Properly Christening My Membership On The New GB Site With An Extremely Timely, Punctual GOTY 2025 List With All The Games That Everyone Definitely Expects

To say that 2025 was an ordeal would be an understatement not just on a global scale, but on a personal level. I would never suggest that I had it rough so to speak - I'm indescribably blessed with the privilege of family and friends who would have carried me through regardless - but though I wasn't a part of the inexorable slow decay of the videogame industry, I had the honour of similarly experiencing unceremonious and sudden funemployment towards the middle of the year in a software sector that took several months for me to resolve. In that regard, I had a lovely extra mote of empathy towards all those affected by what I can only describe as the ongoing hellish corporate labyrinth of greed, even as we experienced one of the strongest years of creativity in gaming yet.

Suffice to say I turned towards videogames as a coping mechanism. Some of those games are on this list. There were originally ten, but I felt strongly enough about eleventh that I felt I wanted to give it a number. Notable absentees of the discourse du jour are Silksong (barely scratched the surface), Hades II (still working on the first game post-credits again, an absolute banger), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (I’ve thoroughly bounced off this one after the first act, I’m very partial to JRPGs but I find the combat honestly a little obnoxious) and Silent Hill F (I’ve watched so many streams that if I’d actually beaten the game myself it’d probably be a solid top 3, but I haven’t yet). These are all at the top of my backlog, but I haven’t played enough of most of these substantively enough to pass judgement - and let’s be real, everyone has already said everything that needed to be said about every single one of these. I’m happy to be a contrarian and give a couple of other less-appreciated games some love as well.

11. Monster Hunter Wilds

I know much has been said about Monster Hunter Wilds’ foibles and on some level I do agree with them. Out of all the big blockbuster games I’ve played, Wilds certainly runs like hammered dogshit in a way few others did. 

But to be honest, I’m not as hung up on the reduced friction of the game as some other fans of the series are. I think the story, while nothing to write home about for me (especially compared to other games like Monster Hunter World), has a charm on its own, and some of the arenas and set pieces were absolutely staggeringly good - the new monsters most definitely carved out a space in my memories long after I beat them for the first time (partly thanks to a rip-roaring soundtrack as well).

I would like to see some of the deprecated gameplay elements take on a little more meaning in future iterations (tracking and gathering in particular feels especially vestigial and lacks the physicality that it brought to previous games), but overall the thrill of the hunt remains strong, even if the call of the grind doesn’t pull quite as hard on my heart.
And it still has some of the best videogame food I’ve seen in my life, holy shit.

10. Assassins Creed Shadows

Of the two historical fiction games about ronin that came out this year, I like Assassins Creed Shadows the best. People have been understandably dismissive of Ubisoft over the last few years for a number of reasons ranging from valid criticisms to absolutely unhinged conspiracy theory, but I went into Shadows with absolutely zero baggage of having experienced the RPG-like entries to the series - in fact, I haven’t played an Assassins Creed game properly since Brotherhood. I do feel for those who are burnt out on these, but in the sense that playing through all these massive open-world instalments would be like going to eat at the buffet every week. As the occasional treat, though, I’ve found it a delightful smorgasbord of well-honed stealth and brutal knuckle-down melee, and clearly delineating the two as separate characters does a really good job of meeting the player where their mood fancies them.

Shadows is a fantastic romp through a visualization of feudal Japan and its geography in a way that evokes the romance and melancholy of samurai period drama, but without feeling like I'm traipsing through a Hollywood backlot or a postcard version of the country. It isn’t afraid to be vivid and drab in equal measure, both quiet and bombastic. It is thick with the usual sounds of shamisen and shakuhachi, but also goes in hard and bold with modern enka and Swahili psychedelic rock. It’s a classic case of being more than the sum of its parts, and all of those parts are at minimum pretty damn fun, even if there is an insane excess of them.

9. To A T

Keita Takahashi apparently went on record for saying that he deliberately set out to be slightly less whimsical and more serious for his next outing into the videogame space, and though I don’t think he necessarily succeeded to the degree that he intended, To A T has a clarity of purpose and theming in its story that far exceeds his previous games.

If its collaboration with AbleGamers didn’t already make it obvious, the game revolves around living with disability, the struggles and triumphs that permeate through everyday life, and the people in orbit who shape those struggles and triumphs. That Takahashi does this through the lens of a videogame where the entire local economy seems to be propped up by a sentient giraffe obsessed with making sub sandwiches, the protagonist frequently navigates the space by whirlygigging themselves into the air in their fixed T-pose and their mother was apparently horny for [EXTREMELY REDACTED] somehow doesn’t make To A T any less empathetic and endearing with its message, and it’s a message that we all ought to take to heart in a world that really could use a lot more kindness right now.

8. Battle Suit Aces

Trinket Studios’ Battle Chef Brigade was such a wondrous, gorgeous marriage of art and action-platforming to a surprisingly robust match-three puzzle game, I was on board with their follow-up game the minute they announced it. I’m not typically a deck builder type of person, but I wasn’t one to care much for a match-three either.

Battle Suit Aces is thundering good fun because of the ways a single-player card game can allow for designing absolutely busted synergies that you simply couldn’t get away with if it were built for competition. The game as a whole seems to suffer a little from being dragged kicking and screaming across the finish line, as at launch there were entire art assets still in their rough sketch iterations, but it barely detracts from being a feast for the eyes. The story and the cast tick all the right boxes for a loving tribute to episodic mecha anime, and when the decks clicked and the numbers started cascading, there’s no other game I would rather be playing. My biggest criticism was always only that I wished there was more of it, which I think is a good problem to have.

7. Umamusume: Pretty Derby

Truth be told, I was expecting Zenless Zone Zero to be my gateway into gacha this year. I’m much more of a character action guy than I would ever be a management sim guy, but ZZZ’s near-frictionless button mashing and wildly exaggerated, overanimated aesthetic never stuck for me. Umamusume: Pretty Derby hit the social media timeline like crack cocaine, and part of me wants to do a longform write-up on why it caught on so strongly as it did. It’s an intersectional of idol culture/cute anime girls, the tension of horse racing (and gambling), and the long-established power of licensed anthropomorphism in Japanese media. 

But I think the ultimate reason I find it charming is that sincerity goes a long way. For all its desire to strip every cent from players’ wallets, the game is full of art, writing and gameplay design that tells us that Cygames’ developers have a genuine reverence for Japanese horse racing and the history of both its human and animal athletes, a level of earnestness that not many gacha can match. Every character is packed full of historical references and minutiae that only a full-bore sicko would know about, and anthropomorphizing all of it into a broadly appealing, very recognizable human competitive spirit is such an elegant formula. The roguelite elements of its progression unfortunately don't hold up especially well in the fun factor at the deeper end of the playtime, but it hasn't stopped me from putting in an absolutely embarrassing amount of hours into the game (the most out of any 2025 game by a country mile), let alone the legitimately compelling storytelling of its external media in films and anime seasons. (The only reason this game isn't higher on the list is that I have some vestigial sense of shame from my Korean F2P gaming years as a teenager.)

6. Cook Serve Forever

I’ve been invested in Cook Serve Forever’s release ever since the game came out in Early Access in 2023. I’ve been an enormous fan of the dopamine itch that the series has scratched for years, and to say that CSF went through a tumultuous period of change during its development would be putting it lightly. I think what the guys on that team made for this game back before its rework was incredibly brave, though I think on the whole the 1.0 “found the fun” more quickly. But I want it to be said that I enjoyed its initial format just as much. I deeply, profoundly respect developers who go out of their way to drastically shift their formula for a sequel, even if it doesn’t quite land, because I believe that any failure is artistically worth more than rehashing the same thing ad nauseum.

It’s been a joy to see this series of games evolve from a hardcore typing game to what it is now, as it expands into stronger narrative-based progression and the curiosity of its newer Simon-Says format of interaction, and I hope Galindo et al. can continue to make new games that scratch those dopamine itches for as long as I live.

5. South of Midnight

South Of Midnight is not an especially outstanding game in the combat department, which dings it a bit, but it is overall functional, which is more than can be said for Compulsion’s previous attempts. Where it truly shines, though, is its Southern Gothic aesthetic (some of the best music this year hands down) and storytelling. Its structure of beginning in the mundane and immediately diving into violently navigating fantastical mythos via platform-puzzling, reminds me a lot of an American McGee joint in an extremely complimentary way. 

Its use of Southern folklore feels so earnest, its characters and their backstories are so deeply intertwined with their historical context, from the unfathomable pain of slavery to the spirit of communities lost to time and economic change, that it doesn’t simply feel like Compulsion are simply using them as a prop for a videogame. They are background elements of experiences normally kept in dusty drawers brought to the fore, the unspoken given voice. And there’s something really special in a story like that which doesn’t get told as often as it should.

4. Ninja Gaiden 4

PlatinumGames has had a tumultuous time in recent years, so it’s lovely to have a moment where we can comfortably say that they’ve made a videogame that unreservedly rips shit riot. While it’s not necessarily the most faithful to Koei Tecmo’s old formula, and is more like a hybrid of Ninja Gaiden’s combat overlaid on top of Metal Gear Rising Revengeance’s sensibilities, this largely works in its favour.

Its encounter designs sometimes feel deliberately overtly obnoxious by intention (flying enemies have never been enjoyable ever since the first Bayonetta game and I don’t know why they keep trying) and some levels are much more of a slog than others, but when the moment-to-moment clicks and I cash out on meter to absolutely massacre the room and the screamer butt metal music is going off at the same time, there hasn’t been a single game in 2025 that has bested that same level of high speed ultraviolence, that makes me feel I could go outside and put a hole in a brick wall with my fists.

3. Dispatch

Interestingly, despite being a BioWare lifer, I’ve never seriously invested much time into Telltale-style CYOA games. But at their cores, the differences in their storytelling systems are remarkably thin, and I found it extremely easy to vibe with Dispatch’s style of choice-and-consequence roleplaying and really endearing, charmingly-written characters. The light management sim stuff works really well as a storytelling vehicle during some really fun story beats, enough that it doesn’t feel like an afterthought, though I would be delighted to see a little more mechanical meat on those bones for the inevitable sequel a few years down the road.

I know purely by cultural osmosis that these kinds of games can start to get bogged down by the weight of all its branching paths or lack thereof (something BioWare sequels often take heat for as well), so it’s really nice to get in on the ground floor of one of these as a cultural moment before there’s any possibility of it all going to shit.

2. Once Upon A Katamari

The Katamari franchise sits squarely at the top of my list of all-timers. When someone completely unacquainted with videogames asks me for a recommendation for what to try out, Katamari Damacy is maybe the first thing I will recommend. Its controls are near self-explanatory, the game’s mechanical objective makes immediate sense despite being utter nonsense, and its playfulness fits so easily into the cubbyhole of a person’s imagination of a balatantly Japanese videogame.

All this to say that there isn’t actually a lot that Once Upon A Katamari meaningfully does differently from the others. There’s some excellent quality-of-life improvements in the control scheme, the new power-ups add a little extra zest and the time travel gimmick allows for a huge variety of zany locales, but honestly the only thing that my Favorite Videogame Of All Time had to do in order to get a podium finish on my GOTY list was to show up with the same juice that it had in the 2000s. It helped that it came out in the same week that I finally reattained gainful employment after being hit by redundancy back in June, so listening to its joyously whimsical soundtrack of non-stop, bona fide 100% bangers on my new commute felt like I was seeing light at the end of a long and torturous tunnel. The King of All Cosmos, his 10cm Prince, and all of his stupid-looking idiot cousins spark pure, unadulterated joy and whimsy, just as strongly as it did decades ago.

1. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

This one caught me by surprise, not in the sense that I didn’t expect it to be an incredible game, but that I was still thinking about it all the way into 2026 for a game that I beat way back in January.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector captured me kinda in the same way that Cowboy Bebop did in my teenage years - whilst going through the motions, I found myself broadly enjoying it but not feeling especially blown away by it. But as I neared the ending and the plot threads were starting to tie up their loose ends, and the overall thesis of it was laid bare, I was hit by an indescribable feeling of yearning and (more ridiculously) hope. Citizen Sleeper 2 portrays a universe of perseverance amongst the ruins of unfettered capitalism and the corpses it leaves in its wake. It tells us that life can persist even in the face of cold, corporate cruelty, and we can endure even the infinite, oblivious void of space through collective strength and the spirit of community. It insists that at the end of it all, what we build and nurture matters more than the span of our individual lives, and the kindness we put out into the world is reward in of itself, regardless of whether or not we live to see it.

That the game can abstract all this through dice rolls, gorgeous character art and light text-based roleplaying is icing on the cake, and I held onto that feeling throughout the hellscape of 2025. As more generations of people continue to spiral in a poisoned post-irony worldview, I suspect I will continue to carry that sincerity and hope going into 2026 and beyond - if only for the sake of my own sanity, I can insist that what little I’ve done for myself and for the people I care about still has meaning even at the infinitesimally small scale. The horrors will persist, but if enough of us support and uplift each other, so will we.