GAMES BEATEN IN 2025

We're back again for another year of this! And this time it's NOT even five months late! Wow! So yeah, last year I started a lot of different games and finished very few of them, so I did not actually write about the majority of what I played. This year I'd like to actually finish playing those, ideally? Pretty please? AND I have money now, so I can actually buy new games again. Anyway, instead of any of those, this year we're starting off with...

If you are familiar with the scene of weird, offbeat video games, there's a solid chance you've heard of an outstandingly strange little game for the PS1 called LSD: Dream Emulator. (No relation to the drug, though the assumption is understandable given its aesthetics; the game's title reportedly stands for "Link Speed Dream".) LSD was in many ways a sort of predecessor to RPGMaker darling Yume Nikki, with both sharing the central gameplay concept of wandering aimlessly through surreal dream-worlds and being transported to new locations by touching points of interest, exploring until something forces you to wake up. It was only released in Japan and eventually found a cult following in the west as it was discovered by niche internet gaming circles, where the lack of easily available English-language information around it made it the basis of a variety of rumors about its production. The truth is that it is perhaps the best-known work of artist and musician Osamu Sato, who in fact made several games throughout the 90s, a few of which spent a considerable amount of time as lost media.

His first video game release, Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou (released as simply Tong-Nou in Japan), was also the only one to ever receive an official English release and lands at a rather distant second in terms of fame. The premise follows thusly: our protagonist Rin has their soul stolen by the living island of Tong-Nou, and so goes to get a temporary replacement soul from an old man at a shrine and then heads off to the island in order to retrieve their real soul. Unfortunately for Rin, they meet an abrupt and untimely demise as they explore, and the conceit reveals itself: Rin must reincarnate as eight different creatures and fulfil each one's purpose in life to claim their nameplates and unlock the path up the central mountain, where their stolen soul lies. This game was met with mixed reception on its release because, as one might guess from the precedent set by Sato's other work, it is incredibly weird in a way that some random game reviewer of the era might find kind of creepy and offputting. This is because they weren't cool enough to get it. It took general gaming culture far too long to be able to appreciate this type of game.

Tong-Nou is a point-and-click adventure game that just sort of drops you into the titular island (which, for the record, is depicted as a floating green head portrayed by Sato himself) and lets you have at it, and only actually starts giving you objectives once you've wandered around enough to stumble across some way to die. Once Rin has died, you're given a choice of facial features you must take to determine your next life, told what your mission is, and left to figure out how to get where you need to be. (For half of them, at least; the other half are functionally small vignettes where you just wait around for something to come along and kill you. Most of the time this is one of the other player characters.) Its structure is very open-ended, most things can be done in any order, and the vast majority of exploration progress is simply knowledge-gated. While a lot of the things you can encounter are in some way meaningful, the way it's all presented with little context very much gives this game a chaotic feeling where things just sort of happen with no rhyme or reason.

Honestly, despite the fact that this game is not presented as a dream the way LSD is, it still absolutely feels like one. The obvious point of interest is the character designs: all constructed out of abstract shapes in the rudimentary 3D of 1994, with their most detailed features consistently being their eyes and lips, and animated with a frenetic and jittery speed that often makes their designs difficult to fully parse. Things will occasionally just zoom by in-frame too fast for you to even tell what they are. The logic needed for puzzles is thankfully fairly straightforward when it's not just "guess and get lucky", but is pretty abstract everywhere else, most of all in the worldbuilding. ...On the subject of the guess and get lucky puzzles though, one of them is tied to the only true Game Over in the game, and it's such a unique idea for a failstate that I didn't even care that it lost me like an hour of progress. It's the kind of bad ending you only get when a game isn't afraid to eschew the rules of game design for the sake of art and I love it. It has you achieve immortality and softlocks you on purpose in a screen that just vomits random assets and screenshots and lines of text at you over and over as you experience the totality of existence forever. Apparently this was originally meant to be a screensaver? It's genuinely so cool.

This game's old enough that it has to be emulated through DOSbox nowadays, but luckily the Osamu Sato fan wiki has a download link with everything already set up for you (the first on this list), and it's also compiled with the fan translation of its sequel Chu-Teng (which you can also expect to see here at some point) and the formerly-lost Rolypolys no Nanakorobi Yaoki. I highly recommend giving it a shot if you care at all about video games as artistic expression. I've barely scratched the surface here, but this game was really before its time in terms of not being afraid to just be unabashedly itself, and it'd be right at home among the scores of "weird indies" that have the opportunity to shine now. We should all play weirder games. It's good for the soul.

Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show...

Once upon a time there was a humble little business software developer that decided to make a video game. And it did fairly well for them! So they decided to pivot to making video games full-time, all the way up to 2009 when they released a sort of spiritual successor to the franchise they started with that first one way back when and accidentally invented an entire subgenre of action game in the process. You maybe have heard of that one? Or possibly the trilogy they followed it up with? I dunno, they're pretty obscure.

I am, of course, talking about FromSoftware of Dark Souls fame. The Souls games have been in my peripherals for ages now, given that I'm longtime friends with a massive Soulsborne lorehead and have therefore passively absorbed a ton of info about them over the years, but I've been woefully negligent in actually playing any of them myself. I played a bit of the kind of mediocre Switch port of Dark Souls Remastered and I've like, booted up Elden Ring long enough to make a character and then spent like twenty minutes running around? But that's about it. I know a lot about how fantastic the creature designs are and a good deal about the mechanics and kind of half-remember the important names from the lore.

But we're not here to talk about those. The allure of janky old dungeon crawlers you need physical notes for calls to me always, and there's not one more archetypical of the description than that very first game FromSoft ever made: good old King's Field for the PlayStation. The original! (Not the game that released in North America under the name King's Field; that's actually King's Field II.) It was never released outside of Japan, but there's a well-circulated fanmade translation patch that's been around for quite some time. I'd had this thing sitting unplayed in my downloads for months when I saw someone mention it offhand in a random stream chat and decided that was as good a sign as any to finally give it a go.

A lot of the most interesting parts of playing this game come in the form of looking out for what would eventually become FromSoft's design hallmarks, which is immediately present in the indirect storytelling format; after an opening scroll giving you a little bit of cryptic backstory context, the rest of the plot is conveyed largely through scattered scraps of dialogue from the handful of NPCs that are down here with you and you're just left to put together what's actually going on yourself. I imagine a lot of this is covered in a manual I did not have access to, as was standard practice at the time. Regardless, the plot we can sort of piece together is that we are a guy named John Forrester (spelling varies depending on the translation) and we're here to look for our dad, who led a squadron into the catacombs in this dungeon that was formerly a monument to a legendary hero now known only as the Dragon. It turns out the resurgence of monsters in here is the work of an evil magician in cahoots with the king, who's gone power-hungry and needs to be stopped. Half of the guys who are important to this story have very similar names and it makes the fine details a little hard to keep track of.

Regardless, we don't need to know any of that to get to the important thing: we got a dungeon to crawl. And honestly, despite how old this game is, I'm kind of surprised by how intuitive all of the level design feels. Each of the game's five floors is fully open for you to explore in whichever way you like outside of a handful of keys and equipment that grants new passive abilities—sort of a pseudo-metroidvania progression—and things are arranged in such a way that you're pretty much guaranteed to find everything you need as long as you're thorough with the space available to you and take note of what you're told, on top of tons of bonus goodies to reward you for being extra observant and brave. The most "dated" element is the considerable number of fake walls, but the game doesn't expect you to be psychic to recognize them; there's an item that temporarily reveals them, always a (perhaps unintentional) visible seam at the top along with enemies regularly placed nearby that will phase through and break the illusion, and there's only one instance where any of them hide something that is part of the golden path's "intended" progression. (Which is still not strictly required, mind. I missed it the first time and only found it later after my emulator lost my save data for some reason.) Enemy strength provides a sort of guideline to the intended progression through the map, but you are limited only by your own skill. Each floor feels impressively vast in its own right, but is ultimately a very manageable size that plays well with the openness to prevent you from losing focus on where to go next. It feels very before its time for its genre, and it's super impressive how well it's executed even this early on.

The combat is not exactly the High Octane Action Gameplay that FromSoft is now famous for, but you can see the seeds of the mechanics they continue to incorporate to this day, namely the use of a stamina bar that depletes with every attack and introduces a timing element as you wait for it to refill. For the most part, it's a matter of keeping out of reach while you wait for an opening to land a hit your opponent, with your options being a standard melee strike and a ranged magical spell. In the early floors you'll be fine simply backing away from your opponent between hits, but as enemies get access to ranged attacks of their own you'll be forced to adapt and make full use of the maneuverability that your ability to strafe affords you. Even from humble beginnings, your survival depends on Schmovement. Facing multiple enemies at once can easily overwhelm you and adds a healthy tension to a given encounter. Your melee weapons have three different damage types that you're encouraged to switch around on the fly in order to find enemies' weaknesses, and Strength and Magic are counted as separate stats that increase independently of your overall level based on whichever one you use more often; you have a character class shown in the menu that adapts to your chosen specialization in real time.

Your walking speed is a little slow but honestly totally passable despite what most reviews would have you believe, which is a technique used to mask the fact that the game is streaming data from the disc in order to cut down on the PS1's infamous need for frequent loading screens. And this honestly does wonders for the game's atmosphere, which—even with the graphics themselves once again exemplifying The Rudimentary 3D of 1994—is strikingly moody and pulls you in effortlessly. Despite it looking the way it does, the aesthetic direction, smart design, and the lack of pacebreaking pauses while you wait for the game to load the next room makes it super easy to get immersed in the world and forget you're playing a video game. There's definitely a sort of magic here that makes it obvious FromSoft's had a very talented team going for them from the very start.

I decided this game is awesome shortly after beginning to play it and actually beating it has only reinforced this in my brain. King's Field is really fun and I like it a whole awful lot. I kinda wanna play the whole rest of the series now and eventually work my way up to Demon's Souls to watch the emergence of FromSoft's design signatures happen in real-time. I think that'd be neat.