Latest Articles (Page 318)

Blood on moss, tattered horrors taking to the sky: Elden Ring is Eurogamer's Game of 2022. And it feels odd to say that, even if it was never really in doubt. Perhaps it feels odd to say that because it was never really in doubt. Elden Ring got roughly double the votes of the closest runner-up when we polled staff and freelancers. Over the last few weeks, games site after games site has announced that Elden Ring is the game they loved most this year. In 2022 Elden Ring is inevitable.

It begins with a word: Pentiment.

I played many games in 2022 that felt prescient about our current moment in time but of them, Signalis felt the most personal. A sci-fi horror that folds back on itself, tied into gripping knots by its own plot threads. Within it, as android-on-a-mission Elster, you are trapped. She's searching for the woman she loves in a labyrinth of archaic technology propping up a rapidly decaying future. VHS cassettes and floppy disks join Soviet futurist spacecraft. The game itself is rooted in the past, made to look like PS1 games, evoking genre classics like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, all to depict a haunting future.

This piece contains spoilers for Far Changing Tides.

Nintendo has quietly patched a security vulnerability that could give hackers access to compromised Switch, 3DS, and Wii U games.

Sonic Team boss Takashi Iizuka says that 2022 was "the biggest year in Sonic history" for fans of the blue blur.

For the first time since August 2021, China's video games regulator has approved the publishing licences of 45 international games, including Pokemon Unite, Don't Starve, and Valorant.

The Nier: Automata anime adaptation is set to debut in Japan on 7th January, 2023.

Surprise! Details of five unannounced Sonic the Hedgehog Lego sets have popped up online.

Former Sonic boss Yuji Naka has been formally indicted for insider trading offences.

Valve's new Steam Replay feature is here with a handy summary of your 2022 PC playtime.

We don't really get that many rhythm games when you think about it. There are some that are really great, and understandably many people's overall favourites, such as Rez, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Audiosurf, and Thumper. And I think the reason for this relative scarcity is a simple one: it's so dang hard to make a good rhythm game. So you can imagine my excitement when a new one, arriving just as the year wraps up, caught my eye.

There is a strong sense of yearning in the opening cinematic for Chrono Cross. A book slowly falls open as a soft melody plays, and text appears on the screen: 'What was the start of all this? When did the cogs of fate begin to turn?'

Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann says HBO's The Last of Us TV show "will be the best, most authentic game adaptation".

Amazon and Smilegate have revealed "part one" of Lost Ark's 2023 roadmap.

Microsoft has hit back at Sony's objection to its planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard by revealing that third-party games like Bloodborne, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Final Fantasy 16, and Silent Hill 2 Remake are party to "exclusion" agreements that will prevent those games from coming to Xbox consoles.

An update on an artist's ArtStation page may have hinted at the release window for Death Stranding 2.

Warning: spoilers are here, all the way down.

Any game that lets you to shoot Nazis in the testicles and then watch as an X-ray cross-section of their undercarriage unfolds to show their plums popping in slow-motion has no right to be a good-looking as Sniper Elite 5. Nevertheless, I was consistently surprised by how detailed and lifelike the miniature open-world environments in Rebellion's gratuitously gory snipe-em-up could be.

Finally, 2022 has given us an answer to the age-old debate: who's better, Mozart or Beethoven? The answer is of course Beethoven, and I can prove it. "Never liked the guy," says one achievement in Trombone Champ. Getting this achievement requires you to turd (destroy) one of the game's collectible Mozart cards. I rest my trombone case.

Surprising literally no-one, my Game of the Year is Elden Ring. It exceeded my Erdtree-sized expectations and, despite some absolute corkers being released this year, nothing else came close. The games that made me happiest, on the other hand, are games I’ve hardly played, if at all. Pokémon Legends Arceus and Scarlet brought me more joy than all the Elden Rings and Immortalities and Marvel Snaps put together.

Game of the Week is part of the Eurogamer Essentials newsletter that goes out to our supporters every Friday and hits the site on Sundays. I hope you're having a splendid day (and haven't you got better things to be doing than reading Eurogamer? Go and drink a sherry or something!)

Right from the beginning, Betrayal at Club Low wants me to know that things aren't going to go my way, thanks to a spontaneous blast of sewer vapor that drenches me in hot rancid filth. It's this hapless surrender to chaos that drives me forward - I smell and probably look like shit, but the show must go on. The show, in this case, is me turning up to my job as a pizzaiolo/covert operative, dishing out pies at Club Low while trying to help a fellow agent trapped on the inside. This isn't just a game about work, but a game about the unbeatable universal high of getting away with shit while working.

2022 has been full of farming and life-simulation games, though Disney Dreamlight Valley stood out for me above the rest of the crop. Even in its early access state (paid, or via Xbox Game Pass), its work-in-progress storybook world already unfurls into a warm and cosy Animal Crossing-alike. I love its deep customisation and its unexpected focus on story - especially the characterful and often hilarious interactions between its heroes and villains. Above all else, though, it's the game's promise of further expansion which has kept me intrigued.

This piece contains spoilers for God of War Ragnarok!

I started 2022 by suggesting that we question the prominence of earning as a "play" activity and of economic transactions generally in videogame worlds. One way of going about that is to think about the many different currencies we've all abandoned in various save files over the years. Rupees in Zelda. Glimmer, legendary shards and bright dust in Destiny. Bottlecaps in Fallout.

Well give yourself a pat on the back, pour yourself a stiff drink and let out a sigh of relief: somehow we've made it through to the last working day of 2022. We're back in earnest from January 3rd, and there's plenty scheduled over the next week or two to keep you entertained with a whole host of our Games of 2022 series, Ian and Zoe providing a veritable blizzard of videos including a watchalong of some truly awful Christmas cartoons and of course the traditional festive lists. It wouldn't be Christmas without them really, would it?

Sports Story is out now, Nintendo has announced.

Following our look at the PS5 and Series X versions of The Witcher 3 Complete Edition, we're completing our coverage for this year by taking a look at the one version of the game we've yet to cover: Xbox Series S. Expectations need to be tempered, obviously, as we're looking at a four-teraflop GPU at the heart of the console in a world where even the 12TF Series X rendition didn't run flawlessly, so the omission of the ray tracing mode on Series S is hardly a surprise. The upside? Series S still offers a 60 frames per second performance mode and also a higher resolution 30fps 'quality' alternative - so how do they run?

As expected, Encased is the next Epic Games Store free game. You can download it for free now until 4pm UK time tomorrow, 24th December.