Aspeon ⁽³⁵⁾

Looking back on 2025, this was kind of a weird branching out year. Not a lot of puzzle game work, but a lot of other stuff:

• Meticulous Microbes update, with new puzzles and a little QoL
• The Musing on Metapuzzles blog series, and a ThinkyCon talk about it
• Safari Logic, basically a paper puzzle, for the Thinky Puzzle Game Jam
• Bow Bird's Mine Ride, a first PICO-8 project, for the GMTK Game Jam
• Check For Traps, a platformer, for Pizza Jam
• Energy Excavation, the one actually new puzzle game, for Confounding Calendar

The one interesting prototype I did was for the "Collector" Ludum Dare- didn't get anywhere puzzle-wise but I did find a bug in the version of PuzzleScript Next I was using, so it wasn't a total waste.

Some more thoughts below the link:

As I mentioned in the previous post, there were so many good games this year that it was hard to narrow it down to a top 10, leading to me disqualifying Type Help and Deltarune on technicalities to open up some slots. But I make the rules here, so I'm just going to add games to the list until I have what feels like a representative sample.

It's end-of-year wrapup time, so let's go. Like last time, this is the pre-post for games I played in 2025 that didn't come out this year, or games I didn't get around to:

My entry in this year's Confounding Calendar is officially out: Energy Excavation.

I'm honored to have it featured both in Draknek's Thinky Third Thursday and Bart Bonte's bontegames blog. Bontegames is probably the closest vibe I've gotten to Jayisgames of yore (especially since he's been around long enough that some of his games showed up there), so it's especially cool to see it there.

Some mildly spoilery design thoughts below the jump:

I gave a talk at ThinkyCon last week about metapuzzles, mostly summing up stuff from the blog but going a little more into the puzzlehunt side since that's something that that audience is less likely to be familiar with. Thanks to the Thinky Games crew, they've already split out the video from the talks, so you can see it on its own:

I also uploaded a PDF of the slides: https://aspeon.neocities.org/stuff/ThinkyCon-2025.pdf