Build a base with friends on an alien planet.

Is it just me or do we ring in each new gaming year with a smash-hit co-op game, usually one that's pretty reasonably priced?

Maybe it's that January arrives to see us flush with holiday cash and looking to link up with friends instead of spending more time with relatives, but the first couple months of the year always seem to be dominated by surprisingly huge co-op hits.

My incontrovertible evidence:

• 2025: REPO (February): 271,571 concurrent players
• 2024: Palworld (January): 2,101,867 concurrents
• 2023: Sons of the Forest (February): 414,257 concurrents
• 2022: *crickets*
• 2021: Valheim (February): 502,387 concurrents

Admittedly I couldn't really find something that fits for 2022. (Lost Ark blew up huge in February 2022 to the tune of 1,325,305 concurrent players, but it's a free-to-play MMO so that feels like cheating.) Still, the trend is mostly true: early in the year there's almost always some big co-op hit that busts the doors off Steam.

These games are usually pretty inexpensive, especially in comparison to the eye-watering $70 price tags of some games these days, and they're often early access, survival-ish, basebuilder-y games. I hereby declare this an official trend and an annual tradition.

I'm bringing this up because, wouldn't you know it? StarRupture, the co-op sci-fi basebuilder from Creepy Jar, makers of the excellent Green Hell, is out in early access on January 6. And for me, it fits the bill for a potential early-year co-op smash.

First, it's pretty darn cheap: StarRupture's base price is a mere $20, and there's a launch discount of 20% so you can jump in for just $16. I feel like the pricing floor has risen right along with the ceiling, so games that would have been $20 a couple of years ago are now going for $30. That makes this a nice and welcome surprise for a new game, even one in early access.

Second, it's got a lot of what co-op players love, like building bases with friends and getting chased by weird monsters (in this case, alien bugs). And for the Satisfactory crowd, there's huge supply chains to set up and manage, and automated factories to construct and upgrade.

I've only just dipped in to the early hours of StarRupture myself, but it's got a lot going for it: a big map with a whole buncha weird-looking stuff off in the distance that makes me want to explore, a pretty engaging tutorial that only hints at what's possible with survival and crafting, and an alien star in the sky that I can only assume, at some point, is going to rupture. I haven't played enough yet to recommend it, but I'm definitely going back in for more this week.

Will this be the big co-op hit that always (fine, almost always) rings in the new year? We'll find out soon: StarRupture launches on Steam in less than a day.

Fallout 4 is a much more cheerful game than its immediate numbered predecessor. In contrast with the grime, slick gore, and green tint of the Capital Wasteland, the Commonwealth is bright and vibrant—it's the sort of place where you wouldn't mind putting down roots and founding a settlement or ten.

Playing Fallout 4 has always felt like walking around on a perfect November morning to me: Everything's kind of grey and dead, the trees have no leaves, but the sun is out, the sky is blue. It has this sort of crisp, clean sense you only get that time of year. I've wondered if this was just a me thing, but when I asked Bethesda art director Istvan Pely about it in a recent interview, he told me that the autumnal vibe was "completely intentional."

"Very early in the project, I took the art team, the environment art team, on a field trip to a local park," said Pely. "Great Falls Park, it's along the Potomac here in Maryland⁠—actually splits Maryland and DC. It was late fall, so all the leaves were down, all the grass was brown, all the trees looked barren and dead.

"I was like, this is what our world needs to look like. So we did a field trip, and we took a ton of pictures of everything. The way the grass is, the overall palette and things."

Looking at pictures of Great Falls, I can see how the inspiration trickled down into the final game. The picture of Mother Gorge on the Great Falls Wikipedia page looks like it was taken in autumn and has a particular Fallout 4 energy to it.

Pely explained that Fallout 4 has themes of hope and rebuilding, with a lot more vibrancy injected into "the man-made side of things like architecture, buildings, cars, and all the props started being a little bit more colorful," but the team still wanted to preserve a certain mournful, melancholy sense to the environments.

"It was important that the world still felt dead," Pely explained. "It still needs to feel like the dead of winter, there's still no life, man is trying to recover and rebuild, but nature hasn't been able to do that yet. It's not a realism thing, it's a tone thing.

"The world was so devastated, it just decimated nature. And even though hundreds of years have passed, it hasn't bounced back yet. Late fall was our team's inspiration for what the wilderness in the Boston area looked like."

Pely and Bethesda studio design director Emil Pagliarulo also spoke about what it was like to imagine cities they've lived in met with nuclear devastation⁠—apparently it's actually super fun. You can read even more about the making of Fallouts 3, 4, and New Vegas in the latest issue of PC Gamer's print magazine, which celebrates the 10-year anniversary of Fallout 4 and 15th birthday of New Vegas.