The best 20 games of 2025, according to my sleep tracker, my coffee intake, and poor life choices

Alright, end-of-year rituals are a sacred thing, and mine is always the same. I boot up my console or PC, scroll through a backlog so bloated it could legally qualify as a lifestyle choice, and experience that familiar cocktail of guilt, nostalgia, and “why did I buy this at full price?” energy. This is the moment where I try to convince myself that I’m being objective, that I’m evaluating games on pure craft and design and innovation — and then immediately throw that lie out the window and start ranking them based on vibes, muscle memory, emotional damage, and how many times a game made me say “okay, just one more run” while my phone quietly ticked past midnight.

2025 was a wild year to play video games. Not just in the “wow, lots of good stuff came out” way, but in that slightly feral sense that the medium kept refusing to sit still. Big-budget releases took strange risks. Indie games swung for the fences with ideas that would’ve been laughed out of a pitch meeting five years ago. Sequels showed up carrying impossible expectations and, in a few cases, actually lived up to them. Meanwhile, my personal relationship with time completely disintegrated as games continued to weaponize momentum, curiosity, and that ancient gamer instinct to keep pushing forward even when your brain is fried and your eyes feel like sandpaper.

So when I say this is my top 20 games of 2025, I don’t mean “the most important” or “the most technically impressive” in some vacuum. I mean the games that dug their hooks into me and refused to let go. The ones I kept thinking about in the shower. The ones that rewired how I think about a genre, or at least ruined my sleep schedule for a solid week. This list is built from a completely unhinged cocktail of craftsmanship, mechanical elegance, narrative ambition, raw game feel, and the very scientific metric of “did this make me forget to drink water for six hours straight.”

Let’s go!

20. Two Point Museum

Two Point Museum is one of those games that makes me lose entire evenings and then act surprised when my body demands food and sunlight. It’s management sim comfort food, but with that extra spice where the systems keep widening just as you think you’ve mastered them. I love the expedition loop because it turns your museum into a weird little ecosystem: you’re not just decorating rooms, you’re feeding the beast. And the humor lands in that classic Two Point way where it’s silly without turning into a loud clown horn. It’s the kind of game that convinces you spreadsheets can be cute.

19. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

This one feels like someone tried to make a tactical RPG out of a fever dream, then duct-taped a visual novel to the side, then lit the whole thing on fire for ambience. It’s chaotic in a way that shouldn’t work, but does, mostly because it commits to the bit with the confidence of a studio that knows you’re either in or you’re out. I kept getting whiplash from tonal shifts, and instead of hating it, I found myself kind of… impressed? Like, “wow, this game just did that, with its full chest.” It’s messy, but it’s alive.

18. Mario Kart World

Mario Kart World is the weird one you defend to your group chat like it’s an indie band you found before they got big. It doesn’t fully nail the “open world karting” promise, but it absolutely nails that feeling of Nintendo trying something new while still making the driving feel like it’s been sanded down to perfection. The rail-grinding and movement tricks are the kind of changes that make your brain go, “oh no, I’m about to become insufferable about this.” It’s not the final form, but it’s an exciting draft.

17. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2

This game is still the reigning monarch of “here is medieval life, now suffer.” It’s not about being a superhero with a sword; it’s about being a muddy idiot who learns the hard way, and somehow that makes every tiny victory feel like you personally invented competence. I love how it refuses to be polite. It’s prickly, it’s demanding, it’s occasionally ridiculous, and it’s also the closest thing we have to a historically flavored RPG that treats its world like a real place instead of a theme park.

16. Donkey Kong Bananza

Bananza is a perfect example of Nintendo getting away with something nobody else could pull off without the whole project collapsing into glitch soup. Fully destructible maps sound like a “cool marketing phrase” until you’re actually playing and realize the game’s design is built around that chaos. It’s dumb fun in the best way, but also shockingly precise. The best compliment I can give it is that it makes other 3D platformers feel like they’re still filling out paperwork while DK is already halfway to the center of the Earth.

15. Baby Steps

Baby Steps is the kind of game that makes you laugh, rage, and then, at some point, stare at the screen like it just read you for filth. On paper it’s “haha ragdoll walking is hard,” but the longer you play, the more it becomes this brutal little mirror about pride, refusal, and the strangely personal humiliation of accepting help. It’s not a game I’d recommend to everyone, but I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys the specific pain of getting better at something purely because the game won’t let you cheat your way out of being yourself.

14. Elden Ring Nightreign

Nightreign had big “this shouldn’t work” energy for a while. The loop was fun, but it felt like a side project trying to cosplay as a mainline FromSoftware obsession. Then the support and DLC dropped, and suddenly the whole thing started clicking like a machine that finally got its missing gear. When it’s good, it’s that special Fromsoft flavor of co-op suffering where you’re bonding through shared trauma and weird triumphs. It’s not flawless, but it’s absolutely the kind of game that turns “one run” into “why is it 3 a.m.”

13. Lumines Arise

There’s something almost aggressively hopeful about Lumines Arise, which feels kind of radical in a year where everything else wanted to be grim, ironic, or emotionally punishing. It’s a puzzle game that treats joy like a mechanic, and I mean that as a compliment. The audiovisual vibe is the point, but the play is sharp enough that it never feels like a screensaver pretending to be interactive. Sometimes you want a game that feels like it’s actively trying to unclench your shoulders, and this one does.

12. Split Fiction

Split Fiction is the kind of game that tricks you into having feelings while you’re busy yelling at your co-op partner for missing a jump. It starts with a setup that feels like it’s going to be cheesy, then slowly turns into the kind of co-op adventure that makes you look over at the other person on the couch like, “okay yeah, this is why we play games together.” It’s constantly changing mechanics, constantly surprising, and weirdly sincere without being corny.

11. Pokémon Legends: Z-A

Legends: Z-A is basically “what if a single city was a whole region,” and somehow that works because Lumiose becomes this layered playground of rooftops, parks, alleys, and weird little corners where you’re always discovering some new thing to chase. The cast helps a lot too; it’s not just a parade of trainers you delete and forget, it’s a living roster that gives the place personality. Also, Mega Evolutions are still the easiest way to make my inner 12-year-old start clapping like a seal. I am not above this.

10. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is that rare “revival” that doesn’t feel like it’s apologizing for existing. It’s stylish, snappy, and built around movement and combat that feel satisfying in your hands, not just in a trailer. The Metroidvania-lite structure works because it gives you space to get obsessed with mastery. It’s the kind of game where you start out flailing and end up feeling like you choreographed violence for a living.

9. Arc Raiders

Arc Raiders is proof that extraction shooters don’t have to feel like they were designed by someone who hates joy. The risk/reward loop is still there, the tension is still there, but there’s a weird friendliness to it when things align. It’s also just a great-feeling shooter in the moment-to-moment, the kind where you can tell the developers care about how it plays second-to-second, not just how it monetizes month-to-month.

8. The Outer Worlds 2

The Outer Worlds 2 is the rare sequel that actually feels like it listened to feedback without sanding off personality. It’s bigger, smoother, and more flexible, but the real win is the companions. They feel like actual people with opinions instead of morality meters glued to your party slot. I love RPGs that let you be a disaster in multiple flavors, and this one gives you room to roleplay without constantly smacking your hand away.

7. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

This game understood the assignment: Indiana Jones shouldn’t feel like Uncharted with a different hat. It leans into exploration and puzzle-solving in a way that makes you feel like a scrappy archaeology gremlin, not a walking machine gun. The environments are so lovingly detailed that I kept slowing down just to soak it in. It’s smart about stealth, smart about pacing, and it nails the fantasy of being Indy without turning him into a superhero.

6. Avowed

Avowed is the kind of RPG that sneaks up on you. You come for the fantasy violence and the sharp writing, and then you realize you’ve been making weighty choices about power, fear, governance, and what people do when they’re desperate. It has that “your decisions aren’t clean, live with them” energy, and it makes the world feel like it’s watching you back. Also, the combat is just plain fun in that messy spell-and-steel way where you’re constantly experimenting because the game actually rewards curiosity.

5. Kirby Air Riders

Kirby Air Riders is the rare multiplayer game that makes a room full of people sound like a sports bar, but cuter. City Trial mode is an absolute chaos engine: five minutes of scrambling, hoarding, sabotaging, and praying the final challenge favors whatever nonsense build you accidentally ended up with. It’s skillful, but it’s also beautifully unfair in a way that keeps everyone feeling like they have a shot.

4. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the kind of game that makes you pause mid-fight because the music is going too hard and you need a second to process how a turn-based system just made you feel adrenaline. It’s emotionally heavy without being melodramatic, stylish without being empty, and it has that rare “this feels like a statement” confidence. The parry-infused combat keeps you engaged, the art direction is ridiculous, and the whole thing hums with this theme of perseverance that hits harder than it has any right to.

3. Despelote

Despelote takes two hours and somehow contains an entire universe. It’s childhood obsession captured with the kind of specificity that makes your own memories wake up and start walking around the room. The soccer control scheme is legitimately brilliant, but what stuck with me more was the atmosphere: overheard conversations, the sense of a place and a time, the way the world feels both mundane and magical when you’re a kid. It’s intimate, smart, and the kind of game you finish and immediately want to talk about.

2. Hades 2

Hades 2 is the rare sequel that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to “top” the original so much as expand the universe with confidence. It’s still that lethal “one more run” machine, still dripping with style, still packed with characters who make you feel like you’re part of a messy divine family group chat. What really gets me is how reactive it is; it pays attention. It remembers. It makes your persistence feel seen. In a roguelike, that’s everything.

1. Blue Prince

Blue Prince is the kind of puzzle game that eats your sleep and then has the nerve to make you grateful for it. The hook is already fantastic, but the real genius is how it turns knowledge into progression in a way that feels almost philosophical. Every reset doesn’t feel like punishment; it feels like a dare. You’re building a relationship with the space, with the rules, with the weird logic of the estate, and the game keeps finding new ways to make you reinterpret what you thought you understood. It’s mysterious, elegant, and mildly life-ruining in the best way.