Rami Ismail is a game developer, consultant, and podcaster who is, in all likelihood, better at flying a plane than you.
I like to think of myself as an optimist. It would be preposterous to say otherwise: I turned 37 this year. I’ve been in game development for 15 years, and making them for almost 30. This isn't work you do to get rich or famous. You do it because, at some point, you fell in love with a game deeply enough to decide you wanted to make someone else feel that, too. It is not a career for an easy mortgage or a stable life. You can be stubborn, a dreamer, or spiteful, but inherently, you have to be an optimist. You have to believe it is possible while every sign, every news article, every parent's dreams say otherwise. The people in the industry, however, feel tired. Optimistic, but tired.
We talk about how "great" games have been in 2025, but I’ll be honest: this is the first Giant Bomb list I’ve written where the problem wasn’t having too many options, but that every choice seemed obvious. Every selection had one thing in common: they were either made by wealthy people, or had been in development for over half a decade. If they were funding, it was usually funding that preceded the “post”-COVID industry crash.
During the lockdowns, while other industries collapsed, games went through the roof. Investors flocked to games -one of the few lines on the revenue graphs pointing up- and poured in obscene amounts of money. Dozens of publishers sprang up, funding anyone with a resume longer than three lines. Where you once needed a prototype and a plan, suddenly, a few years of corporate experience got you millions. Indies were getting budgets two, three, four times the size of what they needed.
The good times turned grim fast enough.
One CEO must have been the first to lie that these impossible upwards trends would never reverse, and soon nobody wanted to be the lone CEO who was honest about the future when everybody else was peddling lies to keep the billions flowing. So, acquisitions, spin-offs, zero due diligence—just infinite money going to whoever could talk best. When the lockdowns ended, and the investments didn't pan out, the money vanished, and the investors ran. For the last three years, there has been basically no capital for publishers or developers.
Of course, investors fund publishers, so consequently, publishers are under financial pressure too. Their response is overwhelming to be paralyzed by caution, funding only what has already gone viral. That means developers have to make whatever they can get to go viral with their often limited marketing skills and budgets. So developers have become risk-averse, too—rushing smaller, market-researched prototypes into the ether, hoping for anything viral.
I write out this dystopian and bleak reality because I hope you consider that the most beautiful games of these last few years are a reminder of what happens when developers don’t have to work the system, and when they can simply make whatever feels sincere or right. No market research would’ve approved a French j’RPG. No genre coverage graph would’ve led to PEAK. No player count prediction would’ve funded a decade-long development cycle for a game about blueprints.
The games you love are built by people who got to dream, and had the resources to back it up.
As a consultant, as an industry personality, as a friend or advisor to countless game developers, as a public speaker - I spend my days talking to optimists. I see the beautiful things they want to make, and the absurd challenges they face in 2025, and when things don’t work out, I try to make the dissolution of their studios a little more palatable with whatever hope I can muster. Watching so many broken dreams wears on the soul. As does the ever-reducing number of games that get to be dreams.
The games I selected this year, then, nourished my soul. They’re echoes of a better time—and, to remain an optimist—hopefully harbingers of a time yet to come.
Blue Prince
I have never regretted playing a game as much as I regret playing Blue Prince. I say that with the oddest combination of love and loathing, of awe and repulsion. Blue Prince sits at that same contrast - of puzzle and roguelike, two things that should not mix together but somehow do, one of those cool chemical reactions that has liquids mix and then separate again in an endless cycle of spectacle.
Blue Prince is technically a terrible idea: take a deeply complex and layered puzzle, and then make your ability to solve it dependent on the roll of the dice. It is also a beautiful example of the truth of genre Venn diagrams: that making a game that is two disparate genres doesn’t make for a game that both groups will love; you’ll generally only get those interested who can tolerate both.
More than a difficulty curve, Blue Prince has a reasonability curve. As the game progresses, your sense of how much the game wants you to continue, how much the game respects you, how much the game loves you - it peaks up and drops down like any difficulty curve. Blue Prince isn’t hard, but it is masochistic. It isn’t challenging, but it requires faith and commitment. It is not unfair, but it isn’t really fair either.
So, after weeks of pure enamoured obsession, I now loathe Blue Prince. I loathe Blue Prince because it defeated me, it outsmarted me, it outlasted me - I lay awake thinking about chess pieces and land masses, always wanting to test my thoughts and hypothesis but never booting up the game again. Blue Prince has won.
And then I remember that Blue Prince seems to me to be a game about not missing the forest for the trees, about obsession and control, and ultimately about acceptance. A perfect mirror to my experience playing the game, a self-awareness baked into the gameplay and narrative. I’ll never beat Blue Prince, but I’ll never stop thinking about it either. That, to me, is worth celebrating.
Ghost of Yōtei
Let me start without spoilers: Ghost of Yōtei is a beautifully restrained sequel - it doesn’t make the mistakes we see all around in sequels to successful games: massive expansions to systems that have nothing to do with the game, enormous worlds without additional meaning, and a rapid ramp-up of the stakes in the story.
The game plays very similarly to Ghost of Tsushima, controlling a lone warrior as they track across the regions of a historical Japanese landscape in search of allies, targets, and purpose. You liberate outposts, sit in hot springs, chop some bamboo, pet foxes, and follow the winds until a bird distracts you. You still have too many options for disposing of enemies to comfortably fit on all the buttons of your controller - but when you stumble your way through the selection interface, it is still beautifully accessible parry-and-punish gameplay.
Some things have been changed - the places you visit are far more visually and thematically diverse. Finding new places on the map now happens with a Breath of the Wild-esque spyglass, and you will occasionally assist an increasingly familiar wolf in avenging its pack. The ultimate Ghost ability now has multiple levels, and the way you unlock abilities has been diversified a bit.
In other words, the game developers clearly decided that the core formula of Ghost worked, and instead of being forced to “take it up a level” with all sorts of new shenanigans that might or might not work, they were allowed to take their expertise gained in the first game, and make a super strong iteration. Every core system felt like it got an extra shine, every expanded system has been re-approached with the distinct thematic direction of the game, and the combat has been focused on the more aggressive Atsu.
To discuss more, though, it’s hard to avoid spoilers - so if you want to avoid those, know that Yotei will satisfy your “Ghost” itch and skip the rest of this section.
The only thing holding Yōtei back from the same greatness as Tsushima is that Tsushima felt like its narrative and gameplay aligned much better. Tsushima was the game of a samurai who was left with an impossible choice: to save his country (and his family), he had to become something his country (and family!) could not accept. It is a traditional “ultimate sacrifice”. As Jin stepped away from the “honorable” and frontal ways of the Samurai towards the more untethered and terrifying code of the Ghost, the abilities got more deadly, lethal, and brutal.
Atsu’s story rhymes with Jin’s - it is an inverse. Where Jin had to leave behind his humanity and transcend to become the “Ghost”, leaving (almost) all other ties behind. Atsu starts the game already as the invincible “Onryo” - as evidenced by the brutal opening kill of the game and her spiteful survival. Her path is back towards her humanity and towards community. You see this focus in Atsu having a home to return to, a history to reconnect to, and a “pack” of allies that she grows closer to throughout. Her anger subsides -still flaring, unpredictable, unreasonable- but subsiding regardless.
Regardless, the gameplay obviously plays out the same. Atsu becomes more powerful, unlocks more brutal abilities, and becomes more deadly as the game progresses. To achieve that, the story continuously has to walk a tightrope that shows her increasing connection to her humanity while balancing that with her ever-overflowing rage that gives her her new abilities - a tightrope that feels wobbly at times, but never has the game fall off entirely.
Ultimately, the themes of Tsushima hit home to me - as a child of two cultures, finding my own path and looking for the approval of parental figures regardless was a resonant message. The story of Atsu, one of finding closure in anything but revenge, is far further removed from me (and hopefully, you, too). It’s a more traditional story, perhaps, and one that has been expertly used throughout games like Red Dead Redemption and Destiny 2: Forsaken. It does a competent job here, elevated on the shoulders of strong acting performances, a foundation of beautifully restrained but confident design, and a gorgeous and diverse art direction.
Yōtei is the type of sequel I’d love to see more of - an iteration built upon confidence and expertise - rather than an exploration of all the ways the game could be “more”.
Destiny 2: Renegades
Destiny remains my end-of-day destination for every day that my PS5 is around, and Renegades remains the best iteration of Destiny since The Final Shape. The current version of Destiny also shouldn’t be mistaken for an expansion pack--it is effectively an entirely new approach to the game. 2025 brought entirely new progression mechanics, then removed them again, added an entire armor set system, tried moving to a bi-yearly model with much larger “swings” in their core design, and Bungie worked tirelessly to figure out the direction of Destiny in this new, difficult reality for the studio.
The most recent storylines have had the difficult task of being the Phase 4 of the Destiny universe, requiring new mysteries and enemies to fill the vacuum of the Witness. In the most traditional Battlestar Galactica storytelling tropes, the player is first thrust into the new world of minor enemies and fragmented conflicts, before they likely will coalesce into properly defined threats in the future.
After you beat the campaign, Destiny 2 is a little less demanding and “fear of missing out”-built than it used to be, allowing players to play about as much Destiny 2 as they want. Where the Edge of Fate campaign established the Nine as the new heart of the conflict, Renegades takes players into a simulacrum of Star Wars - they’re fun storylines, and while I can’t say I don’t miss the old weekly story beats, I am having fun with the new busywork.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
So let me get something out of the way immediately: Clair Obscur’s take on the RPG was not for me. I found the game’s world annoying to traverse, the combat quickly stale, and the Pictos system clever but not particularly engaging beyond finding a combination that worked for me well enough.
But like everybody else, I was smitten by the world and the characters and the music and the sheer imagination of the world. Let me try and rephrase that: I was smitten by just how French this game is.
To have you understand why this game was so important to me, I have to take you on a bit of a detour.
I was born in the Netherlands almost 40 years ago now, to a Dutch mother and an Egyptian father. While in my early years, we spent significant time in Egypt, the amount of time I spent in Cairo started shrinking as education took over my life. I started my career on hardware I got in the Netherlands, went to my first events with my passport from the Netherlands, and made my first ‘hit’ game in the Netherlands. It didn’t take me long to realize that my chances would have been much lower if I had lived in Egypt.
That felt unfair to me, so for over a decade, part of my work has been to support developers worldwide in getting a more fair opportunity. Whether that’s hosting multi-lingual events, mentorships, lobbying governments, writing letters of recommendation, or connecting developers with funding opportunities - I try to make a small difference in ensuring that anyone who wants to make games gets to have a shot.
Having traveled to game development communities and studios globally, one additional thing dawned on me: each of these communities, each of these cultures, they have a fingerprint. You can trace back the origins of a work to a place, a time, an understanding of the world in a specific place of time and space.
Of course, the individuals are the ultimate influence - but they too exist in a culture, in a system, in a community, in a country. That means you could learn to spot, to some degree, the ironic metaphorical tackling of complex issues in South African games (see Broforce, Genital Jousting, Relooted) or the playful warnings of the down-to-Earth struggle and connection with nature (or water in particular) of the Netherlands in games like Horizon Zero Dawn, Ridiculous Fishing, or Hidden Folks.
Usually those influences are subtle, but they’re there: if you have a war game made in the US, it’s likely that the story is about the risk of “not coming home” because that is, at heart, what the US cultural understanding of war is. If you have a war game made in Germany, you’ll get a game about shame and guilt - like Spec Ops: The Line. And if you have a war game made in Poland, you’ll get This War of Mine - a game not about going to war, but about war coming to you.
To me, this realization was incredibly exciting. Around 2013, the notion that “all good mechanics have been discovered” was a serious discussion in games (as it had been before, and will be again) - and I was starting to question the validity of that point. I then played Farsh, a small puzzle game about rolling up and rolling out carpets - it was clever, it was new, it was fresh - not just the theming of it, but the entire mechanic. I had never seen such a mechanic before, not in the almost-century history of game development that I have researched and learned about. I went to Farsh’s Iranian-born developer Mehdi Bahrami, and I asked him how he came up with such a new mechanic - but he revealed the answer was staring me in the face at the game’s boot-up sequence: “To my mother, who spent her youth weaving carpets.” Like Egypt, Iranians live in a world where sand and dust are more prevalent than in the West - and that makes carpets a must-have.
But if all that it took for a new mechanic to emerge was for someone different to make a game without trying to appeal to a mass audience, just for themselves, just because they can, just because they feel like the game should exist - how many new mechanics are still out there hidden in the fingerprints of creators that haven’t had the opportunity yet? That thought has been the driving force behind my work around the world, trying to support and train developers everywhere.
And Clair Obscur, Clair Obscur is a masterpiece with French fingerprints all over it. Because Clair Obscur is a game set in France, sure - but so is the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 scene in which the Eiffel Tower is destroyed - but the setting isn’t the “French” part about the game. Neither is it the French outfits, or the music, or the dialogue that makes it French - no, it is because at its heart, it is a game about French understanding, not about understanding, but about the specifically French version of it.
It is a melancholic game about fallen empires, grandeur, beauty, art, the weight of legacy, grief, and the idea that ambiguity invites perspective rather than the more definitive Anglo-US ideas of absolute right and wrong. The game leans into the more French narrative ideals that aesthetic coherence is a form of truth, that slowness and silence are meaningful progressions, and that form is part of the argument. Clair Obscur creates tragedies and character arcs that resolve without complete catharsis - there is a willingness to let major beats and themes not go “full circle”. Then there is the idea that oppression is rarely centralized into some singular villain - that harm and oppression are systematic, and not that dependent on who is in charge.
Most importantly for the game, perhaps, is the French cultural belief that hope is intellectual and borne from insight, an earned reality rather than an emotional handout you get for participating. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 requires you to reflect and think, to take every intellectual position, and to look past the immediate feelings of the main characters to decide what your feelings are. There is no good ending as much as there are character endings - the cost of understanding the world is burdensome, but also the only available catharsis.
These are not strong positions that every French person will take, and many might disagree on an individual level - but they are the cultural backdrop against which the French are overwhelmingly raised, the works they see growing up, the references of novels and art and cinema and philosophy and religion they learn in school. The amount of awareness and effort and intent it would take for a French person to dismiss these influences would be staggering, which means you could play other French games that lean into these themes and beliefs, games like Event[0], or even A Plague Tale.
Often, though, the commercial realities of releasing games into an Anglo-US world mean that culturally, creators try to make things that “the audience” would love - overriding the impulse of making things that resonate with them - for better and for worse.
Clair Obscur, to me, is a victory of that idea of the fingerprint. It is an exciting reminder that there are billions of games out there that haven’t been made, and that video games as a medium still have endless possibilities ahead. We’re not at some sort of natural endpoint of new and bold ideas - we’re just across the starting line of exploring a world of game developers.
In showing us that with such clarity, Clair Obscur is a gift for those who come after.
Best Whimsical: Ӧoo
I did not expect to love Ӧoo as much as I did when I played it. It’s a simple concept: you’re a caterpillar, and after eating an apple eaten by a bird that eats you, you have a bomb attached to your body. You can drop the bomb to launch yourself.
One of the biggest challenges in game development is to explore a game design. Edmund McMillen of Super Meat Boy fame explains this in Indie Game The Movie more accessibly than anyone else has ever managed to do it.
“Once you've basically cleared out all the things you can do with Meat Boy, then you start introducing new mechanics. With Meat Boy, it's not like Mario, where lots of the Mario games introduce new mechanics in forms of suits that change Mario's properties; that's something that I wanted to avoid. I wanted to make it really, really pure.
Meat Boy never gets better or gets a power-up; it's the levels that change the mechanics. So, right away you introduce saws, and they're usually static saws that just spin in place. You have to avoid static saws. Then later, those same saws—that you know how they kill you and you know that they're round—those same saws then will start moving back and forth. So you've got moving saws, and then even later than that, you'll get these saws that are on these little spinners that act like windmills and they go around in a circle.
Now, it's the same saw that you've jumped over a million times before, but it's coming at you in a different way, and it's just expanding on the basic mechanic and making it different and more enjoyable each time. As a designer, you want to explore each mechanic and make sure that it can be enjoyed at least three or four different ways. If it's only got one use and you can only get one use out of it, then it's pointless, because you need to be able to juice it. You've got to figure out new ways to use it.”
Ӧoo is a masterclass in this. You’ll learn the mechanics in a few minutes, and the game then proceeds to challenge you in every single way the mechanic can be used. It’s a “small” game, about an hour or two at most - but by the end of this little puzzle platformer, you will have seen every possible way the mechanic can be used, and you’ll have fully mastered the mechanic. I genuinely wouldn't know what else you could do with it.
It is small, it is elegant, and if it weren’t for Blue Prince, it would have been my game of the year.
despelote
Visiting my fatherland of Egypt as a kid, I would spend quite a bit of time kicking footballs around - whether it was on the streets or in the soccer fields at the evening “nady” - a word that translates best to “club” but meaningfully is a membership compound with restaurants, seating, and facilities. Despite our family not owning a boat, we had family ties that gave us access to a yacht club in Cairo, and they had a soccer-slash-basketball cage, and I spent plenty of my evenings there.
I also spent my time playing games on the Polystation, a bootleg NES in a PlayStation shell with 99 pre-loaded games (read: nine preloaded games, repeated 11 times, with ROM hacks applied - so you’d have Super Mario Bros as game five but Super Luigi Bros as game 14, and it’s the exact same game but Luigi would be the default character. There was also Super Swim Adventure, which was Super Mario Bros, but all levels are underwater. I digress). The Polystation came with Tecmo World Cup Soccer, a top-down soccer game that I played endlessly despite never beating it.
despelote is a game about childhood. It’s incredibly specifically set in Quito, Ecuador and incredibly specifically about Julián, one of the developers, and incredibly specifically set around the 2002 World Cup soccer. And with that specificity, despelote becomes universal - because everybody has an incredibly specific childhood memory related to playing an incredibly specific game at an incredibly specific place and at an incredibly specific time.
The game opens with Julián playing what very much looks like Tecmo World Cup Soccer, on what very much looks like a Polystation, before my dad pulled the plug to watch something on TV. Sorry, his dad. Julián’s dad.
In most of the game, our young Julián has very little agency - you do things you’re supposed to, and get in trouble for not doing them. You go to school, sit in class, and follow as the excitement of Ecuadar’s chances in the 2002 World Cup whips the country into an excited frenzy. When you get to the ball, you get to be a bit more playful - that little bit of childhood agency and freedom that the game centers itself around as the world fulfills its path forward, but those vignettes end just as quickly. Julián is not a hero, not a future star player, not what the world revolves around - he’s a kid who would be inspired by his Polystation and his memories to make games about being a kid inspired by his Polystation and his memories.
despelote isn’t a long game, but anyone who has an incredibly specific childhood memory related to playing an incredibly specific game at an incredibly specific place and at an incredibly specific time will find a fond memory of their own in despelote.
Outro
It was an odd year, wasn’t it? For how rough the year felt in the industry, it is not like there weren’t fun games to play.
I spent hours in Donkey Kong Bonanza in the opening levels just because smashing things felt so incredibly good. I fell in love with DOG WITCH enough that I decided to help the developer out with production duties (disclaimer: I do not earn any revenue from the game, but I was paid for my time during development). Dying Light: The Beast was solid and well worth playing if you enjoyed the original (and more so if you were disappointed by the somewhat overwrought sequel).
I very much enjoyed the battle-focused Pokémon Legends: Z-A as a follow-up experiment to the world-focused Arceus (which I didn’t like too much) and hope that they’ll combine the two into future Pokémon games. I thought The Alters was clever, Arc Raiders was fun for a bit (but extraction shooters still really aren’t for me),
Time Flies scratched my “what the heck” itch (as did Terry Cavanagh’s egg, for that matter). I programmed a drone to farm in The Farmer Was Replaced and genuinely think that could be a great intro to programming. Morsels was just bloody good action fun. and Roger was beautiful and sincere, and Skate Story was a super cool example of a developers' vision brought to life. Lumines Arise was incredibly solid in the dexterity department, and gave me some of that Tetris Effect OST vibes (although Tetris Effect remains one of, if not my top games of all time). Similarly, The Hundred Line reminded me of 13 Sentinels and the sense of awed dread I got imagining how hard it must've been to develop. I loved MotionRec, the clever little platformer that together with Ȍoo made it a great year for platforming. I loved Nurikabe World, and PEAK, and Slots and Daggers, and Tiny Bookshop. I loved the loudness of Unbeatable, and the softness of Wanderstop.
I look at the development timelines of all of these games and I realize that so few of our favorite games these past few years are recent bets.
Which means that while this year's most beautiful games were incredible, they feel like the type of game we stand to lose in this new "normal" - a normal where investment goes to generative AI slop rather than actual creation. The games that released this year and were successful were almost all tiny projects, self-funded across more than half a decade, funded three to ten years ago, or made by one of the handful of massive AAA conglomerates that remain. And if that's how things pan out, I don’t think our industry reckoning is over. Far from it. I think we’ll continue to see beloved studios and publishers fall over and be absorbed over the next few years.
That said - you can’t stop game developers from developing games, for better or for worse. Despite everybody knowing how hard funding is right now, publishers are getting hundreds -no, thousands- of pitches a year to consider. So, if the money folks and corporations of this industry are going to be careful and take fewer swings, I hope that instead of waiting for things to go viral or lowering costs through slop, they put aside part of their funding to take bets on the remarkable but potentially unprofitable. Allow the developers to put their heart, their fingerprint, their world, and their curiosity into the games that will surprise us and blow us away in 2027, 2028, and 2029.
If 2025 has proven anything to me, it is that not every game with a heart is a winner, but almost every winner is a game with a heart. Despite everything, despite all of it, to many games with heart in 2026!