Chris Plante is the host of Post Games, a weekly interview podcast about why and how we love video games. Alongside that program, he co-hosts one of the longest-running video game review podcasts, The Besties, and serves as a board member of Orange County’s art house cinema, The Frida. He previously co-founded and oversaw Polygon.com, created NYU’s first course on games journalism, co-created the story of the hit narrative podcast Limetown, and edited the tabletop RPG Quest.
I would like to tell you that 2025 will be remembered as “The Year of Too Many Video Games,” but I can’t.
We can safely assume that over 10,000 video games will be released in 2026, and even more will overwhelm audiences every following year for the foreseeable future. Making and releasing games will get easier and easier, and making a living will become nearly impossible without a rareified blend of talent, contacts, and luck. By 2030, 2025’s release calendar will seem quaint.
But right now, in the closing days of 2025, it’s tough for completionists – gamers who like to try a bit of everything, to be “in the discourse” – to adapt to this new normal. So though we know this is only the beginning, let’s take a breath and accept that video game culture has changed in a strange, profound way.
Gone are the days of end-of-year consensus, when so few games were released in a year that a particularly great fighting game or dense RPG would be consumed by practically every critic, whether they liked the genre or not. In 2025, to commit to one new game is to miss dozens of others. On a given day, we might get five new games that only a decade ago would have won prizes at indie game festivals and been championed by none other than Soulja Boy. Maybe one finds enough players to break even.
Not only will most players (and critics) not play many of the best games of 2025, but they will also never hear of many of them, these gems with less than 50 reviews buried beneath Steam Mountain.
This is our new reality, where there’s truly something for everyone, assuming they can find it. And assuming they aren’t too busy playing Fortnite or Stardew or some other game released before 2020.
What does this mean for GOTY season? Well, the modern game of the year list, even one penned by the most dedicated game critic, will have glaring absences. How could the critic not have made time for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2? Or Arc Raiders? What about Battlefield 6… no, not the campaign, the battle royale mode released weeks later? What of the brilliant indie game with fewer than 100 reviews on Steam? Or the inventive twist on farm simulators buried deep within Roblox? Clair Obscur is only 25 hours if you rush to the ending, and Hollow Knight: Silksong isn’t too long if you’re good enough.
This is, if it hasn’t become obvious, a long excuse.
I’m sorry, Giant Bomb buddies, but I failed to pick 10 from the 300+ games I tried in 2025. Every time I thought my list was set, I would think of another dozen games worthy of a spot. Desperate, I made the tough decision to limit my options to games that began with a random letter: “S.”
I managed to whittle the list to 15 games. To be clear, these aren’t all 15 games I played in 2025 that began with the letter S. It’s a fraction of that number. No, these are 15 great games. If you told me, “Chris, this actually has to be your official Game of the Year list of 2025,” I’d say, “Sure, why not!”
For the next year, you could play nothing but these games and you would be entertained, educated, and enriched. You’ll miss everything released in 2026, but don’t worry, because next year I’ll have a new top 30 games that begin with “B.”
- Sektori
- Skin Deep
- The Séance of Blake Manor
- Skate Story
- Simogo Legacy Collection
- StarVaders
- Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds
- Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
- Sword of the Sea
- Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery of Serpentcoil Island
- Star of Providence
- Shin Chan: Shiro and the Coal Town
- Stick It to the Stickman
- Shotgun Cop Man
- Shrine Legacy