 I definitely have a type when it comes to games. In recent years, it's become apparent to me that I will gravitate towards any game that incorporates card collecting and roguelike elements. Literally my top two most played games on PS5 as I write this are Balatro and Slay The Spire with over 300 and over 200 hours in them respectively. I mean seriously, I have a type.
Just recently I stumbled upon a review of Into The Restless Ruins on Nintendo Life of all places. I actually stopped playing my Switch after the pandemic was over, and I ended up selling the thing when we were selling our old house and I had to make decisions about what was going into storage. These days I'm a "Playstation dude," as my daughter calls me. My Super Nintendo is the only Nintendo platform that I've continued to hang on to. The Switch 2 was released this week and I'm not even remotely interested in the thing, but I can't deny that I still enjoy reading NL's coverage of indie games that tend to go overlooked by critics on more powerful consoles. So what is Into The Restless Ruins then? Well, it's an interesting mash-up of genres. It combines card collecting with roguelike dungeon crawls and the gameplay of Vampire Survivors. All of these are elements that I enjoy on their own. So I mean, it sounds pretty clear that this game would appeal to me. And it has. If we're talking about vibes, Into The Restless Ruins is the perfect Playstation Portal game. I actually think that the very first time I even fired the game up it was on my Portal. A couple of hours later I had cleared the first dungeon a couple of times and was feeling like I had a pretty good grasp of the mechanics. There are six dungeons to tackle and many cards and perks to unlock over time. You can replay dungeons over again as many times as you want. And you'd do this to help unlock more stuff for future runs, or if you're into playing for score or speed, I guess that's a thing too. Like trying to beat your own personal best run. The main thing is that you're drawing cards to connect rooms and build out a dungeon. The end goal is to reach the boss room of each dungeon so you have to plan your route accordingly. Plus, there are a bunch of rooms obstructed by cards. Some of these have Seals in them and finding Seals will break down walls that stop you from progressing to the next set of rooms. It's a good flow that combines strategy with RNG pretty well. Over time I started to make more sense of things and come up with my own strategies. I've spent no time researching or googling. I'm just going with my gut here. And it's been going well. Like, I prefer to grab lots of cards (rooms) that are long with doors on both extreme ends. This way I'm able to make a fairly straight line from the start of the dungeon to the boss room by the time the run is over. I also like to line that path with useful perks like upping attack strength or whatever. I like to use dead-end rooms that have various one-time perks (new weapons, revealing clouded rooms, etc) very close to the start of the dungeon so that they won't feel like wasted rooms on runs toward the boss later. Things like that. There's a pretty constant stream of unlocks to keep things interesting as you play. At least in the ten or so hours I've put into the game so far. I feel like pretty much every run has revealed to me new weapons, new global perks and so on. The game starts out strong and also feels pretty easy when you start out. But later dungeons get more devious. The difficulty ramps up heavily as you progress. By the time I cleared the fourth dungeon I felt annoyed and triumphant. I will say that the one flaw I find in the game is that runs are not short. On multiple attempts I found myself succumbing to a game over after putting an hour into a run. That can be detrimental when you have limited time. Like if a run can take over an hour it means way less run attempts for me in a night. And if I'm looking at the clock and I know I should be in bed in an hour or less, I probably won't attempt another run. So there's that. As I write this now, I'm stuck up against the final dungeon and I've made several attempts. I've come close too! One was a crazy run where I used all of these random warp portal cards so I was just kind of zipping all over the vast dungeon haphazardly. It was kind of a chaotic RNG mess, but it was fun. I will say that this game is not Balatro and it's not Slay The Spire. Those are games that I could hooked on hard and fast and because runs were fairly short, they're great palate cleansers even years after release. Into The Restless Ruins feels different. It's like the kind of game where once I finish the last dungeon I'll probably be done with it forever. But it's still a really great little indie game with a unique hook. It scratches a rather specific niche for me, and it's been really compelling in all the hours that I've put into it. This game doesn't have the same longevity that some of my favorites do. But it's been a great random find for me this year, and I have to imagine that come the end of the year I'll still consider it one of the better games of 2025.
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 Blue Prince came out of nowhere. I heard no buzz. No hype. Just all of the sudden it was out and it was the highest rate game of 2025 thus far. The developer was previously responsible for Paradise Killer, a game I'd vaguely heard of but knew nothing about. But overnight, every single podcast that I listen to was suddenly raving about Blue Prince. And to be honest, it didn't really sound like a game I'd be too into. It sounded frustrating really. But it also launched on Playstation Plus, so I had access to it for free. So I'd be stupid not to try, right?
The things that I knew about Blue Prince going into it were the basics. The thin plot is that you're rich uncle left you a house in his will but the stipulation is that you must find the hidden 46th room in order to get your inheritance. And you must do it in a single night. Thus, the game is set up as a roguelike. Nights are runs. The game plays in first person, but there's no combat. No this is really a kind of board game, really. The mansion is spread out over a 5x9 grid. Everytime you open a door, you draft three possible rooms to go into. Each room has its pros and cons. There's perks and penalties for each room. You also have to worry about the layout of doors. You need a path north and you really don't want to force yourself into ultimate deadends. You start the night with fifty steps. Each time you cross into a room, that's one step. So again, this is like a board game. It's also like a strategy game. It's also full of puzzles. And it's also kind of a walking simulator. To put it short, it's not really like any other game I've ever played. I could mention games that are a point of reference, but none of them really describe it. Instead it's like a dozen games, or pieces of them, meshed into something unique. The first time I fired up Blue Prince, I played it for three hours straight and was hooked. I went to bed way too late and continued to think about it. And then I spent the next week obsessed. As the game suggested, I kept notes with any little clue or lead I had that I wanted to remember or try to work out. I had a whole lot of fun and then around hour fifteen I abruptly felt hugely frustrated and made the decision to bail on the game, at least for now so that I don't go mad and change my mind about every single positive thing I've said about the game for the past week. What follows is a mix of snippets of notes that I kept throughout the week along with some further thoughts I'm having about my own descent into madness playing Blue Prince. Be forewarned that I'm going to be pretty loose with spoilers here, as this is not a review. This is my own experience with the game, so yeah SPOILERS ahead! BLUE = ADDITION; YELLOW = SUBTRACTION; PINK = MULTIPLICATION; PURPLE = DIVISION Okay, so one of the puzzles you'll hit is a dartboard with random colors lit up. I had found a note referencing the puzzle and assumed it was math related but couldn't make heads nor tails. I admit I briefly googled to at least get an idea of how it worked, but didn't read too deep into it. Eventually it clicked and I got the hang of it, and it's actually a pretty enjoyable puzzle. The more you play, the harder these puzzles get, eventually throwing in more complicated versions of the math. Another puzzle room is based on the old Labyrinth idea of figuring out which statements are true and which are false. There's three boxes, each with a statement. Two statements are false and one is true. So you have to work out like, if this one's true then that makes this one false automatically. These are more logic than the math one I guess. It's alright but I'd get tripped up on these more often. TERMINAL PASSWORD BEGINS WITH S (SINCLAIR? SWIMBIRD?) - DON'T FORGET MARION MARIGOLD There's computer terminals in various rooms. To access one whole system you need a password, but the one I found on a note was scribbled out. I could tell it started with S. I thought maybe Sinclair. As a note, names in this game reference historical computer scientists, Clive Sinclair and Charles Babbage which I enjoy as a nerd. Anyway, it wasn't either of the passwords I guessed and I had no other leads. I never got into that system. I did however figure out how to exploit the keycard system depending on whether I had found a keycard, or if I was able to knock out the power to the system. I also found a bunch of disks to bring to the terminals and upgrade various rooms to offer up extra perks. This was a cool touch, and one of the few permanent upgrades you'll find in the game. SAFE = 9083; BLUE MEMOS = TRUE/RED MEMOS = FALSE In a couple of rooms (Boudoir and Office) I was able to find safes, but I could never find the code to unlock them. I did find 9083 written on a note, but it was a red note and I also found something later that said that red notes are lies. So yeah, I never did find a combination that did work to open the safes and I have no idea what's in them. OUTSIDE THERE'S A WOODEN GATE THAT'S STUCK (CAN PROBABLY BREAK IT?) AND THERE'S A DARK CAVE UNDER THE MANSION THAT LOOKS LIKE TORCHES CAN LIGHT IT UP At some point I realized I could turn around and walk right outside at the beginning of the game. It's so obvious but easy to miss. Who turns around when you're facing three doors in front of you to start a run? There's things to explore early on, but nothing you can really do. But that's what you do in Blue Prince. You try stuff and make little notes and wonder which ones are just red herrings. DOORS IN THE WEST WING ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE LOCKED? DOORS IN THE EAST WING ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE LOCKED! Again, confusion because of a red note. And I don't know that I ever noticed either wing being locked more often than the other. Maybe it's all garbage clues. CHESS PIECE IN THE STUDY (QUEEN) IS AT D8 There's chess pieces all over this mansion. I'm sure they mean something but I never worked it out. 44 LETTERS IN THE MESSAGE; F = MAIN HALL: FACE/ACE... UNUSED PAIRINGS: GLOVE/LOVE, STING/SING, CROWD/CROW, GROWN/GROW, SNACK/SACK I have no idea what any of this is. I saw this written on a chalkboard. I don't know. I was starting to get overwhelmed here. DOGTAG = 10 A picture I saw in a bathroom. ALZARA (ZOLTAR) The game gets so weird. I found a fortune-telling automaton just like in the movie Big. I used a coin and got nothing of use out of it. At least as far as I could tell. KEYS TO THE CAR... TURN ON POWER TO THE GARAGE... DROP OFF ADDRESS: 14227 SANDY HEIGHTS This sequence of events made me feel good. I was hoping that I'd get to take the car for a drive but no. Just more clues and stuff. TABLE OF ELEMENTS PUZZLE, WTF? I can't even. THE ANTECHAMBER LEVER IN GREENHOUSE IS BROKE (EAST AND WEST LEVERS SHOULD WORK?) LEVERS IN SECRET GARDEN, GREENHOUSE, GREAT HALL Here's where I started to really lose my cool. I finally figured out how to get one of the three doors to the Antechamber open. This presumably will lead me to the 46th room. Opening one door requires luck and RNG. But I was finally able to open up the west door by finding the key to the Secret Garden, and then finding the Secret Garden, then solving the puzzle there that opens the west door. But then the path I created to the Antechamber didn't make it to the west door. So I started another run and guess what? Opening Antechamber doors is not persistent. So wow. I kind of got discouraged and lost all momentum here. After about fifteen hours of being totally compelled by Blue Prince it all blew up on me when I realized that every run is going to remain brutal and dependent on the luck of random numbers and suddenly success felt just as elusive to me as it did in hour one. Like after fifteen hours I should feel like I'm at least close. I'm making progress. I'm getting better. And I mean I'm smarter now and understand the game more, but skill and thought cannot account for the brutality of the RNG. And so I think I need to step away from Blue Prince while I still have fond memories instead of trudging ahead and having fondness turn to hate.  I'm generally a solo gamer. Years ago before we were parents, it was easier to convince my wife to do some co-op gaming with me. We had so much more downtime, which meant that it wasn't so precious. Plus, we were way less tired.
The way things work in 2025 is so much different. Our daughter is six years old. Kids of that age can take a lot out of you throughout the day. And while she goes to bed around eight o'clock, there's grown-up things to be done. My wife will make lunch for school the next day. I'll get the coffee ready for the morning. There's always cleaning up to be done. So by the time we settle down around nine, we're just tired. And like I said, downtime is precious. My wife rarely makes it to ten o'clock, so she's going to focus on what she enjoys most: reading, or watching something (probably true crime) and probably fall asleep in the middle of it. So this is when I get my gaming done. When my daughter is asleep and my wife is reading or watching TV, and probably falling asleep. I'm naturally a night-owl, or at least I'm better at ignoring heavy eyes and sacrificing sleep so that I can enjoy my hobbies. Which brings us to Split Fiction. This is a game that's gotten a lot of hype this year. As I write this is June, it's still the third highest rated PS5 game of the year. And when it was released in March it was the actual highest rated PS5 game of the year. So I kind of had to pay some attention to it. I haven't really been dazzled by Hazelight Studios, personally. Its founder, Josef Fares is a passionate game developer and I appreciate that. But his first game, Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons (2013) was a game that I pretty much hated. Now in fairness, I played that game the way that Fares said you absolutely should not play. I bought the remaster that he had nothing to do with and that added in a single player mode where you control each brother with a separate analog stick. This is awful. But like I said, I really don't have a co-op gaming partner to hop in at my every whim. So that's what I did. I skipped A Way Out (2018) because it was co-op only. And also it didn't look that good to me anyway, but I guess that's neither here nor there. It Takes Two (2021) looked slightly more interesting to me, but again didn't have a single player mode. And I figured if I was going to ask my wife to play a game with me, it shouldn't star a couple who is going through a divorce. But then Split Fiction rolled around. As I mentioned, my wife is an avid reader. She appreciates sci-fi, but she's much more into fantasy books. I'm really the sci-fi dude in the house. So when I showed her the trailer for Split Fiction and how it revolved around two writers, one of sci-fi and one of fantasy who must work together to adventure throughout stories that they had written, well suddenly she was interested in checking this game out. So we made a plan. We bought the game and a shiny new red Dualsense controller. We decided to block off Tuesday nights to be our gaming night. Basically, after our daughter went to bed and the chores were done we'd game as much as we could until my wife was getting tired enough to call it quits. It was a solid plan and we stuck with it for about five weeks. Over the course of that time, I kept a few notes jotted down which I'll try to elaborate on now. THE GAME IS AN ALLEGORY ABOUT HOW AI IS KILLING HUMAN CREATIVITY Maybe this is sort of heavy handed while coming from someone like Fares who so clearly sees himself as an auteur video game writer. But it's a fair concern and it also works well enough to tie in the plot of old fashioned book authors while also working to make a broader point about technology and the video game industry and development crunch and massive studio layoffs and all that. So I actually appreciated the theme. ME AS THE SHERPA Early on my wife kept apologizing. She kept saying she was sorry for having to get used to the controls. She felt like she was moving so slow and holding me back. I explained that without her involvement I wouldn't even be playing the game. So with that in mind, she should view this as not me playing the game with her helping me, but rather her playing the game with me guiding and assisting her. It wasn't about me "beating" this game, it was about us having a bonding experience, so whatever that looked like was fine with me. From then on, we seemed to have a lot more fun and she got more comfortable, presumably feeling less pressure. TEAMWORK AND GETTING OUT OF COMFORT ZONES What Split Fiction does - for better or worse - is force you into a role. I chose the sci-fi girl and she chose the fantasy girl for obvious reasons. But you'll be doing different things at different times. At one point my wife had to pilot a spaceship while I was manning the guns. She hated this section, but forcing a character to do something that maybe the player doesn't love can also be sort of interesting in the interest of teamwork. I also found that it fit the theme of the story well. Meaning, we were jumping between sci-fi and fantasy stories, so each character would feel either more or less comfortable within that world. THE SCI-FI STUFF IS HEAVILY BLADE RUNNER INFLUENCED I mean this is just a pro for me. Blade Runner is easily my favorite movie of all time. So when you see flying cars that look like spinners, well I'm gonna be happy. I don't have much to say about it, I guess I just like pointing and saying "that reminds me of Blade Runner" because I love Blade Runner so much. THE HAMMER BOSS WAS A JERK Seriously. That guy took us forever. THE BIG BALL BOSS WAS FUN This fight was pretty epic. It took serious teamwork, but we actually enjoyed it because even though it was challenging, it was also manageable. Unlike the hammer guy who we had to keep retrying over and over again. THE PIGS WERE SILLY (AND SO WERE THE HOTDOGS) I mean this game goes to some odd places. In one section you transform into pigs. And the pigs can roll around in mud. And also they can fart to kind of briefly fly. I wish I was making this up, but honestly this game can get absurd. Even weirder is that later you turn into hotdogs. Not the dog breed, but actual hotdogs the food. It's just weird. Not good or bad, just weird. FAST MOTORCYCLES REMINISCENT OF AKIRA More sci-fi allusions. Akira is always a good point of reference. So is the fact that when the sci-fi girl has her sword she reminds me of Battle Angel Alita. Or even shades of Ghost In The Shell. None of this means anything, but I guess I just like those vibes so made note of them. MY WIFE LIKES THE GAME BUT THINKS THE MOVIE MIGHT BE CHEESY Yes, there's a movie already announced to be in the works. With Sydney Sweeny. We like her. She's been in good stuff. Euphoria, White Lotus, etc. And that's where my notes end. We played the game for about five weeks and then life got in the way. My wife was enjoying the game but also finding the difficulty ramping up enough to be hard to enjoy if she was at all tired. And again, we have a six year old so we're always tired. So we skipped a week. And then another. And then it was six weeks and before you know it's like Split Fiction is kind of a fuzzy memory. Where were we? Where did we leave off in the story? And now my wife would have to re-learn the controls and try to up her skill level to where it was even though she hasn't touched a game in six weeks. It starts to feel sort of intimidating and less fun all of the sudden, which I can totally understand. So we didn't finish Split Fiction. But we did like the game. We enjoyed the time spent bonding over it for five weeks. It's a nice memory we will keep of at least trying to set aside time to bond over games again for the first time in probably six years. And I appreciate that she made the effort so that I could at least check this game out and say I gave it a shot while everyone was still talking about it this year. So yeah. Good game.  I'm definitely a fan of simulation games. As a kid I was always intrigued by Simcity, and really wanted the SNES version just saw I could watch Bowser attack my city. But I never did find a copy. But later in my life I made up for missing out on a genre I had been intrigued by. I can tell you that in my life I've lost many hours to games like Cities Skylines, Planet Coaster and Civilization VI just to name a few of my favorites.
With that in mind, I've been meaning to play the Two Point games pretty much since they first started rolling out. Two Point Studios is a British developer made up of former Bullfrog Productions/Lionhead Studios employees. As such, they had a pedigree given their experience with Theme Hospital. And not so surprisingly, their first release was Two Point Hospital (2018), which served as a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital. After that they tackled higher learning with Two Point Campus (2022) before launching Two Point Museum in 2025. And that's the one I finally got around to playing because my daughter gave me a Playstation gift card for my birthday. Two Point Museum is an easy enough game to get into. It has a solid and comfortable control scheme for controllers. I have to think that publisher Sega wanted to make sure that these would be accessible games for consoles. The game has a feel that will make sense to anybody who's ever played Theme Hospital or any other modern sim game. It also has plenty of British humor and charm. So I definitely enjoyed myself in the early hours as I was eased into my various museums. THE PREHISTORIC MUSEUM Here's where you really learn the ropes. You start off small: a couple of basic exhibits, hiring tickbooth assistants, a few exhibit specialists. Nothing crazy. And then things ramp up as they often do in these kinds of games. Before long you'll need to start offering some food options to patrons. And you'll want to make sure you've got trash bins and janitors. You'll put out donation buckets and want securities guards to pick those up. Then you'll need more exhibits, so you hire more specialists to go out on expeditions and bring back cool stuff. You display those and your buzz goes up. You've got more patrons so you need more employees. You'll need more seating areas for them to rest. Maybe more food options or a coffee cart. Now that there's a lot of foot traffic you should have a gift shop. Now you'll probably start tweaking the really nitty gritty numbers. Are your employees happy with their pay? Do they need more training? Are ticket prices appropriate? What about food prices? Gift shop prices? You'll spend a lot of time in menus tweaking tiny percents and seeing what happens. And it all feels good. You'll start opening up more destinations on the map and sending out more expeditions. You'll find better fossils and you'll want to decorate the exhibits to increase the buzz. You'll upgrade skeletons with missing bones. There's always something to mess around with and I was feeling really good about Two Point Museum. THE AQUARIUM Opening up my second museum was a thrill. I love ocean life. I was more excited about displaying marine life than fossils. So this was cool. I had a great time sending out specialists on dives and seeing what they brought back. I enjoyed designing the various tanks and deciding which fish could co-exist peacefully with others. I enjoyed keeping track of which tanks were fresh-water and which were salt. The foundation I had gotten from playing the first museum carried over well, and I got really into the aquarium because it just appealed to me more. And before I knew it, it was time to open a third museum. THE SUPERNATURAL MUSEUM Here's where it should have gotten even more fun. The supernatural museum is housed in front of a haunted hotel. This was going to be super fun because it wasn't grounded in total realism. But then... I was told to go back to the first museum and earn two stars to progress the game instead. And so back to the prehistoric museum (AKA: the least interesting museum of the three for me). Here's the thing, how do I earn two stars? It's super vague. The objective just says I need to complete star objectives. But I don't see any of those. I spent the next two hours just doing objective after objective. Whichever task popped up, I did it. And nothing happened to give me two stars. It drove me completely nuts. I googled and found a bunch of people on the internet just as confused. But nobody could give me a clear answer. One guy posted a screenshot of what the next "star objective" was. I didn't have it in my list. Presumably I would if I did... something. But what? And that's around the point that Two Point Museum went from really fun to kind of frustrating. Not because the game was hard but because the objectives and progression felt too vague. What if I wasting hours not doing things that were actually advancing the campaign? With such limited game time and a hope to see the campaign through, that kind of risk was triggering an anxiety within me. I'll walk away from Two Point Museum before I start to really get a negative opinion of it. Where it stands now I'll say that it is a solid and fun sim. It has plenty of personality and wit. It's got lots of stuff to tweak without being overly complex. But I just wish the campaign was a bit more clear. I have a hunch that playing in sandbox mode would be the way to turn this one around further for me, but for now I'm going to put it off to the side and come back with a clear head. That said, I'd still put it in the upper half of 2025 games I've played this year so that's something.  Sometimes I convince myself I need to play a game because I don't know why. Because it's critically acclaimed. Because it seems unique and cool. Whatever it is. And back when the first Citizen Sleeper was released, I read countless reviews that really made it sound incredible. It sounded like exactly my sort of game. It was a slow-burn sci-fi story; it was basically a text-adventure game mixed with board game mechanics, deep strategy and difficult choices. I mean honestly, it sounded like the exact kind of game that I should love.
I downloaded the first Citizen Sleeper not long after it was released and I played probably less than an hour of it and got distracted by something else and never thought about it again. And now Citizen Sleeper is a game that again feels like something I should really love. Maybe I just didn't give the first game enough of a chance. I mean this sequel checks off so many boxes: Critics really love this, and yet the masses don't seem to even know it exists. So it feels like a cult-classic in the making. Again, it is a hard sci-fi story - a noir cyberpunk thriller that seems to borrow liberally from Blade Runner. Its storytelling seems to owe itself to old 80s computer text adventures. Its core mechanics are all about making very deliberate decisions - both to conversations or through choose-your-own adventure type options. Not to mention that skill checks are done with actual dice. I mean, this is very much an old school pen and paper game for a single player that happens to be on a console. And yet. I'll be honest here, I've now owned this game for over a month. I actually bought the game using a gift card that I got for my birthday. I have now booted it up at least four times and I just cannot seem to make Citizen Sleeper 2 hold my interest. I think I'm managed to eek out a couple of hours of gameplay now, but I'm just not enjoying it at all. At all. And I can't seem to understand why, because pretty much everything about this game sounds like a game that I would very stereotypically like. It makes no sense. While the story and setting are things that I enjoy, there's something about the writing that I just can't put my finger on. I want to say it's too dry, but that's not really right. It's actually flavored pretty well with tons of tiny little details to paint a mental picture. So that's not it. It is absolutely verbose, though. I feel like so much of it I'm just thinking that a good editor could have said the same things in less words and made it feel better-paced. But obviously this is just me because again, critics love the writing. I hate to say that I'm finding it boring, but that's almost the best word. Which still makes no sense because I like the concept of the story. And I grew up with pen and paper RPGs! I should embrace this kind of throwback. Kids today watching Stranger Things and seeing what it looked like when us olds used to play Dungeons & Dragons in a basement? I did that! Me and Ted and Kenny and maybe Blair and Richard and some other kids. We did that. I cut my teeth on the old TSR game Dungeon, which I picked up at a yard sale and was so proud of owning. Then I graduated to real Dungeons & Dragons because there was some older kids in my neighborhood who were in junior high and exposed me to that. I had so many D&D reference books and supplemental campaigns. I even moved on to the Marvel role playing game and at least dabbled with Mechwarrior. I'm sure I'm forgetting others that we explored, but honestly we were nerds and there was a store at that mall that stocked all the nerdy tabletop RPGs and it was just so fascinating to me. So why don't I love a game that is basically a sci-fi dungeon master asking me to make choices and roll dice to see if I succeed or not? I don't know. I keep trying but I just can't seem to make this game grow on me. For one thing I think that the dice mechanic is just a mess. The idea is that one die is one skill-check. Or basically it's one move. But your dice can become damaged. You can even permanently break a die. I don't like that. Maybe I don't really appreciate the loop of the game, but it feels like I'm basically just spending each "turn" by finding five decisions to make so that I can roll each die and see if I succeeded. Then I need to go back to my ship and sleep to end the move. Then I'm doing that all over again. It feels laborious. I get that the there's a tension to the dice rolls. I get that there's a probability of success that adds to the tension. But this isn't gripping to me like taking a risky shot in XCOM. Instead it just feels boring and while I can push through a bad game, I always struggle with a game that bores me.  Indie metroidvanias are a dime a dozen. At least that tends to be my stance. I can tell you that I've attempted many critical indie darlings that have failed to hold my interest. People loved Animal Well, but I loathed it. That's just me.
I suppose it's fair to say that I have a weird love/hate relationship with the metroidvania genre in general. Just going off the two series that became the genre's namesake, I love Metroid II and Super Metroid. I love Castlevania II and Symphony Of The Night. And yet the genre as a whole? I don't even know. Every once in a while a game pops up that I really get into, but overall I find myself just frustrated with metroidvanias. Ender Magnolia is the sequel to 2021's Ender Lilies. I remember that game getting a bunch of hype in the indie circles, but I didn't really pay much attention to it myself. And honestly, I'm not sure why I decided to take the plunge on this one. I think it was because I was sitting on some PS store credit and only had to pay like eight bucks to give it a try. Off the bat, it's a really great looking game. Ender Magnolia has a lovely gothic anime art style. It's often bleak, but then there are moments where gorgeous colors fill the screen and totally pop given the overall dark atmosphere. Almost immediately I found the game way too hard. I was about ready to just bail on it after a couple of hours, but then decided to lower the difficulty and it actually made a pretty big difference. All of the sudden I was having a blast exploring and grinding. So no shame there. The lower difficulty made the game fun for me rather than just annoyingly frustrating. Boss battles remain challenging but fun even after the lower difficulty. Many of the bosses feel like little puzzles to figure out and I enjoyed this a lot. After four or five hours I started to wonder why this game hasn't gotten a bunch of hype this year. I listen to a lot of gaming podcasts (both mainstream and not) and I don't even think I've heard it mentioned. It's weird. Anyway, there's lots going on within menus in this one. There's lots of stats to keep track of. There's also lots of reason to go off and explore in search of loot. There's abilities to unlock and upgrade. There's new gear to find. There's augments (relics) to your skills. There's parts to find and new equipment to craft. The first real roadblock for me occurred around eight hours in. I came up against a boss that's a huge spider (The King Of Garbage, I think he's known as). Anyway, he's a jerk. Like this was a huge difficulty-spike. I tried maybe ten times and then went off and grinded a bit more. I swapped out my abilities, upgraded some of them, and came back with ten hours under my belt and beat him on my first new attempt. It was right around this time that I realized I was only about halfway through the game. Maybe less. And the very next thing was opening up a whole new giant area of the map. And another boss fight but this time against a boss that's pretty much considered one of the hardest in the game. He wrecked me so fast and that's when I started to feel fatigue set in. I want to point out that in the 20+ hours required to beat Ender Magnolia (probably more hours for me because again, I'm bad) you could also run through Super Metroid and Symphony Of The Night and probably have enough time left over to watch a movie. When did games get so long? If we're aping the style of the classic metroidvanias, then why do we need to double up the playtime on it? So at this point, ten or so hours into Ender Magnolia I'm considering myself burnt out. That said, I had a hell of a lot of fun for ten hours. I truly enjoyed it. And I only played eight bucks for it. So there's that. Honestly, even though I got kind burned out, I still think this is the first pretty great game of 2025 that I've played so far. At least one that wasn't a remake or remaster.  Infinity Nikki is sure to be a divisive game. It's free-to-play. There's plenty of in-game cosmetics to buy. And while it resembles the slew of post Genshin Impact games like Honkai Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero and Wuthering Waves, its main difference is that it mostly revolves around a fashion aesthetic. Oh, and also it's based on a series of free-to-play mobile games. So yeah, this isn't going to be for everyone, and I knew that going into it.
I do love Genshin Impact, though. Really I do. I can't explain it. There's just something so perfect about that one. The bright anime visuals, the lovely music, the satisfying combat... Genshin Impact really just hit everything perfectly. And in all seriousness, it still gets a ton of play at my house in 2025 as my daughter (who is almost six now) has become obsessed with that game. The way she digs through menus, studies that map, and tries to figure out things that interest her remind me of exactly how I approached something like The Legend Of Zelda when I was just slightly older than she was. I wasn't as smart as her, though. When I was her age I was playing Memory Manor. Anyway, when you consume a lot of critical analysis of video games, you tend to get a feel of what various personalities like and don't like in games. And from there, you can usual wager how you'd feel about that game. Which is to say, I don't always agree with the reviewers or podcasts that I pay attention to, but I have an idea of whether or not their tastes and mine overlap. Sarah Podzorski has championed Infinity Nikki many times on the Minnmax show, and while I don't always think that I like the games that she does, I always appreciate the passion with which she speaks of those games. So again, Infinity Nikki is free. What do I have to lose, other than some time? After installing over a hundred gigs for the game, I fired it up. And then I was greeted with the news that I'd have to update the thing. So I waited for a fairly long time, all the time watching Nikki and a cat do a little dance-off to some slightly big band jazz music. It was pretty cloying. Then I waited for the update to verify. Then I waited some more. Then I googled to see if this was a bug. But no, sometimes even when the verification hits 100% you have to wait like another fifteen minutes. So I did that. And then by the time I got into the game I was annoyed enough to say forget it. A few days later I decided to give it another shot. Only it turns out there was a major update in the time since. I'm talking a major expansion that they're calling the "Sea Of Stars" expansion. Which is stupid since that was the name of another game a couple of years ago. So less confusingly, this is the legit 1.5 expansion. So yeah, a big deal. So another really big update. More installing and so on. So even more waiting around. Then there was a bunch of, I guess you'd call it story. There was something about a world ending. And whales in outer space. There was planetary rings and broken stars. I don't even know. The game looks super pretty though. I'll give it that. It goes for a more realistic look than Genshin Impact's almost cell-shaded look. But when do I even do anything? I spent about an hour watching baffling story cut-scenes unfold. I couldn't tell you what was going on with any of them. I'd walk to a waypoint a few feet away and then a tutorial would tell me to open a menu and do... something. There was crafting and collecting things and upgrading skills and changing outfits and I don't know - leveling up those outfits? Or picking skills for them? Or something? I couldn't make sense out of most of it. Maybe I'm just too tired. Maybe I'm just so set in my Genshin Impact ways that learning a new similar game feels like a chore. Maybe I just don't have any interest in playing dress-up. But it was all so overwhelming, tedious and confusing to me. At one point I walked a few feet and was told to hop on a paper airplane. It told me to hit Triangle to enter then next area. Then I was told to walk a few more feet and get on a boat and do the same thing. What is happening? Seriously. Although I'd done absolutely nothing by this point, I was somehow level 3. I don't know what's going on. I'm actually getting angry at how little I understand what I'm doing and what the point of all this is and when the game is even going to start. But there's that little cat following me around. And there's more menus urging me to open them and pick outfits and craft stuff and assign skills and craft something else and equip and just no. I want to say something nice here. The music is kind of nice. But my interest was lost pretty much immediately. I really can't help but compare any free to play game in the modern era to Genshin Impact. And that's a game I've been playing and enjoying for the past three years or so now. I have no idea when I'll ever uninstall Genshin Impact so having another free-to-play action-adventure game in my life is going to be a tall order. It's going to have to really sell me. And I can tell you that Infinity Nikki did absolutely nothing to pull me in.  EA was dominating the football space a decade ago. Not only did they have Madden, but they also had the NCAA Football series. In simple terms, this translates to having two games a year that could be built using a single engine. If you want to be super reductive, that's like just updating rosters and printing money. Of course it wasn't that simple. But they definitely were shifting a lot of units and both EA and football fans were happy.
Back in 2013, the NCAA was wrapped up in legal red-tape regarding college athletes profiting off their likeness. As such, that year's NCAA Football 14 was the last game in the series for a very long time. But in recent years some things got ironed out. I don't know the details exactly, but I do know that college athletes are now able to make money. I've seen Livy Dunne in commercials. Just saying. And so now, for the first time in over a decade there's a new game in the series. Although because licensing is weird, it's now called College Football 25. Fans were elated. Me? I'd never played any of those NCAA games. I never watched college football in real life, either. But having played College Football 25, I'm now thinking maybe I should. Labor Day weekend meant that it was time for pumpkin spice and football. I had big time fall fever. Our summer was rough. But fall was a new leaf. We had moved into our new house. My daughter was starting kindergarten. I just wanted football. So I downloaded College Football 25. First up was the character creator for Road To Glory. I made a dude way more muscular than me. He goes to Boston College. In hindsight, I wish I had chosen UMASS, as I'm a fan of the band The Minutemen. But oh well. Straight away, this game makes me want to re-watch We Are Marshall. Totally underrated movie, by the way. And also, this game looks incredibly good. The players, the field, the stadiums, the weather. It's all incredible. PS5 at its finest. The music is also great. Instead of a bunch of licensed stuff, it's got marching bands. Maybe this is lame, but I like it a lot. Marching bands pump you up. It is what it is. There's something almost primal there. It turns out that college football is way different than the NFL. College is all about the running game. As such, games have a totally different flow to them. There's less crazy passes. Less holding your breath. More aggression and immovable objects up against unstoppable forces. Possessions end more often with no points. It's nail-biting in a different way than NFL games. And as a rookie starter quarterback who has spent so many years playing Madden, I got destroyed a lot. I dug into the player progression, the leveling up, the perks, the almost visual novel aspect of the choices made between games. And I got humbled. College Football 25 is a much harder game than any Madden in recent memory. There were so many sacks and so many interceptions. I never totally trusted that my defensive line had things under control so I was always under pressure. Passing was always horrifying. But when I did make an amazing pass, I felt like a golden god. I cannot tell you how many possessions ended with me marching methodically down to the other team's 30, 20, 10 only to throw an interception and blow the whole thing up. In my worst moment, I was sacked in my own end-zone. The majority of my season was legitimately embarrassing. But I loved every minute. That's the mark of a good game. You're losing, and you're losing really bad. And it's still fun. College Football 25 crystalizes the drama of college football. I managed to eek out six wins, and then the season just sort of ended. I thought hard and long and ultimately re-upped for another school year. But more importantly, I'm looking forward to exporting my saved player into Madden 25, which is an option that was a great move on EA's part. For the first time in over a decade they have a reason to sell us two football games in a single year. Bravo.  My commute is about forty minutes. That means that I'm in the car for around eighty minutes a day. Which means I'm driving alone four hundred minutes a week. So maybe it's not shocking to say that I end up listening to a lot of podcasts. And spoiler, they're pretty much all video game related. And because of this, I can't help when I start to hear trends. And I also can't help when those trends make me curious about a game. If I listen to five podcasts in a week and all of them are talking positively about the same game, then it kind of sounds like a consensus, right? Even if that experiment is using a generally small sample pool, the repetition can really start to pique my interest.
Often that curiosity pays off. Balatro may have flown under my radar, but as I write this I've got around 140 hours into it. So that was obviously a good recommendation. But other times I'm left a bit let down. Which brings us to Animal Well. Trying to think back, I'm quite sure that I heard many podcasts speaking lovingly about Animal Well. The Game Informer Show? MinnMax? IGN's Game Scoop or Beyond? Some or all of these shows really praised Animal Well. And when I looked it up, it turned out that it was included with Playstation Plus, so why not give it a go, right? Now some of the praise should have scared me off right away. The term metroidvania can go with one of two ways for me. While I myself do love Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night, that doesn't mean I love the myriad games that have aped the blueprint over the decades since. And then there was talk of how this was a metroidvania with no combat, but rather effectively puzzles in every room. Again, this could go either way. Are the puzzles intuitive or am I going to be expected to poke around endlessly? It turns out it was the latter. But let me rewind. Animal Well is a metroidvania with some very old school sensibilities. It doesn't look like a PS1 game or a SNES game, but rather more like an MSX2 game that couldn't have actually existed because of the insane level of detail or the granular physics. But still, it feels very dated right down to the scanlines. Which is fine. It's an obvious aesthetic choice, and I can even find it visually pleasing. You play as a little... ball thing. It kind of looks like a walking potato. Or maybe a bastardized Dizzy. Remember Dizzy? The little egg guy from European computers? Anyway, your potato guy can't really do anything other than walk around and jump. Sometimes he finds firecrackers which he can use to scare away animals. Animals are the main enemies here. Some are more passive than others. And some are very ghostly and aggressive. The whole point of the game is just to open up the map and progress. I guess. But I didn't make it very far. I mean, I opened up plenty of parts of the map, but I was often met with dead ends. These were probably spots where I was intended to figure out some trick to advance, but I just got really bored and frustrated attempting to proceed. I can't help but think that Animal Well is the sort of game best played with friends. Not friends sitting next to you exactly. But I think this is the kind of game that works best if you're chatting with friends about what you've done, what you've seen and how you solved a puzzle. It harkens back to the old 8-bit era of figuring out games via pieces together sections with help from friends on the playground or finding little hints in magazines. In other words, Animal Well feels best suited for a pre-internet world. At least to me. I'm sure I could easily look up a walkthrough by this point and breeze through the game handily. But where's the fun in that? In some ways, this is my own personal catch-22. Playing Animal Well completely on my own blindly is just annoyingly opaque. And yet at this point in my life (I just turned 43, ugh) I just don't have time anymore for hanging out on video game message boards or making plans to game with friends. There's no happy medium for me. It's either go at it alone, or resort to a walkthrough. In that sense, Animal Well makes me think of another beloved indie from recent years - Tunic. Where that game played like a modernized Link's Awakening or something, this one just happens to be a metroidvania. But both are adored for their decision to tell you practically nothing. They are confusing games that invite you to experiment and just spend time picking a direction to walk in and slowly chip away at the game's challenges. I didn't have the patience for Tunic, and I certainly don't have the patience for Animal Well. I'm sure this is a fine game, just not for someone like the 43 year old version of me. Oh well.  I don't even know where to begin talking about Balatro. It has kind of a weirdly forgettable name. But it's an example of why I love video games. I had never heard of it until the day I bought it. I was perusing Metacritic's list of best games of the year and this one caught my eye. The description was basically that it was a roguelike poker. I wasn't convinced, but I downloaded the one hour demo. Almost instantly I was warned that my hour was almost up, so I plunked down my cash.
I've never been a poker guy. But Balatro is truly something else. I say this as I'm nearing 80 hours in the game with no sign of slowing down. Balatro is the game that has dethroned Slay The Spire as my constant go-to between other games. And that's saying a lot, because I've been playing Slay The Spire at least weekly for the past five years. It's the game I play when I don't know what else to play. It's the game I play when I have just a little bit of time to kill before bed. It's one of the most perfectly executed games I've played in a long time. So how do I explain a roguelike poker? It should be simple, right? And it is. It's simple to pick up. But it's oh so deep to master. Alright, so you've got your basic poker hands: straight flush, four of a kind, flush, straight, three of a kind, etc. And each of those has a multiplier. Makes sense, right? So a given hand is the value of each card (chips) times the multiplier. And from there, things get more complex. Much more complex, actually. It all starts with Jokers. You can buy Jokers, of which you can have five of them under normal circumstances. Jokers can do all kinds of crazy global effects. One Joker might add a +4 multiplier to any Heart card you play. Another might add 50 chips to any even numbered card. Another might add X3 multiplier to the final hand of every round. There's even Jokers that allow you to make flushes and straights with only four cards and another lets you skip a sequential number in a straight. And so on. The more you play, the more Jokers you'll unlock and the crazier they get. The key is obviously to know what kind of run you're aiming for and to find and add Jokers that augment accordingly. Then there's Celestial cards, which can actually upgrade your hands. So let's say you want to run a Flush deck. You'll be looking for Jupiter cards which will upgrade Flushes. Now each flush adds extra chips and multiplier to your hands. Then you can get Tarot cards and Spectral cards which do all kinds of crazy global effects. Maybe you can add effects to specific cards. Maybe your King of Hearts has an extra 50 chips when played. Maybe your 2 of Clubs gives you $3 if you're holding it at the end of a round. You can also buy specific cards to add to your deck. Maybe you just want more Clubs. Or maybe you want to collect odd numbered cards. Or maybe you want face cards. Or maybe you want wild cards that have no specific suit so that you can up your chances of a straight flush. The world is your oyster. And then there's the decks. There's a bunch to unlock. Early decks give you simple obvious perks like an extra hand, or an extra discard. Later you'll get into crazy things like decks that only contain two suits. And after you beat the game with one deck, you can keep going deeper with harder versions of it. Now you've got less hands, less discards, less interest earned on winning, harder enemies, more expensive shops... I guess the real beauty of this game is that while it's built upon poker, that's just the bones. It's the roguelike nature of it - the crazy stuff that happens and all the RNG - that makes Balatro worth playing. As I write this I'm closing in on a hundred hours played. And that's over a few short months. And I see no sign of slowing down. It's hard to imagine I'll find a game that I connect with so deeply in 2024. And honestly, I can see myself sticking with this one for years to come. I'm sorry, Slay The Spire. You were a legend for the past five years. But now I think you've become dethroned |
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