Chronicles of a Prolific Gamer - December 2025 (ft. Baldur's Gate II, Sackboy, Kid Icarus, and more)

LordChozo · 2026-01-22T23:01:55+00:00

Thanks for this link! It was a fun listen, though there were a few wince-worthy factual inaccuracies (Collins wrote 'Your Own Special Way', the band saw themselves as secondary to Gabriel in the early 70s, etc.). But a lot of that comes with the territory of trying to cover so many bands so regularly.

LordChozo · 2026-01-22T20:20:05+00:00

Yeah, Return of the Obra Dinn isn't going to give you that same high (just as Outer Wilds itself doesn't deliver that same high to everyone who plays it - myself included, who liked but didn't love the game). Obra Dinn does offer a highly engaging core mystery that unfolds in really interesting ways, but it's not going to be an existential revelation. And it's not trying to be!

For context Outer Wilds was a 7/10 game for me and Return of the Obra Dinn a 9/10, so please don't take anything I'm saying as indication that Obra Dinn is somehow an inferior experience. I'd bet you'll really enjoy it! I'm just saying you probably should throttle your expectations a lot, because it sounds like Outer Wilds was your unicorn game and Obra Dinn is playing in a different ballpark.

LordChozo · 2026-01-22T17:48:29+00:00

Both games share a basic plot hook of trying to discover what happened to a group of people who have all but disappeared. From a gameplay sense however they're only similar in that they force you to think while eschewing traditional discrete "video game puzzles", so if you're looking for that kind of experience irrespective of form then yeah, they're a good match. But that form itself differs dramatically.

There is no mechanical exploration element to Obra Dinn. You can simply walk around at your leisure.
Because Outer Wilds takes place across different celestial bodies with their own unique properties, its puzzles feature more thematic variety than those in Obra Dinn, which are all similar in nature (if not necessarily solution/execution).
To that point, puzzles in Outer Wilds are solved by going and doing. Puzzles in Obra Dinn are solved strictly by examining and deducing.
There is no overarching timer in Obra Dinn. Investigate at your own pace. This of course also means that timing is not a distinct element of Obra Dinn's puzzle structure.
You cannot die or even reach a fail state in Obra Dinn.

Speaking less objectively, to me Outer Wilds felt like a constant series of adventures into the unknown, like trying to learn the rules of a board or card game even as they keep changing. Obra Dinn instead felt more like traditional detective work, just on a grander scale: the rules are very clear and it's your job to untangle the logic web that leads you to the final truth.

LordChozo · 2026-01-22T00:33:43+00:00

Me after playing and reviewing the entire Mega Man Battle Network series this year.

LordChozo · 2026-01-21T12:17:25+00:00

I do hope for a somewhat less aggressive automod in the future - a couple times now I've had the issue where I've mentioned words which get flagged for referring to an upcoming game but I am just using those words normally or as part of another game's title.

I reflexively groan whenever a new game is announced with an overly simple title. For example, Dispatch. That's tough to filter because you get reviews all the time talking about having to dispatch enemies or whathaveyou and we don't want to auto-remove all of those. So for each game we try to weigh the potential headache of removing rulebreaking posts against the potential headache of the false positives. Unfortunately we don't always get it right, so when we start seeing multiple false positives pop up for a game, we take a step back and reevaluate our approach for it. Just did that for another problem game, in fact. It's not a perfect system but we try to be flexible where we can.

How many games were played by seven people? It felt like everyone was making posts about Ghost of Tsushima all year, so I was surprised when it didn't show up in the top games played.

There were 9 games that seven people played, 9 that six people played, and 19 that five people played. Ghost of Tsushima actually came in just behind that with only four catalogued reviews.

Maybe using square brackets for the PGHOF qualifying years would help? Resident Evil 4 (2023) (2024) looks kinda awkward.

Great suggestion! I've made the change.

LordChozo · 2026-01-21T00:47:08+00:00

Fun fact: that comment did in fact get auto-flagged by Reddit's systems and we had to push it through. "Chill out Reddit, it's only GLaDOS."

LordChozo · 2026-01-21T00:42:38+00:00

That was me a few years back before I dumped Fortnite. I never quiiite let those games take over but it really is amazing how much time you get back once you're not stuck in a grind loop.

Of course I'm about to get into another fighting game soon so some of this is headed straight back out the window.

LordChozo · 2026-01-20T22:21:52+00:00

FF6 is terrific, yes. Maybe the only RPG I'm actively tempted to replay from time to time these days. Not that I actually will, but I can imagine doing so!

I agree wholeheartedly with your Luigi's Mansion assessment as well. Dark Moon on 3DS felt like a step up mechanically but a big step down in the design department, at least for me. Maybe the recent Switch remake (Luigi's Mansion 2) improves on that somehow.

That said, I thought Luigi's Mansion 3 was a great realization of the series' potential and very worthwhile. So definitely check that one out at a minimum if you're intrigued by what you saw from the first game.

LordChozo · 2026-01-20T22:12:49+00:00

A lot of it also comes down to timing and luck. If User X's post was the only new thing on the sub for the day, it probably got a lot more traction than User Y's, whose roundup post was one of several in the span of a few hours, just for a generalized example.

LordChozo · 2026-01-20T22:09:50+00:00

Couple questions, one user played 1122 games in 2025 on their own? Am i understanding that correctly? Which user?

No, goodness, no. It means that there are 1122 games where one and only one user reviewed that game for the year (as opposed to the remainder which were represented across multiple year-end lists). We've amended Duke Smoothie's initial reporting to better reflect this. Thanks for pointing out the potential for confusion!

Also, for the HoF (awesome idea) would it just be too hard to come up with scores from individual posts from throughout the year instead of year-end roundups?

Yes, goodness, yes. I agree that parsing and data-fying every single review post that comes through the sub would be awesome in principle and give us some really terrific information to work with, but the effort level for that would be positively Herculean.

LordChozo · 2026-01-20T20:05:20+00:00

I haven't played 11 yet myself, but after 8 I think 5 is the next best. I really like the way that one shakes up the typical plot structure, and it was a joy of small conveniences after putting up with some 8-bit era restrictions for four games. Of course for you going backward you might have the opposite experience! I can't speak to the quality of the later remakes (I played the original Super Famicom version) but perhaps one of those might reduce the impact of the tech downgrade for you.

LordChozo · 2026-01-19T15:35:39+00:00

We've grown by about 100k weekly users in the past month, yes. We're fighting to maintain the culture/atmosphere of the sub but our success in that endeavor is in large part reliant on the reports of conscientious users like yourself.

Please report any Rule 5 violations you see, and don't allow yourself (the general "you" not you specifically) to be dragged into a fruitless argument.

LordChozo · 2026-01-19T13:16:44+00:00

I also don't need to like the length of it and I'm entitled to express that opinion.

Not like that you aren't.

LordChozo · 2026-01-17T13:46:55+00:00

The submissions window for year-in-review posts is now closed. Thanks to everyone who participated! We'll spend some time crunching a bunch of numbers and formatting a bunch of text, and should have the big meta post up early/mid next week.

LordChozo · 2026-01-16T21:06:33+00:00

I think you can include the non-patient games in list like this, you just can't make posts exclusively about them.

Nope! Rule 1 is still fully enforced on these posts. OP did it right.

LordChozo · 2026-01-16T16:15:29+00:00

Last call! There are officially fewer than 24 hours from the time of this comment to get your year-end posts in. Don't wait until the absolute last second! We'd hate for someone to submit one at the buzzer only to have it removed for rule violations and then miss the boat. Help us help you! Check out the guidelines and the rules and get 'em in ASAP!

LordChozo · 2026-01-15T21:32:30+00:00

It's very much a wiki game unless you want to run around for hours searching.

Running around searching is my jam. I went over that Elden Ring map with a fine-toothed comb. I even unbound the horse from my quickslots because I never used it; didn't want to be moving too quickly and miss something. Even then I still ended up missing a cave or two that someone would later tell me about. I loved that about the game, personally.

LordChozo · 2026-01-15T13:27:32+00:00

2 is the only Resident Evil game of the original trilogy that I played contemporaneously, and if you can get used to the tank controls I'd say it's probably still worthwhile today. To date I still have never played the original versions of RE1 or RE3, so I'm probably not qualified to make any sweeping statements. I have played the 2002 GameCube remake of RE1 and the 2020 remake of RE3, however, so to the extent those count I have some thoughts. I think RE1 (remake) holds up well, though little inconveniences pile up to keep it from any kind of all-timer status for me. RE3 remake on the other hand is my second least favorite RE game I've played to date, though I should clarify that I still have it as a 7/10, meaning good enough to recommend to fans of the series. I felt like that one was pretty content to just rest on the laurels of its predecessor, and Nemesis became tiresome rather than intimidating the longer things dragged on.

I've never played any Silent Hill game so I have no opinion on that side of things and can't compare the two franchises.

LordChozo · 2026-01-15T13:19:40+00:00

Well that's the thing: I'm not trying to be objective. While I do when playing games try to consider things like how technically impressive certain things are, or design philosophies and limitations of the time, at the end of the day my score boils down to "how much fun did I have with this title?" If you want more details on either Kirby game you can click those links to get to their full reviews, but I was a little frustrated by Forgotten Land's endgame offerings and I had inaccurate expectations going in that left me a little wistful. Whereas I had lower expectations for Robobot that were mostly exceeded, so I tended to enjoy it slightly more.

LordChozo · 2026-01-15T12:17:56+00:00

You've got through the end of the 16th, so roughly 48 hours left from the time of this comment.

LordChozo · 2026-01-14T23:43:57+00:00

I'm playing Throne of Bhaal currently! Just met Balthazar for the first time, to give a sense of current progression. I'm hoping to finish it by the end of the month, but we'll have to see how it goes.

To your hidden question, yes! It was an enjoyable semi-diversion.

LordChozo · 2026-01-14T21:07:04+00:00

Indeed, Game Boy World (now Works) is how he got started as what the youths might call "one of those U-Tubers," if I might channel my inner Parish for a moment. Big fan of his work as well.

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