Games of the Year 2025*

Maybe one day I'll get asked to write another one of these for a gaming site again. Considering that the last one of these I wrote all the way back in 2020 is accessible only through the Internet Archive's backup link now, that's probably a long shot.

So, out of pure self-indulgence, I'm doing one of these year-end lists and like all coolest people I'm not even going to bother ranking it. It will have only ten games on it, though, and you can come to your own conclusions about my adoration for each one by, y'know, reading the words that follow.

Oh fine, here's one top spot: the absolute best VR game of 2025 is Half-Life: Alyx, again. Congrats for winning this one six years running.

PEAK - The Best Game That Dropped From The Heavens

It's a story so perfect as to be downright unbelievable: two small studios got together for a short game jam, and out popped the biggest success either of them have ever seen. I think it's true you could only get a game like PEAK through the combined talents of teams with pedigrees like Aggro Crab and Landfall. You definitely only get it in the wake of Lethal Company, which PEAK owes a good portion of its loose and goofy brilliance to. Even so, it boggles the mind that something so joyous and exquisitely sculpted as PEAK fell out of a jam process-turned-very short dev cycle. You can rattle off past accomplishments or try to zero in on one part, maybe comparing its climbing system to precursors like Breath of the Wild, but you'll come up short of an explanation for the whole of it.

And don't even get me started on the term "friendslop." PEAK is anything but slop, and anyone who tries to lump it anywhere near the churn of disposable, made-on-autopilot or with heavy automation "content" we're awash in is telling on themselves. Do they even like art?

I think there's something about the delight and delirium of a jam process that is intrinsic to PEAK's identity. I'm all for carefully considered scope and embracing constraints, but man, I just look at everything from Bing Bong's weird little face to the delicately twisted walls of the Caldera and am stuck concluding that there was, for lack of a better term, a kind of uncapturable magic involved in PEAK's creation. It's likely that means Aggro Crab and Landfall are just far better developers than I'm giving them credit for, in ways I can't begin to understand. Good for them, and here's to thwacking your friends in the head with a frisbee for no goddamn reason.

Skin Deep - The Best Immersive Sim Damned To Underappreciation Thanks To Its Genre

Look, if I really wanted a stranger to play Blendo's Skin Deep I'd try to convince them that it's a slick, silly first-person shooter hearkening back to some of the late 90's/early 00's greats. I'd talk up the cube-shaped cats, witty writing, and the palpable handcrafted-ness of the game. This would all be valid, but it'd also be in service of tricking them into playing it. Skin Deep is as much a reminder of how great an immersive sim can be when it's not beholden to being a shooter first as much as it exemplifies why we don't get games like it hardly ever.

Skin Deep unites a bunch of great level designers with simple but profoundly interlocking im-sim gameplay ideas, and over the course of a campaign you can comfortably complete in around six hours it squeezes just about as much juice out of it all that one could hope for. If you're reading this and you're the type of player I'd try to nudge toward Skin Deep by bringing up Blendo's past masterpieces or, say, 2017's Prey to come at it more from the genre angle, then chances are good you've already played it. I would love to be wrong about Skin Deep having limited appeal, but I think if I was there'd be more games like it out there. I want there to be! You only get something like Skin Deep from a team that loves this stuff, though, and I'm content knowing that Blendo and company got the opportunity to pour their hearts into it.

Balatro - The 2024 Game That Everyone Was Right About

I didn't start playing Balatro until January, downloading it onto my Switch in preparation for a cross-country flight out to a friend's wedding in Palm Springs. 48 hours later I was so unable to tear myself away from the game that I even posed for goofy pictures with my console atop the snowy cliffs of Mt. San Jacinto.

Balatro is mechanically sublime. It's cool without trying to be. So many people want to have made Balatro, and while some of them will never understand why they're attracted to it in the first place, others will surely go on to create games that have little or nothing to do with Balatro on the surface yet bear some fantastic Joker-fied DNA thanks to its influence. I hope LocalThunk never tries to make a sequel.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - The Best Game You Should Boycott

Hopefully you already know this, but everything released under the Xbox brand is now a priority boycott target for the BDS movement and No Games For Genocide. I've seen a lot of people remark that this is–as personal boycott decisions go–a pretty easy one to adhere to thanks to Microsoft's history of mismanaging developers, dropping the ball with Xbox hardware, and forcing unnecessary crap like generative AI into every nook and cranny of its business. The point, though, is that Microsoft is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, and so targeting the entertainment arm it uses as a shield against criticism makes good strategic sense for a boycott.

I wish MachineGames' first Indiana Jones title didn't get caught up in this, because early this year I found it to be a sincere and worthy expression of the one throughline I think the film series truly deserves credit for: the fascists are the bad guys and deserve to be cold cocked, perforated with bullets, pushed off of tall buildings, etcetera.

Yes Troy Baker's impression of Harrison Ford is shaky as all hell, and yes the game's attempts to recast the character of Jones as less of a colonial tomb robber are kind of hamfisted. Still, this is a game from the studio gave Wolfenstein a miraculous revival and which understands Spielberg's special touch; a game where you can chomp down some eish baladi, turn a cable into a makeshift zipline with Indy's trusty whip, and then bludgeon a Nazi with a guitar all within 30 seconds of gameplay. You shouldn't pay for this game so long as Microsoft refuses to take its role in genocide seriously. Hell, I don't even know what the company was thinking by releasing Great Circle in the GOTY-consideration netherrealm of late 2024. However, I think it's acceptable to take inspiration and joy from any player-made compilations of Nazis and fascists getting ragdolled by household objects.

Nubby's Number Factory - The Best Game Where Number Go Way, Way Up

There's a part of me that thinks I'd actually have gotten more into math at a young age if Nubby's Number Factory had existed then. Not an edges-smoothed, edutainment-approved version of Nubby; no, the game as it exists now in all of its grubby Kid Pix meets Magic Schoolbus wire rack CD-Rom glory. Could an old Compaq even keep up with a thousand Nubbys ricocheting around a peg field as the score shoots past conventional floating point representation? I'd like to see it try.

Nubby is only $5, cheaper if it's on sale (which it is at time of writing). It should come pre-installed on every PC like Space Cadet Pinball and a Brinks truck filled with enough cash to keep MogDogBlog afloat for life should promptly be backed up to his residence. Nubby4life.

Blue Prince - The Best Game That Made Me Occasionally Feel Like A Genius

Like so many, I became obsessed with Blue Prince for about a solid month of 2025. I saw the rumblings coming from the people I still regularly keep in touch with in games media: something big and challenging and irresistible was coming. As soon as I clocked the ties to Christopher Manson's Maze, an old old fixation of mine, I knew I was done for. Thankfully, Blue Prince was rewarding enough to make the time sink more than worth it.

This is not to say it's a perfect game, and it's probably for the best that it inspired as much if not more consternation over some of its design decisions as it did unreserved praise. Tonda Ros made a fitting spiritual successor to Manson's Maze in the move from the static page to Blue Prince's semi-randomized interactive medium–by which I mean it is both an incredible feat of puzzle design and also kind of just bullshit at points. The piece of writing dissecting Blue Prince that I found myself resonating with the most came from Chris Person at Aftermath, who also finished the game still needled by its too-enticing loose ends. But what good would it be if the game ended with a truly satisfying sense of closure? The chase of mystery was the point, and eventually you either accept that and pat yourself on the back for a great many parlor puzzles and door gimmicks solved or you go mad.

Or maybe my acceptance is its own form of madness? Can I really love a game that in some respects feels so unfinished? Months later, the answer is still yes.

Clues By Sam - The Best Game That Routinely Makes Me Feel Dumb As Hell

I don't need to bore anyone with why I've fallen off of Wordle, Connections, daily Crosswords, sudokus, etcetera. The reasons just aren't very interesting. You know what I do find interesting? The fact that I'm still regularly playing Clues By Sam after picking up the daily habit not long after it launched earlier this year–and that, despite all evidence to the contrary, I still think I'll eventually complete one of the harder puzzles with no hints or mistakes in a timely manner.

The rules of Clues By Sam are intimidating at first, but after some muddling the simple and sound logical dictates of it all sink in. It's an achievement of game design, and really of language, that the game continues to serve up puzzles that present a challenge to players of all skill levels. There are so many ways hints can be formatted and by which paired hints can reveal ironclad information about the day's grid that you'd really need to be unnaturally on the ball at all times if you wanted to play fast and perfect. Then, to top it all off, the fact your performance on the game's intricate four by five grids can still be nicely summarized in the common "dle" style of color coded emoji outputs makes it hard not to think that next time you'll get it. Next time you'll be the best version of yourself. You'll be showered in green squares. You'll show Sam, damn it.

despelote - The Best Game I Can't Begin To Do Any Justice To

In the flow of putting this post together I've been putting this one off in the hopes of hitting a stride where I'm not in that headspace of "this is fun, but is my writing any good?" Well?

Here's the description of despelote from the game's Steam page:

despelote is a soccer game about people. Get immersed in the streets and parks of Quito through the eyes and ears of eight year old Julián. Dribble, pass and shoot your soccer ball around town, and see what happens when you kick it someone's way. Feel the city change as Ecuador comes closer than ever to qualifying for the World Cup.

It's beautiful, it's short, it's absolutely worth your time. I loved despelote.

Arc Raiders - A Game I Enjoy In Spite Of Its Stupid AI Usage

I have now put hundreds of hours into Arc Raiders since picking it up with the thought "well, I'll probably just play a few dozen rounds with friends and then fall off of it." It's a legitimately great game. Even with the relatively few maps it has now, I think it has some of the best level design I've seen in a game in years: the twisty corridors and unnervingly open chambers of Stella Montis have put it in my list of all-time great multiplayer maps. It's fun to get sweaty in pursuit of good loot, it's fun to team up with randos to take down the bigger Arc enemies, it's fun to just get goofy with it–I kind of hate admitting it, but it's even fun to get absolutely rolled by an enemy team or a bizarrely evasive drone and then load back in on a free kit while fuming mad.

In a better world the thing I'd have to ding Arc Raiders for is all the tedious inventory management that comes between raids. It's often a necessity even on losing streaks because it's simply too easy to accumulate stuff and very understandable to put off dealing with said stuff until you're forced too. I love you, Scrappy, but man I wish I could get him to stop bringing back so much plastic.

But the AI voice lines, what a fucking bummer. They stick out from Arc Raiders the same way AI generated stuff sticks out everywhere: they sound off, and taken in the context they're used I also can't help but think "why?" It adds little to the game to have vocal pings for every location on the map and for each bit of trash you can salvage in the environment, and in the grand scheme of things there's not even that much of either–I hate that it feels like a problem that could legitimately and easily be solved by just having a couple devs take turns in a recording booth for a few hours, but it really isn't much more complicated than that. Framing it otherwise is just an act of erecting excuses to justify slamming that "screw labor, theft is cool" button.

It's a testament to what the programmers and artists at Embark have achieved with Arc that this stuff doesn't turn me off of the game entirely. Unlike the creatively bankrupt AI generated ads I see plastered across the NYC subway daily (or worse, ads for AI products), the slop voice lines pumped into Arc Raiders are just detracting from an otherwise good thing. Nobody in their right mind wants or needs a subscription-based LLM "friend" replacement, and no company is benefitting from ditching a brand guidelines book in favor of ChatGPT mediocrity. People do like playing good video games, and Arc Raiders is a great example of how flirting with removing the human elements of making a game cheapens the whole experience.

Unfair Flips - The Best Game About Whatever It Is You Bring To Games

Heather Flowers made a masterpiece and all you do in it is flip a coin. You can buy your way to flipping it faster, you can stack upgrades to tilt the odds in your favor, but at the end of it you're still flipping that coin. I've completed it a few times and I'm not exactly sure why.

There are Unfair Flips completionists. People have streamed themselves playing Unfair Flips. People are out there speedrunning Unfair Flips, in multiple categories. If you can believe it (of course you can) people have left sincere negative reviews of Unfair Flips on Steam. Some of them are quite long. About the game about flipping a coin.

I do not assert that I know what exactly Unfair Flips is putting down, only that I am on board with it and I would think less of the opinions of anyone who is not. I'm not saying you should love the game or even like it, and I do not feel a need to consume well-thought out analyses of its merits.

I feel a need to flip the coin. Do you?

Until next time.