2025 Arbitrary Awards Ceremony
Well well well, another year in the books. Whilst things continue to get increasingly unnerving from a political standpoint, there were definitely some bright spots this year, and so I'm back (yes, I remembered that this blog exists) with an array of pointless and arbitrary awards to honour the good, the bad, and the bizarre from this year!
Game of the Year
Misericorde Volume 2: White Wool and Snow
Yes, I know technically this was released on 30th December 2024. I simply do not care. Misericorde's second volume hooked me a way few mysteries do. Things get even stranger than in the first entry, and I found myself reading into every line, no matter how seemingly innocuous, to try and sense any ulterior motives from our cast of eclectic nuns. Every time the protagonist went for a walk at night I found myself on edge at the thought of what strangeness and danger she might experience. This entry is also significantly more, well, lesbian — with an exploration of sex and kink from the perspective of a cloistered (both figuratively and literally) protagonist as she tries to find her footing with her newfound feelings amongst the other, frankly debaucherous, nuns. Xeecee has crafted something special here and I'd be disappointed that the third volume is a little way away if they hadn't filled that wait with the exciting announcement of 35 Electric, which I can't wait to play next year.
Favourite Thing I Drew
This Movie Poster Thing of My OC Celia
It's been a bit of a rough year for my art, with large periods of art block — I need to get back on the grind. But I was super happy with how this film poster style thing came out!
Blood on the Clocktower Character of the Year
Hermit
It's been a bit of a strange year for Clocktower. We had the last "standard" experimental character release at the beginning of the year in Wizard, both of which was well received, followed by a clutch of characters just before the Carousel release (Hermit, Wraith, Cacklejack and Deus Ex Fiasco), and then the debut of a "new" (but very similar to Fabled really) character type called Lorics of which we've had four releases so far: Big Wig, Zenomancer, Tor, and Hindu. What's that, I'm forgetting something? No, I'm pretty sure that's all the releases this year, it must be your imagination.
Of those releases, it's safe to say Wizard, Hermit, Wraith and Zenomancer are the only real candidates here for the award. Wraith has the issue of being fun in person, but clunky on the app. TPI did their best to come up with an RNG-based solution to simulate the chance of being caught with your eyes open, but ultimately it didn't really feel good and being caught on Night 1 was very rough. Zenomancer is by far the best Loric released so far, and doing quests can be super fun — I can imagine this one really shining on the last day of a convention, for instance. I've yet to receive a quest myself but the Zenomancer games I've played in have been a hoot.
But the two coolest characters were most certainly Wizard and Hermit. Wizard took the Clocktower scene by storm when it first came out, with all sorts of "content" wishes dominating streams for a while. It's still a "sometimes food" for me, as disruptive wishes can really dominate the game, but when you're in the mood for The Academy it really hits.
But I'm giving the award to the less flashy but nonetheless impactful Hermit. I'll admit I may be a little biased here, as The Rose Bride has become my best known script at this point (you can read about the design process here!) — despite the fact I made the quarterfinals of the World Cup this year (an achievement I'm still proud of, even if the Djinn rule I submitted has some issues).
Hermit has some jank, for sure. And in the hands of someone who just wants to use it to make funny scripts, instead of fun scripts, you can make some absolutely nonfunctional combinations like Hermit/Drunk/Zealot (please do not write a script with these on together). But equally it has the potential to create cool things like George's Take a Chance on Me, where pretty much all players are making Klutz picks, not knowing if they're the real Hermit. It's a character that really expands the horizons of the game, and I think that's pretty cool!
Most Rheacore Character Design of the Year
Beat (Unbeatable)
She is everything my nineteen year-old self wanted to be, and quite a lot of what I still want to be.
PLEASE STOP
Generative AI
[Note: I've chosen to spare you all from having to look at more gAI images than you've already seen this year, please enjoy this stock photo of a man in a suit using a megaphone on a grassy verge.]
If 2024 was the year generative AI (gAI) started to get mainstream footing, 2025 was the year it really took off, and the reality of it really set in. gAI is absolutely everywhere right now. Coca-cola and McDonald's launched fully gAI adverts for the holiday season, there are ads for it from big companies like Google everywhere you look, and grifters taking advantage of those who don't know better by churning out gAI books, images, and advice. My mum received a gift this year from someone that was a gAI image of her and her partner. It didn't even look like either of them.
I'm not going to give you a rundown here of why I'm opposed to gAI — it would take more than a few paragraphs and besides, I'm not the best person to do so. I advise you do your own research on the matter if you haven't already. What I will say is that it feels like we're approaching the peak of the AI bubble. To most ordinary people, gAI is simply not that useful. They might find it "cool" to generate an AI image but it's not going to fundamentally change their way of life. gAI summaries might be convenient, but they are also potentially inaccurate (the number of times a Google AI summary has given me misinformation is too high to count). Ultimately I don't think AI will go away, in the same way the internet didn't go away after the Dotcom bubble burst, but I am hoping and praying we're reaching the apex of it being hyped like it is now. I do not want to live in a world where most stories, music, and artwork is AI generated. We're losing a fundamental part of human expression as big companies try and milk gAI for profit at the expense of creatives, and that makes me very sad indeed.
Oh, and one final casualty of generative AI: the em-dash. One of my favourite pieces of punctuation has become the poster child for AI generated slop content. Pour one out for the em-dash — it never deserved this.
Album of the Year
Pachinko (Moron Police)
Pachinko is an album that shouldn't exist. When Moron Police's drummer, Thore Omland Pettersen, died in a tragic car accident in 2022, it looked as if this album was fated to never see the light of day. But with a little help from stand-in drummer Billy Rymer, 2025 was finally the year their fourth album saw the light of day, and, frankly, I've been obsessed with it.
The pitch is this: pop-oriented progressive rock concept album themed around a man who is turned into a sentient pachinko machine by the devil. It's just unbelievable amounts of fun to listen to — some of the best hooks I've heard in progressive rock are combined with inventive instrumentation choices (opening track Nothing Breaks (A Port of Call) features a banjo of all things) to produce pure bliss in musical form. My one critisism of their previous album, A Boat on the Sea, was that the songs could blend into each other but there's no sign of that here, with stripped back interludes Make Things Easier and The Sentient Dreamer perfectly placed on the tracklist to break up the comparative mayhem in some of the other tracks.
If it was just a fun listen then Pachinko would be heavily recommended on its own, but as unlikely as it may seem given its premise, the album also has something to say. The lyrics are quite deliberately left open to interpretation in many cases but there is a clear throughline in the narrative. There are themes of being lost and in a cycle of being unable to realize your dreams, a society that encourages us to hide our true selves and become something we're not, and feelings of loss and losing control (after all, what is a pachinko machine if not an encapsulation of chaos). In the first track our protagonist is taunted by an ominous voice with:
I never said it would be heaven in a nutshell
But more than this, I think your soul will start to tire
All the little hopes and dreams you had acquired, they weigh you down
Now you're burning in the fire
The closer, Giving up the Ghost, is one of the most uplifting tracks I've heard in a very long time, with a medley of reprises and leitmotifs calling back to the rest of the album and the journey of our sentient pachinko machine friend. In many ways, the perfect closer to a concept album, and the message from the first track has subverted into:
I never thought it would be heaven in a nutshell, but more than this
I think your soul will never tire
All the little hopes and dreams you had acquired
They took you everywhere
In a way, the perfect antidote to the state of the world in 2025. May your little hopes and dreams take you everywhere in 2026, readers.