Discoveries

There are too many games released each week to keep up with what’s worth adding to your backlog. That isn’t hyperbole — there really are hundreds of games released on Steam alone every week, not to mention titles new to consoles and other platforms like mobile. Lucky for you, Polygon has the time and resources (and the latent exposure to hordes of new releases) to wade through these titles for the gems. Of course, we haven’t played these games yet, in most cases — they’re coming out this week! — but we’ll highlight new work from our favorite developers, newcomers to the scene, and indies that might get lost in the shuffle.

This week, the big ’un is Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, which comes to PC on Jan. 23 and which will surely reignite the fandom once again. (But this time, without TikTok… we’ll see how that goes.) It’s not a brand-new game, but according to players, it’s long overdue for a PC port, so we’d be remiss to exclude it. There’s also a new Metroidvania called Mark of the Deep that looks addictive and artsy, as Metroidvanias should be, out Jan. 24, along with a bunch of other indies. And of course, Diablo 4’s new season threatens to delight.

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Two years after Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek’s father passed away from lung cancer, the popular Twitch streamer was ready to honor his dad by helping others going through the same thing. As one of the biggest streamers on the platform, it’s not a surprise that his first inclination was a charity stream. But one big stream wasn’t enough — he wanted to create a monthlong event to raise money “in the most gamer fashion ever.”

Grzesiek told Polygon that his father used to play PC games with him when he was just 3 years old. And when he eventually started thinking about becoming an esports player, his father cheered him on. “At the time, I was a teenager and honestly wasn’t earning much from gaming but he would still encourage me to do it because he knew it was something I loved,” he said. “If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

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Plenty of movies come with enough ambiguity to invite discussion, debate, and spirited interpretation, but over the course of the past year or so, few of them have prompted as much conversation as Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms. And in the horror genre in particular, nothing’s even come particularly close. Plante’s thriller, following one woman’s obsession with an accused serial killer, is the rare film that makes ambiguity a central point, while still delivering a satisfying, engaging story. It gives the sense that Plante is entirely in control of his narrative — but doesn’t want to control what people think about it. The movie had a long rollout throughout 2023 and 2024, via a lengthy festival run, limited theatrical release, and VOD launch. But now that Red Rooms has hit streaming services via Shudder and AMC Plus, the conversation around it is likely to keep expanding and intensifying.

Red Rooms stars Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne, a successful Montreal fashion model who introduces herself by silently walking into a courtroom for the opening arguments in the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), accused of kidnapping and murdering three teenagers. The facts in the case of “The Demon of Rosemont” are graphic and horrific, and his defense attorney’s opening arguments aren’t convincing — they amount to “Maybe someone hacked Ludovic’s computer and put snuff films on it? You can’t prove they didn’t!”

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In 2021, the team at Overseer Games had an idea: What if they merged two genres for their next project? That is how Kaiserpunk, an upcoming city builder and grand strategy game set in an alternate early 20th century, came to be.

Set for a Feb. 27 release, Kaiserpunk has had a long road to launch day. According to the devs, there are a lot of challenges that come with mixing genres. Picture a Civilization game, but you start out by placing individual buildings while ensuring optimal workflow. Then you have to connect them all with roads in order for them to work — oh, and make sure they have the necessary workforce assigned. Do all of this while keeping an eye on what’s happening around your settlement and planning out your strategy for interacting with the rest of the world. Then, eventually, you switch focus to the global scale.

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I was a bit skeptical the first time I heard about the local co-op mode in Sabotage Studio’s Sea of Stars. A turn-based game can feel a bit slow when playing alone, so I couldn’t really imagine how it would work with another person sitting next to me the entire time. However, I played Sea of Stars with my little brother over the holidays, and as it turns out, this co-op mode was just what I needed to revive my interest in turn-based RPGs.

Sea of Stars’ secret weapon is the way it mixes real-time elements into its otherwise standard turn-based mechanics. The fights unfold character by character, just like a normal turn-based game, but the player can boost the damage output and defensive capabilities of each character by correctly timing a button press. So if you hit the A button just before an enemy lands an attack, it will lower the damage done. Similarly, if you press the correct button just before the attack animation lands on an enemy, you can up your attack power.

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Donkey Kong Country Returns just won’t stop returning.

Players may recall the game’s initial launch for the Wii in 2010 and perhaps even the updated Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D for the 3DS from 2013, but that’s just the tip of the banana hoard. Returns was also reissued for both Wii and 3DS as part of the discount Nintendo Selects line, launched as a digital-only offering on the Wii U eShop, and even released for the Nvidia Shield in China as recently as 2019 (in 1080p and 60 frames per second, no less).

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There was a particular moment just a few hours into my Dynasty Warriors: Origins playthrough when I felt that I was truly witnessing something special. I was at Hulao Gate, the imposing fortress that defended the pass to the capital of Luoyang. As the Anti-Dong Zhuo Coalition marched to a clearing, fully confident in their numbers, I waited with bated breath knowing what was about to happen. Suddenly, one soldier stammered, “I-it’s Lu Bu!”

The mightiest warrior in all of China had joined the fray, astride Red Hare, the fastest horse in the land. Lu Bu charged into the center of our army, red energy sparking from his halberd, his fierce mount barreling through our forces as he cast his musou, shattering the ground, killing hundreds of troops, and laying waste to allied generals left and right. Everyone was panicking and retreating, though some were like me, standing transfixed and marveling at the sight.

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Later this January, one of the most intriguing science fiction shows of the 21st century will finally return. Nearly three years after its debut, Severance’s second season promises to resolve at least some of the many mysteries posed by this series about a sinister company with the capability to surgically split its employees’ consciousnesses between work and home life (innies and outies, respectively) and the lives of those “severed” workers.

Created by first-time showrunner Dan Erickson, Severance might never have come into existence if it hadn’t landed on the desk of Ben Stiller, who produced the series and directed six of the nine episodes in the first season. But while the emergence of Stiller as a TV director was a surprise to many — since when does Derek Zoolander make prestige television? — it wasn’t his first attempt. Just a few years earlier, he’d directed another critically acclaimed series: Escape at Dannemora.

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Cooking sims run the gamut of intensity, but if Diner Dash is at the sweating-bullets end of the spectrum, Galaxy Burger is at the other end. This space-themed burger flipping game, developed by Galactic Workshop, is dripping with the weird — astronaut cats, delivery bots, aliens, and elvish humans are your customers across the various planets in our galaxy, rendered in 16-bit art.

With each burger joint you open up, you encounter new customers drawn in various art styles — you’ll meet plenty of chibi Robo-Kitties on Venus, while the Earthlings who reside both on Earth and on the moon are Rick and Morty-esque. Some customers are shy, but, importantly, all customers are chill and relatively easy to please. These burger joints are like a pizza shop in a college town run by slow-moving, yet ultimately effective, stoners. There’s no rush, so as the player, you can really home in on lining that burger up perfectly with the bun, or nailing your ketchup art.

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January is a “try hard” month. The year has turned, and many people are attempting to make changes — if not full-on resolutions, then at least a dream, a goal to try to angle themselves toward. I think it’s a great time to undertake a TV project. (Watch historical television! Cross off that one show you’ve always meant to do!) But for the days when the trying has become too much, you need something pulpy and propulsive to sink into. Enter Younger, specifically to Netflix’s catalog.

Younger is a perfect soapy watch for several reasons: It’s long-running. It’s got short, punchy episodes that almost always end with a dangling promise for what’s to come. It’s got a love triangle that gets tossed around like vegetables frying in a wok. But perhaps most notably it’s because Younger is a show where the premise matters a lot — right up to when it doesn’t.

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Modern anime fans have it so good that it’s a surprise when an excellent show falls between the cracks.

If you want to stream a new show, odds are high it will appear on Crunchyroll, Netflix, or Hidive. If the show’s popular, episodes may even hit streaming in the U.S. the same day they debut in Japan. We’ve come a long way from the dark days of paying a fortune for a handful of poorly subtitled episodes on VHS and DVD. What got us here? Media companies finally recognize the voracious hunger for fresh anime, creating fierce competition amongst distributors over licensing new productions, no matter their quality.

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Few games have accurately captured the experience of online brain overload like Stimulation Clicker, a new free browser game by Neal Agarwal (creator of Infinite Craft, The Password Game, and more). This is a clicker game in the style of Banana or Universal Paperclips, but it’s also a parody of clicker games and the whole concept of clicking as a dopamine release.

Stimulation Clicker starts off simply enough, with just a tantalizing button in the middle of your browser screen that says “Click Me.” Clicking on it earns you one Stimulation point; clicking it a second time earns you another Stimulation point. Once you’ve got 3 Stimulation points, you can unlock a DVD logo that will bounce around your browser screen. You may remember watching this screen as a mindless way to pass the time as a bored teenager. This is like that. But it’s also so much more.

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Painting miniatures is a fun and relaxing way to spend time away from your screens, and with the surge of interest in tabletop role-play like Dungeons & Dragons and miniatures wargames like Warhammer 40,000, the hobby is more popular than ever. As a result, many new lines of paint are making their way into your local hobby stores in 2025. After nearly a full year spent testing out the leading brands, one manufacturer has jumped to the top of my list of recommendations for new and returning painters: Duncan Rhodes’ Two Thin Coats from Trans Atlantis Games.

Rhodes got his start in the hobby at Games Workshop’s retail storefronts before becoming the company’s primary video presenter for painting tutorials throughout the 2000s and 2010s. His admonition to always use “two thin coats” of the multi-billion-dollar company’s Citadel paints became the rallying cry for his first crowdfunding campaign in 2021, which raised more than $1.1 million for the initial line of Trans Atlantis hobby paints. While that first wave of product was a touch slow to reach consumers, manufacturing and fulfillment have firmed up considerably. Trans Atlantis paints are now being distributed here in the United States by none other than Asmodee North America, and after calling stores from coast to coast, it’s clear that they’re in good supply just about everywhere that they’re sold.

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Boxing is a full-body workout. Deceptively so — you’re just moving your arms, how tough could it be, right? But if you’re throwing a punch correctly, you’re putting your entire body into that motion. A boxing punch should involve a whole set of simultaneous movements that engage your legs, your core, your shoulders, and your arms. Fitness Boxing 3 cannot offer the same experience as an in-person trainer correcting your every move. But it does provide a series of easy-to-learn routines and daily workouts that ramp up into a regimen that could whip you into shape about as well as attending regular in-person group boxing classes.

As the first paragraph demonstrates, I’ve taken in-person boxing lessons. (Before I got into boxing, I also taught karate professionally for years; I have a black belt in Uechi-Ryū.) So, I have a lot of opinions about martial arts training. It should therefore come as no surprise that I would recommend you take at least one in-person boxing class if you want to really understand how to maximize the workout that you can get from it. Fitness Boxing 3’s virtual trainers won’t be able to tell if you’re punching incorrectly and not using your entire body to the extent that you should. In fact, when I missed a punch in-game, Fitness Boxing 3 would almost always give me a “Perfect” or at least an “OK” score on it; the motion sensitivity of handheld Joy-Cons is far from pristine. But because I’ve taken boxing classes in real life, I knew when I was doing it right, and so I was able to correct my own form and get a great workout from the routines in this game.

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Late last year I learned that jigsaw puzzles are good, actually. Yes, a COVID quarantine was the impetus, but even after the wife and I weren’t forcing ourselves to stay indoors, we still found time to enjoy a good puzzle every few weeks. So it was perfect timing that Wilmot Works It Out, the sequel to 2019’s best game about organizing, was released this fall, because it’s easily the greatest gaming tribute to jigsaw puzzles I’ve played.

In Wilmot Works It Out, the titular Wilmot no longer spends his time at the warehouse, but instead, his home. He’s subscribed to a puzzle of the week club and needs to complete them in the same way he managed his old warehouse. The music is light and airy, and there’s a charming little story about the postal workers who deliver your puzzles. Unlike the first game there’s no time pressure; just puzzle after puzzle after puzzle.

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As a child, the woods I lived by had a pond covered in duckweed, and I would go to it and toss rocks into the water. Each time, the stone made a plopping sound and broke the blanket of thousands of tiny green leaves to reveal darkened water. The effect enthralled me, and now, a new game called Naiad somehow captures that childlike bliss that comes with playing in nature’s waters.

Developed by HiWarp, a one-person team based in Spain, Naiad is a game in which I get to play as a forest nymph named Naiad. As Naiad, I navigate through crystalline waters using my control stick and a top-down view. Naiad’s body arches and twirls as I swim through crystalline waters and explore connected streams and ponds. The sound of frogs and splashing water plays, and sticks, logs, flowers, and leaves bobble on top of the water and ornament it with pops of color.

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Some people bash their heads against difficult games for glory or for loot, but I’m just trying to survive Awaria so I can kiss another ghost. Łukasz “Vanripper” Piskorz, the developer behind cult hit Helltaker, is back with more cute girls to dangle in front of you in a game designed to make you work for it.

Awaria is free on Steam and Itch.io, but scoring a smooch from one of its ghost girls is certainly not. Like Helltaker, Awaria looks deceptively simple: You’re a speedy little mechanic stuck in 2D rooms with machines that need fixing. WASD controls move you around as you carry the right parts to the right machines. And then ghosts show up to try to kill you and suddenly you’re dodging attacks like in a bullet-hell shooter.

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I have a confession: I’m a rampant roguelike uninstaller.

Almost invariably, I reach a point with games like Balatro, Dead Cells, or Hades when, watching my playtime balloon, I feel the need to remove the temptation to play the game. Roguelikes, almost by definition, pursue an addictive structure that reviewers often describe as the “one more run” feeling, wherein the player feels compelled to begin the loop again (and again, and — you get it). Another common phrase you’ll hear tossed around is the idea that you “lost time” to a game, as though the game has tricked you into giving it more of your life than you were consciously willing to give. For me, this kind of compulsive play leads to something I’ve started to think of as “roguelike dread,” or the feeling that I really need to move on from a potentially infinite game lest it completely take over my life. Usually, that is when I delete it.

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Fortnite is no longer just the culture-defining battle royale game. It has since become a platform to host a wide variety of games. Lego Fortnite takes a swipe at Minecraft lovers with survival and clicky crafting mechanics. Fortnite Obby Fun and the recent Lego Fortnite Brick Life bring young players familiar with Roblox into the fold. Fortnite Festival gives fans of rhythm games a regular cadence of contemporary hits to jam out to.

One by one, the devs at Epic Games are crafting modes that slot each type of player into Fortnite’s golden gauntlet, as if the’re collecting fans of specific genres like Thanos does with Infinity Stones. And now, with this latest addition, a team-based shooter called Fortnite Ballistic, Epic has its sights set on fans of gritty first-person shooters. Although the game isn’t as polished as it could be yet — Epic released it in early access on Dec. 11 — it shows the devs’ ambition to bring a new kind of player to the game.

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Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island is like a lot of the games I’m most likely to pick up. It’s got a soothing, whitewashed color palette. The characters seem to be queer. And the gameplay includes a lot of environmental puzzles and jogging around, picking stuff up. It’s perfect for me. But by those metrics, so are a lot of games. So I expected some genre familiarity when I booted it up for the first time. But in reality, Mythwrecked is a breath of fresh air for the genre of chill, cozy role-playing games.

Developed by Polygon Treehouse (no relation) and published by Whitethorn Games, Mythwrecked puts the player in the position of Alex, who gets shipwrecked on a mysterious island that’s inexplicably home to a handful of Greek gods who have no idea who they are or what they’re doing there. While it’s clear that Alex is motivated to get home at first, as she starts running into gods like Hermes, Zeus, Hera, and Aphrodite, she becomes dedicated to helping them recover their memories by doing them favors and finding their lost mementos around the island.

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Theaters were unprepared to deal with legions of moviegoers belting their hearts out to Wicked, which in my professional opinion is an oversight in the sheer passion that Wicked specifically inspires. It’s not just a musical for theater fans; it’s a musical with such a far-reaching scope and audience, with music that is just so damn sing-along-able. Even The Rock weighed in on this!

But thankfully, Universal is rectifying this wrong with a series of special sing-along screenings debuting in over 1,000 theaters nationwide starting on Dec. 25. Huzzah! These special screenings will have the lyrics on screen, just in case you don’t know all of the words to “Popular”. (Couldn’t be me.) There will also be a special intro from stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.

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