Oh hey, it’s been a while since we did one of these. Actually, before we get to my favorite games of 2025, here were my favorite games of 2024 that I was so rudely not allowed to tell y’all about last year.
- Metaphor: ReFantazio
- Dragon Age: The Veilguard
- Mouthwashing
- Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure
- 1000xResist
- Shadow Generations
- Persona 3 Reload
- Astro Bot
- Marvel Rivals
- Life Is Strange: Double Exposure
I tend to get pretty reflective when I write these end-of-year lists. My 2022 list was written mere days after I started here at Kotaku, and my 2023 one was put together shortly after I’d watched the site I’d moved my life across the country for get torn asunder in spite. I imagine my 2024 list would have read similarly, but my 2025 one? I’m maybe a little more hopeful than I’ve been in a while.
In 2025, I’ve started to feel my spark come back. I’m writing things I’m proud of, I’m enjoying games like I’ve regained my sense of taste, and every now and again I get riled up about something happening in the industry with a passion that once felt like it had been siphoned out of me. In a roundabout way, my anger at an industry that keeps finding new ways to treat the people in it like they’re disposable is probably a good thing. A year ago, or even six months ago, I might have just let out a defeated sigh and rolled my eyes, then turned back to the blog mines. Now? I can feel my blood boiling again in a way it hasn’t in a long time.
There are days when I still feel like I’m getting back on my feet, and like my legs are shaking underneath me as I try to stand tall again. Well, as tall as a 5’3” man can, at least. But if I’m feeling something about the games I’m playing and writing about, that’s an improvement over this time last year, when I wondered if I’d ever feel that again. Here are the 10 games that helped me get my spark back.
Honorable mentions: Battle Suit Aces, Absolum, After Love EP
10. Dead Take
Surgent Studio’s escape room horror game Dead Take was one of the biggest surprises of 2025 for me. Though I find its overreliance on jump scares exhausting, I was enamored with how it captures the horrors of being in a competitive, creative field. During a long exploration of an abandoned mansion after a party he wasn’t invited to, Chase Lowry discovers horrors beyond comprehension behind every locked door(and some captured on USB drives). Even if I’m not an actor, anyone who has worked in a competitive, creative field knows how dangerous people in power with a cult of personality can be. They’ll manipulate people into betraying one another, and the desperate will grovel at their feet in the hopes that some of their prestige and notoriety will trickle down into their hands. Desperation breeds tragedy, but so does selfishness, and Dead Take delivers that unmistakable truth in every corner and hidden passage of its mansion.
9. Split Fiction
Split Fiction was an early favorite for GOTY that I feel like a lot of people cooled on pretty quickly. I understand why, to some extent. Its storytelling, while well-intentioned with its parallels to current anti-AI sentiment, is pretty amateurish for a game about fiction writers. But it also has the kind of varied, tight, cooperative platforming that only Hazelight is making these days, and the final level is a truly astonishing feat of technical prowess and design bravado that is so confident, you can tell Hazelight knew it was cooking when it pulled it off. I still remember how it felt when my co-op partner (shoutout Restart’s Jesse Vitelli) and I reached that moment in which the simulation of my character’s science fiction stories and his character’s fantasy ones overlapped, and the game didn’t so much as stutter as it seamlessly blended them both into one final, incredible set piece.
8. Goodnight Universe
There aren’t a lot of games that could possibly live up to Before Your Eyes, which remains one of the most affecting things I’ve ever installed on a game device. The eye-tracking adventure game’s follow-up, Goodnight Universe, had incredibly big shoes to fill, and I have to commend developer Nice Dream for even trying. Though it didn’t hit me the same way its predecessor did, I was still moved by the team’s knack for drawing connections between its characters that echo every messy, tangled web of feelings we might have for one another. Goodnight Universe’s eye-tracking mechanics are simultaneously bolder and less thematically precise than those of its predecessor, which makes some sense considering its story is less straightforward, yet it still manages to bring it all together in a stunning closing chapter. But it is, to its detriment, not as focused as Before Your Eyes, so it doesn’t stick the landing as well. Even so, these guys are ones to keep watching, and I will be first in line for whatever comes next.
7. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage
I’m 33 years old now, and I’m still fighting battles I did as a kid. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is a game for the quiet kids who, even once they reach adulthood, overthink everything they say and do when they’re in a group setting. You can know everyone in a room loves you and wants you there, and you’ll still second-guess every word that comes out of your mouth. Don’t Nod’s supernatural narrative adventure is a return to the Life Is Strange studio’s roots, and it’s wonderful to see the team back in its element, examining human connection in a way that, even if it appears singular on the surface, can resonate with anyone who’s ever once felt like they were on the outskirts of a group waiting for their turn to speak up.
Even as I, playing as the introverted videographer Swann, sat in a small diner with people who were ostensibly my friends during the game’s modern-day segments, the flashbacks that colored in the lines of our relationship felt like the kind of intrusive adolescent memories that are embarrassing to look back on, as they’ve become distorted over time. Lost Records makes you look back on moments that felt huge as a kid only to realize they would feel small as an adult, but because they felt cataclysmic when you were young, the wounds they leave last far longer. The game understands that nostalgia and trauma intermingle, and examining one means encountering the other. The rose-colored filters through which we sometimes look back at the past can’t hide the challenges Swann and her friends sought to forget, and Don’t Nod is in top form as it lets you fill in the blanks.
6. Digimon Story: Time Stranger
When you finish Digimon Story: Time Stranger, the credits will show little sprite versions of your party, as it existed in specific story moments, walking across the screen. For me, it was always some form of three Digimon: Guilmon, Gabumon, and Gatomon. These three have been my favorite Digimon for over 20 years, and every time I head back to the Digital World, I’m looking for these three.
One thing I will give the Digimon games over most other monster-taming games is that their experimental evolution system means you can have just about any party you want right out of the gate. I’m a sentimental guy, and having my three favorite Digimon as my only party throughout the entire run of Digimon Story: Time Stranger helped the RPG coast over some of the bumps in the road. I had my core three before I left the first dungeon, and I didn’t use any others throughout the rest of the main story. The advantage of these modular systems in monster-taming RPGs is that you are free to write your own story with your own party, and while I probably could have made the game easier if I’d traveled alongside other monsters, this was our story, and my friends aren’t replaceable.
5. Fretless – The Wrath of Riffson
I will take a rhythm game in just about any form I can get it, and as developers have started adding musical mechanics to just about any game they can, I’m not really hurting for options. Fretless – The Wrath of Riffson marries sonic strategies and deck-building duels to such great effect that playing through its turn-based battles felt like reawakening to an old, often dormant version of myself who used to perform music professionally. I know a rhythm game is good when its musical minutiae becomes second nature to me, like the muscle memory of playing your favorite song on guitar. Fretless linking every dodge and damage boost to the beat of its music makes its timing-based mechanics a breeze because you feel it in the riffs and percussion underneath them. Sometimes I miss that old musician version of me, but it’s nice to know something like Fretless can bring him back out.
4. Shuten Order
Shuten Order’s individual murder mystery routes might not seem like that much to write home about, but together, the “multi-genre” detective story is a pretty ambitious effort made of five compelling adventure game stories. Rei Shimobe wakes up with amnesia, and is told that God himself has tasked her with solving her own murder. To do this, she must investigate one of five possible suspects. Each suspect leads her down a different route, with each having a completely different set of mechanics to play with and mysteries to solve. Though you’re accusing a different person of facilitating your demise each time, following each path to its conclusion is the only way to find the truth. Shuten Order is full of signature Too Kyo Games twists and turns, and yet, even as a connoisseur of the team’s work, I was still enraptured by the game’s many mysteries, and how it managed to essentially create five different games within one.
3. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
From its first hour, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had its sights set on me, an RPG fan with a proclivity for stories that pick at every wound I’ve ever suffered. Sandfall Interactive’s debut game is a series of gutpunches punctuated by flashes of hope, with elaborate, timing-based battles in between. It circumvents a lot of the problems I have with turn-based games which can often feel too simple for my tastes, with battles that feel like wars of attrition rather than strategic encounters in which my build decisions truly make a difference. In Clair Obscur, dodging and parrying keep things interesting in the moment, but finding synergies in its characters’ bespoke mechanics is where the real thrills come in.
But Clair Obscur’s grief-driven story is what has stuck with me the most. It is a story of despair, loss, and misdirection, with each twist more devastating than the last. Games about how the living must carry on when they have to leave those who have passed behind hold a vice grip on me. Grief holds a grip around my throat unlike any other experience in this life, and every time I see someone else’s interpretation of what it means to persist without those who helped you get where you are, I feel like I learn something new about how I handle it myself. Not every emotion and feeling Clair Obscur elicited from me on that front was a positive one. But I think that’s okay. I don’t think pretending grief always ends with acceptance is my style. It certainly isn’t Clair Obscur’s.
2. Pokémon Legends: Z-A
There’s a moment in Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s late game in which every named hero you’ve met in its Paris-inspired metropolis bands together to save the city, and it made me set down my controller and just take it all in. It has been three years since we got a Pokémon RPG, and it was within those three years that I’ve moved to New York City and grown to care about people and a place in a way I don’t think I ever have before. I’ve been putting off doing a lot of Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s Mega Dimension DLC side quests because there’s something comforting about knowing I still have reason to go back to Lumiose City, as if when the credits roll, all those feelings of community and home might disappear.
Legends: Z-A is not a perfect game, and there are no doubt people reading this who are throwing tomatoes at their screen because I’m not mad about window textures, but it is a Pokémon game that speaks directly to me. Its real-time fights represent one of the most interesting evolutions of the series’ battle system, and make for a much more entertaining, almost puzzle-like iteration in which even quick fights feel fluid, strategic, and engaging in a way they don’t in even my favorite Pokémon games. But more than that, Z-A cultivates a feeling of belonging by focusing on a city and the people who would lay their life on the line to protect it and each other.
I run around Lumiose with my Raichu by my side who, after a decade of waiting, can finally Mega Evolve, and stories play out in my mind of Grisham waving as we pass by his coffee shop, or Tarragon’s workers yelling at us as we climb their scaffolding. We return to Hotel Z and meet up with the rest of Team MZ, ready to discuss how we can best help the city as it struggles to figure out how to allow humans and Pokémon to live in harmony. I love going on journeys across a region in Pokémon, but for this moment in my life, a Pokémon game that spends a long enough time in one place to actually think about its world and how to make it a better place is exactly what I need. If the Legends series is going to be Game Freak’s place to experiment, I’m so on board for whatever it does next.
1. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
It’s kind of a bummer to say that The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is my favorite game of the year but I will probably not be “finishing” it any time soon. I have seen Too Kyo Games’ incredible, ambitious visual novel/tactical RPG’s true ending, but there are still dozens of final chapters I haven’t seen myself. I don’t know if I ever will. The knowledge that so many are still waiting for me is so daunting, it keeps me from picking the game back up and diving in. But knowing those 90+ conclusions are in the game, and that I could have stumbled upon any of them if I’d made one different choice, is still such an achievement. Even as it intimidates me, I can’t help but be in awe of The Hundred Line.
I really can’t name a moment in a video game that hit me harder this year than the first “ending” in The Hundred Line. I’d spent 100 in-game days fighting an invading alien force attacking the titular academy only to fail the mission I’d been tasked with. I could let myself sit in that failure, or I could go back in time, repeat those 100 days, and hopefully do it better next time. I felt a mix of awe and anxiety, as I had an embargo coming up and realized the game was going to be, at minimum, twice as long as I’d anticipated. I wrote a vague impressions post, singing its praises but not being able to explain why; then, a few weeks later, I finally laid out what happened, and why I wasn’t ready to review the game here at Kotaku. I spent a vacation dragging myself through the game’s “truth” route, uncovering all the mysteries within the school and finding a stunning Kazutaka Kodaka finale. That guy hasn’t let me down once on that front, and it makes the promise (threat) of 100 endings as scary as it is tantalizing.
I know I can count on Kodaka for a lot of things. He takes narrative swings most writers would shy away from; his work is polarizing and obnoxious on its way to making an incredibly profound and existential point about why any of us even bother to get out of bed in the morning when giving into nihilism and rotting away would be so much easier, and my god, does he know how to deliver it with the force of a baseball bat to the gut. The Hundred Line isn’t just one of the most ambitious visual novels of all time, it’s led by one of the only writers with the gusto and reckless abandon to make it work.
I hope one day that I’ll head back to the Last Defense Academy to uncover more of its secrets, silly antics, and strategic battles. But at the moment, what I’ve seen is enough to know that I could not have played a game this year that would have resonated with me more than The Hundred Line.
