Several Games of the Year: 2025

Here’s the thing: every year is a weird year for gaming. If you had asked me in 2024, or 2023, or 2013, or 1996, I probably would have said they were strange years in the industry as well. 2025 has seen Saudi Arabian buyouts as we continue to steer ourselves into monopolies. Xbox all but outright saying they don’t care about gaming anymore. Tariffs have loomed over hardware costs as much as generative AI have loomed over development pipelines. Studios have shuttered, critical outlets have changed for the worse (and better).

All while the world outside devolves into what I can only politely describe as chaos, I still found myself enraptured by stories, worlds and hooks built by people that clearly give a shit about their art.

Games don’t exist in a vacuum; they exist wrapped in the context of our lives. Games that make me laugh the hardest aren’t more or less important than the ones that make me lie awake at night, deep in thought, or the ones that cause me to regress into the oblivious joy of being a child again. Rather than a ranking, here are some games that meant something to me in 2025.

2026’s 2025 Game of the Year:
Dispatch

At the time of writing, I am just past the halfway point of my first playthrough of Dispatch, the superhero send-‘em-out from former TellTale Games developers, but it’s completely grabbed me. The conceit of the game is simple; you guide your ragtag group of former evildoers into a cohesive team of do-gooders by matching their ever-increasing skills to the problem at hand and turning them into a found family through dialogue choices.

The point-and-click nature of Dispatch’s progenitors was fine, but the hacking and assigning gameplay have hooked me completely. The writing is charming, funny, and emotional. The voice acting is incredible. The art and animation are gorgeous. And the universe is already deeply compelling. It hits every note that makes a game appealing to me. The fact that I’m calling this my first playthrough is telling of how much I’m enjoying this twist of the superhero tale. The same thing made James Gunn’s Superman a hit over the summer - heart. Heart that holds up a mirror to your own emotions and relationships.

While I can’t talk about it as completely as I would like, the game seems like an absolute triumph - if they stick the landing.

Nostalgia of the Year:
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater

Anyone who knows me well knows that Metal Gear Solid is - quite possibly - my favourite thing. Third-person action games with a strong story have always appeared at the top of any ‘best of’ list. Uncharted and The Last Of Us, Splinter Cell, Grand Theft Auto, God of War, Horizon, Alan Wake and Red Dead Redemption to me are all masterpieces in their own right. Metal Gear Solid has always stood head and shoulders above the rest, not only for its wild story, but for how it both subverts the expectations of the game player and its reverence for techno philosophy and pop-culture. Metal Gear Solid 1 taught me that video games can be more than sprites and platformers. Sons of Liberty not only ruminates on the concept of a sequel, but its talk of societal data control resonates more in 2025 than ever. Guns of the Patriots is fan service at its best, and The Phantom Pain completed the series narrative loop to perfection while philosophising on the concept of self (despite its nonsensical talk of Wolbachia). MGS 3, compared to the rest, is just special.

When Hideo Kojima unceremoniously left Konami, I was crushed that we would not get any more from gaming’s first auteur, and over the years, I had resigned myself to the fact that the Metal Gear saga was over. When Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater hit store shelves earlier this year after years of replaying rereleases, I was curious but nervous, especially after the lack of Kojima involvement and after 2018’s interestingMetal Gear Survive. Delta however, gives players a faithful recreation of the 2004 game while updating it to be playable in 2025. Not only does it deliver remade visuals with object/injury permanence, high resolutions and frame rates, but it also introduces quality of life improvements and control scheme updates. Now my incessant arguments to convince friends to play the series might actually work. It feels old in good ways to not turn off fans, and serves as a great introduction to new players wanting to start with one of gaming’s wildest stories and most ingenious gameplay loops and situations.

Combine the rerelease with my trip to watch a philharmonic orchestra play a 2-hour selection of the soundtrack at the Royal Albert Hall this year and the Christmas gift of the Metal Gear Solid Vinyl Selections and I’m back on my bullshit. I’m already internally speculating about the future of the franchise, not for new games, but once again to be caught up in its world. MGS4 needs to escape the PlayStation 3, and I need an excuse to play it again.

Small Game of the Year:
Thank Goodness You’re Here

Thank Goodness You’re Here released in 2024, but I didn’t actually get to it until earlier this year. You, a tiny yellow travelling salesman, arrive in the Yorkshire town of Barnsworth and begin to assist its residents as you explore. You’ll start by just mowing a lawn and before long you are investigating the meat dimension inside a wedge of ham. You run, jump and slap your way through a series of increasingly wild skits pulled straight from ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’.

Its roughly three hour runtime is a tight tour of weird ideas, word play, sight gags and absurd British humour. Quite possibly one of the funniest games ever made and accessible enough to play that anyone can enjoy it. Instead of watching another terrible comedy movie - boot this up instead.

Japanese Sword Fighting Game of the Year:
Ghost of Yotei

I needed an excuse to talk about how enthralled I was playing Ghost of Yotei. Then the PlayStation year in review reminded me that I actually played Assassin’s Creed: Shadows for longer.

At least a decade ago, I wrote an article that is probably somewhere in some website’s CMS about how Ubisoft games have become rote. Climb the tower and icons pop up on the map. Go to the icon, fight the dude, your completion percentage goes up a notch. I loved Watch Dogs 2 and AC: Odyssey and I have a fascination with Japanese culture and history but the story of Naoe just did not grab me. While the game is gorgeous and the best entry in the series for a few years, it’s simultaneously shallow in its basic gameplay loop and bloated in how many systems live at your fingertips.

Ghost of Yotei however clicked. I enjoyed its Tsushima prequel, but at the time I was dreaming of The Last of Us 2 and so it came across my desk and was swiftly forgotten. Another story of Jin might have got me back in, but the new, smaller revenge story of Atsu had me from the first scene. The game’s combat makes you feel like a supreme bad ass, whether it’s stealthing around a base, parrying and dodging around a group of enemies or slicing up foes in a standoff. As you move through the world, you’ll be exposed to new weapons and tools at the right pace. The mission and enemy types never cause any boredom.

Two things make Yotei stand above most others this year. Every direction in which you point the camera, you’re presented with a stunning vista worthy of Tenshō Shūbun or Katsushika Hokusai. This is then compounded by the incredible attention to detail in the animation. Taking each weapon out of its holster somehow has weight with the ōdachi in particular being thrown into the air, before being able to properly grasp it because of its length. Flicking the touchpad after a sword fight results in Atsu flicking the blood off her sword, then sheathing it and pausing to pose for a split second. Instant Aura. Ghost of Yotei is further proof that PlayStation Studios is a hit factory when it comes to character-driven adventures.

Emotions of the Year:
and Rodger

A story about love, loss, perseverance and pain while subverting your expectations about how interactivity and stories are handled in video games. There will be no spoilers here; you just have to carve out two hours and let it envelop you. An hour to play and an hour to recover.

Back in 2013, I began to hear (and agree with) arguments that the industry had matured through experiences like Gone Home and Depression Quest, and, while there is always room for Doom and Call of Duty, and Rodger is further proof that video games are a medium capable of poetry, art, and emotion.

Purchase of the Year:
Steam Deck

2025 has been a year where handheld gaming has really come to the forefront. I mean sure, the Gameboy has been around since 1989 and Wii U gamepad started a revolution* that no one knew about, but this has been the year that curling up on the couch with a game has truly been embedded in the zeitgeist. PlayStation Portals finally have cloud streaming, Xbox teamed up with ROG, the Switch 2 pretty much solved much of the hardware issue of its predecessor, devices like the Thor have become open doors to easy emulation. I, however, purchased a Steam Deck 3 years later than everyone else and it’s been a revelation.

I’ve always been of the opinion that PC gaming is exclusively for The Sims, Civilization and updating drivers. Indie games like Balatro or What The Golf lived on GamePass or on my phone and were played in sessions cut short by TV time or text messages. I absolutely didn’t need another games console to sit alongside the twelve others in my house which are plugged in and ready to go - my backlog of games is long enough. I finally found a great deal on a refurbished 512GB LCD model. Upon unpacking it had not a mark on it and 100% battery health. “Oh no, someone else hasn’t had any use of this. I probably won’t either”. However, I soon found myself eliminating the social media endless scroll to replay games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Max Payne 3. I picked up a dock and began using the Linux based desktop mode to tinker with emulation bouncing between Snatcher and the fan made translation of Mother 3. It’s turned into a discovery tool for Steam’s endless treasure trove of indie games - like Vampire Survivors and Heartbound - that have always lived firmly in the realm of I’d like to give that a go at some point, but just felt too small for long sessions in front of my TV.

Yes, I may be late to the party - especially now Valve have announced a more traditional console - but a device that I can take anywhere and that is just really good at playing games and nothing else now lives alongside my iPod, my record player and my bookshelf as devices that remove distractions and return me to a dedicated experience. I can grab and go, kill 10 minutes of spare time or spend an entire evening moving between comforting nostalgia and new experiences while leaving anything 4K and 60 frames to my PlayStation 5.

*(I’m deeply serious about the WiiU thing. Second screen experiences, off TV play, some of the best Nintendo Games of all time. Look at the button layout of the gamepad and the Steam Deck and tell me it wasn’t ahead of its time. Most underrated console and I will fight you for this opinion)

Emergent Gameplay of the Year:
Arc Raiders

Gaming in your 30s is very different from your younger years. As a preteen, I’d be button-mashing through Mortal Kombat or Mario and swapping warp pipe and/or fatality tips in the playground. As a teenager, I’d be found on someone else’s couch passing controllers back and forth playing Burnout, Mario Kart, Timesplitters or Guitar Hero. The third decade of life was defined by midweek multiplayer sessions before peeling off to become invested in dozens of hours of Fallout, Uncharted and Grand Theft Auto IV. As I entered the fourth decade the pandemic brought us all online and now the biggest games in the world are your Fortnites, Valorants, GTA Onlines, Warzones. Most of my gamer group decided to go have mortgages and kids leaving money and time short and I then fell off playing games online. All this is to say that it took me too long to commit to my purchase of Arc Raiders, the online-only extraction shooter from Embark Studios, and I wish I had jumped in sooner.

The hook of Arc Raiders is a PvPvE experience that has you rooting through boxes and cabinets for better bits to make gear, exploring the maps to complete quests and getting into confrontations with a wide variety of robots and an even wider variety of players. The loop keeps you engaged with your available and craftable gear consistently evolving and improving your stats and confidence level in taking down progressively bigger machines. The frustration of a wipe is matched in equal measure with celebrations at successes, the “just one more round”, or “I got this next time”. Just when you think you’ve got the hang of taking down a rocketeer, a tick will attach itself to your face, you die, and you lose the fantastic Anvil you’ve been using. You jump from sneaking around avoiding confrontation and bigger, badder robots, to teaming up with strangers to try to trap a leaper, then watching your back as you find the ground littered with corpses.

The killer feature of Arc Raiders is this gameplay loop and the resulting stories that appear out of nowhere. I’ve teamed up with strangers to take down killer machines, celebrating and swapping loot over its corpse. I’ve been in a Mexican standoff with other raiders because somebody got hit with a stray bullet. I’ve gone in with full gear, only to succumb to a basic machine gun attached to a drone. I’ve guided other players to places I know there is solid scrap. I’ve scavenged a battlefield after a fight while wondering what on earth happened. I’ve sniped people who have been picking on a raider. I’ve been in an ammo-less pry bar fight over mushrooms. The Arc Raiders community has been an endless series of backstabbing, hero moments and wacky misadventures.

These, and stories like them, are the new sofa gatherings, the new playground cheat codes. The rumours that run through the online community are the new my uncle works for Nintendo. The systems the developers built turn even the shortest sessions into stories worth sharing and make strangers feel like friends—at least when I’m not trying to grief them.

Nintendo Thing of the Year:
Donkey Kong Bananza

The Switch 2 has had a pretty good release year. Even though it is, for all intents and purposes, a pro model Switch, and has game box art that makes physical collectors nauseous, the persistent drip of games has been great. Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, Pokemon ZA, Hyrule Warriors, Kirby AirRiders, and Metroid Prime 4 have been the tentpoles with GameCube releases and Switch 2 upgrades peppered in for added flavour. The Nintendo thing of the year award is partially because I needed an excuse to talk about those games and couldn’t think of any other way to title this section, but also because Nintendo is content carving out its own large niche in the industry while maintaining, for the most part, the highest and most consistent quality bar of any major publisher.

Pokemon ZA is the first Pokemon game where I’ve actually gone on to catch ‘em all since Red. Mario Kart World took me back to my teenage years when setting up an evening of pizza, beer and kart racing with my closest friends on the evening before one of their weddings. I even finished Luigi’s Mansion for the first time despite owning it for 20 years. However, Donkey Kong Bananza not only takes advantage of the Switch 2’s new hardware, but also feels so good.

Its core conceit is working your way through to the centre of the world to stop spoilers plan. However, what makes the game stand out from its peers is the smashing mechanic. Swinging fists and pounding the ground as you move through levels gives the platforming an extra level of interest compared to other contemporary platformers. It feels almost as good as snapping on the new magnetic joy-cons.

While the destruction is glorious, its visuals and environments also prove it’s the new console’s killer app. The story is surprisingly charming and sweet for a game about a giant monkey. Roll in Pauline’s abilities and the transformation skills, and you have a game that does a great job of bringing Donkey Kong forward beyond its recent formula, celebrating the joy of discovery and showing that Nintendo is always incredible at reinventing the wheel.