While a large portion of gaming industry writers will be busy struggling to rank the games of this year in a fruitless attempt to determine which is the “best” one, the end of the year post here will always simply recap the year in games and talk about some of my favorites without arbitrary, scores or a rank list, just cool stuff that came out this year I happened to like.
Don’t feel like reading? Listen to the article above!
The Main Theme of 2025: Taking Care of Your Catalogue
It was a great year to be a retro gamer as the industry seems to finally be waking up to the idea that maybe old games were good? While corporations have thrown a few dollars at making retro games available in the past, most recently with Nintendo Switch Online offering a solid catalogue including dusting off some juicy titles that before now hadn’t been released in America and a handful of fun collections from Capcom and Konami, retro games have pretty much been an afterthought for many of these companies. Absolute classics have sat covered in cobwebs on the shelves of some random office building in Tokyo for decades. This year however seemed to be the year where they were willing to put some money into refurbishing some of these classics and for the most part they knocked it out of the park.
Definitive Masterpieces
Dawn of War was a game for a very specific time in my life. Real time strategy games dominated a lot of PC gaming in the 2000s: WarCraft, StarCraft, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Command and Conquer, and of course the original Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. Seeing Warhammer 40k models animated and moving around during the game’s trailer, blasting each other on my tiny PC screen was amazing and what was even more amazing was that the gameplay was actually quite good. When Dawn of War 2 was released, I bought it instantly. They had seen the massive success of the first game and in a genius move decided to change the scope and change most of the mechanics, and ultimately I (and just about everyone else) put it down extremely disappointed. When Dawn of War 3 was announced I was cautiously optimistic. Certainly they would go back to what worked? Nope. And so ends yet another great franchise. Until Dawn of War: Definitive Edition. Everything I loved about the first game with modern(ish) graphics, fixed bugs, tougher AI, and nothing significantly changed. The campaign still ruled. The multiplayer was easy to set up and run. Much blood was given to the blood god and skulls collected for the skull throne.
Whenever something becomes great, there’s always an equally strong competitor for them to battle. Coke vs. Pepsi, DC vs Marvel, UPS vs FedEx. In gaming there are two storied JRPG franchises that compete for the title of greatest of all time and that is Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. During the decades each franchise had its time to shine. Dragon Quest started out strong with its first four games, and then Final Fantasy really found its groove with six to ten. Final Fantasy’s online offering beat out Dragon Quest’s, but DQ had some fairly successful spin offs like DQ Monsters and DQ Treasures. Recently both franchise main line titles have been a bit hit or miss, Dragon Quest’s biggest success has been the Builders spin off which mixes Dragon Quest’s story with Minecraft-like gameplay. Final Fantasy is enjoying a revitalized MMO with a solid player base and interesting story. Its the newest choice by the Dragon Quest team though that I believe may put them on top for good, and that is the recreation of their original games in a brand new style.
The first game to release was Dragon Quest III HD-2D in 2024, chronologically first as it is the start of the Erdrick Trilogy. The HD-2D treatment is amazing, beautifully done 3D graphics for the environment and a fun character art style that really emphasizes Akira Toriyama’s art. This year we got Dragon Quest I and II HD-2D in the same package with the same new style. While the first Dragon Quest was nice, it was a little awkward being the only person in your party. Dragon Quest II is where the game really shines. Originally not that great of a game, this new version was essentially a masterclass in every conceivable way. The art and character of the setting has always stood out, but now as you travelled you got to listen to Koichi Sugiyama’s soundtrack performed by an amazing orchestra. The gameplay was always solid, but now there are modern quality of life improvements that I don’t think I would be able to have completed the game without. Finally the story telling was deep, heart wrenching, motivations made sense, characters had depth, and even if everyone still talked with a goofy, old English Shakespearean affect, it still told one of the best stories in video games. I believe this was something missing in Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy had plenty of stories that were emotional and hard hitting, but DQ always felt like story took a back seat. The team that is making these remakes seem like they know exactly what they’re doing and if SquareEnix continues to put out such high quality titles with the rest of the DQ catalogue, Dragon Quest is once again going to surge ahead of Final Fantasy in the never ending back and forth battle for JRPG supremacy.
Worth Checking Out
A few other remakes came out that were pretty exciting, Final Fantasy Tactics is a phenomenal tactical RPG and the remake does a great job bringing it into the modern world. Unfortunately I’ve been pretty burnt out on tactical RPGs for a while and this has languished in my “Needs To Be Played More” pile through no real fault of its own. Suikoden I and II, Lunar, and the Tales Of series are in a similar boat, all good remakes from what I hear, but in this case I never picked up the originals so I can’t really say. I plan on getting to them soon. Probably.
Remake? Remix?
A final shout out to a couple of games that took the old games and made it into something new. Missile Command Delta puts an entire universe around the original game in an attempt to bring it into the modern era and of course Lumines Arise done by the same team that did Tetris Effect has elevated both games into something new and interesting, however I fear they may run out of timeless puzzle games to enhance. Maybe Tetris Attack next or Puyo Puyo? Bust A Groove? I’d like to see them tackle Pang! honestly.
If the quality keeps up then this practice of digging in the bin or dusting off the shelves and grabbing a title that was beloved in its time and pulling it into the modern era may be a win for all of us.
Category of the Year: Story Rich Games
Whether it was via retro remakes like Dragon Quest II HD-2D, full motion video surprises like Road to Empress, or excellent interactive fiction like Scarlet Hollow and Citizen Sleeper 2 2025 featured a ton of games with amazing story. However, none stood out for me more then roguelike puzzler Blue Prince.
I hate puzzle games. I don’t particularly enjoy escape rooms. In fact, the first game that really made me so angry I refused to keep playing it wasn’t the original Mega Man or Ghosts N’ Goblins (both insanely hard), it was Myst for the PC. Myst and its sequel Riven inspired a long standing deep hatred for anything where you’re walking around trying to solve puzzles. It even put me off watching Scooby Doo. This is why when I rolled credits on Blue Prince (calm down I didn’t, you know get all the stuff, I just beat it. Which is wild to think that’s basically only half the game.) I was really surprised I succeeded and how into it I got. The stories of keeping a notebook and writing everything you find down are 100% true, you absolutely need to do that. But the puzzles never felt cheap. They never felt so frustrating that you wanted to pull your hair out. Sure, you might curse the RNG gods on occasion, but each run felt fun and fresh, like a new opportunity to get the tiles and items you needed to get a little farther. And the story. The students I teach always joke about things like Five Nights at Freddy’s and the “deep lore”. Blue Prince has lore for miles. The puzzles revealing more and more of the story, from various perspectives, during various times. It was extremely impressive to experience and feels like planning for this thing must have made the writer’s room look like the “Pepe Silvia” scene in Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Another great…game? Was released this year in episodic form called Dispatch. It was a fully animated and voiced, choose your own path style game with a handful of management mechanics as you sent out bottom-tier superheroes to solve various problems around the city and occasionally you played a mildly annoying hacking minigame. The story, characters, voice acting, and setting was absolutely top tier, however calling it a game feels strange. When you put all that money and effort into the animation and production of the story elements and the gameplay is extremely minimal and uninspired, it feels more like it should have just been a show. I think ultimately Dispatch is caught in a weird situation. Telltale is closed. Without a studio like AdHoc creating amazing games in that style, there’s no guarantee we would ever see that type of game again. However, I don’t think players want to see the same thing over and over. Telltale’s classic choose your own path with interesting data bits at the end about your choices is old hat now, especially when players feel that it doesn’t affect the story that much. QuickTime events during story elements should be shot directly into the sun (luckily there’s an option to turn them off). I guess you can’t get everything right on your first outing all the time, Dispatch certainly got a ton of things correct. Should there be a new Dispatch I hope they lead with something interesting to do as much as there is to watch.
Notable Events of 2025
A few interesting things happened this year: Super Nintendo World in Florida opened up and finally I have a theme park for my extremely niche interest where dorks exactly like me can gather and experience characters and rides people born after the year 2000 barely think about. It does require visiting Florida unfortunately, so we may have to put the trip off until it’s a little less….Florida-y. The first industry wide union for game creators was formed, which is a big step forward in helping to provide people in the game industry with an actual working salary and some semblance of job security. The amount of people being laid off in the industry has been alarming for years now and 2025 hasn’t been any better. Hopefully with a large enough union, and enough resources a collective agreement can be made that ensures the teams of your favorite games stay together and aren’t unceremoniously dumped the minute the game is released successful or not. Finally, Marvel Rivals, the current leader to replace Overwatch, had its first major official tournament Marvel Rivals Ignite. The prize pool was around $500,000 and the winning team, Team VP, walked away with $160,000 of it. Marvel Rivals seems to be taking a lot of notes from Overwatch on a variety of things, and hopefully we can see American eSports crown a new leader to build around as the collapse of Overwatch set back eSports in the US pretty significantly.
Word of The Year: Friendslop
A controversial word indeed, many don’t like the term because of a perceived inherent negativity and it certainly started out that way. These multiplayer social first games were despised by the older and more experienced capital G “gamers” for a variety of reasons. The new generation, however, has absolutely ate them up and helped spawn this entire new genre. Among Us being one of the first to explode in popularity, followed by Lethal Company, Phasmophobia, REPO, Fall Guys, and most recently Peak. It speaks to a very specific time in American culture where going outside and playing may not be option for whatever reason and instead the new way to hang out and do dumb stuff with your friends is through games like this. As someone who grew up in the heyday of LAN parties and early multiplayer FPSs (and is terminally online) it makes sense to me, and it feels like the continued use of Friendslop has seen the negativity start to fall off. While the word may not be solidified in the lexicon just yet, the genre certainly is and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all develops.
Surprise of the Year: Dune Awakening
In what feels like a recurring theme, I don’t particularly like Dune as a setting. I think it’s mainly just ripping off the history and culture of folks from the Middle East and splashing in a little science fiction in a way that I don’t find that interesting. I also have no interest in Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs, as they are often repetitive grind-fest nonsense that requires you to make friends with people to access later levels. If I could do that I wouldn’t waste it on an MMO, I’d do it in real life and finally find some success with the seventy two half finished projects I have in my Google Drive folders. Dune Awakening however, knew exactly how to grab me and that of course, was with building. Dune promised to allow you to not only build massive, complex bases, but also do it by yourself for a majority of the gameplay. It’s probably why I ended up with three hundred and fifty one hours played and a collection of Twitch drop-only building resources that I needed to acquire by watching a streamer I never heard of play Dune for two hours every month. Even though I stopped playing a while ago, this reminds me I should go check to see if there’s any new drops. It’d be crazy to have all that special furniture and miss some of it. Right? Let’s finish this quickly then. Dune Awakening: it’s surprisingly good. The end game kind of sucks if you don’t have a guild or people you play with, but everyone complains about the end game and the devs are actively working on it. I plan to go back when they figure it out, and if things go my way, meaning if a loner more interested in building then in combat, actually has something interesting to do towards the end then I’ll pick it back up, but overall this was a nice surprise in 2025.
The Year in Builders
Look, I have to admit it. At this point in my life I know exactly what kind of game I want to play. My power fantasy has nothing to do slaying a great evil, rescuing someone from the clutches of a villainous organization, or proving I can run through a dilapidated city and shoot my friends the best. I want to build stuff. I want to build cities, bases, settlements, neighborhoods, districts, I don’t care what it is if it has buildings and people and things connect them for a purpose that’s what I want to play. So this entirely self-indulgent section is dedicated to my favorite genre.
2025 was amazing for builders. Farthest Frontier hit 1.0 and officially released in October. This is a great settlement builder that feels rustic and realistic. Whiskerwood released in early access and saw several patches almost immediately as the devs are actively working to improve what already is a pretty solid game. In Whiskerwood you find yourself the mouse manager of a colony set up for the benefit of your cat overlords. I haven’t been able to throw off the yoke of oppression quite yet, but if it let’s me I will immediately move it to my favorites list. Ground of Aces gave us a very interesting World War I British Air Force base simulator where your planes go on missions while you manage the base, a very cool game loop. Two Point Museum came out and it was…less disappointing then previous games. I love almost everything about the Two Point series, but there’s something desperately missing from their games that they need to find. All the improvements in Museum feel like that revelation is just around the corner. Mars Attracts has a lot of humor paired with the classic gameplay of Roller Coaster Tycoon and was a fun distraction for a bit. Anno 117 came out. I haven’t liked an Anno game since the beginning of the series and I’m not about to start now.
This should set you up nicely for the next two items, you know who I am and what kind of games I like so my game of the year obviously isn’t going to be Clair Obscur, Silksong, or Hades II. My most anticipated isn’t going to be GTA 6. I know what I like, and I know what I want to play, so with that these are the games that made my Most Anticipated and Gold Standard Game of the Year.
Most Anticipated Game: All Will Fall
While the overly dramatic title is a little deceiving, All Will Fall is an amazing vertical settlement builder that takes place in a post-apocalypse with Waterworld level oceans drowning a majority of the buildings and trapping people at the tops of the highest and most dangerously unstable skyscrapers. Okay, maybe it is a little dramatic. From here you gather materials from the crumbling buildings and ocean surface to cobble together some shelter and food for your people and maybe the occasional cool bench overlooking the ocean. Eventually the ocean starts to drop and reveals more room for you to build. It’s this verticality that is the most interesting mechanic, as the ocean will sometimes rise back up to cover anything you’ve built, but overall continues to drop and reveal more resources and area. Building connections between all the buildings with wooden blocks gives it a feeling of playing with Legos a bit, and the physics on these blocks can sometimes be tricky. It is really well done though, I certainly wouldn’t have put over eighty hours in a demo if I didn’t think it was a ton of fun. The release date has been pushed back to the beginning of 2026 and I have no idea what the final product will look like, but I’m hooked and ready to take the ride. I have a strong feeling All Will Fall is a classic in the making and I can’t wait for it to come out.
The Gold Standard of 2025: Little Rocket Lab
If you’ve read this far this probably isn’t going to be much of a surprise, Little Rocket Lab, in my opinion is a near perfect game. A famous quote attributed recently to Jordan Mallory was “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.” While I agree with most of the quote, the sentiment is what’s important. Games simply don’t have to be multi-million dollar, five thousand staff member, international collaborations similar to blockbuster movies and TV shows. They can be small. They can be short. They can be focused. Little Rocket Lab’s greatest trick is making the player feel like anything is possible, while wrapping it in a short, story focused experience that has zero fat to trim. An automation game where the player has to assemble parts from resources to manufacture higher level parts, could have gotten way out of control. Some of my longest games of Factorio require at least fifteen minutes at the start for me to go over everything I’ve set up and remember what I was doing. Little Rocket Lab keeps everything confined without the player ever thinking its being prevented from implementing a solution. One of the ways it does this is with an incredible story. The writing for this game is great, it grabs you from the beginning with a good hook and keeps you working towards the goals. The characters are fun, and creative (the robot toaster that you ride that only speaks in bread recipe ingredients is a hilarious sidekick). Little Rocket Lab has character in a way that games like Factorio, Satisfactory, Shapez, and yes even my reigning champion Rimworld can only dream about. This is why I feel the game is so controversial, you have automation fans that don’t like it because its not Factorio-like enough and cozy game fans that may find it too tedious or difficult accomplishing the automation tasks. This brings us back to the original point, “shorter games with worse graphics”, because this game is smaller, because it’s not big budget, because it doesn’t have to shoot for a large specific audience it can straddle both worlds without committing to either. This game simply isn’t possible at the corporate, Triple A level. Little Rocket Lab isn’t just an amazing game, it’s an example. It’s a beacon for smaller games done extremely well for specific niches. I hope we see a million of these in the future and I’m not kidding.
