Carrying on my grand one-year tradition, I do solemnly present to you my games (that I played) of 2025.

I didn’t play many games, again. I lost several months to a bout of RSI, but I thoroughly enjoyed the few games I did play, and here, in no real order, are the ones that have stuck in my head the most.

Mario Kart World

I got a Switch 2 and obviously with it Mario Kart World, which immediately became a family favourite, spurring a full couple of months of intra-household competition. It’s fast and colourful and intense and I have almost nothing more to say about it. Because I spent most of my Switch 2 time playing the jazzed-up Tears of the Kingdom instead? Probably.

Avowed

A broad and generous RPG with excellent world design that wears game production efficiency on its sleeve. Acres of evocatively imagined land are laid out with libraries of generic objects which do just enough to make it feel real, if you squint and ignore the hundreds of often diegetically compromised chests placed to reward exploring its every quarter.

The rest is writing, so much writing (in a nice font), that I largely tapped through so I could return to running through the world again. So many things to find and collect, far more than you need, so many places to go, so many quests to check off. So many characters and storylines to follow. And then I’d find myself keyed into a quest-line that captured me and presented hard and consequential decisions, and yeah OK, Avowed is more than just a product of production efficiency.

Despelote

The three months of no-games caused by RSI in my right arm ended with Despelote. And I endured the discomfort despite the fact that there is a lot of football in Despelote. I have no interest in football but there I was, wincing through a history of the Ecuadorian national team and dribbling a ball through city streets, because Despelote is fucking great.

Despelote is a game about football, yes, but it’s also about childhood and Ecuador and monomania and the difficulty of capturing memory and national pride and dealing with chaos and uncertainty and game development, and about a lot of other things as well. Despelote is also only two hours long and pretty much all you do is run around a town and kick a ball.

I love Despelote’s firstperson take on the football videogame. Contrasting with the stickiness of FIFA, or whatever it’s called now, Despelote’s ball is wild and easy to lose control of, and it’s therefore a thrill to catch it, dribble it through a crowded park, and hoof it through the air. It rewards both a little skill and a little mischievous imagination as you hit bystanders, kick bottles, and generally do kid-stuff while failing to return to meet your mother on time.

So there’s a real game there, but it’s also a tender autobiography by its creator, Julián Cordero, who wove an irresistible sense of humour into the whole thing. I mean, check this trailer, which both exactly captures what it’s all about while also utterly not capturing anything about what Despelote is. Wonderful.

Incidentally, I love its publisher, Panic. Check these three bangers, all published within the past couple of years: Thank Goodness You’re Here, Arco, Despelote. All three games deeply connect with the times and places in which they are set. All three are intimately about the people who live there. All three wildly vary in tone and genre, but they’re all tight, focused games that have something to say. And none tread common ground.

Panic was founded on developing Mac FTP software! And also, it’s no longer just a software company, because it also makes the Playdate, an idiosyncratic handheld console with its own storefront and library of games, free-to-use developer tools, and all the other things that come with creating a game platform.

And all three of those games I mentioned — well, I can say two of them definitely — have this cool thing at the end of the game where you get a URL that brings up a chance to send a self-addressed envelope to Panic and they’ll send something back to you. I mean, what a fucking delightful thing to do in the year 2025. Wonder is still alive.

Keeper

The main thing that I think is extraordinary about Keeper is that it got made. The world’s largest publisher (disclosure: I also work for them) funded this short, linear, dialogue-free adventure with a keen bent towards the picturesque-surreal, with absurdly lush Technicolor landscapes and painterly composition. Keeper’s a game made by game artists and it shows.

It has all the limitations of its form. Keeper is primarily a friction-free ride through dazzlingly beautiful places, and most of its puzzles are calibrated to be little more than interaction bumps (stand there and hold X — that kind of thing). Story-wise, it’s the good days of Pixar, right? An emotive lighthouse, a dash of dwelling on the subjects of life and death and time (some may cry at the ending), and a funny weirdo-cute bird sidekick.

These things are not extraordinary. But I played it through, ahhed at the vistas, and when its surprises came — which I won’t spoil — I was delighted. It’s a bold game, proud of what it is, and I’m happy it got made.

Donkey Kong Bananza

Chaotic terrain-smashing fun by the team that made Super Mario Galaxy. Maybe a bit too chaotic. Bananza is forever opening a big hole in the ground that leads to the next area, but it also wants you to continue gouging though the current area in the pursuit of collecting everything. The core journey though the game is pretty easy; the boss-fights are walkovers and most challenges are over before you know it. This lends the whole thing an appropriately kinetic breathlessness as you’re punching through goons and wrecking little guys’ homes, then platforming through lava, then tinkering with a physics-driven setpiece, and then it’s on to the next. No time to think just go.

Bananza is so bold, so loud, and crashing through its big mutable landscapes is a real buzz. But I’m not finding an awful lot under all the noise and yes, sure, joy. I can only enjoy this huge, sweet gobstopper of a game for a while before I have spit it out. But I’ll inevitably put the sucker back in again.

Q-UP

Released soon after Unfair Flips, Q-UP is another game about tossing coins. But Q-UP is more dense and cerebral, finding an intricate puzzle game inside a sharp critique of online multiplayer games and how they use randomness, ranking and match-finding systems to exploit player psychology. That puzzle game is so good that Q-UP feels, frankly, dangerous, because despite its satirical nature, it’s a profoundly compulsive game on its own terms. You flip the coin and then you watch the numbers go up, and up, and up, and up, and then you tinker with your abilities and you do it again and again and again.

Honourable mentions

• Ball X Pit: Talking of compulsive, here’s the numbers game applied to an Arkanoid-/Space Invaders-like Rogue-like (bounce balls to destroy mooks before they get to the bottom of the screen). Wonderful gamefeel and sense of progression, and lots to think about during each run.
• Earthion: Takes the past couple of decades shmup design and applies them to the form of a classic Mega Drive shmup, which somehow actually runs on a Mega Drive.
• South of Midnight: Lovely visual design and fantastic voice-work are enough to elevate otherwise fairly uninteresting third-person action.
• Öoo: Short and clever as hell puzzle platformer in which you lay bombs to jump, dash and generally navigate the levels.
• The Seance of Blake Manor: Would probably be on my main list, but I haven’t played enough of this excellent firstperson mystery game yet.