Every year an old internet forum I use, Something Awful puts together a game of the year thread. While the forum’s traffic pales in comparison to Reddit or similar aggreagators, it’s one of my favorite threads each year and I end up reading dozens of pages about what people loved playing this year. You can find the 2025 edition of the thread here.
One of the reasons I also enjoy the thread is that it’s a fun time to quickly put together a top 10 list of games that I enjoyed, and write a bit about what made them tick or describe why they didn’t rank higher. For this year, I procrastinated a bit, so my abbreviated submission is as follows:
A bit of a light gaming year for me, didn’t play much for the first half of the year and then only played a couple games exclusively for a few months after that.
This is essentially a Quake total conversion which is fine since Quake rocks. Really appreciated that the levels were generally only a few minutes long, though felt like the designer really leaned on huge arenas with high monster counts that were fairly easy to dodge in.
Pillars of Eternity is one of my favorite series, so I was excited to jump into a game that picks up where POE2 leaves off. Enjoyed the story quite a bit, though by the end of the game I found that the combat became very samey.
I played a hell of a lot of Hades II, but it moved down my list since the story just didn’t land for me in the same way that Hades 1 did. I do think that it still really improves on Hades I in a lot of ways, and I found the decisions you’re making in the run much more dynamic than in the first one.
I’m a sucker for a puzzle game that makes you go “oh wow I should have been able to figure that out” after going through the learning puzzles for a game, and Öoo made me do that like 7 times. The last reveal especially made me wonder how I got though the entire game without accidentally doing that.
Finally got around to playing this 3 decades late. Excellent shooter even now, the super shotgun is one of the most satisfying weapons I’ve ever used in a first person shooter. I’m only ranking this below DOOM just because I found a couple maps in this (Downtown, The Spirit World) to be really confusing.
Also played this one for the first time in 2025. This would have been below DOOM II if it weren’t for Thy Flesh Consumed - those first two maps were probably my two favorite maps in the original WADs for DOOM and DOOM II (I know it technically came out after DOOM II, but steam counts it as required for completing the game).
First Monster Train was one of my favorite deck builders, and Monster Train 2 is a better version of it. Great game to just throw on and do one more run.
Extremely charming and short puzzler. I blew through this in one sitting and enjoyed each “area” of the game.
Dawntrail was a real slog for me to get through last year, and I wasn’t sure if I’d play the patch content. Boy was I wrong - I think that the patches smaller focus did a lot to make the story more enjoyable, and I really enjoyed the raid series for this expansion. Another game that I also appreciate that I can play for 20ish minutes when I get some free time.
A game that I probably wouldn’t have picked up if I didn’t have multiple friends raving to me about it. I found the gameplay and story so enthralling, and I think people undersell how fun it is to experiment with your party’s builds and weapons to feel like you’re getting away with something.