It can be tempting, in an era where there are simply way too many great games coming out every month, to give into list inflation. Top 10s become top 25s. Top 25s become top 50s. By 2030, we might even see our first top 100 GOTY list. Kotaku has not been immune to the ebb and flow of year-end trends. In 2022, we slimmed our best game picks down to 10. In 2024, we went all the way up to 15. Each list was correct in its own way, but sometimes annual rituals draw their strength from embracing tradition rather than changing with the times.
To that end, Kotaku‘s top games of 2025 list this year will go back to straddling the Goldilocks GOTY middle ground of 12 best games. We are still ranking them and describing why each made the cut, but we have gone out of our way to limit ourselves to promoting what we feel are the best of the best. Lists are defined as much by what gets left off of them as anything else. Those painful sacrifices at the bottom of the cut-off are not in vain. They give the rest of the list its juice. So without further ado, here are Kotaku‘s best games of 2025.
12. Donkey Kong Bananza
Games are partly defined by the actions they allow. Hand the controller to someone who rarely plays games and you’ll quickly see reasonable assumptions about exploration and play collide with the idiosyncratic limitations of games many of us take for granted. “Why can’t I go there? Why can’t I do this?” For decades, platformers have been oriented around moving through carefully calibrated environments. Fancy Rube Goldberg machines that nevertheless remains static under the hood.
Donkey Kong Bananza turns everything on its head with one simple transgression that has huge consequences: what if you could break stuff? It’s a question so bold, the game comes with a level reset button baked in because the possibilities are so chaotic you could very well wreck your playthrough. The results are endlessly rewarding though, letting you dig tunnels, stack bridges, and continually uncover secrets where most games are, by design, hellbent on never letting you go. The arsenal of power-ups Donkey Kong unlocks, combined with sprawling, freeform environments, leads to an uneven but irresistible sandbox that not only reinvigorates the franchise but breaks new ground in one of gaming’s oldest, most well-worn genres. — Ethan Gach
11. Pokémon Legends Z-A
Admittedly, I went into Kotaku’s Game of the Year discussions fully ready to let Pokémon Legends: Z-A fall off the list. But when we actually sat down, I was surprised that an actual argument for its placement just started flowing out of me.
Pokémon games are always met with a barrage of criticism, both merited and unmerited, because Game Freak and The Pokémon Company are carrying the world’s biggest sack of cash on their back with the most profitable franchise in the world in their hands and still aren’t releasing games with the same level of scale and polish as other AAA games.
Eventually, after the dust has settled and people look back on them, plenty of games that are met with harsh criticism upon release get a reassessment. So let’s skip to that part: Legends: Z-A is perhaps the most impressive, holistic reimagining the series has seen in probably all of its nearly 30 years.
Legends Z-A’s focus on one city means that it lacks the typical “journey” that’s always been synonymous with Pokémon, but Game Freak uses that smaller stage to home in on everything it’s done well in the Switch era. Its real-time battle system is one of the most transformative changes Game Freak has ever brought to these games, and while yes, there will always be a place for the series’ classic turn-based combat, I would love to see this approach become a foundation for not only future Pokémon games, but also for a competitive scene that mixes timing, parrying, dodging, and more into its battles.
Beyond the battles, Legends: Z-A doubles down on Game Freak’s recent dedication to narrative and character work, bringing together one of its most memorable casts of weirdos yet and letting you stick with them through the game’s entire run. It’s a rich space for Pokémon to get contemplative, examining everything it’s ever done in the name of catching ‘em all.
Legends: Z-A is the result of a team let off the leash and looking to do something more than it’s been allowed to do for decades. Like the game’s Urban Redevelopment plan meant to bring people and Pokémon together in harmony, it may just be another experiment in Game Freak’s journey to figuring out what the future of the franchise looks like, but I hope Legends: Z-A turns out to be a more foundational moment for the next 30 years. Or at least a sign that more big swings like it are on the way. — Kenneth Shepard
10. Battlefield 6
It had been far too long since a really good Battlefield game. Thankfully, Battlefield 6 provided fans, myself included, with an incredible entry in EA’s online FPS series. BF6 isn’t perfect, but nobody was asking for that. What we wanted was a modern military shooter that wasn’t as fast and silly as CoD, but not as slow and tactical as ARMA. And that’s what we got. Nice. — Zack Zwiezen
9. Blippo+
In 2025, it started becoming harder to identify things created with generative AI on sight. The obvious tells such work used to contain became increasingly rare, and so we sometimes had to squint harder, had to do more research, to be sure that clip circulating on Bluesky of someone telling off ICE agents in a particularly satisfying way or tearfully reuniting with their dog was real, and not just footage fabricated purely to manipulate our emotions.
Blippo+ would have been an extraordinary game in any year, but it felt particularly resonant in this one because it’s just so exuberantly, unabashedly, undeniably human, a collaborative work made by very creative people. It’s lively and weird and smart and queer and hopeful. It’s also an innovative and exciting exercise in storytelling and worldbuilding. In Blippo+, you watch the TV broadcasts of an alien planet whose slate of programming includes game shows, talk shows, science shows, sci-fi sitcoms, news programming, cooking shows, celebrity gossip shows, and so on. Through them, you experience a gradual process of discovery, learning more about this planet that’s both very similar to and very different from our own, and getting attached to the personalities who speak to you from beyond the galactic bend.
As time passes, a story unfolds of an event that shakes Blippian culture to its core. The game has plenty to say about possibilities for change in our culture, too, and how technology and media can be tools of the status quo, or mechanisms for disruption and progress. It’s timely, unique, and terrifically entertaining. And I’m still sad that I don’t have any more episodes of Werf’s Tavern to watch. — Carolyn Petit
8. Avowed
It might not be the biggest open-world RPG ever made, but Avowed is one of the best precisely because it excises so much of the usual fluff and gunk so often featured in these kinds of games and focuses on snappy action, fantastic writing, memorable companions, and excellent world-building. — Zack Zwiezen
7. Elden Ring Nightreign
The premise of Elden Ring Nightreign sounds like a bizarre fan mod but in practice it’s one of the most satisfying, challenging, and inventive multiplayer action games around. It proves you don’t need loot grinds, battle passes, or branded crossovers to keep a live-service experience feeling fresh and compelling, and that procedurally-generated open-world dungeons can prove as tense, thrilling, and brutally surprising as the most bespoke MMO raids. Nightreign is not just a brilliant roguelike, it’s a blueprint for how co-op can fundamentally transform a familiar experience into something even greater. — Ethan Gach
6. Arc Raiders
Arc Raiders is 2025’s shared joy, the Helldivers 2 for the misanthropic crowd, and an extraction shooter in which acts of PvP have become sinful. And like most sins, a perverse pleasure for those who partake.
It so deftly combines the best of a multiplayer survival shooter with loot-hunting horror, delivering this all in distinct chunks where visits to the above-ground world are limited to 20 minutes for even the bravest player. Inventory space is your most valuable resource, each square precious as you decide whether it’s worth filling with any of the seven trillion items that can be retrieved, weighing up weight and wait against the frantic dash for an exit.
Few games are capable of offering the same constant sense of ass-curdling fear, of only just making it, and then the colossal sense of loss when failure eventually catches up with hubris. Arc Raiders is a bite-sized game that you’ll play for entire banquets, compelling you to reach further, run farther, and risk more, just for the sake of incremental improvements and the all-consuming satisfaction of numbers going up. — John Walker
5. Split Fiction
After It Takes Two, it’s surprising Hazelight hadn’t run out of ideas and was able to put together another co-op platformer filled to the brim with original, ever-evolving design ideas that make its dozen or so hours a synergetic joy to play with a friend, lover, or enemy you’re trying to learn to get along with. Split Fiction is the apex of Hazelight’s brand of cooperative design, using its blend of science fiction and fantasy settings to riff on different subgenres and finding a way to make each of them a concise, bite-sized game all on its own.
Split Fiction’s premise of a city cynic and a country bumpkin fighting their way through each other’s stories is pretty loose, though it does stumble (likely on accident) into some pertinent pro-artist, anti-AI sentiment. What it lacks in depth it makes up for in variety, and Split Fiction’s story does give the game’s shifting stage plenty of excuses to hand Mio and Zoe new toys to play with.
Split Fiction is perhaps the most impressive version yet of the studio’s signature cooperative conventions, and if you had any doubt in the team’s ability to bring it all together, Split Fiction’s final level is a sublime summation of everything the game had been trying to convey. — Kenneth Shepard
4. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
Too Kyo Games’ visual novel/strategy RPG hybrid remains one of 2025’s most impressive quiet success stories. The studio, helmed by the leads on both the Danganronpa and Zero Escape games, went into debt to make The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy happen after nearly a decade of good but not groundbreaking efforts, and was in danger of closing its doors if the game didn’t pop off. A less bold developer could have played it safe and tried to create something simple and palatable for a wide audience, but The Hundred Line is an incredibly bold Hail Mary that leaves it all on the line, and it’s one of the most impressive games of 2025 and of the visual novel genre because of it.
The Hundred Line is a dense tribute to the genre, with 100 endings and dozens of routes that cover multiple visual novel staples, from zombie horror to a more tongue-in-cheek harem story, all within the confines of the war one group of high school students must fight with an incoming alien invasion. Though routes varies in quality, they are all, at least, baseline good and riff in some profound ways on the game’s core premise. The highs, however, have Danganronpa lead Kazutaka Kodaka doing career-best work with his signature focus on characters caught between despair-inducing struggle and a logic-defying hope and belief in the good of even the worst of humanity.
All of these threads and timelines are held together by tactical battles that may not reach the same tour-de-force level as the game’s branching storylines, but do employ a rock solid puzzle-like system that uses its large cast of freaks and weirdos to great effect, giving them each singular battle styles that reveal just as much about these high schoolers locked in war as any branching timeline might.
Though it’s a dense tome of hope, despair, absurdity, and mystery that can be hard to recommend to the average person, the developers’ ambition of creating one of the largest visual novels ever, with dozens of routes spanning multiple genres all while funneling into the core mystery, is so bold it demands respect. But perhaps the most admirable part about it is that Too Kyo Games actually pulled it off. Having a bold idea that you even attempt to put on a Switch cartridge can get you pretty far, but The Hundred Line didn’t just try to become one of the most ambitious games of its genre. It succeeded. — Kenneth Shepard
3. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
Any game that contains Dollman is already a contender for one of the best. But Death Stranding 2 is also a mechanically dense and extremely confident adventure that is weird in a way most games of this size aren’t anymore. You might not like everything in it or understand it all, but you will be surprised by what happens as you deliver packages across Australia. — Zack Zwiezen
2. Despelote
Despelote is a slice-of-life game about an Ecuadorian boy named Julián and the weeks surrounding the country’s qualifying run for the 2002 World Cup. A remarkable example of interactive storytelling, it employs both grounded realism and wild surrealism to immerse us in its place and time and capture how soccer can be both an all-consuming individual obsession and part of a fabric that binds friends, family, or even an entire nation together. I know next to nothing about soccer but I know what it is to harbor a passion, to see and feel something you love everywhere you look, to feel like part of a larger whole because of it. Despelote is a gift, an opportunity to spend a few hours in the life of another human being through the experience of a wildly original game, and featuring a climactic moment that I consider one of the most audacious and memorable gaming moments I’ve ever encountered. — Carolyn Petit
1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Well, what is there to say about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that hasn’t already been said at this point? A lot, actually, With so much of the industry rallying around Sandfall Interactive’s RPG as one of the defining games of the year, it sometimes feels like the game itself has become an almost untouchable symbol of what video games can still be despite the ever-encroaching dangers of slop and live-service money and time sinks.
Right now, it feels like everyone is hanging their hopes and hatreds on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, to the point where falsehoods that support the narrative have become far more prevalent than what actually got us here. And when it falls short of the ideals some ascribe to it, or is wielded in debates about how we divide games up in award shows, it becomes a centerpiece of a new conversation, often led by people who weren’t paying attention to a genre that never actually went away. Sandfall Interactive’s RPG has, likely against its will, become the game of 2025 in more ways than one as it becomes wedged into every conversation the community is having.
With things so dire, it feels like the video game industry is looking for a savior, or something that proves that the slop c-suite executives are forcing into every game shop doesn’t have to be the way forward. But trying to imperfectly hang every axe to grind on one game has a way of obscuring what it actually is, as it becomes a symbol burdened with more than any one game should have to bear.
So when you push the narrative to the side with all your might, what is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? It’s a turn-based RPG that marries Final Fantasy’s grandiose storytelling and magical battle systems with Paper Mario’s timing-based mechanics to make something that is both strategic and engaging enough to make even the classic RPG grind entertaining and rewarding. Its grief-driven story is filled with misdirection and twists that have divided player opinion, but those divisions are rewarding to consider and debate, and it culminates in a devastating decision in its eleventh hour that fans are still talking about months later. The game’s cast of sad boys and girls walking into what is ostensibly a suicide mission have endeared themselves to fans of a genre that will carry their flags for years to come in art, cosplay, and other fan creations.
All of these lovingly crafted systems and stories are coming from a debut game by a new studio full of industry talent that had become dissatisfied at the big studios where they previously worked, and it’s already being mentioned in conversations alongside genre staples like Persona and Final Fantasy, and…oops. Maybe I’m susceptible to The Narrative, too. It is a juicy one. A team of talented developers, writers, and artists who left big publishers like Ubisoft to do their own thing, making games that look like the big-budget efforts people still want but without the meddling of a publisher trying to inject some live-service grind into them, and being rewarded with success and acclaim does feel like the antidote to problems plaguing the industry. If nothing else, perhaps it’s a sign that more games like it are possible, and if we do get more such games, then perhaps this one will become less of a golden idol for a community looking for proof that the industry’s future isn’t as bleak as it once felt, and it can finally be appreciated solely based on what a stunning debut it is. — Kenneth Shepard