Kentucky Route Zero is celebrating its five-year anniversary today, January 28, 2025. Below, we look back at its inspirations and excitement for experimentation.

It is in the details that Kentucky Route Zero stakes its claim beyond video games. Its typewriter typography. The terse descriptions of characters between bursts of dialogue. The adventure game actions written like stage directions. Lights that illuminate the new parts of a stage or set. It is the details that matter. In practice, KRZ doesn't play differently from any other adventure game, but it feels different than many of them. This is because it takes from a wide array of influences, many beyond the usual preview of video games. Its interest in theater, film, visual art, and radio is what still makes it a vivid game five years later.

It is no secret that video games can be a little self-obsessed. While one could meaningfully label a painting, a movie, or a book as "science-fiction" or "romantic," video game genre designations like "roguelike" or "platformer" can only really describe video games (though if any one wants write an essay about what novels could be described as "strategy" or "simulation," I would be very eager to read it). Many--even most--big-budget games borrow from a ready-made list of influences, such as Star Wars, Alien, Indiana Jones, or Lord of the Rings. This narrow set of sources can make video games feel sometimes hyper-generic: unable to node themselves into a meaningful network, but instead digging deeper into an ever-drying well. When a big game attempts a big homage to genuine artistic legacy, it can feel absurd. Who could possibly take Ghost of Tsushima's "Kurosawa mode" seriously?

Keen Games outlined what the next year of development for Enshrouded looks like, confirming that a 1.0 release for the survival game will finally arrive in Spring 2026.

Enshrouded was one of the survival games that blew up in popularity alongside Palworld last January, with Keen Games confirming that it has amassed over 3 million players in one year. Keen Games consistently delivered updates for it throughout 2024, and the same will happen in 2025. Enshrouded's 2025 roadmap kicks off today, January 28, with the Pact of the Flame update. Pact of the Flame adds several useful multiplayer features to Enshrouded, including an in-game text chat, options for proximity or server-wide voice chat, emotes, and a new social menu. On top of that, a first-person camera mode for building and over 80 new items have been added.

Keen Games also released a roadmap of Enshrouded's expected 2025 updates. Throughout this year, new features like an event system, base raids, weather events, the ability to teleport between servers, build sharing, and a new biome are all expected to come to Enshrouded. Following even more updates early next year, we can all expect Enshrouded's development to crescendo with a 1.0 launch next spring. You can check out an image of the full roadmap below to get a better idea of everything that Keen Games is working on right now.

The modding community can give older games a much-needed overhaul, or add an extra challenge to maybe an oversimplistic one. In recent years, we've seen everything from Resident Evil demakes to GTA upgrades--not to mention the vast landscape of Baldur's Gate 3 mods--but a new mod for 1991's Sonic the Hedgehog adjusts the game's visuals in real-time, going back and forth depending on the player's blast processing in the game.

Brandon Sheffield of Necrosoft Games showed how the mod worked on his Bluesky account and did a quick demo.

"Vladikcomper on the SGDK Discord has created an amazing and ridiculous mod for Sonic the Hedgehog (MD) in which quality degrades to different resolutions/numbers of colors unless you fill your blast processing meter up," he said, as the game switched from widescreen to smaller size as the gameplay went on.

New details have come to light about Call of Duty's rumored crossover with Halo that never materialized. TheGhostOfHope, who is a reliable source of unannounced Call of Duty information, said Sledgehammer Games was planning a "huge" collaboration with Halo for 2023's Modern Warfare III. This would have included "various maps" from Halo coming to Call of Duty as multiplayer maps.

After Microsoft bought Activision, many began to theorize that Master Chief would inevitably come to Call of Duty as a playable character. He never has, and many are wondering why. In 2024, it was reported that the supposed collaboration was "scrapped" for "completely unknown reasons." Social media user Alaix says they have screenshots from the collaboration but hasn't released them.

NEW: Sledgehammer Games had plans to do a huge collaboration with Halo with Modern Warfare III which would have added various maps from the Halo franchise. pic.twitter.com/adZofghstG

Before this, Microsoft's Fallout franchise crossed over into Call of Duty, so there was some precedent. Outside of this, Master Chief came to Fortnite years ago.

Dying Light developer Techland has ambitious plans for its zombie-apocalypse series, as the studio is looking to expand the franchise in the future. As part of its 10th-anniversary celebration of the original Dying Light's launch on console and PC, Techland says it'll grow Dying Light across "multiple unannounced projects" and into other forms of media.

"We'll continue the series with multiple unannounced projects and will also go beyond video games with new board games, exclusive merchandise, original webcomic series, and more on the horizon. Our goal is to bring the world of Dying Light to even more people," Techland said in a press statement.

Fans of the open-world zombie-survival games won't have long to wait for the next entry in the series either, as Dying Light: The Beast is scheduled to arrive in Summer 2025. Meanwhile, Techland says that both Dying Light and Dying Light 2 players can expect free updates to those games soon. Dying Light will receive new events and rewards, as well as a visual upgrade and a remastered soundtrack with new music from the game's original composer Paweł Błaszczak.

Microsoft is one of multiple companies looking to strike a deal to take ownership of the popular social media app TikTok, according to United States president Donald Trump. Asked on Monday aboard Air Force One if Microsoft was in the mix to make a deal, Trump told reporters, including the AP, "I would say yes."

In 2020, Microsoft officially announced plans to buy TikTok, which sent the company's share price surging. Microsoft later abandoned its buyout attempt, with CEO Satya Nadella saying the deal was the "strangest thing I've ever worked on." Now, Microsoft may be back at the negotiating table.

Trump said other companies are in the mix to buy TikTok as well, but he didn't name them outright. It was previously reported that Activision founder Bobby Kotick was assembling an investment group to buy TikTok. The AI company Perplexity has also discussed a potential deal that would give the US government a 50% ownership stake in TikTok.