2025 Game Reviews - 83-62

    This page contains the reviews for numbers 83-62 of my 2025 game reviews. These games were generally, for myself, at least worth the time I spent playing them but were not particularly fun. There are some interesting ideas in some titles in this group but they might not have been fully realized. There are games in this group I would actually suggest to some people, if I really knew a lot about their likes and dislikes and was positive a game fit a specific niche they enjoyed. To see the rest, visit this page.

83. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

    The original Citizen Sleeper is a game I enjoy quite a bit. I picked it up about a year ago when I was really fascinated by the implementation of dice rolls in various types of games. I found the first game's story to be incredibly gripping and was looking forward to the sequel.

    The storytelling took a large step back with Citizen Sleeper 2. There's still plenty of text here but I didn't feel like it was used to create meaningful connections to the characters like the first game did. Those characters were also in and out in a flash more often than I'd have liked, leading to a lack of time to build a connection with them.

    Quest chains feel significantly shorter in this game than the first and I think that's a side effect of the scope creep on display here. I think the writers wanted to go much wider this time around but doing so as a detriment to the depth of the story.

    I did enjoy the expanded game mechanics and new dice but I'd gladly have given that up for a story that resonated with me like my first couple playthroughs of Citizen Sleeper 1 did.

82. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound

    If I had only played the first half of Ragebound it would probably jump 50 slots in this list. I was very much loving this game until a rather jarring difficulty spike left me thinking the time I'd spent in it already wasn't really preparing me for what lied ahead.

    I thought the graphics and art direction were fantastic, I did have some problems with minor hitching a few times on PC though. It was never prominent but it was noticeable in a game that controls so tightly and demands precision. I was glad to see Ninja Gaiden back in the 2D space and loved the backgrounds.

    While I found the game getting difficult enough in the back half that I had a retry a few times on some bosses, I was able to complete it. I think my problem is maybe not so much with the raw mechanical skill necessitated by the jump but perhaps in some of the boss designs themselves and the ways they take advantage of player perception. While never dipping its toe in being unfair, I felt a couple bosses were frustrating me when they would sometimes telegraph a move one way and then do something else entirely... but only sometimes. This meant that even on my successive tries against the boss, I was still not able to properly discern what might be happening and play accordingly.

    I've never been the biggest Ninja Gaiden fan, but I do have fond memories of the franchise. Ragebound isn't likely one I'll revisit, but I certainly played worse this year.

81. TMNT: Tactical Takedown

    I'm a certified Ninja Turtle freako. I'll play anything with Mikey, Leo, Raph, and Donny in it. I've played and enjoyed some Tactics games, but am admittedly not super experienced with the genre. I am, however, experienced enough in the genre to realize how strategically lacking Tactical Takedown feels.

    I enjoyed the story and the cheesy writing even felt more at home in this setting than it would in more serious Turtles titles like Splintered Fate. I love seeing yet another Turtles game make use of Karai. The lack of voice acting was a letdown. I understand that this title may not have had the largest budget, but some spoken dialogue in here would have helped break up the monotony of the soundscape.

    The gameplay is where Tactical Takedown became a Tactical Letdown for me. Veterans of the tactics genre are sure to get bored fast here, as the combat mechanics never really open up and expand or try doing anything you wouldn't have seen before. While I understand that a mechanical dressing down is often desirable for these licensed projects, I think Tactical Takedown plays it a little too safe.

    The progression of the combat stage to new areas over the course of the fight was interesting and I got a good laugh watching a couple bad guys just fall into the void when the ground dropped out from beneath them. However, what they were falling onto was just a flat, static background. There was really no visual flair to any of this. The presentation of the combat left a lot to be desired. Battling on top of a building and going roof to roof as sections of the stage come in and out of play is neat... until you realize the background is just some weird orange gradient with a basic pattern on it and not like... the city the building you're supposedly on top of is in.

    I cannot end this review without stating how utterly baffling I find it that we now have a TMNT tactics game in which the turtles never play a mission together. I've played many similar games that involved the use of multiple characters in the player's party, so it's not like they thought that such a thing would be overwhelming to fans of the genre and I certainly don't think the decision makes sense as a way to pare the combat down for the non-tactics playing Turtles fan who will certainly find it weird that they're playing a TMNT game where every turtle is played alone.

80. Monster Train 2

    Roguelike deckbuilders are probably my favorite genre of game. I played Monster Train years ago and enjoyed it but it's never been my favorite in the genre. I had no real complaints about the first game, but I typically found others more interesting for long-term replayability.

    Monster Train 2, for better and for worse, is just... more Monster Train. I never found the game opening up and being more than what the first game felt like. There are changes here for sure but as someone who didn't put thousands of hours into the first, I'm not sure I can really tell you what those changes are.

    As someone with design experience on digital card games, I tend to be overly critical of early impressions when playing a new one and I wrote down a lot of my thoughts on Monster Train's onboarding (all-aboarding???) as I played it. So here's some words from Past Noah:

    I'm in the second turn of the tutorial. They explained the concept of my health pool on turn 1 and I cannot leave the tutorial right now so it stands to reason that they're assuming I haven't played before... yet they've given 0 explanation or guidance in play at all to the existence of the 3 effects applying on my character, the effect on the enemy character, 3 keywords in the cards in my hand. 

    Then I find out on the next turn that I can hover to see the keyword on the enemy... but that keyword just applies another keyword to the character. That keyword buffs allies when being hit, which is a little random, usually that kind of trigger is retaliatory or selfish or has something to do with the incoming attack... and that ability just refers to another ability which... adds attack to anyone, but has a subclause that also adds armor if positionally in front?  But with a different timing than the application. 

Why do people fold this much complexity into the first moments with the game if there are other elements of the tutorialization process that are obviously designed around the notion that the player may be unfamiliar with the rules? 

    Then I finish the tutorial battle and I'm offered a card choice... again with no guidance... and there are now... 5 bolded keywords here I've never seen. A card type that I have not seen yet and is not explained... as it was not in the tutorial battle they forced me to play but there's a "click for card details" thing so maybe it's there... so I mouse over the card and get the usual popups for keyword explainers then when you right click for more details... there's no explanations of the card type you've never seen... and instead the only information present that is NOT surfaced when you mouse over the card is... flavor text and the artist's name???

     That was one of the worst onboarding experiences I played this year and I really don't know how they expect anyone who may be new to the genre to possibly make it through the tutorial without being overwhelmed and giving up. It's exactly the type of "more of the same for folks who liked it before" feeling I had in Hades 2 and I fear will permeate all throughout Slay the Spire 2 next year as well.

    Despite all of the above, this is still at least an entry I could stomach finishing (though I didn't do challenge runs) in a genre I love. It's not terrible if you're really into the genre and looking for more content, but there's a lot of room for a better experience.

79. Islanders: New Shores

        Islanders is a cozy isometric city-builder and it was alright but didn't do anything to really hook me. I played maybe 5-10 hours of it in total and perhaps the best compliment and biggest criticism I can levy against it is that I don't really have any feelings about it..

    This slot occupies sort of an awkward spot in my list where I'm transitioning into titles that I didn't particularly enjoy but also weren't necessarily bad. There may be things that stand out to me as being exceptionally good or bad about a given game but ultimately these next few are where they are due to being largely unremarkable.

    While I can't say anything to persuade someone to get Islanders, I can't really think of any reason you shouldn't buy it if it looks interesting to you. However, I would recommend checking out Pan'orama instead. I found it to be very similar to Islanders but much more fun. I've managed to put nearly 50 hours into it and still find myself happy to idly play it on the side throughout a day I'm working on something that I need periodic breaks from.

78. Letterlike

    I'm really glad Letterlike actually came out this year. I was worried about the shameful look of my Steam wishlist having FOUR word-building roguelikes on it at the same time. Letterlike and Word Play both released this year so now I'm just waiting on Mark My Words and Wordlike to complete the set.

    Letterlike started as a mobile game that was ported to PC. Its UI, unfortunately, wasn't ported particularly well and is rather clunky. I found navigation of menus to be rather awkward and, at times, downright confusing.

    Its gameplay is very similar to Word Play, which will show up higher on this list, but ultimately doesn't play with the "Balatrification" of the concept as well. I found that Letterlike's modifiers were more focused on changing up the point scoring of the words but not as focused on playing with modifying the kind of words one might be compelled to spell. Mark My Words has a demo that plays more with effects like "nouns are worth more" or "consecutive vowels score double" that add an element of thought to the game that I find Letterlike's effects to not lean into as much.

    Given that none of the others I mentioned above are available on mobile, if you're looking for something to scratch this weird itch and all you have is a phone, Letterlike will certainly do. If you are on PC though, keep reading because better choices are to come.

77. Koira

    What a charming little game Koira should be. I've got plenty of thoughts about this one actually, and putting it this low maybe betrays how much I enjoyed the parts I liked but I really came away from my time with Koira feeling conflicted.

    Koira is every bit of an emotionally-dense story about anger and the ability to let it go that proudly wears its Limbo-inspired visuals like a badge of honor. Sadly, it also bears the weight of Limbo's overwhelming stress in a manner that conflicts with its attempts at more heartwarming moments.

    The game's visuals are cute but they lack enough variety to not wear on you just a bit by the end. You can only see so many snowy scenes that are largely indiscernible from one another before you start to wish for a bit of variety. Admittedly, I also tend to play with the lights off like a goblin and this one made me adjust my brightness.

    Koira's at its best when it's trying to present its landscape to the player through expositive character interaction and probably at its worst when actually going through its gameplay sections, as those tend to be rather repetitive. There are tons of "puzzles" that are focused around a stealth mechanic that feels, at best, inconsistent and there are enough minor variations from puzzle to puzzle to make each one an awkward game of trial and error while still feeling samey enough to blend together the moment you move past one.

    The core narrative theme of the game revolves around being able to let go of your anger but this concept is wielded rather bluntly and doesn't strike a tone that resonated with me so much as made me feel like it's trying to beat me to submission with it. Through an onslaught of terrible things that happen in this game, I couldn't help but think "Ya know... sometimes it's okay to hold anger toward someone/something. I don't think it's wrong to be angry at terrible bigots doing terrible things on purpose."

    Perhaps my strong feelings about its narrative are a clash between my own philosophies on life and the creator's but I think that maybe I'm more just disappointed that the message the game tries to convey was conveyed so poorly. It doesn't shock me that this game resonates so strongly with so many people (its Steam ratings are really good) and I'd probably recommend it to people who enjoyed games like Limbo or Planet of Lana, but I can't get past how strongly the narrative turned me off.

76. to a T

    Man, what a weird game. I have fond childhood memories of playing Keita Takahashi's more well-known Katamari Damacy but I never fell in love with that franchise. I was very interested in to a T when I first saw a trailer for it and I had the song stuck in my head for days.

    Sadly, the trailer for this game was the best thing about it. I think the over-the-top absurdism of the boy's affliction undercuts a bit of the game's intended messaging about overcoming ones own abnormalities. Perhaps the game's message would resonate better with me if I were playing as a character coping with the outcast nature a more grounded ailment would provide.

    to a T's gameplay was very superficial. I think I had an expectation going in that even if the experience as a whole was going to end up lacking, there would at least be moments of fun throughout, based on Katamari Damacy but sadly I was proven wrong. Rather than make me feel sympathy for this character whose irregular shape makes his day-to-day life cumbersome, I instead just felt frustration at the game design for passing that cumbersome nature onto me through awkward movement and collision. One could argue that's the game doing what it's supposed to be doing, given the context, but it all lacks a level of polish that would let that intentionality shine through.

    Takahashi has recently talked about the possibility of being done making games after to a T's muted reception and I certainly hope that isn't the case. While this work didn't necessarily resonate with me, it would be a shame for this industry to lose a mind so creative at a time that creative liberty is under siege.

75. Herdling

    Taking a feature most find an annoyance, like herding missions, and turning it into an entire game is certainly a tall task. I'm a big fan of developer Okomotive's previous work and I thought this game looked really pretty, so I gave it a shot.

    Ultimately, the pains of controlling this game made me fall off before I finished it. I knew Herdling didn't have a long runtime so I tried sticking it out but I couldn't get over the frustrations of its weird controls. The general idea that the herd moves opposite the direction of the player's input makes total sense and that inversion isn't where my problem lied.

    The way you move as a solo character is much more sharp and responsive (almost too much so and bordering on jerky) completely contrasts the slow, wide movement on an arc that the herd takes. Their AI is also not really up to snuff and they will at times just take weird paths opposite your intended direction in an attempt to correct themselves and that correction feeling is weird too... it feels the herd, as a single big entity, is checking its collision against obstacles, and if obstacles are expected to or are colliding, each individual animal in the herd makes its own determined movement away from the offending obstacle. This makes the whole thing fall apart too often and not in a way that feels either like a result of your own input or rectifiable in a way that makes sense right away.

    Part of me wonders if some of that is actually intended. Obviously herding a bunch of things that have minds of their own is gonna lead to moments like that so I can see the thought process that might lead a designer to make that choice, but I'm not sure that's the case. The fact it only tends to happen in tight spaces where you might be colliding with objects in a puzzle and doesn't manifest in situations where you're navigating the herd in a large, open field and one little guy straggles off on his own makes me think it's just a problem with the collision.

    There were parts of this game I really enjoyed too. The art is gorgeous and its storytelling is a phenomenal example of "less is more". I loved getting to name each member of my herd too. There was enough I liked here to finish watching the last hour and a half of the game on YouTube, but that's not a great compliment to a game whose total runtime is probably 4 hours.

74. Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo

    With an art style that so closely resembles Paper Mario & The Thousand-Year Door, my favorite game of all time, I knew I was going to check out Kulebra the minute I saw the trailer. Kulebra is a beautiful story about closure from a 3-person team and that should be celebrated. The game matches its Paper-Mario inspired visuals with gameplay progression reminiscent of Majora's Mask through a Morning-Evening-Night cycle.

    Kulebra is at its best when using the overbearing weight of its environment and setting to reinforce the levity of the stories of the characters you're interacting with. Nearly every character Kulebra interacts with has deep-rooted trauma and needs help finding closure. I understood my role in this process but the often-spirited dialogue would sometimes clash with the nature of the seriousness of the situation. Characters also tend to be a bit too overt in their conveyance of gameplay tasks conversationally. Rather than a flowing conversation that feels natural, there were multiple times a character would rather pointedly say "Make sure to do this specific thing, then that specific thing."

    Disappointingly, Kulebra's weakest point is in its rather bland puzzle design. I've had something of a fascination with combat-less games over the last few years, as I've watched my nephew grow up playing games, and the removal of combat as an element leaves puzzle design as the sole source of player friction. When the game is so dependent on the strength of its puzzles, I feel having solutions as blatantly obvious as most of the ones found here simplifies the entire experience too much. Each chapter has a "boss" encounter but those amount to little more than quizzes on the progression of the story itself. There are moments where a fairly typical stealth system, very similar to many others I've criticized on many reviews already, feel like they're sprinkling a bit of action and excitement into the formula but I think they're too few and the fact I found myself wanting more of a mechanic I generally dislike is maybe the best commentary I can provide on my thoughts for the rest.

73. Drop Duchy

    Roguelite deck building? I'm in. Tetris? Prior to this year, not so much... but I actually got really into Tetris in 2025 and Drop Duchy hit shortly after I found myself feeling confident in my Tetris play. I was sure this was just the right combination of weird for me and it might have been if I didn't find learning it to be such a chore.

    If you've read my review for Monster Train 2, you probably know how much I stress the importance of intuitive onboarding. If you've read my review for Monster Train 2 AND you've played Drop Duchy, you probably understand why it's this far down my list.

    Drop Duchy is packed to the brim with interesting genre-fusing ideas but ultimately hides all of them behind an incredibly steep learning curve and further obfuscates them with a lack of clarity. This game makes no attempt to hide its deeply-rooted board game inspirations but unfortunately those shine through in the very wordy tutorialization that throws far too much at the player far too fast. I'm a highly experienced strategy game player and found myself lost in a web of intertwined systems that caused my eyes to glaze over the first time I tried playing this.

    Once I got the core concepts of the game down and I was ready to really dig into the game, I found that the rng in Drop Duchy manifests itself in many ways that don't feel terribly fun. Where so many roguelites are able to use their deep progression systems and the run-based nature of the thing to really play around with RNG in ways that let the player feel a sense of control, Drop Duchy falls in line with this genre norm. You've got your card selection element after each round, you've got upgrades to your buildings, and you've got a rock-paper-scissors style resource trifecta that sits at the heart of the whole thing.

    Drop Duchy also plays around with too many random aspects that happen outside the player's purview. The "rock-paper-scissors style resource trifecta" I mentioned earlier is referring to the Plains, Forest, and Mountain terrain types that your cards care about, as each spawns different kinds of units for the combat system. That also manifests itself in another way, as enemy buildings ALSO  recruit based on terrain types. More than once you will spend a few turns setting up your terrain tiles perfectly and then be screwed because an enemy building of a certain type comes up next. It's frustrating every time.

    That type of randomness is inherent to such a kind of game and while maddening, I do find it forgivable. What ultimately killed this experience for me is how dreadfully grindy the whole experience is. There is a lot of this game gated behind meta-progression, as one would want, but the steep difficulty ramp from stage to stage in a run combines with some of the pain points above in a way that will leave you feeling powerful after taking out a boss and then just dying out of nowhere in the next encounter.

72. The Outer Worlds 2

    Every time I've gotten Game Pass over the last few years, I've inevitably gone "Man, I should give Outer Worlds a try" and I install it, play for 45 minutes, and uninstall it. Perhaps this should have been a sign that Outer Worlds 2 was not for me, but the world seems so interesting that I wanted to try yet again.

    The appeal that I found in the world of Avowed was what sparked this entire "Play tons of games this year" mission I spent the last 12 months on. I'll cover that game extensively later, but it's not "my kind of game" and I loved it so much that I tried Outer Worlds 2 just hoping that some of the elements I loved in Avowed would manifest themselves here too. Sadly, this game is much more Outer Worlds 1 than it is Avowed.

    I don't necessarily have any specific insight into things Outer Worlds did or didn't do that caused me to fall off, and even calling out commonalities it has with other RPGs that would be turnoffs for me, like encumberance and fiddly inventory management aren't absent in Avowed, so I can't pinpoint them as the reason I fell off of this one. I guess its world just wasn't as interesting as I wanted? Maybe the fact that it's a shooter, which I otherwise play quite a bit of, made me more subconsciously averse to the gunplay that doesn't really stand out as excellent here.

    I'm sure if you liked Outer Worlds 1, there's plenty to enjoy here and most folks contemplating getting into this game would be better served reading the words of folks with far more institutional knowledge on the genre than myself. This was me stepping outside my wheelhouse and not liking the experience. Props to the environment designers though, visually the world is super interesting.

71. Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings

    For entrenched card game nerds like myself, L5R is a franchise you've almost certainly encountered through its LCG made by Alderac. What's on offer here is a tactical board-based combat system like Tales & Tactics with a deckbuilding element to it as well that features hero progression reminiscent of Beneath Oresa.

    I played this in March and unfortunately didn't take many notes on it. I remember really appreciating the quality of the English VO work and the art style, while a bit on the low poly side for the animated models the combat uses, is at least visually interesting with its oil painting aesthetic and heavy inking. The character portraits are much sharper and really shine.

    Shadowveil's gameplay has quite a bit of strategic depth and its progression systems feel both rewarding and engaging. You not only get that sense of "one more run" after each game but you also feel adequately rewarded each time too.

    Narratively, the game presents a more-than-serviceable story for the genre. Though, that's not surprising given the depth of the IP it's attached to. The interesting narrative implication for me is the unique soldiers you pick up along the way. I don't want to spoil too much but there are some cool explanations for the idea of this being a roguelite that aren't the typical hand-wavy dismissal of your character's death.

    This game ended up far down my list because it's unfortunately rife with bugs and performance issues. I've got a very good PC and this game was turning my 4080 into a lawnmower for some reason. I ended up using Nvidia Control Panel to force the game to use my onboard graphics card instead for fear of my computer achieving liftoff. There are long load times, infrequent crashes, and more frequent translation problems. UI animations are also all over the place and while I they all look nice, they sometimes slow down scene transitions in a way that adds up over the course of a good long play session.

70. Rematch

    If Rocket League can be simplified to "Soccer/football but with cars" (anyone who has seen high-level Rocket League competitive play knows it cannot) then Rematch can be simplifed to "Rocket League but with soccer/football." Sloclap is an interesting studio and I love their previous work like Sifu but Rematch just didn't work for me.

    Live service titles like these live and die by their player counts and those player counts, especially in the crucial early days, live and die by their monetization and progression systems. The overall sentiment of players evaluating games through the lens of "Is what I get from the game (meaning items thrown in their face, and not emotional extraction) really worth my time?" is rampant in an industry that's spent the last 10+ years trying to shove meaningless progression in their faces.

    I played Rematch at launch and I don't think it had any sort of player-earnable cosmetics at that time. I'm pretty sure there was no battle pass in place yet with free tiers and challenges to progress. I could be wrong about those details, admittedly, but such is the struggle of the post-mortem review. I remember playing Rematch and thinking "This is fun enough for now while it's new to me, but what is there to do next week when I'm doing and playing the exact same thing and the newness is off and I'm not really getting anything for/from it?" and the answer to that question, for me and for 95% of other players in the first week or two of a new live service title is often "put it down and never look back" and that's unfortunately what happened for me with Rematch.

    I liked the on-field action well enough and there is absolutely a skill ceiling to this game that allows for player skill expression to shine, as one would want with such a title, but ultimately Rematch suffers most from what I think is a misalignment of identity. Sloclap is not at their best here and I think perhaps they stepped a little too far outside their area of expertise with this one. Perhaps they think the same, since there is not one mention of Rematch's existence on their studio website.

69. Haste: Broken Worlds

    Nothing made me feel the pain of being a Sonic fan who isn't into the whole "Make an OC and get freaky in forums" side of the fandom quite like seeing Haste run where Sonic games often awkwardly hit a wall and walk. The more I played it, the more I found myself thinking not just of Sonic but also of some of the best land skiing moments in Tribes.

    I've not had much of a chance to talk about my love for 3D platformers and fluid movement in the reviews I've written up to this point, but believe me... I'm a sicko for some momentum. Haste scratches that itch so viscerally that having it this far down is really a testament to how bland I found its roguelike elements, I suppose.

    The very nature of Haste's presentation within a roguelike structure is the crux of its biggest problem: poor procedural generation. Any given level in Haste has a solid variety of obstacles and will keep you on your toes, but the sameyness necessitated by the proc-gen system makes every level feel indistinguishable from the rest. For a game predicated on traversing the space, the space feeling forgettable cheapens the thrill of your own mastery of the traversal systems. Neon White or Cyber Hook might not provide the endless level variation that Haste has, but they have a much stronger identity built on the backs of their expert level design allowing their movement systems to shine.

    You can still get in that zen-like "flow state" playing Haste and it's certainly worth picking up if you are a certified movement freako but don't expect to walk away with a lasting impression more than 10 minutes after you close the game.

68: Everybody's Golf: Hot Shots

    My most-played game this year is probably Mario Golf Super Rush or Mario Golf Toadstool Tour. I absolutely love a casual golf game (golf sims are dope too) and I have such fond memories of playing Hot Shots as a kid. My mom didn't play many video games with us kids but Hot Shots was one that managed to get her to sit down and grab a controller. It had appeal for the whole family. This latest entry, unfortunately, feels totally devoid of the elements that made me fall in love with the franchise to begin with.

    This was a day 1 pre-order for me even before I knew that pre-order would secure me Pac-Man. I spent much of this year playing Mario Golf in a big group of friends on our Switches or over Parsec for Toadstool Tour. I'd also been playing the previous Hot Shots game for PS4 despite the servers being offline and I loved that entry.

    Everybody's Golf: Hot Shots was a performance nightmare on release. I had it on PC and on Switch and it was equally unplayable on both. Frequent hitches would make you mis-strike the ball every. single. time. When you weren't hitching your way toward shanked balls, you were grinding. and grinding. and grinding for unlocks.

    The content grind might not have been off-putting to me if the play experience was worth the time. Even after a patch that reduced, but still hasn't eliminated, performance problems the game is still rather bland. Characters aren't as expressive and silly as previous entries and course design doesn't hold up for me. I think the course design complaints could be because I spent a lot of time in Mario Golf, where zany courses shine, but also spent a lot of time in PGA 2K25 where realism shines and the course design of EGHS falls awkwardly in the middle of those two extremes.

    Online play lacks crossplay which severely limits any potential life span this title may have had for online play. Steam averages about 60 players. Online matchmaking options are also rather limited. My group of golf game fans has found more enjoyment playing older Hot Shots titles on Parsec over booting up EGHS.

67. Lost in Random: The Eternal Die

    The original Lost in Random is a game I feel got criminally overlooked in more general circles. What a masterpiece and a great "weird game" to play if  Psychonauts and Coraline are your kind of vibe. There's some awkward background stuff between the developers and the publisher that led to an interesting scenario this year. This Lost in Random title is made by a new development team while the team who made the original in 2021 went on to release game #65 on this list, The Midnight Walk, within weeks of one another.

    The Eternal Die is a deviation from the platformer roots of the first game and is yet another action roguelite with DNA traceable to Hades. I wish this had clicked more with me and as I write this review I find myself wanting to go back and play more of The Eternal Die. Unfortunately, it just doesn't really stand out in a year full of titles cut from the same cloth.

    I found the use of the die to be interesting in this context and a good bit of continuity with the first title but the entire vibe of this game is just "off" for me. The weirdness of the first game really doesn't shine here narratively and the setting just didn't click for me in this format like it did with Lost in Random.

    Similar to Hades, I think The Eternal Die's designers maybe got a little too mechanically comfortable in their own creation and have tuned things here in such a way that the dash ends up detracting from the experience, due to the combat system's reliance on it. Too often a stage doesn't allow me to really appreciate the fruits of my build's labor because I'm too focused on playing optimally with the movement tech. Slowing that down a tiny bit offers the rest of the experience a moment to breathe.

    It feels like perhaps there's this design arms race taking place in this genre where the faster and more fluid you can make a character feel, the more you have to crank enemy responsiveness and the more responsive enemies are, the more satisfying an i-frame dash feels. Now that you've got this wonderful feeling dash with i-frames or this sick parry built into your character's kit, you need to increase enemy wave numbers and make them behave more like a mob to introduce more danger to the scenario or the player can kite a wave one-by-one.

66. Deadzone Rogue

    I've got a complicated history with Deadzone Rogue. The developer behind this title, Prophecy Games, started out as an off-shoot band of Hi-Rez Studios and in 2020 or 2021 they released a very little-known auto-chess competitor called Prophecy. They licensed the use of Smite character assets from Hi-Rez and build the best damn autobattler I've ever played. Then they canned it and I've spent years following their path through multiple failed attempts to launch an original title, bring back and sunset Tribes, and then announce Deadzone.

    I wanted to like Deadzone Rogue because I want to see Prophecy Games succeed. Similar to my earlier review about Abyssus, I don't think I have any standout complaints about Deadzone. It feels like a totally serviceable roguelike shooter. It has tighter gunplay than Abyssus but has a fairly weak meta-progression system.

    Perhaps this one is only so high up here because of my affinity for Prophecy Games, but if you enjoy roguelite FPS games, you're not going to find anything egregious or offensive about what's on offer here. It seems to go on sale often and has gotten plenty of post-launch content. There are certainly worse ways to spend your money.

65. The Midnight Walk

    My review of Lost in Random: The Eternal Die is not light on praise for the creative minds behind The Midnight Walk. The entire playthrough of Midnight Walk is permeating with the DNA of Lost in Random but I feel it struggles to capture the magic this team had with Lost in Random.

    I hope there have been a number of bugfixes since I first played The Midnight Walk. I ran into tons of objects clipping through one another, sections where music either cut abruptly and was just gone until restart or music continued to play after it should have stopped, and tons of asset pop-in that made me triple check my settings to make sure I hadn't just set the render distance to some laughably miniscule option.

    When I wasn't running into all the above, I was finding myself interested in the creepy Tim Burton-inspired world but unable to get immersed in it. The claymation effect on display here is gorgeous and the mixture of some objects animating at lower framerates is done much better than South of Midnight managed to pull off with the same intent.

    Where Lost in Random pulled me into its story and never let me go, The Midnight Walk offers moments of masterful storytelling littered across an otherwise inconsistent narrative with more lows than highs. I would like to talk more in-depth in these reviews about specific plot points but I don't want to spoil anything for someone in such a cursory format. It's safe to say though that when The Midnight Walk's story is hitting its highs, it's knocking the ball out of the park.

    An inconsistent story with such high highs would probably end up higher up on this list if its gameplay supported it. The Midnight Walk's approach to puzzle design rivals Kulebra's in its race to mundanity. Where I might have felt nothing when playing Kulebra's puzzles, given its colorful aesthetics setting a tone for a more casual experience, I feel almost betrayed by The Midnight Walk doing the same thing given its much more serious tone.

    This game is available in VR and that is absolutely the best way to play it. Ultimately, if you can put up with an inconsistent experience and insultingly-easy puzzle design, playing The Midnight Walk will reward you with emotional highs a lot of games will fail to compete with. Oh, and Potboy is an adorable ugly character so that's a plus.

64. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black

    As I talked about in my Ninja Gaiden Ragebound review, I've never been a huge Ninja Gaiden fan. I appreciate them for their legacy in the "maddeningly hard" genre of game and I have some fond memories with the franchise, but I'm certainly no expert. I went into this expecting to see plenty of kick-ass fighting and lots of blood and it had both of those things.

    I knew going into this game that I didn't intend to play through the whole thing. This was the most involved game I would be picking up in a span of about 2 weeks that saw 6 titles on this list release. I got the satisfaction I wanted from Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, but given how little I was expecting of it, I didn't think it fair to put it any higher than this. We knew Ninja Gaiden 4 and Ninja Gaiden Ragebound were still to come so I didn't want to burn myself out on the franchise.

    I think I'll end up revisiting this one when I've got some downtime to really commit to learning its combat because I did enjoy its moment-to-moment gameplay. I can't say the same for its story though. This could be a fault of my own, as I knew I wasn't planning to fully complete the game, but I found myself completely uninterested in the narrative and thinking of the spent in cutscenes as nothing more than breaks in the action.

    The facelift from Unreal Engine 5 makes this game look great and I don't recall running into the trademark UE5 hitching and compilation stutter here so it's certainly worth playing through for a longtime fan of the game just curious about experiencing it again with a pretty makeover.

63. Nicktoons & The Dice of Destiny

    I've got such a fondness for so many of the IP involved in this game. TMNT, Spongebob, Rugrats, and Fairly Oddparents are all shows I grew up with and having had the pleasure to work on a game involving many of those IP, I have a special affinity for seeing how designers tackle the integration of characteristics from each against the intermingling that allows the final product to feel cohesive.

    I've never been big into an isometric ARPG so I thought this IP familiarity would help me bridge the gap. I've never played a Diablo or Path of Exile but my impression of the combat in such titles is that it's a step further extracted from something like a Hades than Dice of Destiny ends up being. I thought this extra layer of familiarity in the mechanical sense would ease me into the idea of foraging for loot. Ultimately, I found Dice of Destiny, even at its highest difficulty, to lack enough degree of difficulty to keep my interest. I know this is like the third time in these reviews I've written about the licensed kids game being "too easy" but please understand that that is through the lens of lowered expectation already.

    I was pleasantly surprised to hear voice lines in this game. I was unpleasantly surprised to hear how far some of them deviated from what I expected of the character speaking. The VO work is up and down throughout this game and while it has times that you can almost forget you're listening to different voice actors than you might be used to for a character, there are also times you almost can't tell who is talking because they sound so unlike what you expect. I found this to really pull me out of the experience often enough that I ended up muting the dialogue.

    I think this game fills an interesting role as perhaps a young child's first foray into a game where they might start exploring more intricate game systems like comparative stat-influenced kit building, but I don't think there's much value here for an adult fan of the franchises looking to have a fun romp through their childhood with familiar faces.

62. Sunderfolk

    Sunderfolk is a very conceptually interesting take on the TTRPG game night. It's definitely influenced by a bunch of D&D nerds struggling to cope with adapting their irl sessions to an online format but the result is a product that really modernizes some parts of the experience for the better.

    I've never been into D&D personally, but its influence on most everything else I like is certainly not lost on me. I'm tangentially familiar with it, as I'm pretty entrenched in fantasy nerd culture and pretty much all my friends play together. Sunderfolk takes the idea of getting together with character sheets sprawled across the table and throws it in the Jackbox blender. What comes out is a narrative RPG experience a group of friends can play together on their respective devices around a tv or together over Discord as I got a friend group to do a couple times this year.

    I ended up putting Sunderfolk as low as it is on this list because I was always the host player and playing on a pc but the pc controls were terribly clunky and awkward. I also had to jump through some weird hoops with streaming one screen to my play group but then technically doing my own player actions on a different screen. It was fiddly and frustrating and the problems we had with it ultimately led to us feeling like it was more hassle than it was worth getting everyone coordinated and synced up.

    While I was writing this review I found out there was a big 2.0 update in November that specifically addresses all of those complaints as well as adding more missions and characters. I'll almost certainly be jumping back in but won't delay this review to do so. You can essentially ignore the paragraph above, though I'm leaving it in for posterity, and if "Jackbox-ified D&D" sounds like something you have the right friend group for, this is probably worth picking up.