2025: Year In Review (Jackpot January ‘26 #1)

Even though the world is burning, I had a really good year. A lot of changes, shake ups, breaking old habits and building new, better ones.

Anyway, here are the best and most impactful things I experienced this year, listed in no particular order. I’m a fan of basically everything: books, film, music, video games, so have a look through. I hope you get something out of this love letter to moments so precious that even the white-knuckle destruction of life as we know it by a handful of evil tech oligarchs couldn’t ruin them.

Mouthwashing

Mouthwashing is one of two video games I played this year which truly made me nauseated. (The other one is yet to come.)

Mouthwashing confronted me with some of the most harrowing scenes I’ve ever experienced. An abusive psychopath cuts off his best friend’s limbs and force-feeds them to him. An alcoholic declares in his dying breath that the only times he was happy was when he was drinking. A nihilistic monster drives his ship into the path of an asteroid. By the end, the game’s initial trope-ish excesses deepened and became powerful symbols of degradation and abuse.

It still amazes me how well everything ties together. Apart from a couple of crap stealth sections, the game is so lean yet so capacious with its meaning. It touches on addiction, masculinity, worker exploitation, sexual violence, self-harm, the human capacity for cruelty, corporate negligence, structural inequality, responsibility, the banality of menial labour, and so much more. Above all else, the game is a study of the abusive mind, which it anatomises with unparalleled nuance and insight, and inspires a sick sense of complicity in the player.

A couple more things to praise: Mouthwash is the game’s central symbol and it’s a stroke of genius. It stands for everything from abuse to consumption to sterile corporate faux-positivity. It’s so good it makes me jealous. Also, the music and sound design are excellent, and the main theme in particular is a masterpiece. Unexpectedly, it is a placid, almost relaxing dirge that’s as mournful as it is unsettling, with the creaks and moans nestled beneath its synth melody. It’s like crash-landing to Earth on a burning ship and crawling out of the inferno barely alive.

Mouthwashing is a huge step forward for video game storytelling. Play it. And I hope this hurts.

Kentucky Route Zero

I’d been meaning to play Kentucky Route Zero for a while. I don’t remember what I expected, but it wasn’t what I got.

KRZ is a five-episode game and for the first three, I didn’t know what to make of it. It is an absurdist, surreal trek through the American hinterland, but it’s so diffuse and bleak. Eventually, I stopped trying to understand the game and just let myself experience it, and that’s when I got into it.

Rather than a narrative, KRZ is a tone poem of assorted ideas and themes but it is not random. Patterns emerge through the recurrence of spectres, gig workers, museums, analogue media, indie folk, drifters, and detritus. Just like Mouthwashing, KRZ is a game about long-haul transit but this time the focus is not on breaking down but on wearing out. It is exhausted and beautiful.

If you want to play KRZ, you have to take the game on its own terms. It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you come to it with an open heart, I hope you won’t be disappointed.

Perfect Days

Without a plot weighing him down, director Wim Wenders flourishes.

Perfect Days’ story is the thin surface layer on a meditative exploration of the pleasures of a simple routine. The protagonist, Hirayama, resist plot. He only encounters beats in other people’s stories and does his best to avoid being swept up in them. We meet a young man desperate for money to impress his girlfriend. Hirayama’s niece runs away from home to visit him amid a split in the family. And all the while, he stands impassive in hi dedication to present joy, moment-to-moment.

Wim Wenders claimed that it took the team a long time to build Hirayama’s music taste. I think they nailed it. He drives triumphantly to1970s alternative, serenaded by the likes of Patti Smith, Lou Reed, and Nina Simone. There’s a liberating beauty in it.

I have vivid memories of going for a nighttime walk after the film ended. It was quiet and beautiful, and I noticed everything.

Caledonian Road

In 2025, we looked out at the world desperate for any crumbs of hope we could find. We are a quarter of the way through this terrible century. Yet throughout the year, I’ve had this strange feeling of relaxation and acceptance, as if I don’t need to hope. This crumbling order, this dying hierarchy, our wounded pride – all these will soon be swept away. Caledonian Road gave voice to this feeling.

Andrew O’Hagan’s novel is my favourite book this year. It’s not even a tough call. Caledonian Road made me notice things I’m normally not that fussed about in literature. I rarely consider characterisation, but I couldn’t help noticing O’Hagan’s outstanding command of voice. The book features characters of all classes, genders, and a variety of racial backgrounds, and none of the characters feels simplistic or unconvincing. This is literature at the height of its empathic powers.

At its heart, it’s a mid-life crisis novel. O’Hagan wrote it in his mid-fifties, and the novel’s protagonist, Campbell Flynn, resembles the author in several ways: his working-class, Scottish background, his rags-to-riches trajectory, his political leanings. Yet Campbell’s crisis unfolds in the context of the contemporary disastrous political landscape. He unravels as the world does, wondering if he’s ever made the right friends or the right choices. His story is set against the stories of so many others from all walks of life, always told with compassion.

Nestled at the end of the book, one image captures how we live now: ‘as if… the complications of men and other creatures were in sudden abeyance, waiting for solutions that would exist as soon as the past was over.’

A/S/L

Now we reach the weirdo portion of this list.

A/S/L, my other favourite novel of this year, is the story of three trans women who meet online as closeted teenagers and try to develop a game together. This game is left unfinished, but when the three end up living in different parts of the same city, they’re drawn into an arresting narrative of resilience, anxiety, betrayal, and mysticism.

The three characters are three different transfemme ‘personality types’ which any trans person would instantly recognise. There is Abraxa, the kooky, impulsive agent of chaos with an esoteric, witchy flavour; Sasha, the tortured neurotic who obsessively self-regulates in pursuit of control; and Lilith, a quiet, trusting, kind-hearted who seems like a doormat but actually has her life in relative order.

This novel is not at all plot-driven. It’s a character study which trades in symbols and lyricism more than narrative, and yet its final two sections are among the most propulsive writing I’ve ever read. It’s been years since I sat down to read something that I couldn’t put down, and when I finished it, A/S/L did not disappoint.

Bugonia

Bugonia is both my favourite film released this year and my first Lanthimos love. Every time I would watch a Yorgos Lanthimos film, I’d wind up frustrated. His work should be right up my street, but none of his films clicked for me. Now, finally, he dropped his finest work yet and I’m obsessed.

Right away, the premise is promising: two paranoid men kidnap a female CEO believing her to be an alien in disguise who seeks to destroy Earth. Bugonia delivers on all that promise and more, with tense, character-driven action punctuated by twists around every corner. The film constantly manages to surprise through implication, with Jesse Plemons’ character’s past remaining sinister yet murky.

I was riveted the whole time. The film’s conclusion is so bold and wacky, but Lanthimos plays it straight. Its characteristically disquieting final scene had everyone cackling and cowering at the same time. Never has such a silly ending felt so poignant.

That one scene from Sinners

Sinners is the year’s big success story, a tour-de-force of marketing and word-of-mouth. I know it’ll feature on many best-of lists this year, and the hype is totally justified. Personally, although I enjoyed it, I found the first half a bit slow and struggled to settle into the film’s overall rhythm.

However, about halfway into the film comes The Scene. Before I went to see the film, I kept hearing about This One Scene that was astonishing, that I would simply love. Don’t worry, friends said, you’ll know it when you see it.

Before The Scene, the film proceeds as a realist character drama. Then, for five minutes, a blues song in the secret Black dance bar erupts into an energised aural history of just over a century of Black musicianship. The centrepiece is a long tracking-shot, where we see jazz singers, hip-hop dancers, traditional African performers, and so much more. As a tribute to Black art, it feels reverent yet joyful, a far cry from the melancholic or resentful modes that (white-dominated) conversations around race often employ.

It’s perfect. One of the best scenes in cinema history.

Getting into fashion

Another year, another crisis of the self.

For a long time, I’d been unsatisfied with my personal style and I had no idea why. 2025 was the first year I decided to start learning about clothes: how they were made, how fashion history has evolved, how designers have revolutionised what we wear. It was the greatest confidence-builder this year.

So many sources have been essential to my fashion education, from the Tate Modern’s Leigh Bowery exhibition, to YouTubers such as Bliss Foster and Haute Le mode, to podcasts such as Dressed: A History of Fashion. Throughout this journey, the strongest theme were playfulness and experimentation. Once I learned how to talk about clothes and know when something fit well, I felt free to try all sorts of pairings, silhouettes, and colour-clashes with a real sense of what I like. I was no longer afraid to wear skirts, dresses, and other feminising garments.

Now I can dress up without fear of a dressing-down.

Wanderlust, FKA Twigs

Ms Twigs blessed us with Eusexua right at the beginning of the year. I’m very fond of the whole album, but ‘Wanderlust’ is its standout track.

FKA Twigs’ most remarkable talent (among many) is her ever-changing energy. Her style and image are so flexible: she can do sexy, she can do childish, she can do playful, mournful, and always does beautiful. Tempo changes are a big part of her musical identity, and ‘Wanderlust’ leans into that tendency so much.

The song varies from slow, blissful alto to pacey bridges full of hype and assurance. It manages to be deep and reflective, but light and joyful at the same time and with perfect coherence.

More than anything, I love the world and the people in it. Anytime I’m overcome by this sublime pleasure, this song is right beside me.

Muck Hole

“What up big dogs? Welcome to the Muck Hole.” And with that, my ears perk up.

Though I moved away from YouTube near the end of the year, the algorithm did me a solid and recommended the Muck Hole channel before I quit. Muck Hole makes videos about the psychosocial influences of online video. That sounds way more boring than it is. He is a strict behaviourist, so analyses topics in terms of rewards and incentive structures. As well as cathartic, any video he makes gives instant clarity on the roots behind the strange excesses of the digital world.

More than anything though, it’s his work on ‘lolcows’ that put him on this list. For the lucky, ignorant few, a lolcow is a person who displays extreme behaviours online, such as meltdowns or oversharing, that trolls will latch onto and ‘milk’ for ‘lols.’ It’s a deeply cruel subculture with whole online careers forged from bullying and harassment of outsiders who tend to be autistic and/or queer.

As someone with disabled family members (and a working heart), I believe ‘lolcows’ and their online harassment is a subject long overdue for political critique. Finally, our saviour has arrived. Muck Hole never swings below the belt, or resorts to name-calling or ad hominem attacks. He instead advocates for compassion from an informed perspective.

Horses

Speaking of compassion, here’s another YouTube channel with a standout record.

Horses makes poetic, philosophical videos in which he slowly examines the aspects of the human soul and how to resist its destruction and exploitation by contemporary life. His videos are uniformly thought-provoking, heartfelt, and loving. They are balm for the soul.

For much of my life, I shied away from words like ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, less out of scepticism and more from a sense of embarrassment. Not only was I not convinced of the soul’s existence, but I thought I should be able to prove kindness was important without getting all hippy-dippy about it.

Now I am a full-throated defender of the soul. Whether or not such a thing literally exists is irrelevant to the power the word has. As Horses taught me, ‘soul’ is a word with power. It’s the only one we have to remind ourselves of the goodness, hope, and grace that we’re capable of. Cruelty, therefore, is not inevitable. We can always try to choose better.

As a quick side note, I find the rise of Muck Hole and Horses encouraging. I love a juicy, informative video essay, but there has always been a gap in leftist commentary for emotions and more lyrical or abstract forms of criticism. These two channels are, I hope, part of a larger trend that will recentre our politics around not correctness, but kindness.

CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)

Car Seat Headrest released an album this year, and it was alright. Arguably the biggest problem is that one of its songs is too good.

‘CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You) is an eight-minute epic (what else does CSH make?) about naive, insistent connection. It’s a youthful song celebrating the energy of youth, and its vibe recalls ‘Summer of 69’, ‘Don’t You’, or some other 1980s nostalgic rock ballad, but with the typical CSH sense of precarity.

The song is so good that I want the rest of the album to sound like it. It could be three times as long and I wouldn’t get sick of it. I’ve so many fond memories from this year of running to this song, meeting friends with this song, dancing and celebrating with this song. Soaring, unstoppable rebellion powers it forth; the kind of energy we need to fight for peace, love, and justice.

I hope forever to be ‘a stranger saying, “Hi”/ To moments in life when I feel alive.’

Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days

Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days is the other game that made me sick to my stomach.

I’m surprised to be putting it on any list at all, let alone a ‘best of the year’ list like this. Upon release, the game was declared one of the worst of all time, reviled for its ugliness, cruelty, and hostility to the player. In other words, all the things that make it marvellous.

The game is ugly, yes, and bleak and nihilistic, but this is not a defect. The game is so finely tuned, so deliberate and creative with its chosen aesthetic that it stands as a step forward for the medium as an art form.

It was released in 2010, at a time when video games were starting to self-consciously examine the ethics of their relationship to violence. My big problem with a lot of games from this era is that these moments of introspection that emerge in the narrative lack a complementary aesthetic in the gameplay. We are shown that violence is bad, but we are not made to feel that it’s bad.

Kane and Lynch 2 totally bucks this trend. It is ultra-violent but the violence never feels fun or satisfying. It focuses on wounds, the vulnerability of the human body, and looks as if it was filmed on a cheap handheld camera. It shakes violently when you run, and at the firing of heavy weapons or explosions, the video and audio glitch out as if the scale of destruction overwhelms the technology. At the same time, it feels cramped, tawdry, and cheap.

As you can imagine, these stylistic choices result in a very aggressive, off-putting game that is difficult to sit through but mesmerising to play. It knows what it wants to be and commits itself to a true, visceral portrayal of the horrors of violence that hits you right in the guts.

*****

Okay, that was the list. Bye!