Hi, I’m Aura! I draw and design stuff. You’ve maybe seen or heard me around here a few times. Notable things I did this year was stream through every Halo game co-op, watch a ton of movies, and start making my own video game.
On its worst days, this year felt like gaming was maybe a year or two away from completely imploding. On its best days, I felt excited and enamored with what we’re still capable of making. Even if the AAA side of things is hurling itself towards the stupidest heat death possible, indie developers will always have the unbridled desire for creativity, originality, and fun that the space has always fostered. I wish literally any publisher was willing to fund them from scratch, but I guess we’re all in the “take what you can get” stretch of late-stage capitalism now. A round of applause for the dozen or so absolute bastards that brought us all here! 👏👏👏👏
I have a canonical order in my head for all of these, but I’m going to annoy everyone and shuffle the list around so you don’t know which one is my true GOTY. This year, everyone’s You’re Winner. Before that, here’s some stuff that didn’t make the cut but I still wanted to say something about:
Time Flies
A real delight! Really funny and sincere thing about doing the most you can with the little time you have. Time Flies is fun to both solve its puzzles but also figure out all the goofy ways you can die. Every time I accidentally tapped a lightbulb I chuckled.
Lumines Arise
I’m still waiting for them to patch in better colorblind support to really dig in, but the one run I played of it was great. Enhance truly unmatched in believing We Are All Connected, and I’m glad that, despite another Hydelic-only score, it’s full of rave and 2000s techno.
Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age
A ton of my time this year was beating this for the first time, and while some late-game dungeons are, even in Zodiac Age, total horseshit, it is so head-and-shoulders above every other FF game I’ve played. The triple-threat of Matsuno, Sakimoto, and Yoshida is unrivaled; it’s a real all-timer.
White Knuckle
Insanely sick game about climbing out of a nightmare missile silo. Really unique controls, very lean but effective art direction, and killer momentum make it a blast to play. A lot of games are designed to be really fast-paced but this is a great example of one that just sorta becomes that over time as you become more confident in your maneuvering and knowledge of spaces.
Unbeatable
I haven’t played it yet, I’m putting it here as penance. If I had the time for it this year it might genuinely be my game of the year. I’M SORRY!!! Play Unbeatable. Some friends worked very hard on it, and my wife made some music for it.
Angeline Era
Did not have a ton of time to play this because I got busy, but the little I did play was great. A real masterclass of game design, humor, and effective art direction. Also, a game that feels like its game designer is playing pranks on you 24/7, which is, imo, what games are all about.
Cool! Now, the Top Ten:
STRAFTAT
Anytime you’ve complained about a multiplayer shooter in the past ten years, whatever the complaint, trust me on this one: the game you want to be playing exists, and it’s called STRAFTAT. There’s no meta, there’s no attachments, there’s no erosion of your basic principles required to play, there’s no progression or any of the bullshit that drives the absolutely insane design decisions that get between you and having fun with your friends. All of the guns range from “Literally a Winchester rifle” to “Dark Matter Launcher That Penetrates Walls and Instant-Kills.” Some aren’t even guns! There’s a halberd! There’s mines! There are no kits, just weapon spawns scattered in the game’s hundreds and hundreds of maps. All the music is unlabeled/underground drum’n’bass and breakcore. Downloading STRAFTAT off Steam feels wrong. This is a game you should be downloading off gamerevolution dot com or XDCCing off an iRC channel who’s only activity is the auto-alerts of users logging on and off.
I feel like I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life watching people online mourn the loss of, like, the experience of logging into CS after school and clicking on a random server and oops every weapon is rockets, and the map is the Simpsons house. Cynically, all of that stuff is still around, I guess; it’s just been sanitized into the most boring commercialist version possible. The essence of it, though? The pure thrill of logging in and being In It seconds later? The feeling of getting together with friends and laughing your damn heads off for hours on end? STRAFTAT, baby. The spirit lives on in the exact way you want it to: filled with 64x64 tiled concrete textures and character models that are various combinations of tracksuits and cigarettes.
Like I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have fun with Fortnite and its ilk a year or so ago, but the hyperaccelerationist year we’ve had has aggressively repelled me from Live Service, some games doing their best to convince me that I might actually hate PVP after all, and it was healing to have multiple weeknights taken up by STRAFTAT where any joy or excitement I got was not from so many top-down layers meant to keep me Engaged. It was all just runnin' around, shootin' guns, rounds immediately ending, and going again to fight out the micro-rivalries that arose every night.
I had a lot of really memorable experiences this year with games, but I don’t know if even the COD4 heydays were giving me the vibes and energy that a good night of STRAFTAT with the homies does. It’s free. Go download it and go find out why basket maps are a nightmare.
Eclipsium
Not even sure how to talk about Eclipsium without explicitly spoiling what it’s about or what you experience while playing it. It’s an abstract game where its narrative can escape you if you’re not familiar with some specific knowledge and a desire to really sit and think about imagery for a while.
I mean abstract in a really beautiful artistic way… but also I’m not gonna be surprised when people see it in motion for the first time and sorta go “huh??” It’s maybe the most committed I’ve seen a game be to its filters. There’s a setting in the options to turn on the dithering, revealing that most of the textures have dithering baked into them. I had a good laugh. There was something really freeing about a game being so crunched down, though. I forcefully had to stop trying to overexamine every nook and cranny, where details in the environment were so often reduced to A Literal Pixel, that after a bit, I stopped microexamining everything and let it all waft over me. There’s still a ton of detail to fall in love with, and in certain setpieces, it’s hard not to spend a handful of minutes pouring over the love that went into every environment, but Eclipsium really hits when it uses its deresolution to emphasize the scale and grandeur of its themes and feelings.
I really don’t know how much more I could say without spoiling what is, I think, the most memorable experience I had with a game this year. There’s a thing Eclipsium does towards the end that I’ve literally never seen a game do before, and if I deconstruct it, it’s a neat trick, but as a thing I experienced, it was so striking I had to put the controller down because I was so overwhelmed I was seeing something new. It would be arrogant to say that no game until now hasn’t been inspired by things like End of Evangelion or Adam Jones’ work, but I really do think it’s the first time I’ve played a game that conveys those points of inspiration into, like, its experience. It’s a deep, sometimes frightening, often affecting piece of art that I hope gets to find its place in games history as the unique thing that it is.
Tokyo Xtreme Racer
They made a Tokyo Xtreme Racer game!! In 2025!! It’s not a mobile port, it doesn’t have a roadmap or a battle pass or whatever the fuck!! They just made a legit, uncompromised TXR game in 2025!!
I don’t know if (BIG BUDGET; I’M AWARE INDIE RACING GAMES ARE ALIVE AND WELL, STOP TELLING ME THIS) racing games are in the healthiest place right now. The complete erosion of car culture—now functionally existing adjacent to influencer culture—has meant that the remaining pillars of racing games are more marketing showcases than anything else. That’s always been true to some extent, I guess but the way it manifests now feels exacerbated by the live-service nature of games like Forza and Gran Turismo, where updates fiddle the audience knob between “Remember these cars from when you grew up” and “Some new BMWs are hitting the market which is why three SUVs are coming to this racing game”. The unceasing chase for visual fidelity, for numbers go up, for retention, for all sorts of stuff that means compromise and risk-aversion has resulted in both a complete hollowing of the genre’s best and brightest and left a flavorless slurry of Endless Game in its wake.
Genki’s 2025 Tokyo Xtreme Racer is none of that. To get a racing game with licensed cars that is strictly single-player with a campaign, has limited-but-meaningful progression, and really solid fundamentals without any passive “you need to be playing the game WHILE playing the game” stuff feels like a total anomaly. I don’t know how financially stable Genki was before this but its early access release makes me think this might’ve been more of a “hail mary” situation, and to place that kinda gamble on the niche they’ve fostered over three decades instead of trying to be another “this should be for everyone” kinda thing really made me fall in love with it. I mean, on merit alone, just as another creative person who’d rather ride-or-die doing the thing they love doing, but also because the end result is something that feels as unique and exciting now as it did back in the 90s and 00s.
Sektori
If I wanted to challenge myself, I’d try and write this without ever mentioning Geometry Wa—FUCK.
The most celebratory thing I can say about Sektori is that for a thing so immediately associable to one of modern gaming’s greats, it really stands on its own in terms of what makes it so special. They’re all minor systems or features, but they add up to a game that comparatively feels totally different, and it’s really hard to do that when you’re just making… You know… Robotron. When you’ve locked into chaining dashes into beacons, movin’ around to get the upgrade tree you know you’re comfortable with, and making snap decisions in rhythm to the game’s insanely good 00’s-era dark techno soundtrack, Sektori comes together into a thing that feels like little else.
Blippo+
This came up a lot when talking with friends about Blippo+, where the line between “game” and… y’know, everything else, gets really blurry because where do you draw that line, I guess. I think the only answer I really care about is: who cares? If visual novels are a part of the medium, then interactive art should be right there along with it, and what is more interactive than reproducing the experience of channel surfing on a Vidéoway-like system in 1994?
Blippo is a really important game because it posits the idea of a world whose culture is entirely influenced by public broadcasting. We say this a lot nowadays, but truly: a better world is possible.
The dedication to the bit is something to be in awe of. Developers like Remedy have put us in a kind-of Golden Age for mixed media experienced through video games, but Blippo is like… several television stations. Actual original programming, with schedules, with throughlines, with recurring actors, with their own style of production and editing, filtered through a specific set of broadcast visuals. It’s incredible that I can talk with friends about it, and we all have our own favorite shows and bits. Like, it’s that diverse in content while still all feeling super cohesive to its central idea.
I really wonder if this hits if you didn’t grow up in the specific window of time it’s emulating, where weekly television still reigned but the internet was new enough and talked about enough that the world started opening up in a way that was kind of overwhelming. It’s great to see something that, like, values a specific experience and how formative it was to learning about the world, culture, news, entertainment, and storytelling. It wouldn’t have worked if it was trying to be nostalgic in a rose-tinted glasses kind of way; it succeeds entirely on being earnest and made with modern sensibilities. I truly. wholly adore Blippo+.
Bushwalker is the best show, also.
Hypogea
I wish I brought a specific example of this to the table because it would make me sound a lot smarter than I actually am, but a thing I remember liking about renting games, or buying budget-priced ones, as a teenager was playing stuff that had a really good gimmick, and that was, like, the game. I don’t think it was exclusive to the era I grew up in, and I’m not suggesting some games still aren’t made this way (why else am I writing this). I guess it’s hard to verbalise the specific thing I’m trying to get at. There was something about a handful of PS2 games I played where the game was, like, designed around One Idea. Maybe there was one twist on that idea, but it really didn’t change that much. There were no upgrades, there were no setpieces, there were no tricks or subversion or whatever. It was a thing you just… paid less than a premium price for, and in exchange, you got something that wasn’t entirely ambitious, but the interesting explorations and consequences of a limited scope, budget, and team made something that ended up being a lot more memorable as a result. I don’t think I was ever in the middle of the bell curve for the gaming market, but I dunno like… I couldn’t tell you a single plot beat from God of War 2, but I can sure as hell recall a handful of moments from Nanobreaker or Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. For some reason.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that Hypogea is really similar to that experience. It’s a good game, so saying “it reminded me of Nanobreaker” is really evil and inaccurate on several levels, and I’m sorry for that, but what I mean is that Hypogea has, like, one thing it’s doing. You play as a mute robot who wields a long metal rod, and you use it to platform. The core mechanic is that you can use the rod to grab onto objects out of your reach and can vault over gaps/obstacles with it. That’s it. The game is pretty much solely dedicated to the premise of “it feels really good to pole vault over stuff,” and you know what? It feels really good to pole vault over stuff. The timing and feel of it is honed in this sweet spot of being precise enough to confidently try things and loose enough to succumb to the occasional funny pratfall. The game has a handful of areas with their own twist on how to use the skillset its gives you, and it ends on a cute, bittersweet note right when I felt most satisfied with what I’d done.
It’s not technically or artistically groundbreaking, but I do like the way it looks a whole lot. Its inspiration has a lot of DNA from how Valve games think of cavernous spaces, and the level design complements that really well throughout. You’ve got a pretty limited set of paths on where to go at any given point, but the layout of spaces makes the game feel a lot more open-ended than it really is. I always felt like I was on an adventure, but never struck by choice paralysis of where to go next or feeling lost or anything.
There’s been no shortage of really sincere games released this year, but I don’t know, Hypogea clicked with me in a way that’s still a little hard to describe. It’s the game I played this year that might be the most textbook definition of how we use “sweet spot” to describe something you’re having a really good time with.
Silent Hill f
It’s crazy this game exists. The line of thinking that goes “We should get the Umineko guy to write a Silent Hill game” is one of those things your mind conjures up to fill dead air by playing madlibs with things that speak to you. Then, you come to terms with how life does not provide opportunity for such things to happen because media conglomerates are allergic to good ideas, and decades of risk aversion has led once-powerhouses of entertainment atrophy into milquetoast property holders incapable of doing anything but spending the minimum required to secure endless copyright renewals. Even if it were to happen, there’s no way Ryukishi07 would be allowed to write a game that would pack a punch when it is ultimately the product of a publicly-traded company that has no concern other than “will this make money”. Surely, if that were to happen, the entire thing would have its edges sanded down so aggressively that the remaining shape was some kind of oval, a resulting pitiful approximation of what either its writer or its franchise ought to bring to the table.
And yet,
I have to admit I’m writing this having only finished the first ending—I finished it right before IGF judging began, and suddenly I had hundreds of games to sift through for the year—but the impact that left completely cleared house on any other Triple-A game I played this year.
I’m just in total awe at the unflinching brutality of its storytelling. Shoving your protagonist through the trauma pear wiggler is not new to Silent Hill, it’s arguably its core pillar, but its setting creates a foundation so contextually rich that it’s really remarkable it exists in this from at all. It’s hard to talk about the stuff in f that really shook me without wholesale spoiling its plot, but it all mostly comes from realising how unafraid it is to touch on things that, as I understand, are very “You don’t talk about these things”. f’s narrative and imagery are miserable to experience, an abstracted but visceral portrayal of abuse from all vectors in a society that enforces multiple binaries and stigmatizes individuality, however it is perceived.
While I wasn’t big on some of its narrative-appropriate-but-still extended combat sequences or some of its encounter design in general, those apparently have gotten adjusted, so I’m really excited to go back in and get the rest of the endings without stressing about basically the only sticking points I had. Despite being suffocatingly oppressive and heartbreaking, Silent Hill f really felt like a breath of fresh air. Not just in a year where big-budget stuff has calcified into bland “it’s every genre” pablum, but in a… ugh, I hesitate bringing this up but man!! Our current moment is a world where every media space feels like it’s becoming more conservative, less daring, less interested in inciting a reaction out of people, because if something gets someone to leave, that’s so much worse than doing anything that gets them to stay. I’ll get to it later in the list, but this is a year where a game about sexual abuse was banned from two of the industry’s biggest marketplaces over nothing. This is a year where two American corporations run by fundamentalist pieces of shit took up arms and kneecapped the distribution of adult content across the entire internet. A game that vividly makes real the horrors of patriarchal and sexist issues going so historically far back they become myth and tale, feels like it should not exist.
But it does. It’s pretty incredible that a series mired in nostalgia and mixed approaches, where one group of its fans swears by the games peaking in the mid-00s and the other group is content with an absolute bastardization of a story better told, has unequivocally gotten its best game to date.
Demonschool
Putting my ass bare on display here, but Demonschool makes me really jealous. I think any good artist feels it in minor ways a lot, where you see something and you’re like “Fuck, I wish I thought of that first.” It’s what inspiration probably is at its core, and it’s all part of the weird cocktail that powers you to create art and better your skills at it. But also christ, what a fucking cool game. I’ve played plenty of games that have one or two things that make them really unique, but Demonschool is a real total package.
This flies in the face a bit of the developers explicitly saying they were making a game for a spiritual successor to the Sega Saturn, but Demonschool is most familiar to me as someone who played a bunch of tactics games on the DS and PSP. Part of that is me not being old enough to have played the Saturn growing up (sorry), but its vibe fits perfectly in my head as something in my rotation between Knights in the Knightmare, Metal Gear AC!D 2, or SMT: Devil Survivor. An aesthetically unique game backed by a terrific soundtrack, cleverly written with narrative delivered at a brisk clip, all complementing tactics battles that are simple on their surface but incredibly addictive to optimise and think around.
Öoo
How many other games let you draw your character by writing the title out!! Look at that!! It’s Öoo! There he is again!!!
In two games, Nama Takahashi quickly became one of my favorite game makers around. They’ve got a really keen mind for fun knowledge-check puzzles, and Öoo already feels like a super-refined approach to that. I think for those kinds of games to work, you need a good mix of “Will this work?” and reinforcing lessons it already taught you, which is pretty much exactly what you get here. It feels near-perfect in execution because the game’s not too long, so it’s all over right when you feel you’re at your smartest.
Öoo! What a guy!!
Horses
As a game, Horses is… like, it’s fine. It’s a little wonky, and it’s gracefully saved by a run button, helping you navigate a space that is pretty realistically blocked out but not especially compelling to navigate. It draws inspiration from surrealist Italian cinema, which I have near-zero knowledge of, and accomplishes a style of presentation with that that’s certainly striking at first, but suffers under its technical limitations in a way that I felt let its most striking moments down a bit.
As a game, though… Its story is depressingly unstuck in time, and it’s hard not to succumb to the cynical belief that it will still be relevant 20, 30, 60 years from now. Horses is about a handful of things, but its external circumstances make its commentary on authoritarian adjudication of morality so prescient that I sort of lose my mind thinking about it. Like, of course, a game about fascistic control of self-expression is the one that gets arbitrarily banned from sale over content that does not even exist in the game. Of course, the storefronts offer no explanation as to why the ban is in place or upheld. Of course, the storefronts refuse to allow a defensible form of speech but allow an indefensible one. Of course, the storefronts think this isn’t fit for distribution, but are happy to permanently warp the minds of children.
In the same way that I think it’s impossible to truly separate the art from the artist, I think it’s impossible to separate the art from the circumstances in which it exists. One of my favorite albums is about this, and a handful of other expressions of art I adore touch on this too: Once you’ve created your work and it enters the public realm, it is yours only in name. How it exists in the public, how it’s interpreted, how it’s disseminated, what it stands for, what it means—you have no control over this. It is no longer yours. It’s what makes it art! Art is this. Without this irrevocable transfer of control, art does not exist. Broader than that, it doesn’t exist if there is any kind of black box judgement or moralistic censoring of its distribution. Art is for everyone because it is by everyone.
Earlier in the year, before this whole shitshow, Mastercard and Visa took it upon themselves to kneecap itch.io overnight. An ongoing rampage powered by the most pathetic Christian fundamentalists, they put the squeeze on a marketplace that was the biggest open digital market for adult and queer content. Regardless of what erroneous, inaccurate, unsourced bullshit they extol about protecting children, their life’s mission has always been about erasing any and all freedom of self-expression. It is inextricably tied with the ongoing demonization of trans people in the United States (among others) or other fascistic return to power. Generational structures of power, of abuse, of censorship, of patriarchy, of war, of profiteering, of hate are all melted in a pot whose flame might genuinely be extinguished but has boiled for so long we’re still feeling the heat from it.
The ongoing centralization of the internet has made it remarkably easy to make a living entirely through art, patronage, and digital sales, but centralization also means existing at the whims of those who control said centralization. There are ways around it, but there’s also not, depending on where you have the plum luck of existing in the world. Unsatisfied with ruining the actual real world we exist in, governments and corporations have deemed it necessary for an imaginary space to also have borders and restrictions, causing everyone to suffer in the proces—oh god, I’m writing the manifesto for Outer Haven, aren’t I?
You shouldn’t have to be an artist, a queer person, a minority, someone with eccentric tastes, whatever, to have this hit home for you. This affects everyone because art is for everyone because it is by everyone. This is the same battle being fought with generative AI, a system of speculative wealth and function whose true purpose is not to generate infinite money (lol) but to seize control. The grift of telling you it can summarize your emails or generate your PowerPoint presentations or be more efficient is a set of lies asking you to hand over decades and centuries of keys, so that when everything collapses around their hubris, they are the only ones left with control and autonomy.
I have felt genuinely fucking insane this year watching the pervasive rejection of the technology in gaming circles come to a halt when one game hit enough of a moment to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of engagement. If you weren’t playing it, you weren’t in the conversation, or you were ceding ground to another channel or site, or you were disarmed in the global town square whenever it arose as a topic of interest. It was a pathetic display of complacency, cowardice, and two-facedness. If a means of weakening labor and expression is only disgraceful to you when it is convenient, what do you stand for? What do you gain in exchange for what you are willingly giving up, both to yourself and to the causes you believe in?
Horses has player choice in it that has no functional change on the story’s outcome and, yknow, in a game with a bigger scope and budget, maybe that leads to some interesting explorations of its narrative, which it is lacking of a little. As it exists now, I interpret it as a game that refuses to cede ground to its demons. You are forced to make many choices you don’t want to in a life you feel you did no wrong, but the world has convinced you needs correction, and that in the end you need to have a fucking spine and do something about it.
I don’t think it’s any artist’s desire to really have their work escape their grasp at speeds exceeding terminal velocity. I feel miserable that the conversation around it ended up not being about the game’s content at all, even if I accept the silver lining that it likely resulted in Horses getting infinitely more eyes on it than it would have normally. I empathise with the feeling that what its legacy will come to be will represent something divorced from some of its core themes, but I also feel incapable of separating it from that myself. Art is something that defies rigidity and strict classification. It defies labeling, it defies containment, it defies censorship. It occurs, either on purpose or by accident, and what it was meant to be originally is as strong an artistic statement as what we inevitably define it as. They can’t take that away. They can’t silence that. And even if they defund and destroy the humans that try to create it, we will find a way to speak. and express, and create because it is in our nature to buck, fuck, and run free.
Horses is not My Game of the Year, but it is unquestionably The Game Of The Year 2025.