Weekly Update #51: The Penultimate Weekly Update

December 14-20, 2025

Only one more weekly update after this one and I’ve completed an entire year of weekly updates! What a year 2025 has been. This week marks another slight decline in game time due to the holidays and an unexpected life event, but hopefully that will pick up again next week. My work announced I can work from home through January 5^th which will help with the work-life balance. Anyway, let’s get on with the penultimate episode!

Game Acquisitions

I somehow managed to dodge all of the holiday sales last week. My Steam family purchased two games (Wingspan and Solace State), I traded away an extra Ghostrunner II key on Reddit for four short titles (Fractured Minds, Golf vs Zombies, The Indie Mixtape, and Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus?), and got the rest through freebies on various storefronts. Technically, I had four games hit my wishlisted price, but I decided to hold off on them in the hope that they’ll be even cheaper/bundled in the future. I have more than enough games to hold me over until then.

# of Games: 10

Total Money Spent: $0

Price/Game: $0

Game Recaps

I finished my first short game of Monster Camp with my co-op partner, which only took double the amount of time the game said it would 😅 He expressed interest in playing some more, so it looks like that game is still on the menu! It’s alright, but the gameplay is pretty shallow and we’re already seeing some repeat scenarios so I’m not sure how many more sessions we have planned. We did manage to unlock another secret ending which is my main motivation. In Metaphor: ReFantazio, I made it to Altabury Heights and fought the big bad himself, Louis for the first time. I also fought what I think was the hardest boss of the game so far, Sogne the ice dragon. That one took a few attempts. The game is telling me to power up for the final confrontation, but I can’t help but notice that there’s still over a month left in the calendar and plenty of bonds to work on so I doubt it’s actually the end. As always, here are links to the latest public video on my channel and playlists where you can watch everything so far. I’m planning on going back to Expedition 33 to play the DLC after finishing Metaphor. I’m trying to beat it before the end of the year but I’m not sure if that will happen. Either way, I won’t remove Expedition 33 from my top 2025 list or make it eligible for 2026 since I already beat the main game. 

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last week:

·       Record of Lodoss War Season 1 Episodes 5-13 (complete)

·       Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight Season 1 Episode 1 (still watching, show ended)

·       King Kong

Record of Lodoss War was, as I feared, a super generic fantasy 90s anime. I barely absorbed anything that happened, it was very unmemorable. Most of the voice acting and animation was bad, the story is oddly paced, and the main character is worthless throughout most of the show. I started the sequel but am way too early to form any opinions yet. The main character was recast which made me think it was a remake of what I just watched like the 2022 Berserk anime, but apparently it is actually a sequel. We’ll see if it ends up being any better. I enjoyed Peter Jackson’s King Kong more than I thought I would. I was really dreading it after seeing the three hour and 20 minute runtime, but the time was filled very well. I even got a little sad at the end when they killed him. And just like The Truman Show, it was nice seeing a comedic actor (Jack Black in this case) take on a more serious role. Now I’m all prepared to play the PS2 game!

Conclusion/Upcoming

Another lighter week last week. On top of the games mentioned earlier, I also played some Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince, Pizza Possum, and Divinity: Original Sin at my brother’s place. I wasn’t able to time it, and playing with kids leads to frequent breaks and questionable progress at best, but they were all generally a good time. We’ve now gotten two crowns in Pizza Possum several times but have yet to clinch the third for me to mark it as complete. I was even eating the final pizza for the third crown when I was caught last time 😭 I just didn’t have the right powerup for the ending. If I do play it again, I’ll try to make sure I have some smoke bombs handy. This week, I plan to get back into Metaphor: ReFantazio after only playing for an hour since the 15^th. I guess I’ve just been busy. It’s looking less and less likely that I’ll be able to finish it by the end of the year. That’s OK though, it just means it’ll dominate my top 10 list for 2026! Speaking of, my top 10 is pretty much locked in at this point. My plan is to write one more weekly post, then the monthly post for December, then have my annual top 10/year in review post to round out 2025. Look forward to all of that hopefully next week. Thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,787 (+8)