Browse by year
825 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.
825 reviews
Developer Kittens in Timespace, published by Megabit Publishing, delivers a chaotic, melee-focused 2D action game starring nine playable stray cats reclaiming a city from a villainous corporation, earning near-unanimous praise for its character variety, art and soundtrack from a small but strongly Positive review base, tempered by a single, specific complaint about visibility on smaller or zoomed-out screens.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$7.39 first-person clicker that spends most of its three-to-six-hour runtime pretending to be a joke about number-go-down before revealing a real escape-room puzzle structure — checked against a 442-review corpus and achievement data showing only about one buyer in nine ever reaches the end.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely ambitious cyberpunk tactics RPG blending XCOM-style squad combat with Shadowrun-flavoured heist design, whose exceptionally hands-on developer earns some of the warmest praise this outlet has documented all year — sitting alongside a real, concentrated complaint from its highest-voted reviewers that its June 2025 "1.0" release still reads like Early Access in disguise.
7.5 / 10
Surgent Studios' FMV-infused psychological horror sends a struggling actor into a producer's mansion to find his missing rival, earning a "Very Positive" score for its star-studded performances and unsettling atmosphere, held back by uneven pacing and a divisive second half.
7.5 / 10
A grief-soaked open-world deckbuilder that fuses Into the Breach-style grid tactics with a real card-building game rather than a roguelike run-reset, undercut for some players by a region system that keeps tearing down the deck they just built.
7.5 / 10
A puzzle-precise tactics RPG wrapped around a Persona-flavoured school-life sim, whose Into the Breach-style combat and Saturn-era art and music land far more consistently than its tonally uneven writing, after four separate delays finally got it out the door.
7.5 / 10
A narrative-heavy tactical RPG about exploring a sprawling, mysterious castle full of locked doors and deterministic robot-enemy encounters, earning enthusiastic praise for its hand-drawn art, sci-fi mystery story and puzzle-like combat, while a real, recurring minority of reviewers find its trial-and-error fights and backtracking-to-heal structure genuinely tedious.
7.5 / 10
A charming, dice-driven roguelike deckbuilder from solo developer Heckmouse whose fans and critics are arguing over exactly the question this outlet has learned to ask of every randomised builder — does the player get real tools to fight bad luck, or does the game just stay random — with both sides making their case in detail rather than talking past each other.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely inventive Tetris-meets-deckbuilding roguelike whose meta-progression system fits, almost too neatly, the exact design trap this outlet has flagged before in randomised builders — more unlocked content without more ways to steer around it, making runs feel less focused rather than richer the longer a player sticks with it.
7.5 / 10
Vienna-based developer James Patton, working with Deloria Patton under the studio name Clockwork Bird and following earlier releases Spinnortality and Silicon Dreams, delivers a dice-driven, Citizen Sleeper-inspired narrative RPG about an ex-soldier surviving a steampunk city on the edge of revolution, earning specific, detailed praise for its writing, world-building and consequence-driven choices from a Very Positive review base, tempered by a smaller, honest minority who found its late-game structure and political framing left them unable to fully recommend it.
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 debut game from a studio built by BioWare and Ubisoft veterans that pitches itself as "Monster Hunter meets Shadow of the Colossus" and, for most of its 1,764-review Steam audience, actually earns the comparison — while a substantial minority documents real unpolish, from a fiercely disliked inventory system to physics bugs that launch players into the air.
7.5 / 10
Nautilus Games' cozy digging platformer follows a lost kitten drilling through a meteor-scarred underground world in search of her mother, earning a "Very Positive" score for its gorgeous pixel art and heartfelt world, tempered by thin progression systems and the lack of an autosave.
7.5 / 10
A cozy co-op farming sequel whose year-long Early Access record shows a genuinely dominant "this has less content than its own six-year-old predecessor" complaint, sharpened by a 1.0 announcement several reviewers describe as blindsiding the community — balanced against extremely sustained post-launch development and a real, growing share of players calling the sequel a clear improvement over time.
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 near-universally loved remaster of the genre-defining 1997 tactical RPG, undercut for a large share of its 4,979 English reviewers by one decision that has nothing to do with the game itself — Denuvo DRM that requires an online check even in single-player.
7.5 / 10
Read review of FINAL FANTASY TACTICS - The Ivalice Chronicles
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 fly who wants to be a knight, and mostly earns it FlyKnight's premise is exactly as delightfully strange as its title suggests: you play a fly attempting to earn knighthood,
7.5 / 10
Inklingwood Studios, a husband-and-wife team who turned a pandemic-era career pause into a Kickstarter-funded classic point-and-click adventure, delivers a lovingly crafted 1930s Louisiana ghost mystery that earns some of the year's warmest reviews in the genre, tempered by a specific, consistent minority who found its dialogue overlong and its humour too gentle for the Broken Sword and Monkey Island comparisons it invites.
7.5 / 10
Kyoto-based Skeleton Crew Studio, the team behind 2021's Olija, follows up with a martial arts roguelite built around rehearsing every fight infinitely in your head before executing it for real, a mechanic reviewers consistently praise as a genuinely fresh solution to action-game difficulty even as a specific minority finds its slow death-to-retry loop and lack of run-to-run reward undercut the roguelite structure wrapped around it.
7.5 / 10
Monopoly, But Somebody Finally Fixed The Pacing Fortune Avenue is a $6.99 3D board game from solo Belgian-flavored studio Binogure Studio that wears its inspiration on its sleeve:
7.5 / 10
The follow-up to Before Your Eyes casts the player as a psychic baby craving his family's love while a shadowy corporation circles, delivering the same eye-blink-driven emotional storytelling to an audience that's overwhelmingly moved by it, with a specific, real minority finding its back half meandering and its twists too far removed from its intimate opening.
7.5 / 10
