Julie Muncy is a former contributor at Wired.com and present video game and narrative design consultant working for firms like Hit Detection. She also published her first game, Interstate 35, late last year.
2025 was a strange year, and I played games strangely. I bounced around a lot, didn't finish much of what I played, and slid off of experiences I thought I'd adore. So this list is just as messy and fragmented. These are the best video game experiences I had in 2025.
Labyrinth of the Demon King
I'm going to level with you: I've only played, uhhh, let me check, 114 minutes of Labyrinth of the Demon King, a game that I am told takes about seven hours to complete. I am not an expert, nor am I particularly qualified to actually talk about the quality of this game. I'll admit that.
But: those almost-two-hours of play are the scariest goddamned hours I've played in ages.
If you don't know, the elevator pitch is simple: this is first-person Silent Hill in feudal Japan, a transplant from a reality where King's Field took off instead of Resident Evil. And that alchemy of influences — the cramped low-FOV first-person view, the muddy graphics, the highly lethal gameplay, and surreal, unsettled nature of its dungeons — works in a manner that frankly exceeds the sum of its brilliant parts. I'm used to horror games, I played Silent Hill f (also brilliant) this year mostly without flinching, but this game? This game got me goddamn hyperventilating.
Understand: I want to play more Labyrinth of the Demon King. I've wanted to for months. But I'm scared. You should go play it for me.
Dark Souls: Remastered - Daughters of Ash
Here's my second confession of this particular list: I didn't much care for Shadow of the Erdtree, the massive DLC/pseudo-sequel for Elden Ring. Since Dark Souls 3, I have had the increasing sense that in making this particular brand of action games, From Software is engaged in an arm's race with its most ardent fans, pushing complexity and speed higher and higher in an attempt to satisfy an audience that has decided that the most defining aspect of this series is its challenge and the best type of challenge is a boss fight designed to ruin your day. With Erdtree, I felt like that race has come to a point that I just can't follow along anymore. Either From's Souls games have lost the plot, or I have; I couldn't tell you which. I loved playing Elden Ring and discovering its secrets — once. But I don't have any particular urge to touch it again, and Erdtree failed to move me.
Which put me in an awkward position, as someone who does unambiguously adore most of this almost-franchise, who really wants worlds and experiences that make me feel the way Dark Souls did. Because I understand Dark Souls too well for that, I know it too intimately. It will never be able to give me the same sense of uneasy wonder that it first drew me in with. We speak the same language now, and wonder is not an emotion one typically feels about a dear old friend.
Which brings me to Daughters of Ash, the only experience on this list that wasn't actually released in 2025. Its original form, in fact, dates back to 2019, as a strange, inventive overhaul mod for the PC version of Dark Souls by modder Grimrukh, who has since put out a version on the Remastered version on PC, which is what I played this year. Daughters of Ash takes the raw material of the original game and shakes it around in inventive, strange, and occasionally diabolical ways, taking advantage of its famously interconnected structure to entirely reroute game progression, fundamentally shifting the player's relationship with the game.
It's a prank, in other words, the sort of labyrinthine mega-prank that game mods can do particularly well. Quick example: remember, dear Dark Souls veteran, how you have to run under the drake's fire breath to get to the Undead Parish? Well, in Daughters of Ash, that drake now breathes fire constantly, making that route impossible to take. Which means you have to go the back way, through Darkroot Garden, just to get anywhere near your first main objective.
And that's a mundane example. Daughters of Ash chafes at the limits of its modding tools, adding arcane and odd mechanics, new boss fights, and recontextualizing existing elements in ways that are frequently startling. It's a brilliant experience, sometimes comically difficult but at other times easier than the original game, deciding to shift things around to suit surprise, wonder, and flavor even if that interferes with the game's challenges. It's an experience that takes the player's knowledge of Dark Souls as a given, and thus its primary concern, as a piece of art, is in the art of surprise itself. The art of how familiarity can blind and trick us, how it can set us up for moments of true shock and even fear as the normal is stripped away entirely in favor of something you would have never predicted.
It feels like a corrective to the Soulsborne arms race, a nudge in the direction of what, to me, has always been so special about these games, and which has nothing to do with boss fights: that wonder, that sense that this world operates on rules you do not understand. The sense that anything could be around the corner, and that, when it finds you, it'll probably steal your shit and leave you stranded in a poison swamp.
Centum
I don't really know how to explain Centum to you, except to say that it is a linear-ish (I think?) narrative adventure game that slowly and then rapidly loses its entire mind. It tells multiple overlapping stories, set across vast digital worlds and Gnostic puzzle realities. By the end of it, it's hard to know which of these stories the game was actually ultimately about, and in my memory, the whole thing is fuzzy to the point that giving even a rudimentary plot summary would be hard. It's science fiction, I think, set largely inside a computer run by an out-of-control AI. Don't quote me on that.
Like a lot of narrative adventure games, it is occasionally frustrating, shoehorning in a minigame or two that absolutely does not need to be there. But its protean perspective is so striking, so haunting and beautiful and strange, that I felt compelled to play the entire 3-4 experience in a single sitting. I've not seen anyone talking about this game, and that's, frankly, alarming to me. Play Centum. Go play Centum.
Pathologic 3: Quarantine
My favorite part of any good serialized work is almost always the ephemera. The small side projects, the sneak peeks, the little prologues that were never meant to stand alone. They offer mystery and strangeness by the very nature of their incompleteness, asking questions never meant to be answered in this small side work itself, questions meant ultimately to point toward a more substantial parallel entry.
As such, I met the teaser game for Pathologic 3, Quarantine, with a good deal of excitement that was, ultimately, warranted. It's an odd little thing, unsatisfying, fussy, unpolished, and lowkey unhinged. But it contains so much of what makes the Pathologic series special-- elliptical literary dialogue, theatrical surrealism, dizzying ideas that are so enthralling it almost doesn't matter if they ever actually stick the landing-- that none of its flaws really matter that much. And it does that all in a small, concise, weird little dose, like a Pathologic booster shot.
In *Quarantine*, time is breaking, the plague ran wild, you failed, and reality itself may be paying the price. You are the Bachelor, the worst doctor in human history, and you're fucked. It's *glorious.* Regardless of how effective the game it's teasing ultimately is, I'll always have this taster waiting for me. I'm grateful for that.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage
Lost Records is raw, and emotive, and honest, a character-driven narrative experience about teen rebellion, queerness, tragedy, and the strange dissonance of trying to imagine and understand your younger self. This game hit me like a truck, and not only because the adult version of the main character looks unnervingly like me.
The original Life is Strange will always be a special game for me due to the way it makes me pine for a teenage girlhood I wasn't ever able to have. Lost Records takes that same feeling and accelerates it, drowning me in nostalgia and grief. It's a special game, and probably my favorite experience of the year.