The 10 best games of 2025

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

The first thing you’ll notice is that this is the Frenchest game you’ve ever seen. But look beyond the Eiffel towers, mimes and characters cursing “putain” to find a thoughtful update to the beloved, but somewhat tired, JRPG formula. So the high fantasy storytelling is grounded in fine-textured character beats, while the strategic turn-based combat is given a shot of adrenalin with timed button presses that turn each boss fight into a nail-biter. The engrossing story tells of the battle against a figure known as The Paintress, who wipes out all humans above a certain age each year, and the whole package is presented with sumptuous visual flair.

Blue Prince 

What if you took two of gaming’s most compelling genres and smashed them together? This is the question answered by the supremely elegant Blue Prince, which combines the run-based gameplay of rogue-like games with the intellectual reasoning of the emerging deduction genre. The story casts you as a young man who stands to inherit his great-uncle’s stately home if he can find his way to the elusive 46th room. The twist is that every day, the house changes shape. It’s your job to redesign its blueprint from scratch, strategically selecting rooms each time you open a door. The game unspools its story with great subtlety, while its densely nested puzzles make you feel like a bona fide genius with each breakthrough.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Hideo Kojima is the gaming world’s most beloved auteur, but his charming media presence occasionally threatens to eclipse just how strange his games are. The first Death Stranding represented a clear break from the Metal Gear Solid games that made his name, following Sam Bridges, a courier tasked with connecting a post-apocalyptic America to a kind of cosmic WiFi network. It was a strikingly original game, yet many were put off by the forbidding complexity of simple tasks such as climbing a hill or shouldering a bag. For this sequel, Kojima has sanded off the rough edges, allowing players to choose the degree of combat and challenge they prefer. Great acting turns from the likes of Léa Seydoux and Norman Reedus lend heart to its high-concept story, but the real star is the outrageously beautiful Australian wilderness that demands to be explored for many happy hours.

Hollow Knight: Silksong 

When is a video game too hard? After a long six years in gestation, the most anticipated game of the year finally double-jumped into gamers’ lives in September, and the conversation rapidly turned to whether its difficulty was too punishing, or just punishing enough. The answer hinges on your particular preferences in masochism, but what is indisputable is that Silksong offered everything Hollow Knight fans longed for — another huge, secret-filled world to explore; a melancholy story told via subtle environmental details; a gorgeous soundtrack; a second-to-none combat system which made you feel like a true ninja; and the sense that every inch of this monumental game was handcrafted with care.

Avowed

Obsidian Entertainment put out not one but three major games this year, and all of them were good. There was the “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” survival game Grounded 2 and satirical sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds 2, but its most captivating storytelling came in the hyper-saturated fantasy world of Avowed, a 3D evolution of their Pillars of Eternity series. Avowed paired excellent writing and satisfying combat with superb world design which encouraged players to sprint, jump and slide into every corner of its beautiful world, which was expansive without ever wasting your time.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

British solo developer Gareth Damian Martin is one of the best writers in modern gaming, and his return to the cyberpunk world of Citizen Sleeper brings a fresh cast of colourful characters eking out a living on the periphery of a star system governed by corporations and criminals. While you’ll spend much of your time reading stylish prose and making dialogue choices, expanded gameplay features include tense, dice-based gameplay alongside the ability to unite a group of companions to send out on dangerous heist missions. Game stories rarely come this absorbingly political and intellectually satisfying.

Split Fiction

Hazelight Studios, run by charismatic developer Josef Fares, is pretty much the only company that doggedly makes games that can only be played cooperatively; best enjoyed side-by-side on the sofa with a friend, partner or child. Following from the success of Pixar-style divorce fable It Takes Two, Split Fiction offers a satisfying evolution, mining fantasy and sci-fi tropes to open up a range of platforming and combat challenges that consistently find new, thrilling ways to encourage players to work together. The writing is undeniably weak, but when you’re playing a game that has you transforming into a gorilla one moment and a sausage the next, you’ll be having far too much fun to notice.

Hades 2

Respected indie developer Supergiant never made a sequel until Hades, its 2020 rogue-like romp through Greek mythology, became a megahit deserving of its own place on Mount Olympus. It’s a tough act to follow, but they did a superb job here, expertly judging how much to tweak and what should stay the same. You’re still engaged in looping battles through the underworld, but you’re now playing Melinoë, sister of the original’s Zagreus, who is a more cool-headed character with a distinctive, magic-heavy combat style. This game gives you two separate paths to follow, varying the pace, but supplies the same whip-smart writing, blood-pumping soundtrack and superb combat as the original.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

If you’ve come for the near-psychotic levels of historical accuracy, you won’t be disappointed. This role-playing game continues the story of low-born journeyman Henry as he becomes further embroiled in 15th-century Bohemian politics. Here is a medieval setting without magic and dragons, which delights in simulating history in obsessive, at times irreverent detail. You will find yourself swinging a sword, sure, but also visiting bathhouses, nursing hangovers after a late night in the tavern and learning the complex art of potion-making. Here is a game that does not pander to prevailing trends, instead trusting that gamers are curious to see what it might actually feel like to live in this fascinating moment of history and to make choices that actually matter.

Baby Steps

Although there is a whole gaming genre known as “walking simulators”, none of them have turned the very act of walking into a gameplay challenge quite like Baby Steps. This eccentric title follows 30-something man-child Nate, whose quest to climb a mountain is imperilled by his tendency to regularly fall flat on his face. As you slowly learn the game’s bizarre movement controls, placing each footstep with painstaking accuracy, you will experience intense frustration, meditative calm and genuine elation when you make it to the next waypoint. Add in the comedic skits, which are genuinely funny, plus the unexpected formal experiments in storytelling, and you get a game which is a true original — challenging, hysterical and, at all times, transcendently strange.