Hello Patrons!
It's time for the final Digest of the year. It's a tad shorter - partly because there's not a lot a new games releasing in December, and partly because I'm writing this on the 19th so I can stop for Christmas!
But one big thing did happen - the Game Awards, aka The Keighleys. And while I'm loathe to treat these as the defacto Oscar-like winners, they are at least a good indication of what people liked playing in 2025. So I've picked some articles and videos about the development of some of the winning games to get more info on how they were made.
This is my last Digest for a while as I'll be on paternity leave. But I'll likely be watching YouTube at 3AM, covered in baby sick, and so will have a big batch of stuff to ecommend when I get back!
Game of the Year
Read - Ask the Developer Vol. 19, Donkey Kong Bananza - Nintendo's designers explain the design of this year's "Best Family" game.
Read - Interview with Team Cherry for Hollow Knight Silksong - In an interview at the Australia media museum, Team Cherry discusses the making of this year's "Best action/adventure" game.
Watch (17 mins) - How Hades 2 Was Made and Why Zagreus Had to be Replaced - ThisGuyGlen breaks down the development of the "Best action game".
Read - How the Creators of Xbox's 'South of Midnight' Made a Southern Gothic Fantasy - Rolling Stone interviews the devs behind this year's "Games for impact" winner.
Read - More Games Need Doom: The Dark Ages’ Accessibility Settings - More details on the winner of "Innovation in accessibility".
Watch (1 hour, 43 mins) - The impossible (true) stories behind the making of Clair Obscur Expedition 33 - Skillup's monster making-of on the Game of the Year winner (and about 100 other categories, too).
Behind the Headlines
Read - A decade on from Gamergate, how has the games industry changed for women? - "Some of gaming's most influential women share their experiences, along with what still needs to be done".
Read - "The effect is, frankly, catastrophic" - the voice actors and unions fighting back against gaming's controversial use of AI - "No machine can capture the authenticity or emotion of a human voice actor".
Read - Concept Artists Say Generative AI References Only Make Their Jobs Harder - We "spoke to a dozen professional concept artists about whether generative AI image tools have made their jobs any easier. Zero said it did".
Design
Read - The Outer Worlds 2 Gave Me What I Wanted And I Hated It - "An RPG without encumbrance seemed like the holy grail, but it didn’t exactly turn out that way".
Watch (26 mins) - Failure is Weird - "Failure is a strange part of games as it brings shape and stakes to them, but is also something we generally want to avoid at all costs".
Watch (5 mins) - Why Nintendo changed Zelda games - "The past decade of Zelda games have proven just how much the developers behind these games like to shake things up in between entries".
Development
Watch (39 mins) - The Making of Disco Elysium - Part One: Foundations - "In the first of our multi-part series on Disco Elysium we travel to Tallinn, Estonia to explore how a group of post-soviet high school dropouts were inspired to create a video game".
Culture
Read - “Anime RPG Trash” or Clair Obscur and Genre Trouble - "Being French matters in so far that it seems to serve as proof that Japanese developers themselves have become stagnant".
Watch (28 mins) - How the Blinking Animation of a Clown Car Revolutionizes Super Mario Maker Cryptography. - A Mario Maker level must be completable by the designer to get on the store. Ceave uses cryptography to make a stage that is beatable by him - and no one else on the planet.
Critique
Read - Metroid Prime 4 is the Dragon Age Veilguard of Metroid - "Playing [these games] feels like watching a magic trick where the magician forgot what to do and hopes you'll be distracted enough by some shiny cardboard cutouts that you won't notice their mistake".
Watch (11 mins) - GTA6’s Satire Won’t Work (And Here’s Why) - "With Rockstar's unbelievably exploitative labour practices, from crunch to its more recent union busting, it has become the very thing its games so fervently spoke out against".
Watch (42 mins) - S̶i̶l̶k̶s̶o̶n̶g̶ NakeyJakey is Outdated - NakeyJakey reflects on Silksong - but also a decade on YouTube chatting about games.
Artistry
Read - Moonlighter 2 composer Christopher Larkin wants video game music to evolve - "I want room to move and experiment and change things up".
Watch (22 mins) - what did you do - Noodle looks at how pixel art works with CRT television tech - both in the past and in today's indie titles.
Watch (17 mins) - Cogwork Dancers' Brutal Ballet - "The Cogwork Dancers boss fight is one of my favourite moments of Hollow Knight: Silksong, a perfect way to break up the game with a new kind of fight and one that uses music to its fullest effect in making an impactful moment".
History
Watch (22 mins) - Inside Irrational's Cancelled XCOM First-Person Shooter - "From the earliest days of their time under 2K, Bioshock developer Irrational Games worked on a reboot of Microprose's XCOM series".
Watch (33 mins) - The Trailblazing Panic Horror of DINO CRISIS (1999) - "Often dubbed ‘Resident Evil with Dinosaurs’, this game was an evolution of the survival horror formula that elevated the genre towards more intense action and panic focused gameplay".
Beyond Games
Watch (13 mins) - The water bottle trend has gone too far - I have a cheapy orange bottle from Amazon with a broken hinge and I'm fine with that.