The Official ReaderGrev Game & Stuff of the Year List 2025

Well after most of my peers published their Best of 2025 lists in the middle of last month — as though they’d been slighted somehow by Decembers 20 through 31 — I spent the year’s waning moments monitoring all channels, storefronts, radio waves, catalogues, lists, charts, manifests, social media platforms, black markets, auctions, points of entry, checkpoints, shipping lanes and so on for the final Great Works of 2025, squeaking in under the wire for consideration for this list. It’s tough being the most scrupulous video game journalist working today, but I’ll always be open to sacrificing my time and energy for you, the reader. That’s the ReaderGrev promise.

The list below doesn’t necessarily represent the best Games & Stuff of 2025. In fact, some of the items below would be tough to recommend unreservedly. Instead, I’ve tried to compile a short selection of the stuff that stuck with me in 2025, pruned of obvious selections that have already been covered elsewhere. (Yes, Taxes by Geese was my most listened to song of 2025. No, I’m not going to subject you to a blurb about it.)

Without further ado…

Wildgate

In trying to sell friends of mine on Wildgate (which I do often; the game is free on the Epic Games Store through Jan. 8, by the way) I have described it as Sea of Thieves in space, though it might be more accurate to call it a PvTvPvE game: Player versus Team versus Player versus Environment. I have never been able to gather a four-stack to play Wildgate, so my buddy Eric and I have had to suffer randoms rounding out our team in virtually every game we’ve played: guys who pilot the ship along inscrutable vectors or float off to do their own thing as we’re being boarded. Even still, under these imperfect conditions, I’ve had a lot of fun playing Wildgate.

Let me try my hand at a real pitch: Wildgate is about managing a queue of fires and spinning plates, sort of in the style of Overcooked, as your crew competes against hostile ships to capture an artifact (read: the flag) and fly it through the wildgate (read: the zone where you bring the flag to score; okay, it’s just one-flag CTF unfolding in slow motion). Ships are heavy and cumbersome. You’re not dogfighting so much as steering zeppelins so your turrets are facing the enemy. The game plays slowly until it doesn’t. Points of interest dotting the environment contain loot that’ll make your ship or crew faster and stronger, and you can board enemy ships with an eye to disable its shields or send it on a collision course with an asteroid belt or steal loot or kill other players. Other players will be trying to do the same to you.

I’ve run the artifact into the wildgate without incident maybe once. In most matches, the final minutes devolve into brutal all-cannons-firing brawls between multiple ships. That’s not to say there’s no room for creative problem solving. Once, a player using an invisibility cloak followed my team into the point of interest where we completed a challenge to reveal the artifact, then stole it right from under our noses after we did all the heavy lifting. On balance, more matches result in an interesting outcome than not.

The game is great fun. The devs are still publishing updates, and the communication around them has been world class. I hope more people give Wildgate a shot.

The Legend of Ochi

The Legend of Ochi is, in the most literal sense of the phrase, a “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore” type of movie. It is the sort of movie I might have dreamt up if, as a kid, I was suddenly gifted a ton of money to spin up a production. In the best ways possible, this is a very George Lucas movie.

The story is a little thin (more generously, it’s a tale for all ages) but does it really matter? The movie’s charm hinges on its in-your-face craftfulness — puppetry, performers in ape suits, overstuffed sets and matte paintings — and it is faultless on those terms. The creatures steal the show, but there’s a brief sequence in Emily Watson’s character’s basement, a warren of maps and diagrams, misplaced notes, vials and tools, that is so meticulously crafted that I wanted to shake the set designers’ hands. If you’re a The Dark Crystal kid, or if you know the names of the background monsters in Jabba’s palace (Gamorrean guard hive, snouts up!) you’ll want to check this one out.

Also: My fiancée and I spent most of the movie’s runtime turning to each other whenever baby Ochi did something cute and whispering “It’s Milly” because it reminded us so much of our dog. If you have a four-legged pet you will probably also delight in baby Ochi.

This profile of musician Dave Longstreth in The New Yorker

If you don’t know Dirty Projectors, you probably know Dave Longstreth as the guy who wrote the organ bridge of Rihanna, Kanye and Paul McCartney’s “FourFiveSeconds” (or, you do now; you can hear him, pitch-shifted, harmonizing after Rihanna sings “But I just can’t apologize”). In 2025, Longstreth released the album Song of the Earth, a climate lament backed by an orchestral collective (I really like this record, but also acknowledge that it is kind of impossible to recommend; one of the songs is a verbatim recitation of the first few paragraphs of journalist David Wallace-Wells’ climate change polemic The Uninhabitable Earth) and the press cycle included a shockingly unguarded profile of the musician in The New Yorker: Dirty Projectors Creates a Symphony for a Burning World. I say “unguarded” because the piece includes more than a handful of Longstreth’s former collaborators and friends reflecting openly on his prickly and demanding personality, and also because Longstreth cries (!) several times (!!!) in front of Anna Wiener, the story’s author.

Here’s what a named friend (!) of Longstreth’s — presumably offered up by Longstreth and his reps to The New Yorker as a character witness — told the magazine: “If you had his admiration, it could launch a thousand ships. … But he also had the capacity to lethally wound people — to injure people in a deep, deep place. If we were to try to connect it to the artistry, I would say he really feels the full range of emotions. Some of his songs are exquisitely beautiful. It’s very plaintive, and it gets excruciating.”

Cards on the table: I think Longstreth is a genius, and I’ve admired him for years. My fascination with him began with a self-titled record he put out in 2017, a devastating and often cringe inducing breakup album that he wrote behind the back of his former girlfriend/bandmate, the release of which effectively blew up the band. I have been waiting for the reckoning ever since, and this profile serves it up.

“It was horrible,” Longstreth said. “At the time, I felt misunderstood. But it was näive and incurious of me, building these emotional worlds in song, not to imagine the actual emotional worlds of other people. Particularly the ones I love.”

“I got confused about the border between art and life,” he added.

Longstreth ultimately comes off as a neurotic and extremely weird guy, which is not really the norm for glossy big-picture profiles of musicians coinciding with album releases, which is also why I love this piece so much. If you’re interested in his 2025 output, the closing salvos of tracks seven and eight of Song of the Earth, “Opposable Thumb” and “More Mania,” are probably my favorite musical turns of phrase in recent memory. He also wrote “Through the Long and Lonely Night” for The Legend of Ochi, which is probably his most straightforwardly beautiful and song-y work in years.

Blue Prince

Enough has been said about Blue Prince already but I just want to thank the developers for making a game that (mostly) kept me off of Google as I played. I experience too many moments these days where I just think “I have no clue how to advance ABC objective in XYZ game.” Arc Raiders, the next game on this list, is a great example of this. Baldur’s Gate 3 was too. I’ve seen the traffic that goes to guides online. I know this isn’t just a me problem.

There were, of course, Blue Prince guides online, and I consulted more than one. But for a meaningful early stretch of hours I really committed to the idea — made obvious in-game but also spread by the title’s early evangelists on social media — that the answers would reveal themselves to me on-screen if I just kept playing. And mostly, they did! The rare occasions in which I turned to the internet were largely validated after the fact by the feeling that whatever the answer was, I wouldn’t have figured it out independently (maybe I just didn’t know some European turn of phrase, for example).

I don’t know that there’s a fix for this, but games do not often have ways to respond to confusion or reward lateral thinking, which often results in weird dead ends that necessitate looking up next steps. In that way, Blue Prince felt quite different. Confusion does not block progress. You can work to overcome it.

Arc Raiders

The historians, anthropologists, ethicists and jurists of the future will no doubt wonder how it was permitted for game developers to loose massive social experiments on the general population — and ARC Raiders will merit a particularly close look.

I am an avowed yapper, so I’ve spent a lot of time in ARC trying to talk down other raiders or negotiate a clean exit out of a nasty situation. This, to me, is the stuff of ARC Raiders. I am not good at the game on its own terms. I’m a bad shot and a worse decision-maker under pressure. I once dove, with an unthinking Looney-Tunes like verve, into a dark cellar from which just moments before another player had emerged; my friends and I swiss cheesed him. When I dropped in, his teammates were waiting for me, and promptly avenged their ally. (I got an earful, concurrently, from my own friends.)

I’m better at playing the fiction of ARC Raiders, role-playing (and earnestly feeling) the tensions inherent to the extraction genre: I want to get in, sneak around, get stuff, and get out. I am abundantly sensitive to sounds I can’t place. I crouch-walk a lot. I announce myself before I enter buildings or if I see another player from afar: “Hey, I’m here, I’m peaceful. Let’s be cool.” I play as though the apocalypse is a High Trust environment, and I complain happily when that trust is violated because I know that though I was naive, I was in the right: We could have all made it out unharmed!

THE COUNT by Frog

2025 was the year of Geese, but won’t you spare a thought for Frog?

Imagine if your buddy from high school — you know the one: he’d get high at parties and freestyle, semi-convincingly, to the delight of the people around him (surely we all had one of these) — never left town, retreating instead to a near-monastic life to hone his craft, and you found him a decade-plus later performing delightful observational verse — alternatively horny and weepy and boastful — about the lives of the townspeople like some sort of kindly musical Marty Mauser, and you might understand the appeal of THE COUNT.

THE COUNT probably isn’t even Frog’s best album this year (1000 Variations on the Same Song is more, um, feature complete) but its unhurried, unfinished quality works in its favor, giving it sharper edges and helping it land blunter, heavier, hairier hits. A straightforward description of the album — it sounds like a couple guys huffing their own fumes in a basement practice space with a piano and a drum kit — makes for a tough sell, but the songs are above all self-aware (“Girl, they can't afford me / I'm pushing forty,” songwriter Daniel Bateman rhymes, clearly off the cuff, at one point; “Places, people, take your seats, folks / A man's about to whine about things lost in time,” he sings elsewhere). People talk a lot about bad-good media, something that’s so awful it swings around to being fun, but THE COUNT is somehow the exact opposite: a stroke of genius that might not sound the part at first.

Drop Duchy

I don’t know how to recommend Drop Duchy other than to say that in playing it, I felt like I was microdosing Balatro — the lesser intensity being a welcome relief and not a watering down.

Drop Duchy is a Tetris-like deck builder with rock-paper-scissors combat mechanics. The tiles you place on the board correspond to tracts of land. If you have a Castle tile (I’m making up tiles here for the sake of simplicity) in your deck, the rules of that tile might dictate that you gain one swordsman for every adjacent Forest tile, incentivizing you to build your Tetris board to maximize the benefits of the Castle tile. You’re also often placing Enemy tiles, which you can sabotage by ignoring the conditions that would boost those tiles. Once the board is complete, your unit counts are tallied up against the enemy’s.

Balatro had an inescapable gravitational pull. One more run. One more run. There’s something about Drop Duchy (maybe it’s the music, maybe it’s the art style, maybe it’s the slower pace) that subverts that feeling entirely. I think all of my hours playing Drop Duchy were well spent and intentional, committed knowingly and without losing my mooring in time. Somehow, that didn’t hamper my enjoyment of its puzzles.

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