The best games of 2025 (so far)

I liked Death Stranding 2 because sometimes you have to just sit back and applaud the big swings. Any description of Kojima Productions’ latest “strand-type” game, about a grizzled Norman Reedus bringing Amazon deliveries back to a post-apocalyptic Outback, is in danger of descending into a tidal wave of adjectives. As with so many of director Hideo Kojima’s games—only moreso—On The Beach is ridiculous, over-the-top, shameless, and sometimes kind of stupid. It’s also almost psychotically ambitious, both in its storytelling (which does its best to make a virtue of its creator’s total inability to paint in subtle colors), and in its play, which builds on the open-world freedom of Kojima’s earlier Metal Gear Solid 5 and the original Death Stranding to create an incredible toybox to get lost in. By the time you’re snowboarding down a mountain on a giant coffin, picking off ghosts with a blood-filled boomerang, or disassembling whole enemy bases with a grab bag of ludicrous toys, you realize that while Kojima’s throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what’s-mildly-embarassing approach can create undeniable cringe, it also creates some of the most joyfully expressive, uninhibited play imaginable. All of which is tied into a highly compulsive “gotta make that next delivery” loop. When the reward for showing up on time (and without your packages having been too banged up by the last time Norman rolled his wobbly ass down a mountain) is more stuff to play with, it’s far too easy to keep those packages flowing. [William Hughes]

I liked Eternal Strands because it made “grinding” feel nothing like a grind. Normally, when a game asks me to fight the same creature again and again to eke out a little bit more power, I can get a tad leery. (There is a reason that Monster Hunter Wilds hasn’t made this list, after all.) But Yellow Brick Games’ Eternal Strands makes a huge virtue of its own repetition, turning each of the gigantic bosses that roam its ruined magical enclave into a fascinating puzzle to unravel. Figuring out how to suck the all-important magical energies out of these massive beasts has been some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming in 2025, part Shadow Of The Colossus, part desperate scramble simply to survive. And the rewards for this giant slaying are just as potent: Deeper access to the game’s physics-based magic system, which allows you to pull ever-sillier strategies as your arsenal of spells develops. (My favorite early trick: Realizing that I could use the gravity bubbles that protagonist Brynn learns to cast shortly into her journey to slingshot around their edges, picking up speed to launch myself across gaps—or straight into my foes. The first time I managed this little move was a full-on-grin-to-the-ears moment, as I realized just how diverse and fun the game’s toolkit was going to be.) [William Hughes]

I liked Mario Kart World because it’s just jaw-droppingly gorgeous. There are mechanical innovations in Nintendo’s Switch 2 system-seller, including an open world that feels heavy on potential, if low on incident. But I can’t deny that I’m playing the game, semi-obsessively, at least partially just to look at the dang thing: At the gorgeously realized tracks, at the funny and fashionable costumes you can deck your racers out in, at the whole brightly colored menagerie of silly weirdness and flying shells. The addition of the game’s new elimination mode, Knockout Tour, grants World some genuine vigor, as 24-player races heighten the feeling of being a crab in the bucket, desperately trying to scramble to the top. (Especially if you are a crab; Sidestepper ftw.) But the game as a whole is an absolute aesthetic triumph. I might wish, deeply, that the Switch 2 had launched with more than one actual new title to put it through its paces. But as a single-game sales pitch for the machine’s ability to create bold and beautiful worlds to go nuts in, Nintendo couldn’t have picked a better candidate, whether you’re climbing the tiers of DK Spaceport, passing through the sepia-toned haunted house of Boo Cinema, or racing on the stained-glass perfection of the game’s magnum opus take on series classic Rainbow Road. [William Hughes]

I liked Monster Train 2 because I hated it, at first. Shiny Shoe’s sequel to its excellent 2020 deckbuilder frustrated and flummoxed me in my first night with it, as I found myself consistently bouncing off of mechanics that seemed designed to frustrate my desire to keep the corrupted forces of Heaven from blowing up my Hell-sent train. (Okay, so Valor buffs my units’ damage… but only gives them a shield if they’re at the front of the pack… But I can get more of it by moving them around? It’s a lot of mental overhead.) But the pleasure of Monster Train 2 is in the learning, as you slowly start to see the strategies and synergies that allow your crew of diverse monsters to steamroll their enemies and keep their all-important Pyre safe. By the time I had unlocked all of the game’s factions (including a surprise infusion of new-old content that arrives once you’ve got your feet under you), I was having an absolute blast luxuriating in the game’s complexity, building increasingly broken decks to combat a steadily rising tide of difficulty. Now I look back at those opening frustrations with pleasure, seeing them mark the beginning of the climb—when I’m not letting myself simply be distracted by the delights of just tossing together a new deck to make a run at the Pearly Gates. [William Hughes]

I liked South Of Midnight because it feels like playing a Toni Morrison novel brought to life by Henry Selick. Video games with canonical Black female protagonists are few and far between in general, but it’s even rarer to find a game that so effortlessly centers Black community and traditions in the American South, especially oral storytelling. Compulsion Games’ South Of Midnight follows Hazel, a teenager whose home is swept away in a flash flood caused by a hurricane. As she sets off in search of her mother, who was in the house when it washed away, Hazel starts to see creatures out of folklore and realizes she is a Weaver, a person who can interact with and mend the Grand Tapestry that ties all things together. Even though the combat is straightforward and a bit simplistic and repetitive, the strength of the story and the gorgeous stop-motion-esque visuals are more than enough to keep players invested all the way to the end of the game’s roughly 12-hour playtime. [Jen Lennon]

I liked The Roottrees Are Dead because it proves you can always improve on excellence. This is a rare double-dip for our Best Of lists; arriving very late in 2023, the original Roottrees scored a last-minute spot on our GOTY list by dint of being one of the most compulsive detective games in recent memory. Its new rebuild really is a stellar improvement on an already excellent game, though: Designed by Robin Ward (working from the blueprint of original designer Jeremy Johnston), the game’s base mystery remains compelling, asking you to use a suite of cleverly designed ‘90s-era internet tools to sniff out the massive family tree of a candy empire—now bolstered by a huge number of quality of life features that reduce frustration, without cutting into the puzzles’ core difficulty. The real reason for me to stump for it here, though, is the built-in, and in many ways even better, sequel, Roottreemania, which unlocks after you finish the base game. Sussing out which claims to candy family legitimacy are real makes for more focused detective work than the less-precise original, while the new campaign also contains at least one puzzle that had me kicking myself for days for not working it out. The whole time, though, I was immensely happy, clicking through fake old websites, reading blurbs of non-existent books, and just basking in the connections that slowly burbled up into my mind as I tried to wrestle these convoluted family trees into place. [William Hughes]