Best of 2025
If doing something three times makes it into a tradition, here’s to the establishment of my tradition of raving about twenty works I first experienced and really enjoyed this year. Each sublist is in chronological order, not ranked or anything. I’m digging this practice, both because it helps me remember all the good times, and because it might lead to you all trying out underappreciated awesome stuff and enjoying your own good times!
Games
- Eternal Strands (2025) - A small, confident team makes a small, confident game about a found family climbing up giant robots and dismantling them. This is the game I wished Shadow of the Colossus was.
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025) - This atmospheric, moreish Belle Époque JeRPG has anticipated whatever ridiculous build you’re making and says sure, you can do that. I was glad to see it and its impeccable art direction win many well-deserved awards.
- Blue Prince (2025) - A completely unknown team comes out of nowhere and shadow drops an unimaginably intricate puzzle box of a game where every tiny detail is a clue to yet another meta puzzle. The surprise and delight I’ve experienced picking apart this game with friends has been once in a lifetime.
- Cyber Knights: Flashpoint (2025) - Neo-cyberpunk XCOM except every mission is a heist. The additional leniency, granularity, and progression make this the into game I wanted Invisible Inc to be.
- Monster Train 2 (2025) - The sequel to my favorite autobattling roguelike deckbuilder. After navigating the nine circles of hell last game, your demon train takes on the seven heavens. Equipment and rooms add sparkle to what was already a marvel of pairing two of five wildly unique factions, broken decks, and number go up.
- Old Skies (2025) - The team behind Unavowed and the Blackwell series of indie NYC-loving adventure games delivers again. This time, you’re time-traveling through six distinct eras of NYC and intervening in poignant life stories.
- Hades II (2025) - Supergiant’s first sequel starts with the perfection of Hades and dutifully produces a more perfect sequel, while layering in commentary about what sequels can and must be. Or you can just not engage with any of that and enjoy its world-class gameplay.
- Rift of the Necrodancer (2025) - The Necrodancer team dares to reimagine what high-level rhythm games can be from a place of deep reverence and expertise. It’s Guitar Hero, but the notes move in predictable patterns. Instead of playing superhuman amounts of notes, the challenge becomes intuiting the right notes from ever-more complex patterns.
- Isles of Sea and Sky (2024) - An entire metroidvania about challenging box-pushing puzzles. If you like box-pushing but found Baba is You and Patrick’s Parabox too meta-focused, this game is for you.
Books
- Daggerheart (2025) - What if they made D&D from scratch today with all of our accumulated game design knowledge? Similar or better fluff and crunch, with less than half of the fiddly bits.
- Eunoia (2001) - Christian Bök takes lipogrammatic writing to an extreme. Five mellifluous epic poems, each written with only one of the five vowels.
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003) - Mary Roach’s debut novel, in which she asks people who work with cadavers for a living all our burning questions. Her writing remains incredible even 22 years earlier. Includes a segment with up-and-coming heart surgeon Dr. Oz.
- The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time (2016) - Keith Houston leads us on four delightful, well-researched journeys spanning the complete histories of writing surfaces, writing itself, printed illustrations, and books.
Music
- Lady Gaga - Abracadabra (2025) - A new Lady Gaga album in her 2009 style?! Yes, please!
- Aural Vampire - LET IT DIE (2018) - Droning, industrial, energetic, and beautiful.
- COLTEMONIKHA - communication (2006) - Flowy, quirky, and catchy.
- 5 Seconds of Summer - Teeth (2019) - Dark, intense, and tartly beautiful.
- Mother Mother - Hayloft (2008) - Wild, sonorant, and kinetic.
Video
- The Man From Earth (2007) - A low-budget film about a 15,000 year old man revealing his secret to university colleagues for the first time. Feels like a long Star Trek episode, in part because it was written by one of the original series writers.
- Critical Role: Campaign Four (2025) - The headliner tabletop role-playing actual play series begins its fourth multi-year campaign in a brand-new world. I cannot overstate how talented every single cast member is at creating a novel, engaging, dramatic experience on camera. And then they release it for free for everyone.
cliffhanger
The plot device cliffhanger is first found in print in Variety magazine, a US trade weekly magazine focused on entertainment, in 1930. Instead of its current meaning, the term then meant a movie serial, referencing the cliche of a short ending with a character dangling off a cliff awaiting rescue. Cliffhanger gained its current meaning of “suspenseful situation” in 1950, again by association with that cliche.
Cliffhangers as a plot device are of course far older than that word. The iconic 1914 movie serial The Perils of Pauline includes two shorts that end with the heroine literally hanging off a cliff. Fifty years earlier and one medium over, Charles Dickens’s cliffhanger-laden serial fiction defined the style of the genre by 1860. Over a thousand years before that, أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah), meaning “One Thousand and One Nights”, used nightly cliffhangers as its central plot device.
Both cliff and hang have been English words since before English existed. They are probably more than 2000 and less than 4000 years old.
vibe
The intangible quality vibe was popularized in 1967 as a clipping of “vibration” in the wake of the Beach Boys’ 1966 chart-topper “Good Vibrations”. “Vibrations” meaning intangible qualities or communications, inspired by ESP, made it into the lyrics through California drug slang. Perhaps coincidentally, the cordless vibrator, also abbreviated vibe, was first marketed for sexual purposes in 1968.
Vibe and its relatives were ubiquitous enough to be called the cliche of the 1960s. Both the plural form vibes and the verb vibing, suggesting being “in tune with the vibration of the universe”, were in common use by 1970.
The word experienced a resurgence in the late 2010s, perhaps buoyed by political commentary about vibes being off and running on vibes. Novel phrases like vibe shift and vibe check were popularized as recently as 2022. Vibe coding was coined by Slovak-born AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in 2025.
serendipity
The phenomenon serendipity was named by English writer Horace Walpole in 1754, by analogy to the accidental discovery in the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip”. Walpole used the neologism in a letter to his friend, which became part of a collection that was published in 1833, 35 years after his death. The word remained obscure until an 1877 US magazine called attention to the letter. It only began appearing in dictionaries in the 1890s.
The fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip” took quite a journey before finally arriving in England in 1722, as a translation of a French translation. It first appeared in Italian in 1557, part of a translation of the Persian هشت بهشت (Hasht Bihisht), meaning “Eight Paradises”, written around 1302. The story is set in the Sassanid Empire of 420-440 and is first found written down in the Hasht Bihisht.
Serendip (سرندیپ) is the Classical Persian name for the island that is now called Sri Lanka. It is possibly from Sanskrit सिंहल द्वीप (Sinhala-dvipa), meaning “Sinhala Isle”. Sinhala is the name of the ethnic majority living on the island, who first arrived and began taking over around 543 BCE. That name is derived from Sanskrit सिंह (siṃhá), meaning “lion”. The Sinhalese name for the island is Sinhale. By the 800s it was pronounced Saylan, which the Portugese transliterated as Ceilão (English Ceylon) when they colonized it in 1517. Since its independence in 1972, the island has been named Sri Lanka. श्री (śrī́) is the Sanskrit honorific and लङ्का (laṅkā) is Sanskrit for “island”.
goth
The aesthetic goth originated from the goth subculture, which spread from British club scenes in the early 1980s into mainstream awareness in the 1990s. The scene was named after the genre of music they coalesced around, gothic rock. Goth rock began as a post-punk subgenre of British rock in the late 1970s. Contemporary writers described it as “positive punk” or “punk gothique”, due to one of the genre’s main influences being gothic fiction.
Gothic fiction describes the popular British fiction style that peaked in the 1790s, but was popular for 40 years in either direction. It’s characterized being set in the medieval period and evoking strong emotions, particularly fear and awe. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a canonical example. As you might suspect at this point, gothic horror literature is named after gothic architecture. Specifically, the feelings of “medieval” and “barbaric” the era evoked.
Gothic architecture refers to two different movements: the Gothic Revival movement prevalent in early 1800s England, and the original movement it sought to emulate, the European style of medieval castles and cathedrals from roughly 1200-1500. Like Baroque architecture, the movement was named by its replacement. So their names emphasize their perceived negative qualities. Baroque there meaning needlessly complicated, and gothic here meaning barbaric and uncivilized. Contemporaries instead referred to gothic architecture as “modern work”, “French style”, or “German style”.
Gothic came to mean barbaric or uncivilized around the year 300 by association with the Goths, a group of Germanic people who were driven from their homeland in what is now Ukraine by the Huns, to Roman lands. As such, most of their modern characterization is limited to “eastern barbarians who sacked Rome as it fell”. Sadly, this is where our trail goes cold. It is unclear what the Goths were named for. There’s some suggestive gesturing at the island of Gotland south of Sweden, but nothing concrete.