Games I Played In 2025 And Whether Or Not I Thought They Were Good (4/4)
There's a handful of games I played but didn't complete in 2025- here's those plus the ones I hadn't completed as of finishing the last post but now have.
Episode 2 of this one came out like, last week, but I devoured it at my earliest opportunity (thanks Flairina!) and man. Man. This is the best detective game. Nuts to Danganronpa and Ace Attorney, move over Star Seeker- this game kicks ass. It's an episodic thing, and there's only three cases out right now (0 through 2), but if you're a fan of the genre, you should check this one out.
There's some secret sauce to it I don't want to spoil, but the basic premise is that you're a lawyer in like, a future cyberpunk surveillance state dystopia with all the usual trappings- corpocrats, cyborg mods, gang wars, robots, the works. It's an impressively well-realized setting, though- like, it's disquietingly believable that the world could be like this, sold especially well via the like, glossary log stuff that's fluffed as like, unreliable slop articles trying to push you into paying for a premium subscription to the news.
Game is pretty good, too- like, the case writing is really tight and doesn't ask you to make too many huge leaps or waste time pointing out the obvious- it's keenly aware of what it needs to convey and when to make sure you can follow the mystery. The health/money ante/gambling mechanics for the deductions is a cool system, too- like, you don't get penalized much if you're a little lost and unsure and keep the ante low, but if you're sure you're onto something, you can go all in and reap big rewards.
Also every character is the best character. Morgan, the protagonist, is this jaded hateful two-faced piece of shit who loathes everything around her, and they strike a good balance between letting you root for her and dunking on her mercilessly. Very very fun, not even accounting for the secret sauce.
(Re: the recent episode 2, without getting into spoilers, I'd say it had an incredibly strong first half that made good on the promise of the premise... and then kind of a slow and anticlimactic latter half, tbh, but the momentum from the opening carries it through.)
This is a sort of... narrative idle game type thing? It's really not an idle game at all, more of a... time-management puzzle? Basically, you're stranded in an abandoned terraforming facility on a barren alien planet, and you have to puzzle out what happened to you and the staff there while caught in a mysterious time loop. It's pretty cool, sort of an Andy Weir vibe where you have to deal with the logistics of every little thing.
Like- every action you can take in the game takes some amount of time, and as time passes, your food and water and air meters go down, alongside various other time-sensitive resources. You have to pick and choose what you focus on, in order to overcome obstacles to collect information in each loop. And every time you complete an action, doing that action in a subsequent loop gets slightly faster, so you build up and streamline your survival routine over time in a way that frees up more time and resources to push further into more remote locations. It's pretty well-designed and engaging!
Not finished yet though. One of those early access things where they periodically release content drops with new options. Not sure how or if it'll end.
The premise of this one is... you live in a house, and you have a pair of magic glasses that allows you to see, like, gijinkas of household objects. And all of them have a thing for you and are romanceable characters in a dating sim. You can date your chair, or your computer, or your front door, or... like, literally everything, it's in the name. If you can point your cursor at it, you can date it.
Thing is, structurally, it's not really designed around like, picking your favorite one and dating that one, or even picking a handful. The game is this huge interconnected puzzle of relationships between characters, with dozens of interwoven storylines that evolve depending on your actions- who you've romanced, befriended, or made an enemy of. This is not "Date Anything"- it's "Date Everything". The furniture in your house all know each other, and have complicated history, and if you don't navigate it correctly, you can accidentally alienate people and lock yourself out of their endings. Who you date or hate or friendzone has unpredictable and permanent knock-on effects, and you need to be very intentional with how you manage each and every relationship in the game.
So, like, you have to be very bisexual for this one, is the thing. If you've got that covered, and also have the patience for a really complicated social puzzle, it might be up your alley. It's very funny and has excellent voice acting- I just didn't have the time or inclination to really dig into it.
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 describes itself as a "match-3 survival horror comedy RPG metroidvania", and that's not the half of it. It briefly pretends to be a sort of shlocky Resident Evil-style horror action game, but it reveals in very short order that this is a pretext for something absurdly meta- this weird existential adventure about the protagonist of an abandoned shovelware project navigating and trying to escape the ruins of his own unfinished and extremely broken game. It's got some real Kid Radd energy going on, and I was really enjoying it!
Which is why it's a shame I've been unable to finish it because of a game-breaking crash bug smack dab in the middle of the critical path, which I have found myself totally unable to find a way around.
But like... I'm not sure? Like, the way this game operates, that might well be a diegetic crash bug and I was supposed to do something to disable it. I haven't really given it that much effort, though- in part because its map system is a giant pain in the ass.
You navigate the mansion via this overworld map of nodes controlled by sort of dialogue tree choices, but there's no functional reminder system for what leads where and which ones you've already tried, and going down the wrong branch drops you into an unskippable match-3 encounter you've already beaten, forcing you to either replay the puzzle or reload the game. When you're stuck and not sure where to go, it has no mercy for you, so I haven't really tried to go back to it- it'd be a huge hassle for something that might actually just be the game being broken.
(Was fun while it lasted, though! They do a lot of fun stuff with the match-3 mechanics- you collect the symbols and trade them for RPG actions in a turn-based system, and the variety of combat designs they're able to squeeze out of that is impressive.)
This is... an extremely ambitious and impressive Pokémon fangame. It sets out to, like... totally rework and rebalance the game's mechanics from the ground up, in an effort to make every single pokémon in the game competitively viable and balanced with each other. They introduce a ton of new systems and quality of life changes that make it really really cool on a mechanical level if you're big into pokémon battles.
Like... first, you get this regenerator thingy right away that automatically restores consumable held items like berries and focus sashes and stuff, so you can actually use those things in your playthrough as part of your team's strategy. Making clever use of held items is key and also not something the game punishes you for doing outside of online matches.
Also, gone are EVs and IVs- every pokémon is essentially full-IVs, and you can manage your EV spread directly at any pokémon center rather than fool around grinding on specific wild pokémon. Great quality of life change there.
AND there's regional forms, and there's... one way they rebalanced things was by taking pokémon that were weak when fully evolved but had Mega forms that were usable, and just... had those evolve into their mega evolutions normally, as new pokémon with their own names. It's pretty cool to just have megas on your team without having to use a stone or whatever. Mawile evolves into Deceat now and it's great.
Then there's all the new moves and statuses and stuff- all the status effects that rely on randomness, like sleep and paralysis and confusion, have been replaced with new ones that have similar but more predictable effects. There's a bunch of new moves that give you more reliable coverage options- rock and flying types, for instance, are no longer cursed with having to be inaccurate if they want to hit hard. You've got a lot more options and a lot more control...
...and you need those, because the game is fucking hard. Every battle is a difficult puzzle, no pushover mooks. And it does one thing I kind of really hate, which is... you haven't actually won a trainer battle until you've perfected it- which is to say, won without any of your pokémon fainting. Any time you use a pokémon center, any non-perfected trainers reset and will challenge you again. A lot of strategy in pokémon is about strategically switching and sacrificing mons to gain a positional advantage, and you just kind of can't engage with that aspect of the game in this one if you want real progress- you have to reset fights over and over if your opponent takes even one KO.
That said, it gives you the tools you need to do this- another innovation is that while there is a strict level cap you'll hit pretty quick, EXP gained while at level cap automatically rolls over into EXP candies, which you can spend as soon as the cap increases- or to quickly level up something from your box that you realize you're going to need to handle this one particular fucker who you need a specific typing or ability to counter properly. It encourages you to keep a large roster that you rotate in and out to fit the situation, which is neat.
Story is... I don't know where it's going yet! I'm not done with it! But it's doing some fun stuff- it's set in a region after the plot of a normal pokémon game, where some kid trainer defeated the Evil Team and stopped some crisis with legendary pokémon. You are some rich kid who's challenging the League to stick it to your shitty older sibling... and the whole region, governed by the remnants of the Evil Team trying to rebrand and attain legitimacy as a state, is fucking annoyed that you're trying to do this right now while they're dealing with widespread natural disasters that've destroyed their infrastructure. This gym leader is busy trying to rebuild a destroyed city right now! And you want to have a pokémon battle?!? Are you joking?
Anyway, I'm not done with it yet because it's long and hard and slow going in general, but I'm really impressed with it and will probably keep playing.
This one's a treat. It's, uh... man, where to begin? It's kind of like... some sort of punk zine in videogame form. A real low-budget art piece. It's sort of a walking simulator type thing with extremely simplistic environment geometry, MS Paint doodle cardboard cutout graphics, and like no game mechanics of greater complexity than walking from point A to point B and activating dialogue triggers.
You play as, uh... B.B., some cartoon pink haired girl who makes zines and keeps getting involved in surreal slasher movie situations for unclear reasons the worst luck in the entire world. The "anthology" in the title is descriptive- there's like nine little episodes with their own sort of self-contained plots, usually centering around a strange location where you're menaced by a Killer or Killers with their own strange motives and perspectives on murdering people. Usually, B.B. fails to get killed.
I... don't even know how to describe it beyond that. It's got things to say, and it will either say them via B.B.'s semi-poetic stream of consciousness, the deranged ramblings of some creepypasta freakazoid, or... sometimes through chase scenes and environment design.
It's very funny! And thought provoking! And manages this with no mechanics more sophisticated than plopping Unity's default capsule collider down in rooms full of billboard objects! It's a fun time.
Also, Tammy is valid and deserves to drown as many people as she wants.
After playing Bounty of One and Megabonk and various other games that are apparently knockoffs of this one, I had to see what all the fuss was about- what was so compelling about this that everyone's trying to knock it off?
And, uh, nothing too fancy. It's just pretty clear why this became a phenomenon- it's simple cathartic fun. All about assembling a build out of a bunch of different flavors of "Kill All The Shit Around You" and watching waves of enemies get mowed down with increasing scale and efficiency.
There's... some stuff going on, though. The systems in this one are a lot deeper than the knockoffs I've seen- there's like, these weapon evolution combos to unlock, a bazillion playable characters, secrets hidden in every level, and just like... lots of little easter eggs hidden around the edges if you're poking at the boundaries of what's possible. I'm not sure to what extent I've seen what the game has to offer, yet- I keep unlocking new weird stuff that seems to be pointing at some sort of hidden lore or ending, even though the game is entirely devoid of plot or context otherwise. Mysterious.
oh also while 95% of enemies are just different skins on top of "bag of hit points that walks towards you", they have a whole bestiary for them and the enemy descriptions are pretty funny. got some chuckles out of me. the red skulls painted themselves red because they thought it'd make them go faster. (it didn't.)
Here is what I said about Monster Train 1:
Here is what has happened to me as of Monster Train 2:
Where do you get off having a big screen with little grayed-out crown icons that's visibly incomplete at the end of every run? Where do you get off having unlockables for beating the game on the hardest difficulty with every combination of factions in both directions with both champions? Who let you do this again but this time also every faction from the previous game is also here so there's four times as many runs to do??? And whose bright idea was it to make all of those combinations unique and interesting challenges that are fun to figure out? Are you out of your fucking minds?!?
Also, nitpick: you see how the faction icons for the original game's factions were all like, different takes on stylized horns, because they're devils? But now we have this game, and the faction icons are just like, these overdesigned Rorschach blot things (except the Lazarus League, who are just a picture of a beaker.)
And- there's like, these little story cutscenes you get between runs, where there's characters and they hang out in their downtime? They're pretty cute, but notably only feature the five new factions- seems like they just backported the last game's factions in as an afterthought after the story was already done? Kinda weird. Feels like whoever did writing on this one was not responsible for anything in the previous game and didn't care to try and incorporate any of it into their brand new thing, which is odd considering how much attention to detail went into revamping their mechanics.
Fuckin'... don't touch this damn thing if you're a completionist, it's really really bad for you. If I keep up my stupid irresponsible addict's pace of three runs a day, I'll probably be done with this thing sometime mid-January, after picking it up in October. Life-ruining. Holy fuck.
Okay, I think that's everything, notwithstanding a handful of less interesting second-screen idle games and stuff that there's no point reviewing. Roundup post with scores coming soon.
