Gaming Notes

My Steam Replay dropped last week, which I suppose means that it’s time for one last Gaming Notes post for 2025. I always say that I don’t consider myself a gamer, but then these summaries come out and it turns out that on all metrics—number of games played, number of play sessions, number of achievements logged—I am well to the right of the bell curve. I suppose one reason for that is that I tend to play short games, and I tend to play them very comprehensively—I don’t have full achievements on all the games I played this year, but I’m at 80-90% on most of them. And yet, I still don’t consider myself much of a gamer, because as usual, the games I play are hardly ever the games that everyone talks about (sorry, Expedition 33 fans; it really doesn’t look like something I’d be able to play). This year in particular I seem to have concentrated my interests in either short, conceptually bold puzzle games, or games about spooky stuff happening in a house, with a side business in more casual gaming for when you want to kill some time solving a puzzle that has no narrative significance. Below are some reviews of games that fall in all of those groups.

Before we get started, a couple of quick comments about some games that don’t quite warrant a full review. Strange Antiquities (Bad Viking, 2025) is the sequel to Strange Horticulture (2022), which I reviewed here several years ago. The previous game had the player identify magical plants while an occult conspiracy played out in the background. The new one does the same thing, but with magical artifacts. If you enjoyed the previous game (which I largely did) you’ll probably enjoy the sequel. What Happened to the Crew? (2025) is a free-to-play web game inspired by the masterful Type Help (2025). As in that game, the player must deduce the movements of a group of characters to unlock information about what happened to them. The mechanic remains absolutely gripping, though the story in this later game is less impressive. Finally, Proverbs (Divide the Plunder, 2024) is a good game for those of us who miss wasting time with Minesweeper. A gigantic board has been divided into segments, each of which need to be solved with the familiar Minesweeper mechanic. Solve the whole board, and see Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Netherlandish Proverbs” appear, though really the reward here is a mild brain teaser with which to while away the occasional half hour.

Blue Prince (2025)

In my last games roundup I broke my habit of only writing about games once I’d finished them to jot down some initial impressions of this game, one of the most heralded releases of 2025. I promised to have more to say once I finished, and though I can’t quite say that I’ve done that—more on that in a minute—I have reached a stopping point that allows me to say: Blue Prince is, at one and the same time, one of the best and one of the worst gaming experiences I’ve ever had.

To recap my previous thoughts: in Blue Prince you play fourteen-year-old Simon, the heir to a grand estate. To secure your inheritance, you have to find “the forty-sixth room in a forty-five room house”. Achieving this goal requires making your way across a manor whose rooms have different attributes that affect you and the rest of the house. The twist is that the house is procedurally generated. Every time you open a door, you’re offered three different potential rooms to “draft”. Whichever one you choose will contain different resources and determine your available options going forward. At the end of each day, both the house, and your inventory, reset. This means that there’s an element of randomness to the game that is both frustrating and invigorating. Most of its puzzles require several different things to go right on a single game day—in one puzzle, you need to draft a power source, and connect it to a pump room, which only becomes available after you’ve drafted a swimming pool. What nevertheless makes the game compelling is the sheer breadth and complexity of the house. There’s always something new to discover and unlock, so you never find yourself, as is common in other “puzzles in a house” games, banging your head against a single problem. And the more you explore, the more you discover ways to tweak the game’s parameters: to raise or lower the frequency with which certain rooms are offered to you, or unlock permanent changes to the house and its grounds that make moving through it, and towards room 46, much easier.

That breadth and complexity extend to the world that is revealed as you explore the house. Developer Tonda Ros has done an astonishing job of crafting an entire alternate world, complete with history, literature, folklore, and religion, that reveals itself in the objects and documents you find in the house: in the stained glass windows that decorate a chapel, the illumination on a world map, and even on postage stamps. A story eventually emerges from these fragments, of a deposed ruling dynasty whose loyalists, despite suffering from government suppression, remain fervent in their desire to restore it. It’s in the process of uncovering this story, however, that my first major problem with Blue Prince emerges. It was never clear to me how I was supposed to feel about what I learned, or whether it was even meant to evoke any emotions or investment at all. If you play the game long enough, for example, you’ll learn that Simon’s mother, who disappeared several years ago, is alive and on the run after having participated in audacious strike against the current regime. In a game whose story was actually important, this would change the player character’s goals in a noticeable way. In Blue Prince, it is simply another puzzle piece to lay on the board. At other times, I started feeling pretty uncomfortable about a bequest whose real purpose, it seemed, was to radicalize a child into taking up a century-old, most-likely-doomed dynastic struggle. But if this is a reaction I was meant to have, the game gives no indication of it. Eventually it started to feel as if the house’s worldbuilding details were merely a garnish on the actual meat of the game, the process of getting to the next room, unlocking the next ability, and solving the next puzzle.

All of which inevitably raises the question: what is this all for? If you’ve read anything about Blue Prince, you’ve probably encountered the claim that “the game doesn’t properly begin until after you reach room 46”. I think this is both true and not true. There are many additional puzzles that can only be solved after room 46 is unlocked, but though they are mostly harder and more involved than that puzzle, they aren’t fundamentally different from it. Finding the eight sanctum keys is not meaningfully different from reaching room 46, just more complicated. What you get after achieving the official Blue Prince win condition is, it turns out, more Blue Prince. And at no point is there a sense of the meaning and purpose of all this exploration; on the contrary, the fact that Simon continues to abide by the rules of the bequest even after achieving its terms—despite, as noted, now knowing that his mother is alive—requires the player to ignore the emotional implications of much of what they’ve discovered. I got pretty far into the post-room-46 part of the game, but at some point I looked around, read a bit online about the puzzles still remaining, and realized that I simply wasn’t willing to expend the time and effort to complete them, just for the sake of ticking another box. I don’t think I can sum up my conflicted reaction to Blue Prince better than to say this: I played it obsessively for a month, and spent whole days thinking of nothing but how to maximize the next run; and then I stopped, and in the time since, I don’t think I’ve thought about the game, or its world, or its characters, even once.

The Séance of Blake Manor (2025)

After the all-consuming but ultimately unsatisfying experience of playing Blue Prince, I decided to try a more conventional “puzzles in a house” game. The Séance of Blake Manor, from Irish developer Spooky Doorway, fit the bill perfectly. In 1897, detective Declan Ward is summoned to the titular manor, a hotel situated in a remote location on the Western coast of Ireland, to investigate the disappearance of a guest, Evelyn Deane. The manor is full of guests and staff preparing for the titular séance, and as Ward pursues his case he finds himself drawn into their stories, which often have connections to Evelyn’s disappearance, and eventually reveal both the purpose of the séance, and the danger it poses to everyone in the manor.

It’s a fairly conventional premise, and as a mystery-slash-puzzle game, The Séance of Blake Manor is solid but not terribly challenging. A robust information-gathering system allows you to accumulate documents and facts about everyone in the manor, and to divide your case into sub-mysteries that can be investigated separately from one another. When you draw enough connections in one of those sub-mysteries, a hypothesis appears, which allows Ward to take action that influences the next part of the story. There is, however, one unique twist here. Every action Ward takes, whether it’s asking questions or interacting with an object or even attending a meal, takes time—sometimes minutes, sometimes hours. Some characters are only available for questioning, and some locations can only be visited and searched, in certain times. And with every tick of the clock, the hour of the séance—and thus the end of the game—draw closer.

It’s a mechanic that forecloses some of the more common approaches to games of this type. The one thing you should not do in The Séance of Blake Manor is exhaust any character’s dialogue tree; with 25 interactable characters, just asking each one of them about each of the others will eat up ten hours. Instead, you have to think about which question will most efficiently advance your investigations, and treat the game almost like a resource management puzzle. Attending a talk in the drawing room eats up half an hour of your day; but if you decide not to go, the room, and everyone in it, remain unavailable to you for a whole hour. Searching each character’s room is essential to gathering enough information about them to solve their mystery; but you also need to keep an eye out for their location, ensuring that they don’t become unavailable just when you’re ready to confront them with your findings. It is possible to complete both the main mystery, and all of the character-specific side puzzles, in The Séance of Blake Manor with hours to spare, but figuring out how to do this can be nerve-racking in the best possible way.

The story that emerges from all of these investigations is part historical drama, part folk horror. The more you interact with the guests and staff of Blake Manor, the more you’ll learn about Irish history, and the still festering wounds that continue to affect the country in the game’s present day: the English conquest, the eradication of local language and religion, the sometimes-baleful, sometimes-welcome influence of Christianity, the famine, and the colonialism that the Irish enacted, in their turn, on other nations. At the same time, Detective Ward’s investigations often take a psychedelic turn, with vivid dreams, intrusive visions, and even a drug-fueled bacchanalia, all pointing towards a supernatural component to the mystery of Evelyn Deane’s disappearance. All of this is beautifully realized in Mike Mignola-style animation, accompanied by an excellent soundtrack and voice acting. The result may not be as challenging or as mind-bending as Blue Prince, but its story and setting have lingered with me for far longer.

Is This Seat Taken? (2025)

After two games heavy with story and worldbuilding, I was overdue for something a little more puzzle-based. I found that in Is This Seat Taken?, which while nominally telling a story—about a sentient rhombus who dreams of becoming a movie star—is mainly a series of pattern-matching puzzles. In each level, the player has to fill seats in a certain location—a classroom, a restaurant, a movie theater—according to the wishes of everyone there. Some people want to sit with their friends; others want an unobstructed view; others have worn too much cologne or forgotten to shower. You can only proceed to the next level when everyone is happy, which can end up being devilishly difficult to achieve.

As a puzzle, Is This Seat Taken? is quite similar to the New York Times‘s latest offering, Pips. In that game, you have to place domino tiles on a board according to certain requirements—some areas need to have the same number in each square, while others need to sum up to a certain number. The added value in Poti Poti Studio’s game is not only the story (which, as noted, is fairly perfunctory) but the sheer variety of locations and situations that the game serves up. It’s more engaging to arrange seating in a shared workspace, or pair up couples in a speed-dating event, than to fill out a board with tiles. There are downsides to the story-based approach, of course: I was a bit offended when the game expected me to accommodate characters who want to talk in a movie theater, or listen to loud music on their phone while waiting to board an airplane. Such grumbling aside, however, Is This Seat Taken? strikes a good balance between story and puzzles, along the way delivering a challenging brain teaser.

The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow (2022)

To a gamer of a certain generation, firing up The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow might feel like peeking through a window into the past. The pixelated animation, the straight-ahead camera angle on a series of 2D locations, the look-talk-use interface, the puzzles that often revolve around using or combining the right items from your inventory, all evoke adventure games from the 80s and 90s. You play Thomasina Bateman, an amateur archeologist in late 19th century England, who has been invited to the isolated English village of Bewlay to excavate the titular barrow. Right away, obstacles start piling up in Thomasina’s path. Her contact in the village is missing; the farmer on whose land the barrow stands won’t give permission to dig; her tools and assistant go astray. It’s up to you to resolve these issues and advance Thomasina towards her goal of archeological glory.

Old school adventure games came in a variety of genres and styles, but for the most part they are a fantasy of absolute agency. The player character moves through a fairly static world, where other characters remain fixed in a specific location, with specific dialogue options, which only change when the player performs certain actions. They alone can act upon that world, even in ways that are absurd or wrongheaded. Hob’s Barrow doesn’t buck that approach, but as Thomasina pushes against the difficulties that have piled up against her, it becomes clearer (to us, if not to her) that what is working against her is not merely the convention of the game, but an intentional force. That certain individuals in the village are directing her onto their desired path, which means that the player solving a puzzle is less an accomplishment as another step towards what increasingly seems like—but which Thomasina refuses to identify as—a trap. Combined with some genuinely disturbing, higher-resolution cut scenes, the game crafts a familiar, but well executed, folk horror story about an oblivious outsider whose sense of superiority blinds them to the fact that they are merely a pawn in someone else’s game.

Things get a bit wobbly in the final act, in which Thomasina springs the trap, but the game clearly feels that the player deserves a bit more of a challenge. A series of classic adventure game puzzles almost deflates the tone of horror the game has been building up, before an unavoidable, and genuinely disturbing, feelbad ending plays out. It’s well done but nevertheless leaves you feeling more shocked than horrified. What carries the game over the finish line is its genuinely excellent voice work, in particular Samantha Béart as Thomasina, which helps to sell the tragedy of its final turn. The attempt to combine a classic adventure game with genuinely bleak horror doesn’t entirely work, but is nevertheless an impressive one.

And that’s a wrap on my gaming in 2025! Below are my top five games of the year; feel free to sound off in the comments with yours.

1. Type Help (review)
2. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (review)
3. Rise of the Golden Idol expansion packs: The Sins of New Wells, The Lemurian Phoenix, The Age of Restraint, The Curse of the Last Reaper
4. The Séance of Blake Manor
5. Blue Prince