Things I Liked: October-December 2025

Things I Liked: October-December 2025

01 January 2026

Happy new year! Welcome to another issue of Things I Liked. This season, I took part in Mint's Blog Buddies series and reflected on the year in My 2025!

Long Story Short

Long Story Short is the new show from Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg. It follows a dysfunctional family in nonlinear time as they navigate life and all the shit that entails. I first heard about the show from Schaffrillas’ video about it, which has “I’ll promote it since Netflix won’t” in massive text on the thumbnail. So now I feel like I should do the same, because it’s really good!

The nonlinear, generational story was what drew me in, I’ve explored similar themes in my game ABODE. But I just loved the whole show, and all the characters. It’s definitely more grounded than Bojack was, so don’t go in expecting the exact same tone, but it’s plenty of funny! The final episode was everything I wanted.

Crowd Control

Watch it on Dropout here.

I hinted at this on the last post about things I liked, but Crowd Control is Dropout’s latest Game Changer spinoff. It sees three comedians doing crowd work where every crowd member has an interesting story which is hinted at on their t-shirt. I really love standup comedy, and this is a great format for it! I was super excited when I saw Atsuko Okatsuka in the trailer, but honestly I was a little disappointed by her performance. She started by disclaiming that she doesn’t normally do crowd work in her sets, and you can really tell. I still think that episode is good though, and the show as a whole was awesome. Check it out!

MotionRec

Play it on Steam here.

I first played MOTION●REC as a Pico-8 game on Itch, and was really impressed by how clever its core mechanic was! So I was super excited to stumble upon a demo for the full-length game during Steam Next Fest last Summer, and I bought the game as soon as it released in October. MotionRec is a puzzle platformer where you can record your movements and then replay them standing in a different location (it feels hard to fully emphasise the genius of this mechanic in text, you should go watch the trailer). I beat the game (not 100%) in 3.5 hours, but I’m definitely looking to go back and get that 100% down the line. I love a game that has a central interesting mechanic and just builds on it through level design and secondary mechanics in really interesting ways, and MotionRec absolutely nails that. Also it’s gorgeous.

SCAV

Watch it on Nebula here.

SCAV is the new documentary from the team behind Jet Lag: the Game. It follows competitors of the University of Chicago‘s annual SCAV, the largest scavenger hunt in the world. Each team is presented with a huge list of items, which they must complete to get points. SCAV items range from “blow up a car” to “the SCAV-lympics” to “the moon”, so the whole show has a chaotic energy that I absolutely loved. Fans of Jet Lag and Taskmaster should definitely check this out!

Peter Austin

Watch Austin on YouTube here.

For the last seven months, Peter Austin has been making videos about all sorts of weird cultural quirks, with a particular interest in British folklore. I first saw his video about a WWII pillbox built to look like a ruined cottage, but quickly fell down the rabbit hole of videos from Hands of Glory, mummified hands holding candles that are said to have magical abilities, to the Water Hags of British folklore and their surprising use in an 80s child safety PSA.

Austin is one of many that seem to be following in the footsteps of Tom Scott (shoutout to Chris Spargo while I’m here), but Austin’s videos have a focus on history and folklore that attracts me particularly. There’s so much stuff here that’s going to inspire my fantasy work, and you should check it out if any of these topics have caught your eye!

Wake up Dead Man

Rian Johnson has done it again! I absolutely love the Knives Out series and this third entry knocks it out of the park again. The church setting creates a great moody atmosphere that perfectly complements the themes of hate and isolation that permeate the film. Daniel Craig is having a blast again but Josh O’Connor really steals the show. I need to watch more of his stuff.

I think on a rewatch this could be my favourite of the series yet, truly I will keep watching these until they run out of actors to star in them.

Links

I’m splitting the links section up this time because there’s so much! Some exciting news first:

• Dorian Blackwood has made two games based on my RPTree system! Check out Welcome Home Darling for Australian gothic horror and For the Crown for royal lineage investigation!

I’ve also found a bunch of useful stuff about adventure design this season, so here’s all of that together:

• Dan from Gem Room Games is Overloading the Faction Relationship.

• Gestaltist creates a procedure for making rumours: Number-Omit-Distort.

• The Welsh DM writes about Hub & Spoke Adventure Design, applying IT structure design to a TTRPG adventure release structure.

• Ty from Mindstorm describes a framework for small adventures in Pocket-Sized Powderkegs.

• Nathan Savant has two blog posts analysing Donkey Kong Bananza’s narrative design. Narrative is by no means the focus of Bananza, but it pulls some clever tricks that can be applied to more narrative-focused games (including TTRPGs!). Check out A Narrative Bananza and Systemic Narrative: A How-To Guide!

• I went back to some of the previous work Savant cites in these posts, and found another great double feature from him. On Game Developer: Nonlinear Story Structure in Games and Region-Based Narrative lay the groundwork for these previous posts, and are also very useful for TTRPG adventures. I disagree with his definition of dungeons as “linear” experience (I don’t even think that’s true of Link’s Awakening, which Savant references), but the concept still works if you swap out “linear” with “contained”.

Now for the miscellaneous links:

• A.A. Voigt writes about Deathmatch Island, Squid Game, and the Tension of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

• Incidental Mythology writes about The Meaning of the Amphibian Man in the Shape of Water.

• The Folklore Podcast gathers a number of witchcraft historians to discuss The Traitors in The Traitors: Whimsy or Witch-hunt?

• snow on Tumblr has posted TTRPG School: Required Reading, an amazing collection of academic texts and blog posts for TTRPG theory.

• Also, from snow's blog: In Defense of Clocks, an exploration of real time as a resource in TTRPGs.

• Over at Explorer’s Design: Affinity Studio First Impressions, a review of the new version of Affinity.

• Talk of the Table interviewed Connie Chang and Sea Thomas to talk about Dramaturgy in Actual Play.

• StatMonkey talks about the quest for cinematic TTRPGs: Chasing the Sweet Spot: The Feeling I Still Can’t Name.

• ThemePunked discusses how Terraria Changed Gaming Forever, Terraria was an early favourite game of mine, and I think this video gets at a lot of the reasons why.

• Alfred Valley is Smashing old images together to make Brute Fort.

• Quinns reviews 4 RPGs that come in boxes over at Quinns Quest.

• Over on the Dododecahedron Blog, The OSR Onion is a post applying Vincent Baker’s PBTA design concept of concentric circles to OSR design philosophy.

• The Jolly Reiver talks about a 1963 ghost photograph that has all the visual hallmarks of a fake, but every analyst claims it hasn’t been tampered with.

• On the PlusOneExp store, Make Hard Moves is a free, digital zine by Aaron King about PbtA move design and advice for running PbtA games.

• On Skeleton Code Machine, Exeunt Press writes about Tracking ammunition in CY_BORG and other TTRPG systems