2025 - Year in Review, Games

Alli Grant Est. 5 minutes (880 words)
year in review games 2025
My standard year in review for what games I played! 2025 Edition

Alright! First post of the year in review, and it’s one of the easiest ones. I’ve also made a change to how I track things this year, which is that I broke it down by month. I like how it let me see a better idea of how my play habits changed over the year, but, well…

I didn’t play that much?

Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with what I did play! I did a post about Necese, I did a post about Silksong, and I really should have done one about Monster Hunter Wilds. Short version? I legitimately think it might be the best game in the series. Is it a little easy? Sure, but at this point I’ve been playing games in the series for two decades and this isn’t the G-rank release yet. It has some of the best monster variety at launch that we’ve ever seen, some of the smoothest controls, and its gimmicks (unlike with Rise) don’t hurt the fundamentals of the series. Bringing back Little Miss Forge and Gore Magala? Fantastic. The story is a bit cheesy, but the experience of playing through it in multiplayer was incredibly smooth. Maybe the squad lobby system could be a bit more intuitive, but overall the connection and ability to drop in-and-out of hunts with friends has never been better.

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail’s patches this year continued to bring more and more refinement and quality of life features, some of the best dungeons and raids the game has ever seen, etc etc. Cosmic Exploration is a lot of fun for crafting/gathering content, we got a real relic series again, a beautiful new deep dungeon… I wasn’t playing incredibly actively but it’s been fun to just spend an hour or two a week on to decompress. Unlocking glamour just opened up so much of the real endgame for folks. Strong A, verging on A+, I think Dawntrail is comfortably another Stormblood at this point.

Risk of Rain 2 finally cleaned up the problems that came from the development transition, so I went back to get some more of the achievements I was missing. I still think that they created more problems with a few of the new items than the items solve, but the new ending and characters are incredible, so I guess it balances out. The Vampire Survivors updates to the Castlevania DLC, one of the best homages to another series that has ever existed, got me back into cleaning up adventure mode there too. What a great genre of game, all around. I need to try Megabonk, which I hear combines the two delightfully – my sibling has been obsessed, last I heard, so I should really give it a go.

Bonus round:

Squeakross was an addition from my newfound understanding of picross. I’ve tried to understand it for years, I don’t know why it didn’t click as a Sudoku player, but it finally did! Unfair Flips is fundamentally the best representation of RNG and statistics I’ve ever played. Trying No Man’s Sky for the first time in 2025 was a delight, the updates that came out around when I played gave some additional goals that it really benefited from. I gave Warframe a shot, and I’m having fun with it in the small doses I’ve had, but I think the gameplay loop could use some definite tweaks about how progression works early on. Interstate 35 felt like it was made to call me out. Maktala is a fairly short incremental game that seemed to be worth the few hours I put into it while on the treadmill. Little Rocket Lab is like Stardew Valley with some Factorio elements, not the other way around, which means it’s either going to really work for you or really not – the devs have dealt with a lot of hate from the fact that the game features women of color, though, so the reviews look worse than the game is.

the games

january:

february:

march:

april:

may:

june:

july:

august:

september:

october:

november:

december: