2025 Oaties: Games

This year, I think I'm going to split up my oaties post into two, one for games and one for films. I don't want the posts to be massive, especially since I'm going to continue the tradition I established last year of updating my all-time of-the-year lists along with choosing individual years.

I'll be honest: I'm not feeling great about the state of video games in 2025. I certainly missed some games that might change my opinion here—notable games I didn't get around to that I think I stand a shot of really loving include PEAK, Shadow Labyrinth, Of the Devil, and Kinophobia. I'll mention Despelote as well as a game I watched Eden play most of and thought very highly of. But on the whole, this year leaves a bad taste in my mouth and makes me feel like a hater.

I always try to muster precise and thoughtful critiques of games I don't like, especially when I know other people feel differently, and that often means I'm putting myself in the position of thinking as much about the games I don't like as I do about my favorites. This year, though, it felt like I was endlessly pouring out criticism with only brief intermissions for auditions.

Many people, including numerous friends of mine, loved Blue Prince, Donkey Kong Bananza, and Hades II. I found all three of these flawed in ways that were actively repugnant to my design sensibilities. That's not to say I didn't enjoy them, but the fun I had felt like digesting content, that increasingly refined slurry of choose-three mechanics and the steady drip-drip-drip of unlocks. The failures, on the other hand, were born of deep misunderstandings of the player's perspective-in-the-moment—the very experience whose careful shepherding is what I find most compelling about the very best game design.

I was looking forward to Civilization VII so eagerly I took time off work to play it with Liz. It was so disappointing we abandoned it after two days. Even games I broadly quite liked, like Q-Up and Demonschool, were marred by notable design flaws.

That's not to say there weren't games I enjoyed this year, but looking back at them I'm faced with the horrifying realization that everything I really loved this year was a sequel or a spinoff. Fish Fear Me, Monster Train 2, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Death Stranding 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong all remix or reinvent their source material to some degree, and I think they're all excellent. But the knowledge that none of them (nor Hades II nor Civilization VII) is fully original haunts me.

Game of 2025: Hollow Knight: Silksong

This is kind of a shoo-in choice, if I'm being honest. There are only three games I gave five stars this year. Nightreign is certainly my most played of the three, and (similar to my reasoning for picking Elden Ring as my game of 2022) exploring it and developing strategies with friends was a unique joy. But it's also got plenty of flaws itself—not so many as to make it not an absolute favorite, but enough to keep it from being a serious competitor for the top seat.

I liked Death Stranding 2 a lot more than many. I don't entirely disagree with Carolyn Petit's critiques of the game; there are certainly ways in which its mountain of quality-of-life improvements over the first game feel like sanding down some of the unique character, and while I like the fact that stealth-action sequences were more of a real thing I don't disagree that they do bring it closer to a normal AAA game (and certainly closer to Metal Gear Solid V). Its biggest strength is its narrative, but that's also the only thing that's a truly substantial change relative to the original.

So that leaves Silksong. While it's not flawless, the quality of design is excellent across the board. And what makes me most impressed is the ways in which it plays off and even undermines the expectations of its predecessor. It's a sequel in the vein of Metal Gear Solid 2 or Dark Souls 2: one that's unafraid to reimagine the constraints of the original. Silksong begins with a bold mechanical declaration, that the downward aerial attack that was the bread and butter of Hollow Knight combat was no more, and builds outwards from there with utmost self-confidence. Team Cherry are among rarefied company in their willingness to use friction as part of their palette, and more importantly they do it without simply copying From Software's notes.

For all that I'm a little sad to have to pick a sequel, Silksong certainly deserves its place as my game of the year.

Games of the Years

I didn't play that many games from outside 2025 this year, and the only one I really loved was Slay the Princess which for all my esteem can't really compete with Void Stranger for the 2023 slot. As a result, the only changes to my GOTY lineup are from other cleanups or reevaluations:

• 1988: I've added Tetris as my game of the year. I didn't actually play any new games from 1988 this year, but I did realize that (despite Backloggd categorizing it as a 1989 release) the first documented commercial release of the game was in 1988. That puts '88 over the five-game minimum that qualifies it for a place in my GOTY list, and Tetris beats out Super Mario Bros 2 and 3 (both entirely delightful games) because, come on, it's fucking Tetris.

  Despite Tetris being moved out, 1989 gets to remain in the list with Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap sneaking in as the fifth entry. I played the 2017 remake, not the original, but I generally count remakes as the same year as the original unless they're wildly different.

• 1994: The Incredible Toon Machine displaces Jazz Jackrabbit. Both of these are childhood favorites, but I'd forgotten to mark the former on Backloggd until this year. While the OG Epic shooter platformer was an absolute fascination for young Natalie, as an adult I find the Incredible Machine open-ended approach to puzzle design and the ways it presents challenges in what is fundamentally a sandbox much more interesting.

• 2008: Metal Gear Solid 4 replaces Armored Core: For Answer. I played MGS4 at the beginning of 2024 and I'm not sure why I didn't make this change during the previous update. I like ACFA just fine, but MGS4 is a multimedia masterpiece in its own right as well as the culmination of the primary arc of the most fascinatingly metatextual AAA franchise that ever has or likely ever will exist.

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Bonus: Hundo Club

We welcome two new entrants to the hundo club this year: Elden Ring: Nightreign which I played 277 hours of (mostly with friends but not insignificantly also taking photos for the wiki) and Death Stranding 2 on which I racked up 121 hours just playing through the main plot while taking diversions to do optional deliveries whenever I felt like it, which turned out to be a lot of the time. Shouts out as well to Against the Storm, already a member of the club from last year but which I'm pretty sure Liz and I managed another hundred hours of this year.