My Games of the Year, 2025

2025 was a unique year in gaming, for me. For a start, it was the first time I’ve bought two consecutive Nintendo home consoles; previously, I’ve owned a SNES, Game Boy, Wii, and Switch. I consider the Switch 2 a resounding success, but this first year has brought very few ‘must-have’ releases. I’m not big on 3D Metroid, and I refuse to count all those “Nintendo Switch 2 Edition”s of seven-year-old games as real full releases.

Financial reasons, too, meant that, aside from a couple of pricey AAAs, I haven’t been purchasing too much in the way of new games. Still, that leaves a considerable backlog and plenty of top-quality indie games on the pile, so my 2025 wasn’t entirely game-free! Here are my personal highlights.

Mario Kart World

The one game everyone had to pick up alongside a Switch 2, right? I’m not the biggest Kart fan, but the promise of an open-world element had me intrigued, and there’s really no better two-player game you can pick up on a new system. Everyone knows Mario Kart by now, and everyone can pick up a controller and have some fun.

World delivered big time, giving us an entry to get engrossed in while waiting for the next big thing. It wasn’t quite the revolution promised, but it sure delivered on all the core points. Only purists focussed on the minor differences between this iteration and any of the previous eight. The rest of us had a blast with much-improved graphics, some fun tweaks to the gameplay, and an unforgettable Rainbow Road experience. Although it won’t go down as one of my favourite games of all time, MKW’s general appeal and huge success at showcasing the Switch 2 makes it my Game of the year.

Donkey Kong Bananza

Face it: after a slightly prosaic launch, most of us were gritting our teeth, praying for a successful 3D platformer that felt like a launch title. Bananza was all of that and much more. The main mechanic may be a bit rough around the edges—it could certainly benefit from some camera improvements, for a start—and not quite as ground-breaking (god, ...) as some suggested, but it certainly gave us a fun game. After a few minutes of mayhem, it was easy to forget about the lack of a real Odyssey 2.

Sadly, my playthrough got a bit derailed, so I’m still waiting to finish this one off. I started out trying to collect every last banana, but that completionist desire waned from about the mid-game. I’m hoping this is one I can get back into, though, because, at its peak, it was an incredibly engrossing, captivating adventure that proves 3D platformers still have plenty of imagination left in them. So much so, that it scores as my Most fun game of the year.

Donkey Kong Country Returns HD

Talking of Donk, I can’t ignore the big guy’s big release that kicked off my year. I hadn’t played the original, and had never played a DKC game through until the end before, but DKCR really grabbed me. I finally got it: this style of fast, flowing, punishing platforming is a perfect accompaniament to the more laid-back approach that Mario takes. Although it was new for me, this one figures as my Re-release of the year.

Silksong

Somewhat of a painful subject for me, this one. Without doubt, this was my most anticipated game that has ever released. I waited through those painful years of silence, I got hyped up by the seemingly imminent release in 2021. Four years later, the game’s eventual arrival could never quite live up to expectations.

Siksong is an amazing game, but it exists for me in a weird middle ground. Far more closely aligned to the original than I expected, it was just a bit of an anti-climax. That’s not to say it’s not an amazing, spectacularly good game, it’s just more of a 9 than a 10 in my book. A lot of that may come down to the difficulty level; I’ve concluded that I’m just good enough to enjoy Hollow Knight but not quite good enough to enjoy Silksong at the same stratospheric level. In other words, Silksong, it’s not you, it’s me. Indie game of the year.

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

Following on from last year’s Super Mario World, a retro Mario playthrough is becoming something of a tradition. The difference this time around was that I’d never played Land 2 before. I’m not sure why; I adored Land, which was pretty much my first ever Mario game. I think Land 2 arrived just a little too late for me to notice at the time.

And that’s a shame, because 6 Golden Coins is a very good game and, for the Game Boy, a huge achievement. I don’t think the scale adjustment is perfect (maybe a compromise between the two would be ideal?) but the overall look and feel of the game is right up there with Super Mario World and some of the level designs are up there with the very best Mario has to offer. It’s a shame that the last level is so absurdly frustrating! Land 2 wins this year’s Best Retro Mario award.

The Witness

What can I say about The Witness? It’s probably best summed up by this ‘review’ on the The RPS 100: Reader Edition (2025):

Pretentious, frustrating, and brilliant.

I can’t argue with any of those three adjectives; this game is truly stunning and I’m glad I managed to reconnect with it after a couple of false starts. Are some of the puzzles annoying? Yes. Should some of them make it more obvious what you need to do? Undoubtedly. Have I too-often resorted to trial-and-error? Absolutely. But this is still one of the greatest puzzle games I’ve ever had the fortune to play, a heady mash-up of pure puzzle pleasure and exhilarating exporation. This game was my Best rescued from the backlog title in 2025.

Sokobond

I played a lot of puzzlers in 2025, and most of the best were published—and often developed—by Draknek & Friends. Many of these—A Monster’s Expedition, Bonfire Peaks—were old favourites, so I’m excavating the back catalogue now, which took me all the way back to Sokobond, my pick for Best old puzzler in 2025.

The game’s visuals are as simple as could be, but they help the clever mechanics and twisted puzzle design shine through. I’m still struggling to make it through every last one of the levels—some of the post-game content is really tough but this is a great pick-up-and-get-frustrated game that I can dive back into at any time.

The Electrifying Incident

And, at the other end of the timeline, comes Draknek’s latest puzzler (well, until Spooky Express, which is more of a mash-up anyway—a monster mash-up!). This was a really short game, but one with a hefty amount of additional challenge at the end.

The grapple hook (who doesn’t love one?) opened up a lot of really interesting possibilities, and I’m just hoping it will be developed into a fuller sequel at some point, because there’s a much more involved experience lurking here somewhere. Still, this was my Best new puzzler of the year.