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.
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.
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.
'If you want to torture somebody, first show them your tools' is one of the better horror game design lessons taught by Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I thought of Amnesia's cistern chapter while playing through a later area in Lunar Software's excellent first-person spookathon Routine, announced 13 long years ago, though only in active development for around five. The area centres on a curious underground tree, with water dripping from a hydroponic ceiling and sealed doors on all sides. You can imagine Amnesia's Shadow manifesting here, clogging the roots with acid rot as it homes in on your comically loud footfalls.
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.
Video games don't have mysteries any more. There are too many people and too much internet to allow for such a thing, anything without an answer can, must, and will be solved by someone, often in a timeframe faster than developers expect. So I appreciate when developers refuse to divulge details, or indulge individuals in their desire to know exactly how much they have on their checklist, one such developer being Tonda Ros of Blue Prince developer Dogubomb.
Celebrated indie gem Blue Prince won't be getting a localisation or a direct sequel, as its creator wants all his projects "to be able to stand up on their own and be unique things".
Turnips! Everywhere! As far as the eye can see! Well, not quite, but The Séance of Blake Manor certainly has a lot of them. This might seem like a strange place to start when talking about developer Spooky Doorway's brilliant new supernatural detective mystery, but it actually says quite a lot about what makes it so good. Here, a fun historical footnote - that jack-o'-lanterns were originally carved from turnips - is turned into a feature, as glowering turnip faces leer from shadowy corners and sit in ghoulish formation along the sweep of an imposing staircase. In the grand scheme of things, a minor detail - but it's also one that lends this spooky deductive yarn an air of historical authenticity that sells its supernatural premise so much harder.
