Browse by year
250 games released in 2025 and reviewed here, best first.
250 reviews
A mystery-investigation adventure game set in an oriental fantasy city of humans, dragons and anthropomorphic "beastlings," Very Positive across 154 English-language reviews for its writing and cast -- and consistently misjudged from its cover art, with reviewers repeatedly reassuring newcomers put off by the furry-adjacent character designs that there's nothing adult about it, just a slow-starting, dialogue-heavy story that most reviewers say pays off.
7 / 10
An adorable desktop-companion idler where pixel animals roam the bottom of your screen while you work — undercut by a genuinely strange design choice for a game in this genre, its own idle mascots get sick if you leave them alone for too long.
7 / 10
A genuinely promising return for a cult-favourite action RPG series, currently sold at full future price for a slice of content that doesn't yet match the ambition of its class system.
7 / 10
A cat-themed connect-the-pipes puzzle game wrongly aggregator-tagged as an idler — it's actually a well-made, honestly priced Flow/Numberlink game with over a thousand hand-graded levels and no idle mechanics anywhere in it.
7 / 10
A horse-girl training sim whose warm writing and addictive racing loop won it Best Mobile Game at the 2025 Game Awards, sitting alongside one of the harsher gacha economies its own players have documented in detail — no pity carrying between banners, no guaranteed top-rarity pull even at the pity ceiling — plus a real, dated controversy wave over the developer's January 2026 announcement of a dedicated generative-AI studio.
7 / 10
A solo developer's debut that welds an automated turret to a twin-stick Asteroids clone, then closes the whole arc out in an afternoon — a sharp, cheap hook let down by a mouse-hostile upgrade screen and a progression curve that peaks right as the credits roll.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental built for a 2025 game jam, about hauling a strange substance up out of a mining town's collapsing depths — deliberately short, unusually confident about its Lovecraftian ending, and patched several times since launch to fix the rough edges that shipped with it.
7 / 10
A creature-collecting twist on the Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven that spent seven months in Early Access absorbing genuinely substantial content updates before reaching 1.0 — most of its harshest criticism predates that work and describes a build that no longer exists, though a real, smaller cluster of post-1.0 complaints, including one raised inside a positive review, says its opening 30 minutes still aren't fixed.
7 / 10
A genuinely charming, actively supported Sanrio cozy-life-sim that became a real viral phenomenon, undercut by real mobile-port friction on price and time-gating, and a documented monetisation reversal that a meaningful share of its own most dedicated players say broke trust.
6.7 / 10
A genuinely beautiful, emotionally resonant narrative exploration game about a pizza delivery rider stuck in a looping, half-real world, undercut by a specific, widely reported mouse- focus bug and a save system that can lose an entire chapter of progress.
6.6 / 10
A cozy co-op survival-crafting sandbox about restoring flying islands, actively developed by Funcom's Astrolabe Interactive for a year and a half of Early Access, whose own reviewers document a consistent mid-game slump once the flying-island novelty wears off, alongside real, still-present performance issues and one especially prominent motion-sickness complaint.
6.5 / 10
Ubisoft's feudal Japan entry delivers genuinely beautiful visuals and a widely loved shinobi protagonist, undercut by a real, consistently repeated "formula fatigue" complaint — towers, icons, repetition — a verified gap between Ubisoft's public promise of full offline play and what reviewers report experiencing in practice, and a heavily monetised in-game store layered on top of a full NZ$109.95 purchase.
6.5 / 10
A 1950s British nuclear-disaster survival-mystery whose atmosphere and detective-driven structure draw real, specific praise even from its own harshest critics, who nonetheless argue the game never commits to being any one thing — and whose most-upvoted single complaint isn't about design at all, but an undisclosed always-online requirement on a single-player game.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developer "combat programming roguelike" where you build automated battle scripts out of skills and conditions and then watch them play out, Very Positive on Steam for a genuinely clever core idea -- undercut by a content ceiling most players hit within a handful of hours and a development trail that appears to have gone quiet within weeks of launch.
6.5 / 10
EA's biggest Battlefield launch in franchise history — 20 million units sold, record concurrent players, genuinely praised gunplay and an unusually stable launch — undercut by a widely repeated "bait and switch" narrative in which an acclaimed beta gave way to aggressive post-launch monetisation, and shadowed by a real, independently verified wave of layoffs across the studios that built it just months after that record-breaking success.
6.5 / 10
An ambitious single-world MMO crafting sandbox from the studio behind SpacetimeDB, built around a genuinely deep, RuneScape-inspired grind that its own biggest fans openly embrace — undercut by a real tension between its "idle-friendly" marketing and punishing stamina systems, rampant player-on-player griefing the developers are criticised for under-policing, and a disclosed but under-communicated plan to wipe progress and convert to free-to-play after Early Access.
6.5 / 10
A well-loved anime school RPG going through a gacha revolt in real time. Nine of its last hundred English reviews are positive — and the change they're protesting isn't in the version most Steam players are running yet. Reviewed 4 August 2026, mid-storm.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely deep idle civilization builder — a hundred-plus technologies, era-spanning wonders, a real global trading market — undercut by a headline feature that's been advertised for over a year without actually existing.
6.5 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder that swaps dungeon crawling for an NBA-style season, from Big Ambitions developer Bigosaur -- a genuinely novel mashup that a fifth of its reviewers say plays itself once the deck-building decisions run out.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developer sword-and-sorcery survivors-like ARPG that gained a following through a demo, Asmongold's YouTube coverage, and now more than a year of Early Access -- Very Positive across 2,005 English reviews for a genuinely deep class-and-rune system that consistently earns Halls of Torment comparisons, undercut by a near-universal complaint that the first five hours outshine everything after, and a recent, serious progress-loss bug still unresolved as of August 2026.
6.5 / 10
A gorgeous, hand-drawn metroidvania about a paintbrush-wielding artist escaping a decaying inner world built from her declining mental health — whose art, music and premise draw near-universal praise, sitting alongside a majority-of-negative-sample complaint about spongy, repetitive boss fights and platforming precision the movement itself doesn't reliably support.
6.5 / 10
A free idle RPG with the genuine article — true 1:1 offline progression — attached to a retention design that keeps demanding you come back and play minigames by hand.
6.5 / 10
A cheap, polished micro-incremental about rolling dice into an army of tiny fighters, genuinely well-received but consistently described by its own fans as over almost as soon as it starts, from a developer who publicly promised more content and then, fifteen months later, announced a different game instead.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed space-colony sim that spent a year in Early Access fixing the exact problems its first reviewers complained about, then launched to a small but genuinely engaged audience most readers have never heard of.
6.5 / 10
