ALL TEN GAMES RELEASED IN 2025 RANKED OBJECTIVELY FROM WORST TO BEST — by Ina

Hey what’s up gamers. I’m a gamer too. Here’s every game that came out in 2025, ranked.  

10. Metaphor: ReFantazio

Katsura Hashino is my opp for life. The guy who led the Persona series into its modern form, for good and for ill, spent nine years founding a new studio, hand picking his dream team of developers, and using his authorial blank check to “aim even higher” than anything he’d done before. So what did the team at Studio Zero deliver? It’s bad man. It’s rough. 

I didn’t think it was possible for Hashino to make a game more thematically empty than Persona 5 but he sure proved me the fuck wrong. A game breathlessly praised for its nuanced handling of racism that’s largely comprised of people saying “I hate guys who have dog ears!” which is of course followed by the player character going, “I actually think we should all just be nice to each other!” to thunderous applause. A game where society is run by a Vaguely Catholic Church whose religious and political value systems are never even explained, except that the guys in charge want stuff that My Guys don’t want. A main villain who is too normal and reasonable in his philosophy and politics so he has to ALSO want to kill millions of people for reasons that don’t really align with his other stated beliefs. 

It’s all so insulting, and more than that it’s boring. Metaphor is full of interesting characters performed charmingly, with some fun dungeons and the potential for a return to Persona 3’s playful calendar system, trapped in a framework that is utterly afraid to challenge the player in any way – mechanically, ideologically, or emotionally. A waste of time from start to finish. 

9. Demonschool

https://gamesline.net/i-dont-wanna-go-to-demonschool-demonschool-review-pc/

I would let Kestrel do unbelievable shit to me though, don’t think I wouldn’t for one fucking second.

8. Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within

FINALLY, A GOOD GAME. And sure, maybe Clock Tower II could be a better game, but like, by whose standards? The Struggle Within isn’t a bad game, it’s a famously bad game whose reputation feels like it comes more from Youtube videos than the beautiful souls of people who gave it a shot. And so everyone knows what’s wrong with it: the incomprehensible story, the goofy characters, the unconvincing atmosphere, the constant and unfair game overs. But the problem with games that already have their cultural narratives set in stone is that people so rarely meet them for what they actually are. 

When I played The Struggle Within I found so much to love. The main character, Alyssa (this is one of those games where the localization wants you to believe they have Shinto shrines in California) is possessed by the spirit of a seemingly adult, male, chain-smoking murderer named Bates, pictured above. He’s not only extremely fucking funny any time he speaks or dropkicks a child or shoots people with guns in a point-and-click horror-puzzle game – his presence also complicates play in ways that shake up the by-now very firm Clock Tower formula. Juggling whether Alyssa is holding the magical amulet that keeps Bates at bay so he won’t shake down the wrong NPC, or so he will shake down the right NPC, could be viewed as tedious puzzlework if you’ve preemptively closed your heart, but for me it was fun! It’s part of the game!

Yes, the lighting is bright most of the time. Yes, the game uses piss-yellow slime instead of blood. Yes, half of the game is a silly zombie hospital scenario instead of, like, Clock Tower stuff. Yes, there’s a really dire shooting minigame that serves as a major roadblock to progressing into the endgame. These things are beautiful. It’s 1998 and video games haven’t homogenized. Human Entertainment released three wildly different 3D games that year, including this one. No one had felt like they had figured this shit out yet. It’s so wonderful to experience the first tries at it. 

And yeah, the nonstop surprise game overs happen constantly. Whatever! Juggle a bunch of save files! Use a guide! Don’t be a baby. 

7. Barrow Hill: Curse of the Ancient Circle

There was a golden period in the 2000s where gamers collectively decided that point-and-click adventure games were old and lame and bad and that we didn’t like them anymore. The cool thing about this, however, is that people didn’t stop making those games, they just started making them mostly in Europe with small teams and low budgets to be sold in the computer software sections at Staples. 

Barrow Hill is a beautiful example of this kind of game, where the design of play is just as you would expect for its time and place (every environment is huge, you have to click through five hundred screens of empty space to get to any important location, every screen is full of meaningless clutter that forces the player to click at every stray pixel in hopes of finding something properly interactable), but that stuff doesn’t feel so unpleasant when the aesthetic world that blankets it is so, so pleasant. Clicking aimlessly around a deserted gas station for ten minutes isn’t so bad when it’s under the musty hum of harsh yellow lighting. Stumbling around in the pitch dark woods, wary of an unseen stalker is made slightly less foreboding by the small-town radio show broadcast over your character’s personal handset. 

The game has an eclectic feeling – small and dim but really confident in what it’s doing. Because ultimately this is a trite story trading in the most cliche British Pagan horror tropes imaginable. But Barrow Hill makes bold choices in presentation: splicing generous live action footage throughout the game to emphasize its most frightening and most human moments, for example, or trusting that its primary object of fear can be a giant rock that follows you around. And it can! And it does! And it’s still scary! 

Nobody would make Barrow Hill today. Nobody would have made Barrow Hill five years before they did, or two years, or a year later. It’s a perfect, singular experience. I don’t know what else a game should want to be.

6. Castlevania: Lament of Innocence

At some point we all collectively decided that it’s fucking illegal to be mid??? Everybody suddenly started acting like having to play the humble three out of five video game is worse than your beautiful wife telling you she wants a divorce??? Are you seriously telling me that you’re feeling sleepy on a Sunday afternoon and you just had a pretty good lunch and you’re relaxing on the couch and Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation just came on the TV and you’re gonna, what, change the channel??? 

Grow the fuck up.

5. Armored Core

From Software’s first and best game primarily about Menus. 

Fools might tell you that Dark Souls is the inheritor of Armored Core’s will, what with telling large chunks of its story through item descriptions and by having a big fuckoff stats screen. They’re wrong. Dark Souls is the pale imitation of Armored Core, a game where the Menu is the thrill. 

Yeah, there’s a really excellent mech combat simulator in there too. It’s fast-paced, it’s got like forty missions with tons of map designs and terrain types, weapon and mobility considerations, extremely varied clear conditions, pretty sophisticated enemy AI. That’s not the point. By the time you’re controlling your mech, you’ve already succeeded or failed. It’s about the fucking menu. 

The menu is where you do your shopping. It’s where you customize your robot – painting and rigging and trying new configurations and putting funny little stickers on it. You get emails in the menu, where you can read into all the politics going on in the world around you that your character, a hired gun in ever-truer senses of the word, is ambivalent to. The menu is where you see the things they take from you when you can’t pay your debts. 

Proportionally, you’re spending most of your time looking at menus and submenus. It’s perfect. This is what video games is all about.  

4. Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City

Okay we all know why Etrian Odyssey is good but please consider how many intentional betrayals you can do to people in this one. That’s why it’s the best one. It’s also got the weird, cool classes. You can’t go wrong. 

3. The Painscreek Killings

The Painscreek Killings is a unicorn in the gaming sphere, somehow. A sprawling, slow-paced murder investigation entirely based around clue-gathering and deductive reasoning. Although you’re initially looking into a single decade-old cold case, the plural in the game’s title gives away that the story quickly unfurls into the story of a small town’s collapse at the hands of interpersonal class violence. 

The game elegantly guides the player through a rough three act structure, where all of the clues and locations available to explore and extract eventually lead to bottlenecks that make more of the town and its secrets available to you. Those secrets are always sad and often terrible, and unraveling them imparts a surprisingly tense atmosphere for a game that takes place entirely during the daytime with no NPCs at all. 

Painscreek’s real beauty is in how unwilling to help the player it is beyond organizing your items and in-game documents for you. Because it’s a game that actively tells you in the opening screen to keep physical notes if you want to succeed, it makes for perfect collaborative gaming – I played with a friend and we knocked the whole thing out in one satisfying ten-hour sitting. 

There’s nothing that strikes the kind of balance Painscreek does between complexity of its mysteries and freedom to put their solutions together yourself. Some players might not like how slow it is, how little feedback you get. But I relish it. I wish there were a hundred games like it. But there aren’t. So I gotta cherish this really cool one as hard as I can. 

2. Sakura Taisen

Sakura Taisen is one of those pieces of media that makes the scales fall from your eyes. Today, in a post-Sword Art Online world where every third anime property is about an incel teenager becoming the strongest guy and being magnetically attractive to every woman he meets despite having no personality and often being a vile piece of shit, harem anime so often feels like a poisoned well. Like, even that we’re calling it that, right. It’s inherently about objectifying women, making them property, treating our relationships with them as transactional.

Video games are often like this by nature, for all human interaction, and never more explicitly than in dating sims. Much like Armored Core, games about fucking girls are primarily about spreadsheets and they always have been. 

It’s not like Sakura Taisen isn’t doing this stuff. It’s just that, like, it reveals to me how much I’m willing to go along with literally any idea, if you just make it COOL instead of FUCKING LAME. And Sakura Taisen IS COOL.

Mostly a visual novel, occasionally a style-over-substance SRPG, it’s a game that approaches a lot of ideas that feel dime-a-dozen today with bright-eyed zeal. The five women in the game are all archetypal (chinese-coded anime girl with glasses TRULY an inescapable 90s staple), but they’re all given time to breathe and distinct personality traits separate from their stock character beats. Their most important relationships and stories are often with each other rather than the player’s POV boy, who, it should be said, is also his own man with a distinct personality and firm identity. He’s more than just a channel for the audience and he’s more than an expression of fantasy for power or romance. He’s a cute little guy. Everybody in the game is cute! 

It’s got mechanical swagger too – a dating-sim-lite VN where choices are timed based on the context of the choice. If it’s an action scene you might have a split second to make a decision. If the moment feels agonizing to your character, you might have twenty full seconds to choose, or not choose; that’s always a valid option, fifteen years before we were all praising Telltale’s Walking Dead for introducing the idea to us. 

It’s little details like this that make Sakura Taisen feel special, when in reality it’s a mishmash of a lot of kinds of game and resultantly a pretty shallow take on all of them. It’s not mechanically complex like contemporary dating sims of its day, it doesn’t have the depth of storytelling freedom that a proper visual novel might, and it’s the single most simple SRPG I’ve ever played. But hey, none of it matters. Because all of that stuff is Good Enough, and the rest of it gets by on style and charm and good, honest character writing. I’m hard-pressed to think of an RPG that’s delighted me more consistently for a long, long time. 

1. Combat

It’s so fucking crazy that they made the most perfect video game in 1977 and people just kept making bullshit garbage for fifty years afterward. It’s multiplayer, too! It’s for friends and lovers!

Combat is so fucking cool man, just look at it. Did you know the colors change every time you switch game modes? WHICH, FOR THE RECORD, there are twenty-seven of? And almost all of them are cool! The tanks are slow, they can’t move backwards, and they have a wide turn radius, so movement is the foundation of strategy in this game. It’s complicated when later game modes add stuff like different obstacles, ricocheting bullets, partial or total invisibility. From the word go, Combat has the same endless potential for creative play that any properly balanced multiplayer experience does, but it’s also packed to the gills with ideas on the developer’s end. 

And just when you think you’re at the end of the line? Bam, you’re planes now. Fuck tanks, fuck you, it’s a whole other game. It’s not called TANK Combat, dummy!

This is what the entire game is about: every new map, every new method of play, every new set of rules is about throwing you out of your comfort zone. When even moving at all is as risky as it is in Combat, there’s never a true sense of comfort or safety, and that’s emphasized by how truly different every gametype can feel in your hands. It’s basic stuff, right, but it doesn’t matter how basic it is if it works, and no video game in the world works as immediately or seamlessly as Combat does. I had more fun playing it for an hour and a half with my friend this year than I had with any other video game. It’s perfect! It’s the best game of 2025. 

HONORABLE MENTIONS

FATE/EXTRA CCC

The only reason this isn’t the number 2 game of the year is because I haven’t finished it yet. They finally did it. They realized Nasu is really good at talking about sex as long as you don’t make him show actual fucking and had him make a whole game about it and guess what mother fuckers it rules!

PINFEATHER

This is the actual best game of the year but I made it so it seems uncouth to say so. It’s true, though, ask anyone. A twisted tale of transgender lesbian caregiving horror. Kids might call it “toxic yuri,” but trust me: it’s a story about hate. 

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Ina is a beautiful woman. You can read her really good Persona and Fire Emblem fan fiction and you can read her toxic yuri visual novel Pinfeather.