One of the great pleasures and burdens of video games is that there are so many of them. There’s always something new to play, whether it’s a foundational classic, an underplayed indie, or a weirdo experimental masterpiece. I went into 2025 with the vague plan to focus on games I’ve had in my back pocket but never gotten around to fully exploring, and mostly succeeded. Most of what I played this past year were older titles, interspersed with shorter, more recent indies.
This also means that I have several buzzy 2025 titles waiting for me in the coming year (Demonschool, Angeline Era, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Horses, Consume Me…), not to mention the new releases I’m anticipating (like the absolutely bananas-looking Y2K shooter Don’t Stop, Girlypop!). Ergo, this list is less definitive “greatest games of the year” and more “some cool stuff I played.”
Maybe you’ll find something interesting here, and maybe not; either way, I hope you get some time to play this year.
Grim Fandango Remastered (Double Fine, 2015)
1990s adventure games like Grim Fandango are frequently considered archaic by today’s standards, with their dated graphics and puzzles that tend towards the cryptic. But what struck me about this game was that it still felt so vital: its Art-Deco-meets-Mexican-folklore-meets-film-noir style remains distinctive and transporting, its narrative about an afterlife office drone learning to transcend capitalist greed affecting and relevant—and its puzzles? Well, those are kind of screwy. (One example: a sequence in which players intercept a villainous colleague’s mail by filling a balloon with coffin sealant, throwing the balloon down a pneumatic mail tube to break the machine, following the mechanic into the exchange mechanism to unlock the door, sticking a playing card into the colleague’s mail tube…)
But the outlandishness of the game’s puzzles emphasizes its poetry. So frequently, the solution to a puzzle is to act like a chaotic jerk to the people around you, which corresponds with the main character’s individualistic outlook. But as the game progresses, the protagonist learns to be a better person, self-actualizing in the game’s final hours. Then, there are no more puzzles and the story ends, because he has learned that looking at life as a game is no way to really live.
Formless Star (splendidland, 2025)
Of the few games I played that were actually released this year, splendidland’s Formless Star (available for free on itch.io) really stuck out for me. It’s a short, top-down game in which you play an astronaut exploring the titular planet, where the landscape shifts every time you exit your spacecraft. The world is roughly divided into a few biomes, each with unique creatures, but how the biomes are arranged and which creatures you can find change every time you reload the world; your goal is to find and interact with all 60 different species.
It’s quite simple, but it really articulates how video games can achieve emotional resonance through mood and artistry. The soft and colorful visuals, charmingly dinky soundtrack, and especially, the consistently surprising creature animations all sell the game space as its own coherent world, while the changing layout of the space imparts a sense of mystery and intrigue. The reward for finding all of the creatures really solidified the game as a worthy and complete experience—it reminded me that to play a game is to experience a part of someone else’s life, one that can find its own context and meaning in yours.
Clockwork Calamity in Mushroom World (sylvie/hubol, 2021)
I first came across the independent developer sylvie last year when I played her superlative 2022 platformer Sylvie Lime. I fell in love with that game’s oddball design choices (like the ability to preserve your momentum by turning into a lime) and immediately sought out her other work, which led me to the platformer/life sim hybrid Clockwork Calamity in Mushroom World. Made in collaboration with hubol, another indie game developer, Clockwork Calamity features aggressively bouncy physics, a quirky inventory management system, and irritating random dungeon levels (called “mushroom zones”) that initially turned me off.
But as I explored more of its lo-fi world to help its strange, sincere denizens, I came to understand its elements of friction as organic parts of a larger whole. It’s a game about coming to understand a confusing space through interactions with other people; one that is not about mastery, but community. It doesn’t expect you to be precise, just open to its odd quirks, and its harsher aspects ultimately emphasize its essential sweetness. Banger soundtrack, too.
Chrono Trigger (Square Enix, 1995)
Playing retro games—and especially retro RPGs—can be a hit-or-miss experience, as older titles can feel slow and alienating without the quality-of-life innovations of modern games. Chrono Trigger, a mainstay of “best games of all time” lists since its release, does not have this problem. It helped to popularize many of the techniques that RPG developers still use to ease player frustration and maintain diegetic coherence, like the removal of random encounters and separate battle screens or the implementation of different endings based on player behavior. Its time-travel plot also justifies the use of repeating locations and characters; rather than exploring new worlds, it’s a game about coming into closer contact and understanding with the familiar, constantly subverting expectations and bringing the characters to a greater awareness and love for the world around them.
As such, it’s about as close to seamless as a game can get. That smoothness is why it’s endured, but it left me a little bit cold; I tend to prefer games that feel more stubborn and idiosyncratic, more personal, more textured. But if I didn’t quite love it in the way that I had hoped to, I still enjoyed it, and I’m glad that I finally got around to it.
Stray Children (Onion Games, 2024)
A peek behind the curtain: I pitched this piece around mid-December, thinking I could knock it out in a few days and then enjoy some time off without a writing project hanging over my head. Then I picked up Onion Games’ latest RPG Stray Children—released in Japan in 2024, and translated into English last fall—and realized that I couldn’t finish this list without finishing the game first. Stray Children is in many ways the opposite of Chrono Trigger: it’s obtuse, frustrating, isolating, confusing, harsh, sharp, challenging. Those are all compliments! The game is about a child who gets trapped in a video game world while looking for his father. Every adult you encounter wants to kill you, but if you can figure out the right thing to say to them, you can save their souls.
The opacity of the game’s puzzle solutions articulates an idea I’ve never quite seen before: that expecting heroism from children is unrealistic at best, impossibly cruel at worst, and objectifying always. The video game trope of a young savior, it communicates, trains kids to overextend and hurt themselves. Our society, in which childhood innocence is idealized, feeds on the naiveté of youth, and despite everything, it is still worth it to care for others. This is a game suffused with sorrow, empathy, and hard-fought wisdom, expressed through a startlingly simple set of mechanics and a sequence of unsettling, psychedelic worlds. I can’t say Stray Children is for everyone, but it was definitely for me.
