"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success." -John Steinbeck
I didn't finish my bingo card this year. I probably won't do one next year. The format has proved conducive to burnout and playing things I wasn't actually excited for, having stripped most of my genuine Want To Plays for the first go. I also got totally walled by ZeroRanger and got very mad at several things in the process.
We'll go through the games I did play, first. This won't take long.
Refuse. Odious, stinking, concentrated SomethingAwful feces. No one should have ever been waiting for a sequel to this pile of edgy 00s Internet racism and FF6 worship. Consignment to history is the best fate for this thing and it is actually a tragedy that it will continue to live on at all by dint of a single reference in Homestuck.
There are faint whispers of a good series in here, one that would make me want to get better at the combat, but they barely manage to eke in an hour or two per game bookending 30 hours of dilute Disney plots where Sora gets to do all the action the protagonists of those movies should have, aborting their arcs in the process. I will not be continuing with Kingdom Hearts under any circumstances.
I won't be putting up with terminally mid H-vanias again either especially when they waste my time with this much money grinding. And yes I'm saying that as an active MMO player.
Unfortunately as much as I wanted to go to bat for this underdog it just shouldn't have been a direct follow-up to Deus Ex. It has an impossible act to follow, and attempts it by invoking a lot more sci-fi bullshit and a lot less material analysis. The original DX remains lightning in a bottle, and should be left alone, because clearly even the modders often don't understand it (see my previous piece about Revision).
It's a perfectly cromulent match-three mobile game. This replaced Fieldrunners 2, an equally run-of-the-mill nothingburger. There's no reason to play this when You Must Build A Boat exists as a strict upgrade. I wish I had anything to say about it but there's just not much to glom onto, even if you're more systems-minded than me (which is pretty easy to be).
Sly is cute and all but man this game's enemy designs got racist fast, and I have no particular love for PS2 mascot platformers in and of themselves. Not much to grab on to for analysis here either, as it's a fairly by-the-numbers "dashing gentleman thief and his cop kismesis" plot.
Much worse main plot than the first game balanced out by a ridiculous omake mode that makes up the second half of the gameplay. Omega is saddled with the eugenicist plot of the game it's a direct prequel to and has clear tells of being a tide-over gaiden game, with an almost identical combat system. Maybe 2 will be more interesting.
You'd think that "Mobius did character designs for a sci-fi retelling of Seven Samurai" would land better. Or then again, maybe you wouldn't. Either way this adds a bunch of Final Fantasy gravitas that this particular plot line does not need, an inscrutable after-action level-up system based on what buttons you pressed, and a very awkward PS2 action combat system. I'd love to see a game inspired by this made by three mentally unwell trans women who are action game sickos instead.
I had to revise my appraisal of the Tomb Raider franchise from "linearly gets worse over time" after playing this; it just isn't up to the level of either TR2 or Last Revelation. It isn't outright bad but it certainly is the Level Expansion Pack school of sequel design, and suffers a mishmash of level concepts with very high difficulty that can screw you out of your arsenal if you approach them in the wrong order. Recommended play order is now 1 > 2 > 4 > 3 > 5 (again, stop when you get bored).
I just think that maybe you shouldn't be able, in a sokoban, to trivialize earlier puzzles by doing later ones out of order and thus getting an item that lets you jump pits. The open world is a neat concept but needed better puzzle design to carry it off. Also apparently my era of preferred puzzle design has gone the way of the dodo post-Internet; I don't want to join a Discord just to figure out what got patched in this month.
Fascinating artifact. From the studio behind Bully, Homeworld: Cataclysm, and Counter-Strike... a Disney's Treasure Planet ship-combat RTS, at the stately pace a sicko would actually expect rather than the frantic Westwood/Blizzard house style. This game wasn't for me exactly but I did manage to finish it, and I really appreciated what it's doing. Slavic playerbase still evangelizing this game on Steam in 2025, I see you, and I respect the work, you beautiful maniacs.
It's Homestar Runner, so I'm predisposed. I had a good time and I'm glad the Brothers Chaps are aging gracefully and not franchising out their life's work.
I'm concerned about the future direction of Ryu Ga Gotoku but even if the studio seems invested in sanding down their franchise and dragging Kiryu back out of retirement over and over to chase being Sega's new flagship, I still have a good decade of good games to get through first. This year I had to learn koi-koi and much like learning riichi several years ago for FFXIV and Yakuza 0... it was much less of a pain than it initially seemed like it would be.
Sometimes the big names are that way for a reason. It turns out Dragon Quest is not just well balanced but funny, too, in ways that often seem to be ignored by Western developers who set about "fixing the JRPG".
Sometimes you gotta give up. I got book recs out of this one and god it's just so satisfying hearing the Worst of Twitter, The Everything App lose their fucking minds in real time as you ruin all their get-rich-quick schemes. Buy my friends at Catbird Soft's game.
HAPPY PRIDE, JUBILITES clown emoji clown emoji clown emoji jester emoji jester emoji
I loved Psychonauts 2. The art retains the impeccable style of the first game while bringing it out of the blurry interlacing you'll see if you emulate the PS2 version. The scope is vaster and Raz gets to play with more powers in more ways (and get annoyed reactions out of wider cast). And then there's the writing. From the moment the game opened and made a point of correcting the original's use of the g-slur to "fortune tellers" I suspected they were doing something good -- and then I played the rest of the game and it revealed itself to be the sort of sequel we all wish a studio made after 20 years, with not only a deep understanding of itself and its source material, but a great and unbending sense of compassion and empathy in the very bones of the game. In nearly any other game I would take the diegetic lecture of "don't mess around in other people's minds, Raz" of Hollis' level to be mealy-mouthed winking at the decomposed horse carcass often known as "ludonarrative dissonance", as you then go on to do exactly that -- but even as the plot mandates Raz's continued interventions in the minds of the Psychic Six, not only are they patently necessitated but so too do greater and worse consequences follow. Over the course of the game, Raz's family also arrives at Psychonauts HQ in partial support of him, and their various relationships both with Raz and each other are gently mended as the story progresses. It is also revealed that the entire Aquato family are refugees from the nation of Grulovia, after the tyrannical "Gzar" deployed lethal force against citizens protesting his regime, including the Aquato ancestors.
Psychonauts 2 was initially crowdfunded by Double Fine from 2015-2016. In 2018, the publisher, Starbreeze Studios, declared bankruptcy, long before the game had even been finished. As well-documented in the press as well as PsychOdyssey, the harrowing fly-on-the-wall documentary covering the game's development process, Double Fine was acquired by Microsoft in 2019, who funded the remainder of the game and published it under the Xbox Game Studios label. Tim Schafer said in an interview for Gamasutra at the time, "I look at those characters over there from Psychonauts and they're really appealing to me, but some people, it might take them a while to love them. So they might not be willing to risk $60 on a disc, but if they see that face sitting there next to a giant triple-A game [on GamePass], they might just give it a shot."
Based on reporting from 972, Local Call, and The Guardian, in November 2023 the Israeli Defense Forces began purchasing compute time and resources from Microsoft, among other cloud service providers. Israel uses Microsoft's technology, including Azure and offerings from OpenAI, with which Microsoft has key partnerships, to commit genocide against the Palestinian people, and has done so for at least the past two years. The United Nations has even seen fit to actually acknowledge this and start using the word "genocide" this year. Microsoft, the parent company of Xbox Game Studios and thus of Double Fine, materially benefits from both the sale of weaponized computing power and ongoing revenue from their subscription gaming service, the aforementioned Xbox GamePass. As a result of this, Xbox, specifically, is on the BDS Movement's list of active boycott efforts.
I purchased Psychonauts 2 for PlayStation 4 in December 2024. Xbox was added to the BDS list in April 2025. I played the game after the BDS date, primarily due to the prior commitment to play it this year, and which I ultimately permitted on the grounds that it was not providing further financial or social support to Microsoft. The above two paragraphs were on my mind the entire time I played it. This was one of the most impactful pieces of art I experienced this year; one of the most impactful of all time, if restricted to video games. But was it worth it? What is the cost of a video game?
For me, the player, it's relatively small, though nontrivial. I bought my PlayStation 4 secondhand for about $200. The game itself cost $12 on sale, digitally. I have about 27 hours of playtime according to the PlayStation app, which works out to less than half a cent based on local electricity rates and the assumption that the PS4 ran at 150watt-hours per hour the whole time I was playing. (A PS4 also requires an HD-capable TV to display the game, a stable form of housing in which to store both things... At some point I have to admit that examining the networked costs of every single thing in 21st century capitalism is beyond the point of the exercise, though. In this case the TV and the house both have other uses, and even the PS4 was not purchased solely for this game.)
But what of its production?
Psychonauts 2 initially raised $3.8 million in what is widely known to be one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns of all time, and which was openly stated at the time to not intend to cover the entire budget of the game. Starbreeze Studios invested an additional $8 million for publishing rights. After Starbreeze folded, Microsoft bought the publishing rights from them for $13.2 million, before acquiring Double Fine outright as well. The game was ultimately delayed three times, from 2018 to 2019, to 2020, to the final release date of 2021. The balance sheets of Double Fine are not available to me but presumably Microsoft duly covered payroll for people it employed during their tenure and continues to this day. As budgets go, this is really a drop in the bucket for the game industry at large.
However, Double Fine rose to prominence as an independent development studio, with minor hits in Costume Quest and Stacking while buying back the rights to their previous bigger-budget games for long-tail sales and repeating the "Amneisa Fortnight"s every couple years, churning out prototypes that spun into new small games. The studio had not set out to make a marquee game in almost six years when the Psychonauts 2 Fig campaign launched. Watching PsychOdyssey makes this quite clear, as the development cycle is stretched out three more years, the endless industry cycle of crunch rears its head, and the Microsoft acquisition ultimately manages to get the game across the finish line after two further years. The ominous first episode's description of Psychonauts 1's process, with Double Fine flitting from publisher to publisher with the company nearly shuttering and Tim Schafer taking a personal loan to pay the final payroll before managing to clinch a genuine last-minute deal for Majesco to take on publishing, grimly echoes as Psychonauts 2 gets stuck in its own development hell and Double Fine ultimately loses its independent status. Infamously, at one point, Matt Booty visits Double Fine to reassure staff that the studio will retain its independence, and ends up doing the opposite with standard corporate non-compete demands that seem to blatantly be opposed to the idea of the Amnesia Fortnights that Double Fine owes much of its current recongition too.
At time of writing, Double Fine has released one new game in the four years since Psychonauts 2's release, to nearly no press, and has not made any official statements about Microsoft's business relationship to Israel. Given that even the Arkane Lyon employees who have called for Microsoft to divest have had to maintain anonymity, I do not blame Tim Schafer or his employees for not doing so under the much more retaliation-friendly US labor scene, but combined it is a clear sign to me that Double Fine is no longer an indie darling; it is now a corporate subsidiary. Nor can I assign any blame for complicity in the genocide to a studio that has produced no public work since years before Microsoft's increased contracting with the IDF.
But was the game worth it? Is a single work of art, however great, worth the selling out, the ultimate fate of being complicit--even unwillingly--in the new parent company's later involvement in war crimes, or else giving up employment in the industry altogether? We won't even likely ever know how much it actually cost to get this game out the door. Even with the window of PsychOdyssey we know that Psychonauts 2 had its share of management and scheduling troubles, yet they are utterly dwarfed by the more horrific cases in this industry. But putting a catalog as special as Psychonauts and Brutal Legend in Microsoft's hands, to both gameswash its own involvement in mass genocide and potentially treat the studio the same way they have Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin is hard to stomach. The timeline where Psychonauts 2 simply collapsed and took DF with it rather than getting out the door under Microsoft's watchful aegis is an artistically poorer one, to be sure, but morally?
Psychonauts 2 was the best game I played in 2025 and at time of writing, I recommend you donate $60 to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, and then play a free game on itch.io, instead.