The Year the Medium Grew Up (Again)
Every few years, games have a vintage that makes critics reach for bigger claims. 2025 felt like one of those years, but the argument was complicated. The biggest commercial hits were sequels and remakes, as usual. The most formally interesting work came from studios nobody had heard of six months earlier. And somewhere in the middle, a handful of titles managed to be both enormous and worth the hype.
What made 2025 worth cataloguing is less the individual peaks than the breadth: a deeply weird horror puzzle from a solo developer sat on the same year-end lists as a $200 million open-world sequel. The discourse was louder and stupider than ever about some games, and almost nonexistent about others that deserved ten times the attention. This guide is an attempt to sort that out, honestly.
The Major Awards Players
The titles that dominated every year-end conversation
The game that earned every award it got
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the year's sharpest surprise: a debut RPG from a French studio of thirty-odd people that plays like a reckoning with a genre the industry largely abandoned in the PS2 era, except the combat is actually interesting. The parry-and-reaction system borrows from action games without becoming one. The world has a specific melancholy that big-budget RPGs rarely risk. The one real flaw is that the back half runs slightly longer than the front half earns, but that is the least damning thing you can say about a game this strange and sincere.
Critical Darlings
Scores near the top, word-of-mouth even higher
The crowd favorite that critics underweighted
Split Fiction is Hazelight's best game, which makes it the best co-op game in years and one of the most purely enjoyable things released in 2025. Josef Fares has a reputation for maximalism that sometimes tips into exhaustion, but here the genre-hopping feels controlled rather than desperate. Critics gave it strong scores and moved on. Players gave it their entire social lives for two weeks. That gap says more about how criticism handles co-op games than it says about the game.
Bold Swings
Games that took real formal or commercial risks
The parry-and-reaction system borrows from action games without becoming one. The world has a specific melancholy that big-budget RPGs rarely risk.On Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
The most overrated release of the year
Assassin's Creed Shadows is a good Assassin's Creed game, which is both its strongest defense and its most honest indictment. Ubisoft delivered exactly what they promised after years of controversy: two protagonists, one stealthy, one heavy, a gorgeous rendition of feudal Japan. The problem is that everything works and nothing surprises. After Odyssey, Valhalla, and Mirage all received nearly identical scores for nearly identical ambitions, calling Shadows a landmark feels less like a critical judgment and more like relief that it shipped. It is fine. It is very, very fine.
The Overlooked
Games that deserved twice the conversation they got
The Year in Releases: A Few Key Moments
- FebMonster Hunter Wilds launches, becomes fastest-selling Capcom title ever Monster Hunter Wilds
- FebKingdom Come: Deliverance II ships, Warhorse's open-world sequel earns serious scores Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
- FebAvowed releases, Obsidian's biggest RPG in years Avowed
- MarAssassin's Creed Shadows finally ships after multiple delays Assassin's Creed Shadows
- MarSplit Fiction releases to immediate co-op phenomenon status Split Fiction
- AprClair Obscur: Expedition 33 arrives as the year's first major surprise Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- MayBlue Prince puzzles its way onto every must-play list Blue Prince
- MayDoom: The Dark Ages resets id Software's shooter to medieval brutality Doom: The Dark Ages
- JunElden Ring Nightreign launches FromSoftware's co-op experiment Elden Ring Nightreign
- JunDeath Stranding 2: On The Beach divides audiences as intended Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
- SummerDune: Awakening opens its early-access survival sandbox Dune: Awakening
- FallGhost of Yotei leads the autumn blockbuster wave Ghost of Yotei
Genre Standouts
The best in their respective corners of the medium
The snub that still stings
South of Midnight is the most culturally specific game Compulsion Games has made and the one most likely to be forgotten by December. Set in a version of the American Deep South drawing on Black Southern folklore and conjure traditions, it takes a region games almost never visit seriously and does something with it. The combat is secondary. The world-building is the point. It did not sell the way it should have, and it will not make the top-ten lists it deserves, and that is the kind of failure the industry should sit with for a while.
What 2025 Actually Proved
The most repeated argument of the year was that the games industry is in crisis: layoffs, live-service failures, rising budgets meeting shrinking audiences. That argument is not wrong. But the games on this list suggest the medium itself is fine. The crisis is a business crisis, not a creative one.
The year's best titles ranged from a co-op platformer made by a Swedish studio to a JRPG-adjacent debut from France to a folklore action game from Canada to a medieval open-world sequel from Czech Republic. The biggest commercial success was a sequel to a hunting game that has been iterating on the same loop for twenty years. None of this looks like a medium running out of ideas. It looks like a medium with more ideas than sustainable funding structures to support them, which is a different problem, and one the games on this list are not responsible for.
Play Clair Obscur. Play South of Midnight. Play Blue Prince when you have three hours and want to feel like your brain is being pleasantly taken apart. The year gave you enough to work with.