AtheistPreacher’s Favorite Games of 2025

Well. Here we are. Brand new website. Exciting!

I’ve got fourteen games for my list this year, including ten that were actually released in 2025. The other four are games that I either happened to play for the first time this year, or live services games that I went back to. So if you want my “released in 2025” top ten, you can just lop off the four older entries.

If you notice some big titles missing, well, there are plenty of 2025 releases that I did not buy this year and plan to get around to eventually when a good sale hits (I’ve gotten a bit better over the years at ignoring FOMO and playing more of my gigantic backlog instead). So I haven’t touched Clair Obscur, Hell is Us, Shinobi, Sektori, or Sword of the Sea, but I’ll probably get around to them in the next few years.

Finally, worth noting that because the new site currently restricts “community articles” to ten images apiece, not all of my entries will have a picture. I hope that at some point this limit can be increased a bit!

14. Borderlands 4 (2025)

My experience with the Borderlands series maps pretty neatly, I think, onto the cultural zeitgeist’s perception of it: I adored the first and second games and played the hell out of them, then was unimpressed by The Pre-Sequel, and only middling on Borderlands 3 and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (the latter of which I got on a deep discount well after release).

But it had been long enough that when Borderlands 4 came around this year and was getting fairly positive buzz, I decided I was ready for more of Gearbox’s nonsense. And in the end Borderlands 4 was... fine? It didn’t exactly blow me away, but then I never expected it to. It’s a perfectly competent one of those (for the most part), and I enjoyed the time I spent with it pursuing ever-shinier loot. I could go into somewhat granular detail about the gameplay and mechanics, but I don’t think I really need to... everyone pretty much knows what these games are by now.

My main annoyance with it is that essentially none of the progression you make carries over between characters, even stuff that plainly should (like number of bank slots, since the bank itself is shared between characters), which makes the idea of playing around with a different character seem like more of a chore than a good time, despite there being a level skip to 30. I’d gone in thinking I’d play a couple of different ones but ended up sticking with my Harlowe.

Even though there’s a bunch of DLC planned, I’m not sure that I’ll play Borderlands 4 much beyond this year. It falls squarely into the category of a game I enjoyed well enough but don’t feel much inclined to follow the long tail. Maybe I’ll check in after a few years and it will have improved a bit!

13. Battlefield 6 (2025)

I don’t consider myself much of a competitive shooter person. I mostly gravitate toward single-player games, with some cooperative multiplayer thrown in on occasion with my friend group. Nonetheless I have gotten deep into exactly five competitive shooters in my life that I played for hundreds of hours each, and three of them were Battlefield games: Quake 2 (1997), Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (2010), Battlefield 3 (2011), Battlefield 1 (2016), and Overwatch (2016).

Though it had been about a decade since I’d bought a competitive online shooter that I enjoyed, this seemed like the time. And much as with Borderlands 4, I came away thinking that it was a perfectly fine one of those, though certainly not without its problems.

For one, I played through the single-player campaign out of a twisted sense of obligation, and it was as boring as all the critics had said it was. For another, the rate of unlocking “attachments” for your guns is absurdly slow, and seems geared toward getting people to buy XP boosters just to make it more bearable. Maybe they were just wanting to give people something to grind on, but some attachments make such a huge difference (like thermal scopes and silencers) that once I finished ranking up my gun of choice for each class, it made me want to just stick with those few weapons and not bother with the alternatives at all.

Nonetheless, one thing I’ve always appreciated about the Battlefield games is that there are ways to contribute to your team’s success that have nothing to do with twitch shooting reflexes (which has never been a strength of mine, and has not improved now that I’m in my 40s), and for which the game will appropriately reward you, score-wise. For example, the Recon class has a drone that can do nothing except “spot” enemy soldiers, putting an orange mark above their heads for all your teammates. It’s a ridiculously helpful thing to do for your team, and you also get points every time a teammate kills an enemy that you spotted. Do enough drone spotting and you can easily end up among the top point-getters on your team, above people who have dozens more kills... as in this game, in which I was behind in points only to one other guy who was droning even harder than I was.

I also enjoy the objective-driven nature of these games. Again, I consider myself to be average at best at the actual shooting part, but I often do just fine score-wise (and actual team contribution-wise) simply by, in the community’s parlance, PTFO-ing (i.e., playing the fucking objective). Like every other Battlefield game, each match always seems to have its share of dudes who set up a million miles away with a sniper rifle or are otherwise more interested in getting kills and in their K/D ratio than in actually playing the objective, and mostly they don’t accomplish much. So it’s nice to be able to be able to play a competitive shooter in which I feel I can contribute without being a twitch reflex monster.

12. Crime Simulator (2025)

I almost did a whole blog on this game but just couldn’t find the time. Despite having the word “simulator” in the title, which often signals that a game is hot garbage (boy are there a lot of shovelware “simulator” games these days), this game is actually fun, well-designed, and thoughtful in its mechanics.

My brother turned me onto it after seeing the Nextlander crew playing it and then giving it a shot himself. He had gotten really into Payday 2 (much more so than me) and then followed that up by playing Payday 3 and Crime Boss: Rockay City, and he thought that Crime Simulator looked similar to these games while being all stealth and no combat. I was hesitant at first, since I had gotten bored of the Payday formula and wasn’t sure I wanted to play anything similar. But in the end, Crime Simulator won me over.

The basic premise is that you are a criminal who has been sprung from prison by some shadowy figure who is forcing you to steal enough stuff to pay off your debt for being freed. Every three days you’ve got a quota for stolen stuff that you have to meet, or else your captor murders you, and you get to start all over again. The game is a rogue-lite in the sense that you can get permanent upgrades and buffs that persist between runs.

The game doesn’t give an awesome first impression, due largely to the fact that it doesn’t really explain some fairly crucial mechanics very clearly. For instance, if you’re opening a cupboard or drawer, you need to hold the “open” button in order to do a silent open, while a tap will make noise that could alert nearby NPCs. Another one is that each neighborhood has a roaming police officer who normally won’t be hostile toward you, but if the police are “on alert,” he will attack you on sight. It can lead to new players feeling like they’re being spotted or chased for no discernible reason.

But once you’ve got the basics down and, also crucially, have leveled up a couple of times and earned some of the more important skills, Crime Simulator really becomes an enjoyable time. One of the great design decisions is that NPCs will only ever move at the top of the hour, meaning that if you keep your eye on the clock, you’ll never be surprised by an NPC walking in on you as you’re trying to carry their TV out the door. This is supplemented by what has to be the game’s most important skill, Perception 1, which allows you to see NPC “routes” in advance. In this way you can see exactly where NPCs plan to move in the next couple of hours and plan accordingly.

(I’ll note as a funny aside that it seems deeply silly that all your criming is taking place at night, presumably because most people should be sleeping, and yet all the NPCs in these houses seem to be night owls who are up at all hours. Doesn’t make much sense, but really, if the NPCs weren’t there as obstacles then it wouldn’t be a very interesting game.)

There’s a plethora of stuff you can do to make your own life easier. Some of it is the aforementioned character skills and “world upgrades” that persist between runs. Other bonuses, like “golden cards” (looted in the world) only last for your current run, but can be quite powerful. You can get golden cards that will cut store equipment prices by 25%, or that make NPCs ignore open doors, or that make police alerts go away more quickly. And when you’ve really put in some time you can get some items that almost trivialize a lot of the content, like a silenced pistol to straight-up kill NPCs (though bullets and gun repair costs are so expensive that it’s best used judiciously), and an electronic hacking tool that can remotely disable alarm systems.

One other design decision really tickles me. While you have to meet your quota to your captor every three days, any loot exceeding that amount can be stashed in your hideout for later, and will even persist between successful runs. You can end up being so wildly successful and having stashed so much stuff at your hideout that you can complete an entire new run just by turning in loot that you’ve collected in prior runs without going out to steal any new items at all. I ended up playing this game for north of 60 hours, and the amount of stolen stuff I’m hoarding just makes me cackle.

Meanwhile the solo indie developer is continuing to add to the game. When I playing the game around mid-year there were only two major neighborhood areas to steal stuff from, as well as a smaller “secret” military base. Since then a new neighborhood has been added, as well as the ability to steal cars, and an upcoming patch will also add expansion options for your hideout.

All in all, Crime Simulator was one of my favorite out-of-left-field surprise games of the year. I had no idea it existed and wasn’t even sure it would be my thing when I discovered it, but I sure ended up having a good time with it.

11. Diablo IV (2023)

Diablo IV continues to exist and continues (generally speaking) to improve. It’s certainly a much better experience than it was at release two-and-a-half years ago now. I’d written a blog about its improvements in the middle of last year which got bumped recently, and a lot of what I said there still stands, although some of it has been changed further.

I played a couple of the seasons this year and had a pretty great time, even managing to rope in my friends for season nine. One change since last I played that I really appreciate is that mythic items (the purples) are no longer so rare as to be completely out of reach, which allowed me to put together some builds that felt even more powerful than what I’d been able to get previously.

But I do have to say that for me there’s a bit of a fly in the ointment here. Blizzard is clearly all-in on the seasonal model to the extent that they just don’t seem to care at all about wrecking the persistent, non-seasonal (“Eternal Realm”) characters. They’ve already done two complete overhauls of the gear system that, after implementation, bricked all old equipment as “legacy items,” decreasing their power to the point of uselessness.

In previous Diablo games I’d never played seasons and instead stuck to the persistent characters... I’d rather continue to play with a finished character than have to start from scratch all the time. And with yet another gear overhaul set to make old equipment useless once again on December 9th (for the third time in less than three years), I’m starting to feel like Blizzard doesn’t really respect my time. I’d like to be able to dip back in on occasion and enjoy the fruits of my labor, but they’re making that impossible.

Still, if you don’t mind the seasonal, start-from-scratch-every-time model and have copious amounts of time to burn, then I’d say the game has largely just continued to get better. Just don’t expect that seasonal character of yours to be worth anything after the current season ends.

10. Peak (2025)

Peak was one of those games that seemed to come out of nowhere and suddenly take over everything. For a while it seemed like it was the only game that anyone was playing. I might have passed on it myself if a friend hadn’t gotten into it and gifted me a copy. And yeah, it’s a fun time. I played it somewhat intensely for a week or so, and then would do the odd run every now and again throughout the year. I like that it’s an easy game to just jump back into. Steam tells me that I clocked 36 hours on it.

I could go into more detail, but, uhhh, I think everyone pretty much knows what this game is, right? If somehow you don’t, check out GB, Nextlander, and Remap playing it. You’ll get the gist pretty quickly!

9. Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (2019)

I have to start this one off with a bit of a funny story.

I originally bought a PS4 disc copy of The Division 2 about six months after its release in 2019. And though I ended up playing it for over a hundred hours and very much enjoyed myself, I couldn’t get any of the DLC to work. I ended up getting said DLC refunded from Sony—a painful process, since this stuff is supposed to be non-refundable, but for me it literally didn’t work. It was only around a year later when I wanted to play the NY expansion that I realized that the reason the DLC wasn’t working was that Amazon had mistakenly sent me a PAL version of the game. It would run on my region 1 PS5 just fine, but the DLC was considered as being for a different game entirely. I ended up just buying it again digitally from the PS store. Sigh.

Fast forward to this year. I hadn’t played the game in half a decade, but my brother got the sudden urge for a shooter and decided Division 2 was it. He got it on PC, and I ended up getting a PC copy of my own (my third purchase of this game!). Along with a few friends, we got pretty deep back into the game and I ended up logging 180 hours on it in 2025. They’d made a lot of improvements, including lots of ways to better target the loot you were looking for. I’ve always been a sucker for color-coded loot, and The Division 2 does it about as well as any other game while having great-feeling core shooting. I much prefer it the Destiny games, which I was always lukewarm on and haven’t touched in ages.

It probably helped that I did all of my playing during a season in which the seasonal powers pretty much exactly complemented the playstyle that I wanted to use anyway. Since The Division has always been a bit bullet-spongy at higher levels, I went with a crit-focused “Negotiator” build that essentially allowed me to use my 60% critical hit chance with LMGs to deal damage to multiple enemies at once, and also light them on fire. The seasonal abilities gave this funny “momentum” meter that filled with critical hits, so that I was constantly at max strength for my skills even though I hadn’t invested anything into them, gear-wise.

Anyway, I could go into more detail about my build and why the seasonal mechanics complemented it so well, but suffice it to say that it was the right moment to jump back in. I may even pick it up again soon and see what the newest season has to offer.

8. Road to Empress I (2025)

I first saw a bit of this when the Remap Radio crew began streaming their playthrough. It looked like something I might enjoy, so I stopped watching the stream and bought the game for myself.

Actually, even buying the thing on Steam was a funny deal. You can buy the game itself for $8.49, and a small DLC for $0.99... or you can buy the bundle of both of them together for $7.11, which is less than if you bought the main game all on its lonesome. Not sure what that’s about, but OK!

The first thing you need to understand about this game is that, although it touts having over a hundred endings, your choices really don’t give you any scope to change the core through-plot. That’s because the game is loosely based on China’s only female sovereign, Wu Zetian, who reigned from 690–705. Hence, while at first blush you might think that you’ll be able to (for instance) romance any of the three princes, in the end there’s only one way this story can go.

That’s not to say your choices don’t matter. They do! However, most of those hundred endings that the game brags about are just you dying horribly or being banished very shortly after making a wrong choice (with the occasional “good” alternative ending, in which you are successful in some other career). Upon getting a bad ending, you can easily jump back into the timeline right to the moment of said wrong choice and just choose something else. Since you aren’t meaningfully punished for failure, your choices end up feeling a bit hollow.

All that being said, the fact that the narrative is so linear and lacks any real alternate paths didn’t really bother me at all. That’s because the production values and level of polish on this thing are off-the-charts good. The sets, the costumes, the actors, the writing, the music, the cinematography, even the idle shots while waiting for character choices, all of it is basically faultless. I don’t know how much this game cost to make, but it sure looks expensive as hell.

While I still tend to gravitate more toward games that are gameplay-focused—usually action games of one stripe or another—I have a hard time imagining Road to Empress I meaningfully improving on what it was trying to accomplish as a narrative experience. Aside from the somewhat unfortunate lack of a branching narrative due to the historical source material, it’s basically a perfect FMV game. I’m looking forward to the release of Road to Empress II, which is supposed to come out next year and finish the story.

7. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist (2022)

This game was a part of my attempt this year to play more visual novels, or at least visual novel adjacent games, which I had largely written off previously as not my bag. It’s actually quite a bit more involved than your standard visual novel, balancing a lot of different gameplay elements together. It’s part visual novel, part dating sim, part deck-builder. It even has this weird and cool time travel mechanic going on in which the game will offer you different choices if you’ve seen a particular scene previously... even if you simply reload your save on the same playthrough!

I could go on at great length about this game, but actually, I already have in this blog over here, which clocks in at around 5,000 words. So go and read that if you’d like my more complete thoughts and a bunch of screenshots.

(Note: Sadly, in migrating the blog over to the new site, it is now missing the one embedded video, all of the image with captions— which was 18 out of 23 of them—and all 21 comments. I was sure I had saved an archive.org copy, but... apparently not. Sigh. I hope we will be able to go back to edit and fix these old blogs on the live version of the site at some point. In the meantime, if you want to see that blog with all its now-missing content, you can download an HTML copy I had saved locally here.)

6. Monster Hunter Wilds (2025)

At the end of my 2024 GOTY list, I noted that Monster Hunter Wilds was by far my most anticipated title of 2025. I’m a series devotee who has been playing these games since Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on the PSP, and has played every NA release of the series other than the very first entry on PS2. I was looking forward to the first series entry since World that leveraged the power of decent hardware, rather than being stuck on a handheld or the long-in-the-tooth Switch.

The game’s poor technical performance/optimization and high system requirements were a big story for a while, and as I understand it they’re still not in a great place. But personally, since I had just bought the first high-end PC of my life a few months earlier, that didn’t matter for my RTX 4090 and Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The only way I could get the game’s framerate to significantly dip was to play on native 4K with full ray tracing. Mostly I play on a 1080p monitor with maxed settings and everything runs as smooth as butter. Nice to have a ridiculously overpowered PC.

A bigger disappointment for me was the new story focus in Low Rank. It’s not that it was deeply terrible. Rather, the story was simply very mid, but because of its obtrusiveness, it ended up actually detracting from the overall hunting experience. Low Rank was not only on rails for many hours, but put you into lots of long walk-and-talks which were unskippable and largely uninteresting. I don’t hate the idea of a more robust story, but a story also just isn’t what I come to these games for. If they’re going to focus this much on story, then it either has to be really good, or else get out of the way more than it did. I didn’t feel like I was properly playing a Monster Hunter game until I reached High Rank. And I’m afraid that Capcom took the wrong lesson from the game’s sales success, mixing up correlation and causation. Well, at least I only had to play it once, though if I ever end up playing a second hunter I’m sure I’ll be annoyed anew.

I am also astonished at how needlessly fiddly and complicated the multiplayer systems in these games continue to be. For some reason the MH dev team is just unfathomably terrible at designing smooth and comprehensible multiplayer. No game’s multiplayer systems should be so complicated that they require a 2,000-word IGN guide on how they work. Seriously, my MH dudes, find some devs who actually understand how to do this stuff well when designing the next entry in the series.

Aside from those complaints, Monster Hunter Wilds is a solid title. There was a lot of ink spilled near release over the fact that the game is a bit too easy compared to older entries, but they’ve also added tougher content since release, and also, the inevitable Master Rank expansion—probably coming late next year if I had to guess—has always been where the real challenge lay. The combat overall is as good as it’s ever been, with lots of tweaks large and small to the individual weapons, plus a new system of monster “wounds,” which has mostly worked out pretty well. The MH dev team always tried some big swings with new entries, and a lot of it doesn’t stick, but wounds may be here to stay for future titles, we’ll see!

That Monster Hunter Wilds didn’t end up higher on my list this year is largely down to two factors. First, until the aforementioned Master Rank expansion releases, it’s really only half a game. I mean, I could keep grinding for marginally better talismans, etc., but playing any more right now feels a bit pointless since any new equipment I acquire will immediately become obsolete once MR is here. Second, I think I’m simply suffering from a bit of series fatigue. I’ve played every MH title for at least 200 hours each, and for Iceborne and Sunbreak it was closer to 1,000. I suspect I won’t play much more of it until the expansion hits, and then we’ll see how long I stick with it.

5. Ender Magnolia / Ender Lilies (2025/2021)

Early in the year I was anticipating Monster Hunter Wilds so much that I was feeling a bit bored with video games in general. That being the case, I decided to try playing a somewhat shorter game in my backlog while I was waiting for it. That game ended up being the 2021 Souls-like Metroidvania game Ender Lilies. I enjoyed that one enough that I went ahead and bought the recently released 2025 sequel, Ender Magnolia, which was likewise a delight. Great controls, exploration, combat, music, atmosphere, the whole shebang.

I could go on, but once again I’ve already done so in a blog, so feel free to read that if you want more detail.

4. Lies of P (2023/2025 [DLC])

I didn’t play Lies of P at release even though Souls-likes are exactly my kind of nonsense. That was largely because I was anticipating another such game, Lords of the Fallen, released only a month later (I’d also heard that Lies of P might be a little shorter and slighter experience than I could have wanted). I assumed I would end up buying it eventually when it went on a deep enough sale.

Then it became a free PS+ title this August, so that became my moment. I’m quite certain that the reason it did is that the devs had just put out a large $30 paid expansion for the game in June, and hoped that the glut of folks playing the game for the first time on PS5 would decide to pony up actual cash for the expansion. In my case, that worked exactly how they hoped it would. I hadn’t been playing the game very long before I decided that I was definitely enjoying it enough that I wanted that DLC.

Lies of P is about as close to being a From Software Souls game as can be imagined without actually being made by FS, right down to the UI and the loosely Bloodborne-esque setting. But there are a few things that set it apart.

First, it makes an honest attempt at being a bit more story-centric, and at having that story be a bit more comprehensible overall than what FS has usually done. Part of that is its “humanity” vs. “puppet” system, in which picking the right dialogue choices (usually lying, which puppets aren’t supposed to be able to do), will make your avatar more human (including changes to your physical appearance). There were some genuinely poignant moments in the game, and overall I’d say it was pretty well-done, even though I’m not really in these games for the story.

Second, it has a system in which you can mix and match weapon handles and blades that allows for you to make a Frankenstein’s monster of a weapon, giving you a greater diversity of equipment choices than is apparent at first blush. It’s definitely a neat idea that encourages experimentation, though in practice I ended up looking up discussions online about the best combinations, and settled on a highly recommended one that turned out to be as good as advertised (in case you’re wondering, it was the Bone-Cutting Saw + Bramble Curved Sword handle, which has an absurdly overpowered charge attack).

I don’t think the game is quite top-tier in every aspect. The level design is a bit linear and boring (though there is one DLC area I can think of that overcompensated for the base game’s weakness and become a bit too maze-like), and the bosses are generally big goons that are a little too easy to outmaneuver (generally the bosses are better in inverse proportion to their physical size). I am also annoyed that this dev team has carried forward the FS tradition of creating lots of missable and easily failable side-quests that you can’t possibly know you’re missing or failing until it’s too late.

But what it does well, it really does well. The core combat is excellent, and the atmosphere and vibes are impeccable. The game even encourages you to collect music recordings and play them back at your home base, some of which are rather gorgeous (I was usually looping a track called “Quixotic,” the most hauntingly beautiful of the lot).

Also, kind of a small thing in a sense, but I was impressed that in the DLC they added a bow as a primary weapon that was the first ranged primary weapon in the game, and did it without breaking anything. While the game already contained some ranged “tools” that were limited use, here was a main weapon that was ranged and didn’t need ammunition, and yet ended up feeling pretty balanced with the other weapons. Not the easiest thing to do.

I think it’s interesting to note that in the two years since their original releases, both Lords of the Fallen and Lies of P toned down their difficulty. The former did so by lowering enemy density and straight up making enemies less powerful, while the latter added two difficulty settings with the release of the DLC (there was originally no choice of difficulty) that were both easier than the default. For the most part I liked the difficulty as it was, so I mostly didn’t change it. The one exception, I must admit, is that the final boss of Lies of P’s DLC was so difficult that I ended up lowering the setting for that fight alone (not unlike what I’d done for God of War Ragnarök, in which I played the whole game on the highest difficulty setting and then toned it down solely to beat the optional endgame Valkyrie boss, Gná).

I do think that Lords of the Fallen and Lies of P together are probably the best 3D Souls-like games in existence that weren’t produced by From Software themselves. The former took bigger swings with its dual world system and disappearing bonfires on successive playthrough, while the latter played it a bit safer yet ended up feeling more cohesive and polished. Lords of the Fallen is getting a direct sequel that’s supposed to be released next year, while the studio that put out Lies of P is working on a spiritual successor starring Dorothy of Wizard of Oz fame, though as far as I know there’s no announced release window for that one yet. But I plan to be there on day one for both of those games, since I think these studios have both proved themselves capable of making some really excellent action games.

3. Hades II (2025)

I was late to the party on Hades, playing it about a year after release, and ultimately getting pretty hooked and logging about seventy hours on it. For the sequel I was in on the ground floor in early access. In fact, I put most of my time in with Hades II last year. But I played enough in 2025 to finish the story proper—after it had been patched due to some fan backlash—and earn and play around with some of the hidden aspect weapons that didn’t exist in 2024.

Since I did have occasion this year to return to the original Hades—which I hadn’t played in years—to play a single run, I can confidently say that I think the sequel is, in fact, a better video game. It looks much better graphically, the gameplay and balance and systems changes make sense, it feels even more replayable, etc.

It just doesn’t hit quite as hard due to the very fact that it’s a sequel and we’ve largely seen all this stuff before in a slightly different form. That’s not really the game’s fault. If we had gotten this in 2018–2019 instead of the original game, I’m sure we’d all be just as in love with it as we were with the original.

The one area where it falls down a bit is in its narrative; it just doesn’t really hit as hard for reasons that I won’t spoil here. But other than that, it’s largely a superior experience all-around.

Anyway, Hades II is definitely a game that I’ll remember fondly and will probably be playing the odd run of now and then for years to come.

2. Hollow Knight: Silksong (2025)

Silksong had been inspiring meme-levels of anticipation for literally years now, and 2025 was the year in which the damned thing finally got released. Thankfully, it turned out to be worth the wait.

(Note: I had more here, but ran into some kind of new Community Article character limit. So if you want some of my more detailed thoughts on Silksong, you can look at this forum post of mine [#44]. Not ideal, sorry!)

1. Our Life: Beginnings and Always (2020)

And finally we come to my favorite game I played this year, one that I never could have anticipated would be my #1 game of 2025. If you’d told me last year that a visual novel would be my top game over Monster Hunter Wilds, I probably would have laughed, or at least smiled and raised an eyebrow in bemusement.

The fact is that Our Life: Beginnings and Always hit me in the feels like no video game ever had before. I cried more than once, and I’m not normally a big crier for media in general. It’s not completely without flaws, but it’s got more love and heart in it than any other game I’ve experienced. I liked it so much that it kicked off my further experimentation this year with other visual novel games in general. Nonetheless, I’m doubtful that any other game of any type will have the same kind of emotional impact that this one did, at least not anytime soon.

I wrote a gigantic ~7,500-word blog on Our Life, so if you want my full thoughts, I’d encourage you to read that. But more than that, I’d encourage you to simply give the game a whirl yourself, since the base game is actually 100% free (though some of the paid DLC, particularly the Steps 1–3 expansions and the wedding story, really add a lot to it).

For what it’s worth, there is a sequel titled Our Life: Forever and Always that is slated for release in 2026. The nice thing about this one is that it will have both a female and a non-binary love interest, whereas Beginnings only had one main male love interest (two others were added later via DLC, though for me they didn’t really hit). Being a gay man myself, the male love interest was the only one I really needed or wanted, but I’m glad that this same dev is putting out a game that will round out the love interest gender options, so to speak. I somewhat doubt that Forever will hit as hard as Beginnings did for me, but nonetheless I’m very interested to give it a whirl.

And that’s it for my favorite games that I played in 2025. I’m grateful that I get to continue to post such things on the new Giant Bomb 2.0 website. Here’s hoping we’ll all get at least another decade out of this website about video games. GB forever! <>