I played dozens of retro games this year, and these are the ones I still whole-heartedly recommend going into 2026

One of my favourite things about PCs is that “old” is relative, really. Generations don’t exist in any meaningful capacity. Steam and GOG sell everything from shiny new blockbusters to ancient relics, meaning the same hardware I use to power realistic puddle physics can be easily used to resurrect childhood favourites and discover painfully pink…

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World of Warcraft: Midnight’s new solo-friendly Prey mode will have bosses attacking you out of nowhere: ‘There’s going to be some really mean stuff that we’re going to do to you’

(Thanks to the player Sykeen, who provided some of the screenshots used in this article.) Prey, World of Warcraft: Midnight’s new open-world system, will have bosses attacking you out of nowhere come the expansion’s launch on March 2. We spoke with Blizzard game designer Noah Smith, an informal lead on Prey, about what to expect….

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The ill-starred Perfect Dark reboot had ‘entire chapters’ completed before cancellation, says Joanna Dark’s voice actor, who ‘did not see it coming… it was devastating’

One of 2025’s grimmer themes seems to be a perennial one for the games industry: mass layoffs. One of the very worst examples came in July, when Microsoft laid off around 9,000 people in total, alongside shuttering several studios and in-development projects, perhaps most notably the Perfect Dark reboot being co-developed by The Initiative and…

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How Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made some of us fall in love with parrying, and as our resident parry sicko, I won’t say ‘I told you so’—actually no, wait, I will

As a connoisseur of both traditional soulslikes and parry-based ones, I have watched, mournfully, as my fellow FromSoftware enjoyers hit Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice—a game with some of FromSoftware’s best boss battles ever, no competition—and bounced off it like a rubber blade. I’ve often gone on record to defend parrying on this site, despite the…

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Clair Obscur’s famously small (but not that small) developer isn’t interested in becoming less not-that-small: ‘I think it’s good to have limitations when you are creative’

Sandfall Interactive, developer of this year’s megahit Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, is a famously small developer. So small, in fact, that there was a whole discourse earlier this year about how miniscule the studio is. That lasted right up until another discourse (possibly part of the same discourse) that Sandfall Interactive is actually not that…

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