Donkey Kong Bananza is down to $62.99 at Amazon right now, $7 off its original list price, and a 10% saving for those counting. That’s a pretty rare discount for a Nintendo game not that long after release, 6 months at most by my estimates.
Hello and Happy New Year - is it okay to say that now? I'm not sure where the cut-off point is. Some people still have their Christmas trees up. We had ours out before New Year. Welcome back to What We've Been Playing! Or as I like to call this particular edition of it: What We Played Over Christmas, because it's been a couple of weeks since we've talked.
Kazutaka Kodaka is one of the most recognisable names in the games industry for those who really enjoy anime-inspired visual novels. Recently, he led The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy's development, and the his name may be familiar to anyone au fait with the Danganronpa series. But the creator's journey to get back into the world of game development wasn't exactly a straight line.
The team over at Xbox has added two previously unannounced games to its Game Pass subscription service.
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.
Nier producer Yosuke Saito has teased that there's "just a little something" on the way for fans in 2026.
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.
I think these days, after years of Nintendo outright eschewing the console power rat race and focusing instead on different ways to play and honing their core craft, we forget that Nintendo is still a pretty sharp company in terms of technical innovation. Raw power went aside with the Wii, but the company's dedication to tinkering around the edges to create stand-out original experiences in other ways remained - or perhaps even intensified. There's been a lot of examples over the years, of course, from clever game design innovations to zany peripherals - but Donkey Kong Bananza has to be one of the finest showcases of that thinking from Nintendo in years.
You know what South Park feels like to me? It feels like randomly waking up in the middle of the night, looking around your bedroom as you think "cripes, it's still not morning yet?" A feeling of waiting for the inevitable, the end, or the beginning. Not so much the contents of the show, none of that needs all that much thought, more so its very existence, which is now apparently transplanting itself into Fortnite.
Here we go. The picks of mine which made it into the advent calendar weren’t embarrassing enough, so now I get to flick a few extras at you like discarded bits of liquorice I’ve found down the back of the sofa. Open wide.
In the grand spirit of Christmas, I want everyone to know that for this year's RPS Advent Calendar, I nominated a bunch of games about Japanese assassins and at least one point and click thriller featuring a netherworld of torture devices. Some of those assassins appeared on the final calendar, but not all, and the point and click didn't make the cut.
We reach the penultimate door, and good cripes has it been a long time coming. When was the last door? Like 2017? Ah well, surely everyone’s been completely normal about it.
It’s Hollow Knight: Silksong!
Around May last year, the one and only Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame announced an RPG that was meant to be some kind of mix between classic Zelda, and Diablo, and Thimbleweed Park, that last one being another of the game designer's notable works. It never got a full reveal, or even a name, and unfortunately it seems it never will, as it's essentially been canned.
Keep Driving captures the dream of a road trip, a coming of age experience where you’re finally able to start motoring around the world in your own set of wheels. Your sense of wonder’s still intact and each place you visit on brings fresh surprises.
But the game isn't a schmaltzy dip into wanderlust, or a blinkered memory of youth and a lack of responsibilities. Lurking in the background is the nervousness of inexperience, which transforms mundane tasks into nightmares you must overcome.
Right now, Team Cherry's future is pretty unclear. There is some kind of Hollow Knight: Silksong DLC that'll be coming somewhere along the line, but understandably the developer is keeping their cards close to their chest in terms of what's actually next. They certainly do have some ideas on how they would expand Hollow Knight, i.e. by not making any direct sequels, much like how Silksong isn't one. But in a recent interview, Team Cherry spoke (ever so slightly) more openly about their own future and how the thing that might get in their way most is, well, death.
Look, ok, I get it Square Enix. I understand why you put 2B in absolutely everything. She is a character with particular qualities that certain audiences found very appealing! But I am begging you… stop putting her in things. I'm sick to death of seeing her everywhere, her blindfolded eyes somehow still staring directly into my soul, begging me to spend money on endless gacha rolls, but this time in Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis, the next game she's set to appear in.
Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert has called time on his previously teased but largely under the radar RPG.
Industry leaders have attended a memorial service for Tomonobu Itagaki, the creator of Dead or Alive and the 3D Ninja Gaiden series, who died last month aged 58.
Hollow Knight: Silksong developer Team Cherry has revealed it won't be making the trip to The Game Awards next month, as the team believes Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will sweep the Game of the Year award.