I wrote the following in December 2025, but due to site restructuring, I couldn't grow my GOTY list collection at the time. I just saw that lists are now available to non-premium members, so I'm basically just copying and pasting those thoughts now. Enjoy:
It sure feels like the end of an era with these lists. Giant Bomb has had a turbulent year, and now, on December 15th, 2025, it is in the midst of a large site re-launch following its separation from Fandom. The wiki isn’t put together yet, which affects the readability of my old lists that draw from it. Presently, my 2024 game of the year, according to that list, is “Wiki Item 3030-57453,” which I don’t remember playing. After the scares about the site closing this April/May, I’m glad giantbomb.com exists today with any degree of usability. However, at the time of writing, I can’t actually create new lists on the website and I’m not sure when/if I’ll be able to again. This is all to say, I don’t actually know how I’m going to share this list beyond awkward cut and paste jobs.
During 2023 and 2024, I enjoyed staying in the gaming zeitgeist and playing new games. I enjoyed that to a lesser extent this year, and although I played enough current games to produce a fine top 10 strictly with 2025 games, I realized I preferred the older games I played this year. It could be because I invested in a Steam Deck last December instead of a Switch 2 this May, and my beaten games list is woefully Donkey Kong Bananzaless. It could be that I didn’t love Hollow Knight and Hades, so I didn’t run to pick up the sequels. Blue Prince, Shinobi and Rift of the NecroDancer didn’t land for me either. Metroid Prime 4 was on this list for a while, and the more I played it, the deeper it sank. Anyway, this is all to say I won’t be limiting myself with the writeups below. Still, I made a list of 2025 games for posterity:
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Peak
Split Fiction
Gradius Origins
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
Promise Mascot Agency
Borderlands 4
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound
Mario Kart World
Pokemon Legends: ZA
Pile of Shame: Donkey Kong Bananza, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, R-Type Delta HD, Cabernet, Cast n Chill, Ghost of Yotei
Showing 1-10 of 12 items
Inspired by the Giant Bomb video series titled ‘Metal Gear Scanlon,’ where Drew Scanlon played through the Metal Gear series with Dan Ryckert as his dubious advisor, a buddy and I played through a few MGS games back in college. A few years later, I would actually watch the Metal Gear Scanlon boys play MGS1. Then, in 2020, I beat The Twin Snakes all by myself (and even placed it at #6 on that GOTY list). Finally, I played the 1998 original via the Master Collection. It’s still good the fourth time. The layout of Shadow Moses Island sticks in my head easily. It helps that you get an interesting new boss fight every third room. I’m not a huge stealth guy, but MGS1 only plays like a stealth game 15 percent of the time. The rest is story, codec calls, boss fights, “puzzle” rooms, and forced combat encounters like the two towers. It’s a game that understands pacing, and I think it’d be fun to run through, even if I was skipping the story. …Obviously I didn’t skip the story on this fourth run though. How else would I know how to contact Meryl?
This game had such a stranglehold on me for a week. I’d die to some unfair enemy spawn, or somewhere far away from the church where you respawn and I’d just go ‘well, I gotta get back over there, or go grind more I should definitely grind more.’ And then I grinded more. But the grinding was pretty fast; it wasn’t dreadful or time-consuming like we typically think when we talk about grinding in modern games. The overworld was fun to navigate, without becoming much of a headache, though I did resort to a gamefaqs guide eventually. (Shoutout to Matt Toothman’s guide @ .) I also came to really respect the old password system. I can bring my save with me wherever as long as I have the right string of text. No need to move a .sav file around, or convert it to what the right emulator wants, or put it in the right directory. I dunno, I feel like NES RPGs have this reputation as being clunky, slow, and generally not worth engaging with until they receive a remake. As someone whose favorite Fire Emblem game is one of those remakes, it was easy to just assume that to be true while I heard similar opinions from the subreddit and miscellaneous FE YouTubers. I was impressed when I finally went back to Fire Emblem 1 a few years ago via Nintendo’s strangely limited time localization. Some UFO 50 games, which try to capture the NES aesthetic and feeling, are awesome. This Faxanadu game I heard about from one Booty Bopper really landed for me somehow. I hope this paragraph reads as a formal apology to the NES, a platform with a library I’ve clearly been sleeping on. Nintendo Entertainment System, you’re looking great these days.
If it wasn’t for PS Plus Essential giving me Balatro this May, I probably would have continued to be afraid to try it due to its genre. I don’t often gel with the loop of the rogue-type game, and I can be pretty wary of them, even when the praise surrounding them seems universal. But thanks to Sony charging me $80 a year to access multiplayer and have limited access to basic save management, I got a chance to play this $15 game for free! And it turns out that all those people who were warning about how addictive this game can be were on to something. My Playstation Wrap-Up this year claims it’s my third most-played PS4/5 game this year, weighing in at 104 hours. One round of Balatro is like watching a movie. For the first few ante’s you’re not quite sure what to make of it, as you try to latch on to something that interests you or gives you an advantage. By the middle, you’ve made some connections and you’re invested. By the end, you’ve brought all your synergies together and you’ve kicked Ante 8’s ass. Between Ante 9 and 10, you’re watching the credits and if you’re proud of your build, you keep going. You might even delude yourself into thinking this will go on for a while. And then the theater staff turn the lights on at Ante 11 and encourage you to leave. ‘You’ve had your fun. Please go home,’ they plead silently. And that’s where the analogy breaks, because I often play another round of Balatro then.
What a rad fucking co-op game. That loud guy who wrote and directed it was right. You do fuck shit up and do cool shit in it. They were constantly changing up what you and your co-op partner are doing and it never felt boring. Even when the game halted with some cutscene reminding you about its boiler plate story, it still acted as a vehicle for fun banter with your buddy. The side story levels are the epitome of this, changing the vibes and means of action entirely for a few minutes. Shifting from a harsh Cyberpunk action level into a laid-back piggy farm section was perfect. Similar sections with the supernova and the wizard village also impressed me. I'm glad my friend brought his Hazelight enthusiasm to me, having only played Brothers some years back. I definitely get the hype surrounding this studio now.
Look, I know what you've been thinking this whole read. A top 10 is the universal standard for GOTY lists. 9 or 11 are pushing it in either direction already. 12?! Are you kidding me? Who does this mother fucker think he is? I finished this game last night, and it ends strong, and I have to express that here *somehow*. Though, I'm not sure how. This is one of those games where describing anything it excels at feels like a spoiler. The House in Fata Morgana can be a dreary read, and the ‘time to payoff’ keeps it from being an easy recommendation for me. But if you like games that make you feel sad, buddy, do I have something for you. There’s something uncanny about the portraits, like there’s strange lines and symbols embedded in some backgrounds, and the music ends without looping naturally. It gives the game an appropriately dissonant vibe. I don’t think I’ve experienced anything quite like Fata.
Shmups, or shoot-em-ups (if you're a gentleman), are a genre I've wanted to get into for a while, but couldn't find my entry point. Galaga feels stiff and repetitive, I couldn’t figure out the economy of Fantasy Zone, and I bounced off of ZeroRanger somehow (I should try that one again). I'm thankful then, to this year's release of Gradius Origins, for allowing me to try out 6 old Gradius games with new goo-goo baby easy modes. I was able to beat Gradius 1, Gradius 2, the bad ending of Salamander 1, the completely original to this collection Salamander 3, and above all, Salamander 2. What a cool fuckin burst of audio-visual flare. Salamander 2 looks stunning on my Steam Deck OLED (particularly the second level with the raging fires against the harsh blacks of space), and the soundtrack propels the levels fantastically. It's a great 25 minute video game that crescendos with a final boss that scared me like I've never been scared before. It kept me coming back until I 1CC'd the easy mode. I've even tried a few times to 1CC normal mode, and I plan on putting in more attempts in the new year.
This, or Infinite Wealth, is my favorite yakuza game. It could be that this is the last Yakuza game I've played except for Yakuza Pirates in Hawaii, which, while fun, is certainly not in the running. I really liked the fast pace of this one. Every scene was meaningful, the chapters go by fast, and they never stop and force you to do a large scale minigame to progress the story. I beat the game with minimal Majima interference, and while I do like the guy, I didn't miss him enough to get off the campaign roller-coaster. I go back and forth on whether I think the mechanics of the brawling are “good” or not, but man, does it feel good sometimes. When you fucking deck some loser and you see spit fly from his mouth, or you do *any* heat action and it looks like Kazuma Kiryu just necessitated a five figure hospital bill for whoever his unlucky victim is. I could watch the cutscene of Kiryu kicking some goon through a door to open the next room a thousand times. And I'm in luck, ‘cause there's like 12 of these games.
I love video game climbing. I tolerate a lot of unpolished Assassin’s Creed games to get to the part where you ascend some immaculately rendered building, and look out over and see how small pedestrians on the street look between lesser buildings beneath an often beautifully crafted horizon. Peak doesn't push polygons quite like Assassin’s Creed II, but their horizons have the chance to be accompanied by your friend falling from a higher cliff to who knows how far down, all while proximity chat makes a Doppler Effect out of their yells. I don’t play many survival games. I can be pretty goal-oriented when I play games, and open-ended objectives like ‘don’t die,’ ‘build a base,’ or ‘expand your base’ just don’t excite me. With Peak, the goal is simple. Get to the top of the mountain. And do it without getting severely hurt, hungry, cold, hot or poisoned. Now, you’ve got something there.
I played some Elden Ring back in 2022, and it made my list that year, but I never finished the game. I got to Astel earlier than my gear and level were prepared for and got demolished over and over. I eventually prevailed, but all the wind had been taken out of my sails. At the time, there was a lot of talk that Elden Ring was great, but lost its steam in the back half anyway, so it was easy for me to remove the disc from my PS5 and be done with it then. I started a new character in 2024, and finally saw that run to credits in January this year, and boy. The back half of that game is somehow even better than the first half. On one hand, I get where those complainers were coming from. The damage balancing for some of those later fights tends to be hard, in some bullshity ways, and once you’ve hit level 10 or 30 on your weapon, there isn’t an easy way to RPG out-damage the enemies you’re fighting. But it’s such a beautiful game that I don’t care if the guy who’s job it is to manage sliders didn’t always do his job right. The Brace of the Haligtree and Farum Azula are art. Praetor Rykard is one of my favorite fights in video games. Malenia is extremely cool. The final boss asks ‘what if the last encounter of Breath of the Wild was good?’ I dunno guys, just use the Godskin Peeler to shred health bars while the Mimic Tear distracts the boss.
I may not have dedicated GOTY space to Genshin since it topped my 2020 list, but that doesn't mean I've stopped playing it. It's been my most played Playstation game every year since, and at this point, I've certainly lost more time to Genshin than Skyrim. Last year's Natlan storyline and strange inclusion of Donkey Kong Country style animal friends failed to grab me, but this year's content was particularly enthralling. I loved spending time with Hu Tao in this year's Lantern Rite, the new open world area in the volcano was jaw-dropping, and the new Nod-Krai content is some of the best in the game's history. Hisii Island is one of my new favorite locations, and I love the cobbled-together hodgepodge that is Nasha Town. The new Stygian Onslaught endgame mode has absolutely stolen full nights away from me that I didn't intend to lose. But even as I looked at the clock and thought “I have to put this down,” I couldn't help myself from trying to optimize runs *just* enough to squeak out a win. I'm not putting Genshin, or Elden Ring, at the tippy top of the list this year to celebrate games that I played fully, for the first time this year. But man, these games are all-timers. You, reading this now, should go play Genshin. It's free.
