I am sure for many, 2025 will go down as the year of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It utterly swept the Game Awards, becoming the highest winner in the show’s 11-year history and being the first studio debut to nab the coveted Game of the Year award.
We love to look back on years by the games that defined them: 2023 was very much The Year of Baldur’s Gate, and Elden Ring was the videogame mascot of 2022. But honestly? It doesn’t feel quite right doing that this year. 2025 has been home to a dizzying array of incredibly cool, and interesting concepts nailed by development studios of all sizes. And I kind of love that, at least for me, I can’t pinpoint a single game that has represented my entire year.
Clair Obscur is not excluded from this praise—its homage to JRPGs of the late ’90s with Sandfall’s French twist is well-deserving of its success—but I don’t remember the last time I was able to dive into so many new games that were, well, different. Stuff I had just not seen before, or refined concepts that were able to breathe new life into existing spaces.
Blue Prince is a game that received zero awards at Geoff Keighley’s trailer bonanza—it lost out on both to Clair Obscur—but is one of the most unique things I played this year. An ever-changing mansion where I have to slot random rooms together in the hopes of making it to the end, puzzling out mysteries along the way. It’s a game that I admittedly wasn’t able to gel with in the end, but one that I feel was absolutely deserving of our very own Best Design award.
Blending an RNG-heavy roguelite with a puzzler where I could spend several runs just trying to get the right rooms I needed for the solution is a bold design choice, one that paid off for so many people on our team. Were I not to have a dopamine-addled rat living in my brain and a little more patience, I am sure it would have for me too. Despite not being in love with everything Blue Prince put my way, it’s hard to deny just how excellent its entire premise and execution is.
To a T is another game that didn’t quite land with me but I couldn’t help but appreciate it for how much it tried to do something different. Less of a videogame and more of an interactive TV show from the Katamari Damacy creator, it’s an endearing story about embracing your differences and occasionally using your teen protagonist’s T-shaped build to fly on top of the school roof.
It’s charming and the very opposite of safe when it comes to this industry, something that compelled me to power through to its end credits despite wishing there was a little more meat to the whole thing.
Then there’s my personal choice for the best weird little game of the year: Promise Mascot Agency. All of the good bits of a Yakuza side hustle condensed into a sub-30 hour playthrough with all of the same excellent and absurd vibes that comes from those games, lovingly put together by the folks behind 2020’s Paradise Killer.
A bizarre mixture of crusty 3D visuals that somehow compliment the aging town of Kaso-Machi; Showa-era vibes oozing from every building, road, and shrine; and endearing little freaks like severed finger Pinky or the crying silken To-Fu. Is it the kind of game to sweep awards shows? No, but does that make it any less important in my mind? Absolutely not.
I could go on and on forever: I know for a fact that Breakout-inspired roguelite Ball x Pit has been a Steam Deck staple for some of our team in the last couple of months, and competitive footie game Rematch (from the Sifu team) had all my pals in a chokehold for a hot minute. Umamusume’s horse girl gacha became a surprise hit when it finally ventured outside of Japan earlier this year, too. More recently, Dispatch has reinvigorated the episodic-based videogame and for good reason and Arc Raiders has blown the hell up.
I’m currently going through murder mystery game Seance of Blake Manor and I love the way it uses time as a resource, as well as choosing Ireland as its setting, a criminally underutilised part of the world cribbed for videogames if you ask me.
If anything, I think 2025 was pleasantly defined almost every single damn month. February was the month of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. March was Monster Hunter month. April was Schedule 1. Mai (oui oui) was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. June? Peak. July? Umamusume. September? Silksong, baby. October? Battlefield 6, and November was easily Arc Raiders. Dare I say the only months I can’t really pinpoint are January and August.
I sincerely hope that 2026 is just as exciting for unexpected, experimental games in the way that this year has been. Even if this time next year, it will inevitably be eclipsed by Grand Theft Auto 6’s release. Will I also be playing that? Yes, duh, but I’ll also be here to shout from the rooftops about all the weird, neat little games that have been doing something out of the box.
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