Best Games of the 2020’s is back with the seventh entry this year, and another retro inspired beat ’em up is off the list.

Hollow Knight: Silksong (2025) goes on at #15

This game was touch and go. Not from on a “will it make the list” perspective, but from a “where on the list should it go?” Had I thrown my controller across the room and quit it in Act 1, we might be looking at a low-40’s entry.

Thankfully that was not the case. The learning curve Team Cherry built into this game, may be some combination of intentional design mixed with it’s origins as DLC for the original game in 2017. When the expectation of the player is: “Oh you’ve been baking for a year? Please make my wedding cake” there is room for error. My short time with Hollow Knight taught me to pop a can of biscuits and that’s about it.

Investing in that curve took patience, but Silksong ends up at a mighty #15 because that patience is ultimately rewarded. After 8-ish hours of being abused, wandering around in the woods, and fighting for every drop of progress. It all starts to click. Right around the midway point of Act 1. That could sound like Stockholm syndrome, but the art, world building, and crispy controls not only get you through that early stage, but really come into their own when you are out of it.

I rolled credits on the game, aka end of Act 2, after 33 hours. There is an even more challenging Act 3 that seems like a pain to even start. So I am done for now, but may return one day in the future.

Streets of Rage 4 (2020) gets round housed out of 50th place. It was a blast to play with my youngest and introduce him to an arcade genre I spent so many quarters on as a kid..

The algorithm doesn’t always get it right, but on YouTube it does more often than not for me. Odd Artworks is it’s latest success story. Daily dungeon and goblin drawings are on offer. Quick form, dice rolls for prompts, sketches, and inks. All with some light narration on the approach. The current series is a daily micro dungeon and a new themed goblin every day for October.

Alewife

This one was a white whale. First on our list alphabetically of course, but also the only letter “A” restaurant we ever considered. We’d heard great recommendations and it is most folk’s guess when we tell them about the ABC challenge. Well it straight up delivered on the hype. Vibe, food, drink. Check, check, and check.

Trouvaille

This is surprisingly one the only letter “T” restaurants with good reviews that we hadn’t been to in town. So off we went on a week night to this spot in the heart of the Fan. The food and drink were good, but nothing blew us away. The atmosphere was cold and minimal. Not a bad spot, but not one we’d pick again.

Building on thoughts about social media and modern internet interactions. I’ve been thinking lately about who leaves reviews. I’ll set aside the bot armies that might be thrusting a vacuum cleaner to the top of the Amazon algorithm. I’m talking about the people in your town that are leaving restaurant reviews. Who are these creatures and why do I put so much faith in them when picking out a new restaurant?

Our annual travel for work, fun, and soccer has picked up in the past few years. In that time we’ve arrived at a new rule of thumb when looking for good food. Restaurants 4.5 and above. That may seem like a high bar, but we are batting 1000 when we deploy it. We end up having great experiences and even better food in every city we go to. Here too, a lot of the ABC challenge is driven off of recommendations from friends, but also online reviews.

So that is how we are operating, but that has also lead us to leaving reviews. If we had a good time we’ll drop a 5 star via Google so others might take the wisdom of the crowd and have a good time too.

Mike recently shared a link to an update on developer LocalThunk’s blog and I went digging around the rest of his site. His development timeline from 2021 to 2024 for Balatro is great. A peak into his journey from hobbyist game developer to threading the many needles necessary to make a hit game. Grab a cup of coffee and go read it too, but here are few moments that stood out for me:

I have been making games for about 10 years now and I have been doing visual art projects for much longer, and a very important habit I have developed for creative hobby projects is to stop working on something when I no longer feel the drive. This is for 2 main reasons; first, it allows me to move on to the next idea without totally burning out on the last thing. Second, and more importantly in this case, it allows me to take time off guilt free and possibly come back to the project later on without wrapping it in negative emotions.

None of my hobby’s lead to a passion day job, but I’ve struggled with the self-imposed stress of not progressing projects or getting burnt out and hating them countless times.

• My partner was learning to code in R at the time, and she asked me “How do you name your variables?” I went on some rant about casing, using descriptive words, underscores, etc. She waits until I am finished and says “I like to call mine thunk”. I thought that was just about the funniest thing I had ever heard.
• The way variables are declared in Lua is (sometimes) with the local keyword, thus local thunk was born! I wouldn’t choose this name for quite a while yet but this is the moment I looked back on when I was finally ready to create a developer handle online.

That’s an excellent naming origin, considering “Samichez” is just me thinking that is a fun way to say and spell sandwiches.

More ratings pour in, and by the time the day is done we are sitting above 90 on both Metacritic and OpenCritic. I wasn’t even thinking that this was a possibility, but it sure did build a ton of hype for launch day. I don’t think I would have rated Balatro higher than an 8 and I made the damn thing.

Him giving one of the best game’s since 2020 an 8 is really telling about how close and self-critical we can get to our own work and comparison to what other humans are making.

I hated to see Son leave Spurs this summer, but it was time. He went out on the highest note, delivering the club it’s first big trophy in 34 years. But seeing him move to LAFC and find joy early warms my heart. He reunited with Lloris too, it’s a great story so far. How long can I hold off on getting a Son jersey? We shall see!

After a 3 year hiatus A Life Well Wasted is back with it’s 9th episode since inception in 2009. A 16 year timeline feels insane, but also like the blink of an eye. Prior to making ALWW, I was a Robert Ashley fan when he was on GFW Radio and then Out of the Game. Like it was yesterday.

So here it is another Olly Moss cover piece and an excellent episode about the fall of a triple A videogame. The subsequent fall of the studio that made it, the people impact that had, and a reflection on the time, effort, and creativity that go into something that now doesn’t exist.

Bonus: Chris Plante just put out a new episode of Post Games that includes a behind the scenes with Ashley for his newest episode.