GMTK Digest (October 2025)
Yotei of the Battlefield
Hey all! Mark here.
So I’ve been thinking. Whenever I make the GMTK Digest I find that I love sharing my recommendations for articles and videos. But I’m actually way less interested in writing about the new releases or the news headlines.
Video game news is just so depressing. It’s all about rich morons wasting money and ruining lives. It’s about layoffs, buyouts from dodgy companies, price increases, and wage cuts. I don’t really follow it and I definitely don’t enjoy talking about it.
And as for the new releases - well, you don’t really need me to tell you that new Pokemon and Battlefield games came out this month. And while I would love to share indie game recommendations... I’m just not playing as much at the moment as I get ready for the birth of my son!
For instance, The Séance of Blake Manor looks awesome, but I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.
So I’m going to try and rejig the digest a little going forward. I’ll start by finding more articles and stories about the new releases and headlines. Instead of simply telling you that Ghost of Yotei has come out this month, I’ve shared some pieces about its design, development, and reception. Instead of telling you that Tomonobu Itagaki has died, I’ve shared James Mielke’s tribute to the man.
I’ll keep rethinking it as I go along - I want it to provide as much value to you as possible, and that only happens when I’m personally excited to make it!
On the new releases
Read - Ghost of Yōtei – tech deep dive - “Sucker Punch delves into the tech that helped them bring Atsu’s engrossing journey to life”.
Watch (10 mins) - I’m Getting Bored of Every PlayStation Game Telling the Same Story - IGN points out that games like God of War, Ghost of Yotei, and The Last of Us Part II all feature the same theme: revenge.
Read - Searching for Cool in Open-World Games - “Is Ghost of Yotei itself cool? I’m not sure that it is. Being full of cool things does not make a thing cool; that’s a collection, not a quality”.
Read - I’ve Turned on Battlefield 6’s Senseless Destruction - Watching buildings fall down in a city doesn’t feel so fun when the same images are on the news every day.
Read - Pokemon Legends: Z-A makes the world feel livelier than ever before, but it’s not because of Lumiose’s design - “In an age when the vast majority of open world games try to create (or recreate) entire regions to get lost in, the prospect of being limited to a PS2-era-sized map was enticing”.
