Game of the Year 2025

This is the 15th time I've created a Game of the Year list on Giant Bomb at the end of the year and I also created some lists for 2008 and 2009 so I'd cover the existence of the site. When I'd thought this was all going away earlier this year, I felt a bit sad that I wouldn't get to publish something like this on this site again, I'm so glad this is all back and independent.

Previous Lists: 2008 (Braid), 2009 (Dragon Age: Origins), 2010 (Mass Effect 2), 2011 (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), 2012 (Zero Escape: Virtues Last Reward), 2013 (The Last of Us), 2014 (Dark Souls II), 2015 (Bloodborne), 2016 (Inside), 2017 (NieR Automata), 2018 (Yakuza 6: The Song of Life), 2019 (Outer Wilds), 2020 (Final Fantasy VII Remake), 2021 (Psychonauts 2), 2022 (Xenoblade Chronicles 3), 2023 (Armored Core VI: The Fires of Rubicon), 2024 (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle)

In putting together this list, I was pretty struck by the amount of games that I took a chance on that landed for me where others that I was hotly anticipating were left off or I found bland or disappointing. I think the key thing about this list is (and this is a bit of a lame things to say) my truth and when I sit back in a few years, I’d like to think that I can recall the story that led to each game in this top 10 and the reason I felt compelled to include it, but first, here are some other mentions

Indie Shout Out: Altheia: Wrath of Aferi

I really need to do a better job of watching and really taking notes during indie game showcases. Case in point, in the last couple of days I started playing Altheia: The Wrath of Aferi because I saw it during the IDGAs and thought it looked fun. It’s ironic that I played this alongside Metroid Prime 4 because they both hit a lot of the same structure beats and yet, despite the much more streamlined and polished experience of Metroid, I largely found myself pulled back to Altheia. It really does show me that despite what happens in the triple A space, Indie Games are there and sure, there will be rough edges, but I’m willing to ride those.

Disappointment: Donkey Kong Bananza

I don’t like to do this, but when I hear people talk glowingly about this game I just want to shout, “what are you talking about?” I was excited to jump into this one as I love me a big 3D platformer, especially one made by Nintendo, I don’t even know how far I got but at a certain point I just stopped playing and felt no pull to go back because I found this to be a dumb, repetitive bore and an easy one at that. I had some fun with it, but not for the money I spent on it.

Honourable Mentions/Why aren’t they on your list: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince and a bit of Silksong

Normally I don’t feel the need to justify why a game isn’t on my list, but these three games where particularly large standouts, especially on Giant Bomb so not mentioning them feels like I’m being incomplete talking about the year.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was a game I certainly liked, but it wasn’t the whole package for me. When I think about that game, I think about the cool combat and the fun characters. Unfortunately I think it’s let down by a beautiful but fairly bland world from a level design perspective. I also don’t feel all that strongly for the story, it was never something I wanted to push through.

Blue Prince I loved, this is my type of game and I would have probably played this much longer than I did as I very much wanted to explore all the mysteries of the house but just felt the game constantly pushing back against me. Ultimately, that was enough for the game to leave a sour taste in my mouth when I think back to it.

As for Silksong, can’t really say anything bad about it, really like it, just not as much as the other games I’ve listed…okay, it can be a little annoying.

Top 10

10. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound

At some point this year, it felt like you were either a Ragebound person or a Shinobi Art of Vengence person, I liked the later game, I loved Ragebound. I think where I fall on this one is just how direct everything was in NGR, Shinobi I spent so much time concerned about what was behind me and felt a little annoyed about that fact where Ragebound it was just focusing on what was in front of me.

This is just pure old school fun that smartly adapts the older NES games but more refined and much less punishing though still maintaining a good difficulty balance. It was another stop in my Ninja Gaiden journey that started earlier this year and ran through to pretty much the end of the year.

9. Hell Is Us

At one point, after finishing it, Hell is Us was my game of the year, that’s how much I enjoyed it but the further I got away from it, the more it faded from my mind and I thought to examine exactly why that was. I think it comes down to the fact that it didn’t quite stick the landing both in story and resolving the often challenging and real setting with its fantastic elements. I’m no expert on the Balkan wars from the 90’s but I’ve done a bit of reading on the subject and had friends from the area who were affected by the conflict and while I don’t know if that was a specific reference point for the game, it certainly felt like it was so putting images I associate with that tragedy in an action adventure game was…tough.

But it’s still on the list right and that’s for good reason, because I did enjoy working my way through this game. The exploration and puzzle elements and also the various side missions you go on are all great to work through and while towards the end it did get a little checklisty, particularly going back to places to open chests if you’re a completionist, that didn’t take away from how much I enjoyed it when it was at its peak. This game pushed itself as being intimidating saying there was no quest markers etc and originally, that had me wanting to skip it, but this is one game that I can honestly thank the Giant Bomb guys for as their discussions on it made me want to give it a shot.

8. Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer

Kathy Rain (the original) was a game that caught my eye when I was flipping through Bitmap Books’ The Art of Point and Click Adventure Games which I grabbed at a pop-up store in town late last year and is probably the main reason I invested so much time in the genre this year. It was the pixel art of Kathy Rain in particular that drew me in and seeing the trailer on Steam for the 2nd game and the advances made in that area, I had to jump in to the series. I enjoyed the first game, I thought Soothsayer was pretty great.

We’ve had a lot of Twin Peaks/Lynchian elements in our games for a while, with Remedy leading that charge, at the end of the day though, those games still lean towards action and scares. A point and click adventure game lets you really take in everything at your own pace and KR2 is a great point and click game. Sometimes with this genre, I just want to get a move on and find myself halted by the game, KR2 is efficient with its dialogue and the puzzles all felt earned. I loved how wild and sometimes silly the story got, the characters were all fun and the callbacks to the first game were smart. I hope we get to revisit Kathy and Eileen on future adventures.

7. Avowed

At a certain point, I gave up on The Outer Worlds 2, I didn’t enjoy the first game all that much and while I loved the prologue of the sequel, once it opened up it all fell flat, which is a shame because earlier this year I absolutely loved Avowed. This is just a great, not overly long, efficient RPG that feels just so damn good to play.

The reason I mention TOW2 above is because it felt like there were a lot of elements in that game that Avowed could have benefited from to put it over the top for a lot of people, I can see where the money went of these two games. But that isn’t to take away from Avowed, when I finished the first area I almost felt exhausted in learning there was still so much to go but it just kept building on what was great. The snappy controls that first person combat and platforming erased the mundaneness I often find in the first person RPG.

6. Tormented Souls 2 (and uh, the first game)

A funny thing happened in October, one random weekend, after seeing a trailer for Tormented Souls 2 and its upcoming release, I decided to go to my backlog and play the first game. You see, I’m a bit of a mark for South American literature, I don’t have any heritage from there, it’s just a thing and a couple of years ago when I learned this old school Resident Evil like game was from Chile I was willing to give it a shot. I played it for about 25 minutes, died to a basic enemy after putting what I felt like was my entire amount of ammo into them and had to restart because I didn’t save. I closed out an uninstalled the game. But there was a siren call of sorts that made me want to go back, maybe it was because I knew that the sequel was set in Chile and I wanted to make sure I’d played the first game. I watched some YouTube videos with combat tips and finished it off over a weekend...and I loved it.

Honestly, from there, it wasn’t going to take much for Tormented Souls 2 to make this list, it just had to be good and it is! It’s more of the same but bigger, better and a much greater and often ultra creepy enemy variety, it also has an assisted mode that creates autosaves so no more losing hours of progress. The world is a lot of fun to explore and there are some great environmental puzzles. Yes, Cronos: The New Dawn has better combat than this game, but there is something so special about the world crafted in TS2 that puts it over the line for me, that and the whole South American thing, one day I need to self-examine on that. (side note, I’ll likely regret not putting Despelote on the list when I play it)

5. Keeper

While I was immediately taken in by the beauty of Keeper, the general gameplay didn’t immediately grab me and I thought this might just be a style over substance situation which would be a bit sad as the first Double Fine game since Psychonauts 2 which was my Game of the Year in 2021. Once I got to a village where there was some light time shifting puzzles though, while I wasn’t overly challenged, it all clicked into being an incredible to experience. By the time I got further into the game and saw what else was on offer, I was just so taken in by what it was doing that I let the entire thing just wash over me.

I think the core of this game is that it is full of the kind of things that I want from Double Fine if they’re going to go smaller with their games. While the initial impression in this one can leave people cold if you really work through it (and the game isn’t that long) and get to the first big change in gameplay, there is so much to find here. The third change in particular is one that I find hard to tell people they would love without spoiling the game but it’s so very cool and then the whole thing wraps up in such a great kaleidoscopic trip that needs to be seen to be believed.

4. Silent Hill f

Putting Silent Hill f so high on my list feels a little odd for a number of reasons, first up is the fact that it took me some time to actually play through the game as while I enjoyed playing it, I never found myself drawn back to it. I think that is weirdly part of the appeal for me though, part of why I wasn’t drawn back to it wasn’t necessarily out of fear, it was something more than that, there was a difficulty in there for me but it just stayed so firmly affixed in my mind so when I did go back I continued to find it so compelling.

The main thing there is, I've hardly stopped thinking about it and am even tempted to go back to the game an unlock some of the other endings given how powerful I found the story and conclusion. That’s the main thing for me, the tale this game is telling is just so damn good and impactful in an area that doesn’t really get covered in games like this. I remain amazed and thankful this game was made.

3. Ninja Gaiden 4

When Ninja Gaiden 4 was announced alongside the Ninja Gaiden 2 Black remake, I thought, it looked cool as hell. There is a small but very impactful year or so of my life when I was a kid where I was just all about 80s and 90s Martial Arts movies, they were pretty much all I was renting from the video store at that point, so it’s always been in my mind that Ninjas are cool. I'd never played an Ninja Gaiden game though as I didn’t have the originals on the NES and when the 2000s ones came out, they weren’t the type of game I was seeking out.

So I dove in starting with Ninja Gaiden Sigma and while there was a steep learning curve, by the end of it I was pretty much in love with the game. I got equal enjoyment from the remake of the sequel but I hit a snag on Ninja Gaiden 3, a game I can safely say I hated which had me worried about 4, I realised that there was fine line with these games.

Well, I can say this (and this is probably obvious by the placement on this list) when I finished 4, I just wanted to keep playing. Like the original game, there is a steep learning curve here but by the end of this game I felt like a true Ninja Master and when I got to the showdown with Ryu everything felt just so magnificent that I wanted more game. That being said, it's such a good spot to finish a game and I didn’t fee like things were becoming a slog. It’s high on my list, but there was just such a pure enjoyment here that was unlike anything else I played this year from the cheesy dumb story to the fast epic action.

2. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

I’m going to keep saying this to myself as I do this write up, “this is not Stockholm syndrome!” This is the game that I spent the most time on this year, over 150 hours in fact (my second most played Switch game of all time) and I’m not going to lie and say all of that was great, there were some real soul searching moments in there but at the end of the day, as I’ve now set the game aside satisfied I got the two “true” endings, I can’t help but look back fondly on the experience.

For those that don’t know how the game works, essentially you play through 100 days (there is some cheating in there with day skips etc) with a mix of different gameplay elements including some solid turn-based strategy combat and it’s good, I got to like a lot of the characters and there were enough mysteries to keep me going. Once you’ve finished that first run though there is a sort of reset and all of a sudden you’re repeating the 100 days with all the knowledge from the first run and the game starts to split off based on your decisions with 100 endings. My first thought was, well, how long will it take to get all 100? Answer, long, I haven’t even done it yet.

While I was in the dregs of one half of the ending splits (the first decision breaking off to two distinct timeline halves), I dropped the game for a bit but every time I went to play my Switch 2, it was right there, staring at me unfinished so after a couple of months break, I picked the game up again and after clearing the half of the timeline I was on (about 30 endings deep), I looked up how to get what was considered the “True Ending” and…I loved it, genuinely loved it. The mysteries and story resolutions all landed and when the credits rolled I just felt a real fondness for the game and all the highs and lows I had with it. I’m going to hopefully keep picking at it over the next year, maybe a couple of routes a month till I reach those 100 endings, we'll see.

1. The Drifter

The first game I ever got on PC was Kings Quest V, this came out of the fact that one of the big reasons I wanted a PC in the first place was because I’d been going over a neighbour’s house and watched them play Sierra adventure games in amazement. They were like nothing I’d seen before, far beyond the games I was playing on my NES. I say this to try and convey how much the point and click genre means to me, it was my introduction to PC gaming and it’s a genre I’ve always enjoyed going back to, especially when the right game comes along and this year, in a year where I was waxing nostalgic about the genre already, for a game like The Drifter to come along it was just too perfect.

I’m Australian but I don’t feel overly patriotic when it comes to games, I like the idea of supporting the local industry but I wont go out of my way to play a game just because it’s made in Australia, I play the games that interest me. The Drifter is an Australian game and it wears it quite proudly, but it’s funny in a way because if you turned off the voice over, you might struggle to realise the game's origin because there is nothing there that is necessarily associated with a stereotypical Australian experience. Me though, I’d like to think I would have worked it out because there is a moment in the game where, as the main character you can continue to click on a bench containing some food and the character will talk about food items that I associate so strongly with a number of spreads I’ve dug into at gatherings, when the “Stuff Your Gob” achievement popped I let out a laugh.

Of course, all this would be meaningless if the game wasn’t good, but it’s not only good, it’s an absolute triumph of point and click adventuring. For a genre that probably went out of fashion due to its slow pace, The Drifter finds ways to be both clever with it’s puzzles while also being pulse pounding at times with the tension it creates. The graphics and voice work are all excellent and it was a game that I just did not want to stop playing through the 8 hours I put into it. But more than it being a great game, it also landed with me in a way I’ve found hard to explain to people, it had me walking around the house randomly saying “dolmades” in Mick’s accent, how could it not be my game of the year based on that alone?