Games I Played In 2025
TL;DR
I played 54 games in 2025 - 35 of them for the first time. Most of them were pretty good.
✅ means I rolled credits or otherwise meaningfully played the game to completion or satisfaction.
❌ means I dropped the game.
In each category, games are listed from least recently played to most recently played.
Fresh Meat
These games came out for PC this year.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II ❌
I did not and will not finish Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. As much as I’m thrilled to see an unabashedly gay story in a well-made game that isn’t a sex game or a visual novel, the inability to pause or save the game in order to stand up and handle real life is a complete dealbreaker for me.
Avowed ❌
Pillars of Eternity is one of my favorite games of all time, and Pillars of Eternity II is a worthy successor. Avowed is a huge leap for the studio, moving from CRPG to ARPG, and I don’t think they stuck the landing. The environments and lore are as compelling as ever, but the factions veer too close to simply good and evil to feel like they belong in the PoE universe.
Monster Hunter Wilds ❌
Great character creator.
Sid Meier’s Civilization VII ✅
See my earlier post.
Dissent on Mars ❌
Dissent on Mars has some interesting ideas but lacks the depth to be worth your time.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon ❌
Tainted Grail is a fantastic janky rpg that feels like it slots right into 2008 with TES: Oblivion and Fallout 3/NV. It does overstay its welcome somewhat, and I dropped it about halfway through after ~100%ing the first map, but I’ll probably be back to finish it in a year or two.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky - Enhanced Edition ❌
Eurojank, but also bad and broken.
Synergy ✅
Synergy works until it doesn’t. This city builder features deeply interlocking environment and satisfaction systems, but it waits too long to give you any tools to interact with them. It feels like this Synergy couldn’t decide whether to be CivCity: Rome or Frostpunk, and the mid- and late-game gameplay loops suffer for it.
Cities Skylines II ❌
Incomplete, broken, but getting better. I’ll look at it again in a year or two.
Net.Attack() ❌
Net.Attack() is still in development, but I don’t think there is more than a few hours of fun to be had here in any case.
Drop Duchy ✅
Drop Duchy is a tetris puzzle multi-path rogue-lite with light city-building and deck-building elements, meaning it was made just for me. This game is on equal standing with Slay the Spire for me during work meetings where my only purpose is to be able to immediately answer a question if someone has one (they don’t).
Tiny Bookshop ❌
I really loved my first 10 or so hours with Tiny Bookshop, but it gets old more quickly than any of the progression systems expect. I think this game would benefit greatly from shorter days, more money per book sale, and a much larger collection of titles.
Inzoi ❌
The Sims but Korean and homophobic.
Clair Obscure ✅
Atmosphere: incredible. Style: immaculate. Music: beautiful. Gameplay: so, so, so close to brilliance that its wings
melted off as it plunged into the sea. Because I was detoxing from Dota, I played this game on expert mode all the way
through, including the secret bosses Clea and Simon. Unfortunately, even JRPGs are no longer safe from Dark Souls
dodge and Sekiro riposte mechanics, and this game is balanced around unerring execution without the requisite
engineering effort and QA polish to the input handling system that makes this approach feasible in fighting games.
When one slow input handle (or worse - dropped input) results in a TPK, your input handling must be perfect, and Clair
Obscur felt like playing online through molasses.
Borderlands 4 ❌
Sometimes you just want to shoot an unending parade of cel-shaded psychos, and on that front, Borderlands always delivers. It’s almost unfair to call this a “dropped” game, since I made it about 75% of the way through the story, and I’ll be back next time I have the FPS itch. For now, though, it sits on the shelf.
PEAK ❌
All of the fun of hanging out with friends, but with distance-based comms and death getting in the way. Among Us gets away with this because rounds are under two minutes (and often even shorter), but Peak is miserable for the one person who dies until the whole party reaches the next milestone. Play a board game instead.
Monster Souls: Chains of Chimera ✅
Monster Souls is a cute little gay kickstarter rpg that knows not to outstay its welcome. Clocking in at 4-6 hours, you can comfortably play through the game in one or two sittings.
Blue Prince ✅
An absolute standout this year - Blue Prince is going to remain in my rotation for many years. I absolutely love putting in a few new game bingo runs every couple months, and I hope this game becomes a mainstay of speedrun races and exhibitions.
Slots & Daggers ✅
The core loop of Slots & Daggers would support a lot more content, and so this game ended long before I was done with it. Unfortunately, even though this is a rogue-lite, it does not hold up well to replay - once you’ve broken the slot mechanic once, it is extremely easy to replicate, becoming far too powerful far too quickly on every run.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 ❌
At this point, we all know that this is the salvaged version of 10 years of work across multiple development studios, and it shows. This game should have been shelved.
Europa Universalis V ✅
EUV is an odd one for me. Everything they brought in from Victoria III and Imperator Rome just makes me want to play those games instead. It’s definitely better than the EUIV base game, and I’m sure that it will see many more years of tender love and care from Paradox, but it’s not quite ready to take the grand strategy crown.
Surviving Mars: Relaunched ✅
Surviving Mars with all the DLC, some cleaned up textures, and a plethora of optimizations that make the late game performance almost acceptable. While Surviving Mars was never my favorite Martian terraforming rts-lite city builder (that distinction belongs to Per Aspera), it’s definitely worth the time to play through at least once, as long as you ignore the underground and asteroid expansions that add a lot of tedium for nearly 0 payoff.
New to Me
These games came out before 2025, but I played them for the first time this year. Again, these games are listed from least recently played to most recently played.
FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE INTERGRADE ✅
Cloud is hot, Barrett is hot, and they go on a date - what more could you want from the world’s favorite eco-terrorists? Also, it’s FFVII. Play it.
Cloud Meadow ✅
A sexy pansexual pokémon collectathon. It’s still in early access, and a major expansion was released since I last opened this up, so it’s due for a re-run.
A Date with Death ❌
A Date with Death is not weird enough, occult enough, scary enough, or sexy enough to finish playing.
FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH ✅
Even more hot Cloud and Barrett, joined now by Zack.
FINAL FANTASY XVI ✅
FFXVI is perhaps the apotheosis of Final Fantasy’s ARPG combat systems. It’s too bad the characters are the most boring they’ve been since FFIII, when they didn’t even have names. Final Fantasy has historically been a bastion against the action-hero-ification of video game protagonists, but Clive is an absolute grunt. He wouldn’t be out of place in any other AAA release in the post-covid era with crude, boorish protagonists who believe they’re tortured skeins of trauma, but who only exist to have story happen to them. What a disappointment.
Anno 2070 ❌
Anno 117 came out this year, so I got 2070 and 2205 on sale for $3 each to try them out before dropping $80 on a video game. I think I would have enjoyed this game as late as 2011, but these days, I don’t have enough time to spend 10+ hours on a single map in an RTS.
Anno 2205 ❌
Anno 2205 has all the problems of 2070, and the servers for the global trading system that is required to complete the third map are apparently all offline. This is abandonware at best, and the publisher should be criminally liable for representing this as a working product for sale.
Lkyt. ✅
As with all of the best visual novels, the absolute standout here is the storytelling and world building. I would love to play an RPG or watch a show based in this world. Unfortunately, since there is no sfw mode or patch that I know of, the audience for this game will always be somewhat limited, but if the developers did release a sfw mode, I would wholeheartedly recommend Lkyt to anyone.
Our Life: Beginnings & Always ❌
This is kind of a visual novel, but not very good. Maybe it gets better later, but I’ll never know.
Worshippers of Cthulhu ❌
This game was immensely disappointing because I went into it believing that it was developed by Crytivo, the team behind my favorite god game of all time - The Universim. Unfortunately, this was only published by Crytivo, and by god, does it need a dozen+ balance patches. The cultist-marking mechanic is all over the steam page as though it’s a core part of the gameplay, but you can only specialize one cultist every 10 minutes real time in an RTS. That should tell you everything you need to know about how long the maps outstay their welcome and how well integrated the various mechanics are into the main gameplay loop. I waited until this game was out of early access to pick it up, but I should have waited forever.
Inscryption ✅
Inscryption is great. Go play it. Don’t look up anything about it.
Pillars of Eternity II ✅
I’ve got mixed feelings on PoEII. On the one hand, it largely continues the excellent storytelling, character work, world building, and combat as PoE while improving on the faction complexity and morally gray decision-making. On the other hand - boats. Boats, boats, and more boats. The overworld travel/combat avoidance system is a drag on the whole game, to the point that - when wrapping up some story threads in the late game - I would click on a location in the map and then stand up to make tea while I waited for my boat to travel there.
Dawn of Corruption ❌
It’s a gay sext adventure in the vein of Conquest of Champions, Trials in Tainted Space, and Flexible Survival. It’s not very good. The writing is simple. The sex is crude. The adventure is boring. If you really, really want some gay macrophilia content, there might be something here for you, but even then, you’re probably better off playing one of the established titans of genre.
Old Flames
These games are neither new to the world nor new to me, but they are good enough that I keep coming back.
Vampire Survivors ✅
dopamine feels nice
FINAL FANTASY VIII ✅
Squall is a thousand times more interesting than Clive, and he’s otherwise one of the less memorable Final Fantasy protagonists. And unlike FFXVI, there is a whole ensemble cast to fall back on, all of whom act like real people, and not Keanu Reeves clones.
Software Inc. ✅
This is a management sim for the industry I work in where I can pretend that it is a worthwhile business decision to simply write the best software, deadlines and tradeoffs be damned. It’s a pleasant escapist fantasy from the reality of software development.
Miasma Chronicles ❌
Miasma Chronicles is a tactical rpg set in a post-post-apocalyptic Appalachia after some technological disaster divided the world up into isolated cells. It drips with flavor and atmosphere that constitute an unapologetic love letter to the better parts of Appalachian culture - community reliance without learned helplessness (for straight white men), obsessive frugality, and a streak of “make-do” stubborness wider than Old Smokey. The combat is a good take on the XCOM formula, the leading characters are engaging, and the main mystery (how did the apocalypse happen?) is compelling.
I really want to love this game.
Unfortunately, I can’t get through a play session without at least one crash, and the autosave flags are not nearly robust enough to compensate for that level of instability. I had hoped that the developers would fix the crashes at at some point, but now - over two years since the last patch and a year after they released their next game in an incomplete state - I think this one is going to have to go in the backlog permanently.
Game Dev Tycoon ✅
It holds up.
Terraformers ✅
Terraformers is a turn-based take on the Surviving Mars genre, and it exceeds Surviving Mars in every way for me. I picked this back up after the megastructures DLC came out this year, and it was still a blast.
Victoria 3 ✅
Europa Universalis V swung at the queen and missed.
RimWorld ✅
Dwarf Fortress, but pretty.
Dota 2 ❌
First match: 24 March 2013 Last match: 29 July 2025
Don’t do it. It’s not worth it, I promise you.
Balatro ✅
Jokers go brrrrrr
Terra Invicta ✅
Terra Invicta is a serious contender for the grand strategy throne. The 1.0 release is scheduled for early 2026, and if they can fix some of the horrendous late-game performance issues, it will be trading blows with Victoria III and Europa Universalis V for a long time to come.
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic ✅
It’s like if the resource management expansion in Cities: Skylines was a whole game. And good.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist ✅
This game has been at the top of my favorite games of all time list for nearly two years now, and I don’t see it getting unseated any time soon. Nothing pleases my queer little heart more than a timey-wimey deck-building dating-sim gender-stomping romp through an anarchist refugee garden commune in space.
Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny ✅
Lol: GoD is a superb game that had the misfortune to release in the same year as Diablo, Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy Tactics, 007 GoldenEye, Dungeon Keeper, Star Fox 64, Harvest Moon, and Grand Theft Auto; and in the same 30 day period as Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, LEGO Island, Ultima Online, Age of Empires, Riven, The Curse of Monkey Island, and Fallout. 1997 was a damn good year for games, and likely more than one gem was lost to history, including Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny.
Stellaris ✅
Stellaris is only finally beginning to fall out of my most played games nearly a decade after release, and that took the combined effort of Europa Universalis V, Victoria III, and Terra Invicta. It’s still the absolute colossus of the exploration phase of 4X games, but for all of the overhauls it’s gotten through the years, it’s still relatively weak in the exploit and extinguish phases.
Imagine Earth ❌
I remembered really enjoying this game, but I suppose I just don’t have the same tolerance for jank that I did when I was younger.
Pillars of Eternity ✅
Pillars of Eternity somehow didn’t make it onto my favorite games list two years ago, but that will absolutely be rectified in this coming January’s list. I decided to go back and play this game and Pillars of Eternity II after dropping Avowed, and I’m glad I did. PoE in particular stands the test of time
Dyson Sphere Program ✅
If you liked Factorio and Satisfactory, you’ll like DSP. I highly recommend installing the planetminer mod after you have started building your first few interstellar logistics stations.
Baldur’s Gate 3 ✅
Baldur’s Gate 3 is indisputably one of the greatest games ever made, and I look forward to many more runs over the years.