Reading/Playing/Watching 2025

A list of things I read, played, or watched in 2025 and some brief thoughts for each. I wouldn't consider these reviews but you can read them as such if you like.

This was a great year for games, with hits like Expedition 33, Baldur’s Gate 3, and some other gems. I also caught up on some classic shows like Cowboy Bebop and Succession alongside some fantastic new TV like Lord of Mysteries and Andor.

Books

Lent, Jo Walton

My penitent brother told me that he was committing the sin of pride after converting Florence into the Ark of God so I told him to wear a hair belt and wash the feet of the poor to learn humility. He said he already does that every week so I said it sounds like you're just being prideful and suffering instead of repenting and then the demons surrounding us started crying.

This book was recommended to me, and at first I didn't understand why. It's from the perspective of a real monk in fifteenth-century Florence named Girolamo Savonarola - you can go look him up. Lent takes a couple liberties filling in the details of his life but largely succeeds at showing you the world as he saw it. Literally, showing you the demons and prophecies and everything else he believed in, and how he deals with those as all of his beliefs are challenged. It did a great job of putting me into the shoes of a character wildly different from myself but who still feels rational given the circumstances.

Network Effect, Martha Wells

Murderbot deals with its biggest threats yet, such as emotional vulnerability, caring what others think, and friendship.

This is currently the only full-length novel in the Murderbot series, but is far and away the best one in the series. The novellas are well-paced, but at that length it's hard to have compelling plot and characters and world. These books skate by on thin (but evocative) worldbuilding from an unreliable narrator, so the first few books suffer in the plot and character departments. In this one, the novel pacing gives them so much more room for depth and good character interactions and it all pays off very well. The series as a whole is good but not great, I would recommend them if you like the modern quippy style and the themes of being a murder robot in a corporate dystopia.

Wind and Truth, Brandon Sanderson

A duel for the fate of a planet, and a road trip to the land of grass. You can never go home.

This is the finale to part one of Brandon Sanderson's epic high fantasy series, and it accomplished that quite well. It's the big kickoff for the war that will span basically the rest of the works in the cosmere so it has a lot to do on a meta level. Unfortunately I think the book itself struggled because of it. A lot of the book was effectively recap for anyone who had been really plugged in to the series, most of the rest was setting up stuff so the finale could feel earned. It's the sort of book that feels really cool once, as an event, but not really as a story on its own.

Almost Nowhere, nostalgebraist

Anne lives in a tower with her notebooks. Grant and Azad live in a house. Cordelia attends a school. But only Hector Stein lives on a rock.

I have found all of nostalgebraist's fiction extremely impactful in the sense that I feel permanently changed after reading it. It's like an itch getting scratched for the first time and then you know what it feels like, you know that the itch is there now and you'll be violently aware of it forever. Almost Nowhere is the longest and most meandering of this variety, which gives it more space to scratch those itches but also loses some structure as a story. There are just so many things that are so brilliantly unique it's hard to even classify the type of story, let alone how I would try and massage it into a more intelligible shape.

I also read Floornight this year, which is similar in a couple ways but shorter and written much earlier. Even with their flaws, I think all of these works really hit something valuable and seem like exceptions to any rubric I can come up with.

Crystal Society, Max Harms

The first true artificial intelligences are born and must cooperate to survive as a person.

Speaking of interesting minds, this book was full of them. It's a very stark contrast to books like Murderbot, where a mechanical being has very human emotions. In the Crystal Society, every mind is so alien and interesting that the human characters start to feel alien too. I had no knowledge about the author until a few dozen pages in, when I thought "this seems like an AI alignment textbook" and googled his name to find his LessWrong profile. Despite the moments that felt like a lecture, and the plot of the book jumping the shark halfway through, I was entertained enough to keep reading. Some of this was because it felt unpredictable, like it could take swings no other book would take, but a lot of it was just getting attached to the Society and wanting to see how they would react.

Fine Structure, QNTM

An angel falls to the land of beasts. Is the scientific method broken or is magic real?

Not many authors reward a very close reading as much as QNTM. Ideal reading conditions would include a corkboard, or at least a large notebook. I read a lot of this on a plane, so I didn't have access to my corkboard, but it was still wholly enjoyable. It's very hard to get this sort of hard science fiction done right and also be fulfilling (see The Three Body Problem) but this one does it well enough to be both narratively satisfying and cool as hell.

Other

Games

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

The grief of an entire city, channeled into a yearly suicide mission.

Despite everything about it, I love this game. For a specific type of person (who is not me), this might be the perfect game. Unfortunately I have shit reflexes and piss-poor timing, so a game that relies on those is not well-suited for me. I really really wish there were more fine-grained difficulty and accessibility options for this game because I want to recommend it to people so bad. Unfortunately even at the lowest difficulty you still need to have pretty good reflexes - but then all the strategy around the RPG elements are also made trivial. But the story! Oh, the story is beautiful. The music, the world, the people, it's all wound up in this big knot of a story around one very fucked up family.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Survive and stop the Illithid invasion in the closest thing yet to single player D&D.

I never played the original Baldur's Gate games, but I have played plenty of D&D. Not only is this a great game as far as story and general character development, but it's also extraordinarily ambitious with how free and open it is while still sticking close to standard D&D rules and Bladur's Gate setting. It's a combination that they usually pull off quite well, but does lead to weird situations where things aren't explained or a bug breaks your immersion. Still, it's a beautiful and enormous game that can be played a dozen times and even then you certainly won't see it all.

Heaven Will Be Mine

After the alien existential threat is defeated, what becomes of space and the people who call it home?

A game about making good bad decisions or bad good decisions, but you have to make a decision one way or another. It's just a visual novel which isn't usually my taste, but the themes around loneliness and rebellion and humanity were done really well and after seeing so much about it I'm glad I decided to give it a go. It's about war and violence and self-expression and gravity, among a dozen other things, which gives it a real messy feeling in the best way. All of the main characters and the rivals feel real, nuanced, and have a real weight behind them. I always feel curious to learn more but the game keeps their interiority hidden enough you can interpret everything they say a dozen ways. I've only played two endings so far but I intend to play out everything the game has to offer, which I don't normally do.

Hades 2

The gods face the wrath of their past, and their daughter becomes a witch to avenge them.

As a sequel, a game is often expected to elevate both the gameplay and story from the original. Hades 2 definitely has better gameplay: basically every aspect of the literal game is dramatically improved in my opinion. The feel of the upgrades, the increased variety in maps, the meta-progression, everything is a bit more fun and kept me engaged much longer than the first. I thought the story was pretty good, all said, but like the first game it's very limited by the fact that it has to dangle a bunch of character beats out past the "end" of the game to get you to keep playing (which I didn't do). I think it did a good job of showing how different Melinoë was from Zagreus, how cold and ruthless she had to become and why, and personally I quite liked the ending even though it was quite sudden. But be aware that you'll be expected to keep playing after the credits roll if you want the most out of the story.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

Neither your mind or your body are truly yours. You're living in a borrowed shell on borrowed time.

Citizen Sleeper (1) was a game I played a few years ago, which had a really interesting system built around dice you roll at the beginning of each day. You see them up front, and over the course of the day you get to allocate them to specific actions. If you roll all sixes you'll have a good day, but if you roll low you have to either try to push through it or just give up and rest. The system perfectly echoes the story of someone being betrayed by their own body, trying to help both themselves and those they care about while literally falling apart. This game uses the same underlying system but removes a major deterioration mechanic from the first game, which gives the player more freedom but also undercuts the story's momentum. I still had fun with it, but I was able to effectively ignore all consequences the game threw at me by strategically managing my resources and resting when necessary.

Balatro

It's poker, with a couple little twists. It's weirdly addicting.

Balatro takes the basics of poker and turns them into a roguelike where you can modify your deck, upgrade the points from each hand type, and unlock special joker cards that break all the rules. There's not actually that much to the game but there's always just enough of a challenge and it always feels like you're making some progress so it kept pulling me back. I'm sure it will stay on my shelf as a game I go back to often.

DREDGE

The most dangerous things hiding in the murky depths aren't the fish or the eldritch horrors. It's the secrets.

Often when I'm playing a game I'll ignore the very pointed advice they give you and try the dumb thing at least once. In Dredge, that's the whole game. If you do what the townsfolk say, you'll stay in the safe little bay and only fish when the sun is up, slowly paying off your debt and earning a living. But if you venture out into the sea or stay out after dark, you'll encounter the strange and terrifying horrors that curse the area. It's your job to figure out which horrors are actually dangerous and how to evade them, which will require equal parts bravery and stupidity.

Cocoon

A entire world, held on your back. Take care of it.

I gave this game the "Best Doors" award, because it's mostly about opening cool doors. Doing that is quite fun, with some decent puzzles that require you to understand how a bunch of different pieces fit together. It was never particularly challenging as a puzzle game, but it does require you to pay attention since by definition not all of the pieces will be on your screen at once. And at the end of each puzzle you get to see a cool area and unlock a cool door, what more could you want?

Other

Movies

Conclave

If you think picking a new Pope isn't just a bunch of politics, you're wrong.

A good political movie requires you to understand a bunch of different characters, their strings and motivations and responsibilities. But it also has to make them interesting, similar to each other but distinct, a group of people that are set apart from the world in their own way. And this movie combines accomplishes both aspects very well.

Daybreakers

What happens after the vampires win, when there's no more humans to sustain them?

We watched a number of vampire movies this year (as a part of Bad Movie Night) and I hated many of them, but Daybreakers was the exception. There's the cold, hard, dark metal of the city at night juxtaposed against the warm, open, empty city and countryside during the day. Every scene is framed around that boundary and what happens to those who cross it. The vampires aren't inherently evil - the big bad evil guy is bad because he's a Ruthless Businessman, the whole blood harvest thing is just his business. The movie goes out of its way to show vampires who are just people: smoking under a bridge to curb their hunger, being horrified at an execution, or just trying to buy coffee. I don't want to spoil anything about the ending, but I will say that it never flinches.

Get Duked!

A group of bantering misfits takes on a challenge which becomes a fever dream.

This movie was a chaos trip, starting strong and accelerating the entire way. Despite how wild it feels, it actually has a pretty tight script and good comedy. I think it's a good example of making something that feels very chaotic or improvised on top of a solid structure. Also, if someone tells you that it's their favorite movie you have learned a valuable piece of information about them.

Levels

A naively optimistic story about falling in love across the boundary of a simulation.

Really, I only watched this movie for Cara Gee. It had a couple interesting segments dealing with the transitions between each level but overall it never felt as urgent as it wanted to be. Interestingly, one of the major backstory points is that there was major public outcry against the ethics of detailed simulations. I found that surprising, compared to today's stance of machine consciousness. People in this movie's universe must be significantly more sympathetic to simulations than ours, or slightly more susceptible to LLM psychosis.

Outlander

A retelling of Beowulf with aliens and vikings.

It was easy to make fun of this movie, especially because the main character (Jim Caviezel, alien) has more chemistry with the rival than the actual love interest. However, the sets, the fights, and even the visual effects were decent for 2008. There's basically no connection to Beowulf in the final movie, but I'm sure it was nice for the crew to say they were working on an adaptation.

Mickey 17

The most expendable member of a doomed expedition and his friends.

I felt like I simultaneously wanted more and less from the movie. The best and most interesting portion in my opinion was the middle "how do you live when you suddenly have a clone" bit, but we only got like 10 minutes and a gesture at some relationship drama before moving on to the save-the-world finale. It felt like a novel that got adapted into a movie - I think a miniseries would have been better for pacing but even then I'd still be most interested in the middle bit.

Jupiter Ascending

I don't know how to describe this one, but it would have been better with a gundam.

Nobody said "no" when they were making this movie. There are so many bad decisions that it loops around to being good. This is the source of the infamous "differential equation slopes so you can surf". Sean Bean is half-bee half-man, Eddie Redmayne somehow reads every line in a different voice, and apparently everyone part of the production hated it immensely. Still, I'm glad it was made.

Others

TV Series - Newly Airing

Lord of Mysteries

A Lovecraftian-SCP-tarot-religion-isekai mishmash that actually works.

I love shows that feel dense, like there's just too much stuff to cover. It makes the world feel full and expansive. Lord of Mysteries does that by pulling a million concepts from western literature and religion, then structuring them in a way that they don't feel like hollow references but instead like concrete tools or obstacles. Also the animation is phenomenal, the slow unraveling of mystery is well-paced, and none of the characters feel stupid. As long as you're willing to pay close attention, it's a very rewarding show.

Andor

The struggles of the real people caught between the empire and the rebellion.

Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into Star Wars movies since their acquisition, the best parts of the franchise have been Rogue One and Andor. Everything else tries to bring in the space wizard swords or the too-convenient force powers, but Rogue One and Andor just deal with normal people in the middle of the most tumultuous and dangerous part of history. It's a great setup for the movies and great storytelling about characters who think they're doing the right things, even when all evidence points the other way.

The Mighty Nein

A D&D party slowly forms amidst a brewing war between empires.

This show comes from the same actual play group as Vox Machina, but I enjoyed this one significantly more. The characters are more realistic, less annoying, and less like stereotypical D&D classes. The Mighty Nein feel more like castouts grounded in the world, with real connections and problems. The political intrigue angle is actually interesting, and the stakes are compelling without being another "save the world" plot. It's still a D&D party, and it's still a comedy, but it's much more compelling.

Murderbot

A robot with anxiety tries its hardest to keep some humans alive.

I really enjoy the books this show was based on, and I was very skeptical that they could adapt it to the screen in any coherent way. The books have an avoidant, unreliable, sarcastic narrator who talks more about its favorite media than what's going on around it. The show took plenty of liberties in the adaptation but hit a tone that was as close to the books as I think any show could have been. If you haven't read the book than it's probably just fine, but it is a really good opportunity to see Alexander Skarsgård in a leading role.

Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

The journey of heliocentrism through a century of religious oppression.

Sometimes there are shows where the city is a character, or sometimes a ship or another inanimate object. It's not often that a concept such as heliocentrism is a character, or that it's unambiguously the main character of the entire show. This is a show about humanity's inherent curiosity in all its forms and the many reasons a person might want to sacrifice themselves for something bigger than themselves, even when that thing is wildly dangerous.

Common Side Effects

A magic mushroom that can seemingly cure anything, and those who want to destroy it.

I went into this show expecting very little, which is probably the best way to go into any show. It has some surprisingly interesting characters, surprisingly thoughtful animation, and a surprisingly good pace. It starts a little slow (which is just to say that it focuses on characters instead of story for a little bit) but by halfway through I started developing theories and eagerly anticipating the next episode.

Pluribus

A cynical, misanthropic romantasy author versus an extraterrestrial hive mind.

With a synopsis like that you would expect me to love this show. The premise and characters were interesting, the budget and technical aspects were extravagant, and it got glowing reviews from critics. I didn't hate it, but I didn't like how the show constantly undercut itself, failed to follow up on any meaningful progression, and became predictable in doing the most boring thing. I have enjoyed Vince Gilligan's slow burns in the past, but usually there's other interesting characters for the maladjusted main characters to play off of. Carol remains a very interesting character, but without anything going on the show just falls flat.

I also had a personal problem while watching the show: some of my favorite works (17776, Mrs. Davis, Stormlight Archive, Horizon) are also in this genre space, so I kept looking at things Pluribus was doing and going "oh, this other work did that better". I was waiting for Pluribus to show what made it unique, to do some really interesting thing that only it could do, but it never did. Maybe most of the Pluribus fans have just never seen much else in that space and they would love those other works just as much as I do, or maybe there's something about Pluribus they love that I'm just not seeing.

TV Series - Finished

Cowboy Bebop

A ragtag crew of bounty hunters just trying to stay afloat.

This show defined a genre and I'm not at all surprised it did. You have a highly distinctive world that feels futuristic and fun but also old and lived-in. You have the episodic and highly variable structure of bounty hunting, letting you show off each character's strengths and skills. And you have the characters themselves, who are interesting even before you learn each of their backstories. Highly recommended.

Succession

Who will inherit the largest media empire in America? Who will even want it, when all is said?

When I started this show I hated the characters because they're all assholes who haven't earned anything they've been given. Then I started viewing them as punching bags, as intentionally hateable caricatures of people so you can laugh at their misfortune. But the reality is more complicated than that: these characters are wholly realistic, flawed people who have wants and dreams like anyone else. They want the approval of their father, who is incapable of giving it. They want power, but don't understand its cost. They're petty, they're stupid, they're wildly privileged, but they're still realistic.

Kino's Journey

A wanderer travels the countryside on her motorcycle, never staying longer than three days.

Similar to Mushishi in many ways, this show is more about the various countries the traveler visits than it is about the traveler herself. There's brutality and beauty, oppression and wonder, hatred and overwhelming kindness. None of it is particularly groundbreaking but I appreciate atmospheric shows like these that just let you be in a place and show you how people are.

The Ancient Magus' Bride

A teenager who has given up on life finds herself as a mage's apprentice.

The overall structure of this show could be a bit confusing, so I'd suggest to stick with it even if you don't like the first couple of episodes. It follows a couple of mages, one of whom learns how to be a person after giving up on life and the other who learns to be a person instead of a bone demon guy. It's about the long road of healing and learning, with a large interesting world of magic as a setting.

SPY x FAMILY

It's a pretend family, for a secret mission. Nothing more. Unless...?

This show is almost too cute. It's the most adorable thing I've ever seen nonstop every episode. Unfortunately the show stagnates a bit in my opinion, but if you like what it offers you'll find plenty of it. I stopped after Season 1 based on some suggestions and I might come back for more later.

3 Body Problem (2024)

The smartest people in the world suddenly start killing themselves. A secret society develops a video game.

I was so confused when I saw that this book would be getting multiple(!!!) TV adaptations. The book wasn't that good! There were a couple good character moments, but nothing to write home about in my opinion. Well, this adaptation took some liberties and was all the better for it. It broke the main character from the book up into a handful of people, shifted the setting, and skipped a bunch of boring stuff. It lost some of the parts I actually liked from the book, but overall was actually a pretty good show and I'm mad that I'm invested to see what happens in the next season.

Others