Sundays are for looking at your frost-crusted window and sacking off all plans of leaving the house. After all, the central heating has been broken for a week and there is no hope of a repair for another three. There is nothing outside of the confines of your duvet that’s not cold.
How will you occupy your time in bed? How will you stave off the basic needs of food, micturation, and, well, cups of tea? It shall be with articles and essays, dear reader. Articles and essays.
While I want to say I had everything edited and ready to go for Christmas, I spent small chunks of my break putting the final touches on the RPS 100: Reader Edition, your annual opportunity to tell us about your favourite games of all time. It was a genuine joy to read the entries for each game. You’ve convinced me to try or replay quite a few games that made the top 100.
Eurogamer‘s been running its own reader-written list over Christmas, asking their audience for their favourite games of 2025. There are a fair few that didn’t appear in our Advent Calendar, and I’m going to have to make time for this year. Right at the top of the to-play pile will be Despelote, which Eurogamer writer Maccydee describes as:
A game of remarkable intimacy and intelligence. While it primarily presents itself as a remarkably vivid portrait of a very particular place and time, it’s hard to grasp the true nature of Despelote until its final few sequences. Suddenly the game reveals itself as a thoughtful work on the very nature of autobiographical art and storytelling – the clash of fact and fiction that is necessary to tell a nostalgic tale rooted in personal experience. It does so with some of the most electrifying formal tricks of the year.
Perhaps, though, as you lie swaddled in blankets pooh-poohing the cold, your mind is casting forward, not backward. ‘2025 is a closed book,’ you say. ‘Tell me of the new!’ Well, GamesIndustry.biz‘s Jon Hicks has surveyed his pocketbook of experts to gather predictions of the biggest news stories in the coming year.
Manu Rosier, director of market intelligence at Newzoo, goes big with his prediction that Valve is finally going to hit the big three.
Valve will re-enter the spotlight by officially revealing Half-Life 3, not as a nostalgia play but as a statement about where high-end PC gaming is heading. The reveal will be as much about platform positioning and technology leadership as it is about the game itself.
One can dream, eh?
Our own Edwin has done a similar forecasting of 2026. But, rather than speak to experts, he has interrogated his own flu-riddled brain. It turns out to be equally informative. Score one for the plague brain. Take that, boffins.
This Week In Video Games continues exploring the impact and use of generative AI tools in video games by exploring the work of voice actors. As Maddie Agne says, Embark Studios use of AI-generated voice lines in Arc Raiders caused significant controversy at launch. But the work that was being replaced, they discover, is the kind of session a human professional can record in less than a day.
And four hours, it seems, is the average amount of time it takes a voice actor to record a game. “Oh my God, yeah. Many games [can be done in] a single hour session, a single session — AAA too,” explained Sarah Elmaleh, a voice actress with credits in Hi-Fi Rush, Anthem, and Gone Home, and SAG-AFTRA’s interactive media agreement negotiating committee chair, after my initial shock at how short voice sessions can be.
“I would say for secondary characters or features, it might be three to six [hours], but some additional voices, the kinds of stuff that people are really scrutinizing most heavily in terms of replacing with robots and whatnot, a lot of those additional voices, enemy types, things like that — single 4 hour session.”
“This particular type of performance is the most efficient that I can think of. It’s as fast as they can speak the line,” she added. “When I say we’re efficient, we’re fucking efficient.”
Okay, okay, I hear you. You don’t want to spend all Sunday reading about videogames. You’re here for mollusc orgies and snail-backed tax evasion by someone tied to the Naples mafia. Well, I have something for your niche tastes. (Or rather, Jim Waterson, writing for The Guardian, does.)
It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti with London’s leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We’re discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy.
The farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe salesman called Terry Ball who has made and lost multiple fortunes, has been cheerfully telling me in great detail for several hours about how he was inspired by former Conservative minister Michael Gove to use snails to cheat local councils out of tens of millions of pounds in taxes.
His method is simple. First, he sets up shell companies that breed snails in empty office blocks. Then he claims that the office block is legally, against all indications to the contrary, a farm, and therefore exempt from paying taxes. “They’re sexy things,” chuckles Ball in a broad Blackburn accent, describing the speed with which two snails can incestuously multiply into dozens of specimens if they’re left alone in a box for a few weeks. Snails love group sex and cannibalism, he warns.
Another article from The Guardian you may enjoy is Elizabeth McCracken’s writing advice. As with many lists of writing tips, it can be applied beyond only putting pen to paper. I, for instance, think this point on plotting could explain why I’m not particularly enjoying the twist on this year’s series of The Traitors.
In fiction there are needful mysteries and needless mysteries. If the author and characters know a secret and only the reader is left in the dark, that’s a needless mystery. If you withhold a fact and think, When I reveal this, it’s going to blow the reader’s mind, nine times out of 10 it will only make them think you’ve been playing cards with an ace up your sleeve. Fiction can disorient readers, but if they don’t know where they are, if a piece of fiction continually shuts a reader out of what’s happening, who’s talking, what year it is, they will feel as though they’re on the other side of the door of an interesting party. Some personality types enjoy this feeling of exclusion. Not many.
The people running The Traitors used to provide the appearance of total knowledge to the viewer. You knew who was a traitor, who was a faithful, and that knowledge made every interaction between contestants filled with dramatic tension. Now, however, they are keeping the identity of one traitor a secret from us viewers and this needless mystery is making the world they’re creating harder to parse.
Well, that’s quite enough Traitors sidechat. I’ve been reading Howl‘s Moving Castle this week in which there’s a curse tied to John Donne’s poem Go and Catch a Falling Star. That in turn got me listening to Pentangle guitarist John Renbourn’s setting of the poem. If you’re looking for a song without the misogyny, I recommend Pentangle’s Sovay. It tells the story of a woman robbing her suitor while disguised as a highwayman.