With Project OY development fully underway (and still unannounced), there's not really so much actual game development for me to talk about in these dev diaries. After the Steam Replay for 2025, I did think of an idea: why not write a little bit about it and make that a dev diary post?
So, why post this almost a month after 2025 is done? Well, (1) I was busy during the holiday season, including everyone getting sick, (2) there's something about leaving out 2 weeks of data in December that really bugs me, and (3) the start of this year has been... a lot.
I'll be going through my own Steam Replay semi-chronologically and giving a few of my thoughts. I'm skipping over a fair number of games - either my play time was miniscule, or I just didn't like the game. I'm not here to put down other people's games, every game below gets my personal recommendation. (None of these are ads, and I guess there is a conflict of interest here as another game developer, but also what's the point of making games if you can't still play them?)
The Crush House
This was a really neat game - it's ostensibly a game about producing and filming a 90s reality TV show, but there's a dystopic subplot beneath the surface. It's not the longest game, but it's a concept I personally haven't seen before, and I enjoyed it.
SteamWorld Build
SteamWorld Build was recommended by Iron Village's QA tester Bea, and has a lot of surface similarities with Iron Village. Like, it's a city builder with railroad tracks in the middle and trains that come for trade. The train is much less central to the game, however: you can trade for extra money, and get useful items, but it's not really vital to your gameplay.
SteamWorld Build kind of has two games going on in parallel: a city builder on the surface that plays like a "casual" Anno (I don't think it's all that "casual" outside of the aesthetics though), and a dungeon delving/tower defense game below ground, which supplies some resources to the city above, as well as rocket parts to help meet the final goal. Combining different games like that is a bold move, but I think they pulled it off!
Balatro
So I had to put Balatro here, I was a little late to the party with playing this. It's an amazingly well done game, and I definitely binged on it and stayed up too late once or twice. Once I finally won though, I have to admit... it didn't really stay attached. I know it was game of the year for so many people, and so many people obsessed over making the best combos and card strategies, but it ended up not quite being my cup of tea.
Iron Village
Iron Village is a really neat city builder with cute pixel art, where you build a town centered on a railway... wait a second!
Steam Replay is pretty funny as a game developer, because you get to see your own work pop up in the middle of everything else. Once you set up the Steam SDK, it counts as a game just as much as any other game, even before it's published. In 2025 it was "only" my third most played game at 7% of all play time, but a whopping 1666 sessions played - and that's just the ones that Steam counted. Plenty of play time was before the Steam SDK was put in, and of course other platforms had to be tested, so that number is probably even higher.
What the Car?
I don't even where to start with this insanity. Its absurdity actually made me laugh, but the game also has quite a bit of challenge to it. Just go play it if you haven't already, it's a wild ride.
Baldur's Gate 3
After hearing so much good about BG3, I ended up grabbing it from PAX East in March 2024. Like with so many big RPGs, I ended up spending so much time messing around with mods and creating new characters that I only ended up beating it on June 9th, 2025 😅. Anyway, I've got 378.3 hours on record, so hopefully that's enough of an endorsement.
Two Point Campus
The sequel to Two Point Hospital (which comes up later), and very much in the spirit of Theme Hospital & Sim Theme Park, it's Two Point Campus! I played a bit closer to when it came out, but I ended up playing a bunch more this year. It's got a great quirky sense of humo(u)r, and it's really neat getting to play in so many different settings. There's so much customization too - I'm a real sucker for customization options in games, but I guess that shouldn't be surprising with how heavily I mod some of them...
Fields of Mistria
So there's a lot of comparisons to be made with Stardew Valley, and rightly so, but that's not a bad thing IMO. I mostly played around the early access release and after the first main update, so I'm quite a bit behind, but I really enjoyed it. I really appreciated some of the quality of life features (for instance, actually saving what people's favorite things are!), and I liked how a huge part of the story is fixing and improving the town.
And More...
At a certain point while writing this, I realized this is going to become waaay too long. I've only made it through February on the Replay, so instead of making this dev diary my full time job, I'm taking a break here. At this rate, there'll be two more parts to follow.