2025 - A Year in Gaming

In the Year of Our Lord 2025, I rolled credits on 11 games (okay, 10.5 anyway - you’ll see what I mean). That’s three fewer than last year. I blame the fact that I am still wasting a disproportionate amount of time playing Balatro (#2 from last year) and Baldur’s Gate 3 (#1 from 2023 and a top-5 all-timer). This year was ‘very’ strong overall in terms of product (you’ll notice the top two - and six of 11 overall - on my list were from this calendar year), but the state of the industry overall seems like it’s hanging by a thread. Let’s hope 2026 continues the quality output and steadies itself in terms of industry foundation (give talented people money to make games, folks. Please).

11. Night Trap (Limited Run Games - Originally Released 1992, 2017 ‘25th Anniversary Re-Release’) - Available on everything, played on Nintendo Switch. As someone of my vintage, this was more so I could say “I did it” than any real want or need to experience the deep narrative nuance of this infamous Sega CD ‘classic’. Night Trap (featuring co-eds in nightgowns being terrorized in a haunted house by vampire… things… entirely in Full Motion Video - and featuring Dana Plato of Different Strokes fame!) - caused a bit of a stink when it came out. This game, along with Mortal Kombat, was almost entirely responsible for the creation of the ESRB. The difference is that UNLIKE Mortal Kombat, this game sucks. Whatever - I bought it for $2 on the eshop, used a guide to save all the girls, put it down and will never touch it again. And now I can say, “I finished ‘Night Trap’”. Plus the theme song actually kinda slaps.

10. Mario Kart World Tour (Nintendo - 2025) - Nintendo Switch 2. As a de facto pack-in game (when the Switch 2 launched, I read something about like a 97% attachment rate for this game over the first couple of months - meaning of every 100 people who bought a Switch 2, only three didn’t bother to get Mario Kart World Tour, which is absolutely insane) this is a perfectly fine kart racer. It’s colourful, it looks good, it’s ‘fast’ (no frame hitches or tearing or other issues that plagued the Switch, especially later in its lifespan). There are lots of characters to choose from and a wide range of tracks and areas to explore. With that said, what’s supposed to make this one special actually hinders it a bit, in my opinion. ‘World Tour’ is presented as something of an open world adventure - which if you’re like me and you think “Oh shit, Forza horizon, except Mario Kart? That’s rad!”. Unfortunately, in reality the ‘open world’ aspects are pretty sparse. You can roam around the (admittedly quite large) map and fill out some specific timed challenges (get from point A to point B in 10 seconds, for instance), but there’s no real feeling of freedom. It’s not like in Horizon where you drive around the mushroom kingdom, stop at Bowsers Castle and trigger a race, unfortunately. Maybe the sequel will have that (Horizon 2 was exponentially better than Horizon 1, as an example) and the game will be better for it. But in the end, as THE launch title for the Switch 2 (and a game my son loves watching and playing) it’s definitely enjoyable. But not enough to rank higher on this list.

9. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Dontnod - 2025) - Available on Xbox and PS, played on Xbox Series X. Presenting the requisite CAG (Curtis-Ass-Game) for 2025. A coming of age tale of four girls in the summer of 1995 as they experience life, love and supernatural phenomena, by the same dev team that brought us the original Life Is Strange (an all-time top 10 for me). What’s interesting about this game is that it also explores these same friends in the ‘present day’ (26 years later), giving dual timelines to make choices in (choices in the past can effect the present, but also interestingly, choices in the present will shift how the 1995 sequences can play out). The girls are well acted, the writing is sharp and the music (as you’d expect for a game that primarily takes place in 1995) kicks ass. There are a few quibbles that prevent this from placing higher on this list, however. The Present Day sequences can sometimes feel like they’re pulling the string a little too much. There’s a build to a Big Reveal that they drag out too long. A little tension is great, but if you drag it out too long you can alienate the audience a bit and your moment loses some of the impact as a result. Also, the game (at least when I played it at launch - maybe it’s been patched since) is hampered by performance issues. Slowdown, choppiness. Now this isn’t exactly a twitchy game by any stretch, so it’s just minor annoyance more than anything else, but it’s still noteworthy. Bottom line, it’s a little bit Life is Strange mixed with the tv show Yellowjackets, and if that sentence sounds of interest to you, you will dig this game.

8. Avowed (Obsidian, 2025) PC and Xbox (played on Xbox GamePass). Obsidian had a big year. They released this game in the spring, then the sequel to their ‘Honey I Shrunk The Kids’ simulator, Grounded 2 in summer and then Outer Worlds 2 (which I have not played yet, but I fully expect to show up on my 2026 list given my love for the first game) in autumn. Given that it’s rare for studios to release more than one game every two or three years, releasing THREE IN ONE YEAR is absolutely unheard of in this day and age. It helps that the quality of their releases continues to be strong - and Avowed is no exception. You may be forgiven for looking at it and assuming it’s a simple ‘Skyrim-like’. It’s an open world, first-person action RPG. But that’s selling this game short. Set within the Pillars of Eternity universe, Avowed tells a story of a mute avatar faced with saving the world from a deadly threat (stop me if you’ve heard this before), but where it really shines is in the margins. This game has what I believe to be the best first-person fantasy combat ever. It feels chunky and weighty and reactive. Your spells (should you choose to make a character that indulges) look cool and actually feel like you’re shooting weapons of mass destruction from your fingertips. The gunplay (there are flintlock pistols and rifles - a very pirate-y vibe that fits with the oceanic / island setting) feels good and the powers you get to build out your character are actually interesting, rather than simple incremental damage output increases (one slows down time when you’re aiming, one makes your gunpowder set fire to things, etc). The loot system is well defined and designed so that if you find a gun you really like to fuck with, you can upgrade it to keep pace with newer weapons (you never need to switch weapons just because one does ten points more damage). The real gold of this game lay in the writing, however. The characters (including Garrus himself, Brandon Keener playing a fish-man version of everybody’s favourite Turian) are well-written and have believable wants and motivations. The choices you make over the course of the story (and there are a few) are not cookie-cutter ‘kick a dog or save a village’ good vs evil claptrap. Several choices I made, I felt legitimately ill about afterwards. That’s how you know there is real weight there. A fantastic action RPG, and to my PlayStation homies, this is apt to drop on PS5 pretty soon. I highly recommend it.

7. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty (CD Projekt, 2023) available on everything except the OG Switch, played on Xbox Series X. Is this cheating? Maybe. But if Geoff Keighley can nominate a DLC for Game of the Year (as he did with Elden Ring’s ‘Shadows of the Erdtree’), I can slide this DLC into my top games of the year, as well. The incredible turnaround of Cyberpunk 2077 has already been written about ad nauseam so I’ll spare you the ink, but long story short, I actually quite enjoyed the vanilla version (warts and all) when it dropped in 2020. But with that said, this DLC was my first chance to drop back in since they effectively rebuilt it from the ground up and can I just say - god damn. If this was my first introduction to Cyberpunk, this game is in my top-3, no question. Everything is quicker, cleaner, the combat is so tight, the cyberware has real tightness and feeling to it (using a Sandevistan, the world slows down and you can effectively take out three guys before they even know what hits them). This is all new. Hackers can take control of enemy vehicles. Your significant other will phone you just to shoot the shit, or invite themselves over to your house to, uhh… talk. The game just feels so weighty and lived in. This is unquestionably the Best Version of this game. But I’m supposedly writing about the expansion, Phantom Liberty. It’s a Big story, dealing with a threat against the entire NUSA. You meet the president. You meet Idris Elba. It’s basically the coolest cyberpunk superspy thriller you can think of and it’s absolutely fantastic. The DLC is probably about 20-25 extra hours of content, which is definitely heavy enough for the dollar value. The best part, though? Idris Elba actually ‘tries’. This isn’t “big name actor cashes a cheque and mails in performance”. His character, Salomon Reed, is complex and thoughtful - and depending how you play, can either be your biggest ally or your primary antagonist. It’s fucking great, and if you have Cyberpunk 2077, you need this DLC.

6. Silent Hill 2 Remake (Bloober Team, 2024) Available on PS5, Xbox and PC. Played on PS5. The original Silent Hill 2 is an all-timer, widely considered to be one of the greatest games of all-time (and definitely the high water mark in the Silent Hill canon). It’s also on an island in terms of narrative hooks (the other games have threads that tie them together, but this one can be played on its own without any knowledge of Silent Hill) so it made perfect sense that this could be remade for modern consoles. What DID concern me, at least when it was announced, was the dev team they tapped to remake it, Bloober Team, were not… shall we say, universally lauded? Their previous game, Medium, was flatter than a pancake that had been run over by a semi-truck. On top of that, the initial reveals were rather… uninspiring (it was James looking into a mirror looking sad and then a bunch of fog, it was like shite AI if I’m being honest). But thankfully we grade things on the finished product and in the end they managed to walk the line that remains faithful to the vision of the legendary original, but also accessible and approachable by modern standards. For me, the real gauge was always going to be how it handled that scariest level in video games, the hospital - and it pleases me to say that it’s just as unnerving (perhaps more so because of the new 3D perspective).  The voice acting is good, the script is true to the original (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it) and the combat is crunchy and satisfying - James bashing a monster in the head with a lead pipe feels heavy and suitably chunky and then when the shotgun blows a monster’s literal brains out, you can’t help but appreciate it. Overall, a fantastic remake of a video game classic.

5. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (Machine Games, 2024) Xbox and PS5. Played on Xbox GamePass. Chalk this up as one of the biggest video game surprises of the past several years - not because it’s a licensed game (we’ve gotten past that - the days of all licensed games being garbage shovelware has thankfully gone the way of the dodo) but because it’s a game I didn’t think I ‘needed’. A first-person Indians Jones game? Considering that there hasn’t been a good Indy movie in literally 35 years, one would be forgiven in thinking the Uncharteds had taken the archaeologist’s lunch money and left him beaten in a ditch by the side of the road. Speaking of Uncharted. Troy Baker was honestly robbed of the Game Award for ‘Best Performance’ as his Indy was such a pitch perfect imitation of Harrison Ford that my partner actually stopped and asked while I was playing it, “Wait, did they actually get Harrison for this?” Combine his performance and delivery with a script that’s funny (and even a little touching), great adventure game mechanics (Indy uses his whip for traversal across chasms and it’s as cool as you’d hope it would be) and lots of Nazi-bashing (whipping a gun out of a Nazi’s hands, punching Nazis, shoving Nazis down mountains, it all works) to make a game that totals more than the sum of its parts.

4. Blue Prince (Dogubomb, 2025) Xbox, PS5, PC, Mac. Played on Xbox GamePass. A truly good puzzle game can make you feel like the smartest person in the world. The key is not to hold your hand, but to guide you. Point you in a direction and teach you how the game world works, then when it all clicks into place it’s like a lightbulb has been turned on. The vast majority (say the first 80%) of Blue Prince’s puzzles are like this. This game basically birthed a genre - the roguelike puzzler - and did it with such style and panache that you literally can’t believe this is the first game by this (primarily one-person) studio. There’s a story here, too - unearthed as you wade through puzzle after puzzle after you inherit your grandfather’s country manor. Honestly, it’s just those last 20% of puzzles that stop this game from breaking into the top-3 this year as it moves from ‘the smartest man in the room’ to ‘so obtuse even a Mensa candidate might struggle with it’. I still respect the hell out of it, and even though puzzle games usually aren’t my jam, I put 100 hours into this and loved almost every minute of it.

3. Astrobot (Team Asobi, 2024) PS5. ‘Charming’ - adj. pleasant, polite, likeable. To ‘charm’ is to delight greatly. I feel like the word ‘charming’ isn’t used enough when describing video games. Astrobot (2024’s Keighley GOTY) is a charming video game. It’s cute, it’s sweet, it’s fun and it has some of the greatest platforming mechanics I’ve ever seen. Indeed, I would go so far as to say and Astrobot is *the best* 3D platformer I have ever played in my entire (long) life. The controls and mechanics are so tight and responsive. The ‘challenge levels’ (the hard bonus stages at the end of the game after you’ve finished the story) as satisfying and it’s a testament to how well the game handles that every time you miss a jump or mistime a combo, it feels like a skill issue. It’s something ‘you’ did, rather than the game. As a special aside, this is also my son’s favourite game of all-time. Every time he’s in the room when I turn on the PS5, he points to the icon. He cannot get enough. Whatever Team Asobi does next, I’ll be there for it.

2. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (Kojima Productions, 2025) PS5. I’ve long been a fan of Hideo Kojima. As one of gaming’s last true auteurs, his shit is like Wes Anderson’s. You’ll usually know before it even comes out if you’ll like it or not. It has a vibe, an energy and a place in the video game ouevre that is entirely unique. Part-anime, part-political commentary, all-weird. With all that said, however, I did *not* love the original Death Stranding. I ‘appreciated’ it as a thought experiment as you spent literal hours trekking across mountains delivering packages as futuristic Amazon delivery driver Sam Porter Bridges, but it remains to this day the only Kojima game I did NOT play through to completion. So it’s honestly quite surprising to see me announce that in most any other calendar year, Death Stranding 2 would be my game of the year. The team at KojiPro took everything about the first game that was good (the delivery mechanics, the world building, the pseudo-persistent online world) and made them better, while simultaneously taking all the hard edges and sanding them off - the combat was a mess in the first game, it’s downright fun here - the weapon variety and responsiveness are light years ahead. The building mechanics and infrastructure still degrade, but it’s much more forgiving and there are ways you can safeguard your roads. And repairing Timefall-damaged units is as simple as a couple of button presses. Building relationship links with the people you meet and deliver to has satisfying and worthwhile upgrades that actually encourages multiple return trips. The feeling of making a delivery across the (quite expansive) map and getting fed constant positive reinforcement as you do it triggers the pleasure center of the brain in a way few games have managed for me. The story is still Kojima bullshit, but it’s… sanitized. It’s insane, but it’s the GOOD kind of insanity. And it never goes on too long - like you settle in for a cut scene, it’s not going to run more than five minutes before you get some more gameplay (a perfect early-game reference to this is when you meet an old friend, start a conversation, after about five minutes he goes, “Oh shit, Sam, let’s pause here - you have to fight a boss!” So you do that rather satisfying encounter, then pickup right back where you left off with the exposition). The characters are likeable and you spend a lot less time by yourself (you even have one character who accompanies you on almost every mission - Dollman, who… is a doll… with a ghost spirit of a dead scientist. He’s rad. Anyway). Sam has a crew this time, and it explores themes of found family in a way that’s touching if not subtle. I won’t speak to the story because it needs to be experienced (it’s seriously nuts) but I will say the last two chapters of this game are some of the most batshit-beautiful insanity I have ever enjoyed in any media. It had me gasping and laughing (and even crying). It was a true return to form for one of gaming’s godfathers and an utter triumph.

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Entertainment, 2025) PS5, XBox and PC. Played on XBox GamePass. Are video games art? I think so, but I know it’s a tired argument at this point - people have dug in on both sides of the chasm and it’s unlikely that one game could make a dent. But if any game could, but would be this one. How does the first game developed by a relatively small, French indie studio turn out a game that reinvigorates turn-based JRPGs, sweeps every major award put in front of it and sells millions of copies out of the box? Make no mistake - Clair Obscur is That Game and it is That Good.  Take a relatively-standard JRPG, add a little bit of Souls-like timing based mechanics to parry and dodge during combat (keeping you engaged and active while you plot your next move) add incredible voice acting, a powerful story that touches on themes of love, grief and loss and throw in a dash of the greatest video game music since Uematsu threw down and you end up with this wonderful, incredible, and very, very French tale. Now this game is *not* perfect. The lack of a mini-map in each of the individual spokes you visit off the hub world can make things needlessly confusing. Also some of the enemies are infuriatingly difficult (but most of those are optional, thankfully, and the presence of a ‘story mode’ difficulty level means you could probably get through the entire story without having to worry about engaging in the timing-based rhythm combat if you don’t or can’t). But the positives FAR outweigh the negatives. For me, the true gauge in an impact a game has… am I willing to get it tattooed on my body? My arms and legs have limited space, so it’s reserved for my gaming Mount Rushmore - Mass Effect, Last of Us, Super Metroid, RDR2, BG3, as an example. I think the fact that I’m currently looking at Expedition 33 tattoos says all that needs to be said. It was the greatest game I had the pleasure of playing in 2025.