Goodness gracious, 2025 has been a fantastic year for video games, and most excitingly, for games of all scales and budgets. Big-name releases have hit the spot, while indies have sprung from nowhere to become breakthrough hits, such that wrestling them all down to a top 10 with which I’m happy has been an ordeal. But I got there, and I’m happy with it. I’ve also rather shocked myself by putting two big-name games in the top two spots, thus losing my cool indie credentials. Thankfully the rest of the list makes up for it.
My technique for putting these lists together is to read every other site’s top charts, getting angry with the generic crap that’s getting overly lauded, and then scroll through the 183 new games I played this year on PC alone. Then I pick the 10 which are objectively the best ones, and rank them in a scientifically proven and unquestionable order of goodnessosity, for an irrefutable list on which history is established.
10) Eclipsium
© Housefire
I installed Eclipsium on the basis of the screenshots, and am so glad I did. I’m so pleased to see the game got some attention from others too, with the extraordinary art in this walking-sim horror game astonishing everyone who saw it. This is a peculiar and striking game, combining truly beautiful vistas and horrendous body horror, and it’s so damned interesting. Every surface ripples with pixels, such that the world is only truly tangible when you’re moving, giving everything an organic feeling of breathing. It’s a 3D game that’s then re-rendered onto a 320×180 canvas, with a 12FPS human hand added as your means of interaction with the world. The effect is extraordinary, ensuring an already intriguing and surreal experience is all the more compelling.
9) The Drifter
© Powerhoof / Kotaku
The Drifter starts out looking like a traditional point-and-click adventure, before revealing two super-important things: Firstly, an immediately fascinating story that might be about some peculiar secret forces causing the disappearance of homeless people, and secondly, a control scheme for old-school adventures that makes so much sense in the modern world. Its innovative design for controllers needs to be copied by absolutely everyone else out there, forever.
The game then divides itself into distinct chapters, with a limited number of locations available in each, to keep the developing story moving along nicely. I’m not a big fan of the ending, but what makes The Drifter stand out is that this doesn’t feel like it matters as much as it normally might in a narrative game. It’s still great fun, and everything that comes before the conclusion is so thrilling. Plus there’s fabulous voice acting, gorgeous art, and some really neat puzzles.
8) MotionRec
© Hansum / Kotaku
Here’s the conceit of 2D platform-puzzler MotionRec: You can record your movement for a short while, and then “replay” that motion elsewhere in a level irrespective of the platforms available. So let’s say you need to get to a distant point at the top right, and there’s just a void before you. Record yourself climbing a flight of steps from bottom left to top right elsewhere, then replay it here. The further you go, the more superbly elaborate this all becomes, until you’re solving puzzles that would have absolutely flummoxed you near the start.
The game pretends to be 15 levels long, but the truth is it’s 30, and that’s good to know before you play. There’s something psychologically unsettling about thinking you’re winding down to an end, only to learn you’re only halfway through, and it’s far more pleasant to work through with the knowledge. Also, that second half is wildly more difficult than the first, meaning it’ll take you an awful lot longer to figure out. The game is so clever, and the sparing pixel art amazingly well used, making MotionRec my favorite in a very strong field of puzzle games in 2025.
7) Escape from Duckov
© Team Soda
I was pretty sure Escape from Duckov was a goof. You know how Steam’s charts get clogged up with those god-awful achievement farms, “games” like Banana suddenly seeing hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players, despite being borderline nothingness? I thought, from the name and its sudden popularity, that this was one of those. Nope! So is it a simple spoof? An Escape from Tarkov knock-off but with duck skins? No, it’s that either! It turns out this single-player extraction shooter from a team of five is a superb game in its own right, a compelling loop of outside runs of derring-do, and base-building with the loot you gathered. It’s a twin-stick isometric shooter at heart, with vast locations to explore and quests that encourage you to venture ever-further away from safety, always carrying the grim risk of losing everything. So, an extraction shooter. But with ducks. And no other stinky, horrible players to ruin your day. I ended up spending far longer with this game than I ever thought I would, and just writing about it now is making me itch to switch back from Arc Raiders for my adrenaline fix.
6) Old Skies
© Wadjet Eye / Kotaku
It took me a little longer to warm up to Old Skies than I did to Wadjet Eye’s previous stunning adventure, Unavowed. But warm up I did, until I was singing from the rooftops about this wonderful point-and-click tale of time travel tourism. You play as Fia Quinn, a “time agent” who accompanies the rich on their travels back to moments in the past to ensure they don’t attempt to change anything important in history. Told in chapters, Quinn’s tale eventually begins to weave an over-arching narrative as various events begin to interconnect.
Something I particularly loved about Old Skies, apart from its fantastic writing, acting and art, is that it isn’t obsessed with the butterfly effect, or an obsessive preservation of history. Instead, this is a future where events are constantly being altered by the actions of those visiting the past, with only certain key events preserved as unchangeable. And one of those is 9/11, allowing long-time New Yorker Dave Gilbert to revisit his own experiences of that day in a way that’s effective and affecting, without ever being intrusive or ghoulish. It’s a time travel story like you’ve never heard before, and a splendid adventure game to boot.
5) Strange Antiquities
© Bad Viking / Kotaku
I completely missed Strange Horticulture in 2022. An odd aspect of my job is that if an indie game is already getting lots of mainstream attention, it becomes a far lower priority for me to play so I can focus on the completely unknown and try to get more eyes their way instead. And what a shame, because what a game! However, when commissioned to write an interview with the developers of the sequel, I quickly put that right and played the original before this year’s second game. And what a treat that was!
Both games have you working in a small shop, selling plants in the original, obscure items here, to a range of customers, but nothing in your store is labelled and you must identify them through interacting with a huge range of clues. And wow, what a far greater range there is in Antiquities than its predecessor, with its wonderful spread of ways to interact with items, the piles of pamphlets and letters, its multiple maps with locations to explore (in text adventure format), and secret compartments to discover. It’s a breathtakingly smart game, endlessly delightful in the ingenuity of the challenges, and it comes with a hint system that goes well out of its way to get you past a block without spoiling anything.
4) Donkey Kong Bananza
© Nintendo
I’ve gotta admit, I was a bit deflated after I bought my Switch 2. Mario Kart World felt like such an anticlimax to me, a game that didn’t seem significantly more interesting than previous entries, and with an open-world I was so excited to explore, and so disappointed to experience. It was, oddly enough, replaying Metroid Prime Remastered on the device that won me over—the doors finally opened the moment you shot them! And then along came Donkey Kong Bananza.
Look, you can hate me as much as you want, but I never really got on with the old Donkey Kong Country games. I KNOW. I’m wrong. I’m not denying it. But it rather flattened my excitement for the other Switch 2 game of 2025. So what a happy boy I was once I started playing! Oh my goodness, this is what I like to pretend represents Nintendo, rather than the spiteful, lawyer-forward corporation it too often reveals itself to be: a giant box of joyful fun. It’s a game that just wants to be played, to be thoroughly enjoyed as much as is humanly possible, uninterested in pushing you away or restricting your options for distractions. I deliberately played Bananza as slowly as I could, going back and seeking out every last banana on every level once I realized I was getting close to the end, because I didn’t want it to be over. It’s rare that games are this much pure fun.
3) The Beekeeper’s Picnic
© Afoot Games / Kotaku
Did I really enjoy The Beekeeper’s Picnic more than Donkey Kong Bananza? Well, the question itself reveals the complete stupidity of ranking such lists at all. This is, really, ten games I really enjoyed in 2025, and I’ve ranked them based on incoherent vibes. It’s almost as silly to compare a manic 3D action game about smashing rocks to a genteel 2D story about an elderly Sherlock Holmes as it is to compare it to a favorite fruit or particularly enjoyable train ride. They are utterly dissimilar, and both completely wonderful.
The Beekeeper’s Picnic is a love letter. It’s a love letter to the entire canon of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, a love letter to classic point-and-click adventures, and a love letter in and of itself. This is a game about a post-Great War Sherlock Holmes re-retiring to Sussex and confronting himself over his lifelong treatment of his closest friend, John Watson. As Watson returns from the front lines, where the old man returned to the army as a medic, Holmes delightedly welcomes him into his new countryside cottage, and wants to show his affection for the doctor by putting together a picnic. That’s the setup, and it’s gorgeous.
Even better, creator Helen Greetham is a devoted fan of the Holmes stories, and understands them in a way that almost every recent Sherlock-based media has not. It begins with a scene set toward the end of The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, to establish Doyle’s own representation of the love between these two men, before moving to 1918 to tell a new story set after any in the official series. To present a softened Holmes, a man finally able to be reflective and introspective instead of simply an objective detective, is so brave, and could so easily have come across as disingenuous. But Greetham’s deep knowledge and respect for the character ensures it always feels utterly valid. I adored it. I find myself thinking about it. I have so much more to say about it than I do most other games I played this year. Yeah, you know what, I think I did enjoy it more than Donkey Kong Bananza.
2) Arc Raiders
© Embark Studio / Kotaku
I was not expecting to like Arc Raiders. I was, in fact, not the least bit interested in playing Arc Raiders. Online games in which I have to interact with other players are my kryptonite, and on learning that there was no PvE mode, I didn’t even want to bother. But then I kept reading Claire’s articles on Kotaku about how much fun she was having, and I dunno…she convinced me to try. I’m so glad.
Even after this, it didn’t seem likely I’d stick with it. I messaged a friend to say, “I’m going to try playing Arc Raiders.” His reply: “I can’t think you’ll enjoy it.” A month later, I’m hooked.
As I’ve previously documented, I’m pretty dreadful at the game, although I am improving. I haven’t died for so long now that the next failure is going to hurt like hell, genuinely to the point where I find myself a little reluctant to try sometimes. Then I see a quest I’m sure I can do, moderate what I’m willing to take with me, and get out there. Although I have given up playing on Xbox until I next die, since I’m significantly more comfortable with a mouse and keyboard.
I’m not sure I’d ever have found my way into this if I’d not played Escape from Duckov first, but now I’m totally all in on solo-able extraction shooters. (Never, ever going to play in a team, ever, not never.) I love the world Embark has built. I love the stunning graphics, especially the game’s air, which is a mad thing to be excited about but it keeps taking me aback. I love the utter terror of creeping around buildings, of spamming, “Don’t shoot!” if I see another player, or delightedly responding with an “OK!” if someone else says it first. I love just making it into an elevator with nothing to spare. God I love sliding down the stairs. I still haven’t found enough fucking lemons to upgrade my chicken, and I love that this is a sentence I’m typing.
I’m having so much fun playing a game I thought was absolutely not for me, in a genre I didn’t think I’d ever care about, and that’s a truly spectacular thing. Now, all they need to do is replace the sodding AI voices and I can stop feeling guilty about it, too.
1) Avowed
© Obsidian / Kotaku
January and February games do have a habit of slipping out of end of year lists, so it’s testament to Obsidian’s Avowed that it hasn’t left my mind since I finished it. What a big, beautiful RPG, unquestionably the best of 2025, with companions that feel like old friends, characters I find myself wondering about, and massive world-changing choices of significant consequence. Avowed is up there with my all-time favorites, Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights 2, Mass Effect and Planescape Torment, a game I cannot wait to return to when it’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten the finer details.
Oh, and it’s a third game in the world of Pillars of Eternity, one of the finest RPG series gaming has to offer. Avowed‘s use of the setting offers huge amounts to faithful fans, while remaining completely accessible to anyone visiting for the first time. That’s thanks to the Living Lands being a unique setting in the realm of Eora, such that it sits distinct from the Pillars tales of untrustworthy gods, while still in a world reeling from their revelations.
Kai is an all-time great RPG companion, and it bewilders me that the Wikipedia page for Avowed still lists that there’s no companion romance in the game. It’s not just that it’s the same voice actor as Garrus; I love him like I love Garrus, and I feel like I miss him since we stopped hanging around.
The setting is an all-time great RPG land, with its disparate biomes keeping things fresh, and the parkour-ish climbing and jumping adds a verticality that RPGs rarely see. But, of course, more than anything else it’s about experiencing a story in the company of brilliant characters, which no one else does quite like Obsidian. (No, not even Larian, although I have no shade for the incredible Baldur’s Gate 3.)
Thinking back on Avowed doesn’t feel like remembering a video game I played this year, but more like reflecting on a place I inhabited, the people I knew there, and the adventures we had. That’s truly special, and it’s why Avowed is very definitely my game of 2025.
Honorable Mentions
I have so many other games I loved this year, and I’m going to have forgotten to mention loads of them, and perhaps even one I’d have put in the top 10 if I remembered. But those I can remember to call out are:
- Dawnfolk
- Slender Threads
- Wizordum
- Crashlands 2
- Doom: The Dark Ages
- Ooo
- Project Warlock II
- The Supper: New Blood
- PowerWash Simulator 2
- Strange Jigsaws
- Time Flies
- Gigasword
- The Crazy Hyper Dungeon Chronicles
