#349: Games Of The Year 2025

To celebrate the most magical/annoying time of year (delete as appropriate), for a limited time you can get 50% off your first three months as a paid Hit Points subscriber. That's a good deal I reckon! And the first of its kind for a very long time. You'll find reminders of it sprinkled judiciously throughout today's edition.)

It’s been a strange old year for games at Hit Points Towers. Most of the consensus big bangers have either left me cold, or not quite got their hooks into me. A number of the games I was most excited to play have turned out to not quite have the stuff. I have played and enjoyed a great many games in 2025, but from my perspective it’s been a year of lots of 8s – which is, to be clear, A Good Thing, unless or until you have to sit down and make a list of them for 10,000 people to read and get cross about. This year’s top five has, as such, been the hardest I’ve had to put together since I started this humble newsletter in 2021. Quite annoying honestly, but never mind, I’ve done it now. Presenting: The Hit Points Games Of The Year 2025!

5. Dispatch (PC, PS5)

If you’d told me in January that, come year’s end, a Telltale-style adventure about a bunch of misfit superheroes would be on this list, I’d have laughed you out of the room. Everyone got bored to tears of the Telltale formula ten years ago, when the studio milked it, and eventually itself, to death. The only thing more boring than that, in the media landscape of space year 2025? Superheroes. 

The weird thing about Dispatch is that, if I stop and think about it too deeply, I don’t think I like it very much. The story is just fine, its humour skewing a little edgy-online-young-person, and most of its characters are awful bellends. Its central gameplay conceit, a management sim in which you send a useless and uppity band of sorta-reformed supervillains out around the city to resolve emergencies, is stressful, hard to parse, and a bit annoying. There’s an occasional hacking minigame and the less we say about that the better. I can totally understand why Edge just slapped a 5 on Dispatch. And yet, I absolutely adored it.

The secret, I think, is how snappy it all is. It’s brilliantly performed, with Hollywood imports Aaron Paul and Jeffrey Wright wonderfully supported by the Critical Role crew. But what sets Dispatch apart its understanding that, in a game that’s pretty much all about story, performance is everything. Its more traditional gamelike components are built around the narrative, rather than getting in its way. When you’re given a dialogue choice, it pops up while the other character is still speaking; you have to make your selection in time for the protagonist’s reply or the game will pick one for you, because it knows that pacing is king. There’s no waiting around — no pregnant pauses while the game processes your input, or the next line or scene loads in. It means that dialogue flows naturally, and jokes land as they should. The timing throughout is pretty much impeccable, and ensures Dispatch comes closer to this genre’s ultimate goal — a playable TV show — than any game has managed before. Really, really good. 

4. Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor (PC, Xbox)

I thought I was over the whole Vampire Survivors thing. While the survivorlike has become a genre in its own right over the last few years, none of its leading lights have really drawn my eye; I felt VS perfected its own formula at the first attempt, and frankly I got bored of that formula quite quickly. It’s all a bit too passive in the hands: that miserably slow early game, then the steady scale up to a screen-filling, swarming crescendo that you’ll only be able to keep pace with if the level-up RNG falls your way, and you’ve memorised the arcane numberwang of its loot evolutions. (That last point is largely why I didn’t click with another of this year’s darlings, Ball X Pit; I just couldn’t be arsed learning all the different evolutions and combinations contained within its sprawling loot pool. I’m sure it’s great, like, once you get the hang of it. But it felt too much like work. Also that whole base-building component was muck. I digress.)

Enter Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, a spin on the Vampire Survivors formula that seems to have been explicitly designed for people like me. While it is, on first inspection, another game about avoiding damage and picking up XP while the game kills stuff for you, it’s a lot more active and involved than a true survivorlike. Butt up against some scenery and your character will start to mine it; with this you can carve paths through rocks and other fauna, craft impromptu routes away from danger, or fashion little kill corridors that funnel the enemy swarm directly into the path of your gun. There are currencies to plunder, spent on upgrades at shops between levels, and materials that unlock permanent stat upgrades between runs. Each stage has a mini-objective — mine this stone, collect these mushrooms — that encourage exploration and reward it with a pleasing burst of gold and XP. Yes, it's a game about avoiding danger and picking up stuff. But there's always something else for you to focus on, somewhere else you should or could be heading. The boring, quiet bits feel faster and busier as a result.

Better yet, it dispenses entirely with the combine-and-evolve loop that typically powers this genre’s combat. You start with a single weapon, acquiring more as you progress through a run, and when you gather enough XP to level up you're offered a choice of upgrades for it: easily understood buffs to damage output, fire rate, reload speed and so on, expressed in the classical percentage style. At milestones on each weapon’s levelling journey, you get a choice of two traits, styled as Overclocks, switching its damage type or tweaking its firing pattern. A weapon’s final Overclock is simply run-defining. A four-way burst rifle now fires in an infinite spiral; a shotgun packs an entire clip’s worth of pellets into a single shot; a flamethrower transforms into a whirling ball of death. Late in a run, when you know victory is inevitable, the screen is simply chaos — and unlike most of this genre you know it’s your own decisions that have got you there, rather than the luck of the gods. Delicious. 

3. Shinobi: The Art Of Vengeance (PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox)

It’s been a terrific year for melee combat. As Hit Points has lamented in the past, fans of good old-fashioned XXXY punching have been sorely underserved in recent years given the rise, and subsequent dominance, of the Soulslike — you can have a game about artfully thwacking stuff, but you’ve also got to have bonfires and corpse runs and all that, oh and the attack buttons are on the triggers now, sorry — but I feel like the balance has been redressed a little in 2025. We’ve had three flippin’ Ninja Gaiden games for a start. Unfortunately, none of them make this list. (I’ll save my NG4 moan for another day, I think. Don’t get me started.) Never mind! The Art Of Vengeance more than makes up for it.

There is much to admire about this stellar new Shinobi. It’s a stunning thing to look at, with gorgeous hand-drawn art, some sumptuous backgrounds (including the prettiest fish market you’ll ever see) and wonderful animations. It’s got some intricate, challenging, and admittedly often very irritating platforming. It’s got great flashy super moves and spectacular boss fights. But for me the magic in this game comes from one single thing: a dash, performable at the end of just about every move in your arsenal, that automatically propels you in the direction of a falling opponent.

One of the greatest frustrations in games like these is the realisation that your combo is over — that you’ve pushed an enemy out of range of a follow-up attack, your last move inflicting so much knockback that they’ll have recovered by the time your animation has finished and you’ve closed the distance. Shinobi says: fuck that. Have a button that fixes it. Have a button that lets you catch up to the bloke you just knocked off a platform so you can get another 15 hits in, floating there above the abyss, before dash-cancelling back to the solid ground you came from. Absolute magic. In an era of hundred-hour open worlds and live-service forever nonsense, how delightful it is to be reminded that sometimes all a game needs is one brilliant, perfectly executed idea. 

2. Split Fiction (PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox)

When I played It Takes Two, developer Hazelight’s previous shot at co-op stardom, my eldest was still getting to grips with ‘proper’ videogame controls. Still finding his thumbs, as it were. He was seven years old, as I recall, and our playthrough was chequered with little moments of frustration, these occasional dexterity spikes that he wasn’t quite ready for. From time to time we’d have to switch controllers in order to progress and it just put a bit of a downer on things. It was a lovely time, don’t get me wrong, but he was probably a bit too young for it. (He was certainly a bit too young for the story. I have never met Josef Fares, but if we ever cross paths I will struggle to resist the temptation to bop him on the nose and say, ‘that was for the bit with the elephant.’)

As such Split Fiction represents quite an evolution. Certainly, obviously, for Hazelight: this is its best game by a distance, a relentless onslaught of cool design ideas on which the studio executes almost perfectly (and in which, to my great relief, no stuffed toys are brutally sacrificed). But it also marks an evolution of the co-op scene at Hit Points Towers. The offspring, now 11, has become every bit his father’s son, coping fusslessly, if not quite flawlessly, with everything Hazelight had to throw at us. And man, it threw a lot. The final hour or so of this game is right up there among the best things I’ve ever played, and far and away the best I’ve ever seen in a co-op setting. A new high-water mark for co-op adventuring that cements Hazelight as one of the best in the business. Keep ‘em coming, you lot, and ideally at speed. The kid’ll be off to university before I know it.

1. Hades II (PC, Switch)

I was both too early to Hades II, and too late for it. I played it for 25 hours last year as soon as it launched in Early Access, seeing everything the game, as it was at the time, had to offer. Then when it reached 1.0 a few months ago, conscious that they’d have changed a bunch of stuff and my skills had likely lapsed during the break, I started a fresh save file. This was, on reflection, a mistake. For one thing, it wasn’t that different to the game I’d played in early access. For another, I slipped back into the mechanical rhythm of the thing very quickly with a minimum of fuss. Most of all, though, it’s because while I admire the way Hades II, like its predecessor, breadcrumbs its progression — every run yielding vital new resources, driving the story on, unlocking new toys and so on — my inner rogue-thing addict just wants all that stuff to be over. I want everything unlocked and at my disposal so I can start chasing bonkers builds, and set about breaking the game in two. 

The wait for that is even longer in Hades II — I’m now at 55 hours, have only just seen the true ending, and am still unlocking things at a steady clip — and for a while I was torn between thinking of this as good sequel-making, and lamenting it as feature creep. There’s so much stuff now. The game has pretty much doubled in size, insisting you split your time between descents into Tartarus to kill Chronos and climbs to Mount Olympus to keep Typhon from Zeus’ palace. There are resources unique to each region — some harvested, others grown from seeds back at base, others still dropped by bosses; your inventory is split across three different screens — that you need to progress. Back at the hub are multiple vendors, upgrade interfaces, and ways to ramp the challenge for even more essential progression materials. It’s a lot. Possibly too much, particularly for someone like me, who plays these kinds of games not for their journeys, but their destinations. 

That I am nonetheless driven to persist is testament to the strength of Hades II’s action game. The Hadeses have many bedfellows, yet in the hands there is nothing quite like them, a flow state in which you elegantly sashay (and frequently clumsily stumble) between high-speed, ultra-kinetic damage-dealing and painstakingly cautious evasion. The weaponry has evolved smartly away from the first game’s genre archetypes, and the new, chargeable Omega moves greatly expand the combat sandbox. Buildcrafting is nuts now, the boons bestowed by the gods less reliant on specific, RNG-powered pickups from other deities, and allowing you to focus much more tightly on one specific part of your arsenal. The delta between the game-breaking runs and the bog-standard ones feels tighter, smoother, better. It’s a masterclass, not only in combat design but in rogue-thing construction and, above all, in sequel-making. Supergiant has never done this before, remember; this is the first time the studio has stayed in the same genre two games in a row, never mind the same series. For a while I worried this was a bit of a risk, perhaps even a mistake. I was, of course, an idiot.

To love Hades II is to love its art, its music, its story and its action. To love its elegant, seemingly infinite progression, and its artfully designed endgame, that insists you make the game steadily harder but lets you decide just what form that difficulty should take. But the thing I love about Hades II the most is the same thing I loved about the first game. It's the Keepsakes: a collection of items bestowed upon you by the various gods, titans and minor deities you meet on your journey. You equip one at the start of a run, and switch it out for another in the rest zone between levels. It guarantees you that you’ll be offered a boon from your chosen god at the earliest possible opportunity, which is manna from fuckin’ heaven for rogue-ish buildcrafting.

I can sit down in Balatro and think, right, I want to do silly Baron/Mime stuff, but whether I’ll actually get to do it is in the lap of the gods. I can start an Ironclad run in Slay The Spire hoping to do some bonkers Exhaust nonsense, but I might go the whole run without seeing a single part of the build’s kit. But here? I can pick a weapon, decide on a playstyle, and pretty much guarantee that two minutes into the run I'll have got my paws on the first part of the rocket that will take me to the moon. Loot targeting is so important in these kinds of games, particularly the way I play them, and particularly when they’re as big and sprawling and filled with potential as Hades II. Every run-based game should have its own version of this system. For now all that matters is that this one does. The game of the year by a country mile, and at this rate it'll be next year's as well. I cannot put it down.

There you go! Thanks so much for reading this year — and to you paid subscribers, thanks so much for the support. Hit Points wishes all of you who celebrate a blissfully merry Christmas, and a deliriously happy New Year.

As I explained to paid folks last week, there are some pretty big changes in the works for the newsletter next year. The short version is, free readers will be seeing a lot more of me in their inbox, and paid folks will be getting some fresh exclusive goodies on top. And with 50% off for a limited time... well, you know. Do the thing!