"Coming off Turbo Overkill has been great," Trigger Happy's Sam Prebble tells me over call. "That game's development... I mean, it worked out. But it was very messy because it was my first game and I didn't know what the hell I was doing. So I found myself, when it came to pumping content out, I was like: oh, shit. This code base is fucking awful. Like, I can't put stuff together easily. I'm running into bugs everywhere. But now shit just works!"

You might know Sam Prebble as Trigger Happy Interactive, the solo developer behind frenetic FPS Turbo Overkill. Before that he went by a different name, attached to a very different project. Total Chaos, first released in 2018 under the moniker Wadaholic, is a total conversion mod for Doom 2. With its focus on a thick survival horror atmosphere of tension and disempowerment, it's about as far removed from Turbo Overkill's manic, Doom Eternal-inspired action as a game can get. As Prebble puts it, the only thing the two projects have in common is the first person perspective. Even so, he found himself returning to Total Chaos after wrapping development on Turbo Overkill, resulting in the standalone remake.

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We often get sent so many games from publishers and developers that we simply don't have the time or capacity to play. But 'tis the start of the year and I felt like I had a duty to give some of them a proper whirl and see what's what. Thus I was lured once again into the roguelike genre, for which I am an eternal sucker.

Developed by Wave Game, Magicraft sees you play as a kid who's isekai'd into another dimension (or at least, I think he is, because I chose the option to "skip the story" when I selected new game and only later deduced the situation) and tasked to mince all the demons within it. It's typical fantasy fare with an interesting twist: you can combine any number of spells within your inventory, which made me feel very clever, even if I had no idea what I was doing.

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Like it or not, horror gaming is often built on jump scares. Deriding a good cheap scare ignores the endorphin rush that draws so many players to the genre, in the same way that the "elevated horror" trend forfeits some of the soul of schlocky slasher flicks and ghost movies. Don’t get me wrong, Silent Hill and Alan Wake deserve their flowers - but even those games would wither on the screen if Pyramid Head didn’t bust through a wall from time to time.

One unsung jump scare game in particular pioneered horror in the internet age, blazing everywhere from nascent social media to major television networks. In fact, if you had an internet connection circa 2005, there’s a good chance you played it. Alas, it was too ahead of its time, too successful at leveraging virality before viral horror was sought after. Next time you see a streamer throw their headphones across the room in fright, beware: the spirit of Scary Maze Game is right behind you.

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Don't be fooled by the simple synchronicity of the headline above. We have selected our 24 favourite games from the past year every year since 2008. We reveal these beloved games across the month of December in the RPS Advent Calendar, each game behind a new door.

This article collects all those wonderful games and our writings about them in one place, for a post-New Year reading experience that requires you to click less.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I once read in a book that you shouldn't really believe anything you read in a book until you've checked at least two other books. Unfortunately, those two books both said the same thing, meaning I had to check four more. If anyone knows what every book ever written says on the subject, do let me know. I'm trapped now.

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Welcome back to The Sunday Papers. It's 2025, which means that this column has been running for eighteen years>. What might change here as we move into adulthood? Very little, I suspect. We here are like the chalk cliffs of the South Downs: bright and imposing and subject to inevitable but slow erosion by the sea. Or put another way: I'm thinking about bringing back the bulletpoints to separate different links. How are you?

Felipe Pepe wrote about the gentrification of video game history, arguing that American video game history overwrites more local experiences. "We’re not all suburban kids who got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas."

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I'm terrified to go out, because last time I stepped outside the black ice on my road waggled my feet around threateningly at every step. I'm afraid I'll fall over, but weirdly I'm not so worried about, I dunno, hitting my head, as I am wanging my elbow and getting that jolt of fuzzy numbness all the way down my arm. At least if I hit my head I wouldn't be around to feel the aftermath.

For all you fellows who are equally afeared of the outside world, let's all agree to stay indoors and play some excellent games. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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Factions. Here are the factions: the aggressive conquest Klingon guys. The evil insectoid hive mind who build stuff and/or have loads of cheap soldiers. The researchers who are probably robots and you usually pick because they can be competitive at anything. The diplomacy/espionage ones (humans, or The Greys).

You know what I'm talking about. You may well have thought of a recent exception too, since we've had a fair few 4Xeses experimenting with some of the standard formulae these last few years. It's been a while though since I read through every word of every faction's description and wanted to play all of them. Zephon captured my interest immediately.

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Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 continues the misadventures of Henry of Skalitz, 15th century Bohemian blacksmith's son and chivalric Laddy Lad, who is questing to reclaim his murdered father's sword from some absolute shit of a noble. The prologue starts you off as the handsomely equipped and fully levelled-up bodyguard of Sir Hans Capon - an exasperating gadabout and your bosom chum from the 2018 game. You're on your way to deliver a message to a distant lord, in hopes that he'll take your own lord's side in the on-going civil war. But Plot intervenes in the shape of some suspiciously familiar bandits, who slaughter your retinue and reduce Henry and Sir Hans to a pair of shirtless runaways.

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"I sometimes joke about it, but it's like I need a war to start a new game," Rasheed Abu-Eideh tells me over a call. "The specific thing that made me make Liyla And The Shadows Of War is the attacks on Gaza in 2014, and the specific thing that made me make Dreams On A Pillow is the attacks on Gaza in 2023."

Dreams On A Pillow is a stealth adventure that tells the story of a young mother during the Nakba - the 1948 ethnic cleansing, displacement, and cultural suppression of Palestinian Arabs by Israel. As its funding campaign puts it, it’s a game about "a land full of people being made into a people without land."

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