Aspeon ⁽³⁹⁾

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

Released my entry for Pizza Jam, Check for Traps. The theme was a little silly- with a choice of 15 randomly selected Oblivion quotes to use, I picked "Watch out for traps!" and made a puzzle-ish platformer where the traps are hidden.