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.
If we're plotting out the year based on unexpected obsessions, mine were (in no particular order) weird Italian genre cinema of the 60s and 70s, an unhealthy appetite for unnecessarily elaborate physical media collector's editions, folk horror in literally any form I could consume, and, apparently, No Man's Sky. According to Steam's usual end-of-year thing, the exploratory space sim is by far my most played game of 2025, accounting for - somewhat incredibly - nearly 20 percent of my total playtime.
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.
Imagine a fantasy version of Ming dynasty China, suffering from a plague that slowly mutates infectees into avian-like creatures. Toss in a femme fatale named after the Chinese gods of death, more hard-as-nails enemies than you can shake a guandao at, and Soulslike vibes imitating the greats, and occasionally even surpassing them. This is Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, a game I loved - warts and all - purely on the strength of its level design.
A trademark for Control Resonant has been applied for in Europe by a law firm who've represented Alan Wake developers Remedy on numerous previous occasions. This application's been lodged not long before The Game Awards and is to permit the phrase to be used in relation to games, but at the moment it's still a mystery what exact sort of Control-related thing it refers to.
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing. This week, Kelsey discovers the joys and stresses of managing border control in Papers, Please; Tom holds off his Kojima dislike and plays Death Stranding; Victoria looks for anyone she can to talk to about Dispatch; Ed can't stop thinking about balls; Connor finds himself back in Guild Wars 2; and Bertie finds himself back in Dungeons & Dragons, getting everyone in trouble again.
