For the fourth time in a row, I’ve compiled short reviews of each game I played over the past year. I had much less free time than usual in 2025, so my list comes in at a career-low 18 titles total. The average length of the games I played this year was quite short as well, with only a few triple-A juggernauts to round out a set of more modest entries. As far as trends go, I was able to dig into some of the 3DS catalogue as well as my indie game backlog, which had been steadily growing on Steam. There were some surprises, some disappointments, and some genre-defining, once-in-a-generation landmark watershed critical darlings, but you’ll have to read on to find out which are which.

 

Chants of Sennaar accomplishes what every puzzle game strives to do, perfectly threading the difficulty needle to make the player feel like a genius each time they complete a challenge. Loosely based on the Tower of Babel, the gameplay of Sennaar mainly consists of interpreting different fictional languages. Its hieroglyphics are all relatively simple, but the developers still found many creative ways to escalate the premise and keep things consistently exciting. Whether it’s through combining glyphs to make compound words or translating different methods of depicting plural nouns, Sennaar is constantly forcing the player to rethink what they know about language; my personal favorite puzzle required the protagonist to first decipher and then implement an entirely unique system of mathematical notation. The game excels on a visual level as well. Each of the different civilizations have striking designs and the cel-shaded graphics look gorgeous no matter what color palette is behind them. Chants of Sennaar is an indie masterclass. The only thing preventing it from being a perfect title is its strange and somewhat out-of-place endgame.

 

Super Mario RPG has a certain weirdness about it that’s characteristic of the SNES era. See, even after becoming a worldwide phenomenon in the 80s, Super Mario was still figuring out its identity (especially in the spinoff department) and there was not yet a blueprint for how to adapt a simple platformer into a story-driven role-playing game. Perhaps due to its impressive pedigree within the genre, SquareSoft was able to take on this challenge with a bold creative vision that heavily influenced the future of the Mario brand. The visual gags, colorful personalities, and strange fictional races which populate Super Mario RPG reappear in its many spiritual successors, and sometimes even in the mainline platformer series.

 

Despite its short runtime and the care put into its world, though, Super Mario RPG’s timing-based combat system often becomes quite tedious. The game attempts to mitigate this problem by including minigames at every turn, but these distractions are largely hit-or-miss. In practice, this means that gameplay vacillates between being mildly boring and mildly annoying.

 

The unique charms of this entry, while historically important, are not enough to salvage a mediocre RPG experience.

 

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds takes much inspiration from its 90s predecessor A Link to the Past, with twin overworlds and a story about Seven Sages. But despite the apparent similarities, Worlds is more easily defined by the ways in which its design philosophy differs from the rest of the Zelda series.

 

After the first act, A Link Between Worlds’ dungeons are playable in any order. Additionally, Link rents or purchases items instead of unlocking them halfway through a dungeon. This system is novel when compared to previous top-down Zelda titles, but it’s not without its sacrifices. The ambiguity of the level order makes it difficult for the game to convey a real sense of progression, whether on a micro or macro scale. There is no budding mystery at the beginning of each temple, no grand recontextualization once a new item is unlocked. Link already has everything he needs to conquer a dungeon as soon as he steps foot in it. When repeated across the entire game, his growth as a hero feels somewhat flat and unsatisfying.

 

These ludonarrative woes, in combination with a set of sparse, generically-named NPCs that probably should have stayed in the SNES era, make A Link Between Worlds feel more like a collection of video game levels than a proper adventure. Granted, the individual levels are still as well-designed as ever, but the freeform structure in which they’re presented leaves something to be desired.

 

Papa’s Pizzeria began life as a humble spin-off of Flipline Studios’ mainline platformer series Papa Louie, but it quickly eclipsed the popularity of its predecessor and became a ubiquitous cultural touchstone for the Adobe Flash generation. Pizzeria laid the groundwork for over a dozen restaurant-simulation sequels with its catalogue of unique characters and its emphasis on hands-on gameplay. Even though it was revolutionary within the genre, the original 2007 version had many one-off quirks that would get smoothed out by later entries, so it’s the recent Deluxe re-release on Steam that I’ll be reviewing here.

 

The pizzeria’s setting of Tastyville doesn’t have as distinct of a visual aesthetic as some other Flipverse locales, but the lack of a cohesive theme is a surprising upside of this title. It precludes any ingredient from feeling too out-of-place, no matter how exotic, and facilitates one of the most diverse Special Recipe Cookbooks in the series. Moment-to-moment gameplay is also relatively strong, allowing for a fair bit of player interpretation when determining how best to place toppings.

 

With the praise out of the way, now is as good a time as any to discuss a problem that has been plaguing almost all of the latest Gamerias: their difficulty curve doesn’t just flatline throughout a run, it actively plummets.

 

Papa’s Pizzeria Deluxe is at its tightest in the first few weeks, when the player must paranoically switch between all four stations, leaving no pie overcooked and no customer underattended. After only a few paydays, though, Delivery Boy Roy can afford powerful upgrades that completely shatter the time management aspect of the game. No longer must the player check the lobby or the oven while busy with another task. There are alarms that do it automatically. Even the Cut Station, which is one of the most enjoyable parts of the base experience, is dumbed down significantly by guides that make it easier to cut consistent slices.

 

These brain-numbing upgrades wouldn’t be nearly as egregious if they required some sort of tradeoff or if gameplay complexity increased in a substantial way with the changing seasons, but instead they’re just further exacerbated by the perpetual absence of basic difficulty options.

 

At the end of the day, Papa’s Pizzeria is a casual game. Its timeless appeal is drawn from many different factors, most of which have nothing to do with design principles. That being said, I still hope that someday in the future Flipline Studios will make another attempt at recreating the frantic, fast-paced food service environment that the series initially tried to capture.

 

Fire Emblem Awakening famously saved the series from cancellation by giving greater emphasis to characterization. Fire Emblem games had always featured large casts, but Awakening brought interpersonal relationships to the forefront, fully integrating them with the rest of the game design to an unprecedented degree. In an effort to be more accessible, the gameplay is a bit simplistic compared to other entries. Still, the Pair Up mechanic, which allows players to temporarily combine two units, holds enough depth to keep strategy interesting for most of the run-through. Similarly, the game’s major story beats hit hard enough to carry a narrative that often meanders otherwise. Overall, Fire Emblem Awakening is passable in many areas without excelling in any of them, but its influence on the franchise can’t be understated.

 

Sonic Frontiers feels like it’s held together by straw and glue. On rare occasions, it manages to maintain enough composure to let one of its good ideas shine through. More often, it comes apart at the seams and reveals a sloppy, haphazard mess.

 

The best part of this entry is Sonic’s moveset. It’s expansive and fun to mess around with in a vacuum, which is a necessity in an open-world game. Combat, too, is more expressive than it’s ever been, with lots of flashy attacks that look impactful regardless of the player’s attack stat.

 

But it doesn’t matter how well Sonic controls because Frontiers simply fails to provide any content compelling enough to stay invested past the first few islands. On the gameplay front, puzzles are laughably short and the jankiness of the supersized boss fights outweighs their impressive spectacle. On the aesthetic front, the game’s dialogue is much too cheesy to sell the melodrama of its story, and this oppressive doom-and-gloom atmosphere is exacerbated by a dreary photorealistic artstyle.

 

From the mini-games to the half-dozen different currencies to the main platforming challenges, there are so many mechanics here vying for attention but none of them are polished enough to deserve it. Without any one aspect for the player to sink their teeth into, Frontiers can’t help but feel deeply empty, like a graveyard of half-baked ideas.

 

Resident Evil 4 is everything that triple-A gaming should be: it’s ambitious, it’s sprawling, and it oozes polish from every zombified pore. This entry had an infamously long and expensive development cycle, but that time and money is felt through the sheer scale of its world. Gameplay alternates between spectacular set pieces and thoughtfully designed enemy encounters, all undergirded by an adaptive difficulty system that keeps combat engaging no matter the proficiency of the player. While its individual levels are all top-notch, what sets RE4 apart is how well it keeps up the pace from one segment to the next. Bosses, puzzles, ganados hordes, vehicle chases, quiet respites: all of these disparate parts flow quite naturally into each other, creating a cinematic atmosphere that satisfies even the shortest of attention spans.

 

There’s one memorable moment in particular that I want to highlight because it exemplifies the amount of care that was poured into this title. Late in the campaign, there’s a long pre-rendered cutscene in which main character Leon Kennedy’s face gets nicked by a throwing knife. Immediately after the cutscene ended, I turned the camera around to look at Leon’s model from the front. Sure enough, the model itself had changed to show a small cut. The fact that the developers went the extra mile to include that detail, even though most players only see Leon from the back, proves the extra time in the oven was worth it.

 

This game is a classic for a reason. Please go play it.

 

Jacksmith departs from typical Flipline Studios fare in that it’s more of a resource management game than a time management game. In taking on the role of a blacksmith, players have a large degree of agency when deciding what materials to use while forging. The various boosts that can be given to weapons throughout their construction, in combination with the lite real-time strategy segments at the end of each in-game day, provide many opportunities for meaningful choices.

 

Unfortunately, these choices feel less and less meaningful as time goes on because the difficulty curve does not scale very well into the postgame. After the main campaign, the abundance of high-level ore easily outpaces the attack power of Dudley’s monsters, making optimal strategy pretty unnecessary.

 

But what Jacksmith lacks in tight design, it makes up for with sheer passion and charm. The number of bespoke weapon parts, special blueprints, and elemental enemies goes well beyond what is perhaps warranted for such a short game, and the medieval barnyard warriors bring a light-hearted energy to the otherwise grim battlefield.

 

Neva pushes the boundaries of game art design further than most studios not named Nomada are willing to go. The visual composition of each frame is beautiful, playing with positive and negative space in a way that shows clear intentionality (an especially impressive feat in an inherently interactive medium). There are multiple instances where the game forces the player to slow down and do nothing but look at the gorgeous world they’re inhabiting, and every one of these moments feels justified. It’s not all willows and cherry blossoms, either. The artstyle is versatile enough to depict claustrophobic horror sequences with just as much deftness as sweeping natural landscapes.

 

Unfortunately, though, Neva’s gameplay does not come anywhere close to matching the quality of its presentation. The platforming is a little bit underbaked, but not enough to drag down the whole experience. Instead, the real issue lies with the game’s combat system: it’s dead simple. Throughout the large majority of a playthrough, the player only has access to a few basic attacks. By the time any new mechanics are introduced, it’s far too little and far too late. This makes every combat encounter feel exceedingly tedious and repetitive, an unwelcome intrusion on what would otherwise be a pleasant little art game.

 

New Super Mario Bros. 2 has come to represent the beginning of Super Mario’s bland, brand-friendly era. The 3DS/Wii U generation was notorious for pumping out aesthetically homogenous Mario games, and this title (which would go on to have a sequel less than four months later) is one of many that failed to make a significant impact on the franchise’s identity.

 

That’s not entirely for lack of trying, though. All of the marketing for New Super Mario Bros. 2 heavily emphasized a bold new gimmick: collecting gold coins. The problem is that this gimmick simultaneously goes too far and not far enough. Despite the inclusion of Gold Flowers and Gold Rings and more coins than ever before, the game design philosophy of 2D Mario remains unchanged, even in places where it could really use a rework. The only instances where the coins are genuinely impactful are instances where they throw off the carefully-crafted balance that has existed since the start of the series. For example, the long-standing tradition of earning an extra life for every 100 coins does not work nearly as well in a game that doles out hundreds of coins per level. Instead, it removes any and all stakes from a life system that was already pretty forgiving.

 

Considering these major flaws, it is somewhat embarrassing to say that New Super Mario Bros. 2 is still a very good game, just by virtue of its well-designed levels. The developers may have failed in integrating a new central mechanic, but they succeeded in creating another strong platformer.

 

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice doesn’t know whose story it’s trying to tell. After the first game in the trilogy introduced Apollo Justice and the second game completely upended things by spotlighting Athena and Phoenix instead, this concluding chapter changes course once again to focus on Phoenix and Apollo together.

 

There are lots of meaty concepts here: an enigmatic fictional nation populated by spirit mediums, a culture that treats attorneys just as poorly as the criminals they defend, an underground rebellion with secret ties to the Royal Family, etc. The problem is that Phoenix Wright doesn’t have a whole lot to do with any of it. His arc has long since been completed, and the return of his old partner Maya Fey isn’t enough to justify his heavy involvement in the Khura’inese half of the game. Apollo, meanwhile, has a very strong connection to the Khura’in plotline, but he’s stuck halfway across the world (or wherever Japanifornia is) for most of the story, far away from where the action is happening.

 

Spirit of Justice is not without its merits. The new Divination Séance mechanic perfectly meshes the series’ signature mysticism with its serious courtroom setting, and the final trial is as climactic and satisfying as always. It’s just a shame that the cases leading up to it feel so directionless.

 

Dreams of Aether unashamedly mimics the gameplay and trappings of WarioWare. Its many references to the world of Rivals of Aether are cute enough, but the real draw of this very small game comes from its innovative final level, which requires the player to complete two microgames simultaneously. This simple twist turns Dreams from a cheap distraction for diehard Aether Studios fans into a genuinely engaging challenge that stands on its own merits.

 

Sonic Superstars is a pleasantly middling 2D Sonic experience with modest innovations that neither awe nor offend. The new artstyle adds a lot of charm to zone themes which are often pretty basic, but the new Chaos Emerald abilities are awkward and poorly implemented. Branching paths add a lot of replayability to the levels, but many boss fights (and the final boss in particular) are aggravatingly drawn-out. Although this entry stays well within the series’ comfort zone, it still tries to progress forward instead of relying too heavily on nostalgia, which feels like a step in the right direction.

 

Monument Valley eases you in very gently to its Escher-esque world; a large majority of the base levels feel like tutorials. This slow pace is necessary, though, because the game’s geometry-bending mechanics would create some truly brain-bending puzzles if the difficulty curve were any steeper. Any possible frustration is further mitigated by Monument Valley’s delightfully clean sound design and artstyle, which work together to create a relaxing, focused atmosphere. Still, the game is at its best when the player reaches the post-credits expansions. Here, the levels become much more complex, giving a glimpse into the potential that this series can reach when its designers aren’t constrained by lowercase-a accessibility.

 

LexiConQuest is the rare educational game that poses a challenge even when the player is already familiar with the subject being taught. Its main gameplay hook is derived from an everpresent stopwatch that incentivizes speed, forcing the material to become more internalized over repeat runs. LexiConQuest’s prominent use of emojis is a clever way to represent vocabulary words pictorially while also matching the game’s colorful, cartoonish aesthetic. This aesthetic is further heightened by a myriad of voice clips, floating shapes, and other effects that can mercifully be customized to accommodate each player’s tolerance for sensory overload. I did direct this game, though, so I should probably refrain from giving it a full-length biased review.

 

Blasphemous takes heavy inspiration from Catholic iconography to create a strange and disturbing fictional religion. This perversion of real-life influences makes for some highly compelling worldbuilding; Cvstodia and The Miracle don’t tickle the imagination so much as they strangle it.

 

The theological theming is all-consuming, bleeding into every aspect of the game. For instance, there’s a big focus on combat, but none of the various character customizations ever provide substantial player expression. The protagonist’s moveset remains relatively simple throughout, mirroring his austere and self-effacing nature.

 

Instead, the bulk of Blasphemous’ gameplay mechanics come from the surrounding world, which boasts an impressive number of unique environments, enemies, and bosses. Cvstodia’s biomes are unusual and variegated, but each one hints at some unmentionable past tragedy. Sparse NPCs only enhance the suffocating atmosphere, leaving the player on just as lonely of a pilgrimage as their player-character.

 

Yes, Your Grace gets off to a strong start with its highly addictive week-based progression system, but it has several major failings that sour the overall experience.

 

When it comes to strategy gameplay, YYG shows its hand too early, peaking about two-thirds of the way through a run. Up until this point, the complexity steadily ramps up as the game introduces new resources and relationships to manage. Courting the support of local lords (several of whom have rivalries with each other) is an especially memorable highlight. Once the player enters the endgame, however, the decision-making becomes much less interesting, with smaller quests and fewer relevant characters. This unnecessary simplification really hurts the pacing, making the final few hours feel like a slog.

 

As with many other narrative-heavy games, Yes, Your Grace allows for the player’s actions to directly impact the story. For example, main characters can live or die depending on the king’s decisions. While that sounds like a big deal on paper, the game itself does not treat these deaths with any weight outside of the week that they occur. In fact, even if King Eryk betrays his allies, loses his entire family, and stands alone as a murderous, self-obsessed despot by the end of a run, neither his in-game personality nor the tone of the final battle change. There aren’t so much branching paths as there is one path that has a variable number of gaps missing from it; even though there are plenty of choices to be made, the absence of compounding choices greatly hinders the player’s ability to feel immersed.

 

Final Fantasy III may lack personality (much like its party of protagonists), but its expanded RPG job system is more than exciting enough to make up for any aesthetic or narrative failings. The character classes are quite numerous and quite distinct from one another, providing ample motivation to experiment with different combinations. Several of the dungeons and boss fights are specially designed to serve as showcases for the unique abilities of these classes, ensuring that the player will step out of their comfort zone and experience the breadth of what the game has to offer. Another way that FFIII awes is with its ever-expanding overworld, which adds a sense of scope that dwarfs most of its NES contemporaries. For that reason, as well as for its superior turn-based gameplay, this entry is far and away the best of the original Final Fantasy trilogy.

 

Conclusion

And that’s the list! I’ll see you again in 2026 if I manage to play enough games to crack the double digits.