Stuff I liked in 2025
This is the 2025 edition of my "good stuff" list, where this time I'm collecting things over time as I experience them. Metal records, books, and games I've enjoyed so far in 2025, with the music restricted to new releases.
See also last year's post.
Heavy metal§
Current top 5:
- Kardashev — Alunea (deathgaze)
- Rivers of Nihil — Rivers of Nihil (prog/death)
- Fallujah — Xenotaph (atmospheric tech-death)
- Eluveitie — Ànv (folk/melodeath)
- Allegaeon — The Ossuary Lens (prog/tech/melodeath)
The rest in no particular order:
- Dynazty — Game of Faces (heavy)
- Arion — The Light That Burns The Sky (power)
- Spiritbox — Tsunami Sea (prog/metalcore)
- Dawn of Ouroboros — Bioluminescence (post-black)
- Dessiderium — Keys To The Palace (prog/death/black)
- Havukruunu — Tavastland (black)
- Bleed From Within — Zenith (metalcore)
- Hypermass — Apparition Day (groove/melodeath)
- Elvenking — Reader of the Runes - Luna (folk/power)
- Voidfallen — The Rituals of Resilience (melodeath)
- Slow Fall — Blood Eclipse (melodeath)
- Embrium — Timekeeper (melodic black)
- Buried Realm — The Dormant Darkness (tech/melodeath)
- Novelists — CODA (prog/metalcore)
- Shadow of Intent — Imperium Delirium (symphonic deathcore)
Books§
Max Gladstone — Three Parts Dead (The Craft Sequence)
A fantasy interpretation of our modern world
where the arcane rules of law and ownership
are the basis of actual magic and gods.
A fun hodgepodge of aesthetics, often quite funny satire,
and many great characters.
Quite a long series which stayed interesting all the way through.
Mary Robinette Kowal — The Martian Contingency
The latest entry in the Lady Astronaut series mentioned in last year's list,
this time seeing Elma York et al. building the first human habitat on Mars.
Still fascinatingly grounded in reality
despite the divergence from real-life events,
and full of lively detail that makes it easy to relate to the characters
and their struggles.
Ursula K. Le Guin — The Left Hand of Darkness
Like many of Le Guin's works, this book combines two of my favorite things:
sophisticated worldbuilding and a "man vs. nature" survival story.
On a cold planet whose people have no fixed gender
(a fact reflected in all aspects of their social order),
a human ambassador attempts to navigate their unfamiliar politics
and harsh landscapes.
Alex Pheby — Mordew (Cities of the Weft)
A strange, borderline surreal, vaguely Victorian fantasy world
of wildly powerful magic and seemingly nonsensical events
which eventually cohere into something surprisingly comprehensible.
It starts small, in the slums of the city of Mordew,
slowly revealing the true nature and scale of the world.
This is my kind of weird — unusual storytelling structures,
high-flying philosophical ponderings,
topped off with touches of dry humor and body horror.
Susanna Clarke — Piranesi
A mysterious world of endless corridors and statues,
inhabited by an equally mysterious lone explorer
whose journals tell us the story.
A captivating tale with a palpable sense of place
that I would have loved to spend more time exploring.
Aliette De Bodard — The Red Scholar's Wake
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,
and this spacefaring pirate story could just as well be about wizards instead
with its sentient spaceships, micro-robots and mind-controlled computers.
The core of the story, though, is in romance and political machinations
which I found quite compelling.
Also, "lesbian space pirates" is a hell of a tagline.
Games§
Saturnalia
A horror detective game about an Italian village haunted by a mysterious monster.
Roads and most buildings are randomly shuffled
whenever you lose your crew of four characters,
making sure you never quite get comfortable with the layout.
An interesting blend of procedurally generated and hand-authored content,
stylish visuals, an engaging story, and lots and lots of tension.
Archipelago
A randomizer mod with a twist —
instead of shuffling items within one game,
it combines many games into one world
where items of one game may appear in any other.
It's a wild idea that works amazingly well,
even supporting many games that don't have "items" in a typical sense.
You can play it alone or with friends,
all at the same time or asynchronously over long time periods.
BETON BRUTAL
A tower-climbing platformer in the vein of Getting Over It, Only Up, etc,
but from a first-person perspective.
Very punishing and frustrating at times,
but has good pacing and solid controls
that still feel good when you're going through the same room for the 30th time
to get back to that one spot where you keep falling off.
Dead Space (2023)
I never played the original so I can't say how it measures up,
but the remake was a thoroughly enjoyable horror shooter.
A little more combat-oriented and gory than my usual horror preference,
but the game does some cool things with the weapon mechanics
and world design that made it very compelling for me.
Still Wakes the Deep
A horror story about an oil rig and its crew
who encounter a mysterious organism hidden in the bedrock.
The setting is beautifully realized and perfect for horror —
no way out, and plenty of high places, dark rooms, and massive underwater structures.
Plus some delightfully Scottish character acting.
There's not much in the way of gameplay,
but with atmosphere like this I had a great time just walking through the story.