Author: Andrea Blythe

Games I Played in January 2026

Games, Review
Michelle is a stylish survivor in Sorry We’re Closed | screenshot by me

Sorry We’re Closed (á la mode games) is a survival horror game with immense amounts of style. The art (which is one of the first things that attracted me to it) is stunning, both the nostalgic computer graphics and the character portraits. The music hits the perfect vibes and the gameplay adds to the survival horror experience.

Michelle is a young woman working in a corner shot in a small neighborhood in London. Though on another continent, the community feels very much like some of the counter-culture neighborhoods I’ve seen in San Francisco, being full of charming punks, oddballs, and weirdos. Everyone seems a bit on edge, considering the number of disappearances in the area.

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Global Game Jam 2026

Games Development
Covers for the games Best Face Forward (showing the silhouette of a face with the text arranged inside) and Thomas Was NOT Alone (showing a man in a beanie and suit jacket, holding a wine glass, with pink hearts floating around his head)

Over the weekend, I participated in the Global Game Jam at the UC Davis location hosted by the Game Development & Arts Club. 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.

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Games I Played in December 2025

Games
Everything is oddly insectile in Cocoon (2023) | Source: Geometric Interactive

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.

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Games I Loved Playing in 2025

Games
A grid of four images showing screenshots from The Last of Us II, Mouthwashing, Immortality, and The Outer Worlds 2

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.

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Games I Played in October & Novemeber 2025

Games, Review

Looks like I forgot to share October’s games, so here are both months at once. Whoops!

October

Page for selecting video clips, showing he clips arranged in rows. One clips is highlighted for selection.
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.

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