Best Video Games in 2025

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A Year of Big Hardware Upgrades, New Consoles, and Standout Video Games

2025 will go down as one of the more interesting years on record for not only the games released this year, but also the games I chose to spend my time with. 2025 was a big year of change and upheaval for me, personally and professionally. I no longer work from home anymore and that has been a welcome change, as well. Being back out in the world and not spending 8-10 hours a day at my home office PC meant that I could appreciate PC gaming again in a way that I had not in several years. This console generation has also progressed in such a way that the PC has jumped back out to a significant graphical and performance advantage. Nintendo also released the Switch 2 and that has been an interesting development for them in many ways. I guess, hardware is as good a place as any to start with before we dive further in the games of the year.

New Hardware: My 2025 Gaming PC Upgrade

Back in June the Nintendo Switch 2 launched worldwide. Despite not really having a ton of affinity for the Mario Kart series, I picked up the bundle package along with that new Switch 2 Pro Controller. I like that controller a lot, It feels like a pretty good successor to the original Switch Pro Controller. I did feel sort of duped into getting it because they made it so that while the Switch 1 Pro Controller does work on the Switch 2… for some reason they made it so that you can’t turn the system on with it. So, whenever you want to turn on the Switch 2, you had to stand up and walk over to the docked Switch and hit the power button. Very strange choice.

The Switch 2 itself is a pretty big jump in performance from the original Switch, but boy does it lack any kind of differentiation beyond that. The mouse controls with the joycons is an interesting gimmick that I used in Metroid Prime 4 once. Beyond that, everything else just feels like a Switch Pro not THE NEW NINTENDO and I guess that is both good and bad. I mean, I say all the time that my favorite Nintendo consoles ever are the GBA and the SNES and both of those are really just simple successors that bring more power than their predecessors and let the game library talk for itself. The game library has been one of the biggest areas of concern for me in the first year of the Switch 2. Mario Kart didn’t hit for me. Metroid Prime 4 was a massive disappointment for me personally. Donkey Kong started strong and I really fell off of it around the halfway point. I honestly spent more time playing the enhanced Switch 2 editions of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom more than anything truly new on the platform. Some of that comes down to taste, I suppose. But, when compared with the launch year of the original Switch, it is hard to look at this first year of the Switch 2 as a bit of a disappointment in comparison.

My PC got a pretty significant upgrade this year. I finally upgraded my aging Ryzen 3800X to a Ryzen 7800X3D. I also upgraded my RTX 3080 to a RTX 5070TI. I nearly went with the AMD Radeon 9070XT, but so many games seem to be relying on frame gen and DLSS and all that tech is kind of owned or controller by nvidia so I stuck with their brand despite not being wild about the ways that they are doing business nowadays. But, I suppose that is a topic for another time. The last new piece of technology that I added to my life was my first truly high refresh ultrawide display. Running 165Hz spoils you. I make this joke all the time but running true high refresh is like that episode of South Park where the internet goes out and Stan’s dad keeps telling people that once you’ve seen the stuff on the internet you can’t go back to Playboy and I think that same logic works for high refresh monitors. Once you’ve had it for a while seeing something at 30 or even 60fps feels like a weird blurry slideshow.

Now without further ado, Let’s talk about VIDEO GAMES

Biggest Surprise Game of 2025: Clair Obscur – Expedition 33

2025 was full of awesome games. Some of them we knew a lot about before they came out and some really came out of nowhere and defied expectations and really impressed me. No list of surprises from this year is going to be complete without mentioning the 900lb gorilla in the room, Clair Obscur Expedition 33. A small team made up of ex-Ubisoft folks making a JRPG style game on UE5 that is INCREDIBLY FRENCH doesn’t immediately sound like the kind of thing that is going to unite the world or anything but yeah it kind of did. The game practically swept the Game Awards last month and there was a point last Summer where nearly everyone I knew was playing it. The game manages to harness enough of what makes the Unreal Engine 5 technology so impressive, while avoiding so many of the performance pitfalls that have plagued so many of the releases we’ve seen running on that technology. The game tells a very compelling story about sacrifice and loss and the power of the human spirit. I will fully acknowledge I am not done with it yet. But, even at only 15-20 hours into the game I can see and feel what all the fuss is about. That is a great argument for why Clair Obscur is the most surprising game of 2025.

Honorable Mentions: Underrated and Overlooked Game of 2025

Cronos: The New Dawn
You have all slept on this game. I fully admit I did, too at first. But, all it really took was a few screenshots from a friend and this simple pitch, “It is perfect for you it is like a Russian Dead Space”. Anyone that knows anything about me knows I like weird punishing Russian games like STALKER and I love horror. Add in a good mix of mind-bending themes and absolutely breathtaking visuals and Bloober Team have made a potent cocktail of a game that nobody who has even a passing interest in horror games should pass up.

Biggest Disappointment of 2025: Metroid Prime 4

Metroid Prime 4:
Beyond is a bummer man. I love Metroid Prime. That remaster from a couple years back was honestly almost my game of the year that year and it was just a cleaned-up version of a 20-year-old game. That is really saying something. It doesn’t help that this game was announced 8 years ago. The long wait, restarted development, change of developer, and long periods of time where the team at Retro was radio silent about the game should have tipped me off that the final product wouldn’t meet the high heights of the earlier entries in the series. But, that still doesn’t really cover how much this game let me down.

The primary issue that I have with Metroid Prime 4 is that it isn’t even really a Metroid game at its core. It doesn’t have any “search action” to it. The game is nearly entirely linear. Other than grabbing some missile upgrades or E-Tanks off to the side of the incredibly linear maps, you kind of just go from room to room and shoot an entirely limited selection of enemy types over and over to unlock a door and move to the next room and do it again. There is never a point in this game where you feel like you’re going on an adventure and to explore. You are led by the nose everywhere. Even the outdoor desert area in the game is very limited. You drive around and collect way too many green gems that are required to finish the game and kill a bunch of randomly respawning enemies. Nothing outside of the look and the soundtrack feels at all like a Metroid experience. I could honestly go on and on about the things that I don’t like about this game but suffice to say, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is the most disappointing game of 2025.

Final Thoughts: Trends, Surprises, and What 2026 Could Bring

2025 was a pretty amazing year for video games. The previous several years have been more star studded with long running franchises and sequels. But, 2025 seemed to bring a lot of new top the table or sequels to long running franchises that take some of these series in significantly different ways. I have attached a short and un-numbered list of stuff below that I think you should check out! Thanks for reading my thoughts on the year and let’s hope that it is an indication that 2026 is going to continue with this momentum.

Other Notable Games of 2025 Worth Playing

  • Ninja Gaiden 2 Black
  • Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
  • Outer Worlds 2
  • Avowed
  • Hades 2