Hollow Knight Silksong

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 13 – That’s A Wrap

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I’ve been rewatching matches, finishing some 2025 games, and reading up a storm to wrap up the year, plus to be hones,t working a lot more to have some extra money for Christmas presents, Steam sales, and whatever deals may interest me. I haven’t found any worth it though, and by the time my normal bills came a calling.

This post is going to be mostly on all the end-of-the-year wrap-ups I’ve gotten this year as I work on a longer post. I hope everyone reading this has a good holiday.

Music

Halfway through this year, I cancelled my Spotify Premium account and switched to Tidal, then proceeded to listen to very little music so my Tidal 2025 wrapped doesn’t paint much of a picture of my 2025 music. I’ll just say it was a lot of Paramore, The Beaches, Kendrick Lamar, Aesop Rock, Freddie Gibbs, the scores for Deltarune chapters 3 and 4, and the soundtrack to Hollow Knight Silksong.

Since it’s likely to be my last wrapped, I did temporarily reinstalled the app to get it, so here you go. The only surprise to me here is how fast the Deltarune Chapters 3+4 shot up my personal listening stats, considering I quit Spotify in July and those chapters only came out in June. Last Girls at the Party is not only, in my opinion, a good song but a real earworm that gets my ADHD brain playing it on repeat.

Nintendo introduced their own music app either late last year or early this year if you’re an NSO subscriber, so of course they had to do their own wrapped. My number one and two are a result of Donkey Kong Bananza and Mario Kart World’s great soundtracks that harken back to older games. I do wish Nintendo were faster on the draw to bring those games’ soundtracks to the app, maybe next year.

Games

Speaking of Nintendo, they’ve delayed their 2025 recap release to January, so expect me to include that whenever it comes out in any post I make then. I will, however, make some educated guesses. With the release of the Switch 2, Donkey Kong Bananza is probably at the top of my list,t with Super Mario Odyssey in second because I wanted to replay before making the switch from the first Switch to the second. I put in a decent number of hours of Mario Kart World before I became bored with it, and maybe Kirby Air Riders or Metroid Prime 4 squeezes in towards the end there, depending on when Nintendo chooses a cut-off date.

I expect my stats to be much more spread out between my Switch 2 and Steam next year, but with getting a Steam Deck OLED last August, saving and purchasing a new gaming PC this year, and Switch 2’s launch titles being kind of dry until November – December, these are some very Steam-heavy stats. Plus, I may have spent way too Steam Sale purchase happy Fall 2024 with how I excited I was about my Steam Deck, so I had a lot of different games to play this year. Plus, after receiving a fancy new monitor for my birthday, I really wanted to see the difference between my Nvidia 2030 and my 5060 TI.

What was I doing December 6th that ended my Streak? No idea.
The Steam Deck really changed things up for how and how much I play, huh?

Monster Hunter Wilds and Hollow Knight Silksong served as two peaks where I really locked in. The big difference is with Silksong if I didn’t own so many other games I want to play, I’d still be playing it. Actually, no, I am still playing the window of time is just smaller since release. Monster Hunter Wilds, while I do very much like it, once I finished all the main quests, it left me nothing to keep me going through the loop like previous games did, where I’d unlock different add-ons and such to min-max my gear for future scenarios. I do plan on returning to it next year since they’ve had so many updates, but I expected to put in like a hundred more hours than I did on that game. Silksong, though I will continue to play especially when that Sea of Sorrows expansion comes out in the Spring. It’s not only my number one most played game on Steam this year, but my Game of the Year. More on that later.

On the other games on my list. With the release of Sagat, my favorite character to main, SF6 could easily have been number one, but I’ve played so much Street Fighter 6 that I needed a break and that so happened to be when Silksong came out. However, with a recent patch that buffed Sagat I’m ready to dive back in and really learn Sagat until whenever the New Virtua Fighter Project comes out.

Persona 5 Royal could also have been number one, but I did mod the shit out of the PC version to reduce the time I need to play it. I’ll accept no judgment. I’ve 100% this game twice on PS4, once on Switch, and once on PS5, so a little modding won’t hurt anyone.

The last game on my list I bought before finding out about the BDS Movement, so I’ll be posting a link to that instead.

https://bdsmovement.net/

Between the Switch 2, the Steam Deck, buying games on Steam Sale, and buying a powerful new PC I’m just about done with PlayStation, and my time playing it this year reflects that.

2025

Now look at 2024. All these games I own on Steam now and have paid half the price. Why would I buy anything on PS5 ever again? They mostly don’t have any! Not pictured in 2024 is Dragon’s Dogma 2, which I also own on Steam now. What I’m going to do with my PS5 now, I’m not sure cause not even playing Ghost of Yotei before it comes to PC could entice me. With the basic end of exclusives between the Steam Deck and maybe purchasing a Steam Machine in the future unless Playstation 6 has something crazy to play on it where I can’t play it anywhere else I’m probably done with it.

Books

I’ve been putting in the work over on GeeklyInc.com with my reviews, which is also part of why this post is so delayed after Thanksgiving, and I’ve got two more I hope to get out there this week. I’ve also snapped into it and been reading a lot since Thanksgiving, just about eleven books with two more probably before the end of the year. One of those books is from one of my favorite authors, Jenn Lyons, who this year raised money on Backerkit to publish a science fiction book called Full Negative. The digital copies came out to backers about three weeks ago, and I just finished it about a day ago. I loved it. I’m working on a full review that’ll be published later, but here is a link to the BackerKit if you want to preorder a future copy (Sorry, I don’t know exactly how that works.

While I don’t have my Books of the Year list complete, that’ll be a future post. Here is my article in what I likely consider my favorite book of the year I did for GeeklyInc

Why I Love The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
A Tide of Black Steel Review – A Vanguard for Violence
Brigands & Breadknives Review – Finding Your Own Dreams

Wrestling

The problem every fan has to deal with when it comes to their favorite wrestlers is two things: one day, they’re going to hang up their trunks and no longer wrestle, and when they win the big one, they’ll eventually have to lose the big one. I expected Hangman’s reign to eventually end, maybe even before the year was over, but I did not expect it to end in such a stupid way. Hook being the catalyst to end his reign is such horseshit. Hook’s first match was in December 2021, and it was exciting because he looked like he had a lot of potential as the son of Taz, likely the greatest ECW World Champion ever. The problem is that just a little bit above that level of his debut is where he has stayed since then. He doesn’t seem interested in improving either with just eighty matches since he started. Never seen him advertised for an indie date, hardly ever see him on Ring of Honor, never hear about veterans working with him like they talk about other wrestlers. So, after All In using Hook for this person seems such a foolish idea.

It mostly doesn’t matter, though, because none of this shit after Hangman’s loss is going to matter. A month ago, Samoa Joe being the one to dethrone Hangman at forty-six in what should be a young man’s company, while also having acting jobs he’d have to be written off TV for at a moment’s notice, seemed just as foolish as using Hook. Now MJF is back, and nothing Samoa Joe has done for the past month is going to mean a damn thing. Neither will Swerve Strickland’s return nor his teaming up with Hangman. At World’s End in a four-way for the AEW World Championship, MJF is going to win, and we’re going to have to deal with his bullshit flavor of ice cream until Will Ospreay beats him a Wembley Stadium, which is 251 days away. So, for those who shit on Hangman fans when they were upset (at least they fucking felt something, which is part of the point of pro wrestling), I hope you enjoy Swerve taking a backseat and MJF delivering what is likely going to be a borderline racist promo to Bandido at Maximum Carnage.

To all my readers, I hope you have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holiday, in whatever way you celebrate.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 8 – Orange You Glad For The Memories?

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

In this week’s volume, I talk about Orange Cassidy becoming AEW Men’s World Champion one day, share my progress and a review of Blood for the Undying Throne, and talk about Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Team Cherry’s Samus Aran, and the worst order to play the Yakuza / Like a Dragon games.

Wrestling – Orange Cassidy as AEW World Champion: Important to AEW’s legacy

In the main event of AEW All Out 2023 Orange Cassidy defended the AEW International Championship against Jon Moxley and lost after 326 days, in one of the best matches in AEW history. I already believed he could be before this, but in this reign, Orange proved himself as a main eventer, a regular TV wrestler, a member of your roster you can count on, and get behind. Since he lost the International Championship the first time, his booking has been kind of stop-and-go due to injuries and, to be honest, not capitalizing on the hype of this run. After the match with Moxley, though, Orange stood in the ring with Best Friend members Chuck Taylor, Trent Beretta, and Kris Statlander as the crowd gave him a standing ovation and thanked Orange for this incredible run. The Best Friends are no longer together as a faction, but this photo of them at the end of All Out will live on forever.

Someone posted this photo in a Best Friends channel in a Discord I’m in, and said, “Honestly, this reunion will be so sweet though when OC wins the Men’s World Championship. That had me really thinking about it. AEW has a lot of amazing talent that would make great world champions, but I’ve never been of the belief that every one of them needs to be a world champion, except Orange. There is a list of people who will definitely be the men’s world champion or repeat champion. A lot of them are inevitable.

These three will be the men’s world champion multiple times.

I think Orange needs to be the men’s world champion sooner rather than later. It feels important to All Elite Wrestling‘s legacy to say yes, the man who weighs whatever from whenever should be the guy, no matter how long a reign he has. By mainstream wrestling standards, before AEW was founded, Orange as a top guy would be unconventional, but with his International Championship run, he proved he could be that guy who carried the company on his back to everyone that mattered, and even some who disagreed. Orange Cassidy is a foundational piece of All Elite Wrestling, and to have him in the lineage of one of your top titles is, in my opinion, essential.

Books – The Blood for the Undying Throne Review from Christina

I’m still working my way through The Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur. I haven’t made much progress, but it is the main book I’m reading this week, and by the time next week’s edition of BGW comes out, I will likely have finished the book. In the meantime, you should read my podcast co-host Christina’s review of the book. I haven’t read it yet, just in case of spoilers, but Christina’s reviews on GeeklyInc are always smart, thoughtful, and entertaining. She edited my reviews for a long time, and when we were done they were always better than my earlier drafts.

Blood for the Undying Throne Review: Empire of Death and Death of Empire

Games – Paragon Path, Hollow Knight 3, and the Worst Like A Dragon Order.

A friend got me talking about Mass Effect because he started playing the Legacy Edition, and somehow I’ve been sucked into playing it again, and rather than continuing where I left off in Mass Effect 2 from 2021, I started a brand-new Shepard in Mass Effect 1, and I am already into the same Shepard in Mass Effect 2.

Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2, Street Fighter 4, those were my all-timer Xbox 360 games for a long time. Back then, I thought Mass Effect 2 was a perfect sequel, adding new elements that improved the game and taking away a lot of unnecessary elements from the first. Now, maybe it’s because I’ve played so much more RPGs since the early 2010s, I see it a little differently. I wish some of those elements weren’t so stripped away, the different weapon attachments that change your ammo type, the different armors, and weapons. I miss all of them now in Mass Effect 2. The way they do powers in the second game, either the biotics or the tech powers, is much improved.

Back then, there was this code at the bottom of the 1st game for your custom Shepard that I wrote down because I didn’t quite like how my Shepard looked in Mass Effect 2 when I transported it over, so I kept a .txt file that I used to do this. I still have that .txt, so the Shepard I had back then is the Shepard I’m using now, over fifteen years later. That’s kind of amazing to me.

I’ve never played Mass Effect 3 since I finished it for the first time the year it came out. To be honest, I don’t remember how I feel about the ending, but I do know that I played through Mass Effect 2 all the way through at least 7 or 8 times before ME3 came out, and after finishing the third game, I never played any of them again. I don’t think I was angry or disappointed by the ending. I just kind of felt empty about it. I remember thinking the father telling the story of “the Shepard” to his son, which meant to show how the story of Commander Shepard became a timeline myth, was just corny and poorly done. My point is, I think this time I will play Mass Effect 3 again, this time with all the DLC I missed the first time, and see how I feel about it. I’m sure I’ll write about it.

I was thinking about this. A lot of people have been making fan art of what could be the next Hollow Knight protagonist, and it had me thinking if there was another Hollow Knight game, Team Cherry should just make Hornet their Samus Aran. Hollow Knight as a series doesn’t need a new main character; they’ve already got the best one. In Silksong, Hornet felt like both an established character and developed throughout that game at the same time. In fact, she reminds me a lot of Samus. Hornet speaks with a dignified air of someone who is long-lived and is compassionate to those in Pharloom who deserve it, and shows her prideful warrior side to those who deserve that. So, like Samus visiting new planets, Hornet can go to new kingdoms, gain new powers, and continue on in as many Hollow Knight games as they like to make.

One of my favorite gaming podcasts, Into the Aether did a special episode all about Yakuza 0. One of the co-hosts Brendon Bigley has said and maintains on this podcast that the best order for three of the Like a Dragon games that star Kiryu is Yakuza Kiwami 1 to Yakuza 0 to Yakuza Kiwami 2, and I agree! Kiwami 1 is much more of a breezy introduction to the series than 0 which is a fine introduction to Kiryu and the world of Like a Dragon doesn’t exemplify exactly what you’ll be getting out of most of the Kiryu games or what Kiryu is like as a character. 0 is amazing, but Kiwami 1 is a better introduction.

Do you know what order you shouldn’t play these games in? The order that I played in them, which was pure chaos. Here is the order in which I played the games. In 2018, I played Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6, you know, the prequel game and what was going to be the finale of Kiryu’s story. To this day, I don’t know why I did this. I think I might have picked two I had the money for at the time during a sale, and was like Oh, surely these two will be a good introduction to the series. What was I thinking? You might say, Josh, you knew about Yakuza: Like a Dragon coming out in 2020 with a new protagonist? No, I did not, but that was the game I played next. Then, when they announced Infinite Wealth would have both Kiryu and Ichiban as dual protagonists, I played Yakuza Kiwami 1 and The Man Who Erased His Name. Infinite Wealth basically took up the last quarter of 2024 because it is that damn good. This year, I played Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, followed by Yakuza Kiwami 2. So here is my Like a Dragon order in all its chaos

  • Yakuza 6
  • Yakuza 0
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Yakuza 7)
  • Yakuza Kiwami 1
  • Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
  • Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
  • Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
  • Yakuza Kiwami 2

A list of pure chaos, but I had fun nonetheless. The thing about Like a Dragon is, whether you know the story or not, you just have to buy in, and even if you don’t know the details, you’ll get what is at the heart of the stories, no matter which one you start at.

Yep, we’re good here.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 6 – Hadez II Hangman

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

This is the second week in a row that I’ve released this on Thursday instead of Wednesday, but unlike last week, I purposely delayed this one because I wanted to compare my original thoughts when I wrote this on Monday to what I thought after AEW Dynamite‘s 6th Anniversary episode. If you get the reference from the title, congratulations, you’re old like me.

Games – Hades II

Hollow Knight Silksong and Hades 2 are probably going to be talked about together a lot, despite being very different games. Metroidvanias and Roguelikes share some common ground in that they often have a high difficulty scale, they’re both sequels to successful games in the series, and they’re both developed by independent studios. After twenty hours of Hades II, I have to say I, as in me personally, find it more difficult than Hollow Knight Silksong. The thing about Silksong‘s difficulty, to me, is that it is the same level of difficulty as the first game and requires a skill I had to remember in the process of playing it: patience. Most of the time when I would lose to a boss, it was because of two reasons: first, I didn’t have all the information about the boss’s attacks, and second, I would grow impatient and get too greedy with attacks, hoping to end the fight. With Hades II, you get better at it the more you play it. You develop a muscle memory for the attacks, just like with Silksong, but it requires me a lot more luck, hence the fun of roguelike, and a lot more awareness, which I don’t seem to have. Sometimes I’ll take damage in Hades II, and I do not know why.

Let me back up, though, because I don’t want you to get the impression that I dislike this game. I absolutely love this game. Not once has a run made me feel like I’ve wasted my time. No matter how far I’ve gotten, there has always been something, some kind of resource, some kind of story beat, some kind of future unlockable that I didn’t have before. While I miss aspects of the first one, I am absolutely having a ball with the second one. Without any spoilers, I have had five successful runs so far, four going down and one going up (the first chance you get to go up, you should go up), and the weapon I’ve been most successful with is the Sister Blades, but goddamn do I love the Umbral Flames and the Moonstone Axe. I love all but one of the bosses, not because of any difficulty or anything, but I just find them kind of annoying and uninteresting. The stakes of this game are much higher than those of the first Hades, but it has enough callbacks to the first game that it’ll satisfy returning players. It feels like they both upped the ante of the first game while streamlining so much of it. The fact that doors will tell me if that is where I need to go to get the resources I need is a godsend. If this were any other year but the year Silksong came out, this would probably be my game of the year. Currently, I have it third after Donkey Kong Bananza, but I think it’ll quickly rise to second before too long.

This coming out so soon after Silksong has only one little ember of an idea growing in my mind: Supergiant needs to make a Metroidvania. That’s how I know Silksong is my game of the year, because when I’m playing other games that are also great, whether it’s Hades II, Trails of the Sky 1st Chapter remake, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or whatever else, I’m still thinking about how I want to play more Silksong.

I’ve been removing and redownloading TikTok on my phone a lot this year. Mostly because I will open, and my time blindness will activate, and I’ll lose hours to scrolling videos. Recently, I’ve seen a lot of people reacting to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I have to say I feel quite envious of the people who love this game. It could be with some of these content creators that they’re being entirely performative but from the ones I’ve seen, I doubt it. I just don’t love the story, especially now that I’m in Act 3, where it feels like, without spoilers, too much Clair Obscur and not enough Expedition 33. It feels to me like two stories duct-taped together in a way that isn’t quite working for me, but I still find the battles so amazing. It just doesn’t move me in that way, but then I realized at work what hits me similarly that I can compare it to. What they’re feeling is what I feel in the climax of the Pacifist Run of Undertale and, more specifically, this year’s Chapter 4 of Deltarune. The story, the music, the characters all hit me right in the gut, where I keep my feelings, and I can say I may not feel the same way about E33, but I understand that feeling.

Wrestling – Hangman’s WrestleDream Opponent before and after AEW Dynamite’s 6th Anniversary

Today, Hangman Adam Page is teaming up with two members of the Opps, Samoa Joe and Powerhouse Hobbs, to take on the Death Riders after Daniel Garcia took out Katsuyori Shibata. I imagine Hangman’s championship defense will develop out of this, and I am worried it’ll be a turning heel Samoa Joe. A lot of the people available to be top heels in AEW are either out injured or have already faced Hangman. Don’t get me wrong, in my opinion, Samoa Joe versus Hangman Adam Page will be a fantastic match, but the setup for Joe’s turn feels like shit, we’ve got no one else right now, rather than organic in any way. What reason does he have to turn besides wanting the Men’s World Championship and being Samoa Joe? I’d much prefer Joe just be like “You know, Hangman, you’re right, I did help you win that belt at All In so do me the favor of facing me at WrestleDream.” I hope they make it work either way.

However, while not as high profile, I’d much rather it be someone else. I don’t like fantasy booking, really, because if it doesn’t happen, people tend to be disappointed when an event that was never going to happen doesn’t happen. Still, I’m going to do it here. The Bastard PAC returned to AEW at All Out to the Death Riders with a fresh, shortened haircut and a shirt on his back, unusual for him, but PAC and Hangman were one of the original feuds in AEW, both of them wanting to be the first person to be All Elite Wrestling’s Men’s World Champion. Today’s episode of Dynamite is the 6th Anniversary, so why not run it back? PAC may not be the top guy we wanted him to be when AEW started due to injuries and the pandemic hampering his momentum, but he’s still an extraordinary wrestler, and Hangman, who was already a great wrestler, has only improved since AEW started. That is what I’d like to see at WrestleDream: The Bastard PAC vs. Hangman Adam Page for the Men’s World Championship. It’s probably not going to happen, so I write it here just to get it out of my head. I will not set myself up for disappointment but find joy in what they’ll actually give me.

So, this is me, post-Dynamite, and I have to say I did like the setup for Hangman vs. Joe at WrestleDream. The setup for this was slightly silly, but to be honest, it was completely realistic in how some people act. A more senior employee feels like they’ve been disrespected by their younger colleague, who maybe has been given a bit more, and suddenly they go off the deep end and completely overreact because deep down they’re envious that the younger colleague has something they want. Essentially, and don’t take this as a comment on Joe because Joe rules, but in this specific scenario, he’s got boomer energy going on. So in a way, I found this quite funny, but I’ve also been on short-form video platforms enough to know people can act like this and be harboring this negative energy that they’ll unleash real quick. Safe to say, I thought AEW Dynamite‘s 6th Anniversary was awesome, and WrestleDream is turning out to be a must-see PPV, and so quickly after All Out? FUCK.

Credit to JJ Williams for this photograph.

Anyway, this is starting to get wordy, but having Hangman Page and Kris Statlander as my AEW World Champions, two of my favorite wrestlers, is amazing. I love Kris’s new gear, which she debuted tonight. The one bummer of the show was how many times ICE was advertised on HBO Max, and I’m not the only one unhappy with it. I left my feedback asking for them to no longer show these advertisements, and you can too in the link below in Hangman’s Bluesky post.

fuck ice airing commercials during dynamite, let em know:help.hbomax.com/us/Feedback/tbsnetwork.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/req…

— HANGMAN PAGE (@hangmanpage.bsky.social) 2025-10-02T03:46:45.822Z

Books – Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan and Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

I’m seventy percent of the way through Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan, and I can already see in my head where the story is going, and I’m excited to see how Ryan subverts those ideas by doing something completely different or going in a direction I didn’t expect. The character Ruhlin is in such an interesting spot as someone who never thought of himself as a leader and has been forced to be one. In fact, now that I think about it, all the point-of-view characters are in that position to some extent. I can see the thread of plot that will lead these individual storylines to interweave where they are forced into an alliance against a common foe, just like in John Gwynne’s The Bloodsworn Saga, another high fantasy series from the past few years that I love.

After getting those fancy hardcover editions of Fonda Lee’s The Green Bone Saga, I have the itch to delve back into that series with a highlighter and a pencil for a close reading of my previous copies. I love both a close reading and a reread, which is probably why I like doing my podcast so much.

I’ve also been reading Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders, and the way it plays with grief, magic, and the kind of academia I wanted to be a part of at one time is really hitting me in a good way. It has been a while since I’ve lost time to reading this year, probably since Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent or Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils in the spring.

Speaking of books, the latest episode of the book podcast I’m on, No Page Unturned, is out now. We’re currently covering The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, up to the second book, Harrow the Ninth but we’ve also done all our A Chorus of Dragons by Jenn Lyons, which you can go back to and listen to.

Harrow the Ninth 13-18: Neither Crazy Nor CakeWe discuss what is up with Ianthe, Ianthe's weird room, the unserious Emperor's decor, Harrow and John's conversation about her birth, and hints about what BoE is. We are also wistful for Harrow's door diary. geeklyinc.com/harrow-the-n…

— No Page Unturned Podcast (@nopageunturned.bsky.social) 2025-10-01T21:29:06.648Z

Also check out my co-host Christina Ladd’s review of Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan.

Daedalus Is Dead Review: No Gods, No Monsters

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 4 – Blood, Silk, and Builds

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

Books – Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-Il Kim, translated by Anton Hur

Now that I’ve gotten the Silksong obsession out of my system, I am going to spend the time between now and the end of September catching up on some books I’ve been meaning to finish, including ones mentioned here, and starting the sequel to last year’s Blood of the Old Kings (which the first book is out on paperback now if you want to pick it up yourself). I have my copy of Blood for the Undying Throne, but I haven’t started yet. I’m literally planning to sit down and start it as soon as I finish this book, but what I expect is more of the mystery of how the Empire in the book got its iron grip over this world, and more resistance against it. The Bleeding Empire series so far somehow feels like a throwback to the late eighties – early nineties style of fantasy books, and also a breath of fresh air. One of my cohosts of No Page Unturned, our book podcast, said they can’t wait for me to read this book, as the new country they go to will remind me of Jorat in The Name of All Things by Jenn Lyons, which is one of my favorite books.

Just a little plug, we did do an interview with the author and the translator, who were both a joy to talk to, and I learned a lot about translations and other subjects from them. If you want to check it out.

Games – More Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades 2 1.0 announced.

I have been positively obsessed with Hollow Knight: Silksong. As of writing this, I have done everything to do in the base game one hundred percent, except for one optional boss I missed in the middle part of the game, which I didn’t know was available. I have every mask, every skill, every tool, every crest, and beat the final boss literally like thirty minutes ago. This is definitely one of my top Metroidvanias of all time, and might be one of my favorite games ever. There was only one boss that I became frustrated with after completing Act I, but it always felt like it was on my part rather than the design of the boss itself. I don’t know if others are the same or different, but the patterns of bosses often take me multiple times to catch up, I think perhaps due to my not-so-great eyesight. Like, first try, I’ll see oh this attack causes this attack to pop out, oh I can pogo that I didn’t know that, or I can deflect this attack and get under them, and so forth. The last last boss definitely tested me a lot, and it took quite some time for me to finally beat them, and even then, I think I just barely squeaked by. When I beat them, I didn’t go, “Oh, I’m so glad it’s over.” I wanted to try again and see if I could do it better with different tools and different crests. No such luck so far, but like I said, I just beat it not that long ago.

I don’t want to go into detail about the story or the ending, but I do think I love the story and the characters more than the first game. Hornet’s dialogue is so good, and her interaction with the characters nails what I think her character’s voice and personality based on what we knew of her from the first game. Without spoiling the ending, I do think Team Cherry isn’t done with this franchise or Hornet, and I am looking forward to what they do next. The story of difficulty continues to be a discussion, and I’m firmly in the camp of, just like the FromSoftware games, that difficulty options should be in the games, especially accessibility options. Easier modes should be an option, but if you are able to, normal mode should at least be tried, even if you go through the game on easy mode first. That being said, I am forty now and definitely have had to take breaks from Silksong to rest my hands so they didn’t hurt later, and anyone with accessibility issues should be able to enjoy a game like this with the options available.

Anyway, I had to open my big mouth. I believe I mentioned it here, but as soon as I said Silksong was going to be my game of the year, a Nintendo Direct aired shortly afterward and announced that Supergiant’s Hades 2 was coming out of early access and into 1.0 on September 25th. That’s just next Thursday already, after Silksong has just come out on the 4th! That’s absolutely crazy, but I don’t think personally it’s going to topple Silksong or Donkey Kong Bananza from my top 2 games simply because, quite frankly, I don’t really care for roguelike games in general. There are only two I’ve liked, Hades and Dead Cells, and Hades 2 is about to become the third, most likely. Meanwhile, Metroidvanias and 3D Platformers are some of my all-time favorite genres, but my heart is open to Hades 2 being number one.

I meant to mention this last year, but some games had to get their releases out of the way when Silksong came out, and to be honest, some of them I had not heard of before it was reported about their delays. The one that stood out to me was called Demonschool, sort of Persona 1–2 meets Fire Emblem kind of deal. I think it looks really cool and just wanted to give it some love since they had to delay til November.

Wrestling – AEW All Out 2025

AEW’s All Out is this weekend, and I am excited, as 95% of the time, AEW pay-per-views are outstanding, with the occasional, but I won’t deny the build for some of the show has been a little wonky. I feel bad for Wardlow who was injured on his return and was penned in to get the AEW Men’s World Heavyweight Championship match against Hangman on the PPV, but as someone who was down on Wardlow after Double or Nothing 2022 the guy is a TV defense at beast. I much prefer the idea of TNT Champion Kyle Fletcher challenging Hangman as a fun parallel to last year’s Jack Perry (TNT) vs. Bryan Danielson (World) match. Not only that, but I’ve liked that they played with the history of Hangman at All Out by bringing up his championship match against Chris Jericho at the first All Out. Honestly, it only occurred to me this week, but the list of top heels available right now to challenge Hangman seems kind of thin, almost to a point I understand why they didn’t pull the plug on MJF’s contract for a world title match, but it doesn’t change how I feel about how dogshit that angle was before Forbidden Door.

Likewise, the build to this four-way for Toni Storm’s AEW Women’s World Heavyweight Championship has been kinda thin, especially for Toni Storm. However, women’s fourways in AEW have a long history of overdelivering, and it is another parallel to how Toni Storm won the title for the first time at All Out 2022, which also included Jamie Hayter. I’m always rooting for my girl and Long Island’s own Kris Statlander, but I am not quite sure if this is how I want her to win, nor am I too keen on her turning heel again and joining the Death Riders. Her face turn last year was badly done, but it felt like she was gaining momentum as a face after facing Mercedes Mone twice for the TBS Title in some outstanding matches from both of them, then they spent months of Kris trying to find some resolution with Willow Nightingale that never went anywhere. So, it’s not like the heel turn wouldn’t turn out well, it’s more like I feel like they’ve wasted the potential of what they were building with her as a face the past year, after an unnecessary face turn. I’d almost be more excited if it turned out Jamie Hayter was the one turning heel and joining the Death Riders, as she is hard-hitting and has a lot of history with Toni Storm. Just in general, I’d like them to do more with Statlander and Willow for the next year.

I’ll have more on All Out in next week’s post, but I will tell you that I have absolutely not given a shit about this Cope and Christian reunion against FTR. Christian is the only person in this match that I care for. Cope has been so uninteresting since his return at last year’s World’s End, and while much more entertaining as heels FTR still only does so much for me. If this match is the main, I’m going to be annoyed as either of the world champions are much more deserving, although I do prefer it being Hangman vs. Fletcher, we’ll see what happens.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 1 – Noodles, Knights, and NJPW

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I’m not going to give a long explanation yet to what this is or why I’m writing, because before I know it, I’ll have a thousand words, and that’ll be this entire post before I get to the point of the thing. To sum it up, I want to write about what I like in a shorter format than my book reviews on Geeklyinc.com or on No Page Unturned. I love books, I love video games, and I love wrestling, hence Book, Games, Wrestling. I hear the Aesop Rock song Food, Clothes, Medicine when I say it, but here we go before I get off track again.

Book – Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

My review will be up soon enough, but I have to say, my reading habits this summer have been such a mess. My To-Be-Read pile has grown too tall this summer, yet my reading habits have been subpar. Fall and Winter are such better reading seasons for me as someone who doesn’t do well in the heat.

Automatic Noodle, though, has been a book I’ve been thinking about since I first heard about it. The premise is essentially set in an unidentified future, where robots want to, for once, serve good food to their patrons and are given an opportunity, out of sheer luck, to open their own noodle shop. It’s labelled as cozy, but there is definitely a cloud of desperation hanging over most of the plot, both from the bots, the humans, and the overall world that is in the vibe of a dystopian future run by megacorporations that we seem to be getting a lot of, gee, wonder why? The feeling of dread and oppression is not what I would call cozy, but I’d still recommend it regardless.

I mean, just because it’s marketed as cozy but doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting read. The oppression of sentient robots is a subject I’m sure will be explored more as technology advances and more rights get taken away in the United States and beyond. I will admit I’m holding back for my review, pretty sure, but I really enjoy how Newitz makes each of the bots distinct.

Game – Hollow Knight – Team Cherry

Silksong is real and will be out as of this post in a little over a week. I’ve done everything but the Godmaster DLC on the Switch edition of Hollow Knight because by the time it was out, I was already finished with Hollow Knight, at over 100%. Plus, in 2018, on the Nintendo Switch, I remember being kind of insane, as well as my life at the time being kind of insane. When I bought a Steam Deck last August, Hollow Knight was one of the first games I bought during the next Steam sale because, quite honestly, though it had been six years since I played it, I still felt it was one of the greatest games of all time or at least one of my greatest games of all time.

Now that Silksong is coming out, I felt it was time to play it on PC/Steam Deck. It was like riding a bike again to be honest, and I was aiming to get that achievement of beating the game at 100% under 20 hours. I got very close at about 20 hours and 23 minutes, so annoyingly close. I do not remember there being achievements on the Switch edition; it probably had in-game quests as the equivalent, but it’s not quite the same. Take or leave achievements, I do often find them fun, even if Steam achievements feel lesser than other platforms. I’ve left just enough time between Hollow Knight playthroughs that the challenge remains thrilling, yet not so much that the backtracking feels tedious, while retaining enough memory to avoid repetition. I’ve already beaten it, and once I did, I thought to myself, “Oh shit, it’s still not September 4th.” I started a new file, intending to hopefully get that achievement this time, and also to leave Zote to die, the ungrateful little shit that he is.

Wrestling – AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2025

The build to Forbidden Door was messy, it’s always messy, and to be quite honest, even with the mess I still do find it fun. However, a lot of MJF’s creative ideas I do not find fun, and it felt like, with the stipulations he had forced Hangman to agree to under the pretense that he was going to light Mark Briscoe on fire, that I’m being forced to watch Triple H from the early and mid 2000s reborn. In 2023, I was annoyed with MJF, but in 2025, I’m just tired of it. His promos to all his opponents feel the same; his nicknames for his opponents are all terrible, not in a fun way, but in a way that makes me want to look at my Steam Deck and continue playing Hollow Knight. It just feels all the same. But Josh, you might ask, isn’t that just what heels do? Well, I’m not sick of what Kyle Fletcher and the Don Callis family are doing, nor since All In am I sick of what Jon Moxley and the Death Riders are doing. Ricochet with the Gates of Agony is quite interesting, and Christian Cage, who often has the same edgelord shtick as MJF, quite frankly does it better because he’ll do enough to at least give me the illusion of changing it up. Except for Christian, the difference between a lot of those heels and MJF is that they actually wrestle quite frequently. Maybe if MJF took up so much TV time wrestling as well as promos and segments I might feel different but as of right now, I’m quite tired of MJF.

This isn’t about MJF, though; it’s about Forbidden Door, and despite Max’s terribly convoluted idea for a finish, yes, I am one hundred percent sure it was his idea because it reminded me of the era of WWE I know he loves. Hangman’s world title defense against him, I thought, was excellent before that. It’s how I felt about the pay-per-view overall, quite good overall. Hiromu Takahashi looked great against Kyle Fletcher. Toni Storm defeated Athena in what I thought was a very good match, but I thought they might be holding back for a future rematch. I took a break during the beginning of the tag title match and came back just in time to see some mysterious masked men drive the Hurt Syndicate back to the airport before Bandido could even get the pin on whichever member of FTR was pinned (I think Dax? Don’t correct me, I do not care.). Bozilla, Persephone, and Alex Windsor all showed out for the four-way against Mercedes Mone for the TBS Title, impressing me with ideas I don’t think I’ve seen in four-ways before, and it felt like Mercedes made sure to make them all look good in defeat. Swerve versus Okada might have bee my match of the night. Say what you want about Okada’s efforts I felt he really put his all or at the very least 90% into his defense of the Unified Title against Swerve. The main event lights-out cage match, was both fun and intense, and if this is the last we see from Ospreay and Swerve in a while, it was a great showing by both of them.

Was it my favorite Forbidden Door? No. Was it the best Forbidden Door? I don’t think so either but I felt happy watching it, and when it was over, I was more curious about what was going to happen next rather than worried about the direction AEW was going.