It’s time to look back on the stuff we’ve done and not done all year! External memory storage is good.

2025 was a year of learning not to complete games.

Out of the games we picked up and picked back up, very few of them hit an end credits. Even less of them show all their achievements, and that is fine! It’s so much less stressful! I can enjoy gaming again!

Some were completely dropped, some will be picked back up sooner or later.

The Fantastic

Unbeatable. Play unbeatable.
Blue Prince. Absolutely destroyed my social life and made me very slightly more insane than usual for a few weeks. Annoyance at unkind RNG will not stop this from remaining one of my favorite games of the year. Currently in the “finish eventually” box because I need to finish restructuring my note taking and that’s a whole thing.
of the devil. 2 episodes and the free 0th, all amazing. one of the few games that compels me to stream and narrate all the dialog physically possible, which is fascinating because otherwise it’s been very hard to muster the energy to stream at all, let along for 8 and a half hours approaching 3 am while the internet fights me—
Ghost Trick! Finally played this one, and it was very fun and very good.
Nightreign is a plague upon my schedule and I will never fix this without severe autistic burnout. The DLC only made it worse.
Nine Sols. Not finished with this one yet, but it’s slow going for some reason.
Z.A.T.O. // I love the world and everything in it. It’s such a cute game, it’s such a good game. It’s free! Go grab it, and then buy the artbook and soundtrack.
Silksong. Incredibly technical game, can’t believe it released and is this good. And is getting a DLC so soon.
Pacific Drive is the first time I’ve really loved a car game. This game really has a good sense of downtime and a very very well-balanced travel time to destinations. I haven’t finished it yet because it’s pretty stressful and I can’t stop thinking about how much better it’d be with a joystick or driving wheel setup for the car, but I will probably finish the story in 2026 and then check out the DLC assuming there’s enough time.

The Interesting

No Man’s Sky is one that I picked up for multiplayer, had a decent amount of fun with, and ultimately realized that what I want out of the game will never be provided by the game because it’s too interested on being at places and not interested at all in the way you get between places. There’s a whole thing in headspace about that point that’s still so hard to put into words, which might become a blog post or another video depending on what there’s time for and how bad platforms are in 2026.
Possessors looks like a very stylish metroidvania that unfortunately doesn’t really interest me at all mechanically. I like what it’s going for, but some interaction of the writing and visuals and mechanics just doesn’t do it for me.

The Cooperative

Peak, RoR2, R&S, Barotrauma, Zomboid, NMS, Nightreign, Seamless Elden Ring, Trine 5. All good experiences in multiplayer. Hanging out with friends and gaming is an expensive but legal thrill!
Also, Trine. Time to yap a bit about Trine. That series is only really matched by my experience with Magicka when younger in terms of the absolute bullshit you can get up to and how fun it is to go insane coordinating (and failing to coordinate) rooms and sections. I’ve played every one of them and only dropped 3 because one of the levels didn’t make sense and maybe also softlocked us and 3D just kind of doesn’t work that well for the series.
gogh! Spirit City is a neat pomodoro-type app, but the multiplayer function and near-infinite customizability of gogh easily eclipses it for me, and it’s been a very joyful experience.
I wanna pick up Deadlock again in 2026. Need more time, as always.

2025 was also a year to start reading again!

We picked up a Supernote Nomad for note-taking, digital sketching, and ebook reading, and have finally started to get back in the habit of reading novels and books instead of just webcomics and online posts. It’s nice!

Novels, attempted or otherwise

Infinite Jest: Dropped. The book feels too interested in being mean and neurotic for it to be enjoyable enough for me to finish. Premise is interesting, characters are kind of all over the place, setting is confusing.
The King In Yellow: Put down. Finally read a handful of the stories, which were good. Media references definitely gave me the impression it was going to be a different sort of story? But still a good set of reads.
The Murderbot Diaries: Caught Up. More are planned, from what I understand? These are so up my alley, both in writing style and characters and setting. Rereading them soon.
WataNare: Started. A friend got me to pick up the novels for this series after I’d followed the manga/anime for a while, and Renako’s monologueing is so much better in text for me.
A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan. Earthsea Cycle underway, to be continued in the new year. Le Guin’s books have always been on the periphery for me, because I fell off reading toward the end of college, and it’s nice to finally experience these stories myself. I’m very much looking forward to the others in this cycle. ideally, we can do a bit of a quarterly-ish thing about books in the new year, but as always, no promises!

Things that are not quite Novels

Heaven Will Be Mine. extremely impactful for me.
2236 A.D. is a visual novel that was tentatively recommended to me by a friend, and I will also tentatively recommend it after finishing it. It’s so unique, it’s a bit of a mess, and it’s got some parts that I found grating, but it’s something I consider absolutely worth it.
A webnovel that I am abbreviating to Kamase-yaku for now, as I haven’t found a good english translated title abbreviation that captures it well enough. I’m very slowly working on a translation of the first “Chapter” (something like 42 or 48 posts?) because it’s good practice and as much as I respect the attempt of a small team on ao3 to try and do the job better than a poorly-edited MTL of it that exists, that is ultimately still mostly a transliteration, and that bothers me. I don’t have enough time or reading skill at the moment to just be an editor, so it’s from scratch for now. Eventually, I’ll upload it…somewhere.

Comics

It’s true! Good comics exist! Setting up an RSS reader for the first time in ever has been good with keeping up with these.

https://halo-head.com/ - “Hello From Halo Head is an exploration of the multitudes a person experiences as a response to trauma. Also cartoon animal adventures. I promise it’s mostly funny. it’s a trauma comedy! a TRAUMEDY!!!!”
https://killsixbilliondemons.com/ - One of the best long-running comics I’ve read in recent memory. It’s basically what it says on the tin, with a ton of mind-blowing panels and amazing worldbuilding and character design.
https://rice-boy.com/3rdvoice/ - still unsure how to describe this one, or how we feel about it?
https://horseonvhs.com/nothingdoing/ - what if your job sucked and you weren’t good at talking to people and you had good friends. and there’s a screaming skull that’s become a regular part of the office at some point (that isn’t like a major plot thing but i think about it a lot).
https://www.blind-alley.com/ - one of those comics that’s going somewhere, even if i have no idea where? There’s more we read that year, but didn’t really log? I think Stand Still, Stay Silent was one we read in 2025…but entirely unsure. Good story, even though the author would currently disavow its setting, which is a real tragedy.

Hey how did we also manage to do 3 different programs this year?

dovecote! notes app that is more visual and less vertical-ual text-ual. still in progress, focus stolen currently by the VTT project. technically counts as 1 and a half, since it was attempted in nw.js and then actually made in godot. more updates faster if people bug me enough about it and if i feel like it.
so there’s this really small game jam thing i made for a really small game jam that is like, idk, i feel like saying too much about it is counterproductive? i didn’t get enough done, and there’s a lot of rough edges, but it was a good experience! first game jam in a couple years.
VTT. next big thing. more posts about this online once we actually get it off the ground and set up the repo in 2026, but i’ve had it with roll20 and Foundry also doesn’t solve the issues and also why are we hacking javascript together like this in the first place? bad? don’t do that? there’s a lot of different things going into the design doc, but i’m starting with a map system with depth support before fleshing out a docker-based panel/window system that should give GMs and players proper tools to work with to make it better for both sync and async roleplaying. possibly no prototype until sometime 2027, depends on how 2026 goes…
various web stuff! there’s the image hoard and the blog here cleaned up and stuff just going better in general… i think the web dev fixations have calmed down and now we’re rotating over to software dev again, which is good!

Health took a bit of a nosedive, sadly.

Just every aspect was bad. Allergies, physical fitness, anxiety, diet. Mental health did alright, but that’s the only thing that trended up over the course of the year, and it’ll take a lot more continuing work to get things back in order in order to travel in 2026 (which is something we want to do!).

The Writing Section

For 2026, I want to write more often. This blog has the ongoing SWSTTRPG System Test Oneshot already, and while that won’t work for every TTRPG out there, we do want to look at it for other stuff after this concludes to get a better feel for GMing and roleplay and writing in general, because there’s so many systems out there and so little time to do them with a group.

Also, as mentioned a ways up, translations! Kamase-yaku is the ongoing one, and every so often we’ll come across a song that we like that we bother to do translyrics for. Which, dovetailing into the final section for this one:

The Music Section

UNBEATABLE has gotten me to pick up my bass more often, and i think it’s finally winning out over the electric (for now). (i wish there was a general term for electrics like telecasters because not everything’s a telecaster, y’know?) there’s a lot of good music out there, though weirdly, it’s hard to find good bass that i like and that works for practicing. UNBEATABLE itself has a few, and there’s stuff like Friday Pilots Club and AHUB (and i think Rocket too?) until we work up to ZTMY or whatever else.

vocal covers used to be on the table, but producing for those and making a channel out of them is too much of a pain right now and it’d be more for the experience of translating the songs than singing them and there’s just no time? so.

???

2025, Part All