Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 – 2022 – 2023 – 2024
So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.
– David Byrne, True Stories (1986)
I played and completed more games in 2025 than in the previous year, although I only played one game that was originally released in 2025. I had little interest in any of the year’s high profile releases although I suppose I might play Baby Steps at some point.
In the immortal words of Francis Ford Coppola, let’s go, Mr. Driver:
Astro Bot
Astro Bot: Rescue Mission was my second-favourite PSVR game (after Paper Beast) and the first game I’d encountered in many years that had recaptured the feeling of a game doing something startlingly new and sensorily overwhelming that I associate with the golden age of the arcades.
Team ASOBI followed this up with Astro’s Playroom (the PS5 pack-in game) which went partway to convincing me that a non-VR Astro Bot game could still be worthwhile.
This full length sequel is More Like It, cranking up the presentation (and overall scope) several notches. At the time I played through it at the start of the year I was fairly confident I wouldn’t see anything that would top it in terms of visuals. (Read on to see how wrong I was.)
While it inevitably lacks the sense of scale and physical solidity of its VR predecessor, Astro Bot is still an exceptionally visually impressive game. Every level is packed with convincing materials and elaborate physics simulations (plus subtle haptic effects) making traversal through even the most straightforward platforming courses feel rich and satisfying. Water looks astonishing. There’s one set piece where a boss parts the ocean which even on a flat screen comes close to the frequent theme park ride spectacle of Rescue Mission.
When the game launched last year a lot of people got carried away and hailed it as a credible counterpart to the 3D Mario games. I wouldn’t go that far.
While the generous parcels of (mostly very tough) free DLC levels that have appeared post-launch have redressed the balance somewhat, many of the core levels of the game are very easy, with overly generous timing windows for many jumps and attacks and some suspiciously magnetic platforms. While it’s not as patronisingly devoid of any real peril as, say, Portal 2, it does mean that a competent player can rattle through the game very quickly.
There aren’t a huge amount of secrets or alternate routes to encourage revisiting completed levels, and you’re not really afforded much opportunity to play around with Astro’s moveset for its own sake in the same way as you are in Super Mario Galaxy et al.
By far the weakest elements of the game are Astro’s special abilities. In the previous Astro Bot games these served as embedded tutorials for features of the PSVR and Dualsense interfaces. They were used in brief sequences that introduced some much-needed variety to what was a very linear experience.
Repurposed as part of Astro’s platforming toolset it quickly becomes apparent that several of them (the Monkey, Frog and Elephant for starters) are quite unreliable, annoying and, well, a bit crap. Once you get to the ‘challenge’ levels it’s groan-inducing to see one of these gimmicks immediately glue itself to poor old Astro on the starting line. They really ought to have designed a new set of abilities from scratch.
Outside of the mechanical shortcomings, I’ve seen a few people get hung up on Astro Bot’s overly slick and emotionally hollow vibe, seeing him as a sort of gaming equivalent of Jimmy Carr or a Funko Pop (or a Jimmy Carr Funko Pop). I can see where they’re coming from but don’t mind this particularly.
An Astro Bot game is never going to give you a lump-in-the-throat moment of emotional connection, but the character’s positivity and charm is agreeable enough without becoming cloying. Astro Bot is a mascot character in the traditional sense, which feels a bit like an anachronism in world that has largely reframed mascots as either postmodern agents of chaos or conduits for lazy meme humour.
The degree to which the game leans of nostalgia for other (often better) Playstation-adjacent franchises doesn’t really get my hackles up either. (The game’s collection mechanic revolves around rescuing several hundred bots who are cosplaying as different famous video game characters, who then act out little animated scenes in the game’s hub area/trophy cabinet.)
It’s kind of amazing to see intricately designed homages to titles like Wipeout and Croc in a modern game – it’s certainly a better and more earnest tribute than most of the great UK studios of yesteryear are ever likely to receive from an indifferent industry establishment. Sure, I can see how this could be viewed as a cynical attempt to promote back catalogue games, but frankly the more people who are encouraged to play e.g. The Last Guardian the better.
If you have a PS5, this is the exclusive game you should buy, assuming there is more than one to choose between by now. It is to the PS5 what Brothers in Arms was to the CD player. Is it likely to become your favourite game of the generation? Probably not. But it’s a solid demonstration of Team ASOBI’s virtuosity.
(Also as with the previous installments the writing is amusing and surprisingly self-deprecating, making me suspect that the people who dismiss these games as Sony corporate cheerleading haven’t been paying close enough attention.)
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Indy’s Big Circle (as the kids are calling it) is an odd game. It’s lavishly produced, at least by the standards of a second tier Bethesda game. It clearly had a bigger budget than the Wolfenstein games while at times feeling like the bare minimum amount of content they could get away with shipping for seventy quid, buoyed by franchise goodwill.
Indy is structurally quite unlike Wolfenstein, or Uncharted (which I think is what many people were expecting when it was announced). It’s based around a small number of sprawling (though strictly walking-scale) pseudo-open-world levels more akin to the hub structure of the modern Deus Ex games. This feels like quite a brave gamble for Machinegames (especially coming off Wolfenstein II, where the big payloads of story and level production their silos launched into orbit never quite docked together convincingly), but one that pays off handsomely.
It could be argued that this diffuse structure negatively affects the pacing of the (essentially movie-length) story they’re trying to tell, but (assuming you realise you can go back to earlier levels at will and don’t spend aeons in the Vatican trying to tick everything off, ahem) it just about hangs together.
The game opens with a meticulously recreated flashback to the prologue scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It really feels like Machinegames’ goal was to make a direct sequel to Raiders, and they’ve taken a holistic approach to achieving that. The story is on a similar scale in terms of globetrotting locations and action setpieces. The new characters who are introduced are (more or less) as charismatic and memorable – and intelligently written – as Marion, Sallah, Belloq et al.
The production design feels more like a representation of the 1930s as would be practical for filmmakers to achieve and familiar to a 1980s cinema audience than an authentic period piece. There are lots of little anachronisms, as the technology that would realistically be available to Jones in the circumstances would result in a grittier (and more tedious) survival experience better left to the likes of Kingdom Come Deliverance.
There’s a brilliant mini-documentary on YouTube about the efforts the developers went to to ensure that the performance capture sequences were shot in a style authentic to early 1980s Spielberg. (Aside, I found this video to be much more enlightening than the recent noclip Machinegames documentaries, although those are also worth watching. I don’t think noclip always ask particularly probing questions of their interview subjects. Machinegames’ works tend to have something a bit more thoughtful to say than the typical AAA blockbuster fare, but that sadly isn’t explored in much depth.)
I would go as far as saying that the efforts to making a period-authentic sequel to Raiders extend to the gameplay as well, after a fashion. Someone from 1982 would struggle if you placed a modern controller in their hands, sure, but they’d easily understand what was going on here if watching someone else play: the room names that flash up on screen, along with ‘adventure points’ and Indy’s satchel inventory were all familiar concepts to players of the early Infocom adventure games.
The player is constantly challenged to think like Indiana Jones, and the organic way that stealth, combat and environmental puzzles are presented make it easy to suspend disbelief. (Right up until the end of the game I was never quite sure how safe I was when walking around in disguise.)
The only aspect of the game that contradicts movie serial logic is that enemies never surrender, opting to charge towards Indy regardless of whether they’re outnumbered or outgunned. (Obviously being able to stick up enemies would have been too exploitable if it was always available, but it would have been nice to have a couple of instances of it happening to make it feel like something that could happen all the time, if only circumstances allowed.)
The frequent puzzles dotted around the levels are just challenging enough to be satisfying without ever bringing progress to a halt. I never had to resort to the hint system, although it is nice that it’s there for beginners. I think I made the action side of the game marginally more difficult for myself by usually forgetting to use Indy’s whip or that I could grab enemies to pummel them, sometimes resulting in Benny Hill chases to find more broom handles, rifle butts and frying pans to fend Nazis off with.
We really have to talk about the graphics. You might have noticed that the incessant whining about new games requiring raytracing hardware ended abruptly after Indy launched. Playing through the game on PS5, where the game has raytraced shadows (and I think some global illumination gubbins?) albeit not the full range of RT features, it’s immediately, strikingly apparent that they’re an integral part of the game.
Sending a Nazi crashing through a table where every bit of debris casts a shadow, anchoring it in the scene; having to shift around to get suitable illumination for maps and letters; raising a torch to illuminate ancient tunnels; cresting a rocky outcrop with the sun at your back to see Indy’s iconic silhouette cast on the sands – so many awesome moments and so much of the artists’ intentions would be lost if you could toggle this off in an options screen.
At one point they angle an arc lamp into the mouth of a tomb, and you can bet your sweet bippy that the shadows cast are used to alert you at the most dramatic moment to some patrolling Nazis on your tail.
Most of the maps have a few ‘setpiece’ rooms where the level designers have splurged on having hundreds of unique hyper-detailed objects scattered about (the Vatican treasure room that’s the site of an early boss encounter is a particularly impressive one). Later in the game there’s a bridging section of more linear levels before reaching the final hub, which is basically a couple of hours of steadily escalating visual spectacle (and the final hub level jungle is no slouch either).
Notably there are at least two areas in the game that I suspect are intended to be directly comparable to similar areas in the Wolfenstein games (specifically, the catacombs in The Old Blood and the ruined New York tableau in The New Colossus) to demonstrate the massive leap in visual fidelity over their previous-gen games.
The cinematic scenes look uniformly fantastic and Troy Baker’s Harrison Ford is convincing. There’s one scene (Indy and Gina on the airfield) in the ending sequence that’s so perfectly lit and animated that it sidled right up to the far edge of the uncanny valley for me. At the other end of the scale a lot of the generic civilian NPCs look a bit ‘last gen’, with dead eyes and static faces. (And there are some very odd looking cats.)
Indy is one of the very few games where I’ve gone to the bother of achieving a Platinum trophy, so I clearly didn’t want the experience to end. Winkling out the last few secrets on each map did reveal a few disappointing rough edges (there is one cave area later in the game that has an exit so poorly signposted I worried I’d softlocked the game by saving there; also one secret involving – barely-used and camouflaged in the environment – ‘firebombs’ to burn an obstacle that’s immune to your thrown torches and lighter, which is kind of bullshit), but these were tiny blemishes.
Is it the best Indy game? Even better than Fate of Atlantis? What ultimately clinched it for me was going back to Indy’s lecture hall in Marshall College, thinking “I wonder if…”, and finding a graffito on the desk of Indy’s lovesick student. It’s the best Indy game.
Robocop: Rogue City
Whereas Indiana Jones is a character designed to be dropped into an unlimited number of stories, Robocop (and his world) is designed to support exactly one: Robocop (1987).
I’ve never watched the Robocop sequels. I think Paul Verhoeven enjoyed the way Robocop ends – that hoary old trope of the ending that feels good as you file out of the theatre, but becomes more poignant if you think about it objectively. Murphy hasn’t won his freedom or compelled OCP to rethink their plans for Detroit, the police, or clinically dead government workers in any way. The villains are vanquished, the system goes on.
I mention this purely to set expectations for how necessary any piece of Robocop follow-up media can hope to be. Rogue City is one of the more respectful efforts to revisit the character – not a high bar when he’s been turning up in Mortal Kombat and Saturday morning cartoons admittedly.
Rogue City (from the nonsensical title down) is a low budget Eurojank game through and through. It almost feels inappropriate that the creators have splashed out for actor likenesses and Peter Weller’s voice. Someone with a lot of money (just, not anywhere near enough to make an AAA game) clearly likes Robocop a great deal.
Robocop being such a self-contained story and the developers being so squeamish about contradicting the established canon results in some problems. Most of the juiciest characters from the first movie are dead by the end of it, prompting the need for approximate stand-ins who aren’t anywhere near as well written or performed. The surviving characters mainly served one story-advancing function in the script and aren’t deep enough to work as dramatic characters in their own right.
The police chief is against striking! Officer Lewis is on Murphy’s side. The OCP CEO (referred to, ridiculously, as “The Old Man” even in news bulletins) is fatherly to Robo. The glimpses of the wider cultural landscape (TJ Lazer, the SUX 9000, etc.) we see in mediabreaks and flashbacks are reproduced ad nauseum. Quotable lines from the film appear all over old Detroit as graffiti, which is some ‘Doom total conversion’ level fanboy nonsense.
The writing is as threadbare as you’d expect. I’m guessing that the recording sessions covered the script in chronological order, as Dr. Peter Weller gets audibly more tetchy as the levels progress, and he’s called on to say “…trouble” in his trademark funny way many more times than is strictly necessary. The writers do at the very least understand that Robocop is a satire and don’t give us the surface-level ‘copaganda’ version of the character some of the early video game adaptations did.
It cuts loose a little bit in the few parts that aren’t remixing over-familiar scenes from the movies. An archetypal 1980s b-movie ‘punk’ villain gets some good quips. There’s a subplot about Robo having to take psych evaluations that doesn’t really go anywhere but varies things up a bit. Sadly the budget doesn’t stretch to Bixby Snyder or mediabreaks, with some rather limp satirical radio ads taking their place.
Gameplay-wise it’s fairly unique among modern shooters, feeling a bit more like Virtua Cop than your Dooms and Call of Dutys. Robo is a lumbering tank who can easily obliterate punks one at a time, but risks getting mobbed and pelted with grenades if you don’t proceed carefully.
Striding down corridors blowing bits off enemies does get a bit repetitive after a while. A boss encounter with ED-209 is a highlight, finally answering what a duel between the two would have been like. ED-209 is a ruthless but predictable bullet-sponge, and it feels suitably like hard work to grind him down into scrap.
There’s a neat sequence where you get ambushed by Hell’s Angels on circling choppers. I’d blocked it out until I sat down to write this, but there’s also an unbelievably stressful ‘bomb defusing’ puzzle at one point.
To pad out the game length and because someone had clearly been playing the Yakuza series, there are some sections where you’re free to wander around a little Detroit neighbourhood (and the police precinct) and perform mundane police work and a few side-quests. This aspect of the game is pretty weak stuff.
There is one location that is extremely unsettling for people of my generation though – a video arcade that’s been modeled by an art team who have clearly never seen a coin-op arcade cabinet in real life. None of the attract sequences have ‘INSERT COIN’ messages! One of them displays an options menu! I have never felt so old.
While the amount of art assets (and the standard of detail and polish in the level design) make the low budget nature of the proceedings apparent, the actual quality of the UE5-powered visuals is impressive. Robo and the rest of the primary cast look great (although oddly better at 1080p than 4k, where the slight too-clean contours of the models become a bit more apparent).
Outdoor areas are well lit, luxuriating in ‘infinite’ geometric detail and accurate shadows resulting in near-photorealism at times (particularly when viewed through the analogue video feed-like ‘robovision’ filter). Indoors there’s destructible scenery all over the shop and we get a tour of virtually all of the iconic locations from the movie. There’s some unsightly glitching on camera cuts on console, and the facial animation is rather stiff, which tends to pull you out of the experience during cutscenes.
Robocop is definitely hovering at the low end of 7/10 by any rational analysis, but if you’re a fan of Robocop (i.e. a 10/10 person) it still comes highly recommended. I would not buy it for a dollar because I already own it, as you must surely have gleaned from the above, and also I am not in America. What a silly question.
Dragon Age: Veilguard
I’m not part of the target demographic for this, but it was another PSN freebie, plus I’d heard that it had a protracted and troubled development, which as we know often results in a more interesting end product than if everything went smoothly. (Example: Rage.) Veilguard is clearly a game that’s Frankensteined together from several production reboots and changes of direction, but in a weird way I think it sometimes benefits from that.
I’ve never played any of Bioware’s previous games and came with no expectations, other than what I knew of their reputation: they make story-focused casual RPGs for young adults who get overinvested in pulpy genre fiction. (‘BAFTAslop’.) In that regard the game delivered pretty much what I was expecting (although I had also been led to believe that Bioware’s games were full of gratuitous sex and violence, of which there was none whatsoever).
Maybe if I’d played the previous Dragon Age games I’d put more stock in the fans’ argument that the game the developers wanted to make (but were stymied by corporate meddling) would have been some generational masterpiece, but I doubt it.
The writing in this game on the micro and macro levels is mediocre. Even before ‘Whedonesque’ quippy dialogue became old hat, it just doesn’t jibe with trying to tell a high stakes fantasy story. The game sets up some good scenery-chewing villains and a suitably apocalyptic threat but rarely manages to make the stakes feel very high or the choices faced by the player feel very consequential.
The game’s technical underpinnings feel archaic. The world consists of a few sparse, minimally-interactive and heavily occluded themed levels. The clunky third person camera results in feeling cordoned off from inspecting the world in close detail.
Remember how Deus Ex Mankind Divided was built on some shonky in-house engine intended for a Tomb Raider game, and felt really hamstrung as a result? The way Frostbite has been deployed here feels similar. Using mature tech does at least mean the game is very stable and the loading times are near-instant.
(Aside, I have no insider knowledge of what went down between Electronic Arts and Bioware during the game’s development, but if a game is negatively affected by publisher meddling perhaps some of the responsibility lies with studio management failing to effectively push back against it? Although if EA had no faith in what they were making at all I don’t suppose any amount of negotiating guile on Bioware’s side could have helped.)
(Also: they were probably right to be sceptical of the game’s commercial prospects. The audience has moved on from games structured like Bioware’s big hits from over a decade ago. Abortively trying to bend Dragon Age into a live service game might’ve been the wrong answer, but the only commercially competitive answer – make a Baldur’s Gate 3 – was clearly never on the table.)
Veilguard could be more credibly called an RPG than the Horizon games could, but not by much. It’s more like an overly verbose beat-’em-up. The aim of the game is to exhaustively check off a todo list of quests, which involves travelling back and forth many times between the (admittedly often visually striking) mostly flat corridor-based levels, fighting the same few enemies (and seeing the same two ‘finishing move’ animations over and over again) and solving incredibly basic hunt-the-button and platforming puzzles to pad things out a bit more.
By doing everything (as opposed to deciding not to experience some of the content in your full price video game) and making the right dialogue choices, you secure the favour of different factions in the world and obtain high level gear and abilities for your party members, improving your chances of getting the best ending.
In between shooting 3-5 buttons and spamming special attacks against humanoid enemies, there are boss encounters. Or should I say there is one mechanically identical boss encounter with differently skinned dragons in different arenas throughout the story.
These do look suitably epic, but they all boil down to spamming special attacks to fill up a ‘stagger’ bar then wailing on the prostrate dragon’s tummy with heavy attacks until it eventually dies. After about the fourth instance I started to wonder if this was a clever homage to early 1990s JRPGs like Sword of Vermillion with their endless palette-swapped boss encounters.
The game opens with an extremely comprehensive character editor, allowing your avatar’s appearance to be tweaked at a far greater level of detail than they ever appear in the game. To Bioware’s credit, they do an excellent job in integrating the voice performance (of which there are four options), animation and costumes to make this custom character feel like a seamless part of the authored content of the game. (I approached the character editor in good faith rather than making a bright orange comedy Tango ogre – perhaps this helped.)
The game focuses heavily on the party members you can recruit and ‘romance’ (the titular Veilguard). You can definitely sense that large passages of content have been cut or reworked when it comes to how these characters are presented.
The initial two companions (Harding and Neve) are framed as being incredibly important characters that you’re supposed to be invested in from the outset. (I assumed they must have been returning from a previous game in the series, but apparently not.)
Each character in the party has some ‘high concept’ that informs their interactions with the others and their dedicated story quests, and in some cases it feels like these have been abandoned at some point in development or changed without considering whether their new characteristics make sense in terms of the other characters and world.
Harding’s whole deal is that she’s a lightning rod for some ancient magic. But this is also Taash’s deal, and their story is much more fleshed out.
Neve’s deal (as far as I could make out, they’re particularly underwritten) is that they’re a detective, but we’re shown elsewhere that Emmrich the necromancer can literally commune with murder victims, so Neve’s story thread is instead about factional intrigue between different generic gangsters in a dull and tedious to traverse medieval city level. (Called, imaginatively, ‘Dock Town’.)
Some of the other companions’ arcs have a bit more depth to them. Taash (a surly teenage ogre dragon hunter) has a sensitively done story about figuring out their gender identity, while at the same time having to come to terms with being able to breathe fire. (Bioware know authors that settle for choosing between subtext and text and they’re all cowards.)
(Taash also gets the best joke in the game: On the party stats screen, each character has a little blurb ‘heroically’ describing themselves that changes as the game does on. Taash’s just says “Here.”)
Emmrich is a necromancer who is secretly scared of having to submit to being ritually killed to be resurrected as a lich. (So there’s lots of thoughtful stuff about coming to terms with grief, etc., which is only slightly undercut by everyone commenting on how utterly ridiculous he looks as a seven foot tall magic skeleton at the end.)
Lucanis is an assassin who has been possessed by a demon who takes control when he sleeps (so spends the entire adventure chugging strong coffee). Davrin the paladin is sworn to stop gryphons from going extinct, because gryphons look cool and unfortunately there was no budget left over to give him a personality beyond that. Bellara (the elf mage) gets quite a good story about tracking down her brother who has done a deal with nefarious elven gods.
Bellara’s character is a good case of the game’s troubled development possibly resulting in a better outcome. Bellara is heavily implied to be autistic, and much of her incidental dialogue is commenting on what’s going on in the current game state in fourth wall breaking terms (a lot like Abed in Community).
I can easily imagine an earlier version of the character who was doing this consistently throughout the game which would have gotten old fast. But as it only pops up sporadically in the final script, it retains the element of surprise. (I could be completely wrong and the character was written this way from the start, but it feels like multiple partially-overlapping rewrites to me.)
Again, I don’t know how much of this is established convention for the series, but the use of modern language just didn’t work for me. I don’t think that fantasy games need to use fake Olde English dialogue like the Ultima games, but you can either have a volcano be called something like ‘sleeping dragon mountain’, or have a character straight up describe it as a “dormant volcano”, but you can’t do both.
It feels lazy and sloppy to have characters responding to everything with wisecracks and yammering on about their cosy hobbies in between fights to the death. The approach of having regions of the world be loosely based on different real world countries and cultures is also a bit cheesy – at times almost feeling like a Discworld game (not necessarily a bad thing, just not the tone I think they were going for).
Maybe I’m being unfair. I just couldn’t get invested in this world, in spite of playing to the end. I read every scrap of text and picked clean every dialogue tree in Cyberpunk 2077, because everything deepened the authenticity of what the lived experience of that world must be like. Dragon Age’s world (at least this version of it), by comparison, doesn’t have consistent rules.
In Veilguard there were whole tabs of the menu system full of lore I didn’t bother to read, and before long I was weaving out of the way of no-name NPCs to avoid their boring dialogue like they were high street chuggers.
The technical weirdness also became gradually harder to ignore. There are almost no elderly people anywhere in this world, and the few (maybe two or three) you encounter in the story make it apparent that this was likely driven by the shortcomings of the character generation tech.
During the game’s finale, where you go through a series of battles and story-thread-ending choices, I wasn’t sure whether the game had glitched as I’d effectively become invincible. I don’t know if this is a deliberate choice to control the pacing and ensure that the decisions feel more impactful by not having players repeat them, or if the game balance just finally broke. Either way it made the game feel like it was in a hurry to wrap up.
The lack of any post-game content or New Game+ option whatsoever after the credits rolled (they might as well have just put UNINSTALL on the main menu, like Battlefield 6’s campaign does) felt incredibly jarring.
It looks great. The voice acting (apart from Varric, holy shit that performance is terrible) is competent enough, in spite of the writing. You’ll probably find at least some of the companions tolerable. And from the sounds of things it’s a minor miracle that they actually shipped the game in a finished state, so kudos to Bioware for that. But I don’t think I’d unreservedly recommend it and I don’t think I’ll be playing another one.
Alan Wake 2
I’ve not played the first Alan Wake and I bounced off Control pretty hard so I was a bit wary of diving into Alan Wake 2. All the promotional material I’d seen seemed to suggest that it was squarely aimed at die-hard Remedy fans, and would be full of references that would go over my head.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s actually a very accessible game for newcomers. And while it’s seriously self-indulgent in parts, it is acutely aware of this and at least tries to provide some thematic justification.
The game uses a mixture of live action video and realtime 3D graphics, using Remedy’s in-house engine technology. The presentation is flawless. Dynamic lighting, cloth, hair and facial animation are all among the best I’ve ever seen in a modern game.
There’s a level later in the game set in a large 19th century American townhouse (converted into a nursing home) at dusk that looks jawdroppingly convincing. This high standard is maintained throughout the rest of the game. The levels are relatively small and the strictly controlled scope has allowed them to cram the world with detail.
The live action content is integrated cleanly with the in-engine parts, in some cases (where they can just about get away with it) being projected onto billboard sprites in the scene. While it’s all professionally shot and decently directed and acted, it is kind of funny that the highest-budget entertainment product in Finnish history still has video inserts with production value on par with an unremarkable SNL sketch. (I think there are perhaps one or two quite small practical sets and a lot of bluescreen stuff.)
Without getting into spoilers too much, the game is split into two parallel threads, one half where you’re controlling Saga Anderson, an FBI agent investigating ritualistic murders in an isolated town, and the other where you’re Alan Wake, stuck in a supernatural purgatory operating under a dream logic that is somehow linked to his writing.
Saga’s partner Alex Casey (played by writer/director Sam Lake) ‘coincidentally’ shares the name and likeness of the protagonist of Alan Wake’s books, and as the story unfolds it becomes clear that Wake’s writing is affecting Anderson and Casey’s reality. Can Saga depend on her memories or are the contradictory findings of her investigations the real truth? And will Alan make like Uncle Peter and avoid getting sent back t’ Dark Place?
Remedy have said that their publisher Epic Games gave them complete creative control over the project. This is mostly a positive thing, as I imagine a ‘two-and-a-half-A’ game like this (about 20 hours long, quite strictly linear, and with little to offer beyond that apart from a couple of DLC data disks) would normally struggle to get funding in the current climate.
They don’t seem to have taken all that much advantage of this freedom. I know that their creative intention is to make something in Alan Wake’s (and by extension Sam Lake’s) head, drawing heavily from detective fiction and Twin Peaks. While there is a fair amount of horror and gore, the world presented is quite inert and bloodless.
Everyone is old. There are two sets of comic relief characters, a pair of grifting twins whose skits descend into increasingly bleak black comedy, and a pair of elderly rock musicians who seem like a big Remedy in-joke, the sort of wacky late-game idea early-2000s PC games (like Max Payne come to think of it) would pad their length with after they’d burned through all the cool stuff on the back of the box. Even bouncing between the two narratives every few hours, it tends to feel a bit claustrophobic after a while.
The real tragedy is that even given complete creative freedom, Remedy still somehow felt it was necessary to include combat, and worse still, boss fights. It should be abundantly clear to everyone by now that Remedy have no interest in or particular flair for action gameplay. There is easily enough adventure game content in Alan Wake 2 for them to have dispensed with it entirely but I guess they are still clinging on to some conventional wisdom that it’s a bullet point they need to include to be commercially viable.
There isn’t any depth to the combat, it’s entirely a test of awareness and resource management. My time-tested game design law (that every game that includes a bow and arrow weapon would be made objectively better by its omission) is further strengthened here. Thankfully you can bump the difficulty down to ‘story’ and skip these bits of busywork.
The boss fights are less forgivable. Well, one in particular: There’s a sequence where two highway patrolmen spawn endlessly out of a hole in the ground. To beat them, you have to attack a bunch of glowing nodes to break the ‘spell’.
Trying to attack (constantly healing) targets in pitch darkness, in a thunderstorm, with a load of clattering noise, while hitscanning enemies repeatedly shoot you from behind cover, resetting your attack animation and sending the camera weaving around like a drunken heron on rollerskates is not, in fact, ‘fun’. Even dialled down to easy it’s completely random.
This is easily the most incompetently designed boss I’ve seen in any game this century, and I find it hard to believe that Remedy weren’t alerted to this by playtesters.
So what is there outside of the combat? In Saga’s levels, you’re doing detective work and solving puzzles (and ticking off collectibles dotted around the world that reward you with weapon upgrades and special abilities).
Your walking speed is quite slow and there’s not a huge amount of backtracking so it’s not usually an issue that the levels are quite small (and the engine sometimes struggles a bit moving between ‘chunks’ of the larger levels), although there’s a fetch quest in a theme park area where everything is practically within sight of the starting point with feels a bit silly.
The current state of the investigation is tracked in detail via a ‘case board’ that you can access at any time. It was never quite clear to me whether the player was expected to actively use the case board to work out what to do next, or if it was intended purely as a hint system and reminder of the story so far if you stopped playing for a while.
Having to manually pin new clues to the board seemed somewhat redundant. I don’t recall any point in the game where the case board revealed new information that wasn’t overtly spelled out (or really easy to infer) from the information given during gameplay, and if all it’s doing is recapping things the player already knows, there could perhaps have been a more organic way to do this.
Alan’s levels are a bit more abstract, mostly taking the form of exploration puzzles in a discrete level, or linear setpieces (such as the much vaunted ‘musical number’). The ‘case board’ is replaced by a ‘plot board’. Alan is tasked with finding different ‘plot ideas’, then going to specific key locations and combining a plot idea with that location on the board, magically reconfiguring it to reflect that stage of the ‘story’.
This is quite a cool effect, but the puzzles generally boil down to trying all the keys on all the locks and it’s not very satisfying. These sections (based as they are on the conceit that Alan is writing an Alex Casey murder mystery) also provide an excuse for Sam Lake (and voice actor James McCaffrey) to do extended legally distinct Max Payne bits. The ‘dark place’ is linked together with a New York street hub area which reminded me (with its hyper-detailed phone booths and wandering spectres) quite a bit of Ghostwire Tokyo.
The video-heavy ‘fantasy’ levels (a talk show, a musical, Alan’s wife’s video diary, etc.) are … okay. Sam Lake does some acting in them (wisely, mostly as a self-aware gag about his acting chops) but they’re largely handled by professional actors.
It’s funny, because of the intentionally ‘off’ performances and the use of domestically famous Finnish actors, it’s not always immediately clear whether you’re watching some highly regarded film actor or a member of the development team in a bad wig.
The most severely self-indulgent part of the live action production is a several minute long ‘arthouse film’, but the game scores some style points by presenting this incredibly casually: ending a level with Wake in the cinema where it’s running, and letting the player either awkwardly watch the whole thing over his shoulder or just have him walk out, without it being acknowledged in any way.
The absolute highlight of the game for me, in terms of integrating a ‘cinematic’ story into an adventure, oddly enough came in a quiet moment directly after one of these flashy video-fests. In the backrooms of the TV studio after Alan’s talk show appearance, you have a brief chat with Ahti the enigmatic janitor (played by Martti Suosalo, a very highly regarded Finnish actor).
The performance capture and facial animation in this short scene are remarkable – I think it’s the single most impressive realtime sequence I saw in any game this year. (That YouTube video really fails to do it justice. And do people really just put the controller down during in-game conversations? What are you doing?)
I enjoyed Alan Wake 2 but came away a little bit unsatisfied. I know it’s a meta-commentary about the role of the writer in fiction, but (again, probably pointlessly trying to skirt spoilers) there aren’t any dramatic stakes if it’s Alan all the way down.
I know that the mystery is never the point of a good detective story, but if I’m going to spend many hours with a story based game it needs to add up to something.
I think this has to be the logical end point of Sam Lake’s trademark approach of deconstructing genre fiction (and thereby conveniently spending 80% of the time writing stock characters delivering hokey dialogue). The budgets may be creeping up to the level of actual David Lynch productions these days but the writing isn’t. I hope the next thing Lake does (I’ve no idea what that will be – a game, a book, a film or something completely offbeam) is fully in their own voice.
Stray
I was really knocked sideways by how good this game looks, especially knowing it was made by a small team with a modest budget. The lighting is so naturalistic, the reflections and distortions so crystal-sharp, the vibrant HDR colours almost hallucinatory (they really love their ‘Marty McFly Jr.’s cap’ iridescent material shader in this game).
It makes me wonder whether people are getting desensitised to good graphics and art direction. I know there was some hype when the game was announced, but I’m surprised there wasn’t more gushing over players’ screenshots after it came out. Maybe I missed it.
We open on a group of stiffly-animated cats exploring an overgrown urban ruin, which doesn’t give a very accurate impression of the rest of the game. The ginger cat controlled by the player gets separated from the group and falls into what is gradually revealed to be a technologically advanced city sealed in a bunker, populated solely by humanoid robots after a catastrophe has wiped out humanity.
Spurred on by the instinctual need to find food, water, shelter and to go outside, again, the cat is coaxed to an abandoned apartment where they make contact with a tiny Batteries Not Included*-style robot drone, desperate for assistance in carrying out the plan of the scientist who built it. The pair stick together for most of the rest of the adventure.
At this point Stray turns into a very different game, where the drone essentially turns the cat from a Trico-like dumb animal to a tiny JRPG protagonist, able to talk to the city’s inhabitants, read signage, stash items and undertake quests requiring abstract reasoning.
It’s almost as if the developers wanted to make two different and only very slightly compatible games – a cat-scale platform puzzler and a story-driven sci-fi adventure. The little drone’s personality and story arc are interesting enough, but none of the other NPCs’ dialogue really justifies the story not being told wordlessly. Another World, The Last Guardian and Machinarium could manage it, after all.
In fact I often thought about how Machinarium (while lacking Stray’s hyper-realistic visuals) did a better job overall of realising a twilight robot-world, and a protagonist fumbling through it with only a dim recollection of how the old world had worked.
Even Inside (a game nowhere near to deserving its bizarrely inflated critical status – being essentially a bog standard Box2D platformer slathered in millions of dollars of evocative but meaningless music video imagery) had more to say about the disconnect between the motivations of the player and the character they’re controlling.
The game can be completed in a couple of evenings, and is structured in a somewhat uneven way, with surprisingly little time spent in the final sprawling downtown adventure hub. This neon-drenched labyrinth looks staggeringly beautiful, amping up the quality of the presentation substantially from the earlier locations in the game, and the fact that there’s precious little to do there hints at the developers running out of money or time to flesh it out further.
The more sedate ‘adventure’/exploration hubs are linked with linear action and stealth sequences, which feel a bit undercooked.
I’ve seen some criticism of the ending, but I found it quite satisfying. You get a nice dramatic birdseye view of your journey and its effect on the world, before leaving without turning back. There’s no final boss battle or emotional payoff like The Last Guardian’s final moments, but, well, you’re a cat.
Stray has plenty of shortcomings (we’ve not even mentioned the music, which is so keen on unpleasant crackling and popping analogue synth noises that at one point I was genuinely worried my amp was dying), but it’s short enough and visually spectacular enough that it’s easy to recommend.
Lies of P
Lies of P was the game I played last year that furthest exceeded my expectations. On paper it doesn’t sound very promising. A Korean F2P studio with no console games in their softography, making a very late Bloodborne clone – one with the additional handicap of being based on the story of Pinocchio, no less – does not sound like a recipe for a compelling or memorable game. Surely this is going to be another Stellar Blade, a style-over-substance collage of ideas photocopied from other games?
Trying to describe Lies of P to people inevitably puts them in mind of ‘edgy’ fairy tale retellings like American McGee’s Alice and Todd MacFarlane’s nonsense. I’ve even seen some professional reviews frame the game in this way, which is bizarre as there honestly isn’t really a whiff of campy Jim Steinman-ness to the proceedings at all.
Spend some time with Lies of P and it becomes apparent that the creative team behind it didn’t pick a public domain property at random (or if they did, they’ve gone above and beyond in disguising the fact) to make a ‘grimdark’ version of it, rather having some interesting ideas of their own that they want to explore.
The player takes the role of “Geppetto’s Puppet” (never referred to by name anywhere in the game, out of fear for Disney’s lawyers presumably), a lifelike automaton who has been awaked by a psychic signal into an opulent northern European city (Krat) in a late 19th century where such advanced clockwork automata are commonplace.
This society’s robot servants have gone berserk, slaughtering most of the human population, with the few survivors slowly succumbing to a mysterious plague. A few of the city’s powerful figures have holed up in a hotel and have activated you to drive back the occupying puppet forces and get to the bottom of the mystery of why this catastrophe has happened and why you’ve been created in the first place.
While Lies of P may copy whole passages of Fromsoft’s homework in terms of mechanics, it does so in the service of creating a mood, a world and a lightly-sketched narrative that genuinely doesn’t feel like any other game. To my mind, a key point of reference for Lies of P’s art style is the Soulcalibur games: both games explore a distant past and culture viewed through a foreign lens, and pick up on odd details that one more familiar with the trappings of that culture might overlook. The Belle Époque setting (explicitly chosen as virgin territory for games) is a perfect choice for presenting a heightened, dreamlike version of turn of the century Europe.
Lies of P is a bit more streamlined than Bloodborne and its ilk. There’s no rolling a character (with the only choices at the start of the game being the difficulty level and one of three fighting techniques), and the levels are mostly quite linear affairs, typically only looping back to open a shortcut to the last save point after you’ve cleared an area.
I completed the game on Hard (go me), while playing in a quite ‘suboptimal’ button-mashy way and guarding much less than you’re probably supposed to. If you engage with all the game’s systems (various flavours of items, upgrades and buffs) the game is quite generous in helping you to even the odds in boss encounters.
While I did run into a brick wall at a few points (requiring a bit of grinding and rooting about for secrets in earlier levels), conversely there were a few bosses that I beat on the first or second try. (The very first boss in the game is an excellent skill check to ensure you’ve been paying attention.)
As to be expected, there are a fair few ambushes and traps scattered around the levels, but as these can usually be recovered from or kill you in such absurdly Knightmarish ways (rolling flaming boulder from offscreen, gap in a bridge neatly hidden from the camera by your body, etc.) that I was mostly laughing rather than spitting with rage. Mostly.
Also as per the conventions of the genre, nothing is really explained to you about the game’s systems at any point. I never quite understood the odd ‘weapon customisation’ system (where you can mix and match weapon handles and blades to balance different stats and abilities) and didn’t realise that three of the opaquely named stats you can upgrade correspond to the three distinct combat styles, but neither proved to be an insurmountable obstacle.
The art direction in Lies of P is hard to fault. Almost all of the dozen or so main levels are highly visually distinct. The weather and time of day changes as you progress through the story, and these changes are applied on revisiting previous areas, sometimes resulting in levels looking wildly more impressive than on the initial visit. I’m a sucker for Unreal Engine rain effects, and they’re used to great effect here. The period appropriate music is excellent as well, and heightens the immersion considerably.
There are loads of enemy types (robots, monsters, bandits and things that defy easy classification) and they’re all highly detailed and expressively animated. (And you can gib them! It feels like years since a game has let you fire an explosive shell into a rabid bear and turn it into cascading chunks of steak.)
A few rough edges suggest the developers ran out of time or money before they could polish everything up to the ideal standard. Character models for the other story characters are fairly ropey (there’s no lip syncing and most are rooted to the spot – Geppetto’s peculiar beard looks like it came from a joke shop and all).
Some less important areas of the game are pared back to ‘GTA3’ levels of environmental detail (you’ll find some very boxy hedges, a dull cable car ride, and one end of Gepetto’s state room is basically a cuboid box with a fireplace), which stands out among all the sumptuous detail elsewhere.
The final level of the game is a major drop in visual polish, replacing the moonlit cobblestone streets, palatial corridors and lush wilderness of the earlier stages with bare stone walls and wooden scaffolding. It’s clear by this point that they’ve sunk their remaining resources into capping the game off with three suitably epic final bosses.
And yes, okay, if we’re being honest (nose shrinks slightly), there are a fair few ‘homages’ to other games dotted about among the more original material. The merchants are ripped straight from Resident Evil 4. There’s a magic blue substance marked by butterflies (The Last Guardian), a creepy band leader boss very similar to one from Black Bird (I assume they’re both taking inspiration from some earlier source), dogs jumping through windows (Resident Evil), sharpening and poisoning swords (Betrayal at Krondor et al), and the game even opens on a train in a post apocalyptic European rail terminus (Half-Life 2).
But that’s by-the-by. The single most impressive element of the game is the extremely gradual way in which your character becomes more human.
At the start of the game you’re a Jacquet-Droz style automaton: silent, unblinking, with a porcelain complexion and stiff, deliberate movements. As the game progresses you’ll be presented with moral quandaries in conversation with other characters and given the chance to tell a lie. Each lie raises your hidden ‘humanity’ stat, and very subtly changes your appearance and progressing your enchalametfication.
Very rarely, you’ll find or be given a gramophone record which you can play at the hotel to raise your humanity a further notch. This is where the genius of this system becomes apparent. As you wait 3-4 minutes for the song to play, you get a chance to observe your character up close and will notice… changes. A twitch in the face. Blinking. Light reflected in the previously glassy eyes. Skin blemishes. A slight asymmetry that wasn’t there before.
You’re never sure exactly what has changed (or indeed if something has changed or you simply didn’t notice it before), or when the change happened. While there are other elements of the Pinocchio story dotted about (yes I went back and read it), it seems clear that this was the main reason they picked it as their theme.
Without spoiling anything, the game dropped a final M Night Shyamalan twist for me during the credits: it’s running on Unreal Engine 4! The beautiful environments and lighting that I’d assumed were UE5 infinite-geometry, self-shadowing whizziness (as per Robocop) are all being achieved through brute force and cunning art direction choices.
I think this has to be the most impressive overcranking of a previous-gen engine I’ve seen since Batman Arkham Knight. (Though it does also go some way to explaining the framerate dips and extreme amounts of popup that sporadically occur.)
Not only that but one of the characters is voiced by Peter Davison (the ‘best’ – i.e., my childhood – Doctor Who). Lies of P is the best kind of 7/10 game and I’d recommended it to anyone with a bit of patience for (or more skill than me at) this sort of thing.
Jusant
There isn’t a whole lot to say about Jusant (French for ‘low tide’).
Jusant is quite a dreamlike experience. It’s brief, aesthetically pleasant without doing anything amazing, and mechanically quite samey throughout, making it hard to pick out many notable things to say about it a few months removed from playing it.
Jusant is a very short, very French action/adventure game about climbing a mountain in a post-apocalyptic world where the oceans have dried up.
Imagine the climbing bits of Uncharted (except with actual gameplay and some mild puzzle elements) interspersed with some brief platform/adventure interludes where you collect gewgaws and read snippets of (largely redundant) story text. Aesthetically it reminded me quite a lot of Paper Beast (I’ve not looked up whether they shared any artists but would not be surprised).
It also feels quite heavily influenced by The Last Guardian (the player character especially), which at least makes a change from the usual Wind Waker pilfering so popular with indie games of this scope and genre over the past few years.
The climbing system is pretty solidly implemented (although it does suffer some rare glitches), although I did find it strange that it doesn’t seem to make use of the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback at all. The ending is very satisfying.
Overall Jusant makes quite a nice companion piece to Stray so well done PSN Basic/Legacy/Essentials Tier’s curators on picking them both as freebies.
Everything else
Battlefield 6: I played the beta solidly for a weekend. It’s really good. I’ve not gotten super into a BF game since Star Wars Battlefront and BFBC2, and am probably getting too old to hack it in a hardcore multiplayer shooter these days, but I had a blast. It’s nice to see the last EA game that it will ever be even notionally morally acceptable to pay money for be a fitting swansong for the soon-to-be-mismanaged-into-oblivion veteran publisher.
Psychonauts 2: Bounced off it pretty quickly. The original Psychonauts seems to have been retroactively elevated to classic status by dint of Double Fine still being a going concern. Psychonauts was a quirky but unexceptional platformer (in a sea of them) made by a team stuck in a situation where publishers didn’t want point and click adventures any more. Psychonauts 2 is … another one of it. It’s not anything to write home about as a platform game, and as you sit through another lengthy tangent being delivered by an extremely 90s-looking stop motion puppet character, you have to wonder who this is aimed at.
Revisiting Psychonauts really drives home that PC games could get away with very threadbare ‘IP’ in the brief window just before they went properly mainstream: Mafia was a grab bag of gangster film scenes. No One Lives Forever was funny James Bond, except, y’know, not ‘Austin Powers’ funny. Interstate ’76 was the Beastie Boys Sabotage video put through a Virtua Fighter filter. (Also it rules and they should absolutely make a new one.) Psychonauts is… Tim Burton’s X-Men. That is the entire idea! It doesn’t sustain a modern 40+ hour console game.
I mean, they let Christopher Guest keep making quite poor movies every few years but at least he started with Spinal Tap. I’m sorry, I know lots of lovely and talented people work at Double Fine but I will never quite understand how they keep bumping along year after year releasing clearly very expensive to make but unswervingly mid games like this.
Diablo IV: I’m not going to piss off Blizzard fans as well. I sunk a few hours into it and will probably go back to it at some point. You just realise after a while that you’ve been doing nothing except hoovering up enemies for hours. It looks terrific and is very efficient as a dopamine delivery system, I think you just have to be in the right mood for it.
Suicide Squad: Immensely frustrating to see glorious Rocksteady artwork lashed to a complete nothingburger of an online arena battle lootbox nonsense game.
Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe: While I was playing Alan Wake 2 I wondered what the UK equivalent of an incredibly self-indulgent, meta game like that would look like and oh right it’s The Stanley Parable isn’t it. I assume everyone has played some iteration of Stanley by now, and this sequel ekes out every possible thing that can be done with the premise.
Also, it’s odd that this game will probably ensure (by its inclusion and unequivocal evisceration) that a review by one of the most notorious hack writers of recent times will survive into posterity, long after the site that hosted it has disappeared. (I still don’t quite understand how they got away with that.)
No Man’s Sky: I jumped back in for all the expeditions this year. The new corvette (custom ship building) system is (after a somewhat shaky start) one of the best updates they’ve ever released, and has sparked a huge wave of creativity in the community. Finding out that you could stow away on other players’ corvettes during the expedition was absolutely hilarious. Douglas Adams would’ve loved NMS wouldn’t he?
Cyberpunk 2077: I still fire it up at least once a week or so just to enjoy the ambience. And I almost always end up finding some new tiny secret or easter egg tucked away, even after all these years. Night City is a miracle of modern game design.
Balatro: I loaded up UFO50 on my Switch with the intention of properly getting into it over Christmas and, erm, ended up playing Balatro again just like last year. Dangerously addictive, but with oceans of depth to discover while you’re in its grasp. Also I’m glad to note that the ridiculous PEGI 18 rating it got lumbered with in 2024 has since been overturned. Hurrah!
Tags: alan wake 2, annapurna interactive, another world, astro bot, astro bot rescue mission, baftaslop, balatro, battlefield 6, battlefield bad company 2, bethesda, bioware, blizzard, CDPR, cdprojekt red, control, Cyberpunk 2077, diablo iv, double fine, dragon age: veilguard, ea, Electronic Arts, Eric Chahi, Hello Games, indiana jones and the fate of atlantis, indiana jones and the great circle, jusant, lies of p, localthunk, lucasarts, lucasfilm games, machinegames, max payne, Night City, nintendo switch, No Man's Sky, Paper Beast, PC, playstation 5, psychonauts, psychonauts 2, Remedy, robocop: rogue city, rocksteady, stanley parable ultra deluxe, star wars battlefront, stray, suicide squad, Team Asobi
