The Best 20 Video Games of 2025

The Guardian has published its list of the 20 best video games of 2025, highlighting titles that range from expansive reinventions of familiar series to sharply observed coming-of-age satire and deeply inventive puzzle design. Compiled by the paper’s critics, the selection spans genres and platforms, with picks praised for their storytelling, artistry, originality and the distinctive kinds of “fun” they offer.

20. Wanderstop
Ivy Road/Annapurna Interactive; PC, PS5, Xbox
An arena warrior on a losing streak retreats into a vast forest and finds herself running a cosy teashop. The result is a warm, stylised meditation on mindfulness and social connection as Alta learns to serve hot drinks and sharp conversation, offering a thoughtful study of burnout and recovery.

19. Expelled!
Inkle; Nintendo Switch, iPhone/iPad, Mac, PC
Image credit: Inkle.
Set in a 1920s all-girls private school, what begins as an attempted-murder mystery becomes a cutting critique of British class politics. Witty and beautifully drawn, it leans into boarding-school archetypes—from self-serving prefects to a fearsome matron—while slowly unpicking hidden motives and long-held grudges, with the feel of a superb graphic novel.

18. Hades II
Supergiant Games; PC, Switch
Supergiant returns to Greek myth with Melinoë, daughter of the underworld, battling to stop the titan Chronos from destroying everything. Repeated runs bring gradual mastery of spells and weapons, helped along by alluring immortals and vicious familiars, as you try to “kill Time” and shift fate incrementally in your favour.

17. Grunn
Sokpop Collective; PC
A gardening sim that doubles as a horror adventure, set in a Dutch village of eerie figures and unsettling secrets. You trim the lawn and collect photos, but the game urges caution—especially around the church and a strange bunker beyond the hedgerow.

16. Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders
Megagon Industries; PC, Xbox
Image credit: Megagon Industries.
You carve graceful lines through pristine snowscapes—until a rock sends you tumbling or a cliff ends the run. Minimalist in look and design, it stands out as one of the best skiing games ever made. Multiplayer adds enjoyable chaos, but it shines most when it’s just you, the mountain and a punishing trail.

15. Donkey Kong Bananza
Nintendo; Switch 2
Nintendo’s iconic ape returns with Pauline in a wild platform adventure, as she gains shapeshifting magical powers. Rather than pixel-perfect jumps, you punch, crunch and blast through exotic settings, collecting power-ups and pulverising bosses while gleefully tearing up the Mario playbook.

14. Monster Hunter Wilds
Capcom; PC, PS5, Xbox
Capcom’s spectacular bestiary—ranging from fluffy pink snarling apes to elder dragons that command lightning—finally gets a world big enough to contain it: deserts, volcanic plains, jungle and icy peaks. The story builds through escalating face-offs, before opening into a vast slate of tougher hunts.

13. Split Fiction
Hazelight Studios/Electronic Arts; PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox
Two aspiring writers become trapped inside each other’s stories in a likeable, fast-changing co-op adventure. Standoffish sci-fi author Mio and upbeat fantasy writer Zoe are forced to cooperate through unpredictable shifts in play—one moment action-heavy space firefights, the next puzzling through a fantasy jungle as transforming animals—plus unexpected diversions such as guiding sentient hotdogs into buns, demanding communication, patience and humour.

12. The Alters
11 Bit Studios; PC, PS5, Xbox
Image credit: 11 bit studios.
After a crash landing kills the rest of the crew, Jan Dolski must keep a mineral mission alive—and escape a lethal sunrise—by cloning himself to form a crew of alternate Jans. Between hostile exploration, base management and the disputes of his other selves, the game leaves you reflecting on how choices shape identity.

11. Despelote
Panic; PC, PS4/5, Switch, Xbox
Set against Ecuador’s run to qualify for the 2002 World Cup, this semi-autobiographical adventure follows a young boy’s obsession with football. With a focus on family, childhood and the unifying pull of fandom, it offers an unusual, human take on the sports sim.

10. Two Point Museum
Two Point Studios/Sega; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox
Image credit: Sega.
The Two Point series blends humour with deep strategy, and this management sim continues the streak. As a museum manager, you source exhibits from around the world, design appealing displays and juggle staffing and visitor needs—right down to whether the cafe’s snacks are good enough—in an engrossing challenge filled with cartoon-style visual gags.

9. Ghost of Yōtei
Sucker Punch/Sony; PS5
An arrestingly beautiful samurai action game starring the female warrior Atsu on a revenge quest, gleefully embracing the genre’s most familiar tropes—leaf-strewn stand-offs, burning-bridge confrontations, hot springs, shrines and shamisen interludes—alongside wolves and foxes guiding you to hidden places, and a rich selection of weapons to use on hordes of bandits.

8. Death Stranding 2
Kojima Productions/Sony; PS5
Deliveryman-turned-resistance-hero Sam Bridges returns in Hideo Kojima’s visually astounding, eccentric sci-fi sequel, moving the action to an apocalyptic Australia—kangaroos included. The story can be hard to parse, but the realised world is a haunting landscape designed for months of wandering.

7. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive; PC, PS5, Xbox
Image credit: Sandfall Interactive.
An extravagantly French RPG in which a group of wounded Parisians set out to kill a supernatural painter who erases a generation each year with a few brushstrokes. Surreal, melodramatic and sometimes self-indulgent, it remains exhilarating and oddly hopeful—a breath of fresh air in a genre already full of stylish ambition.

6. Consume Me
Hexecutable; PC
A sharply funny slice-of-life satire about a dieting-obsessed teen in the 2000s, juggling schoolwork, social time and walking the dog while “Tetris-ing” food on to a plate and enduring painfully familiar parental conversations. Its exuberantly absurd presentation underlines the pressure and overwhelm of adolescent life.

5. Mario Kart World
Nintendo; Switch 2
Image credit: Nintendo.
The Switch 2’s showcase title expands the series with 30 varied circuits linked by highways that allow open exploration for the first time. With a cast of familiar favourites and a soundtrack of electronic lounge-jazz-pop bangers, it is framed as another family staple set to stay in rotation for years.

4. The Séance of Blake Manor
Spooky Doorway/Raw Fury; PC
In the late 19th century, you arrive at a remote hotel in the west of Ireland to investigate a young woman’s disappearance—only to find the dead emerging from their graves. Part Agatha Christie-style detective sim, part folk-horror epic, it also has pointed themes of class, belief and colonialism.

3. Silent Hill f
NeoBards Entertainment/Konami; PC, PS5, Xbox
Image credit: Konami.
Set in 1960s Japan, a young girl’s fury at her bullying father becomes a spectral nightmare that consumes an entire town. Written by visual novel author Ryukishi07, it delivers fog, fiendish puzzles and grotesque monsters, while weaving mythology and superstition with feminist themes for a new angle on a beloved horror series.

2. Hollow Knight: Silksong
Team Cherry; PC, PS4/5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox
In Pharloom—a decaying realm of desperate insects and ruined grandeur—players face wretched swamps, moss-choked caverns and dust-laden halls, guarded by foes that can take hours to overcome. The game’s difficulty can be punishing, but it is also the engine of its greatest highs: hard-won victories, the thrill of unlocking new regions, and intimate discoveries that feel uniquely personal.

1. Blue Prince
Dogubomb/Raw Fury; PC, PS5, Xbox
Image credit: Raw Fury.
A young man inherits a mansion whose layout changes daily, and must find its secret 46th room to claim it for good. Each door forces a drafting choice—library, corridor, security room, lab, pool, bedroom, nursery, drawing room—each with secrets, items and clues, and each decision reshaping your route through the house. As your knowledge builds across runs, the game becomes an almost bottomless mystery, leaving notebooks full of theories, names, numbers and mechanisms—an atmospheric, understated puzzle adventure that still finds ways to surprise after dozens of hours.

Taken together, the list sketches a year defined by variety: big-budget spectacle sits alongside smaller, stranger experiments, while familiar franchises are reimagined in ways that feel fresh. Whether through open-world adventure, cooperative play, psychological horror or slow-burn mystery, The Guardian’s choices present 2025 as a standout year for games that are as thoughtful as they are entertaining.

Source: The Guardian