The Games of 2025

Towards the end of each year, I admittedly over-indulge in my rituals of reflection and celebration, particularly when it comes to putting together extensive "Game of the Year" and "Film of the Year" lists. In my defense, laboring over these subjective lists helps me draw connections between games and cements their relationships to one another in my mind. Looking back, it's useful to know the context into which each game released -- what else was popping that year; what came before; what came after... Creating these types of lists gives enough bird's-eye perspective to start drawing patterns of ideas, technologies, and cultural trends and getting a better grasp of the development of concepts and the interchange of ideas across artistic mediums.

With that said, I keep lists of not only my personal favorite games of every year (again, highly subjective based on what I found most meaningful to me, for whatever reason; not making objective claims of quality), but I also compile extensive lists of craft "awards", recognizing the most surprising and interesting innovations across a number of categories of game design, audio, visuals, writing, and more.

Over the course of the year, I have played 119 games that were brand new 2025 releases. Of that list, I have beaten 42 of them (again, counting only 2025 releases). So my perspective is far from comprehensive, but hopefully an interesting view of some of the most exciting innovations and experiments achieved in this calendar year.

Category: Design

Excellence in Game Direction

1. Baby Steps

2. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

3. Öoo

4. Split Fiction

5. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Baby Steps' management of tone and pace of discovery of novel elements is challenged by the glacial pace of avatar movement. For a game with such a degree of player resistance, maintaining its comedic tone and constant pull of player curiosity is a miracle, particularly since the rate at which players advance through the richly-textured world or grow frustrated at particular sections of the map are wholly unpredictable.

Excellence in Systems Design

1. Skin Deep

2. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

3. Blue Prince

4. Monster Train 2

5. The Séance of Blake Manor

Making a good immersive sim is difficult, but optimizing one for consistent rewards of slapstick comedy means that systems have to be tuned for multiple disciplines at once -- stealth mastery challenge and comedic potential. Mastery of systems must never undercut the dramatic tension of the comedy, and the comedy of errors must never undercut the player agency inherent in the stealth action systems. These systems juggle these tremendously.

Excellence in Technical Design

1. Split Fiction

2. Donkey Kong Bananza

3. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

4. The Outer Worlds 2

5. Skin Deep

The technical feasibility of splitscreen isn't a given in the age of 4K graphics; even more impressive is the dynamism of the two worlds of Split Fiction's protagoists, particularly later in the game in which the avatars occupy different, overlappinng worlds and when moving windows between the worlds move through the same spaces. The technical wizardry of the game is used to create thrilling and surprising moments that feel more and more impossible the further you look into them.

Excellence in Combat Design

1. Monster Hunter Wilds

2. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

3. SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance

4. Hollow Knight: Silksong

5. Avowed

The complexity and elegance of Monster Hunter combat, especially as it is balanced around an ever-expanding toolkit of weapon archetypes and moves, remains impressive, but I also have to shout out Clair Obscur for reinvigorating turn-based battling with modern and dynamic twists and SHINOBI's fast-and-fluid 2D battling with its stylish, signature finishers.

Excellence in Puzzle Design

1. Blue Prince

2. Strange Jigsaws

3. Öoo

4. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

5. Strange Antiquities

It's been a great year for puzzles that perpetually unfold into denser and more mysterious webs of further puzzles. Special attention must be paid to Blue Prince for its elegance of interlocking puzzles, often hiding solutions to yet-unencountered puzzles in plain sight. Repetition between runs gives players a familiarity with puzzle components, even before they know what to do with them or that they even belong to a puzzle in the first place.

Excellence in Level Design

1. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4

2. Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders

3. Once upon a KATAMARI

4. Öoo

5. Sektori

When it comes to levels rich with possibility for player expression and dense with lines between which players can flow, the Tony Hawk developers have a lot to live up to in remaking two of the best-designed games in the series. The new levels designed specifically for this package demonstrate an evolution of thought and a deep consideration for how players interact with and move through these levels.

Excellence in Open World Design

1. Baby Steps

2. The Knightling

3. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

4. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

5. Donkey Kong Bananza

Points of interest in open worlds can often be encountered from any direction in any order, so creating open worlds with deliberate storytelling flow can be challenging. Baby Steps takes into consideration player effort as a metric that punctuates and dictates pacing. Since ambulation is the game's primary challenge, the angle of and distance between every prop in the game's enormous open world has gameplay significance. One errant angle on a prop could make or break the challenge structure of an entire chapter. The amount of deliberate attention put into its open world is breathtaking.

Innovation in Expressive Play

1. Donkey Kong Bananza

2. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4

3. Baby Steps

4. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

5. The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-

Expressive play is gameplay that gives the player the ability to play in a highly-personal, unique, and identifiable style, like playing a musical instrument. This can manifest in a robustness and responsiveness of control (micro-expressiveness, as in Tony Hawk and Baby Steps) or responsiveness at systems and objective levels (macro-expressiveness, as in Pipistrello and Hundred Line). Donkey Kong Bananza excels in both categories, giving players tremendous expressive freedom in moment-to-moment play while also allowing them to dictate their own objectives and macro-level strategies.

Innovation in Embodiment / Avatar Control

1. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4

2. Baby Steps

3. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

4. Bionic Bay

5. Donkey Kong Bananza

Feeling one with the avatar (or deliberately alienated from one's virtual embodiment) is more than a task of simple responsiveness. Many systems work together to encourage players to deepen their vicario-sensory relationships with their virtual avatars. While the relationship between avatar and environment has always been a strength of the Tony Hawk series (causing players to even "hallucinate" outside of the game how one would carry those embodied actions into the real world), Baby Steps and Death Stranding 2 both offer opposite takes on virtual proprioception in challenging terrains (Death Stranding to empower; Baby Steps to disempower for comedic purposes). I must also shout out Bionic Bay for its surprisingly weighty and expressive parkour systems that make throwing one's virtual body across gaps feel thrilling and immediate.

Innovation in Mechanics as Metaphor

1. Consume Me

2. Love Letters

3. and Roger

4. Jump the Track

5. Time Flies

Though not the purpose of every game, many games use their mechanics in a metaphorical sense to represent some truth of an unrelated experience in the real world -- a behavior of our bodies, a behavioral tic, an emotional revelation... Always approach indirectly and poetically rather than purely representatively. This year, Consume Me and Love Letters demonstrated a particular kind of awkwardness to a visceral degree.

Visuals

Excellence in Art Direction

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

2. Keeper

3. Bionic Bay

4. Sword of the Sea

5. Skate Story

The art direction of Expedition 33 was consistently surprising and innovative, particularly for a game that ostensibly tried to balance realistic, lifelike characters and more fantastical elements rather than being pure fantasy impressionism like Keeper. Each new biome introduces some kind of fascinating idea, and it all looks great, like an entire game could have been spent on that one concept!

Excellence in Technical Visuals / Graphics

1. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

2. Ghost of Yōtei

3. Keeper

4. Skate Story

5. ROUTINE

Technical ambition with realizing new and difficult-to-achieve visual ideas goes a long way, from the yet-unmatched fidelity of the worlds and characters of Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yotei to the complex tricks of shapes and light that give Keeper and Skate Story their signature appearances.

Excellence in Animation

1. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

2. Primal Planet

3. UNBEATABLE

4. South of Midnight

5. FUMES

For a game that emulates a "photorealistic" visual style, Death Stranding 2's characters are loaded with interesting touches that give them visual appeal and uniqueness amongst other realistically-stylized games. I must also shout out the hard-body animation of the cars and the appealing UI animations in FUMES, maximizing visual interest and appeal at all layers of the on-screen experience.

Excellence in Fashion / Character Aesthetics

1. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

2. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

3. ENA: Dream BBQ

4. The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-

5. The Knightling

Costume choices are always notable (if not always well-considered) in Kojima games, and Death Stranding 2 sees his team's fashion prowess and audacity at an all-time high. Special attention should also go to ENA: Dream BBQ for its sheer variety of appealing character designs, split across numerous art styles, and The Knightling's appealing disciplines of character designs, creating an entire visual vocabulary for the cartoonish residents of its world around which there is a surprising amount of variety.

Innovation / Nuovo (Visuals)

1. ENA: Dream BBQ

2. PAGER

3. Skate Story

4. Nubby's Number Factory

5. 1000 Deaths

No game looks quite like ENA: Dream BBQ. Though it can be reduced to "surrealist", "Dadaist", or even "art brut" in its gestalt, the juxtaposition of so many different styles gives the game not only distinctiveness but also a surprising sense of life and community. Attention must also be paid to student game PAGER and its highly-disciplined yet conceptually-abstract remixing of elements in a two-color display, Skate Story for its aggression and abstraction that not only punctuates the diegetic world but also the interdiegetic UI, Nubby's Number Factory for its intentional and intriguing garishness down to its mixed-media visuals and physics-defying animations, and the appealingly weird world of 1000 Deaths.

Writing

Excellence in Story

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

2. Promise Mascot Agency

3. Dispatch

4. The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-

5. Stray Children

Clair Obscur tackles many subjects that always intrigue me in stories; the virtues and dangers of getting lost in one's creative works and the relative dignities of beings in subordinate fictional realities. Seeing its plot blossom was a thrill, and I'm glad it uses its narrative to poke at interesting philosophical questions. I must also acknowledge the sheer impossible quantity of storytelling embedded within the monumental Hundred Line. Though not as consistently-propulsive as either of its lead authors' more contained works, its ambition is intoxicating.

Excellence in Writing

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

2. Dispatch

3. Stray Children

4. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

5. ENA: Dream BBQ

Sheer quality of moment-to-moment words-on-the-screen, Clair Obscur is poetic and emotionally engaging in all of the best ways. The profundity of its plot would fall short if the quality of writing in the mundane moments was not there to back it up. I must also remind everyone that Stray Children is a follow-up to the legendary anti-RPG Moon, and no one writes quite like that team does.

Innovation in Narrative Design

1. Type Help

2. Blue Prince

3. Strange Jigsaws

4. The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-

5. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

Cleverness in structure of narrative deployment and consideration in interactive narrative systems is perhaps underappreciated for the amount of skill it requires. The relatively unassuming and modest Type Help is perhaps the most interesting example in the doling out of narrative information amongst its deductive mystery contemporaries. The ever-unfolding natures of Blue Prince and Strange Jigsaws (for as traditionally non-narrative as the latter is) lock the player into a perpetual state of curiosity and intrigue. The Hundred Line is respectable for its balance of its enormous scale and dedication to its utterly ludicrous ambition. And no game this year was quite as narratively responsive as Kingdom Come.

Characters

Excellence in Character Performance

1. Gabe Cuzzillo as Nate Jr. (Baby Steps)

2. Jennifer English as Maelle (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)

3. Bennett Foddy as Jim (Baby Steps)

4. Anjoli Bhimani as Yatzli (Avowed)

5. Troy Baker as Higgs Monaghan (Death Stranding 2: On the Beach)

The most memorable character performances this year were the improv-heavy performances in Baby Steps. Cuzzillo as avatar Nate was not only consistently funny, but he also managed to demonstrate a patient shift in the character's affect and relationship with the world's other absurd characters that arcs across the game; not always easy to manage, particularly when improvising most of the dialogue.

Best Debut Character

1. Monoco (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)

2. Renoir (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)

3. Nate Jr. (Baby Steps)

4. Esquie (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)

5. Dollman (Death Stranding 2: On the Beach)

When debuting a new character, making a good first impression goes a long way, and no one made quite as good of a first impression as Monoco from Clair Obscur. At once, his brilliant visual design, fantastic voice work, and intriguing battle mechanics hit the player, and all of this is underscored with one of the game's best pieces of music -- a sudden shift in genre and tone from the music head to that point in the game. It feels like an immediate paradigm shift when he enters the game, and he never stops feeling like the coolest dude you've ever met.

Excellence in Enemy Design

1. Monster Hunter Wilds

2. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

3. Hollow Knight: Silksong

4. Silent Hill f

5. R.E.P.O.

Variety and visual design of enemy units can be a challenging balance, and it's almost unfair to everything else whenever a new Monster Hunter launches, since this is the series' bread-and-butter. But the variety and appeal of the designs in Clair Obscur is also respectable, and the delicate balance of horror and comedy amongst the enemies in R.E.P.O. is impressive.

Best Boss Fight

1. Lala Barina (Monster Hunter Wilds)

2. Nu Udra (Monster Hunter Wilds)

3. Dentist (Split Fiction)

4. Mech Octopus (Death Stranding 2: On the Beach)

5. Cogwork Dancers (Hollow Knight: Silksong)

Again, Monster Hunter is a series built around great boss fights, so the two best fights of the year both come from the series' latest entry. The hilarious and slightly terrifying Dentist fight in Split Fiction calls back to some of the inventiveness of Psychonauts and heightens it with a funny choice in avatar transformation. The Mech Octopus, fought early in Death Stranding 2, also sets a high standard for what to expect in the fights of the sequel, immediately out-classing every fight from the first game with an impressive display of animation and scale ambition.

Audio

Excellence in Music

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

2. DELTARUNE

3. Hollow Knight: Silksong

4. Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE

5. UNBEATABLE

While the music in Expedition 33 is divisive, it hit consistently and heavily with me. Each new track caught me dead in my steps as my attention was drawn toward following its aural flow. Also relevant to this category -- there were two new Katamari Damacy games released this year, and while I was underwhelmed by the soundtrack of the otherwise more ambitious Once upon a KATAMARI, its Apple Arcade counterpart, Rolling LIVE, has an excellent soundtrack, rolling shoulder-to-shoulder with its predecessors without relying too heavily on nostalgic recollections of the series' signature tunes.

Best Song

1. Bun-San Body by 大胡田 なつき (Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE)

2. Monoco by Lorien Testard (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)

3. Strive by Christopher Larkin (Hollow Knight: Silksong)

4. Any Love of Any Kind by Woodkid & Bryce Dessner (Death Stranding 2: On the Beach)

5. Give Me Your Hand by Oleksa Lozowchuk & Interleave (The Outer Worlds 2)

Bun-San Body feels like the signature tune from Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE; a song with two or three more great musical ideas than it even needs. I also have a lot of love for the aforementioned theme of Monoco from Clair Obscur; its sudden genre shift towards funk and jazz underscores how different Monoco is from every character we had met to that point in the story.

Excellence in Sound Design

1. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

2. Skate Story

3. Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders

4. UNBEATABLE

5. South of Midnight

Death Stranding 2 features both heightened naturalism in its quieter moments and world-ending distortion in its more stylized moments, excelling in all fronts of sound design and mix. The careful and precise sound mixture is not only an expressive element of the game's world, but it is also a necessary gameplay tool in the sensory experience of virtual embodiment. Despite its necessity to navigation, the team takes advantage of the moments when they can get "weird" with it without compromising the aural "readability". I have to also shout out Skate Story and UNBEATABLE for their appealing and hard-edge distortion, evoking a certain emotionality and even philosophy for their aggressive worlds.

Special

Best Debut Game from a New Team

1. Consume Me

2. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

3. Blue Prince

4. despelote

5. Bionic Bay

Though Clair Obscur was maybe the most *ambitious* and *impressive* debut game this year, nothing feels like a clearer introduction to a new creative voice than the bravely personal and singular Consume Me. Every aspect of this manic title creates a surprisingly coherent tone and voice. I hope its creators continue to be as bold in future works.

Best DLC / Expansion

1. Overture (Lies of P)

2. The Sins of New Wells (The Rise of the Golden Idol)

3. Venom (GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE-)

4. From the Ashes (Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora)

5. C. Viper (Street Fighter 6)

Lies of P remains the best and the most confident of all non-From Software Souls-like games, and it's great to see the team take a victory lap in the Overture DLC. While perhaps less ambitious in *sheer scale*, the robustness and density of systems contained within GUILTY GEAR's Venom character bounce off of so many of the game's existing systems in fascinating ways.

Best Ongoing Support

1. HITMAN World of Assassination

2. No Man's Sky

3. Helldivers 2

4. GUILTY GEAR -DRIVE-

5. Street Fighter 6

It's not breaking new ground to applaud the No Man's Sky team for their continued dedication to the expansion of their absurdly-ambitious forever game, but for me, personally, nothing hits quite like HITMAN. The continued dedication to expanding and perfecting the World of Assassination keeps me coming back to one of my favorite games year after year. No disrespect; the shlocky tackiness of releasing an Eminem-themed mission is so appealing for precisely this kind of media property.

Best Remake / Remaster

1. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4

2. Super Mario Galaxy 2

3. METAL GEAR SOLID Δ: SNAKE EATER

4. Yooka-Replaylee

5. FINAL FANTASY TACTICS - The Ivalice Chronicles

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 is a monumental effort that feels like it must have been inches away from being killed on the vine dozens of times in its production. The fact that it is not only *as good* as two of the best games ever made but also expands the gameplay vocabulary of those titles with intelligent restructuring and brand new content is all so impressive. It's the best-case-scenario for this kind of remake. And though not as monumental as the leap from "no THPS 3 + 4" to "THPS 3 + 4", the re-release and reconfiguration of Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a long-overdue treat, giving new audiences access to the best game in the storied Mario series. I also have a tremendous amount of respect for the "let's give this a second attempt" ambition of Yooka-Replaylee. Though it's still not *quite* where I would hope the game would be after having so long to reconsider the game's design given years of feedback, it's an impressive step up and a significantly-improved version of the game. I would love to see more of this kind of "let's take another crack at it and see what we can improve" project.

Innovation / Nuovo (Game)

1. BLUEJEWELED

2. Strange Jigsaws

3. A Butterfly

4. Baby Steps

5. Time Flies

BLUEJEWELED is a parodic deconstruction of Bejeweled 2, modifying that game's systems to enact your sickest Bejeweled fantasies. This kind of "in-engine parody" is exciting ground for the modding scene and game comedy as a whole. Given its simple premise, the number of jokes it works into its meta-structure is impressive!

Innovation / Nuovo (Mechanic)

1. Badges / debt repayment (Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo)

2. Elephant bananza hoover (Donkey Kong Bananza)

3. Character pairing (BALL x PIT)

4. Phone unlock minigame (Split Fiction)

5. Shifting stages (Sektori)

Pipistrello is not only an ambitiously open-ended Zelda-like adventure, it also empowers players to judge their own tolerance for measured risk-taking in pursuit of desired builds. Gameplay-enhancing upgrades can be "purchased" with credit; not utilizing the money one has already accumulated, but putting the player in debt and taking half of all money the avatar picks up until that debt is paid. It also often inflicts a negative gameplay consequence (such as reduced total health or reduced attack power) until that debt is paid off, meaning that players must take on additional challenges for however long they anticipate it will be until they earn (double) the amount of the debt. It's a brilliant system and the standout upgrade tree of the year, piggybacking nicely on top of the game's parallel system of gameplay-modifying badges that can be collected, refined, and worn to further personalize the avatar's capabilities.

Best Moment

1. Villain twist (Donkey Kong Bananza)

2. Hotdogs (Split Fiction)

3. Manbreaker vs. stairs (Baby Steps)

4. Rainbow Road (Mario Kart World)

5. Lens rolling (Keeper)

The reveal of King K. Rool and particularly the *recontextualization of the enemy types that I had been combating the entire game* towards the end of Donkey Kong Bananza was my favorite moment of the year. Particularly the use of legacy sound effects and designs for the remixed enemies; it all felt so respectful and harmonious with Donkey Kong's split-custody legacy, particularly notable because I was worried that Donkey Kong's more arcade-leaning visual redesign was intended to distance the character from Rare's influence. Amongst the other memorable moments of the year, I also want to shout out Keeper's lens-only portion of the game, specifically riffing on Metroid Prime's morph ball mechanic (and complimented by music that specifically riffs on Metroid Prime motifs!). It's rare to see games reference each other this directly, and it felt particularly apt in a year in which we also received a new Metroid Prime.

Most Anticipated

1. Grand Theft Auto VI

2. Moves of the Diamond Hand

3. Demon Tides

4. Rhythm Heaven Groove

5. 007: First Light

This is frivolous when considered as an award, but I wanted to do a "most anticipated" section just so I have a personal record of what has most captured my attention at the turn of each year. It can be interesting, in retrospect, to see which games live up to my desires and which leave me cold; or when games overtake others in my desire. Ten years from now, will I regret being so blindly optimistic about these games? What will be the out-of-nowhere surprises that overtake these known quantities? This is a marker in time rather than a true award.

Game of the Year

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

2. Blue Prince

3. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

4. Baby Steps

5. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4

6. Donkey Kong Bananza

7. Split Fiction

8. Once upon a KATAMARI

9. BALL x PIT

10. Strange Antiquities

That wraps up another tremendous year for games. Though there continues to be a strong throughline of quality amongst 2025 offerings, a smaller proportion of it came from the traditional AAA industry. The number of big, tentpole, AAA games was meager this year, compared to past years. I expect it is due to several factors: companies continuing to feel the pains of over-scoping following the COVID-19 surge, chronic mismanagement at almost every major studio and publisher causing unprecedented staff expulsions and a brain- and experience-drain from the industry, larger releases being scheduled to avoid the ever-shifting Grand Theft Auto VI release window...

This void in the AAA space is being filled more and more by ambitious indies, and this is encouraging to see. Though indie development is far from being a reliably-sustainable profession amidst the current market, it's great to see more mainstream players and outlets pay greater attention to indie works than ever before, with indie games dominating Game of the Year lists across the community.

2026 has a lot to live up to, and I encourage my fellow players to consider tracking standouts in specific craft disciplines throughout the year. Doing these kinds of retrospective efforts illuminates how much innovation occurs in every discipline of game design, and how those advancements are in conversation with one another. Much love to the players and creators, and happy New Year!