It’s a difficult time to create video games. Funding opportunities have dried up. Years of poor decisions and overspending have inspired countless layoffs, and a shrinking jobs market. Audiences have much less cash to splash for a variety of factors, including those aforementioned job losses. Despite this, talented developers have found ways to make it work. Brilliant video games are still releasing.
In the first half of 2025, we’ve already seen some absolutely stunning video games. Titles that have reinvented whole genres, and reimagined how players interact with them. Titles that introduce magical and devastating new worlds. We’ve seen bright and brilliant sequels brimming with fresh ideas. We’ve also seen plenty of original tales, inviting players on fresh, imaginative journeys.
What’s most clear in this spread is that video games persist. Regardless of global events, or widespread hardship, there will always be room for new, creative storytelling. We should always take the time to acknowledge the efforts of developers, and how they’ve provided such rich, compelling means of escape, indulgence, and adventure.
Read: Hideo Kojima and George Miller on the power of video games and cinema
Here’s the best video games of 2025 so far, as chosen by the ScreenHub team.
Table of Contents
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 stunned when it launched in April 2025. While the title had been flying on the radar, thanks to various appearances in video games showcases, and a starry cast, nobody expect it to make such an impact. With a smaller crew behind the scenes, Sandfall Interactive aimed to create a turn-based role-playing game with a dazzling story, and a romantic lens.
The studio certainly achieved this, with the game arriving with one of the most beautiful, compelling, and heartbreaking narratives of the year. Paired with excellent voice acting performances and strong, snappy combat, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 easily became one of the best video games of the year.
Blue Prince
Anyone who loves to test their mental muscles in video games was playing Blue Prince in April 2025. This first-person adventure is a fantastic little puzzle box, complete with brain-melting mysteries and ever-shifting clues. As you travel, you’ll find yourself roaming through increasingly complex corridors, trying to figure out solutions to ever more obtuse puzzles.
It’s labyrinthine in approach, forcing your mind into knots as you conquer each new room, and rove towards the heart of the game’s central mystery. If you’re looking to test yourself, you can’t do much better than this novel, mind-worm-inducing game.
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a sweeping fantasy adventure that takes everything from the original Fantasy Life and makes it bigger, better, and more interesting. Here, you’re an adventurer stranded in a strange village, charting various time streams to solve an ancient mystery, and eventually make your way home. But this game isn’t only a fantasy adventure. Several hours in, you unlock an Animal Crossing-like villager management system. In each new “life” you choose, you also get your own special mini-games, like fishing or mining, or chopping trees.
All the while, you’re also stomping through an overarching story-based quest filled with cool missions, with these taking you from one side of time, to another. Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is vast, and there’s so much to love about it.
Mario Kart World
Mario Kart World absolutely rules, thanks to a wave of tweaks to familiar gameplay that make it feel fresh and moreish by design. No matter which races you’re taking part in, even if you performing under par, this game lets you revel in the feeling of going fast.
Read: Mario Kart World review: a familiar formula made fresh
Lush visuals also elevate each race, allowing you to chart space stations, raceways, deserts, fields, galleons, and beyond. It’s a wild world out there, and you can explore it to your heart’s content, whether racing, roaming, or simply gazing at stars.
South of Midnight
South of Midnight is such a richly textured game, in visuals, subject matter, and gameplay. It’s the sort of game that feels incredibly rare in the modern world of gaming – one with a clear and precise vision, buoyed by a team of talented creatives trusted to see the story through. In each chapter, as you roam a magical world, you meet a menagerie of cool, compelling beasties, all wrapped up in their own troubles, with their own secrets.
In South of Midnight, you’re constantly having your eyes opened to the traumas facing these creatures, and to the notion that pain makes monsters of us all. But with deft writing and careful performances, the game balances its darker notes with a real sense of hope for the future.
Promise Mascot Agency
Promise Mascot Agency is one of the weirdest video games of 2025, but also one of the absolute best. In this game, you are a disgraced yakuza who is exiled to a mysterious, semi-abandoned town filled with a bunch of anthropomorphic creatures who fulfil the role of ‘mascots.’ To restore your honour, and the honour of your family name, you must corral these mascots into performing special duties, while also fixing the problems facing your new home.
That includes cleaning up the trash littering roads, expelling evil spirits, and overturning the rule of a corrupt mayor who keeps the town forgotten and in the dumps. Beyond being incredibly funny and kind-hearted, Promise Mascot Agency is also surprisingly moreish, with brain-tickling busywork keeping you roaming around town, and plowing through an absurd, delightful plot.
Monster Hunter Wilds
Monster Hunter Wilds is yet another brilliant game in the long-running Monster Hunter series, brimming with bright new ideas and formula tweaks to make it compelling for new and returning audiences alike. Where previously, the franchise was seen as lightly inaccessible for newcomers, Capcom has continued to push this game forward in the mainstream, with the introduction of new combat styles, new weapons, and a larger, more diverse world.
Here, you can wander dusty plains in search of beasts, and spend ample time marvelling at the scenery, as lightning clashes overhead, storms kick up, and the world gets darker. Monsters will also adapt to these changes, making hunts more exciting, and more difficult. It’s all about adaptation, and that’s what makes Monster Hunter Wilds so engaging.
Avowed
Avowed arrived early in 2025, as a major video games blockbuster with lots of hope riding on its shoulders. While folks who wanted this to be the next Skyrim may have been disappointed by a smaller scope, that allowed Avowed to be a tighter, more focussed experience, with a sweeping story guiding players through a magical world of high tension. It was certainly a favourite for the ScreenHub team, with a combination of layered companions and diverse combat options allowing for a wonderful, whimsical journey.
For Pillars of Eternity fans, it offered plenty of new lore to indulge in. For first time visitors to Eora, it was a colourful journey, regardless. Obsidian Entertainment remains a core leader in the RPG space, and the studio’s prowess was well on show in this game.
Split Fiction
Split Fiction is one of the best video games of 2025 so far, for very simple reasons: it’s constantly surprising, and consistently magical. In this co-op adventure, you play as two rival writers – one likes fantasy, and one likes sci-fi – who are imprisoned in a machine that turns their thoughts and ideas into virtual reality. Mashing up their boldest ideas, the machine takes two players on a wild and breakneck journey through a variety of video game worlds, each defined by their own novel gameplay ideas.
One moment in Split Fiction, you’re hurtling through space and attempting to take down evil robots with junk. In another moment, you’re charting a course through a watery jungle as an otter-like creature. In each new level, Split Fiction throws some new idea at you, to the point where it’s wonderfully overwhelming. It’s an entirely novel experience, and one that really brings you closer together with your gaming companion.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
After a few years of treading water, the Assassin’s Creed franchise returned with aplomb in 2025. Shadows was transformative. In Naoe and Yasuke, the series had two new, very strong protagonists, both of whom had their own unique playing styles, and reasons to invest in their stories. For years, fans had begged Ubisoft to visit Japan in a mainline AC game, and the studio certainly delivered with this adventure.
Japan serves as a lush background for the tale of Shadows, elevating sleek action and stealth tactics, as well as its historic tale of vengeance. This game is beautiful in every aspect, and brims with a bounty of fresh ideas that have helped to revive the excitement around the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
