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GOTY 2025

I do my own little list every year. Also, the games don’t even have to be from 2025, I just have to have played them in 2025.

Actively Bad, Do Not Recommend

  • I didn’t play any bad games at all this year, I don’t think.

Not GoTY, but Fun Enough I Guess

  • Storyteller - a clever and fun puzzle mechanic, good use of a few hours, but ultimately kinda hollow feeling once you burn through the puzzles.
  • The Dark Queen of Mortholme - neat concept, best to watch someone else play it.
  • Blue Prince - I never got so far as to write my final thoughts on Blue Prince, but I got… only so far into this game. I really enjoyed one of the earliest puzzles presented to me, a clever word puzzle, but I felt like the Roguelike parts of Blue Prince got in the way of the puzzle parts of it: it’s frustrating to stumble around not knowing whether you even have all of the components of the puzzle that you need to solve. Many of the puzzles are just “draw tiles in the right order”. Ultimately, I felt like the two core game mechanics: “puzzle” and “random mansion” kinda work against one another and left feeling kind of meh about the whole deal, but the people who got way in to Blue Prince got way in to Blue Prince.
  • Stimulation Clicker - This is a web “idle clicker” style game, but it’s intended as social commentary, and it’s quite effective, at that. There’s a joke in Stimulation Clicker where you order a single item from an online retailer and the game sends you easily two dozen updates on the exact position of the object you’ve ordered in near real time, and now every time that happens to me in real life I can’t help but think of this game.
  • Mouthwashing - this purported “video game” is actually a thinly disguised “short play, that you read”, which makes the horror a lot more manageable: it’s a horror game that I think I could actually play. It’s told out-of-order, told by the world’s most unreliable narrator, and delivered with a lot of symbolic meaning, and it’s the kind of story that keeps you thinking about it for weeks afterwards. A good analogue for Mouthwashing would be, I think, What Remains of Edith Finch: short, spooky, narrative-focused experience. Actual game: 90-120 minutes. Time spent watching video essays about game: 4+ hours.
  • 9 Kings - “Balatro, but for X”, well, this time it’s Balatro for a little war game, and it’s pretty fun. They’re also working on 9 Kings so hard, I would have given it a 6/10 after my first play, but by the time I went to write about it they’d added more stuff and I’d give it a 7/10, then I played some of that and by the time I got to the end they’d added even more stuff and, and - honestly, they’re improving this game at such a fevered pace that I’d keep a close eye on it. 9 Kings is a game for people who like watching a game break apart in front of them.
  • A Short Hike - At some point someone pointed out that the 3D Mario games all start with and depend upon carefully tweaking Mario’s movement until the simple act of navigating any space that he’s in feels bouncy and reactive and tactile and joyous, and that’s the same feeling I get when navigating A Short Hike’s little universe: it’s a game where the point is movement but also movement feels very good.
  • Tactical Breach Wizards - What if XCom was tight and fast and funny.
  • Hades 2 - There’s not that much to write about: It’s just more Hades, which doesn’t seem like it should be a knock against Hades 2, because Hades was absolutely excellent and Hades 2 is just more of an absolutely excellent game. If you want more Hades, Hades 2 has got more Hades. Great way to kill some time.
  • Sunderfolk - they fixed Gloomhaven!

Should be GoTY, but Isn’t For Some Reason

  • Expedition 33 - we spilled so much ink about this one already. It’s Final Fantasy X, it’s Super Mario RPG, it’s So French, it’s So Beautiful. The last 15 years had me thinking that I stopped liking JRPGs, and this one game showed up and went “no, they just stopped making the kind of JRPGs that you liked”.

Definitely Actually GoTY

c’mon, you already know where my heart lies, it’s Deltarune. I gush about this game plenty. I’m gonna do it some more here:

Every time I’ve played a new chapter of Deltarune it’s made me laugh out loud at least once, and included a part that’s made me feel Real Actual Legitimate Feelings, and also included a part so gripping that I’ve been couchlocked through something else important.

Like with its predecessor, the game of Deltarune is so seemingly simple, basic graphics, simple gameplay, but that’s a pallette that allows its creator to do a lot of weird, fun, clever stuff. The over-wrought term “ludonarrative dissonance” has cropped up for when a game’s mechanics and its story don’t line up very well, but Deltarune exists on the opposite side of that spectrum - ludonarrative harmony?

This is a fight you’re supposed to lose, and it feels desperate, insane, impossible, and the game itself acts confused when you try to win it.

(But you can win it, because Susie’s got the heart of a champion.)

HAWT OF A CHAMPION

This is a fight with an old man who’s something of a mentor figure, who likes you and just wants to make you stronger. You notice as you work your way through it that he hits you hardest when you have the most hit points because he doesn’t really want to hurt you. It’s mechanically designed to force Susie to use an ability that you’ve been ignoring, admit it, her incredibly weak healing magic. And as Susie works at it, it starts to get… kinda good. And this fight - it’s maybe harder than the fight against the impossible adversary above. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels friendly. Fun. He wants you to win. You don’t feel frustrated, you feel determined. You like these characters.

These story beats line up so well with game beats that you feel them intuitively, and lo, the game’s soundtrack is just as tightly integrated.

Look, this game is just chockablock with moments like this. It’s why this seemingly simple video game is quite possibly going to take 10 or more actual human years to finish.

It’s like how Stardew Valley got to be absolutely perfect because it’s one creator’s obsessively polished vision.

I think Deltarune is a masterpiece, by the original definition of “masterpiece”: a talented creator flexing unbelievably hard.

Tiff’s List:

  • Avowed
  • Dragon Age: Veilguard
  • Metaphor: ReFantazio
  • Blue Prince
  • Wanderstop
  • Sunderfolk
  • Dispatch
  • GOTY: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33