I don’t play many video games these days, so am unfamiliar with this list of ones Grauniad readers preferred. Are these great games? Tell me about them, as well as any games you thought were better.
I played Clair Obscur and it really was terrific, a breath of fresh air. I loved Final Fantasy 4-12 and this felt like a great Final Fantasy game. Shorter than most of them, but flavored very similarly and really great throughout.
Blue Prince? I played it. It was…different. I prefer puzzle games that are predictable in their gameplay and the randomness of certain things in Blue Prince turned me off after about 10 hours or so.
Clair Obscur swept the awards this year: The Game Awards 2025 - Wikipedia.
Personally, I thought the narrative was really well done — probably the best first act I’d ever seen in a video game — but I couldn’t play past the first hour or so. The combination of a JRPG with real-time parry just really didn’t do it for me. I’d preferred to have just watched it as a movie instead of having to play it as a game…
PCGamer has their own, more in-depth, list: PC Gamer's Game of the Year Awards 2025 | PC Gamer
In RPGs, Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 were both cookie-cutter disappointments — undeserving of any awards, IMO. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was better.
For shooters, I keep hearing great things about Arc Raiders and am almost tempted to give it a shot, but extraction shooters are a huge turn-off; sounds stressful to have to deal with other players backstabbing you and stealing your shit. Battlefield 6 sounds more interesting, but its publisher is on the verge of being sold to the Saudis and Trump’s son in law. Oh well.
Instead, I’ve spent most of my gaming hours this year playing Orcs Must Die: Deathtrap, a silly, cartoonish, but endlessly fun (to me) roguelite tower defense game, the 5th in its series. It isn’t going to win any awards and has pretty mixed reviews and barely has any players left now, but I still think it’s way more viscerally fun than any of the big-name award winners. I’ve tried most of the games on the list for an hour or three, but played this game more than the rest of them combined.
The big-name games often have this sort of “Oscar” feel to them now, a lot of style and pretty graphics and deep dramatic stories and engaging characters and awe-inspiring soundtracks, but IMO they tend to be kinda lacking in the gameplay department, like the interactivity is just there to move the narrative along. I prefer games where the gameplay is what primarily matters, not the story or graphics… still think Balatro is a better game than any of the award winners. Just a personal preference thing, and besides I’m probably more jaded than most.
What does that mean, by the way? Is it a nickname for the Guardian?
I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but I’ve heard good things about Dispatch. It’s a “superhero workplace comedy” where the protagonist runs a group of misfit hopefully-ex-villains. The writing is supposed to be excellent.
I think a typo.
It’s a joke about the number of errors they had that evolved into a cheeky nickname.
Beat me to it. Popular enough to get its own Wiktionary entry.
(Aside: tangential to thread)
“Grauniad” is a somewhat common nickname for the Manchester Guardian newspaper. The term was allegedly coined by a satire magazine in the 1960s, supposedly making fun of frequent typographical errors. I find this explanation unsatisfying. (You see a lot of spelling mistakes in the NYT?).
There are a lot of British papers and they very much cater to specific politics, education and social class. The Guardian is an excellent paper, with a reputation similar to Le Monde or the old WaPo, but has always had kind of a vaguely socialist, “Harvard liberal” sort of slant to its reporting and op-eds. This might elicit “groans” from those with different opinions (and most British people disagree with most other British people). I think this is at least as likely, and a better explanation for why the term is in use six decades later.
The excellent English books and TV shows, Yes, Minister (and the sequel Yes, Prime Minister), describes England’s paper readership thusly.
HACKER: Don’t tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. And The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
HUMPHREY: Prime Minister, what about people who read The Sun?
BERNARD: Sun readers don’t care who runs the country as long as she’s got big tits.
It put hundreds of hours into Marvel Rivals, so that gets my vote. Objectively I know better games released this year, but I did not play them.
That sounds like so much fun!
I have barely started Clair Obscur and it’s already kicking my ass. It doesn’t bode well.
I don’t play a lot of video games—tend to find a couple I like and stick with them. My favorite from 2025 is Power Wash Simulator 2. I loved 1, and 2 is even better. It’s very zen and relaxing—just the feeling of bringing order to chaos is good for my blood pressure, especially in the middle of …waves hands around… .
Set it to easy.
Europa Universalis 5. Like all Paradox grand-strategy games it’s incredibly deep and complex.