The 10 Best Games of 2025

The year 2025 brought quite a number of memorable releases. Some games managed to balance innovation and familiarity, along with some long-awaited sequels, while others drew attention for their niche-focused approach and the audacity to try something new in an industry that seemed to leave no place for new franchises.

In this article, we present the ten best games of 2025, based on their contributions, popularity, and overall results.

Split Fiction

Split Fiction presented itself as an intermediate title for those who expected so much from the studio behind the 2021 GOTY winner, It Takes Two, but managed to create memorable experiences for those who ventured into this new collaborative take.

We follow Mio and Zoe as they explore the fantasy and sci-fi worlds they've created, with various tropes and references that make this a title that, while not aiming to compete on a large scale with AAA productions, offers consistency in what it sets out to do and hours of fun gameplay as a team.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

After years of waiting, the highly anticipated Hollow Knight: Silksong maintained the quality of the first game and introduced changes that alter the exploration and combat experience, but its contribution to 2025 came from reigniting the discussion of the fine line between challenging and fun, raising the debate about how difficult a game should be to avoid becoming tedious for a portion of the audience.

The game follows Hornet's journey and balances challenges and exploration with some consistency, and the soundtrack accompanies the overall rhythm of the game, reinforcing immersion with a visual style that can now be considered a trademark of the series.

Silksong fulfills the promise of continuing the Hollow Knight universe but doesn't rely entirely on the success of its predecessor to captivate the audience, proving to have its own feet as a standalone, but very challenging, adventure for new players.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II offered a consistent and more accessible historical RPG experience with major improvements over the first title in the series as Warhorse reorganized its systems to make them more intuitive without softening the RPG's hard identity.

The plot evolved considerably with better cinematic direction, and Henry's relationships and the social situations that arise throughout the campaign give the choices a weight that matches the game's overall style, with even the occasional humor working to alleviate the rigidity of the setting without breaking immersion.

Overall, Deliverance II is a sequel that understands its purpose and doesn't try to compete with more accessible RPGs; instead, it embraces realism as its language. The result is one of the unique games of 2025 — demanding, consistent, and, precisely for that reason, memorable. If you can ignore the inherent bugs of an ambitious medieval open-world title, what awaits you is a pleasant surprise with great historical accuracy.

Ghost of Yotei

Ghost of Tsushima was one of the most visually acclaimed titles of recent years, and the second game in the series, Ghost of Yotei, does not disappoint in this aspect.

Set in an isolated region of feudal Japan, the title prioritizes local details and a huge map full of activities that make Atsu's journey a discovery of the geographical and aesthetic beauty typical of Sucker Punch, combined with the various social and personal conflicts of the secondary characters — all wrapped up in one of the best graphical and visual capabilities that the PlayStation 5 has to offer.

If there is a flaw in Yotei, however, it is the lack of courage. The game doesn't offer much beyond what Tsushima already did, and although the narrative guarantees fewer stereotypes than its predecessor, it still follows too many narrative tropes established in recent years by other works, giving the feeling that Yotei is a bit of "more of the same": excellent for those who fell in love with the first title, but not very inviting for those who expected more creative boldness.

Dispatch

Managing a group of ex-supervillains in rehabilitation trying to save lives. Dispatch innovates both in its narrative approach and its aesthetic, which combines gameplay focused on dialogue trees and team planning and management with elements of an animated sitcom, creating an experience unlike any other seen before, packed with a story that manages to warm your heart, elicit hearty laughs, or deliver a gut punch, sometimes in the same sequence within a few minutes.

It's not the kind of game for everyone, but it definitely fits the list as one of the most creative and innovative of 2025, as the product sounds like the culmination of what great veterans of Telltale's interactive narrative experiences learned from their successes and failures in previous works.

Donkey Kong Bananza

If you were born in the 90s, you probably played Donkey Kong. Bananza maintains the franchise's platforming tradition and updates mechanics for 2025, being the character's most acclaimed title in many years, repeating simple formulas but retaining all the characteristics of Nintendo classics and that trademark found only in their games.

Last year, when Astro Bot won Game of the Year, a relevant discussion raised at the time was that one of the reasons it received the award was primarily because the title reminded us that video games are about fun. Donkey Kong Bananza essentially offers the same feeling: it's all about having fun, taking the time to enjoy an interactive and colorful game that entertains you simply by being a game, without trying too hard to resemble cinema or without stylistic and graphic exaggerations — Bananza is a game for the sake of being a game, pure entertainment, and that's why it's one of the best games of 2025.

Blue Prince

Blue Prince emerges from 2025 as an ambitious proposal to mix psychological horror, roguelike elements, and investigative exploration — and delivers a coherent experience that justifies its place on this list.

The mutable mansion, the core of the gameplay, demands constant adaptation from the player: with each virtual day, the challenge becomes deciphering patterns rather than reacting to predictable scares. The mechanics organically create tension and transform the exploration routine into a succession of decisions that make sense within the game's logic.

Of all the new games released this year, Blue Prince offers something unique, and few titles with puzzles as their main mechanic manage to exert as much dominance in the indie game environment as this one did in 2025, making it one of the best titles of the year and possibly the best indie game of 2025.

Death Stranding 2

One of the most anticipated titles of the year, Death Stranding 2 has the complete package: top-quality graphics, technical mastery, exploration of a vast world, and, of course, the trademark writing of Hideo Kojima. Combined with a Hollywood-worthy cast and a soundtrack full of renowned artists, the title flirts with cinema often while still offering one of the best gaming experiences of the year.

Traversing the world remains the core of the experience, and the maintained delivery system and open-world structure are still present alongside the mix of sci-fi with supernatural elements and personal dilemmas, without abandoning humor or strangeness, which remains a trademark of Kojima's narrative style, this time with a faster pace — both in story and gameplay — than the previous game.

With all this, Death Stranding 2 establishes itself as one of the big names of 2025.

Hades II

Hades II maintained the core from its predecessor but reorganized everything around Melinoë, which grants a unique and broader scope. The change of protagonist is built so that their abilities directly influence how each run unfolds.

Melinoë is more flexible than Zagreus, and this helps the game gain momentum even after dozens of attempts, as the preparation between runs sustains progress without lengthening the process. None of this makes Hades II any less challenging, though.

What keeps the game among the best of 2025 is the way it expands the scale of the universe. The art direction is more refined, the soundtrack matches the urgent tone, and the cast of gods appears with dialogues that reinforce the personality and aesthetics of the series.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Named Game of the Year by The Game Awards, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is based on a society condemned to die year after year and transforms this idea into an RPG full of personality.

Sandfall's game immediately captures attention with its visuals inspired by classical paintings and the French Belle Époque and blends this with the coherence between the oppressive world, the pace of the missions, and a more contained and less expository progression that allows the player to engage with the central characters and identify with their dilemmas.

Expedition 33 has chosen its own set of themes and works with them extensively. Combat is where this identity appears most solidly: the mix of turn-based mechanics with precise timing reinforces the feeling of having real control over the battle, and the game knows how to vary the pressure well between common enemies and bosses without repeating itself, given that the reading of each one can vary according to the pattern of their attacks.

Overall, the title was the highlight of the year and reminded us that games can be made with excellence without needing to bet so much on maximum graphical capabilities or gigantic budgets; all it takes is the right team with enough passion to create something capable of provoking and challenging the pre-established standards of the industry.