Five Must-Play Video Games for July 2025

Key facts

• Atuel is an interactive documentary without challenges or objectives, designed to be accessible to almost anyone.
• Atuel was created to accompany a documentary film by 12.01 Project about the Atuel River in Argentina.
• In Atuel, players experience being the river, a fish, a cloud, a canid, a bird, and back to the river over 30 minutes.
• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach features antagonist Higgs quoting Kōbō Abe's short story 'The Rope'.
• Hideo Kojima contrasts the rope (connecting) and the stick (repelling), with Death Stranding focusing on the rope.
• Death Stranding 2 problematizes digital platform dependency and the metaverse in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• hate.net is set in a fictional old online multiplayer game where only bots remain in an infinite cycle of violence and spam.
• hate.net draws inspiration from 1990s first-person shooters and speed-focused games like Devil Daggers and HYPER DEMON.
• Many Nights a Whisperer follows a Dreamer chosen to perform a ritual every ten years using a slingshot made from community hair.
• The game prevents reloading saves, forcing players to live with the outcome of the final shot.
• Mosa Lina: Second Layer is a major update to Mosa Lina, now on consoles, featuring random levels and tools with no guarantee of solvability.
• Mosa Lina embraces the limitations of computational simulations, offering no penalties for skipping levels and no rewards for success.