The very best games of 2025: banish the end-of-year FOMO and just play these

That’s 2025 in the books then. A year of anxiety-inducing news headlines, uninspired electric hatchbacks, people losing their minds over the numbers six and seven, and most importantly of all, a year in which this gaggle of excellently crafted games was released.

Beset on all sides by grey-faced people in suits figuring out how to ‘optimise’ their IPs by getting AI to do all that inconvenient game development stuff, and politely but firmly forcing battle passes down the gamer’s oesophagus, these are the titles that said ‘screw the shareholders’ and stayed in touch with why we actually want to play games: they’re really, really, really fun.

This walk-in encyclopedia of medieval Bohemian life made us realise that perhaps if our history teachers had dressed us in armour, let us slice up mercenaries and solve the problems of local townsfolk in exchange for some cheese, we’d have probably got more GCSEs. Then again, the Ofsted inspectors would probably have taken a dim view.

Like its predecessor, epic story-led RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance II takes historical accuracy very seriously, building a massive open world full of tiny details that make you stop and consider important things like just how heavy a battleaxe is, and how comfy it’d be to sleep in a barn after a day spent fetching rabbits on a hunt.

Unlike its predecessor, it’s also surprisingly and disarmingly funny. The central friendship between everyman serf Henry and his boss Sir Hans Capon is the comedic double act nobody saw coming in 2025, elevating the already excellent melee combat, twisted quest design and a world map you want to spend all weekend in without so much as a tea break.

Meet the racing sim equivalent of JK Simmons’ maniacal music teacher in Whiplash: exacting, uncompromising, and sure, we’ll admit it, actually quite scary. Assetto Corsa Rally may have given us a pathological aversion to Lancias, log piles and the Welsh countryside, but we simply can’t stop playing it.

This is rally without the omnipresent guiding hand that corrects your inputs and saves you from the ditch in other titles. By rights, it should be too humiliating and stern to enjoy, but it turns out that steep challenge is exactly what we love about it. We might not always be driving well, but it always feels more like we’re actually driving.

It’s only just released in Early Access at the time of writing, which means there are many more stages, vehicles, and modes still to come. In the meantime, our new hardline rally teacher continues to ask if we’re rushing, or dragging. If rushing through the pace notes and dragging bits of mangled bodywork counts, the answer’s both.

The assertion that one of 2025’s best games would be a courier simulator where you walk for 20 uneventful minutes and then give a box to a hologram at a computer terminal would seem totally preposterous… until you utter the two magic words that make it all make sense: Hideo. Kojima.

In a way, it hardly matters what the legendary Metal Gear Solid creator has you doing in his new game. This is a developer so attuned to what makes games fun, he could release one about sorting tins of very similar shades of light grey paint for 80 hours and it’d still be seminal. Fortunately, the intrinsic satisfaction of travelling across a surreal Australian landscape while fighting or fleeing spectral forms is quite a lot higher than discerning between silver ash and slate.

It’s a story about isolation, connection, coronavirus, and sentient puppet keyrings, told in an esoteric and haunting way as only Kojima can. The cast reads like a Tribeca afterparty guest list, and the mechanics of walking, driving, and building infrastructure to help fellow players get around are absolutely immaculate. Obviously. There’s nothing like it, and that makes it essential.

A good shooter is hard to find in 2025. Too many of them want to keep you in an eternal hamster wheel of season pass unlocks and tedious multiplayer grind, but leave it to the genre founders id Software to light the path back to quality running and gunning.

DOOM: The Dark Ages is a real roll of the dice creatively, because it’s set in a quasi-medieval setting. When you see dragons and shields, you don’t ordinarily think ‘Yes, guns would fit right in with this’. And yet within ten minutes of stomping around in the Doomslayer’s period-authentic booties, shooting Hell Knights in a feudal village seems to make all the sense in the world.

This game’s trick is to keep building on the armory of attacks it gives you, until slowly but surely you’re blocking, stunning, countering and headshotting like some unholy hybrid of a Street Fighter character and a Counter-Strike pro. It has a way of making you feel extremely skilled and clever, and motors along at such a pace that you never realise all the smarts are actually coming from the brilliant design.

Old folks, eh? If they’re not doing 37mph along a national speed limit road in a pristine Mazda 323, they’re withholding their vast inheritance until you can find the mysterious 46th room in their ever-shifting 45-room mansion. Typical.

It’s the latter predicament you find yourself in at the beginning of Blue Prince, an uncommonly good puzzler that has a way of revealing more and more secrets each time you play it. Exploring the art deco estate in first-person, you encounter logic challenges that escalate on a gently increasing curve, unlocking new areas, hidden items and still more puzzles as you go. It all seems terribly straightforward… until it doesn’t. As the credits roll for the first time, you realise you’re far from done.

There’s a roguelike element here that gives you some persistent upgrades as you play, but keeps each run distinct. And that mansion – an insanely complex assembly of constantly shifting rooms – never gets boring to explore, because there’s always so much more to it than you thought. If you feel like giving the grey matter a HIIT session but crosswords are your kryptonite, this is your GOTY.

Yes, it’s the second mention of Assetto Corsa in this feature. At this point, those words are basically a guaranteed GOTY award when you slap them on a game.

Not that EVO’s quality or success was a sure thing at the earliest of its Early Access forms. There were performance issues, and a disconcerting lack of things to do. But as the year’s progressed, developer Kunos Simulazioni has shown consistent glimmers of what its preposterously ambitious game will one day become.

We’re still awaiting the free roam update and a fully fledged career mode, but in the meantime what we’ve got is a gorgeous drive in any number of fanatically modelled dream cars, on laser-scanned tracks that set the new standard for fidelity. Not a bad way to pass the time, then.

Here’s some thinking outside the glovebox: a game about driving, in which you don’t really do any driving. Before you prepare your class action lawsuit against Keep Driving on the grounds of false advertising though, play it for a few minutes. You’ll find a meditative, nostalgic roguelike that captures all the excitement (let’s pick up this hitchhiker!), drama (oh no, where are we going to get fuel?), and tension (yeah, we’re less keen on this hitchhiker 500 miles later) of a road trip, but expresses it as a set of decisions for you to make instead of an accelerator pedal to push down.

You’ve got such a lot of freedom in those decisions, each playthrough can go off on totally different tangents. You might decide to trade in your car for a hot rod and cruise around looking for parts to upgrade it with. You might want to make friends on the way to a concert across the country and turn your vehicle into a mobile party. You might just want to drive it solo, subsisting on petrol station chocolate bars and listening to non-stop jangly ‘00s emo mixtapes. Knowing that the story you’re in is your own, that’s a special feeling.