With its excellent pixel art and slick UI, Desert Race Adventures makes a great first impression. Unfortunately, this light management strategy game runs out of gas far too quickly. With frustrating gameplay that relies too heavily on a limited set of random events and minimal variance from run to run, there’s simply not enough to justify playing beyond a few attempts.
I’m incredibly impressed by how much Katanaut has to offer, especially for a solo developer project. It’s an easy tagline to call it Dead Cells meets Dead Space, but it’s so much more than that. Katanaut is a fantastic action-roguelike that elegantly uses cosmic horror to intensify combat and amplify the emotions felt while playing. I hope it gets attention amidst a crowded September. It absolutely deserves it.
I really enjoyed my time with Off. The narrative design is excellent, with intriguing characters, a unique world, a great sense of humor, and dramatic twists that kept me on the edge of my seat. As a fan of Undertale, it’s amazing to see how much DNA it shares with Off, especially knowing Off’s original release happened six years prior. It certainly shows its age, especially with random encounters and dated RPG combat and systems, but interesting boss fights do just enough to keep the moments between story beats entertaining. It’s a unique RPG that I think all fans of the genre will find something in it to appreciate, and if you’re a fan of Toby Fox’s work, you absolutely owe it to yourself to check out such a vital piece of his inspiration.
Fretless - The Wrath of Riffson is far from perfect. The story is clichéd and one-note, and the combat lacks the necessary balance and depth to remain enjoyable, which is massively disappointing considering the core premise carries so much potential. That said, I still recommend giving [Fretless - The Wrath of Riffson] a try. The way it leverages music in its RPG and deckbuilder mechanics is so clever, and the environments are literally singing with charm. Ritual Studio’s inexperience may have been what holds this back from being a must-play title, but their dedication to creating a world bursting at the seams with the positive energy of music shines through, making Fretless - The Wrath of Riffson an enjoyable and worthwhile experience.
Dragon is Dead surprised me. It took the mechanics of Diablo and masterfully applied them to the action roguelike formula. The beautiful pixel art, excellent enemy designs, and the fun, frenetic combat make playing Dragon is Dead a blast. And the loot and buildcrafting kept me hooked, consistently drawing me in for one more run. I’m concerned about what the launch state might be, especially since bugs should have been ironed out during the Early Access period. I wouldn’t blame anyone for wanting to wait a bit to give PM Studios time to smooth things out. However, I’ve seen how they’ve responded to feedback during that time, and I trust that they will refine Dragon is Dead into a polished experience that I will continue to come back to for a long time.
Deck of Haunts has “good bones,” but it needs renovating with more content, better balance, and some polishing. It’s a clever combination of deck-building and house-construction strategy that is undoubtedly fresh and fun at first, but lacks the challenge to stay that way for long. The potential is there, and I commend Mantis for developing something creative in a genre containing far too many copycats.
Blue Prince is fantastic and my favorite game of 2025 so far. It is clever beyond words, and the depths it goes to in its puzzle designs and narrative are staggering. A rough onboarding period and bouts of slow progress due to the random nature of its gameplay keep me from hailing this as a true masterpiece, but it isn’t far off. Blue Prince is so ingenious and unique in its design, creating an enthralling experience unlike any other, and something I know I will be thinking about for a long time.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector won’t be for everyone. Its minimalistic gameplay and sheer amount of reading may be off-putting for some, but those that stick with it will be rewarded with one of the best sci-fi stories out there, video games or not. And fans of the first Citizen Sleeper can rest assured that this game delivers on everything—the tabletop-inspired gameplay, fantastic soundtrack, brilliant world-building, and, of course, best-in-class writing—that made the original so memorable. To adapt the quote I started this with: “If a game can make you laugh, think, and cry, that’s a heck of a game.” Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is certainly a heck of a game.
Hyper Light Breaker is in its infancy of Early Access. Heart Machine has plenty of time to iterate and turn this into a great game, and they’ve already acknowledged the flood of player complaints and vowed to quickly release patches. I am concerned, though, that even as performance is improved and new content is added, they might never manage to refine the gameplay loop to the point of actually being fun.
Deathless. The Hero Quest is a solid iteration on the Slay the Spire formula. It features some of the best visuals and animations in the deck-builder genre. While gameplay sticks a little too close to the games that inspired it, it does feature a few new mechanics to make it feel just original enough to be worth playing. There are so many other fantastic roguelike deck-builders out there that it’s difficult for me to outright recommend Deathless. The Hero Quest, but if you are looking for more narrative in a genre usually void of it, Deathless. The Hero Quest is a great option with enough content and incentive to keep playing and make it worth its price.
As much as I enjoyed the turn-based combat and RPG systems, they comprised too small a portion of the overall product for me to recommend VED. I do hope this game can find an audience that appreciates it for what it is; there was clearly a lot of passion put into this project. The development team Karaclan, which consists of three brothers from Lithuania, has been working on VED for twelve years.
I really enjoyed my time with The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. It’s incredibly charming, and I had so much fun experimenting with the many echoes, feeling constantly rewarded for my creative problem-solving. It’s certainly a little rough around the edges, but by borrowing some of the modern design sensibilities from Tears of the Kingdom and applying them to the series’s classic structure, Grezzo and Nintendo have created a title worthy of its mainline status that should appeal to both new and old fans of the series.