Gaming Library

As a massive Balatro fan, I finally tried this game after it got a few updates. I enjoyed breaking the game's economy to acquire an exponentional amount of coins. However, compared to games like Balatro, it relied too much on RNG rather than skill expression.

When you manage to get past deadline two or three, you should already have enough coins and tickets to reroll the shop as often as you want. This makes it so that you can always get the exact lucky charms you need for your build, rather than being forced to take what the game gives you. Charms are also less universally synergetic, meaning you are limited in what you can experiment with in a given build. This is what it comes down to: knowledge of the charms and mechanics. When you've got your desired build going by rerolling the shop, there is little skill involved in executing it. Just spin to win, and hope for the best. This can be fun at the start, but watching essentially the same over and over gets boring quickly.

I did enjoy the fact that there is some kind of a story you can engage with, and for those first few rounds, discovering all the secret interactions there are and getting the second ending was a really cool concept I enjoyed while it lasted.

After hearing only good things about this game from the internet and friends, I played it in March 2026 and had to admit that I was captivated.

The story, which I will not spoil for you, but particularly the end of Act 1, the start of Act 3 twist, and the ending of the game are peak storytelling. The ending left me in tears and I kept thinking about the game for days.

I also completely broke the game's combat mechanics, managing to hit for 69-million damage on the boss Simon in a single turn! Oh yeah, I'm also going to go to the Orchestra in Strasbourg later this month!

I am currently playing this "friend slop" game with two of my friends. I went in expecting a relaxing, cozy road-trip simulator, but it quickly devolved into a stressful co-op game as we try to manage the RV's systems.

Contrary to my expectations, this is not a casual game! But fun nontheless.

Still playing through it.

Very similar to the first one! Played the first campaign with my brother.

The agonizing wait for Silksong was real! When it released on September 4, 2025, I was on a family vacation in Southern France. I immediately downloaded it on my Switch 2 and played it. Since then, I completed it multiple times and am awaiting the DLC.

You can find more on my experience with the game here: https://yanwittmann.de/blog/playing-silksong

• My first playthrough
• 3D Printing your own Tav

Baldur's Gate 3 is, without a doubt, one of the greatest games I've ever played. Together with a friend, I started our massive 200-hour co-op campaign in early March 2025, playing 6- to 12-hour sessions on weekends. I played a Tiefling Druid named 'Ramie', as which I loved turning into an Owlbear to crush enemies below me.

After completing the game, I extracted Ramie's 3D model from the running game, repaired the geometry in Blender, 3D printed it, and spent hours hand-painting the miniature.

Currently, my friend and I started a second run where I played a Githyanki Monk named 'Bells', and my friend plays the Dark Urge.

I mostly enjoyed the game while playing. It started off really strong, but I found some of the layers in the mid game to be a little uninspired. The ending was really cool, but the post-game did not manage to grab me.

Wow, what can I even say but that I'm still waiting for Chapter 5 later this year?

Having heard bad things about the intermission races featured in this game, I was hesistant to start playing it. However, I found the open-world racing concept to be great.

I also wrote a blog post where I used the 'Traveling Salesman Problem' algorithm to calculate the most enjoyable driving route across the game's open map to play the game with my brother for the first time.

While mechanically interesting at first, it did not manage to keep me interested for much longer.

Balatro became daily addiction during daily commutes to university. I eventually got a hang of the mechanics, reaching 1e37 chips with a Red Seal Steel King setup.

Not content to just play the game, I actually learned how to mod it. I wrote some Lua scripts to inject my own custom Jokers and Boss Blinds into the game, complete with my own artwork and mechanics. One of these mods was featured on the Daily Silksong News channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crOrvq_R0Cw

I also took the game into the real world by creating physical, holographic/metallic Joker magnets.

Just didn't grab me the way the mainline Xenoblade games did. Maybe I'll return one day.

A fun, bizarre little comedy trip.

The parry-heavy mechanics and what I felt were clunky, unresponsive controls led to me finding the combat to be a little frustrating. I eventually put the game down, but might return eventually. The story was interesting enough.

Played this one with my brother. I liked the base-building and logistics, setting up automated extractors for Nanocarbon Alloy and building a monorail into the cores of various planets.

I felt the actual main ending cinematic was pretty anticlimactic, but we still have some parts of the game left to play.

Gave it a shot but dropped it. The farming loop didn't hook me as much as others.

Great concept, but way too stressful for me.

Dropped it pretty quickly. Roguelikes are fun, but this one didn't stick.

The game's pastel exterior masking deep psychological horror caught me off guard, even though I knew some of the twists ahead of time. When I finally reached the ending, this is another game that managed to make me cry at it.

So many hidden secrets and layers. Fantastic puzzle design.

Spoilers!

While Acts 2 and 3 initially jarred me with their aesthetic shifts, I quickly grew to love the mechanical depth and the dark, meta-horror narrative.

I designed a custom card game inspired by Inscryption.

Dropped it after 2 hours. Sokoban style games just aren't my thing. I had heard about the game having some deeper mysteries, but I didn't play far enough to find them.

A roguelike DLC for Splatoon? I initially was sceptical of the game, but the more I played, the more I liked repeatedly climbing the tower and creating overpowered palettes.

I bought Rain World on sale in September 2023, and while interesting, it (unsurprisingly) initially frustrated me a lot. I got lost in Subterranean after trying to go from Shoreline and had to ask the game's subreddit for help. But once the mechanics clicked, I played through almost every single slugcat campaign . I learned to love the unforgiving ecosystem and the cryptic lore from the Iterators (Five Pebbles and Looks to the Moon).

While playing, I tracked all my knowledge in an Obsidian vault, but writing all the text out by hand was tedious, and the wiki or other sources had spoilers. So, I spent weeks programming a Collection Index for the community to track pearls, read dialogue trees, and view linked map locations. It became a hit on the Rain World Discord and Reddit.

I also took on a big video editing project, taking 150 hours of Twitch VODs from the YouTuber About Oliver and editing them down into highly edited Supercut videos of his playthroughs.

Recently, I built a Scavenger Mask to wear for Gamescom.

I beat the main game on Hard mode!

I also played most of the post-game content, including the large Woolhaven DLC.

I played this game in co-op with my brother. The final 'Badge Marathon' level was pretty hard, but we got around to fully beating it.

I enjoyed the eerie, Lovecraftian horror of the opening hours and the tension of trying to get back to port before dark. However, I felt the game had a severe balancing issue. By the mid-game, I had upgraded my boat so much that the sea monsters were no longer a threat, completely removing the fear from the game. I also found the game's ultimate plot twist and ending to be a bit contrived and anticlimactic.

Played over Christmas 2024. I loved the dense 'metroidbrainia' puzzles, but got severely stuck during the 'Dark World' phase. I had to look up hints because the game gave me the vague prompt 'I believe in you' and left me with no idea where to go next.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChromaZero/comments/1hqgnko/what_a_nice_game_especially_the_second_half_took

I played this massive fan-game in December 2023. I found it to be a masterpiece that easily rivaled the original. I played the Pacifist route first and genuinely cried at the ending. I then tackled the brutal Genocide route. The final boss, Zenith Martlet, proved to be so insurmountably difficult that after hours of trying, I actually had to hack the game to give myself infinite health just to see the ending.

I played this one via the XBOX Game Pass. I enjoyed the themes of the haunting atmosphere and smooth animations. However, the ending, where you become a massive blob of flesh and just roll down a hill didn't quite resonate with me.

Played it, but the story didn't resonate deeply with me and the gameplay was on the simpler side, too.

When you encounter the same moon base three times and realize that nothing matters, combined with the glitches I experienced, this game becomes exactly what I expected it to be.

There was a lot of missed opportunity with the level design. The character controller is made to traverse large areas in style, however the world design is mostly linear and does not provide the space to drift around freely and sometimes requires precise positioning.

Played in October 2023 on XBOX Game Pass. I absolutely adored the beautiful atmosphere, the tense isolation, and the incredibly well-acted radio dialogue with Delilah. However, the ending severely disappointed me. I felt that all the thrilling mysteries, the missing teens, the government conspiracy, the fires, were resolved with boring, mundane explanations, making all the amazing buildup feel like wasted potential.

Played in October 2023 on Xbox Game Pass. I absolutely loved the recursive 'worlds within worlds' puzzle design. I enjoyed the game's audio design, with how the background music would cue exactly when I had set up a puzzle correctly, before executing the solution, because it knew that I had realized what the solution was ahead of me actually doing it.

Another one I played via XBOX Game Pass. I walked away from this game a little conflicted. While I loved the sections where I could explore 'The Slums' at my own pace and do 'cat things', I disliked the linear Zurk blob chase sequences and some of the precise platforming sequences.

Paused playing this with my brother, but enjoyed the co-op.

I found this parody of The Witness hillarious, with how it skewered Jonathan Blow's pretentious puzzle design.

Completed Farewell and all berries. Definitely the best pure platformer I've played. I've since played some mods and had another playthrough of the game.

My friend played through this with two players, which might help as each person remembers different things.

I was completely consumed by the hype for this game. I originally ordered the Collector's Edition on eBay, got scammed, spent weeks fighting PayPal for a 170€ refund, and eventually bought the standard game. When I finally got it, I played it from morning to night. While some say that the Depths were plain and boring, I found that walking, riding on skeletal horses and later flying through the pitch-black underground, was one of the most intense experiences I had in a game. I loved the game's open-ended creativity. I built flying machines with fans and control sticks, and eventually flew directly into the storm clouds above Faron.

The main narrative surrounding Zelda is really cool in concept, realizing the true nature of the Light Dragon in the sky and pulling the Master Sword from its head was one of the best moments. Still, the story was the one downside of the game, often repeating the same dialogues and making characters believe obvious lies without the chance to intervene. Or the fact that everyone appears to have forgotten who Link is, or that all the Shiekah Tech just vanished.

On my birthday (July 5, 2023), I plunged beneath Hyrule Castle and fought Ganondorf. The final cinematic sequence of the two dragons and diving through the sky to catch a falling Zelda was pretty epic though, and I still remember this day vividly in my mind.

A perfect capstone to the Xenoblade trilogy, incredibly fun gameplay.

Beautiful visuals.

I dove into Hollow Knight in early 2023 because my brother played it. At the time, I got Corona, so those memories are deeply intertwined. I found it to be a pretty good game at first, but my impression only got better from there. I wanted to master its brutal combat and platforming.

I achieved 112% completion, went through the Path of Pain, and spent hours grinding against Pure Vessel and Absolute Radiance until I could beat them consistently. I even completed a sub-5-hour speedrun with Steel Soul mode at once. I engaged heavily with the modding community too, playing several randomizers and mods like the Pale Court.

I tried finally playing this on the Wii in February 2023. I ended up dropping it after 8 hours, due to the incredibly slow pacing and what I felt was excessive 'hand-holding' compared to the freedom the other games had. I even formally apologized to all the people that enjoyed this.

I completely fell in love with this games meta-puzzles and the mechanic of piecing together the in-game instruction manual. The combat was surprisingly tough, requiring many and many attempts on some of the bosses.

I was so enamored with the game that I actually bought the physical instruction manual from Fangamer. In 2025, I did a replay where I sequence-broke the game, using secret codes to get bombs early to bypass huge chunks of the intended route.

Good fun for a couple of sessions with friends.

Another massive journey. The mechanics refined everything I loved about the series.

I played this right at launch in 2022. I spent quite a bit of time on the single-player campaign and actually managed to beat the brutal, secret 'Perfect Run' level.

I really enjoyed the level design in this campaign.

Satisfactory was my factory sandbox addiction, racking up over 600 hours of playtime. In my first playthrough in early access, I completed all four tiers.

Since the 1.0 release in September 2024, I've started a second playthrough that is still ongoing. Maybe I should share some screenshots of my factory somewhere on my website.

While the gameplay is on the simpler side, the fourth-wall breaking story absolutely makes up for it. The Solstice route stuck really with me.

I also asked Nightmargin whether I could use her sketch of a Nomai as my profile picture, and since then use it on Reddit and other places.

A fun road trip with procedural elements. Good times, yet I found it to be a bit lacking.

I really enjoyed the forced-perspective, mind-bending puzzles and appreciated the game's deeper narrative message about altering your perspective on life's problems. I even got my Mom to play it, and she found the controls much more forgiving than other first-person games like Outer Wilds.

I played Undertale in June 2021, doing all routes. The game impacted me profoundly on a personal level. In July 2025, I even started programming my own Undertale clone engine in Godot, where I'm still working on a custom fangame.

It was such a cozy, relaxing experience, but it hit me surprisingly hard emotionally. The mechanics of flying and gliding around the island resonated with me pretty deeply.

A solid follow-up visually, but lacking the same mechanical depth as the original.

Paused on this one for a long time.

I played this over the summer of 2021, achieving 100% completion in August. I fully completed the game, and am amazed at this game's world, character and quest design.

Got all the endings, had a laugh, but wouldn't buy the eventual expansion.

This game impacted me on a profound level. Since finishing game, I watched over 30 different playthroughs on YouTube, played the VR mod and spent over 40 hours building a physical, wearable Nomai Mask. On the programming side, I wrote a C# mod mod myself, programmed a Nomai Script Translator that turns English into branching Nomai phonetics. Check out my website for more info on all this!

I also commissioned Tumblr artist Xanabelle to draw my sci-fi tabletop RPG character inspired by the Nomai.

Terrifying but beautiful. It surprised me just how much story and surprises this game had. I expected just another survival game.

My first Hyrule Warriors game. The deviations in the story were disappointing, but the hack and slash action was fun while it lasted.

Rolled right into this after the base game. A solid wrap-up, though less impactful than the other DLCs.

I initially struggled with the combat system coming off of XC2, but I eventually got the hang of it. The story and worldbuilding is pretty epic and worth playing for sure.

I immediately rolled right into the Future Connected epilogue after that.

I surprisingly liked the infamous Water Temple, even considering it one of the best dungeons in the game. I beat Ganon's first phase on my first try, but his beast form took me five attempts.

I absolutely loved the vibrant world and characters. The ending touched me a lot, and Dragon Roost Island is still one of the greatest themes in the series.

I played the first game heavily during the 2020 lockdowns.

A standout memory for me in VR.

Basically the only VR game I keep coming back to.

I played this classic via the Switch Online SNES emulator, finishing it in March 2020. I respected its legacy but noted that some of the old-school design is a little of obscure, as I needed a guide for several instances. I loved the themes, mechanics, pixel art and music though, being impressive for the time.

I praised this as a phenomenal standalone experience that perfectly augmented the base game's lore. It's easily one of the best expansions I've ever played.

I lent this game from a friend, not knowing what gates this would open for me.

This was my very first JRPG, played in 2019, and it absolutely blew me away. It was also the very first game with a real proper story, and I was completely immersed in the world. I spent 160 hours grinding, salvaging for gold, and unlocking Blade affinity charts.

I bought the Switch remake in October 2019 and beat it while being on a class trip to Athens. I collected all the Secret Seashells and beat the Color Dungeon. I really enjoyed the classic top-down formula.

A fun, silly game right at the start of my Switch library.

I was pretty obsessed with the hype for SMM2, being exited for the Nintendo Directs. I bought it on release day. I spent dozens of hours building levels, playing the story mode, and speedrunning various user-created levels. I still watch CarlSagan42 playing Troll Levels in this game.

I played this chaotic physics brawler in 2019 with Nils and his friends during hangouts.

I achieved 100% completion (all 900 Koroks) in March 2019. It was one of the greatest games I had played at that point, being the first game on the Switch. After that, I mastered the game's more complicated glitches: Weapon Duplication, Moon Jump, Hyrule Overloading, Wrong Warping, and so on. In November 2020, I built a makeshift sound booth out of blankets in my room to record audio for a massive, scripted YouTube documentary explaining how to execute these glitches. The video blew up, gaining thousands of views.

I finally played the original NES Metroid in 2019 as my first Metroid game. I had to rely heavily on emulator save-states just to survive the punishing difficulty and use several guides, but it was nice to see where it all began.

Dropped it because my brain is just not big enough for this game.

I wasn't ready to invest enough time in mastering it, but it's a great party game.

Fun multiplayer moments, standard Mario Party chaos.

A challenging expansion I played with my brother

A close second to Galaxy in my eyes. The character controller here is unmatched.

More of the ink-splatting fun I enjoyed from the first game.

My first Steam game. The puzzle design is great, I just wasn't really that smart of a cookie back then to be able to solve them all by myself. You've gotta play The Looker if you haven't already.

A fun little puzzle spin-off. Borrowing it meant I couldn't 100% it, but I still had a good time.

I laid the groundwork for my love of the sequel here, spending tons of hours crafting levels.

Great multiplayer platformer, definitely enjoyed the 3D space mechanics.

How do you even rank such a game? I learned how to program through this game, and played so much survival, creative and on minigame servers.

Check out my planetminecraft account for all my public projects.

More LEGO fun, just lightly recorded in my stats.

A true staple of my gaming life, I spent so much time racing with my brother.

Another fun party game from the Wii U era.

Incredible music levels and incredibly smooth platforming.

I loved exploring the world of Lego City Undercover so much back then. I remember running around every corner and doing everything I could think of. I even found several glitches in the game to get out of bounds in various ways, become invisible, have rainbow cars, and so much more. The story is surprisingly well-written, even now.

A grand finale, even if I refuse to accept some of the plot twists. I really liked the way you traveled around the world in this one, and all the different locations you visit.

A fun Wii U sandbox experience from back in the day.

One of the best co-op 2D platformers out there.

A huge part of my early gaming years, though I shudder thinking about the cost of all those figures.

My father had to look up the last Information Point (i) for me. It was on the other side of a mountain on a beach.

I got this game as a child after playing it at a friend's house. I find it to be one of the best Mario games there is, because of how creative it is, the platforming, and how much there is to do.

The narrative scale here was surprisingly wild for a Layton game.

I actually did not know about this game before visiting a friend at the time, where we played multiple hours over several days. I convinced my parents to get me the game, but then didn't play it much afterwards...

An absolute staple of my gaming life. Endless rounds against my brother made me as good as I am today.

Continued the fun puzzle formula with a great mystery.

I think I never completed the game, and the disc scratched after a while, so there is no saving it.

Classic DS era puzzle solving. Great memories.

I even tried to submit a Speedrunning clip to Guinness World Records, they said that it was too specific to be considered for the book.

A timeless classic that defined family gaming for a while.

A classic I played endlessly over the years on my Nintendo, and still play the multiplayer vs. mode with my brother on long trips.

... I can't really remember much of this game!

Being the first proper video game I ever played, I don't really remember too much of it, aside from some of the more important moments, or learning all the counter-phrases for the fencing sequences.

Since then, I replayed this point-and-click classic over the Christmas holidays in December 2020. It still holds nostalgic value for me.

If you have the chance, you should try this game.