We survived another year, y’all.
2025 was heavy. Political violence and culture-war rhetoric continued to erase, threaten, and exhaust marginalized communities. The games industry didn’t fare much better — another year of layoffs, consolidation, and price hikes made an already expensive hobby feel even less accessible.
I won’t lie: I’m anxious about what comes next. All of that noise made it harder to rest, harder to focus, and harder to sleep. But even in a year defined by uncertainty, there were still moments of joy, obsession, and connection. Art helped. Poetry helped. Games helped. Weird internet niches helped. Being a part of The Punished Backlog helped.
Here are my favorite things of the year, featuring video games, anime, music, and more.
Westside Gunn Albums (and Fourth Rope)
Buffalo rapper Westside Gunn has been a favorite of mine for a few years. In Christianity, God created the earth in seven days but rested on the seventh. This year, the Flygod (so nicknamed after his 2011 hit album) proved he never rests, blessing us with multiple albums — including Heels Have Eyes 2, Heels Have Eyes 3, and12. This year, I bought actual physical copies of the last two entries in the Heels Have Eyes trilogy; I can’t remember the last time I even bought a CD.
Two songs from this year’s catalog stood out and landed in my Spotify Wrapped:“Blow Hendry” and“055” (embedded below).
What makes Gunn’s music hit so hard is the juxtaposition. His bars feel like luxury fine art at the Louvre, then a walk down the Champs-Élysées, before dropping you straight into drug dealing, gun violence, paranoia, and survival. That grime-to-glamour whiplash is layered with deep-cut wrestling references, turning his music into curation as much as confession.
Gunn also branched out into wrestling with Fourth Rope, a project blending hip hop, wrestling, and fashion. I loved wrestling as a kid until middle school when I finally realized it was scripted; this music collaboration has revitalized that passion.
That return meant more than I expected. My godfather passed away last year, and we used to watch wrestling religiously together. Following Fourth Rope this year made me feel closer to him.
Thank you, Flygod.
Mother’s Basement Anime YouTube Channel
Every season, there are a million new anime series debuting, plus an perpetual avalanche of mid isekai. It’s hard to keep track of everything, and sometimes you need an expert to suffer through the duds and tell you what’s actually worth your time.
That’s how I discovered Mother’s Basement, a channel operated by Geoff Thew. His seasonal roundups are satirical, sharp, and powered by a dry wit that makes even the messiest shows entertaining to hear about. If you want a clean entry point, his yearly videos do the job: Best Anime of 2025 and Hottest Trash Anime of 2025.
Where the channel really shines is in its deeper dives. One standout is his video The Worst Anime Director (embedded below), which manages to be hilarious and meticulously argued at the same time.
Thew brings that same rigor to broader topics too, including his breakdown of Gundam’s cultural impact and his reminder that One Piece is, in fact, absolutely political, despite some very strange and very wrong opinions to the contrary.
I also talked about some of my own favorite anime this year in The Punished Backlog’s Big Three discussion, which overlaps nicely with what I discovered through Thew’s recommendations.
Best Anime I Discovered in 2025 Through Mother’s Basement
- Clevatess (2025 – present): A dark fantasy where a beast lord destroys a kingdom, then adopts a royal baby, and resurrects a fallen hero, forcing a wild found-family story out of catastrophe.
- Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (2023 – present): An elven mage reckons with grief, time, and missed connections after the hero’s journey is already over.
- Gachiakuta (2025 – present): A grimy dystopian tale about class violence, trash worlds, and survival after a boy is thrown into a massive abyss.
- DAN DA DAN (2024 – present): A chaotic collision of aliens, ghosts, high school romance, and absurdity that somehow holds together.
- Shangri-La Frontier (2023 – present): A love letter to gaming culture about a trash-game expert breaking a top-tier VRMMO through skill and crazy luck stats.
- SPY x FAMILY (2022 – present): A spy, an assassin, and a telepath accidentally form the most adorable, functional fake family in anime history.
- The Apothecary Diaries (2023 – present): A sharp-witted apothecary solves ancient Chinese kingdom mysteries using science, skepticism, social awareness, and a borderline erotic obsession with poison.
- Solo Leveling (2023-2025): The weakest hunter alive gains an RPG-style leveling system and turns survival into unparalleled aura farming.
- Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill (2023 – 2025): A summoned salaryman opts out of heroics, uses his fantasy power of Amazon online store delivery to make modern food, win over the hearts of incredibly powerful allies, and breaks a fantasy world’s economy.
- May I Ask for One Final Thing? (2025-present): A delightful, satisfying villianess-adjacent fantasy starring my latest waifu who has a penchant for throwing hands and pulverizing arrogant aristocrats.
Good Knights Sleep Channel
As I talked about recently in my piece on the channel, I turned to YouTube to help me sleep with all the chaos I mentioned up top. I found solace through game music, spending late nights listening to full recordings of in-game radio stations from the Fallout franchise.
That habit led me to Good Knights Sleep, a channel run by Scottish actor and writer Kevin Mains. The channel produces long-form, narrative-driven ASMR broadcasts set in fictional universes like Fallout, Star Wars, Elden Ring, and Resident Evil. Mains voices nearly every character, showing off an impressive range.
The gem of the channel is The Midnight Oil, a late-night Fallout-themed call-in show hosted by DJ Radz, “the ghoul with the golden voice.” It’s my favorite thing he’s done. One such video is embedded above.
What kept me around all year, though, is the sheer variety beyond Fallout, with radio stations and ambient broadcasts spanning multiple worlds including Harry Potter, Greek mythology, Star Wars, Batman, and more.
DC Absolute Universe
Fellow Punished Backlog writer Kei Isobe covered some of this ground in his superhero year-in-review, but I want to double down on how strong DC has been this year.
The Absolute Universe was born after villain Darkseid decided he had enough with the regular DC Universe and created his own warped fan-fiction to conquer and exploit. In the series DC KO, we learn through time travel hijinks that he’s already won and that the heroes’ last hope may be to fill the power vacuum he left behind.
In Darkseid’s Absolute Universe, the Trinity’s origins are radically altered. Absolute Superman arrives on Earth older and traumatized by Krypton’s brutal class system. Absolute Wonder Woman is raised in Hell under Circe’s watch, wielding magic tied to darker gods. Absolute Batman grows up without wealth, relying on engineering skill, rage, and conviction rather than privilege.
These are my favorite versions of these characters, Absolute Batman especially. A Batman who unapologetically snaps the bones of saluting neo-Nazis and roasts them with with a flamethrower instantly earns his place in my heart.
2025: The Year of the Ninja
Ninja fans ate good in 2025. As a lifelong shinobi stan spanning back to my first ever Halloween costume, I feasted.
Between Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, and Ninja Gaiden 4, my entire year turned into a rotating buffet of blades, punishment and muscle memory. Even Assassin’s Creed: Shadows provided some fun, even if it paled in comparison to the others, and of course, there was also Ghost of Yōtei.
In particular, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound enamored me (as I wrote in my review) with its precision platforming, addictive arcade-style gameplay, and brilliant sprite animation. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance came through with gorgeous hand-drawn art and an engaging combat system. I pitted the two against each other in a Shinobi Showdown, and I ultimately chose Ragebound as the stronger experience.
The year was capped off with Ninja Gaiden 4, a game that immediately reminded me of Devil May Cry 4. I wrestled with those pros and cons in another showdown here. Despite its flaws, Ninja Gaiden 4 stood on top. It’s the best action combat system in years and one built for replay.
I’m hoping this marks the beginning of the next era of great ninja games.
The Predator Hunts Again
I’ve been a fan of the Predator movies for years. With each new entry, I found myself wanting to learn more about this mysterious alien culture, essentially fueled by the same ambitious impulses as those in The Most Dangerous Game. The first films — Predator (1987) and Predator 2 (1990) — were fancy alien slasher movies, continuing into the early 2000s with the Alien vs. Predator movies. I thought Predators (2010) was solid, but the franchise fell hard after that with the outright atrocity that was The Predator (2018). But since 2022, with the release of Prey, the franchise has been in excellent hands under director Dan Trachtenberg.
Over the years, the species itself became more interesting than the humans hunting it. Eventually, I started rooting for the Yautja (the predator species’ alien name) instead of the humans, who were often portrayed as frustrating bumbling idiots.
Prey was fantastic, offering a fresh take by placing a Predator among the 1719 Comanche Nation. These were the best human-Predator interactions in the entire series, and for the first time in a long while, I found myself rooting for the humans again.
Earlier this year, Trachtenberg followed that up with not only one, but two excellent additions: Predator: Killer of Killers and Predator: Badlands. The former, released in June, is an anthology-style film that spans multiple eras, from Viking raids to feudal Japan to World War II. The result is a beautiful, visceral, violent, Into the Spider-Verse-style animated film with a surprising amount of heart at its center.
Then there’s November’s Predator: Badlands, which is the Predator movie I’ve always wanted — one that centers the monster. The film dives deeper into Yautja culture than ever before, starring Dek, the runt of his tribe. After narrowly escaping a familial tragedy, Dek is plunged into an extremely hostile alien planet and tasked with hunting the most dangerous creature known to the Yautja in order to return home and reclaim his honor — and his invisibility cloak — becoming a fully “blooded” warrior.
It’s a fascinating twist on the hero’s journey, placing the traditional villain front and center. Dek’s character arc is surprisingly compelling as he learns to work with his environment, form relationships with an eclectic cast of characters, and adapt the Predator warrior code beyond its outdated roots. He’s a complete badass in his own right, but it’s also an interrogation of Yautja culture itself. I couldn’t stop smiling throughout this surprisingly PG-13 entry (there are no humans in the film at all), and by the time the credits rolled, I was already excited to see what Trachtenberg does next.
I’ll be picking up Predator: Badlands on Blu-ray the moment it drops.
One More Run in Ball x Pit
I hopped on this train late, only owning the game for a few weeks, but it has that special “one more run” pull that sucked me in like Vampire Survivors.
Ball x Pit blends the core of Breakout with roguelike progression, village rebuilding, RPG systems, and dozens of ball combinations as you descend deeper into a pit that consumed a kingdom and slowly rebuild it.
In the cold winter weeks, games with a lot of repetition — like roguelikes — are especially comfortable and fun. I also enjoyed the first-person roguelike Mortal Sin and the platforming adventures of Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo.
2026: Looking Ahead With Hope
I’m convinced that we are living in the Absolute Universe, but like Darkseid said, the fire of hope is going to have to burn a little brighter in this one.
And I believe, despite everything we’ve all endured this year and the unknown horizon of next year, that fire is still there. Not as a promise or a slogan, but as something you choose to carry, feed, and protect — even when the wind whips up bigotry and the world floods with corrosive late-stage capitalism.
Donovan is a lifelong gamer with a love for fast-paced, single-player action games—especially Devil May Cry, Metroidvanias, indies, and action RPGs. He’s also an “advanced scrub” at fighting games and will play just about anything fun. Donovan is passionate about seeing more diverse characters and creators in the industry—or at least better hair options for Black people. With over a decade in journalism, he joined The Punished Backlog in 2023 to write more about what he loves. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @dono_harrell.
