The Best Video Games I Played In 2025

Over the last few years I’ve written the below posts to accumulate all of the knowledge I gained playing some awesome video games. Hilariously, I often look back at them to remember what I liked about specific games if it’s been a while since I last picked them up.

• The Best Video Games I Played In 2024
• The Best Video Games I Played In 2023
• The Best Video Games I Played In 2022

Each year I tell myself I’m going to play more video games and so far that hasn’t happened. Other hobbies got in the way and took over most of my time, like reading and learning to knit. 

However, this year I think despite those other hobbies, I have played more video games than in previous years, which is trending in the right direction! I’ve also been a bit obsessed with Steam Sales lately and now have even more games that I’ve bought, but have yet to play.

So I’m thinking this trend will continue and I will keep finding new awesome games to enjoy and share 🙂 . So let’s get into my tips for gaming in general and my thoughts on my favorite games that I played this year. 

How Long To Beat

I’ve mentioned in previous video game posts about how SteamDB and its tracking of video game prices changed my life. Well I’m now adding HowLongToBeat.com to that list. 

Its premise is super simple: It tells you how long playing a game takes. However, it also takes that a step further to tell you how many hours it takes to complete the main story and separately how long it takes to be a completionist and how long it takes to finish any DLC the games have. 

In case it wasn’t clear before now, I’m a planner and I love to have all the information I can before diving into something new. So I find it really helpful to know if I’m going to accidentally play a game for 6 hours after starting it (I’m looking at you Town To City) or if it’s only a 3.5 hour experience that I should savor (that’s for you Unpacking). 

Steam

Family Plan

The way I play almost all of my games is through Steam. Purchasing through them allows me to play a game on all of the platforms it allows, such as my MacBook Air or my Partner’s gaming PC or Steam Deck. 

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However, this past year I have been buying a lot more games than usual as I mentioned, and I had been doing it all under my Partner’s Steam account for ease since he’s already signed into his devices that I play on. After seeing this trend and the number of games I was buying piling up in his Steam account, my Partner suggested that I start using my own account and we get a Steam Family Plan. 

I didn’t know this existed, but you can join a free Family Plan and it shares your games between its members. So now I have access to the games I bought on his account, all the games I’ve bought on mine, and as a bonus he can play games that I’ve bought on my account as well. This also helps so that we don’t buy multiple copies of the same game that we play together as a household, which has happened in the past. 

This has helped a lot in those ways and in the fact that it’s super easy to switch between accounts on the same computer and it allows us to both play games that each other owns without anyone having to go offline to do so. 

Return Policy

I had no idea about this, but a friend who also loves games told me that after Town To City (which I’ll talk about below) crashed her computer for some reason, she just returned it for a full refund. I have no idea why it never occurred to me that you could do this like with broken physical objects, but you can!

Steam’s Return Policy allows you to return any game that you’ve played for less than 2 hours within 14 days of purchase. That’s awesome!

Demos

That same gaming friend also made me realize that games on Steam often have Demos you can play to see if you like a game before you buy it. I guess I’m just unobservant about that kind of thing because I never noticed, but I think that’s an awesome idea to see if you vibe with a game before handing over large amounts of money. 

My Favorite Games Of 2025 

So those were my tips for gaming in general. Now let’s see what games I loved this year!

Jurassic World Evolution 2

In my 2023 favorite video games post, I raved about Jurassic World Evolution, which I quickly became obsessed with. Well this year I started playing its sequel and was blown away. 

• The Best Video Games I Played In 2023

I bought Jurassic World Evolution 2 for $3, which is 95% off its original price. I originally did this because I thought this 2nd iteration would just be the first game with some new dinos, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that while it did have the same modes as the 1st (Challenge and Sandbox), it also has two modes I haven’t seen before: Campaign and Chaos Theory!

Campaign is a quest based mode where you help collect and contain dinos after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. This was way more fun than watching that movie, so great job game devs!

It’s also really cool that each mini-campaign takes place in a different landscape. Gathering Triceratops in Arizona felt very different from trying to contain Carnotauruses on the mountain peaks of a snowy Washington State.

The Chaos Theory mode is basically “What If?” scenarios that insert you into each movie’s scenarios starting with the original Jurassic Park. This was SUPER cool! Trying to create the first park alongside John Hammond was wild.

All that to say, these additional modes were a great twist on the original Challenge and Sandbox rollercoaster tycoon style gameplay. There were also several improvements from the last game, such as:

• Managing Power is less complicated
• Where to put paths to complete buildings is way more clear
• More efficient transport: You can now immediately transport dinos from the hatchery compared to in the 1st game when you had to release them into an area and then tranquilize them and then transport
• The game is also even more beautiful than the 1st one: It was beautiful before, but I can easily see the improved graphics, which helps enhance the new landscapes

There was only one aspect of this new game that wasn’t clear to me through its tutorials, knowing the previous game, or by poking around: How To Transport Dinos in this 2nd game. However, besides getting this game for much cheaper than the amount it was released for, my wait also made it so that there are a million detailed guides online on how to do absolutely everything. The one I linked below helped me solve this expeditiously. 

Town To City

After I watched City Planner Plays enjoy Town to City, I bought it for 15% off. It’s still in Early Release so only 2/3 of the towns in the game are available. However, I quickly became obsessed. Here’s the original trailer:

And here is the gameplay that convinced me to buy it:

After buying it, I was just going to dip my toe in and play for 30 minutes. But somehow it was then 7 hours later and I had missed an important text and realized it was dark outside 🤣. 

It’s a fantastic game. It’s so cozy and chill compared to other city builders, which I enjoy, but also stress me out a lot of the time. Town to City is completely different.

I love the blocky art style, the calming music, and the fact that there’s always something new to do and learn. It’s a lovely small town simulator and I’m excited to keep playing. 

Also during my days spent playing only this game, there was a big update that added animals to the game, which added even more cuteness 🙂 . So I’m waiting for bated breath for the official release where I can play the final town that’s currently not available. 

However, one heads up: I played this on a gaming PC, but as I mentioned above, my friend bought it and tried to play on their gaming PC. It kept crashing on there so she returned it for a full refund (which is awesome – I didn’t know Steam offered that!). But that’s just a heads up in case it crashes your game for some reason while it’s still in early release – feel free to return it until it works for everyone.

The Quarry

After my favorite horror film channel, Dead Meat covered The Quarry, I knew I had to try it and it’s very scary, but very fun 🙂 . 

It was 85% off on Steam and it turns out that it’s a lot more stressful to be inside a horror movie in first person and control these characters, compared to watching a horror movie – who knew 😉 . I also discovered that I’m not good at quick-time events so I was already having a very different game than the above play-through, which is actually available in full on YouTube. Here’s video 1/4 if you’re interested:

It’s an absolutely beautiful and terrifying game and I’m excited that I’ve started to dip my toe into first-person horror games.

Unpacking

I bought Unpacking for 60% off after seeing the YouTube gamer SpringSims play it. It looked like fun and I now can confirm that it is! It’s a cozy game about unpacking a person’s house during different moves as they go through life. And as you do so, you learn about who they are as a person. 

 

Originally when I heard there was a game about unpacking boxes I thought, “that’s one of my least favorite parts of moving IRL” and I assumed it wouldn’t be fun, but I was wrong!

When watching the GameTubers above play it and it seemed surprisingly relaxing, I wanted to give it a try and this sale gave me the chance to do so with low stakes. 

And I enjoyed it! It’s calming in a strange way and also interesting to try and figure out someone’s life simply from the things in it. It’s also satisfying in a way that unpacking IRL isn’t to me. That’s probably partially because I don’t know what I’m going to unpack next in the game compared to when I’m unpacking things that I own where there are no surprises 🙂 .

However, one thing to note about this game is that a few weeks after I bought it, the audio kept cutting out when I played it. I then tried just turning off its audio and playing my own music on TIDAL on my computer, but the game also made that cut out somehow. Very strange.

So I played TIDAL music from my phone into my earbuds while playing as a strange workaround to an issue that shouldn’t be happening, and I couldn’t find anyone talking about it online – so maybe it’s just me 🙂 . But even after I closed the game and also Steam, I had to restart my computer because the audio was skipping even on YouTube after that. It was super weird and hopefully a “me” problem.

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Two Point Hospital

A reader recommended that I check out Two Point Hospital and I really enjoyed it. At first I wondered how something as seemingly depressing as a hospital simulator could be fun and now I know 🙂 . 

This game was 75% off and I accidentally played it for 4 hours after my first time trying it. It was surprisingly fun to organize these intentionally silly medical facilities around made up and not very serious illnesses.

It’s silly and so fantastical that the hospital premise isn’t depressing. There is also lots of data and stats, which I love. 

My only issue with the game is that leveling up felt a little too vague for me. Everything else in the game is explicit with goals like “cure 25 patients”, “earn $200K” but the goals that need to be reached to get to the next level aren’t very clear at all.

I also can’t see a percentage of where I am in relation to the next level or anything like that, and increasing levels seemed to take longer as I got higher, which made sense but it was a little frustrating to not know clearly where I stood. That’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of the game, but it is something I wanted to point out in case you prefer clearer progression metrics like me . 

Conclusion

And those are the best games I played last year! If there are any other games you recommend I try, feel free to let me know.

I’m hoping to branch out even more in 2026 and try all the games I bought but haven’t played yet. However, I’m still buying more – so we’ll see if I can stick to that goal 😉 .