We’re taking a bit of a left turn with today’s Game of the Year 2025 award. The last decade has seen a huge flurry of games branded as roguelikes and roguelites, often being used in tandem with other genres and fresh ideas, such as deckbuilding, Tetris, bullet hell and heaven, and plenty more besides.
We’re sticking with the ‘roguelike’ descriptor, but it’s perhaps more accurate to define this category as being run-based games, where you see how far you can get, often earn meta upgrades and unlocks, and then take it again from the top.
Ball X Pit is the breakout roguelite of 2025, with a touch of the bullet heaven and brick-breaking to it. You begin each round shooting balls up at enemies, destroying them and collecting the delicious experience they drop, then choose an upgrade as you level up. These net you everything from balls that shoot lasers horizontally or vertically, to balls that cause earthquakes, pass through enemies, blow them up, or set them on fire. But then you continue until you can fuse balls together, so now you’ve got a ball that passes through all enemies whilst also shooting them with lasers, or one that spreads disease to others. Forget Michael Jordan, sooner or later, you are the most powerful baller in the world, and get to use your balls to destroy a giant skeleton.
Between runs, you spend all the stuff you’ve earned to build upgrades in a little town, unlocking new characters with drastically different abilities or upgrading the ones you already have. You build these structures by bouncing your characters around like they’re balls, for some reason, watching as they bounce off rocks, trees, and unfinished buildings alike, collecting or building as they go. It’s complete nonsense, but it’s very satisfying arranging a bunch of new buildings in just the right way that your workers bounce off them enough to finish building them.
Ball X Pit might be a combination of obvious influences, but they are combined into something that feels unique and, most important, incredibly enjoyable. The strategic options for destroying as many blocks/enemies as possible are surprisingly numerous, but every last one of them is profoundly satisfying. Whether it’s a series of lasers wiping out most of the screen or cutting huge chunks out of the enemy ranks with explosions and earthquakes, the chain reaction is intoxicating. Somehow, this breakout game makes you feel powerful and clever when you’re doing well, but never makes you blame them game when you’re not.
– Gamoc
Hades 2 – Runner Up
Sequels are hard to get right. The easiest thing to do is to serve up more of the same, repeating themselves in a way that can feel too much of a chore to work through, but then you can just as easily overcorrect and become so different that you lose what made the original game so special. With Hades 2, Supergiant have got the balance just right.
Yes, there is a lot more, but it’s framed as a perfectly-paced mystery – what has happened to all the characters you loved from the original game? Dead? Imprisoned? Something else? You’ll eagerly begin another run just to discover more about this fascinating fantasy world and its larger-than-life inhabitants. It’s also different enough from the original game that it feels fresh; new characters to meet, new weapons to experience, and new environments to explore. In fact, as I journey through the underworld for the eighty-somethingth time, I’m delighted to find the game still offers an intoxicatingly thrilling experience – the mark of a truly exceptional roguelike.
– Ade
Megabonk – Runner Up
Since Vampire Survivors debuted in 2022, it’s been a rapidly developing arms-race to try and cash in on the hype around the new bullet heaven, Survivors-like genre hybrid this title spawned. The success of number-crunching roguelike hit Balatro only stoked those fires further, incentivizing indie games, Asian-developed gacha powerhouses, and even some triple-A developers to start embracing the roguelike resurgence. While so many of these games feel like a forced “yes, and” of cascading genre combos and dopamine delivery systems, Megabonk feels like a silly, vibes-first disruption that the genre desperately needed.
Much like Vampire Survivors, there is no consistent lore or setting or style to this game. You can play as a fox wizard, or a skating skeleton, or a monkey, or a robot cowboy. It’s just weird, silly stuff all smashed together, but it’s built around the strong bones of a Risk of Rain 2 style 3D action roguelike that just feels so, so much fun to play. There are smart systems in place that reward subsequent playthroughs and give you a bevy of unlocks, and it’s got all the standard “big numbers + pretty colors = wow” vibes that make so many other roguelikes hard to put down.
At a time when many of these games feel like they’re trying to force your door open and get you addicted, Megabonk casually slides in with a fun-first vibe and pacing that, as it turns out, leads it to being just as addictive as you’d expect any of the best roguelikes to be.
– Miguel
Honourable Mentions (in alphabetical order)
- Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor
- Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road
- Warriors: Abyss
That it’s for today’s GOTY category. Have you been enjoying any run-based games this year? Join us again tomorrow for another category an another award.
