Go! Go! GOTY! '25: Odds and Sods Edition

Go! Go! GOTY! is a semi-regular feature I bring out of hibernation towards the middle of winter (which isn't how hibernation normally works but stick with me here) as an excuse to blitz through a bunch of newish games all for the sake of joining in on the aggrandizing festivities of the GOTY season. Yet the list of candidates for the 2025 edition of this feature got a little wrapped up in some of my other ongoing projects—namely, I already waxed lyrical about Obsidian's Avowed and Dogubomb's Blue Prince in November's "Mento Month" and added FuturLab's PowerWash Simulator 2, Kenny Sun and Friends's Ball X Pit, DoubleBee's A Game About Digging a Hole, Uvula's To a T, and Lunar Software's Routine to the slate for Indie Game of the Week. Rather than flood the community articles section with even more solo reviews in these final days of 2025/early days of 2026, especially since it's just the one guy actually processing them all right now (hey Chuck), I've instead tossed together here all the other GOTY-motivated playthroughs I have opinions about. Real strong opinions.

South of Midnight

This was one of those games that got greatly hyped up back when it was announced at a Summer Game Fest, with a striking visual style that looked akin to stop-motion animation and set in the American South inspired by various Br'er Rabbit style supernatural folktales coming together for its narrative of a newly crowned reality-stitching "weaver" discovering her gift while pursuing her mother whom washed away in their trailer home after a hurricane. The demo had giant alligators and a smartass catfish and seemed to turn heads more so than most of the reveals in that stream. It then released on Game Pass shortly into spring and... nothing. That was the last I heard of it. I didn't see it in any recent GOTY deliberations either, besides taking home the slightly patronizing "Games for Impact" award at the Game Awards. Definitely a curiosity even before this unusual sudden deflation of interest, so I wanted to check it out before the year was through whether to see if it was buried by the ongoing Game Pass deprecation and possibly destined for more of a cultish, underappreciated reputation or if its titular night wasn't the only thing that was mid.

Me during hurricane season once I realize my house is completely devoid of Oreos.

It is fascinating for a whole host of reasons, turns out, not all of which are positive. But let's start with the positive anyway, given it's the holidays. As I've already intimated, the game's got an amazing sense of style: the stop-motion look doesn't really apply throughout the game but mostly only in cutscenes, yet it's still an attractive reconstruction of the wetter parts of the American South even in less photogenic locations like a murky swamp or a rundown slave worker village or a flooded farm filled with poopwater flowing from the local pig factory, and it's accompanied with some setting-appropriate bluesy music with all the authentic twang you could want. Can't say I liked the lyrics all that much, since they were always incredibly literal with regards to whatever was happening in the story at that moment (the details of which you'd have picked up on pretty quickly already through dialogue and collectible notes) and they really had to stretch some lines to fit the meter. It got so distracting during the boss battles, which I had to ("had to") repeat several times for the no-damage achievements, that I eventually dove into the menus to turn them off: the game helpfully separates lead vocals from the music volume, presumably because it knew that the audience would find them kinda annoying after a spell. Otherwise it felt like Disney's The Princess and the Frog in its presentation of that setting with a dose of magical realism sprinkled on top, really highlighting the musical soul of Louisiana and its oft-drenched occupants, all the while never shying away from the region's less savory history with its treatment of people of color or those just different in general.

The less great parts are the combat and general progression of the game. It felt like a by-the-numbers character-action thing that dropped right out of that genre's peak around 2010, following the success of the original God of War trilogy. Like I wouldn't have been surprised to see this sold in a bundle with Dante's Inferno or Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. In a typical level you'd run a mostly linear course of traversal challenges and environmental puzzles, like scaling a wall by hopping between obvious footholds or jump-dash-gliding across gaps, until you ran afoul of one of the game's many little battle arenas. At that point you'd take out two or three waves of monsters using your weaver tools, like some hooks for basic melee combos and a spindle used to trap enemies in a weave temporarily, all the while dodging enemy attacks coming at you from your blind spots. After that, you'd eliminate the "knot" summoning these things to end the battle and move on. Each of the game's dozen-plus levels follow a similar pattern, though a few branch out occasionally into more open areas that have you chasing multiple knots in an order of your choosing. The combat's fine but gets kinda stagnant after around the midway point once you've been given your little buddy Crouton and it no longer has any new abilities to confer (though you can upgrade the ones you have to make them a smidge more effective)—the game does at least offer a "skip combat" function in its accessibility menu if these arenas ever become a real drag. The bosses are a bit more inventive, though the game only has the four and they all tend to stretch on and on (or maybe that's just my perspective after repeating them several times); the exception being the final boss, which is just a gauntlet of regular fights that you're not allowed to heal between. For as much as it might disagree with your gamer spirit to remove what little challenge there is from the game, it could be warranted to better enjoy the story (and the platforming, which isn't that bad but isn't exactly fresh either) without the pace-halting distractions. Feel like I'm committing a cardinal sin by suggesting the Story difficulty mode but I really stopped deriving much enjoyment from those fights after a while given their very finite variables.

A ten-minute boss fight becomes a two-hour one remarkably quickly once you add a "no damage" requisite.

South of Midnight coasts on its excellent presentation more often than not, with the rest of its gameplay and systems feeling antiquated the same way a typical cookie-cutter Ubisoft open-world map-barf game does in 2025: like something the rest of the industry (and the players) left behind a long time ago, but not so long ago that it's since come back around to retro throwback territory quite yet. That said, if you've been jonesing for that very specific format since they dried up a decade ago, barring the occasional Devil May Cry or Bayonetta (or I suppose the newer God of Wars, though those feel like an evolution of the formula), South of Midnight might scratch that itch and give you a pretty engaging and distinctive setting and story to enjoy while doing so. Otherwise it's mostly a case of suffering through the rote gameplay to experience the aesthetic and narrative elements that shine all the brighter by comparison.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion

Tribute and Dotemu are continuing to answer the little arcade kid in all of us pining for the brawlers that to us seemed far grander than glorified Coinstar machines gobbling up quarters like the US Mint was about to run out of them, and actually recreating what those belt-scroller rough 'em ups felt like in our withered nostalgia-corrupted brains. Hell of a way to start a review this close to the holidays but then my Grinch-ian bona fides are well documented here and elsewhere. Rather than Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade brawler, invoked for 2023's spiritual sequel Shredder's Revenge, this time we see a modern reinterpretation of Konami's excellent arcade X-Men game from 1992 expanded to include more of Marvel's cosmic coterie with a story lifted from the '00s about spacefaring villain Annihilus and his attempt to wipe out all life in the universe via his insectoid Annihilation Wave. In addition to X-Men mainstays Wolverine, Storm, and Phoenix/Jean Grey, you have perennial Marvel favorites Captain America, Black Panther, and Spider-Man (along with Spider-Man's rival/nemesis Venom once you've knocked some sense into him) joining the likes of more obscure cosmic heroes like Nova (from whom I discovered that Matthew Mercer can sound a lot like Aaron Paul if he puts his mind to it), former Captain Marvel Phyla-Vell (who also cameo'd in the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie, kinda), Cosmic Ghost Rider (which is apparently the deceased Punisher? I guess he did always love those sick skull shirts), and Beta Ray Bill, who is Thor and away my favorite in this line-up.

In addition to a fair selection of characters (sorry Jan, no Cyclops) each also has several palettes to choose from, mostly for the sake of players doubling up. Here, for instance, I can go with a more viridian Jean Grey I've dubbed Green J.

The game is separated into a campaign mode and an arcade mode, the latter styled much like the brawlers from the 16-bit era with their limited number of lives and continues (though you can unlock a modifier to make continues effectively infinite, like you'd opened up the machine and set it on free play). The former has you progress through the game one mission at a time, with the "challenge" system of TMNT:SR returning here as a set of bonus objectives you can either ignore or unlock for zero gain besides an achievement. One big shift here is that you can play as two characters, swapping them in and out or having them briefly fight together as a nod to the Marvel vs. Capcom series and its extended family of tag team crossover fighters. Characters can be rotated out if they've taken damage, some of which will regenerate over time or can be replenished with larger healing items if they're in a perilous spot, and each mission has two "canon" choices that gives you an excuse to move around the roster a bit and try out everyone: the canon choices tend to be the ones talking in cutscenes and have challenges related specifically to their move lists. That said, of course, you can just keep picking the same characters if you have a preference: to assist with this approach there's a mild RPG aspect where you can level a character up for additional health, focus (needed for specials), and a free passive skill that might give their attacks an elemental affinity or provide a defensive boost. The game understands that they're looking at two audiences here: one that's going to try to unlock everything across all characters for the game's various bonus features, and the ones that are just going to pick Spider-Man for every level and then beat the game as Spider-Man because Spider-Man is their favorite Marvel guy. Spider-Man. That accommodation provides a very smartly designed progression given the usual limitations that brawlers face even with all these modern accoutrements.

I do dig the game's look, with those large well-animated sprites for heroes and villains alike and plenty of details to pore over in the backgrounds of these varied stages including odd places like Destromundo (the space ark belonging to Lady Hellbender, whom we last saw in video game form back with Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy) and the symbiote homeworld of Klyntar. These are all deep cuts for me, someone whose Marvel knowledge mostly taps out at the X-Men cartoon and the MCU, so I appreciate the level of comic nerddom depths from which this team pulled their references. Music and VA performances are pretty much perfect for what they're going for here too. If I have reservations they're going to be largely about the genre as a whole and how I have to reconcile with how poorly it's held up over the years, despite these best efforts to modernize the formula. Feels like they gave way to hack-and-slash and then character-action over time to suit the increasing demands for combat complexity and progression systems, and there are certainly moments where this game feels as deviously cheap as the coin-guzzling arcade games it venerates. This is seen also in the stuff they've added rather than homaged: most stages have at least one challenge that is "don't get hit by this thing" and it's not always clear what they mean by that "thing" until it hits you and you get a little sound clip of the villain laughing at your failure. If you quit out of the level in disgust, you won't get to keep any of the battle XP you've earned—you either have to purposefully let the enemy kill you to save that progress or just grit your teeth and finish the level, either coming back later to reattempt the challenge or telling the system to go screw itself; "I refused to engage with your bullshit" being something you always want to hear from players as a designer. Mostly, though, the game is fair enough and the truly devastating boss attacks that can lay you out in a few hits have plenty of build-up: it's more that it's easy to trick yourself into assuming you can just spam the tag-assist attack to victory since you can get in a huge amount of damage that way (though, as with MvC, you can also get both of your dudes killed pretty quick if they're both out when a big attack arrives). Another antiquated touch: multiplayer-only achievements. When was the last time you saw any of those in a game not exclusively built for multi? Maybe 2009?

Need XP in a hurry? Just spend five minutes bashing corpses against a wall for the combo bonus. This definitely feels like the way I'm supposed to play an arcade brawler.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is, like the brawlers of old, a mindlessly fun action game that's better with friends and Tribute is once again pixel-perfect with its recreation of a certain time and place in video game history. It's also a treat for Marvel fans due to its power cosmic esoterica and how several of its heroes are available in a video game for the first time (unless those Marvel Ultimate Alliance games were way more comprehensive than I remembered). I'm thankful that I found out that in some Marvel continuities Frank Castle became a fire skeleton on a space motorbike, that Marvel canonically has a character called Dick Ryder, and that the Venom symbiote originally came from an edgelord dimension ruled by a Todd MacFarlane character. All exciting revelations for me. Just needed a playable Howard the Duck and it would've been a perfect Marvel brawler. As it is, though, for as much fun as the early hours might've been I'll always get reminded eventually why this genre doesn't really work in the long term: the simplicity is both its chief strength (especially as a multiplayer hangout thing) and its chief weakness.

Keeper

Keeper is Double Fine's newest and unenviably has to follow the surprising mainstream success of the platformer Psychonauts 2, though given that required an obscure PS2 game and an even more obscure VR game to understand all the backstory on they are at least akin to performing miracles entirely by accident. Keeper isn't quite that—it arrived perhaps a bit too late to see much of a presence in GOTY talks, though former site fixture and ongoing silver fox Brad Shoemaker was taken enough by it to put it third on his personal list—but by most accounts it's one of their better games. That, plus the fact it's only about three hours long, meant it was something I wanted to pencil in as the last of these 2025 appraisals before the calendar ticks over and 2026 brings us all new craziness like, I dunno, the USA annexing Venezuela. [Editor's Note: This was written December 30th and hasn't been edited since. Maybe.]

Most striking about Keeper immediately is the setting, one alien enough that the fact that we're an ambulatory lighthouse feels all too germane for what's a regular sight to see while strolling down the boulevard. This is Earth, or an Earth-like world, that has suffered an apocalypse where reality itself appears to have shifted ever so slightly on its axis, causing most known forms of life to quickly give up the ghost to make way for new, more resilient fauna and flora. That we humans have spent so long collectively as a species trying to make sense of the universe that created us, the idea that everything suddenly morphs to a completely alien new normal and we're unable to adapt is both haunting and intriguing as extinction-level events go. That instead of a big boring space rock burying us all in fire and ash, we have some weird-ass gamma ray burst flood through the solar system and futz with everything's DNA (not quite how that would work, but I'm on some Color Out of Space BS here so bear with it) and suddenly nothing makes a lick of sense any more. Keeper also injects that sort of scenario with a sense of whimsy, where even if humanity is gone there's some semblance of the way we approach the world with a combination of curiosity and fear that still exists in this lighthouse hobbling around on spider legs doing the best it can to do... something, that's important to it. See a big eye on a mountain. Beats trying to shepherd ships around jagged rocks given there's no more ships around or indeed people to steer them.

Honestly, this game could give Clair Obscur a run for the "prettiest yet most messed up watercolor paintings" award for its level design.

That ambiguity is another aspect I appreciate about the game's hands-off approach to its narrative. We're not told much of anything, so we're free to project our own ideas and interpretations to the protagonist's journey in lieu of anything more substantial that's been handed to us. It's one aspect I appreciate about the contextual Souls series too—get a load of this guy, still bringing Souls into every review even into 2026—where there's no doubt some serious deliberation about who all these people are and what their motives might be from YouTube historians picking through every textual morsel with a fine-toothed comb, but on anyone's initial playthrough they've got to do the best they can to piece together the story and throw out their own best guesses as to why everything's gone to shit and who these damn knights are that keep stabbing me in the liver.

Anyway, that all becomes background noise before too long and the game becomes a series of mildly challenging environmental puzzles that only very occasionally breaks the linear route into some more open areas that might have you gathering several items or creatures to open the way forward. Many of the puzzles revolve around your light beam, shining it with increased intensity to cause withered roots to melt away or photophilic plants to sprout and break away any rocks or debris it has wrapped its tendril-like roots around. One positive in the game's favor is that it rarely rests on one type of situation like this for very long: the story has the lighthouse undergo some changes and you'll occasionally wander into a place with its own set of rules to observe, like changing the time period to make crumbled bridges rebuild themselves as if by magic to allow egress. Obviously I don't want to name too many more examples of the sort for concern of spoilers but the game keeps reinventing the way it does things and that's usually enough to keep you heading over the next hill on the horizon: what happens next, and what mechanics will these new puzzles use? There's also a slight empathetic element by way of a friendly bird that the lighthouse saves during the intro movie and becomes its constant companion throughout its adventure: the bird can fly off and collect key items you'll need for later, or activate levers that you lack the appropriate limbs to reach and manipulate yourself, but largely exists as this fellow traveler whose fate and fortune is often linked to your own. It's this bird's journey (whose name is Twig, going by the subtitles, though how she was named or why she should care about having a name remains a mystery) as much as it's the lighthouse's and just as eventful.

Eyeball Mountain is usually the kind of place I'd want to walk away from, not towards.

Keeper's an attractive and occasionally emotional game but it also feels very basic, the sort of dialogue-free adventure that the Indie circuit has been making for decades now, and if I didn't know Double Fine was behind it I'd just as quickly assume it was Playdead or Amanita Design or Giant Squid or Thatgamecompany or Wishfully Studios or any number of developers of these "eventful linear journey" narrative games that have the occasional bit of platforming and puzzle-solving to break up all the peregrination your hero is taking. Not to be dismissive of its strengths, and I'm all for any studio attempting their own spin on a burgeoning genre, but it feels like a very slight game given they now have Microsoft money (for how much longer who can say, since it all seems to be getting redirected to AI slop production) and it's been four whole years since Psychonauts 2. Maybe this is just a shiny pebble on the side of the road leading to something far greater on the horizon, and a reminder that DF can continue to make small but attractive and charming games as a matter of course lest we forget about that just because they've been away a while.

(Psst, if you want to find out where these three games and several others from 2025 ranked, my GOTY list has since been finalized and published here. There's been a gridlock on blogs for various reasons but I'm catching up fast.)