Brian’s personal 2025 GOTY List
While I have a long history of creating Game Of The Year lists and even Top Tens, from my extensive history running The Platformers podcast to contributing to lists for the various outlets I’ve written for, this is the first one I’m writing after founding Skybox with Will and Lucas. This one feels a bit weightier as a result, so I am pleased 2025 gave us some true bangers as a small way of cooperating with what we do here.
To all who back us on Patreon, I deeply thank you. I have a dream that one day this site will be able to pay all our bills, and that you’ll always have high-quality, intentional, and substantive stuff to read and listen to under the Skybox banner. Cheers to wrapping up 2025 and here’s to many more years together!
Missed Connections
Games I wanted to get to, but didn’t have time for. Time can be a real bitch sometimes.
- Artis Impact
- The Drifter
- Seance at Blake Manor
- Demonschool
Honorable Mentions
Stuff I really liked, but wasn’t quite able to crack my Top Ten.
Time Flies
A game about how short life is, and prioritizing what you want to achieve during our short time on Earth. Told from the perspective of the famously short-lived house fly.
Spilled!
A short, 30 minute game about cleaning up the environment, this one resonated with me because I am extremely anxious about climate change and human impact on the environment, and that very few people in positions of power seem to want to do anything about it. Use your tugboat to scoop up and dispose of waste, turning the land back into the natural beauty it used to be before we mucked it up.
Earthion
A classic side-scrolling bullet hell, made in the modern era for 16-bit platforms. Made by genre legends to work on Super Nintendo, but playable on Steam, this little dynamo was a blast of an afternoon, and definitely the best of these I’ve played in many years.
Spirit Swap
Body positive, gender-inclusive Tetris Attack. What else do you need to know? Now I can basically play Tetris Attack on Steam, which is my favorite puzzle game.
Windswept
What if “we have Donkey Kong Country at home,” but it was actually good. Didn’t play much, but like with Spirit Swap, it’s great having Nintendo-level platforming action available on Steam Deck.
Monster Hunter Wilds
The first Monster Hunter to really get me. I still need to go back and play more, but the weapons feel great, and the world is cool. The ONLY THING THAT SUCKS is it doesn’t really work on Steam Deck. DAMMIT.
Marvel Rivals
The best hero shooter keeps getting better. Adding Gambit, Rogue, Deadpool, and Elsa Bloodstone to the roster this year, every hero seems more fun and dynamic than the last. The team over at Netease really knows how to keep the hype train going for me, and Rivals continues to be go-to comfort food for me, and a great way to hang out with friends while feeling like a superhero.
Elden Ring Nightreign
Only finished my first playthrough of this one, but it has the FromSoft action I crave. I’m excited to play through this more with friends, but I’m not sure it scratches the lore itch I have for more Elden Ring stuff. Time will tell!
Game Of The Year – Top Ten Countdown
10. Is This Seat Taken?
A clever cross between the “get the wolf, chicken, corn across the river without them eating each other” thought puzzle teachers gave us in school, and a “wedding reception seating arrangement simulator,” Is This Seat Taken? injects a cute story about inspiration, chasing your dreams, and believing in yourself into a puzzle game about trying to make everyone happy. You have a large table or bar, and several people want to eat, a few others want to steal food, and others hate hearing mouth noises. Good luck making everyone happy! It’s a lot of fun, and quite a few great gameplay twists make the runtime feel just right.
9. Henry Halfhead
Henry Halfhead is about not allowing life, and the drudgery of the day-to-day working world, to rob you of your childlike sense of wonder. While this is a lesson I learned many years ago, watching it unfold through different chapters in Henry’s life was touching, as was its cradle-to-grave storytelling. As for gameplay, Henry wants you to find the fun yourself, with “possess objects to manipulate them to complete your goal” gameplay, complete with a physics system that ensures things will often go, humorously, sideways.
8. Hollow Knight: Silksong
While the original Hollow Knight is one of my favorite games ever, largely because it captures the solitude and loneliness I first found in Super Metroid, Silksong is about building community and fighting back against the tyranny of a classist system among a growing list of allies. Hornet, the protagonist, once again displays that sometimes you need a member of the ruling class to fight on behalf of the downtrodden to help overthrow corrupt systems. I’m still working through it, but it also puts a much higher degree of emphasis on movement, so it feels far better than the original to play.
7. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector
The first Citizen Sleeper is about the inevitability of mortality, corporate overreach claiming even the bodies of their employees as a means of working off debt, painting its masterwork on a canvas of a single, fleshed out, location. Citizen Sleeper 2 is more akin to a collection of smaller paintings, each depicting a different aspect of the struggles of working under hypercapitalism and even trafficking. Having your body betray you is as inevitable as death, but the way the sequel gives you multiple (relatively easy) ways out reduces the tension in a way that isn’t truly recuperated by the “stay one step ahead of your captor” mechanic.
6. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles
One of the greatest games of all time, and my favorite tactics game ever, gets a glorious re-release with incredible voice acting buttressing a story about class warfare that is more relevant now than when it was originally released. It really sucks that the Dark Knight and Onion Knight aren’t included, and that there isn’t an option to play with the original script, but this is a near-perfect edition of Final Fantasy Tactics anyway, and I’m hoping the mod community really takes this one places.
5. Look Outside
There are only three games I have played that have truly mastered the vibe of cosmic horror, and each has its own strength. Bloodborne has the utter strangeness and otherworldliness in its character design, environments, and lore. Skald: Against The Black Priory has the exceptional writing, steadily mounting sense of pure, relentless evil infesting everything. Look Outside draws from a ton of different inspirations in the genre to create a sort of self-contained anthology that evokes a sense of horror, sure, but bizarre comedy as well. What if it was the end of the world and things were truly horrific, but some parts of it were… kind of fine, actually? What if you were transformed into an eldritch monstrosity, robbing you of all your senses, but still hung out with your friends down at the diner anyway? I’m glad Look Outside was able to uncover a new side of cosmic horror.
4. Eclipsium
I won’t spoil what Eclipsium is ultimately about here, but it is very evocative. It starts in a hospital room and the first thing it makes you do is cut out your own tongue to place on a scale, which weighs it and then lets you out. As I said in our Game Of The Year episode of The Skybox Podcast, Eclipsium is the closest I’ve ever seen a dark video game get to “playing a series of abstract or absurdist paintings,” and it deserves so much praise for that.
SPOILERS BEGIN FOR ECLIPSIUM
Having just gotten the news that my grandmother died, it hits extra hard writing about this. Eclipsium, to my understanding, is about being hospitalized and the ravages that drugs can have on you even if they are meant to help you heal. Inserting a needle into the vein while lying in a hospital bed causes the player’s arm to light on fire, which evoked chemotherapy to me. I’ve read that the mind-bending pig factory section of the game could be referencing the pig hearts or parts used to create human heart replacement, so it could be a game about having heart surgery, but either way it’s a powerful experience. The player spends so much time trying to find “her” and although they wake up at the end to her arrival in the hospital room, it is after losing much of who the player was. And for everyone who wakes up at the end, there are many that don’t. One day we will all be the one about whom bad news is being delivered.
SPOILERS END FOR ECLIPSIUM
3. Camille and Laura
It’s remarkable to have a game so short, and about something so simple be so resonant. You play the mother of a young girl and you must wake up, take her to school, go to work, and go about your day for one week. It captures the struggles of being a parent, having no energy and having the child request more of you. One more story. Can I have this for breakfast? People are being mean to me at school, what do I do? All of this when you can barely keep your eyes open, haven’t been on a date in weeks… has it been months? How much of yourself will you give to your child? I’ve never seen my own parenting style reflected in games until now, and I’m grateful for that gift.
2. Unbeatable
Sometimes the only way to stand up to authority and create actual change is to beat the shit out of it. That’s what Unbeatable understands. It’s about the difficulty of creating art, how each of us can simultaneously be prodigies and failures, the relationships we have with family and found family, and what we will do when authoritarianism presses down on us. Will we give in and live as we are told to? Or will we rise up with a flaming middle finger and say, as Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against The Machine once did, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me?”
1. and Roger
And Roger is a remarkable game that pulls off one of the finest rug-pulls in my gaming experience. At first, I thought it would be a game about sexual assault, which is already incredibly heavy. Little did I know, it was about something much more personal to me. The way it uses its simple mechanics to reinforce its message is resonant, heart-breaking, and terrifying. It is a difficult game to play through, but I recommend it to you all. I will never forget what I experienced here.
SPOILERS BEGIN FOR AND ROGER
If I had played this game years ago, it wouldn’t have meant nearly as much, but recently my mother was diagnosed with MCI (mild cognitive impairment), a precursor to Alzheimer’s or dementia. My sister and I first noticed it during Christmas, when I asked her to hold onto my keys for a moment so I could change. Not five minutes later, I asked for them back and she looked confused. I asked if they were still in her pocket and she reached in, surprised, and gave them to me. A pit formed in my stomach. My sister and I approached each other at the end of the night to ask each other what was going on. My father had noticed earlier but hadn’t said anything until we confronted him about it. My mother had been fighting him about going to see someone about it. She’s getting treatment now, but the decline has been sharp, and she isn’t the only one. My wife’s aunt died of dementia and the same signs have cropped up in other members of my family. Playing through the scene where the main character of and Roger tries to get out of the bathroom, the door handle multiplying every time it is clicked, making it impossible to find a way out, was terrifying. This is what it means to have your mind betray you. How long will it be until, like the keys, I am forgotten by the one who gently kissed every wound I had as a child. The one who used to read to me and, at my bedside, quote her favorite book each night; “I’ll love you forever, I’ll love you for always. As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.” I hate what this disease is doing to my precious mother, and what it has already done to so many others.
Fuck you, dementia. Give me my mom back.
SPOILERS END FOR AND ROGER
Thanks for reading! Check out our official Skybox Game of the Year 2025 podcast for our full breakdown on everything, and stay tuned here at Skybox (and use the GOTY 2025 tag!) to keep up with our written companion pieces!
