Prime Gaming – December 2025

Listen, baldy, I’m about to have some intense words with you if you don’t buck up your ideas here. Prime Gaming is practically dead. It has been on life support for long enough – all for the name of AI nonsense and cloud gaming. Scourge of the bloody earth. 15 offerings this month, but if I’m honest, there is only really one that I think is worth talking about in detail. Too bad it is the last that I’ll talk about and the one everyone seemed to hate.

We’ll start the month of Prime for December as it has with an offering for the Epic Games Store with LEGO 2K Drive – an open racer developed by the people behind 2K’s WWE and NBA titles for the past decade. Favored on release by some, the 2K-ness crept in with about $45 (discounted) of season passes and microtransactions, and now there is some reasonable discontent for what is a decent idea ruined by money people. If 2K didn’t have to 2K, I think LEGO 2K Drive would have been a fun offering going into a period spent with family, but life is unfair.

As is my next run here, I’m just going to lump it together to save us both time. In order, available this week, the 11th of December, and again on the 18th for GOG, we have Forgotten Realms: The Archives – Collection One, Collection Two, and Collection Three. Collections of dungeon-crawling, party-based, turn-based RPGs that are slower than your nan going up stairs, and drier than the only bit of her that’s still got hair. If you enjoy playing games older than time itself and that somehow feel older, then you are in luck!

Released originally as an exclusive for a now long-dead cloud gaming system that was doomed to fail from the start, i.e, Google Stadia’s horror offering of Gylt. Narrative-focused with hints of puzzles and a whole lot of child-friendly horror, for the simple fact that the main character is a young woman called Sally, who explores her high school searching for her cousin, who was bullied. There is a reason that the Stadia died in a bin fire started by EV battery acid, Gylt wasn’t the blockbuster to launch cloud gaming into the stratosphere, and no surprise that hasn’t happened with Amazon Luna (the cloud gaming one) either.

I think the painkillers have started to wear off, and it couldn’t have picked a better time. Available from the 11th via Legacy Games, Christmas Adventure: Candy Storm is a blight on society so terrible that the copywriter for the Steam description only managed one and a half paragraphs about a hidden object game with somehow just as much effort. If the developer doesn’t care, why should I?

Moving swiftly on to the 18th, and we’re going on to Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus, which is oddly reminding me of Nine Sols for some reason. Available with a GOG code, the metroidvania platformer swaps the Taoism of Nine Sols for Japanese folklore and mythology, and if there is one thing I do love, it is Japanese folklore. So why am I not grabbed so much by Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus? Honestly, I can’t quite tell. Maybe it is the fact that it feels from the outset like it was funded by a Kickstarter campaign, being funded nearly 5 times over the initial goal.

The 18th’s offerings are only available through GOG, so go into these next few with that knowledge. Including Orangepixel’s Gunslugs 2, a crunchy pixel art thing that feels like a more mobile-friendly Broforce. To borrow a clumsy metaphor from Brendan Rodgers, it would be like driving an old Honda Civic when you could drive a classic Ferrari. I’m not saying you can’t enjoy it, I’m saying that if you’ve played one before the other, the appeal falls away so much.

Sadly, I don’t get to use tired comparisons and clumsy metaphors for Orangepixel’s other offering on the 18th, Ashworld. A top-down pixel art post-apocalyptic survival game with aspirations of anime Mad Max, but quickly forgets that there are hundreds of thousands of similar offerings that do a better job at that feeling, including 2015’s Mad Max. I’m not comparing the two; I’m acknowledging the wider idea that overlaps. Ok, maybe I am.

Onto the 23rd, and the only two offerings this month for the week after Fallout Season 2 premieres. We’ll lump them together again because, quite frankly, they are repeats we’ve seen here and on the Epic Games Store multiple times, that being Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game (Fallout 1) and Fallout 2, available for GOG. Do I need to explain the post-apocalyptic RPGs that helped popularize the current Western RPGs? If you’ve played an RPG in the last 20 years, there are probably small influences from these two masterpieces of their time.

Onto something that Alexx quite enjoyed, because he snorts action Rogue-likes the same way I sniff Deep Heat – for the 30th, you can pick up Afterburner Studios’ Dreamscaper. Back in 2021, Alexx drew comparisons between Dreamscaper’s Hades-like action elements and its Persona-like social components. Available for the Epic Games Store, Alexx generally gave Dreamscaper quite a high rating. I’ll admit that I find that surprising, given that I glance at it and I’m not too excited by its looks.

Well, it is the penultimate game, and I’ve not screamed at Big Fish Games yet, or as the publisher is now seemingly preferring, BFG Entertainment. I certainly know what the F stands for. This month’s offering for the Amazon Games App in terms of hidden object tripe is Friendly Fox’s Living Legends: The Crystal Tear Collector’s Edition. If you enjoy banging your head against the sharp end of a claw hammer, then I think you’ll absolutely love this one, but for those of us with brain cells and a will to live, it is a skip.

Now, the final one is the one that I bang on about constantly because I do love elements of it, though I do admit its flaws regularly enough that people ignore that to moan about my praise. You know, typical internet stuff. Available for the Epic Games Store on the 30th of December, you can pick up the great (yet heavily flawed) Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. It’s not a fantastic RPG in the Deus Ex realm, but I love it simply because it is one of the few examples of gameplay being used for racism.

Hold up! I mean that it does a great job of showcasing the small bits of racism and segregation that people don’t usually experience when their complexion is that of milk, and their genitals dangle. In particular, there is a mission early on about having the right papers and police harassment, and it is also a great example of how something could be ruined by a publisher with microtransactions. Square Enix scuminess. However, worst of all, you have to go in knowing Mankind Divided was released almost a decade ago and didn’t get a sequel.