Monthly Update #10: Gaming is Back on the Menu Boys!

October 2025

After several months of just emulation testing and the occasional Tales of Phantasia session, I finally redeemed Game Pass and got back into proper gaming. What better game to start with than 2025 indie darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? And wow, what a game it’s been so far. Before I get into that, I also stepped up my game purchases to fill the void left by not adding emulated games. That’s not actually why I bought games; there were just a lot of really good deals last month. Let’s get into it!

Game Acquisitions

Wow, that’s a lot of games! There are a lot of horror games among them which makes sense given the spooky season. Most of them were from Humble Choice, giveaways, or Steam family purchases as usual, but I bought a considerable amount of them myself as well. Fanatical had a lot of good bundles this month, and there are a couple more I’m considering buying this week too after the November Humble Choice is revealed. I even bought a couple individual games that were on my wishlist which I almost never do. These include the Castlevania Advance Collection and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners - Chapter 2: Retribution (wow that’s a mouthful). You might think I plopped down hundreds of dollars to get all these games but nope, less than $50. Not bad if I do say so myself. There are way too many games here to pick a highlight, there are so many good ones. I’m excited to play them!

# of Games: 64

Total Money Spent: $46.23

Price/Game: $0.72

Game Recaps

This graph feels a little lopsided doesn’t it 😅? Monster Prom 2 was just setting up the game, browsing the shop, and looking through the collectibles and achievements. I haven’t officially started playing it yet. The reason it’s on here at all though is because my friend and I finally finished Tales of Phantasia! Six months in the making, and now my friend can officially say he’s beaten a JRPG. It’s one of my favorite genres and I’m glad he agreed to be along for the ride through the Tales series. The rest of the time was spent on my new GOTY, Expedition 33. I put a lot of time into this game, and I’m glad I did because it is phenomenal. My characters are level 80+ and I’m deep into discovering all of the areas in Act III. I suspect I am nearing the end, but I don’t want it to end which is why I’m exploring everything I can. That’s how you know it’s a good game. I’ll save the rest of my thoughts for the review which will likely be in a weekly post in a couple weeks. This more than doubles my highest month in terms of playtime which is insane. Check out the playlists for my playthroughs! 

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last month:

·       Marvel Zombies Season 1 Episode 4 (all caught up, show ended?)

·       Alien: Earth Season 1 Episodes 1-8 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Futurama Season 10 Episodes 1-10 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Splinter Cell: Deathwatch Season 1 Episodes 1-8 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Gen V Season 2 Episodes 1-8 (all caught, show ended?)

·       Tales of Phantasia: The Animation Season 1 Episodes 1-4 (all caught up, show ended)

·       Berserk Season 1 Episodes 1-2 (still watching, show ended)

·       Happy Gilmore 2

·       Pitch Black

·       The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury

·       The Chronicles of Riddick

·       Riddick

·       28 Years Later

A lot was watched last month it looks like! Including a few shows that haven’t been either renewed nor canceled so I have no idea if they’re still going or not. I was surprised to learn that Tales of Phantasia got its own anime adaptation in the form of an OVA that’s less than two hours long, so I convinced my co-op partner to sit through that with me. It changed A LOT from the game, which makes sense given the short runtime. It was still cool seeing scenes and characters from the game from a different perspective and with English voices. Other than that, Alien: Earth and Gen V were standouts last month, I enjoyed both of those shows. On the other hand, Splinter Cell: Deathwatch and Happy Gilmore 2 were not the best. I didn’t hate anything on this list, so it was still a good month.

Conclusion/Upcoming

I think this is a pretty exciting update! Tales of Phantasia is finally done and I’m playing single-player games again. I’m so happy to be getting back into games again instead of just testing them. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has its hooks in me DEEP and I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll be sad to see it end, but the backlog never sleeps!

For next month, I’ll likely be watching the Berserk anime for most of it. I initially wanted to wait to watch it until just before starting the Dreamcast and PS2 games, but that’s years away and I already downloaded them on my PC so I figured I might as well watch them now. It’s probably not super important to experience them so close together anyway. If I get through those three shows, I’m planning on watching Star Wars: Visions Season 3. I’m excited that they’re going back to the anime styles from season 1 instead of the Clone Wars/Rebels/Bad Batch style of season 2. Not that I don’t enjoy that style, but it felt like throwing away everything that made season 1 good. I don’t have much in the way of movie series going on right now. For November, I’m planning to watch Demolition Man, Ballerina (from John Wick), The Accountant 1 and 2, and Barbarian. I was planning to watch Barbarian with my friend before Halloween, but things got busy, and we unfortunately didn’t get around to it. That’s OK, we can be spooked in November too!

On the gaming front, I’m going to be finishing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I almost wanted to say unfortunately here, but I’ve enjoyed my time with it immensely and all good things must come to an end. The next game on my list will be another long RPG with Metaphor: ReFantazio. This game is even longer than Expedition 33 and will definitely take me through the rest of the year and likely into February to complete. I’ve never played an Atlus game before so I can’t compare it to Persona which is also in my backlog. I’ve heard great things though and I know a lot of people felt it was snubbed for GOTY last year. I don’t expect it to be as good as Expedition 33 but I’m excited to find out regardless. For co-op games, I assume my friend and I will be focused on smaller, more obscure games for a while. We’re going to try out Monster Prom 2 as our first game after Tales of Phantasia. If we beat that or decide we didn’t have a lot of fun, we’ll move on to a sort of hidden object game with Halloween Stories: Horror Movie. You might notice that was one of the games added to the backlog this month from an Amazon giveaway. I’m not really into this genre, but everything is more fun with friends so maybe it will be more tolerable that way. Not exactly a ringing endorsement but what can you do 😅? Anyway, I think that’s enough for now. Look out for my normal weekly post which will hopefully be out tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,684 (+72) <- A few emulated games still snuck in here at the beginning of the month