The Best Video Games of 2025 (So Far)

Such is the breathless cadence of the modern video-game-release schedule — players barely get a chance to rest their poor thumbs these days. Sure, January was quiet, providing a welcome opportunity to enjoy some late-2024 gems (most notably Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl). February, on the contrary, was ludicrous, delivering a deluge of life-consuming experiences, from Civilization VII’s grand strategy soap opera to Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’s medieval RPG of beguiling, maddening detail.

The standout early releases of 2025 are those that exude greater focus: a melancholic sci-fi game brought to life through die-rolling chance, the thrill of seeing prehistoric behemoths roam a teeming fantasy realm. Most straightforward of all? A skiing game with no soundtrack but the audible crunch of pristine, compacted snow. Games often promise the world (and more); here, five that deliver an impressive and refreshing clarity of vision.

Monster Hunter Wilds

(PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X)

Scuttling insects, blooming plants, sporing mushrooms, and the biggest apex predators a video game has ever thrown at you. Monster Hunter Wilds is part Mesozoic-ecosystem simulation, part big-game hunting romp. The showdowns with its signature behemoths, including a lightning dragon named Rey Dau, are dynamic, desperate, and thrilling. Then, at the end of each fight, you carve up the fallen foe’s cadaver, plying the resources back into monster-festooned gear. More so than any game in the franchise since it began in 2004, the dissonant elements of Wilds harmonize: Your role as the dutiful protector of teeming environments is emphasized; you’re encouraged to understand ecological ebbs and flows. The resulting game evokes the bombast of Japanese kaiju movies, the wonder of prestige nature documentaries, and sometimes even the brutality of factory farming, all while remaining its own undeniably majestic beast.

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage

(PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X)

Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, and the Cocteau Twins — the references in Lost Records: Bloom & Rage may ooze ’90s underground cool, but this narrative-adventure game is not aloof; it is strikingly sweet and earnest. There are shades of coming-of-age greats like Richard Linklater’s movies and Stand by Me in the small-town, summertime adventure that unfolds. But Lost Records’s strength lies in letting the player subtly shape the narrative, choosing what kind of person the awkward, amateur moviemaker Swann comes to be through dialogue choices, actions, and, crucially, what she chooses to film with her camera. Like a TikTok account presenting a vision of a woodsy Americana past, the beautifully textured world here is inviting. But it’s not sanitized: The ’90s was hardly an idyllic era, especially for teenage girls. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage has the emotional maturity to be honest about what it so clearly loves.

Keep Driving

(PC)

The essence of the road trip is more than a sense of unfettered freedom on miles of asphalt. It is the small rituals that accumulate into something more profound: conversations that veer between banal and cosmic, sustenance on sugary snacks and scalding cups of coffee, pulling into a gas station and filling up not a cent more than your bank balance allows. Keep Driving, which bills itself as a “management RPG,” understands all of this, conjuring a quintessential road-tripping experience from small decisions rather than actual driving (which is nearly all automated). Which hitchhikers will you pick up? What will you play on the car stereo? Crucially, will you call Mom or Dad to bail you out of a sticky situation? Above all, time seems to function differently while chugging through these scrolling parallax landscapes. That’s what this gently poetic game offers even more than money: the time and space to figure things out.

Citizen Sleeper 2

(PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series S/X)

Amid the twinkling stars of a far-distant galaxy, life grinds on. This sequel to a 2022 indie darling casts you as a Sleeper, a robot worker fleeing their gang-boss captor. It has the look and feel of a tabletop board game, shuttling you about locations on a galactic map where there are cyborg misfits to talk to and freelance gigs to pick up. But this is not a staid game; it bristles with life through achingly pretty prose and mechanics that drive home the precarious existence of its itinerant protagonist. With every heart-in-mouth die roll, and only a certain number of turns to play with until your pursuer finds you, this is a brilliantly tense sci-fi RPG. Yet failure of a particular task or major story beat does not spell game over but thrusts you into what could be an even more stressful situation. Out of the frying pan and into the cosmic abyss.

Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders

(PC, Xbox Series S/X)

Screenshots don’t do Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders justice. You have to see this skiing game in motion to understand its wondrous summoning of alpine landscapes: light that shifts subtly as the sun moves behind clouds, the vision-obstructing swirl of a heavy blizzard, the way your skis cut deeply into freshly fallen snow. Perhaps surprisingly, this stunningly rendered scenery is the site of a most conventional sports game, one of time trials, gear-unlocks, and bone-breaking crashes. But what might have been a brash extreme-sports experience in the hands of another developer is one of almost zenlike serenity in the hands of Berlin studio Megagon Industries. It is just you, the mountain, and whistling, icy wind.