The world looked upon the Nintendo Switch 2, and saw that it was good. Or is it? Observe its enlarged, bezel-shaved screen. Its all-black colour scheme. Its redesigned, more sculpted controllers. Clearly, this is a naked attempt at ripping off and cashing in on the real best gaming handheld of 2025, the Steam Deck.
I, for one, won’t stand for it. Here are five reasons why everyone excited about the Switch 2 is wrong, and should buy a Steam Deck instead. Or maybe the Steam Deck OLED, that one’s better.
Last year’s defining indie smash hit, Balatro? Not nominated for the IGF grand prize. Animal Well, which turned damn near every games journalist into a tiresome obsessive? Not nominated for anything. UFO 50, an impressive, important, big boy achievement snubbed by our own 2024 list? It did get a Grand Prize nomination.
I don’t disagree with any of the nominees or absences in this year’s Independent Games Festival Awards, so I don’t mention any of the above to stir up trouble. Instead I look at this list and think: wow, video games are more varied than ever, so much so that there’s no longer a dominant cultural narrative even within the specific niche of indie gaming.
Lonely Mountain: Snow Riders was one of the best demos I played last year, because it felt so good to gracefully slide down its white-powdered mountains (and clumsily crash into a tree). It might have been one of the best games I played last year, who knows, but it was delayed into 2025. Now it’s got a fixed release date again: January 21st.
My feelings about Forest Reigns are equal parts enthusiasm and disappointment, inflation and deflation, straight off the back of the announcement trailer. On the one hand, as a fan of weird forests, which is to say all forests, I’m keen on the prospect of an FPS set in a post-apocalyptic Paris that has been overrun by sentient, pissed-off trees. It’s from a team led by a former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developer, too, and those S.T.A.L.K.E.R. alumni certainly know how to post a good apocalypse. On the other hand, the announcement video suggests a game in which you will mostly treat the frenzied flora as a source of “emergent” cover and terrain traps. Have a look.
The current sole creator of immersive sim-shooter Fortune’s Run has abruptly announced that the project will be going on hiatus, because they are going to jail. Team Fortune’s lead developer, Dizzie, has been handed a three year sentence for a “violent crime”, following around five years of legal proceedings. The other developer, Arachne, recently left game development after recovering from a mishandled surgical procedure last year. According to Dizzie, her departure doesn’t have anything to do with the aforesaid violent crime, which pre-dates their relationship.
There are currently 35 heroes in Marvel Rivals, split between the roles of Vanguard (tanks), duellists (DPS) and Strategists (support). That’s plenty to get your head around, and the roster is expanding rapidly. NetEase have announced that they plan to introduce a new hero approximately every six weeks – in other words, twice per three-month season. I wonder how long it’ll take them to probe beyond the obvious Marvel headliners and start seriously abrading the bottom of the Connected Universe barrel. Nagneto, for example. Or how about J. Pennington Pennypacker, who shoots coins out of his wrists?
You know when you drop your nice, shiny pen and it rolls under your bed, and you look under there and see it winking from the depths of a stygian expanse of superannuated dust bunnies, lakes of mildew and anomalous debris that absorbs far too much light? Just me? I need to get out the mould spray more often.
OK, how about when you were a kid and you lifted up a nice, round stone and the damp, fertile soil beneath writhed away from you in a fervent knotting of pellucid, boneless bodies and the tickling of a thousand little legs? Right. Anoxia Station is that and also, a turn-based strategy game about drilling for oil. The recently released Itch.io demo is rough around the edges, but I do adore the vibe.
A quick one: Firaxis have confirmed that Civilization 7 will be Steam Deck verified at launch. It’s a pleasant surprise, given that 2016’s Civ 6 is still only listed as “playable” on Valve’s oversized Switch. I like this news about as much as I’m terrified to realise that Civ 7 is just under a month away. I do not need that much strategy game, this early in the year. But hey, at least I’ll be able to play the new 4X in bed as Sid Meier intended.
“Coming off Turbo Overkill has been great,” Trigger Happy’s Sam Prebble tells me over call. “That game’s development… I mean, it worked out. But it was very messy because it was my first game and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So I found myself, when it came to pumping content out, I was like: oh, shit. This code base is fucking awful. Like, I can’t put stuff together easily. I’m running into bugs everywhere. But now shit just works!”
You might know Sam Prebble as Trigger Happy Interactive, the solo developer behind frenetic FPS Turbo Overkill. Before that he went by a different name, attached to a very different project. Total Chaos, first released in 2018 under the moniker Wadaholic, is a total conversion mod for Doom 2. With its focus on a thick survival horror atmosphere of tension and disempowerment, it’s about as far removed from Turbo Overkill’s manic, Doom Eternal-inspired action as a game can get. As Prebble puts it, the only thing the two projects have in common is the first person perspective. Even so, he found himself returning to Total Chaos after wrapping development on Turbo Overkill, resulting in the standalone remake.
Ah Starfield, the game that left the collective consciousness long ago. In her review, Alice Bee (RPS in peace) said that it was such a large thing it ultimately felt “small, cold and unlived in”. I remember thinking the same. Would I have thought differently if it had copious amounts of gore? No. But would I have had a better time? Probably yes. Well, a former senior artist at Bethesda has revealed in an interview with Kiwi Talkz podcast (cheers VGC for the spot) that they’d originally planned for it to have decapitations but decided against them in the end.
