This was weirdly one of the hardest little introductions I’ve ever had to write for a piece: not because I don’t have plenty of material, but because 2025 was so bad that it was close to impossible to avoid writing a patented “hell preamble.”
I suppose 2025 wasn’t so bad if you happened to be a wildly rich AI evangelist, an opportunistic fascist (in the US, at the very least) or a very serious business boy/girlboss who made bank despite okaying/creating the very conditions that facilitated massive layoffs. In other words, if you are blithely, inconceivably wealthy; a terrible person; or both; you may have had a great 2025. I don’t personally know a single soul who did!
Lest this indeed become a hell preamble, I will say this: it’s close to a miracle that beautiful things still happened in this rotten year. Some human beings still did acts of good, despite it all. Some helpers helped others. Some creative people made work that made a difference—whether it was challenging, inspiring, or just distracted me when I needed it badly. 2025 was rotten to the core, but these games—and the teams that made them—are worth celebrating.
Via Raw Fury
Now this is how you do a spooky adventure! The Seance of Blake Manor arrived right around Halloween and served up excellent, dark and gloomy supernatural mystery vibes. Set on a late 19th century Irish manor about to host a dangerous seance, the game tasks your PI player character with solving mysteries and puzzles surrounding the troubled souls seeking communion with the dead. Everyone here has a dark—or sad, or both—secret, and a hotel room to rifle through for clues (one of the greatest and most under-utilized gameplay systems of all time, if you ask me).
via Raw Fury
Blue Prince came at a very opportune time for me to jump in head-first to a big, strange, challenging and multifaceted puzzle box. I played so much Blue Prince with my partner that I wrote about its wonderful foundations as a “notebook game”—a dish best served with a thick notebook (for us, plenty of graphing paper) scrawled with symbols, notes, codes and other ephemera.
While we didn’t solve every single mystery of the manor, we got pretty far (I take particular pride in my progress on those gallery puzzles), and our several hundred in-game days represented time well spent.
via Mossmouth
Yes, UFO 50 came out in 2024 (unless you count this year’s Switch version, in which case, I’m right on time!), but among its 50 games (all retro-styled full titles with brilliant twists) I found a real load-bearing support in getting through this year. Party House—an 80s house party themed deck builder—delighted and distracted me through a comically terrible winter. I fell all the way in to Pilot Quest: Return to Zoldath this past spring, the weird Zelda-ish world and bizarrely addicting idle mechanics. The devious tower defense chaos of Rock-On Island was my faithful study buddy when I started taking science classes again: something to do with my hands while I listened to hours of lectures. To this day, every single fact I know about enzyme kinetics is mentally accompanied by the little sounds and animations of cavemen throwing tiny axes and fireballs at dinosaurs.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of UFO 50, a game I will probably play for years to come, savoring one title at a time until the next one comes a-calling.
