From mega hit Clair Obscur to the genius Blue Prince, the winners at this year’s event help me refocus on why games really matter

The 22nd Bafta game awards were on Friday, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took the biggest game prize. This makes it only the second game ever (after Baldur’s Gate 3) to win top prize at all five of the main awards shows: the Dice awards in Vegas; the Game awards in LA; the public-voted Golden Joysticks in the UK; the Game Developers Choice awards in San Francisco; and now London’s Baftas, the final event to celebrate the gaming output of 2025.

I’ll be honest: I was hoping for a different winner. Blue Prince, an eight-year project by the visual artist and former film-maker Tonda Ros, is the most extraordinary thing I played last year. It’s the game where you inherit a sprawling mansion that changes shape every day, and you must navigate its ever-shifting blueprint to find its secret room. I went so deep on this game that I was still playing it and thinking about it weeks after solving its initial mystery, piecing together bits of opaque lore from Reddit threads. I think it deserved at least one best game award (apart from ours).

‘Unc’ (short for uncle) is meant to disparage older players, but the industry should make games for all generations

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While researching women’s experiences in multiplayer video games recently, I came across this thread on the subreddit about Bungie’s latest live shooter, Marathon. “I’ve played a lot of shooters, and as a feminine-presenting player tbh it’s often a struggle,” it reads. “I’ve heard all the ‘get back to the kitchen’ jokes … ​But Marathon has been completely different, guys. I haven’t had a single issue, people have been incredibly kind and helpful… ​The community feels genuinely welcoming to everyone.”

The top-voted reply? “Benefit of being an unc game.”

Our world feels chaotic, confusing and unfair, but puzzles offer clear rules, solvable problems and reward for effort expended

Maybe you’ve noticed it too. Everyone seems to have become fixated on puzzle games. In the morning, over coffee, I play Word Wheel on the Guardian app. Over lunch, colleagues compare notes on Tradle, the game where you guess a country from its exports. Which place exports about 45% fish and 50% crustaceans? Greenland. Another friend can’t fall asleep without her nightly Sudoku ritual.

The online puzzle craze took off during the Covid pandemic, and it shows no sign of slowing down. New York Times subscribers now spend more time playing puzzles on the app than reading the news. Sales of quiz books hit a record last year, up 24% from 2024.

As physical media makes an unlikely comebac​k​ among younger gamers, the humble VHS emerges as an unexpected archive of gaming’s messy, magical evolution​ that I saw first time around

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As I am nostalgic and of a certain age, I recently bought a VHS video recorder, just for the retrospective thrill of it; then I won a 32-inch CRT television at an auction in Shepton Mallet. Partly, this was to play a few old videos I had found in my loft, including one of me appearing in a 1990s youth TV show talking about sexism and Tomb Raider. (I was against the sexism, to be clear). But it was also because I wanted a new way of spending my money on fragile video-game nostalgia.

The rise of the games industry in the 1980s and 90s coincided with the explosion of the home-video business, and the two crossed paths in lots of interesting ways. There are the obvious treasures I want to get hold of: VHS copies of Street Fighter: The Movie and the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, naturally, as well as early games-inspired hits such as The Last Starfighter, The Wizard and WarGames. I rented most of these from my local video shop in the 80s – which, like many others, also sold computer games by the budget publisher Mastertronic, another interesting (at least to me) crossover between these two entertainment formats.

I’ve been a games journalist since 2007, but still there isn’t much video games coverage that feels like it’s specifically for people like me. So I’m creating a home for it: Mothership

Whether you’re reading about the impending AI bubble bursting or about the video game industry’s mass layoffs and cancelled projects, 2026 does not feel like a hopeful time for gaming. What’s more, games journalists – as well as all other kinds of journalists – have been losing their jobs at alarming rates, making it difficult to adequately cover these crises. Donald Trump’s White House, meanwhile, is using video game memes as ICE recruitment tools, and game studios are backing away from diversity and inclusion initiatives in response to the wider world’s slide to the right.

The manosphere is back, and we’ve lost mainstream feminist websites such as Teen Vogue; bigots everywhere are celebrating what they see as the death of “woke”. Put it all together and we have a dismal stew of doom for someone like me, a queer woman and a feminist who’s been a games journalist and critic since 2007.

Susan Hayes and Craig got to know each other through an online game. When they finally met in person, it felt like a real-life romance novel

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When 2023 rolled around, I was ready for a change. I’d spent the Covid years locked down in Victoria, Canada. I had quit my day job at the end of 2019 to write full-time and travel, only for the world to shut down.

During those long, lonely years, I kept myself distracted by playing an online game. Nothing fancy, just a phone game about surviving a zombie apocalypse. It was a bit of fun and a way to connect with people from around the world. One of those people was a fellow named Craig.

Worth £6bn and with revenues recently rising by 10.9%, the niche interest game has become a global business

You don’t need to spend your weekends organising a face-off between bloodthirsty orcs and elves to have heard of the game Warhammer.

So popular is the fantasy game that its parent company Games Workshop is valued at a staggering £6bn and is almost ever-present on British high streets.

Rosen, who led Sega from the 1960s into the 90s and who died on Christmas Day, was a hugely important figure in the history of arcade and home gaming

It is difficult to think of a more influential figure in the arcade game industry than David Rosen, who has died aged 95. The co-founder of Sega, who remained a director of the company until 1996, was instrumental in the birth and rise of the video game business in Japan, and in the 1980s and 90s oversaw the establishment of Sega of America and the huge success of the Mega Drive console.

As a US Air Force pilot during the Korean war, Rosen found himself stationed in Japan, and once the conflict was over, he stayed on, intrigued by the country and seeing possibilities in its recovering economy. In 1954 he set up Rosen Enterprises and noticing that Japanese civilians now required an increasing number of new ID cards he started importing photo booths from the US to answer the demand. From here he expanded to pinball tables and other coin-operated machines, importing them for installation in shops, restaurants and cinemas. In 1965, he merged the company with another importer, Nihon Goraku Bussan, whose coin-op business Service Games was shortened to Sega for the new venture.