By Nelson Schneider - 12/07/25 at 01:11 PM CT
Welcome back to another installment of the MeltedJoystick Review Round-Up. Here’s what our staff has reviewed since last time:
Nelson’s Reviews:
I made the mistake of researching a game after buying it and deciding to make it the next title to come off my backlog. What I learned killed my motivation to play anything (besides “Warframe”) for an additional two months. I’m surprised I got anything done during the Fall, but I finally ripped off the band-aid, blasted through the bad game as an excuse to test Steam for Linux, played a second good game in about a week, and the crew FINALLY finished “Baldur’s Gate 3 after nearly a year of chipping away at it in pathetic 2-hour chunks.
Bramble: The Mountain King – 2/5
Revenge of the Savage Planet – 4.5/5
Baldur’s Gate 3 – 4.5/5
Chris’ Review:
Chris officially finished his last Backlog Ablution game for the year... and nothing else. He then announced that he would NOT be playing anymore huge-ass Sandbox games until “Grand Theft Auto 6,” whenever RockStar finally decides to release it... but then he proceeded to immediately start playing “The Outer Worlds,” which, while admittedly not a gigantic Sandbox game, is STILL A DAMNED SANDBOX GAME.
Elden Ring – 4/5
Nick’s Reviews(?!):
Holy crap! Nick, who normally doesn’t play anything, played and reviewed a lot of games during the Fall, one of them not even on his obligatory Ablution list. Unfortunately, the only thing that motivates Nick to play games is for the games in question to be incredibly mediocre (or outright terrible) NES titles, leading to some pretty bad hot-takes that do NOT represent the enlightened views of the rest of the MJ Crew or its Editor.
Super Mario Bros. (NES) – 5/5
Baba is You – 4/5
Final Fantasy (NES) – 4.5/5
Featured User Review:
MeltedJoystick users also seem to have taken most of the Fall season off to focus on other things, as we didn’t get any user-submitted reviews that meet the bare minimum baseline we’re looking for. Maybe there will be more time for fun and games over the Winter Holidays?
