If streaming services’ year-in-review campaigns have shown us anything, it’s that we’ve spent a staggering amount of time drowning out the hum of everyday life with music, podcasts and audio series. And with some incredible new releases this year, we were really eatin’ good. Here are some of the Engadget team’s favorite things we listened to in 2025.
If you’ve been shocked by how much you spend on streaming services lately, you’re not alone.
IO Interactive's James Bond simulator 007 First Light has been delayed until May 27, 2026. It was supposed to come out in March. The company says two-month delay is for polish and refinement, which is fine by me. I'd always rather wait a bit longer for a better end product.
Over the past two years, the Nex Playground has carved out a niche for itself with kids and parents alike. It's a small box that sits in front of your TV and uses a camera, along with computer vision AI processing, to track your movement for interactive games. Think of it like a simplified version of Microsoft's Kinect (RIP), with a bit of the local multiplayer we see from the original Wii.
Anna's Archive, the open-source search engine for shadow libraries, says it scraped Spotify's entire library of music. The group acquired metadata for around 256 million tracks, with 86 million actual songs, and is just under 300TB in total size.
The Indie Game Awards has stripped Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 of two major awards, including Game of the Year and Debut Game. This is due to developer Sandfall Interactive's use of generative AI, as reported by Mashable.
Gamers who prefer physical copies of their favorite titles may be getting a major win with the Switch 2.
From indies like Silksong, to AAAs like Ghost of Yotei, and everything in between, 2025 truly had it all, and is likely to go down in the history books as one of the best years in gaming. But these are the games that felt truly special to the Engadget team.
The creators of the Hitman series have honed their style of- open-ended and spectacle-driven sandboxes across several games, and now they're taking their signature immersive gameplay to the world of James Bond. With 007 First Light, developer IO Interactive is crafting an origin story for the globetrotting British spy, showing how he undertook daring missions at the start of his career to eventually become the world's most infamous agent.