2025 was so stacked with nice video games I missed the free, ass-kicking Christmas replace to its finest singleplayer shooter
The boomer shooter renaissance continues to ferment and flourish with nice new video games every year, and a specific spotlight of final 12 months was Cultic. PC Gamer affiliate editor Ted Litchfield known as it “among the best shooters of 2025” that, even among the many Nightfalls and Turbo Overkills of the world, “distinguishes itself by executing the whole lot at a really excessive degree.”
And there is been no higher time to attempt it than proper after Christmas—er, “Cultmas”—as the sport’s vacation replace got here with a bunch of modifications and a bonus map known as “I will Be Residence For Cultmas.”
As for the modifications I discussed, there’s been a slew of optimization tweaks and modifications to steadiness—burn harm has been completely reworked, for instance, now dealing direct harm quite than requiring a hidden ignite meter to be depleted first. The patch notes state it needs to be simpler to “hose enemies with harm whereas burning to soften them even sooner.” How Christmassy!
I worry I could by no means compensate for all of the boomer shooters I’ve missed at this level, however perhaps that is a superb factor. Even when all of us agreed to cease making videogames tomorrow, I might most likely nonetheless degrade into mud from previous age earlier than I run out of nice video games to play.
Cultic and Cultic: Full Version (the latter of which incorporates each chapters and constitutes the total sport) are in the stores on Steam. The second chapter, launched in 2025 as DLC, is just not required to entry the Cultmas map from the “new sport” menu.