They say something needs to happen three times to become a tradition (I don’t know who “they” is). I think this is the third time I am writing about the games I have played in a year. The first one was in cohost here (only exist in the internet archive rip cohost) talking about every game I played in 2023. Last year I wrote a blog post right here. This is that, but 2025. That simple.
This was a big year for me, as you can read here. Moved halfway across the world for a new job. Sold a house. Kinda remade my life to some degree from the ground up. Lived in temporary housing (a small studio) for a few months, which meant no real chance to play games. Still, there are more games on this list than on last year’s! But fewer new games (interesting, innit). Much to ponder, much to consider.
Games that came out in 2025
The Roottrees are Dead
This is a game I had heard a lot about in the past - it had come out as an itch game a while ago (with unfortunate AI art), and then it got a new coat of paint, a new scenario, and a full removal of AI art for a Steam release. This is one of those games in the current wave of “deduct’em-ups” (get that “metroidbrainia” stuff outta here) - games where the main mode of progression happens through observation of facts, documents, patterns and demonstration of some level of understanding of the underlying truth.
This works super well. There’s a bit of Her Story in this, some degree of Obra Dinn too, but I really like how much editorialization the information you’re presented with has been given here. In many of these other games, you are given “raw” information - videos, or primary sources, or direct observation of things happening. Roottrees ALWAYS mediates that information; yes, you search for a name on fake-Ask-Jeeves and you get a webpage, but it’s not a Hypnospace Outlaw-like situation where you get an in-universe page. What you receive is some text that tells you what the information in that page is. Which means the game is taking some of the information retrieval logistics out of your hand (we’ll come back to investigational logistics soon, believe it or not). I enjoyed it a lot.
Blue Prince
I think Blue Prince is my favorite game I played in 2025, but I am not sure it is the best. It is a deeply flawed game that is a bit TOO in love with how clever it is and the pacing can be iffy due to its nature, and it has certainly rubbed a lot of people the wrong way on the internet. I still had a great time. The mix between card-based-ish roguelike game mechanics and deep puzzles for sickos worked very well for me. The caveat is that it really started working for me in particular after I fully accepted the concept that “progress” in this game can mean many things. Ruling something out is progress. Gaining a tiny bit of extra information is progress. A small bit of a permanent unlock is progress. I went fairly deep into the puzzle well, but I did start cheating pretty egregiously on the very-very-late game puzzles (and knowing their solutions, I would not have had the patience to solve them organically). I don’t think I have a clear “Game of the Year 2025”, but this is the closest thing I have.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I think this is a game I look at more harshly now than I did while playing it. It is a very neat JRPG with a few action mechanics. The story works, despite being a bit tropey and not particularly subtle. It’s genuinely funny at times, and the music works well for me. The things that were slight nags while playing it, like the Unreal-5-bloom-ass visuals, the somewhat heavy-handed plot and the absolutely bonkers power curve, really look worse the more I go back to this game in my mind. I still had a pretty good time with it!
Unfair Flips
Over the last few years I turned into a person who deeply despises gambling for many, many reasons. Yet, the power randomness has to completely break our thought processes is something I find really fascinating. Unfair Flips is super simple: flip a coin, get heads 10 times in a row. That’s the game, more or less. There are very few upgrades that are somewhat inspired by incremental/idle games, but the fundamental premise always holds: 10 heads in a row. That is it. You play it for 5 minutes and your brain starts making things up. Is this coin fair? Are the probabilities displayed on screen accurate and reliable? And then it gets worse and worse. You could swear that if you click the button to flip the coin just so it lands on heads more often. You refuse to buy an upgrade during a 5-heads streak because you’re afraid to break it (even if the upgrade would make heads more likely!). It’s fascinating, a bit scary, and if your brain is anything like mine, a really good time. It’s also about half an hour long. (or a minute long, if you’re lucky. or 10h long, if you’re unlucky. That’s the beauty of it.)
The Séance of Blake Manor
I said we were going to go back to investigational logistics! The Séance of Blake Manor is a game almost EXCLUSIVELY concerned with the logistics of an investigation, mechanics-wise. You (the player) are a detective that essentially does not need to deduce anything because you (the character) does that. There’s still some very basic level of needing to demonstrate understanding of the facts, but here it is much more “are you paying any attention to the plot” than “have you connected these threads of information and deduced what they mean”. The friction is not in interpreting and connecting data, but rather in collecting it.
As the detective in this game your time is limited, doing things take time, people have schedules and might not be available to be interviewed. You have a deadline; the game ends at that deadline, whether you’re done discovering things or not. This game still dodges the obvious pitfall of “how do I know what is worth spending time investigating if I don’t know what’s important in advance?” by being PRETTY generous with time; if you’re not misusing your precious minutes in silly ways VERY often, it is not particularly difficult to solve every mystery with many hours to spare. The fun, and the friction, comes purely from trying to do things in a clever way, and optimizing the logistics of investigation, streamlining your schedule and usage of time versus the schedules of the other guests in this manor, and slowly seeing how the pieces fall together.
(as an extra note, I think this game is EXTREMELY well-written, with a fun and thoughful twist on paranormal things and folklore and colonialism and many other things. It is genuinely very cool.)
UNBEATABLE
Speaking of cool! UNBEATABLE is that. I’m sorry if you think the writing is cringe, and the music is bad, and this anime aesthetic thing is overdone. I don’t care. This game IS cool. I am not a rhythm game person AT ALL, and yet here I am. Go play it; it’s just a good time. More importantly: this is one of those indie games that are TRYING things. Maybe too many things. The game is always this close to braking apart, and it IS kind of a mess on the technical side. But the things it’s pulling off, some of the set pieces in Story Mode, are SO incredibly ambitious and enjoyable that, if you’re anything like me, you’re willing to give the technical issues a break.
Older games that I played this year
1000xRESIST
Being a serial immigrant and someone who has parents, a lot of the things in this game hit me pretty hard. People will complain (with certain reason) about how hard it is to navigate certain areas, and that gameplay-wise there isn’t much here. Those are fair criticisms that shouldn’t stop people from playing it regardless. It’s a good story told really, really well, and it looks excellent (the older I get, the more I think low-budget games almost always look better than expensive ones.)
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective
This is an almost one-to-one adaptation of the board game of the same name, with the most obscenely overacted FMV scenes possible (recorded seemingly at some point in the 80s). The FMV is extremely funny, the base game is solid (though not particularly well-suited for single-player). I don’t really have much more to say on this one.
Overboard!
Inkle is one of my favorite developers out there. They have a trademark style of nonlinear branching storytelling that really agrees with me, and they are excellent at accounting for player behaviors. Sometimes they take big swings (Heaven’s Vault, A Highland Song), and sometimes they keep their scope fairly limited; this is more of the latter. Overboard! is a highly replayable, fairly self-contained story of trying to get away with murdering your (terrible, awful) husband during a cruise. You DO need to replay it many times to unlock new threads and branches of the story, and actually achieving the goal is not easy at all! I have not played as much as I wanted of this, but had a great time doing it.
Venba
Another game about Being An Immigrant and Generational Trauma that pairs well with 1000xRESIST. It touches on similar questions and themes, in a somewhat more “lighthearted” way: your central mechanic is trying to reconstruct recipes passed down to you from incomplete notes, which sounds more complex than it actually is. It’s a nice story about trying to fit in in a place that is not necessarily welcoming to you, and about butting heads with your parents. I liked it, but I think the critical praise it received might have been a bit too much.
Hylics
I am really sad that it took me this long to play Hylics. It’s, for all intents and purposes, a JRPG: you have commands, turn-based battles, and so on. That’s where the “normal” part of this game stops. First: how it looks. It is ALL claymation and the art design on this thing is out of this world, and looks even cooler in motion.
Ok, what else? There’s no fail state. If you lose all your health you get warped to “afterlife”, which is its own area, and from where you can warp back to where you were. The sense of humor on this is also spot on. All NPC dialogue is randomly generated (as in words are picked at random from specific categories such as verbs, nouns and so on). It makes for a fantastic, surreal experience, where you are always kinda confused about what is going on until you accept that coherent storylines are not why you’re here. One of the best things I’ve played this year, for sure.
Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters (1, 2, 3)
I’m slowly going through the old Final Fantasy games using the Pixel Remaster collection. It’s been an interesting experience; none of the first three games are good by modern standards, but it’s fascinating to see what has been there from day 1, and where they start hitting on the things that became staples over time.
Final Fantasy I is extremely barebones: the story is basically “go here”, “go there” - because you must. It’s a bit of a repetitive slog and you often can’t go three steps without running into another random encounter - but there’s still some charm and the magic charges system is more interesting than I expected it to be (no MP - you get a set amount of uses per spell level). Some minor things get cleared up on the next entries (you’re locked to the jobs you pick at the beginning of the game, for example).
Final Fantasy II is a MAJOR step up - though also significantly stepping sideways into something completely different. It gives up the concept of jobs completely and instead uses a much more complex system where you gain experience for actions - getting hit will increase your HP, using a specific weapon increases your skill with that weapon, and so on. That also goes for spells: to get a better cure spell, you need to constantly cast it. I thoroughly enjoyed the much more open-ended levelling system, and this game actually tries to have a plot (as opposed to FFI). It’s still plagued by some of the same issues though (that encounter rate, jesus).
Final Fantasy III is the first one with a more “traditional” job system - you can change jobs at any time, jobs level individually (in addition to the characters levelling), each job allows for specific types of equipment and actions. About 3h in, this game does something that would have completely blown my mind if I played it at the time, and it still blew my mind a little bit in 2025 (because I somehow dodged knowing that happens). The plot is still barebones but kinda works, and the encounter rate is somewhat reasonable. This is a “safer” entry compared to FF2 mechanically speaking, but I enjoyed it way more.
Wonder Trek
Wonder Trek is a Japan-only PSX game that has finally got a fan translation this year. I don’t know how to call this. Action-adventure? Just adventure? It’s a 3d isometric-ish game where you are a research assistant crash-landed on an island with a professor. You go around and bonk things in the head with a rubber mallet. Here’s the catch: all the animals everyone thought extincted are actually living here in this island, and they are convinced you’re a poacher. Though there are also actual poachers here.
I had an INCREDIBLE time playing this. It’s really funny, plays surprisingly well, and goes interesting (and extremely sad in the epilogue - you’ve been warned) places. I cannot recommend this enough, and it’s the kind of game I think anyone would have a good time with.
20 Small Mazes
A very simple puzzle game. There are 20 mazes. You solve them, you end the game. How difficult could it be, really? Also: this game is FREE. As in beer. It took me about an hour to finish it - I think it’s worth giving it a try. Play it for 5 minutes, see if you like where it’s going.
Proverbs
This is kinda Minesweeper, kinda Picross. Squares can be light or dark, numbers tell you how many light squares are in a 3x3 neighborhood around it. That’s it. Go to town. It is a single HUGE puzzle broken down into bite-sized, self-contained sections. I played it for about 15h and didn’t even get halfway through. It’s become my go-to for a meditative, “I need to chill” puzzle game over this last year.