Best Games I Played in 2025
- Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023)
Synopsis: So basically you and a bunch of other random people have some special worms in your head that are trying to mind control you and turn you into monsters and you gotta stop that from happening and also save the world, or don’t, you do you. And then there are street urchins and ghosts and dead clowns and stuff.
Full review here. It’s about how I need to learn to have fun.
To elaborate on my antipathy towards Astarion and Gale: It’s not just that I personally find them annoying (I do), it’s also that I was trying to commit to RP-heavy decision-making, and the backstory I’d come up with for my character was that they’d spent years living on the streets as an orphan, and Astarion and Gale are exactly the kind of elitist snobs that would have treated my OC like shit. And the thing that I think often goes unacknowledged in these situations is that, sure, I know that since these two are protagonists I will, if I choose to pursue their storylines, eventually learn things about them that mitigate their worst traits and probably see them grow into being less shitty people. But my character doesn’t know that and in fact it is entirely irrational to assume that that’s the case. Yes people can change but it is reasonable to assume that grown-ass adults will continue to act the way they you have observed them acting, and to make decisions about whether you want those people in your life accordingly.
And I didn’t ignore them completely, I let them stay at my camp and I treated them with a healthy amount of pity and caution, making sure Gale didn’t blow anyone up and making sure Astarion didn’t start feeding on innocent people. Again, I think that was the rational choice under the circumstances. - Bloodborne (2015)
Synopsis: Sorry, it says here I’m supposed to explain Bloodborne? Yeah, no I—no I know I answered the ad but I thought—or you’ll what? Through the—? Right, ok. *Ahem.* You wake up from a horrible dream…or possibly in a horrible dream…and then you get killed by a werewolf and you wake up in The Hunter’s Dream which may or may not be part of the dream that you woke up from and/or in. You are now a hunter. You’re trying to end the dream. Or possibly continue the dream. Or evolve the dream? There are other hunters. They mostly try to kill you. Mostly everything tries to kill you. Mostly everything does eventually kill you. And then you win? …Is that good enough? Can I go now?
Full review here. It gets weird, and is one of the best things I’ve ever written.
At no point have I felt the need to do the DLC. - Blue Prince (2025)
Synopsis: Your grand-uncle just died and left you his estate—with the caveat that you can only claim it if you successfully navigate its ever-shifting floor plan and enter Room 46.
Full review here. It’s about playing single-player games with other people.
One of my coworkers is still playing this game, even though they rolled credits ages ago. It almost feels like the dev is just sneakily adding in new puzzles without telling anyone. - Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (2025)
Synopsis: After escaping from a brutal crime boss, you and your friend immediately stumble into a mystery that spans the system and will eventually lead you right back to where you started—if you survive. Along the way you’ll make friends, enemies, and maybe something bigger and better than what came before. Oh, in space, in case that wasn’t clear.
Citizen Sleeper is a relatively chill game. Most of the time, how you spend a cycle is entirely up to you, and you need not risk failure if you don’t want to. When there are time-sensitive events, it’s generally pretty easy to prioritize them and not get too stressed out (unless, like me, you start the DLC too early and have like 3 timed clocks going at once). Often you’ll have been able to prepare for them and have the resources necessary to account for any bad dice rolls. While I’m sure I technically failed a few events, my memory of the game is that generally I was able to make the choices I wanted to make and shape the narrative as I pleased.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is a game about the inevitability of failure, and it makes this clear right from the start. Try to have your cake and eat it too on Hexport, and you’ll find you have no cake and are (possibly literally) starving. Believe me, I’ve played through Hexport 3 times, I know.
From stress to glitches to timed clocks that keep going even as you’re forced to prioritize other things, I can pretty much guarantee that at some point (at probably multiple points) you will fail to accomplish something you set out to do.
But Citizen Sleeper 2 is also a game about persistence. About people refusing to accept inevitabilities. About finding light in the darkness, creating success from the wreckage of failure. In a world built on ruins, any loss can be a foundation on which to build something new.
And, sometimes, things work out anyway. About a third of the way through the game, some inopportune timing led to me being forced to let a red timed clock run out. The nature of this clock was such that it didn’t immediately resolve, and I spent the rest of the game waiting to find out what the consequences of that failure would be, and being frankly pissed that the game had forced me into that position. And when I say “the rest of the game” I mean literally until I reloaded the save after rolling credits. Finally, a cutscene triggered. The situation resolved. And you know what? It was fine. Not the resolution I wanted, but one I could live with. A story worth telling.
So don’t be afraid of failure. There’s always something on the other side.
p.s. I did, of course, play this game exclusively between the hours of 3 and 6 am, as per the tradition established in my Citizen Sleeper playthrough. Ok well if I’m being honest a couple sessions extended a little past 7 because it’s really hard to put this game down, but it was still relatively dark out. - Dredge (2023)
Synopsis: You’re a wandering fisherman who’s just put in at a perfectly normal island where nothing weird has ever happened. It’s a fishing game. The fish are also normal.
So, it’s a little difficult to review this game in any great detail because I started playing it nearly two years ago and got about 80% of the way through before being interrupted by both my own anxiety (more on that later) and a debilitating injury, and then I just kept getting distracted by other games. As such, while I remember a lot of moments from the game (because it’s a really good game with a lot of memorable set pieces), I don’t know if I can really stitch them together into any kind of coherent thesis.
But it’s a good game! Beautiful art and animation, perfect mood-setting score and sound design, compellingly weird and dark narrative, and the gameplay is surprisingly frictionless. Like, it’s not unchallenging, there’s some strategy, some puzzle-solving, some knowledge-building and environmental research, and some skill-based challenges, but none of it ever felt frustrating.
Where you might find some friction, if you’re like me, is in the horror aspect. But you shouldn’t. Yes, there are a lot of creepy tense moments, especially when you have to go out at night (and picking up one of the many eldritch abominations while you’re fishing is kind of a jump scare), but I think the only times I actually died and had to reload were when I got destroyed by the sea monster in the Gale Cliffs. Most encounters, while tense, will see you making a daring escape, or taking a beating but still managing to limp back to port.
This was where my anxiety played up, specifically in the Twisted Strand when there was a mission that required night fishing and my nerves just couldn’t take it. But coming back to the game after finally completing Bloodborne made me realize that the lessons I’d learned from that experience applied here as well. The worst thing that can happen is you fail and try again, and all it will cost you is time. With that mentality I practically sauntered through the rest of the game, giant eldritch monsters be damned. And, you know, it’s way more fun when you’re not anxiously avoiding half of the game.
So, a beautiful, fun, and surprisingly chill (once you get comfortable with it) horror fishing game.
p.s. I definitely did not solve every mystery even in the base game. I still haven’t found a place for that dog.
p.p.s. A thing that I don’t think I’ve noticed in any other game is how as the world gets bigger it also gets smaller. What I mean is, at the beginning of the game it takes like a whole in-game day to cross the bay to Little Marrow. The bay feels huge because of this, and then you have to go out onto the open ocean?! That’s so much bigger though! But as you go through the game you upgrade your engines, and every time you come back through The Marrows you find it takes less time to cross. By the end of the game the map and your knowledge of the world has expanded so much, but the speed at which you traverse it makes those once vast distances seem tiny. It’s a really interesting effect.
p.p.p.s. Is there a “good” ending? Because if there is I don’t think it’s the one I got. It was a good ending though.
p.p.p.p.s. At one point I shouted out Dredge on Bluesky and Joel Mason (writer and programmer on the game) followed me, which was really awkward ’cause I hadn’t finished the game yet and hadn’t even played it in months. But I am finally free of this secret shame. - Hob (2017)
Synopsis: You’re a little robot dude and you’ve gotta clear some corruption from the land for reasons.
Maybe it’s because I’d just rewatched Castle in the Sky the night before I started playing this, but I get big Castle in the Sky vibes from Hob. What with the resurrecting the technology of an ancient civilization and the robots with big long arms that have an affinity with nature. And the general aesthetic of the constructed environments definitely feels similar to Laputa. Which is all to say game’s got a great vibe, plus the way the environments rise up out of the mist and rearrange themselves is legitimately cool.
The combat’s simple but fun, with a surprisingly responsive dodge and a dash that get’s really useful in the endgame. And since enemies can hurt each other you can have a lot of fun with positioning, especially when you’ve got one big guy and a bunch of little guys.
The puzzles are generally fairly straightforward but not tedious (usually), with the most confusion often coming from just figuring out where to go next, usually solved by just exploring for a bit (and a lot of the time when I found myself frustrated I eventually realized the solution/path forward had been staring me in the face.)
The story is super minimalist, with no dialogue, narration, or in-game text, but it does all lead up to an interesting choice at the end. And, shockingly, even though you don’t have manual saves, if you want to see both endings you can just hit continue after you get back to the main menu and it’ll drop you in right before the final choice.
Which it will also do when, in the middle of the penultimate cutscene leading up that choice, the game crashes and you have to restart. And so we end the positive part of the review and transition into how this game is so incredibly fucking broken.
Switches that just stop working until I reload the game (twice, because the first time it just hung on the first loading screen), getting stuck on parts of the environment that I shouldn’t have even been able to get to, cutscenes triggering that had already triggered and shouldn’t be triggering again and then they freeze the game—it’s so broken that I’m pretty sure I accidentally sequence broke it without knowing it, leading to the last few objectives (one of which was actually an objective that I think I was supposed to have already done) not being marked on my map so I just had to kind of wander around the areas I’d already been in and hope I ran into something. At one point I found myself walking off a ledge into thin air and not falling, for like a long time, to the point I thought there was a legit invisible path there that I was supposed to follow to some hidden bonus area or something. It turned out that was right on the border of what would later be one of the raised environments and the collision hadn’t been quite precisely defined.
The platforming is also terrible. Incredibly unforgiving edge detection causing you to constantly miss jumps any other game would let you get away with, way too floaty direction control so you frequently don’t land where you’re supposed to, and when I tried to compensate for that by using the dash so that I’d at least go in a straight line I found out that sometimes the dash just goes straight down—and then you still die from the fall because there’s no scaling fall damage, it’s all or nothing. And it doesn’t help that the camera is fixed, often at a disadvantageous angle, and will change angle sharply without warning as you move along. I mean, apart from the Castle in the Sky of it all this is obviously Zelda-inspired, and apparently they’re big fans of N64-era Zelda.
So for all that it is generally fun to play, it can also be incredibly frustrating. And to be clear, I ran into glitches that I couldn’t find anyone else talking about online, so it’s not just broken, it’s unstable. You might have completely different problems than I did, and maybe they’ll be even more frustrating, or maybe less. But when you’ve got momentum the pace of progression and the constant discovery of new areas (which, again, are revealed very dramatically) makes the game pretty hard to put down. Unless it crashes and you can’t get it to work again.
p.s. It’s not lost on me that the Dresden Codak storyline “Hob” also involves a big robot with long arms and an affinity for nature. I don’t care to speculate at this time whether that’s a coincidence or not.
p.p.s. Obviously this wasn’t a problem for an experienced gamer such as myself, but it is notable that the game doesn’t teach you how to jump until after the first platforming challenge (which requires you to jump). - Skul (2021)
Synopsis: You’re an adorable little skeleton and you’ve gotta try and rescue the adorable Demon King and you’re going to do that by adorably screwing on other people’s skulls.
Not sure why people seem to have bounced off this game. It’s got everything you want from a good rougelite: a fun base set of mechanics that gets built on at a steady pace, a vast array of possible synergies, and that one overpowered item you look for every run and then you end up beating the game with your starter.
And the story’s not bad, I mean it’s pretty simplistic and not told in the most artful way, but compelling enough. I like that the demons are the good guys, and like actually the good guys, not just the protagonists. And it even kind of manages to bear the emotional weight of those two endings.
It’s certainly got some issues. The English translation is not great, and not just in terms of poor grammar or awkward phrasing, but they actually have inconsistent terminology, so that I wasn’t sure at first if “HP barrier” and “shield” were counted as two different effects. There’s also the fact there’s no way to actually see what all of your currently active buffs/debuffs are, so there’s just a bunch of little symbols down at the bottom of the screen and you sort of have to memorize the important ones. And frequently if there’s a passive that’s tracking a number (such as the count on turret quintessence (oh that’s another one, I think they sometimes just say essence?)) the number will get obscured (and it’s not like it’s that easy to read to begin with).
I also never really saw the use case for having two skulls and switching back and forth. It’s hard enough getting the bones to fully upgrade 1 skull, let alone two, and I don’t feel like the items that focus on swapping are all that great (though I guess I didn’t look at them that closely). Which is unfortunate since that’s obviously a big part of the game that they’d like you to engage with.
Still, I had fun, and if you like roguelites where every run is a new discovery, you should check it out. - Type Help (2025)
Synopsis: Solve a cold case by requesting files from a database. It’s more fun than it sounds! At least if you’re me, specifically!
At base level it’s an interactive creepypasta, the supernatural premise more a loose connection of themes and spookifications than something that really makes sense. But the execution following from that, both narratively and mechanically, is superb.
Few games claiming to have the player solving mysteries actually feel like you’re solving a mystery, but there were multiple times in Type Help when I had to think about the characters, about the layout of the house, about information from other scenes, and put it all together to figure out what file to request. An example: in 05-LI-3-9, Oswald says something about being the end of his line and wishing he’d had kids. It’s toward the end of the scene, though it’s not the last line he says, but he doesn’t say where he’s going next. However, I remembered from a later scene, 08-MA-3-5, that Tony’s room used to be the nursery. Might Oswald, feeling nostalgic for the children he never had, wander in to the nursery, unaware it’s now someone’s bedroom? And since I hadn’t yet placed Tony in the 6th period, I requested 06-TO-3-4, and lo and behold, there it was. And at other times I brute-forced it by knowing the location and participants in a scene and simply trying every possible time until I found it. Sometimes I just guessed and got lucky. It’s mixture of skill, instinct, inference, and luck akin to how feel when I’m working on programming project and I mostly know what I’m doing, which is my favorite kind. And there was one moment that had me yelling, out loud, “YES! FUCK YOU!” At a game whose primary form of interaction is typing file names.
Narratively, I love how it feels stilted and confusing until you finally realize what’s happening, at which point you return to previous scenes and suddenly see the tragedy underneath seemingly innocuous comments. As you discover more, the ways in which people reshape their memories to fit the newly warped reality get increasingly sad and disquieting. Where the premise is vague, the actual consequences are concrete and disturbing.
Nice to end the year on a reminder of how innovative, evocative, and surprising games can be, and to reinforce my belief that browser games are sorely overlooked by games criticism and “serious gamers” (though, credit where it’s due, I only heard about this because The A.V. Club put it in their Top 25 of the year.)
p.s. I think maybe the coolest part about this game is that, because “winning” is really more about uncovering all of the story and understanding all of the intricacies, you could give a new player any random scene that they otherwise likely wouldn’t find until hours in, and I don’t think it would break the game or even really be a “spoiler” in a meaningful sense.
p.p.s. At the start of the game I was convinced that @ was Alan Thomas (who signs his messages AT, I mean come on) and that the whole thing had something to do with time travel. While I am pleased that I was completely wrong about the 2nd bit and it was way less predictable than that, I am still annoyed that I was wrong about the 1st bit. It’s right there! - What Remains of Edith Finch (2017)
Synopsis: Single soon-to-be mother Edith Finch returns to her childhood home to untangle the mysteries and traumas of her family.
I like a good story-driven, mechanics-lite game—Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper are both recent favorites. But the writing and the characters and the world and the general atmosphere of the game have to be top-notch to keep it from feeling like a visual novel with extra steps, and when I started playing What Remains of Edith Finch, I wasn’t feeling it.
Then the young girl whose flashback you’re playing through says “Suddenly… I turned into a cat!” and jumps out the window to chase a bird, which I was absolutely not expecting, and then the whimsy of that moment quickly turns very dark and that’s when I realized that this was mostly going to be a game about playing as different characters in the moments preceding their tragic demise, and now I’ve finished it I’m kind of dumbfounded.
And it’s definitely not just a visual novel with extra steps. The interactivity is vital to the experience, leading to some brutally visceral moments that could not have been as effective without the player being in control—the swing scene might be the most affecting thing I’ve ever played through in a game, to have the player take control in that moment, when they know what they’re doing and what’s going to happen but have to do it anyway, it’s truly gut-wrenching.
Your mileage may vary. There’s a fundamental absurdity running throughout the game that for some may get in the way of a more immersive emotional experience. Or you may simply decide the fairly minimal interactivity isn’t enough for you. But this game offers a truly unique experience, and that’s a rarity worth trying for yourself. - Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017)
Synopsis: The Nazi’s have taken over America and it’s up to you to lead your band of misfit revolutionaries to victory over an addled, ailing, geriatric despot who’s mostly just concerned with his image. Hmm? Oh you meant talk about the game, sorry, I misunderstood.
Full review here. It’s about how I need to learn to have fun (part 2. Or actually part 1 I wrote this before the BG3 review.)
I really didn’t intend to make so many of these their own post, I’m not sure that I like that, it feels like it’s undervaluing the Year in Review format. But I wanted to to link to this review in the Bloodborne review, so.
Honorable Mentions
Certain of Eventual Failure 