Video games in 2025 offered a plethora of unique and spectacular experiences, from a whimsical world brimming with magical creatures to an impressively detailed depiction of feudal Japan. Yet, as the year winds down, some intriguing highlights emerge. The psychological horror title “Sleep Awake” centers around synth rock innovator Gary Numan, who takes on the rather dull role of a colossal floating head known as Hypnos.
This unexpected cameo doesn’t fully represent the overall tone of the game. The hours leading to Numan’s appearance are filled with melancholy rather than chaos. Players navigate through the decaying streets of what may be the final city on Earth. This setting showcases a remarkable level of creativity. The story unfolds through the perspective of a young woman named Katya, who traverses rooftops, surveys the desolate wasteland, and delves into convoluted alleyways. The darkness and surreal logic echo the haunting underground engravings of Italian artist Piranesi.
How did Earth become so uninhabitable, leading to the extinction of life? That’s a mystery we’ll never uncover. Instead, Katya grapples with immediate dangers. Falling asleep poses a threat of vanishing into a bizarre, unreachable realm due to a condition known as Hush. Like others endlessly fatigued in this world, Katya instills arousal serum drops into her eyes. Instantly, she is flooded with psychedelic visions and a riot of colors. It appears her plans are slipping away, much like everyone else’s. The remnants of society have been obliterated by the sleep-deprived paranoia of rival factions.
Initially driven by a desire to care for an aging relative, Katya navigates the game’s haunting, decaying environments from a first-person viewpoint. At one stage, you find yourself on a cultist’s territory, wearing a gas mask, prompting you to sneak past them by crouching under walls or surfaces to stay out of sight. But the tension is minimal; enemies follow predictable patrol paths with extremely wide detection ranges. Ultimately, this makes for a lackluster game of hide and seek.
“Sleep Awake” further disappoints in its gameplay innovation. Tasks include rolling a cart to short-circuit an electrical breaker and locating conveniently placed keycards to unlock doors. Gradually, the city’s illumination fades, revealing that you are progressing through a beautifully adorned tunnel. Surprisingly, this tunnel resembles an amusement park ghost train—light, engaging, but not particularly frightening.
This is unfortunate because “Sleep Awake” is visually striking. The exploration is interspersed with dark yet gorgeous FMV sequences, showcasing eerie silhouettes of trees against a blood-red sky and showcasing bubbling liquids in extreme close-up. At times, these unsettling visuals blend seamlessly with actual 3D environments, achieving a beautifully surreal arthouse aesthetic. This surreal vibe extends to the death screens, where being struck in the head by an enemy causes you to step out of darkness toward a brilliantly lit door. As you do so, the space morphs in real-time, resembling a hallucination, culminating in an auto-save.
The death screen stands out as a rare instance where “Sleep Awake” captures something reminiscent of dream logic and the peculiar, blurred moments between states of wakefulness and sleep. Most of the time, this narcoleptic nightmare merely showcases its psychedelic aesthetics (complete with the floating Numan), lacking interactive depth. Overall, it’s too straightforward and lacks intrigue in critical areas. You might find yourself ready to sleep now.
on On October 30, 1938, an American radio station aired a drama adaptation of HG Wells’ apocalyptic novel “War of the Worlds.” Some listeners were unable to differentiate between reality and fiction. Reports surfaced of panicked audiences mistaking it for breaking news. Academic research later estimated that over a million people thought they were witnessing an actual Mars invasion.
This incident highlights how misinformation can easily take root. Despite claims of mass panic, the reality is questioned. A national radio audience survey revealed that only 2% reported tuning into the broadcast, recognizing it as a work of fiction. Many attributed the panic to “The Play” or narrator Orson Wells rather than actual news reports. The confusion stemmed from listeners misinterpreting the drama as a real-life invasion.
Nearly a century later, misinformation remains a prominent issue. Headlines often report millions being exposed to false information online. A 2018 Gallup survey found that two-thirds of Americans encounter misinformation on social media. However, similar to the War of the Worlds broadcast, misinformation may not be as widespread as believed. Visits to reliable news sources increased significantly compared to unreliable ones during events like the Covid spread in spring 2020.
Complete misinformation may be more uncommon than assumed. Navigating between facts and fiction requires avoiding two errors. Believing in falsehoods or distrusting all information can both lead to challenges. Instead, finding ways to manage the risks associated with trusting information is crucial to discerning truth in the midst of a vast sea of data.
Rather than blindly accepting or rejecting information, we should develop tools to identify flawed assumptions and misinterpretations. Misinformation is not just about inaccurate facts but also about misinterpretations drawn from technically accurate information. We must equip individuals to discern distorted narratives, cherry-picked data, and hidden assumptions when navigating through the digital landscape.
Addressing false beliefs online requires more than labeling content as “misinformation.” It involves empowering individuals to critically assess and interpret information accurately. Striking a balance between trusting too much and distrusting everything is essential for combating false beliefs effectively in the digital age.
and othersLike many of you, I deeply resent the insidious penetration of subscription services. I started with an affordable, shareable Netflix subscription years ago. Then Spotify, then Disney+ when I had kids, then Prime Video, all of which somehow made sense. Then Fitbit started charging me to unlock features on a device I’d already bought. Google now charges me a monthly fee to store the photos I take with my Google phone in its cloud. I pay a yearly fee for an app that lets me look at guitar tablature. Last week, I tried to buy protein powder only to find I could only buy it if I committed to at least a three-month supply. That’s awful.
When it comes to gaming, I’ve been an Xbox Live subscriber on and off since 2003. PlayStation Plus came later, and Nintendo Online came much later with the launch of the Switch. I don’t play many live service games, but otherwise I would have paid £8.99 for the Battle Pass. To add to this already difficult situation, last week Microsoft announced an update to their video game subscription offers that required a spreadsheet to understand.
Currently, there are two words, Game Pass Standard and Game Pass Core, but they both mean the same thing. There is also Game Pass Ultimate, and some of these options apply to PC as well, while others don’t. Some offer new Microsoft games from day one, some don’t. Some include cloud gaming, some don’t. And they all have higher prices now. I’m not stupid, so even after going through these options multiple times, I can’t 100% explain what they mean and how they differ without referring to a table.
“It’s like an Animal Crossing tax.” Photo: Nintendo
PlayStation Plus is now almost as confusing and expensive. The options are called Plus Premium, Plus Extra (also synonyms), and Plus Essential, and the linguistic clarity is enough to make you want to scream into a pillow. They all come with different perks, but you can’t play online with friends without paying. As for Nintendo Switch Online, well, it has almost no perks, so it feels like a tax on Splatoon 3 or Animal Crossing. But at least it’s simple, with only two options, and significantly cheaper than Xbox or PlayStation.
I hate feeling like I’m paying a small mortgage to every entertainment and services company in existence. You could argue that every company is an option, but it doesn’t feel that way. And outside of gaming, most of these services have proven to capture the market with a relatively cheap introductory price, get everyone to switch, and then raise prices once their competitors fall far enough behind. This is why I’m skeptical of things like Game Pass in general. At the moment you can’t claim it’s a very generous offer with a great games library, but if in 10 years’ time Microsoft has bought up the games industry further and decided to charge you £30 a month to play Call of Duty, you’re going to be in trouble.
I often affectionately tease my partner about his unwavering attachment to physical media. In addition to a record collection that’s thousands of records long and shelves of Blu-rays and DVDs, he also buys boxed games on discs and cartridges like it’s 2005. But his approach is starting to seem like an act of rebellion: At least, despite the decline of video game retail, there’s still the option to actually buy and own games.
He’ll be the only one laughing when, in future, I pay £100 a month for an Ultra Super Game Cloud Box Plus to access and play my digital library of games I bought 10 or 20 years ago.
What to Play
Short, simple and anxiety relieving…Flock. Photo: Annapurna Interactive
Under review Swarm This week’s game is super simple, short and anxiety-relieving. Ride your bird through colorful and bizarre landscapes, identifying and recruiting wildlife. They all look a bit like flying fish, but you’ll know the difference between a piper and a greaves, a bell and a droop, and some animals are hiding. Really It blends in well with the environment and feels like a puzzle game, where you’re figuring out how to find a creature based on a sentence from a field guide.
I wish there was more to the game – the creatures that follow you around don’t do much, for example – but it’s relaxing and stylistically interesting.
Available on: PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC Estimated play time: 5 hours
What to Read
Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, chairman of the Saudi Esports Federation. Photo: Anadolu/Getty Images
I reported last year that the Olympics had tried but failed to include esports. The IOC has now He signed a 12-year contract New event series with Saudi Arabia eSports OlympicsSaudi Arabia is already hosting an esports World Cup, and its Savvy Games Group has made huge investments in various gaming companies, all of which can be seen as an extension of the country’s broader sports-washing efforts.
Listen up, all you old-school Roller Coaster Tycoon fans. Frontier has announced Planet Coaster 2A sequel to a highly detailed theme park simulation You will also be able to build a water park..
MobileGamer.biz speculates that: Only 2,000 people have paid Resident Evil 7The reported revenue figures suggest this is a technically impressive iOS port, which, if correct, raises the question of whether the market for premium console-style games on smartphones even exists.
Nintendo in Tokyo, Japan. Photo: Asker Karimalin/Alamy
The well of questions is drying up, so please send them in. I dug through the email archives for this one. Luke:
“With all of this, with game industry layoffs, the state of console gaming, and late capitalism, where does Nintendo fit in? All this? Big Because 3 is primarily a games company and not a division of a large tech company, they have quietly continued to operate without any major hiring or firings. Is this a by-product of their business culture, or something else?
There are many reasons why Nintendo is particularly resilient: it has large cash reserves, sells consoles at a profit rather than at a loss on hardware to make money on games, and has very high staff retention, allowing for the transfer of organizational knowledge. The company’s much-missed former president, Satoru Iwata, made headlines during the Wii U era when he cut his own salary to protect staff from layoffs. But this is not unusual: Japanese companies generally do not hire and fire employees repeatedly due to employment laws.
This article Gaming Industry Let me explain the labor protections that Japanese developers enjoy. It’s nearly impossible to fire employees unless a company is on the brink of bankruptcy. And this is just one of the many reasons why Japanese companies are not affected by the current flurry of layoffs. Thanks to investment from China and the size and profitability of the mobile games market, the games industry is stable and actually growing in Japan.
If you have any questions for the Question Block or any other comments about the newsletter, Please email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
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