Gamers, this is our Oscars. While, unfortunately, the 2025 Game Awards has nothing to do with the Movie Fantasy League, it is still a welcome addition to awards season as a whole. Everyone needs a video game break! Just because the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles was all about video games, it doesn't mean Hollywood wasn't in attendance. JJ Abrams, Gabriel Luna, and Jeffrey Wright were some of the stars presenting and accepting awards, and of course, Miss Piggy is going to more than flirt with host Geoff Keighley as she teased her later appearance in the show. Where's Kermit?!
Clair Obscur, the first game from small studio Sandfall Interactive, tells the story of a group of characters battling seemingly impossible odds in a post-apocalyptic universe with a distinctively French visual style. It has been nominated in a record number of categories and will square up against heavyweights like Death Stranding 2 from industry legend Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear Solid fame, or Nintendo's Donkey Kong Bananza starring the eponymous gorilla.
Below, we examine how it carried the torch of the classic films to create the best new piece of Indy fiction in decades. Indiana Jones is one of the most revered blockbuster stories of the 1980s. Spielberg and Lucas' work on the original trilogy stands alongside Jaws and Star Wars as timeless classics that are worth revisiting regularly. The more recent entries--the Crystal Skull and the Dial of Destiny--do little to live up to the standard that the first three set.
On 25 November, award-winning Italian developer Santa Ragione, responsible for acclaimed titles such as MirrorMoon EP and Saturnalia, revealed that its latest project, Horses, had been banned from Steam - the largest digital store for PC games. A week later, another popular storefront, Epic Games Store, also pulled Horses, right before its 2 December launch date. The game was also briefly removed from the Humble Store, but was reinstated a day later.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion, the comic company's new homage to its classic beat 'em up video games of the past, features the surprising inclusion of a lesser-known queer character. A 90-second trailer dropped alongside the game itself on Monday (1 December), offering fans a frantic first look at what's in store for gamers. Developed by Tribute Games, Marvel Cosmic Invasion sees 15 Marvel superheroes traverse a plethora of locations from the comics as they attempt to thwart an oncoming invasion by the interdimensional insectoid Annihilus.
A report from Adobe Analytics said video games and consoles are expected to be among the "key drivers of holiday spending" this year in the US, with seven products overall singled out. Ranked in no particular order, the top seven most sought-after gaming items for Holiday 2025 are: Nintendo Switch 2 PlayStation 5 Xbox Series X Donkey Kong Bananza Madden NFL 26 NBA 2K26 Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
The Berlin Apartment, a novel new video game, is initially set in 2020. The German capital was in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and few people walked the streets and cafes and restaurants were closed. The game, created by the Berlin-based indie video game studio Blue Backpack, begins with second-grader Dilara as she accompanies her father, Malik, to work since schools are closed.
I pounced on the Nintendo Switch 2 when it came out earlier this year because I wanted something that felt familiar while living abroad. I've been a digital nomad for nearly ten years and currently live in Bangkok, Thailand, nearly 8,500 miles away from my six children and two grandchildren. The Switch 2 lets me play the latest games with my kids, which I love to do, even when the time change makes schedules wonky.
Countless other reviews have said exactly the same thing: Ghost of Yotei is a safe sequel. It's just more Ghost of Tsushima. It's such a rote, generic piece of analysis, isn't it? Pah. I pity those fools who lack my ability to write...er, good. And yet...well, it's completely true. Ghost of Yotei really is a safe sequel, and it really is just more of the same, albeit improved in almost every way.
A quick primer for the uninitiated: Warhammer 40K imagines humanity far in the future, and one where mankind's interstellar empire is held together by duct-tape and sheer willpower, is ruled by a corpse emperor, and is besieged on all sides by terrifying aliens and ancient gods intent on destroying the universe. As the tabletop sourcebook from which Warhammer 40K derives declares, to be a human in this universe is to "live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable."
Some bad news, folks, as the amazing Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is going to be delisted on all platforms on November 15. If you want it put simpler, you won't be able to buy the game or any of its DLC after November 15, so if you want a chance to play this amazing strategy game, now is the time to do it. It's on Steam for £33, the PS Store for £25 and Xbox for £24. I'm hopeful that publisher Slitherine might put the game on sale to celebrate it's final days.
"Grand Theft Auto VI will now release on Thursday, November 19, 2026," the studio said on its website. "We are sorry for adding additional time to what we realize has been a long wait, but these extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve. "We want to thank you again for your patience and support. While the wait is a little longer, we are incredibly excited for players to experience."
It's another Friday in October, which means there are probably one hundred new games to play released this week. Maybe my memory is betraying me but this feels like the wildest October in video game history, certainly this current generation at least. But you won't hear me complaining (much) about that because the wide variety of releases means there's almost certainly something for everyone.
Willits said he bumped into comedian Jimmy Carr at the airport and they got to talking about games, apparently. "He honestly gave me an idea for a video game. I'm not joking. Such a nice and brilliant guy," Willits said. That's all Willits had to say on the matter, and Carr hasn't apparently discussed his game idea publicly online. Carr, who is known for his crowdwork, said in a popular video that he hasn't played video games since childhood.
This month, I picked up a concerned parent from the waiting room. I walked her to my office and asked how I could help. "My 10-year-old son can't focus on anything. I think it's because of the video games. He won't read because he says it's boring, he won't even play a board game with me. He keeps getting in trouble at school for playing games on his Chromebook in class. The only time he sits still is when he's playing video games."
The Nintendo Entertainment System was released in the United States on 18 October 1985: about a year after I was born, and 40 years ago today. It's as if the company sensed that a sucker who'd spend thousands of dollars on plastic toys and electronic games had just entered the world. Actually, it's as if the company had sensed that an entire generation of fools like me was about to enter the world. Which is true. That was the time to strike.
Obsidian Entertainment returns to the world of its comedy sci-fi RPG, The Outer Worlds, for the second time. Like the first game, The Outer Worlds 2 is set in a world where powerful corporations fight for control of entire planets, and you're just a tiny but important cog in the machine. The sequel tells an entirely new story with its own cast of characters, meaning even players who skipped the first game should get along just fine.
"I am desperate for there to be a third-person action-adventure, Uncharted, Assassin's Creed, that kind of open-world thing," Trachtenberg told IGN. "Concrete Jungle was something that I missed unfortunately. And that was a long time ago. And there's just so much fun to be had game wise, I think, with Predator. I hope it could happen."
"I tell everyone there is no 'correct' ending, there is no 'canon' ending, there is no 'official Sandfall' ending," Svedberg-Yen said. "Both endings are there for a reason; we put them both there for a reason; they were designed in a very particular way. Neither is perfect. Both are heartbreaking in their own ways. Both of them have parts that make you glad, parts that you feel like, 'okay, I want a happy ending for these characters,'
In the music, TV and film industries, streaming has completely upended the business model. Instead of buying albums and films, most of us pay for a few subscriptions depending on what we want to watch, and maybe supplement that with the odd vinyl or special-edition Blu-ray. This has been pretty terrible for musicians, who earn approximately $0.004 per play on Spotify, while Spotify itself made $1bn in profit last year (admittedly after many years of operating losses).
As character creators get better, people are making nearly 1:1 recreations of celebrities , characters from other games, and digital versions of themselves . That is normally all well and good, but now players have started recreating Charlie Kirk, the right-wing commentator who was assassinated at Utah Valley University earlier this month, and they're using the basketball game's tattoo options to add, well, another detail to the recreation.
Electronic Arts, maker of video games like "Madden NFL," "Battlefield," and "The Sims," is being acquired for $52.5 billion in what could become the largest-ever buyout funded by private-equity firms. The private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund PIF, and Affinity Partners will pay EA's stockholders $210 per share. The companies value the deal at about $55 billion, including debt. Affinity Partners is run by President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Every day, tens of thousands of people roam through the dystopian universe of DayZ, a popular online game in which players strive to survive a zombie outbreak. Immersing themselves as participants and observers, film-makers Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse and Quentin L'Helgouac'h find strange beauty in this post-apocalyptic world filled with brutality and bloodshed. Their documentary is built entirely around in-game footage, interactions and POV shots, capturing a seemingly endless realm with infinite possibilities.
