Year in Review

Looking back on our best of 2025 with fresh eyes

If you’re reading this, then congratulations on making it to the final day of 2025! It was a malingering and agonizingly prolonged year for all of us, I reckon, so it seems fitting to acknowledge the threads that left room for hope, however cramped. With that in mind, let me take a moment to extend my thanks to all of you for reading, commenting, and otherwise making The Spieler’s first ten months fulfilling and worthwhile. Special thanks are due to our paid subscribers who’ve laid money on the line in support of our mission to broaden the esteem of game design as a modern artform and cultural institution. I’ll do my best to keep growing and improving the publication, and I’m optimistic that more will join your ranks in 2026.

This was a pretty strange year for me on the whole. I’ll spare you the gritty and largely uninteresting details, but suffice it to say that my professional trajectory has been all over the place since my employment status abruptly changed back in April. My bills are paid and my stomach is full, though, so I’m still comfortably in the upper percentiles of human fortune and can’t complain much. I have quite a lot of free time lately, and most of it has gone towards professional development in an effort to resist the antediluvian chaos that defines the software industry for which I’m currently trained. The plan is to finesse some stable employment in the first quarter of 2026, and I’m pretty sure it’ll work out. Once it does, I expect I’ll develop a much more reliable balance in my writing schedule, and I reckon my work here will improve as a result. Appreciate your patience in the meantime!

I’m largely happy with The Spieler’s output in 2025. Some posts could’ve used another pass for clarity, others were undernourished by my busy schedule, and a couple make me cringe to look back upon, but I suppose that’s all par for the course in a solo¹ operation of this nature. This week, as the year winds down and our cholesterol levels continue their descent down to baseline, we’ll have a look back at some of our best from 2025 alongside some contemporaneous reflections. So, then, without further niceties:

THE SPIELER’S TOP FIVE OF TWENTY-FIVE

I’m ranking these in order of my own esteem rather than outright popularity, although there’s considerable crossover between those criteria. Attempting to put them in ascending order felt too arbitrary for comfort, so here they are in no particular sequence:

The Rise and Fall of Literature-Based Video Gaming

This was an ambitious, data-driven project that boasts the most likes and comments in The Spieler’s entire catalogue thus far. Gratifyingly, it brought a lot of new eyes to the publication, and I’m mostly quite pleased with how it turned out. With the benefit of hindsight, though, I wish I’d given myself another week to think it through — the comment section made abundantly clear that there were a number of conspicuous blindspots in my dataset, and my analysis left behind some relevant context as a result.

Principally at issue was that my data from MobyGames, while broad and robust, included a lot of titles that were simply beyond the scope of the analysis (mostly shovelware) and didn’t include some categories that probably were in-scope (all of Japan, for example). Nevertheless, I still think the trend I observed reflects observable reality, and I’m pretty proud of this one. Still laughing at that damn scarecrow, too.

Gaming Needs More Historical Fiction

Our central remit here is to celebrate the artistic accomplishments and expand the cultural horizons of game design, and I think this one resonated the most in those regards. I stand by my thesis that video games and historical narratives are a match made in heaven, and I think that’s one of the more straightforwardly promising avenues for expanding the cultural mainstream’s respect of the medium.

Relatedly, Kingdom Come: Deliverance was my biggest surprise of 2025 for how sharply my opinion pivoted — I started the year thinking it was one of the worst RPGs I’d ever played, but ended it wishing I had the hardware to play the sequel (incidentally, my full review deserves an honorable mention for this list). I can’t think of another game that does historical fiction better, and it’s a terrific example of how versatile game design can be as a framework for storytelling. That versatility will inform at least one newsletter I have planned for January, by the way.

Morrowind Modding is an Active Rebellion

I think this one had some of my stronger analysis of gaming’s cultural evolution, and it was damn fun to write. Playing a couple-dozen hours of Tamriel Rebuilt’s Grasping Fortune expansion was possibly the most fun I had with a video game this year, and I’ve been looking for a good excuse to return to Morrowind ever since. TR and the Morrowind modding community at large really do represent some of the best and most interesting work going on beyond the professional industry these days. I’m following its progress with great interest, and I encourage the same of all you CRPG fans.

The next major expansion, called Poison Song, is widely expected sometime in the first half of the new year. It’ll add another swath of mainland Morrowind to the already vast tracts implemented by TR thus far, and bring us tantalizingly close to the much-anticipated megacity of Almalexia. It’ll also rework a substantial amount of mod content from the early 2000s that feels noticeably behind the extraordinary standards of Grasping Fortune and such like. My apologies to the large majority of you who don’t know what the hell I’m on about, but you’ll know more soon enough.

The Game Where You Rebuild Politics from Absolute Scratch

Our most-read and second-most-liked post, this was in effect a review-come-celebration of an obscure strategy game that I love more than any other. Shadow Empire has had an expansion about internal politics called Republica in the works for awhile now, so I’m looking forward to revisiting it soon. No release date as of writing, but I anticipate it sometime in the first half of the new year.

Now, if I had to guess, I’d hazard that the title did a lot of the heavy lifting where this review’s outsized readership was concerned (and, with no false modesty, I whipped up a pretty dope-ass thumbnail). Rebuilding politics is a tantalizing premise for a lot of us these days, and that’s certainly a large part of why I find Shadow Empire’s fiction and framing so compelling. I have some other candidates in mind for discussing the role of gaming in social/political catharsis that don’t involve wading into the stinking mire of contemporary political dysfunction, so stay tuned for more if you got a kick out of this review.

The Philosophy of the World’s Most Hideous Game

If you caught me at a jog, I’d call Cruelty Squad my favorite game of all time about as often as not. It’s as much a work of art as any game ever published, and I think I came relatively close to doing it justice in this piece and in its sequel published the week after. There’s an argument to be made that Cruelty Squad is better left to stand on its own and that it doesn’t need hobbyists like me trying to interpret it through Marcel Duchamp and Lev Shestov, but I’d retort that “nothing matters and it’s my God-given right to compare a video game to a fucking urinal and mean it as a compliment” is an equally valid argument.

I also got a lot of mileage out of Consumer Softproducts’ 2025 Early Access release of Psycho Patrol R, which will probably see a full release this year and provide a much-anticipated excuse to further stan its developer. That one’s my pick for Most Anticipated of 2026, by the way. Ville Kallio’s been making some terrific progress on his simulation of the so-called “machine zone” that characterizes the experience of slot-machine dependence, and I’m entirely prepared to abandon myself to it when the time comes. Excited to see you there.

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Thanks again for a great year, folks! I’m looking forward to getting back in the groove now that the tricky latter half of December is effectively behind us. I have every reason to believe that 2026 will be a great year for the publication and for the broader ecosystem of games-writing, both of which built palpable momentum since I posted that review of the goofy Vin Diesel game back in February. I’m glad to be a part of it and to have you all along. Best wishes to you and yours for the new year, and I’ll see you next week with a newsletter featuring more effusive praise of abstract game design from Finland.

1. Mostly solo. Shout-out to my wife for proofreading these things every week, which prevented a handful of real catastrophes.