by mento
Showing 1-10 of 11 items
French RPGs used to be defined by the likes of Drakkhen and Ishar: bizarre, wholly original games busy with their own ideas about what ought to suffice for combat, character development, and progression that, while fascinating and beautiful, were often too obtuse and inaccessible for their own good. Before this year, the French RPG model had switched to perfunctory but undistinguished titles from "AA" studios like Spiders and Cyanide: occasionally commendable and certainly playable eurojank that nonetheless never really stood out as distinctive or exceptional in their design. Clair Obscur bridges those two eras in a manner that is truly the best of both worlds: a bespoke setting of painted creatures and a wellspring of "anything goes" imagination turned nightmarish by hostile monsters and a gradual genocidal force majeure pushing its beleaguered, saturnine survivors into action that is all held together by an incredibly dense yet familiar set of mechanics governing character traits, skills, passives, and behaviors from which you could build viable party dynamics. Y'all are probably sick of hearing about this game, or are tired of seeing it top lists when its enthusiasm for reflexes-intensive parryslop would seem to disqualify it in the face of this year's other turn-based RPGs that were purely about the genre's strengths of judgment and resourcefulness, but there's a purity of intent to this game to chase after the red letter JRPG spectacles that kept the PlayStation trucking in its early days (along with Tekken and RE, of course) and reignite our collective passion for them again; as someone who never lost the faith, subsisting in harder times with the figurative hardtack that was Infinite Undiscovery and Blue Dragon, I'm not only in love with this game but in love with its mission statement to bring these games back stronger than ever. It celebrates and elevates those RPGs that came before, but also those that come after.
I'm shocked Avowed didn't receive more GOTY buzz this year. I think we're all suffering withdrawal from a lack of big The Elder Scrolls-level odysseys—Starfield didn't do so hot despite having the namesake of America's favorite cat and the first The Outer Worlds felt like it stretched itself thin with how little substance it had beyond its anti-corpo sense of humor and zeerustic aesthetic—and Avowed came along to finally fill that gap, providing not only an open world that felt fun and rewarding to explore with loot that was very rarely useless vendor trash—even crappy ass weapons with no enchantments could be broken down into materials, and then those materials could be fused together to create more advanced materials your current gear actually needed—but the usual Obsidian dedication to character work, lore, and worldbuilding. Tapping their ongoing Pillars of Eternity setting once again for a fresh take on a "chosen one" narrative, not so much plucked out of obscurity for undeserved greatness but ordained by drawing a cosmic short straw to play babysitter to an omnipotent entity prone to catastrophic tantrums, they've produced one of their most immediately accessible and crowdpleasing installments yet here. Even the combat is great, relying on cooldowns and crowd control (though I could do without the wave-based aspect) to ensure every encounter wasn't just some throwaway mob you could nuke from a mile off. Best of all was how intricately made their level design is, especially urban areas, where you could hop around some odd number of fences and rooftops thinking "was I allowed to get up here?" until your impromptu parkouring was rewarded with a chest stashed in some attic you couldn't otherwise reach and most players probably never found. Avowed and any sequels it receives are definitely going to fill an important gap while we all patiently wait until TES VI is due sometime between 2030 and when the oceans devour us all.
"A game about washing (sometimes literal) shit" would be a hard sell in any scenario and yet the boffins at FuturLab figured it out with their surprise hit PowerWash Simulator, joining a flood of other overly literal sims with something of a knowing wink given how irreverently they often treat the task of spraying everything with a water hose with enough pressure to make Stanley Spadowski green with envy (watch UPF, kids). Dropped next to a vehicle or into an environment badly in need of a scrubbing, the only goal is to get everything fully clean with the tools you have available: an adjustable pressure washer with multiple nozzles and functions, some ladders and maybe a scissor lift if you're lucky, and a garden gnome whose main job is to sit back and observe like Ben Pack's favorite Idris Elba image macro. From that modest seed a mighty tree was born and then blossomed anew with this mechanically improved sequel: there's some atavistic quality to setting the world right with an endless supply of cleansing H2O that just tickles the brain's dopamine center like little else can, especially after a long day of suffering the travails of a chaotic world that seems custom-designed to grind you down. A palate cleanser, a peaceful state of Zen, a mental degaussing from stressful interference; I don't really have the proper psychological wherewithal to express how these games are able to work their magic, though they're able to do so with aplomb anyway regardless of our efforts to explain it. I'll always go to bat for the argument that video games can be serious art that opens our eyes to new discoveries about ourselves and the world but I sometimes think that robs it of its alternative function of a therapeutic balm to the psyche that lets you switch off your brain completely. It's a medium that can be two (or more!) things, fortunately.
As someone who grew up around Arkanoid clones of all sizes and shapes (though usually ball-shaped) I'm inclined to jump on any new reimaginings of that hoary format: Shatter with its Winamp visualizer style and incredible synth soundtrack; Wizorb and Strikey Sisters with their ongoing sense of RPG-like progression; and parallels like Peggle/Peglin's "drop a ball down a hole and hope for the best" pachinko paragons and pinball progressives like Yoko's Island Express and Creature in the Well. It was only a matter of time until someone figured out how to shoehorn the run-based genre into that formula too, and I'm happy to report that even as a sourpuss when it comes to "live, die, repeat" time vampires I greatly enjoyed what Ball x Pit was putting out there. Dropping into an abyss to fling balls at skeletons and other monsters for fifteen minute runs (shorter if you die, though maybe avoid that) were made all the more engaging, not to mention visually arresting, by a Vampire Survivor style influx of new weapons and power-ups earned by hoovering up more nourishment crystals than all of Ryckert's White Castle burgers combined and becoming a DPS-maxing machine flinging dozens of marbles around like it was a particularly frantic game of Hungry, Hungry Hippos. Looking for viable ball combination strategies depending on your chosen character's particular quirk, working the farms between runs for some permanent boosts to push you over the next hurdle, trying out any number of new tools and characters you just unlocked; the game has that addictive "one more run" paradigm on lock as well as any that have come before it. I realize 2025 was lousy with similar endeavors—I might have to give Megabonk a try despite myself—but this felt like this year's "Vampire Survivors" pleasant Indie run-based surprise.
Spraying water, digging holes, it's really been a year of white-knuckle excitement over here at Chez Mento but that's just the type of high-octane shit I need to inject into my veins just to feel alive. A Game About Digging a Hole is a game about digging a hole; a big hole, in your backyard, because you heard there was treasure buried under there. Taking out however many loans you can to grab the quiet suburban property attached to said backyard along with a battery-powered shovel to save your own limbs from agonizing muscle pain, you get to work clearing the topsoil and selling rocks for a $1 a pop (let's not think too hard about who might be buying them) until the upgrades start coming in and you're scooping out whole boulders of earth to see what else awaits you under the surface. It's a game about gradual gratification and constant discovery, tapping into that progression loop that made ancient Flash games like Motherload tick, and like PowerWash Simulator is something you can keep working at with only 5% of your brain, dedicating the rest to important tasks like daydreaming, mentally contemplating which was the best Ben Starr performance this year, or stressing yourself out with anticipatory grief which I hear is the new bad brain thing for 2025 and I'll be darned if I let any of those slip me by. Best of all, the game eventually just ends exactly around the point where you think to yourself that you might finally be done moving earth around. It's not just a game about digging a hole; it's a game that absolutely gets digging a hole.
I played some Routine at the tail-end of the year because it felt like a perfect coda to enjoying multiple variants this year of its very specific format of horror game that combines space travel with mysterious human disappearances, hardware troubleshooting, and a fear of the unknown made all the more potent by the infinite cosmos with its infinite number of things that go bump in the night (and in space, it's always night). Routine's whole gimmick is that it starts as straightforwardly as possible and gets progressively less so, hence the ironic name, though its true strength is in devising an alternative timeline where we had bases on the moon as early as the 1970s. You've dropped into a wing of the station with a slightly newer vibe—the 1990s—and given a zappy diagnostics gun/tool that has the pleasant grey chunkiness of a classic model Game Boy: you can tap buttons on the side to change modes, turn off the power, degauss the camera display (which I don't think I ever needed to use but appreciated having), and check the battery display. It's enough to make you feel secure with your options as you probe this darkened and personnel-free location looking for a way to turn the lights back on, and that's pretty much when the game has you in its claws and refuses to let go. This game gets real scary real fast, to be forewarned, and though the survival horror gameplay is nothing you haven't seen before (especially if you watch a lot of streamers) its grasp of atmosphere is masterful in its insidiousness. I didn't even know it was possible to hide under a table while wearing a full EVA suit but by god I found out in a hurry.
Double Fine has always been a studio that puts out memorable and aesthetically compelling games that often fell a little short in the gameplay department, allowing them to coast along as the type of studio to adopt a cultish following eager to keep it afloat if not necessarily given a huge amount of slavish attention from the gaming universe as a whole, which I feel entirely befits the type of studio it is and the people involved with it. Perennial underdogs, with no backhanded pejorative meaning intended. So when Psychonauts 2 did exceptionally well critically and was a game a lot of people loved unconditionally (myself included) I worried that it would put a lot of pressure on them to follow it up; a Stacking or an Iron Brigade wasn't going to cover the built up expectations. Yet I think Keeper is probably the best answer they could've given to that conundrum, going back to their strengths of making a game full of whimsy and incredible visuals (more in the artistic sense more than the purely graphical fidelity sense; which is my preferred version of "good graphics") that just about holds itself together, like the mysterious vines holding its titular lighthouse monster in one piece, with a selection of environmental puzzles that, to the game's credit, regularly change up after certain junctures in the game's story. There's not much more to say about it without depriving a would-be audience of its twists and surprises beyond that it's the sort of low-key, adventuresome, visually charming, and relatively rudimentary game that got Double Fine where it is today and could serve as a functional second introduction for all the new fans brought in from Psychonauts 2. My hope is that the game's journey reflects that of the studio's, where it's able to do enough numbers to keep that pack of oddballs upright and trundling along the path they're set on for a while longer yet despite the overwhelmingly perilous conditions (of being a developer owned by Microsoft in the 2020s).
Dotemu and Tribute Games made a splash recently by resurrecting the spirit of Konami's TMNT brawler from the late '80s and giving it not only a fresh coat of paint, but a whole new story and deeper set of mechanics that felt modernized without compromising the spirit of what made those coin-operated clashers click. They've done so again here but for the slightly later X-Men brawler, once again finding new venues through which to upgrade what was originally an obliquely difficult feint to swipe all your laundry money from your pockets into something one might call an actual video game. For one, each player controls two characters in a tag team format reminiscent of the Marvel vs. Capcom fighters that remain the best video game applications of that wide roster of comic book heroes. It also delves into the wider Marvel Cosmic universe, letting you mix Earth's mightiest heroes with those found across the galaxy such as Rocket Raccoon or Beta Ray Bill. It's a game that truly venerates its license, its history, and the slightly overstimulating feeling of being in that arcade hall taking down hordes of faceless goons with one to three of your best buds once they'd gotten past fighting over Wolverine and Spider-Man and been yelled at for putting a drink cup ("it's empty! Mostly!") on top of the cabinet.
In the PlayStation 3 era we saw a lot of western games take on the character-action genre, though made less intense than the Japanese games that set the mold like Devil May Cry, as sort of the "main way to make a game in this day and age" alongside copious amounts of open-world fare and then that particular thought process just... went away. The type of linear action game that separated its wave-based combat arenas with a whole lot of sidling across conspicuous footholds, pushing blocks around to make steps, and finding collectibles and epistolary journal entries in dead-ends off the beaten path. The developers of South of Midnight evidently missed that period because they've gone out of their way to recreate it here, with a visually arresting folktale set in American South that sees Hazel Flood—a newly appointed "weaver", those thankless fixers whose job it is to mend the fabric of reality after too much human despair creates knots and tangles in the tapestry that is existence—chase after her missing mama, carried away in a hurricane-induced flood in a sad tale familiar to any denizens of Louisiana, and appease various long-simmering spectral resentments along the way. The game ambles on largely on the strength of its narrative, its setting-appropriate bluesy soundtrack, and the visual splendor of its bayou setting; the gameplay perhaps not so much. For an analogy that Mike Minotti might approve of, the presentation is like Splash Mountain with all its folksy charm and mild sense of danger while the gameplay is like the rickety scaffolding behind the scenes that's been holding it all together since it was first built in the '80s where you swear you can hear it creaking whenever Br'er Rabbit and the jug band mercifully shut up for five seconds (I'm aware it's a Princess and the Frog thing now but the comparison still stands). I thought the tall and mysterious trickster Roux was cool though; kinda wild that he's voiced by the same dude who did Jar Jar Binks.
Every aspect of Blue Prince is clever, from how its puzzles might have several dozen layers and steps to solve that'll probably take an in-game (if not an IRL) month of architectural absurdities to finally suss out all the way down to its punnish name, even: "Bloop Rinse," the semi-regular need to clean off all the bloopy brain matter that drips from your ears after spending way too long placing hallways and boudoirs in geographically advantageous arrangements. Though I piledrivered it all the way down the list here into the double digits due to its exasperating run-based structure—I feel like this site and elsewhere has had a civil war brewing about how tolerable one might find it to intuit the solution to one of the game's many Myst-like environmental puzzles only to be stymied over and over by misfortunate room options—I can't help but admire the level of ingenuity behind its riddles and the wide array of variables to track and secrets hidden in plain sight. Just solving the parlour's lying box game or the dart maths in the billiards room every run felt reward enough sometimes, though finding a token that permanently increased my spending money for subsequent days was really the sort of thing that kept me going and made me believe I wasn't just wasting all my precious hours on some mercurial morphing mansion that my great uncle only left to me because he evidently hated my guts (I read the diary in the children's bunkbed room; the protagonist is canonically a little shit). Anyway, I can respect a game without necessarily liking it—hey there, Outer Wilds—and Blue Prince deserves all its laurels this year for what it gets right. If you can look past what it gets wrong, it'll no doubt be one of your favorites from 2025 too.
