Tag Archives: Video Games

Top 10 Games of 2025

Posted by defectivepixeltest on

If there ever was a year of the indie game, it really does feel like 2025 is that year. Practically everything I played the entire year was from a small or mid-sized studio, and AAA stuff was more few and far between as it feels like it’s ever been.

It’s exciting—even as we’re seeing more and more post-pandemic fallout blow through the games industry, combined with a litany of layoffs and corporate consolidation—it feels like there’s more and more room on the margins for passionate creators to get their stuff out there. Hopefully that continues to hold true into 2026 and beyond, as consumer electronics hardware faces some serious headwinds to its continued price viability.

Anyway, no time to think about all that scary business! Let’s get into my personal favorite games of the year.

Real quick, a couple disclaimers –

Quick obligatory notes:

  • This is a ranked Top 10 list with 3 honorable mentions (unranked).
  • Each game features a link to one of my favorite pieces of music from its soundtrack or to a clip of the game. Feel free to listen as you read.
  • I consider the release timing of Early Access games based on when they exit Early Access, or enter V1.0.
  • Remakes (which are becoming even more common these days) can be on my lists, but only if they are substantial enough in that the game is something fundamentally different. Examples of games I counted in 2019 were Pathologic 2 or Resident Evil 2. In 2020, I didn’t consider a game like Demon’s Souls (even though I loved it) because it is mostly a visual overhaul to the 2009 original game. Hopefully that distinction makes sense and isn’t just arbitrary to you.

Pile of Shame (games I didn’t have time to play this year):

  • Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
  • Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2
  • Hell is Us
  • Ghost of Yotei
  • Battlefield 6

Okay, with that out of the way, on to the list…

Honorable Mentions:

Routine – Lunar Software

Excuse me, sir. Could you perhaps chill while I degauss my display?

Routine Intro – NJ Apostol

The fact that I’m getting the opportunity to write about Routine at all still blows my mind. This game originally caught my eye all the way back in 2012, when myself and a college buddy first caught a glimpse of its Steam Greenlight page—a Valve initiative to gauge user interest that felt huge at the time, but is now all but ancient history. Back when Routine was first announced, horror games like “Amnesia: The Dark Descent” were still very much in the popular consciousness. This was a world before P.T., before RE7, before Alien: Isolation. A lot has changed in the horror gaming landscape since those halcyon days. So what in the world does a horror game look like after thirteen years of development hell? Well, if Routine is any indication, then the answer is: pretty fucking scary.

Routine is premised on an alternate 1980s vision of the future – a world where we got lunar resorts on the moon, complete with their own shopping malls, where we got handheld computers, but with sub-10Hz CRT displays that needed a dedicated “degauss” button—look that one up, kids. Routine’s embrace of analog technology runs deep – the entire game is presented through a thick postprocessing filter that feels like the stuff of 8 and 16-bit console emulators. Thanks to this , Routine tends to obliterate the amount of detail you’d expect from a modern UE5 game on a 4K panel. That tradeoff, though pretty jarring at first, ends up contributing to a vibe that horror games used to have, albeit by necessity—you can’t reliably make out the finer detail of the things that are hunting you, and that lack of information does trigger your fight-or-flight response that much more. On top of this, Routine’s main defensive and puzzle-solving tool, the C.A.T., is an intentionally clunky device to use, forcing you to fumble with in-game buttons on the side of it, all while a threat is closing in on you. It calls back to old-school horror titles, where the cumbersome controls required you to play out a whole scenario on your controller just to fight back—and do it all under extreme duress.

Routine starts off very simply. You wake up in Union Plaza, the aforementioned lunar resort, and the game teaches you some basic movement controls before turning you lose completely. After the first room, Routine will not be holding your hand any further. This becomes very clear, very quickly the first time you encounter one of the Type-05 robots and find yourself needing to learn under pressure. While most horror games typically allow the player time to familiarize themselves with an environment and its puzzles before ratcheting up the tension, Routine violates this design philosophy, oftentimes asking the player to solve puzzles while under the proverbial gun. There were multiple times in this game that I had to ditch out of a computer console I was investigating to deal with a Type-05 that was marching right up behind me. It’s been a while since I’ve played a horror game where I couldn’t count on the presence of a puzzle being a signal that I was currently in a safe room. To not be able to rely on that is intense.

This is made all the more effective by the top-tier sound design. Apparently Mick Gordon worked on this project for a while as a sound designer before handing the reigns over to current Audio Lead NJ Apostol. Well, regardless of which of them is responsible, I can safely say the scene where the Type-05 is first introduced really fucked me up, in the best way possible. Even more sinister is the gameplay conceit that only one Type-05 can be “active” at any point, making for some tense moments where you try to slink past a handful of inactive machines, only to have one of them loudly sputter to life right behind you.

There’s more to Routine than meets the eye. It has an atypical structure, with an absolutely diabolical Act 2 reveal that caught me off-guard in a big way. It’s a brief experience, but excellently paced. It’s perhaps the scariest game I’ve played since 2020’s Visage. I don’t know if any game is worth a 13 year wait, but I was positively giddy to find that Routine—while not the open-ended game it was originally pitched as—actually ended up as something I loved playing through.

Atomfall – Rebellion Developments

The obligatory Red Phone Booth—in case things weren’t British enough for you.

Credits – Graham Gatheral

Atomfall is based on an alternate British history in which the 1957 Windscale fire nuclear disaster—the worst in the UK’s history—was even more of a total cock-up than it already was. Instead of burning for 3 straight days and releasing radioactive fallout across Europe, it instead resulted in irradiated monsters, reports of people hearing voices, the formation of cults, and an indefinite government quarantine. You know, the usual suspects of the dystopian video game genre. On the surface, you might think this is Fallout: New Birmingham, and well, you’d be half-right. There’s certainly some of the DNA of Fallout: New Vegas running through the heart of Atomfall, but mostly in a structural way. This isn’t a huge, open-world RPG. It’s more condensed—smaller in scope as well as mechanics—but laser-focused on exploration and nonlinear design.

That unique structure is the singular differentiator for Atomfall. From the outset, your goal is pretty clear—get inside “The Interchange” and find out what the government is hiding there—but the way in which you carve a path through the game to achieve that goal is completely freeform. There isn’t any objective marker, or even a traditional quest log, to guide you. Instead, you rely on a journal of leads—which functions like a collection of threads you can tug at to make progress. This makes for a much more organic quest structure, where you can suss out information through dialog with NPCs, exploration of the environment, by bartering with merchants, or simply by accident—if you somehow manage to Forrest Gump your way into key locations.

The layout of the map itself is also a key component of this. The game world is divided up into 5 distinct playable areas, each of which is a large open space with numerous pathways between one another. No matter what, you will start your playthrough in Slatten Dale—a scenic locale showcasing Britain’s distinct green rolling hills, now rife with raiding parties and bombed out infrastructure—and you will end the game in The Interchange—a massive WWII-era bunker and research complex, with Metroidvania-esque shortcuts connecting it to each and every other playable area. There’s no fast travel here, so finding your own personal routing to traverse the map safely and efficiently is a big part of what makes Atomfall’s exploration so engaging.

Atomfall is the type of game that harkens back to the 7th generation of video game consoles, both in ways that are refreshing and in some less so. The combat is serviceable, but nothing to write home about. The environments look great, but can get pretty same-y looking if you really go deep with the exploration. Even the story is pretty wrote and predictable. That said, there is something about the way this game throws you the keys and then rightly fucks off, leaving you in charge of how you want to play it that is hugely welcome.

Elden Ring Nightreign – FromSoftware

Do you guys think Let Me Solo Her plays this game?

The Shrouded Roundtable Hold – Shoi Miyazawa

On the surface, the concept for Elden Ring: Nightreign is a strange one. It lifts the core combat of Elden Ring and grafts it onto a time-limited, PvE-only multiplayer extraction framework reminiscent of Fortnite or PUBG, then layers on a hero-shooter structure, complete with unique abilities and even ultimates in the vein of Overwatch. For a studio like FromSoftware, whose ambitions have traditionally been obsessively inward-facing, focused on perfecting a subgenre they themselves created, Nightreign feels startlingly reactive to broader industry trends. And yet it’s still unmistakably a FromSoft game, with all the hyper-specific eccentricities that implies—and, more importantly, it’s just a genuinely great time with friends.

When the rubber meets the road, Nightreign still plays like Elden Ring—just with the seats, radio, and air conditioning stripped out, all in the name of going fast. Your character stats are reduced to basic letter grades, sprinting speed is cranked to 11, and leveling up is done in a single button press. For some, this aggressive streamlining of the Elden Ring formula may be a bridge too far. I was genuinely overwhelmed during my first few runs as I tried to learn the map, the loot, and the traversal mechanics while scrambling to keep up with my far more experienced teammates. It often feels as if Nightreign took its cues from Elden Ring’s speedrunning community, and the result is a brutally steep learning curve right out of the gate.

It’s worth sticking with Nightreign through that initial uphill climb—at least to get to the Nightlord bosses that cap off each run. These are seriously excellent fights, made even better because they are actually balanced around a trio of players. You can technically fight these guys solo like an unrepentant tryhard (their HP scales accordingly), but I don’t recommend it. For the first time in FromSoft history, cooperative play doesn’t feel like cheating or trivializing a tough boss—it’s the intended experience, and it’s worth embracing that fact.

One of my favorite aspects of Nightreign is how certain character classes harken back to the unique styles and mechanics of past FromSoft games. Take the Duchess, one of my personal favorites: she evades with a swift double quickstep instead of roll dodges and wields a diabolical ability to replay the last 3 seconds of damage to all nearby enemies, setting her up for filthy riposte-focused builds. If her Lady Maria-esque fashion doesn’t immediately give you Bloodborne, her high mobility and her kit certainly will. Then there’s the Executor, an armor-clad, katana-wielding Dex/Arcane class who specializes in deflecting attacks with his blade—if you ever mourned Sekiro’s lack of multiplayer, this character is a humble apology from Miyazaki to you. And just to shout it out, I loved playing Ironeye—it’s the first time in a FromSoft game where playing an archer felt both fun and totally viable.

The love letter to fans extends to the boss battles too. I can’t even tell you how much I freaked out when my friends and I assembled for a Night 2 boss fight, only to see the health bar for Nameless King pop up at the bottom of my screen—one of the coolest gaming moments from all of 2025, hands down. There are other certified classics for the oldheads out there, like everyone’s favorite psychosexual nightmare from Dark Souls, Gaping Dragon, and The Duke’s Dear Freja from Dark Souls II—a boss whose double-ended design actually makes a lot more sense in co-op. Is it fan service? Absolutely. Am I above that sort of thing when it comes to FromSoftware games? No, I am not.

Nightreign sees FromSoftware taking a well-deserved victory lap after one of the longest running hot streaks in video game developer history. After putting out absolute bangers—as well as top-tier DLCs for said bangers—for the last 15+ years, it makes sense that Miyazaki and team would want to try something smaller in scope, precision-focused on cooperative gameplay (an element present in their games since Demon’s Souls but still hampered by awkward barriers to entry). That’s not to give Nightreign a pass, though. By definition, it’s a bit of a cash grab—most of the art assets, enemies, bosses, and weapons are lifted directly from Elden Ring. I also strongly suspect that Nightreign was, at least in part, a way to financially offset Elden Ring’s extended development time. The thing is, none of that diminishes how much fun it was—the most I had with a multiplayer game in 2025.

I’m someone whose intro to the FromSoft pantheon came via a good—and exceedingly patient—friend who dropped summon sign after summon sign, carrying my hollow ass through all manner of challenge. Eventually, like many in the diehard fanbase—of which I now humbly consider myself a card-carrying member—I got good: I learned to parry, nail dodge timings, and solo bosses. By the time Elden Ring dropped, I saw FromSoft games as purely single-player affairs. In fact, the co-op elements in Elden Ring always felt at odds with the open-world exploration, at least for me. So given my own personal journey, and the fact that I played Elden Ring almost exclusively by myself, a game like Nightreign—where co-op is the sole focus—feels like a homecoming. I’d like to think I don’t need as much carrying as I used to, but I’m not sure if my teammates would agree.

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Top 10 Games of 2024

Posted by defectivepixeltest on

Boy, this list is late this year, huh? Well, first of all, I’d like to completely shirk any personal responsibility by complaining about how 2024 was a year featuring three (yes, 3!) 100+ hour RPGs that I ended up playing through. Kind of like complaining about just how great the weather is in the Bahamas, but alas. It’s not every year you have a backlog like that — actually, I’ve never had a backlog like that. So yeah, it took me a long time to get to most of the stuff I wanted to in order to assemble this list.

2024 was a strange year in that sense. It was a slow-ish year, coming down off the high that was 2023’s release calendar, albeit with some especially heavy hitters. Definitely lopsided for sure, but a year that had some truly incredible stuff that I won’t soon forget.

All that said, let’s get into my personal favorite games of the year.

Real quick, a couple disclaimers –

Quick obligatory notes:

  • This is a ranked Top 10 list with 3 honorable mentions (unranked).
  • Each game features a link to one of my favorite pieces of music from its soundtrack or to a clip of the game. Feel free to listen as you read.
  • I consider the release timing of Early Access games based on when they exit Early Access, or enter V1.0.
  • Remakes (which are becoming even more common these days) can be on my lists, but only if they are substantial enough in that the game is something fundamentally different. Examples of games I counted in 2019 were Pathologic 2 or Resident Evil 2. In 2020, I didn’t consider a game like Demon’s Souls (even though I loved it) because it is mostly a visual overhaul to the 2009 original game. Hopefully that distinction makes sense and isn’t just arbitrary to you.

Pile of Shame (games I didn’t have time to play):

  • Astro Bot
  • Helldivers 2 (I played this one, but not enough to have a fully formed opinion on it – sorry!)
  • Hellblade: Senua’s Saga
  • Factorio: Spae Age

Okay, with that out of the way, on to the list…

Honorable Mentions:

The Outlast Trials – Red Barrels

Hey, that’s my bad, y’all. I was just looking for the little boys’ room.

Let the Trials Begin – Tom Salta

When was the last time you played a mandatory tutorial level for a multiplayer game where you thought to yourself holy shit this is cool? For me, it was when starting The Outlast Trials for the first time. As a friend and I sat down to play together, we groaned at the idea of needing to finish a forced singleplayer level before we could get in a lobby together — that was, until we got into the thick of it. As we progressed through the fucked up house of horrors that kicks off the game, each at different intervals (his game had finished installing before mine), we kept yelling into our mics, our Discord user icons lighting up with each of us trading “holy fucks” back and forth. It was legitimately terrifying, and got us into the Halloween Spirit, big time.

Congratulating a game on a tutorial level might seem like a pretty backhanded compliment, but I’m being totally sincere. The fact that a sequence like that was so good when it didn’t have to be speaks to the level of care the team at Red Barrels has poured into practically every inch of this game. No detail is too small to be obsessed over. Just walk around the game’s elaborate multiplayer lobby, playing games of fully realized prison chess with your co-op partner, or enter a sensory bombardment chamber to participate in a Stroop Test together, breaking your brain while feeling like a lab rat.

Then there’s the core gameplay itself — a multiplayer PvE game with no combat, and very little options for fighting back. Part stealth game, part communal puzzle solving experience, and part group strategizing effort — I haven’t really played anything else like it. Not only that, but this is the rare multiplayer experience that remains scary in spite of everyone clowning around, throwing bottles like idiots and hiding in lockers right before the enemy enters the room. It’s all fun and games, until you’re the one the enemy is chasing around with a electric police baton.

The thing I like the most about the game, however, is its worldbuilding and vibe — The Outlast Trials takes the bits and pieces of lore established by the previous entries in the series and runs hog-wild with it, envisioning a savage version of the early 1960s where the most virulent, dogmatic tactics of anti-communism practiced by the US intelligence agencies were allowed to spin off into the dreaded morass of the private sector. The Murkoff Corporation — the Outlast series’ version of Umbrella Corp — is the kind of shadowy organization Allen Dulles would have been proud of. Imagine an alternate history where MKUltra had spawned an entirely new industry of human experimentation and supernatural research, the CIA had outsourced it to the highest bidder, and all the most extremist targets of Operation Paperclip were flown in to staff the place — and you’ve pretty got the ethos of Murkoff. The Outlast Trials walks a tightrope between conceivable, depraved reality and outlandish, over-the-top evil — the exact position where horror thrives.

The Outlast Trials is a horrifically unique game, hell bent on immersing you in total depravity. Give it a shot if you have some fellow sicko friends who fancy themselves horror aficionados; it’s worth experiencing its hellish world for yourself.

Crow Country – SFB Games

That art style is just *chef’s kiss*.

Fairytale Town – Ockeroid

Crow Country strikes the perfect balance between nostalgic trip down memory lane and invigorating original take on a classic genre. Its retro art style is immediately eye-catching — the low-poly art is impeccable, the CRT shader is so good that it’s like you’ve switched back to component cables — and yet, once you dig deeper, you’ll find it is more than just a pretty pixelated face. Its way of handling the camera is such a good idea that I can’t believe no one has tried it sooner — you can freely rotate it with the right stick, but the angle is so aggressively angled toward a top-down perspective that you still get some of the claustrophobic effect that old-school static camera angles provided. The left analog stick offers more modern movement, while the D-pad gives you access to good old tank controls — you know, for whenever you feel like playing the correct way.

The good ideas don’t stop there: Crow Country takes cues from southern gothic horror for its unique setting — an abandoned amusement park named for its owner, wealthy Atlanta land speculator Edward Crow. Not only are the vibes great — well, spooky — but it turns out that an abandoned amusement park makes for a great survival horror locale — each of the park’s different lands are visually distinct and easily navigable, while the various attractions make for an excellent narrative excuse to pack the place to the brim with intricate and off-the-wall puzzles. And, on top off all of that, the main character, Mara Forest, is everything you want from a horror protagonist — an unplaceable cocktail of wit, humor, eccentricity, and a not-so-clear backstory. Experiencing Crow Country’s wickedly smart puzzles with Mara’s musings to keep you company made for a great little survival horror package.

Indika – Odd-Meter

Indika is a blend of the mundane and the cosmically weird.

Joel – Mike Sabadash

I can all but guarantee, without even knowing who you are, dear reader, that you’ve never played a game quite like Indika. Equal parts experimental genre piece, interactive arthouse film, surreal Soviet-style comedy, and deeply personal crisis of faith, Indika is a fever-dream-with-a-heart-of-gold. You play as Indika herself, a nun in a Russian Orthodox convent who is shunned by her fellow Sisters in Christ, who believe her to be harboring the the voice of the devil. From the jump, everything in Indika’s world seems to be a contradiction. While she laboriously fetches 5 buckets of water from a well, there’s an always-visible point indicator at the top of the screen. After filling all 5 buckets worth of water, an elder nun spitefully pours it all out on the ground, at which point Indika “levels up”, rewarding her to pick a perk from a skill tree that only offers ways to increase her “Repentance”, “Grief”, or “Regret”. In the following scene, as Indika joins the other nuns in the chapel for prayer, she hallucinates a tiny, whimsically sized man, who jumps out of an elder nun’s mouth and begins dancing down the priest’s arms, grooving to what sounds to be late 90s era electronica.

In spite of how bizarre it is, Indika is a relatable story about a person harboring doubts about their faith in God. How can there be a just God when everything around us seems so random and devoid of meaning? The game’s core insight around a loss of faith is one that has stuck with me ever since I played it — Indika suggests that religion isn’t just about what you chose to believe in or philosophical quandaries about whether God does or does not, in fact, love you, but rather it is ultimately about how you see yourself and how you allow the world to see you. A religion that preaches original sin requires you to see yourself, first and foremost, as a sinner. What does a lifetime of thinking this way do to a person’s self-image? And how would it feel to suddenly be liberated from it?

For those interested in indie games with big ideas about life and the world, I can’t recommend Indika enough. It’s best to go into the experience as blind as possible, so I don’t plan on saying too much else — go experience it for yourself.

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