2025 Wrap Up Post - Part 2
Gaming retrospective, looking ahead, and goals for the new year
If you missed part 1 of my 2025 wrap up, you’ll definitely want to read it here first before continuing—otherwise this post won’t make much sense. 😁
Most of you here probably know me from Twitch in the first place, but for anyone new to my content, I stream (mostly retro) games over there on a bi-daily basis.
In fact, 2025 was a very big year for expanding my content into new and exciting places, specifically modern retro (by which I mean new games made in a retro/throwback style) indie adventure/puzzle games. I became a Raw Fury (AMAZING indie publisher) creator and even got small sponsorships for a couple of streams of new games. Although my viewership suffered a bit over those summer months—because much of the audience I’ve built up is primarily there for classic retro games—I had an absolute blast checking out some newer stuff, and I did attract more people to the channel over time. I also began regularly posting to my YouTube channel, and even livestreamed there several times before internet issues cropped up again and made that infeasible.
There’s so much I could say about each game and what it meant to me playing it for the first time, but for the purposes of this wrap up post I need to keep things short and to the point. I may take the time to explore certain titles more in-depth in later posts, though. For now, I’ll just do a basic list of my favorite titles that I played for the first time in 2025 (not necessarily published this year, though some were), starting with my favorite but honestly they’re all great and I recommend all of them:
CobraCommanda’s Favorite Games of 2025
Blue Prince (Dogubomb/Raw Fury, 2025) - Incredible, incredible game. Absolutely devoured August (when I took several weeks off of streaming for emotional health reasons). Read my Steam review here for more of my thoughts on it!
The Kathy Rain series (Clifftop Games/Raw Fury, 2016 & 2025) - The first Kathy Rain game came out in 2016 and the second came out this year. I played them both for the first time in 2025, and I can honestly say that this series has changed my life (in a good way). More on that in a future post!
The Drifter (Powerhoof, 2025) - Stunningly awesome pulpy point & click goodness. A rad ride with some really neat concepts and ideas as well.
The Séance of Blake Manor (Spooky Doorway/Raw Fury, 2025) - Another fabulous, fabulous title published by Raw Fury—they’ve been knocking it way out of the park lately! I played most of this game off-stream and absolutely loved it. My playthrough was fairly recent, so I still need to leave a review. Will talk more about this one in a future post as well.
Inscryption (Daniel Mullins Games/Devolver Digital, 2021) - This game had been recommended to me for years, and Blue Prince finally got me into deckbuilders; I found it on sale and gave it a try. GREAT game! I see what all the fuss was about. I liked some sections of it better than others, but I still really loved the experience overall. I also feel as if I learned how to play Magic the Gathering overnight thanks to this game. 😆
The Excavation of Hobb’s Barrow (Cloak and Dagger/Wadjet Eye, 2022) - Somehow my first Wadjet Eye game? Not sure how that happened! But I really enjoyed the experience overall with its eerily charming setting and perfect retro pixel art graphics. The ending absolutely destroyed me, but I’m not going to spoil it for you…
NORCO (Geography of Robots/Raw Fury, 2022) - Another game that one of my viewers had recommended for years, set in a dystopian version of New Orleans in the post-Hurricane Katrina years. Again the pixel art was jaw-dropping, but mostly I was enthralled by many of the concepts it tackled.
Honorable Mentions: Occlude (occult solitaire, short but intriguing!); Casebook 1899: The Leipzig Murders (gorgeous artwork, neat historical setting, Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade point & click vibes); Tunic (I don’t think I really need to explain this one’s appeal; it has a massive cult following and is hard to explain other than I guess, “a fox Zelda-like with profound meta puzzles”); Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy (beautiful cozy fantasy puzzle platformer, I love the Trine series); Slender Threads (Monkey Island 3-esque Lovecraftian cute-horror point & click); and Virtuaverse (rad 2020 cyberpunk futuristic retro-style Synthwave thriller point & click I started with Grant back when it came out but never actually finished).
Gosh that’s so many, and I don’t even think I got to them all… And this isn’t even counting all of the amazing retro games I played, too! Or Mass Effect 2 (is it retro?), Deadly Premonition (AMAZING), or things like that. Looking back, I’m actually stunned by how much ground I covered in just one year gaming-wise.
I’m also going to throw my GOG affiliate link out there if anyone is buying games on GOG already (I love their DRM-free approach); it works, it really helps me out, and I really appreciate the support: https://adtr.co/h6QUUI
I Want to Believe
Another really fun and new direction for my channel/content came in the form of Weird November, where I finally embraced the “conspiracy theorist” accusations I had occasionally dodged previously, put on my tin foil hat, and played games with occult/esoteric/aliens/conspiracy themes for an entire month—starting with the absolutely mind-boggling 1996 Myst-like point & click “game” Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages (again, need to address this in a future post) and ending with Deus Ex and Mizzurna Falls, both of which I need to get back to in the new year…
Grant made me a special Mulder-themed backdrop, too, complete with the ability for chat to “threw” pencils into the ceiling by donating to the stream:
The month was a total blast for me and felt like the right direction to move in terms of content—in fact, I’ll be keeping it as my backdrop for the foreseeable future (minus the WEIRD NOVEMBER lettering at the bottom, of course). But overall, I want to let my “freak flag fly” more, as they say.
The Truth Is Out There
Along those lines, in this blog I will begin writing more about my spiritual path, my metaphysical and mystical experiences and beliefs, my personal faith, and how I view what’s happening in the world. I had a profound spiritual awakening in the months around my 25th birthday, and I’ve been studying spirituality ever since from dozens or even a hundred different people/places (including my own psyche/subconscious) and in areas of interest. Given the amount of time and energy this research actually consumes, you’d think I would talk about it way more than I do, but for some reason I felt like I had to pretend to be relatively “normal” (Does such a thing exist? I guess I mean just enough to the point where people wouldn’t harass me too much), but now that I’m no longer giving a crap about what other people think of my content, the time is nigh to start sharing it more. Because I know that it will help people, and many have told me that it already is. And keeping things in because you don’t want to “make other people uncomfortable” with your truth really isn’t beneficial to a society that has already gone/is going so far off the rails that so many people are constantly confused, overwhelmed, and on antidepressants.
In 2026 I plan to do at least one post, perhaps a series of posts, telling the initial story of what happened to me in 2007, how I coped, and how that year changed my life in a fundamental way. Beyond that I intend to devote blog posts to certain individual spiritual topics or, perhaps, what I’m personally sensing and perceiving at any given time, depending on where I feel drawn on that particular day. What’s funny is that spiritual “influencers” on YouTube etc. can often get hundreds of thousands or even millions of views—it might seem “out there” but it’s arguably a bigger and broader audience than retrogaming content! Not that that’s the reason I’d be sharing this stuff, but it is somewhat ironic. Don’tcha think? 😜
I also had intended to write a paragraph about how many of the games I played in 2025 (yes, most of which are on that list) and also films I watched started revealing oddly reoccurring themes and symbols, and how since I believe in the Jungian concept of synchronicity I don’t think it’s a coincidence, at all, it would seem as if my life itself (or at least, the media in it) is presenting me with a fascinating adventure game-style puzzle I’m meant to solve. But I’ve been afraid to talk about this for two reasons: 1. that people will think I’m schizo, and 2. that I will attract actual schizos who will start overthinking things to an unhealthy degree and then never stop sending me a bunch of “connections” that really aren’t relevant just because they want to believe so badly and it will get really tedious, annoying, and overwhelming. I’ve been afraid to open that whole can of worms/Pandora’s box.
I can tell whether or not something is an actual synchronicity because my intuitive “spider senses” will ping me with sort of a pay attention, this is important-type feeling, like goosebumps or a shiver, but in a positive way (usually, depending on what it is). It’s also not something that I can wish for or actively control, and it likes to pop up the most when I’m not looking for it. The very act of trying to force things or make them important (usually to augment the person’s ego) makes them inherently un-magical and thus, from my viewpoint, unimportant/irrelevant. So do not try to bring that energy to me; I’m only interested in actual, real synchronicities and not in people desperate for attention or to create their own meaning.
The other thing is that I think 2026 is going to be such an insane, off-the-rails, mind-bending year all on its own (alien disclosure-themed Spielberg-directed major summer blockbuster, anyone? 👽🛸) that my content and is going to seem quite grounded and pragmatic by comparison. 😁 Which leads me to…
What’s on the Horizon for 2026?
Well, I’ve covered some of that already in both of these posts, but the main thing is that I need to start expressing all of the stuff I’ve been bottling up for such a long time. Even right now, as I’m typing this, I have so much mental overwhelm about the backlog of topics I wish to discuss that it’s clouding my brain and making it difficult to focus and stay grounded. I honestly wasn’t even consciously aware that I was lugging around so much, but I can feel that it wants to come out, and it deserves to be recorded. Again, Adam the Woo is a huge inspiration for me here, and I may even seek to write a daily blog post in 2026, just as he had his daily vlogs for many years.
As mentioned in the first part of this 2-parter, I don’t want to make ultra-stringent resolutions per se, but I absolutely want to get healthier and, more than anything, try to address any lingering emotional or physical dependences that I still have with food and alcohol, also impulse shopping for stuff I won’t actually use—things like that. All of these things are better than they used to be except for food, although I think that part of my heaviness is simply hormones and getting older, because I do make it a point to exercise every other day pretty consistently. I definitely can’t eat as much as I could when I was younger, and I need to properly factor that into my eating habits.
But those are really kind of basic, generic things that a lot of people also try to implement when heading into any new year. I’m in fact hopeful that being more authentic, speaking out more, and prioritizing my creativity above all else will make it easier for me to relinquish those and other compulsive behaviors, because I think a lot of that “inner void” is caused by holding myself back for other peoples’ approval. Hopefully I can finally truly embrace the fact that I don’t require other peoples’ approval to live my life, and that if they don’t like what I’m saying or how I live, then they simply don’t have to be a part of it and can go do their own thing instead. And if they are unable to do that and instead choose to fixate on me and try to tear me down, then that speaks more about them and their personal flaws and weaknesses than it does about me.
As Above, So Below
As above, so below is an ancient alchemical statement that became my mantra starting in November, after Drowned God repeated it ad nauseum throughout the game (just looked it up and I guess it’s actually a modern paraphrasing of the second verse of the Emerald Tablets of Thoth so popular in Hermeticism—who knew!) It basically means “As it is in Heaven/the spirit realm, so it is on Earth/in the manifested reality,” but I recommend studying it and alchemy more deeply if you want to grasp it better.
I started seeing and hearing the phrase pop up in unexpected places, and later watched the 2014 found footage-style horror/thriller by the same name and found my perceptions widened even further by the film’s contents (am still processing these things, honestly). When Grant and I went to the Sarasota Medieval Faire at the end of November, of course I had to stop by my favorite candlemaker’s booth, Triple Moon Waxcraft, and what did they have there? You guessed it:
They only had one left by that point in the season and the wording had gotten a bit sun-bleached, but obviously I had to buy it. And I did.
Another meaning of as above, so below is as within, so without which means that our outer reality reflects what is within us, and vice versa. I have decided that in 2026, all of the creativity and content and perceptions that I’ve been holding back are going to finally break forth—I’m not sure I could stop it even if I wanted to, at this point! I’ve seen a lot, experienced a lot, and thought about a lot that I really want to share with all of you, beyond playing games on Twitch with the occasional profound discussion (though I enjoy that, too!) I want to write a novel and also at least one nonfiction book along with Grant, I want to make art, I want to make crafts, I want to make proper YouTube videos, I want to make a website, I want to work on my brand, I want to possibly make music as well, and probably plan more events (also with Grant). I’m struggling to make sure I get this done before midnight, as I want to kick the year off on the right foot!
Astrologers and numerologists are saying that we are wrapping up a 9 year (2 + 0 + 2 + 5 = 9), a year of endings and completions, and beginning a 1 year (2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 10 = 1 + 0 = 1) which is the number of new beginnings; collectively it has been an entire phase of life and experience that we are now closing to embark upon a new one. These last few weeks have been our chance to process and parse through everything we’ve been through as we clear the space for new initiatives and creations in our life.
“I Know When to Go Out. I Know When to Stay In and Get Things Done.”
The immortal Bowie’s words ring true tonight, but I thought we’d be out partying on Clearwater Beach or something, but it’s just so damn cold (yes, 47 degrees is FREEZING here in Florida and I HATE it 🥶) and I don’t feel like putting in the effort or paying that kind of money. Grant might stream if the internet is amenable. I want to keep playing Indiana Jones & the Great Circle, which I just started playing for free on Amazon Luna last night. HOLY HECK is this game amazing! WOW! Good job, Todd Howard! He’s still got it after all these years. 🤣
Anyway, again on the topic of synchronicity and feeling like the media in my life is trying to tell me something, apparently now I have to think about giants/Nephilim and their place in this big puzzle I’m trying to put together? They came up in the game last night and I got that “ping” again, and it’s at least the third time they’ve come up in less than two months. I never thought or cared about them before. Maybe I do need to bring some people on board to help figure some of this out, because I have no idea how they are relevant at all or what I need to understand about them… woof. 🐶
I also have to say that I’ve gotten into a sort of trance-like state while getting into the second half of writing this post, like very serious brain fog (and yes, I’m 100% sober as I write this), and it’s really annoying but I’m not going to go back and proofread it before posting because I don’t even think I really can right now, and it’s getting late and I wanted to be done with this hours ago. So here it is. I hope you enjoy, and full speed ahead into 2026! Let’s do this. 💪