It had begun to feel like an endurance test by the end, but nonetheless, like the sucker I am, I watched the Stranger Things finale last week. And spoiler warning: I’m going to talk about it in general terms in this newsletter. Because approximately 80% of the final season comprised twentysomething “teenagers” explaining things to each other while using random 1980s objects to illustrate convoluted plans and plot points, my expectations were not high. After an interminable hour, finally, something fun happens, as the not-kids arm themselves with machine guns and molotovs and face off against a monstrously gigantic demon-crab. Aha, I thought – the final boss battle!
The fight was like something out of Monster Hunter, all scale and spectacle with a touch of desperation. For a very long time, video games sought to imitate cinema. Now cinema (and TV) often feels like a video game. The structure of Stranger Things’ final season reminded me a lot of Resident Evil: long periods of walking slowly through corridors, with characters exchanging plot information aloud on their way to the action, and occasional explosions of gunfire, screeching monsters or car chases. Those long periods of relative inaction are much more tolerable when you’ve got a controller in your hands. I am all for TV and film embracing the excitement, spectacle and dynamism of video games, but do they have to embrace the unnecessary side-quests and open-world bloat, too?
The reciprocally influential relationship between games, TV and film has developed a lot in the last few years. A generation of gen X and elder-millennial gamers have recently aged into creative and commissioning power in these industries. That’s why we’re getting people such as Jonathan Nolan heading up an excellent Fallout TV show, and indeed why all video-game-to-screen adaptations have become dramatically less terrible in the past five years or so. It also inevitably means that the boundaries between interactive and non-interactive entertainment are becoming more porous: where previously game-makers were heavily influenced by film (primarily but not exclusively Alien/s and Star Wars), now that relationship works both ways. Most Marvel movies look and feel like a video game to me, and not just because they’re all full of computer-generated graphics. It’s the mood and pace of them.
Edge of Tomorrow remains the most video-game-ish movie I’ve ever seen: its premise revolves around dying and respawning, trying out different things on each run. It’s a sci-fi roguelike of a film. I wanted to play Mad Max: Fury Road the entire time I was watching it, and John Wick 4 was literally a fighting-game boss rush. When film critics say that a film feels like a video game, they often mean it disparagingly; a lot of cinephiles still see games as the lower form. When I say a movie feels like a video game, it’s a compliment – unless it feels like a boring video game.
This was the problem, for me, with Stranger Things: every episode felt like loading up an open-world game that I hadn’t played for a few months. More and more characters kept appearing, and I didn’t remember or care who most of them were. Between the Upside Down, Vecna’s mindscape, real-world Hawkins and an entirely new dimension introduced in the last couple of episodes, there were too many locations to keep track of. Every episode brought on the mild despair I feel when I think I’m near the end of an overlong game, only to discover yet another entirely new area to explore. The painfully long epilogue, meanwhile, was rivalled only by Red Dead Redemption 2’s interminable post-game hours. Please, just let it end already!
Of course, in modern pop culture, nothing is ever allowed to end properly, not if it’s still making money. I’m surprised there’s been no word of an official Stranger Things video game tie-in (outside of a retro-style smartphone beat-em-up from 2019). Come to think of it, we don’t see many of these kinds of licensed games any more: back in the 00s and 2010s, most major movies and TV shows launched with an interactive accompaniment. Presumably this is because of the spiralling cost of game development – you can’t knock out a mediocre PlayStation 2 game in nine months any more – but also, when TV shows feel so much like games, do we really need an adaptation anyway?
What to play
The first game I’ve finished in 2026 is Indika, a surreal and mildly horrible game about a young nun questioning her faith and having conversations with the devil as she goes on an extremely strange journey through bleak, snow-covered villages and abandoned factories with an escaped convict. There are much-needed flashes of humour in here, but also stuff about religion, control and sexuality that I haven’t seen in a video game before. It’s also part of a small wave of games (see Baby Steps) that mocks gamer mentality: there are points, but they are pointless; explore off the beaten path and you will find something useless and inconsequential rather than a secret or something fun. And that’s if you find anything at all.
Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch
Estimated playtime: five hours
What to read
David Rosen, the co-founder of Sega and an influential figure in the history of arcade video games, died on Christmas Day at 95. Keith Stuart writes about his very interesting life.
Hollow Knight: Silksong has picked up a game-of-the-year trophy in PC games storefront Steam’s publicly voted awards. The Sit Back and Relax award was won by something I’ve never heard of: RV There Yet. I have bought it out of curiosity.
My book about Nintendo is out next month! It’s called Super Nintendo and it’s a lively cultural history of the most beloved company in games, based on 20 years of interviews (and 30 years as a player). You can support the Guardian by ordering it through the Guardian Bookshop, and I’ll also be doing launch events around the UK throughout February.
What to click
‘I wanted that Raiders of the Lost Ark excitement – you could die any minute’
From K-pop and The Traitors to Grand Theft Auto VI: your A-Z of the biggest culture of 2026
Question Block
In a recent Pushing Buttons, Keza mentioned that games have consolidated into five established mega-franchises and I was trying to work out which franchises these are? I guessed GTA, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Minecraft and EA FC, but don’t have huge confidence in that!
You’re not far off. According to data from Circana, the top five most played games on PlayStation 5 this year were exactly the same as last year: Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto 5 (including Online), Roblox and Minecraft. All of these games are five to 10-plus years old. This stagnation at the top is why every big publisher has spent millions in the last decade trying to create live-service games, and why most of them have flopped. Last year on Steam, meanwhile, only 14% of all playtime was spent on new games released in 2025. Any developer releasing something new, be they blockbuster or indie, is competing for a sliver of a sliver of players’ time and money. These stats explain a lot about why the games industry is where it is right now, and why there’s such a bleak mood among many developers.
