Culture and opinion writer Carolyn Petit’s year-end selection—her Top 5 Games of 2025—reads less like a traditional countdown and more like a thoughtful argument about craft, context, and the ongoing tug-of-war between accessibility and integrity. In a year crowded with blockbusters and quick exits, Petit uses her platform to ask not just what games are fun, but what they choose to challenge, and what they leave behind in the process of appealing to the broadest possible audience.
A central through-line runs through her picks and her framing of game design itself: the best work of the year, she argues, isn’t the one that feels engineered to satisfy every possible player. It’s the one that resists the impulse to flatly optimize for mass appeal, even when that appeal would be convenient or commercially tidy. This line of thinking gained particular resonance for Petit after a candid moment with Hideo Kojima, recounted by musician Woodkid in a June Rolling Stone interview. Kojima reportedly told testers that a game’s results were “too good” and that popularity could signal a problem: if everyone likes it, maybe it’s mainstream, conventional, pre-digested for mass consumption. Petit has since kept that idea close, using it as a reminder that genuine designers balance polish with edges, friction with discovery, and ambition with restraint.
That tension—between a game that is accessible and one that asks something of the player—anchors Petit’s list. She writes that this year she played fewer games than in some years, not because nothing was compelling, but because she wanted to spend more time reading, watching, and connecting with people she cares about. The result is a top five that prioritizes distinctive voices, idiosyncratic worlds, and moments that feel earned rather than earned-for-the-market. The list includes two honorable mentions that beside their own merits, illuminate the broader conversation about where risk remains possible in a AAA-dominated landscape. The two honorable mentions—Death Stranding 2 and Avowed—offer a useful contrast to the core five, underscoring Petit’s insistence on integrity, texture, and a sense of risk.
Honorable Mention: Death Stranding 2 Death Stranding 2 occupies a curious position in Petit’s reflection. The sequel, she notes, leans toward more conventional combat and moves away from the environmental friction that made the first game’s connective tissue so distinctive. It’s a reminder that Kojima, even at his most audacious, can stumble into familiar AAA rhythms. Still, Petit finds value in certain discoveries and moments—such as a hot spring that doubles as travel, a world-aware twist on transportation rather than a flat, menu-based system, and a climactic reveal that feels exuberant and unafraid to take a bold risk. The piece also nods to a broader industry conversation about gender representation in Kojima’s work, highlighting how even a game with moments of audacity can invite critique.
Honorable Mention: Avowed Obsidian’s first-person fantasy RPG lands in Petit’s notes as a surprisingly distinctive mid-budget adventure. Evoking the world of Morrowind rather than the more conventional swords-and-sorcery path, Avowed rewards exploration and choice, presenting meaningful consequences that unfold in ways that feel significant within the game’s own budget and scope. Petit emphasizes that the game’s value lies in how it can tell large stories and pose big questions without overstretching its reach. It’s a reminder that a well-told, mid-range project can still feel ambitious and consequential.
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Absolum Petit’s fifth pick is a deft reapplication of Guard Crush’s genre craft into a fantasy beat ’em up with roguelike elements. Absolum builds on the studio’s strengths—tight fundamentals, accessible yet nuanced combat, and a world that breathes with a distinct personality—while layering in enough randomness and hidden secrets to reward repeated runs. The four playable characters are not merely different skins; each brings a distinct voice to subplots and boss encounters, with an art style that feels like a lush fantasy cartoon from another era. The allure lies not just in combat feedback but in world-building that remains lively across dozens of cycles, a testament to how a strong roguelike framework can illuminate a beat ’em up’s pacing and risk. Petit praises the game’s willingness to push beyond formula while still delivering the satisfying, clobbering action fans expect from the genre.
Despelote Fourth on the list is Despelote, a slice-of-life title centered on a young Ecuadorian boy named Julián during the country’s 2002 World Cup qualifying weeks. Soccer isn’t a backdrop here; it seeps into every moment of life—dinners, family conversations, school recess, and late-night reflections. The game’s realism is balanced by surreal touches that anchor its atmosphere, making a world where the sport feels inseparable from daily existence. Petit argues that Despelote’s specificity resonates more deeply than generic relatability, offering a storytelling approach that foregrounds lived experience and communal memory. The climactic moment, described in the piece as powerful enough to make the player cheer in a real-world room, demonstrates how a small, intimate story can carry a broader emotional weight and connect players to a culture not their own.
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Terminator 2D: No Fate No Fate is, for Petit, one of the year’s pure arcade joys—a throwback that nonetheless gleams with modern precision. The game prizes a tight loop: a high-skill, run-and-gun tempo that rewards chaining through stages with a growing multiplier, even as the difficulty scales with smarter enemy placement and behaviors on tougher modes. Short in duration but long on energy, the game channels Contra III-level pacing while maintaining a distinct 2020s sensibility in its stage design, pixel artistry, and control fidelity. Petit argues that the game’s length is purposeful, with a design intent that respects players’ time while inviting deeper practice and mastery. It’s a standout example of how a well-tuned arcade experience can feel contemporary without losing the essential thrill of its lineage.
Blippo+ Second place belongs to Blippo+, a sprawling love letter to television as a cultural connective tissue. The game blends a mosaic of programs—game shows, talk shows, cooking segments, and news programs—into a cohesive, affectionate aesthetic that evokes the warm familiarity of vintage PBS programming. Beyond its surface charm, Petit frames Blippo+ as a narrative exploration of a culture on the brink of change, suggesting that a better world might be visible through media that can still feel intimate and human, even as it contends with larger societal shifts. The experience, she notes, recaptures that sense of stumbling onto something delightful while navigating a world that feels simultaneously familiar and strange, a testament to how games can capture cultural memory with genuine warmth and curiosity.
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Shadow Labyrinth At the top of Petit’s list sits Shadow Labyrinth, a game that provokes a long memory and a long shrug of wonder. Inspired by Bandai Namco’s archive of icons, the game opens with a rainy-city image of a gamer identity stepping into a world that seems to conjure a deeper history of games and imagination. The opening sequence—an invitation to merge the player’s sense of self with the character’s journey—sets the tone for a title that relentlessly invites discovery over prescriptive paths. Shadow Labyrinth resists the urge to “explain everything” and instead grants players the space to stumble, reflect, and uneasily piece together a coherent narrative from their own experiences. Petit admires how the game treats its legacy as a living dialogue rather than a fixed canon, and she mines that approach to create a world that feels both immediate and strange, a place where Pac-Man’s earliest incarnations echo through a contemporary, boundary-pushing fantasy.
The result is a game landscape that remains unfixed, where designers don’t intrude with excessive handholding and players must improvise and interpret. Shadow Labyrinth’s approach—world-building that doesn’t sacrifice clarity for mystery, and mechanics that feel natural rather than forced—reflects Petit’s larger point about integrity in design: players deserve world-building that invites genuine curiosity, not polished surface where exploration is only skin-deep. The game’s willingness to foreground guesswork, strange references, and an homage-laden but fully original world makes it, for Petit, the year’s most compelling reminder that games can still feel like a frontier rather than a museum piece.
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Closing thoughts Petit’s Top 5, with its two honorable mentions, isn’t a proclamation that risk is the only measure of value in 2025. It is a case for work that asks players to linger, to interpret, to question, and to feel. It asks developers to resist the impulse to sanitize experience in favor of universal payloads and instead to lean into specificity, texture, and the kind of friction that yields memorable moments rather than disposable entertainments. In an era when “mainstream” can describe both an algorithm and a mood, Petit’s selections remind readers that the most lasting games are those that resist calibration for mass taste, choosing instead to inhabit a particular world with remarkable honesty.