When Hollow Knight: Silksong came out last summer I was in so much pain that I didn't know if I'd be able to play it. Could a video game teach me anything new about suffering? L ast year I became uncomfortably well acquainted with suffering. In March I started experiencing excruciating pain in my right arm and shoulder - burning, zapping, energy-sapping pain that left me unable to think straight, emanating from a nexus of torment behind my shoulder blade and sometimes stretching all the way up to the base of my skull and all the way down into my fingers. Typing was agony, but was painful; even at rest it was horrible.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been named game of the year in a record-breaking haul at this year's Game Awards. The French-developed role-playing game (RPG) cleaned up in nine of the 10 categories it was up for, with further wins in best narrative, best music and best performance. It fended off competition from Death Stranding 2, Nintendo platformer Donkey Kong Bananza, indie games Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades 2, and medieval adventure Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to claim the top prize. During the ceremony in Los Angeles, players also got their first glimpses of two new Tomb Raider games, sequel Control Resonant and a new Star Wars role-playing game. Clair Obscur is set in a world where a supernatural being known as The Paintress prevents the population from growing past a certain age.

Guillaume Broche collects the award for game of the year at 2025's The Game awards. Guillaume Broche collects the award for game of the year at 2025's The Game awards. Alien: Rogue Incursion Arken Age Ghost Town Marvel's Deadpool VR The Midnight Walk - WINNER

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leads the pack at this year's Game Awards with 12 nominations. The critically acclaimed role-playing game (RPG) is up for Game of the Year, as well as three entries in the best performance category. Other contenders for the top game prize this year are Death Stranding 2, Nintendo platformer Donkey Kong Bananza, indie games Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades 2, and medieval adventure Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. They will all compete at the event - the world's most-watched ceremony celebrating video games - on 11 December in Los Angeles, California. Organisers say there were 154 million livestreams in 2024, when platformer Astro Bot was named Game of the Year. What are the Game Awards?

Video games are taking longer to make, but why? It's been 84 years... or so says the meme. For video game fans, it can certainly feel like it, as the gap between big releases gets longer. Earlier this month Silksong, the highly anticipated sequel to 2017's Hollow Knight, was finally released . And don't get us started on Grand Theft Auto 6.

The Switch 2 is nearly here, which means the original Switch is entering its twilight years. It's been eight years since Nintendo released its revolutionary hybrid console, and while many fans have spent the last couple of those itching for the device to be replaced, now seems like an opportune time to look back at what its legacy may wind up being (while acknowledging that it still has some life ahead of it). Instead of bleating on myself, though, I turned to the rest of the Engadget staff to see what comes to mind when they think of the Switch, as just about everyone on the team has played with the console. We've collected our reflections below -- some take a bigger-picture view, some are more personal, some contradict others' experiences entirely. There's plenty more that went unsaid. But I think that's part of the Switch's beauty; it's a device that's resonated with so many, in so many different ways, in its near-decade on the market.

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success in learning control policies from pixels across a wide range of tasks, yet its application remains hindered by low sample efficiency, requiring significantly more environment interactions than humans to reach comparable performance. Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) offers a solution by leveraging learnt world models to generate simulated experience, thereby improving sample efficiency. However, in visually complex environments, small or dynamic elements can be critical for decision-making. Yet, traditional MBRL methods in pixel-based environments typically rely on auto-encoding with an $L_2$ loss, which is dominated by large areas and often fails to capture decision-relevant details. To address these limitations, we propose an object-centric MBRL pipeline, which integrates recent advances in computer vision to allow agents to focus on key decision-related elements. Our approach consists of four main steps: (1) annotating key objects related to rewards and goals with segmentation masks, (2) extracting object features using a pre-trained, frozen foundation vision model, (3) incorporating these object features with the raw observations to predict environmental dynamics, and (4) training the policy using imagined trajectories generated by this object-centric world model. Building on the efficient MBRL algorithm STORM, we call this pipeline OC-STORM. We demonstrate OC-STORM's practical value in overcoming the limitations of conventional MBRL approaches on both Atari games and the visually complex game Hollow Knight.

We regularly write about the games we love at Engadget, and even have "best games" lists for each console. But buying a game for someone else is a different matter entirely to choosing one for yourself. Unless you know exactly what they want, where do you even begin? Well, we'd begin by thinking about what your loved one's into, outside of gaming. Could they do with something to help them chill out every night?

Do you love nothing more than to backtrack through a part of a video game you've already been through? I surely do--I love to confidently revisit an area I struggled through once I've powered up and am now able to take it on with ease. Backtracking can be divisive (my very own editor can't stand it), but if you, too, find it satisfying, you need to get yourself Metroid Dread--the first original Metroid story in nearly two decades, now on Nintendo Switch. It's a game that finds innovative ways to deliver the surprising pleasures of returning to an area again and again, reaffirming my love for this conceit that others may still scoff at.. What exactly are those pleasures, for those who can't fathom traveling to the same place multiple times? I'm glad you asked--because I'm not at all alone in loving this practice.

Just five years ago, Nintendo was at a crossroads. The Wii U was languishing well in third place in the console wars and, after considerable pressure, the company was making its first tentative steps into mobile gaming with Miitomo and Super Mario Run. Fast-forward to today: The Switch is likely on the way to becoming the company's best-selling "home console" ever, and seven Switch games have outsold the Wii U console. However, the Switch's online store isn't the easiest to navigate, so this guide aims to help the uninitiated start their journey on the right foot. These are the games you should own -- for now.