My Five Favorite Games of 2025

I know I’m late, okay? Please don’t be mad. I’ve got a lot of dishes cooking in the kitchen right now.

2025 was an incredible year in video games. Indie games have gone absolutely insane, with dozens of incredible titles that put their AAA competition to shame! At much more affordable prices, at that!

Unfortunately, for all the good, there was still plenty of bad. AI has been a plague on the industry. As a result, we’ve gotten some truly awful games, and even more layoffs numbering in the thousands. For every step forward, there are a frustrating number of steps taken back.

But I’m not here to spread doom and gloom. Today, I’m going to celebrate the games I most enjoyed playing last year. The titles that most strongly highlight why video games are art, and why art can only be made by human beings.

Alas, both my time and finances are limited. There are a ton of amazing games this year that I didn’t get the chance to play. Most of them have found themselves on my ever-growing backlog. So I’ve compiled them into a small list of:

Honorable Mentions

• Elden Ring: Nightreign (I did play it, but it didn’t really hook me for long. That art direction goes hard as hell, though)
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
• The First Berserker: Khazan
• Split Fiction (I enjoyed what I played a lot, but never finished it.)
• Blue Prince
• Mortal Sin
• Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves
• Cronos: The New Dawn
• Doom: The Dark Ages
• Silent Hill f
• Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds
• Ghost of Yōtei
• Absolum
• Bye Sweet Carole
• Ninja Gaiden 4
• ARC Raiders
• RV There Yet?

Yeah. I know. 2025 was crazy. Now, let’s get started with my first pick:

Peak

In my experience, the best multiplayer games do two things. One: they encourage players to work together. Two: they make said players question if their friendships could survive a murder or two.

‘Peak‘ manages to do both of these things, and more. This cute little mountain-climbing game gave my friends and I several hours of fun. As well as igniting several heated arguments. Which is half the fun, really. If climbing a mountain doesn’t make you want to shove your pals off the side, then what’s the point?

Sometimes simplicity really is best. All you need are some good friends, cute little cartoon bobble-heads, and a big ass mountain to climb. There are plenty of items to add some mechanical complexity, but all of it comes back to that one idea: climb mountain together.

This game is cute, charming, and fun. For all that my friends and I argued while playing it, I still cherish that time we spent together.

Hades II

Man, talking about this game makes me feel like a heroin addict eying a needle. Let’s get through this one before I have a relapse.

Even when it first started in Early Access, ‘Hades II‘ absolutely consumed my life. I played every single update for tens of hours, only barely restraining myself long enough for the game to actually come out. The first game was already addictive. But this second one? Something about it just would not let me go!

Supergiant games just hit different. Their style, music, and storytelling rarely miss. I was absolutely hooked on the story right from the get-go. Chronos has been one of my favorite characters in Greek mythology ever since I read Percy Jackson as a kid, and he does not disappoint here as the antagonist. Him being able to un-pause the game during his boss fight actually had me in stitches.

That was the death of me, but you know what? He earned that win.

We get plenty of my other favorites, too. Odysseus, Icarus, Nemesis, the Sirens, Polyphemus, and more. The first game was already a treat for fans of Greek myth, and the sequel is no exception! Hell, this game’s take on Typhon is so cool it partially inspired my own take on the character in ‘Father of Monsters‘!

Shameless plug aside, I love this game. A ton of rogue-lites came out in 2025, and this one is my favorite by far! Who knew killing Time could be such a great way to kill time?

God dammit, now I need to play it again…

Dispatch

Between this and the new Superman movie, I think we can finally stop saying superheroes are dead now.

Playing ‘Dispatch‘ at launch was such a great experience. It was just like keeping up with a popular TV show. Only each episode was just a little different for every person. It was fun watching other people play it online, seeing where their stories differed from mine.

And boy howdy, was mine different. According to the in-game stats, I chose the least popular option almost every single time. More than a few of those choices came back to bite me, often to hilarious effect.

As a cinematic game, this one is an absolute home-run. All of the characters are instantly memorable, with some of the best performances this year. You could remove the whole video game aspect and turn this into an animated show, and it would still be incredible.

The actual game is super fun, too. Whoever thought to make this a super hero management RPG deserves a medal! The way your decisions in the story come back to bite you during each shift made the choices feel much more impactful. For example: I chose Phenomaman instead of Waterboy in episode four. So, when Waterboy joined the team in episode eight, he was still level one, with no stats whatsoever. I had to pause the game to wipe away tears, I was laughing so hard!

AdHoc Studio resurrected the Telltale formula with a vengeance. Personally, I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us next.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

The game’s been out for nearly half a year now. But honestly? It still hasn’t sunk in that it’s out. More than that: it was really good!

Metroidvanias are my favorite kind of video games. Growing up, I played the living hell out of every Metroid and Castlevania game. Even with all that nostalgia, ‘Hollow Knight‘ became my favorite game in the genre. Hell, it still is.

Yet of all the Metroidvanias I’ve played, none have captured me so completely as Silksong. Exploring Pharloom was downright addicting! The sheer level of detail put into this massive map is honestly insane! Add on Christopher Larkin’s incredible score, and the whole game became actual magic!

In my original review, I complained extensively about the game’s difficulty. Was I being a salty little baby? Admittedly, yes. The last game that got under my skin this bad was ‘Dark Souls II’. However, like any difficult game, you’ve just got to thug it out and get good. Is it still too hard for what I enjoy personally? Yes. Does it detract from the game’s quality as much as I originally claimed? No.

The final boss is easily one of the best battles I’ve ever experienced in a video game. A rival battle that competes with such legends as Dante VS Vergil, Raiden VS Sam, and Me VS Dad’s Belt. I legitimately spent hours bashing my head against it, but unlike other difficulty spikes throughout the game, I never got angry. When I finally did beat it, I had one Mask left, my hands were drenched in sweat, and my heart nearly burst out of my chest. My reward: one of the biggest “Holy shit!” moments I’ve ever had in a video game.

Will Silksong fold your spine like Bane breaking Batman? Yes. But, if you’re willing to endure the pain, you’ll experience one of the greatest indie games ever made. The fact that it only costs $20 USD, with free DLC on the way, still feels like a crime.

Thanks, Team Cherry. I can almost forgive you for that fucking bench in Bilewater.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Oh, god dammit. It won again.

I’ll always remember the first time I played ‘Final Fantasy VII‘. I was thirteen years old, and the original game had been ported to Steam. When my parents gave me twenty bucks for my allowance, I picked it up on a whim just to see what it was about. Little did I know that I was about to experience a journey that would actually change my life.

While I had grown up playing video games, none of them had ever really affected me. You know what I mean? They were fun and I liked them, but I never saw them as true art. Not until FF7. Sure, the graphics are dated, the controls are clunky, and there’s a lot of tedious grinding. But that story, with that music, and those characters, completely changed my brain chemistry.

Why am I bringing up an experience I had half my life ago, with a completely different game? Because no other game gave me anything like that. No other game until ‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33′.

Right from the prologue, I knew I was playing something special. Walking Sophie down to the harbor, talking to the hopeless denizens of Lumière, gave me such a powerful sense of melancholy. The Gommage itself had my jaw on the floor; the visuals, punctuated by Lorien Testard’s incredible score, created one of the most unforgettable and heartbreaking scenes I’ve ever experienced. Not just in the medium of video games, but in all of fiction. As soon as that happened, I knew this game would consume my life from start to finish.

Even now, almost a year later, I hesitate to spoil any of the story. It honestly might be the greatest narrative in any video game ever. A statement I don’t make lightly; go back to the first two paragraphs on FF7. The end of each act completely blew me away, all culminating in an ending that stuck with me for weeks afterwards!

I have played a ton of turn-based RPGs in my lifetime. Not a single one of them has been so addictive as this one. Being able to dodge/parry almost every single attack is so damn satisfying, and it’s completely fair even on the highest difficulty; I never once got mad at the game. And that’s before you get into the sheer variety in builds you can construct with every single member of the party. I got my brother to play this after me, and his team was almost completely different from mine!

Not gonna lie, his builds were way better. But I beat it on the highest difficulty with my crummy team, so my ego is well protected.

‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33‘ has firmly cemented itself in my top five games of all time. Depending on the day you ask me, it might even be at the top. I know the game winning every award ever is basically a dead meme at this point. But it really does live up to the hype. This is an experience I will cherish for the rest of my life.

Thank you, Sandfall Interactive. I cannot wait to see what you’ve got in store next.

Conclusion

And that’s it. Those were my favorite games of 2025. Narrowing it down to just those five wasn’t easy. Like I said, this was an excellent year for games.

The industry is still in a rough place. Major publishers are pushing AI even harder than before, and no doubt it will only get worse in 2026. Microsoft is forcing generative AI into all their projects, most strongly in Halo Studios and their upcoming CE remake. Even Larian Studios nearly made a deal with that devil.

But for all the doom and gloom, we still have hope. People are pushing back against this technology harder than ever before. For every dev that falls into the AI pit, there are five more that ban the technology outright. No matter how bad it gets, we’ll always have creators who produce incredible games like those we celebrated today.

Thank you very much for reading. I hope to see you again soon.