Video Games 2025

Guard Crush Games build on lessons learnt co-developing Streets of Rage 4 - specifically the escalating sense of progression seen in the sensational Mr. X Nightmare survival mode - then apply them to a slightly different kind of Sega-style, scrolling beat 'em up. Absolum is, to be overly specific, like the Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder or Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons: Shadows Over Mystara arcade cabs but filtered through the colourful, high-contrast art style of bande dessinée comics then reimagined, mechanically, as a rolling roguelike. Delightful to play, particularly in couch co-op where you can bicker over power-ups with your nearest and dearest, Absolum is designed to be replayed in short, satisfying instalments. The paths that stung players beat back, on their way to repeating unsuccessful boss attempts, differ ever so slightly every time; remixing and rearranging set-piece encounters based around the goons who are embedded in each mini kingdom. Beautiful in a way that screenshots don't quite do the game justice, the sublime Absolum is the result of a multi-media collaboration - the aforementioned Guard Crush working alongside French television animation studio Supamonks, all under the aegis of publisher Dotemu. 

All my Dreamcast favourites in one place! There are a few games included in this Capcom Fighting Collection 2 that, on their original release, were only really available on (expensive) Japanese import. Yeah, you could get a barebones version of Capcom vs SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 in the EU region and it even, as far as I'm aware, supported a 60Hz display option. But what you really wanted to do was invest in a DC-X boot disc then take yourself down to a local importer to be charged far in excess of any reasonable retail price for non-sealed copies of minor upgrades like Capcom vs SNK Pro (£65, back at the turn of the century, courtesy of Liverpool's own Chip Shop 2000). In fairness, any lingering feeling that you'd been completely ripped off was instantly (and forever) dispelled by the heavy duty CD jewel cases and full colour manuals that were standard for Japanese consumers. In the case of Pro, this meant a pleasant smelling leaflet packed with beautifully illustrated examples of the Street Fighter and King of Fighters cast as envisaged by Kinu Nishimura and Shinkiro. Really all we're lacking here, in terms of perfectly replicating my personal DC library, are the For Matching Service releases of Vampire Chronicle and Super Street Fighter II X: Grand Master Challenge (£75 a piece, the extra tenner presumably due to the fact that these discs were only available through a Japanese mail-order website), both of which were, for some reason, incompatible with the Dreamcast's SCART output. 

Designed around the limitations of Sega's 16-bit Mega Drive (but nevertheless available on all modern video game systems), Earthion is a presentation-first side-scrolling shooter that betrays a particular kind of consideration when it comes to how players are enveloped by the sounds generated by Yamaha synthesiser chips. Developed by Ancient Corp, the studio founded 35 years ago by musician Yuzo Koshiro and his game designer sister Ayano Koshiro, Earthion may pack its screens with drifting hazards and advancing alien forces but the real meat of the piece is a brand new, coin-pumping score by Koshiro and a cacophony of crunching, cracking sound effects that would be very much at home in the high-end releases that Konami were regularly issuing on Sega's system in the early 1990s. Like WaterMelon's beleaguered Paprium, Earthion represents the Mega Drive both freed from number-crunched concerns, like the increasing expense of (at least relative to that time) higher capacity ROM cartridges, and the hardware completely at the mercy of a development team skilled enough to confidently skip between arcade-style genres. 

A baffling proposition when first announced. Why are FromSoft trying their hand at a roguelike with mechanics on loan from extraction shooters and battle royale games, rather than building yet another towering action-RPG? Have the Bandai Namco bean-counters stepped in and tugged, hard, on their reins? Even in the moments following release, when pre-orderers was taking their first steps through the tutorial segment, Elden Ring Nightreign felt strangely counter-intuitive. The game's request that players speed through these sumptuous environments, making split-second decisions about what to cram into their meagre inventory on the way to another colossal boss, seemingly at odds with every prior lesson in how to play the development studio's games. 

Brave a few silent expeditions with strangers though and the method begins to emerge. It's as if director Junya Ishizaki and the rest of his staff took a look at the absurdly truncated speedruns possible with FromSoft's longform output and then designed a game that simulated a similar experience for players less able to internalise the location of every fragment in these worlds. Nightreign is a minor miracle really, a game crammed with content on loan from its parent company's heaving portfolio that still manages to feel new and alive in hand. A lot of this ability to satisfy lies in how well tuned each of the available characters are. How each of the eight (now ten, thanks to DLC) Nightfarers fills a specific niche but can still, nevertheless, be piloted and redefined through equipment or upgrades to fulfill others. A clearer idea of tiers within this cast did emerge - especially when players sank deeper and deeper into overtuned post-release modes - but we're still looking at a roster of characters that are every bit as rewarding to learn and play as the original eight World Warriors of Street Fighter II. 

Nestled in amongst Gradius Origins' beautifully presented arcade ROMs, discarded prototypes and hidden console versions (accessible by entering the Konami code on the version selection screen for certain titles) is Salamander III, developer M2's take on what they believe a late 90s sequel to the original arcade spin-off could've played like. Almost comedically challenging - even on the lowest possible difficulty setting - at least in terms of the moment-to-moment expectations placed on this player's waning reflexes, Salamander III takes with one hand but gives back with the other, allowing recently scuttled ships to hoover up their fumbled upgrades, if they're quick enough. And if they're not, then the goon-level enemies that fill these crumbling civilizations-cum-oozing digestive tracts are very likely to drop enough power-ups to get you back to something resembling threatening. Short but triumphant, and very susceptible to coin feeding to power your way through, Salamander III is a feast of pinks and glowing, radioactive greens - a shooter that scrolls in whichever direction it pleases and is never very far away from an enormous alien life form covering their flashing weak point with hovering, embarrassed appendages.

Pillarboxed and packed with shrieking noise and jagged brown polygons - that seem to imply pungent, butyric whiffs - Labyrinth of the Demon King traps our fragile peasant soldier in a stagnant, feudal hellscape and asks that they mooch about crumbling environments, solving opaque puzzles and fending off emaciated corpses armed with broken furniture. Although the implied objective would see players fending off satanic royalty, the moment-to-moment gameplay experience is actually much more desperate. Even armed with weapons that have had a considerable amount of the game's scarce resources sunken into them, the player is still left with the unshakable impression that should they fail to learn how to adequately parry an incoming chair leg then their life in this realm will be short. To their credit, one-man dev team JR Hudepohl doesn't attempt to compound this potential for misery by replicating the inflexible checkpointing of the PlayStation 1 games that have clearly inspired Labyrinth. As soon as a player picks up an item, or completes a puzzle step, that progress is fixed. Tune into this deliberate expendability and Labyrinth is suddenly a much less daunting proposition. 

Although nowhere near as transformative as Capcom's recent pass at their own survival horror back catalogue, or Bloober Team's re-evaluation of Team Silent's sequel for that matter, Konami Digital Entertainment (and Virtuos, and PlatinumGames)'s Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater does sneak in a few changes. On the face of it these corrections shouldn't cause too much hassle, most of them are balance-related and therefore address the ways in which players stressed game logic or the classic input system to leverage advantageous outcomes. Like, say, snappily dismissing weapons then re-equipping them to work around lengthy reload animations. In practice though, this remapping and re-tuning upends how well-drilled players can approach a game that is a lot more focused around successive boss battles than perhaps they might remember. Old strategies are suddenly either absent or now much more cumbersome, demanding players tighten up their controller navigation or even think up alternative approaches for the foes they vanquished twenty years earlier. And isn't that what everyone wants out of this trend for modern updates? For these games to feel new again? 

The other half of the Streets of Rage 4 equation, developers Lizardcube and publisher Sega, were busy this year too. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance keeps the action-platformer blueprint of earlier games but updates combat and traversal to be more in line with modern, Metroidvania expectations. So, rather than be limited to a confident stride, shuriken tossing and close-up sword swipes, Art of Vengeance's Joe Mushashi now has an entire suite of upgradable and expandable, combo-focused movement at his disposal. In that sense, Lizardcube have managed to take the more free-flowing motion seen in the 3D PS2 entries, such as 2002's Shinobi or its sequel Nightshade, and transposed a version of that back into the swaying 2D environments that demand Mushashi climb, avoiding swarming enemies to seek out progression-blocking switches. Art of Vengeance then elbowing aside the less fondly remembered Saturn exclusive Shinobi X to stake its claim as the true descendent of Sega's brief, 16-bit obsession with ninjutsu. 

Even more successful than Bloober Teams' remake of the second Silent Hill game - at least in terms of offering players something that is not only brand new but actually somewhat mechanically transformative in comparison to the classic PlayStation releases - NeoBards Entertainment's Silent Hill f shifts the series' settled, mutative fog to a different time and country: another forgotten, failing mining town as well as a central person with a head full of thoughts and memories that they cannot bear to face. Perhaps this obvious uptick has more to do with the player character than anything else? Shimizu Hinako, a high-schooler utterly throttled by her place as a working-class teenager on the cusp of adulthood within 1960s Japan, makes for a more engaging onscreen marionette than a middle-aged sad sack. 

James' Silent Hill flowed out of his guilt and neuroses; Hinako's labyrinth is an entire society's worth of expectation caving in on her, crushing her before she's had a chance to become her own person. Hinako's town, already crumbling into destitution before thick Martian vines begin ensnaring the buildings, is therefore a trap of dead ends and winding, isolated paths. Pals race ahead and leave you behind, forcing you to creep along after them, metal pipe in hand (firearms are completely absent), vulnerable to the ambushes that they have disturbed. As you nose around draughty school buildings and abandoned households, hidden stashes of crumpled paper begin to become a regular pick-up - the notes themselves containing the kind of excoriatingly personal criticism that can only come from the closest of friends. Hinako frantically updating an in-game journal in an attempt to make sense of this poison. The player's perspective, slowly, begins to align with the more ruthless predilections that your avatar explores in her waking nightmares; a darkness that threaten to spill out into some version of the real world. 

Obviously, given the licensed pedigree, Bitmap Bureau's Terminator 2D: No Fate has a certain commonality with previous passes at this killer robot property, sharing something of the varied approach to gameplay seen in the T2 adaptations published, in tandem with the film's original release, by Ocean Software or LJN Toys as well as the infrared aiming reticles, quoted from the T-800's big screen HUD then applied to Midway's arcade cab. There are deeper, metatextual connections though, specifically in terms of how this piece connects to the Mega Drive adaptation of The Terminator, a short but memorable release programmed by Dave Perry for Probe Software. In the decades since that game's debut, Perry has talked about the creative limitations placed upon him by the license's former holders, Orion Pictures. The game was to focus around Michael Biehn's Kyle Reese to the exclusion of everybody else - so no stages playable from Sarah Connor or the Terminator's perspective. Bitmap Bureau's latest, belatedly, redresses those omissions, building a scrolling beat 'em up stage around a pixelated Arnold Schwarzenegger or allowing players to not only take control of Linda Hamilton's likeness but to make decisions on her behalf that change how the well-worn story unfolds.