To help answer the question: "which of my Steam games were released in the past year", here is a SteamDB page:

https://steamdb.info/sales/?displayOnly=OwnedGames&min_release=2025-01-01 [External Link]

(You either need to be logged-in to SteamDB, or fill the form at https://steamdb.info/calculator/ [External Link] and follow the "Filter their owned games" link. And you need relaxed privacy settings, or possibly the SteamDB extension lets you bypass that)

For me the only game released in 2025 with significant playtime is Silksong (played it a ton, but much of it was grinding uselessly against the sister splinter boss fight, which I haven't passed, though I found a sequence break around it). If we include 2024 games, Moonlight Pulse is another metroidvania I quite enjoyed, though I did hit another wall with a boss fight.

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I started with HL2, I found it easy to get into, the narrative is excellent, supports the action well and keeps things moving along. After that you have the two episodes that give you more of that world.

HL1 was harder for me to get immersed in, I haven't gone back and finished it yet. Technically there are no issues, Valve is still maintaining it well.

But you could also start with the original, and skip ahead to HL2 if the original doesn't work for you.

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That's just a few days' notice. The game has been available for very cheap before (1,50€ in the past year on Steam, according to ITAD and SteamDB; some bundles though not too recently). The current best offer (excluding vouchers) is on WinGameStore.

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Leveraged buyout means EA now has to service and pay down $20 billions of debt that it didn't have before (Ars Technica puts it simply: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/09/how-private-ownership-will-change-electronic-arts/ [External Link] ). So, expect EA to become a worse company to employees and consumers both.

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The gamepad trouble I have is that the analog sticks and triggers are lost if the pad is unplugged/replugged.

Filled the bug report form.

I'll keep playing on Linux though, our gaming platform isn't Microsoft's to control and it needs use and polish.

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- Slight difficulty reduction in early game bosses Moorwing and Sister Splinter.

Hah. I've gotten better, but am still not past Sister Splinter, maybe I'll give it a few more tries before this releases.

(OTOH I've had no trouble with the rosary economy, exploring and threading beads make rosaries more pleasant than HK geo for me personally)

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I would not trust my machine to a random free game like this. Please beware.

There are no positive reviews with significant playtime.
Dev is Russian and was into web3 cryptobullshit for a while, game was ceded to another account which has a VAC ban, and the one positive review with 580 hours playtime is from a cryptobro with an AI-generated blog.

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Tis good! I still get stuck on bosses (currently both Lace and the challenge room in the same area). The previous boss did unlock a large part of the game which was cool.
There is some stuff I find kinder: rosaries aren't necessary lost on death if threaded on a string (strung on a thread?), and there's a 400 shell limit (not that that second currency seems to matter much) that much reduces the impact of a failed corpse run.

The movement feels good and flows well, I like the way you grab platforms, and the downward dash. Hornet has a personality, thanks to that movement and a good voice actress (not a big amount of voice acting, but what is there during combat is good). I wish they had done a bit more still, as the cartographer's song is on a short loop.

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@R D Olivaw, I have a bottle for Ubisoft Connect, with freebies from back in 2021 [External Link].

I do prefer native apps like Steam/itch.io/Heroic, but Bottles does its job well for the rest.

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we use language models and image models that are trained on content from the internet that’s been extracted without consideration for its copyright or licensing

That's the case of anyone doing anything with LLMs and the current AI cheerleading. I dearly wish to see some of the big pushers go bankrupt with copyright damages.

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