An End of the Year Sprint: Video Games

12/29/2025

I have this habit where near the end of the year, I look back at all the books I've read, all the music I've listened to, all the games I've played, and freak out about how I barely finished anything. Usually this leads to a frantic sprint where I consume and finish as many books, games, and albums as I can before the end of the year. This is at least partly influenced by all the end of the year "Wrapped" recaps that every single company has decided to copy. Even discord has a Wrapped recap. Discord does not need a fucking Wrapped recap. The person who I messaged the most on discord was my girlfriend though, so at least that was kinda cute.

Anyway, the point is that I've been playing games, and mostly finishing them. I have thoughts about these games, but none of my friends are particularly interested in listening to me talk about random indie games, so I will write them down on my very own personal website. These aren't reviews, so I wouldn't use them to determine if a game is worth buying. I might fixate on a specific feature that I really like or dislike and neglect to mention everything else. But these are my thoughts on these games.

I think the first game I want to talk about is Nier: Automata.

I played this game around September/October. I usually only play one story-based singleplayer game at a time, and for about a month this was that for me. I really enjoyed my time with this game. With certain games, you can really feel the director's influence and this is one of those games. Yoko Taro loves existenialism, fantasy/sci-fi, and attractive women. I also happen to love all of those things so this game was honestly a great match for me. I love how the game explores different gameplay styles through forced camera angles, and even explores different genres (like the standard action combat switching into a twin-stick shooter). I will say, I didn't think the story was as good as it's been hyped up to be until maybe the last 5 hours or so I spent with the game. Without spoiling anything, I didn't feel that the story was overly engaging, but I was interested in seeing how it unraveled and played out. The game drip feeds you context as to what's going on, and it really picks up once you beat the first ending, which may take around 10 hours. Again without spoiling anything, the last ending you can get in the game has been on my mind since I played this game in September/October. I think it's incredible for a game to do something like that and shows that this is a product of a auteur and passionate game developer, not something meant to keep player retention or any other industry bullshit. I played this game for about 40 hours.

Second, I want to talk about an indie game called Dungeons of Hinterberg.

Dungeons of Hinterberg was a game I'd never heard about before I got it in a Humble Monthly Choice Bundle, in June of this year. Tbh, most of what I play in a year are just the games that I get from the Humble Monthly thing, with exceptions for big and hyped releases. If I keep doing these, that will be very easy to see. I was pleasantly surprised with this game. I will try not to describe games by comparing them to other games, but I will make an exception for this one. This game feels like a mixture of Persona and the Legend of Zelda, especially the newer BOTW and TOTK games. It has a similar relationship system to Persona, where you spend time with NPCs in the game and develop your relationship with them to get a variety of buffs or items. It is also similar to Persona in that there is a time system, and how you spend your days in Hinterberg is up to you. You can do a dungeon a day, or you can not do any dungeons for weeks at a time and just spend your time talking to people and increasing your stats. Your character came to Hinterberg to get away from her life as a lawyer, and she finds that she is uniquely talented with the magic that the town is known for. There are several areas in the game, each with a handful of dungeons, and each area has its own set of magical powers. Some of these powers are very reminiscent of the abilities you get in BOTW. Similarly to BOTW, you use your powers both for combat and solving puzzles in the dungeons. I think there's like 25 dungeons, and some of them are definitely better than others, but most of them are pretty good at least. I enjoyed the story, especially when it focused on how a town can be affected by tourism and how the locals are affected too. I think by the end, I was a little excited to be finished with the game, but overall I enjoyed it and someone taking their time with it might enjoy it even more. I spent around 20 hours playing this game.

Third, I want to talk about Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, a very cute and fun collect-a-thon platformer.

Yellow Taxi is very interesting simply for the fact that there is no jump button in the game. In the game, you play as a taxi collecting gears for one reason or another that I can't remember. There's a character called Mario, who looks like the Mario we all know after a couple of beers and years, and he may or may not need them. As the Taxi, you can boost and special boost (if you press the gas like a sec or two after you start to boost). You can also cancel the boost, which will flip you up in the air backwards. Effectively, cancelling the boost is your jump button. You jump backwards, and you have to do a quick little 3-button manuever everytime you want to jump, but it is possible. I really love the design of the levels in this game. It's a bright and colorful game, and it reminded me of something that I would have played as a child on the PS2. In some levels, you can ride around at your own pace, explore, and look for the gears, but other levels have a timer. I don't really enjoy the levels with a timer as much, but I can see how the timer makes it more challenging and could encourage faster play. I feel like Yellow Taxi did a great job of encouraging creativity in the gameplay. I definitely collected some of the gears in a unconventional way (you can boost off basically anything that is remotely slanted and get some serious air) and I think that you could do that for most of the gears. I did not collect every gear or even play every level available, but I saw most of it and beat the story, so I consider this one done as well. I spent around 7 hours playing this game.

There are still three games I want to talk about, but I don't want to make this post any longer than it already is, so I will write about those in the next post.