Feature archive
December 2025
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158 articles
- December 31
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- Here are 2025's six highest rated hardware, enjoying tippy-top review scores—plus six dishonorable mentions
- I enjoy touching all the hardware bits that pass through PCG's offices, but this bit of kit was all but made for my upsettingly small baby hands
- I'm not waiting 5 years for everyone to realize The Outer Worlds 2 is another Obsidian classic—I'm giving it its flowers now
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2025: All the winners from a bumper 12 months of PC gaming tech
- The most surprising cozy game trend this year was the desktop pet renaissance
- Fallout Season 2 Episode 3 recap: 'All that remains of America is its overwhelming failure'
- December 30
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- Love it or hate it, but frame generation is the one major graphics technology that really needs improving in 2026
- 'Friendslop' dominated 2025 by proving time and time again that graphics are overrated
- 2025 was Fortnite's most topsy-turvy year ever with soaring peaks, miserable lows, and a raging AI debate
- Razer's little Blade has been my ride-or-die throughout the year and is my absolute favourite gaming laptop of 2025
- AI, Crysis, lusty argonians, and pinball: These are our most-read news stories of 2025
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: 2025's wildcards—the best of the rest is full of surprises
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best graphics card of 2025
- 2025's best soulslike wasn't Nightreign, it was a DLC for a game we all dismissed as a Bloodborne clone back in 2022
- December 29
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- Path of Exile 2's new druid class is the most fun you can have being a bear in a videogame right now
- Last year I predicted all three of Valve's announcements so now I reckon I have the ability to speak these 2026 prophecies into reality
- I played 31 new cozy games this year, and my top 6 picks are all completely different
- 2025 has been the pinnacle of weird and interesting videogames, and for me, not a single one can define the year as a whole
- 2025 is the year I discovered I love charging docks, and it's all because of one surprisingly reasonably priced gaming mouse
- 'A good idea, infinite drive, and lots of Diet Pepsi': How YouTube essayist Majuular's life changed course telling the story of Ultima across 2 years and more than 20 hours of documentaries
- Peak shows you don't need horror or quirky party games to be one of the best co-ops in years
- We're living in the new golden age of 2D beat-'em-ups—but the best one released this year had one foot in a different genre entirely
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming microphone of 2025
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming headset of 2025
- December 28
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- Well, this year's graphics card launches were a right shitshow, eh?
- I hated using oil pastels in school, but this artist has made me want to give them a second chance thanks to their adorable, low-poly video game character paintings
- Steam has quietly become the best place to buy videogame soundtracks—even for games that were never released on PC
- The Fractal Design Scape feels like a gaming headset from the future, which makes it the best thing I've tested in 2035. I mean, this year
- I played more than 20 metroidvanias this year other than Silksong, and these are the ones doing the most creative/experimental things with the genre
- Disney's embarrassing AI-generated Star Wars video of scrambled-up animals was the opening salvo in a year full of AI humiliation
- I'm obsessed with detective games, and I think these 9 prove that 2025 was the best year for the genre ever
- 2025 was the best year for ninja games ever, but all of them just made it clear that 2008's Ninja Gaiden 2 remains untouchable
- A game about giant, helpless teddy bears fleeing a dying world may be a bit on the nose right now, but it's also my favorite game of 2025
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming mouse of 2025
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming keyboard of 2025
- December 27
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- PC gaming on Arm chips didn't quite happen in 2025, but the die is cast for an epic battle with x86 CPUs in the next few years
- Welcome to the FPS vibe shift
- It was a good year for survival crafting sickos, and I'll be playing some of these well into 2026
- Out of all the new hardware that has passed through my hands in 2025, nothing has made an impact like a certain Wi-Fi 7 router has
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming motherboard of 2025
- A psychic baby and whacky control scheme undersell the mundane brilliance of one of my favourite games this year
- Counterfeit Monkey is so magnificent a text adventure that I'm convinced the puzzle genre went wrong when it added graphics
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming CPU of 2025
- December 26
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- I spent 2025 digging through all the word game roguelikes flooding Steam to see if any could capture Balatro’s magic—here are the highly scientific results
- Relax after a holiday feast by joining us for a nostalgic tour of old Japanese game mags that blurred the lines between analogue and digital
- PC gaming has a pricing problem, and the memory crisis is compounding it in a way that's utterly heartbreaking for our hobby
- 2026 may be year of the horse, but 2025 certainly gave it a good go with the amount of horse-related games, expansions, and updates we've had
- My fave piece of PC gaming tech to launch this year was the softest kind of hardware there is
- Tiny Bookshop gave me the moment every book lover lives for: recommending the perfect book to a friend and them instantly loving it
- Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar taught me that farming simulators don't have to follow the same routine to be just as fun as Stardew Valley this year
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best SSD of 2025
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming handheld of 2025
- December 25
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- 2025 might have been the year for Linux gaming, but there's still a way to go until I switch from Windows
- I know I'll get rinsed by rising costs somewhere when building a PC but my favorite product this year was one of a few things that didn't ask for more money
- System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Edition is the absolute gold standard of remasters
- Baldur's Gate 3 started on top and kept on climbing: Larian said it wouldn't make a sequel, then drip fed us an expansion's worth of free updates into 2025
- Tavern Keeper is the management sim of my dreams, and the best thing I've played in early access in 2025
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming monitor of 2025
- PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best gaming laptop of 2025
- December 24
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- Three shining examples of brilliant PC game development in 2025
- Fallout Season 2 Episode 2 recap: 'Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter'
- In a year where Obsidian released a pair of RPGs, its best game was an early access survival romp
- Uh-oh, I think I'm finally all gacha'd out
- Celebrate the holidays the way Saint Nick intended, by blasting through hordes of enemies in the best Christmas-themed FPS mods
- December 23
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- Like a good ol' southern potluck, South of Midnight had me going back to play for seconds, and then thirds, thanks to all its little details
- Microsoft's year of shame
- 12 years on, relentless survival game Rust is showing no signs of slowing.
- Roadtrip RPG Keep Driving teaches you that a hitchhiker is just a friend you haven't met, and that friend might have weed
- They survived the MMO massacre of 2025, but 2026 is going to be a tense year for WoW and FF14: And for completely different reasons
- Avowed didn't rewrite the RPG rulebook in 2025, but it still gave me some of my biggest gaming 'wow' moments of the year
- I almost learned something in RV There Yet? but I was too busy smoking cigarettes and driving over big rocks
- December 22
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- I played dozens of retro games this year, and these are the ones I still whole-heartedly recommend going into 2026
- World of Warcraft: Midnight's new solo-friendly Prey mode will have bosses attacking you out of nowhere: 'There's going to be some really mean stuff that we're going to do to you'
- How Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made some of us fall in love with parrying, and as our resident parry sicko, I won't say 'I told you so'—actually no, wait, I will
- The most daring free-to-play action RPG of 2025 is getting its first major update and launching on Steam
- Since everyone got mad about yellow paint again this year, here are 5 alternatives I propose to help players find their way around in 2026
- Out of all the new games I've played in 2025, Grounded 2 deserves a special nod simply because it makes me like a genre that I really don't like: multiplayer survival
- Skateboarding games had a huge 2025, but it was the controversial Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 that I couldn't put down
- December 21
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- Five new Steam games you probably missed (December 22, 2025)
- The process of creating cosplay from scratch is incredibly intimidating to me, but Emily White found a new love for it post-lockdown: 'It can take anywhere from a month to a year to bring a costume to life.'
- It's more important than ever to call out developers for egregious AI usage next year if we want videogames to remain interesting
- It's about time Final Fantasy 14 retires one of its most divisive, overused songs
- Elden Ring Nightreign is a deeply flawed multiplayer game I've spent over 250 hours in this year
- Darktide asked if we want to be scum, and I was the person who said, 'actually, yes'
- Great moments in PC gaming: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic's rooftop chase
- December 20
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- Final Fantasy 14's latest patch has me hopeful for the MMO's story again—even though Square Enix still has a lot of good will to recover
- This Microsoft Excel Easter egg led to a wild conspiracy theory that Bill Gates was the Antichrist
- I play new games about once every never, but Killing Floor 3 reeled me in this year because it's basically not a new game
- December 19
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- 2025 was a monster year for Stephen King movie and TV adaptations… so where are all the games?
- Silent Hill f didn't just give us a superb SH game in the year of our lord 2025, but it offered up one of the best in the series
- According to Steam, the average PC Gamer writer played 72 games this year (56% of which were new) and used a controller more than we'd like to admit
- December 18
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- Days after launching their first indie game, everyone responsible for publishing it was laid off: 'We had a Slack channel with everyone in it, and then you see them leaving one by one'
- The best deals in the 2025 Steam Winter Sale
- 'Our world is like a theme park': Fallout 76's latest expansion into the mysterious Ohio has proven to be its best move yet
- The 9 best quests in Fallout history
- With Total War: Warhammer 40,000, Creative Assembly is resurrecting a 16-year-old experiment, which didn't exactly go to plan last time
- Öoo is a 4 hour platformer about solving problems with bombs, and it's the cleverest puzzle game I played in 2025
- Dawn of War Definitive Edition is the best way to play the best RTS today
- December 17
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- Diablo 4 is having its best season yet, not just because of paladins, but because Blizzard has finally cracked how to make loot endlessly exciting
- Six Xbox Game Pass titles to dive into during the holidays
- Hades 2 is 'just more Hades', and you know what—good, more for me, I never liked my co-workers anyway (I say, coping through my teeth)
- Fallout Season 2 Episode 1 recap: 'The world may end, but progress marches on'
- December 16
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- There's more to Horses than the Steam ban: The controversial horror game is a great example of how games can effectively borrow from film, and how they can also stumble
- 'It's not a clone of D:OS2': 6 big takeaways from our interview with Larian after the reveal of Divinity
- PC Gamer's Game of the Year Awards 2025
- Fallout Season 2 review: If the first season was a love letter to all of Fallout, Season 2 is the result of a huge crush on New Vegas in particular
- December 15
- December 14
- December 13
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- Confession time: How long do you stick it out before you abandon a terrible MMO dungeon/raid group?
- Why I love player housing in MMOs
- 10 years in the making, this total conversion based on Half-Life is every bit as ambitious as Black Mesa
- If the only Larian game you've played is Baldur's Gate 3, here's what you need to know about the Divinity series
- December 12
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- The 9 biggest no-shows at The Game Awards 2025
- Is a return to the Divinity series the right move for Larian after Baldur's Gate 3? Our team of RPG fans is divided
- Divinity's trailer is cool, but I suspect Larian's body-horror Burning Man splatfest doesn't set an accurate tone for the full game—and if I'm right, it'll be weird that it's happened twice
- I've tested PhysX now that it's sorta supported on the RTX 50 series and I'm more convinced than ever it's a feature worth fighting for
- The unsettling world of REANIMAL will inevitably terrify you, but the morbid curiosity always keeps you exploring
- Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is totally real, so we've created a wishlist to send to the Emperor
- The 5 biggest announcements and trailers from The Game Awards 2025
- December 11
- December 10
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- Activision knows the real problem with Call of Duty is its relentless 12-month cycle, but it simply won't end unless you stop playing
- The only CRPG using D&D's original setting is finally on Steam, with fan patches and quality-of-life fixes pre-installed
- The demo of Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth is only a bite-size piece of what's to come, but I'm already in love with its world
- FSR Redstone tested: AMD's long awaited AI-powered frame gen delivers the goods but it's very late to market
- December 9
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- After 2 hours playing this Spore-inspired roguelike, I've evolved into the best possible animal: a giant cow that grows apples on its bottom
- Here are the top 20 most wishlisted games on Steam as we charge headfirst into 2026
- The best weapon against getting downed by another player in Arc Raiders is actually psychological warfare
- December 8
- December 7
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- Five new Steam games you probably missed (December 8, 2025)
- Debate: Which videogame songs are best for unwinding after a long day?
- Cool Shirtz had one goal and one goal only when it came to creating the Minecraft collaboration: To design clothes people can wear 'not just to represent the game, but to become it'
- Whiskerwood looks like an adorable game of cat and mouse, but in reality it's a brutal city builder where my grossly incompetent governance never goes unpunished for long
- December 6
- December 5
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- Catch up on the GOTY conversation with these Game Awards nominees on Xbox Game Pass
- What to expect from The Game Awards 2025: What's rumored to be there, what's already confirmed, and what we think is taking home GOTY
- Google is desperate for us to forget the simple joy of the original internet: Links
- Girls’ Frontline 2: Exilium Rolls Out Crew Deck Upgrade and Comprehensive Anniversary Campaign
- The 25-year history of Total War, from an experimental side project made between PS1 sports games to Medieval 3: 'Now more than ever, we are focusing our technology on the future of Total War'
- December 4
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- Fill out a quick PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted survey for a chance to win a new ROG Xbox Ally
- Enter here for a chance to win a free month of Xbox Game Pass
- Specs explained: How to configure and order the Alienware Area-51 gaming laptop to play the best games this Christmas
- The fact Arc Raiders players are griping about its thin endgame—despite the fact only 5% of players have reached it—is proof you can min-max the fun out of anything
- PC Gamer magazine's new issue is on sale now: Dinolords
- December 3
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- I thought I was bored of boring old elves, but Total War: Warhammer 3's latest DLC changed my mind
- Forget High Elves, the winner of Total War: Warhammer 3's Tides of Torment DLC is the Norsca glow-up, featuring troll waaaghs, burrowing beasties, and finally actual melee cavalry
- As if Disney Dreamlight Valley could get any more magical, the Wishblossom Ranch expansion adding horses has improved the entire experience more than I thought it would
- Fallout Season 1 recap: what you need to know before watching season 2
- This year's Digimon Story Time Stranger may have looked like a traditional JRPG, but its commitment to raising weird little guys gave it an anarchic, constantly surprising energy that Pokémon couldn't match
- December 2
- December 1
