Well, we've done it. By golly, we've done it! Another rotation around the sun whether we like it or not! And what a rotation this has been. EA being sold to the Saudis, Xbox deciding upwards of $1000 is a sane price for a handheld console, Trump's DOJ facilitating the single-biggest coverup in our nation's history, it seems like the news never ends. Never. Ever. For christ's sake.
But anyway, as always, the hobby that unites us has continued to churn out some dizzying highs and truly stupefying lows. 2025 was kind of a standout year for me in one specific way: it didn't ever feel like a bust in terms of game quality. It seems like every year, I've opened up this article by saying some variation of "this year felt like it had nothing good until I looked back on everything at the tail end." Not 2025, though. 2025 came out swinging from the very start, and despite quite of bit of mediocrity along the way, it mostly kept up its momentum.
Normally I like to wax poetic for a little while longer, but I think I've given as much overview as is needed for this year! As always, let's set the ground rules for the reading to come:
1): As is the case each year, only games that I both played and reviewed will be eligible for placement on any of these lists. So unless you look up in the navbar and see a game's title, you aren't going to see it represented in any category. There are times when I simply don't have the motivation to write, or I don't have a lot to say, but this rule of mine helps me to at least get some scattered thoughts out there for just about everything I play.
This means that even if I played something, if I didn't review it, it won't show up. I dipped my feet in Cronos: The New Dawn earlier this year and Total Chaos within the last month, but those games blew, so I didn't finish, didn't review, and didn't include these on the shortlists for any categories.
To further spell things out for you, I obviously didn't touch things like Madden or any other sports slop, namely because I have a little thing called "self-respect." I also didn't engage in this year's Call of Duty or Battlefield 6, though I do hear good things about the latter.
I imagine it's possible that Borderlands 4 is the most mind-bogglingly excellent game ever conceived by man, but sadly I'm too poor for Randy Pitchford, so I suppose I'll never know! Likewise, Donkey Kong Bananza could be the genre-defining platforming masterpiece that Dunkey claims it is, but I refuse to spend my own money on the Nintendo Switch 2 until there's anything resembling a good reason to. By extension, that means no Mario Kart World or Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment. I'm also not a fan of roguelikes, so you won't see Hades II or Blue Prince here. Finally, I don't do multiplayer unless it's in a soulslike context where I don't have to listen to some drooling mongoloid talk...so, no Arc Raiders or....whatever...other little multiplayer things have come out this year.
I also don't play games that I'm pretty sure I'm going to hate or that get critically panned. So, no Mindseye, sadly!
Clearly, I'm joking. But I see it every year: content creators will put out their lists and include some cowardly disclaimer at the beginning saying that if you disagree with them, it's ok, because it's just their opinion. Online vitriol is obviously a hell of a thing to have to contend with, but I refuse to coddle the internet. I'm not you, so clearly this is my opinion. You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to see my opinion. Do better, content creators!
3): You should 100% expect to see heavy spoilers for any and all games on these lists. If I were to exclude spoilers like I did in my earlier days, many blurbs would be substanceless. I'll be trying to keep blurb titles spoiler-free so you don't get things spoiled just from scrolling, but for various reasons that isn't going to be 100% possible this year. It's hard to describe. Some spot winners, simply by existing, spoil major things that you might not expect. I wouldn't worry too much about it because it's only a thing that happens once or twice in this article, but I like to be transparent about this kind of thing. Anyway, a general rule of thumb I always promote is that if there's a game you want to avoid spoilers for, skip a blurb if you see it's about that game.
4): For a handful of years now, I've been on the fence about how many pictures to include with blurbs. You'd be surprised how much time including pictures takes...for instance, just writing down the numbers and names for each spot winner took upwards of 2 and a half hours to do this year. So imagine having to dedicate that kind of effort not to writing names, but to googling, finding pictures, downloading them to make sure they're the correct file type, pasting them in here, and double-checking the formatting to make sure the picture's inclusion didn't screw anything up...for every single blurb.
So yeah, I'm not sure how many pictures I'm going to include, so excuse the sometimes inconsistent visual flair, I suppose.
5): Another thing that has been happening for a couple years is starting out with 10 winners for a category but cutting it down to 5. I usually do this because I don't have enough to say for spots 10-6 or because I don't really feel like writing a full 10 blurbs for a section. In these cases, I'll be including a note at the end of the introductory statement to let you know what won the relevant spots, as victories in these spots still counted for my final list calculations. For most cases this year, I just ended up picking 5 spots in the first place if I couldn't think of a lot to say for a full 10 entries, but I'll still be doing my little disclaimer for the few exceptions.
6): One other thing I've been doing in recent years (that I'll be continuing to do) is only allowing one spot victory per list per game...if at all possible. There are times where that simply isn't doable in my mind, but generally I like to have it so that game x can only win one spot in something like "best soundtrack piece" so that other games get a chance to shine. Anyone who watched this year's game awards can attest to the fact that it's a little boring when only one thing gets represented in a category. I only use a game's highest spot win per list in the final calculations anyway, so this lets me represent a much larger variety of games in each list, which in turn allows for some greater shuffling in the GOTY order.
7): This year I'll be sparingly doing something new. Typically I save "runner-up"s for the final list, but this year, there were some things that were ineligible for spot victories that I nonetheless wanted to recognize. So, occasionally I'll be putting a runner-up at the start of a list. These cases will not be earning their respective games any extra points for the final GOTY list calculations, as they're just things I'd like to mention and nothing more.
8): Buckle up, children! If you thought Project 2025's assault on consumer freedom in this year's Steam/Mastercard embarrassment was intense, I can guarantee you it's going to get worse from here on out. I suspect we're going to see The Heritage Foundation call in a favor or two from its puppet president to achieve its goals before all is said and done, and it might even approach from more subtle or palatable angles at first. Whatever form it takes, we as consumers must be ready to push back like we did with the Steam attack.
With all that out of the way, let's get to it!
This!
Is!
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The Technical Awards
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Best Realistic Graphics
Graphics are the epitome of "nice to have"s for games. It's always great to see quality graphics, but they aren't a requirement by any stretch of the imagination. For this first of the two graphical awards, the focus is on styles that go for realism...and in most years, that tends to roughly translate to "biggest budget." But in 2025, that's not 100% the case! While this category tends to celebrate fidelity above direction, there just so happened to be plenty of games that balanced both these aspects. So, here are the games with the best graphics aiming for realism!
NOTE: Spots #10-#6 went to The Alters, Karma: The Dark World, Ghost of Yotei, Hell is Us, and Atomfall.
#5): Mafia: The Old Country
#4): Silent Hill f
Anyway, Silent Hill f is one of the games that incorporates both fidelity and direction in its visual style. Every second spent in Ebisugaoka is uncomfortable thanks to the strategic use of lighting and shadows along with the traditional Silent Hill fog.
#3): Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
#2): Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Realistic Graphics of the Year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
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Best Artistic Graphics
In stark contrast to the previous category, there isn't really a single factor that determines spot placement in this list. This category is all about graphical styles that aim less for realism and more for a specific artistic vision. As such, spot winners feature more direction than fidelity. Because there isn't an easy answer for what game wins what, this one relies almost entirely on my gut feeling. So, here's what my gut says about this year in terms of artistic graphics.
NOTE: Spots #10-#6 went to: Ignis Dei, South of Midnight, Wanderstop, Silly Polly Beast, and Dispatch
#5): The Midnight Walk
#4): Ruffy and the Riverside
#3): Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist
#2): Hollow Knight: Silksong
Artistic Graphics of the Year: Sword of the Sea
Given that the game is about returning life to certain pieces of the world, you'll constantly see lush (I don't know if that's a relevant word here, but that's what I'm going with) ocean waves combined with desert sand and frozen tundra. You'll also find Siofra River-style lands of eternal night featuring countless shipwrecks, things like that. Beauty and dissonance, a theme also consistent in the game's soundtrack. So, for how expertly it weaves these things together in its visuals, Sword of the Sea is my pick for the game with the best artistic graphics in 2025.
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Best Performing
While decent visuals are entirely a nice-to-have, good performance is a requirement. I posed this question last year and I'll pose it again: if you have current-gen hardware, which graphics setting do you choose? Quality or performance? I've never met a single person who chooses the former over the latter. Anyway, with some games, a good framerate is a given either due to a gigantic budget or a general lack of systems. In other cases, stability is a feat of engineering given the stress placed on the hardware. In any case, these games were the ones with the most stable framerates for 2025.
NOTE: Spots #10-#6 went to: Ghost of Yotei, Ninja Gaiden 4, The Alters, Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, and Sword of the Sea.
#5): The First Berserker: Khazan
While the visuals in The First Berserker: Khazan aren't anything to write home about, there tends to be a lot going on on screen in the game's more intense combat encounters. What impresses more than anything about Khazan's stability is that it definitely seems like it had a smaller budget than other titles this year. The exact budget hasn't been disclosed, but this is a title that features AAA gameplay quality despite a lack of a AAA publisher. So, for what it is, Khazan is one hell of an optimized game!
#4): Doom: The Dark Ages
Because Doom: The Dark Ages is so much slower in its gameplay loop than its predecessors, one might not think it would be too technically demanding. However, it's worth noting that this is a semi bullet-hell game, so there's still plenty of stuff happening on screen. That Microsoft budget probably helps with the optimization, but a good framerate is a good framerate regardless of the reason.
#3): Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
As we already discussed, Death Stranding 2 is a visually impressive game. It also features a hell of a lot of open world systems...after all, literally every square foot of the map has a unique bit of sloping and physics depending on the weather and the amount/size of rocks in the area. With so many things to keep track of with every step you take, any lesser game would've easily crumbled. But DS2 keeps a solid framerate from beginning to end.
#2): Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
There aren't as many systems at play in Expedition 33 as there are in DS2, but what lands it this high a spot is both a small budget and a taxing level of visual fidelity. While this title has some slight publisher backing, it's tremendously small as far as publisher backing goes. Still, you wouldn't think that just by looking. So, not only is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 the best looking game of this year, it also achieves that status with far less money behind it than something like Ghost of Yotei. Despite these things, the framerate never once falters.
Most Stable Framerate of the Year: Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II obviously looks incredible, but it wins this category as a result of its amount of systems. Death Stranding 2 frankly looks like a visual novel compared to this in terms of how much is going on. Without dropping a single frame, KCD2 manages to look better than almost any game this year, keep track of several soft stats, retain an absurd amount of world state data, the list goes on. It's no secret that this game features several bugs, but this is a category about framerates specifically, so in my opinion, this is as cut and dry as a category gets!
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Best Controlling
Not to be confused with control schemes, "best controlling" is a category that deals with the feeling of control. If you jump, do you land where you think you will? If you turn, is it an instantaneous thing or does it take a little too long? These questions and more are the ones these spot winners answer "yes" to.
#5): Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist
There's quite a bit of bias in this placement, I'll admit. See, the original game in the Ender series featured what I consider the cardinal sin of game design: contact damage. So, you'd end up accidentally veering into an enemy and taking damage at times that simply didn't feel fair. This sequel removed most of the contact damage except where it made sense, so comparatively speaking it felt like I had far more control over my movement here.
#4): Ruffy and the Riverside
A 3D platformer had damn well better control well, and Ruffy and the Riverside does exactly that...and that's kinda all there is to say!
#3): Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
While Yakuza games are all iterative and lazy (which I say in an affectionate tone), I can't deny that this results in an excellent technical package every time. As a result, Majima is just as responsive to player input as Yakuza protagonists always are.
#2): The First Berserker: Khazan
I recently began replaying Khazan with a greatsword build instead of my initial spear build, and that's what ultimately landed it this high in this category. Do you know how hard it is to make a greatsword feel responsive? Or any slow weapon, really? Yet, Khazan includes ways in which to make the greatsword swing as quickly as you can press the attack button without making it feel drastically overpowered. It has to be experienced to be believed, but it blew my mind enough to land it in second place for this list.
Best Controlling Feeling of the Year: Hollow Knight: Silksong
Earlier I mentioned that platforming requires an excellent feeling of control, and this is doubly true for platformers with an emphasis on difficulty. While not exclusively a platformer, Silksong contains quite a few hard-as-nails platforming challenges that require the simultaneous use of several of your abilities. But each of these abilities gives you some degree of control over where you land or how far you can drift before using another skill. If you're especially skilled, you can even take on some of the hardest challenges without certain crucial upgrades. That right there is the sign of an expertly crafted control system.
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Best Sound Design
As I tend to say every year, sound design is an underappreciated art in games. It's the kind of thing one doesn't tend to think about unless it's really bad. So, many years ago, I sought to change that with a category meant to celebrate good sound design. The following games are the ones with the best sound samples and mixing.
NOTE: Spots #10-#6 went to: PowerWash Simulator 2, Ninja Gaiden 4, Atomfall, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and Hell is Us
#5): The First Berserker: Khazan
The name of the game in The First Berserker: Khazan (you know, besides what I just wrote) is dynamic range. Spear stabs and greatsword impacts all tend to be slightly understated. Blows that fully break an enemy's posture, on the other hand, come with a firm "boom" that feels like a natural extension of the weapon sound. Then the visceral attacks that take advantage or this broken posture result in a sickening crunch that hammers the animations home.
#4): Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I find this placement hard to describe, as my reasoning revolves around the uniqueness of the sound samples. They feed into the ultimately fantastical nature of the world, so they need to be heard to be understood.
#3): Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
As with everything else in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, the sound design is all about obsessive realism. In stark contrast to something like The First Berserker: Khazan, the weapon sounds are basically nonexistent save for blunt thuds and the occasional scrape across armor or a shield. That's because, wonder of wonders, that's how these weapons would sound in real life. But even beyond the weapons, the ambient noise as you wander through a forest feels distinctly like actually being outside. Everything in KDC2's world is carefully crafted for realism's sake, and the sound design in no different.
#2): Hollow Knight: Silksong
All you need to do to understand my choice to place Hollow Knight: Silksong this far up the list is to go into the game and strike a single bell.
Sound Design of the Year: Silent Hill f
I can't remember the last time a horror game had me feeling as uncomfortable as Silent Hill f did, and this is due in large part to the soundscape the game takes place in. Carefully-placed creaks in the wood floors at perfect volume, the strategic use of ambient silence, every second I spent in Silent Hill f was one where I dreaded what might come next...but not because I was afraid of jumpscares.
No, it was because I was just generally afraid, which is something I don't see often in modern horror (with its obsession with making Youtubers with blue hair scream and fall out of their chairs). It's perhaps a given to have a good horror game take this prize home, but Silent Hill f more than earns this honor.
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Best Soundtrack
This category, if it isn't obvious, is one of the more subjective categories I have. If good taste in music could be objectively proven, after all, nobody would like Sleep Token! So I'm clearly going with my gut on this one, but an additional guiding light in these decisions is whether or not a soundtrack is a good fit. The example I always use is A Knight's Tale, where the director made a failed attempt to channel Baz Luhrmann with 20th Century music despite the medieval setting. That's a bad fit. So, quality is a major factor in my decisions for this list, but I also consider smaller things like that.
#10): Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist (Mili)
Just like its predecessor, Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist crafts an excellent atmosphere with understated instrumentation and childlike vocals that come off as an extension of those instruments (rather than cringe). It's an iterative soundtrack for sure, but still a good one.
#9): Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (Anderzej Janicki)
Last year, Heilung lent their talents to the creators of Senua's Saga: Hellblade II to create...an incredibly boring, nondescript soundtrack. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, on the other hand, features an OST that sounds more like Heilung than Heilung did.
#8): Lies of P: Overture (Various Artists)
Overture brings an additional handful of songs to add to the roster the base game comes with, some of which can go toe-to-toe with the likes of "Feel" and "Quixotic." Beyond this, there are some awesome new themes that made struggling against their relevant bosses feel less frustrating.
#7): Hell is Us (Stephane Primeau)
Hell is Us is the rare example of a soundtrack that earns a spot on this list exclusively because of how well it fits the game. I can't think of a single track from this OST that I've put on a playlist, but it does wonders for the completely alien feel of the world.
#6): The Midnight Walk (Joel Bille)
Yet another OST mainly here because of how well it fits (but one with some memorable tracks), The Midnight Walk's soundtrack mainly exists to serve as set dressing for the story's emotional moments. But it accomplishes this task well.
#5): The First Berserker: Khazan (Lee Jae-kwang, Go Young-hwa, a-JAE, 2WEI)
Is it perhaps a little predictable to put a soulslike on the best soundtrack list? Probably. This genre tends to put quite a bit of effort into soundtracks, and The First Berserker: Khazan is no exception. Still, this is the award for best soundtrack, not most unique soundtrack!
#4): Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (Jan Valta, Adam Sporka)
I've already mentioned KCD2's penchant for realism, and that extends to the soundtrack. Sure, there are times where the OST opts for quality over accuracy (mainly in major story moments), but the majority of the time, the pieces are all structured like an old-timey piece of music might be. I don't get to talk about it much, but a major pet peeve of mine is tavern music in medieval games that just sounds like modern indie music or Mumford and Sons. KCD2 doesn't fall into this trap.
#3): Sword of the Sea (Austin Wintory)
In recent soundtracks, Austin Wintory has delved a little too far into dissonant territory for my liking. I try to keep my expectations in check every time he comes out with something because I know it'll never beat Journey's soundtrack. Despite this, he has typically disappointed.
However, Sword of the Sea is a best of both worlds situation: there's heavy dissonance used, but it's always accompanied by some beauty in a way that underscores the world perfectly. Because this OST is made to score open levels and not to punctuate emotional story beats, the tracks are also easy listening. For people hoping for another tearjerker like Journey, this will be disappointing. But I've listened to the whole thing while writing several times this year. So, that's quite something!
#2): Hollow Knight: Silksong (Christopher Larkin)
If I had to say one positive thing about the original Hollow Knight (I swear I didn't dislike it), it would be that the soundtrack was excellent. In Silksong, Christopher Larkin turns the music up to 11, as cliche as that is to say. The opening track, which sounds straight out of a movie trailer. The folk-adjacent backing track for the first level. The depressive melancholy of the Bilewater theme. The organ-laden boss theme for Phantom. The tearjerking triumph exclaimed in "Last Dive." And of course the beautiful-yet-hostile theme of the Choral Chambers. Not every song in this OST is great, but the vast majority of them are. Still, there's one soundtrack that comes out on top.
Soundtrack of the Year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Lorien Testard)
I mean, come on. What else was it going to be? There's one track that got on my nerves...but the official OST on streaming platforms is 8 hours long,..and then there's another volume that lasts over an hour, so a total of 9 hours. One single bad track out of that is a forgivable offense. And it's one hell of an underdog story, too. The leadership over at Sandfall interactive basically went onto a small French equivalent of Soundcloud (with something like a couple hundred active users) with an open call for a composer for their soundtrack, and that's how they found Lorien Testard. It's every Soundcloud musician's dream!
It would've been a great underdog story no matter what, but the fact that this is easily one of the best soundtracks in gaming period makes it that much better. Beautiful arias, some of gaming's most epic boss themes (without the usual wailing choirs that sometimes dominate the market), different musical themes for different areas depending on their looks. Like, once again, come on! It was never a question of if this game's soundtrack won this award. It was a question of when, and that time is now!
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Best Soundtrack Piece
Remember how I mentioned that the "Best Soundtrack" category was pretty subjective? Well, this particular category is the single most subjective one you'll see today. Unlike the previous list, this one is entirely based on gut feeling. So, the next ten tracks are the best ones from 2025! As always, I'll be including a link to the relevant tracks so you can listen for yourself.
Here's the first of the runner-ups I was talking about in the introduction, and it'll give you a chance to see what I mean. Flambae's song isn't an original composition. It's a character doing karaoke and inserting his own words over an existing song. There's no way in hell I'm giving that anything on this list, but I do feel like pointing it out as something I had fun with. The improvisation is a bit much at times, but I defy you to play Dispatch and not get "I'm a bitch, my name's Robert, such a bitch whose name is Robert" stuck in your head.
I know what you're thinking: "this must be a boss theme!" Nope. Just a regular combat theme.
Keep this one in your back pocket, we'll come back to it in a later category.
If you've kept up with game-centric videos throughout this year, you've almost certainly heard this song playing as a background track at least once. It was kind of the go-to backing track for a lot of folks...until Expedition 33 came around.
Another thing to keep in your back pocket for now!
This one simply fits the beautifully haunting atmosphere for the Siofra River-esque location for which its named.
I wasn't a huge fan of Death Stranding 2's soundtrack, but this piece underscores a pretty emotional moment (the content of which you can probably tell from the cover art) quite well.
While I think "Feel" still rules the roost in terms of Lies of P's record player songs, "Survivor" easily comes in close second both because it's just a great song and because of how it fits within the story's context.
One final one to keep in your back pocket for later.
I know it's a little weird to say this about a second place winner, but I legitimately think this track might be the most beautiful one I've heard in all my years doing this category. Ever since I reached the choral chambers in-game, I've been using this particular piece to help me fall asleep. As a result, it has kinda lost a bit of what made it special, but that's my fault, not Christopher Larkin's.
This track is something like 11 minutes long, but you really only need to listen to the first 2 and a half minutes to get the gist. As you do so, I want you to imagine you're taking part in an intense, emotional boss fight.
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Best Level Design
As I always say, a gameplay loop cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs some kind of visual or geographical context in order to truly pop. I've been pointing this out for years, but 2025 was the first year where I got a great example of this idea in action. Spoiler alert, Ninja Gaiden 4 isn't on this list...and that's because it was a potential GOTY contender brought down to a final score of 6/10 because its level design massively blew. So, these were the 2025 games that excelled in the contexts they plopped their respective gameplay loops into.
NOTE: Spots #10-#6 went to: Silly Polly Beast, PowerWash Simulator 2, Lies of P: Overture, The First Berserker: Khazan, and Silent Hill f.
#5): Sword of the Sea
Giant Squid games are almost always about the audiovisual experience, so level design typically revolves more around movement through these experiences than actual gameplay. Sword of the Sea, however, incorporates active gameplay elements into its movement. The same could be said of Giant Squid's previous game, The Pathless, but Sword of the Sea features some actual artistic vision to go with these active elements.
#4): Ruffy and the Riverside
As a platformer/collect-a-thon, Ruffy and the Riverside features a hearty amount of secrets to uncover, and it manages to strike an unusually good balance in the difficulty involved in discovering these secrets. Each self-contained location also features plenty of ways to experiment with the game's texture-swapping gameplay.
#3): Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist
Level design is by far the most important factor in any Metroidvania, and I can't think of one that fails in this aspect off the top of my head (aside from the recent Metroid Prime 4: Beyond). So, suffice it to say that Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist is as great in its level design as you'd expect from a game in this genre. The only thing keeping it at the #3 spot is the fact that it's relatively light on incorporating specific gameplay features into the levels compared to the next 2 titles.
#2): Hell is Us
Multi-layered and rendered full of history and personality, Hell is Us feels like a one-of-a-kind level experience even though it probably isn't. In most games, I find myself thinking that bits and pieces of certain levels feel unnecessary. I replayed the original God of War trilogy lately, for example, and I've had that thought about several places within those games. Hell is Us, on the other hand, has some level pieces that I'd probably view that way in any other title, but I don't here. It goes to show how far attention to detail and lore-based design can take an experience. However, there's one game that still managed to outdo it in this department.
Level Design of the Year: Hollow Knight: Silksong
Remember what I said about Metroidvanias? Well, as far as I'm concerned, Hollow Knight: Silksong is the best one in years. The map is just as interconnected and full of secrets as one would hope for, but nearly every area seems to incorporate skill-based traversal requirements and intuitive enemy placements. Sometimes it'll have annoying, persistent enemies swarming an area at a height that makes them ideal for bouncing off of to reach a higher ledge. At times it'll have two stretches of exceedingly long corridor split up by a hole in the ground and with agile, tough enemies on either side. Such a room might lead up to a boss, allowing the runback to that boss to be challenging-but-doable to speed through if you keep your wits about you. Every room demands some competent level of mastery over the game's systems without being overly challenging (well, most of the rooms aren't overly challenging, anyway). As a result, Team Cherry gets to take home this award for 2025!
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Best Atmosphere
At last we've arrived at the final technical category, which serves as the ultimate test of everything we've discussed so far. High quality or excellently stylized visuals set the overall scene. Sound design, level design, and soundtracks add to the immersion. Finally, performance and feeling of control help keep that immersion from breaking. Good atmosphere is an amalgamation of every technical facet of a game, and it's why I always save this one for last. But a good atmosphere is more than the sum of its parts, as you'll soon see. Not everything that earns a spot for one particular thing will be represented here, after all. So, these are the ten games with the most solid atmospheres of the bunch.
#10): Metal Garden
#9): Sharks and Minnows
#8): Silent Hill f
#7): Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
#6): Hollow Knight: Silksong
#5): Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
#4): Sword of the Sea
#3): Karma: The Dark World
#2): The Midnight Walk
Atmosphere of the Year: Hell is Us
It features the bleakness you'd find in Metal Garden or Karma: The Dark World.
The alien/inhuman feeling present in Sharks and Minnows or The Midnight Walk.
A world brimming with history and details, just like in Silent Hill f, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
And like Sword of the Sea, all of these aspects are allowed to breathe by virtue of the fact that protagonist Remi doesn't open his mouth to jabber on outside of scripted story moments.
Hell is Us takes the best parts of the best atmospheres from 2025 and blends them into one imperfect-yet-beautiful package, and I'm proud to present it with the last of the technical awards.
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The Character Awards
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Best Character Development
Before I get started delving into specific characters, I like to start off this section of the article by looking at entire rosters. In some years, this starting category serves as a bit of a spoiler for what's to come in the next couple ones. In other years, this category helps games with stellar overall casts but not too many individual standouts get a bit of the spotlight. You'll find out what kind of year this was as you read on. It's also worth noting that while there'll undoubtedly be a lot of overlap, this is not the same award as "Best Writing." While a good script is almost always necessary for good character development, games have also famously used animations or woven character development into gameplay itself. Perhaps one day I'll fuse the two categories into one, but not this time.
#5): Silent Hill f
One of the notes I took as I was going through Silent Hill f was "great sense of history with the characters." The core cast is an established friend group that, due to plot reasons, needed to be set up quickly. That could've lead to characters just standing around for a little while and saying things like "oh, Shu, you and Hinako are always dancing around your complicated feelings for each other since you've been friends since childhood," but it didn't. Instead, Silent Hill f handles its characters with subtle writing and intentional animations.
#4): Dispatch
There comes a point where a handful of Dispatch's characters suddenly show up at Robert's apartment with no warning, saying they're throwing a housewarming party for him and that they've invited everyone. More specifically, Invisigal tells him that everyone is coming, and for gifts she "just told them to bring a lamp or something."
Because I've drawn attention to that bit of dialogue, you know it's a Chekhov's gun in this discussion, but in context, it just sounds like a throwaway line. The same descriptor could be used for the subsequent montage of people arriving at the apartment: throwaway. There are scattered shots of members of the Z Team entering while the party goes on. The doorway is in varying degrees of focus. Sometimes it's front and center, sometimes it's being shot from the space between characters in the foreground. But one subtle thing is constant: every last dumb, selfish, awkward member of this team has, indeed, brought a lamp of some kind. There isn't a single original generous thought in any of these people's heads, so they obviously just interpreted their instructions literally. It's a small detail that comes up every time, but in some shots you have to really pay attention to notice it. That's just one example of how well Dispatch develops its wannabe heroes.
#3): Goodnight Universe
The team over at Nice Dream have a talent not always seen in this industry: impeccable casting. They know how to write compelling characters through a strong script, but what always makes this group's characters stand out is the way the oftentimes unknown actors they choose bring that dialogue to life. Beyond that, a key writing strength the team constantly demonstrates is in developing relationships between the characters.
#2): Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
It feels a little unfair to place Kingdom Come: Deliverance II above Goodnight Universe because the ordering largely boils down to a difference in budget. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II features everything I've said about Goodnight Universe, but applied to a much wider pool of characters. It becomes a little hard to judge what comes out above what when the choice just comes down to "more" or "less" characters. But don't take that as a knock against KCD2. If I'm not mistaken, it has the single biggest script of any game ever, so vast is the amount of characters Henry has to contend with.
Character Roster of the Year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Ohhhh how much to say, how much to say? I suppose a way I can be coy about this would be to say that the development you get would've been worthy of this award anyway...but that it goes the extra mile by not actually being traditional character development...I promise I'll be stopping the coyness soon (within the next few categories, in fact), but yeah, Expedition 33 easily takes this one home.
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Best Voice Actress
If there's one thing I think all the big game award shows at the end of each year do wrong (other than having a surplus of ads), it's the fact that they always blend actors and actresses into a singular "performance" category. Plenty of talent goes unrecognized every year because of that, and I've always strived not to make the same mistake. As in previous years, I won't be going too in-depth with blurbs in this and the actor category unless I have something substantial to say. Instead, I'll be including links to voice samples wherever possible so you can actually hear the performers at work.
#4): Kerri Kenney-Silver as Rebecca (Goodnight Universe)
Sadly, I couldn't find any even remotely isolated voice lines
#2): Konatsu Kato as Shimizu Hinako (Silent Hill f) [Japanese Dub]
As with any foreign-language performer, I have to admit that the acting could actually be horrible and I wouldn't have any way of knowing. However, I doubt this is the case...a minor being tortured is kind of a universal language.
On that note, all the most fitting voice line clips were from...those sequences. So I elected not to include a link here.
[Voice lines are from 1:55-2:35, and be warned that there are major spoilers in this video]
All it takes is 0.01 seconds to realize "oh, you're Shadowheart!" when you first hear Maelle speak. But having now seen the credits roll on Expedition 33 twice, I can safely say my recognition is the other way around. If I were to go to Baldur's Gate 3 again, I would almost certainly think "oh, you're Maelle!" when Shadowheart started to talk.
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Best Voice Actor
Same deal as with the voice actress category, but this time, with male performers. Usually this is a category I have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for, but 2025 was an exception.
Runner-up: Andy Serkis as Renoir (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33) and Aaron Paul as Robert Robertson III (Dispatch)
I have a rule with these acting lists: no high-profile film actors (that I know of) can win a spot.
With Andy Serkis being as famous as he is for roles like Gollum, I can't actually give him any wins here...but god damn does he bring it home as Renoir.
Same with Aaron Paul. You may know him as Jesse from Breaking Bad, and despite some occasional similarities in cadence with his most famous character, I found him almost entirely unrecognizable in his Dispatch role.
#3): Konrad Eleryk as Adder (Kingdom Come: Deliverance II)
You'll hear some voice lines from Eleryk when we get to "Best Moment" later on.
[Note that there are major spoilers in this video. Also, you aren't hallucinating: it's the same video used for Jennifer English]
I have to confess something: I've never liked Ben Starr as a voice actor. He's always cast in the most boring roles you can imagine (Clive from Final Fantasy XVI, Khazan in The First Berserker: Khazan), so he never seems to be able to actually flex any acting muscles...until Expedition 33. After some of the game's most tearjerking moments, I felt like Danny DeVito in the "oh my god...I get it" meme.
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Lamest Character
I know that a better name for this category would probably be "worst" character, but I think it's much more fun to imply dispassionate ridicule with the word "lamest." Every year, there's no small amount of characters that fall flat for me. Whether it's because they use Marvel quips, they spend the whole game whining, or they're boring as hell, these were the characters that fit that descriptor in 2025.
#5): Hanna (Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream)
#4): Hazel Flood (South of Midnight)
#3): Eko (Revenge of the Savage Planet)
#2): Kaser (Lost Soul Aside)
"No, we have Noctis from Final Fantasy XV at home!"
Lamest Character of the Year: Miles MacKenzie (Metroid Prime 4: Beyond)
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Best Animal Character
Conceived in 2021 as a way to give Chorizo the wheelie dog from Far Cry 6 his own spot, the award for Best Animal Character recognizes non-anthropomorphic animals who stole my heart in a given year. This, like the soundtrack categories, is entirely subjective.
#5): Orson (Goodnight Universe)
#4): Molly the Sheep (The Alters)
#3): Beef (Dispatch)
#2): Goro (Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii)
Animal Character of the Year: Bell Beast (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
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Best Love Interest
I've never once been called out for this category, but I nonetheless always feel compelled to make this distinction at the beginning: "Best Love Interest" is not a "hottest chicks" list or anything like that. It also isn't necessarily a "closest to my type" list...I mean, that can be a tiebreaker, but it isn't the driving force. Rather, this category is about love interests as characters. How intriguing is their development? How well do they play the role of the protagonist's main squeeze? How well are they woven into the plot? These are the considerations I make. In recent years I've had to incorporate some pretty liberal interpretations of "love interest" into this list because romantic subplots have been less and less frequent, but this year was...slightly less of a drought.
#5): Alissa (Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon)
#4): Isabella Torrisi (Mafia: The Old Country)
#3): Elemaine (The First Berserker: Khazan)
#2): Rosa Ruthard (Kingdom Come: Deliverance II)
Love Interest of the Year: Invisigal (Dispatch)
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Best Supporting Character
One reason I came up with a specific category for love interests in the first place was to free up space in the "Supporting Character" award. Anyway, protagonists are undoubtedly an important part of any story, but I find that they almost never leave as much of an impact as a high-quality side character. So, these were the best ones for 2025! Also...I try not to do ensembles for single spots, but this year there was no avoiding it.
#10): Arthur Pendragon (Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon)
#9): Kai/Kato (Silly Polly Beast)
#8): Garmond and Zaza (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
The "tragic best friend" character trope is well worn for a reason, and in Silksong, it's filled by this lovable duo. Garmond is a boastful yet wholesome knight riding into battle to avenge his homeland alongside his friend/steed, Zaza (a roly poly). Throughout Hornet's adventure, the two constantly swoop in to offer much-needed aid against the game's many challenges, including the infamous High Halls gauntlet.
#7): Luca Trepani (Mafia: The Old Country)
#6): Iwai Shu (Silent Hill f)
#5): The Z Team (Dispatch)
#4): The Family (Goodnight Universe)
#3): Expedition 33 (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
#2): Father Godwin (Kingdom Come: Deliverance II)
Supporting Character of the Year: The Alters (The Alters)
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Best Antagonist
As the arbiter of most story conflicts, I'd argue antagonists are just as important to a plot as the heroes and sidekicks. It's one of many reasons why Marvel movies blow: their villains are always terrible. Anyway, whether they're mustache-twirlingly evil in amusing ways or sympathetic enough to give a player pause, the following 10 antagonists stuck with me the most this year.
#10): Lord Saito (Ghost of Yotei)
#9): Arlecchino (Lies of P: Overture)
#8): Mrs. Valentina Smith (Silly Polly Beast)
This spot placement is about as straightforward as they come: she's an evil orphanage headmistress. Still, her evil comes through incredibly well. From bullying the director into allowing wealthy donors to have "playtime" with some of the children, to the customary disciplinary beatings, this Trunchbull-coded character radiates villainy, and her Queen of Hearts body doesn't hurt that aura.
#7): Shroud (Dispatch)
#6): Lace (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
#5): The Interrogator (Hell is Us)
#4): Elliot (Goodnight Universe)
#3): Fox Mask (Silent Hill f)
#2): Clea (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
Or if siren isn't a sufficient word, then "goddess" might be better, given that she's ultimately responsible for creating the Nevrons that serve as the game's enemies. And beyond even this, the shocking cruelty she demonstrates towards her family is laced with her own kind of love. She views her actions as ultimately stemming from that love despite the fact that almost nobody looking on would view things that way. As I said, Clea doesn't get much screen time, but her stranglehold on the world is arguably as strong as that of the paintress, and she has one of the better boss battles, so she would be the best villain this year were it not for...
Antagonist of the Year: Renoir (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
I won't rehash every point I make in my article, but I'll say this: Part of what makes Renoir so effective is his ability to challenge one's perception of themselves. If you aren't prepared to do what he does, are you even worthy of raising a family? If you answer yes to that question, can you possibly be a good person? Are terms like "good" and "evil" actually relevant to this discussion? These questions and more are asked simply because Renoir exists, and you can learn more in my article, linked here. As I said earlier, Renoir is the best villain in all of gaming, and I'll die on that hill anytime, so obviously he takes home the gold for best antagonist of 2025!
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Best Protagonist
I've alluded to protagonists not always being the most inspiring characters on Earth a couple times so far, but as the eyes through which we view their narrative worlds, they are undoubtedly the most important of the bunch. A great protagonist, unlike a great antagonist or supporting character, isn't easy to nail down attributes for. Some of the best protagonists in gaming have been paragons of virtue (i.e Commander Shepard from Mass Effect), others have been borderline villainous for sympathetic reasons (i.e. Joel from The Last of Us). Some are the butt of everyone's jokes (Harold Halibut from his game by the same name), some would rip you a new butt if you made jokes about them (Kratos from God of War). Varying degrees of badassery, varying degrees of heroism, varying degrees of depth. As for me, I tend to try and go by depth more than anything else, but other aspects can serve as excellent tie breakers. Without further ado, the best protagonists of this past year.
NOTE: Spots #10-#6 went to: Daniel McGovern from Karma: The Dark World, Enzo from Mafia: The Old Country, Polly from Silly Polly Beast, Hornet from Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Isaac from Goodnight Universe.
#5): Jan Dolski (The Alters)
#4): Henry of Skalitz (Kingdom Come: Deliverance II)
#3): Shimizu Hinako (Silent Hill f)
#2): Robert Robertson III/Mecha Man (Dispatch)
In this scene, he's with the other managers having a stern talk with the team about the fact that he's going to be firing someone at the end of the shift. During this scene, Prism turns to the more established manager to say that they wouldn't be having problems if they had a competent dispatcher. Then the following exchange happens:
Robert: Hey, {biting nickname}, I'm standing right here. You can talk to me!
Prism: I wasn't talkin' to you, bitch. Which weak ass superhero team did you come from? F***in' Geek Squad?
Robert: Doesn't matter where I'm from, {second biting nickname}, what matters is I'm here to figure out who stays and who goes.
Did you notice the calm but domineering tone Robert took in that exchange? It's part of what makes him so great as a protagonist. But there was still a better one.
Protagonist of the Year: Verso (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
This is also where I'm going to be giving one more spoiler warning than you deserve since you were warned at the very beginning. So, spoiler warning as I go into more detail about this decision.
Throughout the course of the game, Verso is presented as this complicated, manipulative person nearly pathological in his capacity for lying. He abuses the team's trust time and time again, omitting key details even when forced to come clean on another lie. It's basically his fault that the mysteries surrounding this world go unsolved for as long as they do.
His development through these things would've already made him an easy pick for this award...but then comes the point in the plot where we learn the truth: this isn't actually Verso. Not really. This is a painted Verso with all the real man's memories and a personality given to him by his mother, the paintress, as a way of unhealthily trying to cope with his death. In other words, everything we've learned so far about him is indirect character development. It's all character development according to his mom, who loved him so much that she'd go to the extremes she goes through in this plot to pretend he's still around.
So it bears asking: if that kind of person's perception of Verso is as conniving as this...what does that say about the real guy?
Despite all of this, the love he feels for his "mother" is as real as real gets. All of his conniving, all of his scheming, all of his intentional lies and lies of omission, are in service of taking the paintress down and forcing her to leave the canvas in order to heal in the "real" world. So as horrible a person as this man is, he, like every other member of his family, is ready to sacrifice everything to save the paintress...including himself.
As I said at the start of Verso's victory blurb, everything we know about him would've landed him this top spot, but the fact that there's so much more to discover underneath the surface just cements his victory even more. So, congratulations on another character award, Sandfall!
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The Aspect Awards
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Best Writing
As I said in an earlier category, this is slightly different from the award for character development in that this is more about basic writing quality than just character voice and dialogue. It also has to do with things like pacing and the like. So, here are the games with the best writing from 2025.
#5): Hollow Knight: Silksong
If you're Chinese, you can go ahead and exclude this one since that translation was evidently terrible. Silksong's script isn't the most nuanced in the world, but its focus is on having characters say things that sound cool without being one-liners (see the next category), and it almost always succeeds.
#4): Goodnight Universe
I already went into some amount of detail with this one in the character development section, but I'll go a little bit deeper here. Established dynamics can be difficult to pull off without gigantic amounts of exposition, but Goodnight Universe's family ensemble manages to feel familiar within a mere couple of minutes thanks to its script.
#3): Dispatch
In my review for Dispatch, I claimed that superhero fatigue might not actually be a thing...maybe it's just Marvel fatigue. As it turns out, witty, comedic banter can be good so long as it isn't godDAMN Marvel quips.
#2): Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Just because KCD2's script is evidently the biggest of any game doesn't mean it's good...but it is good. Focusing purely on Henry's lines, every story statement, every excuse for every crime at every level of speechcraft, all of it fits his character. This is another one with some similarities to what I said in a previous blurb, so suffice it to say that KCD2 would handily take the top spot were it not for one other game that I'm certain you won't see coming.
Best Writing of the Year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
That was a lie, obviously you saw this one coming. And with many other spot victories for Expedition 33, I'm going to write the words "even if it were just" followed by "it would've won this spot." Even if I had only played the game once and experienced the script and the story as it happened, it would've won this spot. But as it happens, I did play it again, and I got to see just how tight the writing was. No seemingly throwaway detail is actually a throwaway detail, and seeing all these pieces connect just makes the experience all the richer. Esquie's offhand comment about Sciel being a bad swimmer despite only having just met her, which foreshadows a conversation where we learn Esquie was responsible for unknowingly saving her during her suicide attempt. Another Esquie moment where he reacts excitedly after one of the expeditioners says something about wine, which foreshadows the moment where he reveals that Verso stores a bunch of wine in his big sack-like tummy and he was excited to share it. Intense tragedy, heartwarming moments, and bits of levity in this emotional narrative, all of it seeps out of every word in this script and every seemingly meaningless beat in the story. And for these reason, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the winner for this award.
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Best Quote
If you don't recognize this category, you aren't crazy. This is a brand new one I came up with this year since there were so many lines I wanted to bring attention to! Underneath each blurb, I'll include a little something about context if needed, but don't expect too deep a dive. This category really is just about throwing out some good lines.
#5): "But there are also stars moving closer to each other" - Kaser (Lost Soul Aside)
Perhaps it's just because the writing across the board in Lost Soul Aside is so dreadfully awful, but this one stuck with me. During a conversation with a sort-of love interest, that love interest says something about being alone because there are thousands of stars moving away from each other up in the sky or something else edgy and cringe like that. Then, as this character falls asleep, Kaser comes out with the above quote. I found it oddly intriguing and optimistic.
#4): "...Yes" - Verso (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
Hear me out. This one is all about context.
Towards the end of the game, after the truth of the world has been revealed and the final battle lies on the horizon, Maelle approaches Verso in camp and calmly talks to him for a while before pivoting to another topic. On the verge of tears, but still remaining calm, she brings up the fateful day when Gustave died. Then, she asks the question I don't think any of us actually considered:
"Did you let Renoir kill Gustave? Could you have saved him?"
Afterwards, we get a dialogue choice, which, verbatim, is between:
"Yes (truth)"
and
"No, I got there too late (lie)"
If you choose to tell the truth, Ben Starr pauses for so long you'd think the game soft crashed before finally, just above a whisper and with clear shaking in his body, replies with the single word quoted here. It's a simple quote that isn't too special on its own, but its inclusion, needless to say, has a devastating impact on one's hindsight.
#3): "I needed her eyes to see the world without pain, her soul to learn to love it" - Gepetto (Lies of P: Overture)
This was actually the quote that started this category, because I wanted to give Lies of P: Overture some more kudos. For context, this is from a letter written by Gepetto talking about how Carlo (Pinocchio)'s mother made him a better person.
#2): "I have survived the fury of your land. I have borne its barbs and its blades, and I have seen wonder behind its dangers" - Hornet (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
I'm pretty sure this is the final line of the game, spoken to Lace before Hornet takes the plunge into the abyss to defeat her once and for all, and it's a banger of a line.
Quote of the Year: "The dark could be the space and time that we need to recover from the death of a dream. And the quiet promise of new beginnings waiting on the other side of grief." - The Dark (The Midnight Walk)
It's hard to think of this one without getting choked up, which is what ultimately wins it this prize. This is a line from the final chapter of The Midnight Walk, wherein The Dark, a presumably antagonistic force, explains the pivotal role that it plays in helping people heal. The Dark speaks with this warm, calming voice as a slow, sweet violin plays. During the time in which I was playing this game, I myself was still unable to reach that "other side" of grief after my dog's passing in late 2024. Everyone tells you it'll eventually be ok, but it's always hard to feel that way. In this quote, the space before coming out the other side is acknowledged as a period of recovery instead of just something to "get through", and moving on is represented not as "being ok" or "learning to live with it," but as a "new beginning." It would be a long time still before I started being able to move on, but during this particular time in my life, hearing this was more comforting than I would've imagined.
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Best Cutscene Direction
First conceived entirely because of 2018's God of War reboot, the award for Best Cutscene Direction is all about the story moments between gameplay segments. These are possibly the least necessary aspects of most games, but in games where narrative is particularly important, a good cutscene can bring it all home.
#5): Mafia: The Old Country
Given that gameplay was so clearly not a consideration for Mafia: The Old Country, it damn well better have had compelling cutscenes to enhance the story...and it did! What struck me about the cutscenes in this game is the lighting, specifically.
#4): Silent Hill f
The fact that Silent Hill f is only at #4 shows how stacked this year was with considerations for this category. In any other year, this one would easily win the top spot for sure. I think the best way to describe my reasoning would be to describe the game's most upsetting moment...so, those of you with weak stomachs might want to skip ahead. There essentially comes a moment where, after having an arm cut off and a burning crater melted into her back, Hinako is next subjected to having her face cut off starting from just above the nose. A weaker studio might have shown this in detail for shock value, but the team behind Silent Hill f realized that you can make such a thing horrifying without being cheap about it. Rather than show the gruesome details, the scene focuses on sound (not screaming, but "clinical" sounds), dripping blood, and camera shots taking place just below where the cutting is happening. It's smart direction that manages to make a person feel sick with camera work that might be acceptable in a PG-13 film.
#3): Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
We'll be getting into why KCD2 earns a spot on this list in more detail later on, so keep an eye out for another category to learn more.
#2): Dispatch
Like with Mafia: The Old Country, cutscenes are probably the most important part of Dispatch. The only difference is that Dispatch is almost entirely cutscenes, not just "majority" cutscenes. And what I noticed in these cutscenes is the presence of something sorely lacking in most Marvel films: actual choreography instead of just onscreen chaos. You can look at any scene and be able to tell what every character is doing. It isn't just a bunch of visual nonsense. Not only that, but each shot is brimming with detail.
Best Cutscene Direction of the Year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I have one example I'd like to use to justify this win for Expedition 33 from the beginning of the final boss fight, and I believe it will speak for itself. This particular antagonist is essentially a god, and boy does this sequence showcase what power he can wield with nothing more than a simple gesture.
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Best Quest
I used to only play RPGs back when I first came up with this category idea, but ever since Doom 2016, I've found that I have less and less patience for them with every year that passes. As such, my criteria for what counts as a "quest" has gotten more liberal. Nowadays it kind of translates to "stretch of gameplay," but my lists, my rules. This year was kind of standout year for quests, though, so I actually have a full list of 10.
#10): Dual Katana Training (Ghost of Yotei)
Use of two swords at the same time obviously requires at least a little bit of ambidexterity, but since Atsu isn't a Mary Sue kind of character, she doesn't have this. So this quest is all about building up her left hand. It starts off with nigh-impossible quicktime events with awkward button presses that gradually become easier as the quest progresses. It's the one quest in Ghost of Yotei that gets universal praise for a reason.
#9): Find the Treasure (A Game About Digging a Hole)
The entire goal of A Game About Digging a Hole is to find the treasure at the bottom of your backyard...so this is basically the whole game. But it's still a fun quest.
#8): Final Shift (Dispatch)
After Shroud launches an all-out assault on Los Angeles in the middle of the night, Robert finds himself needing to run dispatch to save the city. But as I said, it's the middle of the night, so everyone is off the clock. You start off with just a handful of your team available, and the rest of the team gradually funnels in as the stakes look more and more desperate. It's a stress-filled shift with a soft ticking clock element that makes the importance of doing your job well all the more important.
#7): Mount Rushless (PowerWash Simulator 2)
The final mission in PowerWash Simulator 2 is just intense enough to be satisfying while not being tedious like some of the game's larger missions. It also had less technical troubles, and the environment that you gradually uncover through your work is the prettiest in the game. It's a hell of a positive note to end on.
#6): Get Into the Station (Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream)
Up until this point in Eriksholm, you tackle missions with just one or two characters. This is the first mission where you take control of the whole three-member cast. It's also the first mission where the gameplay loop truly clicks.
#5): The Melodies (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
This is essentially act 2 of Silksong. Hornet is tasked with exploring every corner of the citadel in order to find the three melodies that will allow her to pass through the main elevator up to the spider this land worships.
#4): Painted Clea (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
After arriving on a floating island, Verso and company go through large gauntlets of bosses and item collecting in order to reach an intimidating presence at the center of the area. This quest is all about the buildup to whatever is coming, and when all is said and done, it turns out to be the painted version of Verso's sister, Clea. Because she is responsible for creating and guiding the Nevrons that guard the paintress, this is a pivotal (yet options) moment in the plot.
#3): Keystone of Ecstasy (Hell is Us)
If you've seen the Indiana Jones film involving the Holy Grail, you'll have some idea of what to expect with this quest. Remi ventures into some ruins in search of one of the plot items only to find that the area served as a stronghold for this country's equivalent of a satanic cult. Beneath the ground, this area is massive, and the only way to progress is to familiarize yourself with the cult's tenets and customs and solve perilous riddles accordingly. Think of the part of that Indiana Jones movie where he's going through a gauntlet of swinging blades and survives by following the steps to be a pious man ("a pious man drops to his knees," he drops to his knees, and a blade swings overhead, narrowly missing him). All of Hell of Us is fascinating, but this quest was a standout.
#2): Mansion in Time (Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon)
If you happen to enter an underwater cistern in a random lake in Avalon, you'll find yourself magically teleported to a gigantic underground realm with an equally gigantic mansion at its center that contains a lengthy mystery quest. This mansion is stuck in a perpetual time loop, and the only way to break it is to solve a mystery revolving around the three ladies of the castle. Oh, and a key part of this quest involves a malevolent being trapped inside a giant mushroom. So, from the moment you realize that you've entered such an unexpected place to the end of the mystery, this quest is one of this year's best.
Quest of the Year: Rescuing Hans (Kingdom Come: Deliverance II)
But as great as that quest from Tainted Grail is, it's nothing compared to this one. At this point in the plot, Henry and Hans have been arrested by Lord von Bergow's men while the lord is away, and while Henry is simply sentenced to some time as a laborer, Hans' crime of poaching is punishable by death (medieval law, am I right?). So, the guards tell Hans that the executioner will arrive after the 7th toll of the bell that day. Henry is released from his cell and begins his work sentence, but he obviously can't leave his friend behind. Thus, a heart-pounding race against time begins.
Henry must utilize all of his skills (speech, stealth, alchemy, reading, etc) to solve a Rube Goldberg machine of a quest to set things in motion to free Hans. The multi-faceted, multi-objective nature of this quest would've at least landed it close to the top spot, but what pushes it over the edge is that aforementioned ticking clock element.
As I implied, this timeframe isn't measured in in-game minutes or hours, it's gauged in tolls of the bell, meaning that your ears are the only indicator you have. As you go about your business, already stressed beyond belief, you'll occasionally hear the bell toll in the distance, knocking your allotted time down by one tolling. When things are going wrong and something like the 5th bell rings, it makes for the kind of "oh shit" moment you just don't find anymore. If memory serves, I finally did everything I needed to do around when the 6th bell rang, and I was sweating. Congratulations, design team, you really knocked it out of the park!
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Best Puzzles
I love puzzles. I love being made to feel smart. So when a game can pull off puzzles that accomplish this goal, I'm a happy man. They might be designed specifically to be solved, but it doesn't matter. They still make me feel good. Not all puzzles are created equal, however. Some games only have puzzles like "move the block a little bit" or "move the pipes around." So, this category celebrates the titles that cared about their puzzles.
#5): Revenge of the Savage Planet
Revenge of the Savage planet resembles a good metroidvania in many ways, such as in its puzzles. You unlock more and more tools as the plot progresses, which allows you to go back to puzzles you weren't able to solve before. But these tools aren't just keys to be used. The puzzles here require smart use of your tools and a knowledge of their application. In fact, were it not for the fact that some of these puzzles were unsolvable thanks to bugs, Revenge of the Savage Planet would be higher up.
#4): Ruffy and the Riverside
Simple-but-effective. That's the best way to describe the challenges you'll find throughout Riverside. There are stone monoliths that you'll need to decipher in order to create patterns. There are little texture puzzles where you have to put your common sense to use. And there are maneuverability puzzles that test your ability to move throughout the world effectively, as well as your knowledge of the map. It's all standard fare for a platforming collect-a-thon like this, but it works well.
#3): Karma: The Dark World
Brain-benders that only somewhat depend on earthly logic are more than a little hard to get right, but Karma: The Dark World excels in them. One late-game puzzle comes to mind: you're in an office space having to set a code with no clear clues...that is, until you start interacting with the nearby clocks and begin decoding what various lengths of chimes translate to numerically. It's one of those puzzles where the "a-HA!" moment hits much stronger than usual, and it's but one of many excellent mental challenges you'll find.
#2): Hollow Knight: Silksong
In this case, I'm mainly referring to physical challenges, as there aren't many traditional puzzles to be found in Silksong. You'll occasionally come across a room where a section looks impossible to reach...but there's always a way if you think about the tools you have in your arsenal. These segments will test your reflexes, your mastery over the movement system, and your ability to think on your feet.
Best Puzzles of the Year: Hell is Us
Perhaps the best thing about Hell is Us is the fact that it treats you like you're an intelligent human being. Aside from organic clues like vague logs, there's no way of receiving help for its many logic puzzles aside from taking in your surroundings and piecing together whatever context might be needed. In some games I'll end up getting frustrated when a puzzle takes me too long and end up finally looking up a guide, but I never had that urge in Hell is Us. Whenever a puzzle was taking too long, I'd always tell myself "the solution is here somewhere in plain sight," and it always was.
That quest I wrote about in the "Best Quest" category is a great example of this. Shockingly little is explained to you, you just have to pour through the many "you live here so you should already know this stuff" texts scattered in plaques throughout the area and locate whatever passages are relevant. Even then, there's usually at least one more bit of logic needed to figure out the puzzle you're on. But no matter what, the solution always makes sense after you get it. The puzzles in this game are unbelivably good, and Hell is Us deserves all the credit in the world for eschewing the handholding habits that modern games feature all too frequently.
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Best Completionism
Ever since Far Cry 3 back in 2012, I have this consistent urge to reach 100% completion on games I like...yeah, there were signs of the old autism well before there was a diagnosis. But anyway, not all games are created equal in this regard. Some titles have completion criteria that are a major pain, and some have criteria that actually enrich the whole experience. As for what I count as completion, that depends on the game. Some games have in-game 100% counters, for others I have to go based on trophies or achievements. So, whether I actually ended up succeeding in these titles, these were the ones with the best criteria for completionism.
#5): Hell is Us
This is one that I didn't actually 100%, but I feel like I'll definitely go back to tie up the remaining loose ends. Essentially, completionism in Hell is Us is all about interacting with the world as much as humanly possible: killing every last enemy, completing every logic-based quest, etc. So, despite the fact that I missed some things, this is one for which the completionism makes the experience better.
#4): Ruffy and the Riverside
This one may be an obvious choice since it's a collect-a-thon, but good completionism is good completionism. And despite the fact that I didn't have as much to say about this one, I did actually complete it, which is what gives it an edge over Hell is Us.
#3): Hollow Knight: Silksong
I absolutely did not use trophies as my criteria with this game. The reason? I suck at Silksong, so there was simply no way I was going to make it all the way through permadeath mode, nor 100% in permadeath mode, nor permadeath mode in like 30 hours. Thankfully, there's an in-game percentage tracker that I was able to use instead. And just like with Hell is Us, Silksong's completionism depends entirely on interfacing with the world itself: finding every tool available, upgrading Hornet as much as possible, completing every side quest, and a couple more milestones.
#2): Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Continuing the theme of completionism involving the game world, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the best of this type of completion experiences. Every optional experience you need to have to reach 100% completion would be worthy of a spot in the main plot. They feature the best bosses, some emotional moments and lore not found elsewhere, and some gear that gives the player even more opportunities to create a build that suits them.
Most Satisfying Completionism of the Year: A Game About Digging a Hole
Remember that autism comment at the start of this category? Well, here's where it comes in the most...also, bet you weren't expecting A Game About Digging a Hole to kick Expedition 33 into a #2 spot, were you? Anyway, the completionism criteria here is all about fully upgrading your digging equipment, finding more stuff in the titular hole, and in one case, getting to the bottom of the hole within half an hour. It's all about moving the efficiency up and optimizing, which makes all the good brain chemicals flow. I was so adamant about completion in this game that I ended up digging up every centimeter of dirt in the hole despite it not being part of the criteria. Yeah, sorry to all the games with bigger budgets and more objectively good qualities, but this award couldn't possibly have gone to anything else.
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Best Enemies
For most of the time that this tradition has been around, the award for best enemies was about shouting out individual enemy types in games. Starting last year, however, I altered the award to simply award entire games for having good enemy rosters. Good enemies aren't necessary for a game to be fun, obviously, but they can go a hell of a long way towards making a good game great or a mediocre game good. These were the games with the best enemies to fight in 2025.
#10): Doom: The Dark Ages
#9): Lies of P: Overture
#8): AI Limit
#7): Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
#6): Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
#5): Silent Hill f
#4): Hell is Us
#3): Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist
#2): Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Enemy Roster of the Year: Hollow Knight: Silksong
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Best Boss
As the occasional exam for players to determine if they've sufficiently mastered a game's mechanics, there are few things that a title must get correct more than bosses. A good boss is one that both challenges and enthralls intuitively, while a poor one frustrates and tests nothing but patience. These were the bosses I most enjoyed in 2025.
Runner-up: Shrine Guardian Seth (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
#10): Prince Ahrzak (Doom: The Dark Ages)
#9): Mosquito (Silly Polly Beast)
#8): Hunter of Bladers (AI Limit)
#7): Gilroy (Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist)
#6): Lace (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
#5): Ryu (Ninja Gaiden 4)
#4): Reese (The First Berserker: Khazan)
#3): Skarrsinger Karmelita (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
#2): Simon (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
Boss of the Year: Arlecchino, The Blood Artist (Lies of P: Overture)
And then the fight happens. I've never seen such fast combos in a soulslike, nor have I seen such swift combos be so easily readable and parriable. Not only that, but I've never seen an input read attack be easy to predict and avoid. And just when you think it can't get any more intense, phase 2 starts with a flurry of blows even more ferocious and aggressive than the ones in the first phase. And yet, they too are easily parriable after getting through the original panic that will set in. As someone who has beaten him on the hardest difficulty in the boss rematch system (where one hit might be enough to kill you), I can attest to everything I've said both about the difficulty and the fact that it's doable in spite of that difficulty. So, even though Overture isn't actually eligible for GOTY, I'm still proud to present it with this prestigious award for one hell of an excellent boss fight.
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Best Weapon
Great enemies and bosses are all well and good, but they tend to go to waste without exceptional tools with which to fight them. In some cases, these tools can be swift katanas or earth-shattering warhammers. In other cases they can be mastery over the elements or psychic powers. Or they can simply be satisfying guns. A good weapon can, in many cases, be a cherry on top of a beautiful cake, and these were the best ones of 2025.
NOTE: Spots #10-#6 went to: Cataclysm from Lies of P: Overture, The Final Drill from A Game About Digging a Hole, Polearms from Hell is Us, the Bola Gun from Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and Greatswords from The First Berserker: Khazan.
#5): Sea Dog Style (Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii)
All Yakuza games feature multiple combat "styles" with different applications, and one of these tends to be a swifter-moving style that focuses more on crowd control than raw damage output. For Pirate Yakuza, that's "Sea Dog Style." But what separates this particular iteration of the fast combat mode from its contemporaries is its increased spectacle. In this mode, Majima uses cutlasses and pistols instead of his fists with special attacks consist of boomerang sword throws and spinning while rapid-firing those pistols.
#4): Chainshot (Doom: The Dark Ages)
Many of Dark Ages' new weapons come up short when faced with one question: why? Sure, it's cool that the Slayer uses a gun that grinds down skulls to shoot bone shards at demons...but how is that in any way superior to just a regular gun? The Chainshot doesn't have this problem. I mean, yeah, shooting a giant retracting shotput on a chain is definitely less effective than a machine gun would be, but it both looks and feels cooler, so it doesn't really matter. Plus, when you take into account the upgrades that allow you to fully charge the shot instantly over and over, it becomes even more satisfying to use.
#3): Magic (Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon)
Tainted Grail is hardly the first fantasy RPG to feature a magic system, but it avoids the biggest pitfall I tend to see in these systems. In most games like this, you'll end up blowing all your mana on a big spell that doesn't end up killing an enemy. Then you'll wait forever for your mana to recharge while the enemy tries to kill you. There's still some degree of waiting involved in Tainted Grail's magic system, but it isn't nearly as egregious, and the dodge system makes avoiding damage during wait times both easier and more fun.
#2): Sting Shards (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
Early in Silksong, you'll come across Sting Shards: a tool that functions as a kind of nail bomb you can place in the air. Tools such as this are crucial to survival in most difficult encounters, but I found that nothing had quite the same damage-dealing potential that this one did. Because this is a 2D game, a boss or hard enemy is going to cross the whole screen several times. This means that so long as you don't put a Sting Shard way above your target's head or out of their usual jump trajectory, you're basically guaranteed a large amount of damage. This is even more true if you double-up on this trap. No tool allows you to trivialize bosses in this game, but I guarantee that if you make use of the Sting Shards, you're going to have a much easier time with some of the harder combat scenarios.
Weapon of the Year: Burn (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
The final boss of Expedition 33 never got to take a turn in my first playthrough. I had tailored my party's skills and loadouts to maximize burn stacks so efficiently that when the boss' turn began, the burn damage knocked off the entire health bar. And to add insult to injury, after the cutscene leading to phase 2, the residual burn stacks instantly depleted that health bar too. That, my friends, is the power of the burn status. Essentially, if you use a skill or a weapon that applies burn, it'll put a little fire icon next to an enemy health bar with a number inside it. This number represent the amount of times the status has been stacked on top of itself. When the relevant enemy turn begins, it will sustain a certain amount of damage depending on the stacks. The higher the number, the more damage is dealt when the enemy moves. By the time the credits rolled, I was able to stack up several hundred stacks of burn over the course of my party's turns, resulting in that anticlimactic final battle. I've simply never been able to strategize that effectively around a status effect before.
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Best Setting
We all know what a setting is, but a way of describing it that's more applicable to games is that it's the context for level design. In the same way that a gameplay loop cannot survive in a designless white void, even a white void with design is probably not going to be held up without some kind of recognizable world for the design to inhabit. Of course, setting can also just refer to its literary definition: where/when a plot takes place. So whether it's because a setting compliments its levels or because I was fascinated by its look or worldbuilding, these were the settings that blew me away the most this year.
#10): Wanderstop (Wanderstop)
All cozy games tend to have settings that compliment their gameplay loops, but there's something extra comforting about a comfey tea house that exists in a realm out of time and appears exclusively when you need it.
#9): The Planet (The Alters)
While the planet on which The Alters takes place isn't much to write home about from a visual perspective, I was impressed by how the infrequency of its dangerous sunrise contributed to the ticking clock element found in gameplay.
#8): Windfall Zone (Atomfall)
Fascists vs nutters: it's a well-worn idea in post-apocalyptic worlds. As are city ruins overgrown by vegetation. But there's an undeniable feeling of history in Atomfall's windfall zone that just isn't there in most other games like it.
#7): Riverside (Ruffy and the Riverside)
Taking clear inspiration from European cartoons such as Muzzy, the little town of Riverside is as happy-go-lucky as most collect-a-thons are. Sadly, that's all there is to say about this one, because it made it on this list almost exclusively because I found it charming.
#6): Bohemia (Kingdom Come: Deliverance II)
As I've said multiple times at this point, KCD2 is all about historical accuracy and realism, and this rings especially true with its setting: Bohemia (modern-day Czechoslovakia). Everything from the little shrines dotting the landscape to the customs of its people to the structure of the dialogue is taken into consideration, making this setting one of the most well-realized ones this year. So, what keeps it down at #6? Simple...the team didn't make this setting up, or at the very least, they didn't put a particular unique spin on it. Yeah, it really does come down to just that, so don't let the relatively low spot undersell you on just how brilliant Bohemia is!
#5): Avalon (Tainted Grain: The Fall of Avalon)
I put that little disclaimer at the end of the last blurb because while the team at Awaken Realms obviously didn't invent the Arthurian realm of Avalon, the version found in Tainted Grail is of their own design. The world draws from the kinds of early pagan folklore and aesthetics that would've ruled the roost prior to Gregory the Great's intervention, which makes sense given how early Arthurian legend portrays the man as a bulwark against Saxon forces. The sense of history is unrivaled for the game's clearly modest budget, and the way in which supernatural elements are naturally woven into everything is just the icing on the cake.
#4): The World (Sword of the Sea)
Like all projects from this developer, Sword of the Sea lands on this list based off nothing but vibes, and those vibes are immaculate. For this game to take disparate visual parts (i.e. tundras and oceans) and weave them together in ways that feel organic is inspiring.
#3): Pharloom (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
One of my complaints about the original Hollow Knight was that the world ultimately felt random. Sure, there was lore to be found to disprove that feeling, but every area felt at once too similar and too disparate to the others...if that makes any kind of sense. In Silksong, however, different areas have their own distinct cultures signposted not just by the area's look, but by the looks of their denizens. Take the tribal barbarian look of the ants in the Hunter's March or the well-organized might of the citadel-dwellers. And that's to say nothing of how well different pieces of the map transition into others.
#2): The Canvas (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
There literally isn't even one detail in the canvas that doesn't have some kind of plot or lore relevance. Not one detail...other than blades of grass or the sky existing, but don't be a smartass. Every monster, every area, every seemingly insignificant detail has some kind of tie back to the Dessendre family and its struggles. Sometimes you'll find symbolism in these details, other times these details will contain blatant spoilers you'd have no way of picking up on until a second run through the game. The canvas is a world brimming with history and lore, and the Belle Epoch art style adds impeccable vibes to everything else. So...what else could possibly beat this setting? I mean, I started to doubt my choices as I was writing this blurb, after all! Well, read on for the reasoning.
Setting of the Year: Hadea (Hell is Us)
Hadea, like the canvas, is a setting all about details and lore. Unlike the canvas, not every detail has meaning, but all the important bits do. With that in mind, what puts it ahead of the canvas is one specific aspect of the vibes. The canvas is meant from the start to be a fantastical world not resembling ours at all. Hadea, on the other hand, is a fictional country on Earth in the 90's. It's nestled deep in Europe and feels distinctly of its time in the technology used. However, the look, feel, and non-technological aesthetics of Hadea all feel distinctly alien. It doesn't feel like a fantastical world, nor does it feel like this world, nor does it entirely feel like an elseworld story, nor does it actually feel like an alien planet. I use the word "alien" to describe it simply because the strangeness inherent in that descriptor is the closest word I can conjure to capture my meaning. Hadea lacks the dazzling spectacle that you'd find in Expedition 33, but the country's use of color blended with familiar aspects of our world make it by far the most unique setting of the bunch.
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Biggest Disappointment
As much as I'd like this not to be true, no year is perfect. No matter how many certified bangers come out in a given year, there are always bound to be disappointments. This category brings to light not just full games that didn't meet my expectations, but aspects of certain games that I found especially disappointing. An important thing to note is that this isn't the "Worst Games" category. There can certainly be overlap, but I'll reiterate that this is about "disappointments." So, here they are.
#5): Death Stranding 2 craziness
Legendary director Hideo Kojima has always known for being...unique. Ever since his ugly public ousting from Konami, it's just gotten worse. From Playstation giving him unlimited funding and clearly not having anyone around him to say "no," the guy's creativity has been able to run free. And in Death Stranding 2, that's not a good thing. The first game had some goofiness, but the story was at least somewhat serious and trying to say something...but DS2 ends with a guitar battle to determine the fate of the world, after which the villain gets eaten by a giant baby. In any other game that might've been awesome, but to me it felt like I was being taken for a ride. It's safe to say that the craziness in this game single-handedly destroyed my positive feelings about an otherwise-excellent experience.
#4): Necrophosis
I was looking forward to Necrophosis bigtime. From the trailers, it seemed like it was going to be the game that scratched that itch that Scorn could've scratched (if that game didn't have any combat). So it was upsetting to finally download Necrophosis and find out that it's nothing but a self-important, pretentious bit of lovecraftian jank (yes, that's jank, not junk). Seriously, this game's writing comes off like it's from an edgy teenager trying to craft a grimdark fantasy world. Every NPC says something about "this tormented existence," and some truly awful adventure game style puzzles and technical flaws bring the experience down even further. The fact that we're not yet halfway through this list shows how much more disappointing everything coming up was.
#3): Doom: The Dark Ages
In the weeks leading up to Dark Ages' launch, I started to temper my expectations. 2020's Doom Eternal is up there in my top 10 favorite games of all time, and there was simply no way that Dark Ages was going to be comparable. This was especially true given that ID were (smartly) electing to turn down the combat speed. So, I was prepared for that. What I wasn't prepared for was an end to almost everything that made Eternal and 2016 good. Poor level design, an over-reliance on amateur hour cutscenes, and an ultimately useless gameplay loop bogged down by repetition made this barely recognizable as a Doom game. I should specify that this wasn't a bad game...in fact, I'd say that it would be a good game if removed from its IP. But as it stands, it isn't removed from its IP, so it's a tremendous disappointment.
#2): Metroid Prime 4: Beyond
What would definitely not be good even if removed from its IP is the new installment in the Metroid Prime saga. My review for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was the last review of this year, so I don't feel too inclined to do a whole bunch of writing about it again...but everything that made Metroid Prime what it was simply isn't present here, and all we're left with is an attempt at a AAA action game that would've been middling even by that middling-to-begin-with standard. But despite this being yet another beloved IP being let down, there's still one more disappointment to go.
Disappointment of the Year: The Alters technical problems
The Alters could've legitimately been a GOTY contender. You'll notice that I didn't write "top 10" contender. So I mean exactly what I said: The Alters was in consideration for the top spot for most of the time I was playing it. But then came the final mission or so, when everything started going off the rails. The game's many management systems seemed not to know what to do with the endgame ticking clock elements, resulting in immersion-breaking moments like my Alters beginning to plot a rebellion against me despite us being literally a day away from rescue. Then there were the rampant technical hiccups, such as losing the ability to move through the base. Then there was the fact that the overarching ticking clock decided to swipe my last second victory away from me right on the final day. With all of these issues and many more put together, I had to replay the final push of The Alters FIVE times before I was able to get the credits to roll. As I said at the beginning, The Alters was in consideration for THE top spot because of how excellent it was...and it threw all of that away at the finish line of all places. There were whole games this year that disappointed me beyond belief, but I found myself actually depressed by the time I managed beat this game. So, congratulations, The Alters.
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Best Moment
We've arrived at my favorite category of them all, though we still have a handful more before we get to the main event. Every year there are moments in games that hit me where I live. In most cases these are story moments, but there can also be some gameplay bits that fit the bill. So keep the following in mind: in this category, I get to go full hog on spoilers where I might have otherwise held back in earlier sections. The spoiler warning I gave at the beginning of this article kicks into second gear for the next ten spot winners. Without further ado, the best moments in gaming for 2025.
#10): Song of Departure (Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii)
The Yakuza series has never had an aversion to doing whatever it wants. Kiryu hiring a chicken to help run his real estate empire? Check. Having an entire plotline ultimately revolve around a character repeatedly slipping on a banana peel? Check. In this latest entry in the saga, we have yet another example in the titular song. After taking control of a pirate ship and a crew, suddenly everyone bursts into a well-choreographed song and dance routine with a straight face. This doesn't happen at any other point in the story, nor has there ever been any precedent for a Yakuza game to do this. It also isn't a dream sequence or anything cheap like that. They just wanted to do it, so they did. I've gotta, as always, respect the every-living hell out of RGG Studio for this.
#9): Benjy Song (South of Midnight)
South of Midnight is a prime example of "so bad it's good," and nowhere is this amplified more than at the end of the first chapter. The self-contained story of this chapter is that a character you meet killed his brother, who then turned into a tree. In the final push for the chapter, you have to climb this tree to do a thing to move on or something like that, I don't really remember. What I do remember, though, is the Johnny Cash-style song that played. At first, I thought they'd licensed an actual Cash song for the sake of this early-game segment...but then I realized that the lyrics were literally singing about everything we'd learned thus far. This was a song from the perspective of the brother that did the killing. And I could. Not. Stop. Laughing. I'm sure that I howled and literally cried from laughter for a solid 5 minutes from the sheer self-importance of it all.
"Ooooooh yeah, I killed my brotheeeeer!" Like I said, this was only the first chapter, and there were presumably other characters with other things on their consciences coming up, so what was next?
"Robbin' a store, robbin' a store, just gimme the money cuz I'm robbin' a store?"
"The people at the mall were jealous of my power, jealous of my power, jealous of my power, the people at the mall were jealous of my power so I'm gonna wear a bomb on my chest?"
"You pick up the paper and you put it in the shredder, it's the tax fraud boogie (the tax fraud boogie)?"
Lost Soul Aside made me laugh more overall, but no moment in gaming this year made me think I was going to die laughing like this one did. The fact that the song royally, royally blows just adds to the effect.
#8): "Friend" (Goodnight Universe)
At the end of Goodnight Universe, the alien who had unwittingly possessed Isaac is finally released, and for a minute, it looks like this is going to be a classic 80's alien-and-kid movie moment where the alien is ultimately chased away by uncaring adults. But at the last minute, the alien turns back, unable to abandon his host. After continuous reassurance from Isaac's older sister, his mom and dad finally let the alien touch him...at which point he says his first word, "friend." It shattered my heart of stone with the warmth of it all...even if the logic doesn't quite hold up in hindsight...could a baby's first word even be "friend?"
#7): Entering a New Area (Hell is Us)
Hell is Us takes place in several self-contained regions across Hadea, and I spent as much time as I could in each of these before moving on because the experience of arriving somewhere new could only happen so many times. The second your vehicle pulls into a new area, it's like stepping onto an entirely different world with an entirely different atmosphere. New sounds, new color palettes, new lore, every first step you take is brimming with promise.
If you're like me, then by the time you arrive at the final battle of Silksong, you'll have spent over 100 hours in the world. That's a 100-hour leadup to a surprisingly emotional cutscene. After briefly talking with Lace (and saying the quote this game won a spot with in the "best quote" section), Hornet dives into the abyss with the Everbloom protecting her. As she descends into the darkness with the ost piece "last dive" playing, the leaves of the Everbloom start slowly being ripped apart by the beings dwelling within the abyss, signaling that this is likely going to be a one-way trip. As the soundtrack swells and with no spoken words, Hornet's resolve to slay Grandmother Silk once and for all and save Pharloom no matter the cost becomes all too apparent.
#5): The End (Lies of P: Overture)
Time travel is a staple of soulslike DLC plots to the point that it's almost a meme. So, Lies of P isn't exactly breaking new ground when it comes to the premise for Overture...that is, until you look at it a bit more in a Pinocchio context. The story behind the DLC is that Pinocchio is suddenly brought back in time to a period when Carlo (the real boy he was based off of) was still dead, but his adoptive mother/combat teacher (Lea Monad) was alive. Over the course of the expansion, he and Gemini track her down as she hunts the infamous serial killer puppet Arlecchino. The two fight together off and on as the final battle looms, with Lea frequently commenting that something about our hero seems familiar (remember, Pinocchio isn't truly Carlo), and eventually the two defeat Arlecchino. As the sun rises over the battlefield, Lea finally realizes who Pinocchio is just before he's transported back to his own time.
But why did he only return at that specific point? Well, this question is soon answered in the same moment that the question about why he traveled back in the first place is answered. Following Carlo's death, Lea had more-or-less wished upon a star to see her adoptive son again, and more specifically, to sit with him as the sun rose. Cheesy? Yes, as one would expect from a grimdark Pinocchio retelling. But endearing? Absolutely.
#4): Lou Twist (Death Stranding 2: On the Beach)
I daresay Mr. Kojima has a promising career ahead of him as a magician if he finds himself unable to make games anymore. I say this because the twist I'm discussing here relies almost entirely on misdirection and playing on audience expectations. At the beginning of DS2, Sam's infant child, Lou, is killed by Higgs. However, after this event, it appears that Lou is still around, playing the same role as in the first game (meaning, just floating in a pod given the whole "infant" thing). Throughout the plot, Sam gets some sideways glances about it, and if you're anything like me, you're sitting there thinking this was a wasted opportunity. "We already know Lou is dead," you say to the screen, "it would've been so much better to save that reveal until the end or something." You may also think "does Kojima think I'm an idiot?" Either way, the plot goes on and Sam meets a cast of unique characters.
One of these characters is named Tomorrow (because nobody dares tell Kojima "no"), who was found in a weird time travel-y dimension thing that gets expanded on gradually. Because I brought her up, you can now tell she has something to do with the moment in question. Throughout this plot, Kojima has been misdirecting the player's thoughts about Lou by focusing on Sam's grief and inability to come to terms with it. But he also misdirects using a simple lie of omission, one that I've also committed here...go ahead! Read over this blurb again! I never called Lou a "he," but you assumed it! After all is revealed towards the end, Tomorrow regains her memories and tells Sam, "It's me....your Louise!" I'm famously not a fan of how things turned out in DS2, but at this moment I actually sat back in my chair and clapped a little bit. I have to give Kojima this: I was well and truly tricked, and it was masterfully executed.
#3): Bar Fight (Dispatch)
A theme I've returned to time and again while discussing Dispatch is how it subverts expectations. Tell me if you've heard/seen this one before: the hero and love interest are in a bar when a couple bad guys come up looking for trouble. The love interest starts struggling against the bad guys, and as the hero tries to fight, he gets knocked unconscious.
What typically happens after that?
Well, usually the hero wakes up in some kind of aftermath, probably asks where the love interest is, and is met with silence before learning that she got taken to the evil lair or whatever.
Not so in Dispatch. The exact scenario plays out, and we do end up cutting to Robert in some aftermath right after he gets hit on the back of the head, but we quickly learn that the whole gang is there...not an abduction in sight.
"Ah," I hear you say, "so he got knocked out and the whole team had to clean up the mess while he was useless?"
Nope.
As I've said more than once in this article, we expect Robert to be either a doormat or a liability because he doesn't have powers, but that turns out not to be the case. In these aftermath scenes, the team are out eating some in-universe equivalent of Taco Bell, but certain actions come with quicktime events. That looks odd at first, like, why am I getting a quicktime event to have Robert push a straw through a drink lid?
But then, as you press the relevant buttons, the game flashes back to the bar scene after Robert got hit, where he's now shoving a handful of darts through a goon's jaw. This repeats for a few scenes, and it unequivocally shows that Robert is not only not getting his ass kicked, he's standing toe to toe with the rest of his team as they fight off the villains in the bar. He might not have powers, but he's biting fingers off, smashing faces into sinks, just beating the ever. Living. Shit out of the bad guys in his business casual, occasionally working together with other Z-team members to dish out punishment. I'm not the kind of person who likes a whole lot of violence, but something about watching a semi fish-out-of-water everyman roll up his sleeves, grit his teeth, and pull his weight in a fight comprising almost entirely of superhumans makes me wanna pump my fist in the air!
[Moment in question starts at 2:40 and ends when the torch is all the way out]
There have been many death scenes in gaming history that have wowed and broken players, and this one is the one that has stunned me the most. In the second half of KCD2, Henry meets up with a merry gang of scoundrels who aid him in his quest to take down Lord von Bergow. One of these scoundrels is an unapologetically irreverent Polish man named Adder with an inconsistent understanding of Czech (well...English, but you get the idea). After robbing the royal treasury, the team are betrayed by a Frenchman they worked with.
Adder sustains a critical injury and asks to be left behind to pray before his death. I've included a link to this moment above because this really is an audiovisual experience above all else...that, and I promised to get you some voice lines for Adder's actor in the voice acting categories. The music, the lighting, the camera work, the visual symbolism, the heartwrenching writing, the way Adder's prayer smoothly transitions from his usual irreverence to just about the most pure-hearted request for forgiveness you can imagine as he gets closer to death, the acting, dear god, it's a scene that made me forget to breathe.
But the kicker is that I was trying to get through the plot quickly at this point in the game, so I'd never done any optional content with Adder. The guy didn't mean anything to me, yet his shedding of the mortal coil was handled so cinematically that I was shaken to my core. I can only imagine how impactful this moment would have been had I been one of the many, many other players who loved the guy. This was the very first shoe-in for this list, and for a long while, it was the top spot winner...that is, until the French stepped in again.
Hoooo man. There are countless arguments online about which ending in Expedition 33 is the "good" one, but everyone seems to be in agreement that Verso's ending is probably the "correct" one.
Towards the end of the plot, we learn the truth about the world: it's but one of many canvas worlds created by the godlike Dessendre family, with this particular world having been created by Verso in his youth. After Verso died saving Alicia from a fire that nearly burned down the family mansion, the paintress threw herself into his canvas and created a painted version of her family so she wouldn't have to confront the reality of her son's passing.
But until the real Renoir enters the canvas following the expedition's success, we're unaware a key detail: for a painter or paintress to exist within a canvas world is akin to a drug addiction. Living in their own worlds causes their real bodies to wither away in the "real" world. This was why Renoir took on the form of the curator and assisted the expedition in defeating the paintress. It was the only way to force his wife out of the canvas so he could start helping her heal from her addiction. There's a lot more detail than that to consider, but we'll be here all day if I don't move on. Anyway, from the second Maelle was born, he knew his daughter Alicia had entered the canvas as well, which is another reason why he aided the expedition.
When the real Renoir enters the canvas, he finally embraces Maelle/Alicia, apologizes to the painted Verso for the cruelty the paintress forced upon him by making him live with the real Verso's memories, and then proudly states his intent to destroy the canvas in order to forcibly break his wife's addiction. But as he says this, Maelle starts to push back, and Renoir begins to realize that now, having just started the process of helping his wife, he's beginning to lose his daughter too. But I'm going on a tangent about Renoir being gaming's best villain again, so let's move forward again.
After defeating Renoir at the end of the game, Maelle and Verso find themselves at odds about the fate of the world. This canvas contains the last remaining piece of the real Verso's soul. Therefore, it's the last thing standing between Verso and his ability to finally rest in peace.
But on the other hand, this means it's also the last piece of Verso that his family has. If this canvas is destroyed, then he is truly gone in all forms.
So, as the game starts to come to a close, the player must make a choice: fight as Maelle or fight as Verso. If you fight as Maelle, she gets her wish. She stays in the canvas in an ending that feels good. The entire population of Lumiere is alive again (including Gustave), and Maelle gets to live in a world where she still has her brother and an unscarred body...but it comes at the cost of her real body, which begins to crumble in the last second of this ending. And it all kicks off with Maelle defeating Verso and claiming her new life while he sobs and insists that he "doesn't want this life." Not a very good ending in my book.
The ending that wins this spot, though, is a little different. In this ending, Verso defeats Maelle and comforts her as she fades from the canvas, telling her that she'll never truly have to live a life she doesn't want. One-by-one the members of the expedition, the last living souls in this world, fade away, and Verso leads the real Verso's soul into oblivion...giving him the peace that his family has consistently denied him in death.
The scene cuts to a while later in the "real" world, where the Dessendre family has finally managed to move on, and we're left with the bittersweet knowledge that this was for the best. This ending is punctuated with the most beautiful rendition of the menu theme in the OST, and the whole thing is a tremendous gut punch.
I could write for hours upon hours more about both of these endings. I could write about how Maelle's ending makes her an even bigger villain than the paintress. I could write about how Renoir, for all his conniving villainy, is the only character who cares what the real Verso would have wanted. And I could throw my two cents into the "what constitutes a good ending in this case?" hat. But for now, I'll leave this discussion here: Verso's ending is not only the best ending for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I'd argue it's one of the better endings in all of gaming. And it's certainly the greatest moment of 2025.
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The Big Picture Awards
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Most Unique
In a world where AAA greed begets industrywide trend-chasing cowardice, finding something new is a bit of a tall order. But it's never an impossible one. Every year, developers all over the world find new ways to break established molds, and this category is meant to celebrate the games that do so. Like some other categories, what exactly constitutes "uniqueness" is a bit loose. Obviously games with combat systems we've never seen before are shoe-ins, but I usually have to get more creative than that.
#5): A Game About Digging a Hole
So-called "dad" games aren't anything new, but this is the first "dad" game to ever center around the traditional dad suggestion that you go and dig a hole if you're bored.
#4): The Midnight Walk
There are plenty of memes to be found about Tim Burton and his style, and you'll sometimes find artists who aim to recreate it. But you won't often find a team that emulates that macabre Burton-esque charm while making it their own. Enter The Midnight Walk. All of that charm is there in droves ("There's a somebody in nobodyville!!") without feeling derivative.
#3): The Dark Queen of Mortholme
The Dark Queen of Mortholme earns a spot on this list due to its unusual perspective. You play as the titular dark queen: a powerful soulslike boss who is approached by a tenacious player one day. You kill him handily within second at first, but every time he reappears, he has learned your moveset a bit better, and he ultimately slays you in the end. It's interesting to see a soulslike from the perspective of the boss who has to see you walk through the fog gate a million times.
#2): Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
If you're anything like me, JRPGs are usually kind of like an off-brand bag of chips you'd find in some middle of nowhere truck stop on a road trip: utterly soulless fluff. They tend to be either gooner bait or the ten trillionth story about heroes of light trying to find the crystals to defeat an evil god. Because Expedition 33 is french, it isn't technically a JRPG...but like, come on. It features the hallmarks you'd expect of the genre (turn-based combat, trying to defeat a god, at least one lovable mascot), but it comes with a refreshingly earnest coat of paint. Beyond that, the pictos and lumina systems are wholly unique as far as I can tell.
Most Unique Game of the Year: Hell is Us
But for as unique as some other games have been this year, Hell is Us rules the roost for one major reason. It does one thing that is so unheard of these days that this award couldn't have possibly gone to anything else. Hell is Us doesn't treat you like you're a big dum-dum. There's been plenty of discourse through the last two or so years about handholding in games, with some points being more valid than others (yellow or white paint for climbing is not handholding, and anyone who claims otherwise has never played the Thief reboot), but it all points back to the same idea: publishers think you're stupid. This is obvious just based on how they act in real life, but I'm specifically talking about how their games treat you in this case. It seems like nearly every game these days has their protagonists blabber at you nonstop, offering solutions to puzzles if you don't solve them within five seconds. Think Aloy from the Horizon series. If they don't have that, then they have a side character doing the exact same thing! Think Miles MacKenzie from Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Hell is Us' protagonist, Remi, never once opens his mouth outside of story segments. You never get handed solutions to problems. All this and more just shows that not only do the team at Rogue Factor think you're smart, they almost certainly think you're smarter than you actually are! So you're bound to get stuck or lost eventually. But I don't care! It's a shame that being treated like I'm smart is rare enough to warrant a top spot victory in this category, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
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Best Developer
As we all know, a game cannot exist without a solid development team to create it. The Phil Spencers of the world might think that shareholders cause games to appear out of thin air, but those of us with a brain know better than that. At the end of the day, a developer's only job is to make us a great game, but there are some ways that a developer can go from good to great in my eyes. Some developers crawl out of the shadows of larger publishers to create something excellent. Some make pro-consumer decisions that cause the AAA industry to panic. Some overcome impossibly small budgets to create something with a lot of heart. Some accomplish all these things and more. Whatever the case may be, the following developers were the ones that impressed me the most this year.
#5): Awaken Realms (Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon)
#4): NeoBards Entertainment (Silent Hill f)
#3): Rogue Factor (Hell is Us)
#2): Team Cherry (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
Developer of the Year: Sandfall Interactive (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
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Best Story
With this category, we're coming close to the end of the categories before the Honorable Mentions. Ever since Doom 2016 came out, story has become progressively less and less important to me...and it often seems like the same is true for the game industry. With the death of narrative-first shops like Telltale and the gradual decline of studios like Bioware, gameplay has seemed to ultimately take the biggest slice of the pie across the industry. That isn't a problem since gameplay is, after all, the most important part of any game, but it's a trend I've definitely noticed as time has gone by. Nonetheless, a great story will always elevate its game, and these are the 2025 games that had the best ones!
#10): Hell is Us
#9): Lies of P: Overture
#8): Hollow Knight: Silksong
#7): Silent Hill f
#6): Mafia: The Old Country
#5): Goodnight Universe
#4): The Alters
#3): Dispatch
#2): Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Story of the Year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
So, it's up to a small contingent of expeditioners to overcome their inferior numbers to accomplish their goal. But this, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. By nearly all objective measures, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has one of gaming's best (if not the best, jury is still out on that) stories. Every choice made is the correct one, every character has something meaningful to contribute to the stakes, the mystery is filled with convincing half-truths, and every moment is relevant either in contribution to the plot or in reinforcement of the game's themes. There's a reason this is the highest user-rated game in history.
We're likely never going to have a story as special as this for a long time, if ever. From the moment Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 crash landed into the world, there was never going to be any other game to take home the top spot in this category...and I do feel a little uneasy about whether or not Sandfall could possibly catch this kind of lightning in a bottle again, but for now, significant congratulations must be given!
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Best Gameplay
In this final category before the honorable mentions, we celebrate the aspect of games that separates them from other mediums. Any book can have a great story, any film can have excellent visuals, but only games can have a thing you actually do to move the plot along or get to the next visual segment. As with many of these categories, great gameplay isn't a necessity for a great game...but a developer is likely to have a harder time with sales if they choose to forego it entirely. So, these were the games with the most well-crafted gameplay loops of 2025.
#10): Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
#9): Silly Polly Beast
#8): Sword of the Sea
#7): Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist
#6): Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
#5): Hell is Us
#4): Hollow Knight: Silksong
#3): The First Berserker: Khazan
#2): Ninja Gaiden 4
Gameplay of the Year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I've already talked about my burn build for Verso, but I've heard of some truly insane builds online. I've seen players who set things up to have two of three party members instantly die when a battle starts. This gets paired with a buff that applies shields to living characters when the party members in question die, and then another buff that revives party members once upon death. As a result of this strategy, a key damage-dealing party member starts a battle off with an insane number of shields and is able to decimate the opposition before the shields all get knocked off. The amount of ways to tweak things is literally insane.
Never before has turn-based combat felt so perfectly balanced yet so unguarded against the forces of chaos, and both this and Baldur's Gate 3 show that there's still a place for innovation in turn-based gameplay formulas. And you know what else? I forgot to bring up the fact that every party member somehow has a different play style within the turn-based context. Like, holy moly.
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Honorable Mentions
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The final category isn't the end of this article, as always. Before we get to the main event, I always like to go through some Honorable Mentions. Unlike what most people mean by "honorable mentions," this isn't a rundown of games themselves, but rather a rundown of categories that couldn't necessarily support a full 5-10 winners. There are some positive awards to give out as well as some negatives, and there are some new awards as well! One last thing to note: none of these award winners get any points in the final GOTY calculations for their victories...these are basically just for fun.
Gears of War Award for Most Raw Fun
Named for the first game I ever loved that didn't have any story whatsoever, the Gears of War award for Most Raw Fun goes to the game in a given year that was the most fun regardless of whether the gameplay loop was well-made or not. Given how I left things in the final category, I think you can probably guess which game this Honorable Mention is going to. The First Berserker: Khazan was one early frontrunner, as was Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, but when it comes to pure, dumb fun, there was only one option.
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Undertale Award for Biggest Surprise
In 2015, a game called Undertale came, and I wouldn't have tried it out at all were it not for some significant GOTY buzz from other outlets. But I obviously did, because Undertale was my GOTY that year. So, this Honorable Mention is meant to point out one game that surpassed my expectations or took me by surprise in other ways. Dispatch was a recent consideration for this award, as I was thoroughly unimpressed with the early footage that was shown off. Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist was another possibility, as it was literally a surprise since I had no idea it was coming out. However, I'm giving this award to...
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Clementine Award for "Must Protect" Character
In this new Honorable Mention, I decided I wanted to show some appreciation for characters I wanted to protect at all costs. Another possible title for this award could've been "cutest character." Anyway, it's obviously named for Clementine from Telltale's The Walking Dead series, probably the original "protect at all costs" character. One character on the shortlist for victory here was Esquie from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for his naive and sunny disposition. But one character touched my heart far more than any other in 2025.
Sherma (Hollow Knight: Silksong)
If someone doesn't like Sherma, they need to be investigated. Like, just listen to his little song and his drastically out-of-time chime playing and tell me you don't want to protect him! I don't think I've ever prayed so hard for a character not to die than I did with little Sherma. I also don't think I've run so fast to complete a side quest than with the one where you find a note from him saying he's gone to the scary underside of the citadel to look for medicine to help the other bugs.
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Spec Ops: The Line Award for Most Important
What some people need to learn is that a game isn't worthy of accolades just because it has a good message or stands for something positive. However, I believe that these things should be pointed out where possible. So, many years ago I put this award together for that exact purpose and named it after Spec Ops: The Line: a military shooter about the evils of blind nationalism. This is the first year I can remember where I've had to think outside the box to find a winner, but that winner is...
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The Shivering Isles Award for Best DLC
I don't typically play DLCs, so this isn't an award that comes around often. But there's no other real way to give an excellent DLC the kudos it deserves since they aren't eligible for the final list. I'll stop being coy now. Anyone who knows me knows what the winner is.
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Dunkey Award for Best Content Creator
Almost every year it seems like I find some new content creator to watch, but I recently realized that I've never really gone out of my way to recommend any of them. So, that changes now mainly because I found someone this year that I actively want to tell people about. I found someone in 2025 that easily sits up there in the higher echelons of my favorite creators alongside Dunkey himself. That's some high praise, I know, but hopefully I can convince you.
Before I go any further, though, there was another creator I discovered this year who doesn't mean half as much to me or cover gaming in any sense...but I still feel like giving him a shoutout: "Vietnam-era Vet Speak Out." As the name suggests, he's an old veteran. He has an incredibly modest setup and mainly spends his time reacting to music that fans suggest to him. I don't watch him a whole bunch, but I'm subscribed and I like the thought of helping support his work, so he's getting a recommendation from me.
Now, for the winner...
BigGaming64
He begins each of his videos with what he calls "buddy time," named after what his dad used to call quality time with him and his brother. During "buddy time," he talks to the audience about things like impostor syndrome or overcoming people-pleasing habits. Corny? Yes, absolutely. But it goes a long way to reinforce what I like most about him: he's just a really, really swell guy.
I can almost 100% guarantee that if you watch him, you'll find yourself thinking about a good friend you used to have. You know the type. Impossible to drive to anger...full of good advice that you begrudgingly admit is good..........not very funny......you've met this person before. It's like if Mr. Rodgers were putting on his second pair of loafers to go out and catch a slasher flick: He'll happily say "I'm glad you guys are here with me" just before some horribly disfigured, bloody monster jumps into view.
And the last positive I'll touch on? While he occasionally streams, those streams are on a different channel. All of his main channel videos are condensed, edited, solo lets plays. So when he's addressing the audience, it isn't a chat window. It's easy to forget how refreshing that is.
Anyway, that's the rundown on BigGaming64 and why he wins the inaugural Dunkey Award for Best Content Creator. If you're in the mood for a warm, positive, and oddly nostalgic viewing experience and you can handle the horrifying games he plays, I legitimately don't think there's a guy on the whole of the internet more deserving of your time.
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Ubisoft Award for Worst Publisher
AAA Publishers are the scum of the earth. We all know this, but it bears repeating as much as possible. They'll try to raise prices across the board, they'll cut content out of games and sell them as microtransactions, they'll cancel projects right and left to focus on making worthless "live service" games, they'll force their workers into mandatory overtime and then lay them off right before the game goes live so the executives can keep the profits, etc. That last thing wasn't a joke. That actually happened in 2025, though it was the developer of classic games like Hyper Light Drifter, not a publisher. Every year it seems like publishers are in some kind of desperate race to see who can be the biggest piece of shit, and this year was no exception. But just like last year, there was only one publisher that stood above the rest, and it isn't even close. Come up and accept your knuckle sandwich...
But that was just the beginning. It soon came out that in addition to the high price of the Switch 2 and the overpriced games, Nintendo themselves imbedded each console with a kill switch. They could trigger this at any point if they decided you weren't being friendly enough to them or if you were guilty of their turtleneck-wearing vegan-level liberal interpretation of piracy or copyright infringement. So not only did they expect you to pay an insane premium for the privilege of using the hardware you bought, but they could just decide to throw your hard-earned money down the drain and tell you to shove off the second the fancy struck them.
And even that wasn't the end of the scumbaggery. There were many other times this year where the greed clearly got to them (Pokemon Legends: Z-A, for example, which locked entire evolutions behind a paywall). But hey...what else can you expect from a company that knows they'll never get held to account for anything? They put the Switch Joy Con controllers out into the market knowing that they had a defect that causes eventual drift back in 2017, and they did it AGAIN in 2025 with the Switch 2 Joy Cons!
I swear, were it not for the fact that other publishers have serious rape problems, Nintendo would easily be the worst of the lot. That's a great contender for a company slogan, don't you think? "Nintendo: At least we don't have a rape problem!" Gimme a break.
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Madden Award for Most Proud I Didn't Play
Every year there are games that I avoid on principle. Whether it's because of anti-consumer practices, IP butchering, or publisher behavior, the result is the same. 2025 had no shortage of possible winners for this award, unfortunately. Elden Ring: Nightreign was considered because of how bad an idea it was. Another possibility that was hard to pass up for this honor was Mario Kart World because of its $80 price tag and because of the fact that I'd have to capitulate to Nintendo in order to play it. But in the end, pettiness won the day for this first Dishonorable Mention. The winner is...
Like I said, all he had to do was keep his mouth shut. That's all he had to do, but he couldn't bear to not make a complete ass out of himself. I still don't know how he hasn't gotten fired. He's the sole cause of every lost sale the company has ever suffered, and he was directly involved in the creation of the Razzie-winning Borderlands film. Whatever way you slice it, Borderlands 4 didn't grace my backlog this year, and I'm proud of it.
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Kingdoms of Amalur Award for Worst Writing
I've actually been replaying Kingdoms of Amalur lately, and it kept reminding me why it's the namesake for this Dishonorable Mention. It also kept reminding me of this simple fact: winning this award doesn't reflect whether or not a game is good. Kingdoms of Amalur is excellent, and it features the best class system ever, but the writing is terrible. So, good games can indeed win this award...it just so happens that they don't usually win it. South of Midnight was an early contender for its Marvel-style script. Lost Soul Aside was so close to taking this one home also, but the writing in that one was at least laughably bad, and there was one other game whose writing irked me more.
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Borderlands Award for Most Yawn-Inducing
While bad writing doesn't necessarily a bad game make, a game being boring is a kiss of death. The last award's winner, Necrophosis, was one such game. Another was Echoes of the End, with its poor man's God of War ambitions. But in the end, there was no game I was more bored by than...
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Brink Award for Worst Game of the Year
As disappointing as it is that there have been so many contenders for the previous Dishonorable Mentions, there are more contenders for this most damning one. Necrophosis was a possibility (for the third time) for all the reasons I've already mentioned. Ghost of Yotei was up (for a second time) because of how much of a headache it gave me. Finally, Lost Soul Aside was probably the objective winner, but I laughed so much at it that I can't say I had a bad time. So, with those out of the way, the worst game I played in 2025 was...
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ACTUAL Honorable Mentions
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Last year I decided I wanted to start giving shoutouts to games that I either couldn't give a spot on the GOTY list in good conscience...or to games that were on the list at some point in the scoring process and got kicked off. This year it's entirely the latter, as positions shifted quite a bit in the time between the raw score and the final score. More on that process later. For now, the following three games (in no particular order) were ones that once held a spot in the final list but were removed as spots shifted. As far as I'm concerned, they put in the necessary work to reach that list, but it just didn't work out in the end.
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Top 10 Games
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Well folks, we've made it to the main event! The top 10 games of the year (plus one runner-up, as always). 2025 was, as I've said, a high-quality year, which you'll hopefully see as we get started. Before I do, though, I always like to go through the process I use to determine spot placements.
Firstly, after I finish reviewing a game, I take the score I gave it and add it to some additional math for other factors. I look at factors like whether or not I replayed something, how much I think it deserves a spot on this list in the first place, etc. For replayability, I typically give an additional 10 points for each time I replay something. For whether or not I think a game deserves a spot, if I give it a full 10 points (for "absolutely deserves one"), I'll typically give it another 10 points as a bonus. If I give a game a 10/10 in my review, I'll usually give it another 10 points as a bonus for that as well. So, there's some unique math that goes into this. These factors plus the score I ended up giving a game in my review come together to create what I call the "raw" score. I then sort games by the raw score with GOTY being the one with the highest one, and this is what determines the initial spot order. But it's rarely representative of the final product. These scores get updated throughout the year, after all (since I might choose to replay something later on, etc).
Another thing I do throughout the year is keep a running shortlist of possible spot winners for each category. At the end of the year, I look at these shortlists and make my decisions for the individual categories. Then, I assign points for spot winners on top of the raw score. For a category with 10 winners, I'll go up by a factor of 1. 1 point for 10th place, 10 points for first place, etc. For a category with 5 winners, I go by a factor of 2. 2 points for 5th place, 10 points for first. For negative categories like Lamest Character, I take off points by the same rules.
A thing to note about this step in the process is that a game only wins points for its highest-scoring spot. Usually this doesn't come up since I try to only give any game one spot per list, but if there's an exception where a game wins spots #5 and {blank} of the year, it only gets the 10 points for the top spot and nothing for spot #5.
With the raw and category scores combined, I then reorder the list, which gives me the next draft of the main list. From there, it's all up to my gut. At the end of the day, this is still my list, and I can make whatever changes I want. I typically agree with whatever the scores say in terms of what makes the list, but sometimes I'll feel like moving something from 7th place to 6th place or something like that.
So, that's roughly how I get to what you'll soon read.
One last thing before we get into it: I'm well above 10 years doing this, so I like to give a brief overview of what the top 5 spots (I didn't start doing 10 spots until a couple years in, so I only list the top 5 across the board here) in every given year have been to show how things have changed for me over time. So, I'm going to briefly go through every year with the top spots in order and the GOTY winner in bold.
2012: Halo 4, Journey, The Walking Dead, Far Cry 3, Mass Effect 3
2013: Crysis 3, Rain, The Wolf Among Us, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, The Last of Us
2014: Assassin's Creed: Rogue, Transistor, Far Cry 4, Dark Souls II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
2015: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Soma, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Undertale
2016: Pokemon Sun/Moon, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Final Fantasy XV, Inside, Doom 2016
2017: Finding Paradise, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Last Day of June, Nier: Automata, Yakuza 0/Persona 5
2018: Pokemon Let's Go Eevee/Pikachu, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, Celeste, Spider-Man, God of War
2019: Pokemon Sword/Shield, Jedi: Fallen Order, Code Vein, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
2020: Man-Eater, Journey to the Savage Planet, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Ghost of Tsushima, Doom Eternal
2021: Ender Lillies: Quietus of the Knights, Death's Door, Impostor Factory, Demon Turf, The Forgotten City
2022: Olli-Olli World, Tunic, Elden Ring, God of War: Ragnarok, Neon White
2023: Dredge, Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, Baldur's Gate 3, Hi-Fi Rush, Lies of P
2024: Harold Halibut, Dread Delusion, Astro Bot, Crow Country, Mouthwashing
So, that's where I've been in previous years and how I've changed. Now it's time to break down the top 10 games of 2025 (plus one runner-up).
Here we go!
Ultimate Runner-Up):
#10):
#9):
#8):
#7):
#6):
Now we come to the top 5, which represents the absolute best of the year. Each of the previous games obviously get a full recommendation from me, and they're also some of this year's best, but the next 5 are the ones that stand head and shoulders above the competition. Thankfully, deciding on the rest of this list was a lot easier than it was in 2024.
#5):
#4):
The war is between the anti-theistic Sabinians and the Palomist religious sect that both call Hadea home, and do you know what the two factions have in common? The little people are just trying to get by while their militaries and opportunistic militias abuse the other side. The Sabinian military, for example, is the first big military power you meet, and at that point, they've been occupying a small Palomist village, starving the occupants, and...doing the r-word (that online platforms love to age-restrict content for saying) to the women. In another region you explore, a small Palomist militia has occupied a Sabinian settlement, and early on you meet a little girl who is missing an arm. She mentions that the militia told her the arm would grow back if she behaved. Then it becomes clear that everybody in this village is missing an arm, and that this mandatory mutilation was this militia's way of preemptively culling dissent. But people don't take kindly to either of these treatments, so violence naturally erupts, confirming the biases of whatever military is around. And thus the cycle of violence and hatred continues. It's a messy affair with no clear good guys, and the situation can't be boiled down to the usual "fascists vs nutters" dichotomy. And that's just the story context.
Aiding this excellent depiction of civil war is the thick atmosphere this game brings to every area. In some areas, the misery is tangible in the air. In others, the recently-ignited fires of violence still roar with innocent civilians desperate to escape. Ironically, the least "bad" area in this game is one of the most chilling ones as well. This late-game area is just a building: the Sabinian ministry of propaganda. Here, a group of Sabinian civilians have taken up arms against their own government, having realized that their own crimes against their Palomist neighbors were spurred on by propaganda. In this area, the threats are minimal, but it's cubicle after cubicle of people (who are just as indoctrinated as the rebels used to be) who have been strung up recently enough to still be swaying.
I'm a big atmosphere guy, and as you saw earlier, no game did that better than Hell is Us. I realize that I haven't talked about gameplay much in this blurb, but I truly think that what sells this game the most is that atmosphere and the thoroughness of its world and lore.
As we go into the top 3, there's something I want to bring up. Each of the next three games were my GOTY at some point in 2025. So I know that I've already said we're at my highest recommendations at this point, but these were what I considered the absolute best of the year at some point, whereas the others on this list have always been "some of" the best.
#3):
For instance, to brew a potion you'd start by pouring the correct base into the cauldron (wine, water, oil, or spirits), pour the right amount of handfuls of the right herbs in there, boil them for the right amount of turns of the hourglass, take the cauldron off the fire, grind the right amount of handfuls of the right amount of herbs with a mortar and pestle, add those herbs to the cauldron, maybe do another couple turns of boiling, and distill, all with no way of instantly brewing this potion again the next time you want to make one.
And yet, despite having all this fiddliness, once the systems click with you, they really click. You can get fully immersed in the fantasy of actually living in medieval Bohemia and working as a blacksmith, an alchemist, a warrior, a thief etc., with an unheard of level of realism.
In addition, you get to do so within one of this year's best, most well-told stories featuring some of this year's strongest characters.
So, this one is going to be incredibly unkind to you at first if you aren't prepared for it. You'll likely mess a lot of things up, not exactly be sure where to prioritize your leveling, get caught unawares by an unpredictable skill check, forget to switch into your best persuasion outfit before trying to talk your way out of something, forget to switch into your combat gear before getting into a fight, get killed within a minute during a combat encounter, or any number of other things.
You'll most likely also get tripped up by the game's insistence on using a consumable item in order to manually save. In order to save, you have to drink a specific potion. You can also start a new quest or just select "exit to main menu" in the options to use your "closed game" save slot. But a player isn't likely to know all of that at first, and even if the game is more forthcoming about this in its tutorials than I remember, it's likely going to take a while for one to get used to it.
But I have to once again insist that once you do get used to the Kingdom Come-ness of it all, there's nothing else on earth like it. I personally found it an improvement on the original in every way. More intuitive combat that doesn't lose that unique, realistic edge. A more forgiving lockpicking system. The list goes on. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is a titan among other RPGs and a more complete version of the vision that Warhorse clearly had when they made the first game, and it was my very first GOTY for 2025. When the credits rolled, I put my hands up and "absolute cinema"d Scorsese-style, thinking "well, there's no way in hell anything is gonna beat that!" What a year it was that there could possibly be two more games better than this one!
My apologies for the continued interruptions, but there's one last thing to say before the top 2: the top 2 tended to flip flop for a while. There was even a brief period of time where I toyed with the idea of doing a split GOTY...but I never do that (except when things change after an article has already been published, such as in 2017). However, I did eventually end up making a solid decision before the math was even done, and the math ended up reinforcing that. And this solid decision just makes sense.
#2):
All bosses take off two masks of health as opposed to the single mask that some enemies take off, which essentially means you have half health for the game's hardest challenges. If you're having a hard time with a boss, how can you be expected to get better in a timely manner when you're in a position to die twice as fast?
The runbacks for several of these bosses and some of the gauntlets are ridiculously long...like early From Software long. One particular runback in Bilewater lasts for around 5 minutes if you don't find the hidden bench...at which point it lasts between 2 and 3 minutes. All these runbacks aren't just long, they're filled with difficult enemies. So as bad as it is to start bosses technically at half-health even at full health, it's twice as bad to do so with less than full health if you get hit on the way. You can often run past enemies, but if you're careless about it, you can end up accidentally running into one and taking contact damage.
Speaking of things that take a long time, some of the gauntlets last for way too long. The most infamous gauntlet, in fact, lasts for eleven waves. ELEVEN! I legitimately thought I wasn't going to be able to complete Silksong when I reached that gauntlet and could barely make it to wave 8. These gauntlets can be more demoralizing than the bosses...to say nothing about the bosses that include gauntlets before the fight actually begins.
In spite of all these bits of absolute B.S...I persevered beyond that eleven-wave gauntlet. When I thought I was stuck against a wall, I realized that I simply couldn't live with myself if I didn't commit and finish this game that I had been loving enough to consider GOTY all this time. So I took a step back, refocused my efforts, located some different tools that I thought would be better suited for this challenge, and eventually triumphed. And this wasn't even close to the end. I never came up against anything that made me feel quite as demoralized as that gauntlet (despite many of the bosses afterward being brutal) because that experience taught me that I could do it no matter how hard it got. And I'm glad I learned that lesson, because otherwise I never would've gotten to experience some of the game's best fights.
I've spent an awful lot of time in this blurb talking about the things that are wrong with Silksong because they're important to know about before picking it up. But it's equally important to emphasize that Silksong is so good that I pained over choosing between it and the actual winner for GOTY. At several points, I thought to myself "this is GOTY" despite the true winner having more-or-less had it in the bag for a long time.
So, a note about what specifically Silksong does well. The combat paired with the exceptional movement makes the gameplay feel like it isn't exclusively 2D. The world itself is fascinating. The soundtrack is one of this year's best. The characters are endearing. And the bosses are mostly well-made in spite of some of the game's design choices.
At the unfathomably low price of $20, Hollow Knight: Silksong is more-or-less a must-own as far as I'm concerned. Remember, I put over 100 hours into this...so, that's one hell of a bang-for-buck ratio! But one game in 2025 took the cake, and when all was said and done, there was no other choice for GOTY than the true winner. Fun fact: prior to this year, the GOTY that took home the most top spots on my lists was Neon White with 9 1st place victories in 2022.
With that in mind, my GOTY for 2025, with a whopping fifteen 1st place victories, is...
Game of the Year:
Ubisoft is known for making the most soul-crushingly formulaic games you can imagine, and a few members of the Ubisoft development team decided enough was enough. They left their jobs and formed their own studio to make the turn-based RPG they always wanted to make. They worked tirelessly with funding meager enough to need to comb public forums to find a composer and some writers. And despite this adversity, the team managed to deliver a world-changing product in a perfect technical state, with that latter victory being something Ubisoft has never once been able to deliver.
Aside from the game's technical state, the writing team managed to craft one of the most solidly-developed casts of characters in recent memory. They produced a script that carried subtle, unassuming lines that the story wouldn't be the same without, as well as side lines with an equal amount of subtlety and more meaning than most games pack in entire scripts. They carefully crafted a consistent world where the smallest details feed into the narrative's themes and the world's lore. And they gave us a story that challenges us to consider questions that some might find uneasy to consider.
How much obligation is a god truly saddled with when it comes to their creations? Do the needs of a god truly outweigh the needs of an entire world? Are we justified in playing god with people's lives even if what we hope to give them is objectively what they want? In the wake of some of these questions, how much selfishness is a person entitled to? And perhaps most challengingly of all...do any of your answers to these questions make you an enormous hypocrite?
Those are just some of the questions that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 asks...and half the ones I wrote stem from just one character over the course of a single scene. As I said, it's a narrative that does the unthinkable in the popcorn-flick age we live in: it dares to challenge the player. It challenges, it devastates, it comes at you full force in a narrative game of chicken with determination in its eyes and no intention whatsoever to flinch. I'll admit that last statement was only half thought-out in my head, but you get the point.
Every twist, every tease of information, every moment where it denies you some key truth you know is hiding just within reach, all of it is put exactly where it needs to be to make the story work. And most importantly, this is a narrative that rewards your patience with moments that have broken even the likes of Angry Joe in their bittersweet beauty.
The narrative and characters alone would've put Expedition 33 on this list, and the game's many technical achievements probably would have netted it the top spot on their own. But as you saw earlier, the gameplay loop here is superior (when it comes to fun AND execution) than everything else in 2025. I'm normally not a fan of RPGs these days because I get tired and cross-eyed with the micromanaging. But the possibilities for team synergy and creative builds were so interesting and varied that I spent quite a bit of time scrolling through my buff and ability options just to find the optimal loadout for specific characters (to say nothing of the time I spent looking for loudouts that would benefit certain party formations). I've already mentioned my burn build and the death+shields strategies I've seen others use, but they're just the tip of the iceberg.
There are classic RPG tactics like priming and detonating, for instance. This is where one character sets up some kind of status on an enemy, and another character uses an ability to removes that status for drastically-improved damage. Then there are supremely weird strategies involving causing certain party members to take damage when healed. The fact that the developers were able to include such a variety of abilities/buffs/debuffs, make them equippable by every character, and somehow make any combination of team synergy work is the kind of development genius that we simply don't see anymore outside of the likes of Baldur's Gate 3.
Then there's the fact that each character has a specific playstyle that somehow can be made to work synergistically with any other character you want. Verso, for example, increases his overall damage with every hit he lands, making him a ticking time bomb of damage so long as he avoids damage himself. Maelle, on the other hand, comes with a stance system that determines both the damage she deals and the damage she takes. Sciel, to give one more example, works as her own primer-detonator system where that detonation can be used to do things like deal over 200% damage for a while, heal the party, or double the damage another character will do in their next turn.
As I said, I'm not normally one for micromanaging, but I micromanaged the living hell out of this game's RPG systems despite them being deeper than almost anything on the market. I didn't even do that much micromanaging in Baldur's Gate 3, for crying out loud!
This is further compounded by bosses that push the limits of both your strategic in-battle decisions and your build-crafting in unique ways. I've already discussed Simon in the "Best Boss" segment...but did I mention he steals every shield you put on party members? No? Well, he does! So he forces you to rethink your builds in a way that doesn't involve shields.
There's also another superboss whose fight makes you think about your AP. Normally you'd use those AP to activate your abilities and deal increased damage...but in this fight, the boss absorbs the AP of all your party every couple of turns and brings them down to 0. So, you'll soon realize that it's pointless to use any abilities, and thus you'll be thinking of builds to maximize the damage you can deal with your basic attacks. During the time you're using your basic attacks, you'll be passively generating AP as normal...and you'll soon notice that when the boss absorbs too much AP, it explodes and deals a ton of self-damage. So, the battle ends up being about your longevity and ability to operate without making the most out of your characters' playstyles.
There are many more puzzle box bosses that push the limits of your imagination and observation like this. Some are truly unforgiving, some are easy to dispatch once you figure out the puzzle, but all of them force you to reckon with all the game's systems and demonstrate mastery of them.
But the game is as much about skill as it is about brains, which I love. You can either dodge or parry to mitigate damage, which takes out the usual RNG that turn-based games typically rely on. The dodge window is fairly generous while the parry window is pretty strict, but if you manage to pull off the parry, you get to pull off devastating counterattacks. Having a handle on the skill-based systems allows you to excel in the combat even more, and it removes the entirety of the hassles that usually plague this genre.
And as if all that wasn't enough, this is also one of the most consumer-friendly games out there. It comes in at well under the $70 price tag AAA developers are greedily trying to convince us is normal. And the team recently released a sizable "thank you" DLC with an entire new level, a whole roster of new bosses, and an equally huge roster of new enemies and cosmetics entirely for free. All as a thank you to us for all the support.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just the best game that has come out in years. It's safe to say it changed the landscape of gaming for years to come. It has proved that turn-based combat can have a soul. It has proved that even without proper funding, a developer with a spark in their eyes can achieve their dreams. It proves that Swen Vincke was right when he said that if you make a game with passion, if you treat your customers like more than just numbers on a spreadsheet, and if you treat your team with the respect they deserve, the revenue will follow. Finally, it reiterates a fact we all know: the AAA game industry is terrified of passion and are desperate to gaslight all of us into thinking we want the same old lifeless live services they want us to want. Just like when Baldur's Gate 3 came out, when Expedition 33 gained tremendous acclaim (as the highest-rated game in Metacritic history), the AAA industry stepped into the room and told us that quality like this game was the exception, not the rule.
Why is that, I wonder? How is it that a ragtag group of maybe 30ish people with minimal funding was able to create something that embarrasses the suits? With all the millions upon millions of dollars that the AAA industry funnels into their half-finished, lifeless games, why can't they do what Sandfall did?
Easy. Sandfall created this game because it was the kind of game they wanted to play, the kind of story they wanted to tell, and gamers were clearly the people they wanted to play it. Maybe not every game can change things like Expedition 33 has. In fact, the suits were probably right in that this game is ultimately an exception. But if there's anything Expedition 33 tells aspiring developers who want to be free of the nonsense you find in the mainline juggernauts of the industry, it's to keep your dreams alive and never be afraid to try.
The (probably) best story in all of gaming. A gameplay loop that refines the turn-based formula into something remarkably good and far more accessible than normal. Art direction more solid than most of its competition. A technical state that's unheard of for something with so many systems at play and as much style in every frame. A gracious attitude that, like Hell is Us, shows that it views the player as an intelligent human being capable of being challenged both in brainpower and in some pockets of one's worldview. Possibly the best soundtrack I've heard since Journey. And a development team that rose from humble beginnings to take the world by storm.
Friends, I may have some leftover noncomformist tendencies from college, but there's simply no other answer here. As much as it pained me to only put Hollow Knight: Silksong in second place despite having entertained the thought of giving it the grand prize, I'd be remiss in my duty both to you and to myself if I didn't speak the plain truth: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worthy of all the top spots it's going to earn across the many lists you'll see around this time. And for my money, it's handily 2025's Game of the Year.
So, thank you once again for visiting, folks! 2025 was a terrible year outside of gaming, so let's all hope beyond hope that 2026 starts to look up!
Now GO AWAY!
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