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839 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.
839 reviews
A social sandbox MMO with no vendors, no quest-givers and no safety net — genuinely distinctive when it comes to player-built villages and a player-run economy, but its land ownership system asks for real, recurring money in a way a lot of its own players resent.
6 / 10
A swashbuckling roguelike deckbuilder sequel that layers a genuinely inventive card-merging upgrade system onto its predecessor, undercut early in Early Access by a save-corruption bug and a turn-counter management system that splits its own returning fans.
6 / 10
A co-op horror party game about delivering pizza before a monster-filled curfew, launched rough and repeatedly patched into something far more playable than its first week suggested.
6 / 10
MuHa Games' Project Afterfall, formerly Project Thea, carries the beloved Thea series into a Slavic-folklore retro-future wasteland, entering Early Access on 20 November 2025 to a Mostly Positive reception split between newcomers drawn to its immersive world and deck-based combat, and longtime Thea 1 and 2 fans who describe its writing, combat depth and length as a step down, compounded by a repeated complaint about the developer's disclosed use of AI-assisted text tools.
6 / 10
A no-combat, no-timer exploration adventure through an evacuated, sinkhole-torn city, chasing hidden gold with only observation and memory as tools, praised by engaged players for its huge map and old-school point-and-click logic, criticized by others for offering too little direction in that same empty world.
6 / 10
Sloclap follows Sifu and Absolver with a 5v5 third-person football game whose core ball-and-movement feel a huge share of its 53,000-plus reviewers genuinely love — undercut, according to an even larger and more consistent share of that same corpus, by broken netcode, a full box price stacked with an aggressively monetised season pass, and a community joke about teammates who refuse to pass the ball that has become the game's own defining meme.
6 / 10
Attacking on the beat, in an increasingly crowded genre Rhythm Witch: Beat Death sets out to add a genuinely distinct hook to the now-saturated survivors-like genre: rather than au
6 / 10
Freedom is $1,000,000 ROGUE LIGHT DECK BUILDER's entire pitch lives in its title, and it knows it. Your house needs a deck — the wooden kind, not the card kind — and the light
6 / 10
A solo-developed Roman city builder that pits Caesar 3-style urban planning against the Hydra, the Minotaur and Cerberus -- a striking-looking game whose 1.0 launch, six months after it started, split its own audience between "finally complete" and "rushed and abandoned."
6 / 10
Solo developer Madi Abdykarimov's follow-up to the cult meme hit Toilet Chronicles trades a bathroom for a sinking ship, delivering the same absurd, pop-culture-soaked item-combination humour in a shorter, slightly more polished package that still leaves plenty of players wanting more.
6 / 10
A NZ$1.49 solo-developer horror game about a child escaping a cult's private chapel — verified here against Steam's own genre field ("Indie," which says nothing) and its top-voted community tag ("Idler," which says something wrong). Three puzzles, two endings, no idle or incremental mechanic anywhere in it.
6 / 10
A card-battling roguelite deckbuilder about capturing land with teams of elemental "Gokai" monsters, praised for its distinctive Pokemon-and-Yu-Gi-Oh-flavoured card art and surprisingly deep land-control combat, while a real, recurring share of reviewers flag launch bugs, steep gold-grinding requirements and a confusing early tutorial.
6 / 10
Bandai Namco's genre-twisting Pac-Man metroidvania sends a cloaked swordsman hunting a mysterious planet's secrets while haunted by Puck's ghost, earning a genuinely "Mixed" reception split between fans who call it an underrated gem and players frustrated by sparse checkpoints and inconsistent hit detection.
6 / 10
Firaxis's boldest structural gamble in the series' history — mandatory "Age" transitions that force players to swap civilizations twice per campaign — split the Civilization fanbase down the middle at launch and still sits Mixed across nearly 58,000 Steam reviews eighteen months later, even as a genuinely major, free "Test of Time" update rebuilt huge parts of the game in direct response to that backlash.
6 / 10
A visually stunning, psychedelic horror walking simulator from Blumhouse Games that earns real praise for its art direction and soundtrack, while a large, detailed share of its own review corpus argues thin gameplay, a confusing ending and a short runtime don't justify its asking price.
6 / 10
A premium, gacha-free standalone retelling of the Solo Leveling webtoon that a large majority of its 3,000+ reviewers recommend for exactly the reason its title promises — until an always-online requirement locks a single-player game to a server connection, and a post-refund-window paid DLC unlock pattern reopens the monetisation wound this version was sold as fixing.
6 / 10
A solo-developed love letter to Metal Gear Solid's PS1-era stealth, reshaped into a roguelite of procedurally mixed missions, Spy Drops earns a "Mixed" reception for its charming retro presentation and promising ideas undercut by persistent camera and control jank.
6 / 10
A solo-developer incremental RPG where you buy upgrades, unlock companions and grind through numbered stages toward a final boss, priced at NZ$2.99 and finished by most reviewers in a single sitting -- earning it a rare, near-unanimous verdict that it's honestly worth the asking price, alongside a pointed complaint that it's far shorter than the genre veterans it's priced against.
6 / 10
Deckbuilding meets the tactics grid Starless Abyss combines two genres that don't often meet: turn-based deckbuilding in the Slay the Spire mould, and squad-based tactical comb
6 / 10
A miniature-diorama tactics game that improves on Wartile's combat by its own fans' account, held back at its 1.0 launch by selection and mouse-control bugs several reviewers call game-breaking, alongside crashes that persisted past release despite a genuinely long, well-supported Early Access run.
6 / 10
A free love letter to browser-MMO empire building Taking London revives the old Travian and Tribal Wars formula of persistent, city-building nation-warfare, wrapped in charming pix
6 / 10
Wētā Workshop's long-delayed, licensed hobbit life-sim finally arrived after two separate postponements and a publisher upheaval that saw its original label dissolved mid-development — and landed to a genuinely split reception, with an unusually large minority of its 3,783-review corpus describing a shallow, poorly optimised game that undersells both the cozy-sim genre and the setting it's licensed to use.
6 / 10
Read review of Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game
A shop with no debts, no deadlines, and no danger Teddy's Haven puts players behind the counter of a small fantasy curiosity shop on the island of Ursa, gathering ingredients,
6 / 10
Cute drinks, creeping dread The Boba Teashop opens as exactly what its title promises: a small, cozy management game where you prepare boba tea drinks for a cast of pixel-art custo
6 / 10
