Last year, when I made the 2024 list, I said it was a really big year in gaming for me. Well 2025 ushered in a whirlwind of weirdness, at least for me, and things have been very different. With everything that happened this year I wasn’t able to put together a list of ten favourites as I have in past years. This doesn’t mean others posting here can’t post the, but I’m posting a shorter list this year. I wonder how many people had a big year in game, or if they had something quieter like I did.
As with every year previous, I’ve organized two lists of my top favourite game experiences. My first list is my personal favourite games released in 2025, with honourable mentions (in reverse chronological order):
-
Sorry We’re Closed: I’ve seen this on published lists of best games of the year because it launched on Switch, and as a result I’m counting my replay towards my favourite games of 2025. Still the best game of 2024, now the best game of 2025.
-
Silent. Hill f: The Silent Hill series is arguably my partner’s favourite series, and is certainly one of mine. However I was not a fan of the Bloober Remake that spent too much time in the safe space of rehashing a better game with updated graphics. Thankfully, in Silent Hill f, we have a superb new entry in the series that explores both themes and a setting that expands outside of the confines of Silent Hill as we know it while still engaging with core horrors that players will likely find familiar. An excellently tense horror game that also had thoughtful things to say about identity, gender, gendered power dynamics, and social norms colliding with taboos that aren’t just relevant to 60s Japan, but continue to be in the contemporary.
-
Baby Steps: I played Baby Steps for several reasons, but a primary one was thanks to critic and Grouvee Podcast guest @MarioPrime. Baby Steps was part of our podcast discussion of difficulty in games, and a perfect counterpoint to Silksong. It’s also how much the awkward movement of the game would come to resonate with me in the twin between our recording of the podcast and it’s airing because of my own experiences with injury. Baby Steps manages to be both deeply funny and deeply thoughtful, a QUOP with heart that is both hilariously impossible and fully rewarding.
-
Hollow Knight: Silksong: I sat with this for a long time after playing. Hell, we made an entire podcast about it (who didn’t, right?) At the moment, without checking, I don’t know if’ I’ve even given this a star rating on Grouvee. I don’t want to compare it to Hollow Knight, my experience was not the same if only because one is the sequel to the other. So I don’t know which I like more. I just know that Silksong includes some truly beautiful moments that I’m glad I got to experience. Yet some nights I wonder if my experience playing it now, after my accident and after I developed some difficulty playing games, if I would feel any differently than I did playing it at launch. I’ll put that to the test one of these days.
-
Blippo+: I never have a GOTY, but if I had one Blippo+ on PlayDate would be it. I’m lumping the PlayDate and PC version together so that they don’t take up two spots on this list, and I love them both dearly, but there was some thing ecstatic about playing the 1-bit B&W version on PlayDate, a throwback to portable TVs and terrible reception of OTA broadcasts. It made me feel young with a hint of something more than just nostalgia propelling it.
-
South of Midnight: one of the best stories I think I played this year, coupled with beautiful visuals and transcendent music. The game took some criticism for it’s combat, but I found that it really grew into itself if you gave it room to breath by playing on the highest difficulty, where strategy was necessary to win each fight. I think it’s a shame that South of Midnight didn’t receive more recognition for it’s writing, and I recommend the Black Voices in Gaming 2025 Summer Edition video showcase for its excellent interview with the game’s writer Zaire Lanier to anyone who did enjoy the story:
-
Eternal Strands: Do you want to play a game that combines Monster Hunter with Shadow of the Colossus mechanics and that has a story and dialogue that feels like a BioWare game. Well then play 2025’s best Monster Hunter game that was indeed written by ex Bioware devs. I have a blast playing Eternal Strands, even if you find traces of my frustrations in post form on the main Grouvee site. It is a fun game, that might feel a tad easy by the end, but that hopefully foreshadows more fun stuff from Yellow Brick games in future.
Notes or honourable mentions: There are a few games that don’t quite make the list even though I had fun with them. Several are due to the fact that, despite enjoying them, I didn’t finish the game, or because of other circumstances.
- The Alters: I made it over twenty hours into the game when I discovered a catastrophic chain of events that I started due to a single choice and a missed item near the very beginning that halted my progress and killed my crew of alters toward the end of the game without fail. No amount of rewinding my progress helped alter the course of my fate, and a complete restart was required. I took a break, planning to come back to it, but then never did, possibly hurt by the evidence that the devs used gen-AI fill out certain world details. At the point that I found out I had long owned the game so my decision to purchase could not have been swayed, but the daunting task of redoing twenty hours combined with the news made it hard to return.
- Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo: I loved so much of this game, but in the final hours of the game I grew a bit tired of the fact that the combo input for successive moves would fail more than I liked and I dropped the game. I think if I had stuck with it that Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo would have been my favourites of the year but I’ll have to give it a second chance some time in the future.
- Hyper Light Breaker: What a sad fate that befell Heart Machine’s third game, and sequel to Hyper Light Drifter. This would be in my list of favourites if not for the fact that I’ve only played it in early access, and because successive updates to the game removed or changed that which made the game fun to me at the start. During the first few months I 100% everything the game had to offer, but Heart Machine changed several key elements until I found myself visiting the game less and less, until I dropped it. And if anyone is aware of the state of the game now following its “final” update, you’ll know why very few people will likely return to the game in future. A real shame.
That’s that kind of mechanic (and plot) I yearned for as a kid, but only had SMW and Killer Instinct and the like for SNES. I couldn’t get access to the kind of RPGs I wanted so badly, until the PS1. Legend of Dragoon comes to mind. But the replayability mechanics of Chrono would’ve been a huge hit for me.