The thing that surprises me most about these personal GOTY lists, which I’ve been doing most years since I started working at Kotaku (including in the delivery room for my third child), is just how little I remember them after they go up. I could guess what was on the 2020 list, or the 2018 one, or my very first one from 2016, but I would probably get half of them wrong.
The dirty little secret about these lists, at least for me, is how fluid and ephemeral they are. What was in my top 10 shifted throughout the year and that variance didn’t stop once the list was published. I lock in my choice but always harbor doubts, not just about the games themselves but most of all about my own ambivalent feelings toward them. Those change, evolve, and usually just get more complicated over time.
Each of those lists would probably be different if I compiled them today. But that’s sort of the point. They are snapshots of what I thought I felt at the time. Maybe they help, even if only slightly, to clarify someone else’s feelings about one of their favorite games of the year. Or, even better, turn them onto something they hadn’t already tried. I know, though, that mostly we all just skim the lists to see how much they overlap with our own, and what we think that says about our own tastes and the other person’s. So if you haven’t already skipped ahead, here are my top games of 2025 in alphabetical order:
9 Kings
Sad Socket
A beautifully elegant mash-up of minimalist tower defense strategy and roguelike deckbuilding, 9 Kings is still in Early Access and already pretty much everything I want it to be. The introduction of a quest mode late in the year basically added an entire second game. Nothing brought me more joy this year than snuggling up on the couch and watching my brain-dead synergies scale in unexpectedly deadly ways.
Arc Raiders
Embark Studios
This is the first modern game to get me to break my “no mic with randos” rule. But Arc Raiders‘ real trick is just how rewarding it makes playing the multiplayer extraction format as a solo outsider. It does a wonderful job of blending immersive PVE encounters with unpredictable PVP run-ins in a way that adds to the richness of the sci-fi world rather than making it feel like a series of incentive-driven hamster wheels. Solid gunplay, great atmosphere, rewarding progression.
Citizen Sleeper 2
Jump Over The Age
Citizen Sleeper 2, a tight-knit sci-fi TTRPG, feels practically sprawling compared to the first game. That scope can occasionally get unwieldy or see the game run into pacing issues, but the fusion of dice-roll skill checks and light resource management with branching dialogue and player choice yields an unforgettably grim but evocative voyage through cosmic backwaters on the decline. Never have the stakes been so high for even the most trivial tasks. Citizen Sleeper 2 reminded me that letting go is often hard but necessary, and that knowing it isn’t the same thing as actually doing it.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Image: Sandfall Interactive
Everyone’s favorite French-infused, Unreal Engine 5 reskin of Final Fantasy X is as good as they say. I’m not on board with all of the game’s narrative choices, and I’m less impressed by the apparent novelty of a good JRPG in the year 2025 than some, but Clair Obscur is rock solid in so many departments and sets a new gold-standard for (non-tactical) turn-based combat. The writing and performances are especially superb, and none of it would amount to a hill of beans without the (mostly) excellent soundtrack.
Donkey Kong Bananza
Nintendo
If we judged games by merely by the sum of the joy or boredom they produced moment-to-moment, Donkey Kong Bananza would not rank very highly. But games are more than just graphs of the emotions they produce across dozens of hours of playtime. Donkey Kong Bananza is an ambitiously chaotic action platforming collectathon that feels incredibly novel for the first five to eight hours, loses all steam and inventiveness in the second and third acts, and then comes roaring back with one of the best closers of any modern Nintendo game. Could Bananza have been more? Probably. Was it enough? Definitely.
Elden Ring Nightreign
FromSoftware
Nightreign is an excellent action-RPG but a top-notch multiplayer game. It uses the superficial trappings of a Fortnite-like battle royale to completely reinvent open-world exploration, problem solving, and the classic FromSoftware boss fight. It’s less like being thrust into an i-frame boot camp than embarking on a road trip where you know the car will lose a tire, run out of gas, and stall out in the worst possible place, but persevere and the place where you break down in the middle of the night will soon begin to feel like the home you never knew you missed.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles
Square Enix
The best RPG job system to ever do it, combined with an A-tier story and S-tier music, yields an all-time classic that never fails to prove why so many people are still obsessed with it, whether you give it one hour or 20. The remaster is overly cautious with improvements and stingy with new content, but it avoids the cardinal sin of trying and failing to improve on what was already a masterpiece.
Ghost of Yotei
Sucker Punch Productions / Sony
Last month I went to an Italian restaurant and ordered their Spicy Crab Vodka. The first bite was surprisingly delicious. Every bite after that was equally delicious. The fact that every bite from beginning to end effectively tasted the same did not diminish the dish’s overall effect, or how much I still think about it. Ghost of Yotei feels a bit like that. What it lacks in variety or novelty, it more than makes up for with quality, craftmanship, and the confidence to know exactly what it is and be the best version of that. It’s impressively huge and uncompromisingly slick, backed up by great writing and some incredible performances.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Team Cherry
I played a lot of great 2D action games this year. None of them, in scope, precision, and ambition, ultimately held a candle to Hollow Knight: Silksong. It incorporates some of the tried-and-true elements of Metroidvanias and Soulslikes but transforms them into a unique, intimate, at times frustratingly galling journey that asks a lot of you but is generous with its rewards. It’s not perfect, but the flaws it does have only come into focus because of everything else it nails. On my deathbed a snow globe will slip from my hands and crash onto the floor as I mutter the name “Bell Beast.”
Split Fiction
Hazelight Studios
It’s never a good sign when I want to start off an entry with some sort of acknowledgement of a game’s biggest weakness, but maybe it’s a testament to just how insanely smartly designed Split Fiction is that its trite premise and often grating banter did not substantially detract from the whole experience. Split Fiction is so effortlessly good at what it does, it makes it easy to overlook just how infrequent it is to get such a tightly paced, well-balanced action-adventure, particularly one that keeps finding ingenious ways to one-up itself all the way through to the very end.
