If the pandemic felt like a chokehold on game development, 2025 is the year the games industry finally exhaled, and loudly.
After years of delays and uncertainty, the industry caught up with a blistering and unpredictable schedule of deeply personal indies, surprise hits and long-gestating sequels. Studios that spent years with shifting timelines finally emerged with work that felt expressive and polished.
It was a year so busy with quality releases, it’s practically impossible to have covered them all as one person. Like its predecessor, “Kingdom Come: Deliverance II” seems to be a bold reinvention of the computer role-playing game, and I’m eager to experience it. “Blue Prince” by indie studio Dogubomb, another on my to-do list, captured many adventurous hearts.
Honorable mentions include “Cronos: The New Dawn,” which was just squeezed out of this ranking. Developer Bloober Team once had a reputation for making bad horror games, but since last year’s remake of “Silent Hill 2,” the studio has improved greatly. Indie game “Absolum” by Dotemu is one of the most attractive and exciting entries into the brawler genre in recent years. “The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy” seems to be among the best in the visual novel genre, but its daunting run time scared me away.
The following 10 games represent the medium rediscovering its appetite for imagination and risk.
10. ‘Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition’
I usually avoid spotlighting remasters, but Monolith Soft’s once-forgotten opus demands it. What debuted in 2015 on the doomed Wii U now arrives renewed, its grand experiment melding Western RPG sprawl with the elegant crunch of Japanese design finally allowed to breathe. The alien landscapes stretch endlessly without a loading screen or a false note. Return to it now, and you can see the truth: This was a game waiting 10 years for our imaginations to catch up. It’s still probably too out-there for most, but I played it for 245 hours this year, longer than any title in recent memory, if ever. Once this clicks, I guarantee you’ll be hooked, too.
9. ‘Ghost of Yotei’
What impressed me most about Sucker Punch Productions’ samurai epic sequel is how sharply “Ghost of Yotei” told a revenge tale without excess: Its world is painted in stunning colors, but its story is written with restraint and sorrow. Erika Ishii’s performance as the vengeful and pained Atsu anchors the game in something raw and humane, and even familiar open-world rhythms feel newly weighty under the game’s emotional heft.
8. ‘Baby Steps’
The latest game by trickster-sage Bennett Foddy is about immaturity and the slow, humiliating work of becoming a person. The joke isn’t just the player’s inability to stand upright, it’s the self-mocking tone of someone who knows he should be doing better but can’t articulate why. It’s funny until it isn’t — and it’s in that uneasy space, where we question our own motivations, that the game’s best ideas emerge.
7. ‘Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound’
Out of all the games this year, “Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound” is the only one I can recommend with zero caveats to any old-school player. The Game Kitchen created a perfect action game that exposes every hesitation and rewards every moment of discipline and focus. Its bold simplicity, visualized by its gorgeous pixel art, belies a fluid system of interlocking features, balancing enemy aggression and aerial routing. The best action games have always felt like moving puzzles. “Ragebound” is a reminder that mechanical purity will always matter in games.
6. ‘Death Stranding 2: On the Beach’
This was director Hideo Kojima’s most ambitious, metaphysical and strangely hopeful project yet. Where the first game was about connection at the end of the world, “Death Stranding 2: On the Beach” is about what happens after the world has changed. Kojima’s signature storytelling style makes the surreal feel inevitable; the game’s wildest gestures such as teleporting ships, time-shifting storms and cyborg samurai are grounded in emotional logic. Kojima understands that sometimes the most irrational things in life are also the most honest.
5. ‘Hollow Knight: Silksong’
“Silksong” is a more punishing, more elegant evolution of “Hollow Knight,” Team Cherry’s 2017 masterpiece. Protagonist Hornet’s acrobatic movement grants expressive freedom, but the game asks for precision in return. Its cruelty is intentional. Beneath the difficulty lies a world defined by grief and grace, rendered with astonishing detail and musical melancholy. It is both a gantlet and a hymn.
4. ‘Donkey Kong Bananza’
In “Donkey Kong Bananza,” the architects of Mario games display their technical fearlessness with a game unrestrained by terrain. The marquee title of the new Nintendo Switch 2 let its developers layer their adventure along the Z axis, allowing players to punch their way through the entire world in any direction. It fuses perfected platforming gameplay with the chaotic creativity encouraged by the most popular games for kids today, such as “Minecraft” and “Fortnite.” The result is Nintendo’s greatest game since “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.”
3. ‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’
While its narrative didn’t affect me as it did many others, “Expedition 33” — made by an upstart studio headed by developers who walked away from a major publisher to reclaim creative freedom — is without a doubt the defining story of 2025. It married traditional turn-based strategy with real-time reaction, powered by audio feedback that made battle pressure feel physical and powerful. At its heart, the game is a tender meditation on mortality and memory in a world doomed by an entity that deletes all meaning from growing old.
2. ‘Split Fiction’
Hazelight’s co-op adventure is a dazzling experiment in collaboration, both narrative and mechanical. Two writers, Mio and Zoe, trapped inside their creations, must navigate split genres: one sci-fi, one fantasy. But “Split Fiction’s” brilliance lies in how cooperation becomes form and content. Solving puzzles is one thing; reconciling perspectives is another. The game becomes a portrait of artistic partnership: the friction, the mirroring, the breakthroughs. Director Josef Fares and his team created game scenarios never before seen even in the well-worn genres of platforming and fantasy, exceeding much of what even Nintendo can accomplish.
1. ‘Silent Hill F’
The year’s best game is also its most unsettling. “Silent Hill F” turns social horror into something suffocatingly intimate. Hinako’s story is about the expectations that coil around young women, about identity as a performance, about pressures that bloom into something grotesque. The horror escalates not through volume but through revelation. Multiple playthroughs reveal new layers.
The finest games don’t just tell stories, they let narrative and themes seep into the mechanics, making every player action a part of the story’s heartbeat. Of every game I played this year, “Silent Hill F” is the one that proved the power of that union.
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