John Walker's Top 10 Games Of 2025

Goodness gracious, 2025 has been a fantastic year for video games, and most excitingly, for games of all scales and budgets. Big-name releases have hit the spot, while indies have sprung from nowhere to become breakthrough hits, such that wrestling them all down to a top 10 with which I’m happy has been an ordeal. But I got there, and I’m happy with it. I’ve also rather shocked myself by putting two big-name games in the top two spots, thus losing my cool indie credentials. Thankfully the rest of the list makes up for it. My technique for putting these lists together is to read every other site’s top charts, getting angry with the generic crap that’s getting overly lauded, and then scroll through the 183 new games I played this year on PC alone. Then I pick the 10 which are objectively the best ones, and rank them in a scientifically proven and unquestionable order of goodnessosity, for an irrefutable list on which history is established. 10) Eclipsium I installed Eclipsium on the basis of the screenshots, and am so glad I did . I’m so pleased to see the game got some attention from others too, with the extraordinary art in this walking-sim horror game astonishing everyone who saw it. This is a peculiar and striking game, combining truly beautiful vistas and horrendous body horror, and it’s so damned interesting. Every surface ripples with pixels, such that the world is only truly tangible when you’re moving, giving everything an organic feeling of breathing . It’s a 3D game that’s then re-rendered onto a 320×180 canvas, with a 12FPS human hand added as your means of interaction with the world. The effect is extraordinary, ensuring an already intriguing and surreal experience is all the more compelling. 9) The Drifter The Drifter starts out looking like a traditional point-and-click adventure, before revealing two super-important things: Firstly, an immediately fascinating story that might be about some peculiar secret forces causing the disappearance of homeless people, and secondly, a control scheme for old-school adventures that makes so much sense in the modern world. Its innovative design for controllers needs to be copied by absolutely everyone else out there, forever. The game then divides itself into distinct chapters, with a limited number of locations available in each, to keep the developing story moving along nicely. I’m not a big fan of the ending, but what makes The Drifter stand out is that this doesn’t feel like it matters as much as it normally might in a narrative game. It’s still great fun, and everything that comes before the conclusion is so thrilling. Plus there’s fabulous voice acting, gorgeous art, and some really neat puzzles. 8) MotionRec Here’s the conceit of 2D platform-puzzler MotionRec : You can record your movement for a short while, and then “replay” that motion elsewhere in a level irrespective of the platforms available. So let’s say you need to get to a distant point at the top right, and...

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