If 2025 was a mixed year for the videogame industry, it was still a banner year for videogame releases. We’ve collected the best of the best for our end-of-year consideration. Let’s go bananas.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Most years, we will catalogue the 10(+) indie games that moved the industry. But that’s not where forward movement in the industry came from the last year. The development story of the year, without any doubt, is the AA budget success of Sandfall Interactive, who have imparted a deeply auteur-driven and French pronunciation on what a traditional turn-based role-playing game could be. And it’s emphatically lovely. The worldbuilding is astute. The mix of action and classic RPG elements is innovative. It’s a gorgeous game that points toward a bright future for mid-budget development, and ought to be seen as a turning point for a genre that has long rested on its laurels and is now being pushed into the future by a real knockout title, that ought to be franchised immediately.
Donkey Kong Bananza
Oh, banana! Nintendo’s design philosophy positively radiates joy in Donkey Kong Bananza — a vigorously creative destruction-centered videogame. Awash in novel mechanics-forward concepts, it’s an utter delight to play. Brings to mind the refined invention of Old Nintendo, blended with the forward-moving ethos of modern game formats. Through endless invention and creative risks taken with a signature brand, Bananza earns its stripes by being thoroughly excellent in every assessable category.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Waiting is hard work. So is developing a videogame for seven years. Hollow Knight: Silksong took so long to cook that it grew a kind of memetic mythology among its frenzied fanbase. Could it ever live up to the hype? Yes and no! Yes: Silksong — and Hollow Knight as a concept — is now perhaps the recognized, definitional example of the Metroidvania, more popular than the Metroid or Castlevania games the design is named after, and Silksong is the pinnacle of this design. No: It’s “just” a better version of one of the most beloved indie games ever made. So, the answer is still Yes: Team Cherry have answered the call and made another definitional game in their genre (it belongs to them, now).
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
What series has given us more than Like a Dragon? Find yourself a game that can equally do dope crime stories and hilarious thematic adventures, and sometimes, does both at once. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii feels like a pitch that would generally amount to some tossed off DLC, or not make it out of a publisher’s boardroom. But here we are, with a full-fledged game about pirate yakuza, and it’s phenomenally weird, fun stuff. Between collecting a crew of weirdos to sail and battle aboard a pirate ship and engaging in the mass of fun side activities, Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is an absolute delight start to finish, and a dopamine shot directly in the veins of the games industry. Nobody is doing it like Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, making ballsy, high-risk games seemingly against the market, yet exactly for their audience. God love them. It’s a pure product of joy, whether you’re sailing the seas, beating ‘em up, or watching a musical play out aboard your ship. Please keep making weird Yakuza games forever.
Look Outside
Don’t look outside. Something grotesque is out there. Some force of Eldritch evil. It’s taking over. Everyone who looks succumbs. Once they look and understand the ancient truth, they too become a grotesque. And here we are: Stuck in an apartment that’s like purgatory and there are just so many ways to die. Channeling EarthBound (1994) and Undertale (2015), Look Outside finds deep cult appeal, both as a great Survival Horror game about outlasting the end of the world through resource gathering and as a party-based RPG. At its core, the design centers around player agency and choice. The end is coming and you can spend your last days how you want — holing up inside your apartment playing stat-boosting videogames or communing with rabid rats or fighting giant grotesque monsters. Wonderfully drawn pixel art creates constant surprises and lifts the template above familiar made-at-home role-playing games. Look Outside is special and we can’t wait to see what Francis Coulombe makes next.
Lumines Arise
Game of the Year. In a literal and metaphysical sense, Lumines Arise is about connection. Connecting puzzle pieces to music. Also, Arise is spiritually a meditation on interconnectedness. A pure expression of love through block puzzle synesthesia. Applying the same design blueprint from their work on Tetris Effect, Enhance Games have crafted yet another perfect puzzle game. Essential to the genre and the higher expression of what games can do and mean through our engagement with them, Lumines Arise is a superlative trance and a deeply resonant experience that takes the concept of play to a higher plane. Shoutouts are due to two other good rhythm games from the year — the Rhythm Heaven like Rhythm Doctor is a delightful one-button game while Ratatan is the spiritual successor of the PSP cult classic Patapon. Both are worth your time and barely missed the list, but Lumines Arise is transcendent.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
Call it Zeldavania by way of GBA aesthetics (complimentary), but Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is one of the great surprises of the year. What’s so lovely about Pipistrello is developer Pocket Trap’s follow-through with each mechanic. Equipped with the titular Yoyo (a disembodied bat), the tool is used expressively, as a narrative and character device, as a combat tool, as a navigation helper, as a puzzle element, distilling a Zelda-like item adventure down to a multipurpose tool. The Yoyo is, in-fact, a deeply versatile and inventive tool. One neat feature that sounds small but is truly great, is that each upgrade path is unlocked through loaned money. You earn an ability while you’re out using it, which is such a smart inversion of traditional game logic (which usually asks that you save and fight for a tool that a does something specific.) As a holistic design, Pipistrello is much more than it initially appears — not just a holdover for Yacht Club’s hotly anticipated Mina the Hollower, which does some of the same things, but with an 8-bit Game Boy Color aesthetic — yet, it’s also very much a must-play while we wait for Mina.
Promise Mascot Agency
A disgraced Yakuza comes to a strange little town to help run a mascot-for-hire company. This broadly entails doing odd jobs round town — think Deadly Premonition (2010) — tooling around in your Kei truck, driving mascots between jobs where you play rudimentary card games. After a few hours, you cannot really lose, which reveals that the play in Promise Mascot Agency, really, is just about exploring and beautifying the town. You’ll run over the signs of the corrupt city council, try to install a new Mascot Hierarchy to the government leadership, and generally have a weird old time with it all. It’s a simple open world that could be said to be in search of a game but if we embrace the open structure and charm of just being present in those spaces and meeting the bizarre cast, as the game, then we’ve found something materially different than anything.
Raw Fury’s Blue Prince & The Séance of Blake Manor
Publisher Raw Fury, meanwhile, have cultivated a totally unique space with the exceptional Blue Prince and The Séance of Blake Manor, which treat player engagement with their environments as a mode for storytelling and narrative in inventive ways. This placement, as a publisher-level grouping, is necessary, as both games are so exceptionally different from everything else the last calendar year, but also directly compliment one another. Both are about kinds of investigation. In Blue Prince, it’s about harnessing the layout of the environment and coming to understand how it all fits together, while in The Séance of Blake Manor, it’s about investigating how characters exist within this environment over the course of time, learning schedules, and learning through dialogue, exactly what you’re looking for. While the games were not necessarily collaboratively designed, they both represent two of the greatest forward-moving designs in environmental and contextual storytelling in videogames. Both come highly recommended!
Extra Credits
Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chrinicles
A gorgeous remaster of the best Final Fantasy game, Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles, is everything a proper remaster ought to be. A few releases this year also exemplified greatness by iteration — Dynasty Warriors: Origins moves the 1 vs. 1000 Wuxia series forward in meaningful, accessible ways, while PowerWash Simulator 2 enhances the model of the cleaning puzzle anti-shooter in significant ways, and Hades II is a great escalation of Supergiant Games’ industry-leading roguelike. For fighting game fans, Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offered a documentary wrap-around with an unexpected depth of classic series games playable, while Capcom Fighting Collection 2 makes the Dreamcast Power Stone games accessible on modern consoles (we’ve waited so long!)…
F-Zero GX
Best Game Ever? Obviously Donkey Kong Bananza is the killer app for the Nintendo Switch 2 (why didn’t that come at launch instead of a half-cooked Mario Kart?) but the best game that can be played on the new console is Sega’s 2003 GameCube game, F-Zero GX. The greatest adrenaline rush of a racing game, or perhaps of any videogame, having access to F-Zero GX again is one of the vitally important things that have happened in videogames this year. Does it hold up? You betcha. It’s absolutely stellar and still unmatched in terms of speed and mechanical refinement. It is, presently, the best game that can be played on the Nintendo Switch 2, or truly, any console, this year. This placement is not for nothing: We desperately need more F-Zero, and F-Zero GX supersedes Nintendo’s bland effort with the new Mario Kart by miles. They know what to do next. Make more hyper futuristic racing games that live and bleed on the knife’s edge of speed and style.