Well, it’s officially 2026, and we’re all back to work. The holiday break is over, all the decorations have been taken down (right?), and even the New Years hangover is a fading memory.
Surely, though, it’s not too late for one last look back on that glorious bit of time off? Here at PC Gamer, we like to catch up on what games we all dug into over Christmas and New Years, before we fully accept the fresh grind of a new January.
So here’s what we all got up to—but we’d also love to hear from you guys. What games did you play at the tail end of 2025? Let us know in the comments!
Robin Valentine, Senior Editor: I always head into the holiday break with grand plans of catching up on all the games I missed that year… but instead I usually end up replaying something from 10 years ago. When the nights are long and the wind is cold, there’s just something so rejuvenating about bedding in with an old favourite.
So it was again in 2025, as I found myself on a whim starting up yet another new XCOM 2 Ironman campaign—with the War of the Chosen expansion and all the DLCs, naturally. It’s not the sort of game you’d normally call ‘cosy’, but at this point all its brutal alien threats are like old friends of mine.
There is something a little bittersweet about it, though. It holds up wonderfully, easily still one of the best strategy games of all time. But playing through it again is a reminder of how far behind its many imitators still are, all these years later—and the fact that there’s still no sign of an official sequel. Fingers crossed that Star Wars Zero Company turns out to be the new hope I’ve been waiting for.
I’m getting towards the end of my campaign now, with two of the Chosen dead and the Avatar Project crumbling. If I can kick Advent off Earth soon, I might even try and sneak in a playthrough of Chimera Squad too before January’s over…
Herdling
Kara Phillips, Evergreen Writer: There’s nothing quite like a countryside stroll over the winter break, but it’s been bitterly cold where I live, so I thought I do it virtually this year instead. Herdling definitely scratched that itch, but also added the pressure of carting twelve beasts to the top of a mountain, all of which I quickly became very emotionally attached to.
Between trying to keep tabs on all of my Calicorns, force-feeding the ones that got injured mysterious blue berries, and praying that I didn’t upset any bloodthirsty owl creatures, Herdling is definitely one of those games that requires all your attention at all times. Fortunately, since it only takes about 3 hours to get through, I easily made my way to the end in a single sitting with minimal distress, and yes, earned the achievement for getting all my Calicorns to the end safely.
It may have been easier for me to wrap up warm and actually venture outside, but at least I’ve come into 2026 with the satisfaction of knowing I wouldn’t be completely helpless if I had to wake up one day and wrangle 12 gargantuan yet oddly charming creatures. I might panic, yes, but we’d all make it to the end safely at least, despite a few bumps and bruises from the journey.
Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer: One of my biggest gaming regrets of 2024 was never finding time to try out Metaphor: ReFantazio. As a Persona 5 enjoyer, I knew it was pretty much guaranteed I’d have a great time with it, but the stars just never aligned and it wasn’t until Christmas this year (or last year, I guess) that I finally got a chance to sit down with this spiritual sequel.
I was not disappointed. Metaphor takes the tried and tested structure of the Persona series, with its character bonds and turn-based battles, but transplants them into a fantasy kingdom that’s devolved into tribalism and mass inequality. After the king’s murder, a contest to claim the crown is called, and you set off across the realm, recruiting disenfranchised comrades and accomplishing heroic deeds all in the hopes of building a better, more equal world.
I do think Metaphor carries some of the same problems as Persona, notably its somewhat samey dungeons, and a battle system that’s overly reliant on hitting enemy weaknesses, but it more than makes up for it in othe rways. Its fantastic archetype system (which gives you a huge amount of build customisation), its hilarious cast of characters, and its brilliant anime-esque tournament arc structure make for such a great adventure.
It also has one of the most distinctive fantasy aesthetics I’ve seen in a long time, combining medieval iconography, brutalist architecture, Hieronymus Bosch-esque monsters, plus characters who look like they’ve stepped straight out of a 1960s fashion mag.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2
Andy Chalk, NA News Lead: I wrapped up Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 over the holidays, and you know what? It’s a damn fine game. Some notable shortcomings, yes, including a couple of headache-inducing glitches that forced me to replay missions, and an ending that—putting it politely—felt really rushed. It is also, in case this point hasn’t been made clearly enough already, definitely not a full-fat sequel to Bloodlines. I wouldn’t even call it an RPG.
But if you can take your focus off that grossly ill-chosen title, Bloodlines 2 is a hell of a good narrative brawler. The combat is bloody and more violent than I expected, and yeah there’s too much of it—the number of ghouls and thinbloods prowling Seattle’s rooftops on a nightly basis is frankly ridiculous—but at the same time I never got tired of beating the shit out of pretty much everyone who looked at me wrong, so who’s to say what qualifies as ‘too much’? Honestly, Phyre coldly demanding “Fall” as she compels a pack of goons to off themselves never gets old.
In any event, as much fun as I had with the fisticuffs, the story and characters are what really pulled me into Bloodlines 2. The back-and-forth trips between the 1920s and 2020s kept me guessing, and the partnership between Phyre and her cerebral sidekick Fabien turned out so much better than I expected: I’m not really one for Malkavian shenanigans but Fabien’s madness is wonderfully subtle, and I genuinely loved how it becomes evident over the course of the game that despite his odd behavior, he’s not a punchline—he’s a really good detective.
I can’t recommend Bloodlines 2 unreservedly. It could have been better, it should have been better, and if you’re the sort of Bloodlines diehard who’s memorized every line of dialogue and has a poster-sized photo of Leonard Boyarsky on your wall, well, it probably isn’t for you. But for me? I was sad to see it over, and I want more. It’s a distant dream, given everything, but dammit, Phyre and Fabien deserve another shot, and I want them to get it.
Ball x Pit
Rory Norris, Guides Writer: Feeling the fatigue of playing way too much Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6 at the end of 2025, I needed a simple palate cleanser—you know the drill. Mistakenly, I picked Ball x Pit, an indie roguelike I’d overlooked when it launched back in October 2025, despite it selling 300,000 copies in just five days.
I don’t know how it keeps happening, but some devilish developers are still somehow inventing new roguelike offshoots that dig so deep into my brain that I can’t escape them. This time, it’s a Vampire Survivors-esque roguelike meets pinball.
Your goal is simple: collect and upgrade various balls during a run to kill the enemies before they reach the bottom of the screen and hit you. Just like Vampire Survivors, your screen will quickly get very colourful, very quickly. Remember, it’s pinball, so you can also bounce balls to create a never-ending whirlwind of pain.
Each ball and passive item is creatively tied into this core mechanic: Some pass through enemies, inflict status effects, or have bonuses from bouncing off walls and targets. You’re heartily rewarded for strategic shooting and clever buildcrafting.
You can even combine and evolve balls to make even more absurd combinations, like mashing together Bomb and Poison balls to create a Nuclear Bomb, which, unsurprisingly, explodes for massive damage and applies radiation to all enemies.
Add to this the (currently) 16 characters to unlock, like The Shade, who shoots balls from the back of the map, or The Cohabitants, who shoot balls in mirrored directions but deal half damage, and there’s a lot to sink your teeth into.
Oh, and it’s also part pinball city-builder, where you must strategically place structures to harvest resources and build upgrades.
Lusternia: Age of Ascension
Joshua Wolens, News Writer: I don’t have many Christmas traditions—save consuming enough cheese to kill a draught horse—but I always seem to find myself returning to MUDs over the holiday season. This year, I was neck-deep in Lusternia which, no, look, it’s not a hentai game. I know lust is right there in the title but your mind has been addled by Steam dreck. It’s all very wholesome.
Lusternia is a text-based MMO (think the old Zork games: GO WEST, PICK UP SWORD, that kind of thing) that rarely has more than 25 players online at any one time, and which got switched into “legacy mode” by its parent company a year or two ago. In essence, that means it’s now run by volunteers and all its egregious microtransactions got completely switched off—you literally can’t spend money on it anymore.
Which is kind of fascinating, no? I think so, anyway, which fact—along with the game’s actually quite rich and fun fantasy setting where I play some kind of snake-man Monk who has a mouth in his chest and does three attacks per round—keeps luring me back to the game every Christmas break.
Tanto Cuore
Jess Kinghorn, Hardware Writer: Setting aside a frankly scary number of hours spent running around Pokemon Legends Z-A, it is time to confess my sins and admit I’ve spent a fair chunk of this festive period playing a deckbuilder where all the cards are anime maids.
In Tanto Cuore, you take on the role of a manor lord who wants nothing more than to fill the estate up to the rafters with frilly-clothed professionals. Rather than paying your house staff anything in the way of proper monetary compensation, you instead spend love cards each turn to hire fresh faces. Each maid you employ possesses various abilities, such as generating more love or sending victory-point sapping mishaps to rival players—who, in single-player, are also maids.
Despite the cute and fluffy aesthetic, it’s mechanically aggressive; each turn you’re either adding to your horde of house staff or plotting the downfall of another player, with defensive plays often feeling more costly than worthwhile.
I’ve lost my fair share of games now, but every time a rival gloats by calling me “quite disorganized”, I always come crawling back. You could say this hole was maid for me.
Lushfoil Photography Sim
Scott Tanner, Senior Video Producer: As someone who frequently uses cameras in real life and has toyed with Unreal engine, Lushfoil lured me in with its promise of peaceful, low stakes gameplay in beautiful locales. I’d picked up a new GPU over Black Friday so what better way to put it through its paces than throw half a French Alp at it?
Solo developer Matt Newell hesitates to call his creation a “game”, it’s really a series of expansive (and often surprisingly vertiginous) landscapes to explore, ranging from the sun-baked beaches of Newell’s native Australia, to the bleak moss-covered lava fields of Southern Iceland. You’ll eventually stumble across boards with photos of these landscapes and it’s your job to recreate the compositions with your trusty DSLR. Doing so unlocks new areas, new equipment, and often new weather conditions.
I’m more of a video guy than a photo guy, but even I found the photography mechanics a little limited by a lack of lenses and ND filters. You can unlock other cameras but, aside from the super useful drone, the others are essentially just more limited, more post-processed versions of your bog standard DSLR.
What really hooked me was finding a magic portal in Lushfoil’s gorgeous facsimile of Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari shrine which spat me out on a Nepalese mountainside during a blizzard at night. Did the other levels have portals too? I just HAD to know. Cue a week-long obsession uncovering every photo op, weather variant, portal and collectible in the game.
With the exception of the infuriatingly wet, dark and samey East Maddon Park, I enjoyed exploring each environment at my own pace…though my strolls invariably became sprints after 30 minutes or so as I hunted for objectives. Perhaps I wasn’t looking for a casual game after all. What I really wanted was a to-do list. Just not a first-week-back-after-the-Christmas-break kind of to-do list.
Fallout 3
Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: I’m currently at 300 cumulative hours played for one of my very favorite games, Fallout: New Vegas, since I got it for Christmas in 2010, and I have never once rolled credits. But I’m close this time. The playthrough I started around Thanksgiving is further than I’ve ever gotten before: 50+ hours in, level 40, three of four DLCs down, but a ton of faction stuff and who knows how many side quests to go.
So naturally, I took a break to blast through all of Fallout 3, another formative game I’ve never finished. No mods either: Even the basic unofficial patches have tons of dependencies I can’t be bothered to futz with, and a lot of them also have .exe installers that won’t work on Steam Deck—let me just drag and drop the files into Fallout 3 / Data like I used to, dammit!
So I’m raw dogging this bad boy. Aside from all the crashes—way worse than New Vegas or any other Bethesda game—I’ve had a great time. It’s much smaller and easier than I remember, and this playthrough cemented a growing feeling I’ve had that Fallout 4 is the superior game, but Fallout 3 is still worth revisiting. It has a slick, grimy, desperate atmosphere unique to the series, as well as some standout quests and locations like Little Lamplight or the Dunwich Building.
Kletka
Andrea Shearon, Evergreen Writer: The holidays always mean a few extra back-to-back gaming nights with my friends over Discord, and the end-of-year Steam sales for 2025 were a treasure trove of my exact brand of goofy, co-op horror bullshit. I say that as a term of endearment, but cannot stress enough how my new love, Kletka, checks every box for the perfect marathon of multiplayer mischief.
I stumbled upon Kletka thanks to a bundled sale with Misery, another soviet chic, survival crafting haunt I played last year, and it’s sporting the same aesthetic. It’s very much from the Lethal Company era, sending you on a series of dystopian jobs through the Gigastructure, or the Gigakhrushchevka if you’re familiar with Russian creepy pasta. Think of it like the backrooms, and you’ll descend further into the compound in an elevator sharing the game’s namesake, Kletka.
Normal elevators give me enough anxiety, but the Kletka is worse. Instead of a nice, well lit ceiling, this thing has a giant set of teeth hanging overhead. Since the nasty chompers are also the extraction point, you’ve got to feed the Kletka to descend further. It’s a lot of resource management, and things get quite desperate when monsters roaming the floor tear after you, but your elevator also feels a bit peckish. Sometimes I just sacrifice a friend and frantically close the door.
Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor: The festive perineum is the perfect time to cross a game off the backlog like The Bureau you don’t even remember buying. (It was probably in a bundle?)
This is the XCOM third-person cover shooter that couldn’t solve the main problem of cover shooters, which is that you’re constantly sticking to cover when you don’t want to. It’s mapped to the sprint button, so if you try to run from a grenade or muton and pass anywhere near a wall you’ll be whooshed over and glued there—a real 2013 problem we eventually dealt with by giving up on the whole genre.
There’s a nod to strategy games in The Bureau’s battle focus mode, where you slow time and order two squadmates around. The cursor you use to tell them where to move and where to summon drones, turrets, and the like has to be walked around the battlefield like an elderly dog that can’t hop even the lowest barrier. Which is a problem because every map is littered with waist-high walls since it’s a cover shooter, and you have to laboriously work your cursor around them while being shot in slow-motion.
The Bureau’s been a handy way to reset my expectations—not just a bad game but a bad idea. Like Robin I’m tempted to replay Chimera Squad next, a much better XCOM spin-off, unfairly maligned.