Naturally some version of this warning happens every year, but in 2025 it’s more relevant than ever: an unusually high number of 2025’s very best games were defined by their ability to hide twists, cameos, stunning escalations of scale, and other important details from their players until just the right moment – usually deep into their respective stories. So I implore you to be very careful scrolling this list if you’re still waiting to play something released this year.
That said, time for another dose of highly-concentrated gaming goodness, as worthy of discussing as any other part of the interactive tapestry. The original plan for this year’s list was a bit different, but – agh, never mind, I’ll get to it.
-◊-◊-◊-◊-
VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
SPOILERS FOLLOW; PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.
-◊-◊-◊-◊-
10. Le Super Tournoi de Jacinthe – Pokemon Legends Z-A
In 2025 I still don’t do a countdown list of the year’s best videogame characters, nor the best soundtracks or songs from a videogame. But if I did, this year’s editions would feature both Lady Jacinthe and the incredible electroswing battle track that accompanies her boss battle. The former is a delightfully vain thorn in the side of our hero from the moment she takes an interest in the time-honoured Pokemon protagonist power bump, and the lavish tournament she forces onto most of the story’s named cast is a blast – even when interrupted multiple times by more important story beats, to the great irritation of the ostentatious host. Eventually, the final match approaches – against Jacinthe, naturally – and then that tune hits. Suffice to say it’s worth sitting on that opening freeze frame for a good minute or two before you start launching your attacks.
9. Bar Fight – Dispatch
There are more pivotal and/or emotional moments throughout episodic pseudo-Telltale Games renaissance Dispatch, but catharsis and triumph simply do not hit harder than at the climax of Episode 5, when new studio AdHoc showcases just how impressively you can construct an action sequence when you don’t have to deal with that old abomination of a game engine. Time after time an apt directional button prompt will initiate a show-stopping match-cut linking a team-bonding taco session with a flashback to the brutal bar brawl hours earlier. But this satisfaction does not pay off just because of the stunning direction; it’s also a writing flex, giving the team of superpowered misfits at the heart of the game’s story a moment to get along – at long last – before the stakes really escalate in the final few episodes.
8. Epilogue – Dear Me, I was…
When all twelve of the world’s Another Code Recollection fans reached that game’s credits and saw it was developed by Arc System Works, famous for their well-regarded anime-aesthetic fighting games and most certainly not their story-heavy puzzle titles, a number of eyebrows were raised. When the company announced a dirt-cheap, single-sitting, dialogue-free, story-first game during an official presentation otherwise stacked with fighting content, even more eyebrows were raised. But that announcement definitively proved that at least one sub-team within Arc is passionate about the nebulous visual-novel-adjacent corner of videogames, and when I realised I was leaning forward in my seat and tearing up half an hour into the sub-hour experience, I started to understand why that passion was bankrolled. The game is so short that I don’t want to fully spoil the very final scene, but suffice to say someone on that team is a Look Back fan.
7. A New Arm – Silent Hill f
Silent Hill f is a deeply uncomfortable game for its opening two acts, but that discomfort is achieved through decidedly low-key methods: all about horrific implications, motivational ambiguity, obscured details, and an evident unreliability of perspective. Then things, um, change. A scene in an ornate shrine doesn’t quite cut away when it should, as the uneasy score gets twisty before ratcheting up right as a robed figure steps aside. Behind the figure sits our heroine Hinako, who is handed a bonesaw while her right arm is held outstretched. The next minute is a truly excruciating watch, as barely-veiled discretion shots pair with gnarly sound design and a committed Konatsu Kato vocal performance to sell a willing self-mutilation set piece that jolts the themes of the story in an entirely new direction – and elevates the game’s combat mechanics thanks to some new powers.
6. Rougarou – South of Midnight
The primary weapon in South of Midnight’s phenomenal sound design arsenal is a stellar suite of vocal tracks bombastic and wordy enough to make a theatre kid’s day, but the way each song is gradually fed to you piece-by-piece over each chapter is the real key to their impact. Multiple instances of perfectly-tuned needle drops directed by Olivier Deriviere litter the adventure, but one stands above the rest for me. About halfway through the game, Hearing a children’s choir whispering “I break my bones / I rend my skin” as you traverse the world towards your next goal is a doozy of a way to grab your players’ attention and make them feel real uneasy, but hearing the refrains grow louder and more coherent as the level progresses until they catch fire in full jazzy-Broadway glory for the big boss fight is next-level. As an Animorphs kid with a weakness for the theatrical, this got me.
5. Bugsplat – While Waiting
I’ve played a lot of games that do creative things with platform UI over the years, whether in service of horror or comedy, and I’ve heard of plenty more. But I had never played a game that actually crashes the platform on which it is running, on purpose. That is, until I played While Waiting. An otherwise charming and wistful tale about navigating every stop on life’s journey, prompts like “wait to forget her”, “wait for the update”, “wait for the boss to finish the presentation”, and of course that final “wait…” provided plenty of whimsically relatable moments. But the most shockingly committed of the game’s many fourth-wall breaks will stick with me the longest.
About halfway through the game, when I mashed the A button during what looked like a glitch level, my Switch force-closed the game, standard error message and all. I chalked that up to an amusing coincidence worthy of this list anyway, and loaded the level up again. Sure enough, mashed A and the game closed, only this time I could hear the console fan spin up in the background. It turned out the game was doing this on purpose, throwing an invisible rendering load at the Switch hardware to hit that perfect game-and-platform synergy you just so rarely see outside of independent PC titles. Crazy.
4. Oh, You Just Played the Prologue – The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
So between late April and mid August, before the reality of 2025’s hauntingly dense Sep-Nov release schedule began to take ominous shape, my plan for this list was actually to squish every other game into a Top 5, and then do a dedicated Top 5 just for visual novel/tactics hybrid The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. The sheer number of the game’s moments I had written down in my draft contenders folder was simply too large. The rest of the industry eventually caught up and made such a move seem silly, of course, but I just wanted to state that plan for the record to drive home how crazy this game’s plots are. Yes, plots. A hundred decently meaty endings is no small ambition, after all.
Singling out just one of the twists, turns, gut punches or moments of triumph served up by TooKyo Games throughout The Hundred Line feels next to impossible, if only because of all the other occasions that would be consigned to oblivion as a byproduct. So that drafts folder goes in the trash, and I simply have to go with the instant you boot up the game’s title screen after hours upon hours of character melodrama, off-colour laughs, underpowered skin-of-your-teeth boss fights, and one doozy of a cliffhanger – all to be presented with a massive branching timeline and a brand-new panel of splash art: “The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy 2” is about to begin. 20 hours down, only 200 to go.
3. The Kremlings Ride Again – Donkey Kong Bananza
On this corresponding list eight years ago, in the paragraph devoted to my personal Game of the Year runner-up, I wrote “If you told me at the start of the year that the Nintendo game with the most amount of delightful surprises worthy of a spoiler tag would be Super Mario Odyssey, I’d have told you to lay off the Super Mushrooms.” Well, it may have taken an entire console generation for the development team behind that gem to reappear with a new project, but their penchant for overshadowing the rest of Nintendo’s annual output in the wonderful surprise department has not diminished one iota.
Following a full game’s worth of satisfying mechanical evolution, visual variety, and immaculate vibes, Donkey Kong Bananza reveals in one fabulously-directed cutscene the grand return of King K.Rool, DK’s most famous foe not seen in an official Donkey Kong platformer for over two decades. Long assumed to have been cast off by Nintendo’s inner circle as a ‘Rareware thing’, a relic of another era when they didn’t have creative control over their earliest mascot, this iteration of K.Rool – and his Kremling horde – is shockingly, lovingly faithful to the King’s considerable nostalgic legacy. From his first emergence through to the (real) credits, the three-hour extended finale of Bananza puts old Nintendo fans’ jaws on the floor and keeps them there: the throwback tunes, the faithful mook designs, the emergence in and takeover of New Donk City from Odyssey, the freaking DK64 boxing arena, the teary Pauline farewell; it’s all basically pitch-perfect.
2. Finale – Split Fiction
Much like their previous extravaganza It Takes Two, Hazelight’s co-op masterpiece Split Fiction throws moment-of-the-year contenders at you (and your chosen co-op buddy) constantly over 15-odd hours. The hot-potato bomb sequence comes to mind, as does the pinball gauntlet, every part of the fantasy level with the four distinct transformations, and of course the outrageously funny mobile security screening atop a speeding bike. And yet unlike It Takes Two, the craziest segment arguably arrives right at the end. Rapid-adjustment platforming has never been so visually stunning, not to mention disorienting – in a fun way. Fittingly for this amazing studio and the very name of the game, the final half-hour weaponises the very seam of the split screen against each player as disparate stages and hazards sweep across under your feet, and it is gnarly.
1. “ACT III: MAELLE” – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Let’s be honest; all three of the Act finales within Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are jaw-droppers. Each one prompted me to take a break from the game for multiple months, such was the devastating emotional impact borne from an almost entirely left-field plot twist. But despite the very permanent death of the marketed protagonist to cap Act I and a heart-wrenching no-win decision at the end of Act III, I’d wager Clair Obscur’s most lasting narrative legacy will be its decision to uproot everything the player thinks is real at the end of Act II, bringing about the apparent demises of nearly every important character and then that stunning title card as Alicia the paintress awakens, scarred and stunned; the world suddenly feels so much smaller and more personal, but no less traumatic.
Whether Act III itself works for you is another issue; much like Silent Hill f, The Hundred Line, or even DK Bananza, Clair Obscur takes the hugely ambitious swing of changing what the story is even about partway through the telling – and it doesn’t mandate more than an hour of playtime after the big twist before you’re on your way to that gorgeous end-credits montage, so it may feel like the new status quo lacks the time to marinate. But regardless, it’s a corker of a rug pull, foreshadowed just enough to make sense on reflection but not enough to shield you from the devastation. And it arrives after the game’s two most emotional boss battles, too. It will take some topping.
-◊-◊-◊-◊-
Honourable Mentions
–Shark Riding – Sword of the Sea
Sheer, rule-of-cool bliss. Sword of the Sea is already a masterclass in smooth movement feedback, but bringing out a giant shark that increases your speed and destructive potential as a massive ice field opens up around you takes things to another, grin-inducing level.
–Burning… Rubber? – Keeper
Take everything about the thrill of rapid movement from the above Sword of the Sea entry, but magnify the catharsis because for most of Keeper you are a sentient lighthouse and move incredibly slowly. When the late-game reduces you to just your light-emitting device, suddenly the game is all about speed, and it rules.
–Over the Hill – Dynasty Warriors Origins
I may have bounced right off this game right at the beginning of the year, but it has one killer tutorial mission that ends with a truly ridiculous number of ally and enemy combatants charging towards each other; it is perhaps the first proper technically uninhibited fulfilment of the Dynasty Warriors fantasy.
–There It All Goes – Death Stranding 2
This one is worth an entire impassioned page-long recap, but the short version is I relied on the kitted-out vehicle of a complete online stranger for one hour too long and left it stacked with hard-won materials inside an enemy base, overextended, got swarmed, and lost the vehicle. I watched half a day’s work vanish thanks to a completely avoidable mistake while I was a little too far off the beaten path – and that is probably when I truly fell in love with the game.
–What? Prometheus? – Hades II
There is just nothing like holding your controller in a death-grip, blood draining from your knuckles, as you barely make it through each entirely-new enemy encounter on your way up a mountain path you just found out was in the game mere hours ago, only to hear the gravitas of Ben Starr’s voice before a shirtless man and his bird absolutely clean your clock.
–The Train Level – Lumines Arise
It’s probably the coolest one in terms of thematic execution, but the whole game is so mesmerising and flows so well that it’s perfectly possible I missed another candidate.
Vagrant Rant 