Alex's Top 10 Games of 2025

 

 Another year, another ten games to talk about. Somehow I ended up focusing more and more on older games from my backlog, and classics I had long been meaning to give a try. As a result, this list won't feature some of the big hits from the gaming industry: I didn't play Clair Obscure, or Hollow Knight Silksong, for example. You can come back in a few years for my thoughts on those, once I'm appropriately behind the curve. For now though, I hope you enjoy my thoughts about my favourite games played during 2025.

 

10. Donkey Kong Bananza

 For the first time ever I pre-ordered a games console. My logic (or rationalisation for spending such a sum of money) was that, unfortunately, consoles only go up in price these days. So I might as well give in and buy a Switch 2 immediately. I was also somewhat hynotised by the marketing of Mario Kart World, but in the end my favourite tentpole Nintendo release of the year was Donkey Kong Bananza. It's very evidently made by the same team as my 2017 GOTY Super Mario Odyssey, which always made it likely that I would have a great time. Engaging environmental puzzles and lots of sparkly items to collect: this isn't quite on the level of Odyssey, but plenty of great stuff carries over.

 The signature element of this game is the terrain destruction, with DK able to pummel his way through almost everything in a large selection of sprawling levels. The first time I opened the map screen I was initially put off by its juddery frame rate, but I soon forgave that when I realised it was a fully zoomed-out view of the entire level, with my haphazard tunnelling and full-fisted vandalism all on display. It's stunningly refreshing to just have the option to punch through dirt and rock and make your own path to the whichever goal you are currently pursuing. And there is a lot to find, with hundreds of bananas and other collectibles waiting to be obtained. The challenging gameplay is withheld until quite late on, so it's a good thing the core element of the experience is so joyous and fun. I had a great time with DK Bananza, but it ended being just a bit less memorable than other games on this list.

9. PowerWash Simulator

 I'll keep this brief, considering this already made my GOTY list in 2022 and I assume all you lovely readers have a photographic memory. Previously I played PowerWash Simulator on Xbox Gamepass, but with Microsoft being complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza while also hiking prices to kick their remaining customers in the teeth, I was never going to return to Gamepass. It also didn't seem possible to transfer my save file when I bought PowerWash Sim on Steam, and I've never been happier to lose progress in a game. The satisfaction of cleaning up cars, penny farthings, park playgrounds, etc. just never loses its appeal, and now I have the added bonus of rinsing down Wallace & Gromit's house, Shrek's boggy hut, Spongebob's homely pineapple... I regret to inform the developers that I have quite a lot to do before trying out PowerWash Simulator 2.

8. Fate/stay night Remastered

 It turns out Japanese visual novels tend to be long, what with being a form of novel and all. I learned this over the last few years gradually making my way through Higurashi, which for good measure was also largely non-interactive. When an official English translation and remaster of one of the legends of the genre was announced, I was determined to dive yet deeper into my Japanese media obsession.

 Fate/stay night is set in a Japanese city in the midst of a high-octane, deadly magical conflict known as the Holy Grail War. The protagonist is a high school lad (of course) who is drawn into this war against his will, and frequently he suffers various horrible injuries, but on the upside he does tend to fall in love with one of the cute anime girls, depending on the player's choices. The lore of this world is replete with proper nouns like Noble Phantasm, Heroic Spirit, and there were many occasions I wished a glossary was available to explain, for example, the difference between magic, magecraft and mystics. But after the first 30 hours or so I learned not to sweat the details, and just let the absurd barely coherent plot flow over me.

 The screenshot I included for this game shows a section of the story's flow chart. This is an incredibly useful tool within this remaster that should really feature in all visual novels! In the same vein as classic choose-your-own adventure books such as Fighting Fantasy, the multiple choice decisions throughout the game lead to branching paths. Often these paths are very temporary, and the story returns to its linear route forthwith. But a wrong choice can also lead to an early bad ending, or even jolt the characters into a different timeline where events will differ massively. It is also possible that favouring one character over others or neglecting someone can force you into special or sublimely terrible paths later in the story. For a completionist like myself this is a glorious win-win: even if I choose wrongly I can reverse course, and I get to enjoy all the ramifications of this cunningly written interactive story.

 The character artwork and music make up for the slightly glacial pace of Fate/stay night. The more visual novels I play, the more I appreciate what the designers can achieve without any form of animation, let alone a rendered game world. The genre might not appeal to everyone, and there are occasional sexist moments that are best left back in 2000s era Japan, and you probably need to find 50-100 hours of spare time. With that in mind, there is a very interesting story and cultural insight to be found here.

7. Pokémon Violet

 Many years ago I, like many of my generation, was quite addicted to Pokémon Red (well, I suppose some of us played Blue instead). I particularly remember being on a family holiday in Crete and playing an unsocially large portion of the holiday glued to my GameBoy Color. Last summer I spent some time off on the Greek island of Skopelos, and I decided it would be wonderfully nostalgic to return to Pokémon while abroad.

 Not many gaming series can get away with being so adorably twee and earnest as Pokémon. The themes of adventure and friendship are a constant, and they're reinforced by delightful music and of course an endless array of cute little monsters. Someone at the developer must be permanently employed to think up puns: my personal favourite from Scarlet/Violet being the umbilically-linked pair of mice called Tandemaus, which evolves into a nuclear family of four mice, named Maushold! It's just so tremendously satisfying each time you catch or evolve a new form of Pokémon, and when I ran out of new little guys to find I finally understood why there are so many entries in the Pokémon series: people need a continuous supply of the dopamine hit from catching Pokémon.

 Violet has some flaws certainly. Personally I really liked the colourful artstyle, but large portions of the map certainly have a degree of terrain detail reminiscent of the PS2. I would argue this is more than made up for with the incredible design of all the lovely Pokémon. My main criticism is that in the Pokédex you can sort Pokémon alphabetically, but in the boxes where your Pokémon are stored, there are no options to sort or filter, which became very tedious once my collection was into the hundreds. Also, and this may be down to my relative lack of familiarity with the games, but I struggle to hold in my head how the dozen or so types of Pokémon are strong/weak to each other. Some make sense (water beats fire) but others are a mystery to me (fairy beats psychic? I think?). Nonetheless, I massively enjoyed returning to Pokémon and have already embarked on my next adventure in Pokémon Legends Z-A.

6. Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition

 I need to thank my fellow BFVGer Arjybarjy for this one, as he did me a solid and lent me his copy of Xenoblade Chronicles. The world these games are set in has always intrigued me: two continent sized Titans frozen in a moment of gargantuan combat aeons ago, the Bionis and Mechonis, home respectively to organic and mechanical life themselves now locked in battle.

 These vast landscapes are often paired with dazzling blue skies, and this environment combined with a superb orchestral soundtrack all adds up to some delicious fantasy vibes. It's just a great space to explore, regularly broken up by battles with sundry creatures and evil cockney robots. The fighting is essentially a slimmed down version of MMO combat systems found in World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV, except in this case it's accompanied by a cacophony of "combat barks". This is how the Xenoblade community term what could generously be described as the characters' dialogue during battle. Roughly every two seconds every party member shouts something like "we can do it!", but they are also interrupting themselves by shouting out the ability they just used, and when most battles finish there is a brief canned conversation. As a result you will hear the same phrases ad nauseum, which I suspect is not everyone's cup of tea but I have found it endearingly goofy.

 Being a Japanese RPG it's another long game: my current playthrough has surpassed 60 hours and still seems to have some way to go. Despite being a remaster of a Wii game released in 2010, the writing and game design feel quite modern, and I've already established that I'm rather enamoured with the visual splendour of its world. Two sequels and a spin-off await me after Xenoblade Chronicles, so it seems I'm going to be running around on these massive Titans for quite some time.

5. Like A Dragon: Ishin!

(I named him Cupper)

 One of my long-running gaming projects has been to play all of the Like A Dragon (also known as Yakuza) series in order. Perhaps some of you might recall this starting with my 2018 GOTY, Yakuza 0. Thanks to the generous length and side activities of every game, it's been rather slow progress. So it was a questionable decision this year to tackle the spin-off game Like A Dragon: Ishin!, rather than persist with the numbered games in the series. But it paid off.

 Unlike the modern day Japanese mob stories of the main series, Ishin! is set in 1860s Kyoto, during an extremely turbulent period of social change and bubbling civil war as Japan was rudely opened up to the outside world. In this fascinating setting we get the faces and voices from other Yakuza games cosplaying as historical figures - for example the series protagonist Kiryu is mapped onto Ryoma Sakamoto, an influential man who you may not have heard of, but in Japan he has cast a lengthy shadow. (As a side note, I enjoyed this setting so much that I am now partway through a phenomenally in-depth 2000 page novel centred on Sakamoto and other figures of the era.)

 As I grow more familiar with the real life history of the period, it's amazing to see how the writers of Ishin! weaved a tale that is at once both fictional and based on real events, while also giving it the trademark Like A Dragon atmosphere. Kyoto has not been used as a location in the games I have played so far, so the setting was doubly refreshing in that sense. And I loved the nineteenth-century versions of minigames found in other LAD games: my favourites including karaoke as an anachronistic "singing bar", and in place of the baseball batting centre, slashing cannonballs fired by a mad scientist.

 The main drawback of Ishin! is the combat. This has always been the weakest element of the LAD games (leaving aside recent turn-based entries), and unfortunately in Ishin! it wears thin early and becomes extremely repetitive. There aren't many valid strategies other than hammering the same combos relentlessly, and the enemies as in other LAD games can be very annoying. It's for the best that my completionist habits always hit a wall in this series.

4. The Exit 8

 You walk down an deserted, pristine subway corridor somewhere in Japan. Advertisement posters on your left, a man with a briefcase passes you on your right. Once you round a couple of corners, you emerge at the same corridor with the same man walking towards you.

 That's about as much as I can say about the premise of The Exit 8 without spoiling it. It's a short experience (the first time I played it I saw credits after about 15 minutes) and costs all of £3.39 on Steam. Although it is to some extent on the level of a proof concept or tech demo, I appreciated how much detail was put into this virtual train station corridor, the complete opposite of your typical sprawling open world. I recommend playing it with friends who don't know what they're getting themselves into, as I did with fellow BFVG peeps (and noted baby-havers) Gnatasha and This_Is_Jazz/Felix. There is also a follow up game with the exact same timescale, quality and price, named Platform 8.

3. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

 An immaculately dressed woman drives up to a secluded hotel following an invitation from its eccentric owner, who seems to always talk in a manner that seems slightly off. Everything is in black and white, except for certain items which exude a vibrant neon fuschia. The effect is very much like being transported to the other side of a cinema screen showing an obscure Italian arthouse picture.

 Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a cunningly mysterious game that would adequately prepare you for the most challenging escape rooms on the planet. Almost every door is locked, often with combination padlocks. The solutions to these locked doors are invariably hidden in the environment or implied in one of the many, many books and notes strewn around the hotel. As a neat in-universe explanation for the game's inventory, our fashionable protagonist has a perfect photographic memory which you can access at any time. In short order I had a dizzying collection of clues, most of them far too enigmatic to point me firmly in any particular direction.

 Over the course of Lorelei I sampled some of the most glorious 'ah-ha!' moments of any puzzle game I've ever played. It's impressive to see how far this genre has come since the likes of Myst, and I'm eager to find more experiences like this in gaming. I will say however that an avant-garde story doesn't land quite so well when the narrative beats are interspersed with hours-long gaps in progression, due to the very same devilish puzzles that make Lorelei so successful. I couldn't fully wrap my head around certain late-game twists, but it was an incredibly fun time even if I was increasingly confuddled.

2. Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time

 Despite ranking at number 10 in my 2024 GOTY list, the supposedly fourth installment of the Crash Bandicoot series is back and almost at the top. Why you ask? Because as you can see above, I played it not just to 100%, but to "106%" completion.

Gamer pride is a dish best served with a side of cringe, but this really does stand out as one of the most brutally challenging games I have ever mastered. First of all, there's the sheer number of levels: 38 if I recall correctly, each of which has a mirror version with every objective effectively duplicated. Secondly, there are literally hundreds of boxes in every level that must be destroyed without missing a single one (I offer no apologies for using a guide on this point, as some of the placement of these boxes by the devs was gobsmackingly evil). Thirdly, the time trials require a level of skill and optimisation not far off those of professional speed-runners. Finally, there's the small matter of finishing every level in one run without dying.

 There were countless points during this process where I thought I had reached my limit, and yet thanks to my masochistic bloody-mindedness I kept finding a higher skill ceiling and a really deep understanding of the core mechanics of Crash 4. I ended up playing this game for multiple months and after all that effort, I have one specific reward. Every now and then I see a post from the Crash Bandicoot reddit community complaining about the extreme difficulty of attaining 106% in Crash 4, and I can smugly feel superior to strangers on the internet. 

 

1. The Roottrees are Dead

 

 My favourite game of 2025 may have slipped under your radar. The premise here is that several members of a rich family called the Roottrees have suddenly died in a plane crash, and in the media circus that followed it has become public knowledge that any confirmed blood relative of the Roottrees has access to a portion of the family fortune. Countless people making spurious claims to be a "secret Roottree" leads the family to hire the player as a detective to establish the true extent of this lucrative and complex family tree. Also, all of this takes place in the late 90s and your only tools are a PC, a printer and a corkboard covered with notes and pieces of string.

 In the somewhat trite parlance of 'game X meets game Y', The Roottrees are Dead combines elements from the influential indie games Her Story and The Return of the Obra Dinn. Many of the player's interactions with the game involve entering free text into a cute fascimile of old school search engines, similar to Her Story. And the empty spots on the family tree waiting to be filled in with three pieces of information (a name, a picture and an occupation) are a very direct homage to Obra Dinn. The developer even acknowledges these inspirations in an easter egg that can be found in the fake web browser.

 There's a very satisfying loop of fake-googling every term that appears related to the mystery, which leads to a growing collection of printed-out pieces of evidence, and then filling in parts of the corkboard with answers I have varying degrees of confidence in. Before long I was waist-deep in this engrossing armchair detective experience and enjoying each moment when the game "locks in" my answers for correctly filling in three entries on the board. The mystery only becomes more fascinating the further you delve, so I won't say much more. There is a hint system within the game, but I was pleased to find that I was rarely stuck, and I correctly guessed the final piece of the puzzle at the conclusion of the story.

 There is also a post-game expansion with even wilder rabbit holes to go down. Many of the articles and message boards get updated in response to the events at the conclusion of the main narrative, which adds a great sense of there being a living, breathing, 90s online landscape behind the fake computer screen. I did however find the mysteries in the post-game to be significantly harder to unravel; the hint system was very welcome at this stage.

 The Roottrees are Dead took some of my most beloved indie titles and made something delightful and novel with them. It has a nostalgic edge that I will probably never tire of, and excellent sleuthing music. It has rightly earned its place as my Game of the Year for 2025.

 

Honourable mentions go to: 

Mouthwashing - the best bad time you'll ever have

Puzzling Places - jigsaw puzzles in VR

Arctic Eggs - sizzling eggs in a low-poly dystopia

1000xRESIST - hekki grace

Mario Kart World - chaos and shattered dreams like never before

Metroid Prime Remastered - how about 2 and 3 Nintendo?

Bionic Bay - plenty of deadly intense jumping

Yakuza 5 - somehow my 8th Yakuza game, only 6 to go before I catch up