There was a long, long list of surprising things to be found in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach — more so after I went in having missed the first one. I could nominate the sudden appearance of a motion-captured version of Mad Max director George Miller as a character called "Tarman", heart-to-heart chats with a possessed ventriloquist’s dummy, or bundling a kangaroo into a box and slapping it on top of my already teetering backpack before high-tailing it out of the middle of a wildfire — you know, just your typical gaming experiences. But a notification from the game at one point that some fellow human player in the world somewhere had found the lonely shelter I had built halfway up a mountain in the middle of nowhere also proved surprisingly affecting.
What was the most derivative or cliched yet the most enjoyable?
Ghost of Yotei turned out to be very much more Ghost of Tsushima, but it hasn’t stopped me from running around Sucker Punch’s gorgeously rendered version of Hokkaido for hours and hours. The story is super cliched, too — but I’d argue deliberately so, in the classic mode of all those samurai flicks that have inspired the game. Sometimes all you need is a simple tale of revenge to motivate your dicing of several small armies’ worth of fools who think they’re better with a sword than you, but aren’t (not when you have the advantage of being able to reload the game, anyway). Oh, and there’s a wolf that wanders randomly out of the wilderness occasionally when it feels the urge to chomp a few of your enemies. Good dog.
When did you lose yourself the most?
It was probably easy to miss in yet another super-crowded release schedule, but a little game called Herdling popped up in August. It tasks you, playing a seemingly homeless child, with guiding a pseudo-mystical sort of fluffy bison-creature called a calicorn out of an urban environment where it clearly doesn’t belong. Starting with one, you soon enough find yourself responsible for the safety of a small herd, leading them deeper into the wild. There’s no dialogue, so art design and environments tell the story. I mostly didn’t even play it! Instead I watched my daughter make her way through it and it was thoroughly charming and occasionally even spellbinding.
What made you really think?
What annoyed you?
Rant mode on: where to start with this one? Gaming is a bit of a disaster zone at present, despite all the excellent releases this year. Mass layoffs of developers continue; even successful studios are being shuttered left and right. Grand Theft Auto-makers Rockstar fired a bunch of employees for trying to form a union and generative AI slop continues its slimy, insidious seepage into the industry. Yet somehow none of these cost-cutting measures have prevented game and subscription prices climbing higher and higher for consumers — and all, joy, while we still, in 2025, get to enjoy a loud minority of retrograde troglodytes sporadically surging forth from their internet caves to bellow incoherently whenever anyone announces their upcoming game will feature a woman who is not wearing a bikini in it.
As a single horrible example amid the ongoing horrors, though, you might be hard-pressed to beat everyone’s favourite fascist goons ICE using imagery from the gaming classic Halo and the slogan "Destroy the Flood" as recruitment imagery, thus comparing the voracious parasitic alien civilisation-ending bioweapons from those games with, you know, real people who are immigrants to the US. Ugh.
But on the actual gaming front, why on earth are people still putting the last checkpoint before a boss fight they know is likely to kill the player a bunch of times a couple of minutes back from the start of said boss fight? Please level designers, don’t make me jump through those hoops every time just for my chance to get murdered — just put me straight back in and let me get murdered immediately!
