THE BATCROOKS AWARDS 2025
After keeping meticulous notes on every Media Property™ I consumed in 2025, here is my roundup of the BESTS!! all the categories get multiple winners because this is my awards and i can do whatever i want. note that i dont watch new movies often and i rarely watch any actual TV at all. so, dont take this as an actual Best of 2025 lol this is MY best of 2025.
Best Movie I Watched for the First Time in 2025 (Animated)
Normally I post my "review" for these, but the Ne Zha 2 (2025) one is so full of spoilers I'm not going to post it all. I will put the first line: "this was the coolest spectacle of a film i have ever seen."
Robot Dreams (2023): really wonderful movie… probably a movie can't even get more slice of life than this. the attention to just general details and behaviors was so nice to watch. of course gave me a good sob cry at the end.. kind of profound story really heartbreaking and also hopeful. could have watched it go on forever really
Best Movie I Watched for the First Time in 2025 (Live Action)
The Thing (1982): this really was as good as everybody says it is. the effects were so FUN and sometimes it got kinda hokey and silly but that made it MORE FUN!!! i loved it. loved speculating as it happened. good movie
Wake Up Dead Man (2025): abridging this review as I had a lot of THOUGHTS. its just always delightful to watch benoit blanc do his little mysteries, the way they had him look in this one was WACKY. the long hair and beard combo.. where in the timeline is this supposed to be? Is he older or younger in this one? just kinda funny i guess. he is outside of time. the stories have nothing to do with each other, they never even reference the other ones. he is constantly doing mysteries and sometimes he changes up his look. he just looked so different in this one it barely looked like daniel craig anymore lol. ummmmmm anyway this was a good movie very fun, a little weird but ultimately a muder mystery is just fun i love them.
Best TV Show I Watched in 2025 (Broadcast and Internet Categories)
Slow Horses (series 1-5): this was a lot of fun, i thought i might rate it lower because there were a few times it was a little slower or less clever but overall it is too fun really! short little seasons with really quick plots. fun characters who they keep killing off. the season that actually came out this year wasn't its strongest but i still thought it was fine.
Game Changer (season 7): this literally wins every year i do this, but this season was especially incredible. SEVERAL top ten episodes of the whole series in this one, notably One Year Later, Earnest-est, Rulette, and Samalamadingdong.
Best Video Game (Multiplayer)
This is a hotly contested category because the vast majority of video games I play, I play co-op.
Split Fiction: it's so hard to imagine how a game like this can be topped, how even a game As Good could be made with different ingredients!! but hopefully within 4 years or so we'll get to see how they do it again. just a superb game. so many good parts. my only true complaint is how often they would introduce some kind of gameplay mechanic or puzzle concept and not let you play around with it long enough. almost every idea they introduce could be expanded into a 3+ hour game. i think the ones they chose to expand into the full sections were pretty darn good though. the orbs, the DRAGONS. when i got to be a MONKEY!! i can barely even properly remember all the things in the early levels. it was so much!!! and the side stories! just incredible thank you very much co-op game makers
Abiotic Factor: TECHNICALLY this also won last year because it was out in early access, but as we replayed it completely from the beginning after its 1.0 release and it had A LOT of new content, I'm counting it for this year as well. what a monumental feat of survival crafting!! sooo much content and such fun theming. will be hard to ever top. enshrouded was a contender for Very Good survival crafting, and i liked it a lot, but its BotW-ness actually lessened its goodness. Abiotic Factor feels handcrafted down to every hallway and it's so good for it. very excellent co-op experience. Dr. Samuel "Smallballs" Sambells made so much SOUP!!!!
SPECIAL RUNNER-UP PRIZES: Enshrouded PEAK Escape Simulator 2 Absolum
HONORABLE MENTIONS (replayed this year but not new to us): It Takes Two, Crab Champions, Super Mario Odyssey (not technically co-op but it is when you trade off playing every time you get a moon), Warhammer: Vermintide II
Best Video Game (Plays Game)
these are games we call "plays" game. because we plays them. "Cat Plays a Game" and "Sour Plays a Game" are the names of our "streams" (streaming in Discord in the group chat lol). We are CONNOISSEURS of these games they are AN INCREDIBLE THING!!
Blue Prince: having to abridge my notes on this game because we spent so long playing it (90 hours i think) and i had so much to say. I'm actually just going to say that although there were times the RNG of it all slowed things down to an annoying pace, the overall experience of playing this was so incredible that I can hardly complain. my job was note-taker rather than driver, and I have literally 20 notebook pages of DENSE, madman scrawling, intricate notes and diagrams that i wrote throughout the whole experience. Truly a magnificent thing The Roottrees are Dead 1.0 and Roottreemania: the updated version of the itch.io one we played last year, the original mystery was just as fun to solve despite knowing the twist and other things. enough specifics had been forgotten for it to still be great detectiveing. The bonus game, Roottreemania, is just as good as the first. i hope that the next game made in this genre has more diegetic documents though. i want to see the actual website/magazine spread/book pages. all information being in the same visual textbox is a bit sad. but there is a very admirable amount of art in it as the photos of the people, which is cool. and the songs are genuinely so good. this game has expanded on the deduction of Obra Dinn and Golden Idol and created a New and Beloved subgenre of DOCUMENTS DEDUCTION. And so it deserves every award
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Thank Goodness You're Here! The Rise of the Golden Idol Investigations
Best Video Game (Singleplayer)
I just don't ever feel like i have good time to play a single player game all alone lol, and so I do not have a lot of contenders for this category.
Tower Wizard: kind of silly to rate this 5 stars but i played it while SICK WITH COVID after NYC and i just spent 5.5 hours playing through the entirety of this, the cookie-clicker-like follow-up to magic archery. and i loved it
Öoo: ohohoo i really liked this!!!! the most "for a guy like me, no problem" game ever i think. clever moment after clever moment. it's so funny that it truly is progress-locked solely by ideas (other than unlocking both bombs). it is designed sooo well that going back to "unlock" using the knowledge you gained just feels perfect. it was a little more than 2 hours and i wish it was longer. i know that i found 2 flies with no matching frogs which are HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS and i'm wondering if there are more secrets around, but unlike Animal Well it does not have achievements to unlock based on them so i will probably not try and figure them out . overall a perfect little game. i really liked the sound design and especially liked the animation on Öoo itself. whenever i had to take a minute to think through something i could look up and down and animate it thinking hard which i really enjoyed. short but sweet!
HONORABLE MENTIONS: PokeRogue Strange Jigsaws Megabonk ElecHead
Best Book I Read for the First Time in 2025
entire series count as 1 book they're just really long
Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb: while I technically read the first trilogy in 2024, all the others were early this year. I had mixed opinions about Liveship and Dragons, but the Fitz books were all so solid and good. Just a really great experience reading these. i have notes on every single book, but for the award I'll just leave it at that!
Ducks by Kate Beaton: a graphic novel memoir about her time workingin the oil sands of northern alberta. kate beaton is such a good cartoonist and writer, i ate this up. not what i would call a "fun" book because of all the stuff that happens but it was fun to read a good graphic novel.
Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman: undeniably the most stupid fun that can be found in books. The first book had me uncertain because the tone was often SO stupid, but the mechanics (and then eventually, yes, the Characters), kept me going through this entire thing. I loved every single one. even though they were objectively pretty dumb usually. probably the most skillful author i have come across when it comes to depicting things of EPIC SCALE. every single finale was HUGE. the mechanics of levelling up and using a metaphysical inventory and everything?? it was just so fun. so so fun
And that's a wrap for 2025!! i'm so grateful to creatives who continue to make such wonderful media for me to consume every year. thank you everybody
