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Games released in 2025

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

Browse the reviews

825 reviews

Hack-and-Slash Action RPGWindows PC

DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS

A genuine, widely-acclaimed reinvention of KOEI TECMO's long-running hack-and-slash series — praised by veteran fans as the best entry in over a decade for its overhauled combat — built around a deliberate, controversial trade-off that a large share of the same fanbase argues cost the series something real: a single silent protagonist replacing the roster of dozens of playable historical officers, and a story that stops at the Battle of Chibi, leaving half the classic Three Kingdoms tale untold at launch.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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ActionWindows PC

Earthion review

Ancient Corporation and legendary composer Yuzo Koshiro return to their Genesis-era roots with a horizontal shoot-'em-up built to run natively on real 16-bit hardware, earning "Very Positive" reviews for a soundtrack and pixel-art presentation reviewers call some of the finest the genre has ever produced.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Action, Adventure, StrategyWindows PC

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream review

River End Games' isometric narrative stealth-adventure sends a young woman through a gorgeous Nordic city hunting her missing brother, earning an "Overwhelmingly Positive" reception for its cinematic presentation even as a sizeable minority balks at its rigid, one-solution puzzle design and steep price for a short campaign.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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3D PlatformerWindows PC

Hypogea

French solo developer Charlie Wagner, a technical game designer with prior credits on Under the Waves and Otherskin, delivers a short, wordless 3D platformer built around a single standout traversal mechanic — a hooked staff used to pole-vault, swing and climb through a crumbling underground megastructure — earning overwhelming praise for its movement feel and atmosphere, tempered by a small but specific minority who found its controls inconsistent and its narrative mystery thinner than its Ico and Lorn's Lure comparisons promise.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Survival Horror RPGWindows PC

Look Outside

A pixel-art survival horror RPG confined to a single apartment building where glancing out a window turns people into grotesque monsters — a genuine cult phenomenon whose storytelling and atmosphere draw some of the most passionate praise this outlet has documented all year, sitting alongside a real, specific mechanical complaint cluster about a punishing save system and RNG-heavy combat from a small but consistent share of its own reviewers.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Adventure, Indie, Simulation, StrategyWindows PC

Mashina review

From the creators of Judero, this stop-motion digging adventure sends a friendly robot beneath a whimsical claymation world to mend her community, earning near-unanimous praise for its handcrafted charm and soundtrack even as some reviewers wish its short, simple gameplay loop went deeper.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Roguelite Survivors-likeWindows PCLinux

Megabonk

One person made a NZ$14.75 survivors-like that sold a million copies in a fortnight and sits at 94% across 104,643 reviews — and whose most invested players have been asking for the same balance pass since October 2025.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Roguelike DeckbuilderWindows PC

Monster Train 2

A bigger, more mechanically ambitious sequel to one of the deckbuilding roguelike genre's most respected entries, landing at 95% positive on Steam even as a genuinely coherent chorus of the original's most devoted fans argue this expansion came at the cost of what made Monster Train click in the first place.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Strategy / ActionWindows PC

MORSE

Brighton-based studio ALJO Games delivers a minimalist wave-based strategy game that turns real Morse code into its entire control scheme, tasking players with defending against the Kaiser's Imperial Fleet using telegraphy, timing and tactics, earning genuinely enthusiastic, specific praise for teaching a real skill through tense, well-designed gameplay, tempered by a smaller, detailed minority who found its input timing and interface choices work against the very thing it does best.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Nature Management SimWindows PCmacOSLinux

Mudborne - Frog Management Sim

A genetics-driven frog-breeding sim from one half of the APICO team, built around discovering and cross-breeding dozens of frog species across a waking and a dreaming world -- beautifully drawn and warmly received, with real friction in its navigation, inventory and pacing that a year and a half of updates hasn't fully resolved.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Sandbox action RPG, colony managementWindows PCmacOSLinux

Necesse

A top-down sandbox RPG that spent six years in Early Access building the one system that actually separates it from the Terraria-likes around it — recruit settlers, hand them jobs, and your colony keeps working while you're off fighting something in a cave.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Puzzle / AdventureWindows PC

Puzzle Depot

Laughing Manatee Games, a husband-and-wife studio, spent over a decade building a sprawling, post-apocalyptic sokoban adventure with a level editor and hundreds of meticulously designed rooms, earning a uniformly enthusiastic reception from a review base that consistently calls it one of the genre's best entries in years, with even its harshest fans naming specific, narrow friction points rather than any fundamental flaw.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Simulation / Sorting PuzzleWindows PC

Recyclic

A hand-drawn, Papers Please-inspired sorting sim about working a recycling line in a quietly authoritarian world, praised almost unanimously for its charm, escalating rules, and understated storytelling, held back mainly by a hold-to-drag control scheme that several reviewers found genuinely strains the hand.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Roguelike DeckbuilderWindows PC

Replicat

A memory-matching roguelike deckbuilder its own fans nickname "Memory Balatro," executed well enough to hold a near-spotless Steam record, with the honest asterisk — raised by fans and by its rare negative reviews alike — that it borrows its structure from Balatro closely enough that some players see homage where others see imitation.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Business Sim / Crime SimWindows PC

Schedule I

A co-op drug-empire sim that turned into one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of the past two years, built almost single-handedly and beloved for exactly the reasons Breaking Bad was — right up until the empire is built and there's nothing left to do with it.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Twin-Stick ShooterWindows PC

Sektori

A solo-developed, critically adored twin-stick shooter from a Housemarque alumnus, widely hailed by its own fanbase as a spiritual successor to Geometry Wars — Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with a 93 Metascore, undercut for many players by a steep, unevenly tutorialised difficulty curve that even genre veterans describe as a genuine barrier to entry.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Action-AdventureWindows PC

South of Midnight

A visually extraordinary, deeply personal Southern Gothic folktale from Compulsion Games, praised almost universally for its art, music and story, undercut by a real, consistently repeated complaint that its combat grows tedious well before the credits roll — released into a genuinely poignant real-world backdrop in which Xbox reportedly began shutting down the studio that made it only months after publicly celebrating its Peabody Award win.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Deckbuilding Tactics RoguelikeWindows PCmacOS

StarVaders

A grid-tactics deckbuilder that fuses Into the Breach-style positioning with a real card engine and a Space Invaders-flavoured alien assault, backed by a Metacritic 85 and an Overwhelmingly Positive Steam score — with real, specific complaints about UI clarity and balance outliers sitting underneath the acclaim.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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RPGWindows PC

Suikoden I&II HD Remaster Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars Review

Konami's careful, largely faithful HD remaster of two PlayStation-era JRPG classics preserves what made them beloved while quietly fixing decades-old friction points, though inventory management and event timers still bite in places.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Incremental RPGWindows PC

Tower Wizard

A solo developer's follow-up to Magic Archery swaps archery for architecture, building an incremental around growing a single wizard's tower toward a definite, well-earned ending rather than an infinite number-go-up treadmill.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Narrative Cozy SimWindows PC

Wanderstop

A narrative "cozy" tea-shop game from The Stanley Parable creator's studio that deliberately refuses catharsis in favour of sitting with discomfort — a design choice its own highest-voted review frames precisely as "this is therapy, not catharsis," which a substantial minority of players found genuinely frustrating rather than illuminating, especially a mechanic that wipes everything a player has built at the end of every act.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Other years