PPR Presents Golden Zonkies: Class of 2025

ow that 2025 has finished swirling its nasty self into the shower drain of time, we’re ready to jump into the  "Düo-Dusé" fresh! (yeah, George is still calling it that) and begin our annual “Game of the Year” feature for 2025, the Golden Zonkies! We’re not going to lie—the selection was vast this year, and there was a LOT to choose from,  especially during a year where brand new hardware dropped from Nintendo! Still, I think we came away with some choice picks, and we hope you enjoy the deliberation as we present to you, the Golden Zonkies: Class of 2025.

In case y’all don’t remember the updated flow from the last couple of years, we have changed up our format and have done away with categories!  Now, bear in mind that we’re still giving our prestigious mark of excellence, a Golden Zonkey, to the games that are deserving of recognition, but we’re not doing so by a respective genre or category. Instead, we will be giving them out in a personal list format by each of us in the podcast, and we’ll be spending time discussing why we picked the titles we did within a countdown of three.

Also, the biggest change to the process is that we will no longer limit nominations to the titles that were released that same year, but instead, games that we had the opportunity to play that year, because honestly, it gave a somewhat stressful deliberation process a much-needed shot of levity for us to play with for Golden Zonkies!

 Normally, we would have done a roundtable of games that were worth a quick mention from the year, but we decided to mention them in passing instead, along with some not-so-honorable-mentions (we also chose a few more not mentioned on the show to include in the post!) We will then award the “Golden Zonkey of The Year” in a unanimous vote that was similar to the previous format, and conclude the show from there.

With that being said, thanks again for tuning into our Game of the Year special, and for just listening, watching, or reading anything done by us. We’re hoping to make 2025 a banner year for Press Pause Radio, so stick around and enjoy!

Mail us at our new email Mailbag@presspauseradio.com, leave a voicemail at 469-PPR-TALK, and be sure to stop by at our Forums if you haven’t already registered and post your thoughts about the show. Finally, make sure to rate and subscribe to us on iTunes and YouTube, follow us on Twitch page and Twitter, and finally take part in our Facebook and Steam group!

Click to read more ...

PPR Presents Limelight: Baby Steps

od dammit y’all, he’s doing it—George is going to stream Baby Steps.

After all of the hype, the memes, and the ongoing discourse over its themes of overcoming Toxic Masculinity, the same people who brought us Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy have unleashed whole brain-breaking, finger-numbing exercise of rigor and patience that’ll test every fiber of your being, or at least George's anyway.

Be sure to tune in to our Twitch or YouTube at 7:00 PM PST on 01/15/2026 to watch Nathan stumble around like a drunken Bambi! You can check out the streams here or directly on our Twitch and YouTube channels, and vibe along with us as we work towards ushering in a new age of Limelight for y'all!

PPR Presents Play Play: Gladmort Press Kit Demo

025 sure has been a banger year for the Neo•Geo, like—we’ve got Final Vendetta, Vengeance Hunters, and the game in our latest entry of Play Play: Gladmort, by Chipsonsteroids and Pixel Heart.

George had the opportunity to check out a slice of this action title for SNK’s black-and-gold wonder, courtesy of a demo provided by the developer, where he played it with original hardware via the NeoSD Flashcart from Teraonion. Check out what he has to say about it, and all of the ways you can scope out this game now, regardless of whether or not you have what may be the most expensive retro console to own.

QCF: Dispatch

tory-telling is such a powerful method of expression, and is something that can really make the difference in a piece of media, like a film where the production quality isn’t great, or a book where the writing is banal, or for a video game that doesn’t have the best gameplay. An immersive story can save any one of these experiences, but unlike film or literature, a video game has the strength of being designed around a well-crafted story, thanks to the ability to interact with the content diegetically.

All of those moments you found yourself yelling at the characters on screen to discover the  Machiavellian identity of someone close to them, or when you clicked with the hidden message that was woven throughout the progression of the plot—all of these micro-expressions seem to hit even stronger when you had a hand in making it happen. One specific studio has earned its Butter Brickle out of delivering those experiences at a premium, and after being out of the game for the last couple of years, the former development house,  Telltale Games, is now under a new banner, Adhoc Studio, and their reentry to the scene is accompanied by an exciting collaboration as well.

In partnership with the Tabletop gaming fanatics, Critical Role, Adhoc Studio has unveiled their debut, Dispatch, a brand new original story that takes inspiration from the cape-intensive ambience of a Superhero-centric Universe. The world of Dispatch wears its comic book inspiration proudly on its sleeve, and has embroidered that stitch in the thread of Telltale’s previous hits like The Walking Dead or The Wolves Among Us, only with a statistical twist that was built with the spirit of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign under the guise of a 911-like dispatch work simulator. Now, the juxtaposition of choice-driven comment and dice roll-fueled action may initially come off as a dissonant formula, especially when broken down to an episodic format no less, but y’all—they done did it.

The ambitious alliance between Adhoc Studio and Critical Roll proves to be more than just a dap-up for the clicks, as Dispatch arguably stands to be the best choice-driven narrative game the team has ever made.

Click to read more ...

Late to the Party: Void Stranger

emories of my youth in school certainly aren’t the most pleasant times from my childhood, because, surprising no one at all, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call an academic kid—some would say I was more of the opposite. Still, aside from all of the coming-of-age crap that public school pounds into you, there was a memory I had from an art assignment our English teacher gave us to complete (weird, I know, but stick with me.)  The guy was SUPER into Ernest Hemingway, like, he just loved the way that old drunk could mentally instill a scene with his stories using just carefully woven words and nothing more. So, naturally,  he wanted us to try and draw out a specific scene from one of his books, A Farewell To Arms, where we had to do an interpretative sketch drawing of the moment the main character, Frederic, was caught in the mayhem of the Italian army’s retreat during World War I.

The classroom sheet detailed the instruction in a blurb at the top, right below the usual heading where you would write out your name and the date, with the rest of the sheet being a blank canvas for you to use for the sketch. I don’t know what came over me, but I used ALL of the real estate the paper had to offer, which included me scribbling art over the instructions and header area, using every inch of the paper I could.  I mean, I too enjoyed the work of Hemingway, so I’m sure that helped my engagement with the work, but my teacher absolutely gushed over the paper after I turned it in (I promise you this humble brag is going to go somewhere, stick with me.) My English teacher praised that my vision wasn’t limited by the concept of margins, and that I went beyond these perceptions to complete my goal with the classwork.

I haven’t really thought about this dumb little moment for years, until just recently, when I decided to pick up where I left off on a little gem of an indie game that took over my life for a few weeks in 2023, System Erasure’s Void Stranger. As much as I had enjoyed the game, I eventually succumbed to the density of its challenge, and the availability of several other new games at the time, I decided that it was time to move on to something else to boot up on my screen.

So yeah, I started playing Void Stranger again, since I thought it was a natural fit for some bedtime gaming with my new ROG Xbox Ally X, and at some point, something just clicked, and it really has sunk its teeth into me this time around. I know I’m a sucker for the usual Avant-Garde gameplay designs that actively work to subvert the very conventions they’re built with, with stuff like Tunic and FEZ, but Void Stranger is just, in a whole different class of its own.  After, ahem, falling deeper into the void with my play through, I managed to tough out the game and make it to the credits.

Something that I’ve felt immensely proud of, and yet sickeningly anxious about, because I’d soon learn that I’ve only scratched the surface of this dumb little brain worm of a game.

Click to read more ...

PPR Presents Limelight: Ball x Pit

K, so here’s something a little more current—one of stand-outs in the recent ID@Xbox showcase was a game that I could only describe as the Peanut Butter and Pickles of indie action titles: Ball x Pit. Like, the word salad that came out of George’s mouth when he talked about it with the rest of the PPR crew that was both outlandishly wild, and strangely accurate at the same time.

Imagine a Bullet Hell, Rogue-Like Arkanoid-esque vertical-scroller, with intermittent life-sim city/resource building ala Actraiser…

If that reading that sounded crazy to you, imagine typing it out for y’all to glean upon—either way we’re really excited to scope it out!

Be sure to tune in to our Twitch at 7:00 PM PST on 11/04/2025 to watch the this incredible mish-mash of gameplay mechanics masterminded by one dude from New York! You can check out the streams here or directly on our Twitch channel, and vibe along with us as we work towards ushering in a new age of Limelight for y'all!

QCF: AVGN 8-Bit

ne might almost expect a game with the namesake of the Angry Video Game Nerd series to be horrible by design. After all, the Nerd — created and portrayed by James Rolfe — has a penchant for bringing what he calls the worst of the worst to light, sometimes sprinkling in bits of reluctant video game trivia with a sea of curse word-ridden catchphrases. In some instances, it's not entirely unwelcome to see low doses of a weird low-budget robot, cursing mutant, or some other weird shit.

An FMV intro of Rolfe as the Nerd at the beginning of Retroware's AVGN 8-bit may not inspire confidence in the ease or enjoyment of any trials ahead: "This game sucks ... just the way I like it."

Thing is, it doesn't actually suck. Dare I say it's pretty well-rounded, though not the most inventive experience in terms of level flow, gameplay mechanics, or boss battles. This game won't change your life, but you'll have some fun along the way.

Click to read more ...

QCF: Hollow Knight: Silksong

t isn’t very often that the cultural zeitgeist of video games just comes together on a subject like the friggin’ Planeteers summoning Captain Planet, right? I mean, thinking back, the last few times something like that happened were the releases of Pokémon GO or Grand Theft Auto V—video game releases that surpassed the typical grand-scale spectacle for their respective audiences and had instead exploded into being these larger-than-life experiences that invaded all of the water coolers out there.

Well, it happened again with the long-awaited sequel to the 2017 sleeper hit from indie studio Team Cherry—Hollow Knight: Silksong.

What was once ranked among the vaporware meme status of Half-Life 3 or, to a lesser extent, Banjo-Threeie (can’t really do Shenmue III or Zach Snyder’s Justice League, because well, those ended up coming out), the highly anticipated follow-up finally emerged from years of silence with a surprise launch date that was showcased in the 2025 Gamescom event. The sporadic appearance of the trailer not only showed everyone watching and in attendance that the game was alive and well, but it also steadily concluded with an eye-opening launch date that was just a mere two weeks away.

No advance press copies or influencer kits—a worldwide release for everyone to experience completely sealed from behind Team Cherry’s doors until its Sept. 4 launch date. The clandestine rollout couldn’t be more thematic for Silksong, as the crux of the game teased a quest that spanned a world far bigger and more daunting than Hollow Knight’s Hallownest ever was, and after spending hours of needling my way through the troubled lands of Pharloom, I can safely say that the hype is real.

Silksong is one of the finest Metroidvanias ever made—a true peak for the sub-genre of “search-action” gaming.

Click to read more ...