A lot of people refer to the new wave of games with more focused mechanics, no sprawling worlds, a more linear approach and gameplay-first design as a “return to the PS2 era”, but I beg to differ. I believe we’re living the never-realized dream that the Dreamcast promised us.
Why the Dreamcast and not the PS2? Because the Dreamcast got there first. It was basically an arcade board you could plug into your TV, and Sega filled it with games that were short, loud and built around one great idea: Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Rez, Space Channel 5. It was also where a big publisher let its teams get weird, with things like Seaman or Shenmue that nobody had asked for. Then it was gone, discontinued in 2001 after barely two years in the West, before any of those ideas had time to grow. The PS2 picked them up, had a whole decade to refine them and got the credit. The Dreamcast walked so the PS2 could run, and that's why I call it a dream that was never realized: we only got to see the first steps.
I want to draw attention to five games that came out this year, four of them from big publishers and one from a small indie team. They embody what the Dreamcast stood for: the arcade at home, weird and experimental ideas, curveballs thrown at existing franchises, and reimaginings of what something could be on newer, more powerful hardware.
It all began when I was playing Ridge Racer 2 for the PSP on my PS Vita through Adrenaline. This is as focused as arcade racing games get: it has just one mechanic, drifting, and it’s polished to the extreme. The game features several cars that behave differently while drifting, so it never feels dull. Never mind that the game can be beaten in just 5–6 hours; it’s basically a portable arcade cabinet. It made me nostalgic for the era when games came in small packages but with high polish, when development time was spent making sure the one thing that made a game great was impeccable. And that’s what brought me to the first game I’ll be talking about.
Denshattack #
This game is probably my GOTY, so I’m sure I’ll be overhyping it a bit, but it really is that good. It’s an excellent blend of Tony Hawk and Jet Set Radio with a Japanese flavour (despite being made in Catalonia!). Here you are Emi, one of the Denshattackers, rebels and outcasts who live on the margins of society doing tricks with their trains. Your objective is simple: chain tricks, don’t fall off the tracks and defeat the evil corporation. This is the perfect example of what I want to convey here: if it had come out on the Dreamcast, it would be hailed as one of the best games of all time. It knows how to capture the magic of “just one more level”, of challenging yourself to get a better score and reach for that elusive gold medal after you missed one collectible. Denshattack keeps layering new mechanics on top of the ones it has already shown, so it keeps you engaged; every few levels something new comes at you. And the narrative captures the angst and the need for rebellion against the establishment and corporate overlords that the early 2000s brought, when a world of subcultures came into the spotlight thanks to the advent of the internet. Denshattack takes maybe 12 hours to beat if you don’t chase high scores; it knows when to end, and it rewards you for trying your best and coming back for extra flavour in the form of collectibles. This is my favourite Dreamcast game that never came out on that console.
Star Fox (2026) #
But it doesn’t stop there. Some big-budget games, like the next one, Star Fox (2026), also aim for that high-score-oriented gameplay. Here the connection is easier to draw: it’s a reinterpretation of the classic Nintendo 64 game, and it surprisingly stays true to the original. The premise is quite simple: each time you play, you go through a run of seven levels, each with its own secret exit if you meet the conditions. This opens up what are called the three paths: easy, normal and hard, each with its own levels depending on whether you find the aforementioned exits. At the end of a run you get a report with your score. It really is that simple, but it can be so addictive to complete the secondary objectives, collect medals and chase a completionist save. All of this lives within a two-hour videogame! It shows that the critical path isn’t the meat and potatoes here; it’s the appetizer. This means Star Fox isn’t for everyone. Some will feel that full price for a two-hour game is a rip-off, and that’s OK! It wasn’t made for mass appeal; it was made for the Star Fox niche. And you know what? That niche is bigger than it seems. A company like Nintendo dug up an IP assumed dead and revived it to showcase it to a new audience that has only lived through the era of big-budget AAA games, and they’re loving it.
Ace Combat 8 #
Speaking of flying, shooting and high scores, the next game is Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. This year I got into Ace Combat; as with most of the new fan base, Ace Combat 7 and the mighty praise it received were what pulled me into the franchise. Ace Combat, for those unaware of the saga, is an arcade flight simulator. Here the precision of dogfighting is waived in favour of high-G manoeuvres, impossible turns that would make a real pilot faint. But that doesn’t mean it’s a soulles arcade shooter: the Ace Combat games feature a rich story set in a distorted version of our world. This game is the most fun I've ever had flying a plane close to Mach 1, with a narrative that strives to show us the horrors of war from the point of view of someone who doesn't want to be there but is forced to participate: the ever-silent player. Once again, it has one core mechanic, flying, that has been polished over and over for more than 30 years now. So how does it keep you engaged? With a surprisingly large variety of objectives, ranging from high-score missions to escorts, without leaving the dogfights aside; some of them seriously left me out of breath. Once again I circle back to the length of the game as a measure of how concise it is: clocking in at around 18 hours, it’s a medium-sized package that I won’t be forgetting soon.
Resident Evil Requiem & Pragmata #
And finally, Capcom. They’ve released a good number of amazing games this year, all of them drawing from the publisher’s 2000s golden era. But I want to focus on two of them that have a lot in common despite looking so different on the surface: Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem. Look closer at their cores and you’ll see they stem from the same root: linear, action-focused games with over-the-top narratives that explore new concepts that would otherwise seem risky for a big game these days.
In Requiem you play as Grace and as Leon, but here’s the catch: Grace’s levels are horror-focused, with slow gameplay, careful item management and a general vibe that makes me think of Code Veronica on the Dreamcast, while Leon’s sections are high-octane, fast-paced action sequences with little room to breathe. This is more akin to the maligned era of the franchise, like Resident Evil 6, but here it works flawlessly. The risk pays off because of the juxtaposition: the relief we feel after the accumulated tension of playing as Grace, and the whiplash back to crawling when a Leon segment ends. This is the kind of experimentation we no longer see, but here it makes a comeback, all within a small, self-contained package that breaks what we think we know about a given franchise.
Meanwhile, in Pragmata you are a lone survivor accompanied by a little robot girl you’ll start caring for the moment she appears on screen; it’s a sort of parental relationship that mirrors the one Leon has with his companions in the Resident Evil franchise. Essentially, it's Resident Evil without the horror: what if you kept the survival and swapped the horror for sci-fi? Dead Space already gave us sci-fi horror, but as the franchise went mainstream it lost its soul. Pragmata is full of light and optimistic about the future, yet it's careful to deliver an experience that still keeps you tense. It gives me back a feeling I thought was lost: being alone, looking for collectibles, using my ingenuity to solve a puzzle or scavenge for ammo. Both of these games show us a different future for videogames that I believe will keep on happening. Maybe not every game needs to be GTA VI; maybe there’s a glimmer of hope for other kinds of works of art that don’t need to bankrupt a studio.
And that’s the whole point: smaller games, iterating on ideas, taking risks and fostering a culture of creative freedom within studios. Let the weird, niche and flawed packages that contain great concepts flourish instead of discarding them for not selling a gazillion copies. That’s what the Dreamcast promised us. We have the technology; let’s see how far an idea can go.
Thanks for reading!
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