Games You Beat in 2025: Year of the Backlog

[toxicitizen]

The Last of Us Part II Remastered

 

I finished it last night. It's good to have finally played it as I feel like I've been waiting for it for an eternity. I had a feeling the game would make me feel like everyone else is smoking crack and that turned out to only be partially the case. On the one hand, I think it's a massive improvement over the original and I found the gameplay in particular to be incredible. On the other hand, I understand why the game was so divisive based on the story alone. I imagine your typical gamer isn't used to narratives with characters this flawed and nuanced. I also don't think the execution was necessarily the best it could have been.

 

Without getting into spoilers, I felt like the inciting incident was handled about as well as it could've been and when Ellie decides to go after Abby and her friends I was 100% on board with her. The first half of the game was basically what I expected: more TLoU but better.

 

The second half of the game is where I think some issues crop up. Most importantly, I fucking hated Abby so at first I wasn't crazy about having to play as her. When the game finally revealed who she is and what set her on that path, I was like:

 

 

The game did a good enough job of giving her character nuance up to a point. After a few hours of playing as her, I stopped hating her (it helped that her gameplay was really good) but, despite the writers' efforts, I never stopped seeing her as the villain of the story. So when you catch up to the present after her part of the story, I didn't really like having to continue playing as her during

Spoiler

the fight against Ellie. 

 

The game also keeps banging on that "I could've killed you but I didn't" drum as if to highlight that 

 

Spoiler

Abby only killing Joel vs Ellie killing Abby's friends somehow makes her better but that is complete bullshit. Abby only came after Joel because Joel was the only one that wronged her. She would've had no reason to kill anyone else unless she was a complete psycho. But her entire group was actively complicit in Joel's murder (and torture, really), so they were fair game. They were absolutely a part of this and that's on Abby.

 

I also found the ending unsatisfying but that was clearly by design, so I'm not holding that against the game. At that point, I was kinda shocked the game was still going, tbh. When I got through all of those cutscenes after the theater and then there was more gameplay I couldn't help but ask "why is this game still going? lol". I don't mean that as a criticism, though. I'm honestly amazed that a linear, single-player game this meaty was made. Especially one that's arguably mostly a stealth game. I liked that. I liked that a lot.

 

So yeah, basically all of my criticism is about the story. I thought the gameplay was absolutely fantastic. Why did no one tell me this game was influenced by MGS3?! At least, that was the first thing that came to mind the first time I found myself crawling in tall grass to sneak around and pick enemies off one by one. Ethan mentioned not liking the encounter design a while back and I couldn't disagree more. I had a blast crawling around in the grass, taking enemies out with the bow and leaving mines in choke points only to toss a bottle to draw enemies right to it. The resource management also added another great layer to it. I would crawl into a hiding spot and consider whether to craft more arrows vs breaking stealth and using my limited ammo. I can't remember the last time I found a game's combat this engaging and rewarding. Maybe playing on hard mode had something to do with it.

 

There's actually an achievement for beating Grounded mode this time and I'm tempted to jump right into it but I'd like to finish AC Shadows within a reasonable time frame, so I think I'll go back to continue that for now. Maybe I'll use this as an excuse to do a Grounded run of both games at some point down the line.

 

And with that, I think that was the last big Sony game I was really anticipating. I can't really think of anything else that I would be nearly as excited to play on PC. Well, there is one game that starts with B and ends with "loodborne" but Sony seems adamant on pretending it doesn't exist, so I gave up on that one a while ago. If it does get an eventual rerelease, I expect it to be in a form no one asked for: i.e. a needless remake by a different dev that completely butchers the art direction.

Edited April 14 by toxicitizen

[TheMightyEthan]

Blue Prince

 

I'm of two minds with this game. On the one hand, at its core there's a really great game here, with a really cool idea behind it. On the other hand, it's constantly shooting itself in the foot with the RNG bullshit. It just does not respect the player's time. There's tons of stuff that should be a permanent unlock but just isn't for some unfathomable reason, the metaprogression and story reveal is so thin on the ground that you can go multiple runs in a row without making any significant progress on literally any avenue of investigation. It's just frustrating, especially because a few small tweaks could make it so much better. So like when you open a door and are putting down a new room it gives you three options to choose from, and there are dice in the game to let you re-roll those three options if you don't like them, but they're quite rare on most runs. If those dice were more common it would alleviate so many of the problems, and that's just one example, the game is full of things like that where it's just like "why would you do it this way? it's needlessly time-wasting."

 

So yeah, I both love and hate this game. It's a great game that is fatally flawed.

 

Grade: B-

[toxicitizen]

Assassin's Creed Shadows

 

It's been a while since I played one of these at launch. Overall, I really enjoyed it and I think it might be my favorite AC game so far (keep in mind, my only modern point of reference is AC Origins since that's the last and most recent one I played) but ultimately it's still Assassin's Creed. The setting is great, the visuals are gorgeous and the parkour is the most polished it's ever been but that AC jank still shows up every now and then. The "modern day" story is limited to text entries in the new AC launcher and a handful of glitchy sequences in the actual game.

 

The actual story starts out really strong but then it sort of just goes away. After a brief intro with Yasuke, you play as Naoe only for the entirety of Act 1. That includes an opening sequence that features some Tarantino-ass musical choices. It's almost like Prey 2017 where the opening is so freaking awesome that the rest of the game struggles to reach the same height again. Basically it sets up Naoe's motivation and the group of enemies she'll be hunting down for the rest of the game. If you're like me and do a lot of side-content alongside the main story, it might take you close to 20 hours before you unlock Yasuke. When you do, you'll get a bunch of flashback missions giving you more of his backstory, including one that's basically a 30mins short film with the occasional interaction and that might actually be my favorite part of the entire story. Naoe's story is perfectly fine (and she also gets some flashback to flesh out what happened to her prior to the destruction of Iga at the beginning of the game) but Yasuke's story is just so freaking good. Once that's out of the way, though, you're mostly just going after your targets one by one. Which is fine, don't get me wrong. I'm all for the lack of padding. It was just weird to see the story almost taking a backseat after such a strong opening.

 

After a while you go through your entire list of targets and then some more personal quests are introduced for Naoe and Yasuke that pick up where some of their respective side-quests left off. And then the game just sort of ends. Like, when the credits rolled I literally said "What the fuck?!" because it was so out of nowhere. I'd literally just finished a fairly pivotal boss fight/scene that seemed to be setting up the next bit of story and then it just... ends. I have to assume it's setup for the DLC because if not then I don't know what the hell that was.

 

The story isn't the only thing that's uneven. Both Naoe and Yasuke are incredibly fun to play as. Naoe has all the cool parkour moves and tools to go stealthy and Yasuke is for when you just wanna cut down everything in your path and burst through big wooden gates like the Kool-Aid man. The problem is that stealth as Yasuke is treated like a joke. When he does a leap of faith, he immediately bounces out of hiding and the pile of hay is destroyed. When you do a "stealth kill" with him, he screams as he impales the enemy and lifts their corpse over his head. He's really fun in combat but since this is supposed to be a stealth game you end up favoring Naoe most of the time. The game is at its best during main story missions where you alternate between both of them in scripted missions: e.g. sneak in as Naoe to open the gate, Yasuke fights his way in to create a distraction, switch back to Naoe to use the commotion to get to the target and take them out. Having some agency over that kind of stuff to come up with your own strategies could've been great but as it is you can only swap between them either at pre-determined moments during story missions or from the menu when outside of combat/hostile areas.

 

One thing I really liked is that there is no quest log like in AC Origins because, well, there are no boring quests like that game had. When you get a quest from an NPC, 90% of the time it'll just add a circle on your objective board and on that circle will be targets for you to take out. Imagine that, most of the gameplay (both main and side-content) has you just getting lists of targets to... assassinate. In an Assassin's Creed game! I'm surprised it only took them like a dozen games over almost 20 years to figure that one out! (I have no idea if Odyssey and Valhalla were also like this lol all I know is Origins sure as shit wasn't...)

 

So yeah, overall I thought it was very enjoyable but if you don't like Assassin's Creed (or care for the Japanese setting) then YMMV. Oh and another thing I appreciate is that the achievements list doesn't require an insane amount of completion or grinding:

 

 

I was able to get all the missing ones fairly quickly after finishing the main story. The only annoying thing was some stuff required specific time of day/seasons to be doable. If I'd known earlier I could've planned around it, but since I didn't I ended up having to sit around waiting for in-game time to pass because for some baffling reason they removed the option to "medidate" to fast-forward the day/night cycle. Even though there's literally a meditation mini-game for Naoe... There's technically a mechanic to skip ahead to the next season but it's kinda unintuitive and useless. Oh and another thing they removed for no reason whatsoever is the ability to sell more than one piece of gear at a time. This was a solved problem all the way back in AC Origins so idk what the fuck happened there. They patched it back in like a couple weeks ago but I guess it was buggy cause they already patched it out.