The Best Games I Played in 2025
Another year has mercifully come to an end. It was a rough one, but nobody wants to hear that, you’re here for murder simulators! I didn’t play many games in 2025, so it’s a short list this year, one entirely composed of indie games.
This isn’t a list of the best games released in 2025, rather, the best ones I played in 2025. This isn’t going to be quite like the other ‘Best of’ lists you’ve seen, I can guarantee you that.
Promise Mascot Agency
Promise Mascot Agency is easily my favorite game of 2025. It's the purest definition of a hidden gem – a nearly perfect game that was too weird too get mainstream attention.
Promise Mascot Agency is a hard game to describe. It’s a narrative-driven game that blends comedy with drama in a way similar to Metal Gear or Yakuza. It’s also an open world exploration game that sees you driving all across an island recruiting mascots and sending them on jobs, collecting items, racing, grinding on rails, and generally causing havoc. You can also upgrade your kei truck by hunting fox spirits and rebuilt the town of Kaso-Machi. There’s a lot going on, but it all works surprisingly well.
You play as Michi, a lieutenant of the Shimazu clan, who screwed up an important job and lost 12 trillion yen to a rival gang. That money would have ended a bloody yakuza war and indeed united various factions with Michi’s boss, Matriarch Shimazu, as a top player who wanted to wind down their criminal activities and go straight. The other organizations want her head now, so Shimazu concocts a plan in which they fake Michi’s death, and secret him away to Kaso-Machi to run the organization’s last business – a mascot agency.
This is a death sentence for Michi anyway, as there’s a curse on the town that will, eventually, kill any male member of the yakuza who enters. It doesn’t take long until he realizes there’s much more going on, with a massive conspiracy involving the town’s mayor, a traitor in the Shimazu clan, a long abandoned mine, and a severed pinky finger – who happens to be your second in command.
Yes, that’s where the mascots come into play. These mascots are what tie all the game’s disparate elements together in a cohesive, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt story about love and loss, the difficulty of trying to do the right thing, and following your dreams no matter what. There’s To-Fu, a block of tofu who can’t stop crying, Neko Roll, half cat and half sponge roll who’s tired of being called “cute,” Kaki-Gory, a bowl of shaved ice who may or may not be a vampire, and a whole bunch more. These mascots, while often taking a backseat to the main story, are (mostly) incredible characters with their own backstories and side quests.
Your job is to hire these mascots and send them out around town to events, like grand openings, safety events, parities, stuff like that. The town is all but dead though, so you also have to invest money in the town by helping to open new shops, cleaning up trash, and helping the local people. When your mascots are on jobs, they’ll sometimes need help, which is where you play a series of cards in a turn-based battle to defeat these obstacles. Honestly, this card battle system is the weakest part of the game. It’s not bad, more a case of not being very engaging. Cards are easy to find (especially after the content updated added more) making it super easy to play powerful cards that destroy any obstacle in your path more or less instantly.
This game shines in exploring this crazy world in your kei truck, racing around the streets, grinding on rails, transforming into a freakin’ boat, and strapping wings on so you can fly in the air. Screw Spider-Man, this is the game with the best traversal mechanics in a game. It’s simply bliss.
Another standout are the characters. Months after playing the game (three times in a row, I loved it that much) I can still remember every character’s name, their personality, what they looked like, their voices, and their motivations. Pinky wants to return Kaso-Machi to its previous glory as a homely, welcoming small town. Matriarch Shimazu wants to end the bloody yakuza war and use her organization as a sort of people’s committee to help those in need. Nui and Yui just want to kill and torture people, is that so bad? And there’s a guy who loves trains and you can help him rebuild the train station and get a new stop added to the town, so that alone makes this game a 10/10.
Some of the mascots don’t get much time in the spotlight unfortunately, something acknowledged by the developers in the art book about one of their biggest regrets. All of them at least get a couple of scenes to shine, and many of them much more than that.
I cannot stress enough how great Promise Mascot Agency is. Normally I try to reign it in when I talk about a game I like, because I’m afraid of raising people’s expectations too much. But no, I think if you liked any of what you heard about this game, you’re going to love it. Game of the year, game of the decade, I’m dead broken and I’ve bought this game three different times now (Steam, digital PS5, physical PS5), it’s soundtrack vinyl record (I don’t own a record player), and I had to fight myself like hell to stop myself from buying a Pinky plush. I fight I eventually lost. Please help!
Our Adventurer Guild
Technically I started playing Our Adventurer Guild in December 2024, but since I put over 120 hours into a single campaign, most of that coming this year, I’m going to count it anyway. And because its a great game and not enough people played it.
This is a complex game with countless systems and mechanics woven together, each affecting one other in numerous ways. The depth of these systems and the way they feed into each other is almost on par with a 4x strategy game like Crusader Kings or Iron Hearts but a little more, dare I say, fun streamlined.
You are the new head of the Adventurer Guild, basically a group of mercenaries in a ye old fantasy world. The group, led by your friend who was recently killed, let the place slide over the years. What was once a well-known institution, rich and full of great soldiers, is now a ramshackle mess with only a handful of mercs who don’t know the pointy end of their swords from a hole in the ground. And so its your job to build it back up.
It’s not that simple, of course, as there some terrible shenanigans, hijinks even, going on behind the scenes. Your friend may not have actually let things fall apart due to incompetence, an ancient evil once thought extinguished is coming back, and the Adventurer’s Guild is about to find itself on the world stage. As you build up the guild, you’ll get people of some importance coming to you for help, even world leaders by the end. It’s a great way to show how much the guild grows over the course of the game.
The supporting characters are a standout. Your adventurers don’t talk much (except for a handful of special characters) though they do have their own backstories written up in their bios. Those handful of adventurers with more to do are a treat, each with their own special skills and will pop up in the main story and side quests. They all have their own side quests as well, allowing a great degree of freedom in how you tackle them, and how you do so will change how they act as a person.
The support staff of the guild are all fully fleshed out characters. There’s Fiona, your friend’s widow who’s still keeping the place going, Falken, the tough warrior who quickly becomes your best friend, Eden the healer and priest, Bai the wandering martial artist, and so many more. Some of these support staff you can only recruit by doing certain side quests and making certain decisions.
Gameplay-wise, there’s a lot going on. Morale, friendships, bravery, skills, traits, level, classes, armor and weapons all come together to form an excellent combat system. Yes, we’ve finally circled back to combat. You almost always get to go first, starting at one side of the map and having to make your way to the enemies on the other side. It’s pretty standard fare, nothing too crazy if you’re a fan of this genre. What matters most is how well you’ve prepared.
And that’s really what’s so great about Our Adventurer Guild. There’s a lot of depth, and a lot of player choice and freedom. Every single decision you make will have a major impact on either the story, the characters, or the gameplay. This is the kind of game I could write a book about, and I fear I’ve already made this entry far too long without actually saying nearly enough about it. If it weren’t for Astro Bot, this would easily have been the best game of 2024. In fact, it might take that crown anyway.
Utopia Must Fall
Utopia Must Fall is an addictive arcade-style shooter. Think Missile Command crossed with Galaxian, created on modern hardware. Aliens are invading Earth, and as the unfortunate soul in charge of defending the last city, you have to main a cannon pointing at the heavens and manage the city’s upgrades. You control a turret auto-firing at aliens and asteroids/meteorites falling to the city and must defend it and its precious shield.
Your goal is to survive as long as possible by protecting the shield. Once the shield fails, it’s not game over yet, though you will start losing citizens. One big hit without a shield and you'll have to answer to Angela Lansbury, because that's all she wrote. The game is split up in days, with the day section having you fight off aliens and asteroids – and eventually even ground enemies – and at night you get to chose one or two upgrades, depending on how high your score was during the day.
These upgrades allow you to build remote turrets, improve the shield’s strength, forces the shield to fire its own projectile when hit, and even regenerate if its been destroyed. You’re better off not letting it get destroyed in the first place. Crazy, I know. You can also unlock and fire nukes which wipe out a huge portion of the screen, with the drawback of only being able to develop one at a time. The longer you survive, the longer it takes them to get produced, too.
Utopia Must Fall is a typical “old school” arcade game. You can upgrade as much as you like, but once its game over, that’s it. You start the next game from zero. In an endless sea of roguelikes, I found this to be quite refreshing. You don't have the comfort of knowing that if everything goes wrong, you can go back to a hub and start another run with your upgrades in tact. It makes death feel more final and impactful this way.
This is one of those rare times where I feel restrained by the text format of blogging, because seeing Utopia Must Fall in motion is a beautiful experience. It’s visuals are modeled after a Vectrex game with everything drawn by colored lines – I can’t imagine how beautiful the game would look on an actual vector display. The music is also excellent, appropriately enough since that’s what it was nominated for. It’s dark and eerie yet also upbeat at the same time. A deep sci-fi flavor running through it that makes you feel like you can survive while also making you question if you should even bother.
Wanderstop
I thought long and hard about including Wanderstop on this list. The cozy narrative game from the dream team of Davey Wreden, Karla Zimonja, and C418 turned out to be a huge disappointment, despite the fact that I still had a good time with it. This is one of those cases where the story was fantastic, but the actual “video game” aspect is pretty boring.
You play as Alta, a once mighty warrior in an arena who’s on a losing streak. She’s questioning herself and decides to seek out Master Winters, an acclaimed swordswoman, for training. She lives in a forest, and while searching for her, she collapses and winds up in a tea shop. The owner, the mysterious Boris, lets her help him run the shop for a while, and during this time she questions her intentions in and desires. Does she really want to be a warrior? What has it cost her? We learn a lot about Alta, including some terrible things she’s done, and its a subtle dive into a person’s psyche, and how far they’re willing to pursue what they think is their dream without ever questioning that dream.
But the gameplay... Its like they forgot they were making a video game and threw some gameplay elements together a month before release.
You manage the tea shop, which amounts to gathering ingredients around a small clearing in the forest and using them to make orders for customers. I promise you, if that sounds simple, it’s infinitely more so in-game. It falls into the same trap as so many other supposed “cozy” games in that it forgets to be fun, interesting, or engaging. You walk around, pick up a bush, throw it in a drying machine, then throw it in a tea machine and hand it to the customer. I cannot express how dull the gameplay of Wanderstop is.
The story is so good though! This is a tricky one. I’d normally recommend watching a playthrough online and skipping the gameplay segments, but there are several choices in the game that influence the narrative, so that’s not a great option. I wish this game didn’t have this problem, because the narrative is fantastic, good enough to get the game on this list on its own. Wait for a sale, maybe?
