What I Got Up To This Month (April '25)

I may not have much to show for it publicly, but I've been making some serious progress with my therapist these last few weeks and that's been a great feeling. I have a lot of issues I need to work through and I feel like I may actually have some hope of doing that now. Outside of that, this month was sort of business as usual.

I continued my marathon through the Doom games by playing Doom II, and then Doom 64. Doom II is good because it's effectively just a natural evolution of what the original game was doing. The level design is (largely) better, the new enemies are good additions, and the super shotgun is an iconic weapon that I don't want to live without now. Doom 64, then, is also like another Doom II, only it's slower-paced to better suit console players who'd be using an N64 controller. Or, uh, people like me who own an N64 controller they can hook up to their PC. So that's what I did, I played this game with an N64 controller and, honestly? I had a pretty good time. That controller's still not great, but with the right button mapping I made the game very playable.

This was a very Star Wars-y month for me. I started April by playing Jedi: Fallen Order, then I followed that up with Jedi: Survivor (I wrote about these a bit in this blog post). Fallen Order was good, but Survivor was excellent; it basically improves upon every element of its predecessor and has a more compelling narrative. I followed that up with Star Wars Outlaws. It's sort of your standard big and somewhat bloated Ubisoft open-world, but I had a good time because I love Star Wars and this is some pretty good Star Wars. I wrote more about that here in this blog post. Finally, I rewatched Andor in preparation for its new season and, you know what? That first season of Andor is still great, and the second season's been good so far. Interesting and different, but good.

I then followed those up by playing a game I've been meaning to get to for a long time: Katamari Damacy. It was a delight. The music and aesthetics are wonderful and it was just a joy to play. I don't know that I have all that much to say about it but I deeply enjoyed my time with it. As a fan of Noby Noby Boy, it was also nice to experience another Keita Takahashi game too, especially given how this one was far more famous (and notable). Oh, on another note, I finished Death Stranding this month. I already wrote a whole thing about it (which you can check out here) but that was another game I had a very good time with.

I wanted a break from Yakuza after 3 (a game that took me a very long time to finish) so I waited until the end of the month to start Yakuza 4, but I have started it and I'm enjoying it so far. I'm not particularly deep into it (I'm only in the Akiyama section) but it's been interesting to see Kamurocho through the lens of someone who isn't Kiryu. As always, I'll have more to say about this once I'm finished.