My Favorite Games of 2025

 Another year soon coming to a close so time for the annual look at all the games that got me excited this year. 

Other than my favorite of the year these are presented in no particular order, more bundled together in impromptu categories.

So without further ado, let's dive in!

The Underrated Ones

South of Midnight is a game that I haven't seen crop up in many end of year lists, but it really should. 

I loved this one, and honestly it was probably close to being my favorite of the year. An almost old fashioned third person adventure game with immediately satisfying gameplay and a wonderfully crafted setting. The combat was solid, and the wayfinding and platforming fun and intuitive. Each gameplay tool had a purpose. It's obviously informed by the most recent God of War games, but instead of angry and brooding Norse gods you're treated to a mystical coming of age tale in the American South.      

 The world design is vibrant and beautiful, the art style playful and pitched perfectly for the setting. The entire cast of characters are well cast and played. The music also deserves a call-out, it's superb throughout and even manages to pull off one of the hardest feats in gaming, musical numbers that genuinely feel integrated into the experience.

Even if another game might have edged it out for my personal game of the year, this is the one I wish more people had played, and is the easiest of easy recommendations from me.

Likewise the return of the Lumines franchise seems to have slipped under the radar somehow with Lumines Arise. 



This series has held a special place in my heart since I spent countless hours on my PSP with the original. The formula is still there and perfectly implemented, played in time to music it is still block breaking fun. 

Where the current version excels is in VR. As with the Tetris Effect before it, the immersion offered by the game in a VR setting somehow amplifies the impact of the visuals and music to tremendous effect. 

I hope it finds it's audience because this latest version is just as magical as it's predecessors. 

The Surprise Packages

Three games that weren't on my radar, but utterly delighted me when I tried them, in very different ways. 

Tiny Bookshop is a cozy gem of a game. You run a tiny book store in a small coastal town, and have to decide what to stock and how to match it to your potential customers preferences. It's narrow in it's focus but it is all so tightly executed and charmingly presented that I couldn't help but fall for those charms. 



Ball X Pit on the other hand is a frantic evolution of the Vampire survivors model, with some neat framing to extend on the Roguelike elements and power growth. Wasn't quite expecting those Vampire Survivor style mechanics to work as well as they do in the games confined lane spaces. 

It did take me a few runs to 'get it', but then it clicked. Lots of fun to be had with this one!

Blue Prince was a game that I assumed wouldn't be my proverbial cup of tea. I never really clicked with the 'Myst' style games, and that's what I assumed the game was, and while it certainly owes some of it's DNA to those games, it is also something all it's own. 

 

A good use of the 'day to day' roguelike formula, making your movement a part of the game's economy was an interesting twist, and I found the puzzles to be just the right side of discoverable. 

The room drafting map building on each run rewards your experiences and feels like a good way to build a roguelike structure around puzzle game-play. I don't always enjoy games without people in them, but this one pulled me in and kept me coming back. 


The Awards Seasons Favorites

Enough has been said about Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 that I probably don't need to wax too lyrical about it here. I will say it didn't quite hit the heights for me it did for others. I felt like it was a solid, if flawed around the edges, game with an absolutely brilliantly executed story and voice acting. 

I felt like it really wanted to be a bigger, more expansive RPG in the vein of the JRPGs that were so obviously it's inspiration, but the smaller size they could actually make, compromised a lot of the design elements of the progression systems. In a 100 hour game they may have been exceptional, in a twenty hour experience they felt rushed and often irrelevant. The 'dodge & parry' system in a tun based combat game was thus a crutch (since you could technically avoid almost all damage) that papered over a relatively flawed RPG system. 

 

All of that meant little though, as the story and performances were good enough to carry the load. I did make me want to finish the game, just more despite the core-loop, rather than because of it. 

Dispatch I think will also end up on many end of year lists, and rightfully so. 

It felt like a cool evolution of the old Telltale formula, and there was just enough game-play in the dispatch missions themselves to keep you entertained by more than just the characters. 

That said, you're there for the story and the characters. Well cast and fantastically written, you can feel the would be workplace sit-com roots of this project, but that's not a bad thing. The focus on the character interactions are what make the script work.



It is as polished a script as I've seen in games. These are characters you will remember, root for and against, laugh at, and sympathize with. 

 

The One I am Still Playing  

As always there are games from previous years that still demand time, and grow or develop into new beasts. 

This was another amazing year for No Mans Sky as the new updates added a plethora of new and cool features, but none were quite as cool as the ability to build your own large space ships. 

New Water effects, fun new expeditions throughout the year, they just keep growing the game, all for free, really quite impressive.

The Sequel I was always Going to Like

The original made this list a few years ago, so it was no surprise to me that I also greatly enjoyed Citizen Sleeper 2. As with it's predecessor this one is probably more of an acquired taste as the game-play elements remain light, and the true core of the experience is the decisions you make and how that influences the story and it's characters. 

This one felt aware of the balance it had struck a delicate balance in the first game, and didn't want to shake the tree to much and disturb that balance, so it feels more like a next chapter than a new book as it were, but that as someone who liked the first installment this felt right for me.

The game still has the knack of instilling the right kind of stress into an experience. Everything feels consequential, which is exactly the type of experience they are aiming for.


My Favorite Game of the Year - Arc Raiders

If you had said to me at the start of the year that an extraction shooter would be my favorite game of the year, I'd have been surprised and wanted to know just how they achieved that. I'm usually not a fan of the genre, but the folks at Embark have crafted something that elevated the experience usually found in this type of game. 

On the surface it's not immediately easy to pin-point why. Most of the systems are as you would expect. and meet genre norms. Systemically there is little here to separate the game from it's peers. You go in to a map, you scavenge for resources, seek or avoid conflict with either NPCs or players as is your preference, and then seek to escape with whatever you managed to get. 

The core loop is largely un-evolved from other extraction games. The game-play is well executed and the maps offer a nice varied set of experiences, but that core experience is simply that of a well made shooter.

So what makes it so special?

What separates it is the experience it manages to craft around that solid game-play core.

The balance of the ARC enemies, the combat, both PVP and PVE, combined with the layout of the maps lean into the slow, steady, exploration punctuated by frantic stressful combat moments that tax your remaining resources. 

It means that the gameplay ebbs and flows in a very enjoyable series of peaks and valleys. This is all elevated by exceptionally good sound design. The game's constantly layered soundscape keeps you informed of what is happening on the map, both in your immediate vicinity and further afield. It leads to a very immersive experience. 

The game's well designed audio interaction system makes it easy to communicated with friends and foes alike, even if you aren't using vicinity chat. 

This leads to an almost communal experience where you are as likely to come across friendly raiders as you are ones that will shoot you on sight.

Now, I know some have made an issue of Embark's acknowledgment that they use Machine learning for the NPC AIs and that they used text to speech tech for the in-game voices. Neither feel like the type of GenAI that would concern me personally, as both are AI driven techniques that significantly pre-date the current GenAI slop concerns. So for me, I don't hold those uses against them. Your opinion may be different.  

It also doesn't hurt that the game looks amazing, and the lighting pushes it over the edge. I've sunk over a hundred hours into the game already, and that's a rarity for me. I feel like 'immersion' is a word that often loses it's true meaning until you encounter its purer forms.  

This is one of those experiences.