Eden's Game and Album of the year: 2025
- Game runner-up: Kinophobia, a new-gen database game. It’s full of slick little puzzling tricks that are never repeated, and equally full of perfectly conceived pieces of internet flotsam creating the piecemeal palace of the game’s world. Obra Dinn but using the medium of Posts.
Honorable mentions:
- Öoo, a tight, perfectly executed puzzle platformer
- Rise of the Golden Idol's DLC run which finished its release schedule – the best deduction game ever made.
- Despelote, a well-directed, absolutely novel autobio excerpt
- Pokémon Legends Z-A, an engaging alternate universe of Pokémon battle mechanics with stupidly charming presentation & writing
Game of the Year: Q-UP
The raw stuff of contemporary games with Builds and Nodes and Perks, reduced down into concentrated Video Game. If you’re making a game with numbers and you aren’t asking “how is this in conversation with Q-UP”, you’re doing it wrong. It speaks incisively about damn near about everything in the current moment of games and tech with experience, and also it’s just fuckin’ funny. Not to discount the excellent work of the other developers here, but it’s also a fantastic follow-up to James Lantz’s Discord bot-based game Smilebot from years past.
As someone who plays a lot of competitive games, Q-UP unexpectedly (for both me and it, I think) spoke to my heart a little bit too: it gets to the idea of the “ranked ladder” and represents the kind of people like me who hopelessly enroll again and again, no matter what the actual game is, to dance under the weight of that embellished almost-ELO number with the gaudy-ass ornaments and medals they attach to it. That stupid fuckin’ number. Exorcising some of the sickness of that number has been a goal of mine in 2025 and I’m proud that I managed to make some progress on that. And Q-UP helped, robbing The Number of some power with caricature and satiation.
Music runner-up: Grindwork by Town Portal, yet another solid album of meat and potatoes rock sound with just enough mathy puzzle riffs to make every song its own intriguing piece. In approach, it fills in the hole in my etude-loving heart left by CHON's ending.
Album: The Blue Nowhere by Between the Buried and Me
How the hell does a band go for 20 years with no lineup changes, even releasing a sequel album (which was great on the whole, but also feels like kind of a shark jump conceptually) and ousting one of its members for sexual misconduct (thank god), and then release one of the best albums of their career? Blue Nowhere is where all the big experiments they've done over the past decade really come together, the point where their sort of inconsistent flirting with different fundamental genres blossoms into a full relationship. To be clear, these experiments have rarely been flat-out bad, but they just have a consistently hit-or-miss record on the records.
To enumerate, obviously the last all-killer-no-filler album was Parallax II: Future Sequence. Then we had Coma Ecliptic (2016) which really started to branch into brighter prog with really theatrical song personalities, more poppy choruses (very notable), and occasionally wooden rock riffs. Automata I & II (2018) continued with high highs and pretty mid lows, with industrial-tinged mosh stuff, some awkwardly phrased prog progressions, and kind of trite closers to both parts of the release. Then Colors II (2021) had some of their best classic long songs but also one of their least interesting ones, then an interesting synth-driven poppy thing, and some very uninteresting takes on jammy epic rock. I thought we would just get this approach for the rest of their career and I was fine with that.
And then came along Blue Nowhere! The bright prog, synth-driven feel, and arbitrarily odd-time pop choruses actually work on the opening track, Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark. The very industrial metal second track, God Terror, has great vocal effects and electronic percussion (that one weird cymbal sample on the 1s is gorgeous) along with a perfectly built breakdown with those disgustingly messy chugs and squeals. At first I thought the main riff went on a bit long for how simple it was, but the groove took me in the end. The odd-time bridge is great too. Then Absent Thereafter comes in as an absolute love letter to their southern rock influences, with Paul hitting the griddy on the country lick, a great hoedown in the middle the likes of which we haven't seen since Ants in the Sky from 2007, and a theatrical revue ending that caps all the crazy emotions off well.
Pause/Door #3 serves as a transition into the darker middle of the album (I mean, God Terror is dark, but it's also slightly campy fun) with the classic BTBAM circus music sections and a lovely dual chorus, and ends in a shit-kicker of a breakdown. Honestly my biggest nit with the album is that the acoustic bridge needed to be twice as long, but it's still a great oddity to alloy the song's personality. We then get 22 minutes of basically non-stop riffage which is a lot to digest - once you get a grip on the pacing and how everything links together, these songs (Mirador Uncoil/Psychomanteum and Slow Paranoia) are incredibly rewarding. It reminds me of the disgustingly good lockup of Black Box/Telos into Bloom into Melting City off of Parallax II.
Psychomanteum in particular is a cavalcade of insanely good vignettes in classic BTBAM fashion - you have the crazy bass chords and wah-wah in the first section, the great Car Bomb nod in that one riff, and the truly nasty "Scry!/Visions of the past" breakdown. There's the bright driving "Worship the Martian" chorus (one of several things that are like choruses in the song) that actually works here, unlike Blot off of Automata I for example which felt cloying. This chorus builds into the beautiful arpeggiated three-line centerpiece of the song where the bass really ties everything together, announced by the title of the intro track "Mirador Uncoil" calling back lyrically to the chorus of Absent Thereafter. It evokes to me a sense of decades passing, history being made and stories being created out of it. This is perfectly set up by the preceding chorus's lyrics too. I could listen to this section for hours.
Anyways, I'm going on and on about the album, but I'll just say that the title track didn't impress me at first but ultimately does feel like a well-realized, sincere emotional climax of a pop song, with smart drumming choices. The closer is a take on the jammy epic rock stuff that actually works pretty well this time too. It's not quite as good as the Parallax releases, but like, that's one of the highest fucking bars in music, so you can't really fault it for that. I also want to commend them for cutting the overture track that's on the deluxe edition and would have been the opener - that took some restraint, but it was ultimately the right decision. I think BTBAM's style is (oddly) a little too eclectic for that kind of Dream Theater opening which works better with a more digestibly coherent album. Ultimately this album is a real gift that makes me proud once again to be a fan of these guys as a visionary, smart, stupid (a compliment), inventive band that knows how to experiment and knows how to refine ideas too. Truly, progressive metal.