I was in the gift shop of a small art gallery the other day when I bought a postcard depicting a bunch of different keys. The postcard turned out to be a reproduction from the six-volume dictionary and encyclopedia Larousse du XXe siècle (me neither) and the keys come in a gorgeous range of shapes and sizes. The Roman key is broad and boot-shaped. The Merovingian looks like part of a crank.
Boy am I glad to see Styx again. Not because I felt any great yearning to return to the murky, Temu-Warhammer dark fantasy setting of long-forgotten RPG Of Orcs and Men, you understand. But because Blades of Greed represents an ever dwindling chunk of ore from that once rich seam of B-tier games that are just bloody good at what they do. The zenith of the "shorter games with worse graphics" category that people on Bluesky claim to want (and rarely seem to actively seek out, alas).
It's tempting to believe that the Diablo 3 playerbase has been eclipsed by a resurgent Diablo 2: Resurrected on one side, and Diablo 4 on the other, but according to Blizzard, that's not the case. Apparently there's still a "massive" playerbase playing Diablo 3, and it counts players in the "millions".
Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian has changed its stance on generative AI following backlash faced at the end of last year.
Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin would probably be quite surprised by how the world of Elden Ring - which he helped developer FromSoftware create a backstory for - actually turned out in the end.
The Duffer brothers, creators of Stranger Things, have said the final battle of the TV series was partially inspired by Baldur's Gate 3. Matt Duffer was apparently playing the game while devising the showdown.
Polish developer Rebel Wolves has unveiled the main musical theme for its promising dark fantasy role-playing The Blood of Dawnwalker, and surprise surprise, it sounds a lot like The Witcher 3.
There are a few series staples you can expect from Final Fantasy: a guy called Cid, moogles, chocobos, that lovely arpeggio motif in the music, and… surveys? If you've been reading this site for a while - or, indeed, following the Final Fantasy series - you'll know that Square Enix likes to lobby the fanbase to hear our thoughts about the series' identity and future.
43.8 million player votes later, the winners of the 2025 Steam Awards have been announced, with Hollow Knight: Silksong securing top prize, Game of the Year.
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.
I think a lot of Dispatch can be distilled into a single moment at the beginning of the game when the player comes face to face with a penis. There it is, dangling visibly between the legs of an unclothed, toxic-drenched super-villain you're about to fight. The camera all but centers on it. There's no way you can miss it unless you've flipped the nudity switch off, in which case it's replaced by an even more conspicuous black box that only amplifies the naughtiness of the part hidden within. But most people don't turn nudity off because they're expecting boobs. That's what we usually see. In Dispatch, however, it's a penis we see waggling unavoidably on our screens.
I've got an issue with people saying 'turn-based games are back, baby'. For those with the eyes to see, they never went away. Yes, Metaphor Refantazio and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 might have reminded the masses that tactical min/maxing is video game catnip, and that there are so many brain-scratching things you can do with the formula, but the past few generations has been rife with gems in the genre: Dungeon Encounters, the Shin Megami Tensei series, Sea of Stars, Chained Echoes, and Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes immediately spring to mind, but there are dozens more, too.
A senior developer who worked on Larian's much loved and critically acclaimed Baldur's Gate 3 has moved studios, and is now working with Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk studio CD Projekt Red.
Styx: Blades of Greed - the next entry in Cyanide Studio's infiltration series, which plops players into the shoes of a caustic goblin - will now release next year.
More people have downloaded mods for Baldur's Gate 3 than Larian ever expected. "Way more than we ever expected," studio founder and Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke shared on X. The total downloaded-mods number now stands at more than 350m, the studio revealed, and more than 10,000 mods have been uploaded for other people to play.
Blizzard has promised players of World of Warcraft that player housing, which launches in a limited form today (tomorrow across Europe), is going to be expanded in every patch and in future expansions released for the online game.
When Konrad Tomaskiewicz, the former director of The Witcher 3 and now the director of The Blood of Dawnwalker, tells me his new role-playing game has no main quest, I have to ask him to repeat himself because that's an unusual thing for someone making an RPG to say.
It all began innocently enough. It was September and Megabonk was blowing up on Steam, and I was curious. What was this game that had arrived without a formal introduction and raced to more than 100,000 concurrent players? It was the latest in a line of unpredictable viral hits, and I wanted to know more. I wanted to know who it came from, whether it was a slapdash cash-grab made by an opportunistic company, or whether there was something, or someone, more genuine behind it.
