Two massive disruptions shook my gaming habits in 2025. In the first half of the year, a pair of surgeries kept me off my feet for weeks and left me craving the simple catharsis of Civilization 7 and Assassin’s Creed Shadows. By the second half, a little thing called a baby shattered my attention span and sleep schedule, leading me to bounce between games when I wasn’t binging Hades 2.
While I completed dozens of 2025 releases (not to mention the more than 100 titles I played up to double-digit hours without finishing), I’ve never had more regrets over the games I’m sure I’d have loved if I had the time or brain to engage them. Chief among these: Hollow Knight: Silksong, which I sunk something like 30 hours into before a mid-game boss destroyed my will to continue. That’s not to mention The Alters, Avowed, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, The Seance at Blake Manor, Eclipsium, The Drifter, or Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles — all games I hope to return to.
Even if I had managed to play literally everything I’d wished to, however, I’m sure my list would still include the multiplayer games that pulled me through this doozy of a year. The relative isolation brought on by surgery and new parenthood taught me to value these interactions all the more. Which leads me to…
Honorable Mentions
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment is simple dumb fun. The story’s a snoozer, but I savored the times I conscripted my wife or sister-in-law to crash through its hordes. Similarly, Lego Party’s often frustrating, but it steadily grew on me — and it’s got some surprisingly effective innovations on the Nintendo formula it’s cribbing.
25 - Civilization 7
Firaxis made some bold choices and some bad choices with Civ7. Beyond the spotty UI and teeth-grinding glitches, I’m most annoyed by the game’s Age of Exploration, which pushes everyone to pursue the same expansionist playstyle. But in a year when 4X strategy games recaptured my attention, I cherished my multiplayer sessions of Civ7 most of all. I hope to return once Firaxis irons out more issues, because I’m otherwise sold on the game’s Civilization-morphing structure (which, admittedly, it stole from Amplitude’s Humankind, a game I also played with my bro-in-law this year).
24 - Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds
My least favorite kart racer of the year is still good enough to crack this list! CrossWorlds provided a delectable contrast to Mario Kart World and Kirby Air Riders. Its inspired “rival” system and titular CrossWorlds spice up its otherwise traditional courses. The game’s frenetic, boisterous, and jagged around the edges — and I’m glad I could share it with my 5-year-old nephew, who especially enjoyed mowing me down with the Monster Truck item he always equipped.
23 - The Roottrees Are Dead
I’ve got less brainpower for puzzle games these days, but genealogical mystery The Roottrees Are Dead still captivated my wife and me. It’s mundane compared to The Return of the Obra Dinn and The Rise of the Golden Idol, but I’m glad enterprising indies are playing in this space.
22 - Blippo+
I’m a proud Playdate owner, and while I missed using its handcrank to surf alien TV channels in Blippo+, its technicolor PC format really heightened the game’s campy charm. While it never surprised me the way FMV innovators like Immortality did, it’s stuffed with ludicrous costumes, preposterous hairdos, superb sound design, and a genuinely intriguing meta-narrative. It’s the closest you can get to cruising a Meow Wolf exhibit from the comfort of a Steam Deck.
21 - Strange Antiquities
Part escape room and part visual novel, I might like Strange Antiquities even more than its 2022 predecessor, Strange Horticulture. I just wish I could take back the three in-game hints I called upon, which robbed me of a tantalizing Steam achievement. All of them pointed to obvious things I’d missed. In one case, I got stuck because I misplaced an artifact on my desk — I lacked organizational skills, not intellect!
20 - Ender Magnolia
The metroidvania I did manage to ace this year, Ender Magnolia’s easier to recommend than predecessor Ender Lilies, which I finished after great struggle in 2021. Just difficult enough to feel rewarding, the game’s mix-and-match combat abilities come linked to characters you’ll get to know through cutscenes and intermittent dialogue. Unremarkable writing holds the game back from masterpiece status — but the story was still enigmatic enough to lure me on.
19 - Elden Ring: Nightreign
I prefer typical FromSoft co-op to this breakneck speedrun, but I’m hopeful next year’s The Duskbloods can build on the fun I had with Nightreign. I’m a big Hunt: Showdown fan (though I didn’t really take to Arc Raiders, a game that looks similar on paper), so I’m eager to see what Hidetaka Miyazaki’s version of PvPvE gameplay will look like.
18 - Expelled!
Repetitious as it can get, Expelled! still gleams with sterling writing and clockwork narrative design. It also held our attention longer than Overboard! — by lowering the stakes, the game resembles more mischievous playground than criminal conspiracy.
17 - Date Everything!
Another game title with an exclamation point! This absurdist visual novel helped my wife and me unwind through our first weeks of parenthood:
Over the course of my parental leave, we juggled newborn care with our pursuit of 102 “dateables” — anthropomorphized household objects ranging from tables and chairs to office supplies and sports equipment. It’s a ludicrously ambitious premise that only occasionally feels like an exercise in quantity over quality. Some relationships failed to tantalize us, but the game’s imaginative character design and masterful voice acting carried 60+ hours of gameplay.
16 - Monster Con: Monster Prom 4
If I had to pick one outrageous dating sim to recommend this year, however, it’d be Monster Con. Best played with friends, Monster Con’s writing is even sharper than Date Everything!’s, and its one-to-two hour runs are more approachable.
15 - Silent Hill f
In a perfect world, I’d replay Silent Hill f a few times to unlock its true ending, as the game’s initial finale raises more questions than it answers. But incomplete as my experience was, the game’s arresting imagery and pointed exploration of 1960s Japan sunk deep into my psyche. Its unsettling vibes colored my own dreams over the delirious week I played it.
14 - Mario Kart World
If Mario Kart World’s free roam mode had split-screen multiplayer, I’d have played so much more of it. As such, it’s merely a great game, not a generation-defining one. That hasn’t stopped my family from clamoring to play it with me whenever they visit!
13 - Lego Voyagers
Beautifully rendered entirely in Lego pieces, you and your partner play a red block and a blue block who quest to (eventually) assemble a space rocket. The actual building mechanics could frustrate us — we’d often confuse the button to hop off a brick with the button to snap it to other pieces, and a hellishly finicky challenge near the end of the game nearly sunk our ambitions to finish it.
But ultimately, we persevered because it’s so goshdarned endearing. My wife quipped that Voyagers has more likable characters and better writing than Split Fiction [a game we finished earlier in the year] — even though the closest it comes to spoken dialogue consist of “choo choo” noises you can spam while riding a train! It’s simply delightful and ended on a high (and unexpectedly touching) note.
12 - despelote
The game cuts across weeks and months, occasionally interrupted by a narrator explaining Ecuador’s financial crises and football glory days. Mostly, you soak it in. You tune out your parents while staring out of your car window. You chase school friends. You kick bottles over a wall. You (inevitably) annoy neighbors.
Perhaps despelote resonates now because its unpretentious, quasi-documentary style reminds me that life goes on, whatever swirling chaos may be just out of frame. It captures childhood so universally in a setting that’s so wonderfully unique.
11 - Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
Incredibly slick and undeniably gorgeous, Shinobi: Art of Vengeance was as exquisitely tuned and perfectly paced as Silksong was forbidding and long.
10 - Donkey Kong Bananza
My wife and I have never had more fun smashing our way to the center of the earth:
The game makes you feel like a powerhouse. It presents a world that you can completely reshape to your will; later levels don’t just let you excavate terrain, you can also conjure new platforms by flinging special path-creating material through the air. With a second player, the experience becomes all the more frictionless; more sandbox than jungle-gym.
9 - Kirby Air Riders
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is kinetic and crunchy. Mario Kart World is polished to a mirror-gleam. Kirby Air Riders is surprising, simple, and self-confident — particularly in its revamped City Trial mode, which is unlike anything its competitors offer. Perhaps it’s my nostalgia talking (Kirby’s Dream Land 3 is the first game I remember buying with my own money, after all), but, for me, Kirby will always come out on top.
8 - Sunderfolk
Another sterling co-op game, my wife and I ran a Sunderfolk campaign with a close friend this year. While marred by occasional glitches and a truly unreasonable final boss, memories of its whimsical art, streamlined Gloomhaven-esque cardplay, and cozy character writing will always warm my heart.
7 - Blue Prince
Blue Prince would likely rank higher if I had reached its true ending — something a stranger I sat next to on a recent plane trip encouraged me to do (I struck up a conversation when I saw him brandish a Switch 2 — later, I pulled out my Steam Deck to play Blue Prince as he and his partner advised my moves!).
Ironically, the game’s most noteworthy feature — its roguelike design — also led me to abandon it not long after my wife and I rolled credits. If the game gave us more ways to reach the specific rooms we needed to unravel its deeper puzzles, we’d likely have persevered. But gripe as I might about this creative choice, I can respect it — and I can also recognize genius when I see it. At least I can claim to have known about the creator’s work earlier than most people — I’ve followed his Magic: The Gathering site for over a decade!
6 - Dispatch
I’ve called Dispatch a playable TV show so often that I fear I’ve undersold its keen gameplay. Sure, its production values rival any animated streaming show I could name, but its the Telltale-style branching dialogue that really sets Dispatch apart. Few games have made me snigger in one minute only to jerk a tear the next, and I can’t wait to play the Critical Role game Adhoc’s cooking up.
5 - Consume Me
I ran into Jenny Hsia after The Game Awards wrapped up in LA, and I wish I had the presence of mind to have grabbed my mic to interview her on the spot. Her slice-of-life game refuses easy answers to the thorniest issues of her young adulthood, from dating to dieting to faith.
That latter element surprised me. Tongue-in-cheek as it is, Consume Me features a transcendent religious experience that, for a few years at least, altered Jenny’s whole life. I’ve never seen a game so effortlessly translate such a conversion into game mechanics, even as it avoids endorsing the evangelical Christianity Jenny encountered and later moved away from. What’s even more wild is this is just one keenly-observed moment in a game that abounds in them. It’s incomparable.
4 - Absolum
My wife and I loved 2023’s Double Dragon Gaiden, a retro beat-em-up that rewards successful runs with coins you can use to unlock new characters. Absolum, developed by DD Gaiden’s publisher, goes much further. Each run can uncover new magical abilities, items, stat upgrades, plotlines, or routes through its post-apocalyptic fantasy world. We’ve played many games together this year; Absolum’s radiant art and busted combos have compelled us like none other.
3 - Hades 2
Hades 2 hit my life exactly when I needed it. I played dozens of hours while rocking my baby to sleep, hooked by all the ways it makes each run feel meaningful — from the upgrade material you collect to the characters you encounter to the plot you slowly unfold. The game even expands on the original’s “Heat” system, slowly training you to court additional challenges for greater rewards.
Alas, the game’s story didn’t quite land — and I say that as someone who played through the original ending, then rewound time to see the lengthier denouement the developers patched in after release. I also think many of the game’s relationships have less satisfying arcs than those in the original game. But the astonishingly tight combat of Hades 2 kept me happy for well over 80 hours.
2 - Citizen Sleeper 2
Citizen Sleeper 2 was the first 2025 game to really touch me. Immobilized from a foot surgery, I read the game’s final paragraphs through tears. I had interviewed the game’s creator on the significance of its core mechanic: the dice you roll everyday that determine how easily you can eek out a living on the margins of its ultracapitalist, outer-space setting. I’d understood how rich this metaphor was back when I played the original game — how you could see these dice rolls as modelling disability, mental health, or trauma.
But I really felt these themes this time around, my bandaged foot an implacable reminder of my body’s fragility. Citizen Sleeper 2 burrows into what made the first game’s themes about resilience so effective — it’s about finding beauty growing in dark places, and community with the people you dare to trust.
1 - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Clair Obscur’s sweep at The Game Awards made me reconsider its place at the top of my list. I absolutely don’t think it deserved all those awards — particularly Best Debut Indie, which should have gone to a smaller creator. I didn’t want to be just another schmuck breathless to anoint this not-so-obscure title.
But I can’t escape the impact it’s had on me. Clair Obscur delivered a more profound story in 30 hours than last year’s top pick, Metaphor Re:Fantazio, did in 90. I’ve mourned its characters. I’ve wrestled with its endings. I’ve insisted on blasting its music into the ears of my long-suffering wife.
Clair Obscur isn’t as big a landmark for the industry as Baldur’s Gate 3 was in 2023, but I hope it also raises the bar for those RPGs that come after.
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I feel like we’ve had pretty similar experiences on the playing games with a brand new baby front. Date Everything and Hades 2 were my go-to’s whilst I was nap trapped! 😅