Bernhardt's Top-ish Five-ish Video Games of 2025

No Century of the Vampire this week! Instead I'm looking at five video games from 2025 that I really enjoyed, in no particular order and with at least one omission: In April of this year, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement added Microsoft Xbox and Gaming to its boycott list. I personally hold that line, and so among other things, I haven't played any Microsoft-published games since then and have disqualified one Microsoft-published game released in 2025 before the boycott from appearing here. That's how the cookie crumbles.

Weird year for video games! The Call of Duty franchise looks weak for the first time in a decade, perhaps poised to topple and for something else to take over, but no real challengers have emerged. (The new Battlefield is Fine; Fortnite, Roblox and the rest seem to be chugging along same as always. I'm told the Simpsons content in Fortnite is some of the best work they've done in awhile. I'm sure that it is.) In my corner of the world -- almost entirely single-player; almost entirely tactical or progression-based games -- it's been a year where I've changed more than the games have, necessarily. There were a few titles I managed to put 100+ hours into and finish, but especially by the end of the year my preferences and just the time that I had to devote to video games had shifted such that I was spending more and more of my shrinking allotment of gaming hours with smaller, run-based titles. Not only are they easier to put down and pick up on short notice, but they're much easier to play while listening to the audio from something else. Which is to say, I've been really getting into podcast games.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor

Vampire Survivors has spawned an entire subgenre of games. Take your pick what to call them; "action roguelites" and "bullet heavens" are the two most popular I've heard. They're run-based, bite-sized level and wave-clearing survival games whose core mechanics hinge around Picking One of Three Things. That is what it sounds like: The core mechanic that Vampire Survivors itself took from run-based games before it, most of them card games and most prominently among those card games Slay the Spire, is the idea of picking one thing from a randomly provided slate of three things at regular intervals of progression -- leveling up, clearing a stage, clearing a wave, what have you. Sometimes there are multiple kinds of Three Things of which to Pick One. It is, perhaps, the defining game mechanic of our age.

I've played a lot of these games -- I could in fact fill this list with them, and am actively choosing to keep good titles in the genre off of it -- and there are three things that really matter when staging a game around that mechanic: 1) Scalability. It's important that it's not too easy to beat your survivors-like; you need to die the first couple times and only approach progress once you learn a couple tricks about the in-run gameplay. This is actually one a lot of these titles fail at -- being too easy to beat the first time out. 2) Diversity. Both build diversity and play diversity are important -- there should never always be a correct answer when Picking One of Three Things, and different modes of play should force you to prioritize different choices. 3) Replayability. This is both micro and macro: You need both an endless mode and a lot of metagame incentive to keep trying at it. This list is a group of Three Things that you should not just Pick One from; you need them all.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor has them all, and it's great on Steamdeck. We're kind of cheating here since it was in Early Access for a year and change before going 1.0 this September, but a lot of other games will say the same. Maybe another one will show up here next year, after I put 300 hours into it.

BALL x PIT

This is a great example of the other type of Pick One of Three Things game: The game that looks at what e.g. Balatro did to the game of poker and says, "I can very stylishly make you Pick One of Three Things in some other well-worn game system or structure." Here the system or structure in question is Breakout: Rows of bricks appear at the top of the screen and progress towards the bottom, and you, controlling a paddle anchored to the bottom of the screen, fire balls up to destroy the bricks, bouncing said balls back into play when they return to the bottom of the screen.

The vectors for Picking One of Three here lie in both different kinds of balls for your character-paddle to shoot and different passive upgrades for you to put in your inventory that affect your playstyle; in addition, there's a less fully-baked town-building portion of the game that involves playing Pong-like games involving bouncing your townspeople off the buildings you've built to collect resources and progress on renovations. It's a fun little diversion, but it needs a bit more in the Replayability sector to do more than that. There are more content updates coming in 2026, so I will be coming back to this title then.

Blue Prince

Now here's a game I did sink my teeth into. One of the best...narrative...puzzle games...? in years. "Myst-like" feels so reductive but it's pretty accurate; I've also described it as if The Witness was made by both a more and less insane person. A differently insane person, in ways more pleasing to me. You can hit credits in 10 hours or so -- fewer if you're better at video games than I am -- but Blue Prince just keeps going and going and going, upping the complexity and inscrutability at every turn. I have a longer review of the title here. Honestly, the biggest problem with it is it is a game that relies a lot on color, so if you're colorblind, you're out of luck. The development team has said a patch is coming to address this, but as far as I'm aware it hasn't landed yet.

Hades II

Hades II is better than the original Hades in every way except the most important one: It is not, in fact, the original Hades. It is a sequel, and it has a lot of the problems that sequels have. Some of these I don't have much time for -- I have come to prefer Melinoë as a character to Zagreus, and I loved Zagreus; I think both of Scylla's songs from the second biome of the Underworld are fantastic and I prefer at least one of them to In the Blood from the first game; I think Chronos is electric as the new big bad, especially his voice acting. Hades II is simply a better game, mechanically, in play, than the original title -- Supergiant are an incredibly talented studio and were given a chance to iterate on a successful formula, and so when e.g. they decide to change up how a biome's progression works, like the City of Ephyra in the Olympus path, it works so much better than their first stab at non-traditional biome progression (the Temple of Styx, whose randomized length was a constant aggravation).

But it's not Hades! The story by necessity has to be bigger and flabbier and weirder than the first, and while I truly believe the Hades II cast is pound for pound as good as the original, there's just not enough Sad Bad Mad Dad in there (but not NO Dad; Hades is around, after a fashion). Chronos is fantastic as a sneering oleaginous smug prick, but he's not really a patch on the grumpy old man. People also really don't like the true ending, a lot, which I won't get into here. It still very much has a place on my Games of the Year list, because I played a hundred-odd hours of it, and very much enjoyed Picking One of Three Things.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Very similar to Hades II in only one way: It's very hard for me to gainsay it against the first game in the series, because I think it too is a fantastic progression and near-perfection of the mechanics of its predecessor. The story is -- look, you're a stranger in a strange land, you don't know anything showing up, you'll discover deep secrets and overarching truths over time, and in between you'll mainly shift between melancholy and regret. Bunch of really fun cute characters; bunch of good music; beautiful art. It's a Hollow Knight game. They made another one, just the way you like it. The sheer variety of playstyles, being able to switch up Crests so that change how your jumps and attacks work before adding tools into the mix to give you more lines of play to exploit -- it's fantastic. It's also really frustrating, because I'm not very good at the high level play required from a number of the bosses in this game, so at time of this writing I haven't beaten Silksong. Picking One of Three Things has no purchase in the High Halls.

Honorable Mentions

Here are some other games from 2025 I played that didn't quite make this cut.

Clair Obscur Expedition 33: Loved everything about this game except actually playing it. I'm old and don't want to do QTEs and parries literally every single turn of every fight in a game with a lot of turns and fights. Amazing soundtrack, great writing, I'll get back to it eventually.
Eternal Strands: Really good and interesting physics engine-based gameplay let down by some run-based progression I didn't especially like and by very cloying writing. The problems with the writing in my view aren't of quality but of craft; while I appreciate my generational peers in these rooms wanting to be cozy and uplifting and positive, friction and conflict are what drive stories. Don't want to undersell the gameplay here: If, say, you missed all the weird physics crap lost between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, check this out.
Assassins Creed Shadows: They finally made another good one of these kinds of games. That's specifically Assassins Creed -- Ubisoft made a good Ubisoft-type last year with Star Wars Outlaws, which no one played, and the year before that with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which seems to have been more successful but similarly without cultural impact. When it comes to open world samurai amusement parks, I prefer the Ghost Of series from Sucker Punch on the whole -- much stronger art design, much more early restraint on the ludicrous power fantasy -- but this was a fine AC and an absolutely beautiful title. But then, it should be, given that budget.
Atomfall: A nifty little FPS imsim from Rebellion that sort of draws innate "Fallout but British" comparisons but doesn't actually exist on that vector. Almost feels more like if Stalker had a better sense of humor about itself instead.
Elden Ring Nightreign: Fell off this a little earlier than Rob and Norman did, but it's an impressively fun remix of the Elden Ring formula (and, it must be said, assets) into a PvE multiplayer format. From a business standpoint I kind of expected it to crash and burn, but it seems to be doing fine.
Megabonk: Started playing this two days ago. The humor/style is deeply cringe when it intrudes, but it seems to pass all the tests listed above for Picking One of Three Things.

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Tags: video games | Year-in-Review | blue prince