My Favorite Games of 2025

Getting older while remaining obsessed with an entertainment medium brings to mind Pauline Kael’s Trash, Art and the Movies. Kael’s purview of course was film, and as the title implies the main takeaway I think most people have from the essay is an argument in favor of the pleasures of unpretentiously honest, messy, human, cinematic “trash” (often low-budget genre and exploitation films) over self-consciously refined, didactic, high-brow “art” pictures. All well and good, but what sticks with me is her observation about having hung on as a moviegoer for decades, coming back day after day, year after year, and getting bored of, or at least overly acclimated to, the standard agreed-upon structures and rhythms and accepted conventions of the medium: in film’s case, the tidy three acts, rising tension, a climactic resolution where justice wins out and the bad guys get what they deserve, high-minded but simplistic moralistic “messages”; she observes that at one point all of this was new to all of us, but as you keep coming back and you see it again and again, the experience becomes predictable, inauthentic, routine.

And the thing is, there’s always a self-replenishing audience for whom this is all new, year after year: younger viewers who haven’t seen the carefully-crafted high-budget adventure picture or the self-serious procedural crime thriller or the charming madcap romance a dozen or a hundred times already. And so the industry keeps reusing these molds, over and over, for a new generation of wide-eyed viewers. But to the ones who have been around a little longer and seen it all before? The biggest, most accessible part of the medium just isn’t for them anymore. Maybe the polished, conventional big-budget stuff that’s executed with a subversive or personal sensibility occasionally still clicks, but by and large the lover of the medium who’s “seen it all before” is left to seek out increasingly obscure and esoteric work to keep them engaged and expand their horizons.

By the end of the essay this has led Kael to an increasing interest in documentary features— exploring the real world and people’s real stories through film instead of indulging in more and more warmed-over fictional romps; for someone who loves games, or at least this person who loves games, it’s led to seeking out smaller, grittier, less-produced, more personal titles, whether that’s “personal” in the sense of expressing people’s individual stories, or just in exposing their strange and particular obsessions, turning fixations into pixels. It’s the stuff that somebody made just because they too love games and it’s the only way they know to get what’s in their head out into the world; the stuff that isn’t made to chase trends or maximize return on investment or do things the “right way” according to “best practices,” but to bring a phosphor-burned dream from their half-remembered childhood screaming into the present. Conjuring ghosts. Mad visions made real.

Give the selection below a look; regardless of your own personal obsessions, I hope you’ll find something to enjoy.

Skin Deep

Demos can be very hit-or-miss for me. Often I play a demo, it doesn’t click with me, and then if I do eventually play the game I end up loving it. Or, I play a demo, am over the moon for it, and then the full game leaves me cold. Skin Deep fits into the former category, to the extreme. After playing the demo I was like, “nah, I’ll pass”; after completing the full game, it became my #1 GOTY without a doubt. So if you tried the demo and it didn’t hook you, give the full game a go.

Skin Deep truly feels like the apotheosis of the Blendoverse. It has all the hallmarks of the nearly two decades of Blendo games (a strange and idiosyncratically twee retro-futuristic world of espionage and intrigue, bold color blocking, cats with cube-shaped heads) elevated to the form of a comedic, chaotic, systems-heavy stealth immersive sim. And between its dense, compact, surprising mechanics-driven levels (highlights include spacefaring fast food drive thrus, an interplanetary post office, and a mech repair depot where, yes, you can repair and pilot the mech) are first-person story sequence levels that match or rival the sheer pleasure offered by 30 Flights of Loving and the interstitial chapters of Quadrilateral Cowboy. As someone who’s been visiting the Blendoverse ever since the Citizen Abel days, this really feels like the completion of something.

s.p.l.i.t.

Another year, another game by Mike Klubnika on the GOTY list— and not the only game he released this year, even! The dude is prolific, and incredibly inspiring; his work is often exceptionally dark but with a comic edge; his grimy lo-fi visual style and music/sound design are perfectly measured to express the tone his games are going for; and the games themselves are clever, surprising, strange, disturbing, and impossible to forget.

s.p.l.i.t. is a spectacularly bleak, intense one-room game about pulling off— or trying to pull off— a cyber heist with life-or-death stakes. “Intense command line action” is a strange subgenre description, but that’s what this is; dust off your DOS prompt skills and buckle up, you’re in for one hell of a ride.

Lorn's Lure

Imagine it: Half-Life 1’s jumping puzzles meet the inevitable part of a FromSoft game where you’re walking along impossibly skinny ledges wondering whether you’re even supposed to be able to get to this part of the map. That’s Lorn’s Lure! And it rocks! You’ll jump, climb, skid and clamber all over a decaying, unknowable megastructure, searching for— dreaming of— a way out. A beautiful, mysterious, achingly solitary experience I can wholeheartedly recommend.

Eclipsium

Moreso than maybe any walking simulator I’ve played since Dear Esther, Eclipsium really is at its heart a “walk forward through areas” game— but what areas they are! You’ll pick your way through an ever-mutating procession of fever dreams and outright nightmares, accompanied only by your own unsettling FMV first-person hands. Many of the areas in the game especially later on are utterly mind-boggling, to the point where even with my going-on-20-years of game dev experience I have trouble imagining how they pulled them off. Gripping, bewildering, utterly beautiful in all its corrupted, pixelated, overly-posterized glory (remember when your Voodoo Graphics card would overheat and the screen would pop to EGA colors before shutting down? The whole game looks like that) Eclipsium is a series of bad dreams that make for one great game.

PIGFACE/Butcher's Creek

It would be hard to call the unexpected indie first-person Manhunt revival a “pleasant” surprise, but if you’ve been hankering for that certain mid-aughts brand of queasy, nihilistic splatter, 2025 was a great year.

Butcher’s Creek is another banger by perennial honoree of the GOTY list David Szymanski. Creator of Dusk, Iron Lung, Chop Goblins, Squirrel Stapler— and now, a loving homage first and foremost to Monolith’s Condemned: Criminal Origins, but nearly equally to Rockstar’s stealth snuff film opus, and to the psycho-with-a-hammer-in-the-woods strand of low-budget video store exploitation fare. If you wished there was more Condemned without all that crime scene investigating and with more of a smirk and a touch of the old gods, take a trip down to Butcher’s Creek. Once you arrive, the population quickly begins to drop.

Then there’s Pigface, the story of a ruthless assassin (are they an “assassin” if they kill everyone within a half block radius? Or is that just a hired mass murderer?) who’s called on by their anonymous handler to drag themselves out of their shithole apartment and descend upon rural meth labs, decrepit subway stations, abandoned motels, and other thoroughly unclean-feeling locales to clear out the bands of masked, heavily-armed dirtbags that dwell within. Simple but strangely satisfying first-person firearm-and-melee combat powers a pleasingly nasty romp through all the worst places modern American civilization has to offer. Still in Early Access as of this writing, so if you can’t get enough, more is on its way.

Incision

THE EARTH HAS BEEN HOLLOWED OUT, HOUSING A NEWLY FORMED STRUCTURE.

THE SEA OF FLESH SPAWNS TOXIN INTO THE AIR AND THE FILTH SEEPS OUT OF THE FALSE-STEEL OF ITS STRUCTURES.

THE RUST ORGAN SPITS ITS MOLTEN STEEL INTO THE VAST CAVERNS OF FILTH AND THE HOT AIR STINGS THROUGH MY METALLIC CHASSIS.

This is just part of the load screen text for one of the early levels in Incision. You should play it.

Caput Mortum

One of a number of games on this list that I discovered via YouTube videos by the likes of Alpha Beta Gamer, MandaloreGaming, Nocaps, and ManlyBadassHero, Caput Mortum has this fantastic look and feel that I would think of as something like Myst-meets-Amnesia? It has what feels like a very consciously mid-2000s visual style (the closest referent that jumps to mind is the visuals of Serious Sam?) and a really weird default control scheme (that you can thankfully switch to “modern” mode in the options) but it is, in the end, a first-person puzzle/horror game where you independently control the analogue position of your right hand to pick up objects, open doors, and at certain points even fend off shambling golems that would just as well see you dead as you delve deeper and deeper into a medieval alchemist’s subterranean lair. It has this wonderful, unearthly atmosphere to it, it’s never too terribly difficult but always weird and surprising in a kind of pleasingly low-key way, and it’s wrapped up in a few hours. I played, I think, the entire thing (give or take) on a single plane flight back from LA on my Steam Deck, and I couldn’t have been happier with the experience. The kind of game I wish there were more of. Utterly charming.

Starseed Dementia

Yames is one of the most absolutely vital game developers working today, and did you know you can get everything he releases as it comes out, along with really fascinating peeks into his process, for just $1 a month? It’s actually nuts.

I’ve written about Yames before (specifically in last year’s GOTY list when I highlighted Growing My Grandpa!) but I’m just constantly bowled over by how he expresses his really specific, unique set of obsessions through what he makes. The images that appear and reappear include: being whisked away by an unknowable entity and having your body slowly transformed into something other than human; the clinical observation of bodily processes, dissolution and decay; folkloric ritual and myth made real; the horror of coming into contact with beings from across unfathomably vast spans of time that the human mind can’t even comprehend.

To oversimplify, you could find Yames’s work at the crossroads of Cronenberg, Lovecraft and Svenkmajer, but his distressing melding of the medical, mythical and cosmic result in something completely its own, and that’s before even addressing his games’ impeccable aesthetics (magenta and lime color schemes, dithering and posterization to the point of images becoming dustings of stippled pixels, vocal samples that are so destructively distorted as to sound truly alien). You should subscribe to the Patreon (the only way, as of this writing, to get access to Starseed Dementia), and you should play everything Yames has put out publicly on Steam and Itch. Much like the protagonists of many of his games, to enter these worlds is to come back changed.

Dispatch

This is another one where my arc with demos steered me wrong: for whatever reason, the demo for Dispatch didn’t click for me. The cutscenes looked good but the actual dispatching felt a little thin; I wanted to like it, but I wasn’t hooked. Fast forward to the full game’s release, I started playing it after the 5th and 6th episodes came out, and reader, I binged them all in a day.

What didn’t come together for me in demo form really, really does in the full product: the character art and animations are fantastic, the performances are great, it’s legitimately funny, often in a kind of edgy, profane, horny way— it has a surprising amount of bite, which is refreshing to encounter. Every time credits rolled I just wanted to hit that “Next Episode” button, and by god, I did! It’s a classic Telltale game with the production values of a high quality animated streaming series— and the dispatching gameplay is actually really addictive! I didn’t just want to see the story through, I wanted to come back to the actual gamey-game part again and again. And, who thought I’d be this into a superhero thing after what feels like a million years of Marvel movies, but they even managed to find a fresh take on cowls and capes. A triumph of a crowd-pleaser.

Ghost of Yotei

Listen, you’re a cool sword lady with a wolf friend. You ride the horse and kill the bad guys and, most importantly, can dress up in lots of neat outfits. Loved it.