2025 in Virtual Postcards

The only general addition to video game console controllers in several decades now is the share button. Now a relic itself as I think we’re kinda collectively done with the social-media- through-your-gaming-device experiment: the PlayStation’s janky native streaming seemingly never took off, Xbox arguably peaked with the 360 dashboard and avatars and you need to daisy chain a whole series of antiquated devices to get stuff off your Switch SD card.

However, I’m interested in why it is we choose to capture those digital postcards. I use the snapshot button way, way more than I would have guessed and for the most part those images go nowhere. Part of my motivation, and I know this is going to age me one thousand human years by typing it out, is because I still remember a time where if you wanted to rewatch a cool cutscene that plays 34 hours into an RPG, the only way of doing so was creating save slots on physical memory cards (normally at a fixed save point) just before it played. You definitely couldn’t easily find the footage online and ripping high quality video and footage from a gaming device wasn’t for the masses.

But why do we do it at all? I used to think that, like the old school postcard you’d buy from a museum/highway giant ball of yarn/natural monument by owning an image of the thing you’d been to, you were authenticating, with a token, that you’d been there. These days, of course, when many have a camera in their pocket at all times, photography has taken on a new meaning. We’re all digitally documenting our lives but in most instances, nobody is going to ever see those photos (or the hours and hours of footage you see captured by those odd folks walking around with their phone aloft recording every single minute in shaky cam, clamorous audio, warts and all glory).

There is a small but dedicated community of gamers who specialise in in-game photography and many games build in suites of tools to get the most out of pulling out the virtual selfie stick, complete with filters, exposure settings, focal distances and for some games ‘stickers’ to jazz up your screenshots with.

Here’s a curated, navel-gazing selection of some of the moments I decided in a split second to capture from video games in 2025 with a bit of psychoanalysis about why thrown in for good effect. Welcome to my gaming holiday slideshow. I hope you have a spare three hours.

Ah, this place. This screenshot is from the last sequence of the Lost Archives from Assassin’s Creed Revelations. My wife and I have been playing through all the Assassin’s Creed games at a punctuated pace of tens of hours at a time every six to eight months. I remember at the time these games came out, one of the big complaints with Assassin’s Creed was that the hiding in haystacks, shanking templars in beautifully rendered historic metropolissssseses was fun but then the modern day, French metrosexual, Animus bullshit, wasn’t. I can confirm this was true and remains true.

The Lost Archives goes even further than that, though – as a stand alone mode accessible from the menu screen, it’s a completely different kind of game. Instead of scaling buildings, swinging on lanterns and parachuting around in third person, the Lost Archives is a first person, very slow walking simulator and for some reason you have the ability to drop ghostly tetrominoes about the place. Even worse still, you need to use those blocks for janky, imprecise platforming.

There is some incomprehensible thread that supposedly justifies all this but it’s a pretty big ask asking people to follow this childishly vague, pretending-to-be-poignant bit of the story told through frustrating gameplay sequences interspersed with hundreds of hours of open world gameplay. It must have been even harder to follow back when these games were coming out.

Quick sidebar: Coincidentally, this has been a bit of a year of janky French platforming. In addition to the Lost Archives, both Expedition 33 and Pokemon ZA have sections in them where the challenge comes from needing to make precise and finickety movements with imprecise controls and dodgy physics and collision detection. It bugs the shit out of me but I can’t quite put my finger on why. A lot of the challenge of video games comes from the difference between seeing and wanting to do something with your character/vehicle and then executing it. If that were completely removed then all we’d be left with are visual novels and walking sims. However, I think what annoys me about janky platforming is when failing doesn’t feel like my fault. Of course, there’s a whole genre of games now based on deliberately bad controls – your QWOPs, Octopus Dads and the like but the comedy sweetens the blow. The same is not true the 33rd time the cutscene plays before trying to race across scaffolding/play beach ball/dodge laser walls over lava.

If getting through the Lost Archives just to finish the story wasn’t bad enough, there are a couple of horrible trophies tied to threading the floaty physics needle on two of the toughest sections without failing. Now, if you’re the kind of person who is motivated by trophies and achievements or the kind of person who can’t stand to see the progress bar sit at 87% complete forever more then you’re going to want to get them, aren’t you? The two trophies “Impress Warren Vidic” and “Cross Styx without dying,” bronze trophies by the way, demand doing two gruelling platforming sequences without failing. “Impressing Warren Vidic” can thankfully be obtained by exploiting a glitch instead of making it through a proper gauntlet of rotating laser walls, digital lava, and shifting platforms where wrestling the camera and character positioning are half the challenge. The other, “Cross Styx without dying” is, on paper, much simpler. In the last memory sequence of the Lost Archive, after dodging a laser into a pit, creating some floating platforms which are moved along by pixel snow through lava floor laser corridors, you unlock the ability to create a trampoline block. The challenge is to bounce across the Styx by dropping these floating trampolines in bounded boxes. I think at a minimum you can do it in a dozen jumps, however, fall into the Styx you have to restart the whole level in order to get the achievement.

I remember that it took me a few goes to get over the ‘Styx’ first time around, the game seemingly acknowledging that the shitty platforming is difficult – it has a generous number of checkpoints that it will restart you at should you be on the wrong end of a laser or digital lava. So at first I just try to earnestly do it all in one go. The sequence goes like this:

Start the sequence, listen to a gets-annoying-quick voiceover, walk very, very slowly around a corner to a pulsing laser you need to hop over or dodge through into a pit. As you fall, you have to drop a tetromino which will start to sink, hop off that onto a ledge into another pit with lasers for a floor, drop a tetromino which then gets pushed forward toward two laser walls which open and close like jaws. Time it right and you get through to another chamber with a static horizontal laser wall across the bottom half and a row of lasers that moves forward and backward on the top. Here you need to position your tetromino so that you’re high enough to be able to jump over the lower wall whilst the top wall is at the back. The next chamber has a row of vertical yellow lasers moving back and forth that don’t immediately destroy your blocks but do wear them down over time. The exit is high up so you have to keep stacking blocks and moving up, up, up whilst the lasers slowly destroy them. At the top there’s a long drop with lava at the bottom where you can’t drop blocks until right at the bottom so you have to fall down far enough and drop a block beneath you just before you hit the lava. Then there’s a corridor with glowing red graffiti and an archway which when you walk through you unlock the trampoline block. From there you drop a trampoline, bounce upwards and have to do this two more times to come out on the bank of the Styx. From here, it’s a simple drop a trampoline, bounce really high, drop a platform to stand on, reposition and then jump to the next spot. That’s it. That’s all you need to do.

The first section before you even get to the river Styx is easy enough but not a cake walk. I get through all that eventually. Do two jumps over the Styx and fail. Time to restart.

At this point I need to explain a bit about crossing the Styx. In this memory, the gimmick is that you can’t drop blocks anywhere unlike all the previous memories in the Lost Archives. You are limited to dropping them within areas bounded by white lines. A further complication is that within some of these boxes there is a slight current that will push any blocks you drop in one direction. Furthermore, dropping a block whilst you are hurtling through space requires a bit of timing. If you have too much forward momentum, you drop the block below and behind you. So you have to bounce, position yourself to trajectory through the block-dropping box and then drop a platform so you land on it.

After another three unsuccessful attempts, realising it wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought, I hit up the internet just to check the requirements for the trophy. Now Revelations came out in 2011, so I was totally reliant on the generosity of online communities over a decade ago creating guides and tips on how to do this one. The wisdom, it seems, is that in order to get the trophy, you can fail at any point up to getting to the bank of the Styx, however, any failure after this point requires a restart.

I put about four hours into trying to do this last one and I was toying with lying to you that I eventually did it, but I didn’t. It became a Wall(™). If you’ve ever hit a Wall(™) in video games, you’ll be familiar with the pattern. Your best run will probably be the second or third time you try to do it. Then you get progressively worse, failing in new ways and places. Then you get too up in your own head about it. My attempts when something like this:

Die at the hop laser.