The year in Kojima, Silent Hill exclusives, and haute couture gaming

Inverse's gaming haute couture bet, plus an exclusive on why Cyberpunk's manager nearly ditched his PC

As I write this newsletter to you, over a cup of Job’s Tears tea, stacks of Christmas books to read¹, and my incomplete Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 run, I’m reflecting on how far Updater has grown and the profound lessons the year has offered up. In 2025, I spent more days at home than I did going out to networking events and industry get-togethers, taste testing soups I was making, and refining my quick-time reflexes.

A Taiwanese pineapple cake rounded out the year — I began the year in Taiwan, procuring some for my mother, and ended it at the Game Awards, interviewing Konami where I was ironically offered a cake by the Japanese developers. Speaking of award ceremonies, the year was bookended by two of them, from emceeing at the New York Game Awards in January alongside the Iron Lords podcast host, to watching Evanescence and co. take the stage in Los Angeles this month. By the way, I’m fully intent on continuing my tradition of two years in a row of completing a Game of the Year RPG months after it won at the Game Awards. I’m 50% of the way done with Expedition 33 and still noodling over my anti-fan take about how it swept the awards circuit just before I need to fly out to Vegas for the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show next week.

While the circular nature of gaming releases can make one feel like running on a hamster wheel, 2025’s slate of projects did more than shake things up. This is the year I tested Claude and Gemini and put them head to head. (Nothing they said was worth including in this newsletter, but I was able to uncover all of AI’s flaws and promises.) I now have a finer appreciation for pilates, driving to Jersey, and devoting at least five minutes a day to studying Chinese, expanding my literacy. I cooked watermelon gazpacho, congee, and bone broth soup. The year kicked off with a pineapple cake cooking class in Taipei 101 and ended with a Moroccan cooking class at Brookfield Place in FiDi. It’s funny how I’m always learning how to cook in a skyscraper.

Speaking of traveling, I saw gamers everywhere: at a Hoyoverse cafe in Berlin, in Westchester, New York, out in Paris, and in a strip mall down in Kauai, Hawaii. I wrote up a story for the New York Times in September, while juggling my Borderlands 4 review for Inverse. My shooter skills have definitely leveled up; what would have taken me eighty hours in 2019 simply took me thirty, carefully allocated throughout the weeks for self-preservation.

Since Inverse is the underdog and not even a mid-sized website as some consider us to be, we have to be a bit agile and scrappy at getting scoops. And 2025 marked a huge push into covering the intersection of fashion, beauty, and gaming, an area I just don’t see a lot of explicit coverage or focus on, so I’m excited to see how it evolves.

I’ve worked at Inverse and run this newsletter for just over two years now, so to celebrate, here’s a list of some of the greatest hits over the years, from Updater, Inverse, the New York Times and beyond:

• Hideo Kojima Says, ‘People Don’t Understand Me At All’

  In which I sat down with Kojima in Los Angeles this past June to talk fashion and Death Stranding confusion.

“When I write, I am looking at society.” — Hideo Kojima

• 3 years later… they won

  Call of Duty workers finally won their contract, putting an end to a three-year saga, and as someone who covered this story from the start, I had to speak with them again.

• The Decade’s Finest RPG Is Now A Fashion House Serving Looks

  Disco Elysium’s head of fashion Kristiina Ago gives her first-ever interview.

• She Counted Calories as a Teen, Then Created a Game About It

  My New York Times essay on Jenny Jiao Hsia’s award-winning indie debut, Consume Me.

• The Next Silent Hill Could Leave Maine Behind For Good

  Konami developer Motoi Okamoto began by saying he couldn’t say much about the next game, and ended by walking me through his favorite South American authors in a wide-ranging interview I still have more to share on.

• Borderlands 4 Review: The Series May Have Caught Its Second Wind

  This review marks the return of Inverse’s Borderlands coverage and definitely not the last, judging by how much the multiplayer mode has caught on with fans.

• I’m Obsessed With Yakuza 0 On The Switch 2 — But For All The Wrong Reasons

  For several months last summer, I learned mahjong from my Bay Area friends in real life and then taught all my East Coast friends how to play, and spent dozens of hours playing Yakuza.

• Mario Kart’s Most Viral Character Is About to Be Put Out To Pasture

  Sometimes the most delightful story comes along, about a cow.

• Rebel With A Co-op

  A profile of Josef Fares, who made Split Fiction, a very solid Game of The Year contender that I originally suspected might win.

• Blue Prince Was Not Made For Everyone, Creator Says

  An exclusive interview with Blue Prince game designer Tonda Ros.²

• Grand Theft Hamlet Made Me Contemplate Life, the Universe, and Everything

  Seeing Shakespeare reenacted in Grand Theft Auto just imbued this occupation — nay, dare I say, calling — with a higher purpose.

  There’s too much more I could name, but an honorable mention goes to my interview with South Korean life sim inZOI’s game director about his beliefs in Stoicism and how they were woven into the game, and my interviews with beauty gurus Charlotte Tilbury and Pat McGrath for their Genshin Impact and Candy Crush collaborations, respectively. I also have to shout out a trip to Paris where I saw lots of great Pokemon atop uncannily similar buildings.

In the past years, I’ve gotten several scoops on Arcane’s deleted lesbian sex scene, Fallout, GTA 6, seeing the Nintendo Switch 2 early, and profiling the publisher of Doki Doki Literature Club. I’ve also infuriated hordes of Black Myth Wukong fans by calling their game boring (in their defense, I do find some of the critiques of the game could also now be leveled at Expedition 33’s earlier areas — more on that another time.) And none of this is to mention some of the incredible coverage I’ve had the honor of commissioning over the years from freelancers, on wide-ranging essays from an early, poetic Balatro recommendation from Renata Price, to Harper Jay’s essay on friendslop, on Stellar Blade and the male gaze, and Patricia Hernandez’s GameStop reported feature on the dubious items that people trade in. From staff, there is a steady stream of excellence that is too long to name, but I will shout out Hayes Madsen’s most recent Remade series of interviews with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest developers, Robin Bea’s science of cozy report, and Trone Dowd’s apt Instagram reels that always bring you into the fold.

My original plan for this newsletter was to keep it to a few sentences of introduction and a couple of stories to highlight, followed by a few Netflix recommendations. We’re already clocking in at over a thousand words, so I’ll keep the TV suggestions short. Watch the Japanese reality TV show Badly in Love if you want a taste of influencer Yakuzas attempting to date each other (poorly), or the Korean soap opera Penthouse if you miss the Game of Thrones-level grandeur in schemes and backstabbing. And if you just want to soak in a witty, well-written film full of the zeitgeist, there’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery which I actually think pairs quite nicely with this time of quiet reflection and gratitude. Games I’m playing: Hades II (finally got up to Mount Olympus!), The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (aspirationally, this is next), Expedition, and League of Legends. All at the same time.

With that, a fond goodbye to the Year of the Snake and hello, horse year. I’ll see some of you out in Vegas. Cheers.

PS.

I wanted to share a recent Cyberpunk 2077 interview I did with CD Projekt Red, as an exclusive on this newsletter. Kepen claims that new Macs can run Cyberpunk 2077 as of this year, and burn less power compared with the standard PC graphics cards.

“Mac is focused on efficiency... you can just see the power draw go significantly down and without actually compromising quality,” CD Projekt Red senior release manager Artur Kepen says. “Frankly, I’m not touching my PC anymore if it weren’t for the fact that I still just have a couple of games on there.”

Although the Mac release comes five years after the PC and console releases, Cyberpunk PR estimates that the actual process took around 2 years, between negotiations with Apple and the work itself. The team declined to comment on Cyberpunk 2077 plans to come to iPhone and Android and on whether it is already planning on a Mac release for the upcoming Witcher 4.

When asked about how the 2025 Mac version avoided the launch-day bugs that plagued Cyberpunk in 2020, Kepen says, “When it comes to bugs for Cyberpunk on Mac specifically... we were just building from a more advanced version from the get-go.”

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1. Among them: the award-winning novels Trust by Hernan Diaz and Real Life by Brandon Taylor, and a non-fiction science book, Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To by David A. Sinclair.

2. And indeed, some people who hate math didn’t like his game!