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But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Welcome to the third ever RPS 100: Readers Edition. This is the (nearly) annual tradition of you, RPS readers, telling us where we went wrong in our annual tradition of trying to fit all of our favourite games into a list of the 100 best PC games of all time.

The list below is your list, voted for by your fellow readers.

RPS Advent Calendar voting remains an esoteric and mercurial process, even to those of us who practice in it. If two games get the same amount of votes, which goes higher in the list? Did Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor technically release in 2025 or 2024? These are questions most of us dare not ask, and those that do often vanish mysteriously overnight. Until January 3rd or so, when they come back from holiday.

One thing’s for sure: I had a bunch of games that no-one else voted for. Don’t be sad, games. I still like you.

But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!

2025 had video games. 2026 will have video games. GTA 6 might be one of those video games. However, it’s currently only pencilled in for console next year. Not that I considered writing about it in this sort of article two years running, just for a laugh. That’d be hackish and beneath the level I hold myself to. Well, by about three millimeters.

But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!

I've probably mentioned before that RPGs are difficult to scout. They share a deposit problem with strategy games, plus the burdens of story and a tendency towards slow, frustrating starts.

Banquet for Fools goes the prologue route. Fortunately, my few gripes with that solo mini-adventure were mostly quelled by the main event. In fact, in hindsight most of those complaints boiled down to "this is awkward without backup", teaching me how to use my party before I knew they existed. More fortunately still, Banquet for Fools is original and intriguing, channeling the ancient ways of RPGs without losing itself to them. I was delighted to learn who made it, because this feels like the game that will finally let their imagination and talent shine.

It was an interesting Advent Calendar this year, from my perspective. My top four games - Arc Raiders, Silksong, Clair Obscur, and Hades 2 - were all highly ranked. And then none of my remaining games made the cut. I guess I should have strategically placed these games higher up for a better chance of making the cut. Bit of gaming the system, you know?

But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!

For the past month we have been shouting about the games we consider to be the best games of 2025. As is tradition, our choices for the RPS Advent Calendar haven't appeared in an order from least good to best – to us, they're all special.

However, that's not true of the game behind door number 24. When the team's votes were counted, it was a close thing, with only five points in it, but there was a winner.

RPS's favourite game of 2025 is Hades 2.

Now, perhaps someone would like to explain why we didn't give Supergiant's roguelite wonder a Bestest Best sticker?

(Strokes cat) Good eeeeeevening, Mr Bond. You thought you could escape 2025 without your game, 007: First Light, catching a delay? For shame, Mr Bond. It has, and will now Bondily emerge in May 2026.

But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!

This year, generative AI seeped into mainstream gaming. Though it didn't so much shimmer, as smear. It mispronounced lines in Arc Raiders, "drew" a smudgy loading screen in Anno 117, voiced a sweary Darth Vader in Fortnite – perhaps its least subtle appearance was in Where Winds Meet, the wuxia-themed open-world RPG that plugged some of its minor NPCs into AI chatbots. The results were predictably beige and sometimes absurd.

We reach the penultimate door, and good cripes has it been a long time coming. When was the last door? Like 2017? Ah well, surely everyone’s been completely normal about it.

It’s Hollow Knight: Silksong!

Vince Zampella, the co-creator of Call of Duty, founder of Respawn Entertainment, and head of EA's Battlefield franchise died in a car crash on December 22nd. He was 55 years old.

"We're heartbroken by the passing of our founder and dear friend Vince Zampella," Respawn Entertainment said in a statement on Twitter. "Our hearts are with his family, friends, and all who love him."

Greetings traveller, and welcome to Burning Springs! You may know it as the latest location in the newly updated Fallout 76, but to me, a recently defrosted Ohioan historian from the ancient past of 2025, it's home.

The tour will start shortly. I just need a moment to get my bearings. I swear Fort Steuben was 120 miles over that way…? It seems in the years between my big freeze and today, in 2105, the geography got moved around a little. Let's return to that wrinkle later.

But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Here is a list of waste items I can see from my desk, at the time of writing: one piece of mud tracked in from a nearby forest, with a curl of oak leaf poking out of it; two condensed, possibly sentient balls of spiderweb; two fingernails (I know, it’s a terrible habit, I promise I’m not this gross in proper office environments); three screws that really should be part of my bed; one discarded bottle of antibac; ten unidentified somethings.

What do all these objects have in common? Obviously, they would make amazing roguelite protagonists. I know this because I have been playing… Morsels!

But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!

He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice, he’s checking it thrice, he’s checking it four times, he’s checking it five times, he’s checking it Six times, he’s checking it Six times, he’s checking it Six times… Hello reader who is also a reader. We don’t have a game developer contact for the final Bookshelf of 2025. Instead, I’ve called upon my occult connections to secure a last-minute interview with the very Father of Christmas himself.

How jolly his manner! How red his attire! How curiously squelchy the bag thrown over one shoulder! How unidentifiable the appendage he slowly extends from the fissured green immensities of your Christmas tree! Cheers, Santa! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

Clair Obscur gripped me within the first minutes of its dramatic prologue. A turn-based RPG with a Belle Époque, steampunky aesthetic and a bleak world of monsters and magic? I know they say not to put a hat on a hat, but when that hat's a beret… magnifique. The story opens with the people of Lumière celebrating its annual get-together where the Paintress, a sobbing giant beyond the city’s shores, etches a number into a cliff, and hundreds of onlookers immediately evaporate into petals and smoke.

Sundays are for crossing all your fingers and toes that you've not picked up a cold while travelling across the country in a packed train. I will be collecting precautionary supplies of Lemsip, Olbas Oil, and sage (you can never be too careful around this time of year, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future are working overtime).

When you are armed with your sickness supplies, Sundays are for getting truly familiar with a comfy spot on the sofa, ensconcing yourself in blankets, and losing yourself in some good reading for a few hours.

Every game has its limitations, there is only so many actions you can take, narrative threads to unspool, buttons to press. What about a game that you can only play one round of every day? A game where you "take up the sword against an NPC or another girl-esque thing irl and fight until one of you is holding the lifeless, bloodstained hand of the other." This is the description of a tiny, visceral Yuri Game Jam game called Everyday Sororicide.

The thing about Big Business these days is that when you get Big Numbers, that normally leads to Bigger Business, right up to the point the well has not only dried up, but turned to dust. So, when you have a game like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, now winner of many Geoff Keighleys and seller of many copies, you might assume that developer Sandfall Interactive would increase the size of their operations. Apparently, you would be wrong!

The end of a very short era is here! I guess, if you care about the life cycles of tech products made by multi-billion dollar companies. It appears that the days of the original LCD model of the Steam Deck is coming to an end, as a quiet notice from Valve suggests their focus will be with the slightly newer, shinier OLED line of handheld gaming devices.

I've always found PowerWash Simulator's Big Brand Collabs slightly odd, if a touch humorous. They don't always make much sense to me, like the SpongeBob one, though I will admit that the Shrek one does feel like a good fit, even if I am loath to look at intellectual property. And now here we are with its sequel, PowerWash Simulator 2, with its first bit of DLC freshly announced, sending prospective powerwashers off to a distant land called Ooo from the seminal Adventure Time.

I mean, all you can do is laugh, right? You've probably already guessed at what based on the headline, but we'll dig a little deeper into this all the same. Yes, Ark 2 has been delayed, the same Ark 2 that was revealed almost exactly five years ago, that was at one point in time promised to release in 2023, and then 2024, and then sort of half-heartedly slated for 2027, before landing where we are now, with the news that the game is currently planned for release in 2028. Uhuh!

I went into Dispatch with a goal in mind: Be a hard-ass. Seeing the trailers for Adhoc’s revival of Telltale’s signature cinematic, choice-focused story games, I figured it would be fun to roleplay its lead, Robert Robertson, as a straight-shooting boss who only deals in tough love.

I used to play every Telltale game with a character arc in mind, largely to see whether they could bend enough to allow my interpretation. And Dispatch’s world of superheroes caught in the corporate machine handed me the perfect set-up for my story.

Saturdays are for waking up early, stretching out, and realising with horror that you left it very late to ask people what they would be playing over the weekend. Then, when you are just about recovered from the first shock, realising with even bigger horror that you didn't ask them what they would be playing over Christmas.

Oh dear. Oh my. Oh criminy!

Dave The Diver took over my PC around Christmas in 2023. I found Mintrocket's wonderfully charming restaurant manager/ocean explorer a joy to flipper around the depths of, battling big fish, discovering ancient civilisations, and then returning to the surface to do some sushi waitering. I've honestly not thought about returning in a while, but the fresh look the devs have just offered at their upcoming In the Jungle DLC has me very much pencilling one in.