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.
The Soulslike is dead. The age of the Souplike has begun. Indie developer Kite Line has just published Soup Rooms - a sequel of sorts to dong yarhalla's videogame concept album from 2007, in which you visit small square rooms with feverdream aesthetics and a peculiar entity in the middle.
What was I doing back in 2007? Alas, I was not playing Soup. There's a high probability that I cooked soup in 2007, but it wouldn't have been very interesting soup. It would not have featured any spirit wolves, whiny fallen clouds, consumptive Casio men, "boinglers", or Willem Dafoes.
Grotesque and surreal 'farming simulation' Horses has been banned from the Epic Games Store on the eve of release, a couple of years after a work-in-progress version of the game was rejected by Valve. In an alleged statement to developers Santa Ragione, the Fortnite makers explain that they've found the game to be in contravention of policies against "Inappropriate Content" and "Hateful or Abusive Content". Given that, according to Santa Ragione, Epic have had access to a build for two months and had already approved the game for publication on their store 18 days before launch, the whole thing feels like a frantic response to Valve's claims about the unfinished build, which Epic presumably haven't seen.
One of the first "moving pictures" ever created is a moving picture of a horse. In the late 1870s, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced a series of "chronophotographs" of horses and riders, including the famous 12-frame sequence Sallie Gardner at a Gallop. I know about Muybridge's work thanks to Jordan Peele's film Nope, which considers the historical erasure of Sallie Gardner's Black jockey, whose identity is disputed. Another thing that easily gets overlooked when considering these images is their contribution to the practice of horse-breeding.
Muybridge - who, incidentally, murdered his wife's lover, which doesn't seem wholly irrelevant here - captured the images after many years of tinkering with shutters, triggers and emulsions, but they were commissioned by the industrialist Leland Stanford, founder of the university of the same name. Stanford kept racehorses, and wanted a more precise understanding of their movements, with the obvious wider motive of being able to raise more champions; nowadays, gait analysis by means of video capture is commonplace among breeders. Muybridge's breakthrough in terms of photographic reproduction is thus an important development in control of equine reproduction. To stretch that point a little, you could argue that the moving picture has always been a way of disciplining sex - and one animal may seem much like another, once reduced to a quantity of frames.
I understand why walking sims aren't really a thing any more. Some of the earliest big names like Gone Home, Dear Esther, and arguably The Stanley Parable all came at a time where indie games were growing in popularity, but were still predominantly 2D. Something simple like a walking sim is obviously quite resourceful compared to contemporary AAA games, but now the indie scene has blown up to the point where mechanics-first genres like roguelikes are dominating. Except I like walking sims! So when a game like nophenia, a walking sim where you're a wolfgirl with a flip phone exploring different dream worlds, shows up, I'm going to pay attention.
Saturnalia and Wheels of Aurelia developers Santa Ragione have announced that they will "wind down operations and face a high risk of closing the studio", following Valve's refusal to allow their upcoming horror game Horses on Steam, PC gaming's largest digital storefront by some distance. They say they have the funds to support and update Horses after launch for around six months, but claim they "will not be able to start new projects unless Horses somehow recoups its development costs without access to more than 75% of the PC gaming market".
Saturnalia developer Santa Ragione's first-person narrative horror Horses has received a last-minute ban from the Epic Games Store. Epic was one of several storefronts confirmed to have approved a build for release when news of Horses' ban from Steam emerged, but it has now reversed its decision, citing what Santa Ragione calls "broad and demonstrably incorrect claims".
One thing that's probably got a bit lost in all the controversy preceding Horses' release is the fact it's surprisingly funny. Its humour is pitch black, yes, and its comedic moments often dance on a knife's edge between laughter and revulsion, but writer and director Andrea Lucco Borlera's first-person narrative horror - his debut game, created in close collaboration with Saturnalia developer Santa Ragione - is a fascinatingly singular vision. It's singular enough, in fact, that it's not an easy thing to effectively describe, but if you can imagine a sort of thematic reinterpretation of Animal Farm by way of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo on one side, and a meme-able Garry's Mod video on the other, then Horses gleefully oscillates between them, landing somewhere in the middle.
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".
