We eight scribes from RPS are, Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past, Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered, After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most, Why not subscribe to Supporters posts? January leading, still proceeding, See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
Most anticipated? Oh reader, you gentle, innocent child. Hark at you, ambling in here with supple joints, eyes clear as springwater, and the scent of hope in your hair. I have grown old, dear reader. I no longer feel this emotion called "anticipation", anymore than I remember the taste of strawberries in the Shire. Years of waiting for another Legacy of Kain game have broken my spirit. My heart is a sponge of sorrow. My beard coils round my ankles like a listless cat. All has become grey.
When I looked back on 2025 to assemble my advent calendar votes, I was surprised how many of them were smaller titles, especially in a year that saw both a new Silent Hill and Doom hitting the shelves. But then I remembered this year the Steam algorithm's whispered in my ear like the Green Goblin Mask to Norman Osborn, guiding me to lovely indie gems (and telling me to squash that Spider-Man).
We eight scribes from RPS are, Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past, Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered, After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most, Why not subscribe to Supporters posts? January leading, still proceeding, See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
While the old saying goes 'A game in the basket is worth two in Steam Wishlist', as we teeter into a new year it's good to highlight a couple of the games shuffling our way. Especially when there are quite so many of them that include big stompy mechs. Some of them as big as cities. My engine oil-starved heart beats and thumps in anticipation.
I've tried to keep the list to games confirmed for release next year – tragically cutting The Free Shepherd, which is planned to release in 2027 – but there is one exception.
So let's begin with the outlier that's likely to wander tardily into 2027.
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 eight scribes from RPS are, Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past, Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered, After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most, Why not subscribe to Supporters posts? January leading, still proceeding, See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
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.
While I would go so far as to say that I have an affection for the team here at RPS, they certainly tried my patience when it came to the Advent Calendar voting. How dare they not have played and loved the same games as me through the year? Here I was, new head honcho, and I couldn't find a single one in the bunch who had put the necessary hours into Chip 'n Clawz vs. The Brainoids. Shameful.
Thank goodness I can put that right with my Selection Box.
We eight scribes from RPS are, Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past, Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered, After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most, Why not subscribe to Supporters posts? January leading, still proceeding, See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
If I were the foreman of an game refinery, I might be dabbing my forehead in anticipation right now because there is a lot coming down the pipeline in 2026. You may be looking at the telltale bulge of Grand Theft Auto, but I'm more focused on the amount of damn fine horror we've got in the plumbing.
Readers, you disgust me. How many videogames do you need? I spend all year heaping your plate with digital comestibles, and then you rock up at the arse end of December, clamouring for a "selection box" like a flock of gannets.
We eight scribes from RPS are, Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past, Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered, After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most, Why not subscribe to Supporters posts? January leading, still proceeding, See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
RPS Advent Calendar voting remains an esoteric and mercurial process, even to those of us who practice in it. If two games get the same amount of votes, which goes higher in the list? Did Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor technically release in 2025 or 2024? These are questions most of us dare not ask, and those that do often vanish mysteriously overnight. Until January 3rd or so, when they come back from holiday.
One thing’s for sure: I had a bunch of games that no-one else voted for. Don’t be sad, games. I still like you.
We eight scribes from RPS are, Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past, Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered, After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most, Why not subscribe to Supporters posts? January leading, still proceeding, See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
2025 had video games. 2026 will have video games. GTA 6 might be one of those video games. However, it’s currently only pencilled in for console next year. Not that I considered writing about it in this sort of article two years running, just for a laugh. That’d be hackish and beneath the level I hold myself to. Well, by about three millimeters.
Welcome to the third ever RPS 100: Readers Edition. This is the (nearly) annual tradition of you, RPS readers, telling us where we went wrong in our annual tradition of trying to fit all of our favourite games into a list of the 100 best PC games of all time.
The list below is your list, voted for by your fellow readers.
We eight scribes from RPS are, Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past, Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered, After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most, Why not subscribe to Supporters posts? January leading, still proceeding, See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
It was an interesting Advent Calendar this year, from my perspective. My top four games - Arc Raiders, Silksong, Clair Obscur, and Hades 2 - were all highly ranked. And then none of my remaining games made the cut. I guess I should have strategically placed these games higher up for a better chance of making the cut. Bit of gaming the system, you know?
We eight scribes from RPS are, Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past, Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered, After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most, Why not subscribe to Supporters posts? January leading, still proceeding, See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
For the past month we have been shouting about the games we consider to be the best games of 2025. As is tradition, our choices for the RPS Advent Calendar haven't appeared in an order from least good to best – to us, they're all special.
However, that's not true of the game behind door number 24. When the team's votes were counted, it was a close thing, with only five points in it, but there was a winner.
RPS's favourite game of 2025 is Hades 2.
Now, perhaps someone would like to explain why we didn't give Supergiant's roguelite wonder a Bestest Best sticker?
We eight scribes from RPS are, Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past, Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered, After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most, Why not subscribe to Supporters posts? January leading, still proceeding, See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
This year, generative AI seeped into mainstream gaming. Though it didn't so much shimmer, as smear. It mispronounced lines in Arc Raiders, "drew" a smudgy loading screen in Anno 117, voiced a sweary Darth Vader in Fortnite – perhaps its least subtle appearance was in Where Winds Meet, the wuxia-themed open-world RPG that plugged some of its minor NPCs into AI chatbots. The results were predictably beige and sometimes absurd.
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!
Vince Zampella, the co-creator of Call of Duty, founder of Respawn Entertainment, and head of EA's Battlefield franchise died in a car crash on December 22nd. He was 55 years old.
"We're heartbroken by the passing of our founder and dear friend Vince Zampella," Respawn Entertainment said in a statement on Twitter. "Our hearts are with his family, friends, and all who love him."
We eight scribes from RPS are, Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past, Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered, After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most, Why not subscribe to Supporters posts? January leading, still proceeding, See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
Greetings traveller, and welcome to Burning Springs! You may know it as the latest location in the newly updated Fallout 76, but to me, a recently defrosted Ohioan historian from the ancient past of 2025, it's home.
The tour will start shortly. I just need a moment to get my bearings. I swear Fort Steuben was 120 miles over that way…? It seems in the years between my big freeze and today, in 2105, the geography got moved around a little. Let's return to that wrinkle later.
Here is a list of waste items I can see from my desk, at the time of writing: one piece of mud tracked in from a nearby forest, with a curl of oak leaf poking out of it; two condensed, possibly sentient balls of spiderweb; two fingernails (I know, it’s a terrible habit, I promise I’m not this gross in proper office environments); three screws that really should be part of my bed; one discarded bottle of antivac; ten unidentified somethings.
What do all these objects have in common? Obviously, they would make amazing roguelite protagonists. I know this because I have been playing… Morsels!
He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice, he’s checking it thrice, he’s checking it four times, he’s checking it five times, he’s checking it Six times, he’s checking it Six times, he’s checking it Six times… Hello reader who is also a reader. We don’t have a game developer contact for the final Bookshelf of 2025. Instead, I’ve called upon my occult connections to secure a last-minute interview with the very Father of Christmas himself.
How jolly his manner! How red his attire! How curiously squelchy the bag thrown over one shoulder! How unidentifiable the appendage he slowly extends from the fissured green immensities of your Christmas tree! Cheers, Santa! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Clair Obscur gripped me within the first minutes of its dramatic prologue. A turn-based RPG with a Belle Époque, steampunky aesthetic and a bleak world of monsters and magic? I know they say not to put a hat on a hat, but when that hat's a beret… magnifique. The story opens with the people of Lumière celebrating its annual get-together where the Paintress, a sobbing giant beyond the city’s shores, etches a number into a cliff, and hundreds of onlookers immediately evaporate into petals and smoke.
Sundays are for crossing all your fingers and toes that you've not picked up a cold while travelling across the country in a packed train. I will be collecting precautionary supplies of Lemsip, Olbas Oil, and sage (you can never be too careful around this time of year, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future are working overtime).
When you are armed with your sickness supplies, Sundays are for getting truly familiar with a comfy spot on the safe, ensconcing yourself in blankets, and losing yourself in some good reading for a few hours.
Every game has its limitations, there is only so many actions you can take, narrative threads to unspool, buttons to press. What about a game that you can only play one round of every day? A game where you "take up the sword against an NPC or another girl-esque thing irl and fight until one of you is holding the lifeless, bloodstained hand of the other." This is the description of a tiny, visceral Yuri Game Jam game called Everyday Sororicide.
I've always found PowerWash Simulator's Big Brand Collabs slightly odd, if a touch humorous. They don't always make much sense to me, like the SpongeBob one, though I will admit that the Shrek one does feel like a good fit, even if I am loath to look at intellectual property. And now here we are with its sequel, PowerWash Simulator 2, with its first bit of DLC freshly announced, sending prospective powerwashers off to a distant land called Ooo from the seminal Adventure Time.
I mean, all you can do is laugh, right? You've probably already guessed at what based on the headline, but we'll dig a little deeper into this all the same. Yes, Ark 2 has been delayed, the same Ark 2 that was revealed almost exactly five years ago, that was at one point in time promised to release in 2023, and then 2024, and then sort of half-heartedly slated for 2027, before landing where we are now, with the news that the game is currently planned for release in 2028. Uhuh!
I went into Dispatch with a goal in mind: Be a hard-ass. Seeing the trailers for Adhoc’s revival of Telltale’s signature cinematic, choice-focused story games, I figured it would be fun to roleplay its lead, Robert Robertson, as a straight-shooting boss who only deals in tough love.
I used to play every Telltale game with a character arc in mind, largely to see whether they could bend enough to allow my interpretation. And Dispatch’s world of superheroes caught in the corporate machine handed me the perfect set-up for my story.
Saturdays are for waking up early, stretching out, and realising with horror that you left it very late to ask people what they would be playing over the weekend. Then, when you are just about recovered from the first shock, realising with even bigger horror that you didn't ask them what they would be playing over Christmas.
Oh dear. Oh my. Oh criminy!
Larian hope to offer "more insight" into their usage of generative AI via an ask me anything session set to take place in the new year. It'll also be a chance to ask more general questions about Divinity, if you fancy. Naturally, this all comes after the Geoff announcement of the Baldur's Gate 3 devs' next RPG was swiftly followed by comments from CEO Swen Vincke which revealed the studio are making limited use of generative AI.
You are standing in the Dark Room, pockets full of gems and keys, eyeing up the eastward door. The three silhouetted templates on your drafting screen all seem equally unpromising. You go for broke and pick the one on the left. Ah nuts, you’ve drawn the Videogame Journalist’s Bedroom. It contains nothing save rotten coils of USB cables, the stink of bad coffee, and a single active computer screen, displaying a just-written article about an esoteric strategy puzzler.
Which strategy puzzler? The one that rhymes with “blueprints”, of course.
League of Legends is set for some big changes as part of an overhaul targeting a 2027 release, Riot Games have confirmed following a report on the coming revamp by Bloomberg. Yep, the MOBA's devs have pulled the trigger on their official announcement a little earlier than planned, waxing lyrical about laying "the groundwork for League’s next era" now, rather than waiting to reveal all in the new year.
Stand down, great lawyer-machines of the courtly plains. Sony and Tencent's legal scuffle over alleged Horizon "clone" Light of Motiram has ended with a "confidential settlement". As part of that arrow-flinging cessation, Tencent appear to have packed Light of Motiram away and pulled it from PC stores.
Adhoc Studios still aren't sure whether they'll make a second season of Dispatch, their startlingly popular Telltale-style superhero comedy adventure, but they're thinking about it very "seriously". In brief, they're not confident they can bottle the lightning twice, especially if they want to release another season before 2032.
I don't know about you, but I plan to spend Christmas pinned to the sofa by a 15 tog duvet, watching through the family's boxset of Poirot mysteries. The duvet alone won't be sufficient, and like a modern day Giles Corey, I'll cry "More weight!" at a nearby sibling until they crush me with extra blankets. Only one arm will be free from the blanket stricture. This is for operating the remote, reaching for selection box chocolates, and petting the dog. After all, nothing says cosy like ensconcing yourself before a grisly murder at a country house.
Which is of course why The Seance Of Blake Manor is just as apt a recommendation today as it would have been when it was released at Halloween.
"As the internet likes to tell us, it’s been a while." Please keep waiting, there are some magazines over there if you need them. "It’s a process." Shouting won't increase the speed at which it happens. Do you "want the turkey that is in the oven for long enough to be delicious when it finally comes out of the oven"? Some of these are things I often have to say to my cat when the clock ticks to within an hour of feeding time. Some of them are things Todd Howard and co have said about The Elder Scrolls 6 in another little update that's seen them declare yet again that it is coming and add that development's going good thus far.
Many moons ago in the early '90s, I grew up with a copy of the Nintendo Power strategy guide for Ninja Gaiden II. That excellent tome contained bios on all of the game's enemies, and I recall being entranced by one in particular: a gourd-like axe-wielder named Pumpkin Head.
Fast forward 35 years, and Pumpkin Head returns as one of the many villains in Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, a spirited revival of 2D Ninja Gaiden lovingly crafted by The Game Kitchen. More specifically, he shows up in the first stage to chuck an array of blades at new hero Kenji, who wears a blue costume that's only a few degrees removed from series protagonist Ryu Hayabusa's classic attire.
Frankly, Ragebound is the best that 2D Ninja Gaiden has ever been, sprinting a delicate tightrope between homaging the past and offering something new.
What's that I hear? Tinkly piano and the crashing of waves. Oh, it's Hollow Knight: Silksong's first major expansion, which devs Team Cherry have just announced will be coasting up to the shore some point next year. It's called Sea of Sorrow, and as such looks to contain plenty of somber staring into the splashy swell.
Today sees the release of the Arc Raiders Cold Snap update, which douses the popular sci-fi extraction shooter in glittering snowfall. Ah, how gorgeous the flakes twinkling above the Spaceport gantries. How beautiful the frozen lakes of Dam Battlegrounds. It's definitely a mite nippy all of a sudden, though, isn't it? Best take shelter in that bunker before your fingers and toes turn Uncommon green and Rare blue.
Oh dear, there's another player inside that bunker and she won't let you in. Still, perhaps if you start shouting the patch notes through the door she'll relent out of curiosity? Very good, let's begin.
I do not know if a black hole is something we should feed. Ostensibly they are things (anti-things? I'm not a black holeologist) that I would like to be far away from, given what I've heard. And yet here I am, having tinkered around with the demo for A Game About Feeding A Black Hole, which is a game about feeding a black hole, left with the feeling that this is not only a thing I can do, but find tranquility in.
As a kid playing RPGs in the 90s, I’d roam backdrops spamming the pick-up button in hopes of secret treasure. I’d do this especially in PS1 Final Fantasies, with their deceptively inert hand-drawn environments, and their greasy invisible walls. You’d smoosh Squall Leonhart's galloping form up against the level border as though bashing a skirting board with a hoover nozzle, and every now and then, you'd be rewarded with the hitch of a searching animation.
Amid the maelstrom of things happening last week, the original Doom blasted out the candles on a big cake commemorating its 32 years of demon destruction. As part of those celebrations, the shooter which can be played on (inhales) human test, lawnmower, electric toothbrush, tractor, the bad social media place, pregancy test, and gut bacteria - it's gained another way in which to be appreciated. There's now a website called DoomScroll which lets you dive into a bunch of fan-made level WADs via browser.
11 Bit Studios' sci-fi management game The Alters arrived at a point when I was unhappy with the trajectory my life was taking. But, I wasn't expecting a story about a shipwrecked astronaut and his cabal of clones to leave me questioning not just the choices I'd taken that led me down that path, but also highlighting all the choices I had left untaken along the way.
That's not bad going for a game in which you spend most evenings getting hammered playing beer pong.
