The games I've played in 2025 (and what I want to play in 2026)

14 Dec, 2025

Since the year has barely started, I thought it’d be a fun exercise for myself to think about the games I've played in 2025 and what my thoughts on them are. I'll probably skip some older videogames that I've played a bunch in the past as well as some One Shot TTRPG games. Keep in mind these aren't deeper reviews of the games in any way, just short summaries and thoughts on them.

TTRPGs

Aether Nexus: A fantasy mecha TTRPG by Absolute Tabletop (whose Designer/Writer is Matt Click, the son of Shawn Tomkin, creator of the Ironsworn family of games), that immediately hooked me with listing the Vision of Escaflowne and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds among its influences. The book itself is gorgeously illustrated, and features a variety of races (called kin) that all feel unique or at least special. You won't find the typical fantasy races here, not even humans. Although one of the kin, the Cloven, are implied to have been humans in the past in my opinion, though they've been changed and mutated by the war against the insectoid invaders that shattered the planet Esgava. Aether Nexus is actually a hack/evolution of Absolute Tabletop's Mecha Hack (which is a setting-agnostic simple & fast mecha TTRPG hack of The Black Hack that I've yet to play) and therefore includes rather simple rules that offer surprising tactical depth in its combat. It's obviously not Lancer levels of tactical combat (but what is except an actual wargame), but with the combination of 8 different kin, 8 mech frames and a phletora of other options there's quite a bit of meat on the bone. I only managed to run a single game as a GM (called seer here) but I really want to run a short campaign in the broken world of Esgava.
You can get Aether Nexus here: https://absolutetabletop.com/products/aether-nexus-fantasy-mecha-roleplaying-game
If you need maps for the spans (combat zones) I highly recommend the fantastic maps from 2-Minute Tabletop: https://2minutetabletop.com/
And in case you need some game helps, look at the ones I made: https://daydreaming-moose.itch.io/aether-nexus-player-helps

Armour Asitr: Advent: AAA is another fantasy mecha game, this time about a conflict between several rebellious factions and a (fascist) authority Powered by the Apocalypse. I've recently started playing in a game of Armour Astir and we’ve finished a fewshot together. The rules are typically PbtA (so as an old hand at the Ironsworn family of games I simultaneously knew what I was doing and didn't, which was a fun and confusing experience). I feel like the game is very well thought out and has a good grasp on how to make Mech combat narrative by including modules, weapons and systems that are easy to use, and even easier to flavour in the fiction. As my preferences are more geared toward sci-fi though, I'm a bit split on the fiction. Most of the game should be easily reflavourable to sci-fi, with a few things that'd take some more thought (like the elements system, in which different Mechs have different elements and damage types and how they react towards each other).
You can find Armour Astir here: https://royalrabbit.itch.io/armour-astir
A play report written by myself can be found here: https://daydreamingmoose.bearblog.dev/armour-astir-1/

Beamsaber: This is the second of the two games I've recently started playing in (so it's an ongoing campaign). It's a game about Mecha (and other vehicles), the people that pilot them and how they're surviving an unending war with their sanity intact. Although I've been playing TTRPGs actively for a very long time, it's also one of only two games using the Forged in the Dark ruleset I've ever played (the other being a short, cancelled game of Scum & Villainy). But we're using a homebrew ruleset created by our GM that is more oriented towards doing things like Deep Cuts handles it (or so I've been told, since I've neither read nor played BitD or Deep Cuts). We've created our setting as a group by talking through it in Discord as well as meeting in a session zero and advancing time in that setting by using a small game our GM has created, called Fence Across the Road. That was generally well accepted after everybody understood where the exercise is going and I'm very much looking forward to where the game itself is going. So far, I've been having a lot of fun with it, and part of that might be thanks to the abbreviated ruleset we're using, since Beamsaber is one of the more complicated/broad FitD games out there. What I really liked about the ruleset (and which is very FitD as far as I'm aware) is how much thought has been put into the headquarters of the group, the downtime between missions and how the different factions act and react, which gives the game a great feel of simulating a living world.
You can get Beamsaber here: https://austin-ramsay.itch.io/beamsaber (Also available as POD on DTRPG, which would be recommended for delivery overseas since DTRPG prints in several locations worldwide)
And Fence Across the Road here: https://sciencebird.itch.io/fence-across-a-road
A Play Report written by myself can be found here: https://daydreamingmoose.bearblog.dev/beam-saber-1/

Beyond the Wall: For me, this was the big one I spent the most time on last year. Mostly because I've been GMing the game and it has been running for roughly 2.5 years and just finished in early December 2025. At this point, it's relatively old, though. It's still a classic OSR game about a group of young people from a village going on a coming-of-age type of story. The game is typical OSR with its stats, skills and resistance rolls, but offers the unique option of character creation using character books, like the young ranger or future warlord. These'll put the players not only into a specific role in the story and shape the character they create, using these books you'll also create the village and the people living there at the same time. It's a fantastic way to create a starting village and even if you don't like OSR games, it might be interesting as an exercise for your other fantasy games. That said, personally, I won't run it again. Not because it's a bad game, but after 2.5 years, I'm a bit saturated with the game itself and I've been saturated with your typical fantasy settings as well, although Beyond the Wall aims much more closely at a fables type of fantasy and not as much a DND-esque Elves and Dwarves setting. Still, I'm definitely planning to play more sci-fi and untraditional fantasy stuff this year.
You can find the rulebooks in English here: http://flatlandgames.com/btw (Although there are also translations available so you might want to check for those, too)

Changeling: The Lost: This is one of the lesser-known games set in the World of Darkness, with the two major ones that most TTRPG gamers are at least passingly familiar with being Vampire (both the Masquerade and Requiem) and Werewolf. If you're not familiar with any of those, they're essentially what if scenarios, taking our modern world (except for Vampire: The Requiem, which is set during the Middle Ages) and inserting different fantastical beings into it, most commonly as some kind of secret society that runs parallel to the 'normal', not supernatural one. As far as I am aware, they're all set in the same universe, so all these secret societies run parallel to each other as well, and some do have interactions (like Vampires and Werewolves being largely antagonists to each other). In Changeling, as the name suggests, this supernatural society consists of people that have been kidnapped by Fae - unknowable, ancient and extremely powerful beings - and have later escaped but are now forever changed in different ways. These changelings then often join one of the four courts - spring, summer, autumn and winter - depending on which one they identify the most with, since they all have different morals and value different skills and characteristics. In the short campaign I played in, the group joined the summer court, which is often associated with wrath and vengeance, and fittingly to that, the game ended up being a short story about revenge and vengeance against the fakes that had replaced our characters in the real world. But sadly, the game ended rather abruptly, because the GM wanted to only run the game for a set number of sessions, so the ending was not as satisfying for everyone as it was for me (my ex-boxing champion managed to kill his fake). Overall, I also have to say that the rules system itself didn't really click with me, despite me wanting to play a game of Vampire: The Masquerade for a long time now and never getting the chance. To be fair, Changeling: The Lost is one of the older WoD games and as far as I know discontinued and not updated to the modernised ruleset, so that might have been the biggest problem. Still, I'll probably not play Changeling again to be honest because it wasn't completely my style, but I might try out other World of Darkness games in the future, we'll see.
You can find Changeling: The Lost here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/de/product/50010/changeling-the-lost

Dead Belt: If you like a space cowboy aesthetic, the theme of plundering derelict spaceships or ideally both of these, Dead Belt should catch your attention immediately. Created by A Couple of Drakes, it is a solo, coop and competitive experience of playing a down on their luck spacer (or duo of spacers, or two rival spacers), trying to get out of the debt they incurred to set up their 'business' of salvaging spaceships out on the fringes of space. There are different archetypes to play with their own special skills and starting stats as well as different sizes of ships for character creation. The game itself uses a D6 for rolls and a standard 52 deck of cards, including jokers, to create the layout of the ship you're salvaging. So, each card represents one room of the ship, might it be something valuable to salvage, a trap, or something else entirely. The game also features resource management in the form of O2 in your spacesuit's tanks that limits how long you can salvage as well as some others. But it's notably free of having any kind of health or ammo tracking - because the dangers you're facing are all stronger than you and will kill you right quick. It's a deadly game to be out salvaging these ships, Belter. I've got the physical edition as a present for Christmas in 2024, and played a number of games in 2025 and have to say it's a lot of fun. Sure, it can be frustrating at times, but so far, I had a surprising amount of luck and my first Belter is still alive and kicking. I'm hoping to pick it up again, especially since the rules are quick to learn, meaning it's rather easy to pick it up again after not playing for a while. Bonus points for being one of those indie games where it's easy to get a physical copy of!
You can find Dead Belt here: https://acoupleofdrakes.itch.io/deadbelt

Fabula Ultima: I'm imagining after the massive success of FabUlts Kickstarter in the autumn of 2025, a lot of people will already know about this one. It markets itself as a TTJRPG, with an emphasis on the J for Japanese. And that's how it presents itself and plays: Like a JRPG turned into a TTRPG. I stumbled upon it in late 2024 and after reading the core rules, started gathering every book I could get my hands on like a dragon increasing its hoard. I immediately spent half a year trying to find an opportunity to play and now at least got to play around 10 sessions or so and it's become one of my favourite TTRPGs at the moment. I'll definitely be running a short campaign inspired by FF:Crystal Chronicles this year. FabUlt itself doesn't come with a predefined setting, but instead invites the GM and players to create the world together, not only in session 0, but also during play, by giving the players the ability to spend a meta currency (called Fabula Points) that gives them, among other things, the power to shape and change the current scene and world and it incentivizes the players to spend these points by granting XP for every point spend. It's simple and elegant. There's also three Atlases available that focus on different themes (High Fantasy, Techno Fantasy and Natural Fantasy) to give your group ideas and choices to flavour your world. These also add additional classes (among them my favourites, the commander and chanter), since FabUlt uses a multiclassing system in which you pick among the available classes (about two dozen in total) each level to create the class you want to play. Again, this is very simple and elegant and your biggest problem will be decision paralysis because there's so many cool and flavourful options to pick from, ranging from the Berserker-like Fury, to the Elementalist magician, the bard like Chanter, the Pilot with its mecha (or other type of vehicle) or the humble Culinarian that can cook up meals to buff and debuff.
You can find Fabula Ultima here: https://need.games/fabula-ultima/ (Although it's readily available online in various game stores, including translations in several languages)

Koriko: A Magical Year: If you've watched Kiki's Delivery Service (and you should, it's great), you should be familiar with this name, since it's taken straight from the city in that movie. Even if you don't recognize the name, if you know the movie, you know the premise of the game. For everybody else: Koriko is a cozy solo journaling game by Mousehole Press/Jack Harrison where you're playing a 16-year-old witch (which is a gender-neutral term here) that leaves their village to complete their training as a witch by spending a year in the big city. In every game of Koriko that city is called Koriko, but it can be vastly different, depending on how you imagine it, as well as what the dice, and especially, the tarot cards tell you. You're going through a total of 7 volumes, one for your departure/journey to Koriko, one for your arrival there, then one for each of the four seasons, and finally one for leaving. Each volume will have you draw a number of tarot cards (except the first that works by using dice throws on random tables) and the book will tell you what happens and, more importantly, what type of NPCs (called confidants) you'll meet. There are also some fun alternative set ups like the Flying together multiplayer module that changes the first volume and then has you write letters to your friends instead of your teacher at home after every volume. I'm not going to lie here, I've been obsessed with Koriko for quite a while, but after having to put it aside for a few weeks I've been struggling to get back into it and finish the roughly 40% I'm missing. I hope I can rectify that this year, because it's such a fun game.
You can get Koriko here: https://mouseholepress.itch.io/koriko

Ironsworn/Starforged/Sundered Isles: For me, no TTRPG year is complete without playing at least one of these games. They're my favourite TTRPGs and I definitely recommend them to anybody who'll listen (and sometimes to people who won’t). Ironsworn is a very low fantasy game of swearing vows and seeing them fulfilled in a world reminiscent of the early medieval period, though you can adapt this as much as you like since the game is very hackable (I once ran a one shot for my wife in the Dragon Age setting with it, straight out of the box). Originally it was a PbtA game, but with its final release has become its own thing, although the roots are immediately familiar when looking at the moves it uses as well as the three states of failure/weak hit/strong hit for the dice rolls. This year, I finished up the short campaign I was guiding (Guide is the name for the GM if you're playing Ironsworn with a traditional group), which was set in Cumbria during the Viking invasion of England instead of the Ironlands setting Ironsworn normally uses. It was a ton of fun for me, but also tons of work, because I painted a large number of miniatures for the game as set pieces, and even our final game used One Page Rules for a wargaming battle instead of Ironsworn's narrative approach to combat and battles (for OPR see below). Starforged was the second Ironsworn game released by Shawn Tomkin, the creator of Ironsworn. It's pretty much an evolution of the system and shares a large number of its core systems with Ironsworn, but expands and (in my opinion) improves vastly on the original in several aspects. The biggest one might be the change to XP - while you only got XP in Ironsworn for completing quests, in Starforged you'll be getting XP for quests, creating bonds with NPCS and exploration. Other than mechanical changes, the biggest difference is that Starforged uses a retro sci-fi setting called the Forge as its basis, so you can already imagine that this speaks more to me as a gamer nowadays than Ironsworn's setting. Currently, I'm playing in a four-player coop game with my regular gaming group (we've been doing weekly games for over 10 years now, from videogames to TTRPG and digital boardgaming) where we're playing covert operatives of a rather shady and rather villainous organisation during first contact with an alien species (normally, Starforged is human centric and doesn't include aliens, but they're easily included and we wanted to mix things up). And finally, I've also been playing Sundered Isles, which is an expansion to Starforged (meaning you'll need the base Starforged rules to play) that consists of a small rulebook and a book for oracles to play in a pirate/Age of Sail setting. It also includes ideas and tips in it to play with steampunk type of airships or space ships looking like sailing ships (think of the fantastical Treasure Planet), but both of these aren't the main focus. The rules add things like cave spelunking, hold and treasure rules to make it really feel like a pirate adventure. I've run a guided game of Sundered Isles as well as some solo gaming in the past, and now I'm guiding another game with the same group I finished the Ironsworn campaign with last year. The transition was very smooth and painless, since the core systems remain the same, so we could just jump right into world and character creation together, which was lots of fun for everyone included (with Ironsworn we more or less skipped that since I presented the setting to them). I could honestly go on about these three games all day long, but I'll keep the details for a separate blog post in the future.
You can find all three of them here: https://tomkinpress.com/ (with some translations available, so check for those if you need it)

Sword World 2.5: Sword World is the oldest Japanese TTRPG from the early 1980s (although not the first to be played in Japan) and still is one of the biggest that's played there (with Call of Cthulhu possibly taking the top spot and DnD gaining momentum again after being pretty much wiped from the market by Sword World). To date it hasn't been officially translated into English or any other language, but there's a very well done and comprehensive fan translation available on the web. This year, Mugen Gaming will launch a crowdfunding project on BackerKit to get an official translation of 2.5 (meaning the Edition of 2.5, which is very much compatible with the 2.0 Edition, but different than the original 1.0) going and they've provided a very well-done Primer that includes a short solo game to teach you the rules as well as an adventure for a 'traditional' group. Still, SW 2.5 is very scalable and easily solo playable (and some modules market themselves as being for solo players as well as groups). That's also what I mostly did, except for being a player in the new primer's adventure. The rules themselves are very simple in its core and use a 2d6 dice roll for everything (and the easy availability of the d6 has supposedly helped SW take over the fantasy TTRPG market in Japan, among other reasons). But it adds complexity with a number of optional rules, deeper systems and situational rules (like for fighting in water). It also features a very robust multi-classing system that allows mixing and matching major classes (that increase the player level, health, mana and others) and minor classes (which increase skill throws and add features like buffs). It’s often compared to Fabula Ultima, but I’ve read a good description to show the differences once: FabUlt emulates JRPGs and their playstyle, while JRPGs emulate Sword World and its playstyle. I'm hoping the official translation takes off and creates a community to more easily find games with fresh people - because sadly, one negative thing I have to say about the game is that the community seems to exist in a bubble that is in a small part populated with people that readily call Non-Japanese TTRPGs inferior products and their developers incompetent (which was at least my experience on both the official and inofficial discord servers), which seemed borderline racist to me.
You can find the news page for the upcoming crowdfunding here: https://mugengaming.com/pages/sword-world-rpg-coming-soon

The One Ring 2e: As the name implies, this is the second Edition of the One Ring, a Lord of the Rings TTRPG. Originally published by Cubicle 7 and set in Lake Town and surrounding lands between The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings, they have since lost the publishing rights which were then picked up by Free League. Their second edition is close to the original one as far as I'm aware (so it's not using FL's Year Zero Engine), but they switched the location to Bree. It's a class-based system that uses a D12 (the feat die) to which D6s are added, the success dies. These are related to the skills your character has learned and the combination of these is one of my biggest grudges with the system. You roll these dice against a target number, and the standard is 14, which is already very hard to reach with a single d6 added to the pool, but even with two or three dice (of a maximum of 6), it happens way too regularly for my tastes that a character fails their roll, even though they're obviously competent at the task. There's some more to these rolls that allow critical successes (and fails), but that's the general system behind it. I've played the game in a long running campaign as a Ranger masquerading as a Breelander, but the longer the game went on, the less the system clicked with me, mostly because I didn't like the underlying base roll as well as how health and stamina were used (the more armour and gear you wear, the less stamina you have - which is your HP at the same time). The system might work better for me with a few tweaks, and there's a solo version - called Strider Mode - available (developed by Shawn Tomkin, so you know it must be well made), so I might try that sometime down the road. But for now, my interest in the system is still at a very low point. Not because it's bad or poorly made, but because it didn't really do what I wanted it to do.
You can find The One Ring 2e here: https://freeleaguepublishing.com/games/the-one-ring/

Wargames

BattleTech Override: Everybody who knows me knows that I am a huge fanboy of BattleTech, be it reading the novels (though a certain book by a certain disgraced BT author ground my reading momentum to a halt...) or painting the miniatures. But when it comes to actually playing BattleTech, I prefer the fan made Override ruleset, which is derived from the MechWarrior Destiny TTRPG (MechWarrior is something of a sub-set of the BattleTech franchise) with Alpha Strikes movement (the modern of the two official rulesets for fast, larger scale battles with simplified stats and measurement in inches) and a smattering of Classic/Total Warfare (the older, extremely detailed BattleTech ruleset that is nearly unchanged since the late 80s that uses hexes for the movement). To me it's the perfect blend of Alpha Strikes fast movement and line of sight and a more simplified stat sheet than Classic (though still far more elaborate than Alpha Strike, with hit locations similar to Classic). I always play solo and it's a good mental load when playing 4 mechs vs 4, which would be a lot of work when playing Classic. I also prefer using the hexagon-based movement (because they're the bestagons) instead of using inch-based movement. Sadly, the people who made the system, Death From Above Wargaming, have recently come under fire for their latest kickstarter, which they wanted to use to fund their newest season of (excellent) play reports, game analytics and such on YouTube and the reason for that is simple. They used AI to create images, some of them obviously derived from official BattleTech art. So, somebody from Catalyst Game Labs - the current licensee and developer of BattleTech - has seemingly stepped in. The situation is still ongoing, so I'm not going into too many details here. I'm just hoping it gets resolved in a satisfying way, because seeing DFA go down swinging AI slop would be shitty to say the least.
You can find Override here: https://dfawargaming.com/

One Page Rules: If you ever wanted to play a tabletop wargame with a small number of miniatures and an even smaller amount of rules, then One Page Rules (OPR) is probably going to be one of those you've heard of and a good choice. OPR is a collection of different rules for fantasy and sci-fi with different scales (meaning different amounts of miniatures per side). It uses a classical approach of having armies (like dwarves, humans, beastmen etc. for their fantasy games) and the players building an army list from those that can contain a certain number of miniatures and a number of points (with each miniature being worth a certain amount of points). If all of this sounds like Warhammer to you, then you're on the right track. OPR is pretty much what Warhammer would be if it weren't a multi-billion-dollar franchise that gets milked by Games Workshop at every turn (and would be much easier and less detailed, of course). For miniatures you can pretty much use anything that fits, but OPR also offers a variety of STLs as well as pre-printed miniatures for their games. I've used the OPR Age of Fantasy Skirmish rules for the finale of my Ironsworn game, and even though except me none of the players had any wargaming experience, it worked beautifully thanks to its simplicity and was a ton of fun for everyone (I used the halflings for the Anglo-Saxon/Welsh Christian alliance and the human empire for the Danish/Norse-Gaelic Heathens). I might try something similar with my Sundered Isles campaign, but focused on ship battles in the future.
Check out OPR and all its variants here: https://onepagerules.com/

Boardgames:

Encounters BattleTech: The latest release of CGLs board gaming division, Encounters is a 1-8 player trick taking/push your luck card game combined with several different colours of dice used for rolling against the card values. Players take on the role of one of the big mercenary companies (like the Gray Death Legion, Big Mac or Wolf's Dragoons) and race to be the first to reach 10 victory points by fulfilling contracts (or in the case of solo play, race against the clock in the form of a max amount of turns to be played). Fulfilling a contract in turn also grants C-Bills that are used to buy equipment so that the next contract becomes a bit easier by allowing to reroll certain colours of dice or using special abilities. Overall, I personally really enjoyed how lightweight and fast the game is, including set up and tear down (and in the case of solo play, it also doesn't require a lot of table space). Of course, it's not the type of BattleTech boardgame that I'd like to see, but it's a good start. My biggest gripe is probably that the rulebook can be kind of unclear in some parts and especially how the solo rules are more or less glossed over and just an appendix, although the box points out the solo playability specifically.
You can check out and buy Encounters here: https://store.catalystgamelabs.com/products/battletech-encounters (but check for local resellers because CGLs shipping costs to anywhere but mainland USA are atrocious and a joke)

Chronicles of Drunagor: Drunagor describes itself as a fully cooperative and tactical dungeon crawl adventure for 1-5 players, and that description pretty much tells you everything you need to know about it if you've got any kind of board game experience. It's in a similar vein as Heroscape, Gloomhaven or Descent, but adds a few twists of its own, like using plastic forms on which you place the tiles you use to build the map. It's also got an interesting way to track initiative, though I've played too little to actually say a lot about its functionality. I've played this one in a five player group with only me having experience with such a 'heavy' game and most of the others rather being party gamers or very light games. As you can guess, I didn't get to play it a lot, because the group didn't even remotely stick with it, we only got to the first boss and never picked it up again. Which honestly isn't surprising if only one of us ever took the pains to read the rulebook. Sigh.
Check out Chronicles of Drunagor here: https://wearecgs.com/chronicles-of-drunagor/

####Videogames:

I'll skip quite a few here I think, simply because they either weren't too mentionable, really old, I've only replayed them or I simply forgot about it. Chief among those not mentioned here is probably ETS 2 which I bought a bunch of maps on sale and that got me hooked all over again. I also won't include any links because it's probably obvious where to get these. Some of these games are also available for other platforms than the ones mentioned in parentheses.

Drova: Forsaken Kin (PC): Drova is a German made RPG in the same vein as the old Gothic-Series, which is still one of my favourite game series of all times, so naturally I wanted to check it out for quite a long while. Last year I finally got around to playing it and it really blew me away. The pixel graphics are drop dead gorgeous and while a lot of the themes and the setting is very obviously inspired by Gothic 1, there's still so much new and interesting stuff in there. The combat is quite sharp and deadly as well, so if you're looking for a gameplay challenge, you won't go wrong with giving Drova a try. I could honestly write a huge paragraph here, but let me just say that there was nothing I actively disliked about the game and it's quite possibly tied as my personal Game of The Year with (spoilers) KCD2. If you like old school RPGs that don't hold your hands with quest markers, a crisp challenge (although it's much easier on lower difficulties) and pixel graphics, there's really no excuse not to play Drova. Do it. Now.

Guild Wars 2 + Heart of Thorns + Path of Fire (PC): Writing this kind of hurts my heart. I remember running through the city I was studying in, trying to get a physical copy of GW2 back when it was released in 2012. I had no luck, so resorted to a digital version and was not disappointed. I spent so much time with that game back then and overtook all my friends who started playing before me in reaching max level and endgame. Last year two of these friends, me and one other friend who didn't play with us back then dove back in, and while one of the others has remained a big GW2 fan over the years, I've only played Heart of Thorns and the 'new guy' hadn't played it at all. So, we made fresh characters and started from scratch. And boy, was I absolutely disappointed this time. I still don't quite understand why. The story felt so flat (especially all the Living History seasons) and we didn't have the endurance to go through everything we bought (all the Living History stuff and End of Dragons). It really couldn't grip me anymore, the combat felt sluggish and boring now, the characters dull if not downright dumb. But I guess it's me, not you GW2, because tons of people still like you. I'll probably won't pick you up again, though.

Gears of War Reloaded (PS5): Let me preface this with a single sentence: I have a large COG tattoo on me. So now you know my feelings for this series. Together with BattleTech it's one of my all-time favourite franchises. I've read the novels and comic books time and time again and played through all games several times (but never touched MP because ugh. I neither have the stamina nor interest for that). So, my wife got me Reloaded, the remake of GoW Ultimate (which in turn was a remake of GoW 1) for PS5 last Christmas and man. For me, it still holds up, even if it's obviously the weakest part of the original trilogy. I'm currently playing through every game again and re-buying all the books I lost due to a flood, so I'll probably write a larger article about the whole series in the future. But it's good to see that I can own my tattoo even after over a decade of having it on my body. But damn was it weird to play Gears of War with a PS5 controller (the worst controller of them all). Personally, I can't wait for E-Day, but gods know when that will come, doubt it'll actually release in 2026 like it was teased last year.

Halo 1-3 (PC): When Halo 1 was first revealed I was absolutely enthralled by the idea of three player coop of the campaign. Then Microsoft bought the studio, made it Xbox exclusive (I didn't own one back then) and that killed the series for me. I tried playing Halo 1 once or twice when it was on PC but really couldn't get into it. But last year I was convinced to try again by a certain Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk when they talked about it on the first episode of their Once we were Spacemen podcast. I had booked Xbox Game Pass at the time (probably for the last time ever) so I gave the Master Chief collection a shot and managed to get through 1 and 2, but 3 killed the little steam it had. In all honesty, it's partly due to the fact that 3 was never remastered in the same vein as 1 and 2 because what I liked the most in the series, by far, was the lore of the Covenant and playing as the Arbiter in Halo 2. And that was mostly fleshed out through the terminals that weren't even in the original games, so Halo 3 was lacking very much in that category. Master Chief, the humans and human lore really, really bored me. The gameplay itself was okay, but for me nothing to write home about. I was also replaying a bit of Destiny 1 on my XB1 at the time and that probably 'helped' kill Halo again for me, because that's how it should play. And yes, I know, it's unfair to compare a game made for the original Xbox to one made for the Xbox One, but the point stands. The gameplay feels wooden and unfinished to me, as if it's missing something (one of those somethings is properly aiming over the iron sights). Maybe the newer games are more my taste, but I doubt I'll ever get there.

I was a Teenage Exocolonist (PC): Another slight disappointment for me (I promise, there's more games on here I actually like). It's not a bad game by any margin; it just didn't fit my tastes, I fear. It's hard to describe the game and my problems without going into spoiler territory, so brace yourselves. Here, you play as a kid growing up as a (surprise) Exocolonist on a strange planet that ends up trying to kill all the settlers. You're playing through the years, making meaningful choices (including romance), training a plethora of skills that enables you to do more and new stuff. But the gameplay is pretty much only a card game and a visual novel. Which wouldn't be too bad, if it didn't feel so repetitive at times. Which is really the big problem for me, because you should really play this one more than once, it’s the whole theme that is presented to you in the intro sequence already. And I will definitely give it another try as soon as I'm not as angry at the game telling me the ending I chose is bad, even though I still think it's the most neutral and an overall positive ending.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 + all DLCs: It's great. Go, play it. Okay, okay. A little more. I've bought KCD1 at release and really, really liked it. Of course, it had a few weaknesses and it ran like crap on my old PC, but I had so much fun with a game that actually takes its historical premise serious that I simply had to play the second part. And that one is even better, definitely a 10/10 for me, even if all three DLCs are kind of meh (and the monastery made me very angry at times). I think both the Forge and Painters DLC would be much better if you play through them while playing through the main story, because if you do them afterwards, they feel like a lot of busywork – especially the Forge DLC which is mostly: do two or three dailies, go to sleep, do the dailies again. And the Monastery felt like a 2.0 of THAT monastery quest in KCD1, which I hated with a burning passion. Luckily in KCD2 it's not as bad and not a necessary part of the main story. Nevertheless, it's absolutely and highly recommended for people who liked the first part, RPGs in general or historical settings. It's fantastic.

Lightyear Frontier (PC): Normally I steer well clear of early access games. Especially if they're in any way survival related (I swear, If I have to pick up a rock and two sticks to make a hammer or crafting bench one more time ...), but this one had mechs. So, I couldn't resist. But on a more serious note: I had a lot of fun playing what is essentially a farming sim with an interesting, though not very unique, main story, while kitting out a farming mech. Yes, there's absolutely zero combat in this and back when I played it, also only rudimentary NPC connections - you could build them a landing spot and then decorate that spot, but not much more. Not nearly as much activity with NPCs as in other farming games. Besides that, the map exploration can become a bit repetitive and I was sad that the main story wasn't finished yet (but that's the danger of playing early access). I'll definitely pick this one back up when there's much more content to be had. So far, I didn't regret my purchase and I hope the devs don't make me regret it by dropping the game.

My Time at Sandrock (PC): I've played My Time at Portia years ago on the Switch and generally really liked it despite its obvious flaws, like the mediocre romance and overall rather hollow marriage experience. But ever since it's been revealed, the theme of Sandrock really drew me in since I like a space western/sci-fi western setting and it fits very broadly into that category. And it is really quite good, albeit very slow at the beginning, which is also the reason I never got very far. I also picked it up at roughly the same time as I did Drova and Tiny Bookshop, and those two really diverted me away from Sandrock with how excellent they are, but now that I've been away from Sandrock for a while I'm not sure I can pick it back up without starting all over again. And I very much regret that because I saw the potential the game has to be very, very fun to me and from what I hear the romances are so much better in this one. I will definitely have to try and pick it back up sometime in 2026.

Octopath Traveler 2 (PC): Well, here's a big one. I'm a huuuge fan of pixel games, especially RPGs, which probably shouldn't surprise anyone when they know I started my life as a gamer with the original Gameboy and SNES/Famicom. So of course I've got to play Octopath Traveler. I've played part one years and years back and finally picked up OT 2 last year. I've had quite a lot of fun with it (and quite a few annoyances with certain bosses, especially the final one) and it is of course drop dead gorgeous. The cast is good, although with some obvious weaknesses (looking at you Agnea and Partitio) and overall I liked how the individual character stories got woven together at the end, except for Agnea, whose story kind of felt like a side story and didn't quite fit the overall vibe and had too little to do with the complete story. But overall, OT is for me more about these individual stories anyway, so my biggest gripe is that, yet again there's so much time in between the individual chapters of each character that it's hard to make it feel like a coherent story. I wish they'd just give the party a party level instead of individual character levels and let us play the stories in our own pace by scaling the chapter you choose to play to the party level (ecxept the first, introductory chapter of each character).

Palia (PC): The second early access game on this list, which was a surprise to myself as well. But this one's free (except for the mostly cosmetic ingame shop) and has the plus side of being multiplayer. So, I played it with my wife, and we played A LOT of it. I've got something over three hundred hours on my steam account, and my wife even more. For those who haven't heard about the game yet: It's a farming sim/cozy style of game, but as an MMO, although the servers are always relatively small and the social aspects are therefore not very much used besides parties. Technically there's also a guild system, but my guess is that it's the most underused system in the game by far, because it does pretty much nothing useful. It features a story in which the players as humans reawaken in a world in which humans have been extinct for a long time and the world is populated by Palians (elf like humanoids with purple skin) and the main story revolves around finding out what exactly has happened to humanity in the past and why they are reappearing all over the world now. It's quite intriguing, but sadly still not finished. Gameplay wise it features farming, animal husbandry (though in a early state), cooking, resource gathering, bug catching and hunting as well as the typical social interactions with the villagers including romance (though still rather rudimentary). But the biggest draw for me was the excellent housing system that quite often reminded me of the pinnacle of housing called Wildstar, but was still lacking some important features, like being able to scale furniture or easily clipping things together to create whatever you like. At the same time, when I played it, the game also only had one type of house, which has since changed with the early iteration of a newer housing style, but the only thing I took away from that was that it was mostly expensive and didn’t really do much for me.

Tiny Bookshop (PC): Another German game and a huge, positive surprise to me. My wife sent a link to the Steam page to me a few days before release, but I completely forgot about it and stumbled upon it a second time days after its release. I tried the demo and was immediately hooked. Bonus points for not only having a demo, but also automatically importing the demo save(s) to the full version if you buy it. For those not in the know, in Tiny Bookshop you play as somebody down on their luck, who leaves everything behind (yeah, like in a lot of other cozy games), sells most of what they own, moves to a small city and starts selling books out of an old trailer hitched to their rust bucket car, hence the Tiny Bookshop. You'll meet a bunch of people living in the city, form memories with them and solve their problems while getting your business underway. And while it does tend to get a bit repetitive at times, especially if you miss a specific event trigger in a season and need to play a whole year to get there again (which is what happened to me), it still plays fast enough to get through that year easily. Luckily, selling books isn't just randomly stocking your shelves and waiting for people to buy. They also ask you for recommendations, so you need to look through your shelves what you have, and most of the books in the game exist in real life, so if you've read a bunch of books, it's fun to see books you know (and randomly find recommendations for yourselves, thanks Tiny Bookshop devs!). If you like books and/or cozy games, I recommend you try the demo (see what I did there?!).

Well, there you have it. A much too long article about all the games I played in 2025. I did warn you about my incoherent ramblings on the front page. If you read all this, it's really on you, honestly.

Well, let's get to 2026. While it's hard for me to actually plan anything out, there's a number of games I would like to play and will try to. Generally, more mecha stuff, because you can never have enough mecha. In TTRPG terms that means running a few shot of Aether Nexus, playing a bit of Lancer and playing/running Mecha Hack (maybe solo?). A big hope would also be a chance to play MechWarrior:Destiny, but games for that seem to be even rarer than any other Mecha TTRPG. I also got Five Parsecs from Home as a Christmas presents and will try to run that in the wargaming category, probably with my BattleTech miniatures (because I don't own any other Sci-Fi minis or terrain, also mechs are great!). I also still have to try out BTs Alpha Strike ruleset for myself after getting it with my Mercenaries KS, but that might be too ambitious (just as ambitious as playing the official solo ruleset Aces, which I haven't even bought yet). Boardgames is probably going to be even more unrealistic, sadly, but I'd love to get Scythe: Expeditions on the table at least one more time, because I got it as a present with the gorgeous metal miniatures and only had the chance to play it once. On the not-mech front, I'm going to run the introductory scenarios for Die Schwarze Katze/ A Furry Tale, a German TTRPG, as well as the Press Start adventure for Fabula Ultima before diving into a short Fabula campaign with a natural fantasy theme reminiscent of Crystal Chronicles with a large dash of Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn aesthetics. I'll also play Twilight Sword solo when the physical items arrive, because I couldn't keep myself from backing it. And lastly, the bounty hunting duo of Notorious and Outsiders is still waiting for me to finish my started trilogy game, which was a lot of fun so far. When it comes to videogames, I'm really out of the loop regarding release dates, but obviously I'm hoping for a release of E-Day and hoping that Ghost of Yotei will go down in price this year, because 80€ is definitely way too much, no matter how much I enjoyed Tsushima. Claire Obscure: Expedition 33 is also still on my agenda, as well as Roadwarden, besides all the games I mentioned above that I wanted to give a second try, inlcuding playing Octopath Traveler 0, and finishing the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters for the switch (still have to play 5 and 6). And finally, ever taking my break for not having enough time to justify the costs, I really want to finish the main story of Final Fantasy XIV, which I have left at the halfway point of Shadowbringers. We'll see when I'll break down and renew my sub.

Well, there you have it. An entirely too long article about my gaming year of 2025. I hope you had fun, because I did!

#talks