GMTK Digest (September 2025)

Hello lovely GMTK backers!

Oh boy, the video game business just woke up from its summer slumber! This month saw new Silent Hill, Borderlands, and Sonic games, plus massive indie hits and loads more. Even this big list below is just scratching the surface.

I've also got a bumper reading list for you to enjoy - with tonnes of articles and videos to keep you busy. So let's jump on in.

New Releases

Blockbusters

Hollow Knight: Silksong - It's the big one. Seven years in the making, Team Cherry is back with the follow-up to one of gaming's masterpieces. It's another sprawling, atmospheric Metroidvania with rock hard boss fights - and a twitchy, precise moveset.

I've been glued to this game all month. I'm about 45 hours in and I'm still not done. The world is just so big - it's dense and detailed, and splinters off into every direction. You explore one tiny cave or unlock an unassuming door and stumble into a whole new world of ideas, enemies, and secrets.

And, yeah, it's hard. I've died hundreds of times. But you can always explore somewhere else - find new powers, get more health, get more silk, try new tools and traps, change your build. Then come back and succeed. Every failure is the start of a comeback story.

I can't wait to dig deeper for a Boss Keys episode - but I need to finish my own playthrough first!

LEGO Voyagers - A cute co-op puzzle game from the same peeps who made Builder's Journey. I played a big chunk of this with my wife and I'm sad to say it completed bored us. The puzzles are simple and repetitive, and the building mechanic has fussy controls that makes it tedious to construct a simple bridge. We dropped it before the short run time was up.

Hades II - Speaking of indie hit sequels, Supergiant has finally launched Hades II for real. Reviews suggest that the game improves on the original in almost every way.

Borderlands 4 - The new Borderlands launched to a rocky reception, with performance issues on both PC and consoles. The game itself? Seems fine - OpenCritic has it on 83.

skate. - We've been waiting for Skate 4 for ever. And now it's finally, sort of, out - with this early access launch on Steam. Reviews are kinda negative though - people are calling it bland and hollow, and making fun of its wonky physics system in viral vids. Maybe wait for 1.0.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds - Sonic might finally get a chance to upstage Mario in the karting world, as the hedgehog opts for more traditional lap-based races - in opposition to Mario's open world shenanigans. Reviews are solid.

SILENT HILL f - Silent Hill typically takes place in, well, the American town of Silent Hill. But T=this spin-off sends us to a Japanese village. Reviews are generally strong but Eurogamer warns that you'll need to slog through a dull first half to get to the good stuff.

Smaller Stuff

Strange Antiquities - The follow-up to Strange Horticulture, this time about cursed pots and haunted artefacts. I'm really keen to dig into this one.

Consume Me - A life simulation game about feeling fat , lazy, and ugly. A semi-autobiographical game about eating disorders.

CloverPit - One of those spooky, cursed roguelikes - ala Inscryption, Balatro, and Buckshot Roulette. Play a slot machine while trying to bust out of a hellish escape room.

Baby Steps - Absurdist walking simulator (literally) from the devs behind Ape Out and Getting Over It. It's designed to be infuriating, so make sure you're ready for that.

Mind Diver - An innovative new murder mystery game where you explore memories by walking through bizarre 3D scans. Apparently will make you cry, so make sure you're ready for that.

Cronos: The New Dawn - New horror game from Bloober Team, with strong Dead Space vibes.

Headlines

9 months after its 1.0 launch flopped, an indie dev just learned that Steam never emailed the 130,000 people who wishlisted its game - Oops.

Here's everything announced in today's Nintendo Direct - Loads of Mario stuff for his 40th birthday, a release date for Metroid Prime 4, and a big red plastic headset for some reason.

Here's everything announced in PlayStation's latest State of Play showcase - More Wolverine, more Saros, and a super weird remaster of Deus Ex. I never asked for this.

All 40 Games Shown During The September Six One Indie Showcase - If those big console showcases didn't do it for you, here are some smaller upcoming games to keep an eye on.

All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity - This preservation project had to find people who still had games on working iPods. This month, the final game was found.

Reading List

Silk Threads

Watch (7 mins) - Hollow Knight: Silksong's NPCs Are Its MVPs - "You press on because of Sherma, Shakra, and all the other pals you met throughout Pharloom along the way".

Read - Hollow Knight: Silksong Reinforces the Metroidvania Genre’s Accessibility Barriers - "A lack of options for disabled players means another tricky masterpiece is inaccessible to many".

Read - A Condition Took Away The Use Of My Hands. Silksong Helped Me Rehab Them - "Of all the big and small things we hoped for during recovery, Silksong’s release became weirdly totemic".

Watch (13 mins) - Let’s Talk About Difficulty - Hotcyder upends the difficulty debate with a cheeky bait-and-switch.

Design

Read - Playful Narrative: A Toolbox for Story-Rich Mechanics - The Polaris Game Design Retreat is a place for thoughtful game makers to discuss theory. This report - a framework for playing with dynamic narrative structures.

Watch (28 mins) - The Details That Give A Boss "Aura" - "There is one aspect of bossfights that we don’t talk about enough, and that’s the lead up to it".

Watch (29 mins) - Time Limits Are Good (but nobody wants them) - Razbuten talks "about some games that would be better with them, the ways in which they tend be utilized in the gaming space, and how despite being an interesting mechanic, people still hate them".

Watch (24 mins) - How RimWorld Was Made and Why it’s Not a Video Game - "To build a system that could do that, he would have to break a lot of the assumptions baked into traditional game design".

Development

Watch (25 mins) - This Game Took Me 2.5 Years To Make - Blargis wraps up his devlog of his speedrun murder game Bloodthief.

Watch (44 mins) - The Making of Wolfenstein - "We revisit the team at MachineGames to explore the development of their Wolfenstein series".

Watch (11 mins) - I Made The Most Hated Game On The Internet - "In this video I cover the release of the game "A Difficult Game About Climbing" and the development of the expansion of the game".

Business

Read - Waypoint by Indieformer - A handy dandy calendar that aims to list out every notable indie release. This should certainly help with future issues of this Digest!

Watch (33 mins) - The Free Game That Destroyed the $60 Video Game Forever - "But Epic had accidentally discovered something revolutionary: players don't want to buy power, they want to buy identity".

Read - By the way, what’s a AA? - By crunching the numbers on disk space and team sizes, this Substack aims to categorise games into AAA, AA, and more.

Culture

Watch (48 mins) - Abandoned Games and The Internet Graveyard - The Cursed Judge explores different ways for games to end up as ghost towns.

Read - Tony Hawk, EA Skate and the Zombie Afterlife of Skateboarding Video Games - "How the history of skating games shows us what happens when counterculture gets consumed and reanimated by corporations".

Read - Videogames for War, Videogames Against War - "Videogames can easily become military tools because they are toys open to new interpretations".

Read - I Don’t Want to Be This Kind of Animal Anymore - "For many trans people, the self that existed before they realized who they are can be a formless blur of memories that always felt somewhat wrong".

Watch (29 mins) - How Bananza’s Speedrunning Community Got Rid of the Ostrich. - Getting the Ostrich upgrade in DKB adds a whopping 90 seconds to the run. So players needed to find a way to finish the game without it.

Critique

Watch (12 mins) - A Review of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater - "Let's discuss the evolution of game remakes over the years, video game preservation, playing in release order, whether new players should start here and ultimately how Delta really is just Snake Eater... for better and worse".

Artistry

Watch (20 mins) - Do Red Dead Redemption 2's Power Lines Connect to Anything? - Any Austin continues his exploration of video game worlds, this time looking at how Rockstar linked up the towns of RDR 2.

History

Watch (18 mins) - MOLYNEUX: The Nobody - "Part one of a reappraisal of Peter Molyneux's career - and reputation".

Watch (24 mins) - Chris Houlihan Is Real - Zelda on SNES features a weird room filled with rupees, and a sign dedicated to one Chris Houlihan. Who is he? This guy claims to have the answers.

Watch (10 mins) - The Most Iconic Bug in Gaming - "I break down the technical details behind the Old Man Glitch, why encountering MissingNo duplicates items, and how it ends up as a blocky mess of pixels".

Beyond Games

Watch (15 mins) - A chaotic guide to making stuff instead of doomscrolling - "Are you drained? Overwhelmed? A casualty of Big Bed Rot? Here are 10 things you can do right now to break that circuit".

Watch (51 mins) - Digital De-Aging Is Changing Movies (For The Worse) - "The attack of the creepy CGI people must be stopped!".

Watch (15 mins) - Hustle culture lied to you (here’s a better way) - Matt D'Avella explores slow productivity.