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

This month started on a very strange note.  As far as I can tell everything ended up working out, but I feel I was in kind of a weird headspace for a lot of October so I didn't do as much work on myself as I'd have hoped. Still, I spent a lot of time playing and watching things this month so I suppose it wasn't that different than usual. There are a lot of really good video games out right now, if you can believe it.

I played a lot of Pokémon this month. Like, way more than I thought I would. I started the month by finishing Pokémon X and then I spent a whole lot of time playing Pokémon Legends Z-A. I went into this game skeptical it could match Legends Arceus but, somehow, I think it may be better than that game. I have a lot of thoughts about this, so much so that I did a writeup on it, but for now just know that I really love Legends Z-A.

I also got really into Ghost of Yotei. I've written a bit about Assassin's Creed Shadows, and I intend to have more to say about that soon, but Ghost of Yotei, in my eyes, is kind of just a better version of that game in almost every way. It's really interesting having played both in such close proximity and I want to write something about that experience soon, but I have yet to finish this one so that could still be a little ways off. Still, Ghost of Yotei has been a lot of fun and it's my favorite game Sucker Punch has put out in quite some time.

I'm still playing Fortnite. I realize that's not exactly a new development, but I sure am playing a lot of Fortnite these days. It's pretty much become my go-to voice-call hangout game over these past few years and, as one of those, it's pretty great. They added a "Blitz" mode a few months ago that basically condenses a standard Fortnite game into, like, a 10-minute affair and I really enjoy that. It's a very low-stakes game where victories still feel good, and due to the fact that it seems pretty heavily packed with bots, victories come way easier than normal Battle Royale (or Zero Build, as the case may be for me). They've had some big collaborations recently with some Power Rangers stuff that was neat, though I've honestly been a big fan of the Halloween update with its Scooby-Doo additions.

Speaking of Halloween, I watched a few horror movies this month. I have an annual tradition where my brother and I will marathon some horror stuff together and we did that again this year. We started things this time with the original Final Destination (which was about what I expected, and pretty good as a result). We followed that up with a movie called Wendigo which, despite its title, wasn't really a horror movie about a wendigo. It was a pretty solid family drama though, and a good movie, just not what we were expecting. After that we watched a horror short (available on YouTube) called My house walk-through that feels very evocative of PT (in a good way). Next up was a Polish musical/romance about mermaids called The Lure and that was pretty decent. I feel like it wasn't amazing at any one specific "thing" it was going for, but I commend it for trying. Then we watched a recent release called Waves of Madness which feels like a vaguely-cosmic-horror-y take on Resident Evil, with acting you'd expect from RE (for better or worse). It was surprisingly fun and enjoyable, and it even has a (probably unnecessary) filming gimmick that you get used to pretty quickly. We ended the night by watching Creep, which was by far the best film of the night. It's a found-footage horror/thriller thing that is worth going into relatively blind, but it was a great way to cap things off. As you can guess by the spread of films I've mentioned, we generally try to cover a gamut of genres and types of things when we do this and I'd say we had a pretty good selection this year without any real duds.

I finished SILENT HILL f this month and I loved this game. While I had my doubts going into it, Ryukishi's writing is very apparent in the final product and the game is all the better for it. It's a pretty fantastic game all-around that I've already talked about at length so I won't harp on it much more here.

I didn't play any Yakuza this month. As you can see by this somewhat lengthy blog post, I've been busy with other things these past few weeks and I just couldn't make time to start Kurohyou 2 this month. I plan to get to it soon, hopefully before the end of the year, but I also might just spend these next two months working through other new releases. I've played a lot of Yakuza this year already so getting to another isn't a super high-priority for me at the moment. 

Comments