This is a hot take that deserves a fuller treatment, but: The outrage about Sony giving up on producing physical discs isn’t about discs. It’s about ownership. Physical game sales are super low, and PC gaming has been essentially digital only for some time without an uproar. But, like—thanks to sales and bundles, PC games are often available at deep discounts. This is becoming…
An action RPG built on rotating between interconnected combat, gathering, and crafting grinds. An action RPG where the gimmick is that you play all parts of an MMORPG-like economy. There are four combat classes, four gathering glasses, and six crafting classes each with their own progression and you can play any and all of them. You also accumulate AI-controlled “buddies” of each class…
An intriguing story in a compelling sci-fi world with genre-mixing gameplay held back by outdated technical limitations. A hybrid side-scrolling space shooter and top-down action adventure brought to modern platforms twenty years after its original release with bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements. Most narrative progress happens in the top-down adventure on a series of planets and space…
A couple thoughts on bringing old games to new hardware… In 2006, the Jak and Daxter series got its fifth installment: Daxter . It was the first game in the franchise to be developed by someone other than Naughty Dog (though Ready at Dawn ’s founders did include Naughty Dog alumni). It was the series’ first midquel, taking place during the time skip at the beginning of Jak II .…
It’s easy to forget how much game design and marketing is driven by external cultural, technological, and political developments. It’s hard to see the shape of a moment that you’re in the middle of, but looking back can draw things into better focus. Here are two videos that do that in very different ways. First is “ playstation games that might be evil ”. This is a…
My Top Five (Non-Incremental) Games I Played in 2025 Wanderstop (My 2025 Game of the Year) Haven DC’s Justice League: Cosmic Chaos Caravan SandWitch The Gunk Other Games From 2025 That Probably Would Have Made the List but I Haven’t Played Them Yet Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time I was more stressed in 2025 than I have been for a while. Based on…
They say we seek in our escapism what we miss in our normal life. It’s helpful to keep this in mind when your tastes change and you find yourself drawn to something new, as it can reveal things you didn’t even realize were bothering you, and point to what you most need to fix. For example… For me, the start of 2025 was a stressful and unpredictable time. Without getting too…
A cozy narrative game designed to heal the soul. Wanderstop is a character-based narrative game with some life sim elements. The mechanics are about running a tea shop, most centrally by brewing drinks but also through simple meditative chores like farming drink ingredients and cleaning and decorating the shop and surrounding area. The story is mainly delivered through dialog between the player…
A cozy sci-fi RPG that's all about the well-developed relationship between its two leads. Play as couple Kay and Yu who have recently fled to an uninhabited planet in order to be with each other instead of the mates assigned by their authoritarian society. When judged against other RPG video games, it can easily be found lacking. In most traditional categories (exploration, farming/crafting,…
An action RPG with a vibe like a playable superhero cartoon that really should have had multiplayer for the main game. Play as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (swap freely between them) in a smallish open world where you can wander around picking fights, explore the “dungeons” (some of which are used in missions and some of which are just there to explore), find and complete side…
A cozy exploration game that's a bit less than the sum of its parts. Mechanically, Caravan SandWitch is an open-world game with no combat. Traversal is both on foot (you can run, jump short distances, and climb a bit) and in the van (which starts as just a normal van but accumulates several upgrades over the game that add new options). Missions take you back and forth across a small open world;…
A beautifully-animated platform adventure without much depth. The Gunk is an action adventure with 3D platformer and puzzle platformer elements. Explore a quasi-post-apocalyptic alien world and gradually learn what happened there by cleaning up the gunk, solving environmental puzzles, and engaging in light combat. Your main tool is a vacuum gun; it’s used for cleaning up the titular gunk as…
I don’t post here much and when I do it’s kind of grumpy. I’m just not gaming a lot these days, and my time and energy and writing are focused elsewhere. If you’d like to hear from me more consistently, about happier things, and are okay with it not being all about video games, check out my new site: 😋 Dan Yums: A Blog of Simple Pleasures Every day of 2025, I’ll be…
My Game of the Year Dungeons of Hinterberg Literally the Only Other 2024 Game I Played This Year Cat Quest III Game I Played the Most This Year Farming Simulator 22 , which I still play with Senpai-chan Games I Returned to This Year Faerie Solitaire Remastered , which kept me sane in a lot of hour-long work meetings for which I had to be on camera the whole time but only needed to pay attention…
There’s a subgenre of game where you launch something and it travels a distance based partly on skill and partly on luck, and the further you manage to go the more resources you collect which you can then spend on upgrades that let you go farther and farther. Like Yetisports: Pingu Throw with a progression treadmill, and kind of a precursor to endless runners like Canabalt and its…