2026-01-02 03:27:00
It's that time of year when the excitement of the holidays is dissipating, the loved ones have departed, the gifts are consumed and the bank account is empty.
Welcome to January.
But I didn't write this post to be sad and depressed, The beginning of the year is also meant to herald positive change.
I'm writing this to remind myself (and anyone reading) that if this is the lowest point of the year, then that must mean things can only get better.
And if 2025 was rubbish, remember that what's behind us does not dictate what lies ahead.
I may not be able to change the world, but to anyone who needs to hear a kind word right now:
Now let's leave 2025 behind and give 2026 a chance to shine.
Happy New Year. ❤️
2026-01-01 12:49:00
[Several things from 2025]
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
I write this from my short term rental, a one bedroom flat in district 2. It is seven minutes past midnight. There are fireworks in the sky of Ho Chi Minh City, 4 different songs in my ears, and smoke in the air. I have written these points while thinking about my life, sitting in cafes in different cities, climates, and over many infectious glasses of Vietnamese iced coffee.
Books read: 32 Pages read: 11k
Movies watched: 75
Days I have eaten eggs: 73
I would like to end here.
Love to Nats, from Nats.
2026-01-01 11:32:00
Heya!
As I mentioned previously, I'm working on a guestbook website :3 Things are coming along pretty great! No guarantees on getting it done this month, but I'm making pretty decent progress! Also, i recently got help from dabi, so things are moving a tad faster now.
Here's what I've got implemented so far:
Making guestbooks will be invite-only so i can ensure that the platform doesn't grow way too big and I'll be able to afford running the thing. I'm also not using any SAAS pay-as-you-go BS for the hosting, so this thing won't be able to accidentally bankrupt me. It's also written in php, using laravel, meaning that the chance of anything vital this depends on getting deprecated is very low.
In the very unlikely case something goes wrong and the site shuts down permanently - exporting all your data is very fast & easy, and you should be doing that regularly no matter what service you use. (As previously mentioned though, I've made sure that the tech here is going to last, and the costs for running this thing on my end will always be a fixed, very low amount of money. There might be some downtime, but i don't see this going down permanently.)
In the future, i might also add a feature that auto exports all your data periodically and sends you an email with the exported files as attachments.
This isn't live yet, and when it does go live I'll probably keep invites exclusively to friends for a week or two to make sure nothing goes wrong. But, when i eventually publish this for real and am ready to send out invites to more people, I'll make a blog post announcing this. Be patient though, I've got a job and also finals are coming up, so things will get very busy for me in the foreseeable future.
Anyways, if you've got any questions, email me. I might do another post going over things in more detail tomorrow and showing off some pictures of the UI.
2026-01-01 04:40:00
I can't stop thinking about one of the lines towards the end of UNBEATABLE. It's a game that hit me like a truck, and happened to be made by a bunch of folks I have gotten to know, and so I felt extremely clocked by this feeling.
"It takes seven years to completely remake a person."
I'm paraphrasing here, and I promise it isn't much of a spoiler until you also finish the game, but it's something that wormed its way into my brain as I started to think about the year ending and a new one beginning.
Seven years is also the period of time that I've been thrust into the spotlight of the gaming world, and figuring out what that means for my life. It was a complete full-body shock that upended me in a lot of ways. For over thirty years prior I was content to sit at the back of the auditorium and be relatively unseen. Despite Celeste and everything that followed being a wonderful success, it also caused a lot of traumas that I realized I carried with me for a really long time. Seven years, in fact.
Sometimes I feel like I exist entirely within a photograph that was taken of me in 2018. There are children out there that discover my music in their favorite comfort game, and draw fan art of a photograph that was taken of me in 2018. I don't have anything to really, like, draw from this observation.
But, as all holidays tend to do, separating myself from the endless onslaught of work gave me a chance to reflect on all the things that had been haunting me at the back of my brain and preventing me from moving on. There's a hesitance, a feeling that you aren't allowed past a threshold that has been drawn for you. I've been changing, all these years, and not allowing myself to really show why or how. The internals are moving around, reintegrating with new systems and ways of interlinking with the senses. I don't know if any of of this makes sense.
It's more of a personal thing, but I did feel like I reached a threshold. Too many things had changed internally without any of it being reflected in the outside world. It needed a place to escape.
I hate the concept of new year resolutions. It's too easy to say things without meaning them. It's too easy to simply rattle out the things you wish you could change about yourself. Something that feels different about closing out 2025 is that I don't need to state anything. I don't need to draw up a list and state my intent, because I've been doing that for seven years, bunched up taut in a sealed door of "I should make this plan." "I should do this." Too few things slipped out under the threshold. So it feels like 2026 is less a year of wants and more a year of doing. Not letting my executive dysfunction control me. Not letting the anxiety prevent me from doing what I am actively feeling in the moment. I'm done with that.
So, yeah. Seeya 2025 Lena. Farewell 2018 Lena. Let's just do shit.
2026-01-01 01:49:53
Something something industry bad, something something games good.
Now that we're done with the preamble, here are my five favorite games from 2025. Ground rules: Only games that actually came out this year; "I played it first in 2025" is for cowards. Nothing I or my close personal friends worked on. Initial releases only (so no DLC, expansions, live game updates, etc).
Two Point Studios was founded to chase the high of classic Bullfrog management sims like Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper, but for me this is their first game where they really hit on something as special as those old games. 2PM's loop of sending experts out on expeditions, seeing what they bring back, and figuring out how to display them is incredibly satisfying.
Building the game around a core of blind boxes with initially-unknown contents injects so much surprise and delight into the classic management-sim formula. The exhibits retrieved from far-off locales can have dramatic effects on museum guests or on each other, which in turn creates enjoyably intricate optimization puzzles and numerous secret strategies.
For example: If your museum is boring, the conventional way to fix that is to place "interactive displays" that delight children and adults alike. Or you can send a botanist out to a remote jungle to bring back a carnivorous plant that turns some of your guests into clowns, which then go on to amuse your other guests. This is the best management sim I've played in a long time.
Roottrees rests on a single brilliant idea: Using the incremental deduction mechanic from Return of the Obra Dinn as the progression system for a Her Story-esque database thriller. But it's full of smart execution choices. To keep the player from being bottlenecked, the central mystery is a broad, open-ended thing; you're tasked with untangling a large family tree, identifying who exactly is blood related and how. To keep its rules of engagement clear, the game formats most of its textual research as paraphrase – explicitly saying "this doesn't seem relevant to your investigation" when necessary. The built-in note-taking system that makes it easy to excerpt text. The multiple distinct databases that make research more layered and thoughtful by asking the player where to look something up, not just what to look up.
Roottrees, then, allows the player to make lazy loops through its interconnected story world, following different threads of curiosity or suspicion to unravel the individual stories of each family member in turn. It's a revelatory game that I hope spawns a genre; I need a thousand of these, pronto.
Real IF-heads know Jon Ingold's Make it Good, a fiendishly hard parser game that's fundamentally about manipulating what different NPCs know at different points in an intricate clockwork world. Solving the game requires exploring different possible paths and can only really be done across multiple attempts; it uses old-school adventure-game cruelty to a pointed end. You have to thoroughly understand what's going on in the story and orchestrate a set of manipulations that yields the desired result.
Overboard! and now Expelled! are very transparently takes on this idea that try to make it approachable to people who are not, well, hip to highly cruel parser interactive fiction. Using a time-loop setup and a lot of carefully designed affordances, these games make this kind of narrative exploration play feel legible and propulsive.
While I liked Overboard!, I loved Expelled!; somehow the British all-girls boarding school setting just seems like the ideal setup for a game where you're supposed to be horrible to everyone and everything as a means of advancing your own cause. There's enormous charm while retaining some bite; there's incredible characterization; there's an enjoyably intricate meta-puzzle.
Yes, the game runs poorly. Yes, it's "too easy" by the standards of the franchise – though I'd argue that this is mostly an artifact of not having the very hardest monsters available on release. Yes, it streamlines away a lot of the friction the series is associated with.
Doesn't matter, Monster Hunter Wilds is still my favorite game in the series. It simply wins on spectacle, on its incredible sense of milieu, on its creature designs. Lala Barina, Rey Dau, and Zoh Shia have instantly jumped to high places on my personal list of the best monsters in the franchise. Even the Seikret seems to me more flavorful and beautifully specific than the off-brand chocobo it could easily have been.
Monster Hunter has always been set in a much more alien fantasy setting than it initially lets on, but this game really sells just how alien it is. The fulgurite hollow in the middle of the desert. The iron-tinged rainforest that changes its character entirely when the rains come. The caverns that spend half the time being on fire. The final areas of the game that feel more like something out of Blame! than high fantasy.
Ultimately I play these games for the kinetic joy of the combat and for intricate visual storytelling of the monster ecologies, and this game delivers that with joy, intensity, and confidence.
My favorite piece of interactive fiction of the year. I played this early on out of all 30-odd games I played in this year's Interactive Fiction Competition, and it simply stayed on top for the whole thing. Replays and further thought have only cemented it in my mind as a really great piece of writing and narrative design.
This is a short story about coming of age in a very specific place and time, written with an incredibly observant eye. But it's also a story about fumbling your way through a magical ritual to get yourself a boyfriend – and what happens when that goes wrong, and what that says both about magic and about the girls who practice it.
It's no secret at all that I love this kind of horror, but genre predilection aside this is just a confidently-written piece that knows exactly what it is and deftly blends the real and the fantastical.
2025-12-31 17:03:00
Another year is passing. It’s crazy how fast they vanish, and somehow each one feels quicker than the last.
I’ve had a good 2025, and I’m really looking forward to what 2026 has in store. I don’t have any new year’s resolutions, never have, but I do have plenty of ideas I want to explore.
A huge thank you to everyone who stopped by my blog in 2025. I hope to see you again next year.
And a huge thank you to all you other bloggers out there. I’ve read so many great posts this year. No blogger is a blogger without other bloggers, so keep on blogging.
I’ve put together a Happy New Bear add-on you can use to give your blog some party vibes. It includes a bunch of little things, like a fireworks button (approved by dogs), for example:
And if you feel like you’re not quite ready for 2026 just yet, there’s a button for that too. Simply click it to stay put in 2025:
Wishing you a very happy new year! 🥳