Hello everyone. Hope you have all had a good week, and if you've been celebrating the holidays, have had a chance to unwind and enjoy. Its the last Sunday of the year so let's use this thread to talk about what games we played in 2025, our favorites, least favorites pleasant surprises etc.
Games I played that released this year:
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Elden Ring: Nightreign: This is probably my GOTY, but I didn't play too many games that released in 2025. Anyway, I think a lot of people were rightfully skeptical about Elden Ring Fortnite edition but it's an incredibly fun co-op game. I haven't tried the Deep of Night Mode or the DLC, but thats something I am thinking of picking up when I return home from my holiday vacation
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The Outer Worlds 2: the gameplay is markedly better than the first game, once again proving any movement system in any video game just needs a double jump. A lot of people complained about the lack of skill points you get from leveling up, but I thought it wasnt that big of an issue. One aspect I think they knocked it out the park was with the in game radio stations, they were absolutely fantastic and once i turned them on i never once turned them off. The one area I think it comes up way short of the first game is the companion characters: they simply do not match the energy of the ones from the first game. I look forward to the promised expansions.
-Becoming Saint: i picked this up because I saw Northernlion play it and I thought it looked interesting, but unfortunately there was little meat on its bones. The game bills itself as a rouge-like but there is very little variation between playthroughs. Also the devs suffered a huge aura loss in my eyes when I checked the steam reviews and they were replying to every single review. I liked the art style though. 5.5/10
Stronghold Crusader Definative Edition: 97 Year Old Game Studio Still Makes Crossbowmen The Old Fashioned Way. Stronghold crusder is one of my favorite childhood games (it taught me how the economy works). I actually didn't even know they were releasing a remaster of it until I saw that you could buy it bundled with Becoming Saint. Its the good kind of remaster: fixes longstanding bugs and actually ads some content to the game. I have worked my way through the co-op trail with my brother the past few months and we are eagerly awaiting fresh missions to be added to it.
Games I played this year that releases prior to 2025:
-Balatro: crack cocaine
-Dark Souls 1 and 3: i replayed 1 for the hell of it but I did a SL1 playthrough of 3. Very challenging, very rewarding
-Fallout 4: I began 2025 with a brutal, soul crushing period of unemployment and job hunting. To keep my spirits as low as possible, I did a playthrough of FO4 on survival difficulty. Extremely brutal in the early game, I ending up immediately siding with the Brotherhood so I could get access to vertibird transport early. Became the perfect mixture of fun and challenge once I got good armor and put in enough perks so I didn't die in 1 bullet
LA Noire: my comfort game tbh, shame they had to burn through hundreds of University graduates to make it
Rome Total War: still whips
Mass Effect 1 and 2: Playing Outer Worlds 2 made me want to play more space games, so I fired up the legendary edition for my second playthrough of the trilogy. My first playthrough I did male paragon shepherd, so this time I'm doing female renegade shepherd. They really tried to make the paragon/renegade dichotomy akin to good cop/loose cannon but full renegade means you swing between asshole and psychopath. The conversation you have with Anderson and Udina at the end of ME1 after letting the council die floored me with the renegade dialogue options; you and Udina basically become Darth Vader and Palpatine. Anyway, I will start ME3 when I get back from vacation
Hope everyone has had at least a tolerable 2025, and here's to maybe a better year in 2026!
roughly in chronological order:
-dV Rings of Saturn: 2D space mining game, kinda fun to just float around for a while then chomp down on the big rocks and carry it all home (hopefully).
-Talos Principle 2: Got pretty far in this one, but eventually moved on to others things... It felt almost too easy, if that makes sense? TP1 had, at least subjectively, a lot steeper difficulty curve, with the optional and hidden puzzles being even harder to find let alone solve. TP2 felt a lot more easy-going for the main puzzles, the only really challenging stuff seemed to be the optional stuff. Idk, I'm not even hating, I did enjoy my time with it, and I might actually come back to it eventually.
-Citizen Sleeper 2: I enjoyed this more than the first installment, contract system was a nice addition to the gameplay formula and I'm just a sucker for these types of sincere, heartfelt characters that may not be the most realistic (in that gritty Nolan-esque sense of the word), but I can't help but feel enraptured by them
-Clair Obscûr du l'Expédition 33: don't care, didn't run. Was sitting at literally unplayable FPS, even while interpolating it up from a stamp-size worth of actually rendered pixels. Maybe I need to move on from my 970 but maybe people need to optimize their games a bit better if they're gonna make some hype title everyone keeps yapping about for the entire year. I'm not angry, you are
-The Alters: This one actually ran just fine, but I didn't stick with it beyond the first 'proper' area. I will probably come back to this, but the narrative theme of 'roads not taken in life' hit a bit too close to home´for the time being. Good game, from what I've seen.
-Tiny Glade: Just building me tiny glades some times. Is cozy.
-Trash Goblin: Played this for a couple days. It's not deep, but it's cozy and you get to chisel some gems out of trash and put them on a little mask for a mushroom sorta fella and they pay you and you get back to chiseling.
-Hades 2: It's good but I bounced off after a couple hours. I guess I got my fill for the time being, but I'll probably be back eventually.
-Dispatch: Fun comedy game thingy, was a good time.
-The Outer Worlds 2: Played a bit beyond the prologue, so far I've not met a likable character really, and that's kinda where I stopped. Might return, might not. Runs fine though, which is nice.
-Duskpunk: It's citizen sleeper but steampunkish and you build the revolution. Had a lot of fun with this one, though it shows the limits of this sort of 'push the clock with rolls'-type CS gameplay towards the late game. Felt a bit mechanistic there at the end, but I had a great time overall. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone enjoying citizen sleeper, and even those that explicitly bounced off cs for anything other than gameplay reasons. You might still very much enjoy this one unless you hate rolling dice entirely.
-Hi Fi Rush: It's fun to play a dumb guy and blast stuff with guitar powers. Got cracked recently, I think? Runs fine, blast to play, my feet keep the rhythm
-The Roottrees are Dead: Playing currently, really fun detective puzzler type, reminds me a lot of Obra Dinn and I'd highly recommend to anyone who's into deduction puzzlers / figuring out who's who on a group photograph.
oh, and also Peak: The only game I paid for this year. sunglasses emoji Peak is very fun with friends, and I do still have some cowboyhat emoji
Talos Principle 2 is indeed pretty easy because half the puzzles are meant to introduce new mechanics slowly before setting up more difficult ones. TP1 had fewer new mechanics so most puzzles can just keep raising the difficulty of the established mechanics. Also, tbh, TP1 had some really crazy mechanics like the recording box that let you duplicate each piece of the puzzle (and place it in a few different locations across time). The lost puzzles (triangles) in TP2 are significantly harder than the regular ones, and some of the golden gate puzzles that you get at the end of the game are much harder than even the lost puzzles. I think TP1 had more difficult puzzles because pretty much all the red brick puzzles were big brain challenges, but TP2 has some real head scratchers too. TP2's last area has no new mechanic and it's full of difficult puzzles that use nothing but the basic lasers, boxes, and jammers.
Did you notice the random Marx and Lenin quotes in TP2 though?
Honestly, I don't even remember. It's sad to say, but my memory isn't the best and I found the general let's say 'aesthetic mechanic' of sprinkling a good helping of interesting quotes throughout the game somewhat less compelling this time around. I'm not even sure why, maybe I wasn't in the right state of mind for it, or maybe my taste has changed since the first TP, it just felt somewhat superficial to me, for lack of a better term.
This sounds really negative, and I don't really mean it to. Maybe I'm a bit negative. TP1 and 2 are lovely games more people should play, actually.