Browse by year

Games released in 2025

825 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.

Browse the reviews

825 reviews

CLAWSTRIKE

The overall winner of js13k 2025 — a black-cat revenge platformer with instant die-and- retry pacing, silhouette-and-shadow visuals ranked 1st in the competition for graphics, and a fully realised touch control scheme that this review confirmed works, once tested with an actual sustained touch rather than an instantaneous one.

9 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of CLAWSTRIKE

Split Fiction

Hazelight Studios' co-op action-adventure follow-up to 2021's Game of the Year winner It Takes Two, drawing Overwhelmingly Positive reviews and near-universal praise for its inventive, constantly-shifting gameplay and unusually generous Friend's Pass model — with a smaller, coherent minority of the same fanbase arguing its writing and characters fall short of its predecessor.

9 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Split Fiction

Chronigma

A free time-travel Sokoban puzzler that gets one specific, difficult idea exactly right — solving a puzzle by recording your own past actions and then working alongside the ghost of what you just did.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Chronigma

Dragonsweeper

A genuinely inventive fusion of Minesweeper's number-deduction logic with roguelike combat and permadeath — the viral 2025 hit that earns its reputation, confirmed here to work cleanly with a tap for its core loop of revealing tiles and fighting whatever's under them.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Dragonsweeper

ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist

A dark-fantasy metroidvania sequel to the beloved Ender Lilies, trading a slower Early Access build for a widely admired 1.0 release — gorgeous, meticulously quality-of-life-focused, and Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 17,000 reviews, with its most thoughtful critics agreeing on exactly one thing: it's a better game than its predecessor and, for some, a lesser story.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist

Hades II

Supergiant's first-ever sequel splits its roguelite loop into two directions instead of one, hands Melinoë a mana bar to manage on top of her dash, and asks you to keep three separate meta-progression tracks fed at once — an ambitious redesign that mostly earns its scope. It also shipped a 1.0 ending that triggered a real backlash, one Supergiant is still visibly patching a response to nine months later.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Hades II

Inventorix

A spatial-puzzle spin on the Luck be a Landlord school of score-attack roguelikes — pack alien cargo into an ever-expanding grid instead of spinning a slot machine — that has, at the time of this review, not received a single negative English-language Steam review out of 100, and reads like it, largely because it gives players real tools to hunt for the build they want instead of just piling on more randomness.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Inventorix

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

Warhorse Studios' medieval simulation grows up without losing its stubbornness — a sequel that fixes the first game's roughest edges while doubling down on the idea that realism should cost you something. The result is one of the most complete RPGs of the last few years, provided you're willing to let a swordfight or a bowl of stew go badly.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

Öoo

A tiny, exquisitely designed bomb-jumping puzzle-platformer from Japanese solo developer NamaTakahashi that earned a 99%-plus Overwhelmingly Positive Steam record and near-unanimous "masterclass" praise — this review reads its entire, genuinely tiny 18-review negative corpus and finds the closest thing to a real complaint is that the game is short enough most players finish it in a single sitting.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Öoo

PEAK

A breakout co-op climbing hit from a small Landfall-affiliated team, selling millions of copies for NZ$11.99 and earning genuine, chaotic devotion from its players — briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented EULA controversy the developers reversed within days, and by two specific, widely repeated complaints (no save option, a punishing difficulty spike) that a remarkably attentive year of patches has since substantively addressed.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of PEAK

The Drifter review

Powerhoof's pulpy point-and-click thriller resurrects a murdered drifter seconds before his death and sends him sprinting through a conspiracy-laden noir mystery, earning an "Overwhelmingly Positive" score for logical puzzles and a breakneck pace that reviewers say reinvents the genre's usual rhythm.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of The Drifter review

Alaris

A fantasy otome visual novel about a healer drawn into fae politics and forbidden magic, praised near-unanimously across its Early Access run and full release for gorgeous art, distinct routes, and unusually thoughtful character customisation.

8.2 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Alaris

Skogdal

A roguelike deckbuilder set in a hand-drawn 1990s Norwegian small town full of punks, black metal, and creeping supernatural dread, praised almost unanimously for its distinctive voice and surprisingly deep card mechanics.

8.1 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Skogdal

Abiotic Factor

A co-op survival crafting game that traps scientists inside a Half-Life-flavoured secret research facility after a containment breach, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 41,000 Steam reviews for its inventive setting and crafting depth — with a remarkably consistent, still-current complaint that its final act and late-game content don't live up to everything that came before.

8 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Abiotic Factor

Absolum

A roguelite beat 'em up from the Streets of Rage 4 team that critics and players both rate as one of 2025's genre highlights -- hand-drawn combat and worldbuilding that land almost universally, undercut by real multiplayer stability issues and a vocal minority who find its Hades-shaped meta-progression more familiar than fresh.

8 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Absolum

BALL x PIT

A brick-breaker, base-builder and roguelite mashed together into something genuinely novel — and, by a large and coherent share of its own fans, something that runs out of ideas within its first ten hours and never quite finds a reason to justify the dozens more it invites.

8 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of BALL x PIT

Blue Prince

A genre-defying puzzle roguelike-lite set in a mysterious manor whose floor plan you draft anew each in-game day, celebrated with a 92 Metascore and widely called one of the most creative puzzle games in years — beloved specifically by players willing to take pages of physical notes, and marked by a real, still-unresolved design tension between its puzzle-solving brain and its randomised, roguelike-lite execution.

8 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Blue Prince

Crashlands 2

A visually spectacular sequel to a beloved mobile-turned-PC crafting RPG that Butterscotch Shenanigans has supported with an unusually relentless year of updates, held back at launch by mobile-first controls and a text-heavy script that its own most detailed critics — many of them the original's biggest fans — argue buried the sequel's real improvements.

8 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Crashlands 2

DateBoy

Brothers Anton and Henri Pätsi, published by Silakka Entertainment, deliver a free, fifteen-to-thirty-minute comedy game about secretly playing a retro handheld console during a first date, earning overwhelming, specific praise for its voice acting, writing and surprisingly sharp commentary on modern distraction from a review base that is almost unanimously positive.

8 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of DateBoy

Other years