The Game Awards 2025 ceremony brought us yet more gacha game news, this time a big announcement for Arknights: Endfield. The free-to-play game set in the the universe of Arknights has been in various forms of closed tests for a while, but it finally has a release date.
Microsoft has revealed the first batch of games coming to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service this January.
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.
In a loud world where everyone is battling to be heard, it's easy to forget that the quiet and smaller moments of kindness hold the most power. A lot of the time, it's easy to think that keeping to yourself is the easiest way to deal with things, whether you're dealing with your own pain or trying to find the right way to navigate someone else's. It's never easy to know what to do, we're all trying our best - after all this is all our first time being human. But one truth remains:a little kindness goes a long way. Winter Burrow, the intrepid little mouse game, shows this more than anything else I've played in 2025.
Right, get ready for some chatter about where the contents of our collective wallets have gone over the past year. Valve's list of the highest-grossing games on Steam in 2025 has emerged from the great mists, and in a nice revelation, features a larger number of fresh releases than last year's ranking. That's alongside all of the moderately to quite old stuff which more folks keep hopping on the train of with every passing 12 month period.
As the Bob Dylan song goes, how many lush alien planets must a Man presumptuously land on and turn into poorly optimised Toyota plants before he finally decides he’s sick of being an extractivist piece of shit? Dylan was being rhetorical, but I studied at the school of Homer Simpson, and want you to give me an actual figure. I’m going to say: four and a half. If you’ve yet to hit your personal quota, well, here’s StarRupture out now in early access.
Oodles of games are coming out in 2026, and many look impressive. There's the new Resident Evil, yet another reimagining of Tomb Raider 1, and a 007 game that reminds me of the often-forgotten cartoon series James Bond Jr. All will probably be decent, and some might even dictate my guide writing duties.
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.
There are two Brendan Greene's (or PlayerUnknown's, however you prefer to refer to the game dev). There is the Brendan Greene who wants to listen to the feedback offered up by those partaking in the early access period of his current game, Prologue: Go Wayback. And there is the Brendan Greene who doesn't, for quite reasonable reasons. Both of these are still him, and both show up in a recent interview.
When I first caught a very quick glimpse at Into the Fire, the kind of glimpse where you more just see a character design amidst a bunch of fire, I thought it was a new simulation game. A fireman sim, that kind of thing, the kind of game I'm sure exists already without needing to Google it. Into the Fire is not that at all. There is fire, and there is rescue, but there are also ancient mysteries amongst natural disasters, fiery, destructive jellyfish-esque spirits, and a tantalizing mix of science-fiction, folklore, and the supernatural.
Surprise! Chris Redfield, Excella Gionne, and an adult version of Sherry Birkin are all on their way to Resident Evil: Survival Unit.
Seasons of Solitude is a soulful balance of survival game and turn-based strategy about an exiled prehistoric tribesman who is trying not to trash his own habitat. It's the work of Estonian developers Ninjarithm Studio, and is based on Estonian myths.
There's a demo on Steam, which I've spent barely any time with, but this seems Interesting - Interesting enough that I wanted to get a write-up in front of you before the weekend. Please disregard the rapid-fire editing of the trailer below: it works as an overview of the mechanics, but doesn't really convey the sleepy pensiveness of the actual game.
Open world Czech Bohemia-inspired orienteering game Prologue: Go Wayback! from PlayerUnknown Productions and PUBG creator Brendan Greene is out now in Steam Early Access - and that's very inconvenient, because we still don't have consensus on a nickname. Back in 2017, RPS jocularly renamed PUBG "Plunkbat" - a show of feistiness that surely resulted in no angry emails (genuinely, I don't know if it did), and which I recently consecrated by writing it on the wall of a random shed in Scotland. We are still massaging our temples about the new game, however.
The Rock Paper Shotgun CMS groaned like a harpooned whale when I fed the above game title into our database. I was tempted to shave away some punctuation for the benefit of whoever writes about this game next, but then I remembered that I hate everybody here as I do hell, all Montagues, and thee. Anyway, what a title. It's like Type Moon and Kingdom Hearts fell into a cyberpunk snakepit.
I don't even know what half of those typographical characters are called. They appear malevolently polarised, pushing other letters away from them. They seem... primordial somehow. Our distant ancestors used to hack brackets like those into the walls of caverns, when they wished to add inessential tips about flint storage to paintings of hunters getting tusked by mammoths.
A grim and insanitary management game about absolutely abysmal cars? One for you, Brendy! Oh sod it, he's not here anymore. That's what we get for letting him learn how to drive - and letting him have a cell with a window. I don't know how to drive, and I have played neither Jalopy nor My Summer Car, but I do know how to be a dishonest piece of shit, so I am at least 25% of the way towards writing an informed appraisal of Totally Legit Wheeler Seller.
Prologue: Go Wayback is due out in early access later this week, and ahead of that developer PlayerUnknown Productions laid out a little roadmap of updates you can expect in the coming… months? They didn't specify, which isn't necessarily a bad thing - I think setting expectations of when certain features may arrive encourages a more demanding audience - but they did give a good overview of what's to come.
"Season...6..." I gasp through a parched throat and unwashed beard. "Need...season 6...of popular subterranean co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic, developed by Ghost Ship Games..."
Mr. Ghost Ship himself stands over my skeletal body, knees and elbows shredded to the sinew from nearly a year and a half of crawling through the update desert. "How about Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor’s recent 1.0 release, or our upcoming, if sadly delayed, roguelike spin-off Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core?"
"I mean...they’re alright," I croak. "But season...siiiiiiiiiix..."
"Okay, okay," he concedes. "It’s called Relics of Hoxxes and it’s out in Q1 2026, which in English is between January and March."
"Ah...nice."
An upcoming Pokémon game may have a darker story than you'd expect given its cheerful look and typical Nintendo vibrancy. With links to the original Pokémon game trilogy and hints at older lore, what appears to be a quirky spin on the franchise might actually have a sadder side if fan theories are spot on.
