Heya, it's your favorite co-host of Game Mess Mornings when no one else in Grubb’s rolodex is awake, Lex Luddy.
Looking back on the list I wrote last year, I opened by saying that things had been a bit of a shitshow for me. Well, I think 2025 did a good job at reminding me that things can always get worse. I do try not dwell on the negative, especially around the holidays and the new year, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the games that really resonated over the last 12 months haven’t skewed towards the negative in tone.
Maybe there is some small comfort to be found in knowing that other people have gone through the wringer like you have. Seeing folks dealing with similar problems to your own and problems you never even considered someone facing is a nice reminder that there is a world after the shit. Not only that, but these creatives emerged on the other side of the shit to create things that are beautiful, thoughtful, and even fun. It’s been minor solaces like that which have given me comfort this year. I just wish the distance between me and someone able to reflect their hardship into art didn’t feel so impossibly far away. Anyway, all of that is to say these are some of the games that have kept me going through the shit.
Honorable Mentions
- Mafia: The Old Country
- Borderlands 4 (but mainly replaying Borderlands 2 on a new PC)
- Old Racing Games (Ridge Racer Type 4, Driveclub, Forza Horizon 5, DiRT 3)
- Donkey Kong Bananza
- Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles (this would be on the list, but I ran out of time and didn't finish it)
- Afterlove EP
Something Else: Death Stranding 2: On The Beach
I don’t think Death Stranding 2 is anywhere near my top ten (or 11). My 5/10 review detailed the numerous ways that I did not like this game, and I stand by pretty much all of it.
However, for all my misgivings, I still think about Death Stranding almost every day. Maybe that is just testament to Kojima’s banging Spotify playlist, but moments that those bits of music helped create have rattled around in my brain for months now. I don’t think Death Stranding 2 is a good game in a lot of ways. I think it stumbles with its streamlined gameplay, and fails its femme characters.
I do, however, think that Death Stranding gets me to feel things, to mull on moments and ideas, and music and images in a way that ends up being pretty profound. So here’s to you, Kojima & Co. I hope you keep getting blank checks to make things I don’t really like.
11. Sektori
I have never been good at Geometry Wars. Hell, I am rarely good at any arcade games, but I love them anyway.
Sektori is pure video game, turbocharged and injected into your eyeballs, rewiring your neural pathways so that you play it on its terms, and learn its rules. It rules.
10. Absolum
2025 is the year that beat 'em ups finally clicked for me. I like Yuzo Kushiro’s soundtracks as much as the next terminally online trans woman, but beat ‘em ups have always felt stiff to me.
Absolum (and playing the new Scott Pilgrim at Gamescom) finally made the genre make sense. The stiffness isn't a fault but a purposeful limitation that you work with to chain combos and manage health. After getting way into Absolum, I went back and checked out Guard Crush’s Streets of Rage 4, and then Streets of Rage 2, and now I love beat ‘em ups.
This was probably also bolstered by me picking up a six-button NSO controller at the Nintendo Store in Japan (thank you, Alicia, for letting me use your account), and so the button mapping finally started to feel right. All of this is to say, if you are playing Absolum, be sure to pick up an 8BitDo M30 controller; it's really good.
9. Karma: The Dark World
I think I might be the only person in the industry who played this game (well, other than Will Borger). I first played this at SGF 2024 and was super surprised by how much it grabbed me. Don't get me wrong, this game wears its Twin Peaks and 1984 inspirations in its sleeve in a real “I know writers that use subtext, and they're all cowards” kinda way, but coming from the perspective of a small Chinese team infusing their life experience to subvert certain things, really makes it all work.
Also, the late-game art-style shifts are some of the most stunning bits of game and art direction in a game this year.
8. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage
I never really had a teenage social life, at least not the one I wanted. The combination of being a closeted trans woman in an all-boys, rugby, Catholic school in Ireland and the ages 15-20 being spent in and out of mental health facilities, means I have found myself often longing for a kind of girlhood that I never lived.
Lost Records isn't perfect. In fact, it's a mess. The characters are messy, the music is messy, the central mystery is messy. But so is life. So is being a teenager. I missed that messiness — in more ways than one.
7. Wanderstop
I am burnt out. I have been since about, uummmmmm, let's be generous and only say 2019. I cope with this burnout by working, distracting myself, and investing myself so totally in a hobby that I have turned into a career that it allows me to tell myself I am having fun, no matter how much I hustle and grind myself down with late nights and long hours.
Wanderstop demanded I stop. It demands Alta stop, and actually just sit. Do you know how hard that is? When there is so much to do? So much to fight for? So much to be experienced and seen for the first time in a big, wide world that was closed off to you for so long? Do you know how hard it is just to sit on a bench and drink some tea with no purpose, objective, goal other than reaching the bottom of the mug and feeling the sun (or wind) on your face?
Wanderstop knows how hard that is; it knows the only way you'll see that is with hours of empathy and a little bit of tough love from someone you trust. It's really remarkable that this game made me take some time to just… do nothing.
6. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
Listen here, motherfuckers. You people. You god damn people, who complain that this game doesn’t have good platforming. You’re why we can’t have good things. You're the people who would have gotten mad about Wind Waker’s artstyle two decades ago. This game rules. It is good. It lets you air juggle a fool for like 30 seconds and then divekick him into a pit.
For me, this game will always be tied to my first-ever trip to Japan, as I blazed through about 80% of it on my flight over, and the wild experience of going to the Sega store in Shibuya and finding merch for it being sold like less than a week after it released. I really hope that Shinobi is a good omen for the other Sega reboots coming down the pike, mainly so that I keep hope alive that one day Sega will stop fucking around with that Sonic bullshit and get back to what really matters*.
*MAKING A NEW SEGA RALLY CHAMPIONSHIP
5. Lumines Arise
It feels weird to put a game I gave a 10/10 at number five on a list for my GOTY, but I am also the person to be first in line to tell you that review scores don’t matter. Lumines isn’t a perfect puzzle game like Tetris is. I really like Lumines, but it's no Tetris.
So in some ways, that makes the fact that Lumines: Arise is now on the same level as Tetris Effect (a game I have played hundreds of hours of) in my brain, even more remarkable. The jump from “really good Tetris game” to “near perfect, transcendental experience” is much smaller than the jump between “solid Lumines game” and that same “10/10 experience.” The ways that Lumines Arise’s presentation elevates not just the vibe but the quality of the gameplay, as well as your skill as a player, are really quite incredible.
Let Miz & Co. keep making these games forever.
4. Dispatch
Yeah, yeah, found family and all that. Of course, I loved this. I just rebought Eidos’ Guardians of the Galaxy on Steam after all. But Dispatch (much like that GotG game) is something I really didn’t have any expectations for. For as much as I like the cast in this game — pre-release — it felt, I don’t know, stunt-y to surround a handful of voice actors with Hollywood stars and well-regarded content creators, but everyone nails their role. The assholes are incredible assholes, the losers grow on you, and Invisigal is fixable… I swear, I can fix her.
I don’t know, in a year that felt like it took every opportunity to punch me in the nuts, there was something about this game that spoke to me. Like James Gunn’s Superman was a rallying cry for earnest hopefulness, this game was a testament to leaning on others. And sometimes it’s just nice to get confirmation that that’s OK too, y’know?
3. Silent Hill f
These last three games have pretty much chopped and changed with each other for three weeks, so take this as very loose ordering that could change if I wrote this on another night.
It’s hard to quantify just how much Silent Hill f punches above my expectations for it. Do you remember 2014? Do you remember how utterly and totally “out of the video game business” Konami was? It was unthinkable even three or four years ago (when this game was surely in development) that Konami would ever go to a games convention and show something other than Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards, and yet here we are.
I think I only started to process that Silent Hill f might be the real deal when Gamescom came around, and journalists were offered four-hour appointments to just play from the beginning of the game, which is like, unheard of at a trade show.
Anyway, I will get more into this more in a bit, but 2025 was a good year for “feel bad” games. Silent Hill f allows you to wade through the struggle of being a woman, of dealing with impossible expectations, of fighting with your own shifting wants and needs that seem to constantly clash with what the world will permit you.
While Silent Hill games have had multiple endings from the beginning, f manages to have each ending build on one another, and elicit different emotions while reframing the same narrative pieces into something that forms different final takeaways. The result is something that is more than the sum of its parts, and truly unexpected.
2. Consume Me
The plan is that I will write much more about this game in 2026 (shout out to Lost In Cult), so I will try not to cannibalize myself (not a pun) too much here. Few games have seared their way into my brain so aggressively. I don’t think I have rolled credits feeling so strongly about a game, and in this case, so angry at myself.
If you don’t know, Consume Me is a semi-autobiographical game about a young woman who develops an eating disorder. It goes to great lengths to gamify the balancing act of endless exercise, study, hunger, sleep, and self-loathing that comes with developing an ED. From a Tetris-like eating mini-game, where you are trying to get as full as you can without eating too many calories, to WarioWare micro-games depicting obsessive overexercising, the thing about Consume Me that makes it hit so hard is that it’s fun. It is really fun. And I was good at it.
Like slipping into a pair of old pants I wore in hospital and thought I had outgrown, I loathed how easily I slipped back into these habits. How good it felt to keep Jenny up until 3 a.m. exercising, and studying, and drinking coffee, and hurting herself.
*Minor spoilers below*
The final act of the game is where things come to a head. Jenny is living alone in college and is not keeping her head above water anymore. You look in the mirror, and the eating disorder tells you all the things you have to do in the next week; it's an impossible mountain of study, fasting, and managing relationships that you are meant to fail.
I passed this seemingly impossible roadblock. Most people who will play this game will fail the final act. They’ll realize that the hardship of eating disorders is that you can’t keep all the plates spinning. But if you have had an eating disorder, if you have been in the shit, there is a pretty good chance you will pass all the goals, you’ll keep all the plates spinning… and after all that, how was I rewarded by the game? I failed anyway. You will fail anyway. Because that is what happens in life.
Life doesn’t care how much you weigh, how many hours you have exercised in the day, or if you have hit all your goals and listened to your ED every single step of the way. Sometimes it still isn’t enough.
I know some people (especially ones who have survived living with an ED) really don’t like this game’s ending, in which nothing really gets resolved. Jenny just learns to live with her ED, and the ending montage shows it slowly starting to fade as she fills her life with healthy goals and loved ones, and I get that. It’s not a positive message. It is not the way the psychologist would want you to deal with your eating disorder. But if I am honest, that’s what happened to me. You don’t get rid of an eating disorder; you survive the worst of it, you manage it, you learn to live with it and shirk it until you can go weeks or months without thinking about it. But it stays with you, it shapes you like any other part of your past, so in that way, Consume Me is just like life.
1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
There isn’t much more I can add to the Clair Obscur discourse; pretty much every take, opinion, and thought anyone could have around this game has already been verbalized by someone else for better or worse. Yet that doesn’t make it any less special.
Clair Obscur is a game about grief, but it's not just about how we deal with loss, but how we get ready for it.
“Anticipatory grief” was a phrase a friend introduced me to a little while ago when I described how I am feeling. How I am dealing with the shit.
The preparation for loss is its own kind of pain. Looking at a clock and seconds passing, filling you with rage that you're one step closer to things changing, to being worse, and knowing there is no force on earth that can halt that march, even for a moment. Ultimately, the only choice you have in the matter is whether you hold onto that rage and fight against the forces of inertia until they destroy you or learn to deal with them, shape yourself around them, feel them, and continue on. For those who come after.
I don't want to end this on an abject bummer, so I will also say that this year included some pretty notable highs too. I reviewed the biggest game of my career (and have felt more and more vindicated by the one-star score as the weeks have passed). I set up and launched a second website. I continue to hang out on GB content and Game Mess Mornings and, hell. I am even editing all these GOTY lists (with Marino). I got to guest on one of my favourite podcasts (thanks, Nextlander folks). I had my words published in two books. I interviewed some really cool people. I got to spend three weeks in Japan with my good friend, Alicia, and meet and hang out with lots of cool folks. I built a gosh dang computer with my own two hands. I spent more time with family than I had in years past. I watched a bunch of good movies. And my beloved startmenu continues to grow and evolve.
All that is to say, that even in shitty years, good things happen, and I am generally bad at acknowledging that. Hopefully, next year still has more good moments like this and is a bit less tumultuous otherwise… And that I can bully Giant Bomb folks to come to Gamescom again… or better yet… Come to the FÍS Games Summit, Jan. I will take you on a pub crawl through Galway.