as you'd expect. Your grandfather Chronos has taken over the House of Hades and is keeping your father prisoner. He is also using big ugly monster Typhon to assault Mount Olympus.

The gods are a mix of holdovers from the first game and new ones. There are new weapons, and pets that tag along and chip in a bit, and an arcana system for buffs and debuffs. The voice acting is, as always, top notch. The music is very good, but easily the most forgettable of SuperGiant's catalog. The gameplay is as good or better than Hades, and that's saying something.

I'll admit I was disappointed when Hades 2 was announced. The original Hades is one of the best games I've ever played. I couldn't wait to see what the studio was going to make next. Every game they've made has been a lovely surprise. Bastion, Transistor, Pyre, and Hades - none of them felt like they were by the numbers. Not every element of each game landed, but they all felt inspired. And I'll take "inspired and flawed" over "competent but not memorable" 10 times out of 10.

So when they announced that they were making Hades again it was a major letdown for me. I told myself that I wanted them to make the game that they wanted to make, and if that's Hades 2 then I'm with them. After finishing Hades 2, I'm not sure why they wanted to make it. The ending was such a wet fart of a thing, it doesn't feel like they had a burning passion to tell more stories in this world.

Zagreus' story felt personal and immediate. The stakes are lower than in Hades 2, but they are personal. Zagreus learns that his mother is alive and out there, and his father wants to keep him from her and from the truth. It's a fantastic motivator.

In Hades 2, Melinoe lives in the Crossroads. Her former home has been taken over, but she doesn't seem to have much connection to it. Likewise, Mount Olympus is in danger, but that threat never really feels urgent. It doesn't help that the protagonist doesn't really grow or change. Melinoe's personality is that she's nice. Stoic. Dutiful. She feels like a pawn being moved on a Chess board.

The ending and the conceit for continuing to play the game after the credits were deeply disappointing. My understanding is that SuperGiant has since patched the ending to the game. It's a testament to my feelings on Hades 2 that I haven't bothered to check it out yet. The ending of a game doesn't feel like something that gets addressed via a patch. To be clear, I do plan on revisiting it. But I've replayed the original Hades multiple times, and I don't feel any pull to replay Hades 2. Not yet at least.

And GOSH, this makes it sound like Hades 2 is a bad game. It isn't! It's a GREAT game! I really enjoyed my time with it. Had it been put out by a different studio and was a standalone thing, I'd hold it in a lot higher regard. But it wasn't made by another studio, it was made by SuperGiant. They normally do story and worldbuilding better than anyone. And I know they can do better.

Yes Billy, your report got a C+ and it IS better than Sally's A- paper. But you're not Sally, you're fucking BILLY and I KNOW that you're capable of doing better than this!

I've seen people say that the title screen hints that Hades 2 is the second of a three-game trilogy and fuck me I hope that isn't true. That feels like a team winning a championship then spending the next decade losing in the playoffs.

Anyway, Hades 2 is still the 4th-best game I played this year.

3. Monster Train 2

So hey.

Some sequels DO land for me.

The original Monster Train is possibly my most-played game, ever. Most run-based games I will play until I have unlocked everything in the game, and that's usually the end. Original Monster Train I can just load up and play and play, anytime. There is so much variety that the game is endlessly replayable for me. There are 5 factions in the game, each with their own unique playstyle and pool of cards, and on each run you will choose 2 of them. You get the champion of one of these factions (a powerful unit, each faction has 2 with several variations of each). There are relics that offer boosts and drawbacks, and random events.

Monster train gives you a box of assorted goodies and says "Here, go figure out how to win with this stuff" and that is catnip for my brain.

Monster Train 2 gives you five new factions and retains the original five, so the pool is twice as large. There are some other tweaks like room modifiers and gear that can be attached to your units, but it's largely the same game. But more.

Monster Train 2 got me through some times this summer (along with Stardew Valley). I just needed anything to keep my brain occupied, and this game does that in a way that can cross over into the "Oh no, I spent 8 hours playing this game today" way where I enjoyed my time, but there were no peaks or valleys. Just a flat line.

I love it but, as with all comfort food, I have to be careful not to gorge myself on it.

2. Dispatch

I wrote about Dispatch here.

It's a terrific choices-matter style game that punches far above its weight. I don't generally care about superhero stories, especially ones trying to be adult.

Dispatch feels more like a workplace dramedy* that happens to revolve around superheroes. Top notch voice acting and interesting characters drove this game home, and it gave me a couple of memorable moments that are going to stay with me.

I'm very glad I got to play it on its 2 episodes per week release cadence.

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Clair Obscur was all but locked in as my game of year by the time I was done with it (I wrote about it here). Not 100% of course, but in a "If something better than this comes along this year I will be shocked" way.

It brought me to tears more than once in its opening hours. The combat challenged me (I'm a lifelong turn-based RPG fan, but also a lifelong Oh-GOD-don't-ask-me-to-parry-PLEASE person). The mystery is good. The endings are just about perfect. It's visually arresting. The score is wonderful.

For some reason I decided I'd get through game by parrying rather than dodging - dodging is easier, but you don't get the counterattacks that come with a parry. Looking back on it now, it may have been because a parry system (from action games) coming into my house (turn-based RPG's) felt like a personal challenge to me. I'm good at turn-based combat and bad at parries, so melding them is a weird unstoppable force/immovable object situation. And the parries and counters feel so incredibly satisfying. A big fucker takes a swing at you, and you get to say No fuck YOU accompanied by a big dramatic clash on the screen.

I was deeply invested in the characters early on, and the story did not disappoint. Turn-based RPG's don't always end in a satisfying way, but this one very much does. And it proved that an RPG doesn't have to be a 100-hour grindfest. Expedition 33 does what it needs to do in about 30 hours. It's a game about grief and escapism. A lot of people didn't like the endings, but I think they're perfect.

I just couldn't ask for more. Clair Obscur Expedition 33 will go down as one of my all-time favorites.

Best Early Access

Fields of Mistria

I love Stardew Valley. It's one of my all-time favorites, it was in my top 5 last time I made a list. It was heavily inspired by Harvest Moon, and lots of games have been in turn heavily inspired by Stardew. I've played a handful of these and, even when they're well-made, they always drive me back into the arms of Stardew.

I've put about 25 hours into Field of Mistria against my better judgment (I tend to avoid Early Access games until 1.0). Mistria is the first one of these that feels unique enough to keep me engaged.

Also fine early access: Dungeon Clawler, Die in the Dungeon

Best Music

Absolum

Gareth Coker (Ori and the Blind Forest, Ruined King) does a great job with the soundtrack as always. I was already feeling the music in Absolum, but when I heard the above theme from the boss fight against the Underking I was hooked. It's an all-timer for me, up there with the Hades end boss theme.

Also excellent music: Blue Prince, Hades 2, News Tower, Keep Driving

Most Disappointing

Xenoblade Chronicles X

I played all 3 Xenoblade Chronicles games for the first time in 2022 and it quickly became one of my favorite series. They all have complex combat systems that require some effort to learn, but they are all rewarding. They all have a prewritten protagonist and cast, and they're very story-forward.

I was surprised when Xenoblade Chronicles X had me make my own main character. And, after maybe 15-20 hours, the game feels like an MMO (derogatory) unlike the other games in the series that often feel like an MMO (complimentary). So far the game has felt empty and checklisty, with almost zero personality - because my character is a blank cipher.

I don't even remember the central conflict or any of the characters. We crash landed on an alien planet and we're trying to survive? After being very impressed by the other 3 games in the series, I was ready for this game to wow me. It did not.

Also disappointing: Silk Song, Hades 2

Best Game I didn't finish

Seance at Blake Manor

I got this on sale with the intent of playing through it with my spouse. It's a murder mystery game that takes place in a hotel. We got a couple of hours into it and it's really cool. I don't have the brain for this type of game, so we need to coordinate to play this one together and that hasn't happened.

Also good unfinished games: Kingdoms of the Dump, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yo-yo

Looking forward to it

Gang of Dragon

The previous director of the Yakuza games is making a new Japanese crime game starring a chubby dude instead of Kiryu Kazuma? Sign me up!

I played many fine games in 2025. More than ten.

These are the ones I spent time with but didn't make the cut.

Wanderstop

Wanderstop is an Eat Your Vegetables game. It's about an ambitious young warrior named Alma who, after training and working and spending years undefeated in battle, suffers a pair of defeats and begins to doubt herself. She finds herself wandering in the woods, loses consciousness, and is rescued by Boro - the owner of a small tea shop. He is, of course, her opposite in every way. Where she seeks to be the best warrior in the world and prove herself, he finds fulfillment in providing tea to his patrons.

When Alma recovers and tries to leave the tea shop, she loses consciousness in the woods only to be rescued by Boro again. He invites her to stay at the shop as long as she likes, and she can serve tea to help out. She, of course, sees this as a waste of time. Alma needs to get out there to train harder and redeem herself.

The game is written by Davy Wreden and so is full of smart writing and fourth wall-breaking moments. The game offers little in the way of extrinsic rewards. You can clean up the piles of leaves around the area, or not. You can plant flowers in the empty pots, or not. You can take photos and hang them around the shop. Or not. You won't get any gear upgrades or achievements for doing so.

You spend your time taking orders from the various patrons (each is a bespoke character, not proc gen). They each have their own story and, frequently, their own issues they are working through. And you make a lot of tea. Whenever Alma drinks a type of tea for the first time, she has a little inner monologue that helps us know her better.

This is all very much my kind of shit. The problem is that the videogame-y bits of Wanderstop are tedious. Which is the point. The issue with making gameplay that is dull or frustrating then winking at that and nodding is - even when the wink and nod work - the player still has to play something that is dull or frustrating.

The writing is wonderful, delving into how we see ourselves and where our sense of worth comes from. Alma is an accomplished warrior and feels like a failure. Boro runs a little out-of-the-way tea shop in the woods, and he is perfectly content.

Still, I got tired of planting bushes, harvesting leaves, putting various combinations of them into the comically massive tea machine in just the right order and at just the right temperature. I admit I did not clean my plate. I played ~90% of the way through and watched the ending(s) on YouTube. A lot of Wanderstop has stuck with me in the months since I put it down. I just wish the moment-to-moment gameplay was more engaging.

Hollow Knight: Silk Song

I tried. I really did. I will probably try again at some point.

I loved Hollow Knight. It was number 3 on my 2017 game of the year* list. So I was always going to play Silk Song, though I wasn't as bonered up about it as a lot of people were. Hollow Knight felt like lightning in a bottle, like it dropped in from a different, better dimension.

Silk Song has the same level of care and attention as its predecessor. I'd expect no less from Team Cherry, who has taken old Blizzard's mantle of "It'll be done when it's done but it will be fantastic" and run with it.

Hollow Knight Silk Song is a great game, easily one of the best of the year. I just don't think it's for me. It feels consistently punishing in a way the first game did not. I miss the stretches of reflection afforded by the solitude of Hollow Knight; Silk Song didn't have this for me. Silk Song did not let me exhale or unclench. Overcoming most boss fights felt like a relief rather than a joy. The game has a lot of mini combat arenas and long runbacks to collect your bug dollars.

2025 was very taxing, and I couldn't enjoy a game relentlessly beating my ass. I might feel different in the future, but at the moment it feels like I've lost Hollow Knight to the get good crowd.

Strange Antiquities

Like Strange Horticulture before it, I really love the vibes but the gameplay isn't quite for me. Customers will approach with a problem, and you're cross referencing your books and unidentified knicknacks to find the one that suits their needs. You classify it, label it, and move on. You'll get letters and other clues directing you to visit locations on the town map to find more magical tchochkes.

There's also a larger narrative happening that you will unfold, and play a part in. The game has multiple endings depending on how you handle certain requests. It's charming, lovely, and very well made - I'm just not a puzzle guy. Still, I enjoyed it quite a lot - I solved most of the puzzles and used a guide for the rest.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yo-yo

This is a top-down Zelda style game, done in the aesthetic of a Gameboy Advance title. I couldn't ask for more from One of These. Tight gameplay, lots of upgrades to earn and swap in and out, smart writing, and banging music.

Did I mention that I don't enjoy puzzles? As with the old Zelda titles, most of the dungeon puzzles are things I need to get through to reach the enjoyable parts of the game. They aren't badly done here, it's just a part of genre that I struggle with.

Demonschool

On paper Demonschool is a slam dunk for me. It's a Persona-esque story where you're attending school and hanging out but also fighting demons by way of turn-based tactical combat. The music slaps or fucks or whatever kids say these days when music is real good. The visuals are PS2/Dreamcast-ish (positive). And Demonschool is good! I enjoyed it enough to finish it. I expected to love it, but I don't.

You have a list of locations you can visit each day with most of them being optional. The combat lets you plan out your turn and keep rewinding and changing until you're satisfied, then you execute the actions you've queued up. That lets you experiment in a fun, low-stress way.

But the 50th battle feels a lot like the 5th. I think they made a really cool thing with the budget they had, I just wanted a little bit more. Every aspect of it left me wanting a little bit more.

Kingdoms of the Dump

This is a charming little indie game that I had a good time with. It was made over several years by someone who worked as janitor. It's a turn-based RPG in a pun-filled world of garbage starring a trash can named Dustin Binsley. I just ran out of time on it, and I 100% plan to return to it and finish it in 2026.

Megabonk/Jotunnslayer/BALL X PIT

I think this year cemented that these action roguelikes(?) are not really for me. It's a trend started by Vampire Survivors. I can enjoy them, but there's a pretty low ceiling for how much I get from one. I have a perfectly pleasant time while I'm playing, then they are gone from my mind immediately after. They're like eating Skittles - a handful now and then is nice, but if I eat a whole bag I'm going to hate myself later.

I played a fair bit of all 3 of these, and I think BALL X PIT was my favorite. It mashes up an autoshooter(?) with Breakout, which feels far more inventive than most of these. They feel like TikTok of the videogame world. Sometimes I don't want to think - I just want to be distracted, and that's fine occasionally at the end of a long day. Too much of that is just sad.

Once Upon a Katamari

There have been a lot of Katamari games over the years. The original PlayStation 2 title felt like it dropped in from another dimension. It was a surprise hit, and that's a hard thing to recapture. The further the series got from that first title the more forced the games felt. As has so often happened, they churned out too many games too quickly, and the series faded away.

I didn't expect a new main Katamari entry in 2025, and even less expected it to be good. The conceit this time around is rolling throughout history, and it's as good a setup as any. You're rolling in feudal Japan and the wild west and in prehistoric times. The rolling is good, the writing is unhinged, the music fits, and the controls are appropriately frustrating (not bad compared to other Katamari games, just compared to other video games).

Starvaders

This year, like most years, had a lot of run-based roguelikes. I enjoyed Drop Duchy, Flick Shot Rogues, Dice Legends, Spellrogue, Deck of Haunts...probably more. It's easy for me to like this sort of game, but it's tough for one to really stand out.

Starvaders is a turn-based strategy game where combat happens on a grid (TILES!!). There's a lot of spatial considerations to the gameplay, and you get different pilots with unique abilities and card pools. It's a really solid One of These.

Battle Suit Aces

This hung in on my top 10 until the very end of the year. It's a fairly chill lane battler. I enjoy those, and don't see many of them these days. It's the follow up to Battle Chef Brigade, which was charming but ultimately missed for me (timers stress me out too much).

Battle Suit Aces is a labor of love clearly made on a budget. It's extremely aw-shucks earnest in its storytelling, so much that I couldn't help but love it. It scratches my tinkering/deckbuilding itch, despite not being challenging enough to force me to engage.

It couldn't quite hang in my top 10, but Battle Suit Aces brings a smile to my face.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

2025 was a weird year for me and gaming. 2024's boardgaming renaissance was short-lived, so I had no problem putting together a full list this time around. It was a very rough mental health year, so that made games like Death Stranding 2 tough to maintain a good groove with. I'm writing this in late December and didn't quite finish it.

For as much as it's over the top and goofy, its atmosphere is also heavy and oppressive. Sure there's Sam wearing a goofy bunny hat and shouting PEKO while he fights bad guys, and Troy Baker fighting you while flipping around and attacking you with a futuristic electric guitar. There's also dead babies and people being dragged into tar. I put the game down for several months this year when I just couldn't handle anything remotely heavy.

It's also yet another sequel in a year of sequels. It doesn't have the "Whoa, what the fuck IS this world all about?" that came with the first game. I've spent the vast majority of my time with the game doing deliveries by vehicle rather than on foot, which is good. I think? There's something meditative about travel and, while Death Stranding does this well, it does eventually start to wear thin. I'm at the point where I don't really want to deliver anything else, I just want the next story beat. I don't know whether the story is good or bad, but it's a lot. And it's entertaining.

On paper, Dispatch is not for me. I've never had much interest in superhero stories, even less so for the edgy, "adult" superhero stories where they cuss and they fuck and the violence is, like, totally visceral.

Two things brought me in on Dispatch:

It's made by ex-Telltale folks. I'm a sucker for Choices Matter games. I've always played them as couch co-op games, or in parallel with friends (comparing choices is fun).

The non-story bits of the game take the form of a strategy game rather than the usual exploration gameplay.

As it turns out, the strategy game is pretty so-so. It's not bad, it's just...fine. Each hero has numerical ratings for Combat, Vigor, Speed, Charisma, and Intelligence. Suss out which traits a job will need and send heroes who are strong in those traits. Some math happens with a die roll then you find out whether you succeeded or failed. Everything is abstracted by way of icons moving around a city map. It serves to break up the story bits and give you something to do apart from making dialogue choices.

Robert IS a dispatcher, after all.

The best parts of this are the writing and the sound bites (such as big stodgy Golem quipping a gruff, unenthusiastic Kobe when he succeeds). Some jobs require a single hero, some can accommodate multiple heroes, and your crew will occasionally spat, or sometimes form friendships with the hero they partnered with. After working a job heroes need some rest time so, if you're not careful, sometimes calls will come in and all of your heroes are either busy or resting.

Ultimately though, it doesn't seem to matter much whether you perform well or poorly in these parts of the game - at least not as far as the story is concerned. You do get the satisfaction of a job well done, or the sting of failure though.

Similarly, the game has cutscenes dotted with quicktime events, and success or failure at these seems irrelevant to the main story. When I started the game, it gave me the option of having interactive cutscenes or not. I chose to have them because videogames, and I think the experience would have been better without. I experienced the problem I've always had with QTE sequences going way back to Indigo Prophecy - I can't appreciate or really even follow the stuff happening on screen because I need to be vigilant for button prompts. Dispatch's animation is so good that I found myself missing button prompts because I was, ya know, watching the cool shit happen.

The videogame-y bits aren't what won me over though. Critically it made me care about the main character. Robert Robertson* falls on hard times and has figure out how to move forward in his life. He's an Ironman-esque superhero, like his father and grandfather before him. When that life goes south, he hires on as a dispatcher for a sort of superhero paid security firm. And the great writing and humor was immediately apparent in the demo when you're standing at a urinal on the first day of your new job, and the massive dude using the urinal next to you offers a fist bump.

CHOICES MATTER

Dispatch is made up of 8 episodes, with 2 dropped each week, and AdHoc did a good job of setting up cliffhangers each time. Episode 3 made me mad (Blonde Blazer is an okay person but a shitty leader), Episode 5 had me grinning, and Episode 6 had me fighting back tears.**

The first superhero you meet is Blonde Blazer; she approaches you in a bar, lightly flirts with you, and offers you a job. She's your boss and also one of two romantic options the game gives you - the other being Invisigal (formerly Invisibitch) and these two characters are more fully fleshed out than the rest of your team of misfits.

The voicework is terrific here. When I saw that the cast was partly made up of well-known streamers, I was afraid the end result would be the usual mess of stunt-casting gone wrong, but no. Every voice in the game brings their character to life and lends them their own special warmth and personality. From mopey powerhouse Phenomaman to awkward, stuttering Waterboy to the dick-punching midget Punch Up, it's truly an ensemble cast where everyone shines. Aaron Paul kills it as quippy-and-smug-but-has-heart protagonist Robert Robertson, and Matthew Mercer is amazing as ever. Jeffrey Wright is incredible as Chase. I could go down the entire cast like this. A game this narrative-driven lives and dies by its voicework, and Dispatch soars here.

The story is a terrific chain of amusing mundane office work moments punctuated by tense dramatic moments that builds to a (mostly) satisfying conclusion. Your crew is a team of antiheroes that feels like it is going to spin apart at any moment, being held together by its new dispatcher and his well-meaning boss. You have to balance keeping the team productive with endearing yourself to them, and that's a tricky act to pull off.

Dispatch is a game greater than the sum of its parts. As I attempt to coldly dissect it on the review table, it reads like a 6 out of 10. But what it does well, it does SO well that I wasn't really bothered by its shortcomings. It helps that it did what every episodic game ever should have done*** which is only release once the game is complete, then drip feed the episodes on a weekly basis. That helped give the game a cadence like a weekly TV show (remember those?). I've played episodic games where I was waiting months for the next one to drop, and that is a momentum killer.

Dispatch does one of my very favorite things in storytelling - it shows us a found family full of misfits and fuckups who come together and support one another. This game has been rattling around in my head since I finished it a few weeks ago. I'm going to sidestep the tired "Is it even a game?" topic and say that I was completely engaged and entertained throughout the full ~9 hours of my time with Dispatch. I've been going about my day occasionally singing Flambae's karaoke rendition of Meredith Brooks' I'm a Bitch under my breath. I'm a bitch, my name's Robert, such a bitch whose name is Robert I'm a bitch, little bitch, I'm such a fucking bitch...

Is there higher praise?

*Yup.

***I know, easy to say from my chair.

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

**Episode 3: Having to fire someone to send a message is very fucked. Not bad writing, just bad management. Made me respect Blonde Blazer less.

Episode 5: The team gathering at Not Taceo Bell and reliving the barfight was brilliantly portrayed and good fun.

If you're anywhere near the world of video games discourse, first I'd like to apologize (in general). Also, you've definitely heard of Clair Obscur. It's the rare game that seemingly came out of nowhere and released to almost universal acclaim. The usual semantic arguments* and people trying to push an agenda** are out in force, but the game itself has really lodged itself into the public consciousness.

Its success reminds me a bit of Baldur's Gate 3's success a couple of years ago. Turn-based RPG's generally don't hit big, not in a "massive sales numbers and dominating the online discourse" way. Same for sprawling, complex RPG's based on Dungeons & Dragons. It's nice to be surprised, in a good way.

Right off the rip, if you look at Clair Obscur you'll notice 3 things:

It's a turn-based RPG

It's melancholy as FUCK, fam

It's French. Like, baguettes and berets French

The game's premise is that, once every year, an enigmatic woman known as The Paintress appears and paints a number on a distant monolith. First she erases the previous number, and everyone of that age is erased (or gommaged). The next number is one tick lower, so it acts as an agonizingly slow doomsday timer.

When the game begins, the Paintress erases the number 34 (killing everyone who is 34 years old) and writes the number 33. This event coincides with an expedition - people who have one year left to live may opt to join an expedition to find and defeat the Paintress in an attempt to end this cycle. It's a sort of (anti?) holiday in the game world.

Right away, the game treats this all in a realistic way. Some people think the expeditions exist only to provide false hope, others believe they are a worthy expenditure and that some hope - however faint - is better than giving up. Neither side is framed as wholly right or wrong. The topic of parenthood comes up early and, if you think about it much, that is a complex subject in a world with an accelerating expiration date. Some folks want to experience family and parenthood and recognize that without children we can have no future. Others believe that having a child who will 100% be orphaned is cruel and selfish.

Again, there's room for reasonable people on both sides of this.

Gameplay-wise, it's the most challenging turn-based RPG I've ever played. It's a strange thing to grapple with. Genres are blurred so much at this point, calling it an RPG requires an explanation. The one thing that sets its systems apart is that the combat requires dodging and parrying in the way that a FromSoft game does. Every enemy attack can be dodged or parried. And even run-of-the-mill enemies frequently hit HARD. If you're consistently missing your dodges and parries, you're going to have a very tough time here.

Expedition 33 is not the first game to add timed button presses to turn-based combat. The Paper Mario and Mario RPG games have been doing this for years. While those games make hitting the prompts feel like icing on the cake, Clair Obscur puts this mechanism front and center. And, unlike those games, this one does little to help you figure out if your prompt is too early or too late, and doesn't give you much in the way of obvious timing cues.

Enemies do the Dark Souls thing of approaching you, hesitating, drawing the sword back for...1 steamboat...2 steamboat...3 steamboat...4 st-FUCK I missed it again. Every enemy has its own timing for each of its various attacks and abilities. Sometimes they have useful audio cues, and it helps to think of the combat like a rhythm game in those cases. Other times there might be a flash or a shake to cue on. Sometimes it's just vibes, man.

There were many moments where I felt like I was 10 years old again, yelling at the TV that the game cheats and I definitely hit that button and fucking C'MON. This is counterbalanced by how incredibly powerful you feel when you successfully parry all of an attack and trigger a high-damage counterattack. Or when an enemy attacks your whole party and you parry it, you get a team retaliation. EXPEDITION 33 PERFORMS A COUNTER HNNNOOOHHMYGOD.

This is not to say that the game's systems outside of the timing-based combat are plain or half-baked. Each character in your party has their own unique fighting style, which will either be a selling point or a drawback depending on your point of view. For me it's the former. One character changes fighting stances, each of which has its own abilities, buffs, and weaknesses. Another builds up elemental charges and spends them to power their abilities. A third has a tarot card system with sun and moon abilities. It's a lot to learn. There's also a system where you equip gear called Pictos, each granting a unique bonus or ability along with a stat boost (somewhat similar to Final Fantasy 7's materia system). Everyone also gets a selection of weapons, each with its own boons and hindrances. It can be overwhelming, but for me? It's one of my favorite things about the genre. Give me a big toolbox and let me customize.

I found myself thinking of Elden Ring quite a bit while playing this game. The punishing, timing-focused combat is an easy connection to make. The game's vibes are also similar. It's a big, weird, mysterious world that isn't always going to explain itself to you. It all has an ethereal, dreamlike quality to it. The game also has a few ill-conceived platforming sections. Neither game is at its best when it's asking you to jump with precision.

In fact, that's one of my few criticisms of the game. I can count on one hand the number of times Clair Obscur asked me to do any tricky jumps, but I enjoyed none of them. Likewise for the game's climbing sections or "Press X to launch yourself across this chasm onto a grappling point with technology or magic or whatever" stuff. Those things aren't bad, and you could argue that they add a little variety to the traversal. They just feel vestigial to me.

Likewise for the game's map system. Or lack of map system. Like Hollow Knight, I understand that this choice was made for lore reasons (they are on an expedition into uncharted lands, of course they don't have a map). My tendency toward getting easily very lost in a 3D game world made this tough for me, but it was more of a minor annoyance than a major hindrance. The critical path is generally lit by lanterns or something similar, but I would often find myself forgetting which direction I was moving after a combat.

But all of this is tiptoeing around the real draw here: the worldbuilding and the story. The writers were nuanced in their depiction of game's themes of trauma, loss, hope, and life's cruel choices. I will not go into detail as you should experience the game for yourself (or at least watch a playthrough if the combat system is a bridge too far). I'll say that I was moved to tears probably at least 3-4 times in my ~35 hour play of Clair Obscur. The game featured a rare "I need to set the controller down and take a walk" moment for me. I can understand everyone's perspective in the story, and it's a tale without villains - only victims.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is going to stay with me for a long time.

For those who come after.

*Is it a JRPG? Can a game made by a French developer be a JRPG? What if you add challenging dodges and parries? IS CLAIR OBSCUR THE DARK SOULS OF RPG'S? IN THIS VIDEO ESSAY I WILL ATTEMPT TO-

This was a weird year for me and video games. I played a lot of them, as usual. This year saw a ton of big JRPG releases, which are very much My Jam. I had a hard time really engaging with the hobby though. Some of it was due to logistical issues but most of it was due to getting back into board games.

I had trouble splitting focus between hobbies, I always have. Whatever I am into, I am INTO it hook, line, and sinker. That's not to say I didn't enjoy videogames this year, I did. But when it came time to make a top 10, I had trouble putting together a list. Usually I end up with 15-20 that I have to pare down to 10; this year I had trouble getting to 10. Worse is that no game really blew me away.**

So, rather than go through the motions, I am going to do Top 5 Board Games and Top 5 Videogames for 2025. The videogames will be 2024 releases, while the board games will be games that were new to me in 2024 (I've been away from the hobby for 8 years).

5b. Ark Nova

Ark Nova is my posterchild for the modern midweight Eurogame. It has a lot going on and, when I read the rules, it didn't stick at all. When I set it up and played through a few turns it was all pretty straight-forward.

While there are a lot of options, none are especially complicated. Ark Nova is a table hog and the first couple of games run a little bit long, but it became a favorite 2-player game for my wife and I.

Players are competing to build the best zoo, each with their own personal board to populate with enclosures and animals. Some will require specific conditions (enclosure must be next to water or rocks, or you must have a certain level of scientific expertise, or you must be partnered with a zoo from Africa or Australia, etc). Animals increase your income and the appeal of your zoo. You can also contribute to conservation projects - juggling conservation with your zoo operations is key to victory.

It's a plate-spinning game where you need to do A and B in order to do C, but you actually need to do Z before you can do B, and so on (complimentary). It also features a wombat.

5v. Metaphor: ReFantazio

I have a lot of feelings about Metaphor ReFantazio. It's stylish as hell, it gives you a party of highly customizable, interesting characters, and the premise feels fresh and weird - the king is dead and the public is going to vote in his replacement so it's a sort of popularity contest.

It has a few stumbling blocks - some built into the game, and some are my own fault. First, the game's weather system was a thorn in my side - admittedly because I didn't engage with it as much as I should have. When the weather is bad, combat is harder; okay, no big deal. It turns out I underestimated this element - the game's combat system includes resistances and weaknesses, and when you hit an enemy's weakness you get an extra action. This is crucial to doing well in combat and will be instantly familiar to any Persona fan.

This aspect of combat goes away in bad weather. I went into a challenging dungeon in bad weather and struggled with it for hours before deciding that it wasn't going to work. I had to reload a save from some 5 hours prior (because of the way the game's expeditions and calendar work). This took the wind out of my sails for a while.

There's a lot I like about the story, though it was asking me to accept one too many weird surprise moments late in the game. And I usually love Shoji Meguro's music, but the soundtrack to this game was a massive letdown for me (I'm alone in this, I know). Lots of chanting and weird vocalizing had me reaching for the mute button rather than buying the OST. I love the voice acting, combat system, and writing (the character back stories are excellent - Heismay in particular).

Ultimately, it's a game I want to love more than I do, and it left me with a bit of melancholy.

4b. Azul

I don't think of myself as a fan of abstract games, but I often enjoy them when I find myself playing one. Azul has become a favorite for my wife and I. It plays up to 4 players, but it's far and away best with 2.

Players take turns drafting tiles to fill out their personal board, but it's very much NOT a multiplayer solitaire game. Keeping an eye on your opponent's board, considering what they need and how to stick them with unwanted tiles is every bit as important as focusing on your own board.

It's quick to play, full of interesting choices, and opportunities to stick your opponent and gloat (or curse them when they do the same to you). Plus, it has nice chunky tiles you can clank around in a bag.

4v. Bloomtown: A Different Story

Honestly Bloomtown is a microcosm of my 2024. It sounds great on paper, and I'm impressed with it and enjoyed my time with it, but it never really hooked me.

It's an RPG about a young brother and sister who are staying with a distant relative in a small town for the summer.*** There are shenanigans and hijinks and, eventually, supernatural peril. The only real criticism I can aim at it is that it very clearly takes its inspiration from the Persona series - maybe a little too shamelessly sometimes. The menus, music, and battle system feel uncomfortably close to Persona. But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I really didn't have a problem with it.

It's a game I admired more than enjoyed, and it's squarely a Me Problem.

3b. Harmonies

A recurring theme in this best of 2024 list: the videogames that should have landed for me didn't, and board games that shouldn't have resonated did.

Harmonies is a fairly light, short multiplayer-solitaire game with a strong spatial element. That description doesn't fill me with optimism. Players have their own private player board where they are placing different terrain types in an attempt to attract different types of animals. It's all pretty abstract in execution, but the visuals and theme are a big part of the hook for me.

A big part of the appeal with boardgames is the tactile experience of handling the cards and pieces, sitting at a table with friends in meatspace. Harmonies is the posterchild for this - the artwork on the animal cards is gorgeous, the wooden terrain pieces are slightly oblong and it feels great to bang them around in the bag, hoping to fish out that mountain or water you need.

It engages my brain but doesn't overstay its welcome. It became a comfort game around the house in 2024 and it's still going.

3v. Astro Bot

Astro Bot Rescue Mission is the best VR game I've ever played and one of my favorite games, period. Astro's Playroom was a lovely pack-in title that showed off the PlayStation 5 in a fun way. Astro Bot is a fucking corporate mascot who wants to celebrate the history of the Sony PlayStation™ brand with you, and it should be the most cynical, hollow thing ever made.

It somehow works though. It all has a fluffy "aww shucks" charm that pierces my jaded, pessimistic defenses. Some of it is cheating a bit - it's playing on the history of PlayStation, a train I've been chugging along with for 30 years now. I have lots of nostalgia, and this is laser targeted at me. It's not just the big hits, lots of little niche weird titles (the kind that Sony has largely ignored as The Industry has gotten bigger and more risk averse) are here too. Sure, I expect to see Lara Croft and Kratos, but it's nice to see games like Mister Mosquito and Gravity Rush represented too.

It's all delivered by way of a tight 3D platformer full of curiosities and wonders. It introduces new mechanisms then sets them aside before they wear out their welcome. It all feels good to play, the world is a shiny, joyous sandbox that tucks its more challenging bits off into margins where the sicko can crash their ships onto the rocks of timed challenges filled with tricky platforming. It just does everything right. Astro Bot is on par with Mario in terms of quality for me, and that's saying something.

2b. The Crew: Deep Sea Mission

Modern boardgames are intimidating. I've researched, purchased, taught, and played them for years and I still get overwhelmed learning them. I can only imagine how an outsider must feel looking at a board full of wood and cardboard and cards and numbers, like a science project threw up on the dining room table. Will I be able to learn this? Will I have fun? Will I feel stupid? I'm feeling stupid already! Oh god.

Most people (in my part of the world anyway) have some history with traditional card games like Rummy or Poker. And (specifically in my area) trick-taking games like Euchre. They'll see a stack of cards on the table and I'll ask if they know Euchre - if they say yes, then they're already familiar with the concept of leading, following suit, taking a trick, and how a trump suit works. Great, we're already 80% of the way there. Additionally, it's a cooperative game so no one is going to be stranded on their own.

The most important bit - it's really fun! Each player gets their own goal(s) at the beginning of the hand, and the team collectively wins if all goals are achieved. Everyone is invested regardless of whether their own personal goal is simple, and everyone has hidden information so there's no danger of an Alpha Gamer taking over and directing traffic. The difficulty is easy to scale, the hands are quick, and the game has provided plenty of moments where - after a moment's pause - the last card is played and the table erupts in cheers or groans. All in a small, inexpensive box.

Can't ask for better than that.

2v. Balatro

In a weird way, Balatro being this high on the list is indicative of how bad a year 2024 was for me with videogames. Not that Balatro is bad - it's great - but I wasn't captivated by it the way a lot of people seem to be. I played a LOT of it (it was my second screen PC game for most of the year). It was a convenient habit for me. It's so easy to pick up and play for 20 minutes or 4 hours.

I love and miss Poker, but Balatro isn't Poker. Not really. It's an audacious game about making the best Poker hand you can. "Best" is relative here though, because you can break the rules of Poker in terms of the value of a given type of hand (you can boost the value of a Full House, Two Pair, and so on) and by way of dozens of Jokers which aren't a part of the deck, but modify your game in plenty of ways big and small. One says that Spades & Clubs are interchangeable as are Hearts & Diamonds; if you get that, you'll want to pump up the value of a Flush hand for that run. Watch out for an encounter that nullifies your Hearts suit though, as it will nullify your Diamonds as well.

One of the great joys of Balatro (and roguelikes in general) is that it lets you feel absolutely unstoppable before somehow stopping you. It's a game about making broken combinations of things. You're going to break the system. Balatro knows this and welcomes it.

1b. Oath

I enjoy bite-sized games. They're easy to fit into my life. Battle Line, Innovation, Race for the Galaxy. I need one other person and ~45 minutes. You can play easily several games, building up the knowledge and experience that is so important to enjoying tabletop gaming.

On the other end of that spectrum are games like Oath. Oath is a long, rules-heavy mess of an experience. It wasn't until my 3rd or 4th game that I started getting the hang of the systems (and Oath's games are generally not short). The most skilled player will not always win. It's a game that only thrives when played by the same group several times, and when those players give themselves over to the experience.

That description should be enough for me to steer clear of Oath. I picked it up based mostly on glowing praise from Shut Up & Sit Down and, for some reason, this whole messy box works for me. It's easily my favorite game of 2024 and one of the best ever.

It inspired most of the (few) posts I put up last year. I don't get to fully enjoy many of my favorite games because they require a dedicated group to play somewhat regularly. If I could have a regular monthly group dedicated to a single game, it would be Oath.

1v. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Well.

Ichiban Kasuga is a wonderful himbo with a heart of gold, and this game feels like (among other things) a long goodbye for Kiryu Kazuma. The game has all the quirk and heart that the series has always had, and the combat system feels tighter than the last time around.

I believe Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is the best 2024 game I played last year that isn't named Persona 3: Reload. I still haven't finished it. Part of this was due to logistics. I've touted the quality of the Xbox Play Anywhere system for years now; this allows you to play supported games on an Xbox console then pick up that same save on PC and vice versa. This has always worked beautifully, and the freedom to play at my PC or on the couch is wonderful.

Infinite Wealth, however, would crash when I played it on console. Not with any consistent trigger, but always within a couple of hours. I'd lose my progress, which is incredibly deflating - particularly for long, sprawling games. That would put me off the game awhile, and I'd hope that an update or a reinstall would fix it, but it never did.

I don't often replay games, especially long-ass RPG's. I've played a lot of those. Persona 3 is one of my favorites, possibly at the very top of that list. As with all games (and movies, books, show, music, etc.) it is impossible to separate the time and place of my experience from the experience itself.

I specifically remember buying Persona 3. It was the special edition that came with a slip case and art book (and soundtrack?). I hadn't played a turn-based RPG in too long and, while I'd never heard of Persona, it looked like an RPG that takes place in modern times where you go to school during the day and fight demons at night. I love slice of life stuff in videogames, so I gave it a try. And fell in love.

Right off the bat it hooked me. I'd never played anything quite like it. Nearly 20 years later I have the game in my personal top 10 and consider it one of my favorite game series. When they announced Persona 3 Reload and I saw that it was getting a full remake to bring the visuals in line with Persona 5, I was excited and a teeeeeny bit apprehensive. Would it hold up to my warm memories?

It isn't a one-for-one remake. Lots of quality of life improvements have been added - most importantly the ability to directly control your party members in combat. Gone are the days of watching your party members and hoping they heal Junpei, or don't waste SP on a combat ability when a simple basic attack will do the job.

You can now save the game more easily, there are more opportunities to leave Tartarus, and your party no longer gets fatigued after being in Tartarus for too long. They've added the baton pass system from Persona 5, and each character has a sort of ultimate ability that charges up and can be used in a pinch.

The writing still has its questionable moments. Some of which are understandable (high school guys want to date, talk to, sneak a peek at high school girls) and some less so (your classmate Kenji still talks like someone 10 years older and really wants to hump everything - including a teacher). I think I remember a gay panic scene from the original game that I didn't see this time around. The game's treatment of sexuality has always been a black eye on the series. I'd like to think they're moving in the right direction, but we'll see.

I tried to explore some different social links from my first time through, so I ended up dating Yukari and largely ignoring Chihiro this time around. I explored the story lines of the girl at the shrine, the track star, and the monk this time around, though I still pursued the old couple at the bookstore and the dying young man at the park. Sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants.

I was glad to find that Persona 3 holds up incredibly well for me, not just because of the updates to bring it in line with 2024. The game's world, story, and overall vibes land for me better than its two successors. The beating heart of the game is anxiety over the passage of time and dealing with loss.* There's a low thrum of unease always just beneath everything, and it slowly comes into focus as the story wears on. The game's dichotomy between the familiar daily school life and the mystery and danger of the dark hour is as appealing as ever.

The cast is still my favorite in the series, and I found myself interested in every one of their backstories and how their characters developed. Everyone has their own trauma and scarred history - except for Junpei. He's the game's happy-go-lucky sidekick, and for much of the game his conflict revolves around not knowing his place in the world. He's playing second fiddle to the main character, and he knows it. As the group fights to end the Dark Hour and rid the world of the encroaching epidemic of Apathy Syndrome, he knows that an end to this conflict means an end to his purpose and sense of usefulness. This lands better than you might expect and made Junpei relatable for me. He's my favorite himbo bro BFF in the series (compared with Yusuke and Ryuji).

Persona 3 Reload accomplishes what very few games have - it makes me feel invested in both the larger story of the world and the individual characters within it. It somehow feels the way the original game felt back in 2006. It's the best version of one of the best games ever made, and I'm looking forward to The Answer DLC coming next month.

We have comfort TV around here. Movies, too. In times of trouble, putting on Community, or Lost in Translation feels warm and cozy. I'd never considered the possibility of a tabletop game filling such a role. Race for the Galaxy filling occupying this space for us is about a million miles from where we got started with the game.

Initially I got the game because of the high rank on BGG (I recall it being ranked as high as #3 at one point?) and the low cost. The sci-fi theme does nothing at all for me. Race is a too-large box* with some player mats and a lot of cards. The game was incredibly tough to get my head around. I remember playing against the excellent Keldon AI at first, just trying to grok the game.

I understood the rules, but now how to play well at all. I was losing consistently. There was something here to be grasped, but I had to decide whether to put the work in to find it. After all, if it's a game based on luck then I should win as often as I lose, right? I hung with it well enough to get a handle on it, then taught it to my wife who proceeded to win her fair share of our games (maybe just a touch more than that).

In Race for the Galaxy, the game is played in rounds made up of 5 distinct phases:

Explore: players draw cards from a central deck, keeping some and discarding the rest

Develop: players may play Development cards onto their personal tableau

Settle: players may play Planet cards onto their personal tableau

Consume: players trade goods from their tableau for points or additional card draws

Produce: players produce goods on their tableau from cards capable of doing so

None of this sounds too complex so far. The devil is in the many details here. First, players will only execute a phase if someone at the table chose that phase at the beginning of the round (these are revealed simultaneously). For example, if I choose the Settle phase, Molly chooses Produce, and Gary Sinise chooses Develop then no one gets to Explore or Consume this round. We all will Develop, then Settle, then Produce - with the players who chose those phases getting a special bonus. If I choose Settle then we all get a Settle phase where we may play a planet card onto our respective tableaus, but I also get to draw an additional card for doing so (Molly and Gary Sinise do not get this bonus).

So now players will have incentives to choose certain phases based on the cards on their tableau or in their hand. Your planets and developments in your tableau will give you various bonuses during specific phases. If I have Interstellar Bank (draw a card whenever the Develop phase is chosen) and Public Works (draw a card whenever you play a development into your tableau) then I have incentive to choose the Develop phase. Gary Sinise knows this and will not choose Develop because 1) he knows I'm likely to choose it so he wants to choose something else that benefits him and 2) if he chooses Develop, he's giving me those free cards.

Gary Sinise is no fool. But I KNOW this, so maybe I'm not going to choose Develop either. If Gary wants to play that Drop Ships development, he's gonna have to choose Develop himself. I'm no patsy.

If this sounds like it's getting complicated, it is and it isn't. The rules as written aren't especially complicated once you've played a few rounds. The flow of the game makes sense. The sheer tonnage of choices and options to weigh against one another is overwhelming, especially early on. Like so many other things in life, you're rewarded for pushing through to find the quality in a piece of art that isn't immediately accessible.

There's one mechanism I haven't mentioned yet, and it's brilliant: you pay for the cards you're playing from your hand by discarding other cards in your hand. This adds a level of angst to most every choice in the game. "I really want to play this Alien Planet, but its cost is 5 so that means I will have to discard FIVE other cards from my hand! I want to play 3 other ones for sure, so do I just spend my turns trying to draw more cards?" That way lies madness, because you end up with a handful of cards you want to play but have to make sacrifices for. While also factoring in your tableau bonuses and trying to read your opponents' needs and predict which phase they're going to choose. I really want to play that Alien Planet, but I've been waiting for Molly Shannon to choose Settle for the past 3 rounds and SHE ISN'T DOING IT I know she's waiting for me to choose Settle first well I'm NOT going to do it! Let Gary Sinise do it.

The game also has a couple of ways to trigger the end of the game: when the game's pool of VP chits is emptied (mostly from Producing goods then Consuming those goods) or when a player plays their 12th card to their tableau. This means that tempo is a factor, and your big sprawling VP engine of expensive cards isn't going to hit its stride if your opponent is racing to play cheap cards to reach 12 cards in their tableau. If I see you building something grand on your side of the table, I'm going to hit the gas and try to end the game before you finish.

Race is brilliant. I especially love the "discard cards to pay for other cards" mechanism. It's easy to fall into the trap of "I need to find this one card to make my tableau work" and then curse your bad luck when you don't draw it. Like many of my favorite games, you need to learn to roll with what the game gives you rather than trying to hammer it into the shape you want.

The vast majority of my plays of Race have been 2-player games with my wife. It's a game I directly associate with her. We've turned to it to occupy our minds in times of crisis - big or small - several times now. When we went through a miscarriage and needed to mentally be anywhere else, we played Race. And when there was a terrible storm late one night when my wife was 9 months pregnant and due to give birth any day now, we played Race into the small hours of the night.

Race for the Galaxy is an absolutely brilliant design. It came out 17 years ago as I write this, and it holds up. Like all games, it also brings to mind the circumstances in which I played it. Games aren't just expensive boxes of cardboard and intimidating rules, they're shared experiences that create memories with loved ones. Race carries that truth more than any game on my shelves.

I grew up around games. When I say that, I usually mean "video games." We had pinball machines and a jukebox in the basement when I was growing up. I'd go to the arcade with my dad and, while he played pinball (or Ms Pac-Man) I was playing Galaga, Sinistar, and Zoo Keeper.

There were tabletop games too, albeit far fewer. I remember playing PayDay with my mother, Authors with my grandmother, and Rummy with my dad. Those were once-in-awhile things though.

Even when I got really into tabletop gaming, it was very specific (Dungeons & Dragons, Magic the Gathering). I remember playing Munchkin and The Great Dalmuti a few times. The former was amusing, the latter left an impression on me. I also dipped into Euchre and Poker.

These were all some degree of lifestyle game. I was never walking into a shop and browsing the shelves for a game or asking a friend for recommendations. It wasn't until Catan launched on Xbox Live Arcade in 2007 that this changed.

Having grown up with video games from the Atari 5200 up through the PlayStation 2, the Xbox 360 being an online game console was - ahem - a game changer. Xbox Live Arcade let me purchase games from the comfort of my home. It's a common thing now, but at the time it was only small games - Microsoft had rules about file size for digital games. Among these was Catan: a digital version of a boardgame I'd never played.

It was another strategy video game, one that we enjoyed quite a bit (I remember the music being peaceful). We got Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne on Xbox Live as well and, when we made our then-annual trek to Gen Con, I swung by the Mayfair Games booth to pickup a copy.

Mayfair had a whole mess of weird games I'd never seen in stores, and they were handing out ribbons to people for playing demos. Collect a set of resources and get a coupon for the store! We came home with a copy of Settlers, the Knights & Cities expansion, Gangster and Friedrich from the Mayfair booth, and a copy of Carcassonne.

When I got home we discovered that there were different Carcassonnes and we got the wrong one? I went online to find the one I meant to buy, ended up at BGG, and the rest is history.

As for the game itself, Settlers of Catan holds no interest for me these days; it's too light and too dependent on die rolls for my tastes. A few years ago a buddy gifted me a copy of Settlers of America, a version of Catan where you start out in the eastern US and build rails, slowly buildings rails, roads, and settlements westward. If I were to play Catan today, that would be my flavor.

Oath: Chronicles of Empire & Exile bills itself as "A game that remembers."

It's best experienced with the same group of players rolling from game to game with the locations and denizens changing over time. There is no provided lore in the game. There is no flavor text anywhere. No backstory. "The lore book" says designer Cole Wehrle "is your first 5 plays of Oath."

Like so many works of art, you get out of Oath what you put into it. I was the chancellor in our first game, and my wife and daughter immediately named their factions. Kat played as The Seekers, the blue faction represented by a mysterious cloaked figure of whom only a single eye is visible. Our daughter chose black and coined them The Shadow Clan immediately. "I took this name from something I read" she sheepishly admitted. "That's okay" I replied. "So did they"

When my initial run as chancellor ended after a single game, I took the yellow player pieces and declared that The Empire of the Sun would reclaim their rightful position upon the throne of power, which we did. Eventually. We've played a whopping 15 games in a little over 3 weeks. We have plenty of stories of betrayals and triumphs, clever gambits and colossal blunders.

What I've been thinking about lately, though, is the world of Oath. It's as much a character as any of the players at the table. There are 23 site cards in the game box, 9 of which will make up the available world in a given game of Oath. Players play cards onto those sites, representing the denizens and buildings that make up the societies in those parts of the kingdom. At the end of each game, the sites (and their societies) ruled by the winner are carried over into the next game, and the rest are removed. Each site can hold from 0-3 cards, and typically has a special rule concerning travel or, if the site is the homeland of one of the game's 6 factions, a bonus for playing a card of that faction there.

At the beginning of your first game, the 6 factions are fairly balanced. At the end of each play 3 cards of the winner's advisor faction are added to the card pool, and some cards from the discard piles and the losers' advisers are removed sight unseen. This means that, over time, your world naturally starts to tip toward some factions and away from others.

For example, our first few games saw the winner using advisers of the Arcane faction. This meant that Arcane cards were added to our card pool (and to a lesser extent, Order and Hearth faction cards were added as well). More Arcane cards means those are more likely to be drawn and used, so they're more likely to be used as advisers for the winner and thus more Arcane cards will be added, and so on.

What this means for us that our world is essentially a magocracy with a strong authoritarian bent. We regularly see Arcane cards like Fire Talkers (+/- 3 attack dice if you control the Darkest Secret), Portal (spend a secret to travel to or from this Site without spending supply) and the Dream Thief (Pay 2 favor to swap any 2 face down advisers). If you think of magocracy like a technocracy, it becomes relatable.

We're also very strong in the Order faction's cards. Things like Curfew (You have to pay the ruler 1 favor before you can trade with denizens), Toll Roads (You have to pay a favor to a Site's ruler when you travel there), and Tome Guardians (Enemies cannot target or take the Darkest Secret in any way) make frequent appearances as well, eliciting sly smirks or exasperated sighs depending on your game state. We're heavily tilted toward these 2 factions, we have a fair amount of Hearth and Discord cards, very little in the way of Nomad cards. and almost no cards from the Beast faction - and yet, one in particular has been a mainstay in our kingdom. The Roving Terror comes up quite a bit. It allows you to spend a secret to discard a card from any site then move the Roving Terror there.

Since the winner isn't always tied to ruling the most sites, sometimes the kingdom changes very little from one game to the next, sometimes is changes wildly. As I write this, we've had a stable regime for the last several games and our game looks familiar from play to play. Our world feels both fantastic and dangerous. There's a lot of neat, mystical shit going on, but you maybe don't want to leave the house.

The site cards themselves are also key in informing the story of our campaign. One site card in particular has been a thorn in our side: The Narrow Pass.

The Narrow Pass says that, when a player is traveling to its region, they MUST travel to the narrow pass. Oath is a game where players will only get 5-8 turns in total, and you never have enough supply to do all the actions you want to do. In that environment, a card that forces you to spend precious supply traveling somewhere you DON'T want to go...well, it's prompted more groans and eye rolls than anything else in the game. My wife will say "Okay, I travel here then I muster, then I'm going to campaign against..." only for me to hold up a finger, pick up her pawn, and set it on the Narrow Pass. Cue the slumping shoulders as she winds back and reconsiders all of her plans.

I love this.

When I say that our Oath world is oppressive, the Narrow Pass is an ever-present part of that world. It feels like a wasteland where the citizens are doing their damndest to enact change while the chancellor, looking down at all of the lands they rule and their pile of money and insists that no, life is actually very good.

My wife has snatched victory by playing the Vision of Faith while holding the Darkest Secret alone at The Hidden Place. I've Blackmailed the chancellor to steal the Grand Scepter, granting myself citizenship then using the imperial army to seize relics for myself. We've had negotiations for citizenship fall through and lead directly to a change of power for the next game.

Every card and site in the game is influential under the right circumstances, and it all lends itself to weaving an emergent narrative. In a game with zero lore and zero flavor text, this is an incredible achievement. Oath is a real bear to teach, at the end of your first game you might know how to play. Sort of. You'll understand the actions, but not when and why to take them. It's the old "it gets good after you've played for 10 hours, trust me" thing that I've said and heard dozens of times.

Some people will never like it. I'm surprised that I like it. The game can - and will - end on a die roll after 2-3 hours. There's king-making aplenty. There are fiddly rules and, after 15 games within a relatively short span of time, I still need to consult the rules and FAQ's when someone takes the Campaign action more often than I'd like. The winner will not always be the player who played the best. When I made a conscious effort to see the game as a shared story we were telling together rather than a competition, I fell deeply in love with this game.

At last!

The Empire of the Sun rules over the land once more. I have sworn an Oath of Supremacy to my people, to bring the glory of the empire far and wide.

I unearthed a relic while visiting an Ancient City; it is said that bandits all across the land will swear allegiance to the one who dons the Bandit Crown. Suddenly every land across the empire was peopled by ruffians raising their blades in my name!

Once again, the Empire of the Sun was thwarted by the Seekers. This time they plotted and schemed in their Hidden Place, ruminating on dark secrets and leveraging their power for blackmail and skullduggery.

Their twisted machinations have paid off for them once more. I write this from my holding cell, cruelly situated atop the tower in the castle I once called home, overlooking the city that looked to me as its leader. I held everything in the palm of my hand.

It is said that patience is a virtue. Indeed, the Empire of the Sun has been virtuous of late. The glory days of our House have been long relegated to the annals of time. The chancellor holds sway over the populace. Indeed, the people adore them. And why shouldn't they? Most folks live a life of relative ease and stability. There are forums where communities can gather for open debate and discussion of ideas.

The chancellor has treated our family well, and we have returned that generosity. My father kept the Shadow Clan in power (even if he wanted that power for himself). Similarly, I have worked to keep the status quo. I have done so with an eye toward the future and a vigilant watch on The Seekers.

I did everything in my power to show my worth not only to the Chancellor, but to the populace as well. The people love the Chancellor and when their reign is ended it will be me who takes the Grand Scepter and sits upon the throne, for I have secured my role as the leader of the high council, and my knowledge of the inner workings of the kingdom (and its highest-ranking officials) is vast.

The Empire of the Sun put that fool Chancellor upon her throne! It was nothing more than an act of spite against the Seeker, but she offered us citizenship nonetheless.

We were exiles no more.

We could have lived a life of excess, grown fat off the taxes of the populace. But I had ambition.

I offered her advice. Showed admiration and gratitude. I smiled and bowed, swearing fealty all the while plotting our return to the seat of power that is rightfully ours. I needed only to secure the Grand Scepter for myself.

Symbols hold great power and meaning, none more so than the Grand Scepter. The one who wields it wields divine authority. I just needed her to let her guard down at the right moment.

Ever a thorn in my side, the Seeker made a play for the Chancellor's Dark Secret. The Chancellor panicked - rightfully so. After all, this was all starting to mirror the very events that put the Chancellor on the throne.

I saw my opportunity and I took it. I seized the Banner of the Darkest Secret not for myself, but for The Empire! Surely this would elevate me to the Chancellor's most trusted advisor! How could she doubt my loyalty after I'd intervened to preserve her rule?

That question will haunt me for all my days, for she seemed to know of my intentions. Indeed, the Grand Scepter became even more unattainable than before. Perhaps the surprise loss of her Banner of the Dark Secret - the object that inspired the populace to follow her in the first place - shook her. Perhaps one of my own trusted advisors betrayed me.

It matters not. If I had the power to rule, I would be sat upon the throne.

I am not.

Would it have been better to live out my years in comfort and excess rather than plotting and scheming? I would have been saved the bitterness I carry with me now. In the eyes of the people I am the Chancellor's lapdog, a loyal servant to the Empire. I have brought shame to my ancestors.

A simple life is no bad thing. I only pray that my progeny chooses the path that I avoided.

The sun rises and sets on another era. The Seeker failed to uphold their sworn Oath of Protection. The people feel safe when their ruler can show strength. A glorious kingdom must have an equally glorious reliquary. I moved in Secret to Usurp the chancellor, showing the people that I could do what she could not.

I was warned against the treachery of the Shadow Clan and, indeed, they made a move to steal our most precious, Darkest secret. So desperate was their need for it that they would not be stopped.

I anticipated this. My plan to reclaim the throne was undeterred, but the Seeker proved more resilient and less pliable than I'd hoped. I advised her that the Shadow Clan held a dark secret that would undo her claim to the throne. If she would but welcome the Empire of the Sun into her kingdom, I had the knowledge to thwart her foes.

She would not listen to reason.

She waged a campaign against me, stealing my precious relics and inspiring her citizenry. She was a worthy leader! She would uphold her oath! Her victory was short-lived, however.