Gumballs & Dungeons
A free roguelike RPG port of a long-running mobile game — with the microtransactions stripped out, a year of updates its own reviewers said would never come, and only 49 English reviews to judge it by.
7 / 10
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Games released in 2025
250 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.
Browse the reviews
250 reviews
Hell is Us
A visually striking, thematically ambitious action-adventure whose bold "no map, no quest markers" promise turns out, according to a large share of its own players, to mean hunting for symbol-matched locks and keys rather than genuine intuitive exploration — and whose combat, marketed heavily in trailers, is repeatedly described by its own fans as not actually the point.
7 / 10
Idle Life - An Idle Game
A solo-developed Early Access idler about clicking your way from dirt and sticks to iron tools and beyond, sold with a self-aware "brutal grinder" pitch that mostly delivers -- but comes with a rough spreadsheet-style interface and a save wipe waiting at the 1.0 finish line.
7 / 10
Kaizen: A Factory Story
The first release from Coincidence, the studio Zach Barth founded after closing Zachtronics, and a genuinely good factory-automation puzzler by any independent measure — that its own most enthusiastic reviewers still rank as the weakest entry in its creator's catalogue, a verdict this review's near-unanimous negative sample backs up in specific, comparative detail.
7 / 10
Katanaut
A solo developer's three-years-in-the-making cosmic-horror action roguelite that draws passionate praise for its atmosphere and combat feel, while a consistent thread of its own fans worry it's chasing Dead Cells a little too directly to fully stand on its own.
7 / 10
Keep on Mining!
A NZ$7.39 mining incremental that sold 100,000 copies in seventeen days, is finished by three quarters of the people who buy it, and spends its second half padding a two-hour game past the refund window. Its own reviewers name the trick.
7 / 10
Mafia: The Old Country
A handsome, deliberately linear twelve-hour crime story in 1900s Sicily that three in five buyers actually finish — released at NZ$119.95, which is the number most of its arguments are really about.
7 / 10
Mage Arena
A $2.99 voice-controlled spell duel that turned a solo developer's Early Access experiment into one of 2025's biggest indie surprises — a year on, the novelty has mostly held, but the update cadence and the mic's grasp of accents have not kept pace.
7 / 10
Maltese's Fluffy Onsen
A gorgeously drawn desktop-companion bathhouse sim starring a Korean webtoon dog character, backed by the most sustained developer support this lane has found all session, split between a large international fanbase that adores it exactly as it is and a real minority who find the content thinner than the price and the "Idler" tag suggest.
7 / 10
METAL GEAR SOLID Δ: SNAKE EATER
One of the greatest games ever made, rebuilt shot for shot and shipped at NZ$114.99 with performance problems Konami stopped patching in January — now 60% off, eleven months later, for reasons the review page makes obvious.
7 / 10
MISERY
A chaotic, genuinely addictive co-op survival game set in a STALKER-flavoured nuclear exclusion zone, praised by players for its dark comedy and bunker-crawling tension even as a substantial share of the same review sample argues its "1.0" label is misleading for content this thin — and whose launch was briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented DMCA dispute with STALKER 2 developer GSC Game World and an admitted offensive Discord incident from a member of the small development team.
7 / 10
Revolution Idle
A free incremental built around filling concentric, spinning colour rings instead of the usual bar chart of numbers — genuinely huge in scope, openly derivative in structure, and popular enough to have accumulated over seven thousand English Steam reviews doing it.
7 / 10
Rogue: Genesia
A densely systemic bullet-heaven survivor-like that grew from a simple, focused Early Access hit into something several hundred-hour veterans now describe as buried under its own added complexity — alongside real, current complaints about difficulty balance and performance.
7 / 10
Skyformer
A factory game with one iron deposit. Skyformer caps how fast you can extract anything, so you can't solve problems by building another mine — and then it makes the weather you terraformed into existence come back and destroy your factories. Half a gigabyte, genuinely novel, and rough where it counts.
7 / 10
Soulstone Survivors
A content-dense, genuinely fun bullet-heaven roguelite with 22-plus characters and hundreds of skills, praised for its scope and exceptionally responsive small developer team — undercut by a real, consistently repeated complaint spanning both its fans and critics: despite the huge nominal variety, most builds converge on the same handful of optimal choices, and the endgame settles into what reviewers repeatedly, vividly call a "dodging simulator."
7 / 10
Space Rock Breaker
A NZ$4.79 incremental about shooting asteroids and dropping the ore into a Plinko machine. Its achievement curve is the flattest this library has measured — almost everyone who buys it finishes it — and its prestige system is the one part that doesn't work.
7 / 10
Stellar Blade
Shift Up's PS5-exclusive-turned-PC-port lands with genuinely praised combat, striking visuals and one of the strongest PC ports of its console-exclusive generation, undercut by a real, widely repeated "style over substance" complaint about shallow side content and a thin story — one this review can confirm the game's own director has publicly, directly admitted was underdeveloped.
7 / 10
Supermarket Simulator
One of the biggest indie management-sim hits of the era, whose addictive stock-and-sell loop earned it a huge, devoted following through Early Access — a following that has spent the year since its 1.0 release documenting two real, dateable grievances in detail: unresolved AI-generated promotional art, and a 2026 DLC rollout that now more than doubles the price of owning everything the base game once implied was complete.
7 / 10
The Alters
A genuinely inventive sci-fi survival game about a stranded scientist cloning alternate versions of himself from different life choices, whose acclaimed writing and design were overshadowed at launch by a confirmed, publisher-acknowledged failure to disclose generative-AI content — including leftover AI prompt text found in shipped translations — that this review independently verified through press coverage rather than relying on review-corpus allegations alone.
7 / 10
The Candle
A NZ$7.39 first-person survival horror game built entirely from a streamer's improvised joke pitch, sold with "Idler" as a top-voted community tag despite having no idle or incremental progression anywhere in it.
7 / 10
The Knightling
A shield-surfing, Jak-and-Daxter-flavoured open-world action-adventure whose movement, art and award-winning soundtrack draw the kind of praise that gets a game called "the PS2 game we never got," undercut by year-long unfixed performance stutter and a combat system a large share of its own reviewers call the weakest part of the package.
7 / 10
The Last Caretaker
A genuinely beloved Early Access survival-crafting game about a lone robot scavenging a drowned Earth to save the last of humanity, Very Positive across more than 12,000 reviews for a premise and atmosphere reviewers describe with real passion — undercut by severe, well-documented performance problems, a persistent unresolved crash bug, and a motion-sickness accessibility gap that several devoted fans describe as painful to keep flagging.
7 / 10
The Necromancer's Tale
A 400,000-word gothic CRPG about a minor 18th-century noble's slow corruption into a master of the undead, widely praised for its writing and choice-consequence Trust system — and just as widely criticised, by a smaller but vocal minority, for basic combat, opaque reputation swings, and softlocks that can strand an underprepared build for hours.
7 / 10
The Slormancer
An action RPG that layers levelling on top of levelling — your character, your skills, your weapons and your items all grow independently — and earns real comparisons to Diablo and Last Epoch for its first ten hours, before a near-universally hated grind wall right before the final boss undoes a lot of that goodwill.
7 / 10