GOTY OF THE YOTY 2025

some of my favorite media of 2025

Can you believe it’s February March already? I suggest we look upon this as some sort of second third January, perfectly on time for my annual GOTY OF THE YOTY.
You can find 2022, 2023, and 2024 here.

For 2025, in no particular order:

🐐 GOTY OF THE YOTY 🐐

1. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo (Pocket Trap)
   An original top-down action adventure filled with cool movement mechanics set in what I can only imagine is some sort of Rat São Paulo. Big GBA energy, and I have no idea if this is true here, but you can kinda tell when a game was programmed by one of the designers. Feels good.

2. Jupiter Hell Classic (ChaosForge)
   Accessible traditional roguelike. Accessible 👏 Traditional 👏 Roguelike 👏!!!
   It’s a demake of the fancier Jupiter Hell, which is a remake of the simpler DoomRL, which is a roguelike interpretation of the classic shooter everybody loves. Can’t wait for what the next step in this recursion will be. I’ll definitely be enjoying more of it in 2026.

3. Baby Steps (Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy)
   Baby Steps has the best videogame tutorial I’ve ever played, probably the funniest control scheme I’ve ever seen, and a one of a kind grown-up take on masculinity that goes places most games won’t dare to tread. And it’s a hoot to play as a pass-the-controller game with friends.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Despelote, Gnomes, Many Nights a Whisper, Consume Me, Öoo, Shotgun Cop Man, Evil Egg, Ruin

🎥FOTY🎥

1. Common Side Effects (Joe Bennett, Steve Hely)
   Beautifully paced thriller/animated series. A lone nerd takes on the pharmaceutical industry, featuring the best FBI agents you’ve seen since Twin Peaks and plenty of room for psychedelic animation flexing.

2. The Clock (Christian Marclay)
   The Clock is a 24-hour art piece cut together from movie shots of clocks, synched to whatever time it is while you’re watching. I had the pleasure of seeing 14:55 until 15:30 and then like 15:59 until 16:18. Really fun to think about what making this must’ve been like.

3. Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger)
   This dares to ask the big emotional questions, such as: will Dog ever meet Robot again? Beautiful, no dialogue, just feelings.

📚 BOTY 📚

1. Between Two Fires (Christopher Buehlman)
   I used to joke I didn’t like fantasy because horses are scary, but in this medieval horror journey all the horses are long dead and rotting with plague so it’s all good. Beautiful to-the-point prose, as if someone taught Cormac McCarthy about punctuation.

2. The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)
   This is a climate apocalypse story (cli-fi?) about how with a bit of hands-on bureaucracy and a lot of terrorism we can turn the world into a post-fossil-fuels utopia. Nobody does hopeful politics like KSR.

3. The Third Policeman (Flann O'Brien)
   An absurdist little novel about how having to deal with cops is a sort of tiny hell. It was written in 1940 but only posthumously published in 1967, probably because it was too weird for the English. Very funny, very imaginative, and definitely worth a read.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Native Tongue, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, The Shadow of the Torturer, The Sparrow, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Manhattan Beach

🎵 MOTY 🎵

Good music that accompanied my year:

1. Mensonges invites Mona San

2. RA.1000 Mark Ernestus

3. ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U | Boiler Room: Tokyo

4. DJ Skia - Best of Senegal (Mbalax) 2025

5. BAALTI 190225

6. oddeen - od

Looking back

My 2025 was great, I got to see manta rays! Please imagine this is me writing this newsletter:

Then some work stuff I helped make happen:

• Nuclear Throne Update 100 released, exactly 10 years after launch! Featuring a new character, custom difficulty mode, localization into 15 languages (I did the Dutch version, je weet toch), 4-player co-op, and much more.

• Ridiculous Fishing EX: Area Fishy-One, in which you can put on a tinfoil hat, catch cryptids, and FINALLY shoot the Moon.

• Collaborated with Button Shy on the Dustbiters: Pocket Edition. Perfect for on the road!

• Released and sold out a physical edition of Nuclear Throne for the Switch, as well as a beautiful Y.V. plushie.

• Helped launch the Iconic Roguelites and Disc Room x Astro Prospector bundles on Steam.

• Gave a workshop with Kitty Calis about making 1000 games per hour at Guadalindie.

• Minit and Nuclear Throne were part of AGDQ and helped raise money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation!

• Went on the TSLOG podcast with Jukio and Joonas to talk about Nuclear Throne update 100 and impatient game design.

• Work continues on the unannounced project, the one I promise we will announce soon each year!

• And we’re once again one year closer to the ULTRABUGS release (wishlist please).

Thanks for reading, in the meantime you’re very welcome in the ever-growing but still-nice jwaaaap discord!

Wishing you all a lovely 2026,
JW