[Disclaimer: I received a review key for The Shaved Ice Shop through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played, and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
The Shaved Ice Shop is a strange little game from indie developer Holitass. It's part cafe sim (because the shop sells coffee, milkshakes, and shaved ice), part life sim (because you buy groceries and walk from the cafe up flights of stairs into your apartment), part thriller, and part retro atmospheric-horror (because of the aspect ratio and film grain). The majority of the game, however, is spent in the cafe fixing drinks for customers before heading home for the night, and it was only during the second-to-last chapter that I realized that the game takes place at a night cafe, not that time is incredibly wonky.
Before we get into the actual game, I need to preface a few things. First, of the six times I played this game, I became nauseous 75% of the time and was thankful that each chapter only lasted about 18 minutes. I have some theories as to why this happened with this game, but nothing conclusive, so keep that in mind while I speculate. First, I couldn't invert the y-axis, but I've played non-action games with a non-inverted y-axis before, so I don't think that that alone would cause my nausea. Second, the formatted screen ratio could have had something to do with it. The screen ratio itself didn't bother me as it added to the aesthetic, coupled with the graininess of the "film," which helped to contribute to a sense of unease. Lastly, there was no reticle of any kind. I remember Jenna Stoeber (when she still worked at Polygon before they were bought out by Valnet and fired 25+ of their existing staff) did a video highlighting the effect that having a reticle in video games (not just first-person games, you plebian pus rats) and how it can help reduce motion sickness (aka simulation sickness).
The gameplay is primarily centered around taking three to four orders to complete a shift, which seems rather odd for an entire night shift, but, going back to the motion/simulation sickness, this ended up being the perfect amount of time I could spend playing before I would have needed to quit altogether. Also, not being able to invert the y-axis played a bit with navigating behind the counter. Not having a reticle, apart from the above paragraph, played havoc with being able to pick up packs of ice for various drinks, and clicking on which particular kind of syrup you want to add. I found being able to click on the small target to open the gate in the back of the shop somewhat annoying. All of that aside, once you finish the first day, which is the last day in the timeline, I felt more comfortable operating the machines and how the game wanted me to make drinks, except that on the second day (being five days before the first day; trust me, it makes sense), I got confused and had to look up the steps to take to make a flavored milkshake. I also greatly appreciated that I never felt that I was going to lose the game or customers if I took too long to make a drink, and that there was only ever one customer at a time, probably due to in-game limitations, but it was still nice.
If you want an accurate cafe/shaved ice shop simulator, though, you should look somewhere else, at least because of the three/four customer shifts. Recipes are not real-world accurate. You don't have to account for the amount of liquid in a cup if you're going to be adding additional liquid. When drinks pour out of the blender into cups, the hole is at the upper portion of the lid, which wouldn't make sense from a physics standpoint. And as we're in the blender, there is no cleaning of the equipment between drinks. There's one blender for making blended coffee drinks and ice cream. Later in the game, your character makes instant ramen a la Cup O' Noodles by placing an unopened container in a microwave without opening the lid to add water, and the animation of you drinking straight from the cup keeps the lid closed; also, without boiling the inside of your mouth with scalding hot sodium-rich deliciousness.
I lastly wanted to touch on the story, which will probably be the briefest section, as I want to avoid spoilers. Since the bulk of the game is preparing drinks for customers, the story that happens in the background happens when you're off shift and heading home to your apartment in an alley behind the shaved ice shop. The events are not overly complicated, but still land with an "oh damn," but not in a way that's surprising. I'm not at all disappointed that I saw the story unfolding the way it did by the end of the third episode (Four Days Before). If you watch the final episode (One Day Before), I decided to choose the response I did because I felt that the character would still be in shock and likely have experienced forms of relationship abuse from the same source for a while now, and standing up to their abuser wouldn't've been a choice that they could make on their own without a significant suppport network. I did try to get an alternate ending, but something wasn't happening in the game the way I thought it should (is this too vague?), and I gave up after four attempts.
The Shaved Ice Shop, despite all of the inaccuracies in the actual running of a night cafe, and the frequent simulation sickness, and the missing reticle (see paragraphs two and three), was a nice and short comfy thriller. If you like your comfy couch stories to include abusive relationships, murder, and suicide. Actually, now that I write that out, it doesn't sound like a cozy game. . . It was a nice game, though, once I was able to stomach the nausea.
I've never played any of the Adventure Island games, probably because six-to-twelve-year-old me didn't want to play a middle-aged man running around a series of islands in a hula skirt; I prefer my nearly naked men to be wielding spears and lances.
Like a lot of ending themes from NES (and some SNES-era) games, the ending theme to Adventure Island 3 is an entirely original theme that wasn't compiled from songs earlier in the game or the series. What I like about this song is how the melody line takes on the galloping role that is typically handled by the bass line. There's another flittering tone there in the middle doing runs of a sort, tucked in between the galloping piano (MIDI piano?) and the wonderful clapping percussion line. "Ending 1" is a pretty short song, looping after only 25 seconds, but for me, it's one of those songs that doesn't let you realize you've been listening to the same melody six times over the last three minutes.
I don't remember where I first heard about or acquired MANDAGON, but it's likely that I saw that the game was free and added it to my Steam account. Then, I promptly forgot it existed until going through my Steam library from the bottom up (when sorted by recently acquired) and didn't recognize anything about this game. The game is described as taking inspiration from Tibetan Mythology, of which I know absolutely nothing about, so I'm not even going to try to make connections between the visuals and gameplay and anything to do with Tibetan culture. There is a thread on the Steam forums that delves into the symbolism that I didn't catch, and I'd recommend reading through it if you want a 100% deeper analysis than what I have here.
MANDAGONis a pretty simplistic platformer. You control a square-shaped bobbing head capable of a massive vertical leap. There are no power-ups, no enemies to fight. There are collectables of sort, in the form of totems scattered around the map that either give hints to the story or nuggets of Tibetan philosophy. There are also six tablets that you have to collect to open the final door at the center of the map. There are elevators you can unlock (although I didn't unlock them all), ladders to climb, water jets that propel you out of the water, and, for lack of a better term, a tethered jetpack to help you reach out-of-reach platforms.
I don't really know what else to say about this game. It was short, just over 31 minutes, and was not at all complicated. When I used the first of six tablets the illumnated the central door, I was afraid that the subsequent tablets were going to be more difficult to obtain, but that wasn't the case at all. The map is helpful in this regard, as knowing where buildings are that you can enter (to find the tablets) and where the tablets are supposed to go is visually obvious; doors are black on buildings, and pedestals for tablets are white buildings.
It was just really nice to sit down and play an entire game in just over 30 minutes. To experience a work of art that integrated symbolism and meaning from a culture that wasn't my own, but that I could still appreciate on several levels. Reading analyses from the Steam thread above offered more of a heartfelt story than I knew existed. Kind of similar to how I interpreted the story in Last Labyrinth, or really a lack of interpretation.
I've had this article on the back burner for a while in the hopes of interviewing Christopher Tyng about this particular composition. I was trying to find out if he had written songs for a Simpsons video game and the songs were plugged in after the fact, or if he had written specific songs for specific locations, knowing ahead of time how they were going to be used.
Because! While I really like this song and find it super catchy, I find it hard to actually place this song within C. Montgomery Burns' massive mansion east of Springfield Gorge, just outside of town. I can't really see either Mr. Burns or Smithers sauntering out to the wrestling ring to this song, or even when Mr. Burns chucks a nuclear bomb into the ring.
The song is high energy, if somewhat subdued during the actual gameplay, and works well with the campiness of the entire game, i.e., Simpsons characters beating the crap out of each other in a very slapstick manner, so I'll give it that. And while having a theme performed on an evil-sounding harpsichord is more appropriate for the characters and setting, it makes for bad video game wrestling music.
Which is probably why I'm not the producer or sound designer picking out music at a video game company.
Well, Nintendo finally released their Year in Review this week, which is the reason why this article was pushed back an additional week, but I'm kind of okay with that. So many companies that collect data on their customers (Steam, Spotify, FitBit, Reddit, etc) and a lot of those, possibly thanks to Spotify, are released around the beginning of December, so it was nice that Nintendo actually waited until the beginning of the new year to post our collective data on the previous year.
That being said, let's start off this year with Steam's RePlay for 2025:
No real surprises here, although I probably would have the first Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster as coming in fourth after Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster; although I'm still a little surprised that I clocked 64.9 hours in FFIIPR; maybe I left the Steam Deck on? But 23.5 hours in Final Fantasy is still very respectable for a 38-year-old video game that I've beaten just over half a dozen times. Resident Evil 6, it turns out, I spent 36 hours on.
The breakdown between Classic Games, Recent Games, and New Games seems pretty accurate as far as play time goes. Although I wonder if Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls Online are considered Classic Games,as they were released 11 and 10 years ago, respectively. Regarding the genres, JPRGs at the top felt pretty accurate, although apart from Resident Evil 6 and some early dabbling in The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series that I started (and have yet to finish) might've been the only Zombie-related games....oh wait. I did play/The Squire played quite a bit of Plants vs. Zombies, so there's that too. And I guess you could say that there were zombie-adjacent demon-like creatures in HELLBREAK. I don't know, who am I to argue with the data that Steam's collected?
And then there was Nintendo.
Yeah, no surprise there with Super Mario Bros. Wonder taking the top spot. The Squire received that game for Christmas 2024, and we play it at least once a week. Or we did until a couple of weeks ago, and now LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is on heavy, almost daily rotation. The Squire loves to choose different characters to play as, so be prepared for multi-hundreds of hours going into that game in order to unlock as many of the characters as we can get.
But that's this year, so let's go back to last year.
There were a lot of games I played on both the Switch 1 and the Switch 2, partly to try and beat Triangle Strategy, and while I did make a huge chunk through that game, I do feel that I ended up making so many bad choices that that game felt like a huge tragedy.
Oh, by the way, purchased a Switch 2 last year. I'll preface that I 100% don't regret this decision. The system feels and plays great. I'm still a little annoyed about the whole game card only being playable by one system at a time, even when it's only being used by one account. You know, this whole article. I guess the only other thing is that the only dedicated Switch 2 game I've purchased over the last six months was Mario Kart World, although I did recently purchase Star Wars: Outlaws because it was on sale for only $5 more than the lowest price it's ever been on Steam, and the port does look really good. And lastly, we don't have a camera for the Switch 2 and have never used that dedicated C-Button to chat up our other friend(s) who also have a Switch 2. I think Duke has one.
Okay, we're getting away from our original mission.
I felt pretty good about some of the progress I made through previously purchased games like Car Quest, Lords of Exile, and (partly) happy with 9 Years of Shadow, except I did hit a skill wall about 75% of the way through, so I might need to put that game on perpetual hold.
Jumping down to the genres, I'm guessing Action was from Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Lords of Exile (need to write about that one), 9 Years of Shadow, and I did start Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus back in February, although that didn't go too far for reasons I can't remember. The RPGs I think were from several games I received from Keymailer that didn't quite stick, although I did put a fair amount of time in Collection of SaGa: Final Fantasy Legend to get in the right headspace for Romancing SaGa - Minstrel Song - Remastered International, which again, was another Keymailer game that I thought was going to be better than it was, at least for me.
The last thing I want to talk briefly about is selecting LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga as my favorite game of 2025 (that was released in 2022). I feel like it's just been a really fun game for The Squire to play, and the couch co-op aspect has been a lot of fun too. One thing that I hadn't anticipated was that it's helped develop his navigation of menus, as within a few seconds, I'll see our stud count (in-game currency in LEGO games) drop by roughly 25,000 because The Squire has purchased an in-game rumor on how to unlock any given character he wants to play as. And I really think that playing this game will get him used to playing a game in a 3D space with dual joysticks (one for moving, one for camera; and yes, the y-axis is inverted). So we're teaching skills over here too. So that's good.
Let's finish things here. It's getting late on Thursday night, and I would like a few hours of sleep before waking up at 6:30 AM. So thanks for sticking in there with us through a few thousand words and 10 minutes of non-doom phone on my part (see above videos if you haven't already) set to some groovy tunes. Here's hoping 2026 is a good one.*
"BGM #09" from Gonta no Okiraku Daibouken on the Game Boy Color (2000) Composer: Unknown Album: No Official Release Publisher: Lay-Up Developer: Lay-Up
If I were to tell you that there was a Game Boy Color game that centered around a canine mascot heavily featured in dog food commercials in Japan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you'd likely believe me. So now that you're on board, we're featuring "BGM #09" from Gonta no Okiraku Daibouken (Gonta's Great Adventure). I couldn't find a whole lot about this game or the golden lab Gonta whom the game is based. Apparently, Gonta was a very popular dog on the Japanese TV program Mezamashi TV during the "Kyuo no Wanko" segment that would feature good doggos. This might even be the same "Gonta," but from what I was able to find out, "Gonta" is a modestly popular dog's name in Japan.
As for the music, from what I was able to find out, some of the music in Gonta no Okiraki Daibouken was adapted from the music that was used during the "Kyuo no Wanko" segments, so it's likely that "BGM #09" was pre-existing music written for Mezamashi TV and not specifically for the video game. But as for who the composer was, I wasn't able to find any reliable leads; although there were some AI-generated leads that were all further unverifiable.
So all we're left with is a catchy little chiptune from an obscure Japanese Game Boy Color game about a popular dog featured in a segment about good dogs, and continues to grace the labels of Sunrise brand dog treats.
I was tempted to leave my first impression as just that, but we'll expand on it just a little bit.
I was a bit worried going into this game, as I've mentioned before, chasing that high from ACE COMBAT X: Skies of Deception and being pretty let down by that last batch of games in the series. But I'm, I think, about halfway through my first campaign playthrough (on Easy because I was worried the game was going to try to be violent with me; looking at you ACE COMBAT: Assault Horizon) and apart from being afraid of some missions on higher difficulties and even what I would need to do to get that S rank, I'm having a blast. I love the gameplay so far, I love the music. I'll often sit and rewatch the mission I just played with the radio turned off and toggling the slow motion to make the videos all dramatic. For instance:
and
And then there are plenty of stills too!
So yeah. I just wanted to say that if you're on the fence like I was prior to the Steam Winter Sale, the game is great, and I'd be surprised (and deeply saddened) if the next 15 missions go downhill really fast.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered International through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played, and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Some brief context. I've not played many games in the SaGa series, only Final Fantasy II, which I'm told is often considered to be the progenitor of the SaGa series since FFII designers Akitoshi Kawazu, Hiromichi Tanaka, and Koichi Ishi all worked on/directed several SaGa games, and The Final Fantasy Legend. I did have some assumptions about this game, such as maintaining the mechanic of usage-based leveling that existed in both FF II and TFFL, but I wasn't expecting so many hidden mechanics that feel integral to both sucessfully progressing and enjoying the game.
When I started the game, I decided to choose Albert out of the eight possible characters, mainly because all the characters are numbered, and Albert is number one. From what I read online after selecting Albert, this seemed like the best choice since it sounded like you learn a lot of the early game mechanics with Albert's story, so I wasn't too worried about not picking up the game or not being able to follow any mechanics. That ended up being a huge mistake, as I've since found out that with Albert in the third area, Valhalland, that I never picked up or learned Jump before leaving for Yeoville, I never picked up Smoke Bombs, I've never heard about ER (Event Rank, and if you know, then you know that it's a key quest tracking and progression mechanic), and I had the Minstrel join Albert in Bruelle because I didn't know that he's likely gone for good in Albert's story which means I don't have any spell casters in Valhalland which is inundated with SaGa's versions of Final Fantasy's Slimes/Jellies/Mousse/Flans.
From this alone, I feel like I'm playing a game where I should have already read an instruction manual, or that I'm coming into a game that's already steeped in mildly obscure mechanics that you're already supposed to have known ahead of time. Should I have taken a course beforehand? At worst, it feels like I'm playing a game that's meant only for people who already know what they're doing. That this Remastered Romancing SaGa is meant for people who have either already played the original Romancing SaGa or want to learn key game mechanics from outside the game. It's not a great feeling to have going into an established JRPG series from a developer that I, for the most part, love.
But then you ask yourself, now that I know all this information, where is the problem with either starting a new game file or creating a new character? And I could, lord knows I've restarted many a game in the past (Dark Souls glowering from the darkened recesses of my brain), but there's no drive behind that desire. There's no desire, right now at least, to either restart Albert's campaign or choose to start as Claudia or Hawke. And that's a pretty bad feeling to have.
Sadly, this is where I'm at with Romancing SaGa - Minstrel Song - Remastered International. Albert is stuck in Valhalland with Sif and a random Valhallan Warrior, somewhat underpowered and feeling like I'm digging myself into a progression hole. I'm not completely turned off to the entire Romancing SaGa series, though, and looking at screenshots of the original Super Famicom version does make me want to play that. Who knows? Maybe Square Enix having seen such a positive reception towards the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster collection, they might put out a pixel remaster collection of the first three Romancing SaGa games, or at least, something similar to their Collection of SaGa. That would get me excited to play this series, because we all know that I love a good old retro JRPG.
When you're playing a physics-based puzzle game, it's important to have some chill music to keep you calm as a part of your brain rages at having to construct a singularly long and totally nonsensical line around the screen to vault a ball into the air so that it lands on a star in the hopes that the game recognizes the genius of your creation. That's the beauty of "Afternoon Snooze" in Crayon Physics Deluxe. The piano, guitar, (chimes?), and violin are all chill enough to help keep your emotions in check, while also sounding interesting enough to keep your brain interested in the music; I guess, as long as you're not someone who gets distracted by music in video games.
And damn, that outro! From 3:50 until the song abruptly cuts off (I probably could have made it fade out, but I didn't), a cello (is that a cello?) manages to bring an entirely new element and feel to the song, only for it to stop/cut off 30 seconds later. That might be my only gripe, that the song doesn't go on for another two minutes at that point, but it's still a great song that I'm going to miss hearing in Crayon Physics Deluxe because I've called the game "done." Potentially more on that later.
We like lists here. Lists are good because they offer us the excuse and ability to list our thoughts in an easy-to-digest form. First, there are the games released in 2025 that I actually played. Next will be the games released in 2025 that I bought (not counting games received for free through Epic, GOG, Amazon Games), and last will be games that were released in 2025 that I remembered that I was interested in but never purchased. I will hyperlink to articles I've written when possible.
Games Released in 2025 that I Bought but Haven't Played
Nothing. I only bought one game with my own real-world money that was released in 2025, and that was Horses, partly because the concept sounded interesting, but also to support the developer, as their game was being delisted before it could even be sold by Steam or the Epic Game Store for reasons that didn't seem consistent with their developer terms of service. Any other game I bought last year was released in a previous year/decade.
Games Released in 2025 that I Would Like to Buy/Play
The Stone of Madness (1/28/25)
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (2/4/25)
Avowed (2/18/25)
Assassin's Creed: Shadows (3/20/25)
South of Midnight (4/8/25)
Blue Prince (4/10/25)
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (4/22/25)
Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 (4/24/25)
Doom: The Dark Ages (5/15/25)
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time (5/21/25)
Cave Crave (6/26/25)
Tales of the Shire (6/29/25)
Hollow Knight: Silksong (9/4/25)
Cronos: The New Dawn (9/5/25)
Borderlands 4 (9/12/25)
Baby Steps (9/23/25)
Blippo+ (9/23/25)
Hades II (9/25/25)
Silent Hill f (9/25/25)
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles (9/30/25)
Ghost of Yōtei (10/1/25)
Little Nightmares III (10/10/25)
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 (10/21/25)
Once Upon a Katamari (10/24/25)
The Outerworlds 2 (10/29/25)
Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remaster (10/30/25)
Amanda the Adventurer 3 (11/6/25)
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment (11/6/25)
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (12/4/25)
Octopath Traveler 0 (12/4/25)
I'm sure that there's something to be said about the fact that, despite the Switch 2 launching six months ago, I've only purchased one Switch 2 exclusive, and that's a title that came packaged with the system. I've been using the system to work through some of my backlog of both physical and digital titles, but nothing that was released in 2025. And that's one downside to these three (really two-and-a-half) lists is that they don't capture all of the games I played this year that could fit into other categories, such as:
Crowdfunded Games from previous years
Humble Bundle Games from previous years
Random Free Games on:
Steam
Epic Games
GOG
Amazon
Backlogs on all the aforementioned storefronts, but also throw in the Switch 1 and 3DS.
But that's kind of what will be covered in next Monday's article, where I will go into my Nintendo 2025 Year in Review and Steam RePlay. You can look forward to fewer lists and more screenshots if I don't decide to upload the whole video next Monday.
I know in the past we've held off on doing a Monthly Update in January and focused on a Year in Review, both in terms of games we've played and dozens upon dozens that we haven't, along with official look-back videos and pages from Steam and Nintendo. And we're still planning on doing those next week. Still, I broke up the Year in Review article to cover the next two Mondays, partly because Nintendo hasn't released their data for players. Still, I also wanted to keep the articles a bit more concise and less overwhelming for you, our dear reader(s), with all this nearly needless information. So that's next week.
I also wanted to mention that for the entirety of January, I'm going to be releasing a video daily for a meditation/mindfulness app for the Meta Quest 2 VR headset I picked up on Keymailer. Now, I have my own reservations about properly meditating while having a white box of circuits strapped to my face, but there was a daily mindfulness section of the app that I thought would either make really good or really bad videos for YouTube, so we're going to find out. There's a playlist currently up at the link here if you'd like, and feel free to join along, since, as of yet, there doesn't seem to be a significant visual component to the mindfulness aspect, which is rather ironic considering the medium.
But anyway.
Conklederp and I started the second season of Fallout, but it has been our MO for the past month; we've only made it 20-30 minutes into the episode of whatever we're streaming before one of us gets too sleepy to stay awake. Be it heads visually exploding in Fallout or descriptions of heads exploding in the Ken Burns' documentary The American Revolution, we're not able to make it very far.
I started up Pigeon's Mission, a successful Kickstarter campaign for a game designed by a then-six-year-old and developed by his dad. I've currently hit a skill wall (stop your laughing) after spending I don't know how many lives on the world three boss (seriously, please stop laughing). It's a boss that has multiple attack stages, along with some 4/5th screen-sized attacks in the back-half of the fight that I haven't figured out yet. I'm guessing that I'm overthinking the fight and making it more difficult than it needs to be, considering I one-shotted the world two boss and haven't had this much trouble during the whole of the game. Yeah, yeah. Git gud and all that. I'll probably throw up a video next week to help justify my frustration.
And lastly (yes, maybe?) I started Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown last night and have been enjoying it a lot more than previous Ace Combat games I've played in the last 10 years. I like the fictional setting, I like the standard (easy/pleb control set up), I like that it feels closer to Ace Combat X than Ace Combat: Joint Assault, Ace Combat: Horizon Legacy, or Ace Combat: Assault Horizon. I am only three missions in, and I only have access to the F-16, and I just bought the F-14, and I haven't looked into it yet, but I REALLY hope that the A-10 Warthog is not locked behind one of the many DLCs the game has. I guess I should check before the end of the Steam Winter Sale.*
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