#picklotl

~Games I Played This Year~

Rift of the Necrodancer

The World’s First Thirst Trap Rhythm Mini-Game Award

Rift of the Necrodancer is the sequel to beloved indie game, Crypt of the Necrodancer, except instead of moving to the beat in a dungeon crawler, the gameplay is more like Guitar Hero where cues come down a track. The twist is that the cues are enemies and each enemy is associated with a specific rhythm. Skeletons are a quarter note, but if that skeleton has a shield, then it’s two quarter notes. There’s also some rhythm mini-games similar to the ones you’d find in Rhythm Heaven, but with Necrodancer’s own style and aesthetic… which is where the thirst trap in the award title comes from.

The music is great! I mean, it’s gotta be, it’s a rhythm game after all. DannyB is back on the soundtrack, but other artists like Alex Moukala and Jules Conroy have also hopped on to do some music. I also love the art style a lot, it’s got those nice bold lines, vibrant color palettes, and the character designs are great! The game natively supports custom tracks from the community and they’ve also collabed with other indie games (and I guess also hololive and Vocaloid???) to bring official music charts into the game as well! Usually for a nominal fee, but, hey, support indie devs.

I still haven’t fully finished the story mode in this game, though. Like Crypt, Rift is DIFFICULT. It is possible to play with a controller, but in my experience as someone who played piano in a past life, keyboard feels way better… which is partially why I haven’t put as much time as I’d like into it (I’m stuck on the Steamdeck when I usually have time to play). But! If you like rhythm games that lean heavy into the reactive side of it all, check Rift of the Necrodancer out! It’s good.

Kabuto Park

The Buggiest Summertime Vibes Award

Kabuto Park is a little game about catching and collecting bugs! You then take those bugs, feed them candies to make them stronger, and have them compete in card-based sumo battles with other bugs. The gameloop reminds me a lot of Pokemon GO, where you go out, catch bugs, turn in the bugs you don’t really want for candies, and then use those candies to power up your faves. Which is a good thing! I like PoGO. The art is super cute, there’s a good number of bugs to collect, but the game never overstays its welcome. It’s a nice, short, cozy experience.

No Sleep For Kaname Date - From AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES

The World’s Most Bullyable Pervert Award

I’ve been a Somnium Files fan for a few years now and was really excited (and also scared) to see that they came out with another one! Everyone’s favorite pervert detective that we all want to beat with hammers, Kaname Date, must figure out where the hell Iris Sagan, also known as internet sensation A-set (You bet) has been abducted to and by whom. Also everyone’s favorite artificially intelligent robot eyeball hamster, Aiba is here as well. This game is a lot shorter than the other two entries in the series and takes place in-between them chronologically.

Somnium Files’ big narrative gameplay thing are Somniums, mind palaces where you pick at peoples’ psyches to pick up clues for the overarching case. Story wise, out of all three games, this one has one of the best ones. New to this game, though, are escape room segments, which… were fun for the most part. I will admit, I’m usually not great with puzzles. I am too impatient for puzzles. But dang it, I gave it my best shot. The hint system for this game is really weird. On the difficulty I played at, for puzzles where I knew what to do, the characters would usually yap about what I had to do before I was given the chance to attempt it. But for things like the finale puzzle for each section, it felt like the difficulty spiked, and suddenly none of the characters wanted to talk about it at all or give me any further hints when I ACTUALLY needed them. I did have fun, but that’s maybe my only gripe.

I’ve seen some people voice complaints about the game being too short or the stakes not being high enough. For me, well… that’s actually good! It’s a filler episode! Not every story has to be a 50-hour high-stakes thriller. We also get supplementary moments to build on what we already know about pre-existing characters. For that alone, I hope more narrative games reuse assets more often to make bite-sized, low-stakes, filler-type video games like this.

Deltarune Chapter 3 & 4

Introduced Yet Another Tumblr Sexyman Into the Internet Ecosystem Award

If The Game Awards won’t give this game a nomination for Best Ongoing Game, then fuck it, I will.

This game needs no introduction, I mean. You’re on the internet. You know Undertale, you know Deltarune. I’m gonna be real, this is a bit of a difficult game to talk about because my Tumblr dash has been so INUNDATED with fanworks for the past six months, that I need to dig DEEP into the recesses of my memory to remember the game from a canonical lens.

That being said, though, I liked it! But… I don’t think I have anything more profound to say past that. Chapter 3 was a fun romp- Tenna’s a great character as are the other TV World freaks. And then the thing happens that made me go, “Yeah no if they had released this as a standalone chapter and we had to wait, there’d be riots in the streets.”

Chapter 4 is where things get more serious… and I’m about to get more serious for a sec. In a sociopolitical landscape where a generation above mine has a choking, writhing grip on society and is doing everything they can to make sure we don’t have a future, Gerson’s character was a nice, warm blanket. It was just really nice to see an older character who showed Susie patience and was willing to pass the baton to the next generation… and then the thing at the end happens and it’s not a “riots in the streets” cliffhanger, but boy that setup is GOOD.

The gameplay has been great! Toby and co. have been constantly finding new ways to mix up the battle system and throw us curveballs. I had no idea you could push RPG Maker to do all the things that these chapters integrated. Looking forward to more!

to a T

The Perfect Shape Award

Keita Takahashi of Katamari Damacy fame and company made something weird and silly again. To a T is a video game about a teenager born with the disability of perpetual T-pose. I would actually probably compare this game to Dispatch (which I’ll talk about later on), where the format is like TV show episodes that you play through. But instead of the decision-based Telltale formula, it’s more like, you watch a bit of a scene play out, and then you move around the map and do some mini-games. These don’t have any consequences on the narrative, though.

The gameplay is… fine. There’s just kinda not… a lot of it, but it’s the kind of game that prioritizes the narrative first. The game does some cute ludonarrative things, though - you start out each day (if you want!) by making sure your character eats breakfast and washes up for the day correctly and it feels a little jank because… y’know, perpetual T-pose. But they have a lot of cute custom-made devices that help them with everyday things! It’s a genuinely nice little touch for a disability narrative.

The story is… a weird and strangely heartful tale about embracing what makes you unique… and answers questions you wish you didn’t have the answers to. It’s a silly story that… honestly younger audiences might have a more fun time with. Overall, this game is charming and whimsical and I think it’s worth giving it a playthrough or a watch-through.

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3

The Dino Fucker Award

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is the third in its line of fictional sequels (1 and 2 do not exist, it’s a bit) from Strange Scaffold- developer of games like El Paso Elsewhere, I Am Your Beast, and Clickholding. It’s a match-3 game with turn-based combat. You and the CPU take turns matching objects on the same board, collecting shapes, and using those shapes as fuel for special attacks. The gameplay’s fun and it’s got a fun and silly meta-narrative going on. Strange Scaffold’s writing has always kind of been a little hit or miss for me personally (nothing wrong with it, just not my taste), but this one hits, I’d say. It's worth checking out if you grew up on Bejeweled and also like a silly VN.

Date Everything!

The Literal Tall Drink of Water Award

So like.

If you know me like… even from a surface-level glance, you’d think that I’d be the last person on earth that would pick this up, but… the studio is headed by Robbie Daymond, Max Mittleman, and Ray Chase, and the game has like dozens of industry-level voice actors in it, so…

Yeah I’ll take some psychic damage for the bit.

Date Everything! Is the video game where you date gijinka of everyday ordinary household objects and more. There’s about a hundred datable characters and… yeah it can get a bit overwhelming. I think there’s maybe a good 20 or 30 characters I haven’t seen yet. From what I have seen, though, each character is thoughtfully written, designed, and fully voice acted. Yes. Even the toilet. I really appreciate the diversity in this game- there’s representation for a bunch of different cultures, lifestyles, points of view, and takes on sexuality and romance. There’s also different body types in this game! Not every character is stick skinny or the “normal” version of hot. Personality-wise, too, not everyone is palatable! There are FREAKS in this game, and you know what, you don’t have to like them, that’s super okay! The game never pressures you to go the romance route and never shames you for just wanting to be friends… or even enemies with someone. They just want you to go out and meet people!

The concept of the game is unhinged from the jump, but it’s also kinda cozy. I don’t know if I can recommend it as a true dating sim, but definitely if you like visual novels and are just a general fan of voiceover stuff, I think you’ll have fun.

PEAK

The Physically Clenched Award

PEAK is what happens when Aggro Crab and Landfall join forces to make a co-op roguelike about mountain climbing. You customize your scout, hop on a plane with your friends to god knows where, crash land on a deserted island, and make your way through several biomes without starving, falling to your death, succumbing to poison, etc. in order to make it to the peak and get rescued.

This is like, somehow simultaneously one of the most stressful games (I mean, number one goes to Silksong) yet chill games I’ve played this year. It’s just nice to go on a hike with your friends and try not to die. I do appreciate how this game handles death, though. You spawn in as a ghost and you’re tethered to one of your group mates, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of the game. While you’re waiting for your teammates to make it to the next biome, you can coach them and help them scout out their route. You can still participate even if you’re not actively climbing!

Overall, the vibe of PEAK is deadly, but silly, and it feels great to work together with your friends and see yourself improving over several different runs.

Is This Seat Taken?

The Remembered to Take a Shower Award

Is This Seat Taken? was one of the last games I played this year. It's a short game where little shape-people are going to a function- be it public transportation or watching a movie, and they all have their preferences on where they wanna be. It's your job to arrange them in a way that makes everyone happy. The art style is really cute and the logic puzzles were just about the right difficulty for me- not mindless, but not "I'm stuck on this for an hour" kind of hard, either.

Once Upon a Katamari

The Rollin’ It Back Award

At time of writing, I haven’t finished the game yet and I’m still picking it up here and there when I can (this game hurts my hands). At the time of announcement, though, I, like probably a bunch of other people, looked at this game worried they weren’t gonna be able to nail it. After all, it’s a Katamari game in 2025 without Keita Takahashi on the team. But, to my relief, that ended up not necessarily being a bad thing.

My biggest concern with Katamari sequels is that the first game’s missions gave you enough time to meet your goal, but also gave you a good amount of what I like to call “fuck around time.” As more games were made, though, there was more of a focus on simply meeting a time requirement, and less of Takahashi-san’s M.O. of just having a toy to play with. Thankfully, this game seems to be leaning towards the first, where levels aren’t suffocating you. There's also an incentive to replay each level as the hidden gifts and cousins are back, but also three crowns in each level to collect. Thanks to massive quality of life improvements, these are all easily tracked this time and the new power-ups make it way easier to complete your goals, but are balanced enough that they don't break the game, either.

Music and visuals wise, again, it’s a 2025 Katamari game. The game looks great and, yeah, the low-poly of it all is still real good. The themed levels have also been pretty good this time around, there’s some fun and creative stuff in here. The soundtrack, I think, is where “this is a Katamari game made in 2025” really, really shows. Katamari definitely has had J-pop songs in the past, but the style of the genre has changed since then. With this established, would I personally have picked Katamari on the Doun with the peppy idol vocals for this game? I don’t think so. I don’t think any of the songs on the OST are necessarily bad, a lot of them are bangers, actually! But you can definitely feel the difference in aesthetic choices from Damacy, We Love Katamari, and this game.

All of that being said, I’m not the most seasoned Katamari player… but! Once Upon a Katamari is enjoyable. It’s got a slightly different flavor than the first two games, definitely, but I think this new team more or less knows how to make a Katamari game.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

The Gamedev Heaven Award

Yeah no I warned you guys that there would be an essay in here

I shouldn’t have to give this game an introduction since, like, if you’re reading this, you probably follow me for my Hollow Knight fanart or have at least picked up something through osmosis, so you probably know the whole deal*, but Hollow Knight: Silksong is the sequel to Hollow Knight. You play as Hornet, the protagonist’s sister and one of the first few bosses you fight in the first game. I’m still kind of processing my thoughts on this game in a way more articulate than just, well, Hollow Knight’s my favorite game and Hornet’s my favorite character out of everything, of course I liked it.

I spent seven years waiting for this game. I spent seven years making fun of the “Team Cherry abandoned us, the game’s taking so long” gang and telling them to shut the fuck up and go play something else while they wait ("always a good time to go beat the video game known as OFF"). For seven years, I held onto the hope of being able to play this game as a small frivolous thing to keep me going when times got rough. And… It was worth it.

I’m gonna start by addressing the Oblobble in the room: The Difficulty. Hollow Knight is a game that I cannot recommend to everyone on account of its difficulty and Silksong even less so because this game is even HARDER than its sibling game. Is that a bad thing? Not… necessarily, but I’ve seen some polarizing views. Speedrunner and QA tester friends tended to breeze through the game and had a great time. I also know some other friends who don’t regularly play challenging games also have a similar experience. But I’ve also heard tales of old Hollow Knight mutuals and even Hollow Knight speedrunners bouncing HARD off of Silksong.

I definitely had moments of “Excuse me, what the HELL are you asking me to do??” There’s a lot of combat challenge rooms in this game that ask you to fight waves of enemies with no breaks in between, similar to the boss rushes in HK. I’m still not sure if I agree with the two-mask damage system completely. I also have problems with the shard system in which I was hesitant to integrate tools into my boss attempts because I’d eventually run out of shards and feel punished for using them. 

Progressing your strength in this game is also weird. Needle upgrades in this game sometimes felt less like an extra boon and more like a mandatory thing you HAD to do just to keep up with the skill level of the game. There’s also only a handful of upgrades in this game that’ll make things easier across the board, many of them are very situational or only work in very specific builds. Those certain upgrades that would make your life way, way easier, might also be tucked away in the part of the map you just never thought to check out. The game definitely rewards you for exploring but… ehh… re-routing a few things closer to the critical path would’ve made our lives easier.

However, over the years I’ve played HK, I’ve built up this mantra of, “I know I’m not good at this, but the only way I can change that is to try. If I get hit, that’s probably my fault, and I just have to figure out a way to not get hit next time. The first step is to learn my script, and then the second step is to execute it.” And… for the most part, I think that attitude did help me through the game. I think your enjoyment of the game will highly depend on how much patience you have for The Challenge, your own skill issues, and reconciling within yourself that it’s gonna take a bit to overcome both of them. Not everyone has that and… that’s okay! But also, this game is really, really tough! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!

In terms of art, as always, the world is gorgeous. Whether you like Hollow Knight or not, I think everyone can appreciate the immense work and love that went into this game. The worldbuilding is as good as ever- there’s so many instances of environmental storytelling. Areas blend and almost quite literally bleed into each other, no one biome exists in a bottle separate from the others, not even the one that’s MEANT to be a sealed-off bottle. There’s a LOT of different enemies and bosses in this game, many of them with banger designs and some with MASSIVE spritesheets. So much artwork went into building this game.

For the story and characters, again, I’m still processing my thoughts on it, learning new things about the lore, and I’ll probably still be doing so for months to come. Hollow Knight did a very good job of exploring the theme of what it means to be born and what obligations we have to uphold from simply existing and Silksong is no different. In terms of cast and NPC writing, they’re fun! Lots of friends, lots of weirdos, as always. Silksong also did a very good job of fleshing out Hornet’s character more. You learn more about her past, what she likes and doesn’t like, and it’s just really nice to see her casually interacting with people outside of situations that call for extreme violence. 

Silksong is a game that means a lot to me, as evidenced by the essay I just wrote. Is it for everyone? No, no piece of art that was made with heart and soul ever is. But if I had to give something my personal Game of the Year, it would be Hollow Knight: Silksong.

*shout outs to Bee, who showed up to my stream one day and said, and I quote, "I know little to nothing about Hollow Knight/Silksong, except the little skull bug dude is a girl here, did she transition"

~Games I Have Watched~

ENA: DREAM BBQ

Originally a webseries, I’ve seen bits and pieces of ENA over the years but for some reason was never really pushed to interface with it on my own, but I happened to catch an ENA: DREAM BBQ stream one day.

Yooooo this shit’s gooooooood

The world of ENA is a bit difficult to explain. It feels like you’re actively being exposed to the nuclear fallout from the second fall of the Tower of Babel. The world is very psychedelic and dreamlike and it will fill you with discomfort and possibly fear at first, but give your lizard brain like 20 minutes to normalize with it all. The game itself is mostly a walking simulator where you meet characters with what I can only describe as Design Sauce. ENA herself is very gender- Aleks Le voices the suave salesperson side of her, while Nola Klop voices the yelly, angry side. Do I understand what’s going on in this world? Not at all. Do I respect the amount of creativity that went into this world? Hell yeah.

Poco

Poco is a point and click about a tiny clown that gets kicked out of the circus and needs to find their way back home the only way a clown knows how. For a student game, the production value and polish is REALLY good. The little world they’ve built up is neat. It’s not a super long game, it’ll probably take just a couple hours to finish, but it’s a nice little thing you can play for free.

Stray Children

Stray Children is a weird game by the Onion Games, the devs of games like Moon: Remix RPG and Chulip. Your protagonist is a dog-faced kid that gets sucked into a world that operates like a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. In this world, there are monsters called “Olders” who are initially violent and incomprehensible, but as you gather information and learn what their deal is, you can talk them through their struggles and free their souls.

It is an understatement to say that this is a weird-ass game from every single angle. The story concept itself is weird but the gameplay is as well. It’s been compared to Undertale, where each enemy can be fought or spared, however, unlike Undertale, killing non-boss enemies does not have story-changing consequences and farming a bit of EXP off of them actually makes the game easier. “Sparing” enemies on the other hand, is the most difficult part of the game. Shed husks of the Olders are found throughout the world map and interacting with them gives you a journal entry with a hint for the puzzle to quell their souls. Some of the puzzles in the game are a bit obtuse and feedback isn’t always given. This might be due to translation errors, localization problems, design flaws, or maybe a mixture of all of them. Also like Undertale, there are bullet hell segments between the puzzle segments in battle encounters and some of them can be a bit too punishing.

All this being said, I’m fascinated with the decisions made for this game and I would love to see the design docs. I would recommend this game if you have the patience for an old-school styled turn-based RPG experience. This game can be punishing, the puzzles can be frustrating, but the game oozes weirdness and creativity.

Dispatch

Dispatch is a game that happens when ex-Telltale devs and Critical Role shake hands. It’s an episodic story about a superhero man’s fall from… somewhere-less-than-grace and into a dispatcher role, where he has to play mentor to a bunch of ex-villains with all the messy stuff that happens in a corporate office space without a good HR department. As someone who’s just kinda burnt from the superhero genre, this was a refreshing take!

The characters are fun and the writing is snappy, funny, and holds its emotional weight well. The BIGGEST thing for me personally, though, is the character known as Royd - the most accurate representation of a modern-day Polynesian man I have ever seen from a production outside of Hawai’i or the West Pacific. While some media have trouble portraying Hawaiian Creole English (*cough LIKE A DRAGON INFINITE WEALTH cough*) Royd's pidgin is IMMACULATE. I really really love how they wrote him and portrayed his character.