Browse by year
104 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.
104 reviews
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
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
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
A gorgeous, brilliantly-made extraction shooter that sold 16 million copies and then spent nine months watching its own community turn hostile — with the developers now matchmaking players by how likely they are to shoot you.
7.5 / 10
Obsidian trades the open world it once pitched for four dense, handcrafted regions of Eora, and the trade mostly pays off — sharp first-person combat and companions with real opinions, wrapped around a plague mystery that resolves faster than it deserves to.
7.5 / 10
A free cat that drums your taskbar every time you press a key — 107,572 reviews at 96.6%, 5.8 million downloads in year one by the developer's own count, and an achievement ladder that climbed to 25 million bongos and broke its own completionists.
7.5 / 10
A survival MMO that actually earns its licence — stillsuits, spice addiction and sandworms all function as real systems — held back by an endgame that still leans too hard on forced PvP for players who came for the desert, not the fight.
7.5 / 10
Techland's return to Kyle Crane and the original Dying Light formula, widely, specifically praised as a genuine "return to form" after the divisive Dying Light 2 — backed by an unusually clean, well-optimised launch and an explicit, kept promise to ship without microtransactions — undercut for a real minority of players by parkour-unfriendly map design and a genuine, documented fairness controversy over how a later Definitive Edition treated existing Deluxe Edition owners.
7.5 / 10
FromSoftware compresses Soulslike boss combat into 40-minute three-player runs, trading Elden Ring's open-ended build freedom for ten fixed heroes, a shrinking map and a clock that never stops.
7.5 / 10
A single-player RPG built to feel like a classic MMORPG raid night, populated entirely by NPC "SimPlayers" who level, group up and loot alongside you — a genuinely novel hook wrapped around an Early Access game still finding its footing on UI, quest clarity and combat feedback.
7.5 / 10
A medieval survival city builder from the makers of Grim Dawn that spent three years building the deepest farming and disease system in the genre, then left Early Access in October 2025 to a Very Positive Steam rating and a still-vocal minority saying the milestone patch didn't fix what was wrong with it.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$7.19 fishing idler that lives along the bottom of your screen, updated relentlessly for a year — and whose 26 English critics mostly object that an idle game shouldn't need watching.
7.5 / 10
A first-person idle dungeon crawler that sells you the whole game once, then gets out of the way — its classless skill system and guild-building give it real depth, even if its offline expeditions undersell the "idle" in the title.
7.5 / 10
A mobile adaptation of Nexon's beloved 2004 PC MMORPG that went from a widely mocked teaser trailer to South Korea's Game of the Year, largely on the strength of a monetisation model its own audience specifically praised for restraint — not yet available in English.
7.5 / 10
The best traversal in games, attached to the worst PC port Nixxes have shipped — and a top-voted review that isn't about performance at all, but about the PlayStation runtime the game installs without asking.
7.5 / 10
A solo developer's take on RuneScape-style skilling, rebuilt as a multiplayer idle game with a real player-driven economy — and a cow theme it commits to with a straight face.
7.5 / 10
Capcom's biggest Monster Hunter yet strips away almost everything that used to make the series hard to love — and a lot of what used to make it worth loving. A phenomenal hunt loop wrapped around a launch-year PC performance crisis and an endgame that shipped thinner than the marketing suggested.
7.5 / 10
A genuine revival of one of action gaming's most demanding franchises, co-developed by PlatinumGames and Team Ninja, launching to widespread praise for its combat within days of the death of series creator Tomonobu Itagaki — undercut by a real, consistently repeated identity debate among longtime fans over how much of the game feels like Platinum's own house style rather than classic Ninja Gaiden.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$7.39 plinko roguelike about making numbers get bigger, 97.4% positive — and 56 of its 100 most-helpful negative reviews are about the same thing: you are not really in control.
7.5 / 10
The long-awaited official Steam release of one of indie RPG history's most influential cult classics — a surreal, unsettling 2008 RPG Maker game credited as a direct inspiration for Undertale, Deltarune, Omori and OneShot — undercut for longtime fans by a completely replaced soundtrack, a change with a specific, well-documented and genuinely sympathetic reason behind it.
7.5 / 10
A physics-driven co-op extraction horror that wears its Lethal Company debt openly and still carved out its own identity — helped, oddly, by a store banner so deliberately ugly that half its own reviews open by apologising for it.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$5.99 frog who cuts grass on your desktop — 95.4% positive, fifteen updates in eighteen months, and negative reviews from players with three hundred hours in it.
7.5 / 10
Jagex takes twenty-five years of RuneScape skill icons and welds them onto a Valheim-shaped survival loop. Fifteen months into Early Access, with a 1.0 date now on the calendar, the question is whether the skilling actually survived the move or just changed clothes.
7.5 / 10
A visually extraordinary, boldly original entry in Konami's horror franchise — trading the series' familiar American fog town for 1960s rural Japan, with a story from acclaimed writer Ryukishi07 and a score featuring series composer Akira Yamaoka — undercut by a combat system that reviewers on both sides of the recommendation line agree fights against the psychological dread the series has always been known for.
7.5 / 10
