Right before Christmas time, when I started putting my Game of the Year list together, I had an odd realisation: not only was not a single game on the list something I played on console, but I didn't remember playing any console games through all of 2025.
I mean, I'd dabbled. You can't work in this job without picking up a controller at some point, and so if you were being a pedantic asshole you could say I "played" Mario Kart World and Ghost of Yotei at a friend's place. But both were for a matter of minutes, literally to check them out; to say I'd played them would be like sitting through the first four minutes of Fellowship of the Ring then saying you'd seen the movie.
It was an odd thing to reckon with. Partly because it must surely have been the first year I hadn't properly played a console game since the 1980s, which would have been a hell of a run, but mostly because I quickly realised that instead of being some life-changing realisation, shaking the very foundations of my understanding of this medium and my place in it, it ended up as some harmless trivia. I just didn't really care. It was 2025, you can play The Last of Us on PC now, who gives a shit what machine you play a game on.
Not that it really mattered, because on December 25 I opened a present from my kids and it was a copy of Gran Turismo 7 for the PlayStation 5.
The most perfect game to land in this situation, given the fact it's probably the most console-ass AAA title left on the planet that doesn't have the word Nintendo on the box. Sony has put a lot of PlayStation games on PC over the last few years, from Horizon to God of War to Ghost of Tsushima, but not this. Never this. Gran Turismo IS PlayStation, it is born of the console; PC racing games are a different breed, and Polyphony must rightly reckon that this experience, a quintessential Japanese console game right down to the music and menus, just wouldn't work there. So if I wanted to play Gran Turismo 7, and I did, it was going to have to be on the PlayStation 5.
Why now? This game came out in 2020! Well, I'm not ashamed to say that while I am an enemy of brands and the idea of loving brands, I have one glaring and fatal exception: the electric car manufacturer Polestar. I'm very into the company's focus on both design and sustainability. I own a Polestar 2 and it's incredible, but I want a Polestar 5 more than I have ever wanted a car in my life. Thing is, it's priced at roughly AUD$250,000 (see above), so it's a car I'll likely never get to even drive, let alone park in my garage. So the closest I'll probably ever get is driving one in a mostly-realistic driving video game, where it recently arrived as part of an update that doubled as a marketing exercise for Polestar (see below). A cheap and obvious marketing trick, but they got me.
I'm still not buying the car (unless?!?!), but PlayStation in particular got me, because I love this game. I've always been a fan of Gran Turismo for the simple reason that while it's got its fair share of car tweaks and spare part settings, the main purpose of the series is to serve as an interactive car brochure, a digital exploration of the fancier end of automotive culture. This isn't a driving game with radio DJs and a neon interface, nor is it Assetto Corsa; this one goes out to everyone who obsesses over driving a car that costs more than an apartment, but who doesn't mind having to drive a Mazda 3 for a few laps first. Like me.
To give you an idea of the game's tone, if you haven't already played it: Your main source of progression in GT7 is visiting a lovely little cafe in the woods and getting missions from its friendly owner, while a camera pans lovingly over whatever car you're driving at the time and a succession of automotive celebrities and designers share trivia with you about some random BMW from the 1970s. For anyone who is into the looks and history of cars, this is sicko stuff, it's perfect.
It's also great that despite all the advances in video game horsepower over the last three decades, this is still very much a Gran Turismo game, with the same pros and cons I could have listed after a few hours with GT2. It feels "real" but also weirdly sterile, and the sound effects are realistic but also empty, but the handling and races are all honed so perfectly that none of that really matters. The urge to win a few more bucks so you can buy an old Ferrari overpowers every other complaint I have about spending more time in menus than on the track, or the game still somehow not having a proper damage system. About the only things that have changed since 1997 are that the graphics have got better while the music has got worse.
Not that I bought too many Ferraris; I wanted this game for the Polestar 5, and after a little grind to unlock it I got my hands on it and never looked back. This thing flies, especially with upgrades, and while I'll never own one I can now at least say I've come as close as I ever will, from getting to hear its electric whirr through my soundbar to panning the in-game camera around its interior and leaving its cinematic driving videos to play on my TV like an aspirational screensaver.
For the sake of trivia, it would have been interesting to make it through all of 2025 without properly playing a console game. But for the sake of my own enjoyment, I'm very glad I broke that streak with just a few days to spare.
