Gaming Respawn Plays (January 2026)

The year 2026 is upon us, and with it comes the first Gaming Respawn Plays of the new year. We have a lot of cool and interesting games coming to us this year, so we expect this feature to show off a lot of these new titles as we play through them. But we will also, of course, continue to use this feature to take a look back at some of our older games that we like to revisit between playthroughs of all the newer ones. In fact, this month’s feature mostly focuses on older titles we’ve been playing (some more recent, others less so). Join us for Gaming Respawn Plays (January 2026).

Matthew Wojciow

Ghost of Yotei, Split Fiction, and Fallout: New Vegas

This month has been spent mainly playing all the games that I was lucky to receive as Christmas presents. The majority of that time has been given to Ghost of Yotei. From minute 1, I have been hooked, and while there are some frustrations with the combat difficulty, I just look forward to sitting down and spending an hour or two hunting the Yotei Six every day. The other thing in the game that I am almost addicted to is hunting the bounties.

While the constant ronin encounters get annoying, it is fun to just take them out.

The other major game I have been playing this month is Split Fiction with my partner. We played through It Takes Two a year or two ago now, so the next Hazelight title was always going to be a must play for us. It is definitely a relationship tester, and we already have preferences for different parts of the game. For me, I love the sci-fi levels, whilst my partner loves the fantasy levels, maybe because she loves The Lord of the Rings, I don’t know.

Lastly, over the last couple of weeks, I have delved back into the world of Fallout: New Vegas, with the second season of the TV show being a weekly watch at home.

Peter Keen

Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise

I’ll start with what I HAVEN’T been playing that I thought I would. There is a lot of chatter online at the moment about how Battlefield 6 is losing its player count fast. I didn’t think I was one of those people who thought I was losing interest. I have played the game since launch for 200 hours, plus the 40 hours I spent on the beta before that. I had started to tick off the multiplayer trophies I needed to go for a platinum push. With only two online trophies to get now, one trophy has stopped me in my tracks and has highlighted that, for now at least, I’ve had enough. The trophy in question is “A Joyful Nurse“. To get this, you need to take up the role of a Support player and revive 1,996 other players in multiplayer. Admittedly, I haven’t played the Support role as much as I have the Engineer, but after nearly 200 hours, I’ve only got around 800 revives. Apart from the platinum trophy, this trophy is the one the fewest BF6 players have at just 0.6%. The record amount of revives I got in one game was 69. Even if I hit that many revives a game, it’s still going to take me far longer to get this trophy than any other. In short, trying to get this one trophy is sucking the fun out of the game for me. I go back to my preferred role as Engineer, have a great game or two, but then get bored again as I’ve done the same for so long, so it’s all becoming a bit tedious, and I think I need to break from it to get my mojo back.

So then, I thought I’d get into Ghost of Yotei. After really enjoying the game for around 10 hours, it suddenly turned my PS5 off. No warning, nothing, just “piff”, shutdown. “That’s odd,” I thought. Played the game for another 10 hours, then again, “piff”, shutdown. This time, though, my PS5 didn’t want to power up again for over 10 minutes. During that time, I thought my PS5 had died. While this was going on, I searched online to find that LOTS of other gamers have had exactly the same experience playing the game. So, rather than my PS5 getting ruined, I stopped playing until such time a patch comes to fix this.

After that, I thought I’d really get back into Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds and push through it. I even started to stream the game for an hour a day. In 6 streams (just over 6 hours of gameplay), I didn’t win one online race. I’ve tried everything, but the worst of it was, not only did I not win, a lot of the time I wasn’t, to be honest, even close. It’s not much fun playing a game that, deep in your heart, you know you’ll never win. The best I managed was getting 2nd place. I figured out why I didn’t like it, though. It’s because certain styles of players drive with the complete intention of bumping deliberately into others to get boosts. Obviously, I could try this myself, but I hate the style as, going forward, you just drift left and right and take up the road. Getting bumped off track, or out of the way of the boost you were trying to get, or a side route you were aiming for, after a while gets really dull. The game is also utter chaos and doesn’t have a great ranking system based on drivers’ abilities or results. It’s based on their levels. So, if like me, you’re at a level over 1,300 simply because you’ve played the game for hours but are utterly rubbish, you’ll end up being stuck in lobbies with people who are at ranks 10,000! So, I stopped playing that.

I then tried to get into playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (clue there is the word “tried.”). I’ve given it a good blast and nearly made it 50% into the campaign, but it just isn’t grabbing me. Don’t get me wrong, it is a fantastic game in many ways, but it’s just not making me look forward to turning on my PS5 to carry on with the game.

So, for a week or two, I’ve been in a bit of a funk of not really playing anything…until I thought I’d fire up an old PS4 game from RGG Studio (of Yakuza series fame). That game is Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise.

The gratuitous violence, the language, the blood, the action, the girls, it’s all just what I needed to forget the stresses of the world when I can sit down and play a game. Isn’t that what video games are supposed to be? Escapism? Add to this, anyone that knows me knows how much of an RGG Studio fanboy I am, and they will be pleased to hear that the level of polish on this old game is superb!

So, for now, I’m happily sticking my thumbs into the sides of people’s heads, twirling them around to destroy other enemies, flinging them away, then watching as they explode from within. You know, nice, wholesome gaming stuff 🙂