I play 50+ video games every year, so why not make a list of the best ones? People like listicles, right?

Personally, I don’t have much interest in Game-of-the-Years.  Usually, the games at the top of these lists are games I already heard about, because people had been talking about them!  So for my list, I’m doing things differently.

• I’m only including games I played in 2025. That disqualifies Expedition 33, Silksong, and Hades 2! Older games are eligible if I happened to play them in 2025.
• I am presenting the list in reverse order, with the top games first.  The top games are already widely recognized.  But a bit further down the list is where it gets more interesting, as I talk about obscure games that appealed to me personally.  I’d like to talk about these games without trying to claim that they’re actually the best games ever.

1. Blue Prince

Blue Prince is a puzzle game that is so utterly unique in concept that I’m sure it will spawn a new subgenre of puzzle games. It’s so brilliant in its execution, that its future imitators will long live in its shadow.

The player explores an old mansion that changes its layout day to day. They manage resources such as steps and keys, while solving puzzles and searching for secrets. It is extremely dense in secrets, and required more notes than I have ever taken for any other puzzle game. And yet by presenting the player with only a few rooms at a time, it avoids overwhelming the player, and feels almost sparse. Furthermore, the puzzles often feed back into the resource management, offering rewards that are meaningful and unique.

It’s a particularly long and challenging puzzle game, and one that will not appeal to every puzzle gamer. Nonetheless, it’s a puzzle game for the ages that will meaningfully push the genre forward.

2. 1000 X Resist

1000 X Resist is the video game with the best writing. It’s a visual novel / walking sim taking place in a future where everyone is a clone of the All Mother. The protagonist, Watcher, bears witness to the life of the All Mother, before she became their goddess.

It’s a densely thematic work about cycles of oppression and resistance. It’s the overbearing parent and rebellious child, the fascist state and the underclass, the colonizer and colonized. It’s a story about the Asian diaspora, and the conflict between first- and second-generation immigrants.  It’s a story about heroes becoming villains.  It’s also very well told, frequently mixing up storytelling methods to show a variety of perspectives in conflict with one another.

3. Helldivers 2

If you can’t tell, I tend to stick to certain video game genres, mostly puzzle games and narrative games. Nonetheless, I do venture outside that range, especially when I play games with my brothers. When we tried Helldivers 2, it completely took over our play sessions!

Helldivers 2 is a PvE team shooter. You shoot up aliens to defend Super Democracy. The game’s world is very heavily inspired by Starship Troopers, being a satire of fascist propaganda. And the gameplay, well it involves a lot of explosions. A core part of the game is friendly fire–every weapon you use can hurt yourself and your party. You can make a show of force by using a beacon to call down a nuke from orbit, but the aliens knocked the beacon out of your hand, so the nuke falls on you and your friends instead. It’s the intersection of comedy and teamwork.

4. The Roottrees are Dead

In The Roottrees are Dead, you play the role of a genealogist. Several people from the famously wealthy Roottrees family died in a plane crash, and your job is to identify the surviving relatives in order to resolve the question of inheritance. To solve this mystery, you must go down an internet rabbit warren, searching every key word you can find. This feels like a new paradigm for detective games, combining ideas from Her Story and Return of the Obra Dinn, while exploring a sort of multi-generational epic.

And it’s a game by a solo dev, originally created for a game jam! I really admire it.

5. Hell is Us

One of the things I really appreciate about the Dark Souls games is not their combat or famous difficulty, but their approach to exploration. Rather than letting you just roam around freely, they strive to make exploration challenging and interesting in itself. Paths wind confusingly up and down ruined structures, circle back in on themselves, using clever line of sight tricks to conceal paths and reward attentiveness. Hell is Us is one of the few games that seems to approach that complexity, only without so much emphasis on combat.

Instead, there is more emphasis on puzzles and story. The puzzles aren’t necessarily innovative, mostly inventory puzzles, and code-breaking. A lot of the challenge comes from the lack of handholding. No maps or quest markers, just some verbal descriptions that give you a little clue about what you’re supposed to do.

I also think the story is really good. It’s about a country in the midst of a nasty civil war, and the atrocities that the two ethnic groups do to one another. I wrote a whole article about it.

6. Once Glorious Artahk

Once Glorious Artahk is a 2D exploration puzzle game. Similar to Hell is Us, it also features large and confusing maps, albeit from a top down perspective, and absolutely no combat. It has a variety of puzzles, often using clues to obtain a magic word to unlock new entries in your magic book. It’s also basically a metroidvania, granting you new powers that repeatedly recontextualize exploration.

While I was initially put off by the story’s verbosity, I got really into it. It’s a long series of fairy tales, which weave together many centuries of history of the fallen kingdom of Artahk. It explores a pantheon of gods, and the source of eternal night. I really wanted to explore and solve more puzzles so I could read more of it!

7. DROD RPG 2

Deadly Rooms of Death (DROD), is a classic 1996 puzzle game with many sequels across the decades. DROD RPG is a spinoff series that take inspiration from RPGs, but cast them into puzzle form. Basically, all combat encounters are completely deterministic. You kill enemies, lose some health in the process, and then you collect whatever powerups and keys they had been guarding. The catch is that all resources in the game are finite, including health. So whatever resources you spend, you lose forever. It’s a game about efficiency and optimization.

This sort of optimization puzzle game is part of an obscure genre known as a magic tower game. There are very few examples to go around! I’m sure that some people will find it stressful, because there are so many decision points, and there’s basically no way to find the absolute optimal solution.

But personally this is the kind of game I love to obsess over. I like making spreadsheets and developing heuristic strategies. And each chapter, the game mixes things up in a way that throws a wrench into my previous strategy. I put more hours into DROD RPG 2 than I did any other game in 2025.

8. The Art of Reflection

There’s a whole subgenre of puzzle games that take inspiration from Portal. They try to introduce some mind-warping mechanic, something like portals, but not actually portals, because we already know about portals from the hit puzzle game Portal. So we have games like Superliminal, where you can make objects bigger or smaller by moving them between the background and foreground. I think most of these puzzle games aren’t very good, because it turns out mind-warping mechanics don’t necessarily generate interesting puzzles.

In the Art of Reflection, you have the ability to zoom in. And when you zoom in on a red sphere, you can immediately travel there, using a Dolly Zoom. If you’re seeing the sphere through a mirror, you just travel right through the mirror into the mirror universe. Mind-warping game mechanic, check. But this one actually has interesting puzzles in it! Some puzzles genuinely stumped me.

9. Gentoo Rescue

Gentoo Rescue is a new entry into the sausage-like genre. A sausage-like is a challenging puzzle game (usually a sokoban) where the systems combine in surprising ways to create new challenges. It’s the puzzle subgenre for serious puzzle gamers, like Baba is You, Patrick’s Parabox, or Can of Wormholes.

Gentoo Rescue isn’t at the top of the genre in my opinion, but still very good. It’s about sliding penguins around on ice. Soon the game introduces tools like hammers and springs that changes how the penguins move. Eventually it introduces metapuzzle elements, where you can transport things into and out of individual levels. It’s just a bunch of tough puzzles with delightful solutions.

10. Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop

In Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, you repair a series of space ships by following the instruction manual. For example, to repair the rebreather, you have to open it up, check that the miniature planet is spinning properly, and has the proper number of snails and trees on it. Every module has instructions written in a different style, as if someone pasted together disparate product guides, and added handwritten annotation. It’s kind of like playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes with yourself, only wackier.

In a way, it’s sort of a cozy game, where you perform a series of actions over and over again. But unlike a cozy game, it’s actually difficult and punishing. Even the very simplest module takes like ten steps. I enjoyed the sense of mastery as I learned to quickly and consistently repair each module, referring to the instruction model less and less. Then it would hit me with a new module, and I got to crack open a new section of the instruction manual and be confused all over again. I wish more cozy games dared to be so challenging.