January 2025 in Games

January wasn't a packed month for games, but it was a solid one across a few standout titles.

The most anticipated game was Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. The first game released to huge critical success back in 2022 and both are primarily the work of one developer, Gareth Damian Martin. Inspired by tabletop RPGs - in which a 'GamesMaster' (GM) leads a group of characters through a story with interactive elements usually determined by dice rolls - Citizen Sleeper is a proper narrative-focused game. The interactivity is governed by an action economy: every day begins with a roll of up to 5 dice (dependent on your health), each representing an action you can take. Spending a higher-numbered dice on a given action has a higher chance of a positive outcome. A lower-numbered dice raises the possibility of failure.

Not that failure is too much of an issue here. Both games have been criticised for their low stakes; it is relatively easy to escape any threats and balance your in-game resources to avoid perilous situations. This is clearly a creative decision in order to prioritise the story - to make it more likely that more players will experience it all. It's much like how a GM in a tabletop game will avoid letting their players fail because… well, no one wants to be sent home early from games night.

Whilst the story is not continuous over the two games, both essentially cast you as androids on the run. I haven't actually played CS2 yet, but I have finally got around to the first game. CS1 takes place entirely on one space station, where you are one of a number of refugees fleeing different social upheavals in a world recovering from corporate rule. CS2 expands on the single-location setting of the first game and sends you on a planet-hopping adventure. Rather than helping different characters until their story lines are 'complete', you build a party of friend who travel with you.

CS1 is an earnest, queer (Martin is non-binary and many characters are queer or queer-coded) look at displacement in a hard-scifi setting. The writing is some of the best I've encountered in a videogame: rich, descriptive, nuanced and complex. The interactivity of dice actions is smooth, easy to grasp and gives you constant choice over where to push the story next. The presentation has an uncompromising sense of style but it is crisp and clear. All these things tie CS up as one of the most fantastic narrative games ever made. I can't wait to jump on the sequel.

Another big release in January was Dynasty Warriors: Origins. The latest in the long line of Warriors games from Omega Force, this promised to be a return to the good old days, stripping back some of the more complicated systems added over the years. At the same time, Origins boasts a significant visual overhaul. Up close in cutscenes, you might not notice so much - the character models are still a bit stiff and awkward - but on the battlefield, with hundreds of swords swinging onscreen at the same time, this is a truly impressive experience for your eyeballs. That busy battlefield is the core of these games (which have earned their own genre label, 'Musou') as you hack and slash through waves of enemies in ancient China. Here, wading through the throngs is broken up by encounters with higher-ranking soldiers, during which you have to engage more fully with dodging and parrying systems in order to survive.

I've only played a little bit of the Origins demo. Despite critics praising the game for improving player direction (previously, it could be difficult to know which part of the battlefield really needed your attention), I found Origins completely overwhelming and I struggled to parse the onscreen action. This is actually a typical problem in these Musou games: there's a lot going on and tutorialising isn't their strong suit. I also found the voice acting in the overly long cutscenes pretty excruciating but to be fair, as a demo-player I wasn't really prepared to invest even though I've heard the story improves later in the game.

I think that a seasoned Dynasty Warriors player would have a smoother experience here by some magnitude, and a patient player stands to have a great time getting to grips with the wealth of combat options available. These games are all about the power fantasy, and critics seem to agree that this is the strongest entry in a good while.

The last big game this month was Eternal Strands. This comes from new studio Yellow Brick Games headed up by ex-Bioware dev Mike Laidlaw. Eternal Strands takes a different approach to the old Dragon Age games, which showcased Bioware's talent for writing; Laidlaw's new release is interested primarily in physics simulation. Playing with ice, fire and kinetic magic, the world responds to each element with wide-ranging and carefully mapped interactions. Fire melts ice, sure, but swords also splinter wooden beams. Eternal Strands features impressively destructible environments that led Edge magazine to ponder the concept of structural physics: a much-touted feature in previous generations that has languished since then. Simply put, few games go as far as Eternal Strands in their simulation. The complexity trade-off has a big impact on development costs, here resulting in a reduction in graphical fidelity compared to some of ES's contemporaries. I didn't play this one - it seems to me a game that would benefit from time spent experimenting with its systems, not one I could get a quick impression of for this write-up.

If you're an old-school Xbox 360 gamer, January's remaster of Ninja Gaiden 2 might have caught your eye. Previous reimagined as Sigma 2 for the PS3 just one year after its original release, this new one - Ninja Gaiden 2 Black - unites the two existing versions in one handsome package. And golly, it is a gloriously pretty and smooth experience. The first game arrived in the golden age of hack and slash action games, and stood out as a technical showcase in 2008. Here it gets to live out its full potential on much more powerful hardware.

Whilst the visual upgrade is essentially a new lick of paint, the blisteringly fast combat is mercifully smooth. Even so, my initial impressions were that Black is a fiddly, imprecise button-masher and that Ryu was a struggle to control. Some of this is surely the lasting impression of the original game, a certain sluggishness that developers have (broadly) improved on over the years. However, as I got to grips with the rhythm of combat - throwing shurikens to slow approaching enemies, clearing crowds with my jump attack and using the heavy attack to dispatch wounded foes before they exploded on me - I started to appreciate the opportunity buried in the combat systems for becoming a true ninja. By the time I got to the first boss I felt like a total shinobi badass, just like the game wanted me to.

(I still hate the camera - it sits far too low to the ground - and a big thumbs down to the narrative introduction which sees the big-boobed Sonia kidnapped almost immediately. I am assured that the plot is, in general, cheesy enough to not take seriously. So far I've learned that, "The fiends are trying to resurrect the Archfiend.")

Black was shadow-dropped (i.e. revealed and released on the same day) alongside the announcement of Ninja Gaiden 4, due out next year. Not much is known about the upcoming game but if Black is anything to go by, a return to form for the hack and slash genre, dressed up in current gen finery, will be a welcome ride.

Also out this month was Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, the awkwardly-titled (or translated) sequel to the equally awkwardly-monikered Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights. Magnolia builds the 2D action of Lilies into a proper metroidvania. The anime aesthetic lends itself well to the story of gothic scifi dystopia, in which the player character has awoken with no memory. You travels around The Land of Fumes fighting corrupted Homunculi - essentially androids. On defeat, they join your party, giving you an extra ability. Rather than use these abilities directly, the Homunculi are summoned in front of you to carry out their attacks. Whilst this could be a little disorientating in terms of screen space or character positioning, developers Adglobe and Live Wire have managed to keep it all tight enough to feel intuitive with a little light spatial calculation keeping things engaging. The levels are simple but the art still is gorgeous, with enough sparkle to keep it's smoggy steampunk world from feeling too grim. I didn't expect to love this as much I do, and I want to keep playing to discover more of Ender Magnolia. Also, shout-out to the detailed difficulty sliders. It feels increasingly like common practice to include options like these to adjust a variety of difficulty parameters and it's great to see players offered more opportunity to get involved.

Finally, January saw Nintendo's remake of Donkey Kong Country Returns. Originally released for the Wii in 2010, this was the first DKC game not developed by Rare but was critically well-received as a return to what was great about the original SNES trilogy. The DKC games have always been known for their difficulty. For some, this is what's great about them. They are stripped back, tricksy, and at times uncompromising with their checkpoints. For others, the difficult is what makes these games hard to love. I played the demo and didn't love it, finding Donkey Kong too heavy and his ground-punching attack too unwieldy. It's possible that it worked better with the Wii's motion controls, but here it feels too stop-and-start. I passed the demo to an eight-year-old I know to see what he thought, and it was quickly cast aside as "too difficult like old games." This is probably a game for those nostalgic about the DKC they once loved. If you're new to the series, you're probably better off checking out the original SNES games, all of which are on the Switch Online subscriptions. You'll know pretty quickly if it's you're kind of thing. These are the final days of the Switch lifecycle, and it continues to feel like Nintendo are spinning their wheels, putting out slightly easier releases before the Switch 2 comes out later this year.

That's January! It was a lot to play and a lot to write up, so I'm gonna leave it there and hopefully be back in February!