Burning the midnight oil at noon

Top 25 of ’25: Bloodbark

For 2025, rather than doing a Top 10 Video Games article, I’ve decided to do something different and do a countdown list of the games I liked most of all the games that I played throughout the year. That incudes all games I played, regardless of release year, if I’d played them before, etc, etc. No rules!

So, of the 99 games I’ve played from January until the time of me writing this, I’ve narrowed it down to a list of 25. The first of those being Bloodbark.

Release year: 2025
Developer: SirTartarus
Platform: PC

A short experience that will take maybe half an hour to beat if you goof around, Bloodbark is an indie horror game where you play as a lumberjack. Your goal is to look for special trees that bleed when chopped, which, if I’m remembering the lore correctly, are very rare and worth a ton of money. So your dude wants to collect a bunch of this lumber, sell it, and retire early.

Of course, it’s not that simple. As you stay in the forest longer, and as you cut down more bloodbark trees, you begin to have hallucinations. And they only get more vivid and disturbing as the game goes on. Eventually you start to question reality, and if the trees that you’re cutting down are really even trees at all…

That vagueness is part of what made this game really stick in my mind. I thought about it for weeks after I finished playing it, just muddling over the details and trying to figure out what exactly was going on and what the meaning of it all was. I think, in the end, it’s perhaps supposed to be about respecting nature, but I really can’t be sure. There are also two fairly different paths through the game, with one ending that is significantly more ambiguous than the other.

While Bloodbark is effectively a walking simulator, it does reward exploration by containing a metric buttload of little secrets and easter eggs. There are also a number of in-game achievements, and even a series of collectibles that you might not even notice if you aren’t looking for them. I had a great time playing it, and I look back on it quite fondly. Hence, I give it the coveted first spot in my Top 25 of ’25.

Month End Video Game Wrap-Up: November 2025

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Pokémon Legends: Z-A (Switch2) – While it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Legends: Arceus, it was clearly going in a very different direction from the start. Not outstanding, but I had a lot of fun playing it! And will keep playing through the postgame and DLC expansion.

Ramona (PC) – What I’ve been calling an “escape house” game, this is the most recent Doesn’t Matter Games release, and it doesn’t disappoint. A creepy house full of puzzles and jumpscares? Sign me up!

Kromaia (PC) – A neat 3D space-shooter game that’s as dizzying as it is impossible to see what’s going on. While I could see myself playing it through in leaner times, there are so many other games I’d rather spend my time on. So I beat the first level and then tossed it on the “not really feeling it” pile.

Too crunchy for the popper

Another one was bound to happen eventually.

Let me tell you about balls

I’ve recently become more than a little enamored of an independent video game called BALL x PIT. To be quite honest with you, I’m not entirely sure how one is supposed to pronounce that title, but I’ve just been saying “ball pit” in my head. What I am sure of is that I won’t be capitalizing the whole thing every time I type it out. That’s just obnoxious.

Ball x Pit is, largely, a brick-breaker game. You’ve probably played one before. Arkanoid, Kirby’s Block Ball, Wizorb, uh… others. If these don’t ring a bell, the gameplay consists of shooting a little ball up a shaft, where it will bounce around a bunch, and if it hits one of the bricks in said shaft, the brick goes away. The goal is generally to clear all the bricks without letting your ball fall off the bottom of the screen. Ball x Pit works a bit differently, as waves of brick-shaped monsters will constantly spawn and slowly move towards the bottom of the screen. If they reach the bottom, they will attack your character, and if you lose all your HP it’s game over.

However! You have not one, but a small arsenal of balls to fire at the encroaching enemy, giving you a much better chance at success. And not unlike Vampire Survivors (and the many clones that followed it), enemies will drop crystals when they perish, and collecting enough crystals will net you a level up. This gives you a (random) stat increase, as well as a choice from three upgrade items. Upgrades come in two flavours: new balls with special effects, and passive items that confer all sorts of advantages. Sometimes one of the options will be a thing you have, in which case you’ll be able to upgrade it to further boost its effectiveness.

Month End Video Game Wrap-Up: October 2025

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The Trees Holding Heaven (PC) – A teeny-tiny “horror” game, which is mostly just a parable about not disposing of science water in the forest. It did legitimately cause me to scream, so that’s a thing.

Ramona – Play With Me demo (PC) – You ought to know how I feel about Doesn’t Matter Games by now. This is the demo for an upcoming title. It’s… exactly what you’d expect if you’re familiar with the developer. I liked it!

The Moth Inside Me (PC) – A horror game made for the “2024 LSD Game Jam”, which should tell you all you need to know. Great atmosphere, and some parts definitely resonated with me. While I think it was often a little too hard to figure out what to do next, I did enjoy it overall.

‘Ween Movies 2025 – Volume 2

A great surprise to everyone -mostly myself,- I’m back with another couple of vaguely seasonally-appropriate movies to talk about! And when I say “vaguely” I really mean it. I really ought to just throw on a Friday the 13th at some point just to get a little of the Halloween spirit going in my place.

The Endless

While Tubi lists The Endless as Sci-Fi/Horror/Mystery/Thriller, I would at least re-order those so that they go Mystery/Sci-Fi/Thriller/Horror, which is the most appropriate order. At most, I’d probably just pluck Horror out of there altogether. Yes, there is a certain cosmic horror element to the movie, but it’s really not the focus in any capacity.

This film follows two brothers, Justin and Aaron, who are living a bit of a rough life ten years after having escaped from a “UFO death cult.” Justin, the elder brother, feels like it’s his responsibility to take care of the both of them (despite them being at least in their mid-twenties), while Aaron longs to return to the cushy life that the cult had provided them. When he receives a random cassette tape from the cult announcing that they’re about to “ascend”, it spurs them to make a return visit to say their goodbyes, and maybe to show Aaron that it’s not as wonderful as he remembers it being.

Once they arrive, things do seem fairly peaceful, and the cult welcomes the brothers back with open arms, despite Justin having told many nasty tales to the media about what goes on there. The cult members all have their own eccentricities, but they’re happy, living simple lives where they’re free to pursue their passions and ignore the troubles of the modern world. Aaron is immediately enamored, but Justin remains skeptical, feeling that things are just a little too peaceful, and that there’s something rather important that the cult is keeping from them.

‘Ween Movies 2025 – Volume 1

It’s that time again. Halloween is coming and as a fan of horreur, I have to up my movie-watching game. Well, I suppose I don’t have to. But it’s basically all I do for the season any more so… I don’t really know where I was going with this thought. Let’s just do the thing.

V/H/S/94

This is an anthology film, for all the good and bad that entails. In addition to the four short films that are featured in it, the framing device also has its own story. It’s about a SWAT team that busts into a warehouse to… I don’t really know what they were up to, but they find a bunch of corpses and mannequins and screens that lead into the other segments. This was by far the weakest part of the film, and honestly I would have been happier if there had just been a Crypt Keeper-style host that introduced each segment. Points for having each of the short films tie into the framing device, but it was still lame and had the worst actors by a country mile.

This first short follows a news reporter and her cameraman as they investigate a local legend of a sewer-dwelling creature known as the Ratman. It starts off with your average interviews of random townsfolk, but then the big boss demands that they actually go into the sewer to get the real story. Our heroes reluctantly comply, entering a storm drain where they find a dirty old homeless man. He creeps them the heck out, and as they run away, they’re knocked unconscious and, well, things take a bit of a turn from there. I can’t say I saw what happened next coming, and it’s definitely a much better ending to the story than if they’d just found a monster and got mauled by it. While this was the most surprising story in the anthology, I wasn’t totally sold. The whole climax was shaky-cammed to Hell and while I know that often the scariest things are what you don’t see, the obfuscation was very clearly there because they didn’t have any money to actually put the action on screen.

It Begins Again

Friends, Romans, countrymen – Spooktober is here! Well, it got here yesterday but I can’t embed videos until they’re live, so I had to do this post today, and, yeah…

Anyway, with the month of October comes a full slate of horror (or at least horror-adjacent) let’s plays over on TE Video. I mean, nobody’s going to watch any of it, but I’m excited! And that’s all that counts.

It all kicks off today, with an older game from TurnVex called Within Skerry. I’ve played most of TurnVex’s games, and they’re generally decent. Unfortunately, this one includes a mechanic that requires you to take dozens of photos of split-second events to unlock the best(?) ending, so I didn’t get that one.

https://youtu.be/FuFew3OUh-4

I’m not going to type out everything that’s scheduled to go up during the month because I’m kind of over doing that, but rest assured that there are plenty of thrills, chills, and spills to come over the course of the month!

Month End Video Game Wrap-Up: September 2025

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The Lancaster Leak (PC) – This is actually a trilogy of 20-30 minute games. An anthology that tells three different stories, each in a different style, and with an overarching plot thread that connects them all. Looking forward to more!

Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star-Crossed World (Switch2) – I’ve been wanting to replay this game ever since I finished it, and the new DLC was more than enough reason to do so. Still the best Kirby game, and now there’s even more of it.

Replay (PC) – A 7-minute-long indie horror where you play as a person playing a haunted video game. Gave off FNAF vibes despite not being anything like FNAF, and left me wanting more.

Let’s Talk Dragon Quest Heroes

Ten years ago, Square-Enix and Omega Force released a video game called Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below. It is a “musou” game, which means that it’s a generally mindless hack-and-slash game where you mostly just tear through thousands of hapless goons. It’s also a spin-off of the Dragon Quest series, but I think that part’s a little more obvious.

Nintendo did a similar thing with the Legend of Zelda the year before, Hyrule Warriors, which is a game that I played obsessively. Twice. I didn’t end up playing Dragon Quest Heroes, though, since I was poor at the time and had to be more selective about my video game purchases. But it has stuck in the back of my mind all these years. Ironically, now I have enough money to buy all the games I want, but there isn’t nearly enough time to play them all. The grass is always greener.

All that to say that I finally bought and started playing DQ Heroes the other day.