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.

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.

Games I Played in September 2025

Games
Hero character in Bad End Theatre.

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.

Games I Played in August 2025

Games
Polly is the infamous mascot of the shipping company the crew works for. | screenshot by me

Mouthwashing (Wrong Organ) is a psychological horror game about a crew left stranded in space after their ship collides with an asteroid. The five person crew operates a long-haul transport ship, and are constantly reminded by the company’s mascot Polly to stay focused on work and to not linger to long in idle distractions. The isolation on the ship and the slim chance of being rescued reveals dark secrets and the crew’s hidden selves.

The game approaches the narrative as a puzzle, presenting scenes from two points of view — Curly, the captain, and Jimmy, his second in command — and arranges these fragmented scenes out of chronological order. This puzzle structure allows for an emotional escalation, building tension through mystery, rather than a straightforward progression of the plot. It also reflects a sense of workers being trapped in the flow of their lives, struggling to take responsibility for the mistakes they’ve made as the story cycles back on itself and grows increasingly surreal. I was particularly haunted by the Curly’s looming eye swirling in its socket, like the Tell-Tale Heart’s ever beating heart beneath the floorboards.