I played a lot of games in 2025. Very few of them actually released in 2025, partly because I really wanted to make a dent in my backlog and partly because I made more of a conscious effort to try interesting little things that would pop up in my social media feed. The games I decided to write about are the ones that stuck with me the most. The ones that, even after I was done with them, I enjoyed rotating in my brain and admiring from different angles.
11. Star Wars Outlaws
I have a Star Wars OC. Well, two, technically. One is from when I was much younger. He was a Jedi in the style of Luke, as I’m sure many OCs were. An earnest go-gooder who sometimes struggled with the Dark Side but always took the high road in the end. He wielded two lightsabers, one blue and one green. I don’t think about him anymore.
The other is Dia V’rei. She’s a Twi’lek with dark green skin and quite a few tattoos, who in her youth eked out a living by participating in races, legal or otherwise. She got caught up in some bullshit with the Empire and now the ghost of a disgraced Sith Inquisitor is living in her head. They’re both trying to make the most of the situation. She has one lightsaber that used to be blood-orange, but now it’s teal. The focusing crystal makes a sound eerily similar to a wail of despair when she switches it on.
Star Wars Outlaws does not let you create a character. It has a very specific story to tell about a very specific protagonist. That part of it is fine. It’s a solid, enjoyable romp of which I only remember the vaguest details. What the game does best, though, is satisfy the core reason why I still sometimes think about Dia V’rei and add a little bit to the story I have for her in my head: it’s fun to imagine existing in Star Wars. The first time I touched down on Akiva–a humid, jungle world where it’s almost constantly raining–I just wandered the city streets for half an hour. I slowly weaved through the markets, admiring the lush plantlife, letting the ambient noise wash over me and imagining how the rain would feel on my skin. I wished, so badly, that I could be there.
More than anything, it’s those moments that truly sell why Kay Vess endures all the stress and life-threatening jobs. An hour from now, she’s probably going to get shot at by a rival gang again. But in this moment? Life is perfect. Let’s enjoy the rain.
10. No Man’s Sky
This year, I played No Man’s Sky for the first time since its release. It’s simultaneously a very different game and also fundamentally the same thing. I understand the growing frustrations of the purists every time a massive new update was released. There was an appeal to the simplicity and loneliness of the original game that is now forever lost to time. The game now has base-building, ship-building, a fleet mechanic, and even a dedicated multiplayer hub you can summon with a button-press. For my part, though, I enjoyed that I could pretty much ignore any of these extra systems if I didn’t care about them; and the changes I did care about ultimately made it much easier to appreciate the core of what made NMS fun in the first place: finding absurd worlds and getting yourself into situations.
NMS swept my friend group like an infection, and at one point there were at least 4 of us playing the game at the same time. We never did missions with each other, but we would chat on Discord and stream our own games to each other. On one such occasion, I was having some pretty rough luck with the planets in a new system I had just warped to. Every celestial body I landed on provided a new, unique hell to experience: constant freezing blizzards, acid rain, hostile wildlife, or an atmosphere entirely composed of toxic gas. Meanwhile, my roommate was exploring what the game itself described as a “paradise” planet. It was beautiful, had no extreme weather, peaceful wildlife, and abundant resources and water. She was still miserable, though, because the air was filled with bubbles, and they were really getting on her nerves. She hated those goddamn bubbles.
I, of course, teased her about it.
“I’m over here on literal hell worlds and you’re complaining about bubbles?”
I didn’t understand, she told me. The bubble filter was really annoying.
After calling it a day on my current planet, I got into my spaceship and sped over to the final planet in the system.
“One more chance for something nice. Maybe I’ll get bubbles this time,” I remarked.
I landed on the planet. It had a bit of a red tint and looked like a desert. Still, the ambient temperature wasn’t too bad, the alien life wasn’t hostile, and even the Sentinel activity was relaxed. It was certainly not a paradise, but I just might have a pleasant time here.
Less than a minute later, I got caught in an extreme storm. My survival suit flashed a warning message: “COMBUSTIBLE DUST.”
I burst out laughing. That’s the game, baby!
9. taking my Dark Knight girlfriend to the corner store
This was the year I started to more actively seek out sapphic stories to read. As much as I like to consider myself thoughtful and well-read, I have a very bad habit of just reading or playing whatever happens to come my way through friends’ recommendations or critical praise. This does mean I very rarely encounter anything truly terrible, but the second edge of that blade causes me to get stuck in artistic ruts. When I try to find new books, I’ll see something with a premise that’s up my alley that has a lot of very good reviews, and then get scared off after reading one 2-star review that says, “The characters never really developed beyond their starting archetypes.” Is that true? I’ll never know, because I will simply avoid trying it out of fear of “wasting” my time with something mediocre. And then I will play another Assassin’s Creed game for, like, 50 hours. It’s embarrassing.
This was the year I shoved my decision paralysis in a locker and did my best to keep it there. Dark Knight girlfriend was an important part of that process, partly because it’s very easy to just read something and see what happens if it only takes 20 minutes. I’ve read short stories in sci-fi anthologies that take longer than that. And you know what? It was a pretty nice time. It has fun with the obvious fish-out-of-water premise, and I connected strongly with the main character’s constant background-anxiety. What I loved the most, though, was that the scenes it cared most about were very mundane and domestic. It is, after all, a game where you take your girlfriend to the corner store. Then you get back home and cook for her and talk about your plans for tomorrow. There are a couple moments you could very loosely describe as action scenes, but they are over quickly and primarily exist as gags. They aren’t the point. The point is the everyday routine, and the comfort in sharing that routine with someone you love.
It did not blow my mind. It was exactly what I was hoping it would be, but in a way that helped illuminate to me what my hopes even were.
8. Life is Strange: Double Exposure
I was not expecting to play a Life is Strange game this year. I played the first game as it was coming out in 2015 and enjoyed it quite a bit. After that, I would be aware of other games in the franchise releasing and getting generally positive reviews, but I felt like I had moved on by then. A similar thing nearly happened for Double Exposure. When the first episode released, I became vaguely aware of the discourse surrounding Chloe breaking up with Max in the “saved her” timeline, and then I just didn’t think about it for an entire year. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers who worked on Double Exposure would become scapegoats for a subset of fans who wanted a target for their frustrations. Some took the layoffs that would happen just three months later as a kind of vindication. It felt weird and unsettling to see all this play out for a game that had once meant a great deal to me. When a couple of my friends later recommended the Double Exposure to me, I finally decided late into 2025 to give it a shot. I wanted to know what the game actually was, not what people were trying to turn it into. What I found was far more interesting and introspective than the early kneejerk reactions had given it credit for. My biggest problem with the first game was the infamous final decision, which made it seem like Max was being arbitrarily punished for trying to use her powers for good. Double Exposure instead makes the case that Max is perfectly capable of being her own disaster.
Double Exposure wants to talk about adventure games and the type of person who’d be a protagonist of one. Like a lot of heroes in this genre, Max is an insatiably curious snoop, and the game continually presented very standard adventure-game mechanics in a context that made me feel absolutely awful for doing them. If she senses there’s a problem or mystery she doesn’t know about, she will do whatever she can to figure out what’s going on and try to “solve” it. She will cause a distraction to snoop through someone’s briefcase for confidential legal documents. She will shift timelines to break into private offices and read emails. She will use an emotional confession told to her by someone in a state of desperation and sadness to cajole more information out of an alternate universe version of that same person. You, the player, get very little choice in the matter. You have to do it, because it’s what Max would do–what she so often justifies as something she must do–and then you will probably watch it blow up in her face later.
This is never directly stated to be the specific or even only reason Chloe broke up with her. There is no one reason. However, Chloe does express anxiety about how Max uses her powers, and whether Max would ever try to win an argument with them. Max insists she wouldn’t; but if that’s the same Max who also doesn’t think twice about rummaging through the personal lives of people she knows to fix a problem all on her own, well, I get why that might not be reassuring. There is a need in Max to control the chaos of life, to make the universe and the flow of time bend in a direction that she believes is best. It’s a desire I deeply connected with, one my teenage self also had when it seemed like so many things around me were changing in unpleasant ways. Was there something I could have said or done to make it all work out? Was I just not smart or clever enough? The difficult reality was that many things were just out of my hands. I never had a say in the first place.
7. Unnamed Space Idle
I don’t usually play idle games. When I venture into the genre, I’ll poke around at a game for two or three days and then eventually forget about it, never to return. I “played” USI for 719 hours. Maybe part of it was just that the aesthetic clicked for me. I love spaceships, and it did, at times, feel like I was pushing buttons on a control panel to eke a bit more power out of the reactor. Maybe the gameplay loop just appealed to me more than others I’ve tried. USI places a huge emphasis on doing focused progression. You very soon reach a point in the game where trying to improve all your ship’s systems at the same time becomes impossible. You have to learn to be okay with letting some stuff sit on the backburner while you catch other systems back up.
It took a while for me to acclimate to this style, but the moment I depowered my warp core, shifted all my stats into material synthing, and then saw recipes with an estimated build time of 1 year suddenly finish in 3 minutes was an incredible high. There’s not really much else to it. I still like booting it up for a few minutes a day to check on my progress and poke around for a little. I’m splicing my crew members with alien DNA now. Things are going well, I think.
6. Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery
It’s funny to me that I first learned about and played this game the same year that Uma Musume was released. Uma Musume is a very monkey’s-paw style of game to me. On the one hand, I’m happy to finally have horse-girl representation sweep through the spaces I inhabit. Cat girls and dog girls have hogged the spotlight for so long. The various Umas have fun designs and personalities, and I appreciate when artists draw them kissing each other. I, too, run because I love feeling the burn in my thighs and the wind catching my hair like a banner flying behind me.
On the other hand, I personally despise the real-life sport of horse racing. There are many inside the industry who claim to love horses. I’m sure that must be true for some portion of them. As much as I love horses, I will almost certainly never own one myself, because they are extraordinarily expensive in comparison to almost any other pet you can legally keep. I imagine that horse racing represents an opportunity for some to actually make a living interacting with the animal they adore. This does not change the fact that horse racing is an ugly sport that blatantly commodifies and exploits horses purely to engage in an entirely different type of exploitation of humans.
Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery is not explicitly about racing, but it is about sports. The stat-raising gameplay is cold, calculated, and sterile, like a simplified spreadsheet of any sports management sim you can imagine. The actual impact on your horse, though, is gross and upsetting. The abstraction of the stats represents the more tactile reality of your protagonist transforming a living creature into a horrifying flesh-mass through careful regulation of diet and injections. Your ultimate victory requires the slaughter of your only companion in the world. Congratulations! You’re officially a Horse Master, for all that matters.
I guess I appreciate the bluntness.
5. VRChat
If I end up buying a VR headset next year, it will be entirely because of VRChat. One of my favorite things to do in this world is go to a place I’ve never been before with someone. We then walk around and talk about anything that comes to mind. It is one of the greatest joys of living in a physical, material space, and it’s frustratingly hard to do when most of your friends live hundreds or thousands of miles away. VRChat’s social hangout spaces acted like a life raft to me. The life raft is never as nice as the boat it was stored on, but it’s there for you when you need it most.
The whiplash of tones you can get when visiting different environments is a big part of what made it so fun for me. After spending some time on a rooftop break room in the twilight of the early evening (where I watched my friends excitedly discover that they could use an already-lit cigarette to start another cigarette), we hopped over to a dead-mall-esque structure that appeared to be entirely dedicated to tourism vTubers. Or perhaps vTubers who were simply doing a collaboration with Japan’s various tourism organizations. We didn’t recognize any of them and had a very limited grasp of the language, so it was impossible to fully understand the context. Still, we had fun wandering around, assigning one of the vTubers to each other, and talking about the places we’d like to visit if we were on vacation. It was an experience I desperately needed.
4. The Rise of the Golden Idol
I’m still a little star-struck by the Golden Idol games. Conceptually, it’s so simple: study what’s happening on the handful of screens that show a frozen moment in time, then use a bucket of a couple dozen words to explain what’s going on. It’s remarkable how the game uses those two basic structures to find so many different ways to tell a story. One chapter will show you a zoomed out view of an entire city and ask you to piece together how the schemes of a group of scientists slowly unravel as the day progresses. Another chapter will zoom into a single apartment complex, each room showing the ripple effects of those same scientists’ callous disregard for the people they used in their experiments. It shifts effortlessly between being hilarious and bleak. It feels so damn good when, after spending half an hour staring at a scene wondering what you’re missing, you realize you completely misunderstood one detail, and now everything else clicks into place.
3. This Bed We Made
I played through This Bed We Made in two days at the very end of 2025. I only heard about it because a friend mentioned it offhand, and I’m so, so glad she did. This game is a narrative-heavy adventure where you play as a 50’s hotel maid snooping around guests’ rooms. She soon gets wrapped up in a story of forbidden love and can eventually discover and explore her own lesbian desires. It hit me like a heat-seeking missile, and it provided a fascinating contrast to Double Exposure. Where LiS gestured toward but never quite successfully grappled with the ethical nuance of Max’s vigilante-detective routine, TBWM presents a more straightforward argument: you have a moral imperative to resist the police. Laws can be unjust, cops are lazy and incompetent, and they will absolutely use their power to persecute so-called “degenerates.” A key part of the game is using the small amount of control Sophie’s job provides her to decide what items to preserve and what to throw away, and getting a good ending depends on you, the player, exercising that power. All while that’s happening, you get frequent check-ins with your preferred supporting character, which for me played out as Sophie slowly realizing, “I think my coworker likes women. Wait, do I also like women?” The whole thing was very charming.
2. Mysterium
I’ve lived in Minneapolis since 2022, and halfway through 2025 I realized I was still just as much of a social shut-in as I was in the Arizona suburbs. I really like being around people, but I’m also very anxious about meeting new ones. There’s a part of me that always fears each new social experience will be the one I fuck up so bad that I never live it down and also reveals that no one ever liked me to begin with. This is why it took me two whole years to go to a local queer board game night that was perpetually on the “I should do this next week” agenda.
My fears, of course, were completely unfounded, and I had a delightful time. One week, I decided to bring along my copy of Mysterium. It’s a game I adore, but I’ve almost never had enough people around to play properly. The short pitch: one player is a ghost, and the (up to six) others are psychics trying to solve the ghost’s murder. The ghost hands out cards from a huge deck of abstract, surrealist art that is evocative but never too specific. The psychics must then use the cards they’re given to deduce which suspects, locations, and makeshift weapons the ghost is trying to direct them toward. The ghost cannot speak or provide any clues other than the cards. Sometimes a psychic locks in, interprets the ghost’s clue perfectly, and gets it right on the first try. When that happens, they both feel like geniuses. More often, though, the psychic gets it wrong, and they both get to laugh at how badly they messed up.
That’s the beauty of Mysterium, to me. There is technically a fail state, but “failure” is its own reward, because it’s really funny. I loved every second I spent playing Mysterium with people. I brought it three weeks in a row, and it had the whole table cackling every time. Damn me and my stupid anxieties. I could have experienced this kind of joy so much sooner.
1. Warframe
Over the last decade, I have attempted to play Warframe three times. The first couple times, I managed to stick with it for a few hours before feeling overwhelmed and putting it down to focus on something else. This year, for some reason, I decided I wanted to give it one more, fair shot. I’d watch a couple tutorials, focus on doing the questlines, and actually figure out how the thing works.
I have now played Warframe for 290 hours. It certainly helped that several friends also got hooked on it soon after, and it’s a lot of fun to regularly hang out in voice chat helping each other with one of many varieties of grind in the game. What truly shocked me, though, is how much I enjoyed the writing and story. As you play through the main questline, you can see Digital Extremes gradually understand both what type of story they want to tell and how best to tell it within the framework of the game. It starts out with simple expository voice-overs that are a little hard to pay attention to while you’re in the middle of a mission, and ends with elaborate cutscenes and a visual novel with complex branching dialogue and dating elements.
Gameplay elements that you’ve long-since taken for granted are recontextualized dozens of hours later in genuinely heartfelt plot revelations. You will meet a whole parade of fun and interesting characters and make jokes with your friends about how you imagine them interacting with each other in their off time. You will discover that a family can be an adoptive Exposition Mom, a traumatized space ninja, their girlfriend with magnetic powers who’s trapped in a timeloop, and their computer son who probably has an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. Also that war veteran who defected from his corrupt government to form a resistance movement dedicated to freeing people from mind-control slavery is basically my uncle. I am currently flirting with a nun and will eventually need to talk to my magnetic girlfriend about forming a polycule.
That all of this even exists in Warframe is remarkable. That it somehow comes together into a genuinely touching story about bodily autonomy, the daily struggle of living with trauma, and the power of communal support networks feels like a minor miracle.
Iris (she/her) loves to ramble about games, comics, and movies, especially if any swords and/or knights are involved. You can hear more of her critical work on her podcast: The Iris Archives.
