Favorite Things Summer 2025

Published: 2025-09-02

Some of my favorite things from the last 3 months (May 2025 - August 2025)

Hilltop’s English translation of Boku no Natsuyasumi 2

I became familiar with the Boku franchise through Tim Roger’s review of the first game. Hilltop’s translation of the original Japanese version to English was a tremendous labor of passion, and as recommended I played one in game day per day throughout the month of August.

I didn’t regret it.

Metro Gravity

Metro Gravity is one of those games where the developer just kept adding concepts they thought were cool. “What if Psudeoregalia was Gravity Rush with Portal style physics puzzles?” “What if Sekiro was Hi-Fi Rush?” usually games like these live and die as gifs you see on twitter, but Metro Gravity came out, it’s real, I played it, and it’s good. The game does feel like a lot of separate games fused together, lacking a sense of cohesion. But the ideas are very interesting and a lot of the game is very well executed, it’s certainly a triumph of an accomplishment for a solo developer. There certainly is nothing else like it.

Split Keyboards

Got me a splayed Orhtolinear split keyboard. I’d say the best part about it isn’t necessarily the improved ergonomics (those are nice), but the ability to re-flash the firmware in real time. Set up a symbol layer to make common programming symbols much easier to type.

CSharp

I spent this summer looking for a good language to make games in, after this article and this much longer article, I’ve settled on a modern C# workflow and have been very happy with it. I can’t think of any other languages that can give you high level hot reloading and Metaprogramming, but also low level features like Native AOT and Value types with Layout alignment.

TrimUI brick

The TrimUI Brick or the “Bricky” is A Linux based retro emulation handheld. It was very nice build quality and screen density for the price. It’s size and form factor allow me to always have it in my bag, as opposed to something like a steam deck, which requires a commitment to bring with you. I’ve been playing lots of weird old retro games on it, as well as some ports of PC games through the super cool portmaster project.

Deltarune chapters 3+4

Undertale was the game that got me into game development, so Deltarune holds a special place in my heart. Didn’t expect to be continuing to wait for it 7 years after the first chapter came out, but Chapters 3 and 4 were great. I think this and Team Cherry’s Silksong both represent what development can be like with developers who have no external pressure to actually finish their project. This isn’t always a good thing, but it’s nice to get as close to the artists original uncompromised vision as possible.

Valkarie Profile

Valkarie Profile is exactly the kind of game I was looking for when I set out to play more weird old Games. You play as the Valkarie who is collecting souls and training them, and then sending them to act as warriors for the Ragnarok war. The game has a big “X number of days till Ragnarok” countdown timer and every action (resting, dungeon crawling, visiting places) passes time, very similar to the persona calendar system. The game has 2D side scrolling dungeon crawling and the battle system is a hybrid real time/turn based system, with each of your 4 party members are mapped to one of the 4 face buttons. You have a certain number of actions each character can take per turn When you press a party members button they attack the targeted enemy, but you can press multiple buttons/the same button twice to do combos. This game is so strange and odd and interesting. The only time I’ve seen any of it’s systems being used by other titles is the 2019 Indie game, Indivisible, taking the battle system and distilling it into a fully real time action rpg system. I have 5000 words written about JRPGS that I should be sharing sometime this season.

Cyberhook

Cyberhook is a fun movement game, very simple premise but hooking and swinging is fun what can I say, got 3 stars on all the non secret levels. Listen to this mix as you play.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldurs Gate 3 has an absurd amount of interesting decision making and player agency, it’s 140GB stuffed full of thingies for you to do and approaches you can take to problems. It’s the closest we’ve gotten to solving the Computer DM issue I totally made up in that video about RPGs I made in high school (no i’m not linking to it, you need to find it).

Dungeons and Dragons

Actual 5e DnD is fun too. Played a one-shot with my friend and her usual group. They’re a lot more role-play heavy than I’m used to, but that’s the part of DnD that is the most different than it’s computer counterparts, and still fun for sure. I’d be down to play again soon.

Seoul Sisters Kimchi seasoning

Food has been solved.