Rachel Kaser’s Very Serious Awards for 2025 Video Games

It’s April 2026, and almost every major body has finished giving out its awards for games released in 2025. The Game Awards, the Golden Joysticks, the New York Game Awards, the BAFTAs, etc — all of them have given their awards out for the best and brightest interactive media to come out in 2025.

And I feel left out.

I played a lot of games in 2025, and yet, for one reason or another, I never actually got the chance to give out my own awards or make a ranking list. Previously, I made one such list for the 70 games I played in 2022; and another for the 85 games I played in 2023 (side note: goodness, no wonder I have so many gray hairs). I also made a top 5 list for my favorite games of 2024. But nothing for 2025.

Until now.

Welcome to my awards for the games I played in 2025 — all of them! Unlike previous years, where I did numerical rankings, this year I want to give each game an award based on its own merits (or… other outstanding qualities). I like to engage games on their own terms, and I don’t think a numerical ranking would be very helpful and descriptive for the games of 2025.

Also, this feels more in keeping with my other awards: The BOSS Mode Awards, the awards event spinning off from my BOSS Mode series, the winners of which will be awarded at GamesBeat Summit 2026 on May 18-19!

Now, if you’re reading this in mid-May 2026 or later, then congratulations: You’re reading the complete version of my awards, with all 65 new games that I played in 2025 acknowledged and appropriately awarded.

But if it’s not yet that time, here’s how this will work: I will update this article with each new batch of awards after they debut in my Inside the Industry newsletter (which you can read if you’re subscribed to GB MAX)! I’ll write up a batch of 13 awards for each newsletter, with the 2025 awards culminating in the BOSS Mode Awards. Just to remind you, these are the awards I’ll be giving out then:

• The Boss Mode Woman of the Year Award: With this award, GamesBeat honors a woman who has significantly influenced the industry over the past year.
• The Future Boss Rising Star Award: This award honors an up-and-coming woman in the industry who has managed to make a splash in a short time.
• The Final Boss Award for Lifetime Achievement: This award is for the legends who have been in the games industry for years and have made a lasting positive impact on the space.

So without further ado, here are the Very Serious and Important Awards for 2025 Video Games, As Presented by GamesBeat’s Rachel Kaser!

Considering how paradigm-shiftingly incredible Return of the Obra Dinn was, I feel bereft that there aren’t more games inspired by it. What do I have to do to get that same sparkling feeling when I finish a puzzle and for just a moment I’m the cleverest person on the planet? Well, my luck turned around somewhat in 2025, because the official PC version of The Roottrees Are Dead launched on Steam.

Credit: Evil Trout Inc. TRAD’s puzzles have a cozy, low-stakes vibe. While the story has elements of tragedy (and absurdity – we’re talking about five generations of Willy Wonkas, here), it doesn’t overshadow the sense of accomplishment and reward that comes from untangling the Roottree riddle. The built-in hint system offers a nice safety net for those who are truly stuck, which feels more intuitive and less embarrassing than consulting an online walkthrough.

2025 was the year I came to a startling realization: I have been playing Assassin’s Creed games for over half of my life now. I love this series in a way that transcends even my critical gamer faculties. Even when my higher brain functions all register that an Assassin’s Creed game is mediocre at best, I can’t help but want to play as much of it as I can.

Credit: Ubisoft Shadows is an okay game, riddled with atavistic design decisions and animations. It tastes of formula at every moment of its many hours of gameplay. But damn it, playing an Assassin’s Creed game fills me with a sense of lightness and joy no matter how mid it is. So congratulations, Ubisoft! You got grandfathered in by virtue of having been part of my life during my formative years.

Minimalist games – which tell their stories with little-to-no spoken dialogue or text – are sometimes the least complicated forms of artistic expression in video games. What that can sometimes mean is that it’s hard to get immersed in them if the art doesn’t move you. Herdling, a minimalist game that tells its story almost entirely with context clues and paintings, gets around this with one simple expedient: Floofs.

Credit: Okomotive The Calicorns, the in-game creatures your character is trying to usher to freedom, are a mishmash of adorable features: Thick, fuzzy coats; big, round eyes; snuffling, burbling noises; running animations that either emphasize their stubby, galloping legs or their big, lumbering shoulders. I got so attached to every single one, giving them names and petting them every chance I got.

I’d be fibbing if I told you that I loved Split Fiction. The setting was trite, the dialogue cringeworthy, and the plot about original ideas surviving the grind of the corporate machine was rather strange for a game published by EA. But if you’ve got a friend or partner with whom you’re sufficiently unserious (and I am so fortunate), then it’s one of the biggest barrels of laughs released in 2025.

Credit: Hazelight The part of the story that I most enjoyed was how the two central characters, both authors, behave about their work. Each is stubbornly resistant to criticism in their own way, puts a little more of themselves into each story than they’re willing to confess, and doesn’t want to do any other kind of work even if it pays better. That hits a little close to home, not gonna lie. The most unrealistic part of the game is that there’s no side story exploring their teenage fanfiction.

The Carol Reed games provide probably the most extreme counterpoint to Clair Obscur’s “indie” status. It will never fail to entertain me to remind everyone that this series of point-and-click adventure games created using photos of real locations in Sweden exists. And it’s a good thing I do, too; you can really only find the Carol Reed games if you already know what they are, like an urban legend of some kind.

Credit: MDNA Games Murder Malady is the 20th Carol Reed game, and it’s every bit as beautiful as the others. While Carol doesn’t always visit the most picturesque places, every location is photographed to be aesthetically pleasing. It makes me appreciate the beauty in everyday locations, not to mention want to visit the place where Carol lives.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Or in the case of PowerWash Simulator, if the gameplay was exactly what everyone wanted, why change it? PowerWash Simulator 2 feels like the most marginally improved sequel of all time, delivering the same core gameplay, the same general sorts of environments, and a similarly silly sequel story.

Credit: FuturLab The one improvement I can identify is that the sequel doesn’t give me vertigo. I’m not exactly sure which tweak fixed that, but whatever it was, it worked, and I don’t have to fiddle with the settings to not be sick after playing. So that’s a win!

Slime Rancher was such a uniquely wonderful and joyous experience that I didn’t think there was any way to make it better. I shouldn’t have underestimated Monomi Park, because they managed to make Slime Rancher 2 even more of a delight than I could have hoped for. It’s everything I liked about Slime Rancher wrapped in rainbow grass and candy-colored hillsides.

Credit: Monomi Park But it’s not just the plurality of adorableness that I liked about the sequel: It also adds new features, new gameplay mechanics and new slimes. It’s just innovative enough to keep the vibes of the original while delivering something that feels like a new adventure. It’s just the right amount of different.

Light spoilers here, but only for the beginning of the game. When I first saw Winter Burrow, I thought I knew the score: It’s a cozy game with survival and crafting mechanics, starring adorable woodland critters rendered in gorgeous, storybook art design. This is going to be so cute, says I.

Credit: Pine Creek Games Imagine my surprise when the protagonist’s parents die of overwork in the mines within the opening cinematic. The rest of the game, while relatively short and simple, builds upon the premise of finding family and home in the aftermath of profound grief. But that opening was a gut punch I was not expecting, and it helped keep me hooked for the rest of the game.

I almost called this award “The Roguelike for People Who Hate Roguelikes” – but Blue Prince finally got me to admit it: I don’t hate roguelikes. I like roguelikes, as long as they’re clever and reward persistence, rather than rote repetition. I like a game that works with me to help reveal its story through mechanics, and no game did that better in 2025 than Blue Prince.

Credit: Dogubomb Blue Prince takes the basic concept of a procedurally generated environment, like the dungeon crawlers of old, and weaves it into a story of inheritance (both literal and metaphysical), political intrigue, and the weight of familial expectations. It also helps that each “failed” run felt less like a loss and more like an opportunity of further exploration. If I were giving out a Game of the Year award, I’m not going to lie – it’d be a strong contender.

Good animation in a game is something I actively try to note whenever I’m playing. I spent years educating myself on good game animation principles and how animation serves and betters gameplay. So when I say that Shinobi: Art of Vengeance’s animation jumped right out at me, understand that that’s a rare and beautiful thing. Usually, I have to set aside time to observe animations in action – this time I noticed them immediately and was delighted by what I saw.

Credit: SEGA I’m not kidding: I spent several minutes at the beginning of the game making Joe Musashi run back and forward across the starting area because his running animation was so clean. His attack and special animations were all beautifully executed – it helps that the game is also fun to look at, full stop – and even the enemy animations helped make the gameplay more enjoyable and “readable,” if that makes sense.

While I didn’t grow up in Louisiana, I grew up not far away and have spent enough time in the southern United States to know what it looks and sounds like. And, in my opinion, South of Midnight captures that better than any other game I’ve ever played – certainly more than I imagined it would. There’s a palpable sense of home in Hazel’s world, making the place feel lived-in and ordinary while also the setting for a fairy tale adventure.

Credit: Compulsion Games Art design, to me, is more than just aesthetics and atmosphere. Good art design is the breath of life in a game’s world, and South of Midnight’s art design brings heart and soul to its world in a way that feels at once familiar and wondrous. Not going to lie, I’m a little salty that it doesn’t seem to have taken home as many art awards this year as I feel it deserved. If I can redress the balance a bit in my own way, then I will.

I don’t usually play the “hot” mobile games. Everything else in my life is about new games – my phone is for the old favorites, like my paint-by-number app. But this year I decided to give one particular game a try: Is This Seat Taken? And I’m pleased I did, because it fit well into my own little mobile economy, being fun, challenging and, most importantly, low-key.

Credit: Poti Poti Studio Is This Seat Taken? is the kind of game you can jump into during the quiet, in-between parts of your day – when you’re waiting for a PC or console game to download, just as an example. The puzzles are just enough of a challenge to hold my attention, but not enough to consume me. It’s the kind of game I actually want on my phone, something I can enjoy on its own merits, as opposed to something that competes with my other, bigger interests.

When I’m bogged down with massive games that require so much of my time and attention, I love to cleanse my palate with shorter games that tell a complete story in a fraction of the time. The Berlin Apartment doesn’t just tell one story – it tells five, including the framing narrative about a little girl learning to appreciate the stories in the world around her.

Credit: Blue Backpack The narrative about a tiny corner of the world in what would have been East Berlin, right next to the Wall, told from 1933 to 2025… yeah, you can see some of the implications of what the story is about. While the game doesn’t shy away from those implications at all, it focuses more on the ordinary lives of the people who lived in those times, and how the Big Things Happening affected them and didn’t at the same time. It’s an enjoyable walk through history.

This list is a work-in-progress. Please check back in a few days with the next batch of awards!

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