Lilah's Best Games of 2025
The shitty old year has ended and the shitty new year has begun. What better time to sit and reflect on last year's gaming habits? 2024 was the Year of the MMO, seeing me dive into both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XI. That bled through some into 2025, but 2025 was very much the Year of the Board Game, and that led me to play less video games than usual. But that didn't stop me from playing through a number of them anyways, so without further ado let's get into it: the best games I played (for the first time) in 2025!
2025 Games
Angeline Era
I'm a known Analgesic Productions fan, and very much count Anodyne 2 among my favorite games. I am also, proudly, an Ys sicko, and hold a special fondness for the early bump-combat era of that series. So it's not much of a surprise that Angeline Era was my Game of the Year for 2025. I was pretty pleased with the backloggd review I wrote for this one, so I'll just let that do the talking here:
In my adult life I’ve become very enamored with “going for a walk”, and while many games have tried to capture a sense of discovery and exploration I don’t think any has captured the spirit of “going for a walk” like Angeline Era. Angeline Era asks you to bring a sense of curiosity and intentionality to it, and rewards that by subverting the typical structure of most RPGs to deliver a world of playful toybox levels full of mystery and humor and melancholy, a world that exists as often to be unfolded and savored and enjoyed for its own sake as to serve the hero-centric needs of progression. Its dioramic-like overworld and the need to actively search for levels to make them appear captures the childlike joy and discovery of stepping outside your door and observing the world around you, with the expressive experimentation of its level design and the floaty tangibility of movement and combat making each discovery a reward in and of itself. It’s yet another banger from one of our most exciting indie studios - we are so lucky to have Analgesic Productions
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Clair Obscur, or "French Nier" as I sometimes like to call it, truly deserved so much of the hype and acclaim it received this year. It's both a resolutely modern take on the JRPG, with a stunning parry-based combat system that got me good and a build system that's eminently breakable in disgusting ways, and also a JRPG like they used to make, rooted in the big Playstation blockbusters but synthesizing its influences rather than slavishly copying them. That's to say nothing of its proudly weird streak, its humor, its gorgeous art design and beautiful soundtrack, and above all the surprisingly focused intimacy of its story. This one was really something special
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
I know this technically came out in 2024, but it was so close to the end it's basically a 2025 game. Most studios approaching an Indiana Jones project would have closely followed the mold of Uncharted and built out something controlled and cinematic with blockbuster shadings. Instead, Machine Games tried to adapt the essence, the experience of being Indiana Jones, with a focus on the tactility of Indiana Jones' clumsy adult human body and a foot in both imsims and the sneaky-punchy spirit of Starbreeze's The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. It's also very proudly and openly anti-fascist, not just in the usual way of Indiana Jones but also in the way it turns its Nazi villains into a very modern type of Cringe Fascist Guy. Finally, we have another Indiana Jones game worthy of standing side-by-side with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
Non-2025 Games
Crimzon Clover: World EXplosion
I had yet another of my many shmup phases in 2025, and as a big CAVE fan I decided it was time to give Crimzon Clover a go. And holy shit, this game is fire. All the beautiful bullet patterns, intense gameplay and intricate scoring you'd expect from a CAVE title, but with a uniquely hyperactive over-the-top energy all its own.
Scarlet Hollow
In May, my wife and I got Covid after I went to a work offsite in New York (I'm still a little mad about it). This did, however, mean that the two of us got to spend a few days lazily laying on the couch, playing video games together and reading books (I cannot tell you how much Lord of the Rings I read over those few days).
One of the games we played that week was Scarlet Hollow<, the ongoing episodic mystery-horror VN by the same team as Slay the Princess (which was developed in part to fund the rest of Scarlet Hollow). And reader, it got us GOOD, with a town full of darkness and atmosphere and buried secrets and horrors and a wonderful cast of traumatized characters to smooch. Best of all, it's incredibly reactive to your decisions in ways both surprising and impressive. We can't wait for the next episode when it drops in a few months! I loved Slay the Princess but I like Scarlet Hollow even more.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Night Road
I had my brain rewired by Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines in college and ever since have held a love for the dark urban-goth stylings of the World of Darkness. But I've largely had to make do with Bloodlines to engage with that universe - there aren't really any other good VtM video games, and I've never found a group to play the tabletop game with me.
Enter Night Road, a VtM interactive novel with chunky stats, a huge amount of player freedom, compelling characters and conflicts and a cool customizable car that help transform it into a full-fledged CRPG in text form that feels like a real successor to Bloodlines. There's also a Vampire Prince who casually reads Olga Tokarczuk in his spare time which makes him an absolute king in my book. I spent a week blitzing through this, obsessed and unable to put it down.
Final Fantasy XI: Treasures of Aht Urhgan
At the very start of 2025, I finished the tail end of Chains of Promathia, oft cited as the best Final Fantasy XI expansion. For all its merits, I walked away exhausted - by its length and sprawl, by the incomprehensibility of much of its storytelling, by the level of travel required to complete it (extreme, even with the modern conveniences of crystal-warping). "Is this it?" I thought. "Is this the best I'm going to get from this game?"
Enter Treasures of Aht Urhgan, which brought everything I needed to feel re-energized and excited about FFXI again. A new landmass/nation that feels culturally distinct! A small-scale, tightly paced story, the game's best so far, with memorable characters with conflicting political motivations providing the seeds for great drama, all told via polished cutscenes and exposition as clear as Promathia was opaque! But best of all is the sidequests - I've largely skipped these in my journey through Vana'diel but Aht Urhgan provides plenty with real narrative substance, including a series of quests delving into the backstories of the Serpent Generals (five NPCs involved in the expansion's new PVE mode, Besieged) that are as worthwhile and compelling as the main quest itself. I walked away from Aht Urhgan refreshed and excited as can be about Wings of the Goddess
Diablo
This is cheating a bit, as I've played Diablo before. But I hadn't played it since High School, nor had I ever finished it or really engaged with its design. Here's another one where I'll just quote my backloggd review:
A fantastic and fantastically fun act of RPG deconstruction, boiling the genre down to its most primal elements. There's no complex strategy, no skill trees - just a hero, a town, a labyrinth, and an army of demons to kill via single-click movement and combat. There's a real sense of joy and skill in the ruthless simplicity of Diablo's design. That's partly due to the combat itself, which is significantly elevated by some excellently chunky sound effects that give weight to every attack, every hit, every kill, every loot drop. It's partly due to the atmosphere, and the way limited vision builds a sense of dread and suspense about what horrors will be around the next corner. And it's also partly due to the power curve - level ups come fast and furious, and it's less loot-focused than its successors, with less-frequent drops that nevertheless provide a massive power boost. It also understands the limitations of its own framework, and keeps things short and sweet to avoid overstaying its welcome.
It is so, so much better than its sequel, which goes for more but totally unbalances the original's ruthless simplicity in the process.