2025 Wrap-Up

Hi!

I used to share book reviews and other similar thoughts on Facebook and Instagram. Then, at some point in 2024, I stopped posting there (due to a combination of those platforms being annoying and evil) and planned to start sharing my thoughts someplace else on the internet. That led to a prolonged period of indecision, where I periodically spent time looking at different hosting platforms and thinking about fonts and colors and being embarrassed at the idea of writing anything as if anyone would want to read it. At long last, I’ve decided I should rip the band-aid off and put this out here and share my thoughts once a month, starting with these highlights of 2025, and monthly going forward.

Here are a few things I really liked in 2025:

Five Decembers by James Kestrel

In late November of 1941, Honolulu police detective Joe McGrady gets an after-hours call to investigate the brutal murder of a nephew of a top military official. While Joe is searching the crime scene that night, he is attacked by two men. He narrowly escapes, killing one of the men but losing track of the other. Within a week, Joe has identified a suspect and obtains authorization to follow his target's trail to Hong Kong. He arrives in Hong Kong on December 6, 1941, but, as history-knowers will anticipate, world events dramatically complicate his plans. The story follows McGrady from that first December through the titular fifth December, splitting the book roughly into thirds -- the first third, where he investigates a murder in Hawaii, the middle third, where he tries to survive as an American stranded on the other side of the Pacific during World War II, and the final third, where he returns home and tries to piece his life together and resolve his investigation despite the fact that the rest of the world has little interest in him achieving either of those goals.

This was my favorite read in quite a while, and probably in my top five or so books of all-time. The story covers five years but plays out like a generational epic. The first third introduces itself as a traditional hard boiled detective story -- very well-done and nuanced, but still a familiar tale of no-nonsense tough guys sticking their nose into places where people don't want them looking, trying to see justice done. The prose is tight and unsentimental, but it gives you just enough insight into Joe's softer side to help you understand why he's a bit of an outcast from his fellow cops. The turn into the second third of the story is really where this book surprised and impressed me - the way McGrady passes the war years trying to survive while making a semblance of a life and a purpose for himself was not the sort of story I thought I was in for from the descriptions I'd read of the book. McGrady's eventual return home is both triumphant and tragic, leading to a final third of the book that continues the great detective storytelling from the first third but with his work now shaped by the perspective and the trauma that he carries from the war. Major plot points are not exactly unexpected -- at most points if you're thinking "I bet this is the next problem that's going to arise," your first guess is probably right -- but the way they play out hit hard nonetheless, and the contours of the greater mystery were bigger than I expected. A great mystery and adventure with moments of tragedy and heartbreak that make you love it all the more. I loved this book.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship impossibly far from Earth with multiple dead crewmates and no recollection of who he is and why he's out there. As he confronts smaller problems (what's his name? where exactly is he?) and much, much bigger ones (can he find a solution to the Earth’s problems and somehow fly himself back home?), Grace's memories come back to him in plot-convenient dribs and drabs as we follow alternating chapters in the present where he solves problems in space and the recent past where we learn the greater context of how he ended up here. In his earliest memories, Grace, a former scientist who left academia to teach kids, learns of a scientific curiosity that is soon revealed to be an existential threat to life on Earth - previously unknown interstellar particles have been growing in the atmosphere and sucking down energy from the sun at an exponential rate that could kill the whole solar system within a few decades. In the present, Grace breaks down the unthinkably huge problems in front of him one step at a time, extrapolating from little experiments he might have performed with his students to make much bigger discoveries in the hopes he can find a solution from a distant star that resisted similar phenomena and somehow bring that solution home in time to save our planet.

About a decade ago, I read and loved Weir's first novel, The Martian, the story of an astronaut accidentally abandoned by his crew on the surface of Mars, who fights to survive by using the scientific method to solve immediate problems (making shelter, growing food, maintaining oxygen supplies) all in the service of a much larger problem (figuring out how his fellow astronauts can make it back to rescue him from Mars before he dies). It was a compelling story, but I remember finishing it and thinking "how could this guy possibly write another book?" It was such a unique structure of a story, rooted in Weir's writing the story on his blog in regular installments exploring these hypothetical problems that he later self-published as a novel. He can't just do the same thing again! And, from what I understand of his second book, Artemis, he didn't, writing a more traditional novel that wasn't especially well-received. With Project Hail Mary, though, as you might infer from the description in the previous paragraph...Andy Weir just kinda did The Martian again! It's not the same, of course -- the problems are different, the characters are different(ish), the situation and structure are different -- but at its core, it's a guy in space trying to science the shit out of his problems. And it's great!

I’ve always been lukewarm on “hard sci-fi” - that is, science fiction that takes care to justify and explain its futuristic technology as thoroughly as possible. I’m not a scientist, so does it really make a difference to me if the fake science is like 97% real or 40% real? Stories that spend too much time trying to convince me that their pretend technology could be real often strike me as dry and boring. Which makes it all the more impressive to me how exciting and interesting Andy Weir’s books are even when they are just incredibly methodical explorations of science problems. If I ever tired of a step in Ryland’s journey, it was only out of my attachment to the character - poor guy, let him just solve this problem and get home, don’t screw this up for him! I did get a little frustrated with the artifice of Ryland’s convenient progression of his memory. The story eventually provides a justification for his faulty memory that explains why his memory is messed up, but even with that, no amount of explanation can disguise that it’s just a storytelling cheat. Ultimately, it’s effective enough of a storytelling structure that a somewhat flimsy justification doesn’t harm the experience, but it is a little silly. With a few complaints aside, this is an exciting, amusing, surprising, and thoughtful book, well worth my time.

The Séance of Blake Manor by Spooky Doorway.

In The Séance of Blake Manor, you play as Declan Ward, a detective in Ireland in 1897, invited to a the titular manor to help solve the disappearance of a young woman named Evelyn Dean. Evelyn is one of the manor’s many guests in town for the week to witness a psychic medium commune with a ghost at the end of several days of lectures and presentations on mythological, spiritual, and paranormal matters. As you seek to learn what happened to Evelyn, you’ll find that each of the manor’s guests has their own mystery or conflict to explore, all of which may have implications for the seance and for the other guests.

The Séance of Blake Manor is another game in the rapidly growing detective game genre that was semi-recently kicked off by games like The Case of the Golden Idol and The Return of the Obra Dinn, games that ask the player to interact with characters and the world to collect clues and information in service of making deductions and inferences that help you solve complex mysteries. Some of the games in this genre are incredibly dense and challenging — solving the Golden Idol games felt like preparing for the LSAT, and I ultimately bailed on Obra Dinn when it got too tough for my brain to handle — but Blake Manor is a much more gentle mystery game, focused less on brain-breaking deductive logic and more just slowly unveiling creepy stories based largely in Irish folklore. The draw of the game is in meeting the characters and asking the right questions and exploring the environments to learn about their stories; once you have those puzzle pieces, they way they fit together tends to be pretty obvious.

The manor is a large open environment, but with plenty of locked doors and areas that are off-limits at certain times of day. Time plays a key role — the clock doesn’t tick while you walk around, but every action you can take, like examining an object, reading a document, or asking a person a question, advances the clock by a set number of minutes, with certain events scheduled for certain times, all leading up to the séance at the end of the weekend. The ticking clock is the kind of mechanic that can drive me a little nuts — did I take too long to find this thing? if that line of questioning didn’t get me any useful information, should I reload my save to before I asked the questions to get those 3 minutes back? — but after a while, it becomes pretty clear that you have plenty of time and there’s no need to sweat it. It’s mostly an interesting system to let you investigate a world that moves on its own schedule and makes you feel like you’re inhabiting a real environment.

I do think the games is a little too open for its own good, though. After an initial tutorial segment that gives you a short time limit to achieve a discrete goal, the rest of the game is wide-open, letting you know you have until the end of the weekend to solve as many of the characters’ mysteries as possible. In theory, the idea of exploring the whole house and solving any of the dozen or so different related mysteries at any given time is interesting, but in practice, it’s rarely possible to learn more about the stories of more than two or three characters at any given time. Even if the world is theoretically open before you, for the most part you kind of have to solve the component mysteries in a fairly narrow sequence, as you certain doors or conversation prompts are always going to be locked until you’ve uncovered specific things first. Even if the environment presents itself as pretty open, in practice there’s usually just one or two stories you should be focused on at a given time, so why not just say that? I think a tighter structure would’ve removed some frustration where I was wandering around the whole mansion trying to follow one story thread that just was never going to be available to me at that point.

My other quibble with the game is common to these kinds of mystery games — when they set out this mechanic where you are linking clues together to solve a mystery, sometimes those steps require you to find more information than really seems necessary before the game will treat the mystery as solved. Rather than spoil anything, I’ll make up an example that is similar to an issue I had: you meet one character who confesses that she has always regretted that, as a teenager, she gave birth to a baby who she put up for adoption, and mentions a few identifying characteristics about the baby; later, you meet another character who is about 15 years younger than the first character and has those identifying characteristics; that character then mentions to you that they never knew their mother and they were adopted. Mystery solved, right? Yet your detective cannot process this deduction or even ask obvious follow-up questions to either character until you find an additional document that reveals more details about the adoption. Too often, it seemed clear that Step 1 leads to Step 2 leads to Step 3, and yet the game insisted I wander around in circles until I stumbled across Step 2.5 to affirm that obvious solution.

Those complaints aside, this was one of my favorite experiences of the year. The visual design of the manor and the characters was a beautiful and unusual sort of hand drawn style, the story explored a number of different Irish, British, pagan, and other sorts of mythologies that were interesting to read about, and figuring out what was happening at the manor and how to save everyone from their dark fates was a lot of fun. Theoretically there are different endings you can reach, and whether or not you solve each character’s mystery affects whether they will attend and/or survive the séance, but it’s not really a situation where you’ll want to replay the game with different choices to see different outcomes, it’s ultimately just a bunch of binary options that play out when the ending tells you what happened to each character after the séance.

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That’s it! Three things I liked in 2025. Sometime in the next week or two, I will write about some things from January 2026. The end.