One of my biggest personal changes over 2025 has been rediscovering my love for video games. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve had a legitimate games of the year list the way I do for movies. I just don’t play enough new releases to make it meaningful. New games are too expensive and too time-consuming, so I usually end up playing only the ones that I stayed interested in a couple years after release.
That’s still true. However, since I did play more games this year, I still wanted to put together a “my year in gaming” type of post. I’m going to try something different this time. I’m going to walk through 2025 month-by-month and discuss the main game I played during each. These aren’t necessarily my favorite games or even my most played games of each month. They’re the ones that left an impression. If you walked up to me on the street and said “What were you playing in January 2025?” I’d probably say “The Roottrees Are Dead. ”
Speaking of which:
January
The Roottrees Are Dead
My first 2025 play of the year, in fact one of my very few 2025 plays of the year, was indie puzzler The Roottrees Are Dead. It’s a investigate-em-up in the vein of Return of the Obra Dinn or Case of the Golden Idol where progress is gated not necessarily by any unlocks or discoveries but by your understanding of the story. As a puzzle it’s very well constructed. I especially like its “intuition” system, which directs your attention to certain pieces of evidence based on how many undiscovered leads it contains. Unfortunately the writing left me less enthused. I think my problems start at the word “Roottree,” an awkward-sounding name that as far as I can tell nobody actually has. The whole game is written like that. The puzzle makes the playthrough worth it though, so if you like clicking on a fake computer I highly recommend it.
February
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
I loved Jedi: Fallen Order, so I was eager for a sequel as soon as they announced it. When the PC port launched in a busted state I waited for the patch that would fix it. And waited. And waited. And then in late 2024 decided this happens too often and I should just buy a PS5. This was the first game I played after 100%ing Astro Bot the first time. It’s gorgeous and atmospheric in a way I’m not used to seeing. (Seeing games crash on a dedicated game console is also a novelty to me, so maybe the PC version wasn’t that bad after all.) I learned I am a graphics mode over performance mode type of player. Maybe modern players are numb to foviated ray occlusion or whatever the cutting edge graphics techniques are, but I was taking screenshots like a tourist. I just like hanging out in Star Wars. Few games have done it better.
March
Another Code: Recollection
Another Code, or Trace Memory as we knew it at the time, was one of those Nintendo Power favorites I never played, so I always had a skewed sense of how successful it was. It’s a puzzle game, but turns out in practice it plays more like a visual novel. The puzzles are mostly simple and superficial, and there is zero reward for exploration. The default controls seem to telegraph that by making it a slow process just to turn around. What kept me invested was Ashley and her family. The sequel, originally one of those oddities that released in Japan and Europe but not North America, in my memory doesn’t even have any puzzles and is purely a narrative adventure game. Basic as it is, I really grew to love these characters.
April
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered
This being my first year with a modern console (I say with all due respect to Nintendo) I had quite the wishlist to cover. Insomniac’s Spider-Man may be the best superhero game I’ve ever played, and I’ve played three of the four Arkham games. Yes, including Arkham City. The game has everything we want from Spider-Man: crime fighting, smooth swinging, and one villain too many. Is the story a tad bloated, or is that just what comic book stories are like? The performances are pitch-perfect, as are the cutscene animations. Again, lifelong Playstation players might think it’s the same-old, but this is all brand new to me. I had no idea video game storytelling was capable of something like this, and now I can’t wait to tackle the sequels.
May
Pikmin 4
Earlier in the year I played Pikmin 1 on Switch and got hooked in a way I’ve never been hooked by Pikmin before. I must have been a little too young to really grasp the original on Gamecube, because I played that game a whole lot but never came close to beating it. As an adult I realized how easy it is, actually, and sped through it so quickly that I immediately bought the most recent sequel just to keep the fix going. Pikmin 4 might be even easier, but it’s also several times larger, with items, dungeons, upgrades, NPCs, and something like three times as many Pikmin variants. And space dogs, I guess. I’m not pro-Oatchi but I’m not anti-Oatchi either. If Pikmin 1 is a game-ass video game, then Pikmin 4 is a vibe, and I value both of those things greatly.
June
Persona 3 Reload
Full moon again, crazy how time flies. I love Persona 3. I love Persona 3 so much that when anyone has even minor complaints with it I dissociate because I am fully uninterested in any critical analysis. You don’t like Fuuka’s story? That’s a weird thing to say because Fuuka is a real person. I approach every problem asking “What would Fuuka do?” Indulge me in a cliche: Persona 3 Reload looks the way my memory of Persona 3 does. The best thing Persona 5 had going for it was its style. P3R applies that style to a better game, plus some hot new jams and an epilogue chapter that doesn’t make me give up and watch the cutscenes on YouTube. Which makes it all the more shameful they left out the female protagonist path from Persona 3 Portable, preventing this edition from being truly definitive.
July
The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures
Ace Attorney has always been an absurd series but this might be the game where the absurdity reached a tipping point for me. I can understand machines that create doggy doors and emergency brakes on a boat and Soseki Natsume. I can’t get on board with a legal system that ends a trial as soon as a juror pipes up and goes “I’ve seen enough, let’s end this so I can go home.” That’s not a legal drama anymore, just a legal-themed murder mystery. Such as they are, though, the mysteries are well-constructed and create the topsy-turvy turnabouts that Ace Attorney is known for. These are all minor critiques compared to the greatest disappointment of all: The localizers finally broke down and had to admit these games are Japanese. Who’s interested in my fan translation where Naruhodo is actually an American of Japanese descent?
August
Mario’s Super Picross
I’ve continued to let RetroAchievements direct what I play and even went as far as buying one of those Chinese emulation handhelds… which I have used almost exclusively for Picross. Mario’s Super Picross is the second Japan-exclusive sequel to Mario’s Picross, this time for the Super Famicom. I actually have a physical copy of this game, but I never completed it because non-handheld consoles are the most inconvenient platform for Picross. I’ve played every Picross S game on Switch and never once loaded it in docked mode. Mario’s Super Picross is long, even by modern standards. I felt like I was plugging away at this all year. But now I have proof on RetroAchievements that I fully completed it. Now I never have to play it again.
September
ToHeart
They made a ToHeart remake. They released an official English translation of ToHeart. In the year 2025 they released a remake of ToHeart in English. On Steam. I should write a post about my love-hate relationship with visual novels at some point. I’m not how much I like ToHeart, but I am glad it has a remake. It’s a rather significant milestone in the history of the genre, which through most of the 80s and 90s was chiefly supplied with psychological horror and mystery stories rather than romance, and for that it deserves to be more widely available. I just wish the remake was better. It feels half-finished, rife with graphical glitches, poor performance, and bizarre interstitial free-roam segments that serve no purpose. Your enjoyment will depend entirely on your tolerance for anime.
October
Lake
I was a little busy the second half of October, so there was only time for short games if I didn’t want a playthrough to be interrupted. I went with Lake, which a friend had gifted me for my birthday. I first saw Lake on Game Pass where it looked like the perfect type of game for that platform: non-violent, relaxing, beatable in an afternoon. Then it left Game Pass before I got around to it and has haunted me ever since. I shouldn’t have let it. As much as I’m a sucker for the “move to a small town in the Pacific northwest” microgenre (I am, always and forever, a Life Is Strange devotee), Lake didn’t have any new ideas to bring to the concept. I may not recommend it, but I’m glad to have finally scratched that very specific itch.
November
Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration
All the hullabaloo over the Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection got me curious about the Digital Eclipse interactive documentary collections, which I previously hadn’t given much thought beyond “that sounds neat.” I’m now a huge fan. They are very neat. It’s tempting to be suspicious of Atari’s brand-management motive for this collection. They’re making a significant effort to get you to associate classic Atari with the current entity known as Atari, which is not the same company. In the interviews the current CEO keeps popping up to talk about games from the 1970s. You weren’t there, dude! The thing is… I support this mission. It wasn’t that long ago that “Atari” was announcing blockchain initiatives and hotel projects in the Middle East. Their recent pivot to retro gaming is exactly what Atari is supposed to be. So sure. Buy Digital Eclipse and give Tetris the same treatment. Buy Intellivision and, uh, Bubsy. It’s a business and I am the target customer. Not for Bubsy. Why did they buy Bubsy?
December
Keeper
I explained at the top why I don’t pick a personal game of the year anymore. With those caveats in mind: Keeper is my game of the year. What a work of art. “Lighthouse Walking Simulator” doesn’t even begin to explain what this game actually is. It is in equal parts beautiful, funny, tense, and thrilling. I don’t want to risk saying anything more, suffice to say if I was ranking this year’s games by the most important metric of “‘hell yeah’ per minute”, this is #1. Playing more games this year meant also paying more attention to game news, which as with all news paints a bleak picture. Closures, layoffs, censorship, Fortnite. Keeper gives me hope for games as an artistic medium. As long as Double Fine’s still kicking, we’re going to be okay.
A few extra games I played this year I want to shout out:
- Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (Switch remake) – Good game, I’m still #TeamSuperPaperMario though.
- Emio: The Smiling Man – Kind of a lovable disaster.
- Mario Kart World – I’m still not into it, but Mario Kart is always fun with friends.
- Golden Idol Investigations – I said I’d play these forever and it’s dawning on me what that entails.
- Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun – Oh so that’s what “boomer shooter” means. Right behind Keeper on the hypm scale.
- Is This Seat Taken? – Pleasant enough.
- Pac-Man World Re-Pac – Never played these at the time but it’s enjoyably breezy. I might pick up the sequel.
- Metroid Prime Remastered – Great, great game, obviously. They should make a new one.
- Pokémon Blue – I’ll talk about it later.
We’re a week into 2026 and 2025 is almost over. My top 10 movies list posts on Friday.
