Game of the Year 2025
Welcome to the annual post where I talk about games I liked because I didn't use this blog for anything else. And also welcome to the end of 2025, I feel like we've been saying this a lot lately but good year for video game releases less so for the people that work to make them. Also fuck 2025 just in general just for good measure. Anyway video games.
(Sorry for some missing/bad screenshots, away from my main PC as of writing)
Honourable Mentions
Rose and Violet Story Mod for Persona 5 Royal - A kind of wild modding project that subs in Kasumi into the protagonist role. They've done a whole bunch of changes big and small including rewriting a major character storyline. Just a really cool thing to see made into a playable mod something that would normally remain in the realm of fanfic just because of how much damn effort it takes to put it all together. Messy, strange and a ton of rough edges but still wonderful to play nonetheless.
Dawnless Days Mod for Total War Attila - A long awaited campaign mode for this Lord of the Rings mod came out in December and it's a very cool thing. It's still thin on the ground in many ways but it's still cool how well it's come together.
Everspace 2: Wrath of the Ancients - Everspace 2 continues to be a great game and this last DLC is just a really good capstone to the whole thing. All the characters get a little bit of a send off and getting to go into Okkar space is a nice way to end close out just one of the best space shooters in a long time.
Super Fantasy Kingdom - A city building rouge-lite. Simpler than something like Against the Storm but very focused on the loop of get resources build up your heroes to defend you during the night.
Thronefall - Another lite city builder, but closer to being a tower defence. Except your king is an active unit to the strategy game.
The King is Watching - The last city building survival game to shout out but with the very fun gimmick where only a few tiles of your city produce while the gaze of the king watches on them. So resource gathering is a more active process.
Ball x Pit - Breakout meets a survivor game. Really cool how well this works out. Ton of cool different builds and characters to go through.
Endless Legend 2 - Still in Early Access so one of the big draws of having a whole mess of really different factions isn't quite there yet. But the Tidefall system is so cool at keeping the map fresh so you keep getting new land to explore until the end of the game.
The Farmer Was Replaced - Really cool programming game. I don't like python syntax generally but it's a really cool intro to programming as puzzle game and clever about doling out programming concepts in very manageable chunks.
My Top Ten
10 - Tempest Rising
Superficially this is is a Command & Conquer like made for the modern day. And that's cool, just in and of itself. But it takes a healthy dose of active abilities less of the style of Red Alert 3 and more like Starcraft (look, there is literally a siege tank and carrier equivalents). A good campaign with some pretty varied missions, even the ones with limited units all bring something neat to the table. A shame that the third faction isn't playable quite yet but that's coming in the future. But overall it's very cool to have kind of a high production one of these.
9 - Demonschool
This one takes a little while to get going narratively and mechanically but it does so much without levelling and makes the most of different character types and ability modifiers instead. It also has one of my favourite boss gimmicks (week 5) I've seen in a long while. And it just has a whole bunch of fun messy characters to hang out with and smooch.
8 - Skin Deep
It's kind of incredible how much fun turning an immersive sim, that tends to be a pretty serious tone of game, into a slapstick comedy. Saving cats that have been chained in wall boxes by flushing the disembodied heads of your enemies down the toilet. It cool to see this game finally come out after being in development for such a long time.
7 - Haste
Gotta go fast to outrun the end of the world. A momentum game where you you just gravity dive to build up speed into the next rise and then repeat. It gets a lot out of it's rogue lite structure, and it gives you enough space to experiment with the different items and try out different builds (invincibility on near miss is maybe the best item). Some of the later bosses are were a touch too hard and there isn't quite enough variety in them but a great game that just gives you a great sense of speed, especially in endless mode where you can reach some truly ridiculous speeds where you're zipping by entire chunks of the level faster than you can reasonably react.
6 - Mechwarrior 5 Clans (+Ghost Bear DLC)
This one is a huge surprise to me, because I hated Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries. Both the base game from last year and this year's DLC are just a grand old time stomping around in Battlemechs setting the Inner Sphere ablaze. I wish that the writing had a bit more nuance that Harebrained gave to their Battletech game, this plays in far more familiar Mechwarrior territory. Which is to say that it's a pretty by the numbers Sci-Fi war story but through the Battletech lens and thus ridiculous in it's own special way. Some really solid campaign mission design and actual mech customisation really solves a huge chunk of what was kind of a drag in their previous game.
5 - Atomfall
I've really enjoyed playing the Sniper Elite games over the last couple years so a not quite Stalker like from Rebellion seemed like a good old time. And it is! It's a great first time out for them in this style of game and I'd love to see them take another go at it in the future. They do some really fun things structurally with how to get to the end game area (I even did the speedrun achievement in 90 mins that was really fun to route). But some great atmosphere and some good old fashioned British weirdness really bring this into it's own despite it's flaws.
4 - Rhythm Storm
There's just something about vector graphics and a whole mess of particle effects that is just so appealing. A run is only 3-4 levels long, you have a bunch of different ships, different weapons, do your best to survive the escalating waves and that's the game. There's such a moreish feel to this game where you can just go for another run and then watching lots of things blow up (sometimes yourself) into a cloud of particles.
3 - Abiotic Factor
Taking the survival crafting game and shoving it into a Half-Life office space instead of a grassy field is brilliant. Played this mostly in multiplayer and it's just a good time. They went all out on the theming and it lets them go to all sorts of weird and wonderful places. Just a constant surprise as to where this next weird portal is going to take you and what nonsense you're going to have to deal with this time. And I like that the base building can be relatively light, but you can also take the time to build up a whole bunch of really useful items. Also the store all of same type for containers button might be the most genius bit of UI that everyone needs to steal going forwards.
2 - Cyber Knights: Flashpoint
It's hard to overstate how much this game really hits the cyberpunk heist fantasy. On mission, you have your hacker using their deck breaking into their security system to pull down the cameras and take down the laser grid. Meanwhile the rest of the team is going through the building taking as much as they can not nailed to the ground, taking out guards and dissolving their bodies so they don't get found by a wandering patrol.
And outside of that tactical layer, you have your hideout where you lay low, build up new gear, install cyberware and making deals with contacts for your next score. Sometimes your contact might need something a bit extra in order to get some new guns in sometimes a favour and some cash to grease the wheels. Other times you'll need to take on an Obligation from a third party that will get called on some time down the line. There's just a ton of systems here that all work together that have you thinking through what is the best way to pull off each mission. Stealth sounds like a great idea until a bounty hunter shows up and you're going to wish you brought your big guns and grenades to the field, or maybe you could just leg it instead. This pulled me in hard the same way that XCOM 2 did and it's easily one of the best of these released in the last few years.
1 - Blue Prince
The House. What a singular video game this is. Grafting the room drafting mechanic from Betrayal at House on the Hill to a puzzle game is an absurd idea but it works so well. The way that it layers puzzles and knowledge at many different levels. One location will have a hint for a puzzle in a different room, but later on that same hint will be used in a completely different location for a puzzle that you won't even have known was there.
There's something really special about a puzzle game where you can walk past a prop or bit of scenery a hundred times and you won't know what to do with it until you get some other bit of information much further down the line. Or you might just intuit the answer to it. This is such a cool game where it comes to hiding information and needing to squirrel that information into your brain so that when you find the next step in that thread you know how to pull on it in order to get to the next one. This feeling definitely subsides later on where you're only juggling 2-3 puzzles instead of 10.
This is a game that can absolutely be played wrongly, later on in the game you get a ton of tools to manipulate the draft to kind of do whatever you want, but early on it really wants you to roll with the punches so that you keep getting new information. RNG can screw you over no doubt, but more often than not a I think it does tread into slightly too esoteric territory later on in the game, but I hit credits on day 22 and felt like there was so much more left that I wanted to explore. Even having dropped it to play other things there's things I'd like to see, but this is a hard game to pick back up I have pages of notes and hundreds of screenshots that mean so much less to me now than they did six months ago.
There is also some really cool lore and story to the game that involves the house itself, Simon the player character, deeply political children's books and the state of the world that is just really cool to learn and poke at (yes, lore is also puzzle knowledge). But it's also fairly dark and bleak with multiple big events all surrounding both the family generationally and the history of the house itself. Again, an utterly singular game that we won't see something similar to for a long time.