Top 10 Favorite Games of 2025
This is an annual list of my personal favorite games of the year. To clarify, these are not the "best and worst" games of the year. They are titles I enjoyed or was let-down by based on my own preferences and expectations. Most of the titles on my disappointing list are not even what I would consider bad games, they just weren't for me, or were not what I was expecting.
All the games on this list are the launch version or later, and I have either played them to completion or abandoned them. The list is ordered based on my overall enjoyment (one being the best) of games I played in 2025. Most of the games listed here will not be brand new 2025 releases. They are games I played in 2025 that were new to me.
A young woman named Sauge receives a distress signal from her sister Garance, who perished six years ago in a crash on the planet Cigalo. As a former resident of Cigalo, Sauge reconnects with the locals and borrows the only functioning vehicle to search for her missing sister on the dying world.
The story is a bit of a convoluted mess that undermines and contradicts itself. For example, there is this mysterious figure - the Sand Witch - that appears abruptly and disappears just as quickly. Naturally one would assume this person to be Garance, but in a surprise twist at the very end, the SandWitch is revealed to be an unknown person called Kea, which just feels like a blindside for the sake of it. Garance, who everyone thought died in a crash, did in fact die in a crash, but somehow sent a distress signal six years later. A fragmented AI version of Garance was possibly the one who sent the signal, but it waited years to do it for unexplained reasons.
Most of the main mission goals have Sauge breaking signal jammers or activating relays until the final mission door is unlocked. NPC side quests are the usual 'collect X items' you find in most games. It's fine but nothing to write home about. The biggest quest dilemma I encountered involved a couple who were considering moving away to pursue better opportunities for their child. However, they were concerned about how well Cigalo's residents would fare without their mechanic and doctor. The player is asked to give their input and it seems like an important decision, but the only consequence from this is a different photograph during the ending credits. Regardless, I wish the game had included more conversations and quests like these that make you think about the community and what their future will look like. Or more missions that tied into the game's overarching themes about environmentalism and capitalism; such as the one that involved getting seeds from local plant life naturally adapted to the region's climate because the residents were running out of sterile company seeds.
An assortment of microchips with differing rarities (indicated by their color) can be found in the remnants of old buildings, vehicles, and machinery left behind by the Consortium mega-corporation when they abandoned operations on the planet. These chips are used to add a new upgrade to the van once every chapter and are used to access areas that were previously inaccessible. While fun at first, I got a bit annoyed after a few hours of backtracking to places I had already been simply because I didn't have the right tool to open or hack a door.
Caravan SandWitch seemingly wants to have poignant moments and big unfolding revelations, but the writing or translation just isn't good enough to match those ambitions. The gameplay was more rigid and restrictive than I was expecting, but not terrible by any means. There is a lot of charm to its cell-shaded art style and character designs, and the game generally has a feel-good coziness and positivity to it. The main theme song, Pensée Dérobée, is also quite pleasant to listen to. If it looks interesting to you or you just need something to lift your spirits a little, you could do worse than Caravan SandWitch.
Compared to other games in the zoo building and management genre this one is very forgiving, allowing you to build and decorate the animal enclosures however you like. All the animals really need to stay alive is water and the density of animals you can comfortably cram into each enclosure is shockingly high. You can't really mess anything up. Even putting a salt lick and a tire swing in a crocodile enclosure will have a positive effect on them.
You can edit the animal's diets to be better or worse for them, and engage in controversial DNA splicing to create unnatural chimeric creatures.
A number of animal "variants" can be discovered through selective breeding. The antelope for example may yield a bongo, oryx, or sable. Even if you choose not to selectively breed them the animals will multiply rapidly on their own, some faster than others. To deal with the overpopulation you can donate the excess (for a fee), release them into the wild (for free), sell them on the black market (which is profitable), or harvest them for resources (useful). Each of these actions is morally good or bad and will impact the types of buildings you can construct. A morally good person for example can not steal electricity or reuse sewage water, just as a morally bad person will be locked out of recycling and clean energy.
For my first playthrough I ran an ethical zoo that kept the animals in good health and tried to save endangered wild populations through breeding programs. The staff were paid well above minimum wage, given regular bonuses, and reported high job satisfaction. For my second playthrough with a dinosaur park I went the full morally bankrupt InGen route. All the food stalls used poor quality ingredients with MSG added to mask the bad taste. This in turn made the guests thirsty for cola loaded with sugar and caffeine that was both addictive and gave them the energy to move around the park faster. Excess dinosaurs were culled and turned into food or hollowed out to be used as attractions for the park visitors. Staff were overworked, underpaid, and never given severance pay.
Subways are used to move guests and zoo keepers around the park quickly. It is also possible to zone certain areas off as "staff only" so that they can more efficiently do their jobs and hide anything unsightly from the park visitors, such as dead animals. Generally the NPCs are all very good at navigating the environments. Although, there was an incident where I kept getting "keeper blocked" notifications even when the pathways were clear. I could see the keepers entering and leaving the enclosures just fine but there would be a piece of animal excrement under the toys or structures that the keeper just couldn't get to. Or if you build a pond for the waterfowl with a little island in the middle for them to hang out on (like I did) the keepers will have no way to reach the island. Outside of this I didn't run into any major problems and found it to be an engaging little game with a surprising amount of content for the price.
After getting hit by a car the protagonist, known only as the Keeper, awakens in a medieval setting where he must tend to the local cemetery, and with the aid of a talking skull, seeks a way to return home. Graveyard Keeper is a delightfully morbid game where you manage your time, sleep periodically and gather resources to produce urns, tombstones, embalming fluids, and food. Every so often a donkey will drop off a new corpse that will gradually decay until tended to. Unwanted bodies can be cremated and the better ones buried in the graveyard to improve the church's appeal.
All cadavers have a quality rating indicated by skulls: red for sin, white for virtue. Various parts can be harvested from one body and implanted in another to improve the body quality. Most body parts can't be sold directly for cash with the exception of meat. Fat can be used for church candles or oil. Human skin can be turned into "pig skin" paper, and bones can be ground into an ash or meal for use in porcelain ceramics. When removing parts from a body the blood and fat will convert two red skulls into white skulls. Bones have no effect at all on skull levels and offal effects a different number of skulls every time. An embalming station can be used to further improve the quality of a body with various injections. Despite all this, you don't actually need to manage your graveyard or corpse quality all that much. To reach the endgame anything with more white than red skulls will do. I managed to easily reach the endgame using subpar corpses and a half-filled cemetery.
Better corpses give better ratings and better efficiency for zombie laborers (Breaking Dead DLC).
There is a single village with NPCs and vendors you can interact with. Unlike most games in the genre where socializing is half of the gameplay, you cannot raise your friendship levels with the villagers through conversations or gift giving. Instead it is raised gradually by progressing through their personal storylines. Some friendships will halt at the halfway point and become impossible to progress further because the maximum friendship level can only be achieved with the primary "seven deadly sins" characters: Inquisitor (wrath), Snake (envy), Ms. Charm (lust), Astrologer (sloth), Merchant (gluttony), and Bishop (pride). The player character is greed. It is actually impossible to complete the main storyline without also doing the NPC's personal quest-lines because they all interconnect. After years of playing farming sims where you would have to spam gifts daily or weekly to raise NPC affection this was a refreshing change. The way the stories interwove was an interesting concept that I have not seen executed in the genre yet.
My only gripe is that there isn't a proper quest log, so keeping track of the various tasks that have been assigned can get overwhelming. You also have to select very specific lines of dialogue during some conversations or you will be unable to progress a quest further. At times the game can be unclear about what it expects you to do. During one quest the player needs to get instructions to help the Miller fix his mill. Naturally you would assume that the instructions should be handed over to the Miller, but that is incorrect. Instead the game wants you to activate the instructions on the mill itself. There is a good amount of inconsistency in the game design overall. Some work stations for example, can be upgraded directly to the better version while others have to be torn down first, then the newer version built from scratch.
From a technical standpoint the game is an absolute mess on the Switch. It takes minutes to load and crashes occur with regularity, erasing days worth of progress. Regular gameplay is in a perpetual state of lag that worsens the further you progress. Inputs will be missed while organizing your inventory, sword swings will clip over enemies but still consume stamina, and walking from one place to another becomes a literal headache. Dialogue boxes are frequently off-center, scrambled or will open multiple times over-top of one another. The donkey will drop off non-existent bodies and NPCs will turn invisible. The game may not save properly or will get stuck on an infinite save screen.
The narrative's conclusion isn't worth putting up with the technical issues either because it just ends without explaining anything. The 7 deadly sins characters all had mementos tied to their sins, and there was such a heavy emphasis in the story on death and resolving past traumas that I figured the protagonist must have died and was in some sort of limbo or place for souls to repent. Only through helping the major NPCs to resolve their sins and find peace does the portal home finally open for the Keeper. The Keeper even has his own questline (Game Of Crone DLC) where a communist donkey starts a revolution and tries to break the Keeper out of his capitalist ways.
The Keeper's beloved is ultimately summoned to him through the portal rather than him coming to her, which aligns with the player character's association with greed. However, this doesn't explain how or why he was brought to this world in the first place. There is a 'ship of the dead' and a Keeper doppelgänger in the Town that are also never resolved. Without the DLCs you never find out who Gerry was and how he ended up as a talking skull. If you've never played the developer's other games you'll also never know who the red-eyed, trenchcoat man is. It feels incomplete and anti-climactic.
I love this game and think it is well worth picking up if it looks interesting to you. I just wouldn't recommend the Switch version which is in dire need of further testing and bug fixes. I highly recommend picking up the Breaking Dead and Stranger Sins DLCs to automate a lot of the resource gathering and for the additional story content and funds they provide. I couldn't imagine playing the game without these two DLCs; they really should have been included in the base game and not sold separately as add-on content.
A lost boy is found wandering the wastelands of an uncharted region presumed to have been uninhabited. The boy was separated from his people when a monster known only as the "White Wraith" attacked his village. This event prompts the Hunter's Guild to survey the area in an attempt to learn more about the region and the people and animals that inhabit it.
Wild's story differs from past entries in the series in that it focuses heavily on interacting with uncontacted tribes who know nothing about Hunters or what weapons are. It departs from the series usual topics about living in balance with the natural world to instead focus on an ancient people, known as wyverians, who had the technology to terraform whole ecosystems, create floating cities through gravity manipulation, and crafted artificial immortal monsters. The ruins of powerful weaponry and complex structures are found throughout most of the series environments as crumbling remnants slowly being reclaimed by nature and I always enjoyed the ancient civilization and its unexplained downfall as a mystery lurking in the background. Bringing them to the forefront in Wilds and demystifying them removed a lot of the fun of its existence in the lore for me. The region designs in Wilds also felt off - artificial - like my character didn't belong there, which is perhaps fitting given the nature of the narrative.
The core gameplay loop of the Monster Hunter franchise is simple: kill beasts, craft gear with their skins, repeat. The player has a set amount of health and stamina that does not change throughout the game, although, it can be boosted temporarily with food and potions. The player's gear is what really matters. It determines damage output, defense, active abilities, elemental strengths and weaknesses - everything stat wise about the player character. Play style is further defined by the type of weapon being wielded by the Hunter: Greatsword, Sword & Shield, Dual Blades, Hammer, Hunting Horn, Lance, Gunlance, Insect Glaive, Switch Axe, Long Sword, Bow or Bowgun. The type of weapon being wielded would normally impact your style of play, such as how you position yourself near the monster or dodge, but Wilds has altered the difficulty in order to be more accessible to a wider audience. Learning monster attack patterns, elemental weaknesses, and attacking or dodging at the right moment is no longer necessary for most of the low rank, which can largely be button mashed through. This reduced how satisfying the monsters were for me to fight. Although things got a little better once I reached high rank.
There is supposedly a new pack mechanic in Wilds but I didn't notice anything different from how packs normally function. Wilds also introduces a new wounding system where instead of breaking parts like in past entries, wounds will now appear on areas of the monster's body that have been attacked repeatedly. Tearing a wound open will deal extra damage and stop the monster in its tracks. Traditionally, the Monster Hunter series would punish the player for being greedy. If you over-committed the monster would make you pay for it. But in Wilds you can be greedy and get rewarded for it.
Having to eat food for buffs isn't as necessary as it used to be due to the decreased difficulty, and weapons can be sharpened while on a mount, removing the need to find openings during combat to perform weapon maintenance. I actually didn't realize that it was still possible for weapons to bounce off of monsters because my weapon never degraded enough for it to happen. Status debuffs have similarly been made inconsequential. For the first time ever in a Monster Hunter game I found that I didn't need to tinker with my armor sets or optimize them for the battles ahead. These changes were seemingly made to keep the action going, to get the player back into the fight as quickly as possible. It's a direction I just couldn't get behind. I like having to prepare for a fight and having to track the monsters. I like learning their habits and bringing the appropriate gear to deal with them efficiently. In Wilds I was 'fighting' the monsters but I never felt like I was 'hunting' them.
Wild's roster of monsters is made up almost entirely of new animals with a balanced variety of mammals and invertebrates. There are still a few wyverns but they do not dominate the roster like in past titles. The number of boss monsters felt a bit thin but is actually about the same as what World had at launch. The chatacabra, rey dau, and jin dahaad were some of my favorite new additions. Among the returning monsters only blangonga surprised me because he hasn't appeared in very many games. Don't get me wrong, gore magala and lagiacrus are cool and all, but they get reused so often that I am kind of tired of seeing them now. Where is the gigginox, gobul, nibelsnarf, or qurupeco? They may not be popular choices, but I am craving more variety in the returning monsters instead of the same handful of fan favorites over and over again. There are also no siege monsters or elder dragons - walking forces of nature - in Wilds selection of wildlife. That could be a pro or con depending on your preferences. They were so abundant in World that I initially didn't mind their exclusion at first, but towards Wild's conclusion I was starting to feel their absence.
A new mount called a seikret auto-paths to destinations, disincentivizing learning or engaging with the maps at all. By fast-traveling everywhere or continuously aiming shots to grab resources I never had to think about how to traverse the map or got to marvel at the fictional world and the beautiful creatures in it. In Rise you also had a mount called a palamute, but it was much more responsive to control than the seikret and entirely optional. Every map in Rise was designed so that you could get around with or without the palamute. The seikrets can not be left at home and even if you could, most of the locales in Wilds contain zones that are designed to be navigated exclusively by the seikret. Despite having a mount, Rise still made you learn how the areas were all connected and where the important gathering spots were. Wilds is the first Monster Hunter game where I have no idea how the environments are laid-out and can't recall what they look like. Part of it has to do with the environments being comprised of very large open spaces that are empty or bland in appearance and unpopulated. A new inclemency system meant to make these areas more dynamic and dangerous, just ends up applying an annoying grey filter or haze to everything. During clear weather, which you get upon reaching high rank, the colors suddenly pop. As soon as the inclemency system kicks back in, the colors go back to looking muddy and washed out.
Palamute's had their own armor sets, giving them a higher degree of customization than the seikrets.
Nothing here is awful necessarily; Wilds just felt hollow to me, like it had the skin of the series but not the soul. I adore games like Tri and World and occasionally still return to those titles, but I don't have that same enthusiasm for Wilds. Whenever I did go back to Wilds I found it was because I was forcing myself to finish it instead of genuinely wanting to go back for the fun of it. That only changed upon hitting high rank when the challenge increased and I was finally allowed to move at my own pace.
The player character starts off as a resident of Cierzo village with a substantial blood debt (a type of kin punishment) inherited from their ancestors that must be paid off. Once a payment has been made, or the player's home has been seized, multiple paths are presented for clearing the debt for good: a) join the Holy Mission of Elatt to swap bloodline duties for godly ones, b) get adopted by a member of the Blue Chamber Collective to change bloodlines, or c) become a resident of the Heroic Kingdom of Levant where the blood debt system does not exist. There are three parallel storylines, one for each of the three factions that view the same events from different perspectives. Playing through just one faction questline will have clear cut heroes and villains while playing through all three will create a more complex picture of events with morally gray people.
Each area has its own visual identity that manages to set it apart from other fantasy settings.
Insights gained from playing all three factions:
• The god Elatt was once a mortal man from the Sand Corsairs tribe. Most Sand Corsairs worshiped the "Cabal of Wind", so when Elatt's new religion proved popular the tribe decided to punish him. They cast a powerful spell using mana siphoned from a ley-line which turned the land to desert. Things did not go according to plan because the "scourge" was then born from Elatt's torn body and his spirit ascended to god-like status. Elatt then trapped a bunch of tortured human souls inside of a crystal to create the vigil pylons that ward off the scourge from populated areas. When the Kingdom of Levant managed to secure the desert, which had become unlivable after the ley-line ritual, Elatt gave the land to the king and queen as a reward for their deeds.
• With the desert safe once again, the Sand Corsairs wanted it back, believing it to be rightfully theirs and not something that Elatt had any right to give away. Unable to take it by force, the Corsairs allied themselves with the Blue Chamber to get a meeting arranged. The diplomatic meeting between the Holy Mission, the Blue Chamber Collective, and the Kingdom of Levant was disrupted by a bomb that had been planted by the Kingdom in the Collective's archive. Several ambassadors were taken captive, including (curiously) a member of the Kingdom - Kirouac. In truth, the Kingdom of Levant had been framed by its Prince Pietro, who disliked the Kingdom for treating the Blue Chamber as equals and accepting Sand Corsairs as citizens. Working with Baron Montgomery, Pietro killed his own brother - Prince Jaden, and plotted a coup against his parents - King Simeon and Queen Calixa. Pietro was eventually caught and executed by firing squad for his crimes.
• War is declared over the bombing, but things do not initially go well for the Blue Chamber. To tip the odds in their favor they form an alliance with the ash giants. The Blue Chamber then turns its attention to a rouge member of the "Krypteia" - a secret faction within the Blue Chamber. This rouge member had become a lich sustained by the life-force of her descendants, which the Blue Chamber regularly hunted down and destroyed. The Montcalm Tribe are actually hostile to Rissa Aberdeen's tribe (in Cierzo village) because someone from the Krypteia (implied to be Rissa) poisoned one of their members; likley over "lineage" or association with the lich. The Krypteia also gain clairvoyant-like abilities through something called the "ancestral memories" which the lich uses to exert some control over the Blue Chamber. Roland Argenson (the lighthouse keeper) joined the Krypteia to pay off his blood debt and managed to defeat the lich but not without becoming one himself.
• Jager Sullivan (from a Blue Chamber bloodline) is caught abducting Holy Mission members to use in experiments aimed at mind-controlling the scourge, specifically "Immaculates". Most did not survive the experiments and Jager will escape if evidence of his crimes are not handed over to the Blue Chamber. In similar fashion, Sagard Battleborn, in violation of Blue Chamber tenets, abducted members of the Kingdom of Levant from Holy Mission territory and had them tortured. This act greatly upsets the Holy Mission because it jeopardizes their neutrality. The Blue Chamber Collective (or a faction within the group) further brakes from established tenets by teaming up with the Sand Corsairs to loot Kingdom food caravans with the aim of causing a famine. Blue Chamber villages are then looted (off screen) by the Kingdom in retaliation. During peace negotiations Rissa demands reparations for the looted villages but refuses to acknowledge that her side attacked the caravans due to a "lack of proof". It is accepted that not all the tribes within the Blue Chamber will honor the peace agreement and some may seek vengeance; possibly with weaponry obtained from the Kingdom as part of the negotiated reparations.
• The Holy Mission of Elatt has one of it's members - Zephyrien - attacked by someone using Kingdom weaponry. Sirocco is suspected due to ongoing disagreements over their people migrating to the Hallowed Marsh (Holy Mission territory). Sirocco was also supposed to attend the diplomatic meeting but never arrived. The actual culprit is Cyrene (a Kingdom general), who not only staged a coup in the Kingdom to seize power for herself, but also worked out a side-deal with Sirocco. In exchange for land and Zephyrien's assassination, Sirocco would lend her their aid. Cyrene is slain by someone from the Kingdom or Holy Mission faction, but not before nearly succeeding in assassinating the king and queen.
You have a bag that can only carry so many items and these will slow your movement speed.
Outward is marketed as a survival game where you are "a commoner rather than a hero". You will need to take care of your hunger, thirst, sleep, and diseases but these are very easy to manage. In my opinion Outward is more akin to a RPG with walking simulator elements mixed in: create potions, defeat bandits, loot dungeons, learn magic, save a village. Exploration and travel between areas takes up 95% of the gameplay and is fun at the start when everything is new and unfamiliar, but becomes tedious over time.
A portable pot and tent can be set up almost anywhere, including in towns and dungeons. There is a chance for scripted attacks to happen while sleeping.
Without horses, a teleportation system, a paid transport system, shortcuts, or some other means of travel I found my motivation to keep playing dwindle. The map layout requires you to walk in a linear line from point A to B to C and then back that same way. There is no way to cut across from point A to C, which eliminates some of the fun this game could have had if it required you to plan out your routes. Do you take the longer safer path or the faster but more dangerous one? There could have been a sense of accomplishment in repairing old bridges or ladders to open up new routes. As it is there just isn't much to do in the wilderness areas. Outside of a few wandering enemies, which you have no real reason to kill because there is no leveling or experience points system, the world is devoid of activities. The combat system itself is basic at best with an emphasis on dodging and blocking. It has that cumbersome Euro-jank feel to it and most fights can be cheesed with poison or bleed status effects.
Enemies can be goaded into fighting each other.
There are only 13 non-repeatable side quests to complete and most have to be stumbled upon; an NPC will not hand them out and quest markers do not exist. Quests also have hidden timers (anywhere from a few days to a month) that you are never told about, making it easy to fail quests by taking too long to complete them. When you join a faction for example, a 20 day (in-game time) timer starts ticking. If you do not defeat the three warlords of Vendavel Fortress within that time frame, Cierzo village will be destroyed for good.
A "Game Over" does not exist. Instead every 'death' has the player being saved by a mysterious stranger, enslaved, dragged off by animals or transported halfway across the map.
Outward can be a tough game but not in the traditional sense. Rather than being truly hard, most of the difficulty comes from the game being deliberately obtuse and unclear. It simply refuses to tell you anything. I like to go into games blind but with Outward I had to turn to guides on occasion because I often found that I didn't know what I was supposed to do next in a quest. Or I knew where I was suppose to go but not how to get there. One time I acquired a quest item only for it to go missing from my inventory and the quest log still indicated that I needed to find the item. After worrying for a bit that I had possibly encountered a game breaking bug, it turned out the item was still in my inventory, it was just invisible now for some reason. You're also never told how skill trees work or what 'Breakthrough Points' are or that you are limited to just 3. This makes it possible to lock yourself into a build that you do not want.
The nights are dark. A lamp or other light source is required for night-time travel.
From the advertising I thought the player was going to be more of an ordinary person, perhaps a long-distance mailman delivering packages, a salesman offering rare or exotic goods, or someone engaging in black market type dealings. Essentially taking on the role of those video game merchants who are always conveniently around whenever the hero needs them the most. I didn't expect the player character to be a watered-down version of your typical video game hero. In that regard I was disappointed.
That said, I don't hate Outward. There are some genuinely good ideas here with rough edges in need of sanding. The designs for practically everything - environments, items, buildings, monsters - are great and styled in a manner that gives me a nostalgic feeling. The soundtrack was also way better than I was expecting - Hallowed Marsh and Chersonese were my favorites. Outward feels like a game from the Euro-jank era and I mean that in the best way; the sort of thing made by a small creative team with a lot of passion. It's rough and certainly not to everyone's taste, but there is a lot of charm to it.
This zoo building game allows the player to build custom buildings and enclosures from a wide selection of pieces. The terrain can also be sculpted in anyway you like, from tall mountains to deep caves and flowing waterways. There is so much room for creativity with thousands of pieces and I was amazed by how much I could build on the console. Player's also have to manage the staff, shops, pricing, power supply, security, visual appeal and cleanliness while performing research for the conservation of threatened species. There is a big emphasis on education for the park goers and the player. The terrain types, temperature ratings, enrichment items, and animal compatibility are all accurate to real life. Many of the animals the zoo takes in are also listed as being rescues, exotic pets, or customs seizures.
Each animal is beautifully animated and comes with its own set of care requirements that must be met to avoid fines and protestors. There are requirements for space, climbing, water, temperature, enrichment, biome and herds or packs. Animals also have stats for life expectancy, size, health, and fertility, which are relevant to breeding. Inbreeding will have a negative effect on the progeny. Unfiltered water, a messy enclosure, overcrowding, and poor breeding or immunity stats will cause animals to get sick more often.
The selection of base game animals was very good, although some places like Africa dominate the roster for obvious reasons. My favorite inclusions were the African wild dog and gharial. A few animals were too similar or redundant for my liking. I just don't see the need for two elephant species (Indian & African bush), four great apes (chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, & orangutan), two brown bear subspecies (Grizzly & Himalayan), and two versions of mainland tiger (Siberian & Bengal; formerly subspecies prior to 2005) to be part of the base game selection. Most of my wishlist animals - giant anteater, maned wolf, saiga, caribou, crested porcupine, red river hog, kiwi - were added in as DLC, but I would've rather had some of these included in the base game instead of multiple sub-species. I'm also holding out hope that a Chinese giant salamander or Indian giant squirrel will be added in the future.
I really like the inclusion of exhibits, which are pre-built vivariums for smaller animals such as frogs and insects. They are mostly self-sustaining and good for generating money early on. A walk-through enclosure for bats and butterflies was restricted to DLC content until the Ceylon Rose butterfly (called the Malabar Rose in-game) was added to the base game as part of a free update.
The player can set up guided tours and talks with trained educators, or use various transport rides - car, train, boat, monorail, or gondola - to move guests around the park more efficiently. Any ground-based transport that cuts through enclosures can be blocked by the animals walking on the tracks, causing a backup. You have to plan ahead or build around the enclosures. Some building pieces are also underutilized, such as burrows which are used by only 2 animals (without DLC) and the burrow cameras do not work on console.
The PlayStation 5 version causes the console to overheat after about an hour of play. Mine would abruptly shut down without giving an overheating warning.
Planet Zoo is one of the more complex zoo games to learn because it leans heavily into the park management and construction aspects, which necessitates a lot of moving parts. Roads can be finicky to lay down and water may be obstructed for unknown reasons. There are incomplete sets for curved structures and no pieces for super-large rounded buildings. It comes with a steep learning curve and if you don't manage the zoo well it is possible to fall into massive debt that is difficult to recover from. But the complexity is part of the fun and once you learn the ins-and-outs, the creative possibilities are endless.
Medieval Dynasty is a village building survival game that has a believable looking medieval aesthetic, but is not trying to accurately replicate a specific time or place. There are two maps to choose from. 'The Valley' is a single-player map that uses a pre-made character called Racimir, who is trying to uncover more about his uncle's Robin Hood days. 'The Oxbow' map allows the player to create a custom character of either gender and play single or multiplayer. The story is about exposing the Castellan's secrets.
The Valley map is technically the tutorial. On the Oxbow you will be thrown into the thick of things and expected to figure everything out on your own.
Gameplay is split between constructing buildings using materials gathered from the surrounding area and completing quests for "Dynasty Reputation" which allows for more villagers to be recruited to the player settlement. Any wilderness area is free real estate for the player to build on. There are no "build zones" and trees can be uprooted completely to stop them from regrowing. The only obstacles are large boulders and slopes which can't be removed or altered. Performing activities related to farming, extraction of materials, and survival will grant 'technology points'. Hitting certain thresholds will unlock new or better versions of buildings. Villagers can be set to automate tasks such as hunting, cooking, gathering and farming, but require shelter, food and firewood to remain happy.
By flirting and giving gifts to NPCs the player can court them and have a child. The same will happen automatically between any opposite gendered villagers assigned to the same household. Over time everyone, including the player character and farm animals, will age and die. Once the player character has become old enough to expire, the game will progress using the player's heir, or conclude for good if there isn't an heir. I was never able to get invested in this part of the game because the social aspects are shallow at best. To me it felt like an unnecessary gimmick that didn't add much to the experience. I also had the flirting options glitch and freeze up on me multiple times. Extending the length of each season from 3 days to 6+ gave me the time to move at my own pace without feeling pressured.
The number of villagers you can recruit is limited by your reputation. To increase this, the people of the land must be aided through questing. The larger 'chapter quests' for the Valley map are essentially the tutorial and the side quests are just repeating generic fetch quests. The chapter quests on the Oxbow map however, involved family secrets, treachery, murder mysteries and assassination plots, and were generally very interesting compared to the smaller side quests which ranged from your standard fetch quests to things like comparing the neighbor's houses (spot the difference). The 'correct / best' outcomes for some of these quests were a bit odd or morally questionable, such as using badger lard to cure a man's terminally ill wife instead of taking her to a legitimate doctor. Or arming a child trafficking bandit with weaponry knowing that they are going to use it to murder the child's family.
Medieval Dynasty's mechanics have a number of peculiarities. The merchants for example, do not have enough money to buy mid-to-high tier crafted goods from the player, and their wallets only refresh once every seasonal shift. To get around this, you have to buy goods from them until they have enough cash on hand to buy your goods. You can't sleep in beds found in abandoned buildings (Oxbow map), which is the only way to fast-forward time to the next day and there are restrictions on when you can sleep in your own bed. You will have to travel often to sell goods, recruit new people, and complete quests, but travel between towns can be a long uneventful slog. Mounts are locked to your farming skill and are some of the most expensive purchases in the game. Wagons act as fast-travel points, but they cost too much money during the early game to be practical and are largely irrelevant mid-to-late game once you've unlocked your own mount.
The presence of windmills and spinning wheels places Medieval Dynasty's setting in at least the year 1201; likley somewhere in central Europe, as moose (seen in-game) were driven to extinction in the west and south during the period. Combined with the range of the white-tailed eagle and the names of NPC's, Germany or Poland are the most likley candidates for the game's location.
There are plenty of glitches and design decisions that can make the game frustrating to play, such as the lack of fast travel options and enemies being hard to see, which makes it easy to get sniped and sent back to your home on the other side of the map. NPCs will float backwards and the quest to pay the annual taxes can fail seconds after initiating, incurring a 1K+ gold penalty. Loading a save file will sometimes open to a game over screen, potentially breaking the game. In spite of all this I found the gameplay loop addicting and kept coming back for more.
Set in a 1890s America, humanity's technological advancements and prowess have flipped the tables on vampires, turning the hunters into the hunted. The D'Abano family of vampires want to adapt to the changing times, but the Old World Vampires still cling to tradition and the old ways of doing things. And while the vampires struggle with competing ideologies, their nemesis - the Rentier Institute of vampire hunters - are similarly held back by corruption and bureaucracy.
Evil West doesn't have anything profound that it wants to say with its story. It doesn't try to explore the nature of humanity or touch on colonization (by human or vampire), or even acknowledge the parallels between its protagonist and antagonist both carrying on their father's bloody legacies. Evil West doesn't even concern itself with making narrative sense or being coherent because the story is just a vessel to explain why Jesse Rentier (the protagonist) is punching the fangs out of wave after wave of vampires. The gameplay is the star here, not the story surrounding it.
The way Evil West confidently embraces a narrative so full of plot holes, contrivances, and conveniences is strangely entertaining because there is an earnest goofiness to it all. Scenes are edited oddly, such as Vergil Olney (the tech guy) dropping down from the sky or somehow teleporting to places he shouldn't be able to reach. None of the characters are terribly complex and are always as conveniently ignorant or knowledgeable as the story needs them to be. Then the whole vampire conflict just neatly wraps up on a literal theater stage in a manner that feels both uncanny and cheeky. Normally this sort of storytelling would annoy me to no end, but it didn't here. It could be because there is barely anything of substance in the story to overthink and I knew beforehand what I was getting into: a simple gory-fun game where the combat is the focus.
The combat is a spectacular flourish of gory goodness. Jesse will zip around the battlefield with perfect fluidity, punching enemies in the face and literally tearing the weakened ones in half with his bare hands. Every enemy leaves a different imprint on the battlefield: vampire cowboys can have the guns shot out of their hands, giants with shields will only take damage from the back, floating insect hives will buff their allies, and so on. The developers were very careful with their enemy combinations, positions, and spawn waves in order to push the player into using every tool at their disposal. And Jesse's arsenal of weaponry is extensive: a power gauntlet, a revolver, a rifle, a shotgun, a crossbow, a flamethrower, explosive charges, and a gatling gun. Each one is introduced gradually and spaced out well enough to allow for familiarity before introducing something new. I never felt overwhelmed and by the final boss I was utilizing my entire arsenal with mastery. There is also enough leeway and overlap between the weapons to where you could neglect one without suffering for it.
Each weapon comes with upgrades and can be used to interact with the environment, such as firing a line across a gorge to create a zip-line.
Evil West is an unexpectedly pretty game with visual details that would normally be overlooked or ignored in similar games of its genre. Some levels are clearly setup to stun the player and hold their attention for a moment, while others are lit in provocative colors. Even the skies are a treat to behold with auroras dancing over snow capped mountains and a glowing moon streaked with the dark shapes of flittering bats. I wish there was a photo mode because the set dressing and visual design are quite captivating and stylish.
The designs for the vampires range from bloated corpses to bestial bat forms, to a handful of your typical "charmer" type vampires. Some come with railroad nails (used to prevent them from rising) protruding from their flesh while others have parasitic ticks and leeches dangling from their skin. The Jenu Giant is an enemy type that likley took inspiration directly from the Jenu creature of Miꞌkmaq folklore and the boo hag was similarly lifted from Gullah mythology. The werewolf like Nagal may have been inspired by the Nagual from Mesoamerican cultures or the rougarou from French Canadian and French American communities. Most of the enemy designs are superficial only though, and don't delve into the mythology or religion surrounding their origins.
Evil West is of modest length. It took me roughly 12 hours to beat over 16 playable levels. By the time the credits rolled the combat had begun to feel stale, so I think the developers paced this one perfectly. I also didn't encounter any bugs outside of an audio glitch that removed the sound from the first two chapters (a restart fixed it) and the game getting stuck on the rifle once. I could visually swap weapons but when I fired the flamethrower for example, it would fire rifle shots.
Evil West was refreshing in a way; it felt like a throwback to when fun, tight gameplay trumped story and it was alright for games to be short linear distractions for a few hours instead of hours long narrative epics. I tend to prefer story heavy games and I like to overthink the narratives, but I went into this one knowing exactly what it was going to be: simple fun chaos that was pointless trying to make sense of. And it was some of the funnest gameplay I have experienced in a long time.
The story follows a feral cat who gets separated from his companions after falling into an underground city inhabited by robots. The cat assists a resistance group trying to open their city to the outside world by using his small size and agility to navigate the vertical environments of a post-apocalyptic world inspired by the real-life Kowloon Walled City in China.
While I normally don't like platforming, Stray made it easy to leap from place to place using just a single button-press. There are plenty of games where you play as an animal, but Stray was the first to make me feel like I fully embodied the animal. The way the cat moves, sits low to the ground, knocks things off of shelves, rubs on people, and scratches furniture not only added to the immersion but served a gameplay purpose without feeling gimmicky or inorganic. If I decided to smack a painting on the wall there was a good chance I might find a safe code behind it. Scratching a door might get someone to open it or cause a window shade to roll up, opening new pathways. Knocking items off of shelves may create new paths or reveal important items that had been tucked away in a box.
Stray can be beat in roughly 6 hours playing leisurely or 2 hours by speed-running. For such a short game with such a novel premise, Stray ended up being more than I was expecting. While superficially about a little lost kitty, who functions as the point-of-view character similar to Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes, the story is really about the cat's drone companion B-12 - the last human in existence. In contrast to similar stories where saving humanity is the whole point, Stray instead acts as a reminder that this planet is not just ours and it will go on without us. There are so many philosophical themes embedded into the story about alienation, exploitation, misrecognition, environmental destruction, and the search for meaning and purpose.
Most of the narrative explores human society through the lens of non-humans, starting in the ramshackle Slums where everybody looks out for each other. The robots take the time to engage in various forms of art, and trade in favors or barter. Most of the quest-lines involve friends or family, and interactions are generally very heartwarming, making it easy to feel valued and appreciated as an individual. The cyberpunk-styled city of Mid-Town, which sits above the Slums, is the exact opposite. Everyone keeps to themselves or their inner friend-groups, and most don't have time for idle chatter with a stranger. Nearly all interactions are transactional or based in commerce and there is an underlying unhappiness that pervades throughout the city-folk. The final area, which sits above everything else, is clinically sanitized and lacking in art or nature besides a few carefully curated pieces. The robots working there are all nameless emotionless husks defined solely by how well they can carry out their designated tasks. Everything ultimately concludes on a hopeful note though, about life moving on and giving those that come after us a better life. It's very wholesome.
I knew nothing about this game beforehand and simply picked it up on a whim because I found the Moebius inspired aesthetics attractive: thin black outlines filled in with soft color tones and minimal shading. The game is also set within a desert biome, which is my favorite type of environment in video games because of the contrasting warm/cool color tones (depending on the time of day), the vast openness of the landscape and the modes of travel games have to invent to cross those distances - a hoverbike in Sable's case - without it becoming dull.
"One thing we know about sand is its propensity for change. Sand may be solid but it flows like liquid; swaying, shifting, nomadic in nature. It doesn't have a final state. Follow one grain for long enough and you'll find crumbling mountains, undulating deserts, and restless sediment in a riverbed. Even then, sand isn't an end product. It can find ways to harden into sandstone or be shaped into glass, repeating the process. Sand reminds us that the world is in a never ending cycle of metamorphosis." -Michael Welland (Sand: The Never-Ending Story)
The storyline follows a young girl named Sable on her "Gliding" - a rite of passage. To complete her pilgrimage, Sable must explore the desert world, find herself and decide what she wants to do with her life. By interacting with NPCs and learning about their crafts, culture and philosophies, Sable will earn badges that she can turn in for a mask. Sable's journey ends whenever she finds the mask that she wants to wear forever. Only three masks are needed to complete the game, which can be accomplished in as little as hour or 15 minutes for speed-runners. Alternatively, Sable can collect multiple masks and decide which one suits her the best at a later date, which can be done in about 20 hours for a completionist.
There is no combat or main questline to follow. The player may go wherever they wish from the beginning and complete tasks (or ignore them) in any order they like; nothing is gated. If you see something interesting in the distance, you can go there and climb it. This generated childlike wonder in finding a hidden cave or just seeing something visually stunning in a landscape that initially seems devoid of such things.
Unlike the mountain in Journey or Hyrule Castle in Breath of the Wild, there is no obvious end point and no visible goal on the horizon. This is because sable's story is all about self-discovery, enjoying youthful freedom while it lasts, and finding your place in the world. In this regard the gameplay meshed with the narrative in a way I haven't felt in some time. It was liberating to play a game that was entirely open to me from the start because it wanted me to explore, to take my time and enjoy the journey. I never felt hindered or held back from exploring like I did with the rain in Breath of the Wild or fall damage in most other games. When approaching camps I would wonder about the sorts of people I would find there. What their perspectives could offer Sable on her journey and how Sable could benefit them.
So much is silently communicated through the jobs people complete, the clothing they wear, and the architecture partly inspired by the real-life Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. Remnants of an ancient civilization are mostly left to interpretation and the imagination.
Sable's art style got me to reflect on modern gaming and the trend towards realism, ray-tracing, and "cutting edge graphics". And the irony that Sable's relatively simple aesthetics are what has impressed me the most (visually) in the last couple of years. It truly looks like a Moebius drawing in motion. That said, the animations try to emulate a hand-drawn look by intentionally skipping frames. I like what they were trying to do with this, but it ended up looking stilted and unnatural to me at times. Perhaps with some tweaking, even just a few additional frames, they could have achieved the animation style they were going for but with a more natural feel. I also encountered a lot of bugs that forced me to restart the game multiple times, turning a low stress experience into a frustrating one. Some of the issues I encountered were lighting/shading malfunctions, getting stuck on the environment, the hoverbike call not working, Sable disappearing, and the fishing controls freezing. Updates are slow coming, or may have stopped(?) because the developer is a two man team working out of a shed, and they may or may not have moved on to their next project. Which is a shame because the technical issues are what is holding Sable back from being a remarkable experience.
For such a low-stress, simple story with no antagonists I really got hooked into this one. Discovery is something I have always loved in games, but so few open-worlds seem to do it well. I'm also a sucker for pretty graphics, which Sable has in spades. The ending appropriately drives home the importance of the journey, not the destination and ends on a bit of a bittersweet note. Not because anything bad happens, but because Sable's journey has concluded. Now, like so many other characters in the game, she can only reminisce about a good time gone by; one she'll never get to experience again. Instead of being the child sent off on her Gliding, Sable is now the adult seeing a child off on their Gliding. At times I wondered if not completing the game counted as a sort of ending. One where Sable never returned home to finish the rite and just continued to travel the world forever. The clan elders mention that some never do come back, and that is a valid life-path some may choose to take in the Gliding.
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