Wearing its inspirations on its sleeve, Clair Obscur paints itself into the pantheon of great RPGs.
VGChartz's Mark Nielsen: "If there's one genre you can almost always rely on to put out at least a few solid titles each year it's the RPG genre. Whether it's CRPGs, WRPGs, JRPGs, ARPGs, or MMORPGs, there are a lot of subgenres with rich histories and confusing abbreviations, and each of them brings something worthwhile to the table. This year in particular was a bit of an interesting one since it had no brand new entries in the really long-running, genre-defining series like Final Fantasy or SoulsBorneRing to step in and steal the show. Instead, our shortlist consists mainly of much more unique titles within the genre, but they're certainly no less deserving for that."
VGChartz's Taneli Palola: "Before we leave 2025 completely behind us and begin taking a closer look at the horrors that 2026 surely has in store, let's once again mull over the best and worst of the last year. As is more or less tradition by now, the winners side took ages to properly fill, while there was an abundance of choice for the losers, but to keep some semblance of balance I whittled both sides down to just five. Let's take a look, shall we?"
Good read.
“Phil Spencer made some rather curious statements following the layoffs, notably stating that ”our platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger.” So the company is simultaneously the most successful it's ever been, while also firing people by the thousands. Its gaming division is supposedly stronger than ever, yet it's effectively gutted many of the studios that brought it success in the first place.”
This is how a textbook Makavelian society works, where the top dogs become more successful in terms of flair and pomp with soaring bank accounts, only to realize the foundation of the society is rotten and relatively close to collapse. According to former border patrol agent JJ Carell., in 2025 the US was the largest consumer of human in trafficking on earth, and that slavery in America was more popular last year than it ever was, even compared to back when slavery was actually legal in the 1800s. But activist today will blab about how happy they are. But activists today will blab about how happy and proud they are that slavery is technically illegal because they fundamentally fail to grasp how a Makavelian society functions.
Console Creatures writes, "This is it: Console Creatures' Game of the Year 2025 is... Clair Obscur: Expedition 33."
Awesome, I can't wait to jump into this, this weekend. Finally, a new and unique RPG, with taking inspiration from the classics. Everything about this game looks and sounds great.
Another GOTY contender,
Good year for RPG lovers. Nice!
It's getting high praise all over. Will pick it up for sure.
I want to play this as well. GamePass is killing it this year Oblivion yesterday and this game tomorrow.
I preordered this a long time ago as it looked great. I did not expect this great of a reception