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Best Games of 2025

2025 sure has been a weird year. Heck, just this past month has been a chaotic one with recent announcements regarding GPU and SSD prices making everyone panic. Some new games came out, some old games came out again, and some old games came out with a fresh coat of paint and pretended to be a brand new games (at least change a few planks of wood before playing the ship of Theseus).

For me personally, I started up the new and improved Rukinations again, I sat down and finally organized most of my collections, and I put something together I could be proud of.

I've never been a fan of directly comparing games and rating them, my normal example is comparing Tetris and Skyrim, but it's a tradition at the point to least talk about the best things that have happened throughout the year. I decided to start small with 2025 and look back on the top five games I played this year. If you haven't already, check out the list of games I've played this year to see which games might be on the list. Or don't. I get it. I don't care much about the ones that didn't score as high either.

Here are a quick set of meaningless and arbitrary rules I decided upon for this list:

  1. Only games listed under the Hall of Fame or Honorable Mentions are eligible.
  2. Only full games under those sections are eligible (no expansions or DLCs only; main game playthrough must be included).
  3. A game published in any year is eligible as long as I completed it this year.
    (I rarely play games the year they come out, anyway.)
  4. Games aren't listed in order from good to bad. Games are ranked by how much fun I had playing them. Bad games can be fun, and good games can be boring as heck.

Without further ado, let's get started on our year in review at Rukinations.

5. Silent Hill f (2025)

I don't exactly hide how much I loved reading Umineko no Naku Koro Ni by Ryushiki07. An easy recommendation for anyone who's read any of his other works (such as Higurashi) or anyone interested in horror or the variants of mystery fiction, the latter in particular for this entry.

When I discovered that Silent Hill f was written by Ryushiki as well, I counted the days until this game launched. I was already a big Silent Hill fan too on top of this, so in my mind my hopes were already set pretty high.

For the most part, those expectations were met.

Was this game perfect? No, not at all; I rarely call anything perfect (not to mention this game is in fifth place). I personally did not enjoy the combat system of this game. The rest of the game, though, was spectacular. Great atmosphere, great story, and layers upon layers every time you go through the story.

Ryushiki's work is not something you're meant to run through once and forget about it. It's hard to explain out of context, but if you've read Higurashi or Umineko then you understand why you don't finish reading after the first chapter ends. Silent Hill f is written the same way; if you only play through or watch a playthrough of the game once, you're going to miss most of the story. I understand that not everyone enjoys that (truthfully, I only played the game once this year and watched playthroughs of people much better at it than I am for the rest of the endings). But if you're going to experience this game, it's important that you experience this game more than once.

4. Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse (2016)

I also don't hide how much I love the Megami Tensei franchise. Heck, I don't shut up about it. I'm playing through the Pokémon Legends: Z-A DLC as I'm writing this particular entry and I already compared it to a Megami Tensei game three times. They are usually super hard RPGs that are unforgiving towards the player but equally unforgiving towards the enemy if you can get the hang of things. Less so for Shin Megami Tensei IV and IV: Apocalypse, but still.

I loved playing through the original IV many years ago, but never got a chance to play through Apocalypse myself and decided this year was the year I finally gave it a shot. Apocalypse blew me away. The game improved absolutely every issue I had with the original IV and improved even further beyond.

For context for anyone who hasn't played the games, the Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse duology somewhat works on Final Fantasy logic. They're not directly tied to other Shin Megami Tensei games, but they are directly tied to each other (specifically, a diverging plotline set-up where the protagonist of Apocalypse merely existing drastically changes the course of events plaguing Tokyo). It's a little similar with what happened in Shin Megami Tensei V and V: Vengeance, the only major difference being that V: Vengeance is written more of an alternate scenario.

If you've never played a Shin Megami Tensei game before... yeah, don't start here. This game is certainly one of the more newcomer friendly games, but you'll be missing a lot of context without playing the original IV. But it's still a great game nonetheless and I'm glad I finally got around to playing it.

3. Resident Evil 4 (2023)

I still prefer the original Resident Evil 4, but that doesn't make this game a bad game by any means. Mechanically, Remake is a great game. Great combat sequences and combat system. Great improvements for the plot (albeit at the loss of most of its humor), and an absolutely amazing arcade mode. Remake will probably end up permanently installed on my computer until when/if we get a better Mercenaries mode in a future title.

I completed my first Professional playthrough on this run, though this was a New Game+ run. I only played through the game to get a feel for the combat for Mercenaries mode again. But it's still a great game that I enjoyed.

2. Pokémon Legends: Z-A (2025)

This game has absolutely no right to be such a fun platformer. I don't know why they made it a platformer, but it's fun.

I absolutely loved this game. I've said this a million times, but I wasn't sure if I would like this game's combat system but ended up falling in love with it pretty quickly. I love hunting Pokémon in this game. It's certainly not a perfect game, and you could easily make a case that GameFreak could have done more, but most of the complaints made against this game are either absurdly high expectations or arguing in poor faith.

(I'm sick and tired of people complaining about the map being a single model. That's just factually untrue and has been proven wrong more than once.)

Ultimately, there isn't much to say about Pokémon. It's a monster collecting RPG. If you like monster collecting RPGs then it might be for you. If not, then I totally understand. But this is still one of the games I enjoyed playing the most.

1. Alien Isolation (2014)

I love the Stalker Horror subgenre. Resident Evil 3 (and sorta kinda not really its remake). Amnesia: The Bunker. Even Resident Evil 2 (and actually its remake to an extent). Some entity is stalking after you the entire time and making your already miserable experience in whatever horror you're facing even worse.

My first playthrough of Alien Isolation many years ago didn't go so well. I liked it until about half-way through (roughly Mission 7 if I remember correctly), at which point one sequence in particular made me so frustrated that I was happy for the wrong reasons when I finally beat the game. I later played through Amnesia: The Bunker an ungodly amount of times and thought that maybe I didn't give Isolation a fair shot; after all, I got frustrated with one specific sequence that took place halfway through the game, there were another eighteen chapters that could have made up for it.

Despite my frustration, I decided that I had enough experience with the rough formula thanks to The Bunker that I wanted a change of pace on top of replaying the game. I decided to play the game on its hardest difficulty and unlock that achievement for not killing a human NPC the entire run. It was certainly challenging, and some sequences were more frustrating than that one sequence I had trouble with during the first run-through.

But when I was done? I wasn't happy to be done. I was proud. I was excited. I was ready for another run. Then I immediately played the DLC missions.

Those DLC missions were fun too. Not as fun as the main campaign, but they were fine in the end. I don't know anyone who bought the game and its DLC explicitly to play as Ellen Ripley.

(Bonus good news - I completed that initial section I had trouble with in one go this time!)

Funny enough, this game is the one I'm most likely to replay again in the future in this list. I love the thrill and the adrenaline rush of playing through games like this. I already said I love this subgenre, but no game quite pushes the genre to its limit like Alien Isolation. Amnesia: The Bunker only competes because it's a quicker paced title with more random, rogue-like elements to help it stand out. But Alien Isolation is certainly my favorite game in the subgenre and I'm looking forward to how Alien Isolation 2 further pushes the genre to its limits.

2025 was a fun year for me personally, and I'm hoping 2026 is just as exciting. I already have some plans for the first few games I play in 2026, and hopefully I can play a wider variety of games in the coming year. Cheers to the end of a fun year and making the most of the next one.