Last year changed the way many of us thought about software. It certainly changed the way I did. I spent much of 2025 building, probing, and questioning how to build software, and in many more ways what I want to do.
The former, a story about a traumatized boy defending a city from alien incursions using a biomechanical humanoid mecha in the hopes he will be able to understand himself and earn approval from others, is an apt point of reference for Control Resonant's protagonist Dylan Faden. Dylan, the brother of Federal Bureau of Control's director Jesse Faden, is a powerful parautilitarian who has abilities by way of a connection to an otherworldly entity called Polaris.
I haven't played Crimson Desert enough, but we had everything that I've seen from Crimson Desert in the plans for that game. It was signed with a big publisher that has a lot of famous IPs...And then they just changed business direction again and wanted to focus on their existing IPs instead of new ones. They broke up with us on a text message, which I will never forgive them for.
"We want to make the Graham Norton of video games," says Kirsty Rigden, the chief executive of Brighton-based FuturLab, which makes PowerWash Simulator. Aspiring to emulate a talkshow host who has a reputation for being affable rather than for setting pulses racing is perhaps an unusual ambition for a gaming studio.
Timber Rush is about numbers going up in the crudest way imaginable, a clicker game that barely even features clicking, in which you move your woodcutter side to side as increasing numbers of increasingly silly logs fly around the screen.
The best new co-op games are those that do something a bit different, offering more than a single-player experience with another player thoughtlessly tacked on. These multiplayer games account for groups of friends all wanting their own role, with a shared goal in sight and plenty of chaos on the path to getting there.
Trails Beyond the Horizon's new character, Ulrika, is like staring into the abyss of a broken TikTok algorithm, and while my knee-jerk reaction might have been shock and even a little disdain, over the next 100 hours, I grew to find the character's bit surprisingly genuine and, admittedly, hilarious. What first felt like a gimmick grew to become one of my absolute favorite parts of the game, enhancing the already distinct personality of the Trails games.