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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.
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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.
It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.
2025 has gone by in a flash, hasn't it? Well, apart from the days I've spent tabulating all your Game of the Year votes and presenting the results here - that has felt like an eternity and I think has given me permanent neck pain. But, let's not worry about that. I'm sure you'll agree it was worth the sacrifice.
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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.
I got into Balatro late, far too late to earn any respect from my peers, but once I did it engulfed my life for months. I eventually had to go cold turkey at the beginning of 2025, but that hasn't stopped my eyes from wandering towards it every time I look for a new game to play on Steam.
But now I've found something else to quell my urges, and no it's not a therapist. I'm actually talking about Chosen Garden, a new roguelike deckbuilder that's set to come out March this year. I've been playing its little demo, and I have a wonderfully awful feeling that it's going to do the job too well.
In Chosen Garden, you take care of a magical garden, planting loads of fruit, veg, and flowers, alongside adopting cute animals and having to deal with arduous weather conditions that turn up once every three rounds.
You start with a 9x9 plot full of plants. You'll then get a limited number of turns to harvest said plants in a 3x3 harvest zone (you can expand beyond this tile by tile). There'll be a point goal each you need to meet or exceed each round and you can improve how many points you get depending on what plants you have in your garden, as well as other perks like animals and tools.
Each plant will also have a unique perk. For example, when you harvest a Cherry Blossom, you can add the adjacent tiles to the harvest zone, and when you harvest a wild flower, you get +5 Base or +5 Mult. Depending on how successful your harvest is, you'll also get coins which you can spend on getting new plants, tools, or animals at the end of each round. It really does follow the same formula as Balatro, which is good news, as if you played that, then you'll catch onto Chosen Garden quickly.
I started my second run on the Zoo map pretty relaxed. I'd been given comfort grass as a base plant that, when harvested, gives a +4 Base or +4 Mult and had chosen the Spinach as the accompanying starting plant, which adds a random 0-12 to the Mult alongside a small chance to gain 20 coins.
I'd found a mythical dragon, adopted a dog, planted watermelon seeds, and it was all going so well until round six. The adverse weather condition kicked in, and I was in the midst of a sandstorm. During this round, my first harvest would give no score, not too bad right? Wrong.
I decided to be smart and pick a small plot to harvest in the top right corner, 4x4, not much of a waste, but I hadn't realised my new Pea plant that was in the harvest zone would randomly add directly and indirectly adjacent uncommon and rare plants to the harvest zone, meaning I nearly took out half the grid in a round that would count to nothing. Dammit. Now I only had four more turns to gain 1000 points and half the grid to work with.
Needless to say, it didn't end well. Ending short of 300 points, I wasn't able to get across the point threshold, and my round ended there. It's ok though, games like this are meant to be short-lived, until the fateful day the stars align, and you manage to go on a generational run. I am still waiting for that day, but I hope it will come soon.
2026 games: All the upcoming games
Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together
While the old saying goes 'A game in the basket is worth two in Steam Wishlist', as we teeter into a new year it's good to highlight a couple of the games shuffling our way. Especially when there are quite so many of them that include big stompy mechs. Some of them as big as cities. My engine oil-starved heart beats and thumps in anticipation.
I've tried to keep the list to games confirmed for release next year – tragically cutting The Free Shepherd, which is planned to release in 2027 – but there is one exception.
So let's begin with the outlier that's likely to wander tardily into 2027.
A recap: of the seven hopefuls I slipped into our bulk 2025 list of "Oh, that looks alright" games, only three actually released in 2025, and one of them wasn’t very good. If it’s the hope that kills you, I am therefore dead four, arguably five times over. Real Necron shit, honestly.
RPS Advent Calendar voting remains an esoteric and mercurial process, even to those of us who practice in it. If two games get the same amount of votes, which goes higher in the list? Did Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor technically release in 2025 or 2024? These are questions most of us dare not ask, and those that do often vanish mysteriously overnight. Until January 3rd or so, when they come back from holiday.
One thing’s for sure: I had a bunch of games that no-one else voted for. Don’t be sad, games. I still like you.
For the past month we have been shouting about the games we consider to be the best games of 2025. As is tradition, our choices for the RPS Advent Calendar haven't appeared in an order from least good to best – to us, they're all special.
However, that's not true of the game behind door number 24. When the team's votes were counted, it was a close thing, with only five points in it, but there was a winner.
RPS's favourite game of 2025 is Hades 2.
Now, perhaps someone would like to explain why we didn't give Supergiant's roguelite wonder a Bestest Best sticker?
Sova is a narrative-driven action roguelite set in a surreal sci-fantasy world where every run reshapes your story through expressive combat and deeply branching dialogue.
In Sova you navigate the ever-shifting Conjecture – fighting, exploring, and piecing together a story that bends with your decisions. Walk away from conversations, interrupt characters, or punch them mid-sentence. Choices leave lasting marks on quests, environments, and combat as … Read More
The post Sova – Beta Sign Up first appeared on Alpha Beta Gamer.
To successfully deliver presents to every child on Earth within a single Christmas eve, Santa Claus would need to travel in the region of half the speed of light – enough to vaporise the flesh and disintegrate the sleighs of mere mortals. He’d therefore appreciate the sheer go-fastness of the roguelite running game that’s blasting out of door #3.
It’s Haste!
I'm still a little burned-out on Carrollian adaptations after Nightingale, but I will not let that tarnish my enjoyment of Wonder of Blue, a fey 2D labyrinth roguelite based on fiction's most famous Alice after Alice Bee (RPS in peace). It features a lovely selection of pixelart colour palettes, and some pleasingly tricksy enemies. You play Liddell – yes, I too had forgotten Alice's second name isn’t “in Wonderland” – and you are trying to navigate a series of procedurally generated dungeons made up of single-screen rooms. At the end of the journey waits the Red Queen.
Some days, I think I'd rather gouge my eyes out than read another email about a new roguelike or roguelite. This confuses me, because many of favourite games are roguelikes or roguelites, including Dead Cells, Balatro, FTL: Faster Than Light, and the recent Morsels, a reeking procedural dumpsite that speaks to the overproduction of Rogue/rogue derivatives at large.
Roguish games are everywhere right now. According to SteamDB, 1602 games tagged "roguelike" were published in 2024 out of 18567 total, versus 312 out of 9655 in 2020. Stir in roguelites and the countless games that advertise themselves as having "roguelike mechanics", and I sincerely worry that you're describing the majority of PC releases from the past couple of years.
Original TimeSplitters and GoldenEye developers David Doak and Steve Ellis have reunited to make - oh, those scalliwags, you're going to love this - a roguelike word puzzler called Beyond Words, which is being billed as "Balatro meets Scrabble".
I get no joy from skills and gear in games that tweak back of house stats. An upgrade that adds 0.5% to explosion radii. A helmet that multiplies your base 'luck' total. A god's blessing that increases your character's attack rate by 4%. On paper these boosts change a game, but I often find them unsatisfyingly intangible in practice. I am but a simple editor of words and, as such, numbers confuse me. If I had wanted to be up to my chin in numbers, I would have followed my uncle into the abacus-making business. (For one thing, I'm glad my house isn't filled with loose beads waiting to be painfully trod on while barefoot.)
Which is why I'm surprised by how much I'm enjoying Monsters Are Coming, a game that if you lifted up and shook would rattle with invisible numbers like a rainstick.
Gang of Frogs is a third person co-op shooter where outlaw frogs sail through the galaxy, plundering loot and fighting hordes of monstrous bugs in fast-paced roguelite action.
In Gang of Frogs you pilot spacecraft as part of a frog gang roaming the cosmos in search of treasure and flies to eat. You’ll upgrade your weapons and equipment as you progress, creating increasingly powerful builds … Read More
The post Gang of Frogs – Beta Sign Up first appeared on Alpha Beta Gamer.STAND: Sins of the Immortals is a brutal third-person hack and slash where immortal warriors battle endless waves of monsters in a dark fantasy realm corrupted by forbidden powers.
In STAND: Sins of the Immortals you play as one of three cursed immortals – Tank, Archer, or Samurai – accompanied by AI companions (or friends once co-op arrives). The demo features hordes of dark creatures … Read More
The post STAND: Sins of the Immortals – Beta Demo first appeared on Alpha Beta Gamer.
