2026 Gaming Blog

The first game I played this year was Big Hops, an ambitious 3D platformer with emergent design that feels like a smaller scale take on what DK Bananza was going for. The mechanics are really fun and freeform, the level design is tight, and the Moebius-inspired environments look pretty sick, it's a good time all around. However, Big Hops is unfortunately also very buggy and janky which constantly pulled me out of the experience, and between that and the limited UI, 100% is just not worth it. I definitely enjoyed Big Hops, but it could really use some more polish across the board, which the developer is at least currently attempting to fix with patches.

As a fan of Bomberman, I've been pretty frustrated with Konami's handling of the franchise of late. But finally, they actually gave us some good food. The Super games were never my favorite Bomberman titles, but they are the perfect entry point into the series with a variety of structures and gimmicks. This collection not only lets people re-discover some of Bomberman's most iconic games, but it even localized the JP exclusive fourth and fifth Super games, tosses in the NES duology for good measure, and ties it all together with a slick and charming presentation. And for a reasonable price to boot? Now bring on the PC Engine and 64 collections, Konami!

Pragmata's demo finally hit the Switch 2 and while short, it's very promising. Its unique combat system that forces you to juggle RE-style gunplay with hacking puzzles seems unconventional and overwhelming at first, but learning its quirks only makes you feel like a badass for clutching out a win in every battle. The story and setting is intriguing, the soundtrack has some fun techno bangers, there's a lot of potential here. That being said, I'm less sold on the actual movement which feels floaty and lumbering to a fault. But don't let my gripes detract from how cool it is to see Capcom putting out such an ambitious, experimental title in 2026.

Darwin's Paradox is a charming little 2.5D cinematic platformer published by Konami where you play as an octopus out of water. It got a cute Metal Gear Solid-inspired demo that manages to cram in so many memorable setpieces in its half-hour runtime, from stealth segments, to blissful underwater controls, to tricky platforming across walls and ceilings, to slingshotting up a big-ass Metal Gear. It was a fun time, my only gripes being some minor visual issues that may very well be fixed by release. If the full game has anywhere near the same level of creativity and offbeat energy as this demo, I think we're in for a real gem here.

As someone who actually likes the Mario Tennis games, I'm pleased to say Fever is the best entry in the series since Power Tennis by a longshot. It plays, looks, and sounds great, and it picks and chooses all the best aspects of prior games and masterfully fuses them. Its brilliant fever racket mechanic is able to combine the chaotic goofy fun of Power with the sweaty intensity of Aces, without feeling too obstrusive or overcomplicated. Sadly, the Adventure Mode is still pretty undercooked, but unlike the last few Camelot games, there's still more than enough to chew on beyond that. There's a ton of modes, unlocks, and minigames that help this feel like a much fuller package than its predecessors, with the standout being the genuinely difficult and expansive Trial Towers mode which forces you to master every single court, character, and racket. It's all great stuff.

Yeah, I knew from the trailer that this was entirely my kind of game. A blend between the flashy fast-paced setpieces of the minecart stages in Donkey Kong, and the expressive score-chasing of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, boasting an wonderfully over-the-top visual style reminiscent of Jet Set Radio. The demo ended with you driving atop a ferris wheel as you mow down satellites, and riding up a volcano as it erupts, and that's just the second level! At this rate, I can only imagine what the final level is gonna be like. The movement took a bit to get used to, but once it clicked, it felt so good chaining tricks in the demo's unlockable Trick Park. And of course I can't be remiss to mention its fantastic soundtrack and absolutely stacked roster of composers. This is definitely a GotY candidate if I've ever seen one, everything about it looks perfectly geared to be a slam dunk.

While I always thought the concept of a Ditto-centric Pokemon game was awesome, I was pretty skeptical about Pokopia for quite a while due to it just seeming like a basic life sim. But after those reviews dropped, I knew I had to see what the hype was about and I'm glad to say Pokopia surpassed my wildest dreams. This game is huge! There's a beefy, intricate, deliberately-designed story campaign with solid quest design and compelling exploration that pushes you to engage with the game's many systems and rehabilitate each zone. But there's also a blank slate town on the side that you can customize however you want. The story of a post-apocalyptic Kanto is explored impressively well with its great sense of mystery and PMD-esque character writing, but the game maintains a cozy and welcoming atmosphere that leaves the player to discover everything at their own pace. Don't let those initial reveal trailers fool you, Pokopia is a rich, complete experience that easily holds its own as the Switch 2's next BIG game. And it's the best Pokemon game we've gotten in years to boot.

Rubato is a 2D physics-based collectathon that went semi-viral due to its unhinged release date trailer, and having played the full game, I can confirm that it's even more unhinged then the trailer looked. It's also extremely good. This is a bold, audacious, sincere, playful, scrappy game with so much clear love and passion put into it from the deeloper. It's a bundle of pure fun throughout its roughly eight-hour runtime that also has deceptively compelling characters and a lot to say, elevated with a surprising amount of polish and an absolutely god-tier Y2K-era soundtrack. I don't think everyone is gonna vibe with Rubato, but for the right people, this game is gonnabe something truly special.

Yep, this is Tomodachi Life alright, just with an improved Mii creator more akin to the Miitopia remaster. If you like the first game, this really is just more of that, Livin The Dream's demo alone already shows that it's more than capable of capturing the charm that made so many fall in love with Tomodachi Life. It's also just fun to put my OCs onto the island as Miis and watch them interact. That being said, in a post-Pokopia world, I'm not sure how much longevity such a comparatively passive life sim will have. I hope there's more than enough fun side activities like the concert hall that Nintendo hasn't revealed yet, because as fun as this demo has been, there's always the chance I get bored of this one pretty fast.

Unlike Star-Crossed World which was very much a DLC campaign, this Switch 2 Edition feels more like Super Mario Bros Wonder Deluxe. It takes an already very great game and touches it up with QoL features like improved multiplayer, a new playable character, more badges, lots of new easter eggs, and plenty of great new content like the fun Koopaling boss fights that put the base games' fights to shame, addictive challenge mode that offers some much-needed challenge, and a shockingly robust multiplayer mode. However, the fact that actually playing the multiplayer mode is so limited does hold this package back in terms of value for me, Bellabel Park desperately needed CPU and worldwide online support. As such, for as much as this edition fixes many of my issues with Wonder in terms of challenge and replayability, I still think Star-Crossed World is the better deal.

A touching cyberpunk VN about finding comfort and community in a corrupt world that feels particularly relevant, with a simple but effective gameplay loop about serving drinks to trigger dialogue branches. The protagonist Jill Stingray's surprisingly relatable and fully-realized character arc is easily the highlight for me, along with the top-notch atmosphere and soundtrack, but the cast had plenty of memorable and likable faces (even if there were a few I wasn't especially fond of).

I already liked Blind Forest, but this sequel is a soaring improvement on pretty much every level, and one of my new favorite metroidvanias of all time. The level design is consistently creative, the new combat system is a joy to master, the visuals are drop-dead gorgeous, the new boss fights and chase sequences are mindblowingly good, and the time trial modes adds plenty of replay value.

This is a cute demo for the very good Toree Saturn, though outside of its fun Christmas Nights theming and cool unlocks, there really isn't much to this one and it gets repetitive pretty quickly.

While I'm a big fan of the GBA Starfy trilogy, this entry felt like a step backwards despite still having the same fun core gameplay. The level design while more varied than before often feels gimmicky and slow-paced, the more out-there world themes lose the chill underwater atmosphere I love about the other Starfy games, and the soundtrack was oddly grating and high-pitched. It's still a decent platformer at its core, but sadly the most unpleasant Starfy game for me.

With a new Mario Tennis game on the horizon, I decided to revisit the most-beloved entry in the series and it really sunk its hooks into me. The new stage gimmicks and Power Shots add a lot of that Mario chaos to the gameplay while still keeping things accessible and arcade-y. The variety of mode types in Exhibition Mode, atmospheric daytime shifts in the Tournament Mode, and impressive roster of minigames kept me playing for way longer than I was expecting to.

The only localized Starfy game is thankfully one of the best for its smoother gameplay, fun level mechanics like minecart chases and low-gravity, rewardingly tough postgame, pleasant soundtrack, and bevy of side content. While its soft reboot status means it drops some of the series' staples, the new cast members like Bunston and the Terrible Trio are more than welcome replacements, and I can't really complain much when Starfy 5 is such a big refinement in terms of gameplay.

Nine Sols is a staggering accomplishment of indie game development, an incredibly ambitious, fun, and thoughtful parry-focused metroidvania with fluid movement, strong combat with an excellent flow state, solid level design, a compelling story, lots of engaging side content, and a very good boss roster. With the exception of the final boss which I thought was too overtuned for their own good, a nearly-perfect game in my eyes.

Probably my favorite iteration of Metroid II. Sure, it lacks the story punch of the original and the gameplay loop of killing 40 Metroids will never not get repetitive, but the mechanical enhancements to the formula with stuff like the parry, Aeion abilities, and Spidersparking are brilliant. The second half of Samus Returns is filled with fantastic boss fights and setpieces, and the soundtrack is one of the series' best. It's a great game, even if a bit overshadowed by its follow-up.

Kind of a rollercoaster? I was really struggling with the touch controls at first and to be fair, there are a few more dud minigames than I would've liked, but once the tapping and flicking clicks, the sheer responsiveness makes it hard to go back to buttons in other games. While Tengoku was a solid start, Heaven was the first game in the series to feel like a truly joyous burst of energy with its visuals and music, and there are plenty of standout tracks like Lockstep, Frog Hop, Love Lab, and Fan Club. Not better than Fever, but still a very fun and classic rhythm game.

From a pure quality of life perspective, Megamix is the strongest Rhythm Heaven game to date, with a visible ranking meter, the option to pick between buttons and touch, overall stronger feedback, and of course a massive minigame roster contains tons of old classics and solid new picks. Unfortunately, Megamix is also padded out the wazoo with overly easy prequel chapters, tedious cutscenes, and grindable unlocks. It's a smoother experience than DS with less valleys but also less peaks, meaning it isn't quite as memorable for me.

Similarly to Va-11 Hall-A, this is a game that has long held one of my favorite soundtracks of all time that I never actually got around to playing until now. And while Mamorukun Curse may not be quite as good as its legendary OST, it's still a very charming and replayable Pocky & Rocky-like with a bevvy of modes and customization options. As a port, Recurse is also probably City Connection's strongest effort, with great performance, minimal input lag, and pretty much all the content from previous versions combined into a single package.

While not anything groundbreaking, New Super Lucky's Tale really grew on me as a charming ode to 6th gen mascot platformers. It starts off a bit slow, but from World 2 onwards, the game starts tossing these creative and varied scenarios at you all the way to the end. The visual style is fluffy, the soundtrack is surprisingly catchy, and the blend of linear and exploration-based objectives gave me some real Spyro vibes. I just wish it was a bit longer though, and that the framerate was better on Switch.

While its predecessor Reverie Under The Moonlight may have stronger bosses and a thicker atmosphere, I found Moonlit Farewell to be the more thoroughly well-rounded metroidvania with its satisfying exploration, freeform sigil system, more fluid movement, and faster-pacing. Most of all though, this game is drop-dead gorgeous with some of the more fluid and detailed spritework I've ever seen in an indie game. Just a polished, confident, and addictive swan song for the series all around.

While I already liked NamaTakahashi's first puzzle game Elechead, Ooo is a much tighter and more confidentally designed game. Ooo takes a deceptively simple moveset that really only lets you move and place and detonate a single bomb, and mines pretty much every possibility out of it. There's movement tech! There's clever spatial reasoning! There's a satisfying metroidbrania style of progression that leaves room for lots of sequence breaks! And there's postgame challenges that push the mechanics to their absolute breaking point. Learning Ooo's tricks were so rewarding that after beating it, I went ahead and speedran it. Multiple times! That rarely happens with any video game.

Minishoot' Adventures is a solid blend of fun bullet hell twin-stick shooting and Zelda-like exploration. The constant feeling of growth throughout does make for a pretty addictive game, but I can't really say it did anything particularly standout for much of its main campaign, at least outside of the really solid boss fights. That being said, Minishoot's postgame is actually pretty damn great, with an incredibly fun secret final boss, a rewarding series of battle challenges that really put my skills to the test, and a bold ending that I'll probably never forget. So while most of this game was perfectly fine, it did end on a very strong note.