My Favourite Games From The UW Fall 2025 Game Jam

Q: What do military battleships, speed dating, brainrot, kittens, and the ION all have in common?

A: You can turn all of them into great video games in 72 hours or less!

Last weekend, the UW Game Jam brought together over a hundred student developers in Waterloo (and beyond) for a marathon weekend of rapid-fire game development. Teams received a theme on Thursday and had a playable game on Sunday—that’s only 72 hours to make an entire video game from scratch!

The Fall 2025 iteration of the jam managed to break the records for number of participants and number of games submitted—a record set just last term. I’m absurdly proud to see more and more people each term coming to the jam to step out of their comfort zone, make their first game, and see how rewarding it can be to work on interactive art you care about, surrounded by a supportive and talented community (and an extra huge shoutout to the UW Game Dev Club exec team for how well-organized everything was)!

I’ve been traveling for the last few days and so I couldn’t find time to actually make anything myself, but I was so excited to play them all so that I could recommend to you the ones I liked the best. I was so excited, in fact, that I forgot the publication deadline for this article was the day after the jam. Whoops!

All that to say that there’s still plenty of games I haven’t gotten a chance to try. I’m sure they’re all worth your time to check out, but here are some of the ones I can personally recommend.

Dreadnought: A great example of how strong theming and art can make a simple game idea feel dramatic and epic. At its core, this is a game that could be played on pen and paper, but the layer of narrative theming around it—with letters from the front, messages received over the comms, UI you need to physically navigate, and a delicious moment of anticipation when you fire your gun—elevate it to something I got really invested in.

Cat vs. Bot: Games made for game jams are kind of the equivalent of flash fiction—it’s a chance to explore a short, punchy idea that only needs to sustain 5-10 minutes of gameplay, not several hours. Cat vs. Bot is a great example of this. It’s a short platformer game where, at each checkpoint, your controls are jumbled and rearranged in a new way. I love games that play around with the physical way you control them, and having to contort your hands to control your character in weirder ways each time is very funny.

Operator! Operator!: A simple game about connecting different nodes on a telephone switchboard to each other to connect the appropriate signals. In the later stages, it does feel really frantic, and you feel like a real multitasking telephone operator. Shoutout to the actual rope, which is a lot of physical fun to fiddle around with. I almost lost a few times because I just got distracted jiggling it around.

Mission: Seducible: A speed-dating game with incredibly high production values (full voice acting is CRAZY for a jam game) where you need to determine who of your three speed-dating partners is your true love, and who is an enemy spy trying to kill you. Not to flex, but I got the spy AND got a date on my first try, boosting my ego to dangerous levels.

I Heart Ion: A really fun idea for a visual novel where you only kinda understand what your romantic interest is actually saying. I got rejected by Ion-chan, which brought my ego back down to earth. Maybe a light rail girl and a human boy can’t fall in love after all...

Nostos: A really relaxing “press the button to the rhythm” game which is almost more of an interactive music video than a game. Play as a child on a boat in the ocean trying to signal a lighthouse for help and enjoy the original (!!!) music.

Jack Gordon’s Home Defense Simulator (2007) (5G Capable): On the exact opposite end of the relaxation spectrum is this brainrot-themed shoot-em-up game. As someone who doesn’t use TikTok, this is what I imagine it feels like to be on TikTok.

Rising Edge: A really creative tower defense game where not only do you need to construct the towers, but also the circuitry and wiring that links those towers together. You need to construct your own ad-hoc control system and manage your increasingly complex wiring to keep your defenses intact. This could easily be fleshed out into a full priced game.

Waterloo Is Not Love Island: A short and sweet narrative game with an excellent title about an oblivious new student searching for love in the wake of a murder. Great character names, too.

If you’re interested in playing some of these games (or any of the 20-ish I didn’t get a chance to try), head over to the itch.io page to try them all. Make sure to leave a nice comment and make someone’s day!

And if you’re feeling inspired and want to make your own game soon, you should join the Waterloo Game Development Club! Besides events like the termly Game Jam, they run weekly meetings on Thursdays where people give talks on game development and share what they’re working on, and Game Potlucks on Saturdays, where people bring a game they’ve been playing and show off why they like it.

Most importantly, though, it’s a great community of passionate people who love making games, and can encourage you to keep working at it when you get demotivated. If you’re at all interested, you should go to a meeting. To join, check out the Instagram and Discord links at the Linktree.