The year is coming to a close, and we’re looking back at the best games that came out in 2025. This year, the staff at CNET came together with our sibling sites PCMag, ZDNET, Lifehacker and Mashable to vote and discuss our favorites. No matter what your taste, there were a ton of games, big and small, making headlines and filling up backlogs. You may not have heard of them all, but I’m sure there’s a gem in here waiting to be your new favorite.
Here are our collective top 10 games, unranked except for a clear, overall Game of the Year winner. We’ve also included a single honorable mention for a game that was released under unique circumstances.
Read more at Mashable: The 11 best video games of 2025
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Honorable mention
Metroid Prime 4 Beyond
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond sneaks in as an honorable mention since not enough of us had the time to play this December release, but Samus Aran’s latest adventure would otherwise absolutely be a game of the year contender. In the best Metroid tradition, Prime 4’s planet is a masterful maze to unravel, full of ingenious environmental puzzles and elevated by atmospheric extraterrestrial artwork. Exploring the immersive world with Samus’ suite of abilities, including returning powers like the ice beam and new psychedelic spins on the Morph Ball, encourages you to open up your third eye to find the path forward. We don’t get too many blockbuster, truly 3D games that embrace the nonlinear delights Metroid pioneered, but Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is a spectacular and long-awaited reunion worthy of the legacy.
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Jordan Minor, senior writer, PCMag
Top 10 best games of 2025
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Before Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came out, the term «turn-based roleplaying game» would usually be used to describe notable JRPG series such as Persona or Dragon Quest. Developer Sandfall Interactive completely defied expectations. You had the battle system, which even though it’s turn-based, is arguably the most active combat in the genre, with its unique parry and dodge system that are practically required to beat the game.
Then there is this incredibly magical world full of inspirations from French culture, with visuals so beautiful and a soundtrack so amazing that there’s already a symphony concert tour for it. Oh, and the storyline is so rich and compelling that you want to learn everything about the last human island called Lumière and the mysterious Paintress, whittling down humanity year by year. Everything about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is simply amazing, and the fact that it was the debut game from an indie studio is astonishing yet almost not surprising: A turn-based RPG with painting-like visuals inspired by 19th-century France is simply not a game any major publisher would greenlight.
- Oscar Gonzalez, contributor, CNET
Hades 2
Hades 2 missed my game of the year nod last year because while it was terrific even in early access, a lot of key pieces weren’t yet in place. It launched fully baked in September (OK, almost fully baked), and it was somehow even more terrific. With similar mythological underpinnings, mechanics, characters and battles to the original, it follows Hades’ daughter Melinoe’s fight to wrest control of the underworld and Mount Olympus from the clutches of her grandfather Chronos and to rescue her imprisoned family.
I think it’s a lot more interesting and fun to play than its predecessor. The game introduces spellcrafting, more diverse resource gathering, deckbuilding and animal allies. Instead of a single region to more or less linearly fight your way through, you battle down through the underworld as well as up to the top of Olympus. Since you can choose which direction to head at the start of a run, it lacks some of the monotony roguelikes can get. There’s a ton of lovely incidental music throughout, and it’s beautifully designed. My almost 230 hours (and still rising!) of game time should be a pretty good indicator of how absorbing, multifaceted and replayable it is.
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Lori Grunin, senior editor, CNET
Split Fiction
Split Fiction feels like a game designed for couples. My wife and I have enjoyed every minute of this split-screen co-op journey, where players help each other navigate through brilliantly designed stages awash with puzzles and action sequences. She loves the fast-paced sci-fi storyline while I enjoy frolicking around in the fantasy elements. The story itself may not be as strong as other games from the developer, but the mechanics are what hold us in the game — some of which require very involved cooperation, while others are just playfully fun. There are so many varied game styles that even we, with our ADHD brains, can play for hours on end.
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James Bricknell, senior editor, CNET
Monster Hunter Wilds
The Monster Hunter series is the perfect line of games for kids who played with dinosaur toys but never grew up. Monster Hunter Wilds takes the spectacle that the franchise is known for and dials it all up to a whole new level. Everything feels alive, like this is a living and breathing world. The jump in graphical fidelity gives Wilds a sense of realism not experienced in previous entries, while monsters like the Rathalos and Gore Magala were somehow made even more ferocious. The weapons changes have been phenomenal, too: There’s nothing quite like perfect-guarding a slash from a giant bear-thing to then immediately transform your charge blade into a big chainsaw and cut through the beast.
I firmly believe Monster Hunter Wilds will age like wine. The team over at Capcom has been in tune with the player base and has taken constructive criticism in stride. The game has only improved over the months, introducing weapon adjustments, new features like permanent Arch Tempered monsters and what is arguably the best fight in the entire series: Omega Planetes. I look forward to what 2026 will bring to Wilds.
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Cesar Cadenas, writer, ZDNET
Ghost of Yotei
It’s been tough to recreate the feeling I had when I played Ghost of Tsushima. Its timing was also auspicious, as its release coincided with COVID lockdowns and endless hours spent indoors, where I could play video games with a consistency I hadn’t felt in decades. For about two years, I lived in Tsushima. After liberating the island as Jin Sakai, I started the multiplayer DLC Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, where I played every raid, mission and survival challenge with a group of friends. After Legends came another DLC, Iki Island, followed by my returning to Legends to chase every bonus challenge it had to offer. Five years later, my hope for the Ghost of Tsushima sequel, Ghost of Yotei, was to give me the same urge to pick up the controller and live in its world.
Since the early days of the pandemic, my life has expanded to include the kinds of responsibilities that can’t be set aside for video games. A partner, kids and a house meant less of the flow that comes from living with a controller in my hand, even though my family sat with me during sessions sometimes to ask questions and watch me play. In between travel, a house closing and parenting, I still managed to play every side mission, find every collectable and fight every duel toward the Platinum trophy I earned a month after I started.
I followed the protagonist of Ghost of Yotei, Atsu, as she sought revenge for the murder of her family. I mastered each weapon to fight every type of enemy. I played on Lethal difficulty to recreate the feelings of triumph I experienced in past DLC challenges. And now that it’s done, I feel the urge to go back, to pick up the controller, and to live in Yotei again. But I have a new hope this time: for my family to join me in time for Ghost of Yotei: Legends.
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Jordan Calhoun, editor-in-chief, Lifehacker
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Independent studio Team Cherry blew the doors off the Metroidvania genre with 2017’s Hollow Knight, and the wait for the promised sequel lasted an interminable eight years. But all that time cooking was seemingly well spent, as the follow-up, Silksong, preserves and iterates on its predecessor to offer another dose of the thrills (and frustrations) of Team Cherry’s signature side-scrolling challenge.
Silksong follows Hornet, erstwhile frenemy from the first game, who’s abducted to a faraway fallen kingdom, where she must uncover its secrets and face her captors. Packed with great platforming, fun enemies, tough bosses and unique areas, Silksong lives up to Hollow Knight fans’ high expectations. While some (including this writer) find a number of its bosses to be needlessly difficult, with loss after loss grinding away any joy in repeated attempts, Silksong is deliberately tuned to force players to fully engage with it on every screen — no sleepwalking through this game. If you can stomach the difficulty spikes, you’ll find an utterly unique experience (and plenty of weird little guys) in Team Cherry’s latest opus.
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David Lumb, senior reporter, CNET
Death Stranding 2
Death Stranding 2 is, as far as I know, the only video game released in 2025 to prominently feature a shirtless electric guitar duel as part of the story. That’s not the only reason it’s on this list, but it’s a good entry point into understanding why Hideo Kojima’s latest journey is one of the best games of 2025. Unlike its 2019 predecessor, Death Stranding 2 lets its oddball personality shine through, resulting in a substantially more confident game that clearly knows what it wants to be, more so than the first game did. Cutscenes are a joy rather than a burden, enemy encounters are fun rather than tiresome, and the simple act of hiking from point A to point B in postapocalyptic Australia created some of the most memorable video game moments of the year.
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Alex Perry, tech reporter, Mashable
Dispatch
The marketing for AdHoc Studio’s debut game, Dispatch, describes it as a «superhero workplace comedy,» but I don’t think that captures the beating heart of the story. Yes, the eight-episode Telltale-style narrative is irreverently funny in the same way a James Gunn movie is — but it’s also full of soapy character drama and heartwarming «found family» moments that might prod you to shed a few tears.
Stepping into the role of retired hero Mecha Man as he becomes the «man in the chair,» players are tasked with inspiring a team of reformed villains to become better people. It’s a refreshing change from the high-stakes heroics of other games, and trope-y story arcs are elevated by truly phenomenal voice work from a star-studded cast, including Aaron Paul, Laura Bailey and Jeffrey Wright.
It helps that Dispatch’s character work and often grounded dialogue are uplifted by real technical achievements. Junctions of player choice no longer awkwardly pause speaking sections, making conversations feel fluid and real in a way no similar game has managed before. AdHoc Studio’s first release is a reminder of why the Telltale Games formula once held a stranglehold on video game storytelling. I love Mecha Man and his screwed-up Phoenix Team, and I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to hear about another season.
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Tyler Graham, writer, CNET
Blue Prince
Blue Prince is an unassuming title. Billed as a puzzle-adventure game with roguelike elements, Blue Prince starts simply enough, with a premise that resembles a modern-day Myst with a variety of logic-based puzzles. But that simple design slowly descends into a dizzying Russian doll of enigmas wrapped in mysteries. The game is riddled with arithmetic and problem-solving that goes far beyond your expectations, and which ends up as fascinating as it is frustrating — and like the proverbial onion, this baby has got layers. I was taking notes, I was comparing ideas with friends, I was doing math! For every problem I solved, I found three more underneath, but the intrigue of Blue Prince kept me stepping into that shapeshifting mansion with renewed interest and intent every time. It’s one of the most unusual games I’ve ever played, and one of the best games of 2025.
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Zackery Cuevas, writer, PCMag
Best game of the year
Donkey Kong Bananza
I wouldn’t have believed that a game about Donkey Kong endlessly smashing stuff up could make me want to keep playing it as much as Bananza has. While Nintendo is a company that has a history of repeating its hits, Donkey Kong Bananza feels like a crossover tribute to lots of Nintendo games all in one — and it’s the better game for it: exploration and secrets like Super Mario Odyssey; questing and characters like Zelda; frenetic action and day-glo colors like Splatoon; sprawling 3D maps that go in all directions like Metroid Prime.
The total package, the weird and charming story of Pauline and Donkey Kong, the characters that feel like they dropped out of an animated film — and all the things I keep smashing to dig up more secret stuff — added up to a formula I’d be very happy with Nintendo repeating. For me, Bananza even tops Super Mario Odyssey, a game I loved to death. It’s a pretty damn good start for the Nintendo Switch 2, and it also shows off how well games can perform on Nintendo’s latest hardware.
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Scott Stein, editor at large, CNET
