My Year in Games, 2025
Well, long time no see, eh? Apologies for the radio silence; life has been a bit hectic until recently.
I’ve played a campaign (or am currently playing) a campaign in nine games this year, three of which I’m playing for the first time. The experiences ranged from a calm nostalgia to a high-adrenaline thrill across multiple genres: first-person shooter, action-adventure, roguelite, and racing. Each game has its own blurb detailing my experiences and other cool stuff. Enjoy 🙂.
The Entire (canon) Uncharted Series (1-4 + Lost Legacy)
Ah, Uncharted… my beloved.
So beloved that I dedicated a whole shrine to it!
It had been four or five years since I picked up any of the games, so I was pretty excited to pick it back up again, right from the start.
I started Uncharted 1 a bit before New Year’s and finished Lost Legacy in mid-July. Despite the slow pace, I thoroughly enjoyed my playthrough. It was a wonderful nostalgia trip with stops at a mysterious South American island, long-forgotten ancient cities, and a pirate haven in all its beauty. Storylines featuring love triangles, betrayals, and surviving unforgiving conditions. Shootouts with armed mercenaries, pirates, and supernatural beings. That was the Uncharted I remember and cherish.
Out of the five games, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End stood out from the rest. Despite being made in a pressure cooker environment which included a total rewrite, it felt like a perfect ending to the series. The cinematic set pieces ranging from a gunfight in Madagascar to a swordfight inside a sinking ship, The reunion of Nathan and Sam’s fraternal relationship, and the strain it had on Nathan’s marriage, all packaged together as a nearly perfect experience.
Uncharted 4 stands as my favourite game of all time, and I am very grateful to have replayed it one more time.
Balatro
Balatro is a poker-based roguelite game that came out in early 2024 by Canadian indie developer LocalThunk.
To play, you have to advance through a series of rounds with a target score to reach.
Points are determined by the cards you play, with some hands scoring way more than others.
But the targets get higher and higher, so you must employ special cards that boost your scores under certain conditions, or jokers.
There are a lot of jokers available with their own quirks, such as multiplying your score if your played hand has an even-ranked card.
The game’s popularity garnered high acclaim, and Balatro scored the Game of the Year award in 2024.
Having played the game for around 35 hours, I found it quite addictive! The cards you are given, the options in the shop you can buy with prize money, and the “bosses” at the end of each round add up to many, many, many combinations, making every run unique. That’s what made the game so fun, it doesn’t get stale because when you start a new run, you have to try new jokers and strategies.
Despite the hours I plugged in, I have only won against three or four decks (each run based on a given card deck has its own challenges). It’s also a difficult game as you’re limited by how many changes you can make and the jokers you can buy. However, each run provides a unique permutation of challenges and options that keeps me hitting the “New Run” button at the end of each failure.
There’s also a very good write-up by LocalThunk on the development of Balatro. If you are interested in independent game development, I highly recommend you read it.
Half-Life
Half-Life is a first-person shooter developed by Valve in 1998.
We assume the role of Gordon Freeman, a research scientist whose life turns upside down when extradimensional beings and the U.S. Marines descend on the Black Mesa Research Facility, killing anyone in sight.
Freeman must defend himself and navigate the complex with guns, RPGs, and experimental weapons that use uranium as ammo.
I wrote a blog post about my experience with Half-Life during my campaign, praising the encouragement to explore your surroundings and figure things out along the way. This game is an exercise in great design: instead of explicitly telling the player where to go, it’s all designed such that it’s intuitive and the player can figure things out. Half Life contrasts with the games I’ve played and enjoyed that keep a lot of facts and provide hints or assets to make navigation or problem-solving a little easier (and that’s not bad either, it’s just interesting to see a game pull it off without them).
Half-Life did yield some frustrating moments, and I had to bail to Google a few times. I’m also pretty thankful that I can manually save in the middle of the final boss. Good grief, that one was pretty damn hard…
NASCAR Racing 2003 Season
NASCAR Racing 2003, or NR2003, is a racing simulation game developed by Papyrus for the PC.
It offers a realistic simulation of driving a NASCAR-spec car across all the tracks that hosted a race in 2003.
What makes NR a very popular game is the strong modding community that has created…
- cars across motorsport disciplines with thousands of real and fictional liveries
- tracks ranging from rural short ovals, institutions of motorsport like Monza, and wacky fictional tracks limited only by imagination and technology
- tools to help bolster the experience, such as manually throwing cautions or tracking scoring
This year, I started a driver career mode as NR2003 did not have it built in. I started my career in 1995 from the third-highest step of stock car racing, the SuperTruck series. The season was pretty good with strong runs and a few wins, and I excitedly hopped over to 1996 after playing Half-Life. But… I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the driving, and I switched over to a different game (more on that later).
The driving, cars, and tracks were great, don’t get me wrong. But the absence of a career mode and the player’s car not mattering (meaning that if you set a car’s pace to 0 and then to 100, you will feel no difference) led to a lack of progress and made things a bit tedious. You can’t upgrade your car or get hired for a better ride like in NASCAR Thunder or NASCAR Heat 5, which do offer full-fledged career modes.
So while I may switch over to them for a campaign, I don’t plan to leave NR2003 in the dust. I can still race a lot of places with a lot of cars, and maybe there is some way of creating a career mode of a different kind… But I’ll leave that for later.
I’ll probably cut the career page on this website shortly, too.
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Arkham Asylum was released by Rocksteady Studios in 2009 and remastered for PS4 (the platform I played this on) in 2016.
In the game, the Joker has escaped containment and has taken over Arkham Island (housing the asylum) with Harley Quinn and his recently transferred henchmen.
Batman, the world’s greatest detective, has to protect the asylum staff and put a stop to the madness by looking for clues, beating the crap out of henchmen, and upgrading his equipment.
I really did enjoy this game to the point where I was a bit dismayed when it ended, thinking “that’s it?”. The combat was satisfying to get right, be it performing a stealth takedown or launching an enemy multiple feet in the air. The minor bosses (Scarecrow, Killer Croc, and Bane, for example) yielded unique fights that kept the game fresh. The Scarecrow levels were my favourite because of how dark and sudden they were, especially the level starting off as a screen glitch! It was very clever, and I initially thought my game had issues! The atmosphere and environment were dark and gritty… which is very appropriate for a Batman game.
There is one pet peeve I have… There is no manual save option! I had to wait for an autosave to be triggered in order to leave without losing any progress. It’s a strange omission, but it doesn’t deduct enough from the positives to be significant.
2025 was a good year in terms of gaming for me. You may notice that none of these games actually came from 2025, and it’s mostly due to hardware limitations. My newest platforms are a Dell laptop from 2020 and a Switch from 2019, rendering any new exclusives as either too taxing on my PC or just not available on any platform I own. I did see that the Steam Machine is being released early next year as an entry-level prebuilt for casual gamers. As someone who is spooked by building a PC, it is quite attractive to me. I’m not someone who needs 4K or 120fps, I can have plenty of enjoyment with a machine of such specs. Although I do hope the recent surge of RAM prices doesn’t make the price too painful…
But until then, there are what? Thousands of games on Steam that could run on my laptop, and many, many games on both the PS4 and Switch out there I can snag. Video games are abundant and plentiful, each offering its own sort of fun. And with the Steam Winter Sale going on right now, I’d be a fool not to take advantage of it.
May you, yes you, have a Happy New Year!