I played The Sims 2 for the first time in 2008 and I was hooked from the first couple of hours. I loved how the game presented itself as a template for all of my creative outbursts at the time, especially Build Mode. I believe this is where my love for level design began – I was free to utilise the tools in the game to create anything I wanted, something unique. 

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I still play The Sims 4 today – the talented custom content artists and mod developers in the community inspire me to constantly try new things.

I still remember Minecraft in its beta phase when it was free, water and lava sounded the same and Herobrine was at large. I first started playing in early 2011 and, similarly to The Sims, I love the freedom it gave me. The catch was that if I wanted to build or craft anything, I would need to source the materials first. This would push me to venture into the world and its depths.

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There have been so many changes and improvements to the game over the years that when I play it nowadays, I'm almost always overwhelmed!

Portal is where my interest in puzzle games began, I love the way it ties its story into the different levels you have to complete and reveals little by little at a time, making it all the more addicting. What kept me interested in it, other than the story, is the fact that every single room was solvable – something that I doubted time and time again during my first playthrough. It was fascinating to me how a puzzle could go from impossible to perfectly solvable with just a shift of perspective.

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I often replay the Portal games!

When I first started playing Skyrim I didn’t have too much experience with combat games, I found myself dying instantly dying at the shout of the Draugr Death Overlord in any given dungeon on the map, let alone a powerful dragon. Eventually, I started paying close attention to the skill trees and the build I was using, completed the main quest and even went on to do the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild side quests, along with several others.

Finishing it gave me a sense of confidence to play through other similar games!

One of the best indie games I have ever played Papers, Please, pleasantly surprised me with a heartfelt and well-executed storyline which more than made up for the lack of traditional game mechanics. I’m Bulgarian and, although I wasn’t around during the communist regime, I learned a lot about it from my grandparents and their struggles. I think the game does a good job portraying the challenges civilians were faced with at the time.

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In late 2024, I platinumed Papers, Please on Steam!

When GTA V first came out for PlayStation and Xbox, I watched a couple of playthroughs on YouTube and it looked amazing to me. I am and have always been a PC gamer, when Rockstar released it on PC in 2015, I was finally able to play it. I was obsessed - the driving mechanics, the shooting mechanics, the story, the ability to switch between characters, the city of Los Santos, all of those things and many more made me fall in love with it instantly.

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I started playing GTA V Online in 2023 & 2024 with friends, and it still holds a special place in my heart.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to be a PC gamer with the PlayStation exclusives Sony Interactive kept releasing. God of War was no exception to this – once I had a taste of what the world and story had to offer, I knew I had to play it. I ventured into Midgard and was instantly immersed and infatuated with the story and the amount of lore it had to offer. It wasn’t long until I finished the whole game and was left amazed by absolutely every aspect of it.

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(Beating all Valkyries still a work in progress!)

Check out my God of War project!

In the summer of 2020 at the height of the COVID pandemic, I had saved up some money and finally decided to buy my first console. With the craze around Animal Crossing: New Horizons at the time, I decided the perfect console for me would be the Nintendo Switch.

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One Nintendo experience stood out to me the most and that was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The shrine puzzles reminded me of my Portal days and the story has me coming back to BotW to this day.

Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding which is, quite literally, genre-defying. That genre is ‘stranding’, as he put it. When I first started playing it a couple of months ago, I would have never thought it would be joining God of War and Portal among my favourite games ever. I started my playthrough off disliking it, but that changed as I persisted to Episode 3 where vehicles, hematic grenades and road building were introduced.

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 I’m still playing through everything it has to offer and, given the density of content, I’ll be doing that for a while – something I’m very pleased with!

I've always been deadly afraid of Souls-like combat-forward games like Elden Ring. So much so that I hadn't touched a FromSoftware game my whole life until I played Elden Ring. My partner got it as a birthday present this year and, with the existence of the Seamless Co-op mod, I decided to get the game so we could play it together. My love for immersive gameplay, open-world exploration, RPG character building and sorceries, was no match for my fear!

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The level design is genius - areas seamlessly connect and, once you learn the map, there is no stopping you!

One of my favourite game narratives of all time! I've played Undertale at the end of every year for the past 3 years or so. It's almost like a way for me to reflect on my year and get a dose of DETERMINATION for the next one!

Very unique world-building, story-telling, character design, combat, and soundtrack - almost everything about this game is 10/10 for me. It's especially impressive because it was achieved with very minimalistic assets & mechanics.