The way I do my personal Game of the Year is based on games I finished in the year, not based on whatever was released. That said this year's winner did come out this year and I don't think it's even close. I'll do a reverse order ranking and talk a little bit about each game.
I only finished 17 games this year, I got really slack in the latter half of the year and ended up playing a few different things rather than focus on one. It really didn't help that I've got sucked into playing some free to play games that have been taking up a bunch of time but at least I've been having fun.
17 AURA Hentai Cards
I really feel like I need to justify myself for even playing this game! I have a friend and it's become a bit of an inside joke to share screenshots of stupid adult games between us. Occassionally me and her will stream them and just laugh at how dumb they are. This is one I actually played the whole way through AND got the multiple endings... Was it worth it? Not really.
This game is a deck builder crossed with a visual novel kinda crossed with a dating sim. Oh there's also some slide puzzles thrown in there for some reason. I'm not sure if there's any AI art used in it (the developers have been accused of it for other things I think) but this is the kind of game I think about when I think "AI slop" and I feel like it's only going to get worse. The writing isn't great but I there's some decent art and there's a girl to suit everyone, from mermaids to slime girls. The story involves a ditzy goddess that overslept and let the world come under demon rule. She shows up and ends up giving you the power to learn the abilities of women you sleep with. You also make them fall in love with you via battles. The main character vows to save the world and marry the goddess - this is where the multiple endings come in, you can either side with the goddess or side with the demon queen at the end of the game. Siding with the demon queen gives you a kinda cool demon lord ending I guess.
The gameplay is pretty basic, you unlock new cards as you progress through the game (by sleeping with women) and you can choose to add them into your deck. I managed to find a two card combination early on from the Christmas DLC that basically broke the game and I just breezed through the whole thing. At least it had some pretty good music.
16 Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast
I already wrote a lot about this game and I don't think my thoughts or feelings have changed since then. The game was fine but overall it didn't feel like a Goblin Slayer game to me.
15 Ghostwire Tokyo
I wrote about this one as well (thought not much really). It's a fun game that has very cool atmosphere and a setting I really liked but it started to drag a bit towards the end. There was also only maybe one good boos fight unfortunately.
14 Evil Tonight
One of my favourite movie genres is Italian Giallo. They usually involve a killer stalking their victims with black gloves and are usually set in something like a fashion or ballet school. Evil Tonight is basically a giallo game which is very cool and something I haven't really seen before. It's a survival horror game with a pixel art style. It had some really nice animations and character portraits, the puzzles weren't overly obscure or difficult and it had some really good pacing. The overall story was pretty basic and it only really had one memorable character. Some of the enemies were real bullet sponges but there were some fun boss fights. It really could have done with a map! It's only 3-4 hours long though so well worth a playthrough.
13 Rondo of Swords
I think I'd like to write a longer review of this game because I find this game really interesting but also very frustrating. It's a strategy role playing game but with a really unique battle system but it has some really obtuse mechanics that could be better explained. I found the game to be pretty hard - it actually took me two playthroughs to finish it because in my first playthrough I got to the final boss but just couldn't beat it (but I liked it enough to play through all over again... several years after the first try). I'd say the final boss could be considered unfair and if you haven't done your playthrough right you're definitely going to be stuck. The game has a very interesting art style for the characters which I really liked.
12 Monster Hunter: Wilds
I love Monster Hunter games. I've been nicknamed the Fashion Hunter by a friend because of my love of grinding to get the right look. I know this looks low down on the list but that's because I only ended up playing the single player story and Monster Hunter just doesn't do single player story very well at all. I had a friend I was going to play multiplayer with but her PC couldn't handle the game so I ended up having to go solo. The game looks and plays fantastic so I'm sure it would have been an easy top five for the year if I had done the multiplater. All I gotta say is the kid in the single player was really annoying and it felt like the game would take away control from you a lot.
11 Metro Quester
This was the last game I finished for the year (I had to rejig the ranking to get this in) and I was pleasantly surprised by how fun it was. It's kind of a roguelike but not quite. It has a real early PC gaming aesthetic to it that I really liked. The game takes place in a vast underground dungeon that you have to explore. Gameplay is broken up by days based on how much special fuel you have - this fuel slowly drains as you move and through some actions in battle. You also have to collect a certain about of food each week or risk getting a debuff. At first this gave me some anxiety but I never came close to not having enough food. The gameplay systems are fairly simple but there is some depth in the combat as you juggle skill combinations and resources. It felt like the perfect handheld game as you could just pick it up, play a few days and then put it back down.
10 Atomfall
I really enjoyed how British this game was. Atomfall is an open world game that felt dense rather than some sprawling sparse map. The environments were colourful and beautiful. There was nature to explore. It felt like a game where choices you make actually matter. I don't know how many endings there are but it felt like there were a variety of ways to deal with the situation you're in (I don't want to spoil any of the story). The area had a variety of different characters and factions all with their own interests, motivations and goals which I think really adds to its replayability. It also didn't overstay its welcome and kept up a good pace. One disappointing thing was that the combat felt a little undercooked. There wasn't a lot of variety to the weapons and melee combat felt very underwhelming.
9 Pokemon Legends: Z-A
I haven't really played a mainline Pokemon game for a while now but I did play and mostly enjoyed Pokemon Legends Arceus so I was looking forward to picking this up and I wasn't disappointed. I enjoy the experimentation they do in the Legends games and I feel like they're getting close to making the perfect Pokemon game for me. I liked the real time battle system them implemented, though it did at times feel a bit less strategic and a bit more spammy. Having the whole game set in a single city sounds limiting but I think they did a good job with it. I really enjoy these smaller, denser open world games but I would have liked to see a bit more non-battle stuff to do besides sitting for a coffee with you pokemon (which is very cool). The story was... fine I guess. I did like that it was a bit of a sequel to Pokemon X/Y which is definitely one of my favourites. I'm looking forward to seeing how they improve on this one.
8 Final Fantasy 4 (Pixel Remaster)
It's Final Fantasy 4. It's real good. I've previously tried playing through the DS version but I bounced off it pretty deep into the game. It just felt like a bit of a slog to be honest. The pixel remaster version on the other hand just felt fantastic to play. Honestly, I think I preferred the job system from Final Fantasy III but the characters in this game were great and the story had SO MUCH DRAMA (especially some of those late game reveals!).
7 Split Fiction
I love that there's a company out there making these kind of co-op games, they're just really fun to play through with a friend. Personally, I prefer It Takes Two over this one but this was still fantastic. The story in this felt a little meh to me but that gameplay was top notch, just a really great time to spend with a friend.
6 Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club
This game was a real surprise to me. A visual novel... about child murder... FROM NINTENDO? Just wow. I've always wanted to get more into visual novels and this one has hooked me straight into the genre. This game has great art, all the characters looked distinct and interesting. The background were also really great. Emio himself was super creepy looking, especially when you see his face. The writing was very good, I really enjoyed the story. The voice acting was superb. And just... Ayumi-chan. Also one of the characters in the game has super based views on cops that were just chef kiss. One thing I would have liked to see was the ability to make choices that impacted the story direction.
5 Lylat wars
This was is probably a big mix of nostalgia plus the game just being awesome. I remember going over to a friend's house as a kid to play this and spending hours trying to work out what to do to go through the alternate routes in the game. There's a lot of the voice lines that are just permanently burned into my brain and I love it.
4 Shadow Hearts
Shadow Hearts is a fantastic dark PS2 RPG. It has a very interesting combat system and some great characters (the voice of Ash Ketchum voiced two of the main female characters and the voice of Giovanni voiced the male lead!). The story was actually pretty interesting and I really wasn't expecting a Japanese game to write about Japan invading China and framing it as a bad thing. I also kinda dug the little love story between Alice and Yuri, it was kinda cute but I dunno if it really felt earned. Bosses and enemies had really cool designs. The magic and ability system felt a little undercooked, it was often better to just hit things than use a spell outside of healing. I would have liked them to do a bit more with the judgement ring system, hopefully they do in the sequels which I'm looking forward to trying out (I've already started Shadow Hearts 2 and it's great).
3 Koudelka
What a game! This is a PS1 survival horror RPG and it's just fantastic. The game has some great characters with what I thought was good voice acting. The direction of the in engine cutscenes was fantastic, especially the way the characters move about and interact. There's this really nice scene between Koudelka and Edward where they just sit, drink wine and talk. The setting was awesome and it ended up being one big interconnected map which was very cool. Koudelka herself is just such a cool character. Very take no shit girlboss. I played this game after I played Shadow Hearts which I found really cool - Shadow Hearts is actually kind of a sequel to this game as Koudelka shows up in it and you revist the setting from this game. The game did have some weird quirks though. Weapon durability felt kinda dumb with weapons breaking all the time. Magic was super overpowered but there were also so many enemies that would just silence you. This game easily made it into my top 100.
2 Wuchang Fallen Feathers
This game came out of nowhere for me. It showed up on Gamepass and looked interesting so I gave it a try. I had a really love/hate relationship with it for a quite a while... it felt really hard and had some annoying quirks that made it feel unfair but I pushed through and I'm really glad I did. The Chinese setting is fantastic and felt kinda new and refreshing compared to a lot of other Soulslike games. There's an optional boss you can fight in this field of flowers and it's just beautiful. The armour and weapons were very cool, I had a lot of fun playing with fashion in the game. I dunno if I'd say the story is great (I'm not sure any Soulslike game really does a good story) but it had fantastic atmosphere. I gotta say I did find the soundtrack to be pretty underwhelming, I only really noticed it once or twice. I can kinda understand why the game got a bit of hate, as I said earlier the game is hard and I mean HARD. The combat is fast paced and aggressive which unfortunately meant that some bosses gave you very little room to attack or heal. There were a lot of times where I'd die almost instantly after entering a boss room and I came close to quiting so many times. However... once the combat and game clicks with you it really clicks and just becomes really really fun. Instant entry into the top 100 for me.
1 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I don't think I really possess the words or ability to talk about this game. The music is fantastic. The setting is fantastic. The characters are fantastic. The gameplay is fantastic. The writing is fantastic. It's a beautiful exploration of grief and acceptance. Do yourself a favour and just play it.
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Genre: Strategy/Tactical Roleplaying Game
Developer: Apollosoft Inc, mebius
Publisher: Bushiroad Inc
Director: Akio Kitamura, Hirokazu Kawase
Designer: Shinua Ishihara
Writer: Kumo Kagyu
Composer: Takashi Okamoto, ending theme by Cassie Wei & Yamato Kasai
Finished: 2025-09-20
Playtime: 17h 11m, with post-game it was 27h 17m
Rating: 3/5
Goblin Slayer is a light novel, manga and anime series written by Kumo Kagyu with art by Noboru Kannatsuki. It's a story set in the Four-Cornered World, a fairly generic fantasy world and a place where no one really seems to have a name. Kumo Kagyu is a big fan of tabletop roleplaying so it's no surprise that the story takes a lot of inspiration from Western fantasy like Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings, a fact that he acknowledges in his books. The series follows the titular Goblin Slayer, a man deeply damaged by some rather unpleasant childhood trauma involving goblins and who has one goal in life - killing goblins. His dedication and single-mindedness basically make him the John Wick of goblin murder.
The story aims for a darker tone though it probably comes off more "grim dark" than anything. Personally, I think it uses the shock value of horrible acts done to women as a bit of a crutch to show the horrors of the world and then doesn't really follow through. The early narrative explores what exactly an adventure is. It strips away the idea of noble adventurers plundering ancient tombs for treasure or saving fair maidens and presents a more stark reality - there's no glory in killing monsters. It's scary and brutal and if you're not careful it'll slowly erode away whatever humanity you have left. There's a segment in the first book where High Elf Archer asks Goblin Slayer why goblins do what they do and it's hard to tell if he's talking about them or himself.
I think Goblin Slayer sums it up best himself in a conversation with the main character of the game:
Guild Master: It's tiring, isn't it, fighting goblins?
Goblin Slayer: It's no adventure.
Goblin Slayer: Long ago there was a village attacked by goblins, just like this one.
Goblin Slayer: No one came then.
I went into playing this game with some background knowledge of Goblin Slayer. I read a few chapters of the manga and watched the anime series back in 2018 but haven't kept up to date with it since then. I'm a big fan of strategy RPGs and remembered thinking the series was okay so I thought I might as well give it a go. Sadly I'm also a real sucker for physical copies of these more obscure games on the Nintendo Switch so I couldn't resist.
The main question I had while playing is... why is this a Goblin Slayer game? You could argue it's simply because the story is written by Kumo Kagyu himself but Goblin Slayer and his party are not the main characters and they barely play a part in the story so why is called Goblin Slayer? Is it thematically similar to the series? Aesthetically? Tonally? After playing through the game and the post game I still wasn't sure so I decided to go back and read through some of the light novel to see if I could find an answer.
In the world of Goblin Slayer goblins are considered the weakest of the weak with the story frequently comparing their size and strength to children. However, they're also incredibly petty, vicious and above all cunning (also kinda like children). They win because novice adventurers underestimate them and because they have large numbers, set traps and use ambushes. They don't fight fair. Goblin Slayer is equally unfair in how he slays them - he smokes out nests and kills them as they flee. He diverts rivers into their nest to flood them. He uses poison gas. He sets them on fire. This is something the game really fails to deliver as goblins are really just treated like any other enemy in the game. They don't try to overwhelm you with numbers and because of how the maps work they don't set any ambushes. This means you're really missing out on the fear and tension from inching your way through some dank cave as you watch your back in case something jumps out. The game attempts to emulate Goblin Slayer's ruthless preparation by allowing you to set traps on the map before some battles but they're mostly useless and you can go through the entire game without using them.
Battles themselves can be quite slow. Your characters have a small amount of movement and entire turns can be spent just moving your characters forward, especially on some of the bigger maps. In the late game you also run into the issue that your slower characters get left behind and most of the action is over before they can catch up. It's often better to just turtle you way across a map and let the enemy come to you which can really limit the tactical feel of the game. I'm not saying they're boring or easy - you need to think strategically about character positioning and trying to optimise the turn order of your characters to maximise damage, protect your squishier characters and avoid friendly fire from your area of effect spells. Enemies can do a lot of damage very quickly, especially to your casters. This does lead to some fun and tense moments but there's no real penalty to having a character die besides them getting less experience for the battle.
The maps themselves lack interesting layouts so you can play each of them in basically the same way. This changes a little in the late game where some destructible crystals are introduced that lower the amount of damage you do to enemies but to be honest all that does is slow things down. Battle objectives are also bland and consist of killing all enemies, killing the enemy leader or protecting one or more NPCs. The only truly interesting battle that made me think was against the final boss.
The game has a unique mechanic where under certain circumstances you're able to roll the dice of fate in order to get some kind of benefit. For example, if you're attacking an enemy with their weakness you can roll to do more damage. You can set a limited number of these abilities and you can only use them a few times each battle. The mechanic is emulating a key point from the story as the gods of the world roll dice to compete with each other. However, one of the main taglines of the series is "He doesn't let anyone roll the dice" which refers to the effort Goblin Slayer puts into his preparation when fighting goblins. I guess since he's not the protagonist of the game it's fine to include it. The mechanic comes in handy sometimes, especially when you unlock the one that lets you survive a deathblow but overall it felt kinda pointless.
In between main quests you have to meet a "Normal Quest" quota before you can proceed. You typically have two-three to choose from and you can only do a limited number of them before they disappear. These quests have nothing to do with the story and feel like extra playtime padding but they are one of the main ways to get money and equipment that the shop doesn't stock. You can also choose to do repeatable maps that are designed to grind for experience points. These maps are tedious and you can avoid them entirely if you stick to a single party for the game. Occasionally you'll also have the option to do sub-quests that usually contain some extra story or an amusing small skit involving some of the characters, such as all the winos trying to find a legendary cask of wine. These are a nice break from combat and show a bit of extra character development. These may or may not involve a battle.
The story is a fairly typical fantasy affair with a touch of anime tropes but it moves along at a nice pace and doesn't overstay its welcome. There are ten chapters in all with each one maybe taking around an hour or so to complete. The writing is fairly basic but there are these occassional moments when it describes a scene that can really evoke some nice imagery:
There are flowers that drink blood to bloom.
Red blood dripping from corpses:
Gulp, gulp.
Loud slurping.
As the morning comes, the flowers become even more beautiful.
Poisonous flowers with thorns, swaying beautifully under the moonlight.
As bright as blood...
The most notable thing is that this is not a story about Goblin Slayer himself (it's right there in the title "Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast"). He and his party are side characters that have little to no bearing on the main storyline - they're called in because there are goblins that need killing. You can't change Goblin Slayer's equipment which is a bit of a character trait of his from the book. He's constantly described as having cheap, dirty armour and a basic weapon but he's also very practical with how he fights and makes heavy use of weapons that he finds on corpses. This could have made an interesting game mechanic if they worked it into the game. Honestly, it's hard to see why he's even in the game at all other than because he's what will sell copies.
You play as Guild Master, the headstrong and impulsive daughter of the local lord that's returning home after the unexpected death of her father. Upon arriving at the adventurer's Guild Hall she gets reports of goblins holing up in a local abandoned castle and decides to head off by herself to scout things out. She gets spotted and ends up fighting her way through the castle until she falls through a collapsed floor and accidentally awakens Blood Princess, a vampire with a mysterious past that instantly lays claim to Guild Master. The two of them kill the remaining goblins before returning back to the village. Eventually you find a mysterious box in you father's room that becomes one of the main plot points of the story.
Your party, and main characters of the game, consist of a childhood friend of Guild Master called Scout, a girl very interested in heroic deeds (hint hint) named Conan and best of all Polar Bear Priest. You can hire adventurers to add to your party but to be honest I didn't bother using any of them. If you use the main party and Goblin Slayer's party you'll hit the ten character limit per battle so there's no real need to branch out.
The story is told through visual novel style cutscenes between battles. The main story segments are fully voice acted (Japanese only) and while the character art is good it's also pretty static and has a small number of character expressions. There is the occasional piece of very nice CG art that I never failed to take a quick screenshot of. I think the illustrations were done by Noboru Kannatsuki.
One of the main themes the story plays around with is that no matter how long we live we all only have one life and it's up to us to make the most of it. On the other hand you have the main antagonist of the story - a cult obsessed with finding an artifact that can be used to raise the dead. I think the cult is done in an interesting way as they very happily justify their horrible acts with the fact that they'll just resurrect you later. This also means that they don't fear death as they have absolute faith that they'll be brought back to life later.
Once you finish the story there is some post-game you can play through. This consists of a small prequel story about Blood Princess and a series of Ruins Exploration quests. The Ruins Exploration quests are a series of 20 maps that slowly increase in difficult. They're incredibly basic and just involve you moving through a largish map and killing everything in sight. You encounter a few different variations of enemies you've already fought in the main quest. They do provide some decent loot up to map 17 but given there's no NG+ it's pretty pointless. The final map doesn't even have an interesting boss to fight, just a high level regular enemy. It took me maybe 10 hours to slog through them all and it honestly felt like a waste of time.
So... is this a Goblin Slayer game? I think technically... yes, though I'm not sure I'd consider it a good adaptation. The writing is definitely similar but I'm not sure it captures the feel of Goblin Slayer (at least the early novels) and having him relegated to a side character doesn't really help. I'm really on the fence about how I feel about the game but I think it is overall still enjoyable and the story was good enough to keep me engaged but I'm definitely glad this was a sub 20 hour game and not a 100 hour one.
What I liked
- There are some nice character designs (looking at you Polar Bear Priest)
- The CG art is good
- The voice acting was great
- It wasn't a long game
- Battles had some good music
- There were moments of quite nice writing
- Nice credits song
What I didn't like
- There's a real lack of variety in the maps and objectives
- Combat felt a bit too slow, too often a turn would just be moving around the map
- Very disappointing post-game
- Would have been nice to see more variety in the character art, only Guild Master has a change of outfit and it's very brief
- Lack of character customisation, maybe something like a skill tree for them would have been more interesting
Platform: PC
Genre: Action-Adventure, Horror
Developer: Tango Gameworks
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Director: Kenji Kimura
Designer: Suguru Murakoshi (Lead)
Writer: Kenji Kimura
Composer: Masatoshi Yanagi
Finished: 2025
Playtime: 15h 19m
Rating: 3/5
I first played this game on PlayStation 5 back near release but for whatever reason dropped it to play something else. My full playthrough ended up being through Microsoft Game Pass on PC. I finished this game near the start of the year and unfortunately took no notes so this might be a short one!
I'm a big fan of Japanese horror movies and also a big fan of folk horror so the aesthics of this game were perfect for me. I love the idea of being an exorcist and using things like talismans to fight spirits. It's just very cool.
The gameplay was good and I enjoyed the movement options to get around the city. I also appreciate that it's open world but not massive, I get very demotivated in games when I open up a huge map that has objective/quest vomit all over it. This game did have a bit of an issue with uniniteresting and repetitive side quests, I started off with a plan to 100% it but I got tired of them by the end and just pushed the main quest. That said, this is an issue with most games I play where I start off liking them so much that I want to 100% everything and then just burn myself out on them by the end so I can't really hold it against the game.
From what I do remember though this game was really carried by it's aesthetics and gameplay as the story was very forgettable (I think the big bad wanted to use the MC's sister to... destroy the world?).
What I liked
- The Japanese folk horror aesthetic, the designs of all the different spirits were fantastic and some of them were pretty creepy
- The design of the city itself was good. In general I prefer Japanese style open world games as they tend to focus on a smaller but more detailed world compared to a lot of Western games.
- Movement and control of the character felt very good, I like the "parkour" feeling of jumping across rooftops
What I didn't like
- The boss battles were pretty bland
- The overall story was fine but forgettable