The best games of 2025

I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. It's been a huge year for video games. Small developers are leading a renaissance of original ideas breaking through.

Into the mainstream.

They're going up against blockbuster franchises like Call of Duty and Winning. The seven AM team debated adding games to our best of features this year, but the numbers don't lie. More than four out of five Australians game and to industries at least three times the size of the film industry.

Games can be so many things, high art, pop art, and pure dopamine, sometimes all at once.

Today, video games.

Critic and tech journalist at the ABC Rad Yo on her top five favorite games of the year. It's Saturday, December twenty seven, so Rad welcome to seven AM. It's great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me. So we are here to talk about the best games of the year, a topic in which you I think are an expert.

I am not, and I'm looking forward to learning.

Look, it has been an excellent games years, so if there was ever a time to tickle your interest get you in on.

It, it would be this year. Perhaps fantastic.

Well, tell me what your first pick is.

It would have to be Hollow Night's Silk Song. This is an absolutely incredible game.

And I read reports that Silk Song when it was released, everything crashed because so many people were trying to buy it. And this is an independent Australian made game, So how did it become that popular?

Yeah?

So Silksong is a sequel to Hollow Night, which came out in twenty seventeen, and that game sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide, so people have been chomping at the bit myself included for Silk Song to finally come out. It's one of those that as soon as you pick it up, you can feel how lovingly.

Crafted it is, right, like you feel.

Pulled into this mysterious, chaotic, interesting dark world.

And can you describe the actual world of the game for me a little like where are you when you enter into Silk Song?

Yeah, so you are in like this bug world.

You're kind of underground, and you play as a little creature called Hornet, and there's all these different sort of interesting bug creatures around, many of whom seem to have like something has gone wrong in the world, right, like they they're not quite what they should be but you start to really feel for like, I don't know, fleas and stuff.

I didn't think that would ever happen.

I love it.

I also love that this game is made by a really small team of people in South Australia.

Team Terry, I believe they're called. Tell me a bit about them.

Yeah, when we say small team, we mean some more like very very small team. Cherry is in fact three people, Aary Gibson, William Pelham and Jack Vine. And as you can imagine with such a small team, they are very multi talented.

You know.

It just takes such a staggering degree of passion, skill obsession to be able to create something as refined as this.

And can we talk a little bit about the score, because I've been told that there were members of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra involved.

Yes, the score is absolutely gorgeous.

It was done by Christopher Larkin, who is an Adelaide composer. Absolutely incredible. He did the first game as well, And it's quite rare to get a fully orchestrated game score, especially in an indie game, which is fair enough that's an expensive undertaking. But there really is a magic to having a human player a human musician bringing their own

And a lot of the kind of talk around this game has been around how difficult it is, So I mean, how challenging did you find it?

I'm gonna say very challenging. I haven't finished it, but that's sort of the beauty of it. I don't think that the enjoyment of these games is about finishing them. It's about spending time in them. And this is gonna sound a bit woo maybe, but I'm a bit woo.

So what are you gonna do? It's about what the game teaches you about yourself.

I love that.

Yeah, what is it taught you? It teaches you.

Resilience in what I think is a really visceral way. Doing some thing that requires so much persistence and the decision to kind of step back in and try again allows us to experience failure and persistence and success in a way that is hard to replicate elsewhere in life.

Okay, let's move on, and what is your next pick?

I'm gonna say Hades two.

Few tales are told of Hades, whose reign has grim Lord of the Dead, came to a sudden end when all at once his past caught up with him. So Hades two is a much bigger game than the original. Hades one had just like one gauntlet that you could run over and over again, whereas Hades two gives you a little bit more choice. So you can either go down into the underworld and fight the big bad Chronos, or you can go up to the surface and defend Mount Olympus.

Death to Chronos, vengeance for my family.

But most importantly, you can bring a p along in this game.

Who did you bring? Yeah?

Yeah, the cat gives you extra life and yeah, I think that's cute.

And tell me a bit more about the storytelling, because my understanding is that in order to learn how to play the game, you have to kind of die over and over and over again, which to me maybe sounds a little frustrating, But what's it like to actually supply it.

You're so right, It is something that you need to kind of balance really carefully as a developer if you're.

Going to make a game like this, because.

It can be really frustrating, especially in Hades, where if you die you go right back to the actual full beginning.

Right.

So, building failure in as a part of the game, you need to make it not feel like failure because there's always something new to unlock, and there's always different abilities to try and things that you can test out to see like if the synergy is better and if it works better. And in that way, I think they strike the balance quite well.

And so tell me a bit about the visual style of the game. What does it look like to be in this world?

It is stunning, I mean, super giant. The developers are known for the art in their games, and I think that is in huge part due to their incredible art director.

Her name's gen Z.

The original Hades was already praised for its art style. It's got this like inked in cell shaded look to it that feels quite.

Bold and hand drawn.

And I think that that's something I really like in games as well, that we're seeing more of this sense of a human touch to it, it not being you know, completely computery or digital. And because Hades is also based on Greek mythology, there's like such a rich culture and history for them to draw from, and when Hades two was revealed, the Internet had a field day because everyone was like, man, these characters are also hot.

That's like what it's known for.

Yeah, it's an ongoing joke that Hades makes people realize they're bisexual.

Coming up monsters on a train.

So right, we're talking about your favorite games of twenty twenty five. What is next on the list?

Ah, it's gotta be Monster Trained to another sequel.

Yeah.

Look, sometimes I have mixed feelings about sequels. I think generally I do prefer like fresh ideas rather than people making the same games over and over again.

But at the.

Same time, it's hard to turn down a well made sequel of an excellent game, and it's simply not my fault if they made these sequels and did a.

Really good job of it.

So where does this one take over from the original?

The original is basically you're on a train full of monsters, a monster train if you will, head into the frozen heart of Hell to reignite its flame. But the angels of Heaven are trying to stop you, and that's why you're fighting.

It's not really a story, but.

The second game has tried to introduce more story by like having little cutscenes.

Where characters talk to each other.

But the real magic of Monster Train two is the fact that they've gone in and just expanded what is possible. They've introduced all of these new mechanics, new clans, and it feels like somehow there is always more and I love it so much, And the soundtrack is absolutely ripper, especially if you're into metal.

And my understanding is that this is a deck builder, but I think I need you to explain to me what.

That meant happen.

So some people like think of deck builders as being card games, which I guess they technically are, but I promise if you look at it, it doesn't feel like you're playing cards like in real life. Think of the card as basically like the button that you press in order to deploy something. And in doing that, you kind of also have this like meta game of which cards do you pick and what do you already have and what do you add to kind of have them all work together.

And it sounds like this is another game that would benefit from a lot of different times playing through, which is similar to the other two that we've already spoken about.

Look, what can I say I know what I like, all right, I'm a simple girl. I like the comfort in exploring something new within something that's familiar. But I think, I think that it really allows you to settle into comfort while also like having the excitement and novelty of newness. It gives the opportunity to learn and practice and get better, which is super satisfying, but it's not, you know, using that cognitive load of having to process something entirely new

Okay, what do you have next?

Next up is Claire Obscure Expedition thirty three. Now, this is an incredible game with an incredible story of not just like its story within the game, but how it came to be all. It's the debut release from French developer Sandfall Interactive, and they made this incredibly detailed, very expansive game that is of a caliber and polish that you would expect to see from a team of like upwards of two thousand people with a core team of thirty people.

Wow, it should not exist. It's wild that it does.

But I absolutely am so glad that they are basically standing up and showing the industry and the world what can happen when you believe in people who believe in themselves.

Well, if you're going to give someone flowers, you should probably do it.

Before they wither and die.

What the flower or so far.

Dark Sophie would approve. Yeah, it sounds like there is a bit of a theme of that here, of these kind of smaller developers making these pretty incredible games, and they're competing against these, you know, huge prolific studios.

That have been around for a long time. So is that a sign I suppose to you that the industry is changing.

I think that the game development industry is in a very, very tough spot where games have sort of been pushed too far into being a commodity and have lost kind of their grounding in being art because at their core games are art. Obviously, you are also battling with the reality of commercial viability.

But Claire Obscure.

Has come in so strong and said, when we go back to the heart of it all, which is making something good that we believe in, that's actually the magic source. It's not about trying to make something that optimizes getting a dollar out of a player.

And what is it actually about, Claire Obscure.

The basic premise is there is a giant, unknown spirit creature thing that's like kind of far off on an island in the water that you can see, and each year it disappears everyone who's over a certain age, and each year that age gets lower, so they keep sending expeditions out to try and like defeat it. And this is Expedition thirty three. So it's just ticked over that everyone over thirty three gets disappeared and they're like trying to figure it out.

That's cool.

It is cool.

Coming up a pure hint of dopamine. And so what is your final pick of the uh?

My final pick is something that is kind of like pure cotton candy.

It's called Ballpit.

It's written like ball x pit.

Tell me about it? What's the wat to play?

To me? Bullpit is like a games game.

It is basically just if you distilled everything fun and silly about a game and put it in a ball in front of you, like mac and.

Cheese or like roast potatoes.

Right, it's maybe a little bit unrefined, but not in a bad way.

You see, while any two balls can be fused together for an additive combination of their powers and effects, certain pairs can be evolved together, becoming a completely new ball with its own unique powers and effects.

And I think that it's funny that I've just described games as art and gone on like this this brant about how like they should be valued as a cultural product.

And now I'm gonna hard.

Pivot and talk about just like a pure dopamine delivery.

System, and this new ball can also be fused to another ball, or possibly evolved again if you a newer new ball with its own newer new powers and effect and applications.

Okay, so we've got five contenders for a game of the year here, Which game are you going to be spending the most time with over the holidays?

I think over just the holidays, it's probably gonna be clear obscure, because it's the kind of thing that like, I've sort of been saving for a big break where I can just lock in and play a huge block of it. But if we're talking over like the next year, two years, three years, one hundred percent, I promise you it will be monster trained too.

You're hooked. I am hooked.

I'm absolutely hooked. I think now it's all I can think about.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and for talking to me about all of this.

It's been a great time.

Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you after you get out of your own monster train to hole.

I'm scared I'll lose much of my life.

I can tell