The world is a nightmare and yet I play games 2025
There’s too much to talk about when you think about the year as a whole. The threat of LLMs running our lives, Generative ai models stealing and reshaping our creativity to effectively make us stupider as people. Destroying our environment, making us sicker, stealing our water. All the fun of the future but only the part that makes it a dystopia.
The richest man in the world has no friends and he will die alone, but that’s not going to turn his moral compass around any time soon.
Hell, even the challenges in my life hit a wall at 80km/h this year. It started with cancer in the family (which is still in check, so far so good.) and a wildfire rolled through the village of Denare Beach, Saskatchewan and took out half of the houses in the community.
If you catch my streams, you might have been around when I did a marathon of Final Fantasy XII over the summer to help donate money to my parents to help them rebuild their life. It was a modest sum over the course of all the streaming, but honestly they’re grateful. I can’t imagine what they went through, and I can’t imagine what they’re still going through. But even though my community is tremendously small in the grander scheme of twitch, I am happy to have such a group in my circle.
BUT ENOUGH of this dilly-dally shilly-shally of my life, it’s time to talk about games. In the year of our lord 2025. You know, there’s something funny about it this year. I suppose if I was a publication, or a big time streamer raking in the dough, I would have the money and all the time in the world to play everything that came out. But everything is expensive, and I had to really make smart choices about how I wanted to spend money.
It would genuinely be funny to me if someone read this list and their big takeaway was, “well you’re clearly not smart about your money.”
5) Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment
Ever since the first Hyrule Warriors game on the Wii U, I have been a fan of the idea of mowing down hundreds of dudes as the hero of time. With the “Age of Calamity” they had an opportunity to tell an interesting story that took place before “Breath of the Wild” but the whole thing was more of a ‘what-if’ scenario. While fun, it didn’t really tell the story that I wanted it to.
That’s what makes “Age of Imprisonment” a much better game by comparison. Zelda travels to the past, and if you spent any time with “Tears of the Kingdom” you know how it ends and it’s the journey to that destination that makes it a worthwhile experience.
This is also the second game in such a short amount of time where Zelda is the main character. (The first, being “Echoes of Wisdom”) Every other character in the roster is either someone established through the ToTK cutscenes or some random guy with a different variation of a play style.
It honestly works, because you just slip into a team of characters that compliment how you like to play and every character is less clunky than the previous instalment. It’s important to emphasize that every character is fun to play, AoC had a chunk of characters that just weren’t fun to play at all. It is silly that the Switch 2’s first Zelda game is a Musou, but the gameplay loop is satisfying and the levels never over stay their welcome, so honestly, it’s worth checking out.
4) Monster Hunter Wilds
What makes Wilds an interesting experience for me this year, is that I spent a good chunk of time playing MH4U on the 3ds for a month, so I was (unintentionally) giving myself two completely different MonHun experiences.
As a fan, I’m not a hater. I get the criticism that someone might have that “Wilds is a step in the wrong direction, gameplay used to mean something, blah blah blah”. But the thing I always notice about people that make these arguments, is that they have a hard time understanding that things will just change. The first Monster Hunter game released on the PS2 in 2004, since then the franchise has adapted with the hardware and streamlined the experience to make it more accessible. As more people play, it becomes less niche. Being less niche involves a broader, easier to understand experience. Sure Wilds is an easier game, but who cares! It’s a power fantasy about traveling the world and keeping an area's ecosystem in check by beating the ever-loving shit out of monsters that are bigger than you.
Plus, for the record, MonHun Facegurl is my favourite iteration of Facegurl because she’s just a idiodic gremlin wearing stupid armor, swinging big weapons and maybe leaping before looking a LITTLE too much.
3) Final Fantasy Tactics
Final Fantasy Tactics, is and always will be, one of my favourite video games of all time. Fantasy stories centred around warring kingdoms, political/religious bureaucracy and idealistic naivety of young heroes fighting for a better life is the kind of stuff that makes the world of Ivalice so fascinating, and why I would always champion for more games in it’s same vein (please play FFXII and Vagrant story).
This rerelease of a beloved strategy RPG does a little in terms of good quality of life improvements and even the difficulty setting has been adjusted to be easier or more challenging, but it’s relatively the same game. The thing that makes this version of the game stand out so much more is the fantastic voice acting. Hearing the emotion come out of every character takes moments that I already know feel much more memorable.
I know, I gush. But seeing FFT back makes me hopeful for releases of the Advance games or maybe even new games in the Tactics universe. I want a whole handful of games that I can be annoying about. But this one is a good first step, please play this game.
2 ) Deadlock
I only touched it a tiny bit in the year before but 2025 is the year that I played a lot of Deadlock. It’s not because of Overwatch fatigue, I still very much play that game a little lot. What is does though, is exactly the kind of thing that Overwatch does.
An interesting settling, engaging characters, and a satisfying gameplay loop that is fun to pull off but hard (for me) to master. I don’t even really like mobas. I hate League of Legends and Dota 2 because I can’t seem to wrap my head around them. But perhaps because it’s a third person shooter on top of being a moba, I can actually understand it. I can certainly apply my skill from Overwatch to this game and have something resembling good.
I caught the bug because I have friends to play with and Deadlock in the year 2026 is going to have additional characters added before (maybe) it even hits beta. It’s always good to have another game to play all the time so I don’t burn out on other things. As an Overwatch player it feels like I had a natural migration in one direction or the other. Deadlock fills that itch of challenging that Rival just won’t. Look forward to more Deadlock streams, more Throwsdays, more slow understanding of complicated mechanics for my old man brain. (oh I’m grateful my PC can run this).
1) Silent Hill f
My Game of the Year is effectively something I didn’t actually play myself. Post pandemic, made for difficulty in hanging out with friends for a good chunk of time, but this time we made it work. Every sunday we would get together and do something and one of those things was a playthrough of Silent Hill f. (We also played Death Stranding 2… there’s a lot of that game that I would enjoy but also, NOPE.)
The remake of Silent Hill 2 was certainly underrated, but ‘f’ was honestly a big surprise.The thing is, as long as you understand the fundamentals of what makes a game “Silent Hill” then it doesn’t really matter what you do with it.
A game set in a small Japanese town in the 1960s was a perfect reason for Hinako Shimizu to find herself in the hell that engulfed her world. Struggling between the friendships she has and the marriage she doesn’t want, takes your hand and forces you into moments that are grotesque and uncomfortable.
It hit the same beats that a Silent Hill would, it gave you the kind of monsters that would be unique to Hinako and all of her inward bullshit. It gives you two kinds of playthroughs that represent the kind of things that a young woman of her age was probably having to struggle with in that time period.
There’s also a level of ambiguity that is open to interpretation, and I can’t remember the last time I just sat with a video game and talked about its meaning. Not looking up reddit posts or youtube explainer videos but sitting there and chatting about the game that you experienced and what you took from it.
We used to be a society!
There we go, I dusted off the blog yet again to pretty much just write a small list of the games I enjoyed the most.
It’s imperative that I go into this new year being more creative. I used a lot of my time for 2025 improving my mental health and my attitude. With the way technology/internet seems to be going, there’s never been a better time to spend less time on it.
Video games are a good escape, but even that escape is costing more, and the price doesn’t justify the executive meddling, or trying to convince the consumer that generative AI is part of your life now. Maybe next years goty blog will look a little different. maybe I will finally get to have the freedom to do a little more than a goty blog.
In any case, this is my list this year! My games I went out of my way to afford. may 2026 have more games, more positive experiences and a healthier change for everyone.