As a person with minimal online presence and an even smaller following (a couple friends read my stuff, I’m mutuals with a couple writers I deeply admire online who may also happen to click through - hi guys!) it’s never really made a lot of “sense” for me to do any of this, but I enjoy the ritual of combing through the year and reflecting on the art I enjoyed. If I were a better writer or a sharper critic, I would probably tackle film, books, or music, but alas, what I know is video games, and what I kinda know how to write about is video games. This preface might sound a bit more self-antagonistic than I mean it to. I think my insecurity lies in that, the nature of having written a “top ten” makes me come off as though I think that I have the kind of prestige that means people will care what my top ten is. It’s all just a bit of fun.

Clearly heavily inspired by Bethesda’s take on the Fallout series, Atomfall is much more than “what if Fallout were British”. I knew the game was something special when it eschewed objectives altogether. After a brief intro sequence, the player exits a bunker on a mysterious quarantined section of the British Countryside, with only the notion that they must access something called The Interchange and that “Oberon must die.” Instead of map markers and quest journals and lists of objectives, the player is given only leads to follow, things that may or may not lead them into The Interchange, or on a collision course with one of the areas many faction leaders with their own goals and ends. The game allows you to build your own relationships with the factions based on when and where you encountered them, whether or not you met their leaders first, or if you even gathered all possible information before making a snap decision. I myself became a staunch enemy of the military faction of the game when I wandered into a restricted area, assuming that all military NPCs were immediately hostile. Not true, I found, after researching different possible endings later. I had simply stumbled into them at the wrong place at the wrong time and decided to acquaint them with the business end of a shoddy, rusted revolver that I had pilfered off a corpse in a river moments before.

Even the trading system is impressive, foregoing any currency and heading straight to bartering. Different NPCs value different items, and will consider items more or less personally valuable depending on how many they have, and how many you are selling them during this specific transaction. If I give you three grenades, well, now you have three grenades. Do you really need a fourth grenade? The bartender at this military occupied village doesn’t seem to think he does. It’s such a breath of fresh air to see a team considering a change in open world scrounge-em-ups and taking a more systems-forward approach to design philosophy.

I dare not spoil its best moments here, but to play Eclipsium is to feel as though you’re wandering through the cutscene of a lost Sega CD game. The visuals are intentionally chunky so as to obscure detail and create as much mood as possible. The first thing you do in Eclipsium is slice out your tongue. You won’t need words where you’re going. It contains massive tonal swings that are woven together expertly, shifting from scene to scene in a dreamlike haze, as our protagonist literally pulls themselves apart to complete their goal. The ending section is almost as funny as it is gruesome - the protagonist pulling their own ribs out to use as climbing anchors. All the body horror is a fantastic contrast to the swelling synth tour of the world, elevating a somewhat traditional walking simulator to a gripping folk horror tale about self-sacrifice, change, and the rattle of machines so great and terrible that, even far away, they shake our foundations. I completed it in a single sitting, unable to leave it be for even a moment.

We’ve reached the ouroboros point - developer Onion Games (a studio with a legendary lineage of games, including Moon: Remix RPG, Chulip, and Rule of Rose) has released a spiritual successor to Moon: Remix RPG fully pulling from the very games they inspired. Sometimes frustrating, Stray Children is a game about touring another’s nostalgia, navigating a confusing strange world through the eyes of a child. The music, presentation, are a warm bath for anyone with memories of mid-90s Playstation adventure/RPG video games. The puzzle design is enigmatic - seemingly unrelated items and text found in the early hours will become relevant tens of hours later. You’re as sure to find deep lore down a secondary path as you are to find it buried behind several loops of a maze. Stray Children is as much about missing out as it as about picking through the remnants of a time you can no longer understand. It’s brave and messy and heart-wrenching.

I think there’s a dangerous trend of applauding small numbers of developers in studios that made games in 2025. When talked about by enthusiasts it’s usually said with awe, but it seems to have become yet another tool for marketing tactic, to either erase work or create some sort of anti-worker prestige about the magic of making games. In any case, the fact that Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion is, as far as I can tell, mostly the work of one person, blows me the hell away. I can’t think of the last time I played a game with animation so expressive, with jokes so punchy, all with such strong voice. It’s a Klasky-Csupo roundhouse kick of horny, explosive, parkour shootin’ and it’s an absolute blast. The game allows you to continue to look around during dialogue and uses this for punchlines several times and it’s always a slam dunk. Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion is a masterstroke of an artist and game designer with tons of a bite and a bone to pick. It’s feisty as hell and deserved at least ten times the attention it got. Having played this feels like stumbling upon a gorgeous secret I want to share with the world. Go pick it up and give it a spin before everyone finds it - you get to be the cool kid who found the punk rock thing before it was cool.

I kinda can’t believe that Routine actually exists. I remember watching the original trailer back in 2013 and coming away slack-jawed at how creepy and atmospheric is. The devs, Lunar Software, went silent for a bit, Alien: Isolation came out the next year and gave me a lot of what I had been looking for in Routine’s original haunted retro-tech halls, but I still held it in my heart. Over the course of the next few years, there’d be an occasional “we’re not dead” update, but I started to lose hope. It wasn’t until it re-appeared in 2022 at Summer Games Fest that it felt real this time, oh man, it was finally happening! Then they went dark again. It finally launched this year, and what a treat to report that it’s not only good, but it’s one of my favorite games of the year.

I am surprised at how much of Routine’s personality from that original trailer twelve years ago is still here. According to an interview on Remap Radio, Routine has changed dramatically since that initial inception, but the vision is so strong its survived all these years and coalesced into something better than I could have imagined. “Immersion” is a sort of meaningless world in a lot of games criticism because what “immerses” a player can be so objective - but in Routine it’s the name of the game. There’s so much physicality to the space and to the body of the player character that it’s impossible not to feel attached. Once you begin playing, the game never ejects you from the world. You’re never given a break, the menu button doesn’t even pause the game. You have to choose to leave Routine, otherwise you remain trapped in its dark, silent halls. It has, possibly, my favorite mechanical touch in a video game ever: your primary tool and mode of defense is your Cosmonaut Assistance Tool or C.A.T. Every button on the C.A.T. can be pressed to change modes, reload batteries, etc. My favorite part? It has a power button. You can panic and misclick and turn your main tool off in the middle of being chased by a murderous android. Genius.

What can I possibly say about Hollow Knight: Silksong that a thousand other writers haven’t? It’s good, man. It’s among the most polished games I’ve ever played, which makes it feel like Team Cherry really wasn’t joking that they’ve truly been spending all of this time having fun making the best game they possibly could. You can disagree with the design decisions, the runbacks, the difficulty, the pacing, etc. One thing you can’t criticize is that it’s incredible what a lot of money and a lot of time and correct scope can do for how good a game feels to play. I only wish that every development studio got a chance to do what Team Cherry did.

It’s weird to say that my fourth favorite game of the year is something that I’m hesitant to recommend in polite company, or someone who doesn’t know me very well. Beyond Citadel is about the closest thing to an ero-guro fetish game one can get without actually going there, even if the creator says that it isn’t that. Beyond Citadel is an unholy fusion of classic build engine shooters, Blame!, and a little bit of Evangelion for good measure, and it’s deeply interested in weapons. Despite the fast pace of the game, every gun requires several button inputs to properly reload, cock, and prepare to fire. Mispressing a key can cause you to fumble a magazine to the ground, eject a perfectly good bullet prematurely, or even find yourself mulched by the very explosive you meant to send towards your enemies. The game is also deeply interested in what a bullet does to a human body, and the horrifying eroticism of that kind of penetration. A gunfight in Beyond Citadel is frantic, loud, graphic, and wet. To walk around afterwords is to see the heaving bodies of anime women, gasping and struggling to breath, the last bit of light leaking from their eyes, armor destroyed to reveal uncomfortable amounts of the bodies below. The collectibles in each stage are usually erotic art that involves the characters, but also tells you pieces of the story. The eroticism in Beyond Citadel is part of its identity, creating a deeply uncomfortable relationship to you and the trail of destruction you leave with your guns, and not in a corny “what if violence were bad” kind of way.

I adored Citizen Sleeper, adored its parting question of what it means to “grow vast and strange.” I never expected the follow-up to explore that so thoroughly, to take the “no fail” design of the original and throw it out the window completely, to make the risks higher and the characters more empathetic, and yet, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a titanic sequel. It’s everything I ever could have hoped for for the follow-up of one of my all-time favorites, clearing the original in my mind in nearly every way. I could spend thousands of words telling you about why Citizen Sleeper 2 is such an achievement, but in the interest of brevity I will tell you my favorite story that happened to me in the game:

My Sleeper and my crew had found a group of colonists, and among them was another sleeper: Flint. Flint, like my sleeper, is on the run and carries the weight of having cashed out too many favors, relied on the kindness of strangers one too many times, and now finds himself crushed with guilt as he has put another colonist in danger. He asks us to head to a facility to deal with the person hunting him once and for all, to put this behind him and pay back his debts to the colony he now calls home. After reaching the facility, my crew and my sleeper work tirelessly to turn the traps set by the hunter against them, pushing ourselves to our very breaking point in a mad scramble to eek out a victory against a physically superior and cunning foe. In the very last action, I use a “stress” ability (the game allows you to push yourself beyond what your body can handle in exchange for a better roll) despite the fact that my sleeper doesn’t have the physical resources to handle it. My sleeper manages to physically keep an opening for Flint to escape a hatch that traps the hunter inside, but it proves too much for their body - it shorts out, and they die. Temporarily, of course, they’re brought back online by the ship’s mechanic, but they now carry a permanent scar - death in Citizen Sleeper 2 means one of your dice (you complete actions via rolling specific dice) becomes glitched, meaning it always has a chance of failing, no matter how well you roll. For the next several hours, I failed lots of tasks because of this, I cursed my choice to take it on, it sometimes feels too big of a burden to bear to see the kind of results I want - and yet I never feel even the slightest temptation to reload a save. The idea of becoming permanently disabled, of permanently taking on a new burden to save another added such texture and richness to the story I was telling with the game. I will remember it always, I will keep it in mind as I grow.

It was always going to be this way - I was always going to love Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. Kojima Productions’ latest is the most recent project lead by Hideo Kojima himself, a man who has informed so much of my taste it sometimes feels like I’m about as corny as he is. It’s ridiculous and stupid as his games always are, but Death Stranding 2: On the Beach feels like the most personal work Kojima has made in a long time - it’s still got his trademark masturbatory self-referential wankery, his weird attitude towards women (in fact, this may be among the worst he’s ever been in that regard? And that includes the game where a woman must be… naked to breathe… sigh), and yes his stilted dialogue that doesn’t sound the slightest bit natural no matter how hard Lea Seydoux tries to sell it (and boy, is she trying in this game, even more so than the original Death Stranding). However, Death Stranding 2 is also a game about a man’s alienation from his children, of turning around to find them having grown, unaware of the time that has passed him by. It’s unflinching in its depiction of grief, of the systems of violence and imperialism and the way these alienate us more than pandemic or cataclysm.

Mechanically, it’s the most expressive he’s been since 2015’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and even though it treads a lot of the same ground as Death Stranding, the world is beautifully recontextualized. It’s a safe sequel in lots of ways, and daring in so many others. Despite all his shortcomings, I do think that Hideo Kojima and his team are among the most over and underrated artists out there, and easily one of the most interesting collective of creative voices working today.

No one is more surprised than me how much I adored Silent Hill f. Looking at the preview footage of the game, it looked, frankly, like a mess, and even with the writing chops of Ryukishi07, I simply didn’t have the hope that it would bear any fruit. It wasn’t until the critical reception seemed to be “terrifying, yet with clunky combat, the perfect 7/10”, that I found myself interested. I’ve written about my feelings on it at length, but to put a point on it, Silent Hill f is a triumph of horror story-telling - a deeply resonant and empathetic work about the societal roles that alienate us from ourselves and from each other. It’s such a breath of fresh air from a series that I had assumed was completely gone for good, after I had a somewhat middling reaction to the Silent Hill 2 remake by Bloober Team and the series had more or less been on ice since 2019’s P.T., barring the truly abysmal Silent Hill: Ascension and the lackluster “Short Message”. Silent Hill f is the most the series has felt like itself since Silent HIll 3, unpacking a deep societal rot through the lens of a character who, despite what they may have done, probably doesn’t deserve all this. It’s a game about suffering; graphic, deep suffering, that never feels cruel towards its characters, giving them each a deep respect and humanity. Sure the combat is a bit tiresome, but all to a purpose, building to a crescendo of righteous rage and a conclusion of quiet, hopeful reflection. It is a gentle hacksaw, and absolutely my game of the year.

I adore Demonschool. I adore Faye, its fighting dipshit protagonist. I adore the music. I adore most of the cast and the design and the mood and its Into The Breach meets Shin Megami Tensei: Persona combat. I do wish it were about ten hours shorter.

Kaizen game works had another banger on their hands this year, though I feel the scope of the game just barely exceeds its grasp. Despite how much I enjoyed my time with this, its also hard to feel like the narrative chops just aren’t up to snuff with what I know they’re capable of after Paradise Killer. That said, extremely worth your time, front-to-back incredible game.

I just haven’t had time to finish this one yet, I’m sorry, I don’t think I will get to it before the year is over! I love what I’ve played so far to the point that I will probably write a whole thing about it when I finish!

Creepy, engaging, and downright brutal at times. A short, not so sweet nightmare dungeon crawler with some fascinating mechanics and killer vibes. This one was just barely edged out of my top ten this year, but like every other honorable mention here it’s one-hundred percent banger.

I loved that game! You can read all about why I didn’t include it here!