Over the weekend, I participated in the Global Game Jam at the UC Davis location. I’ve done several jams in the past, but always as a solo developer. So, this was the first time I participated in a jam with the intention of joining a team, let alone at an in-person event. Quite nerve-racking.
Fortunately, everyone was wonderfully chill. The event kicked off with a presentation, with former Davis alumnus providing advice on how to approach a jam, before declaring the theme for the 2026 jam: Mask.
Cocoon (Geometric Interactive) is a puzzle platformer with some of the most satisfying and interesting puzzle mechanics I’ve ever seen. As a strange bug-like humanoid creature, the player is released from a cocoon and tasked with exploring and finding their way through alien worlds. The worlds are strangely biomechanical, making them feel unsettling and cohesive all at once, and the puzzles are fascinating and intuitive. In almost every instance, I could figure things out by bumbling around a bit, with the solutions being so satisfying I found myself getting emotional just through the sheer act of playing the game.
My only frustration came from the boss fights, since the gameplay felt disconnected from the beautiful wonder of the rest of the puzzles. Each boss fight just felt like an annoying obstacle holding me back from the delights of the rest of the game.
Over the last year, I played 28 full games, of which I finished 24. As with previous years, most of my gameplay has come from the lingering backlog of years past, with only a handful of games having been released in 2025.
It’s been an interesting year of play for me. In many cases, the easy joy of play gave way to more complex experiences. Some left me emotionally wrought. Others featured gameplay that slipped into the frustrating, but nevertheless held me captive with their narrative.
Fortunately, some lighter fair was also included in the mix. There were games that delighted me with their puzzle design, offered unique narratives, or just granted me the simple joy of a fun experience — something I definitely needed by the end of this year.
Looks like I forgot to share October’s games, so here are both months at once. Whoops!
October
Selecting video clips in Immortality. | screenshot by me
I finished Immortality (Sam Barlow / Half Mermaid Productions), and it’s phenomenal. To learn how to play the game, the player really just has to dive in and discover how to play the game. The mechanics of pulling up videos, scrubbing them (playing, fast-forwarding, and rewinding), and then zooming in on objects or people in scenes allows for an impressive amount of discovery and exploration of this multi-layered and powerful narrative.
Marissa Marcel was an up-and-coming actor, who starred in three films — none of which ever aired. The game presents itself as a retrospective, allowing the the player to delve into clips from these films along with behind the scenes footage to discover her story. In the end, it’s so much deeper than the surface story, revealing a fascinating perspectives on how artists strive for a kind of immortality through their craft.
Bad End Theater (NomnomNami) presents a simple narrative. A hero is sent to rescue a maiden from the clutches of a demon overlord. But with this visual novel, the player is able to select which character they want to be — hero, maiden, minion, or overlord — and the choices you make as one character effects how things turn out when you switch over and play as one of the other characters. As the player continues, they are able to turn on or off certain personality traits, which impacts all of the possible outcomes. And all of those outcomes are inevitably bad — terrible deaths, failure, and isolation. At first, it might seem like that’s all there is, but the game actually builds to a sweet and satisfying ending. It was a delightful little game.
