Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! It is that time again, time to roll over into a new season, and time to record our massive two-part games of the year show. As we roll into Season 13, we have a minor revision to our lineup and two shows stacked with fifteen games each. As is our tradition, the list was divided into two parts, and the more votes a title got, the later in the show it appeared. It was a great year for gaming, but also a year where we were constantly getting distracted by the next big thing coming down the pipe. While we played a lot of games… we did not necessarily FINISH a lot of games.
Good Morning Folks! This week you are getting a bit of a bonus post, because it is extremely rare that I talk about anything on Saturdays. Generally speaking I blog Monday through Friday and then only by happenstance on Sundays because that is when I post the new episode of AggroChat. Today is a bit of a unique situation because last night we had our semi-monthly pen and paper play group. We are playing an Indie RPG system called Public Access, which is effectively an urban horror/found footage type gameplay experience. If you are a junkie for SCPs, Cryptids, or even The Secret World MMORPG then this might be a system for you. What sets it apart from the traditional D&D style “Roll-play” systems is that most of the game is storytelling. We the players paint the scenes by adding in little details, and we the players narrated both our successes and failures… which allows for some interesting situations like having “do-overs”. For example my character has an ability called “Come With Me If You Want to Live” where if I fail a roll and am in Grave harm…. I can narrate my way out of the situation and turn a failure into explaining how I narrowly escaped certain death and also saved my entire party at the same time.
Trigger Warning, I played around with the Adobe Photoshop Generative filters a bit during this post so you will see some of my homegrown AI slop as a result.
This is a session being run by “The Librarian” and I am very new to this group of people, but have seemingly blended with the group pretty quickly. Two of us are entirely new, two are regulars from other RP outings… and collectively we have created this internet age Scooby Doo Gang in the process. I am playing a burned out punk that used to be a little skater kid and now has a band… but the band never quite took off. The thing we have in common is that we all once lived in the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico and all were latchkey kids during the 80s and 90s. There is a cable access channel that no on in the town seems to remember, but we all do… and met up on a message board devoted to it. Over the summer we all agreed to meet up and investigate the town from a rental house, and as a result a Corporate Lawyer type, a Professional Athlete, a Burned Out Punk, and a Cryptid/Conspiracy Theorist all combined powers to try and solve the deep mysteries in this town.
My character shocking to no one, drives a white panel van… which has become the focus of some of the adventures so far. One of the really interesting things about this setting is that splitting the party is not a bad thing. In fact it allows for some really interesting mechanics. Last night for example we had three different scenes taking place at the same time, and while there may only be one set of characters active at a time… it does not mean that the rest of the players out out of the action. There is this phase called “setting the scene” where each player sort of “yes ands” their way through adding details to flesh out the uncanny nature of a lot of the vistas that we come across. For example we were presented with a wood lot, and were asked to explain what makes it look more evil than it might be. The detail I threw in is that the wind had blown through the lot, overturning the root system of the trees and making it both hard to move across it and at the same time giving the appearance of intestinal shapes snaking around the ground. Each player adds a little flavor to the world so we are all effectively building the lore, because in truth there are zero right or wrong answers… and the story is not written, only a set of guidelines for the person running the adventure to follow.
The Athlete and I have sort of developed this weird buddy cop movie thing that we are doing, and we have tag teamed investigating the desert scene. Essentailly there are rumors of these creatures coming at night and carrying people and livestock away, and we are trying to investigate what is happening. I narrated that I remembered this little old lady at the crossroads selling tamales out of an igloo cooler, and wanting to go out there and check out if she was still selling them. When we got out there we instead were introduced to her relative who now has a proper food truck, and introduced us to a series of clues… one of which required us to come back the next day. We also found a key to a hotel room, and in the room was an igloo cooler with a huge bag of blood marked with the Zodiac Taurus symbol on it. That is the Zodiac sign of my character the Burned out Punk. Last night… was our second campaign in this setting so we returned to visit the food truck again and were treated to a surreal wedding photo album, which unlocked additional clues about the scene. However while looking at the photo album, time passed faster than it should have… which required us to make a decision. Shelter someone for the night at the crossroads… either in a sketchy museum, the hotel room we discovered previously… or hop in the van and make a break for town.
The Athelete and I opted to make a break back for town… which created our Night Move for the evening. There are Day Moves which have relatively minor consequences… but Night Moves can end up in the permanent loss of characters. Since I had an escape card in the form of my “Come With Me If You Want To Live” ability… I decided to make the roll which was my Composure of 1 + 2D6. One of the interesting things about this system is that it is the players that determine what MIGHT happen if they fail the roll. So I talked about envisioning scenes in Vampire movies where parties are trying to get away and they swoop down on the roof of the van, trying to rip into it. “The Librarian” said that it was worse than that… they would not only attack the Van, but if I failed they would wreck it forcing us to be stranded out their with them. In my head I was preparing a way to narrate our narrow escape, preferably without losing my beloved panel van, but rolled an 8 which modified by my Composure became a 9, which was enough to get us safely back to town. However the entire time we were driving we were being chased by an ever growing flock of shadows… and just before reaching town some of them painted a Taurus symbol… aka the symbol of my character on the roof of the van in blood.
So what is really interesting about the whole concept of solving these mysteries… is that you collect clues and the clues serve as bonuses to your rolls. However there is no fixed mystery to solve, no correct answer that you have to arrive at. Instead the players decided that 1) they are going to attempt to solve a mystery and then 2) the Guide leaves the room and the players brainstorm a story that could match all of the clues that they have gotten, each clue again giving you a slightly better chance at making the roll. The brainstorming session was great, and the story that we arrived at was that the Food Truck owners family was part of a cult, but we were not sure if they were willing participants or being mind controlled by something darker. The Deep Lake Devils, aka the shadows that were following us are the harbingers of something worse, and the cult collects the blood of each zodiac sign as part of a sacrifice designed to close certain locks or enchantments and keep something far worse from coming into our world. The scene at the hotel room was us interrupting one of those murders and we ended up getting the bag of blood… which they need to replace and my character just happens to be the correct Zodiac Sign. So we solved the first part of the mystery, that states that the Deep Lake Devils are not of terrestrial origin, but now we have to figure out how to either banish them or cut our own bargain with them in future play sessions.
If you are curious, there are a lot of actual plays posted on YouTube for this game setting. I purposefully have not watched any of them, because I really want this to be a fresh expeirence for me. It has been a very long time since I have done anything pen and paper realted, but this reminds me a bit to our high school days playing the storyteller/white wolf system and the way in which we ran it. We were playing with a bunch of folks who were not necessarily seasononed mechanical TTRPG players, so we largely ran it as a story that we were all weaving together. I love the freeform nature of Public Access and how it is a narrative expeirence that we are all partaking in, instead of something that we are having done to us. I also really love this group of folks that I am playing with, and look forward to doing other games and other systems with them in the future. We are all technically local but to make it easier on the constraits of lives and families and such, we are playing over Discord. At some point thought I think we should all get together for dinner or something.
Anyways. It was a really fun night, and I find myself looking forward to these semi-monthly sessions quite a bit. Have you played Public Access? Have you played any systems like this that are way more storytelling driven? Drop me a line below.
The post On Strange Wings appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I am continuing my 2025 in Review series and this morning talking about one of my guilty pleasures. I watch probably a truly excessive amount of YouTube, and in truth it is less that I am actively watching it and more that it is keeping me company while I do other things. This morning I talk going to talk about some of the channels that I regularly watch pretty much anything that they release. There are certain channels that publish something every single day, and others that release on a weekly schedule… but it is super rare that I do not click through and watch the new videos each time one drops. Other than I will likely talk about a few of the folks from different communities that I watch content for when I am in the mood to consume it.
Trent Holbrook aka Miscast
This is probably my channel of 2025, and has been a lot of why I have been interested in getting into a bunch of more creative endeavors. Trent is a bundle of chaotic creative energy, and I feel like we all need him in our lives. Like Ace is not prone to doing any of the things that Trent does, but is still watching him because he is just too pure and inspiring with the nonsense that he does. Essentially this is MOSTLY a Warhammer and kitbashing channel, but he also dabbles in 3d modeling and has been on this entire crusade to figure out how to create his own blisterpacks for the miniatures he creates. The above episode specifically is surrounding him creating reusable temporary characters for people to drop into existing D&D campaigns. His entire channel is operating in permadeath mode where if he misses posting a day, he is going to delete the entire thing and all of the assets that he has created during that time. As someone who did blogging every single day for three and a half years… I regret to inform him that there will be a time when it does happen and I will miss this spot of brightness on the horizon. In theory his original channel will still exist but obviously because of the pressure of a daily channel he has not posted there in six months.
Tia Weston – The One Dollar House Series
Another channel that has been part of my life for the last year, is the One Dollar House series by a vlogger named Tia Weston. Essentially on August 11th of 2024, she purchased a house for $1 from someone that she knew… and over the next year every Sunday morning she dropped a video talking about whatever had happened that week. This continued until November 2nd when she had effectively wrapped that series and was fully moved into and living in the house. I am not necessarily super into home improvement channels, but there was something compelling about the honest nature of how this was shown. Sure the dollar house thing was a clickbaity title, but the content itself was deeply interesting as it dealt with the ups and downs of having to renovate a house that was in quite honestly some pretty lousy shape when she got it. On November 9th of this year, she bought a second abandoned home and is now working through the process of cleaning it out and renovating it, and I am once again happily tuning in every Sunday morning for htis nonsense.
Laura Kampf
Another channel that I watch pretty much every Sunday morning is that of the self proclaimed Janitor of Los Angeles, Laura Kampf. I think I originally was introduced to her content by Simone Geirtz, which I have been following and watching content from since her shitty robot days. Laura currently is in the middle of renovating a “free” travel trailer from the 70s, but has widely varrying content from picking up trash off the street and making something out of it, to talking about how she makes products that she sells and how she markets them. Just a deeply interesting and creative person, and it pairs nicely with Tia’s House series as I am sitting down on Sunday mornings to edit the two podcasts that I edit every week. While I am eating my breakfast and trying to wake the fuck up, I am listening to these two people and whatever they have gotten up to in the previous week.
Tendo – Daily Thrifting
Tendo is a chaotic mess of a human being and I have been following since the birth of his channel called Duck Duck Blue devoted to a toy store of the same name. That channel was an infectuous mix of the interesting cast of characters working there, frank discussions about stocking and pricing issues of running a toy store, and random creative projects as he attempted to build out different parts of the store. Sadly all of that content is gone, because there was a rather wild sequence of events that led to the store closing, a breakup of Tendo from the person he co-owned the store with, and effectively him becoming a single father as the primary caretaker of their newborn son. Nothing has really been said about ANY of that, but Reid one of the workers in the store released this pretty cool video about the Final 24 Hours of the store. What the Tendo channel now is more than anything is the daily diary of someone trying to take care of a child while stocking multiple vendor malls with merchadise harvested in large part through daily trips to Goodwill and various other thrift stores. I am not sure what it is about this but I find it deeply compelling, snapshot of a day in the life of someone else type content.
Josh Johnson – Tuesday Night Comedy Sets
Josh Johnson might be the single most talented comedian out there right now, full stop. Originally I knew him for his work on The Daily Show as a corespondent, and more recently after the departure of Trevor Noah… he has subbed in as one of the more regular hosts of the show now that they are in this weird no single permanent host kind of mode. Somewhere along that point I stumbled onto his YouTube channel and more specifically his comedy sets once he started the current Flowers Tour that he is on. Most comedians have a set, that they work for awhile, until it becomes stale…. and then move on and create something new. Josh Johnson releases a brand new set every single Tuesday night, as a YouTube premiere event… and it is often times deeply topical and none of it retreads any of the ground he has visited previously. It is wild just how damned creative he is, and how he gives the feeling that what is very obviously a thoroughly polished set… comes off as though he is just talking to the audience. Phenomenally good stuff and if you are not already listening to this each week I highly suggest you tune in.
Sir Gog – Path of Exile Analysis
I am obsessed with Path of Exile. If you have read this blog for any length of time you will know this. One of my favorite content creators in this space is SirGog, and quite honestly I am probably more active in “his” community than I am in any other part of the sphere. There is a specific Global chat channel that his folks use, and I shifted to making that my home ages ago, and never doubted that decision because it tends to be a group of fairly analytical folks who are also extremely helpful. What I like the most about SirGog is his long form videos where he talks about exploring what is happening in the meta of a given league. Rarely are these things that I am necessarily chasing, but I do find it extremely valueable to know what sorts of tech is being used and in what ways. Additionally he does an amazing job of evaluating changes to the game and how it might impact players and more often the economy. All of this is deeply valuable for me when I decide to branch out and start playing that second or third build of a league.
CheckPoint – Loading Ready Run
They are still on holiday hiatus, but I love Loading Ready Run and more specifically Checkpoint. This is a weekly comedy show… and ends up being quite possibly one of the best actual gaming news shows that you can watch. All of the crew are delightful and quite honestly I am pretty much willing to watch anything from them over the years. I don’t necessarily get into the more longform stream content as much, but I do occasionally watch things if something tweaks my spidey senses. I do however watch pretty much every episode of Checkpoint and it often becomes something we reference and talk about each week on the AggroChat podcast because a large number of us do this thing. I am also a big fan of Graham Stark specifically and his solo vidocs that he records when the LRR team is visiting some event . Great group of folks, they all seem delightful, and would love to be friends with them… but I won’t be weird and parasocial about it. LRR specifically is a huge reason why we migrated AggroChat to Kind.social, because it is run by LRR fans who have a deeply compatible set of ethics.
Ashens/NerdCubed Advent Calendars
This one is topical ONLY during the lead up to Christmas but I am going to give it a shout out regardless. It was roughly a decade ago that I stumbled onto this nonsense. I had been following Ashens for awhile and enjoyed his quirky product reviews recorded with a busted brown couch seat as the backdrop. I am even a huge fan of his two Film Projects (Ashens and the Quest for the Game Child, and Ashens and the Polybius Heist). However the capstone of each year is this dumb series where they record effectively dueling Advent Calendars and choose a winner each day. Sometimes there are penalty calendars, other times it is just them making fun of the dumb things that pop out of them. This year was particularly wild because Ashens had a survival calendar that was mostly just a bunch of weapons. Nothing gets me in the holiday spirit quite like tuning in for this nonsense every day, and the videos usually dropped coinciding with my lunch break.
Rogue Hobbies
As I am starting to fall further and further down the Warhammer hobby rabbit hole, another YouTube channel that I really enjoy watching is from Louise Sugden aka Rogue Hobbies. Videos are always charming and I really appreciate the bright and cheerful color schemes that she paints. These are not necessarily the style in which I want to paint things, but I still think they end up really freaking cool. I specifically linked the above video because I thought it was a neat transformation taking an old Mighty Max toy and turning it into something Warhammer themed using Epic scale miniatures. Kind of like Trent this is just a really cool channel to watch that might give you inspirations for other nonsense that you want to do regardless of the hobby that you are into.
Laranity
Now we are going to get into a few general shout outs. Laranity is absolutely my favorite streamer in the Guild Wars 2 space, and any time I need to farm drops I know I am going to be watching her channel. She is delightful, but she also makes a bunch of edited videos that are pretty solid. The above for example is a paid collab by ArenaNet where she taught Annie Fuschia who is mostly known in the World of Warcraft creator space how to play Guild Wars 2. She does a lot of interesting build review type content as well, or various general money making strats on how to get the most out of specific map farms. Its all super pure, and charming. If you were wanting to get into Guild Wars 2 I would probably say her content is your starting space because it straddles that line between pure casual and hardcore, and does a good job of introducing you to some basic concepts to build upon.
Pohx – The Father of Righteous Fire
I also have to get a general shout out to Pohx, who is the father of Righteous Fire in its current form. This build was the build that allowed me to start to enjoy all of the many splendors Path of Exile has to offer, because it is super fucking simple to level and is aggressively tanky at end game. I still play an RF build almost every league, because it gives me a solid base to then branch out and explore whatever weird stuff is happening in the meta with my second and third build of the league. Pohx is so unbelievably patient with the viewers, because there are so many ways you can fuck up a Righteous Fire build and he maintains this painstakingly edited and simple guide site. On top of that he is just a chill dude, who does a thing and does it reliably. I appreciate constants in the digital world.
Strange Aeons – Tumblr Royalty
Something that you probably do not know about me, is that I have a deep and lasting affection for the weird world of Tumblr. I was never as active on it as some, nor did I regularly comment on it… but I have always enjoyed being an outsider looking into that particular fish bowl. When I “doom scroll” something from bed, it is usually weird arts and shit on Tumblr, and I feel better off for doing that instead of Instagram or Facebook. Strange Aeons is super fucking hard to describe, they might post a deep dive into the etimology of Rawr XD, or give us a recouting and tour of the Grover house from SomethingAwful legend. So much of it is dives into the history of the fringe internet that was, that I honestly remember quite well. They also happen to be permanently enshrined in Tumblr Royalty after fighting the Muppet Joker at Dashcon 2.0. This will not be everyone’s cup of tea but I fucking love it.
Sarah Spaceman
Another channel that I have become fond of this year is Sarah Spaceman. Like I cannot give you a rational explanation for why I enjoy her so much. Firstly I am not a sewist, nor do I cosplay, nor am I honestly into most of the shit she seems to be into. However she DID introduce me to Dan Da Dan which I adore now… so I will forever be thankful. Its a channel about the behind the scenes happens with cosplaying and the judging of cosplay at conventions, and also has had this whole side quest recently surrounding the events leading up to the wedding of her and her longtime partner that often gets featured in content. They did this whole wild Game of Thrones meets Zelda thing and it was delightful. I am all for Weirwood Trees with Korok Faces. Anyways her stuff brings me joy and I cannot fully understand why, but also do not care. It is background material to be consumed while I am doing other things.
Toy Federation
Every saturday morning this channel drops a video, and effectively it is a shot and edited show format that is similar to something along the lines of Pawnstars. Toy Federation is vintage toy store in Greer, South Carolina and they are also behind the rather large Retro-Toy Convention in Greenville, South Carolina. Essentially their claim to fame is having a very fair and public process for evaluating the toys and pricing them, essentially giving you half the value in cash and a very “take it or leave it” sort of approach. What they speciallize is complete toys, so it has been interesting as they have delved into the back and shown just how many partial versions of things that they have, and the painful process of waiting for one or two parts to come in the doors so that they can clean it up and put it out on the shelf for someone to buy. I will always have a deep resounding nostalgia for the toys of the 80s and 90s, and specifically the toys that I personally played with. I don’t have the space or the give a fuck to actually collect these toy lines anymore, but I can get my fix by watching others doing it.
So what are your favorite YouTube channels of 2025? What do you put on in the background or what did you happen to stumble across that you think I might be interested in? Drop me a line below.
The post 2025 in Review: YouTube appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! After giving you updates on my life… it is time to roll on into the rest of my year in review topics. I legitimately do not know how many of these I have, but I have stalled long enough. This morning I am going to talk about the games that were important to me during the last year in either a good way or a bad way. This list is not going to look anything like most 2025 in review lists, because I do not play a ton of new games. I play an awful lot of ARPGs and treat each season as though it were a game launch. This wildly skews the sort of results that I have in this scenario. I am also this time sort of loosely grouping the list into less important to more important, but not necessarily a strict order.
Path of Exile II: The Last of the Druids
This is probably the most recent of the games I am going to talk about it, and I am still more or less playing it. On December 12th, Path of Exile II released a big update that launched the Last of the Druids and Fate of the Vaal league. In it they gave us access to the first of the Int/Str hybrid classes the Druid which has ascendancies for Shaman and Oracle. More important than that, they gave us access to the primal ability tree and the talisman weapon that allow us to turn into a Bear, Wolf, or Wyvern. I’ve been deeply critical of Path of Exile II up until this point, seeing it as a bit of a mechanically worse version of Path of Exile that just happens to have better graphics and a better user interface. Playing Bear Druid, and specifically Demon Bear Shaman is what really pushed me over the edge to truly enjoying this game. It is fun as heck to hop around the map causing big explosions with my fat bear ass. The game still has problems… and will continue to have problems for a very long time… but this gameplay got me hooked.
Slormancer
Slormancer is a little 2D sorta isometric view roguelike arpglike game that is a heck of a lot of fun. I did not play this game anywhere near as much as I should have, but I hope to remedy that in 2026. I did play it enough however to want to talk about it. The mechanics of this game are just really fun, and it reminds me of what if you took Rogue Legacy and turned it into an ARPG. I mostly played the knight character, but the archer was pretty fun as well. This really wants to be played with a controller though, and is ideal for television gaming. Once I get off my ass and figure out what I want to use as a proper Steam in the Livingroom setup, I will probably be playing more of this. If you have not checked it out and like any of the types of games that I eluded to in this post… check it out. It’s a heck of a lot of fun for $20.
Dune Awakening
I have such wildly mixed feelings about Dune Awakening. This is going to be a game that goes in my disappointments of the year pile. The AggroChat folks and friends decided to play together on a private server that Tam rented for us as we all got started, and I feel like that is the correct way to play this game. It is unfortunate that it requires someone shelling out for a server, and it is even more unfortunate that it does not grant you private access to the shared open world pvp deep desert. What killed this game for me though… was upkeep. You are required to play a certain amount of this per week in order to generate enough fuel to keep the shield on your base active, or your base slowly disintegrates over time. This feels really fucking bad. Namely because I got busy with various events while playing this game… and then had the death of a spouse which knocked me even further out of whack with ever getting back in. Once I lost everything, there was no point in me going back. I would love to see a pure PVE sandbox version of this game that allows you to set custom rules on a server by server basis for things like upkeep. The game itself has gone from a peak concurrency of not quite 200k players to an average of 8k…. so I think maybe it did not work quite right for a lot of players.
Hellclock
So what if I told you there was a game… loosely based on the real world events surrounding Brazil’s War of Canudos… that took place in the aftermath of the abolishment of slavery, but also somehow involves exploring dungeons and killing zombies and shit? Hellclock is a deeply odd and stylistic roguelike ARPG where you have a fixed amount of time to explore on each run, and once you run out of time everything winds back and you get to keep any powerups that you purchased during the previous run. The cyclical nature of the game is deeply satisfying and you get various tools to extend your runs as you get better. I did not play anywhere near enough of this game but again I think it is prime fodder for once I sort out my Steam in the Livingroom setup. I have to solve my wireless network woes before I really do that unfortunately because I have my old gaming rig hooked up in the livingroom, the connectivity speeds are complete ass. I’ve also not really figured out a good keyboard and mouse option, and there will be games that I don’t necessarily want to play with a controller. Anyways NONE of that is about Hellclock, which is just a universally interesting game.
Titan’s Quest II
Titan’s Quest II had quite a number of updates throughout the year and I spent several days really getting into the game and checking out what it had to offer. I landed on the decision that I do not really enjoy playing a melee class in the game, but dig the heck out of playing ranged. I played a sort of icicle archer thing that worked really well, and honestly the game itself is just gorgeous. The fights are pretty interesting, and this is very much a worthy successor to the first game, which in itself was a worthy successor to Diablo II. If you like ARPGs in general or you were ever a fan of TItan’s Quest, then I suggest checking it out. They are continuing to release updates for the game as it is still in development so if you would rather play it once it is finished, then this might be a game to put a pin in and check back when the 1.0 release finally happens.
Abyssus
This game is a heck of a lot of fun to play with a friend, and Ace and I spent a bit of time playing this game and should probably at some point return to it. I think Destiny Rising more or less stole the place in our gaming lives that this took up for a bit. Essentially Abyssus is a wave based arena shooter rogue-like… about exploring the depths of an underwater dungeon. You and your friends take on waves of monsters, get loot, and work your way down to fixed boss fights at specific floors. The deeper you go the harder it gets and the more varied the environments become. Big Nautical-punk vibes with this game because you are both wearing these diving suits while you wield your big damned guns and kill things. The further you go the more points you get to configure your build and control your weapon load-outs, but a lot of options unlock symmetrically as you reach certain floors giving you a mix of guaranteed upgrades and choice based upgrades. I am not sure this game would be fun solo, but it was a blast with someone hanging out on voice chat.
Path of Exile – Mercenaries of Trarthus
Mercenaries of Trarthus was a challenge league that ran in Path of Exile from June 13th to October 27th and represented the first new content we had gotten in almost a year since the launch of Settlers of Kalguur the previous year. First it was just amazing to get some new content in the game, but more than that it introduced Mercenaries and I have always loved those sorts of mechanics in ARPGs. One of my favorite aspects of Diablo III was building out my companion to buff the things that were weak in my build, and that is largely what players did in order to make some truly busted builds. The real meta of the league was doing some sort of build that could apply large amounts of Lightning damage, and then using Doryani’s Prototype on your mercenary, to debuff all of the mobs in your presence to have large amounts of negative lighting resistance. I think the build that I ran as my second in the league managed to get close to -300% Lightning Resistance while dealing a ton of damage with Storm Brand of Indecision. It was thoroughly busted but lord did I have a lot of fun playing this league.
Monster Hunter Wilds
There will be some of you who do not remember just how much I got into Monster Hunter World when it released in 2018 both on the original PS4 release, and later when it came out on PC in August of that same year. I had never really mainlined a Monster Hunter game despite trying to dabble in them on the mobile platforms, but this game sucked me in and stole so much of my time. Monster Hunter Wilds was a return to the same style of game as Worlds and when it launched I had a heck of a lot of fun playing it. Sadly I did not really stick around as much as I thought I might, but that does not discount the fact that I had an awful lot of fun playing it. I probably would have played it more but every time Ammo, Sita and I tried to group up I started having network problems. Capcom… has some of the shittiest grouping systems ever, and if they got someone from a western live service game to come unfuck their game interface… I think folks would be around far longer. I only put in around 60 hours, but it was 60 hours well spent.
Last Epoch – Beneath Ancient Skies
On August 21st Last Epoch dropped a pretty signfiicant update with Beneath Ancient Skies which added a whole new chapter to the game and a new league mechanic hunting down primal monsters and chosing to evolve them making them more difficult and rewarding. I had a really fun league with this game, but ultimately I burned through it pretty quickly. I played a Fire Minions Necromancer build and then ultimately hopped on the Thorns damage train for quite possibly the stupidest build I have ever played in any game where I am just nuking the entire screen with thorns damage. The new act was a lot of fun and it is probably the best content they have added into the game to date. The primal league mechanic was also a lot of fun, and each time this game expands it keeps getting better. I think the challenge for me is that I “finish” with the game way faster than I do with Path of Exile. I reach a point with my builds where I have seen everything that I really want to see and really pushing to the true pinnacle content of the game requires more hours than I really want to dump into it. That is not a failing of the game and more a case that it still needs more years to cook before it will be as rich of an experience as Path of Exile has.
Path of Exile – Legacy of Phrecia Event
Earlier when I talked about Mercenaries of Trarthus, part of the reason why that league was so damned much fun is that it had been a literal year since we last got a new league in the game. So much of GGG’s time was being devoted to the care and feeding of the fledgling Path of Exile II, that the POE core felt ignored. That is not to say things were not happening, we had a few fun private leagues like the Pohx League event, but there was one thing that probably took the cake. Almost as a shadow drop, Grinding Gear Games gave us the Legacy of Phrecia alternative ruleset event where every single one of the 19 Ascendancy classe were replaced. It was wild to play through this and I played a Righteous Fire Scavenger… which is the alternative version of the Scion. It was so much fun, and now this game mode exists as an alternate ruleset that you can use to create custom leagues. There is part of me though that wishes at some point all of the Phrecia ascendancies go core and become just alternate options allowing us 38 different ascendancy choices in the game.
Destiny Rising
Destiny Rising is essentially my game of the year…. but it does not get the top slot for reasons I will talk about later. This is a gacha game from Net Ease that remixes the tried and true Destiny format, but also makes it a heck of a lot more enjoyable in the process. There is no reason why I should be loving a Gacha game as much as I am, because I thought Genshin Impact broke me of that. However… Destiny Rising is shockingly fair when it comes to its Gacha mechanics. I have 3 accounts, 2 of which I have spent zero money on… and they both feel like I have plenty of things to do without having spent a dime. The whole three acccouints thing is largely because I am trying to maintain a guild when there are really only two or three of us that are actively playing. That is a whole other discussion. If you ever loved Destiny at any point in the past, you owe it to yourself to check out Destiny Rising. It is so damned much fun and really streamlines what made that game great. If you DO end up playing… hit me up because we certainly can use some more active players in our guild to do dailies.
Guild Wars 2 Fractal Incursion Event
My “Game of the Year” really goes to more specifically an event of the year. In September, Guild Wars 2 shadow dropped an event called the Fractal Incursion. This added a new feature to the game which allowed you to randomly queue for Fractals, giving the game what it needed so badly… a more modern group finder. Not only did they do this… they bribed the fuck out of us to run tons of them by providing a path to a piece of legendary armor, and also giving you a pathway to get said armor for every single weight class in the game. The end result was that Lion’s Arch specifically around the Mists portal was busier than at any point I have ever seen in this game’s history. The above screenshot was taken one morning when I was working on my blog post… so completely off peak hours for either EU or NA and it was STILL packed. Better yet we are going to be getting a version of this same group finder for a combined version of Raids and Strikes later this year. This has breathed so much new life into Guild Wars 2, and prompted us to have some really fun Thursday night fractal groups as we all chain ran them trying to get through the achievements. Absolutely the highlight of my gaming year, and on the 13th I believe we are getting a return of the Fractal Rush event so looking forward to that as well.
Those were my games and gaming events of the year. I am sure it looks pretty different than the lists for most people. I did not really play much in the way of single player experiences this year. I hope to remedy that in 2026, but who knows where that will go. My happy place tends to be listening to an audiobook while plugging away at a mechanically interesting but narratively devoid experience. Even for this coming year my games list will be the games that I played, not necessarily the games that came out so at some point when I finally do get around to beating Clair Obscur it will probably make a list. Anyways. Were there any unusual games that made your personal Games of the Year list? Drop me a line below.
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