The Best Video Games of 2025 So Far

If the evergreen success of Blade Runner has taught us anything, it’s that stories about synthetic people and their quest for freedom remain fertile ground for great storytelling. Like its 2022 predecessor, Citizen Sleeper 2 sees players assume the role of an android with a digitized human mind, struggling to survive in a cyberpunk future by picking up odd jobs and assembling a crew of eclectic characters through text-based conversations and dialogue choices.

Inspired by tabletop games, Citizen Sleeper 2 utilizes the dialogue tree and a dice mechanic, where every decision made comes with the risk of failure that will impact the story moving forward. Whereas decisions made in the first game mostly impacted the protagonist, the sequel leans further into the RPG party concept, with each individual crew member picked up having their own die to roll, with players having the ability to assist. In a year filled with sweeping epics, Citizen Sleeper 2 offers a more pensive and intimate experience that evokes the feeling of taking on the daily life of what would normally amount to side character in a larger sci-fi world.

As a studio, Obsidian Entertainment has a long track record of taking established roleplaying IP and crafting sequels that are more complex, morally gray, and idiosyncratic in their storytelling than the first games. But despite their success with titles like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II and Fallout: New Vegas, it’s their original work with the Pillars of Eternity series that truly showcases what the team can do when given free reign to create their own world.

Avowed takes the worldbuilding of the Pillars series and shifts the perspective from classic top-down RPG to a first-person experience like The Elder Scrolls (although it can be played in third-person too). At a glance, it might feel like Obsidian’s take on Skyrim, but that’s not a slight; it’s a sprawling fantasy RPG with excellent combat that revels in letting players inform how the plot plays out based on decisions made in dialogue and action. And despite comparisons to other beloved open-world games, Avowed’s region of the Living Lands is somewhat smaller — in a good way — focusing on designing a dense, lived-in world rather than a largely empty one to roam just for exploration’s sake.

Over the last 20 years, Capcom’s Monster Hunter games have gone from a niche series with a dedicated following to a global phenomenon for RPG fans. Monster Hunter Wilds is the biggest entry yet, with a downright enormous world to explore, filled with diverse biomes filled with creatures to quell.

Fighting monsters in the game can be daunting, with 14 weapon types to choose from and master, and both elemental and environmental threats to watch out for. While it can be tempting to chase a mammoth-like monster in the distance, herd behavior in creature AI can cause players to be easily overwhelmed when animal instinct kicks in to protect the group. With four-person cooperative multiplayer, the challenges can be tackled together — although the party still exists as CPU-controlled allies when playing solo. Monster Hunter Wilds can take some getting used to, but once it sinks its teeth in, it quickly becomes a time sink worth investing in.

When EA released It Takes Two in 2021, no one expected a mandatory two-player cooperative game about a struggling couple hashing out their relationship issues by being turned into dolls would end up a game of the year contender. But it was! Now, developers Hazelight Studios have returned with another emotionally driven coop adventure with Split Fiction, and it’s once again one of the best gaming experiences that can be shared with a willing partner.

Following two writers, Zoe (a fantasy author) and Mio (sci-fi) who get sucked into computer-generated world inspired by their own work, the game sees players working together to solve puzzles and traverse levels that flip-flop between the genres. The story of Zoe and Mio is endearing and often very funny, but the bond between the characters (and the players) grows tighter as the challenges become more complex. The game’s final stage is a technicolor gauntlet of constantly shifting visuals and mechanics that’s so ambitious, it’s practically worth the price of admission alone.

For a series about assassins set in historical fiction, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed took nearly 20 years before discovering the art of shinobi. Originally due to arrive last year, Assassin’s Creed Shadows was delayed until 2025 for an extra layer of polish, and the result was worth the wait.

Set in feudal Japan circa 1579, Shadows is the first game in the series to follow two protagonists: Naoe, a young shinobi on a quest for revenge, and Yasuke, an African samurai searching for redemption (who’s based on the historical figure of the same name). Unlike recent entries in series that focused more on RPG elements, Shadows emphasizes the stealth gameplay of the earlier titles, although playing as the beefier samurai of the duo lets players more accustomed to action combat enjoy a less sneaky, more hard-hitting approach to encounters.

With a sprawling narrative that downplays much of the sci-fi lore and continuity of the series, Assassin’s Creed Shadows plays like both a greatest hits of the franchise and perfect entry point for newcomers.

After falling behind in terms of big IP, Xbox Game Studios has been on a roll this year with a murderer’s row of major releases. Among them, South of Midnight shows how committed Microsoft’s gaming division has been to be exploring and innovating with fresh ideas.

Developed by Compulsion Games, South of Midnight is a Gothic fantasy that follows a woman named Hazel, who must traverse a folklore-inspired vision of the Deep South in the wake of a destructive hurricane. Using a beautifully rendered stop-motion animation aesthetic, the game evokes the feeling of a controllable Laika film rolled into a strong third-person action adventure filled with magical abilities and colorful characters. Hazel’s story is wonderfully written and showcases a narrative and cultural themes inspired by the Black communities of the American South in ways that rarely get to exist in the gaming industry.

It’s rare for a first-person puzzle game to incorporate randomization as a core mechanic, but Blue Prince manages to weave together the feeling of luck with intense strategy in a deeply satisfying manner. Players control Simon P. Jones, a young man whose recently inherited his great uncle’s estate — under one stipulation. Simon must locate a hidden 46th room among the 45-room manor within a set number of days.

Each day, Simon enters the manor, but its layout is blank; each room is created only once the player opens a door and chooses what room to add to the blueprint. Some rooms provide clues or tools to use; others can be a dead end. Only by learning the value of each room and returning day after day can players figure out the chain of events that must occur to fixate on the missing room. But finding it just the beginning, and the game continues unfurling its mysterious well after what would otherwise be the end. Blue Prince is an inventive and intuitive puzzler that rewards paying attention to detail in its cozy home.

From developers Don’t Nod, famous for the supernatural coming-of-age story Life is Strange, Lost Records scratches a very particular kind of Nineties nostalgia that fans of Yellowjackets will adore. The two-part episodic adventure follows the dual-timeline story of four teenage girls who form a deep bond in the summer of 1995 only to mysteriously part ways until their reunion 27 years later.

Players take on the role of Swann, who in her early years is an aspiring filmmaker who uses her camcorder to catalog her summer with her friends Nora, Autumn, and Kat. Using the camcorder to record sequence and specific dialogue choices, players chart the path of the girls’ narrative — with a core mystery revolving around what really happened out in the woods of Velvet Cove that broke everyone up. In many ways Lost Records feels like the true spiritual successor to Life is Strange, hitting the emotional highs and spindly storytelling that game’s sequels never quite could.

While there are many games that tease multiple branching paths and endings to encourage repeated playthroughs, The Hundred Line lives up to its name with up to 100 ways the story can pan out. Following a motley crew of once-normal people living in a very abnormal version of Tokyo, where people regularly flee underground to hide from a completely unknown threat, the game is part-mystery novel, part-strategy sim, and doles out enough narrative to fill multiple seasons of a shonen anime.

Players are given 100 in-game days to prepare to save the world from an alien invasion (although their exact origin or intent is unknown to the characters), with each day spent learning about each of the characters, training to gain new abilities, and occasionally fending off the creatures as the assault the facility for whatever lies in its vault. An eclectic mix of genres, The Hundred Line draws players in with text-based roleplay but pivots frequently to (extremely hard) turn-based combat and even Mario Party-like exploration of the outer world where movement is controlled by card draws. Blending so many seemingly disparate ideas shouldn’t really make sense — and sometimes it doesn’t — but it’s never anything less than engrossing.

While big names like Street Fighter have long dominated the fighting game community, anyone who recalls the arcade days of the Nineties knows that SNK’s Fatal Fury deserves more attention. The first new entry in the franchise in 26 years, City of the Wolves is a resurrection of the fighting game series originally created as a spiritual successor to the very first Street Fighter.

And while it plays familiarly to Capcom’s flagship brawler, City of the Wolves puts its own spin on the 2D fighting formula with a technical yet accessible combat system that makes flashy moves and risky payoffs easy to execute, with a high skill ceiling for experts. Its cast of colorful characters like Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui may ubiquitously appear in tons of other franchises, but they’ve never looked better than they do here; City of the Wolves’ comic book-inspired art direction is visually lush and makes every sweaty bout a joy to behold. After a quarter century on the sidelines, Fatal Fury is back to reclaim its name.

The ultimate dark horse contender for game of the year comes in the form of a French RPG that nobody had on their bingo card. Despite coming from a small indie studio, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 plays like a high-end Japanese RPG, going toe-to-toe with series like Final Fantasy and Persona in terms of incredible gameplay and heady dark fantasy worldbuilding.

Set in a world where a being known as the Paintress eradicates every person over a certain age annually, humanity’s life expectancy has fallen year after year. After each culling, an expedition is sent to kill the fiend, although each of the previous 32 have failed. Players control a party of deeply flawed characters through a harrowing quest to save life itself, knowing full well it’s a suicide mission. In a year filled with narratively complex games, Expedition 33 rises above as one of the most devastating stories in recent memory, while also showing the classic RPG gameplay can still thrive without comprising to fit a more modern action-oriented palate.

While there’s numerous standout games this year that offer smaller, more intimate stories, few feel as deeply personal as Despelote. The narrative follows a childhood version of the game’s co-creator, Julián Cordero, living out his life in Ecuador’s capital, Quito, during the nation’s journey to qualify for the 2002 FIFA World Cup. Less of a straight video game and more of a two-hour fever dream of someone else’s memories, Despelote has players relive key moments of Cordero’s life from a child’s perspective — from sitting at the dinner table drowning out a parent’s voice to racing home before the streetlights flicker on after getting caught up in a game of soccer.

Visually, the environments of Quito are brought to life from photographic scans of the city, but every person or pet looks to be hand drawn with paper and ink. The game breaks the fourth wall by the end, but the seemingly aimless direction is the point. Playing Despelote feels like grasping at a foggy memory, where the emotions are intact, even if the details aren’t quite right.

Following the one-two punch of breakneck action in Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal (2020), the third entry in the modern reimagining of id Software’s seminal first-person shooter series opts for a different approach. Doom: The Dark Ages still has plenty of ripping and tearing with big fucking guns, but the pace of the game has slowed down a notch, focusing instead on blocking, parrying, and strategic use of specific weapons and skills.

A prequel to the previous games, The Dark Ages serves as a pseudo-origin story for the iconic Doom Slayer, a hulking mute protagonist who now wields medieval facsimiles of classic Doom weaponry like the Super Shotgun in tandem with a razor-sharp chainsaw shield. It’s most certainly a change from the heights of the last two games, but annihilating the hordes of hell with a machine gun that spews skull fragments remains a joy.

Of all the games to get a Fortnite-like facelift, FromSoftware’s dark fantasy Elden Ring seems like an odd choice. And yet, it works! As a three-player cooperative spin-off of the main game, Nightreign takes the essence of Elden Ring — exploring open areas and underground caverns, battling deadly foes and seemingly insurmountable bosses, and desperately trying to stay alive in the process — and cranks up the speed.

Rather than arduously creeping through every inch of a sprawling open world, Nightreign sees a trio (or a solo player, if you’re ballsy) airdropped onto an island in search of the right materials to slay the level’s big bad. It’s difficult to grasp, at first, playing antithetically to what Elden Ring experts expect; but once the core loop clicks and the plans comes together, it’s an engrossing and pulse-pounding reframing of the soulslike formula.

Deltarune could be considered a bit of a cheat on a yearly best-of list, with the game’s episodic structure seeing its release doled out over the course of several years. Chapters 1 and 2 were released in 2018 and 2021, respectively, but with the arrival of the Chapters 3+4 this year, Deltarune has been packaged as a (mostly) complete experience for the very first time — with its next addition slated for next year.

Developed by Toby Fox, Deltarune is a bizarre role-playing game that serves as a side story to the equally strange (and beloved) Undertale. It’s a top-down RPG that often feels dreamlike in how its retro-styled pixelated world shifts and bends between the overworld, combat encounters, and dialogue — which can often lead to conversations that can skip fights entirely with enemies. Trying to describe its erratic plot or genre-hopping gameplay is kind of moot; the best way to experience Deltarune is to simply leap in cold.

Every generation has their own favorite version of Mario Kart, but Nintendo has swung for the fences with its Switch 2 launch title and killer app, Mario Kart World. The biggest entry ever makes use of the term world in a very real way, providing a fully explorable open environment filled with secrets and challenges to find in free roam. Regular Grand Prix races and newly added Knockout Tour — a death race-like battle royale — all incorporate the game’s interconnected areas, with courses flowing seamlessly together with cohesive themes and interstitial treks from one track to the next.

But the greatest update to the game is the increase to 24 racers (up from 12), which makes every session crazier, more hectic, and downright chaotic. Levels have wider roads to incorporate the body count, with branching paths and shortcuts to take. With so much going on, it can often feel like little pockets of emergent chaos are happening all around in the periphery. It isn’t just a great version of Mario Kart; with all of its new editions and updates, Mario Kart World is potentially the best the series has ever been.

For years, fans of Frank Herbert’s Dune series have longed for a video game experience that can match the scope of the original novels. Now, at the height of Dune fever, their wish has come true. Funcom’s Dune: Awakening is an MMO (massively-multiplayer online) survival game that tasks players with forging their own mythos on the harsh world of Arrakis — if they can brave its threats.

Set in an alternate timeline where Paul Atreides was never born, the story sees House Atreides and House Harkonnen in a state of civil war on the desert planet. Creating their own custom avatar with a selected origin, Awakening is very much a player-choice driven experience than let’s you play in the Dune sandbox without being hamstrung by its continuity.

When word got Remedy Entertainment, a studio known for their mind-bending supernatural thrillers Control and Alan Wake, would be making a multiplayer game, many fans were left scratching their heads. What would that even look like?

Turns out, it’d look a lot like Ghostbusters if, instead of charismatic goofballs, it starred faceless government employees doomed to blue collar clean-up duty in a perpetually broken, ghoul-infested compound. FBC: Firebreak is a three-player cooperative shooter that takes the off-kilter and slightly eerie world of Control and turns it into a slapstick-heavy game of jobbing. Players take on the role of Firebreakers, a special task force assigned to clearing out and repairing the damage done by interdimensional beings within the Oldest House, the headquarters for the fictional Federal Bureau of Control.

Story wise, there’s very little going on in Firebreak that will advance that larger narrative of Remedy’s video game shared universe, but mechanically, it’s a fun (if slight) co-op shooter that takes the exhaustive stakes of games like Left 4 Dead and pares down the stress level. It’s great for jumping into an online match, running and gunning, and getting out with some progress made. It’s just a gig, after all.

One of the most popular online multiplayer titles of the last 10 years has been Rocket League — a game that’s essentially soccer, but with cars. So, it might sound stupid to describe Rematch as Rocket League minus the vehicles. That’s just soccer, right? Sort of!

Rematch is of course, a game of soccer, but rather than playing from a bird’s eye view or adhering to the football sim stylings of games like EA Sports FC, the developers at Sloclap have crafted a more immersive take on the sport. Players control athletes from a third-person perspective more in line with an action game, and compete in either 3v3, 4v4, or 5v5 matches that eschew little things like fouls or even boundaries as the Rematch goes for a more arcade-like, bone-crunching experience where the virtual walls can be used to rebound balls and slide tackles never warrant a card. It’s a somewhat barebones live-service title compared to others, but with easy-to-learn mechanics that bely technical depth, Rematch thrives when players are on the pitch.

A new Hideo Kojima game is always a major event, but the Metal Gear creator’s latest feels like something even bigger. With cutting edge motion capture, Death Stranding 2 often plays like a virtual movie, complete with an A-list cast; but it’s also a quirky mix of gameplay and disparate tones that only an artist like Kojima could get away with.

Set in a dystopian future where humanity has been separated into tribalistic communities, the game takes place 11 months after deliveryman Sam Porter Bridges has painstakingly reconnected strongholds across the U.S., and now the mission continues in other regions from Mexico to Australia. Like the first game, the bulk of Death Stranding 2 is essentially a walking simulator, where players must strategically pack their payload, accounting for balance and weight, to trek between waypoints and deliver resources. There’s combat (which is improved from its predecessor) and hours of esoteric, navel-gazey cutscenes that bring the story into some very dark emotional and philosophical places. It’s experimental, especially for an expensive blockbuster, but its ambition pays off in a once-in-a-generation experience that blurs the lines between video games and arthouse filmmaking.