Games I Played in 2025 [2025-???-??]
The following is a list of games I played this year, ordered from least to most favoured, alongside some broad thoughts on each one. This list only covers primarily singleplayer games, and as such will not cover any primarily online multiplayer games.
DRAMAtical Murder
Date: January | Status: Finished
If it wasn't clear by my handle, I like BL (Boys' Love). As a gay person I struggle to relate to the majority of straight romance in media, the fixations on opposites and the inevitability of marriage, vaginal sex, and babies bears incredibly little resemblence to the kind of relationships I have. You'd think that yuri would appeal to me, a girl who has almost exclusively dated girls, but no. Aside from the anatomical differences, I rarely find myself connecting with the sorts of characters and situations in these stories. Perhaps I find it harder to put myself in the shoes of a cis girl dating cis girls, than I do putting myself in the shoes of an effeminate boy who likes the "wrong" things and dates the same sex. BL also has way more gore and violence so that also helps.
I need all this prelude because DRAMAtical Murder is a visual novel, and one that demands you bring a lot of yourself into the experience to truly interface with it. Honestly it took me a while to get through it in the beginning; the first half has to set up 6 different routes and 11 endings, so it's necessarily quite dry and slow, more focused on introducing the believable sci-fi world and the characters within than on delivering any emotional bombshells. Once you're done with that though, the main routes are pretty much all killer no filler.
I am shocked that I found something deeply personally affecting in every single route, it seems statistically improbable that each one would have something so moving to me specifically. Almost all the main characters are easily lovable (not Mink but I like his route for different reasons), and they all explore ideas around sex and violence in their own interesting ways. Amongst its many ideas it explores building trust with somebody who has been physically abused, learning to be intimate when everything feels numb, and the self destructive urge to be totally stripped of your agency. Not only is the sex thematically cohesive and essential to the story (a rare treat if ever there was one), but it is exceedingly well written, whether the tone is arousing or disturbing.
Maybe the most interesting idea this game has is the thin boundary between pleasure and pain, both are powerful sensations that feel wonderful in the right hands and violating in the wrong ones. If pain were not so easy to access, perhaps we would crave it with the same weight as sex. Rarely do I see sex truly discussed in any piece of art, all too often they gloss over one of the most universal and important human experiences, as if it could never be interesting or even worth depicting. To see it depicted with this much care and precision, with the appropriate emotional weight and impact behind it, makes me very happy.
Unfortunately this is a difficult game to recommend. I have a feeling it will struggle to resonate with people who don't have a very particular sexuality, and of those who do the extreme violence may be too much. This is a story which, depending on the route, contains graphic and detailed depictions of gore, mutilation, murder, psychological abuse, torture, physical abuse, sexual assualt through intoxication, and sexual assault through physical violence. The game really isn't shy about rape, the detail and realism is enough that I'd be surprised if the writer had never been a victim, it plays into both the fantasy and the reality of it in a way that could be very distressing for the wrong person.