Game Cultures Cluster Games of 2025 and 2026
With the start of a new year of research for the game cultures cluster, it felt like a good time to look back at the games that impacted us the most in 2025, looking ahead to what we’re excited to play in 2026. With any luck, you’ll find one or two interesting games which might have passed you by, or perhaps a reminder to pick something up that you’ve been meaning to play for a while.
Andrew Bell
2025
Demon Lord Reincarnation
I played quite a few big titles this year, but ultimately it was something more compact which made the biggest impact on me. Demon Lord Reincarnation (DLR), by Graverobber Foundation, takes the classic format of dungeon roleplaying games (DRPGs), adding a little bit of modern polish for comfort, but ultimately doing a great job of introducing the genre to a modern audience.
The game requires the player to navigate a maze-like dungeon across five floors, with increasingly hostile monsters, traps, and dungeon architecture, to deal with along the way. Each floor of the dungeon exists within a twenty-by-twenty grid, which is not mapped out in any way within the game. Instead, the player is expected to draw out their own map on grid paper, keeping track of notable features along the way. I have always kept a lot of handwritten notes and informal maps for video games (partly down to my atrocious memory), but never to this level of precision. The journey down through the dungeon is considerably slowed down by this process, but the act of drawing out the map adds a really solid sense of place, which is perhaps less pronounced for me in current, more convenient, games.
The narrative twist at the end of your crawl to the bottom of the dungeon makes use of the maps you’ve created in different ways, with a bit of a switch in playstyle. It made the experience really memorable and game me a lot to think about for my own monster-game designs! I have a particular interest in games made by solo developers and small teams, so it’s been enjoyable to play through Graverobber Foundation’s catalogue of DRPGs, looking at refinements and differences that have emerged over time, thinking about the shift in audiences courted by each.
Dread Delusion
2025 was obviously a year for throwbacks and inconvenient game mechanics for me, as my other stand out was Dread Delusion by Lovely Hellplace. For me, this game called back to earlier open world classics, such as “Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind”, released in 2002 by Bethesda. As someone who works in low-poly, retro 3D graphics, I felt an immediate affinity with Dread Delusion, which utilises the style brilliantly to tie into the general strangeness of this well contained open world of floating islands and dead gods.
I was particularly pleased to find narrative choices that were not necessarily based so much on black and white moral positions as much as allegiances to the various factions featured in the games. I personally chose to align myself with the remaining eldritch beings lurking in the shadows, rather than the inquisitory force that employs the protagonist at the start of the game.
“Dread Delusion” is very sparing in its provision of fast travel options around the world map, which itself can be tough to navigate. There is no world map provided to the player at the outset, though they may use their map and compass to fill it in with landmarks as they proceed through the adventure. For someone as directionally challenged as myself, this was frustrating at times, but ultimately rewarding, providing a strong sense of (strange) place.
2026
Entropy
Following my playthrough of Dread Delusion, I’m looking forward to the new game by Lovely Hellplace, Entropy. Looking at early promotional material, the game seems similarly dedicated to strangeness, rendered in a PlayStation/PS2 low poly style. I’m interested to see how this all translates into a different genre, as they move into the turn-based roleplaying game space.
Shroom and Gloom
I’m also looking forward to Shroom and Gloom by Team Lazerbeam whenever it comes out. I have always been a fan of the roguelike deckbuilding genre, where players are required to design and refine their deck of cards, which they pit up against increasingly challenging opponents, either getting all the way to the end, or dying along the way, and then starting all over again with a fresh deck. Shroom and Gloom marries this idea with a really visually striking style that I haven’t really seen before, where it feels like the player travels through a tunnel of paper cut-outs layered on top of each other.
Dr Harri Charles
2025
Final Fantasy XIV, V Rising & Coming Out on Top
As part of my research, I returned to the gay dating and porn game, Coming Out on Top, where you attempt to form relationships with a range of potential partners during your freshman college year.
Final Fantasy XIV is a massively multiplayer online game that sees players create their own character and progress through a wide range of content spanning over a decade of game development.
V Rising is a multiplayer game in which players take on the role of a re-awakened vampire returning to the world, building their own vampiric castle and gradually reclaiming the world from the humans.
2026
Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game, Leisure Suit Larry, Monster Prom & My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant
In 2026, I look forward to playing: more Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2 and Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game.
In continuing my research, I will most likely be looking at the Leisure Suit Larry and Monster Prom series and the game My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant.
Dr Poppy Wilde
2025
Heavy Rain & SOMA
Last year felt like a bit of a weird one for me games-wise – lots of games started, and several unfinished, staring out at me from my Steam library in a judgmental way every time I open a different game. However, there were a few I completed that stood out, for different reasons. In April, during the Easter break, I played Heavy Rain. My main assessment of this game is that it feels like it’s made by people who have never made a game. Such an incredibly frustrating experience in so many ways, that I ended up relieved rather than disappointed when some of my player-characters died from “failed” (I maintain they were on time) Quick Time Events (QTEs). On a lighter note, I actually loved SOMA. Having seen an excellent research paper about SOMA by Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield at the Video Game Cultures conference in 2024 that we hosted, my interest was immediately piqued, but it took a while for me to get to it. SOMA intersects excellently with themes of embodiment and posthumanism – two of my areas of research interest – as well as bringing together some of my well-loved genres: sci-fi and horror. As a 2015 release, I was 10 years late to the party, but I highly recommend it. The ending was chef’s kiss – I haven’t written about it yet, but I expect it will appear in a future publication of mine.
2026
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 & Hela
Aside from the brutal frustration of Heavy Rain, last year also provided me with the same length of time (9 hours) in trying to make the 2025 Game of the Year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, run on my gaming laptop. Being told something is an incredibly beautiful game and also being told “it’s a very Poppy game” when on your screen it looks like everything is made of sand and stutters to the degree of making a game unplayable feels like a cruel and unusual punishment. However, at the very end of 2025, hours ten, eleven, and twelve of grappling with settings, mods, patches, and hardware, the game miraculously acquiesced to my manipulations (with a shoutout to my IT whizz Mum and her input), and became functional. As of 13th January I have 17 hours on record, so this should be my first completed game of 2026, but it has been so hotly anticipated (and hard fought for) it has to be the focus of this post. As for 2026 releases, I have a close eye on Hela, an adventure game where you play as a “brave” mouse and solve puzzles, “in a land where heartwarming storytelling and the beauty of nature intertwine.” That sounds like the 2026 we all need!
Eugenio Triana
2025
The Séance of Blake Manor
2025 was a great year for distributor Raw Fury with the release of hit puzzle game “Blue Prince”. Then late in the year came “The Séance of Blake Manor” from Irish developers Spooky Doorway, which despite being released in late October had achieved Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam by the end of the year.
A folk horror story set in a mysterious hotel in the west of Ireland at the end of the 19th century, “The Séance of Blake Manor” seamlessly combines several of the mechanics from other popular detective games such as “The Case of the Golden Idol” and “Return of the Obra Dinn” to tell its story.
But what truly made it unique was its time limit mechanic. Players have a limited time to solve the mystery and each action they take or dialogue branch they explore will cost them a certain amount of minutes. Time mechanics in linear mystery stories tend to be frustrating, because no player wants to invest the time solving the mystery only to run out of time before the end and have to restart.
The way “The Séance of Blake Manor” gets around this is by providing multiple mysteries for the player to solve. Although initially at the hotel to solve the disappearance of a single person who might be involved with the titular séance taking place there, the player soon realises that each guest is involved in some way. A strange spiritual object in the central hallway of the hotel keeps track of the souls that have been saved and prevented from taking part in the séance. The player can solve the original case they were hired on for and maybe several guests’ fates, but can they maximise their time at the manor to save everyone? Failure is hard, but a complete success is a satisfying reward for the best detectives.
All this, against the backdrop of the Irish cultural renaissance of the late 19th century and the growing spirit of nationalism made a “The Séance of Blake Manor” a game that was rich both mechanically and thematically.
2026
Aether and Iron & The Black Company RPG
Released as a demo as part of Next Fest 2025, “Aether & Iron” garnered a lot of attention despite being from a small developer team from Washington state.
What makes it unique is that it’s an RPG with a novel field of combat. Whereas most RPGs are about melee or ranged combat between individuals alone or in groups, “Aether & Iron” focuses exclusively on car-to-car combat. Similar to board games like “Thunder Road Vendetta” the combat in “Aether & Iron” exists in a never-ending straight track around which cars navigate and take part in turn-based combat. Cars are always progressing linearly but can move up and down the grid or shift spaces horizontally to take new positions to attack from. They will have to avoid road obstacles and other shifting cars while doing so.
“Aether & Iron” ties this new approach to CRPG combat with worldbuilding that supports its mechanics. The world of the game, inspired by 30s and 40s America, is one in which scientists have discovered how to levitate objects. All cars are hover cars, explaining the centrality of driving to this world. It has separated society into those who live in the highest floating buildings and those who live at the bottom.
Your character will be a smuggler from the bottom area trying to get to safety a mysterious character from the top that might hold the secret to the levitation technology. Finding out whether that’s where the story is headed is part of what makes this game so highly anticipated, but also to find out whether developer Seismic Squirrel can keep the car-to-car combat challenging and interesting all the way through.
“Delta Green” has had one of the most unique routes to becoming a widely played and appreciated tabletop role playing games (TTRPG). It started as a setting for “Call of Cthulhu” in 1992, which gradually gained popularity until it became a fully-fledged system in 2016. Then “Impossible Landscapes”, a long campaign book released in 2021 by one of the game’s creators, quickly gained reputation as one of the must play campaigns in TTRPGs. Over thirty years after it started as an addition to it, “Delta Green” is starting to compete with “Call of Cthulhu” as the horror TTRPG of choice.
In 2026 its developers, Arc Dream Publishing, are set to launch what will be the company’s second major TTRPG: “The Black Company”. It’s an interesting choice of setting. “The Black Company” was a book by Glen Cook published in 1984 that is often credited as being the first grimdark fantasy novel. It concerns a mercenary group that and its four-hundred-year history fighting for an aggressive expansionist empire.
Its setting of mercenaries fighting a never-ending shadow war more as a job more than out of any ideals has many parallels with Delta Green. But the series of novels released its last volume in 2000. There has not been much additional material since then. Other fantasy series that it inspired, like “Game of Thrones” or Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy have pushed it away from the lists of must-read dark fantasy novels.
“The Black Company” TTRPG will not only have the hard task of trying to match the lightning in a bottle success of Delta Green but also introduce a new generation of readers to its world. But it will be able to expand Arc Dream Publishing’s great writing skills and dark worldview into a new genre: fantasy. “The Black Company” is the Cyberpunk 2077 of TTRPGs.
Prof. Nick Webber
2025
Final Fantasy (again, some more)
I have several ongoing long-running projects which structure quite a lot of my game choices. By projects here I mean ‘silly ideas that came to me one day and I put into practice, and years later I am still doing’. For 2025, I suppose the visible one for me was the next instalment of ‘playing all the Final Fantasy games in order’. I came fairly late to the franchise – the first FF game I played was FFXI – and it was some years after that that I decided to try to play them all. Why? I don’t know. No reason other than that there was a list, probably.
In any case, this meant that 2025 was the year of Lightning. I started FFXIII at the tail end of 2024, and through 2025 completed that (January), XIII-2 (February), and Lightning Returns (August). As a trilogy, I found it a bit bumpy, but Lightning is definitely the FF protagonist I have liked the most, and Caius Ballad is the source of some fantastically quotable commentary on history and time (good for my research). I think there was probably a bit much FF in 2025, though, and I expect 2026 to have rather less.
2026
The Pile of Games on My Office Floor
I have a place where I store my tabletop games, and a different place where I keep the games I am planning to play ‘soon’. That hallowed spot is my office floor. As simply putting games there is a statement of intent, it’s a good place to explore what I’m (apparently) going to play in 2026. One ‘project’ on the floor reflects my tendency to pick up RPG boxed sets as a way to quickly sample a game with one of my time-poor gaming groups. Here we have RuneQuest, Pathfinder 2e, Mothership, the most recent iteration of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition, Edge of the Empire (Star Wars RPG), and Triangle Agency. I’m looking forward to playing some (all? Surely not all?) of these games during the year and maybe even liking them. I’m probably even more curious about Triangle Agency after this review.
Also on the floor are board games. These include Imperial Assault (I love this game), Star Trek: Ascendancy, Terraforming Mars (I will play this one day I swear), Bastion, and Warhammer Quest (the card game). Supporting my research on games and Britishness, I also have John Company and Brexit: the Board Game of Second Chances. We’ll have to see how many of these make it to the table in the coming months.
Mary Anne Argo Chávez
2025
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
I am a very slow gamer in general, but also, I am drawn to very short games or rather long ones (like [J]RPGs), so I tend to play few titles per year. Considering this, one of the games I really enjoyed during 2025 was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, released in December 2024 by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Software. I am not a person that usually plays a game upon its release, but as an Indiana Jones fan who had never played an Indiana Jones game before, I was very excited. What I really enjoyed about it was its transmedia approach as well as the world-building. Every cutscene, dialogue, or mechanic was a nod to the Indiana Jones character and franchise, which made you feel that you were playing a movie that was never released. It included some fun details like the mechanic to restore your life by eating food, which was also culturally located (in the game you travel to different countries crossing the classic Indiana Jones world map), the possibility to use a disguise to enter specific zones, or intelligent catchphrases when you hit an enemy. These are not exclusive to the Indiana Jones franchise, but the way they were presented made it feel very specific and related to other Indiana Jones media, not just the movies but also the comics. In particular, in some locations you could restore your life eating raw lemons, rind included, as apples, something that you can watch Sallah doing in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Apart from the food, all the world-building made wandering around each location very fascinating. As you visited every country, you could see posters, books, and information which were inspired by real historic documents, objects, or artefacts.
2026
The Yakuza saga
Apart from Indiana Jones, during 2025 I played Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami, and I would love to keep playing this saga. I really enjoy mystery or detective-esque games, and since playing Yakuza 0 (the first one I played), I quickly realised this saga will transform into one of my favourites. I recently began playing Yakuza Kiwami 2, and I hope to be able to finish it before the release of Yakuza Kiwami 3. Apart from really enjoying the stories and characters, as I am researching nostalgia, it is very interesting to me how the Kamurocho district is presented and designed (the game’s version of the real Kabukicho district, where most of the games take place) in different time periods (the 80s and early 2000s in the games I have played so far). Returning to it in different games makes you aware of the differences in buildings, trends, and even people through the years. It really captures the experience of returning or revisiting a place you know but that has changed.
Dr Charlotte Stevens
2025
Unpacking
Unpack a home – from a single bedroom to an entire house, discovering a character’s story through the items that come with her.
2026
Putting those unpacking skills to use by moving into a new flat. One that will have a table big enough to host board games!
Reuben Mount
2025
Hades II
You would think that a sequel to the phenomenal Hades would be a quick win, but there was so much that could have gone wrong with following such a critical and commercial darling. Luckily, this was not the case, and Hades II continues the prior success. The most interesting things about this game are the balancing of the gameplay and the interwoven narrative. Beginning with the gameplay, there was a decent period of re-adaptation to unlearn the muscle memory of the prior experience as the magic system took the forefront over the arguably more melee-based predecessor, but once I got the hang of it, I couldn’t imagine any other way to play this kind of game. The narrative is a more formulaic affair than Zag’s jaunt, but the variety of characters and their slowly unveiled narratives make up for what the main narrative lacks.
2026
Romeo is a Dead Man
In a year that features a new Resident Evil, it would take a hell of an announcement for that not to be my most anticipated game of 2026, but here we are. From the frankly unhinged mind of SUDA51 comes this apparently hyperviolent and bafflingly dumb (complimentary) game featuring a guy that’s on a rampage, but is dead … I don’t know. I’m not sure I understand anything about it even after multiple watches of the trailer. One thing is for sure though, if this matches the energy and creativity of his previous titles, I’m already seated for what is likely to be a wild ride through a game with different genre mechanics, narrative absurdity, and – of course – a generous helping of references to professional wrestling.