30 Games I Want To Remember From 2025

My friends and I keep a spreadsheet that ranks our top five games of the year, every year, going all the way back to 1982. I didn't play Bubble Bobble in 1986 on account of being born in 1990, but it's fun to consider whether I'd rank it higher or lower than Rampage, Metroid, and OutRun.

Ranking has been tough for 2025. I know my GOTY, but I played a wider variety of new releases this year than I ever have before (and released a game myself). If I'm going to spend my one life on Earth playing these things, I should at least remember them all, not just the top five.

Below I've ranked thirty games loosely in order of personal affection. I'm not a critic, I'm not really Saying Something here, I just want to document what worked for me this year.

Some great looking games I've yet to find time for (Skin Deep, Pipstrello, Hunded Line, Keeper, South of Midnight, Dispatch) and to be honest, with a kid and a full-time job, I rolled credits on only a fraction of the games I did manage to play. Longer games in particular tend to fall by the wayside. Speaking of which...

30. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Expedition 33 is not actually my 30th-favorite game of the year (please have mercy), I just put it here as a personal TODO. I've played about 8 hours and I get the impression that some of the more interesting stuff comes later. I've at least played long enough to randomly get the theme music stuck in my head.

The quicktime combat stuff is very satisfying when you nail it. I dunno, it's all very striking and a lot of people I trust have ranked the game at number one, but I haven't felt driven to play more yet. We'll see. We Continue.

29. SPELLHACK!!

Great-looking "survival deckbuilder" with a retro Computer Room aesthetic. I knew I'd enjoy the looks and the deckbuilding, but I was also surprisingly on board with the cyberpunk wizard world and its narrative, such as it was. I like the sprite of the cool witch with sunglasses.

28. Kirby Air Riders

I don't think I "get" Air Riders. I don't get why people talk about City Trial like the second coming of Super Smash Brothers. I didn't find the depth I hoped for, or maybe I just can't keep up. This feels like a personal failing.

But I stan Kirby. I frollicked through this year's Star Crossed World expansion for Forgotten Land, which I used as an excuse to go back and 100% the rest of that lovely game. I've loved Rick since playing Kirby's Dream Land 2 in the backseat of my mom's Ford Expedition, and my daughter has a Rick plushie that I bought for her in Santa Monica on the first trip I took after she was born. In Kirby Air Riders, Kirby and Rick race spaceships that blast into each other. That's good!

27. Q-UP

At Blizzard, I work on competitive, online games with vocal communities. Q-UP is a very, very funny game.

The downside of making a game where the central joke is "there is no gameplay" is that I can't find much reason to keep playing. (Yes I know the "gameplay" exists elsewhere.) Maybe that's the risk of building your game on a gag. After an hour or two, I feel like I get the joke. It's a great joke, though.

26. Easy Delivery Co.

I found Easy Delivery Co. really inspiring as an indie dev. A deeply atmospheric delivery game that combines throwback influences without feeling derivative. A "dark cozy" world that's somehow meditative and antagonistic at the same time. A modest scope but with plenty to discover. A very physical game with thoughtful vehicle controls, but one that doesn't necessarily try to make you feel fast, or powerful, or even fully in control. Those are tough lines to walk and I think Sam C pulled it off.

25. Angeline Era

Angeline Era is a super endearing game and I want to spend more time with it. Playing a sequence of encounters feels like eating an omakase dinner. Thoughtful little level design snacks.

The "early 3D" vibes are pitch perfect, with only those illustrated character portraits not quite fitting in with the rest of the art IMO. The 3D models steal the show.

I'm charmed by the offbeat design choices, e.g. "all the levels are hidden in the overworld, and once uncovered, you enter them by playing a 2D quicktime minigame". It doesn't "work" for me every time, but it's always delightful.

24. Borderlands 4

I don't like AAA open world games and the Randy Pitchford School of Comedy is a tough listen. Unfortunately, I was so hooked on Borderlands 2 that I still have affection for the series. I don't play Destiny anymore, I'm missing the looter shooter loop, and Borderlands 4 scratches the itch.

The action in these games is so tight. I'm always impressed with the variety of the weapons and how many ways you have of combining them with your abilities, which are really quite cool (especially Siren's). I don't think the game is, like, remarkable, and some things really irk me (how is it possible the inventory takes this long to load?) but the open world worked better than I expected and by golly it feels good to play.

23. Haste

Speaking of road trips in my parent's car, I used to hold my hand to the glass and run my little fingers along the horizon as we drove, jumping over houses and sliding down mountains. It's pretty incredible to play a videogame that translates this (universal?) fantasy into software.

You can tell when a game has one core, load-bearing feeling, a one-word concept like "momentum", because all the game design decisions bend towards that feeling like a black hole. It's a very pure experience.

22. Torso Tennis

In 2025 I started watching Northernlion regularly, which is hugely out of character for me because I don't use Twitch. I like NL's sense of humor and his perspective on the games he chooses to stream, so it was a fun surprise when Torso Tennis, a surreal, tennis-adjacent, autobattler-inspired roguelike that I came across last MAGFest, showed up on stream. I was really happy for the developer!

The MAGFest booth was exactly as cool as you'd expect it to be (very cool). Sitting there on a Steam deck back in January, I only understood about 15% of what was happening on screen, but picking it up on release, it all clicked.

It's amazing how much more invested I'll get if your systems make me laugh. Tell me that I unlock a passive ability every X rounds and I'll immediately forget why. Tell me "It's Saturday! Time for a tattoo that makes you better at tennis" and I'll remember forever.

21. Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound

This year I was excited to spend some quality time with my good strong friend Ryu Hayabusa and his two new games. I don't have any interesting feelings about Ninja Gaiden 4, but Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound was both exciting and maddening.

The action is juicy and well-paced, until it isn't. You enter a flow state and it feels amazing, then some other sequence comes along that feels haphazard, anti-choreographed. More than once I hit some nasty bugs that required me to restart the game. For an action game that should and sometimes does feel like a rollicking forward stampede, I kept hitting awkward walls and technical setbacks.

The vibes are strong. The sprites are superb. But get out of gameplay and it's kind of a visual mess. Stretched icons, garbled pixel fonts... as someone who spent way too long getting text to render properly in his little arcade game, Ragebound's UI gives me the impression that they wanted That Retro Look without the hassle of scaling assets.

I'm rambling because I thought I would adore the game. Just like The Game Kitchen's other game, Blasphemous, which should have been a slam dunk for me, but which I quickly dropped. The way it invoked Dark Souls felt cynical, and Ragebound's use of "retro aesthetics" feels similar. But it must be more fun because I keep playing.

20. Replicube

One of those ideas you wish you'd had: "an open-ended programming puzzle game/toy about writing code to replicate 3D voxel-based objects". You can match the target any number of ways, and I really enjoyed solving the puzzle, then going back and optimizing my solution for more points.

Seeing the voxels react to my inputs, I realized it's the exact flavor of fun that made me want to be a software engineer. "Write some code and see cool stuff happen on the screen" is literally the driving force of my professional life. It's also why I struggle to enjoy backend work...

I loved seeing "pros" play the game in a competition held by Walaber. Streaming a handful of players as they tackle brand new puzzles was a very cool way to test the mettle of your most sicko players in a game that wouldn't otherwise work for speedrunning.

19. The Royal Writ

For a roguelite deckbuilder The Royal Writ is not the deepest, I guess, but does ramp up, and more than anything I was charmed by the art style and characters, which are stellar. The interstitials in particular really shine.

I also found a lot to be impressed with when it comes to the complex UX of card games. I loved how it showed the math behind modified unit stats. The overlays for game rules were super handy and I used them more than I expected to. I found it neat how visual status effect indicators were overlaid on the cards. All in all a very clever and cute little game.

18. Nubby's Number Factory

Pachinko meets Balatro in a y2k visual package that looks like VAIO Space for Windows 98. Basically laser targeted at me, and I really liked it but I didn't get as addicted as I expected to (same story with Balatro tbh).

Maybe I can't get that invested in number-go-up games that revolve around The Build, with what you do "physically" being almost inconsequential. Sort of similar to how I was disappointed that Ball X Pit was more Vampire Survivors than Breakout, I wanted Nubby to have a bit more Peggle. That's on me though, the name of the game is literally "Number Factory".

17. Dune Awakening

I spent many nights on Arrakis with those same friends who keep the GOTY spreadsheet, and most of that time I was decorating my house. I was impressed with how easily I could play architect, and I liked base-building in a shared world (rather than one of those Bisect servers you set up with your friends and then forget you're paying for).

Our higher-level friends would regale us with tales of daring PvP heists in the Deep Desert. I appreciated the abundance of semi-structured stuff to do in a genre that's usually too open-ended for me. Less so the combat, which is a shame because I would have played more if I'd felt challenged to venture beyond my property lines.

We've mostly stopped playing. Your stuff degrades if you don't take care of it (e.g. pay your taxes, fuel your generators) and although our most commited friend is keeping the lights on, the sands will claim our bases eventually. I feel a pang of resentment but in the end I appreciate the commitment to the bit.

16. Mario Kart World

What a confusing game! I blew through all the circuits. The open world feels strangely hollow, some objectives not even having in-game trackers until recently. I have to wonder if they had (or have) other activities planned for the space.

But I love it? Aimlessly cruising the Mushroom Kingdom is unexpectedly compelling, or maybe just comforting. Knockout Tour is my new favorite way of playing Mario Kart. And of course the music is phenonenal, a huge boon for the YouTube Nintendo music compilation industrial complex.

15. RV There Yet?

I didn't play Peak, but I knew I'd eventually find the friendslop (complimentary) for me. Apparently what I craved was dragging a rickety vehicle across an antagonistic landscape with my buddies. I laughed more playing this game than I did at anything else, and this year had some really funny games. We recorded the whole thing and immetiately shared clips with each other when we stopped playing.

It must be incredibly fun to develop a game with the express purpose of enabling stupid nonsense. Dedicating multiple buttons to smoking cigarettes, ostensibly because the guys look so serious smoking them... I can only aspire.

14. Earthion

Spend any amount of time getting into "retro games" and you'll realize just how many schmups (shooters?) we used to make. Maybe that's obvious but I never really played them as a kid, and it's only recently that I've started to have opinions about what sorts of schmups I like.

So Ancient's new 16-bit gem comes at just the right time for me. The difficulty in these games is always a sticking point, and I think Earthion threads the needle. I beat the game on the easiest difficulty after just a few tries, and working through the harder difficulties feels brutal but achievable. The game has a code system that allows you to start a new run with last run's powerups (but a lower score), which is another interesting way to handling challenge.

The art is solid if a little staid, the CRT filter options are delightfully fiddly, and obviously, Yuzo Koshiro's soundtrack is really, really good. Buy it on Bandcamp.

13. Once Upon a Katamari

Pure joy. Is there any other franchise with this much character AND such an ironclad core design? Rolling up historical garbage in a all these different modes, I find it hard to think of any equals.

12. Absolum

Absolum is just a kickass videogame. I can relive the Golden Axe glory days as a beligerent dino-riding dwarf, but in a slick roguelite framework. And it looks terrific.

Thrashing goblins feels great, but I'm bad at it. I had no trouble improving at Earthion or Silksong but beat 'em ups just kick my ass. I also played Hades II right beforehand, and nobody can compete with Supergiant's "reactiveness" in roguelite narrative. Maybe I'd have ranked Absolum higher if I wasn't expecting fully voiced reactions to everything I did.

11. Skate Story

I feel foolish for ranking this game so highly after playing just a chunk of it, but I love everything about Skate Story. It's so god damned cool.

It's the best looking game of the year, I think, everything from the art direction and environments to the UI and VFX, how it's intertwined with the gameplay in a way that you only get from solo creators with a talent for more aspects of game development than most of us could handle, with a cohesiveness that gets rarer the larger your team gets. It's also really funny. I can't wait to finish it.

10. Sektori

Anything that can flip open my brain's back panel and plug right in, bypassing all the usual bullshit of conscious thought -- that's valuable to me. I think you have to treasure that flow state.

Sektori hooked me faster than any other game this year. "Techno-drenched Geometry Wars roguelike" is a series of words that overclocks my neurons before I've even played the game. Now I have played it, and when I'm playing other games on this list, I think about playing Sektori. I'm addicted to locking in.

9. Hades 2

I played more Hades 2 than almost any game on this list, and I'm conflicted. In many ways it's richer than the original. Supergiant stacked a bunch of stuff on top of a 10/10 game, and somehow it's better and not worse.

Better mechanically, at least. I didn't vibe with the music in the way I did the first time. I didn't fall for Odysseus and Dora the way I did for Hypnos, Dusa, Meg, Orpheus. I missed Zagreus.

Melinoë was as self-serious as her "Death To Chronos" plotline, which was so one-note that I was actually convinced some subversive twist was coming. The twist never came, Melinoë's character never developed, and suddenly it was over. Supergiant changed the ending a month after launch, but having experienced the original already, I'm kind of screwed (and reading what got changed, my gripes still stand).

What's wild is that Hades 2 is still one of my favorites. It's just that fun, the way the action has been deepened, the way the game has a prepared response for every move I could make. Hades was a nearly perfect videogame, and even if the sequel lives in its shadow, it's in the same family.

8. Despelote

When I was enrolled in the Colorado Springs Parks and Recreation youth sports program, soccer was mostly an excuse to play with my friends. My mom always brings up this one game where she turned and saw me, together with an opposing player and way across the field from the ball, on our hands and knees, admiring a ladybug. I wasn't a serious athlete.

I remember endlessly kicking the soccer ball against the side of my garage, alone or with the friends who would go on to play seriously in high school. I was more interested in playing FIFA 98 on my friend's PC, fixating on it for hours like Julián playing Tino Tini's Soccer '99 while his friends and family try to talk to him. While time is passing.

With that magic shared by all personal art, Despelote describes a hyper-specific time and place that somehow brings you back to a place in yourself, different as it is.

7. Öoo

Öoo is a tiny marvel. How is it possible to communicate so much with so little? I did the "laugh out loud and shake my head" move like seven different times in it's very modest runtime, a combined feeling of "wow I can't believe I solved it" and "wow I can't believe how cleverly they showed me I could solve it". It's masterful, and there's not an ounce of fat on it. If I ever make a game this elegant I will die happy.

6. Blippo+

In what may be a textbook example of recency bias, I started Blippo+ last week and it is now one of my favorite experiences of the past few years. I feel an ancient excitement bubbling up when Quizzards slides onto the TV guide. I'm going to start a Werf's Tavern fan blog. It is funny every single time I tune in to Video Cola, hear that perfect intro stinger, and watch my screen slowly fill up with soda. I want to see Bushwalker at AGDQ. God I love Bushwalker.

Honestly it's difficult to pinpoint why I love it. Maybe it's nostalgia for the corny MST3K sketches and similarly un-self-conscious programming I watched growing up. Maybe it's the pure humanity of a sprawling, live action channel surfing simulator in a year macerated with AI slop. Maybe there's nothing more to it than being lovingly crafted, creative, silly, novel, and funny. I don't really think it's possible to separate what make it special "in a vacuum" from what made it feel refreshing in 2025. But it's special.

5. Elden Ring: Nightreign

Dark Souls Fortnite is way, way better than it has any right to be, in exactly the same way that Dark Souls Breath of the Wild worked better than I could have imagined in 2022. I am in awe of From's ability to have a formula that is so iconic -- and seemingly so specific -- take it back to the drawing board, tweak the exact right number of elements, and emerge with a game that is both wholly its own and recognizably the source material. It just seems so risky, but their hit rate is insane.

For a game as arcane as Nightreign (you really do need to know or learn some Elden Ring quirks), it was surprisingly fun to goof around with. I enjoyed getting friends together and bumbling around Limveld more than partying up with tryhards, even after I myself became the tryhard. I think that's fairly surprising for a game so punishing. Goes to show how fun collectively figuring shit out can be, even (especially?) in a hostile world.

I kept playing Nightreign because it was too fun to stop. That may sound obvious but it's actually kind of rare. It wasn't because I wanted to see the story through, or because I wanted to get better and improve my rank, or because I wanted to "solve" it, or find it's secrets, or even to beat it. I just couldn't resist queuing again, because the game is fun.

4. Baby Steps

It's tragic that most players will abandon poor Nate in the early-game mud. I'm glad I had a friend telling everyone he knew that the game is worth finishing. What looks like an exercise in self-punishment evolves into something genuinely moving. It's got a lot to say about the meaning we bring to games by playing them, about vulnerability, pride, and presence. It also has a lot of donkey dicks.

I can't blame anyone for expecting Baby Steps to be streamer-baiting masochism. It is sort of that; if you want to make progress you have to find SOME humor in "level design as cruelty", though the meanest challenges are optional. That, or your brain needs to be broken in the specific way that your reaction to cataclysmic loss is "we go again".

I couldn't muster that stubbornness in Getting Over It, but I just had to keep playing Baby Steps so I could trigger more dialogue. The cutscenes are so funny that they actually feel like an adequate reward for whatever ungodly challenge they're on top of, as good or better than a "gameplay reward" would feel. Maybe the funniest game I've ever played?

I even had a sort of "Tetris Effect" that lingered after playing. I was hyper-conscious of walking IRL. Walking in other games felt floaty, and I kept pulling the triggers for no reason. The game is visceral in a way that sticks, and I think that's part of why the humor (and pathos!) really, really hits.

3. Donkey Kong Bananza

I was so psyched when I heard the Mario Odyssey team was making a Donkey Kong game, but instead of the platforming I wanted, I got Bananza's open-ended destruction. Aimlessly burrowing through dirt, stumbling over rewards instead of earning them... it bummed me out.

At a some point, by sheer force of delight, Bananza completely won me over. I love this game. I love my friends Donkey Kong and Pauline. I love the little dance they do before moving on to the next layer. I love the different songs Pauline sings for each Bananza, especially the Zebra one. I love the word "Bananza".

It's not the 3D Mario I wanted, but it's more elegant than I expected. The late-game gimmicks are pretty clever. It skews towards freeform discovery but honestly that was the direction Odyssey was heading anyway, and you can't say it's isn't done with that Nintendo brand of careful escalation. Once I attuned to the format, I fell in love. Like with Odyssey, I want to find every secret because it means I'll get to stay in the world a little longer.

2. Hollow Knight: Silksong

Watching the credits roll on Hades 2, I thought about how even a fantastic sequel will fall short of the original, how you can't go back. Then I played Silksong and it felt like coming home again. And in your new home you can heal while airborne.

Unlike Hades 2, Silksong takes Hollow Knight and dials it ALL up. The plot of Hollow Knight was intriguing, but the story of Silksong moved me. We've got a protagonist with a point of view. Hornet feels incredible to control, and feels that way almost immediately, whereas Hollow Knight takes time to pick up speed.

Difficulty is subjective, but for all the ink spilled over it, I thought it was dead on perfect. Act 3 gets pretty brutal but rising to meet the game feels genuinely great. Assuming you always take the time to explore for upgrades, the bosses are intense and usually require repeat attempts, but they're never unfair.

It's punishing but not broken, only taking its toll when you overextend... exactly like Dark Souls. Silksong reminded me that I loved Hollow Knight partially because it's one of the only games to ever really "get" what makes Dark Souls work, and hey that's my favorite videogame.

Silksong is beautiful and awe-inspiring, both the experience of traversing its outsized world and the real-world understanding that a few real people made this thing, and that they hit those heights for a second time.

1. Blue Prince

What can you say about an experience like Blue Prince? It was a lightning bolt from another planet.

Like Simon camped out on the grounds, I essentially lived at Mt. Holly for the months of April and May. Before work, I'd fit in a quick run on my Steam Deck. On my lunch break, I would pore over my 435 saved Steam screenshots and compare notes with my friends on Discord (or with my coworkers on Slack). After my toddler went to bed, I'd spend as long as I could in the manor before passing out.

I was in that lucky slice of the Venn Diagram between "deckbuilder enjoyers" and "puzzle enjoyers". The friction between those two genres put some people off, but the way they combined was so, so delicious to me. Working the odds with dice and gems to draft exactly the room you want, the room you want because it has a chance of dropping the item you think you need, and you think you need the item because you finally worked out what feels like a clue in a book you saw two weeks ago... then the room DOES drop the item, and the item IS what you needed, it WAS a clue after all, and you solve a massive puzzle that's been plaguing you forever, and even better, that solution exposes three new strings to tug on. It doesn't get better than that.

I actually land slightly more on the "deckbuilder enjoyer" side of things, and the game accommodates me beautifully. I have challenge modes to really tear into the roguelike, and if I don't feel inspired to solve an especially arcane mystery, I can always ask a friend for a hint. (Surprisingly, I rarely feel the need to ask for pointers until that crazy final chunk of story.)

On the flipside, if you're more of a puzzler and less of a deckbuilder, you're out of luck. You can't solve the mysteries without engaging with the roguelike. I see how that interdependence could be frustrating, but the game wouldn't be half as interesting without it.

The systems have a hold on me, but why do I feel so enticed? Why does it feel like the house hides more mysteries than a finite videogame possibly could, even if its developers labored for the better part of a decade? Why do I half-believe the stories people share of a figure, visible just barely at the end of a long hall?

It's not because the story tells me it's possible. It's because, when I walk the silent rooms, when I read the words of residents long gone, when I see the sun glinting off some strange trinket I hadn't noticed for however many days, when it feels like everywhere I look the house is telling me that the unknown is just barely out of sight, in front of me or just behind -- when I hear that MUSIC -- it feels possible. It's pure atmosphere.