Game Of The Year 2025, Editors Pick, Jade King

I’ve tried to expand my video game horizons in 2025, and I’m still unsure whether I was truly successful. As usual, I gravitated towards sequels and expansions to familiar favourites while dipping my toes into independent efforts that set my heart aflutter. But between the lines, I’ve tried to go even deeper. To put my tastes to the test and attempt something new.

With any luck, this list is a small testament to that effort. As usual, members of TheGamer’s editorial team will pen their own lists before we collate everything into a site-wide list with the power of mathematics. For now, here are my top ten games of the year.

10 Ball x Pit

There have been plenty of ‘numbers go up’ games in 2025, but few have robbed me of more valuable time than Ball x Pit.

This delightful ode to pinball is far deeper than its initial mechanics might suggest. What begins as a fairly repetitive and unforgiving process of levelling up characters evolves into one of the more fiendishly satisfying experiences of the year.

Even now, I’m still staying up too late discovering new ball combos and falling even deeper into the endgame.

9 To a T

2025 brought us this delightful coming of age story from the mind of Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, centring on a young child who must live out their entire life with a body stuck in the shape of a T.

While it doesn’t control especially well, and feels mechanically inconsistent at times, there is something so delightfully charming about this game that has stuck with me. I adore dressing up my character each morning and spending time with an assistance dog who helps me get around, despite my disability.

Rebecca Sugar also sings a song about how much a giraffe loves to cook, which is still in my head several months after the fact.

8 Lumines Arise

I didn’t expect colourful squares to make me cry in a puzzle game this year, but Lumines Arise isn’t like other puzzle games.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi follows up the brilliance of Tetris Effect with yet another life-affirming title that might just be the definitive version of Lumimes. It combines incredible music, satisfying gameplay, and a sense of global belonging that few experiences this year can match up to.

7 Donkey Kong Bananza

It turns out that what I needed to sell myself on the Nintendo Switch 2 wasn’t Super Mario Odyssey 2, but a game from the same team that defies our expectations at every turn.

Donkey Kong Bananza doesn’t simply let us platform across masterfully designed levels in search of collectibles, it invites us to destroy them. To jump, smash, and sing until there is absolutely nothing left.

Combine this delightful gameplay formula with a wonderful relationship between Donkey Kong and Pauline and you’ve got one of Nintendo’s best games in quite some time.

6 Goodnight Universe

Before Your Eyes was unlike any other narrative adventure game I’d ever played, employing your eye moments to tell a wonderfully compelling story. So it makes perfect sense for the same development team to take this idea and run with it.

Goodnight Universe has you playing as a baby with psychic powers and the power to think and act like an intelligent adult. The only thing is, you can’t do much as a newborn child.

This premise is the foundation for an excellent tale all about family, belonging, and how far you would go to protect the ones you love. A game after my own sentimental heart.

5 Deltarune

As someone who was never truly swept up in the Undertale hype, I didn’t expect Deltarune to take over my life quite so much when Chapters 3 & 4 arrived earlier this year. Despite being relatively simplistic in its visuals and gameplay, Deltarune proves so instantly charming in its characters and writing that I couldn’t help falling deeply in love with it.

I want to eat butterscotch pancakes with Susie and Kris without a care in the world, but I’m also aware of how much darker and more introspective their tale is going to get before it all comes to an end.

4 Silent Hill f

Konami has crafted one of the most important survival horror games of all time in Silent Hill f.

A terrifyingly honest portrayal of womanhood in 1960s Japan willing to analyse a society that throws young girls to the wolves and refuses to protect them.

Not only is this an exciting revival of a franchise no longer being kept on life support by the occasional remake, it’s a bold and unexpected experience that gets better the more you are willing to play. Jump in and don’t be afraid to let this one get under your skin.

3 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Sandfall Interactive has crafted one of the best JRPGs in decades with Clair Obscur, a huge achievement considering the developer hails from France. From the moment you set foot on the continent in pursuit of the Paintress, this adventure will take hold and never let go.

Its battle system is a masterful twist on parry-based combat while its cast of characters are all poignantly justified examinations of grief, hope, and anger within a world where your premature demise is all but certain. And as someone who lost their older brother a few short years ago, the relationship between Maelle and Gustave is one I won’t be forgetting for a very long time to come.

2 Hades 2

Supergiant Games was always going to stick the landing with Hades 2 — even if it needed a second attempt to get the ending right — but this sequel still took over my entire life a second time.

After putting 50 hours into early access, I jumped into the finished game and refused to let go until I saw every single character interaction, romance, and combat encounter. Even now, I’m still discovering so many new things as if I've only just begun to scratch the surface. There are also lots of pretty girls, twinks, and everything in-between. A stone-cold banger.

1 Death Stranding 2: On The Beach

There is no other game quite like Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. I said the same thing about its predecessor, another game from Kojima Productions I adored because it wanted desperately to redefine what a triple-A blockbuster could be.

Its sequel is more refined, more satisfying, and free of the awkward narrative baggage that held what came before back from true greatness. I never tired of delivering packages across continents or contributing resources to structures across the land, knowing that even my smaller actions would go on to have a magnificent impact.

You can call this game esoteric or pretentious, but there is a beating heart at the centre of Death Stranding 2 that represents everything I love about the medium. A willingness to be weird, unexpected, and unapologetically unique. Nothing else came close to that this year.