2025 hasn’t been the best year in the games industry (and associated creative spaces). I’ll leave it to our industry trends, significant events of the year, and State of the Game Industry coverage to extol the issues and how they have affected people who make games.
It’s a testament, always, to the folks who can ship a game, let alone a great game, in the current world. And 2025 had some great examples!
In our favorite games of 2025, we managed a fledgling news business, sliced and diced through the levels of hell, drafted so many, many rooms in a puzzle mansion, and manipulated blocks and… baby steps through surreal worlds. We did all this and much more, so without further ado, here are the games we liked, loved, and lived through in 2025.
Baby Steps (Gabe Cuzzillo, Max Boch, Bennett Foddy)
Image via Devolver Digital
Everything is meaningless and we are doomed to fall flat on our stupid human faces. Those are the lessons imparted upon me byBaby Steps, the latest exercise in pain and futility from Gabe Cuzzillo, Max Boch, Bennett Foddy. The demented open-world stroller is truth incarnate. You simply need to walk from Point A to Point B. That’s it. Plant one foot. Then the next. Watch the inches turn to meters. The meters turn to miles. Find your way home. It sounds so simple—so why is it so hard? Life, man. Life.– Chris Kerr
Image via Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive.
The game that defined a year of industry discourse. How many people made this game? Was it the 30-ish core team at Sandfall Interactive? Or the 407 people in the credits? (Thanks MobyGames.)
Let’s not let discourse drown out Sandfall and Kepler’s magnificent achievement. Clair Obscur could only make an impact because it’s such a phenomenal piece of work, blending classic turn-based gameplay with modern storytelling sensibilities and a fresh artistic vision.
This is not just a success story about creative vision, but also the creative process. Much has been made about how key contributors like writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen and composer Lorien Testard never worked on a game before—but remember it isn’t enough to just hire talented new voices, you have to nurture them.
Sandfall clearly did just that, proving that healthy, collaborative working environments are as key to a game’s success as an out-of-left-field vision. – Bryant Francis
Image via Raw Fury
Blue Prince is a near-perfect example of a “notebook game”—a game so intriguing you bust out a notebook and start scrawling letters, symbols, diagrams, and possibly… architectural drawings, to hash out theories and puzzle solutions. It’s also a near-perfect game to play with someone else, especially if you have complementary puzzle-solving styles.
I adored passing the controller back and forth with my partner, myself enjoying the more spatially oriented puzzles (and, for lack of a better term “obsessive attention to detail” bits), and gladly handing off when the rooms heavier in logic puzzles came around. Blue Prince was a favorite pastime in my house this spring, and I was very grateful for the brain-tickling distractions it offered. – Danielle Riendeau
Dispatch is a remarkable first outing for Adhoc Studio. The team itself was founded by former Telltale Games developers, and it shows. Dispatch delivers a strong cohesion of art, design, and writing that sets itself apart from the choice-driven games of yore.
Playing the role of Robert Robertson III casts you as a good man during his worst days, stripped of superherodom but given the opportunity to work as a dispatcher for a team of work-in-progress villains-turned-heroes. You’ll dole out assignments—aiming to match character strengths to emerging calls for superhero help—and leverage Robertson’s own skillsets though hacking mini-games and quick decisions to help your heroes find their way to success.
There’s a lot that can be praised about Dispatch, but the quippiness of the dialogue is one of the first you’ll encounter. Conversations feel smooth with character animations and expert delivery bringing each dialogue choice to life. Moreover, the characters and their mindsets feel authentic and create a believable world, even among the superpowered antics at play. – Alissa McAloon
Image via Enhance
Have you ever experienced the prophetic euphoria of strolling into a club just as the DJ tees up a banger from your favorite artist? That is precisely the sort of high offered by Lumines Arise, the latest block-busting symphony fromTetris Effect maker Enhance. In a similar vein to its spiritual predecessor, the thumping puzzler asks you to fend of tumbling quadrilaterals across shifting stages that morph and melt in tandem with a pulsating soundtrack. Lock in and achieve nirvana. – Chris Kerr
.jpg?width=1280&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale "Samus sits atop a motorcycle in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.")
Image via Retro Studios/Nintendo.
Retro Studios’ Metroid Prime 4: Beyond made for an excellent capstone to Nintendo’s Switch 2 rollout strategy. Instead of rolling out with a blockbuster adventure featuring Mario or Link, the company placed its bets on franchises like Mario Kart, Kirby, Donkey Kong, and Metroid to make a case for its new console.
Of these, Metroid Prime 4 carried a great weight on its shoulders, needing to prove not just that years of start-and-stop development could turn into a great game, but that a Nintendo first-party title could succeed without a brand-friendly mascot or industry-redefining game design.
The game is a solitary experience loaded with friction (perhaps not as solitary as some might like, admittedly). It’s the kind of gameplay more popular with indie or double-A teams as large studios search for social experiences that drive player retention.
By keeping the faith in Metroid Prime 4, they and Retro Studios reminded players and developers that the Switch 2 is also a home for quieter games best played alone in deep concentration. – Bryant Francis
Peak (Team Peak)
Image via Aggro Crab/Landfall
Imagine crafting a dinky little video game that’s all about giddy, absurd moments and having it sell over 10 million copies worldwide. That’s precisely what happened whenAggro Craband Landfall partnered to develop Peak. That alone would be enough for inclusion on this list, but the factPeakwent on to essentially spawn its own sub-genre and conquer social media (who knew clips of wide-eyed scouts plummeting into the mist would be so moreish) absolutely cemented its position as one of the most impactful and downright joyous video games of 2025. – Chris Kerr
Hades II (Supergiant Games)
Image via Supergiant Games.
Supergiant has done it again. The studio that gave us Bastion, Pyre, and of course Hades continues to demonstrate excellence in the craft of game design, audio, visual art, and the Early Access business model with Hades II.
This success stands out because sequels can be dangerous things for indie studios. They risk being cannibalized by their predecessors or simply failing to meet expectations, and Supergiant’s polish-focused process makes Hades II feel like an inevitable successor to the original.
It’s a game that feels made by people who still had gas in the tank and ideas to explore after the earlier entry. Our site’s tagline used to be “The Art and Business of Video Games.” Supergiant once again continues to embody the best of what that slogan has to offer. -Bryant Francis
Image via Nintendo
I need to first admit that I have yet to lay hands on a Switch 2 and Donkey Kong Bananza, but I’ve delighted in watching dozens of hours of this joyous, innovative 3D platformer. Mainly, I’ve watched a favorite Donkey Kong speedrunner (V0id) master the ins and outs of the game, further showing off the creativity of the level design (and inventive destruction mechanics). There is a joy to this game I haven’t seen in a pure platformer since the Super Mario Galaxy titles, at least not in this dimension.
I’ve been a platformer fan since I first picked up a controller (in the last 80s) and a Donkey Kong gal since my obsessive grade-and-middle-school stint with the Donkey Kong Country titles, so I am very excited to one day get my banana mitts full on the game in the future. – Danielle Riendeau
After a long day of managing a publication, it’s nice to log out of work, kick your feet up, boot up a game, and…manage a publication. Many a journalist in 2025 gave a nod to News Tower as a novel take on the Tycoon genre grounded in the classic newspaper business with a particular focus on the way teams turn breaking news into front-page stories.
It’s the attention to smaller processes that makes News Tower shine. Keeping researchers and writers comfortable and undistracted in their work environment through noise and mess management is key to getting quality work out of your team. The reporting process is nuanced, allowing players to chose different angles to best suit their intended audiences, which themselves vary depending on which neighborhood of 1930s New York you’re focusing on. Factions add an ethical element, reminding you that you’re not reporting in a void and that the words you print have an impact on the power balances within the world around you.
News Tower brings together many familiar elements of other Tycoon games while borrowing some from other niches within the management sim genre, blending all into a cohesive and only sometimes chaotic experience borne out of real-world systems and processes. – Alissa McAloon
