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 albums, 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 3:
- Kardashev — Alunea (deathgaze)
- 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)
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.
I read through the entire series without a break
(except for the final entry, which is not out yet at the time of writing)
and was sad to have it end.
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.
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.