This is an annual list of my personal favorite games of the year. To clarify, these are not the "best and worst" games of the year. They are titles I enjoyed or was let-down by based on my own preferences and expectations. Most of the titles on my disappointing list are not even what I would consider bad games, they just weren't for me, or were not what I was expecting.
All the games on this list are the launch version or later, and I have either played them to completion or abandoned them. The list is ordered based on my overall enjoyment (one being the best) of games I played in 2025. Most of the games listed here will not be brand new 2025 releases. They are games I played in 2025 that were new to me.
A new fisherman arrives at the Greater Marrow archipelago to take up a job offer as the town's local angler after the previous one left unceremoniously. As the days wear on weird shapes are glimpsed through the mists, strange voices are heard at night, and mysterious lights or apparitions are seen stalking the waters. Fish with mutations start cropping up and weird infections "slither" aboard the fishing vessel. A Collector enlists the Fisherman's help in dredging up relics from an incident in the town's not-so-distant past. As a reward the Fisherman is granted supernatural powers to make his job easier. Mixed in with these relics are messages in bottles and old diary entries about a married couple caught in a shipwreck.
Gameplay:
Dredge is a sort of fishing simulator that tasks the Fisherman (player) with upgrading their tiny fishing vessel to catch new and ever freakier aquatic lifeforms. Fish are caught passively with certain nets installed or reeled in at specific fishing locations through a simple mini-game. There is a limited amount of space on the boat, indicated by a grid. Each fish takes up a different amount of squares on the boat and can be rotated to maximize storage. Fresher fish sells for more, as do mutated variants. Bulbous infections can spread from one fish to another, and although it has a preservative effect, its unsightly appearance makes infected stock sell for a fraction of the normal sale price.
The systems all lead into each other. Fishing is a way to make money for upgrades. Dredging provides the materials needed for upgrades that can't be obtained any other way. The limited inventory space creates a stronger need for upgrades and balances how much you can gather at once.
The darker it gets outside and the longer the Fisherman goes without sleep, the more paranoid he'll become. The more unstable he is, the more likley a ghostly apparition is to attack. The boat's lights can help to keep the darkness at bay but it will also attract the attention of monsters lurking in the night. A speed boost gained through occult means can aid in making a swift getaway but at the risk of overheating the engines. The environment also shifts at night - rocks that weren't there the previous day may materialize through the gloom, making it unwise to speed directly into the nearest port lest you wreck your vessel. It adds a good bit of strategy, balance and danger to every outing.
Conclusion:
Dredge was one of the few games in recent memory that made me feel a sense of wonder and excitement from exploration. Both the gameplay and the narrative mysteries are engaging despite their simplicity. I wanted to know what the Collector was up to and what would happen next. The eldritch horror elements are so well executed and include beautifully grisly fish designs that subtly incorporate human-like features to unnerve the viewer. The low poly art style with its muted color palette accentuates the horror vibes quite well.
After burning out on master rank Monster Hunter World, I decided to try a different kind of hunting game. One in a genre I have never actually tried before. Most hunting games seem to be "arcady" like Duck Hunt, or whatever Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 is suppose to be. But Hunting Simulator 2 actually tries to simulate real-world hunting and hunting ethics. The graphics could look better, but are fine for what they are; about what I expected from a niche hunting game.
There is a good amount of visual variation and elevation between the various environments. Occasionally it will rain when you visit a map, but otherwise there is no dynamic day/night or weather cycle. The same handful of animals also appear in nearly every location because North America and Europe share a Holarctic realm, so there is a lot of overlap in the types of animals present. It would have been nice to have South American, Australian, African, or Asian regions with their distinct fauna, but that probably wasn't in the budget.
The animal animations are kinda basic. There is no animation or indication whatsoever for when a shot connects with an animal, which got me fined for "excessive shots" because I couldn't tell if I had hit the animal or not, and I wasn't sure if the game expected me to 'mercy kill' it like in Red Dead Redemption 2. Injured animals also just kind of stand still for a few seconds before running away and then limp indefinitely. Possibly an animation glitch, but a lot of the animal movements were funny like that and don't react to the environment like you would expect them too. There are no herds, no foraging behaviors, and predators leisurely hang out with their prey.
Some of the animal models could use work, such as the spindly back legs on the bison.
There are three geographic locations - Colorado, Texas, and Europe - each with two hunting grounds to choose from. Hunting ethics are stressed in this game, so you will have to buy licenses for each animal in each region. Poaching, taking excessive shots, killing female animals, and abandoning kills are all fineable offenses. Like in real life, you have to use the correct weapon type for the different animal sizes, and the game will flash a warning when you are using the wrong caliber or lack the required license. Weapons and scopes (caliber and reticle) can be selected and changed, as can your clothes, various gear items, and which breed of hunting dog (tracker, pointer, or retriever) will accompany you. I really like the idea of having a dog that can flush birds from ground-cover, follow a trail, and retrieve smaller game. Blood trails are hard to see, especially in thick brush, and are not usually worth the tedium of following, so the dog could theoretically remedy this. However, the canine will start following a trail and then stop unexpectedly, or start following the hunter instead of the trail. You have to spend a few hours leveling the dog up before it's of any real use on a hunt and I eventually just gave up on it. Most of the time I could follow the trail faster than the dog and without spooking every animal in the area along the way.
The thing I disliked the most was how sparsely populated the massive maps were. I spent several real-world hours walking around looking for something to do, wondering to myself why I was playing this game instead of doing something more productive. There are post-apocalyptic wasteland games more alive than this. After 20 to 30 hours it got a little better when I figured out where the animals spawned-in, so I wasn't traveling around empty voids anymore. I get that it is suppose to be realistic, but this game can be so obsessed with capturing the realism of hunting that it forgets to be a video game. I don't regret my experience with this game, but Red Dead Redemption 2 did a better job in my opinion of balancing realism versus fun while still giving me a fuller, more rewarding digital hunting experience.
A trophy room showcases your progression through the bestiary and acts as your base in-between hunts. Most of the taxidermy is in static poses and head mounts. You do not get to choose what goes where or what poses the full-body mounts are in. There is one trophy slot for each animal with no way to store multiples of the same species. So for "Legendary" (unique coat pattern) variants you will have to choose between the large normal-colored specimen you have or discarding it for a smaller version with rare colors.
My first foray into the original Harvest Moon series (now called Story of Seasons) was a title called Friends of Mineral Town - a remake of a 20+ year old game. It stayed faithful to the original, to the point that it was basically the same game with a new coat of paint. That is all well and good for nostalgia seekers, but for me it was too dated and bare-bones compared to what you expect from the genre today. After being let down by Mineral Town I never thought I would touch another Story of Seasons game, but then Pioneers of Olive Town went on sale.
Unlike Mineral Town, Pioneers of Olive Town is a completely new entry in the series, so it includes many of the quality of life improvements pioneered by other games in the genre, most notably Stardew Valley. The player's farm is now highly customizable, and there is better automation and ways to grow plants out of season. You no longer need shears or a bucket taking up precious inventory space to milk cows or shear sheep. There is a good variety of crop and flower options with new varieties unlocking as the years tick by. The progression overall just feels so much better than what was in Mineral Town. The only downside is that Olive Town over-corrects a bit too much and shifts the focus away from farming to manufacturing. You can't just use logs anymore. Now you have to process them into boards. Wool has to be turned into yarn and then into fabric. Weeds are made into rope which is then weaved into one-time use fish-baskets. This sort of thing makes sense in a building simulator like My Time at Portia, and Stardew Valley had this to some extent, but you could also just buy the processed products without having to make it yourself. So many items in Olive Town need processing and take so long to process that one third of the farm will likley be taken up by machines running 24/7.
Structures will not degrade over time, but weeds and puddles occur far too frequently. These have to be cleared by hand and are what I saw people complaining about the most. I thought I would hate them more than I did, but they ended up just being a minor annoyance and an eyesore.
Enough storage space to hold all the raw goods plus the various stages of processed goods always seemed to be in short supply without sacrificing yet another chunk of the farm to storage boxes. Even the refrigerator in the player's home never had enough space for the food items, so I was constantly having to look at what a recipe needed, running outside to get it from storage, and then having to run back inside. Very tedious. For some reason the silo can only hold 99 fodder while a regular storage box can hold 3,000. So what is the point of having a silo? The actual farming itself is also rather simple: plant, water, harvest. There is no fertilizer, no crop damage, and no need to improve plant quality. Feral livestock will also just appear on the player's land, which you can tame for free. I suppose it makes for a more relaxed experience, but a sad part of me can't help but wonder if someone is purposefully dumping these animals on the player's farm like a box of unwanted kittens.
They have olive trees and olive crystals in the game, but no olive egger chickens?
Besides farming, the other big draw of the genre is socializing. In Stardew Valley (arguably the best in the genre) things could get very heavy whenever it delved into real-world issues such as depression, addiction and PTSD. Pioneers of Olive Town by comparison is less serious and more 'feel good vibes'. All of the characters are written to be likeable and charming without any real baggage or problems in their lives outside of the occasional missing bike or runaway cow. They're fine for what they are, just not particularly compelling or deep. You can also get married and have a child, but the child is found (given?) by the spirits of the woods. It's pretty weird, especially when none of the locals question where you got this random child from; my dark mind immediately jumped to baby farming and baby harvesting. I assume this was done because Olive Town doesn't have a doctor, which is also weird considering it is suppose to be a tourist destination.
Marvelous Europe (developer subsidiary) donated £20,000 to part-fund the building of a new breeding facility at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland's Highland Wildlife Park (RZSS) to save the critically endangered pine hoverfly, one of the UK's rarest species. It is hard to get funding for the conservation of insects because they don't have the appeal of megafauna like the elephant or tiger, but are arguably more important to the health of the environment. It was a generous gift from Marvelous.
The main story goal is actually to attract more tourists to Olive Town. Why they want or need more tourists is never explained. The town looks fairly well off and doesn't seem to be in any dire need of more visitors. What the tourists are coming to Olive Town to see is never explained either. It's a pretty ordinary looking town with nothing especially noteworthy that would make it a tourist spot. Overall I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I don't think I would play it again, but I got a decent amount of entertainment out of it.
I don't know much about musical theory, nor am I a musically inclined person. However, I do love to listen to video game soundtracks. They can be a powerful listening experiences in their own right, or be as evocative as the scores composed for film. Each of these posts will feature a sampling of music tracks from a single game title, or series/franchise in some rare cases. A complete list of these can be found on the Video Game Music page.
Composer: Miwako Chinone
North American Release Date: February 2025
A guild of Hunters is surveying an area thought to be uninhabited when they discover a boy lost in the wastelands. The boy was separated from his people when a monster known only as the "White Wraith" attacked the village. This event prompts the Hunter's Guild to launch an investigation into the region.
The Nature Of A Beautiful World | (Main Theme)
The Lord of Ice | (Jin Dahaad Theme)
Earth-Piercing Bolt | (Rey Dau Theme)
Ebon Hellfire | (Nu Udra Theme)
Crested Torrent | (Uth Duna Theme)
Radiant Cry of Life | (Guardian Arkveld Theme)
"The world is vast. Detours are among people's finest prerogatives. Losing one’s way can be a wonderful thing." - Rove
