HEY! It’s me, Dan. I worked at Giant Bomb for a long time and now I own it. I played a lot of video games in 2025. Here are my favorites.
First off, here’s the stuff that missed the cut:
- 20. Simpsons Fortnite
- 19. Once Upon a Katamari
- 18. Avowed
- 17. Mario Kart World
- 16. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection
- 15. Lumines Arise
- 14. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4
- 13. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
- 12. Megabonk
- 11. Sektori
Wow, check out that Old Man Block between 13 and 16!
Ok, now let’s get down to the…
TOP TEN GAMES OF 2025
10. LEGO Party!
If you come to this website, you already know that I love torturing friends and family in party games. Mario Party has always been the king of that for me because sometimes you can win because of scheming (very fun) and sometimes you can win because of absolute bullshit (even more fun). While I deeply love Mario Party’s level of nonsense, I can’t help but respect LEGO Party’s efforts to make it more of an actual game with real stakes and tests of skill. It’s even managed to replace Mario Party (for now) as my family’s game of choice when we’re all together. Especially with the last Mario Party being the somewhat disappointing Jamboree, this has been the year of LEGO Party when it comes time to test your friendships.
9. Ghost of Yōtei
I really enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima, but Yōtei felt like an upgrade in just about every way. Its map is more interesting, I prefer its upgrades and weapons, and Sucker Punch has continued to hone its cinematic flair. It’s probably the most visually jaw-dropping game on this list, which goes a long way towards transporting you to a different time and place for its revenge story. In an age where “map barf” games have become tired, Yōtei pulls off its world with grace.
8. Donkey Kong Bananza
This was a game after my heart from the opening seconds. I knew I was gonna love it as soon as I started fucking up that cave and learning that most of the buttons are just for fucking shit up. It’s the evolution of Donkey Kong we needed. Ever since DK64 kind of shit the bed, it seems like Nintendo has been satisfied to “play the hits” with the excellent Returns series, but this is Donkey Kong we’re talking about! He deserves more! Throwing the Odyssey team on this is a great sign that Nintendo is serious about the big dumb ape, and Bananza does an amazing job of reinventing his look and the gameplay while simultaneously throwing out plenty of nostalgia bait for the old folks like me.
7. Blue Prince
Since elementary school, I’ve always been a sucker for logic puzzles. Plenty of games have scratched that itch for me over the years, but none packaged it in a more fascinating way than Blue Prince. I was plenty enamored by the initial concept of laying down a maze to get to the end of the house, but the more the game revealed of itself, the more I loved it. They say you can tell how good a puzzle game is by the size of its screenshot folder (I lied, no one says that), and mine was filled with hundreds of shots of books, crests, paintings, and plenty of things that wound up being nothing. But that’s part of the beauty of Blue Prince. Virtually anything you look at in that game could contain the “eureka moment” you’ve been searching for, or it could mean jack shit. I loved poking and prodding at everything in Blue Prince, and each new discovery just made me want to explore deeper.
6. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
I was a bit of a Genesis kid and somehow never played the Shinobi games. My thoughts were clear of nostalgia as I entered Art of Vengeance, and holy hell did it blow me away. I know a game’s combat is good when it gives me a million abilities and upgrades, and I can actually pull them off during gameplay on purpose. In a genre with a lot of Maxi, this is a Mitsurugi, you know?
5. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
I eventually came around on the first Death Stranding, but I never quite loved its tone. It’s a bunch of sad people, and sometimes they’re literally blue, and they’re pretty much always crying. Great. On the Beach features most of the same characters, but now they’re surfing on coffins and having guitar battles and hanging out with a talking puppet. At one point, a baby might have gotten shot, but it turns out to be okay, I think. Keep giving Hideo Kojima however much money he asks for.
4. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond
There are a lot of things I love about Metroid Prime 4, but I think my favorite is how uniformly everyone – press and public – agreed that it was a super good game and one of the best Metroid entries. It’s rare that such a universal consensus is reached among the notoriously argumentative gaming audience, but this is one of them. Here’s to Metroid Prime 4, a game that everyone loves! Hip hip hooray!
3. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? Look, you all know the deal with this game, I don’t gotta explain it to you. All I’ll say is that I somehow LOVED a narrative-heavy game with JRPG combat. I’m still not really sure how they pulled that off.
2. Hollow Knight: Silksong
If a game has me literally screaming for a couple of weeks, I know it’s a good one. For one, I never really yell at games. And secondly, if a game did make me yell in frustration, I probably wouldn’t stick with it for very long. But the frustration, the deaths, the painful near-wins, they’re all a big part of the Silksong experience. It pulled off its brutal difficulty and lack of hand-holding in a way that made me instantly prefer it over the original (which really took some time for me to come around on). Between the many meaningful upgrades, the cohesive and unsettling tone, the razor-sharp combat, and most importantly, the gauntlet of unbelievably well-designed boss fights, Silksong sits alongside the absolute best of its genre.
1. Hades II
For the last few weeks, I’ve been internally debating what my favorite game of the year really is. At certain points, I considered all of the games in the top four of this list as potential contenders. While Hades II may be the boring, safe choice considering the armful of awards its predecessor took home, I found this sequel to be undeniable. Sure, it’s more Hades, but when you’re talking about a contender for the best roguelite of all time, I’ll take more of that anytime. It manages to pack in so many interesting progression layers in the hub world. Like any great roguelite, I was never upset about dying because that meant I got to go back to the hub and take inventory of its many changes. Adding a second path for your runs was a fantastic decision, and it led to me spending way more time in Hades II than I did in the original. Supergiant raised the bar once again, and I’ll play (and likely love) as many more of these as they wanna give me.