Sunday is for staring at a frozen window and abandoning all plans to leave the house. After all, the central heating has been broken for a week now and there is no hope of repair for another three. There is nothing outside of your blanket that is not cold.
How will you spend your time in bed? How can you satisfy the basic needs of food, pee and a cup of tea? These will be articles and essays, dear reader. Articles and essays.
While I'd like to say I have everything edited and ready for Christmas, I spent small chunks of my break putting the finishing touches on it. RPS 100: Reading Editionyour annual opportunity to tell us about your favorite games of all time. It was truly a pleasure to read the entries for each game. You've convinced me to try or replay quite a few games in the top 100.
EurogamerI put together my own reader-written list for Christmas, asking my audience for their favorite games of 2025. Some of them didn't show up on our advent calendar and I'll have to make time for this year. At the very top of the stack of games will be Despelotewhich Eurogamer writer Mackidy describes as:
A game of amazing intimacy and intelligence. Although it is primarily a surprisingly vivid portrait of a very specific place and time, it is difficult to grasp the true nature of “Despelot” until the last few scenes. Suddenly, the game reveals itself as a thoughtful exploration of the very nature of autobiographical art and storytelling—the clash of fact and fiction that is necessary to tell a nostalgic story rooted in personal experience. It does so through some of the most exciting formal stunts of the year.
However, perhaps when you lie wrapped in blankets and laugh at the cold, your mind is moving forward instead of backward. “2025 is a closed book,” you say. “Tell me about something new!” Fine, GamesIndustry.bizJournalist John Hicks dug into his expert wallet to compile predictions on the biggest news stories for the coming year.
Manu Rosier, director of marketing analytics at Newzoo, is making big predictions about Valve finally getting into the big three.
Valve will once again be in the spotlight, officially unveiling Half-Life 3 not as a nostalgia game, but as a statement about where high-end PC gaming is headed. The disclosure will concern both platform positioning and technological leadership, as well as the game itself.
You can dream, right?
Our own Edwin made a similar prediction for 2026.. But instead of talking to experts, he examined his own flu-riddled brain. It turns out to be equally informative. Score one point for the plague brain. Take this, scientists.
This week in video games continues to explore the impact and use of generative artificial intelligence tools in video games by studying the work of voice actors. As Maddy Agne says, Embark Studios uses AI-generated voice lines to Arc Raiders caused significant controversy at launch. But they discover that the work they were replacing is a session that a human professional could record in less than a day.
And four hours seems to be the average amount of time it takes a voice actor to record a game. “Oh my God, yes. Lots of games. [can be done in] one hour session, one session – AAA too,” explained Sarah Elmaleh, a voice actress who has worked on Hi-Fi Rush, Anthem and Gone Home, and chair of the SAG-AFTRA Interactive Media Agreements Negotiating Committee, after my initial shock at how short the voice sessions could be.
“I would say for minor characters or features it could be anywhere from three to six. [hours]but some of the extra voices, those things that people are really looking into in terms of replacing robots and everything else, a lot of these extra voices, types of enemies and things like that – one 4-hour session.”
“This particular type of speech is the most effective I can think of. It's as fast as they can speak a sentence,” she added. “When I say we’re efficient, we’re damn efficient.”
Okay, okay, I hear you. You don't want to spend your entire Sunday reading about video games. You're here for shellfish orgies and cunning tax evasion by someone connected to the Neapolitan mafia. Well, I have something for your niche taste. (Or rather, Jim Waterson, writing for Guardiandoes.)
It's a drizzly October afternoon and I'm sitting in a Lancashire country pub sharing pints of Moretti with London's leading snail farmer and convicted member of the Neapolitan mafia. We're discussing the best way to stop the clam orgy.
The farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe salesman named Terry Ball, who has made and lost many fortunes, spent hours cheerfully telling me in great detail how Tory former minister Michael Gove inspired him to use snails to defraud local councils and collect tens of millions of pounds in tax.
His method is simple. First, he creates shell companies that breed snails in empty office buildings. He then argues that the office block is legally, despite all indications to the contrary, a farm and therefore exempt from taxes. “They're sexy things,” chuckles Ball in a thick Blackburn accent, describing the speed at which two snails can incestuously multiply into dozens of individuals if left alone in a box for a few weeks. Snails love group sex and cannibalism, he warns.
Another article from Guardian you might like Elizabeth McCracken's writing tips. Like many lists of writing tips, it can be applied to more than just putting pen to paper. I for one think this plot point may explain why I don't particularly like the twist on this year's Traitors.
Fiction has necessary mysteries and unnecessary mysteries. If the author and characters know the secret and only the reader is left in the dark, it's an unnecessary mystery. If you hide the fact and think, “When I reveal this, it will blow the reader's mind, nine times out of 10 it will only make him think that you were playing cards with an ace up your sleeve.” Fiction can disorient readers, but if they don't know where they are, if fiction constantly cuts off the reader from what's going on, from who's saying what year it is, they'll feel like they're on the other side of the door at an interesting party. Some personality types enjoy this feeling of exclusion. Not much.
The people working on Traitors gave the viewer the appearance of complete knowledge. You knew who was the traitor, who was the loyal, and this knowledge made every interaction between the rivals filled with dramatic tension. However, they now keep the identity of one traitor a secret from us, the audience, and this unnecessary mystery makes it difficult to analyze the world they create.
Well, enough talk about traitors. I read HowlThis week's Howl's Moving Castle, in which a curse is linked to a poem by John Donne Go and catch a falling star. This in turn made me listen to Pentangle's guitarist. Setting of the poem by John Renbourne. If you're looking for a song without misogyny, I recommend Pentangle. Sowai. It tells the story of a woman who robs her admirer while disguised as a robber.
