The most discussed video game of the year included plenty of sequels — among them Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II and Assassin’s Creed Shadows — and the debut R.P.G. that could, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
But lots of smaller games captured our attention as well. The New York Times has already reviewed dozens of them, and here are some additional favorites:
Absolum
Reviewed on the Switch 2. Also available on the PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Switch.
Though Split Fiction is the more notable two-player game released this year, Absolum is the sleeper couch co-op triumph of 2025. A side-scrolling beat-’em-up in the vein of Double Dragon and Streets of Rage, Absolum introduces the initially frustrating X-factor of death returning you to the very start of the game. Your characters reincarnate, reborn through a magical and disturbing process led by a cryptic maternal figure.
Yet the ability to have another person to collaborate and strategize with, along with a world that forks and changes with each run, means Absolum is an endlessly entertaining and exciting experience. Special powers bestowed randomly redefine how a given run might go. Punches might trigger electric shocks or encase foes in destructive bubbles or create vortexes that sweep them into the air, ready to be juggled.
As the game progresses and gets more complicated, combinations of powers stack in unpredictable ways, creating downright game-breaking ripple effects. Endless catastrophic super-attacks can fill the screen and create a joyful chaos. It all somehow works. And it looks beautiful, a Bluth-esque fantasy world exquisitely drawn and animated.
— Yussef Cole
Dispatch
Reviewed on the PlayStation 5 Pro. Also available on the PC, Switch and Switch 2.
Comedy is often built upon the violation of norms. So naturally, a corporate comedy might profit from rude banter, pranks, N.S.F.W. imagery, physical altercations, shameless flirting, mocking the boss with gusto, etc. Dispatch is a flagrantly funny experience that welds together an episodic superhero cartoon with several game mechanics.
Players go on shift as Robert Robertson III, an ex-superhero who is down on his luck when he lands a job at the Superhero Dispatch Network. There he must forge an oddball bunch of ex-supervillains into a cohesive team of do-gooders.
Taking up one’s position as a desk jockey entails sending the right hero with the appropriate stats to cover an emergency, and then waiting for the results to roll in. Off the back of successful outcomes, one can gradually crank up characters’ stats.
Specialization pays off. One situation may call for someone to go on television and try to win over skeptics, while others call for leading people to safety or dealing with cultists. With increasing frequency, Robertson will also have to provide hacking support by strategically moving a node along a grid.
The writing and voice acting in Dispatch make the zingers hit hard and fast. Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright, Laura Bailey, Thot Squad and others bring a sense of conviction to their characters in a laugh-and-forget-your troubles game.
— Christopher Byrd
Is This Seat Taken?
When a fellow gamer described Is This Seat Taken?, it sounded intriguingly like virtual Sudoku. And it totally is, if you replaced the square grid and numerals with a crowded movie theater and anthropomorphic shapes wearing giant cowboy hats.
Feel free to smash “skip” through the minimal storyline to get to the several hours of logic puzzles, which require the player to meet demands both reasonable (“I want to talk to someone”) and questionable (“I want to steal popcorn”). The early solutions are simple — a triangle who wants to sit next to a car window — but they quickly get more complicated as the requirements and obstacles pile up.
Is This Seat Taken? is a charming game. The characters are gleeful when picked up by a tiny hand, and glower when they are placed somewhere they do not want to be. At one point, my daughter and I were on a public bus rearranging the diamonds, pentagons, squares and circles who wanted specific seats on a bus.
Don’t take away the wrong lesson from the many characters who have forgotten to shower, enjoy playing loud music and use their phones in the theater. As George Costanza proclaimed, “We’re living in a society!”
— Jason M. Bailey
Kaizen: A Factory Story
Reviewed on the PC. Also available on macOS.
The simplest way to describe Kaizen: A Factory Story is as an assembly line simulator. You play as an American named David who’s summoned to work at Matsuzawa Manufacturing in Tokyo during the late 1980s. (Bright and optimistic, the game is set during Japan’s bubble economy.) Your job is to plot out and optimize the construction of an array of household products: coffee makers, rice cookers, camcorders, televisions, socks, bidets.
Each of these starts as a grid-based puzzle with the same array of tools — a riveter, a drill, an extendable arm that can rotate or move parts — that you lay out and program in sequence. The solutions are never particularly difficult, but once they spring to life your work is graded against a global community of players who have constructed the same products. This is when you may begin to question whether your solution could have taken less space or time, or been accomplished with fewer tools, each of which incurs a cost.
Kaizen: A Factory Story has inspired a community of charming solutions on Reddit, the knowledge of which won’t spoil the fun. It’s open-ended and so idiosyncratic that it belies categorization. I haven’t even mentioned the choreographed dance sequence, or the letters from your family that beam with pride.
— Rumsey Taylor
Two Point Museum
Reviewed on the Switch 2. Also available on macOS, PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Through the years, players have managed amusement parks, hospitals and zoos. But could a game capture the balancing act of running a museum? As a reporter who mainly covers the art world, I was suspicious.
From the outside, museums are designed to project confidence, security and eternity. But as the public might have noticed with a recent string of robberies, including at the Louvre in Paris, running these institutions is often crazier than you expect.
Two Point Museum strikes the right balance in a fantasy setting where you are sending astronauts to retrieve space artifacts from a cheese planet while balancing the needs of scientists, janitors and visitor services. What makes the game addicting is a progression system tied to metrics like audience happiness and the analysis of artifacts.
Museums in the real world often go wrong by financially overextending themselves. Would I follow suit when I had the opportunity to expand into an adjacent plot of land? Of course. I wanted to build an aquarium wing and a greenhouse for my growing collection of carnivorous plants.
Digging myself out of the financial hole was half the fun as I balanced the budget, adjusted ticket prices and cut deals with local sponsors for advertising revenue. Eventually my museum was back on even footing and ready for an expanded gift shop.
— Zachary Small
Xenotilt: Hostile Pinball Action
Reviewed on the Switch. Also available on the PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Arrays of multicolored lights flash. Music pulses, often of the chiptune variety. Fiery explosions appear like erupting volcanoes.
Xenotilt: Hostile Pinball Action, which was released on consoles this year, is all very alluring, especially to pop culture history buffs. Not only is it a homage to Xenon, the first 1980s pinball machine that talked to players in a digitized female voice, it also stands on the shoulders of greats like Alien Crush and Sonic Spinball. The flippers become brutal weapons that fire fast as a machine gun.
The experience is wonderfully complex and daunting, perhaps because Xenotilt is the turducken of pinball games: The playfield is designed as three games in one.
The bottom table has a metal squid-like enemy that evolves into a chomping, robotic cat head. In the midsection is a feral-looking wizard (of Oz) that transforms into a leather-clad woman. And perching above it all is a witchy android who becomes quick to anger when you launch the ball anywhere near her head. Sometimes her talon-like fingers turn into gleaming orange rays that blast your ball all the way down.
When I first achieved a hundred million points I was happy. Managing to hit the same threshold with one ball made me ecstatic.
— Harold Goldberg
The post 6 Splendid Games You May Have Missed in 2025 appeared first on New York Times.
