A Not So Brief Ramble About How I’ll Be Doing My Best of 2025 Post

I think I’ve gotta be 1 of the only bloggers who has to spend time thinking about how to make something read less formally. That’s kind of sad, isn’t it?

Either way, I’d like to take a less formal tone with today’s post. That’s entirely because it’s not really “content”, so…I don’t really want to spend a long time either writing, or editing this.

Editor’s notes: he says before writing 1400 words!

Anyway, I know it’s early, but I wanted to talk about how I’m going to tackle my Best of 2025 post. Specifically, I wanted to address, and elaborate on some of the changes that I’ll be making this year when compared to previous years. 

Normally, I’d include an offhand blurb within the post in question, but I don’t want to do that with my Best of 2025 article for 2 reasons. The first is that, historically speaking, my Best of posts are long as sin, so having an additional 500 (or 1400) words in the preamble would make the whole affair a bit of a mess. At least, when I picture it in my mind’s eye, I’m not satisfied with the result.

Secondly, I don’t think most people want, or need a detailed explanation for why I’ve written something the way that I have. That assumption isn’t based on any type of empirical evidence – it’s just a gut feeling. Plus, I can always point someone here if they’re curious as to why I’ve decided to do things differently this year.

OKAY!

So, what exactly are the changes I’m planning to make?

For a couple years now, I’ve thrown around the idea of restricting what games can actually make it onto my year-end listicle. The reason being that I tend to put a handful of games that aren’t actually from the year in question on said list. You can quite plainly see that for 2024 where Fire Emblem Fates claimed spot number 2, or 2022 where Dark Souls: Remastered claimed spot number 1. In both cases, I played the games in question for the first time that year, which is why they were in consideration even though both were released years prior.

Though that raises a question: is this a dumb way of doing things? Yes, and no. It is my list of games that I played throughout a given year. And I do think that there are merits in actually writing that sort of information down. Even if it’s only so you have a reference point of where you were at, and what experiences stood out to you within a given year.

However, I recognize that some people – I assume many, actually – don’t necessarily read a listicle about the best games from a given year expecting to read about my exact experiences. Rather, I’d assume that a lot of folks do something similar to what I do: I read year end listicles to curate a shopping list of interesting games that I missed. There are a lot of year-end sales (especially on Steam), so discovering what I missed, and subsequently rectifying that with a purchase can be a very effective way to wrap up the year.

With that in mind, I’d like to include only games which were released in a given year on my year-end listicles going forward.

Honestly, I probably could’ve just made this change without saying anything, and no one would have even noticed. 2025 was an absurd year for indie games, which still account for the bulk of what I regularly play. Plus, my shortlist of candidates is already chock full of games that were released in 2025, so making the change this year should be relatively easy (at least compared to previous years).

Though, it’s not just relevance that I was worried about – I’m also concerned with how a lot of the same games suck up all the air when it comes to year-end accolades. For a fairly easy example: The Game Awards (henceforth TGA) just announced their list of nominees for 2025. As is true most years, the overwhelming majority of the categories feature the same 6 titles. While I recognize that all of the nominated games do, in fact, deserve to be there, it’s a little frustrating to watch the entire industry be boiled down to only a handful of releases every year. 

And that’s before we even mention how TGAs overwhelmingly favours a game’s marketing budget to its actual quality. The easiest example that I can point to of this phenomenon is the best Fighting game award, which always features some smattering of repackaged big-name franchises (3 of the 5 nominees this year), while totally eschewing anything indie.

At the risk of being accused of cherry picking, here’s another example: Hollow Knight. It was nominated for a single award (Best Debut Indie) at TGA 2017. At the time, it was a PC exclusive, and enjoyed modest success on Steam. Ergo, it wasn’t a big enough name to be widely recognized.

This changed in 2018 when Hollow Knight was ported over to consoles, which saw its popularity surge dramatically. So much so, that anticipation for Silksong, the sequel, became a bit of a running joke on the internet, with its eventual release being a commercial hit to the tune of 6 million copies sold.

And wouldn’t you know it, Silksong is nominated for 5 different awards at TGA this year because it’s actually a household name, which its predecessor wasn’t (in 2017).

Regardless, I’m a big fan of being the change you want to see in the world. As such, the other change that I want to make to my year-end listicle is to not include bigger, or more well-known games.

The central logic driving that decision is that you don’t need to be told that Hades 2 is great, and that you should go play it. There’s already a bunch of reviews praising every aspect of the game littered all over the internet. Y’all really don’t need me to heap additional praise onto it even if it is my game of the year.

Instead, I’d like to focus more on games that didn’t already get their flowers. Games that were only reviewed by a couple of outlets, or who have a much smaller footprint on the industry as a whole.

Now, I know what some of you might be thinking: isn’t that exactly what Adam Millard (The Architect of Games) already does?

Yes. That’s where I got the idea, and every year I keep thinking to myself, “I should start doing something similar.” Hence, this. Better late than never, as they say.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a great way of deciding what does, or doesn’t count as small so I’ll be using a very arbitrary metric:

• Less than 8000 Steam reviews at the time of writing

You can’t see this, but I’m shrugging with a “don’t give me that look” expression on my face.

Basically, I needed to choose a cutoff point that’d let me exclude the games that have some amount of notoriety, but wouldn’t exclude fringe success stories. Again, you don’t need me to tell you that Silksong, or Hades 2 are great because 100 thousand people have already said as much within the Steam reviews. Likewise, last year’s Balatro, or 2019’s Slay the Spire (likely) didn’t need a shout-out since both amassed followings in the millions shortly after their respective releases.

Instead, I’d much rather focus on games you may not have already heard of. Unless you heard about them because of me, in which case thank you for regularly reading my blog. You’re the lifeblood that fuels, and sustains me.

So that’s kind of where my head is at this year as far as it relates to writing my year-end listicle. I want it to be more useful for folks who’re looking for recommendations while doing their year-end (Steam) shopping, and I also want to intentionally highlight games that I feel haven’t received as much representation. I’m hopeful that’ll be more generally useful to folks, but I also just want to use my platform (small as it may be) to shine a light on some of the weird, and wonderful titles that make this hobby special (to me).

If you have any questions, or just want to say hi then the comments are right there. If not, I hope to see you back here when I post my Best of listicle in December. I’m aiming to have it out around when the Steam Winter Sale starts which is apparently the 18th. So let’s call it the 20th, since I usually miss my self-imposed due dates.

Okay. I’m outta here. I have a lotta games I need to get through between now, and then.

Thank you for reading. 

Bye!

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