We’re firmly in that weird period between Christmas and New Year’s where the desire to sit around and do nothing is pitted against a restless energy to get out and explore.

You’ll be pleased to hear that doing nothing won out. Well, not nothing. Sitting around and playing the PS5 while in a food-induced stupor would be more accurate. But for that description to be accurate you’re going to have to see some pictures of food.

The brined and spatchcocked 5kg turkey (over)cooked in 80 minutes which is incredible given its size. If I was being more careful I should’ve taken it out ten to fifteen minutes before and tested the internal temperature, but I was pretty relaxed about the process this year and just rolled with it. It wasn’t quite as juicy as last time but still tasted great.

The orange chocolate tiramasu trifle also turned out well, although the flavours were more subtle than I had expected and developed over several days. As pleasant as it was, I wouldn’t rush back to recreate it. I preferred the coffee jelly trifle a few years back. I baked wheaten bread for breakfast on Christmas day and topped it with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Overall it was a more simple approach than last year with a single dessert rather than three, but still too much food. Tis the season.

Gaming

We have played more games in the last week than the several months leading up to Christmas combined. It was great being able to play games on the PS5 out of the box (of course having unboxed it a week prior helped) and we made the most of the time sitting around to get stuck into a few titles. I have played a little of a lot of games including Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Stray, and Murdered: Soul Suspect.

Stray has been the standout of the holiday for me. The game follows a stray cat in a post-apocalyptic world populated primarily by robots. The titular stray falls down into an underground city and, in trying to get back to the surface, uncovers the story behind the demise of humanity and the attempts of the robotic population to anthropomorphise.

The animation of the cats is unlike anything I’ve seen before. Near photorealistic graphics combined with the fluid cat movements is an unreal combination. Seeing the clunky movements of animals in other games underlines just how much the developers have put into the animal realism on show. Add to that the ability to do very cat-like things such as clawing up carpets and walls, knocking paint cans off ledges, and curling up in a cosy corner, and it makes for a really fun game.

Much of the gameplay is exploration based. Finding things for individuals and collecting information. Early on you help to free a robotic drone, B-12, who joins you on the quest to return to the surface, inhabiting a small backpack that you carry around. B-12 translates for you and allows you to collect items while you help them to recover memories lost many years ago.

Murdered: Soul Suspect

Now to jump way back to 2014 and a murder-mystery game that I remember hearing hype about prior to release, but that faded relatively quickly. Murdered: Soul Suspect stars Ronan O’Connor, a reckless police detective who is thrown out of a window and shot to death at the beginning of the game. That Ronan was dead to begin with is no significant stumbling block in our enjoyment of the game, for this is a supernatural thriller experience. We are thrown into the world of the dead where Ronan is left a ghost inhabiting the real world (in this case, Salem, Massachusetts) while he resolves his unfinished business. Presumably this is the investigation of his own murder at the hands of a serial killer plaguing the usually sleepy town.

The gameplay is third person perspective, and you walk around crime scenes and other locations possessing the living and interacting with other ghosts to collect information about crimes in the area. There are collectible items which offer more story information and some detail particular crimes (such as the finding of a body in a hotel water tank). Once you have collected enough information, you make decisions on what the most relevant facts are to the case in order to progress the story. This is where the game falls down somewhat, as these are often overly simplistic.

For example, “What might trigger memories of the murder for her?” and we would select “The sound of breaking glass” thinking this might be referring to an overheard noise which led to some attention in the direction of the crime, and some relevant information being divulged. Nope, the answer will be “The murder”. This requires no real investigative skill and does the player a disservice. The stories themselves are compelling enough that we will keep playing, but there are little niggles here and there which break the flow of the experience.

We will frequently miss an object that requires interaction because they require you to look in precisely the correct place, rather than just being in the approximate area. This kind of attention detection for lack of a better term has been solved in almost every other game of this vintage, and does make the gameplay feel somewhat dated. In this way, although it was released in 2014, the game feels more akin to something from the late 2000s. That’s not to put you off it completely. These are by no means gamebreaking problems and it is worth checking out if you’re at all intrigued. It just so happened to be in my back catalogue on the PS4 and I thought I’d finally give it a try.

The Rest

I have played a little Hogwarts legacy and so far, it’s quite enjoyable. I’m not deeply embedded in the Potterverse so it doesn’t carry as much meaning to me, but the world that I have seen appears well fleshed out with plenty to do and excellent theming. The game is graphically impressive too.

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 is finally playable for me and it feels like the game I should have been playing in 2020. Realistically even the PS4 Pro was insufficient to run a game as demanding as Cyberpunk, and playing it on the PS5 shows it off at a beautiful 60 fps. It can run at higher resolution than 1080p but the lower framerate feels detrimental to the overall experience. I am looking forward to getting to the Phantom Liberty expansion.

Deathloop warrants a post by itself. I first tried this mind bending time loop game on my new laptop back in January following the Great Fire of 2023 (in which the Dell Studio Gaming laptop met its demise) but it couldn’t produce a decent enough framerate to make it playable. Needless to say, Deathloop on the PS5 looks beautiful and plays beautifully. It’s still a weird game that I’m just getting to grips with, but promises plenty more hours of fun and intrigue.