Ars Technica’s Top 20 video games of 2025
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Assassin's Creed Shadows, the first one on the list, is now at -50% on Steam (not at GOG at all). Probably many of the others too.
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Everyone is scared to recommend it now because of the whole AI debacle. It's a shame.
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The what? Anyone with a brain can look at the game and see that it's human-generated. The only AI I've seen in it was the enemy AI, and that's basically just simple scripting.
It's a great game. The only explanation I can see for it not to be on this list is that no one at ars has played it.
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Ghost of Yotei was my personal GoTY, but there’s no question that C33 was one of the most impressive things I’ve experienced, gaming wise, ever. Not being on the list is kinda wild! C’est la vie
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Curse you! Like my Steam library needed more games I may never play!
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Maybe it doesn't interest them or they just haven't played it.
EXP33 didn't interest me either. Even when a game is massively popular, there's still people who don't care about it.
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The anti-AI crowd trying to make an example out of Sandfall for using AI, a studio that explicitly decided they did not like AI and wouldn't be using it, over a game that the creators clearly poured their hearts and souls into, is a perfect illustration of the thought and nuance that goes into online outrage.
The contrast between the discourse and the actual situation is very striking.
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Expedition 33 was shockingly good. The game world was complete and the music was the best I have heard in years
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The only one on that list that I liked is DOOM: The Dark Ages, yet I wouldn't count it among my personal favourites. I didn't play a lot of games to begin with, but my personal favourites this year are Dispatch and The Alters.
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Foundation is my GOTY (of games fully released this year). Have had lots of fun with it. Of the games on the list I want to play Avowed, but I want to finish playing Pillars of Eternity II first which will happen any year now. 
I should also finish Outer Worlds so I can play the sequel ...
I should also finish Outer Worlds so I can play the sequel ...
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I love seeing these end-of-year lists across the Internet. I usually find at least one game of interest that I have never heard of.
I am not yucking anyone's yum, but I wish I was at least somewhat interested in fantasy and medieval settings. If I see leather/chain mail/plate armor or elfin ears or a sword in the screen shot, or if the title has "king" or "knight" or "dragon" in it, I am instantly disinterested and skip to the next game. I don't know if sci-fi settings are not made as much, or are not as high quality, or if they just tend to not make these lists anywhere.
Old man rant over.
edit: fixed typo
I am not yucking anyone's yum, but I wish I was at least somewhat interested in fantasy and medieval settings. If I see leather/chain mail/plate armor or elfin ears or a sword in the screen shot, or if the title has "king" or "knight" or "dragon" in it, I am instantly disinterested and skip to the next game. I don't know if sci-fi settings are not made as much, or are not as high quality, or if they just tend to not make these lists anywhere.
Old man rant over.
edit: fixed typo
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I haven't played it either.
Yet It's probably massively popular for a reason. Not including it is weird.
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Blue Prince looks interesting. I might eventually get the Assassin's Creed listed here. Aside from that, this list makes me realize what an outlier I am in gaming. Started with an Atari 2600 way back when they first came out (thanks mom and dad for buying that for my older sister and me) to a C64, a couple Amigas, then PC gaming but this list has very little that gets my attention. I don't do all driving and racing sims, I like VR and games like the original Monkey Island series and have way too many hours playing The Sims games with my wife.
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Actually their most recent changes weren't thought out too well as they try to fix the age transition mess to the point that the game is no longer playable at the higher levels.
Here's an example. If you're in the antiquity age and one of your immediate neighbors doesn't like you. They forego technology advancement and simply keep building the most basic army units. If they attack in that age, your more advanced units can deal with them. But if they delay until the start of the exploration era, they get an automatic upgrade and releveling. When they invariably attack at the start of the new era you're swarmed by a massive army of units equivalent to yours but with the extra AI buffs and you simply get overrun. Not very fun.
They used to limit the number of units that could be carried over from the earlier age to prevent this but removed the limit without thinking about the consequences. Simply the Ages system wasn't well thought out and isn't really fixable as it is a basic component of the game.
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If you enjoy puzzles in video games, you should 100% give Blue Prince a shot. First puzzle game I’ve played since the Myst days where I kept a journal of notes (the game even recommends doing so at one point).
Solving the mysteries of that house is ridiculously satisfying to me as a puzzle lover.
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That minesweeper game seems like an updated version of Mamono Sweeper, with monsters, hp, leveling, and stuff. https://hojamaka.com/games/mamono_sweeper
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I’m glad Avowed is (finally?) getting the recognition it deserves. Obsidian had an absolutely stellar year; their best since 2010 in my opinion.
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shadedmagus
Ars Praefectus
I have played Expedition 33, and it is an amazing work of art. To not be on this list is a very surprising disappointment.
On the topic of the "controversy" - I understand that people hate what LLM AI is, and I'm not fond of it considering the resources it consumes to work. But both Larian and Sandfall were using it in the most proper way possible: as a tool to generate placeholder resources or pre-concept art while their artists and developers make the actual assets and design happen. This "controversy" is a nothingburger, and I'm pretty disgusted that awards were pulled because of it.
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Ars is also just Ars and games are entirely subjective. It’s not the first year they’ve bucked the $yearlyHotGame and it probably won’t be the last.
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FWIW, i tried B.P., but i completely failed to click with it. i couldn't bring myself to care about the story enough to bother solving any but the simplest of the puzzles and after a while, it just seemed like a lot of waiting for the random number generator to give me useful rooms. it's a 100% puzzle game, which i guess is not my thing.
for the record, i also hated Myst (though i did buy my first CD-ROM drive just to play it, back in the day)
YMMV
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Oh wow, really? I thought KCD1 was absolutely brilliant. As a gamer in their 40s, I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate the grounded and mature world of the KCD series. It’s such a breath of fresh air.
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I don’t know how many times this has be mentioned, but games (and entertainment in general) are subjective experiences. This is a staff list of personal favorites for this website, ArsTechnica.
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My favorite games have generally lined up closely with Ars’ favorites over the last 30ish years so it is surprising no one on the team experienced the same awe or had a perpetual tear of joy in their eye like I did while playing E33 this year. Because it was made by a small studio and deliberately went against the gameplay conventions large publishers claimed players would want in 2025, it feels worth including, even if it appears on most other goty lists.
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Ages is the most terrible change ever introduced to the franchise, and it transformed the game into something "not Civilization". The core fans hate it. The mechanics are plastered together with duct tape. The overall experience has become extremely guard railed, to the point where it's hard to win if you don't follow the programmers assumptions almost to the letter. There is no feeling of "agency" in your civilization or it's leader ... because who cares? It will all be soft-reset in just a few more rounds.
Civ releases have been painful in the past. But no prior release has been as disastrous as this one. Some - few - people liked it. That's not "controversial" as much as it's being "out of touch" with the community and fan base.
As of December 2025 this is the actual data available on Steamcharts:
Civilization VI daily players: 46,819
Civilization VII daily players: 9,675
In other words Civ VII has just 20% of the players of it's predecessor at this time. Compared to it's launch in January it has a mere 13,7% of players.
(Source because arsians like facts)
Some more data:
- at launch Civ VII had 84,558 concurrent players
- the player count of Civ VI exceeded the new release after less than two weeks
- player drop from 84,558 to 9,675 is about 80%
- total franchise player loss is about 23,081 over the past year (40% down compared to now)
- sensortower reports an estimated 1,2 million copies of Civ VIII sold on Steam
Converting total sales to peak-concurrent players is hard and obviously Firaxis is not sharing the fiasco openly. However, if the player drop from total sales equals the same 80% as the concurrent peak-player count (which I believe is a reasonable approximation) then a staggering 960,000 customers bought this game AND DUMPED IT; either by getting a refund or by simply never playing it again.
I passed the 2 hour refund threshold myself, on the Founders Edition priced at $140. In itself a crazy price, but after pouring thousands of hours into the franchise over the years, I simply could not imagine it would actually be THIS BAD and also STAY THIS BAD because Firaxis refuses to accept the truth of what they did. Instead they are catering to the 20% of the players who "liked it" (even while there are still many complaints) and doubling down on their design choices. Most frustrating 140 dollars I have ever wasted. Last dollars I will ever give Firaxis.
The fact of the matter is: it's not "controversial" to like the game. It's being out of touch with the wider fan base. I obviously have no grief with players who like it - all power to them. They are lucky and I envy them! But Firaxis should have called this game something else. Like "Civilization Ages" or "Civilization Bordwipe Galore" or "Civilization Half-Baked". It is fair to say that fans are - overwhelmingly - disappointed with this release.
Franchise is 40% down, players overwhelmingly purchased then dumped the new version, and only one in five players are staying around. How the hell management at Firaxis hasn't been literally booted out the door is nothing less than astonishing. No regular worker on a shopfloor could ever screw up like this and keep their job.
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I love Mario Kart World, but the free mode is probably the most boring thing about it for me. I was excited to try it when I read all the World reviews back in the day, but was underwhelmed when I finally scored a Switch 2 and sat down with it. Which is fine. The racing is great and the courses are beautiful and really fun. Worthy successor to an already great MK 8.
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Well, it's mostly Kyle Orland's list of favourites, there's not a single entry by Andrew Cunningham.
Come on Andrew, what's your take on best game on the year?
Edit missing a "not"
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a human online
Seniorius Lurkius
Why does it matter?
It’s been written about in so many other places, been game of the year in so many other places, why would Ars use the space to write about it here? What’s left to say?
Why does every year-end list have to look the same? What’s driving the need for validation that would require them to include something that’s been validated everywhere else?
If they didn’t like it, didn’t play it, or just had some other favorite, why wouldn’t they write about those instead of some bizarre obligation to laud a game that’s already been praised everywhere else?
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As I understand the controversy: they used diffusion models to generate some art nouveau-ish background images that have since been replaced by human made art. Certainly worse than Larian's (completely innocuous) use of image generation for mood/concept boards, but still nothing worthy of the pitchforks. People get entirely too hysterical about perceived threats from "AI".
The worst bit is that Firaxis are so fixated on remixing and changing the original recipe that works. Just build a better Civ V, it's that simple. I can't think of single addition from VI or VII that doesn't in some way detract from the core gameplay that (most) fans want and which was slowly refined through Civ I, II, III, IV, and V... It's weird that they've spent 15 years reinventing the wheel they themselves created, meanwhile keeping a blueprint for the perfect wheel collecting dust on the shelf.
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DDG to the rescue.
https://www.auer-lighting.com/en/products/maxos/
There's more to life than min-maxing. Sometimes you just wish to explore the tech tree.
I don't see the connection between the phrases "Amazon Prime" and "on-time delivery" or is that because of the apocalypse?Ryan Whitwam said:
Someone remembers the hit experience Duke Nukem Forever.Kyle Orland said:
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I get the problem they were trying to solve though -- for me, the thrill of the game play is the early game. Once you hit 1000 AD, or even earlier than that, the tedium really ramps up, too much managing of units, cities, sprawl, etc.
Forcing the era reset to bring things back to a more manageable level seemed like a great idea in theory -- bring some of the excitement back by stripping away a lot of the tediousness. I'm going to have to try it again now that the patch is out and see .. I liked it at first, but then again fell into the same trap of "Ok this is getting boring and tedious now" that I tend to do with Civ games.
Maybe my attention span just isn't what it used to be.
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I actually spent way more time in the open world than I did actual races. I love just roaming around, I find it relaxing. I did the same thing in NFS Most Wanted 2012, which I know is a game that gets a bad rap, but I found it fun simply driving around trying out all the different cars. I like racing games that give you that option.
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