Yes, it is I, the guy who publishes books about old games like EverQuest and the original Animal Crossing, the guy who made all those Buck Bumble 64 remixes that Jan played during Bee Week—just who you need to tell you which contemporary games are cool. These… are my top 17 game-adjacent activities of the year.

Playing fetch with the murderous doggies of Animal Well. Only play will quell the violence in their hearts. In this way, doggies are the original gamers.

Watching YouTube videos of people uncovering the secret game modes deep within UFO 50 and then going back to trying to beat the first level of Seaside Drive.

Getting my long-sought-after 50-streak on UFO 50: Party House randomizer runs… and then eating shit on the very next run.

Playing Minishoot’ Adventures, a topdown 2D Zeldalike starring a cute little bullet hell spaceship. Really giving the people what we want, this game.

Cheering for the rise of Balatro, a huge win for fans of the roguelike deckbuilder, a genre with tons of untapped potential. When a wave of Balatro-likes surely hits Steam in early 2026, I will not be one of the haters. (in the meantime, I recommend you play Slay the Spire, Dicey Dungeons, Monster Train, Wildfrost, and Party House.)

Watching the Slay the Spire II gameplay trailer at 0.5 speed to try to gleam a little strategy so maybe I can pull off a win on my very first run when beta opens this year.

Playing Hades II in open beta. It’s as essential as the first Hades. A lot of you are waiting to play until Supergiant completes the game, but you’re missing good in-game meta jokes about the game’s incompleteness. The content rollout, mechanical tweaks, and patch updates have been a blast to follow.

Playing Outer Wilds and trying to beat it before I began editing a book about it, running out of time, learning the game’s big secrets from the book, and now forever wondering—would I have figured out those big secrets on my own?

That moment during my wedding reception when our DJ, Dorina, played a Zelda overworld remix, and the dance floor popped off so hard that it startled even Dorina.

Composing retro midi songs in Musescore, intuitive music composition freeware that really does feel like a video game. Give yourself no more than a couple hours to make up a song, and you’ll know you’ve won the run if you email your new song to your friend Andy and he replies that it is sick actually. But beware: Andy gets harder to surprise the more songs you send him, and in this way the game’s difficulty increases over time.

Buying Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2024 and looking forward to playing it—and Astro Bot—in 2025.

Convincing hundreds of Tiktok kiddos to classify video games based on whether the main character is a funny little guy, rude little dude, or a scruffy tuffy. Please PAX let me expand this into an entire hourlong panel.

Understanding that a year as a unit of time is more useful to farming than to art, recalling that gaming is full of recency bias, and playing games from any other year. Have you played Immortality yet? Holy shit!

Anticipating what next year’s Most Anticipated Game nominees will be. It’s a great category for an awards show, and its existence doesn’t expose the rot at the core of anything.

Remembering playing Drug War for the TI-83. The problem with adulthood is that nothing I do feels subversive any more. Being in math class, looking like I was doing math, but actually playing a game about selling drugs? (And learning the term “ludes” while not figuring out what it’s short for until years later?) What new game can give me that feeling?

Watching the Fallout TV show, remembering everything I love about Fallout, playing Fallout 4 again, getting a game-breaking bug during Fallout 4’s opening scene, remembering everything that’s jank about Fallout, playing 45 hours of Fallout 4, and then putting it down before beating it as God intended.

Imagining myself returning, for years, to UFO 50, an amazing testament to the power of curiosity, constraint, vision, and—wow—hard work. (Eirik Suhrke released the OST to Bandcamp, and it’s 331 tracks long.) What began as a goofy, tossed-off collection of “games” became a collection of 50 actual games, several of them worth the $25 retail price on their own. Bursting with ideas and equally willing to confound and delight, UFO 50 is my game of the year and a shot of adrenaline to a medium whose big-money arm is subsumed with bloat, caution, firings, and fear. Merry Christmas, everyone!!