The High Impact Awards 2025
A secret about me: I am not very good at writing essays and reviews that meet my own standards. Sometimes, I can't find the right angle to express my fascination with a work. Other times, I burn myself out with the research. I don't receive much compensation, and the only benefit is the incremental improvement of my writing skills. It gets very tiring to write long articles for free.
I would like to reverse the trend and hold a small awards ceremony for the works that I should have written about. These are works that would have earned a spot in Mimidoshima if I had had the time or energy.
Any work is eligible as long as they don't have a post on the Mimidoshima site, Steam reviews, or the kaorukofan1993 Backloggd account. The point is to spotlight media I haven't written in detail.
Actual 2025 Media
Most Progressive Scenario: The Seance of Blake Manor
While the game is marketed in the same vein as Blue Prince and classic mystery adventure games, the game is more remarkable for addressing anti-colonial subjects like reparation.
As a result, the characters feel real because they face dilemmas rooted in the cultural standards of the historical era in which the game is set. And the way the Irish mythology is incorporated into the story is wonderful: it made me want to read more than just the Mabinogion and learn more about the colorful world of faes and giants.
If I were asked what my GOTY is, I would say this.
A paid game available on Steam.
Most High Concept Visual Novel: connect the dots
A visual novel depicted entirely in storyboards and diaries based on a somewhat forgotten old anime -- it's difficult to describe what this cultural work actually is.
But it is a work about learning to create anew from the old, and artistic creation is a process of moving on. Although it didn't receive accolades, I find myself thinking about this unusual work in random moments, which is a testament to how magical it is.
A free game available on Itch.
Best Horror Yuri: Pinfeather
I remember when we released Spring Gothic, we were surprised that another game from developers we liked came out around the same time. The two games and some others felt like they were hearkening a new yuri EVN movement -- I hope that is true.
As for the visual novel, it is masterful. The foley sound effects are a standout: each sound inspires more dread in me as I go deeper into the story, learning the anatomy of bird-humans. The overdependency is played very well, leading to a pretty great conclusion.
Highly recommended if you like KitaKawa.
A free horror game available on Itch.
Best Historical Love Triangle: Ten Metre Tide
This visual novel captures the solitude of living on a small rural island your whole life. The spicy relationship adds to the isolation: it's the talk of the town, the only dramatic thing in this quiet world,
I cannot put into words how rich the atmosphere is or how intelligent the scenario is. It deserves the Toxic Yuri Jam VN award and more.
A free game available on Itch.
Best Queer Comedy(?): Flesh and Pressure
The balance between actual self-deprecation and comedy at the expense of oneself is delicate, but this visual novel does it extremely well. It combines sexual fetishes and awkward social scenarios to make a very down-to-earth protagonist who just wants to be loved by others.
It's a pity people haven't written essays on the game. It's the kind of work that invites a lot of introspection.
A free game available on Itch.
Best Found Footage Visual Novel: Bad Time Bug in Apartment 309
A disclaimer: this is the first game of the Motley Residence anthology project that I'm co-organizing. I'll talk more about it when I am more organized.
The game is entirely presented as camcorder footage, and there are some impressive transitions to what is essentially the timeless tale of a shut-in trapped in her SCP apartment.
Her ums and ahs, sudden tangents into backstories that must've been picked off from real life, and general discordance make her a very compelling and unreliable narrator. Like Pinfeather, the game also includes some terrifying foley SFX.
A free game available on Itch.
Best STEM Yuri: No Mice in Heaven
Some of my favorite visual novels are about art, but it seems like the world of science has been largely overlooked.
I'm glad that this game exists. The laboratory setting and the politics within are fully realized, making the relationship dynamics feel real. The few minutes I've spent in this world have given me new insight into how people behave in the natural sciences, and I also get a pretty toxic love triangle as a little bonus too.
A free game available on Itch.
Best Poisonous Yuri: FREW/HORT
I won't say too much about the game, but the way it develops its stories through computer interfaces is novel. It's a slow read that pays off extremely well.
A free game available on Itch.
Best Poem Game: Portrait with Wolf
Is this a game about violence? Abuse? Art? I would like to read more thoughts on the game as I'm that ogre who can't understand Ulysses. It is at the very least a pretty text game.
A free game available on Itch
Best Minesweeper Variant: Dragonsweeper
The strategy behind each click is very satisfying to get into. Easily one of the best games this year.
A free game available on Itch.
Best Mystery: The Case of the Worst Day Ever
I have not finished the game yet, but it is easily one of the best designed Golden Idol-likes out there. Each case is genuinely difficult and requires different leaps of logic to get to the basic issue at hand.
And I like how much theming there is: one memorable case involves multi-level marketing grifting, and you have to understand its corporate structure to make sense of the premise.
Anyone seeking a mystery challenge will do no better than this game.
A paid game available on Steam.
Best Horror Mystery: Type Help
Now a modern cult classic, the game incorporates some of the best modern mystery trends into a spooky fest. The usage of Twine to evoke so much with little is marvelous.
Save a weekend for this.
A free game available on Itch
Best Puzzle: Gentoo Rescue
This is a mind-bending puzzle game in which new mechanics emerge and interact in strange ways. While it can be overwhelming at times, I find it palatable because the puzzles are short and dense. And as you progress, the earlier levels take on new meaning.
I would recommend checking out the developer's talk about how he used a puzzle solver to design the game. It made me want to try designing a puzzle game...
Best Weirdchamp Narrative Incremental Game: Asbury Pines
While it appears to be a Melvor Idle clone with a heavy dose of Twin Peaks, the game expands into the world of science and historical fiction. It's an over-ambitious story that resolves too neatly for what it is, but I have to admire it from a distance.
I may write about this game at a later date, but if I hadn't, the thing I would focus on is how the game secularizes the ideals of Calvinism into a futuristic Hegelian science fiction overture. And the connection to Twin Peaks is stranger thanks to it.
The developers also admit they used generative AI not only for the pre-development phase but to picture the more grandiose imagery in text. Besides the ethics, I think it explains why the game feels like it's punching above its weight.
A paid game on Steam.
Best Educational Nonogram Game: Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum
Jupiter Corporation collaborating with Raden is a welcome surprise for me. I already admire Raden's expertise in the fine arts, but her choices and the blurbs she gives make her even more impressive.
The five star nonograms are excellent puzzles in of itself. I enjoy the puzzles that secretly guide you, even they seem impossible. That's what logic puzzles are all about.
A paid game on Steam.
Best Dungeon RPG: Quester | Osaka
I was interested in the Quester series because the combat design was made by a TTRPG designer associated with Group SNE.
While the previous game had original ideas but end up feeling rushed, Osaka is a more confident game: it wants you to slowly feel the vertical progression (equipment) by making them rarer to drop. The combat design also feel much tighter -- very little is a pushover, and the game forced me to engage with other mechanics I didn't try out in the original.
If you only want to play one Quester game, make it be this one.
A paid game on Steam.
Best Commercial Incremental Game: Tower Wizard
In a sea of too-short and too-long incremental games, Tower Wizard stands out by switching up mechanics with each level you ascend. The developer's previous game, Magic Archery, is a solid experience but it feels like they had not exploited the possibility space. Here, Tower Wizard satisfies many urges I want in an incremental game without turning it into a debilitating addiction.
I often find it difficult to recommend incremental games on an ethical standpoint, much more so than even gacha games, but this is actually something I can get people to play without feeling guilty.
A paid game on Steam.
Best Husbandgirl Recommendation: a dialect for two
This is a biased recommendation, but even without the conflict of interest, I think it's a genuinely riveting visual novel.
Two robots learn to develop the concept of sexuality in a (mostly) post-human through cultural objects. They may be reinventing the wheel, but their answers are original and as valid as conventional human wisdom.
A free game on Itch.
Best Ongoing Interactive Fiction Series: Lady Thalia
It's fun to be lesbian Arsene Lupin stealing fine art through a mix of social engineering and adventure game mechanics. The character growth is impeccable -- the latest entry as of this writing takes the romantic relationship to an interesting, uncomfortable direction for me.
The series is an easy recommendation to yuri fans who read my blog and are interested in the world of interactive fiction.
A free game series available on Itch.
Best Ongoing Escape Series: Rusty Lake
Initially a Twin Peaks clone, the series manages to develop its own identity as a story about families and trauma. The escape room puzzles are geniuses, and the animation and visuals are stellar.
Unfortunately, following the developer-intended route is kinda annoying. You need to buy at least two games in order to start, and the first few entries are not great. I only started digging into the worldbuilding once I hit Rusty Lake Hotel.
Nevertheless, this is a series I'm now a fan of. I encourage anyone with an interest in escape games to play this if you haven't.
A paid game series available on Steam.
Best Abrasive Narrative Game: OVER
This is a long, overwhelming read: you follow a giant family struggle to be organized and have fun in an amusement park, but it's difficult when one of your relatives is homophobic as fuck.
The game did worse than 3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS, but in retrospect I think it deserves a higher place. It fixates on the exhaustion of dealing with relatives so well that it brings up dreaded memories I have with my own family.
A free game available on Itch.
Best Survival Horror Vibes: Saltwrack
Because I've never read the literary influences that shaped this work, this game feels out of the world. The visuals it evokes through the prose is so mesmerizing I forgot I was reading text for a while. The choices also feel like they have weight to it.
A free game available on Itch.
Best War Game Not About War: Wayfarers
It's a long, sometimes aimless game by a debut developer. But it deals with the intersection of the RPGs of yesterday and the military in unique ways. I found myself reflecting on this game a fair bit, even if I don't have the words to describe how magical this game is.
A free game available on Itch
Not 2025 Media
Best Life-Changing Movie: Penda's Fen
This movie feels like everything I want: anti-colonial, queer, coming of age, and just plain weird. I can't believe this was made for TV. I won't say too much, but this is easily one of the best movies ever made.
Best Movie with Iguanas: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans
I'll let a passage from this enlightening post explain why this movie is great:
“Herzog said ‘I think we’re going to go long, and then [the producers] are going to make me lose my iguanas—and if they make me lose my iguanas I feel like I can’t be a filmmaker anymore,’
Best Structural Film: (nostalgia)
I've been getting into Hollis Frampton after Peter Greenway shouted him out. The BFI recommends this short as your introduction, and I can see why: it plays with the dissonance of memories and what we're seeing on the screen.
Watching this and some more made me interested in exploring the world of formalism to express myself better. Somehow, I don't feel formalist enough after watching this.
Best Arthouse Movie: A Zed and Two Noughts
My first introduction to Greenway's feature length movies. It shocked me so hard that I now understand the phrase "every frame a painting" is not an exaggeration. This is what he sets out to do, and he accomplished that so well.
Best Twin Peaks season: The Return
Watching this made me feel the hole Lynch made and left in the history of television again. It plays with the expectations of a sequel made years after the fact, and how the evils of American society and history cannot be lifted.
Best Short Documentary: Le Sang des Betes
Great vegan propaganda movie made by someone who isn't vegan.
Best Boomer Documentary on Second Life: Ouvroir, the Movie
Chris Marker, the most prominent essay filmmaker of his period, wants to introduce you to his island and his Photoshopped creation. His iMovie editing has the same energy as Unregistered Hypercam 2 videos, but the ending line sticks with me: "He knew he was watching the end of a world. What are you watching?"
I want to write a piece on his interactive media someday.
Best Slasher Film: Funny Games (1997)
The director may have intended this to be an anti-slasher film, but the excessive violence and tension made it my favorite slasher.
Funny how dialectical it is.
Best Feminist Slasher: Black Christmas
From the director of Baby Geniuses 2, this proto-slasher film brings up perennial women's issues including abortion. It fits with the home invasion narrative too.
I can see why many feminist critics of that era said that slashers were feminizing their male audiences thanks to this movie. It's a horror movie about the incompetence of the police and the violence caused by gender norms.
Best Holiday Movie: Journey to Italy
It's interesting that this movie was what inspired the French New Wave because it's a personal, essayistic tale weaved by a director and his troubled marriage. The writing is excellent, but it's also full of these little tensions that don't get resolved.
And that's the kind of 7/10 work that inspires some good criticism. I was talking to someone on the Critical Distance discord about how Cahiers du Cinema tried to talk about video games, and they said that you gotta start from where they started: writing about 7/10 games consistently and enthusiastically.
I hope we in video games get a Journey to Italy. The closest thing were Undertale and 1000xRESIST, but they didn't create a wave of critic-developer practitioners. Perhaps, games need to be more interestingly mid...
Most Soulful Documentary: The Beaches of Agnes
This title was so unassuming that it took me by surprise that it was about old age and learning to be happy with what you have and lost.
I love The Gleaners and I, which I recommend watching before this one. But this one takes a step into something more personal, more self-empowering. Agnes Verda extracts her colorful life to tell about what she values in filmmaking and relationships.
Like, did you know Verda was the reason that Harrison Ford has a career? People didn't like his acting, but she did.
It makes me wish I knew Varda personally. She was an inspiring figure, and it made me interested in delving back into creative nonfiction again.
Best Queer Expression: Tongues Untied
An anthology of the queer poetry and performances, it is fiery and angry about how the world had abandoned the LGBTQ+ community to HIV/AIDS. It's even more tragic when you learn many performers in this movie passed away shortly after.
Best Queer Documentary: Shinjuku Boys
While older documentaries like Paris is Burning and The Aggressives are not perfect, they do shine a light into historical subcultures that have become smaller albeit alive in today's age.
Shinjuku Boys, on the other hand, somehow (and more likely accidentally) captures the diversity of trans men and gender-nonconforming people working in the host club. The interviewees are free to speak whatever is on their mind, including sexuality and how they approach sex. The story is never dictated by the documentarian but them.
It's a highly refreshing movie that helps me appreciate how LGBTQ+ life in Japan is more diverse than I previously thought. Very recommended.
Best Queer Experience: Blue (1993)
The entire movie is a static blue screen. All you hear is the haunting words of someone who was trying to make something different until he discovers he has HIV/AIDS. It's uncomfortable to watch this movie. I want to not stare at the blue color, but I have to. If I want to listen, I have to watch it.
It breaks my heart that human history is so fucked up.
Best Roguelike: Path of Achra
If you enjoy planning to the extreme, this is the roguelike for you. The skill tree is out in the open: you can express yourself by figuring out which skills to dump points in and what to get next as you progress through the game.
The game also taught me how to parse roguelike synergies better, so I would recommend it to anyone who wants to be better at finding broken combinations.
A paid game on Steam.
Best Abrasive Game: Space Warlord Organ Simulator
This game gives me a headache. It is designed to be unfun and overstimulating. As the game progresses, it gets more and more alienating to play the game, which encapsulates what it probably feels to be a day trader.
A paid game on Steam.
Best Escape Game: Abyss of the Sacrifice
While it resembles Ever17, the game is best appreciated as a hardcore escape game that has unique, varied puzzles. In one puzzle, you even learn to make tea and cake for your father. There are many ingenious problems to solve, and the tight narrative pacing feels tight if you're solving puzzles at a nice pace.
I consider this to be the best escape game I've played so far. Anyone who likes this genre of games should seriously play it.
A paid game on Steam.
Best Shmup I Still Can't 1CC Yet: Batsugun
I spent weeks practicing this game, and I can't string the sequence of tricks together. That doesn't mean I dislike playing this game. To the contrary: I love the game to pieces. I learned so much about shmups through this swan song of Toaplan, and I can see how this would influence the later CAVE games.
I'll 1CC you someday. Just you watch.
A paid game on Steam.
Best Idol Game Scenario: Tokyo 7th Sisters
I am not sure if this game deserves to be on this list because I would like to write about this game. There's a post idea in my head about idol media like Trapezium and VTuber graduation, but just in case my procrastination strikes again, I want to say this is one of the best visual novels I've read. Everyone should play it.
It will be remiss of me to not bring up how tragic this year is.
Every month feels like a reassessment of my political commitments as a hobbyist in the games media and development spaces. There are many "masks off" moments about how people actually feel about the second term of the Trump presidency and the global right resurgence. I have many times wondered why I even tried associating with these writers when they hate what I stand for.
I am getting less patient about the reluctance of establishment and legacy media to help highlight, for example, the BDS boycott on Microsoft. Transphobia and misogyny are now the norm. I cannot play games or watch movies without thinking how the cultural contexts have been warped to suit ultra-conservative and fundamentalist agendas.
How is one supposed to have fun and critical insights in a world where every moment spent on this earth is a new nightmare? The brazen usage of generative AI, the closing of libraries, the censoring of queer media in storefronts, prediction markets betting on the lives and deaths of people in atrocities, and more all point to a desire to turn the world into a game for rightwing optimizers.
But this is why I write: to show there is in fact diversity in our world. I think it's important to be hopeful, to write about subculture media and more in a world that wants to narrow our horizons. If I am able to introduce people to untranslated media and thus show that there is another world out there, the hope is that they carry it with them into the adult world and say there are alternatives.
I will never accept that we are heading toward a future where we allow the right to play out their malicious fantasies. I know this is not the "smart play" and I will be seen as immature by many, but that only makes me more stubborn in hoping for a better future.
I know what I'm doing is not enough. That's because I am alone in this enterprise. I hope people who read this diatribe will pick up the writing mantle and join me in writing against the grain.
The world needs more amateur progressive writers than ever against this reactionary deluge that seeks to overwhelm all of media criticism.