Aimlessly Going Forward

blog by Tomas Sedovic

Games Played in 2025

video-game, retrospective

Table of Contents

I genuinely planned to not play anything big in 2025…​

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Boss battle scene. The protagonist Gustave is in a battle pose holding a long jagged sword in one hand. The boss called chromatic Troubadour stands opposite. Tall, fully covered in mask and cloak holding a long trumpet.

…​but then Expedition 33 came out of nowhere, blew everyone’s mind and I gave it a go. It blew my mind too. It is a soulsborne and Final Fantasy hybrid with a very French personality and it just works really well.

The thing that drew me in first was its music. You get a sense from the trailers, but I recommend listening to Lumière:

You enter a world that’s quite bizarre but distinctly French (you can spot a twisted and bent La Tour Eiffel right away). Most everything you see has some connection to painting. There’s chroma, lumina, gommage and creatures that resemble living paintbrushes. The game fully commits to this painterly vibe and it goes beyond a mere setting or theme. Have I mentioned the soulsborne influence already?

You come from a small city after a disaster that struck the world — it twisted and bent it, ripped it apart and reshaped into something that’s more dangerous and less coherent. But what’s even worse, every year all people of certain age die. And that number is going down. There is a huge tower in the distance shining 33 for all to see.

And so every year, some of the people at the end of their artificially-shortened lifespan travel to the continent, trying to reach the tower. Or at least clear the way for those who come after.

So on you go, exploring the world, finding shortcuts, clearing out monsters, growing stronger and learning — what happened, how to get to the Paintress, read messages from the previous expeditions.

When you die, the world resets (Dark Souls style) and you respawn a checkpoint. You encounter bosses that are challenging and require to learn their attack patterns and dodge or parry.

But combat is where the Final Fantasy influence comes in. It’s turn-based with each of up-to four characters in your party having completely separate abilities and combat styles. But, when the enemy is about to attack, if you time it right, you can dodge their attack and even parry for massive amount of counter damage.

I’d not believe this would work, but it does. There’s no run to the boss — if you die, you can restart the battle at a press of a button. This lets you 100% focus on the boss fight. But, it is also really draining. Compared to soulsborne, the combat is more static (it is turn-based), but you have to watch the enemy attacks like a hawk, learning their patterns and trying to counter them. Do that for 20-30 minutes and you’ll be tired without even realising. I 90-minute boss session can get really exhausting.

It is all glorious though. While I do prefer Dark Souls or Bloodborne, Expedition 33 is far more accessible (you can pause! There’s in-game help! You don’t loose anything upon death! The enemy attacks' names flash on your screen so you don’t have to guess! You can choose a difficulty level!) and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s curious about that experience in a less obscure environment.

I love the characters, each exquisitely designed and written. And I love the story itself all the way up to the ending.

Which is where my one complaint lies. There are two choices there and as far as the game is conterned, one of them is clearly "correct". Which, if you’re of a certain mindset or lived experience, is obviously clear to you. But if you’re of a different mindset…​ it is far less clear cut.

I wish they offered the latter ending the same weight. There is a strength and growth you can see throughout the game that’s just taken away at the end and I found that quite disappointing.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Top-down look at a room dimly lit with purple light. There are several enemies on the floor, the five protagonists standing. The room is full of electrical panels and one a couple of bodies are lying next to them. It's a mess.

I loved listening to Tom Francis speak on The Crate and Crowbar podcast back when he was a co-host there and I’ve been following his game development career ever since he started.

And, alongside Christine Love, he’s my favourite games writer. Games are so rarely genuinely funny and both Tom and Christine are the two, who can consistently make me laugh and squeal in delight.

Tom also has this fantastic ability of figuring out what’s good in the games he loves and what can be done without. Which he applied to the turn-based tactics games such as X-COM. I’ve tried some of these (most recently Invisible Inc. and Into the Breach) and I always become quite frustrated and give up pretty quickly.

So to hear Tom discuss all of these design choices that take the fun out and seeing him put it to practice with Tactical Breach Wizards, I gave it a go. And was delighted.

It is a ridiculous game. You’re placed in the world of supernatural powers and you form a group of special forces agents that’s composed of witches, mages, shapeshifters and clairvoyants.

They breach a room, deal with the enemies inside, secure the objective and get away as quickly as they can. Using brooms, magic, grenades and seeing 1 second into the future.

And it’s the best game of the genre I’ve played. Beyond the wonderful level design and hilarious writing, you have essentially infinite rewind. You can test out all the actions within a given turn, observe their consequences and either commit or come back and try something else.

The abilities you can apply interact with each other and the environment in wonderful ways and even once you come up with a solution, you always want to keep trying different (more efficient or funnier) approaches.

Plus, each mission has a set of optional objectives which are absolutely not necessary to progress, but they very much make you think: "can I really take everyone out in the first turn? That doesn’t even seem possible". And if you feel like it, you’ll start tinkering. If not, you move on, no worries.

It’s great. It’s the most time I’ve spent with a game of this kind. When I got about halfway through the final act, I’ve had enough and moved on.

But this is absolutely time and money well spent.

Dispatch

A large broad-shouldered muscly man looking like a brand-safe version of Superman is lying on his back on the hood of a car, the windshield broken next to his head. As if he fell there. Another man wearing a blue shirt looking like a store manager is walking towards him, hands in pockets. He's saying: "Heya, Phenomaman? How ya doin' bud?

Now this was an unexpected surprise. Remember Telltale? Them of Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us? In my mind at least, they kind of invented the sort of modern take on narrative-heavy adventures that focuses more on exploration, dialogue and story than on looking for objects and solving puzzles.

I never got on well with the point-and-click kind, but these games worked for me. And again, at least in my mind, they were the precursors to games like Life is Strange that are more free-form.

Dispatch harkens back to the Telltale past. In a world full of supernatural beings, you become a dispatcher at a "call a superhero" agency, directing a team of former villains who are ready (or possibly court-mandated) to do good.

They’re an unruly bunch, not sticklers for rules or ethics, being shoved into what’s strongly resembles a call centre.

The game is episodic and splits its time between the actual day job (you receive calls, decide which "heroes" to send in, help guide them) and the pre/post-work life. Which is where the telltale magic happens.

I wasn’t keen on the actual dispatching part of the game. You get calls in real time and at least for me, the pace was such that the messes I caused (either by missing appointments or sending wrong heroes or failing the challenges) wiped out any successes, with me resulting in the one percentile of all the players.

This was likely exacerbated by the fact that I was playing this on the Steam Deck and the controls weren’t working great there. It’d work much better on a PC I reckon.

Otherwise though, the game is really funny and well written. I loved the characters and how they grew over the course of the game. The episodes were short and sweet and while you could play the whole game in one sitting, I find it’s better to stick to an episode a day.

I’m not a huge fan of the straight-up superhero genre, but taking the off-beaten track — one that’s focused on the "real" lives these people would live rather than just running around with funny costumes — works really well for me. The Watchmen are amazing, the Heroes TV series was pretty decent at that.

Dispatch does this wonderfully.

The Dark Queen Of Mortholme

A gothic room with a portal on one side and a massive throne on the other. The floor is all shiny except it's covered with a lot of bloodstains. Next to the room is a pale queen twice as tall as a human, fully covered by a dark spiky armour and a spiky crown. The queen's huge spiky mace, her hands and the spikes on her crown are all covered in blood. Opposite her is a small dark-skinned woman with a glowing sword, wearing a hood. The queen is saying "You think that if you try hard enough, you can challenge the natural order itself.

This is a really lovely short game.

What if Bloodborne, but you’re the boss. You stay the same, but the pesky little "hero" keeps coming after you time and time again. And she learns new attacks. Learns how to dodge your attacks. Picks up new items.

To a boss, the hero must be really terrifying. They start weak and you keep killing them with a single attack. But they keep coming. They’re relentless. And bit by bit, they get dangerous.

And yes, you have your second phase and special attacks. But you don’t improve. You don’t level up. You can’t even leave your room. When you die, it’s over.

So as the hero gets better, the game gets more frustrating as they start dodging your attacks and picking away at your health. But it takes maybe 1-2 hours to get through all the endings and so it all works out.

It’s a really wonderful look at the other side of soulsborne games.

I Was A Teenage Excolonist

Scene drawn in bright pastel colours. There are four beautiful characters of various builds, clothes, colours and genders standing close to one another, smiling and looking sexy. They're all inside a hall that has vegetation growing directly from the floor. It's all giving off a cute alien vibe. This is a surprise party. A text box reads: "SURPRISE!!! You do your very best to play along and act surprised. Woo, streamers! Balloons! Great.

This is really cool. A colony ship arrives on a planet. Things don’t go as planned, but they settle down and begin their new life.

You play a ten year old kid — a child to a colonist couple. Along with the other children, you study and learn skills that should be useful in the future.

The game is split into months and every month you pick an activity to focus on. Each year, you grow up a little and over time the relationships with your friends and adults change.

You can study, work, explore or just lounge around and each month there are people to talk to.

Each game challenge (study session, monster encounter, attempt to solve something) is resolved through a collectible card game. You gain cards by performing certain activities, sometimes you can find them or buy them and of course, forgetting a card is much harder than gaining one.

Overall, you settle in a nice rhythm. Months turn into seasons turn into years, but every now and then something bad happens. The planet’s not exactly hospitable and you’re far away from Earth — there’s no help coming.

The way you play — whom you spend time with, what you do — has huge effects on what happens. There were several traumatic events that I thought were just plot points beyond your control, but they weren’t. With the right skills, I could have prevented them.

Which plays into: the game is meant to be played several times, which I missed somehow and I think knowing that would have affected how I played.

I really enjoyed it, it looks like a really lovely cozy colony management sim with almost Stardew Valley vibes, but you feel the time ticking and when it hits, it hits hard.

PS: When going through the screenshots for the game, I was all delighted and saddened again, it still affecting me months after I’d played it. I’m thinking about picking it up again.

Next

Now this is a fairly large list and I doubt I’ll get through even a majority of this. Plus, new things come in and completely change things up (like Expedition 33 did in 2025). But these are the sorts of things I’ve been thinking about.

Screenshot and link to the website for the Dose Response game

Hi! I wrote a game! It's an open-world roguelike where you play an addict called Dose Response. You can get it on the game's website (pay what you want!), it's cross-platform, works in the browser and it's open source! If you give it a go, let me know how you liked it, please!