My favorite games of 2025

This was a tough year for gaming, no question about it. While we enjoyed the releases for a staggering amount of great titles, the industry itself continued to spiral into the depths of AI-hell. Driven by greed and talentless hackery by techbros, this collapse is disheartening to watch as someone who writes about – and for – games.

With that in mind, I tried my best to keep this list as clear as possible of titles using AI slop in them. But, with the way things are going, there might still be amendments ahead. Warhorse Studios, for example, has decided to stick their foot in their mouth by allowing their lead writer spout off on Twitter about how AI is inevitable. All it does is make me want to play their future games less.

It took me weeks to put this list together and it still doesn't feel complete. Some titles, like Mario Kart World, Elden Ring Nightreign, Keep Driving, and more all deserve a spot somewhere in the top 10. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii came and went to top spots multiple times. Ask me again next week and it might appear there anyway. That's the thing with great years for releases; everything is worth playing. It would be easier to say what it isn't worth your time.

All negativity aside, here are my picks for my 10 favorite games this year.

10. Assassin's Creed Shadows

Ubisoft has spent many years in the doghouse for their backwards attitudes towards consumers and their increasingly baffling and convoluted storytelling in the Assassin's Creed saga. At this point, it's all but impossible to tell what's going on in the story without a wiki and a notebook.

So it's with great surprise that Shadows isn't just a compelling adventure yarn, but a thoroughly playable and fun one to boot. There are still issues; namely in Ubisoft's greedy microtransactions and inability to decide if they're making an action game or an RPG. But once past those two major downsides, Shadows proves to be one of the best titles in the series to date.

Throw in a decent expansion pack and a terrific all-platform cross-save function and Shadows is a major step in the right direction that finally has me excited about the franchise in well over a decade.

9 . Hollow Knight Silksong

The follow-up to Hollow Knight almost didn't make my top 10 list for one simple reason: It isn't accessible.

It's a difficult and unforgiving game that features both visual and mechanical devices that made it almost impossible for me to play. The gameplay loop and level design is second to none, it's just a shame both are buried in an experience that intentionally keeps people with impairments at arms length.

Now, granted, Team Cherry is an impossibly small studio. There is only so much you can ask from them. But even in interviews their approach to accessibility feels flippant and dismissive; as if those who can't deserve to be left out.

So it's a contradictory feeling to place Silksong at number 9 and among the best games of the year. It stands here on the merits of its beautiful art design, fantastic score, and occasionally deeply moving world that evokes a sense of old Don Bluth and east European animations.

In another world, it would also include an option for the rest of us to feel like a part of its community. There, it would easily stand tall as one of the best games of the decade.

8. Farthest Frontier

A great city-builder offers choice and agency, but only just enough to keep the players focused on the task at hand. Any more and the city loses its composition; any less and it won't have space to feel personal.

In Farthest Frontier, developer Crate Entertainment has hit the magical middle ground where the tinkering is just varied and complex enough to keep you hooked for hundreds of hours, while still delivering a relaxing and accessible environment to flex artistic muscles.

The results are magical once you get going. Your city grows from a small hamlet to a sprawling landscape with endless details lovingly crafted into the houses and market squares. The survival mechanics are occasionally hit and miss, but they're also smartly optional. By allowing everyone to play on their terms, Farthest Frontier offers a vision of city-building simulations for all others to follow.

7. DOOM: The Dark Ages

Can you imagine how good a year must be that one of the best DOOM games in existence is getting left out of end-of-year listings? It would have been unthinkable in the past, but here we are.

Well, not on Region Free, says I, for Dark Ages is not just a great DOOM title, but it's the second best one in the series right behind the reboot from 2016.

Fast-paced, varied, and hell of a lot of fun, Dark Ages also boasts the best accessibility settings in any game this year. With incredible work done to preserve the gaming experience while still offering assistance to almost every impairment you can think of, Dark Ages proves that gaming can and should be for everyone, and it deserves all the accolades for that.

6. Sektori

This gem of an arcade title from a solo dev has no plot, very little in terms of accessibility, and is almost nothing but gameplay from beginning to end. It is also one of the most purest gaming experiences around that reminds me of the lost years of throwing coins into arcade machines for one more round.

Superbly designed and with one of the best soundtracks in years, Sektori is an acquired taste, but thoroughly worth the effort for everyone to at least try.

5. Avowed

Packed with fantastic writing, memorable characters, a stunning world, and with a length that can only be described as "just enough", Avowed is an old-school RPG that captures modern elements of gaming perfectly. It came out early in the year and I still keep returning to its shores for an exploratory session here and there.

It proves that not all RPGs need to be hundreds of hours long. Some of the best experiences come in tight, compact packages that you can play over and over again simply because the ride itself is so much fun.

4. Ghost of Yotei

The sequel to the already brilliant Ghost of Tsushima, Yotei takes the open world formula and perfects it to the limits that I'd argue this genre can go. Everything from here is refinement, but unless something grandiose comes along that changes how we approach the gameplay entirely, I think we've reached the peak.

The view below is brilliant, encompassing two decades of some of the greatest games seen on three generations of consoles, but it is an end. And if that's the case, I couldn't think of a better swansong than Ghost of Yotei, a heartfelt and beautifully designed samurai epic that captures the spirit of the films it emulates with nuance and eloquence.

3. Hades II

The original Hades is one of my favorite games of all time. The sequel is better in many ways and worse in others, but it's also so immensely ambitious and bold in the ways that it attempts to rethink what made the original work that I can't help but love it.

The final third doesn't quite work and it's still too difficult to recommend to everyone, but some smart accessibility settings and one of the best-written worlds in gaming help plenty. It's just a joy to visit and hear bits of dialog that surprise even after hundreds of hours and runs across Greek mythology.

2. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2

Another contradictory experience, Kingdom Come is a brilliant game with stellar characters and an evocative world brought down by some nasty people behind the art itself. Whether it's their ties to Gamergate or some truly terrible takes on AI replacing employees, it is immensely hard to separate the art from the artists at this point.

But, at the same time, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 takes great strides to not look like its developers. It finally acknowledges that the middle-ages weren't lily white, it recognizes that women and sexual minorities existed just as ever, and it finally, finally builds an organic and textured relationship between the characters that is so much more than your typical "lads being lads" romp we're used to.

At best, and especially after the first act ends, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is one of the most shockingly mature depictions of a bygone world that evokes the spirit of great literature and the enticing "what-ifs" of imagined adventures in Bohemia.

1. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Hideo Kojima has grown up and nowhere is that as evident as in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, an encapsulation of everything the maestro has done in his career, only more mature and less misogynistic than ever before.

Finally putting together a compelling cast of well-rounded and nuanced characters, Death Stranding 2 is a deeply emotional adventure story about making connections, rebuilding found families, and moving on after devastating events that would destroy many. Beautifully built around zen-like tasks of delivering packages to an isolated world, the story is a tender exploration of what it means to reach out and ask for help, and Kojima's brush with his own mortality lends a melancholy air to every minute of the long story he's telling.

Included are fantastic accessibility settings, tremendous narrative design, and some of the finest cinematics in any game in history, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is the best game Hideo Kojima has ever made, and an easy winner this year as one of my favorite experiences with this art form.