Also, full transparency here: the time change and 5:00 sunset have been royally kicking my ass of late and sapping my willpower to write. So, if it looks like I'm decisively phoning it in for this article, you're wrong...just not too wrong! That's sometimes the price one pays for having a rule that they have to review everything that might earn a spot on any of the year's GOTY lists! As always, I'll try to cover everything I believe you'll need to make an informed purchase decision, but this is a catch-up first and foremost.
You play as Yakumo: a Tokyo Ghoul-style emo edgelord who is also super-powerful ninja destined to kill the dark dragon that has long plagued the world. The whole story here is Yakumo going to various places to defeat bosses to gain access to cursed weapons to break the seals on the dragon so he can kill it...well, I guess I should say "most" of the story is that.
But for as good as the gameplay is, the level design is horrendous. You go from a fairly entertaining Neo Tokyo area to a boring shinto shrine area to a boring underground sewer area....and then you literally do them all again, but in reverse. What's more, when you're going back to those levels again, you fight exclusively bosses you already beat. Each of those areas accounts for a total of 4 or 5 chapters apiece.
One other improvement to mention is the use of color.
You hit enemies with a skateboard as a melee attack, use a rechargeable pistol, and occasionally pick up a heavier secondary gun. This is all done in a way that resembles a twin-stick shooter. I wouldn't say it's exactly a twin-stick shooter, but the comparisons are more than fair. All-in-all it's a solid gameplay loop as twin-stick shooters typically are, but the whole experience is hindered by some unfortunately old school bits of game design.
The biggest draw of Metal Garden (for me, at least) isn't the combat or the story: it's the environment design. There's no other way to say it: this is the closest any game has come to accurately capturing the scale and intricacy of Half Life 2's level design....basically ever. Interesting how frequently that game has come up in this article, but it truly has to be seen to be believed.
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Team Ninja, Platinum Games
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows
Ninja Gaiden 4 represents a truth that not many people recognize about games. I say it every year in some of my end of year categories, but a gameplay loop in a vacuum ultimately means nothing. A good loop requires the context of good level design and the like to make it truly pop.
Case in point?
Ninja Gaiden 4 has perhaps the single best gameplay loop of anything I've played this year...
And it's also one of the most aggressively forgettable games from that same span of time. Like, good lord is it forgettable.
Look, the story was never going to be important, so let's just move on to what matters in a game like this: the gameplay loop I was glazing not too long ago.
Ninja Gaiden 4 is a spectacle fighter, so you likely know what that means: combinations of light and heavy attacks in various sequences (light-light-light-heavy, light-heavy-light-heavy, etc) paired with jumps and slides and the like to dispose of enemies in ways meant to look flashy and cool. And christ on a pogo stick does it look flashy and cool. It is, in fact, the flashiest and coolest a game has looked (and more importantly, felt) in recent memory.
Here's how it works: When you unleash heavy attacks on an enemy, there's a chance the strike will dismember them. If that happens, you can press the heavy attack button again to unleash a killing blow straight out of an action movie. For example, if you're using the staff weapon, the killing blow might involve knocking the enemy around for a couple seconds before knocking their head off with a satisfying *thud*.
On the other hand, if you're using your dual katanas, you might flip over the enemy and slice off all their limbs on the way down. It legitimately never gets old, despite the fact that you'll end up doing it hundreds of times.
I feel like I'm not quite getting across how awesome these killing blows are, so I'll say this before I move on: during the tutorial, I was actually giggling with glee like a little kid. I don't think I've ever done that before in a game.
So 4-5 actually cool city areas with minimal differences between them, 4-5 boring shinto shrine areas with minimal differences between them, then 4-5 boring underground sewer areas with minimal differences between them, each ending with an admittedly excellent boss fight.
Then there's one chapter revenge tour for each, ending with those same excellent boss fights...which aren't quite as excellent the second time. Recycled content followed by recycled content followed by somehow even lazier recycled content. In this context, recycled content might've been forgivable if it had been good...but few of these levels are good.
On the technical front, I'm happy to report that Ninja Gaiden 4 is mostly solid. The framerate never falters, there aren't any texture troubles, crashes were never a concern, etc. It was often difficult to get the lock-on to work, which was a major pain...but everything else was solid. The soundtrack in particular features a high-quality emo anthem the likes of which I haven't heard since 2009!
This has not been one of my better reviews, but it's like I said in the opening paragraph: Ninja Gaiden 4, despite having me literally giggling with joy from how fun it was, is somehow one of this year's most aggressively forgettable titles.
Contradictory?
Yes.
Harmful to my credibility?
Possibly.
Just how it is?
Unfortunately.
Let us review:
Awful level design - 1.0
Awful level design (recycled) - 1.0
Utterly forgettable - 1.0
Difficulty with lock-on - 0.5
The final score for Ninja Gaiden 4 is...
6.5/10 - Almost Good
Sorry it turned out this way, Team Ninja/Platinum Games, sorry it turned out this way.
Publisher: Futurlab
Developer: Futurlab
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch 2
In my 2022 GOTY article, I gave the original PowerWash Simulator the #8 spot on the final list. What makes that more astounding than it likely already sounds is the fact that 2022 was a relatively good year! Sometimes you don't need a complex, visceral gameplay loop like you'd find in Ninja Gaiden 4 to stand apart from the crowd! Sometimes all you need is something simple-yet-satisfying.
With all of that in mind, PowerWash Simulator 2 is largely just the original game with some much-needed quality of life improvements.
Like in the original title, the campaign is a series of cleaning scenarios (a car, a theme park, etc), and your goal is to clean whatever is in front of you from top to bottom. In this sequel, however, you have some more tools at your disposal.
Firstly, soap. Go figure, right? But while the original game featured bottles of soap made for specific types of surfaces (stone, wood, etc) that had to be purchased individually, PowerWash Simulator 2 simply features an all-purpose soap nozzle that requires no money to fill. What's more, this soap functions as a tactical nuke of a cleaning tool that makes the toughest grime go away when the soap is rinsed with even the weakest water nozzle.
So if you're up against a wall that features a large swath of grime that would normally take a couple of passes with a heavy-duty nozzle to clean, simply covering the whole area with soap and then washing it away with whatever nozzle you want will do the trick!
Another big quality of life feature is the surface cleaning tool, which is kind of like a circular motor mop. You have to move a bit slowly with it for it to work how you want, but it ultimately has the same effect that soap has (without having to apply a layer of the stuff and then rinse).
But by far the biggest quality of life feature to be found here is the liberal interpretation of "clean" that most surfaces subscribe to. One of my complaints about the original game was that there were several surfaces in several jobs that required you to remove every pixel of dirt before it counted as clean. This meant you'd spend several minutes scanning every inch of a surface looking for a teeny-tiny speck of dirt that you missed.
Not so in this sequel...mostly. There are a handful of items that still feel a bit too picky about their cleanliness parameters, but for the most part, this wasn't a problem.
This sequel features environments with bright pinks and blues and oranges and the like, which makes the cleaning feel all the more satisfying. Lack of color wasn't a complaint I had with the original title, but this is still a pretty clear improvement.
Where PowerWash Simulator 2 falls short, however, is in its bizarrely terrible technical fidelity.
The game is plagued by pretty frequent stutters, and in later levels, these stutters can become truly unreasonable. In a rollercoaster level, I actually took measurements: every 15-40 seconds, I would experience freezes around 3 seconds long on average.
That, dear reader, is insanity for something that requires as few hardware resources as PowerWash Simulator 2. I mean, really, Super Mario Sunshine was released in 2002, and it managed to render larger levels with moving, spawning grime without stutters.
Then there's the fact that the end-of-job playback glitches out literally every time. After you finish cleaning, you get to watch a timelapse of your work as a reward for all the time you spent. However, the playbacks in this sequel never once happened without patches of dirt remaining on the screen or taking multiple seconds longer to despawn than they should have. The playback is kind of one of the biggest draws of this package, so the fact that it can't ever be depended on is more than a little disappointing.
There's also a theater level that features a bug that I initially considered game-breaking.
In this level, there's a scissorlift at your disposal....however, you can't move it. And it's sitting on a big patch of dirt. You can't complete that bit of rug without cleaning a significant portion of the dirt that's underneath the lift...so if you want to move forward, you have to get as low as you possibly can and desperately inch the nozzle around gingerly in the hopes that you'll eventually shave off the correct amount of pixels in the limited under-lift geography that isn't blocked. I was obviously able to make this work, as has the community, but it isn't an acceptable problem to have.
There are also some smaller things like a complete lack of feedback on the manual save button, but these aren't as big a deal.
So, yeah, PowerWash Simulator 2 has some pretty major stumbles, but it's also an improvement over its predecessor in just about every way that counts.
Let us review:
Severe framerate stutters - 1.0
Almost game-breaking bug - 1.0
The final score for PowerWash Simulator 2 is...
8.0/10 - Great
Well done, Futurlab, well done!
Publisher: Top Hat Studios
Developer: Andrei Chernyshov, Anji Games
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows
As you can plainly see, Silly Polly Beast has a silly name...but I'd bet you're curious about it, aren't you? The same was true for me, and had I not sought to quell that curiosity, I would've missed one of 2025's best hidden gems.
This likely won't come as much of a shock, but you play as Polly: a mute teenager on the run after working with her sister to burn down the orphanage they lived in. The plan was to meet at the riverside after the deed was done, but at the start of the game, Polly's sister still hasn't shown up. While waiting around, a strange dog appears and steals Polly's lighter. A chase ensues, and after falling down a pipe, Polly wakes up in "The Abyss," which is basically the underworld. Down there, she meets a mysterious entity named "The Tormented," who offers her a way out of The Abyss in exchange for her help killing three demons. What could possibly go wrong?
From there, we have our story. It's simple, but has some surprisingly effective turns and endearing characters.
In terms of gameplay, Silly Polly Beast is a bite-sized variety pack of various styles. There are some isometric bits, some sidescrolling bits, some Temple Runner-style skateboarding bits, and some Silent Hill-esque puzzle areas. While that probably sounds pretty disparate, the actual gameplay loop remains consistent throughout these styles.
For instance, even on easy mode, healing items are so limited and so ineffective that you'll almost always find yourself two-to-three hits away from death, with your health never getting restored on its own at checkpoints or upon a respawn after death.
That in itself isn't the problem.
All-time classics like Half-Life 2 and...well, come to think of it, all all-time classics do that and it isn't an issue. The issue is that there isn't more than one save slot per playthrough. To return to Half-Life 2 as an example, if you enter an autosave with low health and get your ass handed to you, you can always load an earlier save to try and get your hands on some more health packs or retry an earlier combat encounter to lose less health before going back to that autosave area.
Not so in Silly Polly Beast. There have been times over the course of my two playthroughs where I entered an autosave area with literally one hit point remaining and had to think on my feet and play extra conservatively in order to survive. I was always able to succeed at this, and I guarantee that you will be too if you find yourself in that situation, but I can't say it was a fun experience.
Compounding onto that is another old school design decision: insta-kill falls. In rare circumstances, Polly will find herself in arenas on top of buildings or somewhere else where it's possible to "fall off." If you do that, it's an instant game-over. In normal combat scenarios, that's annoying but survivable. However, this rears its head in one of the last bosses, where you're forced to eventually fight exclusively on a balance beam-like frame. Precision movement under pressure in an isometric character view? Not the best thing in the world.
Aside from these examples, there are also a couple good old school design decisions, namely in the game's few puzzles. Not too much to say about those, but they treat you like you're an intelligent human being, which I always appreciate.
Another thing I always appreciate is style, which Silly Polly Beast has in droves. Imagine if Persona were given a sort of girlpunk coat of paint with some classic cinema sensibilities, and you have a rough idea of how Silly Polly Beast looks, sounds, and feels. What's more, despite the clearly limited budget, this game's style doesn't come at the cost of glitches or framerate compromises. It's just amazing to me that Silly Polly Beast can have so much more happening on screen than PowerWash Simulator 2 and still somehow perform better.
This game is one that I'd bet money hasn't crossed your radar yet, dear reader. There hasn't been any marketing that I've seen, and I'm legitimately one of the few people I've seen online covering it. So, take it from me: Silly Polly Beast is worth your time if you're in the mood for a small, high-quality little actiony/survival horror-y type thing.
Let us review:
(Bad) Old-School Design Choices - 1.0
The final score for Silly Polly Beast is...
9.0/10 - Fantastic
Well done, Mr. Chernyshov, well done!
Publisher: Tinerasoft
Developer: Tinerasoft
Platform: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
But as likely as it is that Silly Polly Beast hasn't crossed your radar, I'd put down much greater sums of money betting that you haven't heard of Metal Garden. This being the smallest game in this article, it'll also be the smallest review.
Metal Garden is a moody, atmospheric FPS from a (I believe) solo developer. Taking place inside a massive corporate megastructure, your goal is to find a way out. That's about all that can be said for the moment-to-moment plot, but be aware that there's also a surprising amount of lore to be found to flesh things out.
As far as gameplay is concerned, it's largely a pretty standard FPS save for one major standout mechanic: the injury system.
When you lose all your health, you don't die. Instead, your health bar fills again, and you sustain an injury to a body part. Depending on which body part gets damaged, you take a combat consequence. For instance, if you get a head injury, the aiming reticle disappears and you instead have to aim down the sights. After taking 4 injuries, you finally die. This isn't likely to happen, as strafing around enemies tends to cause all their bullets to miss. Melee enemies are a different story, but c'est la vie.
If I had to nitpick here, I'd say that the atmosphere, while good, is pretty one-note. It wears out its welcome a little bit towards the end, which isn't a great look when a game is already maybe 3 hours at most. The combat is also, as I've already implied, a bit uninspiring...but again, that isn't really the point.
I guess the point of even reviewing this game in the first place is to get you to play it. Metal Garden is, quite simply, a masterclass in level design that brings with it an interesting approach to traditional health systems. I think efforts like this deserve to be rewarded, even if I can't find a whole review's worth of stuff to say about it.
So, given the relatively small size of this game, I'll be applying my smaller game scoring scale.
Let us review:
Uninspiring combat - 1.0
Wears out its welcome towards the end - 1.0
The final score for Metal Garden is...
8.0/10 - Great
Great effort, Tinerasoft, great effort!
Publisher: Skybound Games
Developer: Nice Dream
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2
In 2021, a game called Before Your Eyes released and took the narrative game world by storm. For my part, it didn't make it onto my GOTY list that year, but it was one hell of an emotional tour de force. How could such a story (about a terminally ill child crossing into the afterlife after his mother tells him his life mattered because of all the joy he brought to those around him) not be?
So, when word came out that the developers were coming out with a new game this year, I was obviously ready to buy it day one. I'll say this right at the start: if you're looking for another bittersweet To the Moon-style tearjerker, this isn't that...nor is it trying to be. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth your time.
Despite this not being a tearjerker like its predecessor, this is as much of a character piece as that game was. Rebecca (the mom), Simon (the dad), Cleo (the older sister), and Isaac himself are all some of this year's best characters. The same can be said of the script, though that's probably obvious.
However, there are a couple relatively small problems to report.
Subtitles frequently didn't match the spoken words, to name one thing. For instance: a subtitle might read "the people," while the actor says "the audience". It doesn't impact much, but it's a bit of a pet peeve for me. How hard can it possibly be to change the text that shows up on screen to match what the actors say? Or alternatively, how hard can it possibly be to tell the actor to read what's on the script? Again, not a big deal, but I find it puzzling.
Finally, this game does suffer a bit of the old Return of the King syndrome where it seems to end like 10 times before the credits actually roll.
As simple as that is, though, there's still a bit of jank involved.
The big thing is that if you're playing in a way that doesn't use a webcam, you're going to experience frequent problems getting the cursor to line up with certain items on the screen in the exact right way to activate them. At one point I had to reload a save because I was convinced I had triggered a bug. But when I booted the save back up, I found that I needed to move the cursor just off to the side of the thing I was trying to interact with.
In some on-rails segments, you'll also experience several animation glitches that can possibly be headache-inducing. These segments aren't very long, but it's an issue I experienced in every one of them.
Folks, if you're in the mood for an extremely strong narrative with some equally excellent characters and don't mind an experience with some roughness around the edges, I think you'll find something to like about Goodnight Universe. Once again, I'll be using my smaller-scale scoring system.
Let us review:
Story-side problems (subtitles, RotK syndrome) - 1.0
Gameplay-side problems - 1.0
The final score for Goodnight Universe is...
8.0/10 - Great
Congratulations again, Nice Dream, congratulations again!
Publisher: KeepItGoin' Games
Developer: KeepItGoin' Games
Platform: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
I lied in the Metal Garden review. This is going to be the shortest one.
Pizza Boy is a demo on itch.io from a first-time developer (link to page here) in which your goal is to forcibly deliver pizza to people as swiftly as possible. It also features incredible voice acting!
I won't be giving this one a score, though. Because that first-time developer happens to be my younger brother, and I happen to be one of the voice actors! So go forth and give it a shot today!
We're getting close to the end of the year, and that means we're getting close to the GOTY lists! It's hard to say how many more reviews are going to come down the pipeline. You'll likely see a review for Metroid Prime 4, but unless something excellent comes across my radar, that's going to be the next and last thing before the big one. So, barring any big surprises, I'll see you then!
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