Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland in search of our better selves?

2025 was simultaneously one of the longest years of my life and one of the shortest. We started Skybox, which is pretty cool. If you’re reading this, thank you. If you’re supporting us on Patreon, it means more to me than I can say. We’re a small site with a limited budget (every dollar goes to our writers; the editors make nothing), and your support allows us to do this. Thank you.

2025 was clarifying for me in a lot of ways. At the end of the year, for the first time in months, I had time alone to really sit with myself. I wasn’t working. I wasn’t worrying about Skybox or money. I had time for myself. That time was clarifying, and I used it to think about my relationship with games, with myself, and with other folks in the space. I did a lot of good work last year. I wrote the definitive review of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves (for which I was never paid, but nevertheless). I wrote a retrospective for F.E.A.R. for Rolling Stone. I wrote reviews for The Midnight Walk and Bounty Star and Rhythm Doctor and Dynasty Warriors: Origins and Everdeep Aurora that I’m really proud of. And several pieces that I wrote were featured in Critical Distance, including one on Madden that made their End of the Year roundup. It was a good year for me professionally, and that’s without getting into all the consulting I started doing, which I am deeply grateful for. The kind of year that makes you reflect on yourself. And I wasn’t always happy with what I saw.

I’m trying to be better this year. I’m drinking less, eating healthier, finding more time for myself, trying to be more selective about what I work on, working harder to keep things in perspective, learning to walk away. I’m oddly at peace, if we’re being honest, something I haven’t really been able to say at any other point in my life. I have a couple of really exciting new bylines coming up. I’m trying to do more features work, some of it at Skybox. Features are both what I prefer to write and read, even if there is little market for it outside of independent publications. But as they say, the purpose of a thing is what it does, and I cannot claim to love to write something and not write it. We are who we choose to be.

In that spirit, I’m trying something a little different with Game of the Year this year. Often, these lists try to justify themselves and the games on them because, ultimately, I think we write these lists hoping the people reading them will play the games we’re writing about. I’m not going to try to justify what’s here. Instead, I’m going to tell you why these games stuck with me. Maybe it’ll be a story. Maybe an image. Maybe just how it made me feel as I played it. You can do the rest.

Will Borger’s top ten games of 2025

10. Pizza Bandit (JOFSOFT)

The doc’s down, there’s wendigos in the house, the fire’s dying, and I’ve just eaten our last slice of pizza. It’s not looking good for the home team. The invention of time travel itself is in danger of never happening, which means we won’t be here to make sure it does. I could lose my head thinking about that, or I could pick the doctor up and cook him some venison while my boys put down the wendigo. That’s probably the play. We make it out, scrambling for our time machine/dropship, every Time Reaper in creation on our heels. We make, barely. Lucas is the last guy in. Sick guitar riff. We’re back at the pizza shop, laughing. I crack open a beer. Pizza Bandit is perhaps the most “Dudes Rock” game I have ever played.

9. Little Nightmares III (Supermassive Games)

You’re never alone. Not really. You explore together, boost one another to ledges, lift things neither of you could lift alone. After every death, you help each other up. What gets me isn’t the nightmare, not really, but how we traverse it, what it shows me about these characters, who they are, how they’re coping, all without a word. Loss hits you when you least expect it. And sometimes, escaping hell comes with a cost.

8. Everdeep Aurora (Nautilus Games)

I’m a kitten named Shell looking for my mother; if she’s not back by the time I awaken, I’m to meet her in “the usual place.” Something has split the moon in two, and its shattered pieces rain from the heavens. The only safety is underground. I borrow a drill from a frog; he’s looking for someone, too. We’re all searching. Underground, I find others. They need help finding lost items, rescuing friends, breaking free of the bonds of family and expectation and pain. Shell’s great strength is her kindness. As I carve paths through the rock and navigate this place, creating paths I will retrace and alter by doing so, I learn about the other animals in it. Their stories become part of mine. We are all searching for a home at the end of the world, and none of our stories are forged alone. I found a kitten sleeping on a bench in the rain at the end of the world, and she helped me remember how to live.

7. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound (The Game Kitchen)

The demons roar down the stairs in waves, a tsunami of colors. I bounce off the first, slice through the second and the third, who powers up my blade for the bigger fourth. My katana splits him in half; I never stop moving. The demons don’t let up, and neither do I. This dance is full of stumbles and falls as I learn the steps, but I know the rhythm. Each time, they come back, and I am stronger while they are the same. I can’t stand them near me. I move in the places they aren’t, strike where they are. I cut through.

6. Mecha Break (Amazing Seasun Games)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be perfect for three seconds. My team is elsewhere. It is just he, his Stellaris, and me, my Alysnes. I am not perfect the first time. His warblade cleaves my armor from my frame, but Alysnes conceals a secret. Freed from my heavy armor, I am lighter, smaller, faster. Perhaps less durable, but where the advantage in speed was previously his, it is now mine. He is more cautious now, I more aggressive. I begin to chip away at his advantage. There will be no resurrection for him, no lighter frame once his armor is broken. And each second he does not kill me is another second closer to when I call back my heavy armor and become whole. He is desperate, his armor nearly gone. Time is my ally. I wait. He lunges, the same attack that caught me the first time. This time, I am perfect. For three seconds, I achieve total control. This time, I slide gracefully to my right, and his blade slices only air. Behind him, I bring my halberd down. Over the comms, my teammates call for aid. I call my armor back, and race to them. Start the clock again.

5. Ninja Gaiden II Black (Team Ninja)

Another staircase. The same, but different. This time, there are no demons. Only other ninja. I ran along the walls and slice at them with my katana. On the ground, I use my Vigoorian Flail to catch several at once, severing limbs. I behead the survivors, use their essence to charge my next attacks, tear through their comrades like cheap paper. God help me, it feels good. Still, they come on. The Lunar Staff next; it contacts them before they are close. More severed limbs. Blood everywhere. I am always outnumbered, never outmatched. Not in the coliseum against the giant, four-armed werewolf and his scythe. Not on the Statue of Liberty against the Greater Fiend who wields lightning. And not here, on this staircase, against dozens of them. It is not a fair fight. They didn’t send enough men.

4. Elden Ring: Nightreign (From Software)

We’re about halfway through the cave when we realize we won’t make it before the fire reaches us. There is no exit at the other end. We turn around, past the miners and other foes that haunt this place, and run, dodging their swings as best we can. At the cave’s mouth, another reminder: the cave is set in a sheer cliff, one we must climb if the advancing fire is to be avoided. We split up. No joy for me. None for Mitch. Then Justin’s voice, over the headset, telling us he’s found a way. We sprint to it, through the fire, launching ourselves up the air currents and over the rock. The fire stops. We continue. Night is coming, and there is much we have left to do to be ready for its horrors.

3. The Midnight Walk (Moonhood)

A village of disembodied heads, defined by their past sins, hoping to avoid retribution. A creature, the last of its kind, consumed by grief. A town destroyed by a misplaced act of revenge, hoping to put its ghosts to rest. A little girl who lit matches because they reminded her of the stars. This is what I travel through as the Burned One, Potboy by my side. There is trust there, though neither of us speaks. I will guide him, keep him safe. He will stay by my side, provide aid. This is a world whose boundaries are drawn by pain. We can fix none of it. But we can light a match and ease that pain, offer warmth and comfort to a soul in need. This is a story of stories, of creation and its consequences, and of what frightens us. But we will make it together. I lit a match, and found my way, and I was not alone.

2. Bounty Star (Dinogod)

Clem stares up at the Raptor. The last time she piloted one was the worst day of her life. A version of her died, and what remains stands here. She knows nothing else. Her pulse quickens. Her heart bangs in her ears. She closes her eyes. Exhales. Opens them. Then she climbs into the cockpit. I understand her, because I know what it is to have the worst day of your life defined by something you love and what it is to spend years recovering from it, wondering if you ever really, truly will. I don’t know the answer.

Clem is a Raptor pilot. This is what she’s good at, what she loves, what she does. It is also the source of her greatest trauma. I understand her because I know what that’s like. As I rebuild her life, grow her farm and upgrade her raptor, I watch her begin to heal. To welcome people back into her life. This town takes in all kinds, even the broken and the lost. Clem wears her scars on her body, but the deeper wounds are not visible. Both she and I sit in that cockpit, but we are not in the same place. Sometimes, there is no choice but to face what haunts you. Sometimes, the only way out is through. Sometimes, you have to go back to the thing that brought you to ruin because it’s part of who you are. Sometimes, you have to get back in the fucking robot and hope there’s a life on the other side.

1. Rhythm Doctor (7th Beat Games)

I am a remote intern at a hospital testing an experimental rhythm therapy. I watch the patients and the doctors through the hospital’s cameras. Oftentimes, they speak to me, but I cannot respond. I am a finger on a button. This is not my story. On every seventh beat of a patient’s heart, I press a button to defibrillate them. The results are remarkable. Along the way, I learn their stories: the young boy who has trouble confessing his feelings for a girl; an older couple on opposite ends of the hospital who yearn to see one another; two overworked doctors and their distant, results-oriented administrator; a musician and the hospital’s barista, whose shared love of music binds them; a star baseball player who tears his rotator cuff, and has to reckon with what comes next. 

Treatment has complications. Sometimes, I have to switch between cameras as my patients rapidly move around. Sometimes a virus infects my computer, and I cannot see or hear the beat. Sometimes, things get even stranger. Rhythm Doctor does things I have never seen before. My job remains the same: I press my button on every seventh beat. And in doing so, I get to know these people, and help them heal.

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!