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250 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.
250 reviews
A turn-based RPG that makes you dodge and parry every enemy attack in real time, wrapped around a hand-painted Belle Époque France that's dying on a one-year clock — and one of the rare acclaimed games that earns the noise made about it.
9.5 / 10
98.1% positive across 127,913 reviews, and every future chapter is a free update — an RPG that is both one of the best-reviewed games on Steam and an argument about what a full-price purchase should buy you.
9 / 10
Seven years after it was announced, Team Cherry's sequel arrives faster, meaner and bigger than the original, and mostly earns every one of those seven years.
9 / 10
Hazelight Studios' co-op action-adventure follow-up to 2021's Game of the Year winner It Takes Two, drawing Overwhelmingly Positive reviews and near-universal praise for its inventive, constantly-shifting gameplay and unusually generous Friend's Pass model — with a smaller, coherent minority of the same fanbase arguing its writing and characters fall short of its predecessor.
9 / 10
A free time-travel Sokoban puzzler that gets one specific, difficult idea exactly right — solving a puzzle by recording your own past actions and then working alongside the ghost of what you just did.
8.5 / 10
The former Telltale team proved the choice-driven narrative game was never dead, just badly run — four million copies, a BAFTA and 97.5% across 181,617 reviews, most of whose complaints are about a release schedule that has since ended.
8.5 / 10
A dark-fantasy metroidvania sequel to the beloved Ender Lilies, trading a slower Early Access build for a widely admired 1.0 release — gorgeous, meticulously quality-of-life-focused, and Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 17,000 reviews, with its most thoughtful critics agreeing on exactly one thing: it's a better game than its predecessor and, for some, a lesser story.
8.5 / 10
Supergiant's first-ever sequel splits its roguelite loop into two directions instead of one, hands Melinoë a mana bar to manage on top of her dash, and asks you to keep three separate meta-progression tracks fed at once — an ambitious redesign that mostly earns its scope. It also shipped a 1.0 ending that triggered a real backlash, one Supergiant is still visibly patching a response to nine months later.
8.5 / 10
A spatial-puzzle spin on the Luck be a Landlord school of score-attack roguelikes — pack alien cargo into an ever-expanding grid instead of spinning a slot machine — that has, at the time of this review, not received a single negative English-language Steam review out of 100, and reads like it, largely because it gives players real tools to hunt for the build they want instead of just piling on more randomness.
8.5 / 10
Warhorse Studios' medieval simulation grows up without losing its stubbornness — a sequel that fixes the first game's roughest edges while doubling down on the idea that realism should cost you something. The result is one of the most complete RPGs of the last few years, provided you're willing to let a swordfight or a bowl of stew go badly.
8.5 / 10
A tiny, exquisitely designed bomb-jumping puzzle-platformer from Japanese solo developer NamaTakahashi that earned a 99%-plus Overwhelmingly Positive Steam record and near-unanimous "masterclass" praise — this review reads its entire, genuinely tiny 18-review negative corpus and finds the closest thing to a real complaint is that the game is short enough most players finish it in a single sitting.
8.5 / 10
A breakout co-op climbing hit from a small Landfall-affiliated team, selling millions of copies for NZ$11.99 and earning genuine, chaotic devotion from its players — briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented EULA controversy the developers reversed within days, and by two specific, widely repeated complaints (no save option, a punishing difficulty spike) that a remarkably attentive year of patches has since substantively addressed.
8.5 / 10
An automation game that skips the usual pretend-programming abstractions and just hands you a Python-shaped scripting language, then asks you to actually write the loops and functions that run your farm. The rare "learn to code" game that works as a game first.
8.5 / 10
Obsidian's satirical space RPG grows a genuinely excellent build system and a slow-motion gunfight worth building around, then hands the writing and the companions less attention than either deserved.
8.5 / 10
A co-op survival crafting game that traps scientists inside a Half-Life-flavoured secret research facility after a containment breach, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 41,000 Steam reviews for its inventive setting and crafting depth — with a remarkably consistent, still-current complaint that its final act and late-game content don't live up to everything that came before.
8 / 10
A roguelite beat 'em up from the Streets of Rage 4 team that critics and players both rate as one of 2025's genre highlights -- hand-drawn combat and worldbuilding that land almost universally, undercut by real multiplayer stability issues and a vocal minority who find its Hades-shaped meta-progression more familiar than fresh.
8 / 10
A brick-breaker, base-builder and roguelite mashed together into something genuinely novel — and, by a large and coherent share of its own fans, something that runs out of ideas within its first ten hours and never quite finds a reason to justify the dozens more it invites.
8 / 10
A genre-defying puzzle roguelike-lite set in a mysterious manor whose floor plan you draft anew each in-game day, celebrated with a 92 Metascore and widely called one of the most creative puzzle games in years — beloved specifically by players willing to take pages of physical notes, and marked by a real, still-unresolved design tension between its puzzle-solving brain and its randomised, roguelike-lite execution.
8 / 10
A visually spectacular sequel to a beloved mobile-turned-PC crafting RPG that Butterscotch Shenanigans has supported with an unusually relentless year of updates, held back at launch by mobile-first controls and a text-heavy script that its own most detailed critics — many of them the original's biggest fans — argue buried the sequel's real improvements.
8 / 10
A genuine, widely-acclaimed reinvention of KOEI TECMO's long-running hack-and-slash series — praised by veteran fans as the best entry in over a decade for its overhauled combat — built around a deliberate, controversial trade-off that a large share of the same fanbase argues cost the series something real: a single silent protagonist replacing the roster of dozens of playable historical officers, and a story that stops at the Battle of Chibi, leaving half the classic Three Kingdoms tale untold at launch.
8 / 10
The second act of the Remake trilogy trades Midgar's corridors for open regions, a deep Synergy-and-Folio combat system and a genuinely excellent card game — then buries a chunk of it under checklist busywork and a PC port that still stutters a year on.
8 / 10
A pixel-art survival horror RPG confined to a single apartment building where glancing out a window turns people into grotesque monsters — a genuine cult phenomenon whose storytelling and atmosphere draw some of the most passionate praise this outlet has documented all year, sitting alongside a real, specific mechanical complaint cluster about a punishing save system and RNG-heavy combat from a small but consistent share of its own reviewers.
8 / 10
One person made a NZ$14.75 survivors-like that sold a million copies in a fortnight and sits at 94% across 104,643 reviews — and whose most invested players have been asking for the same balance pass since October 2025.
8 / 10
A bigger, more mechanically ambitious sequel to one of the deckbuilding roguelike genre's most respected entries, landing at 95% positive on Steam even as a genuinely coherent chorus of the original's most devoted fans argue this expansion came at the cost of what made Monster Train click in the first place.
8 / 10
