I love a good "Ah-ha" moment. I love them even more when they actually lead to the right word, and not something that's close but not quite there. Hmm. If only Wordle could tell when I typed with enthusiasm, and gave me an extra nudge for my efforts. Still, at least I had enough rows spare to correct my mistake.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, December 29

Today's answer is a kind of lively modern latin dance. Not a rumba or a cha-cha, the other one.  

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, a letter is used twice in today's puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you've decided to play Wordle but you're not sure where to start, I'll help set you on the path to your first winning streak. Make all your guesses count and become a Wordle winner with these quick tips: 

• A good opener has a mix of common vowels and consonants. 
• The answer could contain the same letter, repeated.
• Avoid words that include letters you've already eliminated. 

You're not racing against the clock so there's no reason to rush. In fact, it's not a bad idea to treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Sometimes stepping away for a while means you can come back with a fresh perspective. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

One easy Sunday win? Sure thing. The answer to the December 29 (1289) Wordle is MAMBO.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Previous Wordle solutions can help to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer isn't likely to be repeated. They can also give you some solid ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 28: DECRY
• December 27: GRAIN
• December 26: AFFIX
• December 25: SHARE
• December 24: EAGLE
• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY

Learn more about Wordle 

There are six rows of five boxes presented to you by Wordle each day, and you'll need to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the daily puzzle.

Start with a strong word like ALIVE—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don't waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you've typed your guess and hit Enter, you'll see which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don't forget to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don't forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Hey, have you heard about this game about digging a hole that's coming out next year? It's called A Game About Digging A Hole and that's pretty much what it's about. You dig a hole in your backyard and find treasure and ores and you sell all that stuff and use the money to buy other stuff to make digging go faster and get richer from digging up more stuff to sell, ad nauseum, until you're very rich from digging a hole in A Game About Digging A Hole.

It's also very clear from the trailer that nothing further of interest aside from the digging will occur.

Developed in about two weeks, A Game About Digging A Hole was made in Unreal Engine 5 by developer Cyberwave, who'll also be releasing their (much longer in development) survival crafting title Solarpunk some time in 2025. A Game About Digging A Hole will also release in 2025, and no price is available yet, though the Steam page says it "Costs as much as a ☕ coffee, but is fun for longer!"

"Dig deep, sell what you find, update your equiptment to continue your journey further and further. With every spadeful you dig, you get closer to the truth. There's no rush, no rules - just you and the adventure underground," says the developer.

A Game About Digging A Hole was apparently inspired by old school Flash game Motherload, which a lot of people reading this are not old enough to remember but which several other people will have heard the name of and will immediately have a full-body flashback to their middle school computer lab, complete with smells.

You can find A Game About Digging A Hole on Steam, where it will release in 2025.

Oh, right, what the hell? That is a lot of game releases. According to ever-reliable stat tracker SteamDB, that's our total for the year, and that is a lot. Like, a whole 5,600 more than 2023 which was itself a few thousand higher than 2024. It means that 2024 is what appears to be the highest single-year jump in game releases ever tracked on Steam with no signs of the flood slowing down. More games than ever, faster than ever.

Despite the onrushing tide of games, only a few more of them made the threshold of popularity that Valve requires for community profile features to get enabled—that's when they can have profile customization like trading cards, badges, and emoticons, and when they count towards a user's Game Collector and Achievement Collector totals.

Just 3,964 games reached that total compared to 3,874 in 2023 and 3,491 in 2021—with the number dropping by a few hundred for years before that. So there are more games than ever, but only a few more of them than ever are getting noticed and played by the community.

SteamDB also has their filtered list of the best-rated games of 2024 available, where you can see that people really love Balatro, but that's probably something you already knew, isn't it? That's followed up by MiSide, WEBFISHING, The WereCleaner, Sheepy, Satisfactory, Black Myth: Wukong, TCG Card Shop Simulator, Fields of Mistria, and 20 Small Mazes.

The takeaway from that list is that if you want recognition you should just put a lot of time and effort into a nice game and give it away for free.

The NieR Series social media accounts announced the milestone by sharing an image celebrating "Over 9 Million Global Shipments & Download Sales" alongside the message "This isn't possible without you."

It's quite the testament to PlatinumGames' and creative lead Yoko Taro's vision of an action-heavy action RPG with a wildly complex and at times even confusing story. It's a series that's clearly a labor of love, with the producer insisting it'll continue as long as Taro is alive to work on it.

And, clearly, there's demand for Nier with the game selling many millions of copies now despite the lack of any sequel in sight. It's buoyed long-term by the enthusiastic community of fans around it and the sheer value of the game: It's one of those that keeps serving up new content and secret endings even as you play dozens more hours and finish it over and over.

Nier: Automata clocked a 79% PC Gamer Review back in 2017, held back more than anything by a pretty lackluster PC port.

Nier: Automata also had a pretty well-received anime adaptation that, shocking no-one, unveiled yet more secret lore and endings that involve the game itself.

They just might surprise you with ambition and depth well beyond what you'd expect, and you can feel cultured, "in the know," and above all productive as you check passion projects and outsider art off the little gaming backlog to-do list you keep on your phone. I've gathered eight of my favorite weirdo deep cuts of the past year, plus two from the end of 2023⁠—they were technically in the running for this year's Game Awards, so they still count!

Picayune Dreams

• Developer: Stepford, Andyland, milkypossum
• Release Date: December 4 (2023)
• Price: $5/£4
• Read More: Picayune Dreams is the first Vampire Survivors riff to really make me feel something

I loved Picayune Dreams' demo, but I only just got around to digging into the full release. It's the only "this game is like Vampire Survivors, but" -type game to really steal my heart like the original. Picayune Dreams is a "bullet heaven" game with more active, challenging combat than poncle's breakout, and even when you've reached the walking nuke threshold, the game has some gnarly bosses with thumb-cramping attack patterns to weave through.

I completed a run and saw its story through to the end after about six hours, but even after that it's a game I had trouble putting down. After reaching the ending, secrets, unlockables, and a global online leaderboard beckon to keep you coming back. Fantastic art, a pulsing breakcore soundtrack, and a surreal, unsettling, Evangelion-esque story seal the deal.

Psychopomp

• Developer: Fading Club
• Release Date: January 30/October 24
• Price: $9/£7
• Read More: You absolutely shouldn't miss Psychopomp Gold

Psychopomp is a psychedelic, disturbing, occasionally outright scary descent into what is either madness, or the true subterranean world that wears our own like a mask. Solve puzzles and converse with/hammer smash the strange denizens of this other world in a game that thrives on its winning soundtrack and breathtaking dreamscapes. Originally out in January as a free game, the version you want to play is the $9 "Gold" re-release from October⁠—it's twice as long and has updated graphics to boot.

Felvidek

• Developer: Jozef Pavelka, Vlado Ganaj
• Release Date: March 29
• Price: $11/£9
• Read More: Felvidek's demo had everything I love and none of what I hate about JRPGs

I was excited for Felvidek for some time, but I was still surprised to find it has ended up as one of my favorite games of this year. It's early modern times in the Slovak highlands, and in addition to the general strife of the day, something vile and supernatural stirs under the land. Protagonist Pavol is a washed-up, cuckholded, and disgraced man-at-arms who must investigate with the help of straight-laced priest Matej.

Felvidek's desaturated, sepia-toned visuals don't really look like anything else out there, but its later monster designs⁠—as well as its bangin' prog rock soundtrack⁠—remind me of Mason Lindroth's Hylics. Similar to Hylics, Felvidek offers a stripped-to-the-studs retro take on turn-based JRPG combat, with minimal complications, no grinding, but some surprisingly challenging fights. I love this game.

Skald: Against the Black Priory

• Developer: High North Studios
• Release Date: May 30
• Price: $15/£11.5
• Read More: The best thing about this retro fantasy RPG is that I keep forgetting it's actually Lovecraftian horror

If Skald: Against the Black Priory is good enough to win praise from Larian head honcho Swen Vincke, surely you could stand to give it a shot. Something I've really enjoyed about it is how Skald expertly evokes late '80s, early '90s DOS RPG pixel art, music, and vibes without being slavishly devoted to the more outdated mechanics of the time. This is a hardcore CRPG to be sure, but it feels transparent, fair, and balanced in a distinctly modern (or at least late '90s) way. I also have to second senior editor Robin Valentine's praise of Skald's surprisingly, deliciously sinister world building and horror elements.

Dread Delusion

• Developer: Lovely Hellplace
• Release Date: May 14
• Price: $20/£15
• Read More: Dread Delusion brims with an exhilarating sense of discovery that starts to wobble in the final act

Dread Delusion is a little weird for me as a "2024 game" since I've been playing it in early access since '22, but this low-fi, Morrowind-inspired RPG got its full 1.0 release earlier this year. Combat isn't my favorite aspect of Dread Delusion, but that's not why we're here. The game's real draws are exploration, atmosphere, and immersion in a truly strange, imaginative sci-fi/fantasy world.

The Oneiric Isles feature a collection of deeply flawed societies clinging to asteroids above a red star. My favorite one of those cultures is the nation of human flesh-eating undead who have finally managed to peacefully co-exist with their neighbors thanks to the invention of lab-grown "human" meat, teeing up what might be, at least for my money, an all-timer RPG quest.

Anger Foot

• Developer: Free Lives
• Release Date: July 11
• Price: $25/£21
• Read More: Anger Foot is a funny, unique FPS only slightly let down by performance issues

At $25, Anger foot is the most expensive game on this list, but it's still less than half the price of a triple-A game, and it's a fantastic arcade FPS. "Hotline Miami in first person" is the easiest topline pitch, but I also found it plays a lot like 2022's fantastic Neon White. Its time trial shooter gameplay really got me into a flow state of John Wickian murder, and even as a guy with little patience for "funny" games, Anger Foot's writing had me smiling most of the time and even having a few genuine guffaws.

Judero

• Developer: Talha and Jack Co.
• Release Date: September 16
• Price: $18/£15
• Read More: Judero is peak indie game

Judero is a wonderful action-adventure game made out of old GI Joes and claymation. The titular Judero is a wise and kind druid out to right the wrongs of the world with his mighty walking stick and ability to possess creatures great and small. Judero has the feeling of a fable or fairy tale, filtered through the folk psychedelia of '70s UK pop culture. One thing that's really stuck with me are the surreal, anachronistic conversations you can have with NPC townspeople, who hold forth on everything from lost love, to gender, to climate change, to anthropology. If that sounds too dry, it's also a very funny game, I promise.

Mouthwashing

• Developer: Wrong Organ
• Release Date: September 26
• Price: $13/£11
• Read More: Spoiler-free impressions/review-lite of Mouthwashing

Looking for a bad time? Try Mouthwashing, baby. It's like if Scavenger's Reign traded its breathtaking scenes of natural beauty for stifling claustrophobia, or if Alien's tension and body horror were entirely manmade. After a collision with an asteroid, deep space delivery ship Tulpar is marooned and its captain left maimed, unable to communicate, and in constant, horrible pain. A nonlinear narrative explores how things got this bad, and just how horrific the aftermath will become as rescue fails to materialize. I finished Mouthwashing in just three hours, but I'm still thinking about it months later.

Straftat

• Developer: Lemaitre Bros
• Release Date: October 24
• Price: $0 ($5/£4.3 "DLC" to double the map count from 70 to 140+)
• Read More: Straftat is so good, it's almost unfair that it's free

Straftat has proven a teamwide favorite on PCG, a bat signal for every old school FPS-liker on the crew. It's 1v1 only, a pairing of the CoD Gulag (one of that series' truly great innovations) with old school PC FPS map design and movement. Straftat is a mighty engine of "one more game," the antidote for live service blues and battle pass blahs. It also has a fantastic sense of humor, priming you for moments of ragollizing slapstick.

Bonus round freak pick: Thief: The Black Parade

• Developer: Feuillade Industries
• Release Date: November 30, 2023
• Price: Totally free, baby
• Read Watch More: Thief: The Black Parade is canon

The chronology is all outta whack here, but I just had to include this one, while I also could not in good conscience lead with a mod for a game from 1999⁠—it's for Thief Gold, not 1998's Dark Project, please don't email me. But we've made it all the way to the end of the list, so we can have a little treat. The Black Parade bills itself as an unofficial expansion pack, but it's really more of an unofficial Thief sequel: 10 massive missions that take advantage of the intervening years' progress not to push graphics tech, but deliver some of the most jaw-dropping immersive sim maps I've seen. I missed The Black Parade in the churn of last year's holiday chaos, but it's as great a time as any to dive back into The City.

But I'm calling it. Enough. We're done. From now on, we're only releasing games that are actually complete. And by 'we,' I mean 'you,' the imaginary publisher reading this. The whole phenomenon has become alarmingly common, with games both big and small releasing preterm and having to be brought up to snuff long after we've already dropped $60 on them.

Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1 became what it always should have been last September, nearly a year after release; the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition began looking like GTA approximately a month ago; will Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection ever recover from "probably one of the worst launches of all time"? Maybe with a few more patches, if it ever gets them.

Speaking of Star Wars, brace yourself for some kind of overhaul of Star Wars: Outlaws under its new director. On and on it goes, gradually becoming an unpalatable new normal.

Fixer upper

Admittedly, all of this is a little odd for me to say, given that Stalker 2 is one of my favourite games released this year and I gave it a pretty glowing review. Hell, I stand by it; Stalker 2 is great, and it was never as bad as some of the games I mentioned above even in its buggiest, pre-day-0 patch form. But the fact is, objectively, the game could've used more time to cook, and when GSC creative director Mariia Grygorovych said that "It's not perfect, we need to fix everything… But it's a game! It's a game with soul, with feelings there, with love there. Even the problems, you can't fix them if you don't have a game," it got my brain whirring.

I don't mean to put Grygorovych in particular on blast; the studio has a better justification for an undercooked game than any other in history, but her statement inadvertently crystallised a sentiment that has become all-too-common among games execs. We live in an online age—on PC, pretty much every single thing you play comes from a digital storefront, and even consoles have reached a point where physical disc drives are sold as strange, vestigial add-ons rather than the centre-stage of the whole experience. It's easier than ever to push a game out the door early in order to catch a particularly lucrative sales window, putting executive pay-packets and shareholder value ahead of devs and players, and only fixing the whole thing in post.

Imagine how tempting that is to the bean-counters and bottom-line men of the world, in an area where games are more unsustainably expensive and sprawling than ever. Imagine how tempting it has already been. We're all familiar by now with Cyberpunk 2077's story, that it was pushed out against the protests of its developers by executives hoping to capitalise on players double-dipping across console generations. Similarly, the MGS Master Collection and GTA Definitive Editions both got pushed out to hit autumn releases that coincided with milestone anniversaries. Even GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych admitted that shipping the game in time for the Black Friday/Christmas sales window factored into the studio's calculations.

It ain't the devs—no one wants their name on a busted game, and no one wants the endless social media harassment that comes with it—it's the head honchos. They're confident that, hey, if we make the team take a wrench to the thing after it comes out we can have our cake and eat it too, releasing at the most lucrative possible moment while still getting a decent game at the end of the run. Call it the early accessification of everything.

It can only go on for so long, I think. No, I don't mean that in some starry-eyed 'surely the capitalists will see sense,' kind of way, I just mean that you can only keep putting out broken games for so long before whatever trust was left crumbles completely. At some point people are going to stop pre-ordering and buying on day one in enough numbers to make a dent. Or I hope so, anyway.

So I'm calling for a two-pronged approach. You and me? We're teaming up to keep our wallets in our pockets until games—and especially games from mega-huge publishers—prove that they've entered the world into a less-than-on-fire state. And devs? Devs have gotta unionise and support one another to give themselves the tools and power they need to push back on absurd demands from the suits.

And, well, to be fair, devs have way better reasons to be shoring up their own power right now than making sure I don't feel like I wasted $60.

But still, putting out busted games with a vague promise to fix 'em later isn't acceptable, and if putting an end to it means taking power out of the hands of people who pull the purse-strings and putting it in the hands of people doing the work, or maybe even scaling down how ludicrously ambitious and unsustainable modern games are? Well, two birds with one stone, as far as I'm concerned.

I did not expect a game about mushrooms to be my personal pick for 2024. I also didn't expect Donald Trump to be re-elected President of the United States. Life really is like a box of chocolates, I suppose: Most of it tastes like crap, but every now and then you bite into something that doesn't suck.

Morels: The Hunt 2 is ostensibly a game about wandering the forest, hunting mushrooms, and as elevator pitches for videogames go, yeah, I've heard better. But it works! Dense, well-realized pastoral settings, excellent weather effects, and very effective audio cues come together to create outstanding outdoor playgrounds, and while hunting mushrooms is the name of the game (literally), you can skip all that and just stroll around snapping a few photos if that's what the moment calls for.

And so I did: My eyes were always open for edible fungus but I sunk a good chunk of my time in the game following the sounds of birds in trees or sloshing around in small ponds looking for frogs and turtles. Which is fine, because it really doesn't matter if the mushroom harvest isn't producing big yields: There are levels to advance through and weekly tasks to complete, but ultimately Morels: The Hunt 2 is about nothing more than chilling in the forest, embracing whatever vibe grabs you in the moment.

It's a real departure from the usual videogame routine, but the relaxed, no-pressure gameplay makes for a wonderful diversion from shooting dudes, stabbing dudes, and blowing dudes up. It's nice to hear a strange noise in a deep, dark forest and instinctively run toward it, rather than away from it, in the hopes of getting a good picture or at the very least seeing something new. Yes, I did once get my ass kicked by a wild dog or wolf or something (it was too dark to tell, and I'd foolishly neglected to bring a flashlight), but because "death" isn't a thing in Morels: The Hunt 2, it was simply a lesson learned (and a bit of mushroom-hunting time lost).

I was also taken by developer Wes Abrams' commitment to the game. He and brothers (and co-developers) Derek and Jason are real-life mushroom hunters themselves, and their passion for the hobby—and the fact that they were "pretty big gamers" themselves back in their younger years—is what inspired them to make the game. And it's neither a throwaway gag nor a quick money grab: They're 100% serious about recreating the experience as accurately as they can for a small but dedicated community of players who want to go outside without, y'know, going outside.

(Which isn't to say the commitment to realism is all-encompassing. There are mythological creatures to be found in the game including a unicorn and, so I'm told, a mermaid, and while I haven't encountered either of those I have 100% seen a flying saucer in the mid-Western sky.)

"We don't make games for the money, we make games because it is something we love," Wes Abrams told me earlier this year. "It has been a blast working on Morels 2. We have had a lot of fun with it and knowing we have a player base looking forward to the release of the game is really motivating."

That's another aspect of Morels: The Hunt 2 I find joyful. The player base is very small and that's obviously a factor, but I've never seen a hint of toxicity or "git gud" nonsense anywhere. It's just people who like huntin' mushrooms occasionally chatting with and offering tips to people who like huntin' mushrooms, not too far removed from the friendly chit-chat exchanged between people passing on a forest walking trail. There's a genuinely refreshing wholesomeness to it.

It's all just so goddamn nice, without surrendering to cloying cuteness or schmaltz, and there are days (weeks, months, what year is it?) when I could use a little shot of that. But none of it would mean much if Morels: The Hunt 2 wasn't also a really good game, and it is. Whether it's a game for you, I cannot say—it's pretty niche stuff—but it's a spot-on execution of a unique idea that has a whole lot more going on than you might expect. Morels: The Hunt 2 will never be a headliner like Cyberpunk 2077 or Elden Ring, but it was a happy highlight for me this year, and I'm happy to make it my personal pick.

Tyler Colp, Associate Editor: My favorite expansions don’t just answer questions or continue the plot from the original game, they stretch your imagination for what is even possible within it. Shadow of the Erdtree completes Elden Ring like it was always supposed to be there, adding surprising new weapon types, gorgeous new areas, and brutal new enemies.

The entire thing is built like the original Dark Souls; it’s not exactly a corkscrew world, but it certainly feels like it as you drop down into dungeons and resurface in a place you caught glimpses of 20 hours before. The Land of Shadow is dense with secrets and structures that slowly unravel one final, masterful story in FromSoftware’s tremendous action RPG.

Fraser Brown, Online Editor: Shadow of the Erdtree lets you murder gods with your stinky feet. It's very good.

Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor: The only thing more tired than gushing about Dark Souls' influence on action games is talking about how great metroidvania level design can be, but Shadow of the Erdtree's map is so good I can't help but be doubly insufferable for a minute. Erdtree makes a sumptuous meal out of the old "see that mountain? You can go there" cliche by making you work for it, dangling enticing destinations in front of you and making the path to each one a navigation puzzle of some kind. Jumping, hidden paths, huge shifts in elevation, open areas that flow gracefully into denser dungeons… this expansion was an antidote to my open world fatigue, and I hope years from now we can point to it as an inflection point for open world games doing way more with their environments than just making them big spaces to gallop across.

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer: I beat Radahn, Promised Consort (Radahn was harder pre-patch) after hours of trying (he's easier now). Obviously, everyone else struggled (it was way harder before), likely including you, dear reader (I beat him on release, it was harder).

Shadow of the Erdtree is excellent—like a window into what Elden Ring could've been with a tighter, closer-knit world. New records for blood pressure aside, I had a blast. While I did enjoy the breathtaking scope of the base game plenty in my first playthrough, I missed the days when so-called "legacy dungeons" were just the entire meat of the series' gameplay—please imagine me shaking my first at a cloud—and Shadow of the Erdtree came close to a complete return to that form.

The entire expansion's world is layered on top of itself like a pain lasagne, with outdoor environments that never overstay their welcome. There are a couple of spots where you can feel FromSoftware biting off more than it can chew, but on the whole, the deliciously dense delicacy made me very happy. Except for Radahn, he can taste my tarnished heel.

Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer: Though I'll always have a soft spot for how Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City perfectly conclude Dark Souls 3, or The Old Hunters' absolutely top tier bosses, Shadow of the Erdtree is undoubtedly the most intricate expansion FromSoft has ever produced.

As both Wes and Harvey note, exploring the map is a wonderfully layered experience. While guiding the game, I remember the all-consuming excitement of finding a tiny ledge in the final area and following it, crossing towers, jumping through a window, and taking lifts down until I eventually found a hidden shrine with a legendary weapon.

The funniest thing is I remember looking up at the same shrine 40 hours earlier from another area, wondering how I'd ever get there. FromSoft is fantastic at those down-the-rabbit-hole experiences and it truly perfected the craft with this expansion.

Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: My own, personal game of the year for 2024. Mechanically a marvel: Some of the best weapons, levels, and bosses FromSoftware has ever made. Dex gang rise up, we needed overpowered beauts like the Backhand Blades or Rakshasa's Great Katana to handle enemies like Ultra Instinct Brother-Husband and Bayle, the best videogame dragon ever.

Adding to that sense of seeing something from afar and finally reaching it hours later my colleagues mentioned, the fantasy vistas in this game just sucked the air out of my lungs they were so beautiful⁠—the Cerulean Coast, Ruins of Rauh and Shaman Village in particular stand out in my mind. The experience of descending forever through what seemed like a memorable but distinctly "side content" dungeon only to enter the boss room at the bottom and emerge into the Abyssal Woods is a videogame all-timer for me.

As someone who is perpetually anxious about what might be lurking in the dark, or around a corner, or even in the comfort of my own home, The Outlast Trials isn't a game you'd recommend I play. I jump at the slightest of noises and yelp as I do so, but that hasn't stopped me from spending hours upon hours in the Murkov facility facing otherworldly horrors that would paralyse me in fear if I saw them in real life. I've even gone one step further and forced friends to embark on this twisted adventure with me, and my maniacal laughter has met their screams of terror across Discord. Until I'm the one being targeted, of course.

The trials you go through are nothing short of horrific. It took me an embarrassing amount of hours to make it through the first one, 'Kill the Snitch', which forces you to drag a person tied to a chair with a bag over their head through a police station. Along the way you have to rummage in the corpses of what I can only assume are prisoners or people who tried to complete the trial before you to find keys that unlock the doors blocking your progression. That alone is bad enough, but a series of monstrous mutants are unleashed while you're running around trying to find a body marked with the same symbol as the key you need to find.

I swear, I spent more time hiding in bins than I did helping my team solve the puzzles to get through the trial. At one point, I’m convinced, the enemies had eyes exclusively for me. Every time I felt brave enough to sneak out of my hiding spot, I immediately got rushed by several mutants wielding a variety of weapons, who left me to bleed out and beg my teammates to come and bandage me up. This became a routine across all the trials we completed, but I found a lot of confidence in basically directing my teammates where I wanted them to go from the comfort of my hiding place, which probably wasn't a positive for them but certainly was for me.

But it's not just about the trials. These are what you're tempted to jump straight into once you enter the facility, and they're the thing you think about constantly when you've eventually shut the game down for the night. But the one thing that I love most about The Outlast Trials are the games around the lobby that give me some well-needed downtime after I've been petrified in the last run by the skinner man or, god forbid, Mother Gooseberry. There's arm-wrestling, which is basically a test of your reaction time and I don't quite understand how I keep winning, a good old-fashioned game of chess, or a game of Stroop which I quickly realised was my true calling.

Stroop puts you and a friend face to face in front of a mass of screens and presents the challenge of matching the colour being said over the loudspeaker with the colour on the screen in front of you. But to make it harder, the font colour of the words written in front of you is also different. It's like a brain training exercise, and I spent a lot of time as a kid playing games like this, so it's no wonder I walked in and wiped the floor with whoever was brave enough to take me on. I was no longer needed for trials, this minigame was where my skills shined.

Despite my fears about whatever we were coming up against, as someone who doesn't play a lot of multiplayer games, finally having one which I feel constantly compelled to come back to is a wonderful change. Sure, I've had nightmares about puppets with drill-bit tongues, or being grabbed from a hiding spot and electrocuted before running for my life, but I do truly love the experience The Outlast Trials offers. As twisted as it is, I can't imagine my drive to keep running each trial to get the best grade or beat it in record time will cease any time soon.

The only way to avoid that is to kill them first, a plan I'm well on the way to executing. I've already found a weapon, a gun that shoots timed exploding mines. This is better than a knife, which means getting up close, but worse than a pistol, which has lower risk of collateral damage. Finding my target is proving tricky, however. The building site I'm trapped in is thronged with people, while braces and quiffs seem to be in vogue.

Eventually I spy green braces and a blond quiff on a man standing with his back to me, in a narrow room housing a large boiler. But as I'm about to plant a mine on his back, all hell breaks loose. A patrolling policeman picks someone out of the crowd and starts brutally beating them to death. The crowd roils as dozens of people race screaming for the doors, and amid the confusion my target slinks away.

I catch up with them a few minutes later, again stood with their back to me, the crowd thinner this time. I raise the mine launcher again. But another policeman spots me doing this, and demands to know what I'm doing. I glance to see where the cop is, and in that split second my fate is sealed. The screen flashes red, and the camera pans down to show a gaping crimson hole in my stomach. My character glances up to show a man with my face holding a bloody knife, lingering on their burning red eyes for a second before the screen fades to black.

Welcome to DoubleWe, a single-player social stealth game in which you're tasked with killing your own clone. Developed by Turkish indie studio NightByte games, DoubleWe launched a demo earlier this year to virtually zero fanfare. I urge you to give it a try, as it's one of my favourite demos I've played in ages.

Each of DoubleWe's scenarios starts by placing you in a randomly generated chunk of vaguely cyberpunk city. I say "vaguely", because you shouldn't go in expecting the preposterous scale and detail of CD Projekt's Night City. DoubleWe's environments are mostly brown corridors and sparsely decorated construction sites, with most of its cyberpunk vibe stemming from the columns of futuristic airships flying overhead.

Ultimately though, DoubleWe's setting doesn't matter. What matters is the events that transpire within these spaces. When you spawn, your character is equipped with a single piece of equipment. Sometimes it's a mirror. Sometimes it's a shard of glass. Either way, you use it to look at your reflection and identify your distinguishing features. Your gender, your hairstyle, your eye-colour, what kind of top you're wearing, whether you're wearing shorts or pants. Each new level casts you as a different person, and memorising what you look like is the first step in survival.

From this point onward, you need to be on your guard. Somewhere out there is an exact clone of you, and if they see you, they will try to kill you. DoubleWe's demo doesn't explain the nature of these clones, but the menu screen makes it clear they are several steps left of human. In any case, you want to be the one who spies them first (and ideally, the one who shoots first too).

To do this, there are two key obstacles you'll need to overcome. Firstly, you spawn without a weapon, meaning you need to find one of the highly convenient briefcases scattered around and retrieve the randomised weapon within. Secondly, the level is crammed with dozens of other people, all milling around and getting between you and your target. Not only do collateral kills lower your score, since all weapons are single-use items, killing the wrong person also leaves you defenceless. What results is a mixture of Guess Who, Hide-and-Seek, and Hitman, as you search the passing crowds for your target and wait for an opportune moment to assassinate them.

It's an ingenious concept, although DoubleWe can take a few rounds to demonstrate its potential. Initially, finding and killing your clone isn't that difficult. Because of DoubleWe's simplistic visual style and its cardboard cutout NPCs, identifying your target is usually straightforward. You'll occasionally spot someone who looks similar enough to your target to warrant a quick check in the mirror, but you must be extremely cavalier to kill wrong person. Moreover, because your clone only ever attacks with a knife, confrontations are usually resolved quickly.

I will say, however, that pulling the trigger is explosively violent, far gnarlier and more physical than you might expect given DoubleWe's simple presentation. Moreover, even at this stage, interesting scenarios can emerge. Sometimes you'll spot the clone before you've found a weapon, and have to quietly sneak past them as you search for a briefcase. Sometimes they'll spot you before you've found a weapon, at which point you'll need to quickly exit the area to stop your doppelganger chasing you down. Showdowns can also play out in slightly different ways. I've encountered clones that hesitate when you point your weapon at them, and others that race toward you with alarming speed whether you're armed or not.

Crucially though, DoubleWe's demo lets you play more than one level, through which scenarios grow progressively more difficult. Environments become larger and crowds thicker, while the game folds in new ideas like the aforementioned policemen, as well as NPCs who become weirdly fascinated by you, following you around and obscuring your vision. Levels can also be affected by randomised mutators, making environments darker or foggy.

In these latter stages, DoubleWe can be an superbly effective paranoia generator. In one level, I spotted my target and then lost them as they ducked into a corridor. As I followed them, a surge of bodies came tumbling the other way, and as I tried to navigate through the swarm, my clone stepped out of the column and shanked me dead. There's also nothing quite like rounding a corner to be immediately confronted by your clone to jolt you awake.

The more I played DoubleWe, the more it got under my skin. It's fascinating how quickly a situation can feel like it's slipping from your control, as you go from diligently stalking your prey to being jostled relentlessly in a crowd, your anxiety mounting with each dot-eyed face that passes by. And just when you think you've got the measure of it, something will happen that catches you off guard.

As I mentioned, DoubleWe is currently only available as a demo. But the demo feels like a surprisingly complete experience, with a multi-level arc, new weapons that unlock as you play, and even a resolution of sorts. Indeed, one concern I have is how well the experience will translate to a full-length game, as the demo's snackable form feels ideal for the concept. Sniffing out clones is an excellent way to kill half an hour, and the nature of the games makes the demo fairly replayable. But I'm not sure how well it will extend over ten or twenty times that length.

I hope I'm wrong, though, because it's a fantastic idea, and there are certainly things a full game could improve, like adding more interesting spaces for events to play out, folding weapons more naturally into the environment, and making clones harder to discern from the larger crowd. There's no word on when the version of DoubleWe will be released, but when the demo is this fun, I'm happy to wait.

Wow, that was tough. No matter what I tried, today's answer seemed to keep slipping away. Oh sure I had some yellow letters around to help, but they didn't want to turn green, and nothing else was in a rush to help. I'm relieved my final guess worked out for me, but I really wish I'd got there sooner.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, December 28

This word's all about expressing a negative opinion, whether spoken out loud in a meeting or written up in a newspaper. You could do this publicly to denounce bad company practices, or point out the flaws in a proposed ruling. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

There are no double letters in today's Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you've got the basics, it's much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path: 

• A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels. 
• Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
• Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Here's your latest win. The answer to the December 28 (1288) Wordle is DECRY.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 27: GRAIN
• December 26: AFFIX
• December 25: SHARE
• December 24: EAGLE
• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you'll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You'll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you're wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which ones you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Posted to Reddit a few days ago is a bit of footage of WoW classic characters in Alliance capital Stormwind spreading the plague amongst each other in true 2005 fashion. It's not clear how the debuff got out of the raid instance this time. Some have suggested it wasn't that precise Corrupted Blood effect from the raid, rather one created by a weaker version of boss Hakkar the Soulflayer in another dungeon.

Looks like we are going back to 2005, someone in Season of Discovery figured out how to bring Corrupted Blood to Stormwind again, video taken a few minutes ago from r/classicwow

Corrupted Blood is perhaps one of the most famous events in the history of MMOs, breaking containment at that time to even be covered in mainstream press and receive attention from scientific authorities. In 2007 a study of the corrupted blood incident was published in The Lancet, one of the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.

To quote that piece: "The Corrupted Blood outbreak in World of Warcraft represents both a missed opportunity and an exciting new direction for future epidemiological research."

That turned out to be entirely true. During the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic that data was referenced and considered by those same researchers while looking at the spread of the real-world disease.

We told the story of the Corrupted Blood incident in full ourselves in the documentary series Tales from the Hard Drive, hosted by Lenval Brown, the voice actor who narrated Disco Elysium:

World of Warcraft has remained the top of the pack in MMOs for the full 20 years since 2004, a fact we recently marveled over and examined in a big ol' feature.

Assuming of course you have an Xbox Series X/S to play on.

The confusion stems from a December 23rd tweet from the FortniteStatus twitter account that said the skin would be unavailable starting, uh, December 2024. Which weirdly meant that you would have been able to buy it for 23 days but you'd be forced to return it.

Anyway, vigilant users quickly noticed the error because, as Epic said back in 2020 when announcing Matte Black Master Chief as a skin, you'd be able to get it in Fortnite at any point in the future and there would be "no time limit for unlocking this style."

"We apologize for the confusion from our previous tweet saying it was no longer available," said Epic the next day. A Christmas Eve miracle, I guess. Or one more just-in-time victory for the one and only Master Chief. Or both. Anyone's guess at this point. Maybe the plot of Halo 7 will be MC trying to stay in Fortnite ala Wreck-It-Ralph.

So much so that it would be impossible for me to catch you up on everything that's been going on. Instead, I've plucked out some of the biggest moments, good and bad, that reveal a genre that's still full of energy.

World of Warcraft took us underground

The big 'un had a busy 12 months, mainly thanks to the launch of The War Within, the first part of a trilogy of expansions. Adventurers spent most of the expansion underground, in some of the most impressive locations that Blizzard's designed across the MMO's venerable history. Big stakes, striking maps, hero talents that leaned into each class fantasy, and significant changes to how alts are handled all lead to The War Within feeling like a great step in the right direction—though as a fan of Dragonflight, I feel like WoW's course correction started happening a while back.

Of course, the year hasn't been without its drama. Mists of Pandaria Remix got off to a rough start after Blizzard changed how the item that granted players most of their power worked at launch, when it had previously been a lot more effective in the PTR. Then it clamped down on some exploits, leaving some players seriously overpowered while others were stuck in a very long grind. Eventually things evened out, though, and after some more fixes it ended up being one of WoW's greatest experiments.

2024 also marked WoW’s 20th anniversary, culminating in a big event that was ostensibly meant to celebrate the MMO's storied history. But, as contributor Heather Newman put it, the event ended up being a disappointing grind. It's a shame to end the year on such a note, but overall this was undeniably a strong 12 months for the 20-year-old MMO, and there are some very exciting things coming in the future.

Final Fantasy 14 saved Square Enix

Even before Final Fantasy 14's Dawntrail expansion was taken into account, its success was propping up Square Enix, which has been churning out quite a lot of games that haven't met the company's profit expectations—in particular Final Fantasy 16, which had two shots at success, first on PS5, and then on PC a year later, but failed to make a splash. Stalwart Final Fantasy 14, though, has just been going from strength to strength.

On the subject of Dawntrail, launching around the same time as The War Within was a big risk, but that doesn't seem to have slowed the MMO down. I'm nowhere near hitting that point in the game yet, after only just getting back into A Realm Reborn a few months ago, but in our 80% Dawntrail review contributor Daniel Lucas said "a rich world and amazing dungeon design more than make up for dips in the story".

Dawntrail also gave us a substantial graphics overhaul, affecting all of Eorzea, allowing FF14 to continue its reign as the prettiest MMO.

But for veterans, the strict update cadence and the often conservative form these updates take has made FF14 a bit predictable. As Harvey put it, FF14 "hasn't been able to grow its team or up its game because, well, it's the only thing keeping the rest of Square Enix afloat". It needs to be able to take some bigger swings, but for that to happen Square Enix is probably going to need to release some games that more people want to play.

New World became New World: Aeternum

In an attempt to try and recapture some of the excitement and massive player numbers New World enjoyed at launch a couple of years ago, Amazon decided to relaunch it as New World: Aeternum, to coincide with its arrival on consoles. Unfortunately, it also confused just about everybody by not being remotely clear in regards to what, exactly, New World: Aeternum actually was.

When Amazon initially briefed me on the relaunch, it described Aeternum as a mix of remaster, remake and spiritual successor that would exist alongside the original game. That was confusing enough, but then it made an official announcement that pitched the game as an ARPG, not once mentioning the word "MMO", implying an even more dramatic change.

Most of it turned out to be nonsense. New World: Aeternum is simply New World, but with some tweaks. It's possible to play through the entire campaign solo, but it is no less of an MMO. And the remake/spiritual successor stuff was just not true. It's at best a remaster, but even that's pushing it. The Angry Earth expansion brought about far more changes than Aeternum, which ends up feeling more like a decent-sized update. That's it.

On PC, this not-entirely-accurate portrayal was successful in getting more players back in, but nowhere near the amount it saw at launch the first time around. Instead of a million colonisers running around in the woods, it managed to get up to just over 50k concurrents. Since October, though, the number has fallen back to 20k, which is where it was before Aeternum arrived. Not exactly a victory.

Once Human turned Control into an MMO

Once Human's relative success is slightly bittersweet. It's nice to see a brand new MMO finding a playerbase, but at the same time it's kind of a bummer because it's also another post-apocalyptic survival game—just one that sticks a lot of people on the same map and gets them to build bases that don't remotely match the game's aesthetic. I didn't find it to be an especially noteworthy survival game, either, as it leans more into the crafting side than anything else, and does so in a way that feels pretty standard, though I did enjoy the Control vibe.

Contributor Heather Newman enjoyed it a lot more, though, calling it a "deep, surprisingly sticky, truly free-to-play mashup of what you like from a bunch of other survival MMOs" in her 84% Once Human review.

Once Human does highlight that it's probably easier to release an MMO these days if you're also jumping on existing trends. Despite the fact that a big new survival game seems to come out every couple of months, the appetite for them shows no signs of dwindling, and the mechanics of survival games jive pretty well with MMOs.

Guild Wars 2 made us homeowners

While Guild Wars 2 players have technically been on the real estate ladder for a long time, there's not much to do with the bog standard, identical homes we all get. It's a bit like renting. That changed with this year's Janthir Wilds expansion, which introduced homesteading, an extension of the customisation-heavy guild halls that my guild has been having a lot of fun with over the years.

Since last year's Secrets of the Obscure, ArenaNet has been feeding us with more regularity, swapping the sporadic expansion cycle for regular expansions every year, which it then fleshes out through smaller regular updates. The result is a smaller amount of new things per drop, but at a cadence that's a lot more frequent. Secrets of the Obscure saw ArenaNet making some missteps as it adapted to the new routine, but Janthir Wilds has been a lot more smooth.

November's update also included the first new raid in five years, rather than doing the traditional thing of just expanding the already-gargantuan world map. This move was a bit of a risk, given that Guild Wars 2's playerbase is not exactly full of raiders. But it also showed that ArenaNet was keen to explore the different sides of the game and move outside of its comfort zone. To make it slightly less of a gamble, the raid map and the enemies are also used outside of the raid itself, in both a 50-player event and the update's story, so even the more casual players were able to get something new to nibble on.

Star Wars: The Old Republic adapted to life under a new developer

Despite my fear that BioWare handing over the reins to Broadsword heralded the beginning of SWTOR's march into maintenance mode, the developer switch hasn't really changed much about the MMO. This is not to say that it hasn’t been growing, it's just been doing so in a way that it probably would have if BioWare hadn't left the game to instead focus on Dragon Age and Mass Effect.

Broadsword has continued working on the ongoing story of a Mandalorian maniac, and it's now started a modernisation project. Several worlds have been given subtle graphical upgrades and dynamic quests—not unlike Guild Wars 2's—and character models have similarly been tweaked. The latter hasn't gone off without a hitch, though, introducing some weird quirks that make characters look a bit weird, sometimes to the point where they resemble walking corpses.

Fixes are underway, at least, and there's good reason to be positive about the direction. Broadsword is clearly not content with just keeping things running and maintaining the flow of MTX and subscription fees. It's making an effort not just to add to the game, but to dust off some of the cobwebs too. I've been playing off and on since launch, and while I'm not as enthusiastic about the MMO as I once was, I've resubbed and still feel like I'm getting my money's worth.

Throne and Liberty finally launched after 13 years

It's strange to imagine that plenty of folk have been waiting for Throne and Liberty for over a decade. Initially billed as a sequel to NCSoft's Lineage, and originally known as Lineage Eternal, it suffered a slew of delays, changes in the development team, and multiple rebrandings, before finally launching in South Korea in 2023, and globally in 2024. I'm not convinced that anything is worth that wait, but certainly not Throne and Liberty.

Look, it's fine. I'm not really a big F2P Korean MMO guy, but even with that in mind I find the grind and business model to be gratuitously awful here. Oh yeah, and it's a localisation disaster. Which is a shame, because boy is it fun to murder monsters. The fast-paced, flashy combat system lets you seamlessly switch between two weapons, dramatically changing your abilities, and the whole thing just feels so wonderfully effortless.

But this wasn't enough to bring me back after launch, which was a nightmare thanks to the insurmountable lag. Things have improved since then, granted, but performance continues to be an issue. Still, it's remained reasonably popular on Steam, where it manages to bring in 70k concurrents.

While Lineage was of course one of the most important early MMOs—especially in Korea—Throne and Liberty still feels like a pretty niche proposition, given the massive grind and the focus on PvP. So for it to be doing pretty well is a reminder that there's still a hunger for MMOs—even the ones that aren't very good.

City of Heroes was officially resurrected

This is wild, honestly. City of Heroes, the greatest of the admittedly small number of superhero MMOs, was tragically killed off by NCSoft back in 2012. That should have been the end of the story, but thanks to diligent fans it was given a new chapter.

In 2019, the distribution of the source code allowed various teams to unofficially resurrect the MMO, keeping it alive for those players who still remembered it. I recall following some of them and considered jumping back in, but the unofficial status stopped me from returning to my old stomping grounds. I didn't want to get invested again only for them to die a second death.

But this year, something unprecedented happened: NCSoft granted the official license to one group of fan developers, making City of Heroes: Homecoming the unambiguous, completely-above-board, official City of Heroes. This inspired me to return, and oh boy, the nostalgia. The team has proved itself as a fantastic custodian over the years, and while it's lacking in a lot of modern conveniences, it's still a game bursting with flavour and creativity.

And the rest

This year also saw The Elder Scrolls Online get a (poorly received) expansion, Gold Road. I've actually started dabbling in it again for the first time in years, but I've not touched the new expansion yet, which judging by the player reception has been a bit of a dud. Meanwhile, Bethesda's other MMO (I'd personally argue that it isn't really an MMO, but the consensus seems to be that it is) Fallout 76 has been enjoying a boost in popularity thanks to the Fallout TV show, and is poised for a very exciting 2025, featuring playable ghouls.

Amazon-published MMOARPG Lost Ark has been having a rough time of things, unfortunately. After a strong launch in 2022, and a few population bumps since then, its popularity has been trending downwards, culminating in a significant dip in player numbers this summer, which it's yet to recover from.

RuneScape designer Andrew Gower released his new F2P MMO in early access this year, Brighter Shores. Lincoln found it to be "obsessively devoted" to grinding, "with little interest in the world surrounding it", but it's been fairly well received on Steam, though only has a small number of players. It's going to have an uphill struggle convincing the RuneScape vets to leave either RS or OSRS behind for something so similar.

So there have been plenty of ups, as well as some downs, but broadly it feels like MMOs are just in a really strong place, even as they face steep competition from the growing number of alternative live service games. Pity me, though, as a man who seems to be incapable of only playing one of them. I'm never going to be able to escape my MMO-shaped prison, it seems.

Mollie Taylor, Features Producer: As I've grown older and found myself with less free time, I've largely fallen off the JPRG train. But Metaphor: ReFantazio has pulled me right back in and reminded me why I adore this genre so much.

The game feels like an adult Persona—swapping out high school for high fantasy—crafting a gripping story and beloved characters that I came to deeply care for. I've fallen in love with Scouse dogs Fidelio and Basilio, while Hulkenberg's relatable love for food provides much-needed respite between the more intense battles for the throne.

The Archetype system is also genuinely fantastic, reminiscent of the old-school Final Fantasy job systems. It creates far more freedom than I ever felt I had with my Persona teammates, and I had a ball creating different team synergies and cross-classing skills before big battles.

Metaphor: ReFantazio may not have had the biggest budget or scope, but it has so much heart and style. I still can't stop thinking about it 150 hours and two playthroughs later.

Fraser Brown, Online Editor: Metaphor is the best game I've played all year. Though not strictly speaking part of the Persona series, it's also the best Persona game. I don't care about high school drama—I've done that already—but a civil war that's also a structured competition run by a corrupt theocracy, and which may end with a young lad and his pals—which includes a talking bat—ending a kingdom's institutional racism? Yeah, that's pretty novel.

Joshua Wolens, News Writer: For years, Atlus has had one dream: To tell a story with political themes that doesn't fall flat on its face. Persona 4 whiffed it hard. Persona 5 came closer, but still wobbled. But here, with Metaphor, and with its story of a small heterochromatic boy and his fairy pal on a quest to end apartheid and wake up his boyfriend (or something, I haven't finished it yet), the studio might actually have pulled it off. Hats off, Hashino-san.

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer: Metaphor: ReFantazio is my first ever Atlus game, and I picked a hell of a time to jump on, because it might be one of its best. As Joshua outlines above, the game's story is downright excellent, consistently endearing, well-written, and bursting with a manic kind of creativity that's typical for the studio, just with swords and sorcery instead of high school and mind heists.

I also agree with Josh in that it has a hell of a lot to say and mostly sticks the landing—tackling the problems of prejudice (and the impossible task of building a utopia) with surprising tastefulness and nuance. I was particularly charmed by how it slots the power of fantasy stories into all of it, too. The game was built by people who understand that fiction can have a real, tangible impact on people's lives—who then proceed to play with the how and why with deep wisdom.

Phil Savage, Global Editor-in-Chief: Yes, yes, the story is good, and a nice change of pace from Persona's high-school bread and butter. But what strikes me most about Metaphor is what Atlas has done with dungeons this time around.

As with Persona, I'm pushing myself to finish every dungeon in a single in-game day—it's the most efficient way to play when you also have to build relationships, improve virtues and, err, go fishing. But here you have to travel between those dungeons—some of which are multiple days away from the hub city you're currently visiting. I love hoovering up all the extra side-quests and bounties at the start of a main mission cycle, seeing all the locations I'll need to visit and planning out a route—a lengthy excursion that will hit all of the big objectives before eventually tackling the next big story quest. And the game rewards you for spending time with its optional objectives. Once you've outleveled an opponent, you can just directly kill it without having to go into turn-based battle mode.

It also means the fights you do have to take—those of similar or higher level enemies—can be a bit more threatening than your standard Persona mob encounter. There are some fun tricks to certain enemy types—the standard elemental weaknesses, sure, but also more interesting considerations like enemies that enrage when you've a magic staff user in your ranks, or ones that gain extra turns and more powerful attacks if you leave any of your party on the frontline. As Mollie says, the Archetype system offers plenty of freedom, and throughout the campaign, Atlus seeds fun strategic wrinkles that encourage you to make full use of its versatility.

I can't remember a single game that has polarized the PC Gamer team as much as Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Even pre-launch, opinions were mixed, and now that it's been out for some time, we've congealed into three camps: Anti-Veilguardites Robin and Fraser, Radical Veilguard Centrists Harvey and Lauren (who wrote our review), and The People's Revolutionary Council of Revisionist Veilguard-Likers, which consists of Jody and yours truly.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is not my personal game of the year, that's gotta be Shadow of the Erdtree. It's also not my second favorite game of the year⁠—that title belongs to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. But by God, Veilguard is 100% my third favorite game of 2024. While not perfect, I think it's a heartening return to form for BioWare, and one whose finer qualities have been eclipsed by both valid critiques of its storytelling, as well as far less acceptable "antiwoke" bellyaching. I really dug this game, and I want to give it its flowers before the year is through.

Even as BioWare struggled with everything else during its wilderness years of the late 2010s, it's only been getting better at making action-RPGs, and Veilguard is no exception. I love tactical RPGs, but that hasn't been BioWare's bag for a long time, and while I could take or leave some of the ways Veilguard smooths away the last remnants of CRPG-adjacent rough edges from Inquisition, a lot of the team's decisions here were pretty inspired.

I appreciate the way Veilguard curbed loot inflation, as well as Inquisition's tedious and unbalanced item crafting, with a unique, upgrade-centric system that incentivizes finding duplicate copies of the same weapon. The one-two punch of making all player armors usable by all classes while companions get their own bespoke gear erodes some of the distinction of the class fantasies (why's my rogue running around in plate mail!), but it also eliminates finding dud gear you just can't use, and simplifies the process of balancing all that loot.

Veilguard definitely has a reverse difficulty curve, and its fights are starting to feel samey as I approach the 60-hour mark, but that's an issue I've found with all of BioWare's games to date, and the core of Veilguard's combat and character building is fun enough to carry the day for me. I'm always a rogue first in Dragon Age, and here I opted for the classico dual swords edgelord "Duelist" specialization. The "Thousand Cuts" subclass-specific ability feels so good, I don't mind that every fight consists of me building up enough Rogue Pointz™ to just start spamming it⁠—my qunari rogue adopts an "en garde, my liege" stance before launching into a flurry of AOE anime slashes, trailing poison with every strike.

Veilguard's level design, meanwhile, is unambiguously BioWare's most interesting and complex in over 20 years, at least since Neverwinter Nights in 2002. I'd seen Veilguard's levels derisively compared to Overwatch maps, with simple layouts and pretty skyboxes, but that sells Veilguard short, and I think it's in a whole other league compared to the Mass Effect games. Don't get me wrong⁠, I love Mass Effect⁠, but its levels were exclusively linear shooting galleries with maybe a short side path or two to a weapon upgrade if you're lucky, while its non-combat hubs were the tiniest Disneyland suggestions of real places.

The Veilguard's levels are videogamey⁠—they don't immerse me or feel like real places in the same way Elden Ring or Indiana Jones managed⁠—but they are also fun, twisty, and visually striking, with Metroidesque shortcuts and switchbacks, as well as enough hidden loot and secret areas that I felt genuinely rewarded for exploring both in missions and during free roam of the hubs. A word of advice though: I definitely recommend taking Fraser's cue and toning down Veilguard's aggressively handholding objective markers. I went one step further, completely disabling both them and the minimap, and I haven't regretted it once.

Would that you could do the same to Veilguard's little choice explainer pop-ups. Every time something in The Veilguard transpires because of your previous actions, a little tooltip shows up like Microsoft Clippy to remind you why: "Remember when you spat in this guy's soup? He doesn't like you now." There's a genuinely difficult choice early in the game where you have to consign one of two hub zones to a stinky natural disaster, and I loved this moment, but the magic dulled a bit as the game just kept reminding me of it. Veilguard undermines its genuinely impressive reactivity by constantly explaining it to you like you're a toddler.

But that's just an annoyance, while the story being told is genuinely good fun. Thedas is definitely tamer, friendlier, and less politically fraught than it's ever been⁠—I was more amused than annoyed that the infamous Antivan Crows assassin guild from games past is more or less a confederation of plucky, crime-flavored freedom fighters now⁠—but it still feels like Thedas, and I didn't realize how much I missed this setting until I dove back in.

Veilguard has a solid crew of companions to hang with. If Mass Effect Andromeda was a resounding F and Dragon Age Origins has an S-tier crew, then Veilguard's cast gets a B. Neve, Harding, and Taash are sub-replacement level for me⁠—I found them by turns aggravating and boring⁠—but Lucanis kind of won me over. Under that edgy cool guy assassin exterior, he's basically just Carth from KotOR or Kaidan from Mass Effect, and I have a well-documented affection for that archetype.

Plucky archeologist Bellara, Grey Warden hardass Davrin, and friendly neighborhood necromancer Emmerich carry the cast for me. I was worried that Bellara would just be a worse version of Talli from Mass Effect or Merrill from Dragon Age 2, but after a poor first impression, I found her to be a winning, layered character with a great arc. Davrin brings a nice edge to the sword-and-board knight sort of guy, and I really dug how things played out between him and pet griffon Assan⁠—there's a bit of a Lone Wolf and Cub, "step dad who stepped up" thing going on, and I found that much more fun and palatable as one aspect of one member of an ensemble as opposed to The Plot of Every Console Triple-A Game For A While. Emmerich, meanwhile, is just a nice guy, a sweetheart⁠—he reminds me most of Gale from Baldur's Gate 3⁠—but the contrast of his chirpy attitude with his grimdark necromancer profession and aesthetics really charmed me.

It took us 10 years to get a new Dragon Age game, but it wasn't a linear process of toil on a singular vision. What would become The Veilguard saw one hard reboot and the departure of numerous longtime BioWare developers, including writers David Gaider and Mary Kirby, as well as directors Mike Laidlaw and Mark Darrah (Darrah did return as a consultant). The game then went through some kind of soft reboot from a live service multiplayer orientation back into a singleplayer game.

That's development hell, and somehow, The Veilguard escaped it. With a backstory like that, you might expect the finished result to be a mess, a cross-section of competing visions and stratified eras of development that's simply unfit for prime time.

But that's not what we got at all. The Veilguard is a fun, well put-together, and engrossing action-RPG that's had me hooked for 60 hours and counting. I know it's a good RPG because I indulged in my favorite vice and rerolled my guy after 20 hours to make a slightly different guy, and I didn't mind experiencing the first act of the game again⁠—I even cranked the difficulty up to the "tough customers only" Nightmare setting to spice things up. BioWare actually managed to do the thing with Veilguard despite all the factors working against it, and I'm proud to call Dragon Age: The Veilguard my third-favorite game of 2024.

This caused my colleague Harvey Randall some slight distress. "Mighty allfather of FPS games and co-creator of Doom John Romero decrees that 'gib' is pronounced in the most upsetting way possible," said Mr. Randall in an article at the time.

Except I'd been pronouncing it with a soft g, like giblet, my entire life. Ever since I'd first heard it. This isn't something we ever had to think about because it's a shortened version of a real word. The chunks are gibs, yes, the components of giblets. It's not like gif, for example, which is its own whole word.

Except now it's totally like gif for the Mr. Randalls of the world, and everyone else who's been saying gib with a hard g, even though that's neither how you say giblet nor gin. There are, it seems, many hard-g gib pronouncers among us—ask your Discord group and you might find some real discord.

So honestly what the heck, John? Just don't answer questions like this because now we have to quibble over pronunciation for the rest of time.

Looking forward to revisiting this in a decade or two when some kind of linguistic consonant shift means we pronounce giblets with a hard G but still pronounce gibs with a soft G. Presumably I am the only person in the world who has this particular nightmare, but by sharing this I have eased my burden.

If Moore's Law predicts that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years then we should go ahead and coin Barone's law saying that the number of games like Stardew Valley launching doubles every year. As the farm sim contender count continues to rise, it gets harder and harder for me to separate wheat from chaff but each year there's always one really standout farmlife sim and in 2024 it was the early access for Fields of Mistria. 

Even in early access, Mistria has been incredibly in touch with its roots. I already had high hopes for Fields of Mistria when I found out about its dual inspirations of '90s farm sims and magical girl anime. The townie-focused stories of romance and revitalization in farm sims are a perfect pairing with the trope-y character archetypes of pre-millenium anime. 

It begins as genre convention demands: Your customized farmer arrives in town to take over an old property that needs some serious TLC. You'll meet all the local townies like the grocery owner (Holt and Nora), carpenter (Ryis), blacksmith (March and Olric), and rancher (Hayden) all ready to help you upgrade your gear and property so you can dump all your profits right back into the local economy. 

After playing more of them than I care to count, I've found that so many farm sims start with a cool concept but fumble their fundamentals like overly long chopping animations or clunky menus. Mistria fires on all cylinders immediately. Tool interactions are snappy fast, the interface is visually appealing, and the story introduction doesn't drag on with too much dialogue. 

Moments into playing I realized just how much Mistria is a farm simmer's farm sim, incorporating all sorts of features that Stardew Valley players have long considered must-have mods like seeing NPC locations on their map or being able to jump over fences instead of walking around them.

But more than just quality-of-life improvements to genre staples, Mistria brings some genuine little moments of glee. I remember nearly kicking my feet squealing when I first noticed that the mysterious dragon statue on my property has a relationship meter that's a heart instead of a normal relationship gem? We still don't know what's up with that but the fervor to find out is second only to everyone chanting and begging to romance March's brother Olric.

Another favorite feature of mine is animal breeding. Not many farm sims go in on playing with genetics with your livestock and I love how simple but rewarding Mistria makes it. There aren't lengthy stats for farm animals, just colors, but there are so many colors that I've been obsessed with figuring out the combinations that will unlock all the different variants like red chickens, or blue-spotted cows. I can't wait to start breeding rare rabbits. It's another example of just how finely-tuned Mistria is in finding features that are obvious catnip to farm sim players and giving just enough depth to them without turning any one aspect of the game into a slog.

All that clarity of design would have been wasted if Mistra weren't also completely confident in its personality. Fields of Mistria is so intimately in touch with its roots, both the classic farm sims it's emulating and the magical girl anime of the '90s. It's so rare for a game that wears its inspirations on its sleeve like this not to get mired in reproduction but Mistria deftly hops over that pitfall too.

Mistria's characters could have come off as flat callbacks to anime of yore but its characters are all so much more than sale rack Sailor Moon. Standoffish blacksmith March has an archetypal aversion to your player character but he isn't just one note: letting loose with a few drinks at the Friday night gathering at the inn. Mistria's other characters are equally easy to pigeonhole at first glance but all open up a lot more as the seasons progress. One of the ruling family twins Eiland seems shallow and foppish initially but has a genuine interest in archaeology and a stubborn streak when it comes to pursuing Mistria's historical secrets.

Those personalities come out even more in my favorite weekly tradition: Friday night Dungeons and Drama sessions. The whole town gathers at the inn each week, separating out into different social activities of which the most amusing is the weekly tabletop RPG session. Eiland begins as a beleaguered DM ("drama manager") initially as the group contends with stat dumpers, new players, and murderous rampages. But as the seasons progress the campaign ends, giving Eiland his turn on the player side of the table while Balor the merchant relishes the opportunity to surprise everyone with twist character reveals.

Mistria isn't some masterclass in dialogue writing, nor is it even something that reminded me of why I love a great fantasy novel the way Roadwarden did in 2022, but the way its characters speak and interact feels right at every moment. It toes the line between sincerity and hokey the way that the great anime of the '90s it's emulating also can.

Fields of Mistria recently got its first major update with new relationship cutscenes for its characters and other additions but it does have a ways to go yet to go before it arrives at a 1.0 launch. That's expected to be sometime next year, according to its developer. Until then though, Mistria has already been the best farm sim of my year by a country mile.

To call Helldivers 2's first year 'hectic' is like saying that a tidal wave got you 'damp'. I've been combing over our past year of coverage to write this article, and let me tell you, it's a rollercoaster. Its players have loved it like a carnival ride, showing up en-masse to create the first stomach-dropping plunge, followed by a series of sharp spikes and helix turns. It's enough to make a gamer woozy.

It's perhaps fitting that, as a game, Helldivers 2 had a troubled start even before it hit Steam. This thing was in development for almost eight entire years, with former CEO (current CCO) Johan Pilestedt citing both the studio's rapid growth and a set of moving targets as the main factor. In his own words, "We had this mentality from being in a small studio where we basically said yes to any challenge because we knew that we could do it. But the problem is that, suddenly, when you can't do it anymore, that starts biting you in the ass."

I'm struggling to draw any conclusion, other than the fact—and I say this with complete sympathy—that Arrowhead Games is just a studio that will never get to know peace. Pilestedt must have upset a witch or something, and now a pox has been placed upon the studio to get knocked down, then get back up again every other month.

An Arrowhead shot into the deep end

I don't think anyone, least of all Arrowhead, anticipated that Helldivers 2 would be as popular as it was in those first few months. As someone there at the beginning, I can say it was absolute mayhem. Arrowhead hit the ground running in "crisis mode" (their exact words) to deal with a horde of hundreds of thousands of players showing up to shoot bugs and bots, across Steam and PlayStation.

Captain Pilestedt of the good ship Arrowhead would later describe the atmosphere as a "war room", adding that when "we were looking at performance [it] became clear that like: 'this is actually going to be a big problem in a couple of hours.'" It's a hilarious image—one half of the studio having a launch party, the other half realising they wouldn't get to sit down for a while. Or, as it turns out, basically all of 2024.

Those servers, dear reader, were screaming for mercy. Those defcon one player counts doubled the weekend after, causing server crashes to the point where some players were staying logged in overnight just to avoid the dice roll that was trying to get in. The player count itself had to be capped at 450,000, while Sony was forced to send in extra engineers like a king delegating troops to its ally's warfront, which allowed them to bump that cap up to 700,000 as infrastructure was put in place. Even then, things wouldn't be relatively stable until around February 26—roughly 18 entire days after the game first launched.

I can't imagine the kind of haul that took place at Arrowhead HQ over those opening weeks, I can only hope that anyone got any sleep at all.

March-April: You and me could write a bad balance

So. Arrowhead had a hit on its hands; a rip-roaring success, millions of copies to be sold over the following months. It was thrust into the spotlight, and pre-emptively crowned king of games for all of 2024—issue is, crowns are bloody heavy, and no-one figured that out as quickly as Arrowhead did.

Its first major balance patch, which arrived March 6, did not land spectacularly well. To summarise, a set of weapons and stratagems were turned to rubbish—the anti-tank Railgun, a beloved child of the playerbase, was slammed particularly hard. Its nerf blew a hole in the balance of the game, with the populace quickly realising that their silly horde shooter was full of annoying tank enemies they lacked the tools to tackle.

Meanwhile, Arrowhead was struggling to handle its suddenly massive community and, to a certain extent, its own employees. While I do not envy the job of responding to hundreds of thousands of loud, very upset gamers, writing "watching u all cry amuses me so much" probably isn't the best way to calm things down. This was followed by a promise by Arrowhead to keep things copasetic and to "educate our developers" going forward.

Mind, it's not like all of them were being that unreasonable—I'm certain we were seeing developers boiling over rather than lashing out. While the comments from devs were being immortalised, reposted, and shared, the context was absent. The onus is, perhaps unfairly, on official representatives of a company to keep their chill—but we're all only human, and there was a lot of out-of-order behaviour on the part of the playerbase, too.

Still, it wasn't all bad. Arrowhead began its banter as it meant to continue, with the introduction of mechs and flying terminids, casually dropped into the game while no-one was looking and denied by Pilestedt with a twinkle in his eye. Flying bugs, however, were accompanied by other technical bugs. For example, arc weapons started to crash games mere days after an entire Warbond centered around arc equipment dropped. Oof.

The major spectre looming over the game, though, really was the armour thing. Certain enemies were just too hard to kill, and cropped up too damn often. There were patches that addressed this, but over the months, the meme of "just use stratagems" began to spread, due to dev comments in March telling players to rely on stratagems rather than their actual guns.

As March turned into April, bugs—not the Terminids, but the aforementioned game glitches—began to grate at players, who had previously assumed they'd be fixed in short order. Misaligned scopes, the Sickle being stopped by bushes, the Spear being borderline useless, and bouts of crashes. The devs even talked about it—arguing that Arrowhead only had "so much time in a work week".

It's about this time that Galactic War fatigue started to settle in, too. Recruits were beginning to glimpse the man behind the curtain, especially when the Menkent Line happened. Players worked hard to, in-universe, help engineers establish orbital defences on a set of planets. Not soon after, however, those planets were being invaded—despite the efforts of the masses.

Combine that disappointment with another patch in April that continued to nerf some fan favourites, like the Quasar cannon, and players were left feeling like they were playing a game that introduced more bugs than it fixed with each update, while seeing all of their favourite toys ruined. Then, uh, all of May happened.

May: Sony repeatedly steps on rakes for an entire month

After gathering together all of these snazzy little links for this article, I am 100% happy to call May Arrowhead's dark midnight of the soul.

It all started with Sony, who decreed that all Helldivers 2 players would have to link their accounts to PSN, the publisher's online network. Sony argued that the PSN-free months leading up to this point had been a "grace period", permitted due to the game's rampant server issues.

Problem being, among the general (and understandable, honestly) distaste for having to make a new account for a thing they didn't want to use, players realised that PSN only serves a select number of countries. Meaning that players who'd been shooting bugs and bots for Super Earth just fine were suddenly getting the rug swept out from under them.

Over 200,000 negative reviews poured in, a spike that shot Helldivers 2 firmly into "mixed" user review territory. It was such a sudden and dramatic response that a developer who'd encouraged unhappy players to make their anger known in reviews, or refund the game, was seemingly fired for it. To quote Pilestedt at the time: "Ouch, right in the review score."

Sony eventually backed down, although the game remains delisted for sale in non-PSN countries to this day.

It doesn't help that, while all of this was happening, the aforementioned problems with miserly balance patches and bugs were ongoing—including a weird change to patrol spawns that left them utterly borked for a while. Pilestedt even spoke up about it, saying he felt the patches had "gone too far". To quote him: "It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed." Then Polar Patriots, a Warbond barely anyone liked (no, really, they did a survey) dropped, seeming like a low-point for Arrowhead's promised live service design.

This all weighed pretty heavily on Arrowhead's developers. In the words of former community manager Twinbeard at the time: "I think the biggest issue so far has been that we were overwhelmed", referring to both the game's launch mayhem and the PSN controversies. "It takes time—a lot of time—to bounce back and get ahead with such massive pressure, and what can easily be perceived as us being slow or not listening is more (IMHO anyway) the fact that we're still not up to speed."

By the end of the month, Arrowhead had recognised it needed a change. Pilestedt stepped down as CEO to focus on the creative and design aspect of the game as CCO, while Paradox veteran Shams Jorjani arrived to fill his shoes.

June: We're so back

June seemed like a month of hope for Arrowhead—the studio fully admitted it needed to hold its goddamn horses, and a massive patch in the middle of the month, featuring a lot of weapon buffs and bug fixes, felt like the start of something new. That's not to say there weren't issues, mind—the Spear, in addition to a long-standing tradition of never hitting what it's actually aimed at, also began to crash games. And just like this section of the article, these peacetimes were short-lived.

July-August: It's so over

Escalation of Freedom, on paper, seemed like a winner—new enemies and objectives, more weapons, votekicking, and a swampy biome to provide a new kind of hellscape to romp around in. It should've gone down well like a nice cup of liber-tea, given what was promised. Unfortunately, it, uh, did not do that.

While the content updates to the game were solid, the balance updates were not. For starters, the Flamethrower, which had been becoming a fan favourite, got completely mangled. The patch note, "adjusted flame effects to work more realistically," actually belied a complete retooling of how the weapon felt to fire—and a nerf besides. Remember what Pilestedt said about the fun being removed? Yeah.

I don't want to necessarily paint this update as a disaster, because even through all of this turmoil, Helldivers 2 still held relatively healthy numbers for a live service co-op game—only dipping to around 10,000-20,000 players at a low murmur on Steam. No Fortnite, but busy enough that you could go in and find a game basically whenever you wanted.

Still, the dents to the Flamethrower represented something far more severe—a fracture in the playerbase's trust. Divers were promised an end to random nerfs, and that Pilestedt would be more in-touch with the game's development. And yet, when it came down to it, the same balancing patterns were re-emerging.

That's not to say they had actually been lied to, or anything. The thing about game development is that it takes a while—as Twinbeard stated in May, the whole of Arrowhead had been playing catch-up. It's entirely possible that the patches pushed in July had been organised in a pre-realisation environment, and simply not pulled in time.

New CEO Jorjani, to his credit, handled this test of leadership admirably. "I'd take this ANY day of the week over nobody giving a s**t" and "Me just talking about it isn't enough, actions matter" are some refreshingly transparent responses to player woes.

In came Arrowhead's "60-day plan", an ambitious PR move that gave angry players a timeline and a laundry list of promises. This should, under any reasonable circumstances, have led to some form of disaster; two months is not a lot of time when it comes to development, and Helldivers 2 had a lot of rebalancing to do. Then they only went and pulled it off.

September-December: We're SO back!

The 60-day restoration project released its first part mid-September, and boy howdy was it a doozy. Not only were those heinous Flamethrower changes reversed, but Arrowhead finally started to ease the clamps when it came to their heavily-armoured enemies. Old favourites like the Railgun were buffed, while specialised anti-tank weapons like the Recoilless Rifle had their effectiveness boosted through the roof to keep them relevant. There was a laundry list of primary weapon buffs, too, heralding an end to the "just use your stratagems" era.

It went down smooth, causing a spike in users that hadn't been seen since before the Escalation of Freedom days. These kinds of player bumps are a rarity for balance patches, but it felt like people were dang curious to see whether Arrowhead was making good on its promises.

Fast forward to mid-October, and the 60-day patch plan was complete. More reductions to enemy armour and more buffs to weapons, as well as a refresh of secondary systems like enemy patrol patterns, put the finishing touches on a transformation of design intent. Gone were the days of needing a hyper-specific loadout to avoid punishment at the hands of Big Joel; now you could muck around with the game's ever-expanding arsenal of weaponry without feeling like you were screwing yourself.

The game was, finally, after all its ups-and-downs, free to focus on content—and it's been delivering on that, too. The Democratic Space Station came along in November, and while it didn't have the easiest entry, its existence allows players a more direct handle on the Galactic War, for good or for ill. Then there's Omens of Tyranny, a patch that dropped outta nowhere during The Game Awards, finally working in the long-absent Illuminate faction and putting a glorious capstone on the whole thing.

It's a fitting bow to a chaotic year that has ended with a reclamation of Helldivers 2’s "Overwhelmingly Positive" recent review score, after the catastrophic review bombs of May. It's even more fitting that… look, to break the movie magic for a sec, I had this entire thing drafted, edited, and ready to go on December 18. By the time you're reading this, I'll be eating Christmas leftovers with my family. But before the week even had a chance to end, I had to add this paragraph because, just under the wire, Arrowhead had to sneak in one more controversy with its Killzone Crossover. Don't worry, it got better. The rollercoaster continues, and it's been fascinating to follow along.

So often, live service lifetimes are either runaway successes (your Fortnites and your Marvel Rivals) or tragic flops (your Concords and your Suicide Squads). But Helldivers 2 sits somewhere squarely in the middle of that.

It's a game whose popularity ambushed even its developers, whose community—loud, passionate, and occasionally out of line—both hate it and love it in equal measure. Its first year has been a story of catastrophe and redemption. But now, at the end of the year, it feels like liberty has finally found its home. I just hope Arrowhead's developers have managed to rest, because by Democracy, they deserve it.

I was 24 when I at last got my hands on the RPG I was sure would reveal the future of the genre; the same year I decided to stop trying to find a real job and instead embarked on my questionable career as a videogame critic. Dragon Age: Origins was everything I'd hoped for, but I would have perhaps been less enthusiastic had I known that it served more as the conclusion of an era of exceptional CRPGs.

Every BioWare game since then has shifted further away from the design philosophy that had initially enthralled me. Dragon Age 2 with its rushed dungeons and action-RPG combat; Inquisition with its big open-world-inspired maps and reduced character agency; and of course the second and third Mass Effect games, which existed in a completely different RPG space.

I loved them all the same. Hawke's misadventures featured some of BioWare's strongest, boldest writing; Inquisition boasted an epic scope, companions I couldn't help become smitten with, and a brilliant extension of BG2's strongholds as you became the leader of the titular organisation; and while Mass Effect may have been a million miles away from the CRPGs of yore, Shep's quest to save the galaxy over and over again absolutely gripped me.

So as I mourned the loss of the old design, I still accepted that things had moved on. People didn't want CRPGs anymore, I kept being told. So I just accepted modernity and found plenty of things to love about the new games. These were still, ultimately, BioWare RPGs, after all.

With Andromeda, though, that all changed. I genuinely could not tell you a single character's name. I can't even be arsed looking them up. I just do not care. From a combat perspective, it was a decent shooter, but that's as much faint praise as I can muster. Dull story, forgettable characters and choices I didn't give a hoot about—it was the first BioWare game I didn't bother finishing. Until Anthem, anyway. I put maybe five hours into that multiplayer disaster before I just ejected forever.

Not my Thedas

So I was simultaneously excited and extremely worried when BioWare announced that it was finally returning to Thedas. What changes were in store for us this time? Unlike Andromeda, this new Dragon Age was a direct continuation of Inquisition, as we hunted down our treacherous pal, Solas, the titular Dreadwolf—at least until the game was renamed as The Veilguard. This connection to a game that, while not reaching the heights of Origins, had so many brilliant qualities reassured me. What an idiot.

I really tried to enjoy myself. God, I tried so hard. I attempted to find nuggets of joy within its hamfisted dialogue, one-note companions and the flashy but soulless fights. But I just couldn't do it. Every time there was a glimmer of hope, it was dashed against the rocks of infinite disappointment.

Honestly, I'm amazed I finished it. There was certainly a point where I was starting to feel like I'd rather do anything else than listen to a hot Grey Warden talk about his big dumb bird for the hundredth time, or play therapist to a giant dragon slayer who just wants to moan about how their mum doesn't understand them. These should have been great characters. A veteran knight reclaiming his order's lost legacy, a proud warrior wrestling with their cultural and gender identity—there's so much good stuff to mine here. But nope, they're just plain boring. All of them.

I'm beating a dead horse, I know. I've already said my piece. But it's just a real shame. When I got to the final cutscene that teased what we can expect from the next Dragon Age, it really sealed the deal. I'm out. BioWare just isn't telling stories I care about anymore. Instead of moping around, I'm moving on. BioWare had an exceptional run, but that developer is long gone. What's left is just an EA studio that makes middling games I'm not really interested in.

The silver lining, of course, is that all the claims about nobody wanting CRPGs proved to be complete nonsense. We've got plenty of them again, not least of which is Baldur's Gate 3. Waiting to find out what Larian's planning for us next, I feel like I'm that eager 19-year-old again. So instead of being bummed out about The Veilguard, I choose to be excited about what other developers are doing. I'm choosing optimism, it's just not directed towards BioWare.

The yellow letters I found early on were a stubborn bunch, refusing to turn green no matter where I tried to place them. I ended up having to stop for a bit of a breather, giving myself the chance to look at it with fresh eyes. I'd like to pretend it all fell into place after that, but in truth I just had to fight some more until I finally got it right.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Friday, December 27

What would you call the seeds found in rice, wheat, and barley? There you go. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you've got the basics, it's much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path: 

• A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels. 
• Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
• Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Hey, looking for this? The answer to the December 27 (1287) Wordle is GRAIN.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 26: AFFIX
• December 25: SHARE
• December 24: EAGLE
• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY
• December 17: SCOWL

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you'll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You'll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you're wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which ones you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Well, as proven and viewed widely by streamer Nandre, you can in fact hit Ante 39 and just straight up explode the videogame to win because 1.8e308, the highest number it will track on your machine in the game's code, isn't high enough to win the score requirement of that ante. Which is... also higher than the highest number your machine will track, so it just displays as "nan"—programmer speak for "not a number."

Nandre reached the goal to celebrate everyone's favorite Roguelike winning at The Game Awards 2024.

This puts Balatro in the distinguished company of other arcade-style games you can't actually hit the "end" of when playing an endless mode because the score just keeps going on. Tetris, perhaps most famously, is a case of this kind of highest-possible-scoring via breaking the game. The Classic Tetris World Championship keeps an archive of winners for the NES version.

Could you go higher still? Yes, actually you can, because—just like with Tetris ROM hacks—you could mod the game to handle ever-absurdly-higher integers with what I can only assume would be ever-more-absurdly-game-breaking consequences.

Gotta say, though, this makes me want a Balatro championship along the same lines with every play using a fixed seed. Are we doing that yet? Can we do that? We should all do that.

Anyway, if you're here you probably love Balatro as much as I do and should definitely see these rather unhinged outtakes from the live action Balatro trailer.

In 2024, no videogame gun checked all those boxes better than the Helldivers 2 AC-8 Autocannon. I've gotten to know the Autocannon well these last 10 months. We've fought countless battles side-by-side, the reliable 'tuh-thonk' of its armor-piercing rounds sending bugs, bots, and squids to an early grave by the hundreds.

AC-8 Autocannon

An uncomplicated, yet simply genius design both for the game itself and the in-fiction Helldivers, the Autocannon is not the best gun of 2024 because it's the best gun, but because of its quirks, its learning curve, its imperfections. The Autocannon is an animal to be wrangled, and once you do, it's a rewarding workhorse of a gun. This gun deserves a medal—in fact, it deserves four medals.

🥇Best design

The Autocannon looks like something a human should not be holding. Everything about it screams "this was originally intended to be fired from a stable turret structure," but Super Earth went ahead and made it portable. Its armor-piercing shells can unmake aliens of every tier, but at the high cost of the worst aim drag and highest recoil of any support weapon. It's essentially a gigantic bullpup rifle—approximately 90% of its body is barrel and it's top-loaded with unique ammo cartridges.

Despite its unwieldiness, the Autocannon is surprisingly ergonomic. The slot where it rests on the shoulder looks inviting and the included ammo backpack conveniently holds up to 10 extra cartridges at five rounds each.

🥇Best sound

(Right-click video and click "Show all controls" to turn on sound)

Tuh-thonk. Tuh-thonk. Tuh-thonk. When an Autocannon is popping off, you can be sure something big is going down. Sound is the Autocannon's most distinctive characteristic. Shooters have taught us that the end-all-be-all of power weapons is the scorching boom of a rocket launcher, exploding once on liftoff and again on impact.

The Autocannon makes a strong argument for less is more. The sound of an Autocannon is closer to an M1 Abrams tank—louder than the bullet itself is the immense metallic "clang!" of the cannon's hammer striking the firing pin, like a blacksmith landing precision blows on stubborn steel. Fired automatically or with measured breaks, the Autocannon is always the main character of the soundscape.

🥇Best reload

Autocannon barrages are punctuated by one of the most satisfying reloads in videogames. Expended shells are lobbed out of the weapon's top breach until it runs dry. Reloading the cannon is appropriately involved—divers have to plant their feet and take a knee, at risk of being overrun while carefully retrieving cartridges from the backpack. I choose to believe this is the game telling the player to sit back and watch the show. The metal-on-metal sliding of the cartridges is strong—fresh rounds slot neatly into place like a tape deck, feeding into a curved internal magazine.

The star of the reload is the backpack. Like a handful of Helldivers 2 support weapons, the ammo backpack can be worn by a teammate to enable a special tandem reload. This turns the Autocannon into a devastating 60-round machine gun, as the ammo helper can continuously slot in cartridges as fast as the operator can shoot them until the whole pack's gone.

🥇Best impact

I will never get tired of watching a squad of Automaton grunts reduced to nuts and bolts by a single Autocannon shell. In a game that's chock full of guns with an amazing sense of impact, there's just something special about it. I think it goes back to the tank comparison—Autocannon bullets shred straight through machine and flesh like they have somewhere better to be. It doesn't make a big show of itself or leave its target zone obscured by fire and smoke. It simply takes what was there a moment ago and atomizes it.

If you're only looking to grind out missions for a warbond, there are better guns in Helldivers 2. The Railgun can kill everything the Autocannon can with better mobility, accuracy, and faster reloads. I know some divers who don't even consider using the Autocannon because the ammo pack takes up the slot they usually reserve for an energy shield.

That's fair. The Autocannon's best qualities can't be observed on a tier list anyway. It is, by far, the most Helldivers 2 gun in Helldivers 2—brash, irresponsibly destructive, meticulously crafted, and best enjoyed with a friend. For my money, the Autocannon should be held up as the north star for designing powerful, skillful weapons with personality. It takes Gun of the Year with ease.

Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor: Satisfactory is a different game for me depending on the week. Recently I found myself in the thick of the jungle on the far side of the map from the friendly green plains I'd first started building in; I had to go a long way to find iron deposits rich enough to let me build a towering, multi-floor factory dedicated to modular frames. They're just boring metal cubes, but for a week I obsessively arranged a perfectly balanced system of inputs and outputs for each individual component—the iron rods, the iron plates, the steel pipes—until the sum total of all that effort amounted to 21 frames per minute and a glass penthouse overlooking a waterfall at the edge of the world.

Did I need to build a skyscraper? Was it the most efficient use of my time to thread power towers across multiple biomes so I could zipline my way to the outer reaches? I stopped asking myself those kinds of questions hundreds of hours ago, long before Satisfactory left early access this year. This game is ostensibly about efficiency and optimization, but the real joy comes when you stop building to complete the objectives and start creating for the sake of it. Making parts is the point, but it also barely matters at all. I've since moved on from my frame factory to crisscrossing the map with train lines. It'll keep me busy for a few months at least.

Satisfactory has the same endlessness as Minecraft, only trading the RPG-esque mechanics for the compulsive satisfaction of arranging conveyor belts at perfect 90 degree angles and building realistic supporting struts for factories that the game would let me leave floating in the air if I chose to thumb my nose at gravity. There was a potential early access path that leaned more into survival meters or more specific objectives and endless missions to complete, but those things aren't remotely as compelling as the expressiveness Satisfactory 1.0 embraced instead. The final game is rife with paints and lighting and girders and windows and angled roofs and walls that combine into monolithic masterpieces in YouTube videos that first smack of the impossible, and then drive me to want to be even more creative myself. It's one of the best videogame spaces you can exist in in 2024, and maybe my game of the decade.

Jake Tucker, Editorial Director, PC Gaming Show: At first all I cared about in Satisfactory was how to make my production lines as efficient as possible. After a hundred hours, I decided that was silly and all I really wanted to do was convert the planet into my own personal playground, letting me jump and zipline around the planet with aplomb. Maybe capitalism is good?

Nick Evanson, Hardware writer: If I was being uncharitable, I could summarise Satisfactory as simply being Factorio in 3D, but it's far more deserving than that. Fundamentally, the gameplay elements are very similar (collect resources, build stuff, watch a big rocket leave the planet), but the additional dimension means structures are more than mere machines. I have spent countless hours just rejigged pipelines, walls, supply belts, and so on, all to create a factory that's not just as efficient as possible, but as visually impressive as it can be. Naturally, my first attempts were a veritable plate of spaghetti, but given that Rome wasn't built in a day, neither can one expect the same here. Add in the creativity of Minecraft and you have my perfect game. Well, my perfect game of 2024, that's for sure.

Phil Savage, Global Editor-in-Chief: Yeah, I've seen some Factorio fans dismiss Satisfactory as being a more simple alternative, and there is some truth to that. Your resource nodes don't run out, and you can craft storage boxes that beam materials directly into your inventory through extra-dimensional magic—there are a lot of subtle tweaks that make the logistical element less taxing. But really, Satisfactory is just shifting the challenge elsewhere. The fact that resource nodes are infinite means that you're not encouraged to build a central bus system for your most valuable materials, but to instead create lots of individual factories each tailored to one main product. The challenge is one of spatial organisation, creating complex production lines that efficiently achieve your desired result.

I'm still relatively early in my Satisfactory career—by which I mean I've played about 70 hours since the 1.0 launch. Unlike Wes, I am not creating grand skyscrapers. Most of my factories are on 10x10 foundation grids; gravity defying, utilitarian monstrosities that let me concentrate on figuring out the mechanics of efficiency in this world. And every time I feel like I get it—that all that remains is the busy work of doing everything I'd already done, but more and bigger—some new set of recipes come along to offer a different kind of challenge. My last 10 or so hours were spent figuring out oil, and the satisfying problem of recycling byproducts without bricking the whole production line. It may not look pretty, but damn does it feel good when you see these machines whirr to life—each perfectly calibrated to toil away forever without waste.

DeathSprint 66 wears its biggest aesthetic influence on both sleeves: Stephen King's The Running Man and, in particular, the big-budget '80s movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The book is one of King's earliest, so early in fact he was still writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachmann, and so DeathSprint 66's neon-soaked televisual stylings all come under the umbrella of the Bachmann network: Welcome to the future, where you run through endless deathtraps for money while the crowd goes wild.

I was sold on DeathSprint 66 just on that, and then I realised it got even better. I've always loved surfing mods, which can be found in plenty of games but for me are inextricable from Counter-Strike, and this is essentially Surfing Mods: The Game. I think these began as movement challenges before spawning their own sub-genre, and they're basically maps where you have to get from point A to B as quickly and gracefully as possible. This is the core of DeathSprint 66, except there's murder lasers and flesh-rending metal everywhere and, of course, you're racing against others.

DeathSprint 66 has PvE courses, and these are great for learning the ropes, because this is an unapologetically fast and difficult game. After your first half hour you'll have died dozens of times, failed countless courses, and be very familiar with the idea of another clone body being launched onto the track. DeathSprint 66's course designers are sadists that have been given free rein, and all you have to do is run through their elaborate configurations of slicey lasers, hairpin turns and sudden bursts of verticality without hitting anything. You'll fail, again and again, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a PC somewhere at Sumo Newcastle tracking all the humiliation just for yucks. 

This is a game that likes killing you, in other words, but the good news is it's just as keen about killing others. The beating heart of DeathSprint 66 is the PvP mode where up to eight players race and try to screw each other over as much as possible while doing so. Honestly this game doesn't even need weapons, such is the default carnage of eight players sprinting forwards and shoulder-barging each other off the tracks and into wall-mounted mincers, but boy does it have 'em. 

Look at that cocky little squirt running away in the lead. Fast? Not as fast as the gigantic glowing-red buzzsaw that just bisected his ass. Or the seeker charge that relentlessly hunts him down and ends things with a boom. There's a lovely weapon that sets a stationary laser trap to insta-gib Deathsprinters and, if you set it in just the right position near boost pads, it's super-hard to see. But the notifications that soon pop up are to die for.

A large part of DeathSprint 66's appeal is the precision, the clean lines and snappy controls and the pure exhilaration of a perfect lap. But what makes it work, what makes this game sing, is the total chaos when you get eight people at once trying to do that. It's a miracle if there are no fatalities by the first bend and, when you really get in a tight group and no one can quite escape the pack, the pack turns in on itself and a bloodbath ensues. There are elegant multiplayer races to be found in here, sure there are, but most land somewhere between Fall Guys and Mortal Kombat. 

There are times in DeathSprint 66 where you'll impress yourself. A tight corner opens out onto a grind, and you take the line onto a wall, hurdle up in seconds and pirouette off before slamming into a laser trap, land in the perfect orientation, and instantly surge forward. There are other times when you stumble around like a hyperspeed drunk and get gibbed constantly by the things you didn't even see coming. Somewhere in the middle of those extremes is where the magic of DeathSprint 66 lives: That sense of power, precision, control of one's self then, just as inevitably, the explosion into bloody chunks. Womp womp. Ready to go again?

Like a lot of kids who grew up with unrestricted access to the internet in the early-to-mid 2000s, I spent a helluva lot of time in social chatroom games. Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, IMVU, and Gaia Online were in my regular rotation, being an exciting (and more importantly, free) new way of connecting with people all over the world. 

Sure, they were frighteningly unmoderated and often times hostile—ripe for predatory behaviour and for folks stealing your data under the guise of letting you be the illustrious "admin" of, I dunno, something—but when I grew up and they largely vanished into the 2010s, I felt a little sad. Things have sort of reemerged with Roblox popping off, but I've never much resonated with a platform that is very clearly geared more towards children while I trundle through my 20s.

But then, this year, Webfishing happened. I was initially drawn in by its kinda crunchy Animal Crossing art style and my penchant for being a giant videogame fishing sicko. I hadn't really considered the whole multiplayer chatroom side of Lamedeveloper's (great name, by the way) creation. I just wanted to fish, man!

It's funny, really, because as a kid I couldn't care less about yapping with internet strangers. These days I'm far more anxious about it, so I was hesitant to fish alongside a bunch of other real humans—or dogs and cats, I guess. I cautiously threw myself into someone's server the first time I booted Webfishing up, not entirely sure what manner of Online People I was going to deal with.

Huh. That's an Among Us chalk drawing on the floor. And a Pride flag. And, of course, a penis. One by one, the room's present fisherman shot me a "hey" in chat, coming out through their animal mouths as non-descript gruffs. I hear faint meows as characters leap and trip across my path. Apparently it makes them go faster. To me, it looked like a whole lot of tripping over.

Based on the first several seconds alone, I was getting the feeling that Webfishing was actually pretty neat. While my memory of navigating chatroom games as a child was more hostile, this was a chill and safe experience. I grabbed my rod and started to do what I'd actually come here for: fishing, baby. I headed over to the dock where most of the other players were stationed. Some had laid props out like loungers, beer, and picnic blankets for the ultimate cosy vibes.

Every time someone landed a real chunky catch that enveloped my entire screen, one by one folk would type "beeg fish" to acknowledge that it was, in fact, a big fish. I found myself joining in after the first few impressive catches, and before I knew it I was caring less about the fishing and more about engaging in weird and wonderful conversations with these strangers.

It's the kind of chatroom experience I'd always yearned for as a kid. Being among people my age, sharing my interests even when there were cities or oceans between us. Webfishing somehow manages to perfectly encapsulate the pure vibes of early 2000s chatroom games while also making it a really pleasant, safe space to be a part of. These are my kind of weirdos, and it's made every room I've joined in my hours since an absolute joy to be a part of.

The fishing still rocks too, mind you. I'm still not quite at the "launching myself halfway across the map to perform a trickshot" level of skill that has been taking over my Instagram and TikTok feeds, but I've been finding an innate pleasure in rocking up to a body of water, laying down a six pack and a picnic blanket, emoting to sit down, and casting my line out as a way to unwind. Clicking away to reel them in, before my cat (who has a lil' booger hanging out her nose) swings round to display her catch for everyone to see. Ending up in all sorts of conversations about streamers, queer culture, studying, work life, and television shows before the host zips out of existence, taking the lobby with it and leaving me to seek out those vibes with a new room with 20-odd anglers.

It's a vibe I have simply failed to match in anything else I've played this year, one which is definitely making 10-year-old Mollie feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Webfishing really is the perfect game for the folks like me, the ones who yearn to yank just a small part of their childhood back as the horrors of adult life rear their ugly head. No thoughts, just fish and yap.

Once a powerhouse publisher, Ubisoft might still be churning out the big blockbuster games, but judging by the last couple of years, and especially 2024, it seems to be incapable of getting a win or turning things around. Even when it does release games one would expect to be successes, it just doesn't seem to be able to attract players. It's hard to imagine how the last 12 months could have been worse.

To give you a rough idea of how well it's been going, here's a chronological list of what's been going on at Ubisoft:

• Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora failed to bring in the players
• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown underperformed
• Skull and Bones didn't make a splash
• The Division: Heartland was cancelled
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was pushed back to 2026
• Star Wars Outlaws didn't set the galaxy on fire
• Assassin's Creed Shadows was delayed until 2025
• The Lost Crown team was disbanded
• XDefiant is shutting down
• French employees went on strike
• Ubisoft is reportedly up for sale
• 744 staff have been laid off since October '23

It's… not great.

Game plan

At the heart of the issues is the simple fact that Ubisoft's games just aren't cutting it in the sales department anymore—even the huge open-world games that were once the publisher's bread and butter. Avatar, which launched in December '23, should have been an easy win, given the inexplicable popularity of James Cameron's middling movies, but it reportedly failed to leave a mark—at least by Ubisoft's standards—and saw significant price reductions shortly after launch.

Skull and Bones followed shortly after, and while Ubisoft is still maintaining it, the reception was as cold as the North Sea. After countless delays, the result was a mediocre open-world piracy game that didn't come close to capturing the seafaring fun of its inspiration, Black Flag. Everything about it screamed that it was a game that would have been cancelled if Ubisoft didn't have a funding deal with the Singaporean government. I doubt the updates will keep rolling in after next year.

I don't think anyone had high expectations for Skull and Bones, but Star Wars Outlaws was another matter. An open-world Star Wars game starring a smuggler and her two pals, a cute critter and a taciturn droid? It should have done gangbusters. Especially since it threw out so much of Ubisoft's open-world bloat. I loved it, but it underperformed and Ubisoft ended up pushing it out on Steam early to try and claw back some cash.

Honestly, Outlaws' performance suggests that Ubisoft is just screwed. It managed to correct a lot of the legacy issues with the publisher's open-world model, tapped into some of the coolest elements of the galaxy far, far away, and while it did have some performance issues at launch, it's a helluva looker. It's the best thing that Ubisoft's released in ages, but not enough people cared.

A vocal minority lambasted the game for being "woke"—I guess because it has a female protagonist? Or because fighting fascists is bad now? It's all nonsense, of course, and these toxic weirdos don't have enough cachet to move the needle. So I just think players have lost faith in the company. Even when it does release something good, people are too hesitant to open their wallets.

We saw the same thing with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. The Persian platformer was well-received critically, and part of a series that fans had long wanted to see resurrected, but it failed to sell well, sequel plans were scrapped and Ubisoft disbanded the team. One of the excuses reportedly wheeled out by Ubisoft to explain the scrapped sequel was that it might cannibalise sales of the original, which makes absolutely no sense at all, especially in light of the fact that The Lost Crown was the second 2D Prince of Persia to come out in 2024. The first being The Rogue Prince of Persia, an early access roguelite.

Meanwhile, Ubisoft is still struggling to remake 2003's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a game that was announced in 2020 and was expected to appear in 2021. Now it's due in 2026. Development has already been rebooted once already, and four studios have been involved. If they can't figure out how to make it work after this long, I don't think we should be holding our breath.

These days, it's pretty common for big publishers to have a few live service games in their pocket to keep generating cash and prop up future game development. Square Enix, for instance, has been able to weather disappointment after disappointment thanks to Final Fantasy 14. Ubisoft has had some success in this regard thanks to For Honor, The Division and Rainbow Six Siege, but it has been struggling to replicate this lately.

In 2020, Ubisoft's attempt to get into battle royales launched out of the blue. Hyper Scape was quickly forgotten by pretty much everyone and was killed off in 2022, the same year it launched Roller Champions, a free-to-play future sports romp that I guarantee you haven't thought about in two years—that's if you'd even heard of it at all. It's still going, apparently, but it's hardly a feather in Ubisoft's cap.

With Skull and Bones failing to make a splash, Ubisoft really needed XDefiant to do the numbers. It was always going to be an uphill battle, though. A Ubisoft mascot shooter trying to compete with Call of Duty? Yeah, that's a toughie. Jake had fun with it, but it struggled to reel in players—to the point that Ubisoft started trying to tempt folk with in-game cash. Amid all of this, XDefiant's executive producer claimed that "The game is absolutely not dying". A few months later Ubisoft announced that it was, in fact, dying. It's not accepting new players, existing players can't buy anything, and it will finally be put out to pasture in 2025.

Failure to launch

At least Assassin's Creed Shadows was coming. Folks had long been hoping for Assassin's Creed to finally make its way to Japan, but after such a rough year, Ubisoft didn't want to take any risks, instead delaying it until 2025. "This will enable the biggest entry in the franchise to fully deliver on its ambition, notably by fulfilling the promise of our dual protagonist adventure, with Naoe and Yasuke bringing two very different gameplay styles," Ubisoft said.

Unfortunately it's picked the worst month of the year to launch in: February. It's a big enough deal to compete, I reckon, though given Ubisoft's recent track record, there are probably going to be plenty of prospective players deciding to skip it in favour of Monster Hunter or Avowed or Civ, taking a 'wait and see' approach, which could end up costing Ubisoft dearly.

Ubisoft's failures have also resulted in studio closures and layoffs, while French employees went on strike over a mandated return to the office policy in October. There's just no way to put a positive spin on things: Ubisoft is in serious trouble. It should come as no surprise, then, that shareholders are looking for a lifeboat, which may come in the form of a buyout.

Shareholders are now reportedly figuring out how to structure the buyout in a way that would leave the Guillemot family remaining in charge, but apparently the second-largest shareholder, Tencent, has been dragging its heels. Given the huge dip in share price, down from a historical high of $85 in 2021 to a mere $13 this year, the rest of the shareholders no doubt want this to be handled quickly, before even more dips in value.

So! Will 2025 be Ubisoft's year? It seems unlikely. Everything really hinges on Assassin's Creed Shadows, so we'll have a clearer picture in February. If that last couple of years are any indication, though, I suspect that things are only going to get worse.

Mouthwashing was one of the best games I played all year and is now one of my favourite horror games of all time—which is pretty impressive for something I managed to finish in under two and a half hours.

Stuck on a broken spaceship called the Tulpar, which is just floating aimlessly through the void with no hope of rescue, Mouthwashing sees you switch between characters Curly and Jimmy—the captain and vice captain of the ship—as the short story unfolds.

There are plenty of unsettling things about Mouthwashing, like the implications of Jimmy's violence against the freighter’s nurse, Anya, or the bleak suggestion that the company which these workers have given their lives to views them as nothing more than cogs in a machine. But the most striking aspect is the nonlinear story.

Mouthwashing is something of a masterclass in how to tell a scary tale. Instead of relying on cheap jumpscares or constant chase scenes and bloody fights, it uses its narrative structure to make you feel uneasy and keep you in the dark. I've always thought the worst part of horror games is the unknown. Maybe you don't know what monster is hunting you, or you're unsure of where you are. But in Mouthwashing, you don't know who to trust or what the truth is.

It's impressive how Mouthwashing was able to tell such a well-rounded story in such a short time, but it wasn't the only horror game this year to do so. Still Wakes the Deep is no longer than six hours, but even so it's another masterclass in short, horrifying storytelling.

Weather the storm

A neat trick The Chinese Room uses to make you feel like you've known the protagonist Caz McLeary and the rest of the crew on the oil rig for much longer than you have is acting like that's the truth. Walking into the canteen for the first time, you're greeted with friends and coworkers picking up conversations with you and discussing previous events around the rig—because the story starts after you joined the crew. It's a great way to create meaningful bonds and establish characters quickly so you can jump straight into the horrifying action.

The writing is fantastic, following a troubled Caz who has run away from some stupid decisions to hide out on an oil rig. The only problem is that he also ran away from his family, a regret that haunts him right through to the end of the story. I don't usually cry while playing games, much less horror ones, but this one got me.

Other than the narrative, Still Wakes the Deep is also psychological horror at its finest. Trapped on an oil rig in the North Sea, running away from a monster that is beyond human comprehension, is just as awful as it sounds. You not only have to try and fix a breaking rig but also have to deal with all your friends dropping like flies around you.

There were so many awful moments, like when a mutated coworker chased me through a half-flooded engine room, or when I sat under some rubble for almost 10 minutes because I was too scared to make a run for it while another monster was on the lookout. Chase sequences are my weak point, and Still Wakes the Deep is full of them.

Collective punishment

Another highlight of the horror year had to be Lethal Company. This multiplayer sandbox horror game has gone from strength to strength in 2024 with several big updates—like v50, which added crying mechs and evil butlers, or v64, which brought us the tactical belt bag, a must-have for any seasoned scrap hunter.

In part thanks to its new maps and monsters, Lethal Company is a shining star of solo horror game development. This game has become a regular venture for my friends and I because of how terrifying and funny it can be.

Last time I played Lethal Company I got carried off into the sky by a hungry bird, flattened by a giant robot, and chased through a mineshaft by a frenzied mutating monster that ended up killing my whole crew. But that's just your average day when it comes to hunting down scrap for some megacorporation.

Sandbox horror has always been one of my favourite things to play in co-op because of how unexpected and random everything can be. Unlike the other more narrative driven horror games that released this year, games like Lethal Company—or recently Pilgrim—thrive off players being able to tell their own stories, which are usually pretty chaotic.

All in all it's been a fantastic year for horror fans, and celebrating smaller horror releases shouldn't take away from some of the larger games like Silent Hill 2, which I also really enjoyed. But I have to say, my experiences in games like Mouthwashing and Lethal Company far outshone any adventure into Bloober’s foggy town, or Derceto Manor in Alone in the Dark. When it comes to the creepy and unexpected, the indies have the upper hand.

I could've sworn the green letters… heck, every letter was hiding from me today. No matter what I tried I just seemed to turn up more greys. It turned out for the best in the end though, the answer not so much revealed but more the only possible word left I hadn't tried. Phew.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, December 26

You'd do this if you were attaching or sticking a little extra onto something else, like a pin on a shirt, or a stamp on an envelope. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you're new to the daily Wordle puzzle or you just want a refresher after taking a break, I'll share some quick tips to help you win. There's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day. 

• A mix of unique consonants and vowels makes for a solid opening word. 
• A tactical second guess should let you narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• There may be a repeat letter in the answer.

You're not up against a timer, so you've got all the time in the world—well, until midnight—to find the winning word. If you're stuck, there's no shame in coming back to the puzzle later in the day and finishing it up when you've cleared your head. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Relax, you've got this. The answer to the December 26 (1286) Wordle is AFFIX.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Keeping track of the last handful of Wordle answers can help to eliminate current possibilities. It's also handy for inspiring opening words or subsequent guesses if you're short on ideas for the day.

Here are the last 10 Wordle answers:

• December 25: SHARE
• December 24: EAGLE
• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY
• December 17: SCOWL
• December 16: BOAST

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes every day and the aim is to figure out the correct five-letter word by entering guesses and eliminating or confirming individual letters.

Getting off to a good start with a strong word like ARISE—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good tactic. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

I have just bought (or more accurately, my partner has allowed me to buy) a Meta Quest 3. That's because after playing Asgard's Wrath during the holidays last year I'd wanted to make the upgrade to play its sequel in all its glory. Despite all these good games, my VR headset has proven to be a surprisingly good tool for developing some sense of mindfulness.

By May this year, I noticed it wasn't the huge experiences and grand adventures that kept me coming back to my little headset. Instead, it was methodical rhythm games like Beat Saber and Synth Riders. Even when I got the chance to test out the Pico 4 Ultra this year, which is a competent Meta Quest competitor, one of the things that most intrigued me was the included ankle trackers for their rhythm game compatibility.

As a hardware lover, but also a chronic overthinker, I've become too fond of having an extra screen to watch a video or listen to music from. Even now, writing on just a single monitor, I lament the fact I haven't bought a second by now.

If you were to check my VR playtime this year, I think Beat Saber would sit near the very top, and it's not necessarily because it's the VR game I enjoyed the most. I've found Batman: Arkham Shadow to be great fun and have played the first hour or so of Behemoth. Though I haven't yet got the courage to start something as big as Asgard's Wrath 2, I expect myself to get there in the next 2-5 business weeks.

However, I realised after quite some time with it that I use Beat Saber in a way akin to mediation. I'll look at the exercise ring on my Apple Watch and think I can close it with a few minutes of exercising in VR but, actually, I've realised it's just an excellent way to clear my head.

Beat Saber is quite a tactile game, with controls that vibrate as you swing at blocks coming towards you, but it's not filled with things to pay attention to. There's no story to speak of, no hidden message that you have to decipher. It's just you, music, and your sabres.

As someone who likes to have two or three screens on the go at one time, I've found myself 'cutting back' on screen time by slapping just one big one (the Meta Quest) to my face. I know that sounds counterintuitive but it's true. I've noticed myself decompressing from a hard day or popping the headset on when I have to think something through.

I've always enjoyed taking a shower when I want to think something over because it's an intentional pause in everything else going on in my life to take stock, but there's only so many you can take before you perhaps need a better coping mechanism.

Under the guise of being able to do some light exercise in my home, I've often found myself putting on the headset just to get a moment to think. The music of Beat Saber, being predominantly EDM, isn't quite to my usual taste but it's the the perfect backdrop to a contemplative moment. Instead of looking at its music as a traditional soundtrack or grouping of challenges, I've been flitting through songs as you might choose a form of white noise before yoga.

This is where the Meta Quest 3 comes in. With new and improved controls, a better chip, and most importantly, greater passthrough, I've been able to more casually keep myself hydrated in the headset or get a good sense of my surroundings. You still can't really look at a phone in there but I'm kind of glad you can't. The limits of this technology have been a boon to my own mental health and sense of space in a way I didn't quite think was possible.

VR has proven to be very good at providing a space for me to think at multiple points in my life and I think that's part of why I like it so much now. At the start of the lockdowns in 2020, I spent quite a lot of time caring for my sick nan and being very cautious about leaving the house for fear of bringing anything life-threatening back with me. That was when I bought the very first Quest, which was also my first time trying VR.

I didn't have a PC capable of running VR so being able to play games natively without the costly expense of upgrading my rig felt like a game changer. Then, I bought the Quest 2 soon after its release and only liked the shape and processor of that headset even more.

In the last year, I haven't newly found this meditative space in VR, instead, I've just realised it exists. I've found the comfort of a headset multiple times to think things through over the last few years but, now, it's all a bit more intentional.

I suppose it's time I get a few more song packs then, to go with this shiny new headset.

To commemorate Helldivers 2's mostly incredible year, I've recorded an abridged history of the Second Galactic War so far. I tried to keep to the biggest events, the best community actions, and chose not to exhaustively list every major order. I was able to log a surprising amount from memory, but this would not have been possible without the tireless work of the Helldivers Fandom wiki, which does actually list every single major order. For a complete accounting of the war so far, go here.

The Second Galactic War begins

• Period: February 2024
• Key events: Battle of Malevelon Creek, TCS Construction
• Liberty Levels: Maximum

A two-front war kicks off

Millions of new recruits are rushed through basic training and sent to the frontlines. I'm introduced to the Terminids, a scourge of giant bugs spreading their toxic tendrils across the galaxy, and the Automatons, a dangerous faction of robots with endless resources and a distaste for democracy.

The battle for a creek

An early example of the Helldivers community embracing the meta-narrative of the galactic war, a group of fellow divers band together to defend the planet of Malevelon Creek—distinctive for its permanent darkness and dubbed "Robot Vietnam"—from Automaton capture by whatever means necessary (playing the game a lot, basically). They call themselves Creekers.

Super Earth builds a Terminid Control System

A campaign begins to contain the spread of Terminids to the far reaches of the galaxy. I'm deployed to clear out bugs from border planets and enable the construction of the "Terminid Control System."

Super Earth's hubris backfires

• Period: March - April 2024
• Key events: Mechs unlock, Shriekers arrive, Automaton defeat
• Liberty Levels: High

Helldivers liberate mechs in record time

A major order presents us Helldivers with a unique opportunity: Liberate Tien Kwan and instantly unlock exosuit mechs. We hear Super Earth loud and clear: so clearly that we kick the Automatons off Tien Kwan in just over 24 hours. High command had anticipated it'd take closer to a week. The EXO-45 Patriot Exosuit is ours, and glorious.

The TCS comes online

Terminid Control System construction is completed, but Super Earth needs us Helldivers to turn it on. A special mission type appears, and divers personally douse dark-yellow Termicide gas across the border planets.

Bugs suddenly fly, Arrowhead denies

Soon after the Termicide is dispersed, reports of an unknown breed of flying bug circulate online. Indisputable video evidence is put forth to Arrowhead boss Johan Pilestedt, who says "bugs can't fly" and blames the fake news on "bug sympathizers." Ten days later, Super Earth confirms the existence of Shriekers, and Pilestedt updates his stance: "I have always believed there to be a possibility of flying bugs."

Operation Swift Disassembly takes aim at Automatons

After weeks of bug drama, our new offensive against the Automatons begins. To mark the occasion, Super Earth approves the distribution of two new weapons: the Quasar Cannon and Heavy Machine Gun. The Quasar Cannon becomes an instant favorite among soldiers as we discover it can bring down Automaton dropships and a new threat: armed gunships.

The second battle of Malevelon Creek

Taking notice of the community's attachment to Malevelon Creek, an official major order directs us to take back the Creek once more. Rallying cries are raised, propaganda is created, and the Helldivers work fast. We pull it off, and unlock a special cape.

The Automatons are defeated (for a day)

Swift Disassembly's final phase, Annihilation, calls on us to wipe out the "lifeless, emotionless, hateful socialist" bots once and for all. We defeat the Automatons days later and the bastards literally disappear from the map. Two days later, they somehow return, now armed with towering Factory Striders.

Terminid spread reaches boiling point

• Period: May 2024
• Key events: Meridia supercolony erupts, Helldivers arsenal updates, A planet dies
• Liberty levels: Low

Helldivers say yes to rockets, no to Anti-Tank Mines

As the Automaton front begins anew, Super Earth is giving us a choice over which colony to save: the one that unlocks an Airburst Rocket Launcher or one that unlocks Anti-Tank Mines. Obviously we choose rockets, and it won't be the last time those mines are shooed away.

A supercolony sprouts on Meridia

The culmination of the disastrous Terminid Control System and the noxious spread of Termicide is the birth of a supercolony on Meridia. Here the Terminid presence is at its nastiest: the planet's surface is blackened with hardened bug ooze and nests are opened at startling rates.

An Exosuit variant arrives

On the bot front, Super Earth orders us to capture another factory producing exosuits. Saving this one unlocks the EXO-49 Emancipator Exosuit, a variant of the Patriot armed with dual Autocannons. It's a thing of beauty.

Meridia falls, a black hole appears

Super Earth has declared the supercolony on Meridia a lost cause. The spread is worsening and the TCS is officially deemed an utter failure. We're ordered to detonate "Dark Fluid" bombs developed using ancient Illuminate technology. I watch Meridia be consumed entirely by a black hole, creating a permanent blemish on our galaxy.

Business as usual

• Period: June - September 2024
• Key events: More battles, Anti-Tank Mines become a meme, Escalation of Freedom
• Liberty levels: Normal

The fight continues

So begins an extended period of relative quiet. The war rages on both fronts, but we don't manage to take or lose much ground against either enemy, and we don't unlock that many new toys for a while. Wait, is war futile?

Not unlocking the Anti-Tank Mines becomes a meme

Seeking to entertain ourselves, we continue to ignore the Anti-Tank Mines every time a new opportunity appears to unlock them. The mines are denied a third time as we choose to save a colony of children instead. Arrowhead donates $4,000 to a children's charity as a thank-you.

The MLS-4X Commando arrives

A new expendable rocket launcher arrives to rival the EAT. The Commando is a four-missile pod launcher capable of destroying Automaton fabricators. A worthy instrument of liberty.

Super Earth punishes Helldivers with Anti-Tank Mines

Arrowhead flips the script, this time ordering us to kill a certain number of enemies or else it'll unlock the Anti-Tank Mines. The tactic works, and the mines are finally unleashed.

New threats appear

The Escalation of Freedom update does not meaningfully affect the war, but it does introduce new threats on both fronts: The Terminid Impaler, Bile Charger, and heavily armored Automaton walkers.

Democracy goes mobile

• Period: September - November 2024
• Key events: DSS construction and activation, Liberty Day
• Liberty levels: High

Democracy Space Station construction begins

Without knowing what it is or what it'll actually do, we deploy to help construct the Democracy Space Station. Months of back-and-forth fighting follow as both enemy factions attempt to thwart its progress.

The Jet Brigade threatens the DSS

The Jet Brigade, a particularly aggressive band of jetpack bot grunts, becomes the nemesis of the DSS, and adds a little flavor to bot deployments. They're no match for democracy, it turns out.

Liberty Day remembers the fallen

October 27 marks the first Liberty Day of Helldivers 2's run. Super Earth celebrates by gifting us a relic of the first Galactic War: the 2184 Constitution rifle, a bolt action gun that kinda sucks, but that's fine. Also in the gift bag is a set of Helldivers 1 armor.

DSS finally comes online

After months of waiting, the Democracy Space Station comes online, adding a new dimension of strategy to the galactic war. We can now exercise our right to vote on where to send the DSS and contribute Req points to activate temporary buffs for that planet, like capture protection or periodic airstrikes. Of course, the first thing it does is start indiscriminately killing friendlies.

The Illuminates return!

• Period: Ongoing
• Key events: Illuminates strike, Fast Recon Vehicle introduced
• Liberty levels: Maximum

The Illuminates come out of nowhere

In a totally unpredictable and unexpected twist of fate, a third faction has entered the war. The Illuminates, long believed to be eradicated during the first galactic war over 100 years ago, are back with an army of Super Citizen zombies, now turned "Voteless." This is an ongoing threat, but we Helldivers are more than capable of stopping these undemocratic squids.

The Helldivers score some wheels

Super Earth deploys a new tool on the battlefield to take on the Illuminates: a car. It's called the Fast Recon Vehicle, it can hold up to four divers at once, has a manual transmission, and a mounted machine gun. I like where this is headed.

After decades of being told over and over that PC gaming had died, there's a real pleasure in seeing it flourish more than ever before. Being taken seriously as a platform means more major games, with even PlayStation exclusives now reliably making their way to PC, and more support given to the PC experience of those games.

But there is an anxiety that comes with that too, especially if you've been a PC gamer for a long time. To a large extent, the core personality of PC gaming is being niche. As it grows more and more mainstream, attracting ever greater interest from major companies, there's a fear that what makes it strange, unique, and distinctive will be sanded away. A 'consoleification' of the hobby sometimes feels nigh.

Yet earlier in 2024, I had the pleasure of being a guest on PCG's official podcast, Chat Log—I was pulled in to discuss Steam's top wishlist charts, and what they say about the current state of PC gaming. Looking down that list of 100 of the most anticipated games on the platform, one thing was undeniable: PC gaming is still extremely weird.

Weird and wonderful

Where console charts are dominated by mainly the biggest releases, PC's most popular storefront remains a wild west. On any given day, the top 10 most wishlisted games is almost guaranteed to include:

• An extremely janky survival game
• An indie debut with an irresistible gimmick
• A very fiddly strategy game
• Hollow Knight: Silksong… still
• The latest over-anticipated multiplayer zombie game
• Something you've never heard of, that no games site has ever covered, that's inexplicably unbelievably popular

Keep scrolling down the top 100, and you'll find an incredible diversity of games, spanning all sorts of odd genres and specific styles, and all across the spectrum of scale, from indies made by one person in their bedroom to big budget games from massive teams and every step in between. It's never easy to predict what will be on the list—seemingly obvious upcoming games will be nowhere to be found, while obscure titles from unknown studios or tiny projects with no marketing rocket to the top.

That's reflected in the shape of this year. When we look back at the biggest stories and the most important games of 2024 for us as a site, it's a motley list. This is the year a survival game full of knock-off Pokémon found 25 million players in two months. One of the most celebrated and talked-about games was a poker roguelike. Stalker 2, a sandbox FPS developed literally under siege, finally actually came out, and was even jankier and more compelling than we could have hoped. A new Valve game leaked, started building an active playerbase before the developer even admitted it existed, and became one of the most popular and hotly discussed games of the year without ever actually being released.

Our Game of the Year awards conversations were surreal, as we debated the merits of a game about a little Yorkshire lemon hanging out with Matt Berry versus one where you and your friends try to survive in the depths of Half-Life's Black Mesa. Significant time was devoted to discussing a primarily text-based dungeon crawler where you can fight quantum lampreys and make friends with a psychic gorilla. We spent as much of our meetings trying to nail down what genres games could even be said to belong to, so we could put names to categories, as we did evaluating their quality.

All of which is to say: PC gaming is, somehow, both more mainstream than ever, and weirder than ever, at the same time. It's an eclectic local band propelled to superstardom, but still as fiercely dedicated to trumpet-based acid folk as ever. (We liked them before they were cool.)

It's still the place that pleases everybody not by hosting a handful of things we're all expected to like, but by creating space for a million things that cover every possible bizarre interest. Whatever your kink is, it's on Steam somewhere, with its own new innovations and a diehard community ten times bigger than you expected. Even the big console-first releases, now more common than ever on PC, just feel like part of that tapestry instead of supplanting it—another category among many to enjoy.

And every now and then, out of that soup of strangeness, a genre thought dead will suddenly rise from the ashes to become the thing everyone's talking about again—if you predicted that in 2023 the thing everyone would be excited about would be an isometric RPG, you're a more potent psychic than I. Other times something totally new will blindside us with an idea suddenly obvious in retrospect. Of course, a dungeon crawler based around arcade claw machines, why didn't I think of that?

For decades, PC gaming retained its unique identity in the face of mounting adversity. It was never going to be erased by mounting success. And thank God for that—this wonderful hobby of ours is still a haven for the strange and unexpected, and every day on this job is a new and baffling surprise. Long may it stay that way—we should celebrate it becoming more accessible and more popular than ever, but that doesn't mean we can't keep PC gaming weird.

Joshua Wolens, News Writer: This might sound odd, but what I most love about Stalker 2 is how Stalker it is: how far it goes—even in dolled-up 2024 form—to preserve all the systemic strangeness and seemingly bizarre design priorities that made the original games great. Even with the A-Life system apparently busted, the world still feels to me like it lives, breathes, and vibrates with potential for complete lunacy—boss encounters can get cut short when the scary monster stumbles into an anomaly, packs of dogs can descend on your enemies to wipe them out before you can even unholster your gun, that kind of thing.

But it's the little touches, too. Why does GSC consider it necessary to procedurally generate names for every human you encounter, enemies and all? No idea, but where most studios would just label the schmucks you run across in the Zone things like 'Bandit' and 'Duty Patrolman,' Stalker 2 will give them names like 'Vanya Badass,' and 'Gena Sleepy'. It's an incredibly minor choice that ends up lending humanity both to your enemies and the game as a whole, a revival of that Morrowind-style approach of giving everyone at least a vague place in the world.

That's the handle, I think. It's gorgeous and, when it works, relatively slick (at least compared to the old games), but at its heart Stalker 2 is a beautiful caveman we thawed out of a block of ice: the last, dim torch of an uncaring, old-school philosophy of game design that GSC, god bless 'em, has been carrying for the last 14 years of development.

Fraser Brown, Online Editor: Yeah, like Josh I'm just enamoured with how much Stalker 2 transports me back to 2007. It's gorgeous as all heck, but it still has that weird, janky soul that ensures I'm perpetually being surprised.

It's exactly the sort of thing I would have taken a punt on back in my early 20s, when I'd spend ages browsing the shelves in Gamestation (one of the many brick and mortars that were killed off by digital distribution) to take advantage of the staff discount I got from being night manager at Blockbuster Video (which owned Gamestation, until it too went under). God, I'm really dating myself here.

Every journey into the zone is its own weird vignette. Will I get mauled by dogs? Will I get into a fight that ends when my enemies accidentally step into an anomaly and get flattened? Will I run out of ammo at the worst possible time and have to hoof it back to base, popping radiation meds, drinking vodka and wrapping myself up in bandages until I'm a post-apocalyptic mummy? Yes, to all of them.

Robert Jones, Print Editor: Stalker 2 crashed onto PC in rough shape and with tons of the series' trademark jank on display, including some uncool progress-halting misery and, for me at least, a weird as hell bug where a swarm of rats would follow me around wherever I went. Seriously, for a time I became the rat Pied Piper! But despite the myriad of bugs, patches and, at times, deep frustrations, Stalker 2 still delivers an incredibly unique, immersive, and gripping gaming experience that recaptures the bleak and bizarre beauty of the original game perfectly.

Stalker 2 is a game where you'll frequently find yourself having to fight against both the immense hostility of its virtual world, as well as the myriad of ways the game could go bad on you, which can sometimes feel so random to a point of comic cosmic unfairness, but you soldier on regardless, in the dark and without hand-holding or safety net, as when everything is working as it should, Stalker 2 delivers one of the most mature, beautiful, complex and challenging experiences in gaming today. It's a game that captures much of what PC gaming is all about and, in my opinion, is a worthy winner of this year's Spirit of PC award.

Troy Baker, I owe you an apology. I wasn't really familiar with your game.

Well, that's not true. After the last 15 years of starring roles in high-profile blockbusters like BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us and on and on, it's more that I thought I was too familiar with Troy Baker's game to believe in him as Indiana Jones, imitating the voice of an actor I've been listening to for most of my life. The performance didn't work for me in the trailers, and neither did much of what I saw on screen: The Great Circle looked, in snippets, to be a bit too simplistic, a bit too clunky.

But Indiana Jones and the Great Circle pulls off a magic trick. It is a bit simplistic and a bit clunky, with some very stupid baddies and combat that places more importance on the film accuracy of its meaty punching sound effect than the intricacy of its brawling. And yet I've been playing it at least three hours a night since I started with a weekend binge. Playing it I don't feel like I'm a kid again—I feel like I am actually Indiana Jones, and I mean that with utter sincerity knowing it's the kind of cliche I would roll my eyes at if I read it in someone else's article.

Stop booing me—I'm right!!

Even the best licensed games haven't pulled off stepping into their characters' shoes to the extent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle manages it. Batman: Arkham City and Insomniac's Spider-Man are great videogames, but their power fantasies are a bit more like controlling an action figure than Just Some Guy.

The Great Circle reveres Indiana Jones, but it knows it somehow has to translate the heart of Harrison Ford's "everyman" performance into a game to succeed, and that doesn't work with a normal videogame character who's as elastic as a Nathan Drake, constantly bouncing from one impossibly bombastic setpiece to another. How do you make an Indiana Jones game in a post-Uncharted, post-Tomb Raider world and not make it seem like a faded copy of a copy? You make it an immersive sim.

Forget the PC genre that encompasses the likes of Deus Ex and Dishonored for a second—I can't think of a better pair of words to literally describe exactly what Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is. This game delights in the true fantasy of being Indiana Jones, which is being an explorer and archeologist who himself delights in poking around The Vatican for eight hours looking at frescos and muttering about their history under his breath. Of course he would use a notebook full of drawings and scraps of notes to suss out thousand-year-old puzzles and speak the language wherever he goes. Of course he'd get so caught up in the lust for a new discovery that the bad guys would (briefly) get the better of him. Of course he'd survive half the game's bombastic moments with heroic derring-do and only make it through the rest due to dumb luck or a comedic twist of fate.

I was smitten with The Great Circle early on when it let me loose in The Vatican with little guidance beyond my own curiosity. But the moment I knew it was really something special came hours later, when Indy's first face-to-face confrontation with the big bad was more slapstick than heroic. He falls through the ceiling while attempting to spy on Nazi archeologist Emmerich Voss, then accidentally elbows him in the face while fighting his lackey; Indy's partner, the Italian reporter Gina, almost saves the day, but bonks her head on a shelf. A bullet that narrowly avoids killing Voss's underling instead bullseyes a painting of The Führer.

In trailer clips The Great Circle's cutscenes came off as stilted, but in context they're consciously grounded at the right moments and exaggerated in others, mimicking the mixture of derring-do and goofiness that made Spielberg Spielberg. The spell that animates these scenes is the combination of MachineGames' incredible likeness of Harrison Ford and Troy Baker's performance, somehow eerily authentic without ever crossing over into distracting impressionist territory. When Baker barks out an angry or panicked retort it's so dead-on you could dub the line into one of the movies and I don't think I'd notice.

As astonishingly good as those cutscenes are, The Great Circle's best and boldest choice is still forcing you to play in first-person, with endless deliberate design choices that add a touch of Just Some Guy friction where there would be zero resistance in other games. Pressing a joystick to turn a key in a lock; pressing a button to grab a machine gun by the barrel and wield it as a club; holding up and reloading Indy's revolver one agonizing bullet at a time. Major story beats revolving around arranging the photos you've taken on a table as physical objects. Indy getting his ass beat in just a couple punches if you haven't eaten an adequate amount of biscotti before a fight.

The Great Circle is willing to be a bit slow, a bit obtuse, driven by curiosity rather than setpieces, in ways that feel so anathema to modern big budget videogaming I found myself saying "I can't believe they let them make this" to myself at least once an hour. As Ted Litchfield wrote in PC Gamer's review, it almost mirrors Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games, which "have bad stealth, bad combat, samey dungeons, and uneven skill systems, but sell a fictional world so well, so completely, they're still some of the best RPGs around."

MachineGames is flexing galaxy brain levels of "understanding the assignment" here: The Great Circle nails the spirit of the character so effectively that gameplay weaknesses like "Nazis with zero peripheral vision" don't matter in the slightest when a screen-perfect Indy smirk, a John Williams crescendo, or a puzzle with some bigass ancient gears is never more than a few minutes away. 

I expected to feel the same about The Great Circle as I did the last Indiana Jones film, Dial of Destiny—fun and heartfelt in moments, but ultimately little more than a sad attempt to revisit a character who should've been left to rest. Instead even before I've finished this adventure I'm already fantasizing about the next one. MachineGames has figured out all the delicate character work. With that challenge out of the way, imagine how much simmier it could make its second stab at an immersive sim.

Microsoft made the boneheaded decision to deprive the world of more games from Arkane Austin; if anyone over there has any sense, they'll recognize what a special, against-the-odds thing The Great Circle is, and give MachineGames' Indy the tenure he deserves to keep adventuring for many years to come.

Elie Gould, News Writer: Manor Lords came out at just the right time for me. Before landing on this medieval city builder/management game, I played quite a few horror games and metroidvanias, which can honestly be pretty tiring. So it was refreshing to be tested by a game in a different way. Instead of needing perfect reaction times, I had to do mental gymnastics to figure out whether this was really the right place to start an arable farm or solve trade issues by flooding the market with sheep. I’m not saying that I mastered this city builder, but I sure had a lot of fun growing my quaint town into a serious political and economic centre.

Andy Edser, Hardware Writer: Manor Lords is the sort of strategy-based city builder that I'd probably mess around with for a bit if it was a 2D, top-down, low budget offering, before eventually leaving for more graphically-temperate climes. But lo and indeed behold, it's actually one of the better-looking games I've played this year.

I hate to sound shallow, but I am, so that's just the way it comes out. At its core though, Manor Lords is a vibe game—a slice of middle-ages muckery that's acted like a goblet of not-so-refreshing mead to swish away the spicier notes of my usual grand strategy adventures to create something altogether more grounded.

I expected it to crunch and jank with the best of them, a result of its mostly-single-dev production—but instead it's been a smooth ride. The interface might be filled with a dizzying array of options, but it never feels overwhelming. That's a trick that other city builders would do well to imitate, and lends itself perfectly to chilled-out after work sessions. Sometimes I don't need to save the world after a long day typing words about tech. Sometimes I need to ponder history.

I could listen to my villagers mosey around my catastrophically-planned town for hours, the gentle tingle of lutes drifting me into a place of mindful peace. Until it all kicks off, of course, and the swearing begins. Manor Lords is a mud bath to soothe the gaming soul, and my year has been all the better for it.

Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer: Just like Andy says, Manor Lords has been one of my gaming happy places this year. There's just something so comforting and pastoral about the entire affair. It's a smart city-builder, but it has an impeccable atmosphere as a medieval life sim, too, transporting you back to a simpler time when you only had to worry about making it through the winter or bandits pinching your eggs. It's funny, because proper medieval life sims usually bore me to tears.

Atmosphere, in my opinion, is the secret spice that really makes a city-builder—it's one of the main reasons why Frostpunk is so special—and Manor Lords is extremely good at channeling those rustic medieval vibes. I think the game is also very smart in terms of scale, letting you feel like a local lord where a lot of strategy games would try to expand the scope. Manor Lords never tries to drag you away from your settlement and its people, instead letting you tend to your township as it grows, and tackle each concern as it arises—which must be pretty similar to how life back then actually was.

It perfectly satisfies my craving to escape modern life and start rearing sheep or making dye from berries I find in the woods. Better yet, I don't actually have to face the reality that the life of your average medieval peasant was probably quite tough.

You ever play one of those games that seems like it never stops revealing new stuff? New mechanics, new locations, new rabbits out of new hats? Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the ur-example of that kind of thing in the past few years, but I've got one you might not have heard of to add to the list: Depersonalization, a Cthulhu-flavoured and tabletop-inspired RPG from MeowNature that just seems to keep unfolding the more you play it.

What's it about? I'll let the store page description do the talking: "Dice! Tabletop role-playing games! Cthulhu! Diverse story modules! Rich branching narratives! We are prisoners of fate, but sometimes we also roll the dice and create miracles!"

So that's that cleared up. But if you still can't quite picture it, imagine an RPGMaker-style game with simple, 2D pixel-art presentation. Imagine a lot of choices and many potential bad ends. Imagine a lot of skill checks, a layered and creepy world, and a whole load of ambition which is sometimes constrained by rough translation—but the devs promise fixes are coming. And hey, if you've got it as part of a sub to Game Pass, it's easy and (more or less) free to try it out.

Taking it depersonally

The game kicks off by putting you in the shoes of Anan, a beautiful blond detective—of some sort—in a vaguely 19th-century fantasy town. There are strange goings on afoot, and investigating them means roaming from location to location around town, picking up clues, and subjecting everything clickable to a merciless array of skill checks.

The strangest going on, though, is Anan himself. He turned up in town as a child about a decade ago after his ailing mother was abducted by a bizarre, loping monster, an incident that sent the stately home he grew up in collapsing to the ground and destroyed any trace of Anan's family.

None of which he remembers, mind you. This is a proper RPG, amnesiac protagonist and all, so actually piecing all this stuff together as a grown-up means a lot of investigation.

If that sounds like Disco Elysium to you, it does to me as well, right down to the bit where you get to decide just what kind of a detective your charming bishonen protagonist is going to be. Almost no skill checks restrict you to single abilities. For instance, to eavesdrop on a conversation I could try to use my Observe skill, my Perception, or just rely on Luck, much in the same way that DE lets both a genius and meathead detective find their own paths through problems.

If that sounds great, it is, and I found myself constantly surprised by just how many new skills and uses for them Depersonalization unveiled even in my jaunt with its prologue. On top of that, there are puzzle elements (combining items to overcome problems or, in my case, just set fire to your mother's rugs), dialogue choices, and a turn-based combat system that hardly ever insists you engage with it—I never came across a fight I couldn't hide or flee from in my time with the game.

The caveat to it all is the translation. Depersonalization comes from a Chinese studio, and quite a bit of the dialogue veers between 'a little off' and 'bordering on incomprehensible' in English. In fact, the game launched in Chinese, and it was only by sheer luck that I—a stupid Englishman—managed to click my way into the options menu and change that (for reference, you want the second option on the main menu, then click to the right on the very first option in the list it gives you).

On the one hand, it kind of makes the entire thing feel even deeper and more beautiful than it already is. On the other, I had to work pretty hard to understand what was happening in a lot of scenes.

The good news is that the devs have heard our anglophone cries and promise a better, professional translation is close at hand, with a new batch of English writing for the game coming as soon as this month. You might want to wait for that, but honestly? I recommend firing it up—or its demo—right now anyway. Depersonalization is already a special, incredibly deep RPG even if I do have to re-read the odd line of dialogue a few times. If you want to dip a toe in yourself, you can find it on Game Pass and Steam.

Today's Wordle was a string of happy accidents, every new row leading me straight to the winning word. I had three green letters show up on my very first row, and from there it just kept getting better and better. I couldn't be wrong if I tried by my third, because there was only one very obvious slot left to fill. Don't worry if it hasn't gone the same for you—that's why we've got the answer ready to go if you need a hand.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, December 25

Giving someone a portion of cake, splitting responsibilities or chores between two people, or even letting someone know how you're feeling can all be this word. It's all about give and take.  

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is not a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Playing Wordle well is like achieving a small victory every day—who doesn't like a well-earned winning streak in a game you enjoy? If you're new to the daily word game, or just want a refresher, I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success: 

• You want a balanced mix of unique consonants and vowels in your opening word. 
• A solid second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• The answer could contain letters more than once.

There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by the end of the day. If you're struggling to find the answer or a tactical word for your next guess, there's no harm in coming back to it later on. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Here, for you. The answer to the December 25 (1285) Wordle is SHARE.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Knowing previous Wordle solutions can be helpful in eliminating current possibilities. It's unlikely a word will be repeated and you can find inspiration for guesses or starting words that may be eluding you. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 24: EAGLE
• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY
• December 17: SCOWL
• December 16: BOAST
• December 15: FUNKY

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it's your job to work out which five-letter word is hiding by eliminating or confirming the letters it contains.

Starting with a strong word like LEASH—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good place to start. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second go should compliment the starting word, using another "good" guess to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.  After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS). 

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

During these disappointing times I like to run back into the creaking arms of ye olden dayes. Which to me is anything between the era when games spanning four floppy discs were considered a luxurious extravagance and 800x600 was an excessively high resolution, to the time we all got excited about some weird new Quake clone with textured grass and vehicles (surely that'll never catch on) called Halo.

These older games aren't automatically better—plenty of this year's new releases have been incredible, and there's a steaming mountain of old games best left forgotten—but the games below can legitimately hold their own against anything else already in your digital library, and feel as fresh and fun today as they always have.

Bright and beautiful

Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug (1982)

Namco's game may be older than time itself and possess none of those fancy modern details like "scrolling" or "a main character with a proper face," but it's perfect for a quick five minutes of gaming when nothing else in particular feels like it's worth loading up. The lively dirt-clearing scratches the same itch as neatly lining up Tetris's blocks, and cleverly squishing the monsters pursuing poor heroic digger Taizo Hori with a well-timed big, heavy rock is always deeply satisfying.

It's the sort of game that most people would play for a bit of fun and then walk away from, but underneath the cute flower-covered surface and happy little tune lies a classic score-focused arcade challenge just begging to be mastered.

Alternatively: Mr Driller DrillLand (2002)

Taizo's back and this time he's brought his arguably more famous son, Susumu (Mr Driller), as well as a selection of family and friends along for the ride. This was originally a Japanese GameCube exclusive before finally being translated into English and released on Steam, ready to surprise and delight with its moreish mix of puzzle-drilling action and adorably daft hats.

First-person thrills

Thief (1998)

Don't let the pointy faces and angular interiors fool you: this game is as detailed as they come. Thief's dark steampunk world is my playhouse (and often my graveyard too): every well leads to some fully mapped-out underground waterway, every ordinary room has aboves and unders and blind spots just behind the door for me to hide in, blackjack raised and ready to strike. Important conversations are overheard by actually sneaking close enough to eavesdrop, and burning torches are meant to be quietly doused from afar with water arrows.

If I can imagine it, Thief will probably let me try it. Nothing beats the thrill of a sticky-fingered run through a building crawling with guards, or picking the exact key I need off someone's belt as they obliviously pass by.

Alternatively: Wing Commander (1990)

If skulking about under the stars doesn't sound appealing, how about looking out of a spaceship's cockpit while flying among them? Wing Commander somehow made combining epic action space battles with impressively sim-like flight control and damage modelling look easy. Then they added an incredibly reactive story that continues on whether I succeed or fail a mission. All this complexity, even though it was designed for hardware with barely double-digit CPU speeds and 1MB of RAM.

Gimme all the D&D vampires

Love for D&D games, dungeon crawlers, and, um, a certain vampire spawn of Larian's inspired me to seek out further dice-rolling adventures of the gothic fantasy kind this year. I was a little surprised I had to go so far back in time to play an RPG based on this setting, considering that Ravenloft's popularity is almost as undying as its vampiric master is. It's a shame too, because even something as old as Strahd’s Possession shows how much potential is locked up in this cursed land.

The level-draining vampires and spooky cemeteries crawling with monsters are creepy enough, but there's something truly unsettling about exploring a village filled with people too scared or plain worn down by it all to help. The cherry on this ghoulish cake is an incredible automap system, one so good it not only lets me annotate my maps in-game but also allows me to export them to Notepad, or even print them out on paper. Paper! Imagine looking at maps drawn on tree pulp. Incredible.

Alternatively: Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (2004)

Sometimes all you need to have a good time is a bit of character building, a lot of loot grabbing, and some of the most impressive water effects 2004 had to offer. This is one of those action RPGs that makes it very easy to promise myself just one more run for the fourth time this evening, especially as it plays so well on Steam Deck. The last boss of Dark Alliance 2 is immortalised as a tasteful marble bust on a small table in Baldur's Gate 3's Szarr Palace.

Spooky times

Castlevania Dominus Collection (Haunted Castle, 1987; Dawn of Sorrow, 2005)

I eagerly downloaded this on launch day because I loved the thought of having a flimsy excuse to play through the wonderful Portrait of Ruin one more time, and then stayed for what was billed as pretty much some neat little bonus: a completely reworked version of the series' pariah, Haunted Castle.

Nobody actually liked Konami's old arcade take on their classic vampire whipping series—it was unbearably unfair and stiffer than a frozen zombie—yet this remake has quietly gone and done the impossible, turning the rightly reviled game into a new classic with redesigned stages, incredible remixes of some of the series' most iconic tunes, and beautiful pixel art that looks authentic and refreshed all at once. If I'd wished for a new-old Castlevania it wouldn't have been as good as this.

Alternatively: Alone in the Dark (1992)

Before Resident Evil ‘invented’ the survival horror genre, there was Alone in the Dark. I played this through to refresh myself on the original adventure and its pointy people/charming pixel art backgrounds before I dived into this year's Harbour/Comer-starring reimagining of the Derceto mansion incident. I'm a little sorry to say this old game was honestly the better of the two, thanks to the puzzle box nature of the mansion's design and the unnerving feeling of actually being, well, alone in the dark.

Modern pixels

OK so these next two are technically the exact opposite of retro, seeing as they're both brand new releases and made with modern PCs in mind. But they so effectively embrace old ways of doing things that they fit right in with the classics of yesteryear, offering something familiar without simply copying some famous dead game's homework.

Skald: Against the Black Priory (2024)

Skald's an eldritch horror themed RPG that looks a lot like a recently unearthed Commodore 64 adventure, with an interesting battle system that encourages thoughtful positioning and making tactical use of a heavily customised party. The best thing here though, apart from everyone being driven mad by incomprehensible horrors and the presence of grisly sacks of flesh that defy all logic, is the amount of narrative choice on offer. Sometimes this can have immediate (and potentially deadly) consequences or reveal new plot threads, sometimes it is just enough to give me the option to react to a painful memory in my own way—or not eject my lunch all over the floor when I see (or smell) something terrifying.

Alternatively: Devil Blade Reboot (2024)

This Japanese indie game looks and plays like a lost Saturn shmup, possessing the perfect mix of crunchy pixel art and '90s arcade-style visual flexing. Everything's explosions and bright blue lasers and gigantic slabs of metal. And like all the best Saturn shmups it can be enjoyed as a simple bit of fun or played and replayed until your thumbs hurt, every second of every stage bursting with points-scoring opportunities.

In 2021, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were whiling away the Covid lockdowns in GTA Online when they had an idea: "Why not stage Hamlet inside the game?" They recorded hundreds of hours of in-game attempts to perform Shakespeare amid the chaos of GTA 5 and put together a feature-length documentary, Grand Theft Hamlet, which has now won multiple awards, earned a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, and will premiere in US theaters on January 17.

The film is already in a number of UK theaters, and was first shown at SXSW back in March, where it won Best Documentary Feature. Crane and co-director Pinny Grylls also picked up a couple of British Independent Film Awards.

The juxtaposition of a violent, chaotic videogame and Hamlet creates an obvious tension, though the amphitheater in GTA 5's Los Santos isn't necessarily all that different from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, says Grylls.

"There's a certain thing, the irreverence of the fact that the people we were meeting didn't really give a shit," Grylls said in a recent interview with Radio Times. "You [co-director Sam Crane] said to me very early on, 'It feels like I went back in time to the Globe 500 years ago where people would just throw apples at you ... or there were prostitutes coming and going, and people were selling stuff.' The theater in Shakespeare's time was like that. It was popular entertainment. It wasn't a dark room where everyone had to be quiet."

We already know, of course, how much meaning and comedy can be found in the ways players interact in online games, and GTA Online has been a particularly fertile ground for dramatic roleplaying. Perhaps PC Gamer contributor Joe Donnelly didn't approach "I tried to rob a jewellery store as a blind drunk Bad Santa in a GTA 5 roleplay server" with a mind to seek the "moments of pathos, emotion, and lyricism" that the Grand Theft Hamlet website promises, but you know, same kind of thing.

Outside of Red vs. Blue, I can't think of another obvious instance of machinima getting a theatrical release, and reviews for Grand Theft Hamlet are positive so far. Empire called the film a "riotously funny, unexpectedly poignant ode to gaming, Shakespeare, the indestructible nature of art, and the benefits of befriending bazooka wielding extraterrestrials."

Grand Theft Hamlet is not available to stream right now, but will presumably be available on Mubi, which owns the subscription streaming rights, sometime after the US theatrical release in January.

Not me, though. I'm a valiant defender of the working class and a (provisional driving) licensed financial expert. I'm here to help you—and me—defeat the cost of living crisis by creating the Metaphor we have at home. All you need is a copy of Skyrim, some mods, and a little ingenuity.

Low standards help too.

Facing my true self

The fundamental experience of Metaphor: ReFantazio is being a small boy with weird eyes who hates apartheid, so the first mod I'd need to recreate it amid Skyrim's snow-capped peaks was obvious: Heterochromia Reborn – a Complete Eye Customization Overhaul. Skyrim's default eyes are dim, un-lustrous, depressingly uniform. With these, I'd be able to approximate the gorgeous gazers of Metaphor's protagonist right at character creation, getting me in the mood to overthrow society with sensible tax policy or whatever.

Sweet merciful Christ.

Turns out that Heterochromia Reborn offers, if anything, too much customization. Heterochromia has been too reborn, and the default starting stage for each of your peepers is total non-existence. This is horrible.

I quickly located some mismatched eyes and stuffed them in our man's head, giving him the appropriately dreamy gaze of Metaphor's magical Mandela. But there was still a problem. The real Metaphor protagonist—named Will, by the way—is a young lad, and pretty short of stature. Skyrim's default roster of musclebound grimy warrior-types didn't quite capture the vibe.

I needed someone more youthful. In stepped Playable Child – Elder and Vampire Races – Appointable For Conquest Of Skyrim, which let me play as someone in the springtime of their life. One issue: The heterochromia mod didn't quite take with the new playable kids, leaving young Will with two Luciferian black opals where his eyes ought to be.

He was also glowing for reasons I lack the mental wherewithal to interrogate.

But close enough, I thought, dyeing our hero's hair its trademark indigo and sending him on his way. I had him choose Hadvar and the Empire rather than Ralof and the Stormcloaks in the tutorial, reasoning that the latter were too big on hate crimes to really jive with Will and crew.

Venture forth

We were in business. I had a protagonist. Now I just needed a party. Your companions are, for my money, the best part of Metaphor: ReFantazio. They're an affable cast of oddballs you can't help but fall in love with. If I couldn't replicate them in my Skyrim Community Theatre production of the game, it'd be better to cancel the whole thing.

This was a toughie. Metaphor's heroic gaggle is unique. How would I capture the anguished nobility of Strohl? The upright Prussian nobility of Hulkenberg? The being-a-small-bat-person of Heismay?

Difficult to do, but Skyrim modders are nothing if not industrious and exhaustive. I was sure it wouldn't be an insurmountable task to find reasonable analogues for my favorite Metaphor party members.

After some searching, I became convinced that it was an insurmountable task to find reasonable analogues for my favourite Metaphor party members. It was time to find some unreasonable ones. First up, Hulkenberg. What defines her? Honour, strength, and a hidden but rich inner life.

Those were her surface traits, sure, but at her core? What defines Hulkenberg is that she's called Hulkenberg. Hulken berg. Where have I heard a name like that before?

Sometimes I astound myself.

With Yennefer of Vengerberg fitting seamlessly into the 'berg-shaped hole in my party, it was time to find our Heismay. This one was even harder. As hard as I searched, I couldn't find a short, white, anthropomorphised bat to take up the party's ninja role. It was time to get creative.

First up, Heismay needed to be short. Shorter even than me, a Satanic yet egalitarian child. To this end, I installed Bardin Goreksson – Voiced Dwarf Follower (Warhammer Fantasy), an alarmingly detailed dwarven companion who was appropriately lacking in stature. Now I just needed to turn him into a bat.

Bethesda's Creation Engine has no in-built means of mutating your followers into stunted batpeople, which only highlights the extent to which it has become divorced from the wants of its players. As such, I relied on another mod to chiropterise Bardin. I admit that, maybe, at this point, I gave in to laziness, because all I did was download the prosaically named Batman mod and put the armour on the dwarf, who loved it.

I had my small bat man, leaving me only to install the most simpering noble follower I could find—Lucien—and cast him in the role of Strohl. I'm working to a schedule here.

Game of Thrones

The final piece of the puzzle was politics. Metaphor is fundamentally a story about a competition for the throne: the first bizarre green shoots of representative democracy in a world that's heretofore been thoroughly fantasy-feudalist. I couldn't just run around Skyrim with my party whacking frost trolls, I needed to summit the heights of secular power.

Enter LC Become Jarl of Ivarstead SE – Port with Expansion and Voices Fix, a mod that promises to "introduce the opportunity for the player to become Jarl of Ivarstead, and to enjoy all the luxuries that come with such a title—such as a magnificent castle." Jarl is Swedish for king, probably, and I figured this was the best approximation of Metaphor's actual plot I could get.

I gathered my party and popped over to Ivarstead, newly home to a decidedly non-canon and enormous castle. Upon entering, we found a man called "Goldur of Warehouse," sat idly at his desk munching on a heel of bread.

"What's going on here? You look scared!" Will said to Goldur as he, dead-eyed, continued to chew.

Turns out he was terrified. The castle had been attacked, the Jarl had been abducted, and all Goldur could do was eat bread about it. With a voice that sounded suspiciously like it had been recorded on a headset microphone, Goldur implored our party of progressive heroes to free Ivarstead and its castle from the yoke of oppression. Donning armour I pulled off a dead guard—which did not manifest on my body but which did make me bald—we set off into the castle depths.

Inside, we found werewolves, and I immediately realized the folly of taking on mods like these on a completely fresh level-1 save. We might as well have jumped in a blender. Every strike sent us hurtling across the room. My comrades were knocked unconscious, I was killed outright. It was only by valiant effort and finding a section of the wall I could stand on where enemies couldn't reach me that we eventually fought our way through. At one point, Heismay began singing a song about a guy whose "brow was ruffled bald," which I took personally.

Once we'd made it through the ice caves that were inside the castle for some reason, we found the Jarl. He was dead, as were his guards. Did Metaphor's villainous Louis Guiabern do this? Most likely. It could also have been the many, many werewolves.

I gave the former Jarl all the respect due a perished aristocrat and robbed his corpse, yanking a jeweled circlet off his head that might maybe mean something to Goldur.

I returned the circlet to Mr Warehouse, who still hadn't made a dent in that baguette, and he was aggrieved. "Our beloved leader is dead!" he cried between mouthfuls. Who would look after the people now?

Perhaps a certain black-eyed boy? I think so. Actually, the questline was a lot longer, and Goldur wanted me to faff around gathering resources and whatnot before I got to be Jarl, but I figured this article was already long enough, so I simply summoned the former Jarl's circlet back out of his inventory and put it on. Hail to the king, baby. Racism is over.

Verisimilitude: Indistinguishable from the real thing.
Fun factor: RPG of the year.
Money saved: $70.

Along with being great, Dredge is also a wee bit deceptive, at least at first glance. A cute little fishing boat, a lovely sunset, a quaint seaside village—the octopus is a little weird, yeah, but fish, right? They're weird by nature. But things take an odd turn in a real hurry, and I'm not talking about wind in the wire making tattletale sounds here: There's something decidedly not good happening in the depths.

"Dredge has the most immaculate vibes of any game I've played this year," PC Gamer's Mollie Taylor wrote about Dredge in 2023. "By day it's a relaxing and serene fishing game, but once the sun sets it turns into an unsettling realisation of how isolated your tiny boat is on those big dark waters. Dredge plays to that polarity wonderfully, crafting a delightfully spooky world that has my usual horror-averse self desperate to dig deeper into its mysteries."

And if "nyctophobia horrors" aren't your thing, Dredge also offers a "passive mode" that maintains the creepy atmosphere but tones down the outright awfulness. ("Awfulness" used here entirely in a complimentary fashion, to be clear.)

So Dredge is really good, and it's now really free—but only for the day. The Epic Games Store is in the midst of its not-quite-daily giveaways for the holidays (15 games over a three-week stretch) so you've only got until 11 am ET on December 25 to grab it.

If you're looking for something new to play over the holidays, allow me to direct your attention to Striden, and more specifically the new round of playtesting that's now underway. The holiday playtest features a brand-new co-op PvE mode that sets teams of up to five players on a mission to fix their radio so they can get out of town, all while defending their base against waves of enemies.

Striden seemed like a fairly straightforward multiplayer shooter when we got our first look at it earlier in 2024 at the PC Gaming Show, but there were a couple notable twists. The bear with the glowing eyes is probably the most prominent bit of "what is going on here?"—the bear is actually an unlockable weapon controlled by players that seems to do a pretty good job of turning opponents into paste—but I also couldn't help but notice the moose-drawn turret.

The resolution's not great but that is 100% a moose pulling an artillery piece. You don't see that every day.

There are actually stories of attempts to develop "moose cavalry" in 17th-century Sweden, although there's no real historical foundation to it, but it is kind of a cute fit for the game's setting: Striden is set in an alt-history 1970s on the Scandinavian peninsula, which has been battered by a nuclear exchange in a war between East and West. That's why the weaponry in the trailer looks not exactly modern, and also how the radioactive bears come into play, among other things.

Striden was revealed as a mix of Battlefield-style large-scale shooter and extraction shooters: In its initial form, the game pits four teams of five players against one another in a battle against each other and the brutal environment to accrue points that will enable them to call for rescue and escape to a presumably safer locale. The mode in this playtest is being developed in response to player requests for PvE action, and while developer 5 Fortress warned that it's still "in a very early stage" and thus not a "finished PvE experience," it's fully functional and should give players "a vibe of what is to come in the future." The studio says that will include things like side missions, more varied enemies, and more to explore on the new map.

The Striden playtest is open to all—just head over to the Steam page and hit the "request access" button, and you're in. It's set to run until January 2.

On the other hand, sometimes your reviewers come to you and say, look, I know this has the appearance of an ASCII game from the '80s, but it's amazing, incredible, fantastic, brilliant. 94%! And you ask them some questions, and ask other editors what they think, and play it for yourself a bit, and a little while later you're doing a water ritual with a guy named Abbashaphat Mordecai which causes your reputation with "newly sentient beings" to decrease, and so you decide, alright: 94% it is.

Sometimes the games are just good. That was true a lot this year.

Of course, a score is just shorthand for how a reviewer felt about a game, and lots of games don't get high scores from us even though plenty of people think they're brilliant, including people at PC Gamer. Most games don't get a score from us at all, because we can't possibly review everything, and don't typically score early access games. In other words, this is not a comprehensive list of the best games of the year, and in fact some of our 2024 GOTY Award winners aren't on it. And yet it's still a pretty big list. 2024 perhaps wasn't the splashiest year for PC gaming, but bad? Definitely not.

Here are PC Gamer's highest review scores of 2024:

89%

• Persona 3 Reload: "a highly-polished remake of the 2006 classic"
• Tekken 8: "The best Tekken game in years, let down only by its struggling netcode and aged customization"
• Dragon's Dogma 2: "A magnificent adventure with impressive fights and some very rough edges"
• V Rising: "An even better version of one of the best Early Access survival games"
• Little Kitty, Big City: "an adorable, entertaining journey through a delightful world that's just the right size"
• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes: "a thrilling mystery that asks players to rise to its challenges, and rewards them when they do"

90%

• Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: "fulfills the promise of being the most true-to-life and detailed game of its kind"
• Shogun Showdown: "This wonderfully clever strategy roguelike demands your best, and it deserves to get it"
• Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred: "Compelling characters to root for, creative loot to chase, and fiercely expressive action"
• Satisfactory: "a masterfully made game for crafters, builders, and factory managers of all kinds"
• Riven: "as impressive, immersive, and unmissable as it's ever been"
• Animal Well: "a sleep-destroying puzzle metroidvania of baffling depth"
• Granblue Fantasy: Relink: "an essential ARPG"

91%

• Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake: "welcoming for newcomers, a fan's dream, and a truly timeless classic"
• Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance: “combines the fresh, familiar, and the fiendish into one incredible RPG”
• Wild Bastards: "The roguelike and FPS genres haven't been spliced so successfully since Deathloop"
• Balatro: "A roguelike deckbuilder debut already worthy of joining Slay the Spire and Monster Train at the King’s table. Essential"

92%

• Destiny 2: The Final Shape: "It's simply the best Destiny 2 expansion—both a satisfying conclusion to the series' first saga, and a compelling shooter packed full of stuff to do"
• Factorio: Space Age: "Blowing out Factorio’s scale and reinventing its factory systems multiple times over, Space Age is an immediate contender for the best expansion ever made"

94%

• Caves of Qud: "a genre-defining achievement in play, story, and roleplaying freedom"

95%

• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree: "not only complements the base game but expands its thematic and systemic scope even further."
• Metaphor: ReFantazio: "a beautiful, 100-hour-long journey from beginning to end"

This year I played three 100-hour Atlus RPGs and I’m alive to sheepishly admit it (but only just). The first was Persona 3 Reload, the last was Metaphor: ReFantazio, and wedged in the middle was Shin Megami Tensei 5 Vengeance, which was easily my favorite. It’s more tonally askew than the Persona games, more psychedelically bleak, and while I didn’t really absorb the story enough to recount it now, its landscapes have left their mark on me.

I was compelled to play SMT 5 straight after Persona 3 Reload because a) on paper it's comparatively simple and b) because it was an Atlus RPG and I couldn’t stomach anything else. My favourite thing about Persona is the combat and that’s basically all SMT 5 is. There is no time-consuming, FOMO-inducing social link stuff to grapple with, and no laborious daytime routines or calendars to stress over: it’s fundamentally a combat-first JRPG with creature collecting (and of course, the occasional interminable dialogue sequence, but you can skip them). The rhythm is simple and rewarding: explore big open maps, collect new monsters and deities, and pit them against foes in tactical turn-based battles. What you’re doing in the opening hours of SMT 5, you’re still basically doing 60 hours later.

Shin Megami Tensei loyalists are always eager to remind Persona fans that the latter is an offshoot of the former. They’re also wont to point out that Shin Megami Tensei’s monster collecting predates Pokémon. But I think it’s reasonable to describe Shin Megami Tensei as “Persona, but Pokémon”, just as it's reasonable to describe Metaphor ReFantazio as "Persona, but fantasy", because that will make sense to people who never encountered Megaten before Persona 5 launched it into the mainstream western consciousness. It still vastly undersells exactly what SMT is though, because that is near inarticulable when taking into account its minor flourishes.

Shin Megami Tensei 5 felt revelatory to me, even though fans (whether of Atlus games or JRPGs more broadly) seem split on whether it’s “great” or just disappointingly “good”. The most gripping element is, of course, Atlus’ Press Turn combat system, which demands a careful and tactical playstyle. It’s fundamentally a process of attacking with the right monsters equipped with the right elemental powers, but the way this set-up gradually blossoms into something akin to chess makes the combat in, say, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, feel hopelessly imprecise and inelegant. Unless you’re over-levelled (and for situations like that there’s a lightning quick auto-battle mode) it’s nearly impossible to brute force through a SMT encounter.

It’s a great game then, but what I love about SMT 5 has barely anything to do with what I do on a moment-to-moment basis with my hands. SMT 5 is set in the sandbanked ruins of a future Tokyo. It’s not a graphically impressive game, and that's made all the more obvious due to its lack of Persona’s overblown UI flair. Despite being set in a destroyed re-imagining of a real place, the handful of open world maps in SMT 5 feel more like videogame spaces than most contemporary JRPGs. Big golden collectibles are spread across sand plains and skyscraper corpses, and baddies roam aimlessly in big, dumb packs. It was originally designed for Nintendo Switch, and you can sense while playing it that everything about the game—the level design, the stripped-back UI—was designed with handhelds in mind.

It may not be “impressive” graphically, but boy does SMT 5 have atmosphere, and yet, not the kind of atmosphere you expect from a post-apocalyptic videogame designed for millions of players. Usually “post-apocalyptic” implies some sense of vanquished grandeur. There’s usually an inherent melancholy only dispelled by the brutality and doggedness (or zaniness) of the survivors we meet. But you don't meet survivors in SMT 5's fallen Tokyo; there are no survival stories, no attempts to "humanize" the devastation or orientate it with our real life experiences. SMT 5 strikes a distinctly strange tone, one that’s sickly and faintly oppressive, but also dream-like.

The protagonist Nahobino doesn’t suffer fall damage and can glide down hills at graceful high speeds. Glowing red columns shuttle Nahobino high above the map, revealing the limits of the land and their artificial “open dungeon” layouts. The movement in SMT 5 is surprisingly lightfooted and balletic but it doesn’t need to be this way, from a gameplay perspective. Light platforming is sometimes required but it never demands full use of the mobile fluidity Nabohino enjoys. Instead, the movement contributes to the deliberate unreality of these sparsely detailed 3D worlds; it’s hard to account for otherwise.

Sound is a huge factor too. The sound design is weirdly enclosed, making no effort to evoke open spaces. When Nabohino’s first fairy companion Amanozako shouts “Hey! Hey!” to alert of a nearby buried treasure, her voice is drenched in an off-kilter reverb quite at odds with the wide open areas I’m exploring. Her stock standard JRPG whimsy gains an awkward kind of menace. Meanwhile, a shift in the moon cycle elicits a lurching ascending drone that sounds like a corrupted take on Ocarina of Time’s discovery chime, broadcast from a seastuck vessel. Below all this, a faintly industrial soundtrack ticks away in the background, sounding more like something from an obscure ‘90s German industrial compilation than anything else I’ve heard in a mass market videogame. Even the rest area music, which sounds at first jarringly chintzy, acquires a chilling dimension over the course of SMT 5’s 80 hours.

This is not a game concerned with trying to create “real, living” spaces. Disorientation seems key. Playing SMT 5 puts me in a weird, receptive edge-of-sleep mindspace, and there’s something verging horror in this. Not in the tense, nail-biting mould of blockbuster horror, nor in the psychologically discomforting sense we might associate with something like Silent Hill or Soma. SMT’s is a slightly off surrealist horror. It's never scary—it often tries to be cartoonishly funny—but there is something latently skewed about it. Nothing feels real, nothing is meant to feel real. It’s a sense of the uncanny that modern indie horror developers have nailed over the last couple of years, mainly thanks to their implementation of early 3D graphical shortcomings. Similarly, when you look at more categorically vague modern indies like Liminal Void, or Psychopomp, or even Cruelty Squad, with their deliberately garish art styles that lean wholeheartedly into digital artifice, it’s hard not to see SMT’s fingerprints all over them.

When I think about it, that “antiquated 3D” vibe is a quality that most modern Atlus JRPGs share in a more subtle way, even Metaphor: ReFantazio. Look past the loud UI and gorgeous townships—which seem to borrow from Yugoslavian modernist architecture and monuments to striking effect—and Metaphor is a weirdly flat-looking game. Foliage is static and flaky. Distant hills clearly hide nothing beyond them but a blank horizon of unfilled map space. Out in the open field areas, Atlus makes little effort to make their game worlds look like real worlds. I can only assume this is deliberate: despite the social “simulation” aspects in Metaphor and Persona you are not meant to be carried off into an approximation of any real world in Atlus games. Instead, via a number of unusual rubbings together, they feel like waking dreams. SMT 5 is that principle boiled down to its essence. SMT is, after all, the essence of all of its offshoots: it’s the “purest” form of this brilliant studio’s distinctive vision.

By now it’s a cliché verging moronic to describe Shin Megami Tensei—or Persona games—as “weird”, but leaving aside that broad preconception, I can’t think of another studio whose games give me such an idiosyncratic sensory rush. In 2025, I’m going to play through all three of the Etrian Odyssey games I just bought during the Steam Winter Sale. I doubt they’ll shift my tastes quite as much as SMT did, but if there’s one great thing about loving games right now, it’s that we have a stupid abundance of choice and a dizzying wealth of deep cuts to explore, and there’s always a new epiphany just around the corner.

Overall, Shin Megami Tensei V illuminated, for me, a seeming consistency in Atlus' meaty RPGs that I might not have otherwise noticed, and which I've come to yearn for in other games: an unashamed willingness to embrace the strange beauty of unreal videogame spaces. In Persona, our teenage heroes temporarily escape the familiar backdrops of high schools and shopping malls to enter bizarre, illogical, labyrinthine spaces. In Shin Megami Tensei, illogical labyrinthine space is all there is.

Jake Tucker, Editorial Director, PC Gaming Show: STRAFTAT makes me feel old. Not like the way my knees crunch as I get out of bed each morning or the way I don't understand TikTok, but in the way STRAFTAT channels the FPS games that I used to waste hours in as a teenager.

The 1v1 battles sound hypercompetitive: The "two players enter, one player leaves" styling at the heart of STRAFTAT may evoke the thunderdome, but there's an inherent ridiculousness because of the collection of random levels that lays things out like Mario Party for murderers. In one you'll fight in a maze of corridors with assault rifles, in another you're sliding down an icy slope hurling landmines at each other, or fighting each other with repulsor guns and knives as you try to knock your opponent to their doom.

STRAFTAT's biggest strength is that no matter how silly it looks, the guns feel great, the janky art style always lands, and the level design is on point. Each round will take seconds to play out and it's intensely competitive, serious stuff. This is the core of things and it holds STRAFTAT together because no matter how silly the maps get or how ridiculous the weapons are, it's clear the Lemaitre Bros have a deep understanding of how they want these 1v1 matches to play out, and they haven't compromised on that vision. So, I guess it actually is a Thunderdome. But the participants are going at it with nothing but rubber knives and a yoyo.

Morgan Park, Staff Writer: It really is something special. Like a modern LAN party in a can, STRAFTAT is a fundamentally social FPS with the sort of quick-session magnetism that makes folks want to huddle around a Discord stream and call "next."

I can't say enough about those 70+ maps: a deep pool of battlegrounds both regular and extremely weird, like the one where the only gun pickup is at the end of an obstacle course, or the one that's just the Red Room from Twin Peaks. STRAFTAT is that bookmarked Team Fortress 2/Unreal Tournament server with all the good maps. And somehow it's free.

Evan Lahti, Strategic Director: It's so good to have a Quake-adjacent shooter that drips with slapstick. You can't help but laugh when your first seconds of life, sprung from the gate ("SPRINT, SLIDE, GRAB GUN ASAP"), immediately culminates into "You found a baseball bat, but your opponent found a rocket launcher or a gatling gun." Futily swinging the thing as you get absolutely vaporized by some guy named Toilet Boss 99, your body ragdolling into a bottomless pit. It's Soviet Looney Tunes.

Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: My only problem with STRAFTAT is that I've been playing it enough to get "annoying good" at the game. Not actually good, like good enough to beast all comers in random queue (there are some hot hands out there) or hold my own at a purely theoretical⁠—at least at the time of writing⁠—STRAFTAT tournament, but good enough that it's getting hard to recommend STRAFTAT to more easygoing, well-adjusted friends. I know that we'd load in and I'd wall jump and crouch slide to the primo weapon spawns I know by heart, grinding my buds into the dirt and making them never want to play any game with me again, let alone STRAFTAT.

And that's a damn shame, because this is an FPS with some genuine everyman appeal. It doesn't try to hook you with progression loops tied to limited run seasonal content or whatever. It keeps me coming back with a joyful "one more round" magic that has me feeling like I'm playing CS 1.6 or The Specialists at a LAN party in 2009.

Jake Tucker: I, for one, have grown tired of Ted apologising profusely as he murders me on map after map

Morgan Park: I've been on both sides of that one Ted. Showed it to a friend who didn't want me to go easy on him, but I won enough to turn him off the game. Then I played with another friend who just embarrassed me for a half hour straight. Not exactly STRAFTAT's fault, but a party mode with more players would go a long way!

I'm going to level with you, dear reader—I know very little about Chinese mythology. Beyond my interest in the Three Kingdoms period, mainly brought about through strategy games, it's not something I've ever really been exposed to. However, year after year, I bang on about the exciting versatility of the soulslike genre and how it's the perfect vehicle for exploring new settings and mythologies.

With Enotria: The Last Song channeling Italian folklore and Black Myth: Wukong inspired by Journey to the West, it's been a decent year for soulslike fans looking for settings more grounded in real-world mythology than last year's Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen. While I personally found Enotria to be a bit too clunky, I think Black Myth: Wukong is the perfect poster child for what this genre can be.

Many accuse Black Myth of being too easy, but I agree with Tyler that it's a fantastic first soulslike if you've struggled with harder games—this isn't just a genre for those who crave difficulty or want the challenge of overcoming a nightmarish boss. If anything, I applaud Black Myth as a linear soulslike with bosses you don't have to endlessly bash your head against.

Post-Elden Ring, it's hard not having the option to seek out something else in the open world and come back later, and in a game with as many bosses as Black Myth, making them too tough would kill all momentum.

Black Myth's absurd production values also help realise its world. With little knowledge of the mythology, I was able to just drink in the pure magic of the setting—that opening cutscene is the perfect example. You've got this instantly likeable monkey king making wisecracks as he defends his mountain against the assembled armies of heaven, and the result is the most cinematic soulslike intro I've ever seen.

With each chapter, Black Myth presents areas filled with spectacle and stories. Some you have to seek out—as with each region's secret areas and quests—while others are told through the characters you meet, and shown in the gorgeous animations at the end of each chapter:

These cutscenes, in particular, demonstrate such a level of care and authenticity in regards to the world—I was honestly speechless when I saw chapter two's stop-motion sequence. No matter what you think of Black Myth: Wukong as a soulslike, I think the effort it puts into realising its setting is undeniable, and that makes it a really special game for fans of the genre who are familiar with the mechanics but want something fresh to explore—a rare example of a game not trying to imitate Yharnam or Lordran.

Take chapter two, for instance. You wake in a desert, riddled with arrows, to find a headless priest serenading you—somehow—with a sanxian; a kind of shamisen-like instrument. As you explore the area, fighting its rat-men denizens, the priest keeps popping up and his songs transform into the region's soundtrack; a genius way of subtly hinting at the area's lore, the tragedies that occurred there, and the priest's identity.

There's the Pagoda Realm in chapter three; a Tower of Latria-esque prison centered around a gigantic prayer wheel, which plunges the area into madness when it starts spinning, increasing the difficulty and variety of enemies. It'll feel familiar to anyone who's played Demon Souls, but it's such a fresh way of reimagining that concept.

This is what Black Myth: Wukong does best for me; consistently realising its setting in fun and surprising ways. That's not to say it isn't a decent soulslike, either. It doesn't have the loadout versatility you might find in other examples of the genre, but its skill system has a lot of depth, and because of its less stringent difficulty, you can kind of decide how deep you go. You can weave together combos and spells to tackle its tougher bosses and change your gear to reflect your chosen playstyle.

It still has the familiar mechanics of the genre—gathering currency from enemies to level, healing flasks, tricky bosses, shrines you return to when you die and respawning enemies, but it also brings in a lot of its own smart ideas. I particularly enjoyed the spirit system, which sees you collect enemies and bosses like Pokémon, and use them to perform special one-off attacks. Spells are also very fun, like A Pluck of Many, which lets you summon a bunch of monkey clones to pummel the enemy into submission.

If you missed out on Black Myth: Wukong this year, but you're a soulslike fan who wants a fresher take on the genre, I wholeheartedly recommend checking it out. Perhaps it's due to my lack of familiarity with the original tale, but there were so many moments while playing it where I was pleasantly surprised by the rich and imaginative in which it told its story. For me, Wukong really is a must-play if you're curious about recent soulslikes and what the genre can do.

Someone always gets left behind, even in the age of science, and this time, it's me, sacrificed to the silk mines to kill worms for dirt so the topsiders can carry on expanding their precious chicken farm.

It all started after I suggested jumping back into modded Minecraft. My friends and I used to play Tekkit and the like back in the day, and after trying and failing to make any real progress in Satisfactory due to creative differences, we all decided it would be best to stick to what we know and start a new factory in Minecraft.

I'd like to point out that a modded Skyblock server was my idea, so I was a little shocked when the group came together to assign project roles, which landed me providing the dirt for the expanding factory. I admit I may not be as useful as my friends, who are actually engineers, but I can string pipes and red stones together just as well as anyone else.

I think my exile was in part due to my friends still not forgiving me for the Red Night of '14. This is when I got a little carried away with expanding our Skyblock base, and neglected to place any lights down. Without light to ward the evil away, every hostile mob that had been waiting to spawn for weeks suddenly dropped into our world. We all died, and the creeper explosions wiped out half our base, taking most of our crops and all of our water with it. But that's just one mistake made a decade ago, so I don't think trapping me down below the world to farm dirt in 2024 was a fair punishment.

But I begrudgingly continued to gather muck for the topsiders previously known as my friends so they had space for their precious chickens. It wasn't too bad at first. All I had to do was farm silk worms from trees and compost the waste, which could then be made into dirt blocks. Before long I got into a rhythm, becoming an absolute dirt-producing machine. Then I started to get bored.

I began trying to use my dirt blocks to build a way up to the surface, but every time I got close, someone would get wise to my plan and hit me back down. So, instead, I started tunneling around below the surface, leaving decoys everywhere so they wouldn't know where I'd be coming from, but that didn't seem to work either. In the end, I decided the only way I'd ever be allowed on ground level again would be if I bargained for it.

If the price is right

They had everything they needed: food, chickens, and an endless supply of dirt. But one thing they hadn't got their grubby hands on yet was an endless pot of XP for enchanting the chicken eggs (I don't actually know why this was necessary, but from what I heard, it was a vital part of the factory process). So, with this knowledge, I pitched a compromise: I got allowed back on the surface, and they would get their mob farm for endless XP.

To my surprise, the topsiders went for it and allowed me back on the surface to make them a mob farm. I was surprisingly underwhelmed with what they had achieved so far with all my dirt. It turns out that they had been bickering about whose plan for the factory would be best, so much so that all they had made was a skeleton factory and a chicken run.

Despite their failures, I made quick work of the mod farm. I've constructed hundreds of these over the years, and I know the schematics by heart. The only problem was I forgot to tell them not to break any of the bottom blocks where you kill the mobs to collect the XP, although I thought this went without saying.

After only a day or so, someone got too excited at the prospect of collecting XP and tore open a hole at the base of the mob farm, unleashing hordes of zombies, skeletons, and creepers into the chicken factory. Before I knew it, there was no more topside—as creepers blew craters in the Skyblock base, obliterating everything, even some of my dirt farm. The whole ordeal didn't end until someone had the quick thinking to simply log off and then briefly turn the world to Peaceful. But the damage was already done.

Predictably, I was blamed for this blunder just like I was 10 years ago, and after some infighting, we all decided we ought to give factory sims a rest for a while as we weren't even cut out for the simplest form of sim, Minecraft. Although I rest easy knowing that even if I didn't manage to make impressive technical advancements, I did my job mining dirt well enough.

The Spirit of the Samurai’s strongest suit is, above all, striking visuals. It’s a linear platform hack n’ slasher (not a metroidvania at all, despite what the store page may claim) about a samurai with a destiny, and an evil demon lord that needs sending back to the underworld. Every scene from an overrun village to the demon lord’s vaguely organic fortress is a treat to look at, detailed and bespoke, and while there’s not a huge number of environments (owing to the game clocking in at maybe 4 hours, deaths and copious cutscenes included), they’re all impressive works of art.

It even moves interestingly! All of the game’s pre-rendered sprites are beautifully lit and layered, with just enough tilt-shift effect to sell the game’s unusual stop-motion animation style. Characters and monsters alike snapping along at intentionally low framerates, artificially channeling the likes of Ray Harryhausen. It’s a great look, and clearly something that vast amounts of time and effort has been poured into.

So why are the cutscenes not using the same stop-motion style as the gameplay? Instead, just playing out at a steady 30 frames a second, without the curious collection of visual effects. It almost feels like the two halves of the visuals were produced independently of each other, and don’t quite dovetail right. That sense of the disparate parts of the game not quite being glued together properly carries through to almost all of the mechanics.

Hacked off

Probably the worst offender is combat. There’s clearly some interesting ideas here. You have three points of health, but you only take damage once your stamina bar is drained—a bit like flipping the script on Sekiro, with enemies having regular health bars but the player working on a three-strikes system. Unfortunately, with enemies loving to attack from multiple directions at once and roll around unpredictably, taking the couple hits necessary to score a wound is all too easy.

With blocking, jumping and dodging costing precious stamina, it’s possible to die in just a few unlucky seconds, especially if an enemy is too close to you, which causes your character to kick at them ineffectually instead of swinging his sword like you wanted him to.

And even when you can swing, hitting enemies is also more fiddly than it should be. While there’s a dedicated attack button, most attacks are performed by tilting the right analogue stick in a direction and holding it there. Each direction has one fixed attack, plus two open combo slots that you can put two (of a couple dozen) possible moves in, creating a custom combo string. Interesting on paper, but I found most heavier attacks left me open to more near-instant death. And so I ended up ignoring most of the systems and moves in favour of a quick string that stunlocked all but the biggest and most annoying of monsters.

There are also some systems that just feel like they’ve been included because other games had them. Almost every scene is littered with collectible items that you either need to mash the use button to stop and play an animation to scoop up. Worse yet, additional items are hidden in barrels and crates that need to be whacked a couple times before you can stop once more to grab the dropped goodies.

Grab bag

Enemy bodies also need to be manually looted, and why? Because they’re full of random junk items that you can trade in for gold to buy consumables, effectively adding two or three extra steps to even the simplest purchase. Why do these junk items even exist when the game could have just given you the money instead? Why do I have to stop and pick up every last one? The lingering question the game always left me with is "why?"

There’s so many ideas and systems here, but they don’t add anything to the experience. I’m a huge fan of weird, technical combat systems in games (give me God Hand’s custom combo system and directional dodging any day of the week), but very little here feels like it’s in service of any kind of coherent design, and that’s frustrating. Things feel like they happen arbitrarily. You earn XP, you make stats go up, but their impact is barely felt or even explained. It’s just one more little distraction.

This pursuit of novelty even manifests in the form of a couple short stealth segments where you play as the samurai’s kitten, an adorable critter that—when paired with the main character—attacks and immobilizes even the biggest demons handily. Until you’re playing as the cat, at which point everything becomes a threat to be evaded. That sense again that there’s two ideas happening at once that don’t quite gel. They’re not terrible stealth segments, and the platforming is serviceable, but they're completely inessential.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that The Spirit of the Samurai has all the parts of a consistently good game, but in assembly someone threw an extra box of arbitrary gubbins into the mix. The visuals and atmosphere were just about enough to see me through to the end of the game across a single afternoon, but looking back, I wish I could have pulled out half of the game’s guts, just to see if it made more sense without them. A strangely dissatisfying feeling. But if my growing ennui isn’t enough to stop you, then The Spirit of the Samurai is out now on Steam.

Those things sound like a dream, sure, but in practice they kneecapped any semblance of challenge that makes those classes so fun to play. Every boss was now just a giant, arena-sized punching bag with varying mechanics to learn. At least, that's how it felt, anyway. Those things were already creeping in during Stormblood and Shadowbringers, but it was Endwalker where the oversimplification really came to a head.

The often easy and homogenised battle design has proven to be one of the 2021 expansion's biggest criticisms, something which lead battle designer Masaki Nakagawa and his team has been making up for in spades in Dawntrail. After all, even he admits they went a touch far with streamlining fights.

"Prior to [Dawntrail], our policy of reducing gameplay-related frustrations was sometimes taken too far," Nakagawa told PC Gamer in a recent interview. "And in some cases, even the hurdles and frustrations that existed to make the gameplay more engaging were eliminated, which made them less fun."

Discussing Endwalker specifically, Nakagawa confesses the team "vetoed some interesting ideas for mechanics so melee players wouldn't be frustrated by periods of downtime where they can't attack the boss; we removed them regardless of how interesting the mechanic could be." Like I said before, it did really feel like melee DPS jobs bore the brunt of Endwalker's underwhelming difficulty the most, though healers aren't far behind. "In hindsight, we should've weighed the interesting nature of an idea versus the frustration of being unable to attack, but our policies had formed an environment where such ideas were easily eliminated," Nakagawa said.

The team's mindset has since shifted to "placing greater emphasis on enjoyability," with Nakagawa calling it "a bold decision for us with a lot of unknown factors." It's been paying off so far, though: Dawntrail's battle design has been far better received than its predecessor, with story dungeons nailing the challenge even if there are still arguments over whether its savage and ultimate raids are still a touch easy.

But even with pure difficulty set aside, Square Enix has been doing more interesting things. There's plenty of downtime across its first four raids—players get knocked into the air and rendered unable to attack, melees have to zip far away from bosses to drop AOE puddles, and mechanics that require lots of movement have proven great practice for all my slidecasting when I play White Mage.

Interestingly, Nakagawa brings up the Alexander raids from Heavensward. As he points out, they're full of niche and bespoke mechanics that you don't see anywhere else across the game, ones that often rip you out of your rotation to do things like bat bombs away as a giant gorilla or hopping on a mount. "If we continue to veto ideas like those out of concern for frustrations, like losing DPS when turning into a gorilla, our content would lose its diversity and all bosses would end up following the same patterns," Nakagawa said. "That said, we also don't believe that everything needs to be unique; after all, some battles should remain orthodox while others can be tremendously innovative, and it was this ideology which led to the revision of our content design policies."

I can definitely understand Nakagawa's desire to perfectly balance regular rotation-based fights with some slightly whackier mechanics. Hell, I know melee DPS who won't even use Limit Break because it messes with their rotation. Finding a nice middle ground where a little critical thinking is needed while still largely being able to pump your rotation out effectively is something I think will take beyond Dawntrail to figure out, but great steps are already being taken.

Pick things up (and throw them)

Anything that isn't fixed to the floor can be picked up in The Finals, from goo barrels and exploding canisters to the cash box whenever you're playing Cash Out. When you're carrying something though, you can't fire your gun or engage in combat. So you should get in the habit of throwing things constantly. Be sure to throw the cash box to a teammate for efficiency, or simply in the general direction of your team if you're going to die with it in your hands.

As for the exploding canisters, fire barrels, gas traps, and goo crates, don't just use them willy-nilly—it's easy to hinder teammates. Whenever possible, you should use them to engage and distract enemies before laying down fire.

Your abilities should (almost) always be on cooldown

No matter which class you're playing, you should ensure your abilities are on cooldown more often than not. The refresh time isn't particularly long and even if you're the most accurate FPS player in the world, enemies using abilities will be able to outplay you. So get in the habit of using your abilities as much as possible.

Block jump pads with goo and destroy ziplines

Movement is key in The Finals, from dodging, ducking, dipping, and diving in combat to maneuvering your way across the map as quickly as possible. The latter is usually done with launch pads and ziplines, but obviously your enemies can use these too. If you're defending an objective and you know where your enemies are going to be coming from, destroy the ziplines and block launch pads with goo. You'll seriously slow them down.

Pretty much everything is destructible

The Finals is special because pretty much everything is destructible. Almost every building, trees, walls… the only things you can't destroy is the ground and any objectives. However, you can destroy the surroundings around the cash out to ensure any enemies that want to steal it have to do so in the open and are easily spotted. This will practically ensure your cash out won't get nicked during the two minute timer. If you have explosives, you should also destroy rooftops and walls to take out any safe vantage points enemy snipers are utilising.

Underhand throw grenades when enemies are nearby

You can throw grenades the standard way by right-clicking with one in hand, but did you know you can also throw them underhand by left-clicking? They'll only go a few meters in front of you but this method is ideal when you're in an enclosed space and want to flush out enemies—just drop it then dip out of there again—or when you're fleeing from foes chasing you and want to drop one at your feet.

Revive your teammates

A common mistake from newbies is to completely ignore the option to revive teammates. As long as you're not in the middle of combat, you should always do it where possible, because it saves them precious seconds running back across the map to get to the objective. Remember the first tip about picking things up and throwing them? If your opponent needs reviving in the open, you can also pick up their little revive statue and take them to a safe place before beginning the revive.

Goo is very flammable

There are multiple ways you can summon goo in The Finals: canisters, the Goo Gun if you're a Heavy, Goo Grenades, the list goes on. There are also lots of different ways to cause a fire from Pyro Grenades to flame barrels, so whether you want to set goo on fire to cause your opponents problems or you need to get the heck outta dodge because some nearby goo has been engulfed, it's one of the most important environmental tips to understand.