The sheer number of games released on PC each year continues to grow, reaching frankly staggering figures. Playing them all is simply impossible, but we did play more than a few great ones in 2025.
Below, we’ve compiled our picks for the best PC games of 2025. For the purposes of this list, we considered games that are either exclusive to PC or are meaningfully better in some way when played on PC, be it because of high-end hardware allowing its visuals to shine, keyboard-and-mouse controls being the best way to play, mod support elevating the experience, or some other factor. Because there are just so many games fitting that criteria that we loved, this list is composed of a total of 10 games, double what we named for any individual console.
Of course, if you’re not concerned with exclusivity and just want something good to play, you should check out our picks for the 10 best games of the year (all of which, amazingly, are available on PC) and our 2025 Game of the Year. We also have a running list of the best PC games to play right now, if you’re open to recommendations that include the best of years past.
Megabonk
In a year where roguelike games seemed to come a dime a dozen, Megabonk fine-tunes this genre with its flavorful take on 3D Vampire Survivors. Sights and sounds satisfyingly pop as you take your character and fend off hordes of enemies in endless waves.
One of the best parts about Megabonk is it’s easy to pick up, hard to master approach, with the character only needing to walk about while it automatically attacks. But with advanced strategies on which power-ups to pick up and in which order, characters with specific perks and speeds, and movement that has almost Titanfall or Apex Legends levels of skill expression, this gives it breathing room for both casuals to have a great time, and hardcore players to chase that leaderboard high. Once you hit that one run where you take out hundreds of thousands of enemies and your attacks are so large and fast that they cover the entire screen in flames, that’s when the game gets its hooks into you and compels you to get back in and try to get that build again next time.
Good roguelike games want to have that satisfying loop, both short term and long term, and Megabonk does both with comedic and stylish flair. As a game with 2025 memes and humor, we’ll look back on this game as both an amazing game and a time capsule of its era. — Max Blumenthal
Ooo
Some games can wow you with the scope of their ambitions, layering mechanics on top of mechanics to provide a level of complexity that could support multiple games. Ooo does almost exactly the opposite, but it’s in that approach that it’s so remarkable.
Ooo is a hybrid metroidvania/puzzle-platformer in which you explode bombs to solve puzzles and navigate your character around levels. While you eventually get access to a second bomb, this isn’t a Metroid-style game where you’ll acquire new power-ups and abilities that effectively unlock new doors. Instead, what lets you get from the beginning to the end is your continued discovery and understanding of what’s possible with the limited tools at your disposal from the very beginning.
What seems like a very simple, if highly enjoyable, bomb-exploding mechanic allows you to accomplish much more than you first realize. With the exception of obtaining that second bomb, impassable obstacles only ever require you to expand your mind and the way you approach them. That makes for a series of tremendous “a-ha” moments as you peel back the layers of what was right in front of you from the start. — Chris Pereira
Blue Prince
Blue Prince takes the mechanisms of roguelike progression and applies it to an ever-changing puzzle box, and the result is like nothing else we’ve seen. As the inheritor of a mysterious estate, you’re tasked with reaching Room 46–the final room just past the Antechamber of a shape-shifting house. You can try as many times as you’d like to reach the room, but doing so is the key to claiming your family birthright.
The house itself changes from one day to the next, and the rooms are never configured exactly the same way–as you move through the manor, each door you open presents you with a selection of three rooms to find on the other side. You begin to discover that one room is a reliable source of a key. Another can provide gems or coins. Others might have broader effects that can impact other rooms, or even the whole house, or every subsequent journey on subsequent days. Deeper and deeper you delve, slowly shifting from learning how to use your wits to solve the rooms, to learning how to use the rooms themselves to solve the house. By the time you reach Room 46, you’ve only begun to unlock the mysteries at the heart of the manor.
Blue Prince is an intricate winding puzzle box that seemingly has no end. Becoming the master of the house means mastering the house itself, and that is an unforgettable transformation that takes place primarily within your own mind. — Steve Watts
GameSpot and Fanatical share a parent company in Fandom.
Old Skies
I’m hesitant to write much about Old Skies, a poignant story of love and loss told through the lens of a time-traveling mystery. It’s a phenomenally written point-and-click adventure filled with stunning twists and shocking character connections that are best experienced with very little foreknowledge.
But you’re still reading, so I’m gathering that you need a little more. Old Skies sees you traverse through various moments in New York’s history as a time-traveling fixer named Fia Quinn–people hire you to take them back in time to see the sights, learn long-lost secrets, or find closure surrounding specific events. In certain circumstances, you can even help them change the timeline if the predicted ripple effects won’t impact the future “canon.”
As expected, people are dumb and often cause more problems than they solve, and it’s up to Fia to course-correct when necessary. Fia and her coworkers aren’t affected by the timeline, making them especially capable at the job, but unable to make lasting connections with people and places that can change or be erased at any moment as multiple people are simultaneously traveling back in time. You get to see how lonely it is to live as someone so untethered from time that they can’t form families that may not exist the next day or have favorite movies or books that may be considered masterpieces in one timeline and nonexistent in the next.
Ultimately, Fia’s quest to establish a lasting impression on anything is one filled with grief and longing, and actor Sally Beaumont’s superb voice work lends the character a barely contained desperation in the face of the rising helplessness such a task entails. Her journey is one of the most moving stories I’ve played through this year. — Jordan RamĂ©e
Peak
Peak often gets lumped in with the burgeoning genre some refer to as “friendslop”–low-budget cooperative multiplayer games that tend to create goofy chaos, often derided as relying on your friends being funny to make them interesting. Putting that label on Peak does it a disservice, however. While it is a cooperative game and a chaos engine, where you might get sucked up by a tornado, carried into the trees by a giant spider, or blown off the side of a mountain by a hidden geyser, it’s also smartly simple and incredibly tightly designed. Peak is a great game when you’re with friends, but it’s also a great game when you’re alone.
What elevates Peak and makes it so compelling is solving the puzzle of climbing a mountain. With every step forward and every climb upward, you have to make decisions to find the right path. Do you have the stamina to make it up that vertical cliff face? Is there an easier path just around that dangerous corner, or will you get stuck on a ledge without the strength to escape? Is it worth the risk to venture out into the treetops to reach a suitcase full of valuable supplies, when you’re unsure if you’ll be able to make it back safely?
Peak revels in simplicity, while constantly bombarding you with complex questions. Its core is just a game about climbing, and how far you can climb is dictated by a stamina bar. But constantly making judgments about how far you can get, what paths are safe, and what equipment is worth lugging along with you, make each climb exciting. Add in a procedurally generated mountain that changes daily, items that can totally change your experience and often do unexpected things, and the ability to work together with (and, in a pinch, cannibalize) friends toward your group’s survival, and Peak presents a multiplayer experience that’s always fun because of its design–not just because you’ve got funny friends on the mic. — Phil Hornshaw
Dead Take
Dead Take’s horror primarily lies in the hints of truth squirreled into its narrative–developer Surgent Studios describes its first-person adventure game as a reactionary experience to real-world events and stories in both the gaming and film industries. The game sells that narrative by portraying each of its characters through full-motion video recordings instead of animated models, a consistent reminder that the disturbing ramifications of what you’re slowly uncovering and the pain you’re watching play out across the faces of real people are not complete fantasy, but semblances of truth based on the lived experiences of those who had a hand in making this game.
It’s subsequently a powerful experience, as equally compelling as it is disturbing, playing off the rapt fascination we often have for stories of pain and misery to draw you deeper into the symbolic descent of a man’s mind. You play as Chase, an actor who breaks into the seemingly abandoned mansion of Cain, an enigmatic Hollywood producer. Remnants of a party linger in the eerie stillness as you search for Chase’s friend, Vinny, another actor who secured the leading role in Cain’s upcoming movie–a role that Chase was also gunning for–and who has strangely disappeared and stopped answering his phone. Cain’s labyrinthian mansion is structured like a reverse escape room, forcing you to search the environment for keys that allow you to plunge deeper into its various rooms and corridors to uncover both what transpired behind those walls as well as how pre-production of Cain’s movie and his obsession with seeing “something real” ruined the lives of half a dozen people.
Especially near the end, Dead Take veers a little bit too far into the surreal, but a majority of its five-hour runtime is devoted to immersing you in its chilling atmosphere and compelling mystery. Several of the performances in the full-motion video sections are some of the best I’ve seen all year, and one particular monologue by Jane Perry (who portrays Cain’s wife, Lia, in Dead Take but is best known as Hitman’s Diana Burnwood and Returnal’s Selene) is so gobsmackingly powerful, I had to pause the game and pace for a full minute to calm down before continuing to play. If you’ve got a PC and a free five hours, you owe it to yourself to play through Dead Take. — Jordan RamĂ©e
The Roottrees are Dead
When I was in college studying journalism, I had a class called Computer-Aided Reporting. It was, essentially, a series of lessons about googling well–skimming through the internet to find reliable sources, tracking down public information from government websites, and using different databases and services to find key background information. It was one of my most useful and interesting courses.
That class is pretty much the experience of The Roottrees are Dead, a detective game about tracking down information about a famous family through the ancient internet of 1998, which has been remastered and expanded from its original 2023 release. Ostensibly, your goal is to determine which members of the Roottree family are blood relatives as part of a convoluted inheritance plan after key members of the family are killed. What you’ll actually discover, however, is an expansive story of family intrigue going back generations.
The Roottrees are Dead is a period detective game that recalls the early days of the internet, while still capturing the modern sensibility of scouring through sources, determining what’s true and what’s bunk. The experience is nostalgic, as well as masterfully crafted–it’s a pretty good approximation of what the internet used to be like, before the domination of a few companies and the compartmentalization of knowledge between them. You’re rewarded for thinking carefully about how you can coax the computer into helping you find the information you’re seeking. That helps The Roottrees are Dead stand apart even from similar detective games, and with a compelling mystery to unravel, it’ll dig into your brain just like falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. — Phil Hornshaw
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Not since Cyberpunk 2077 have I played an RPG with a world as reactive, surprising, and exciting as Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 (KCD2), which is sort of funny, since the two couldn’t be much more unlike one another. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, you continue the story of Henry of Skalitz, an orphaned young man who finds himself in the middle of history circa 1403. Everything in this world feels worth doing, because the game’s systems are always mixing to create incredible moments that feel directed by you.
KCD2 excels at leaning all the way into its setting, immersing you in the time and place like few games would dare. If you want to craft a new sword at the blacksmithing shop, you won’t just provide the materials; you’ll handcraft it yourself, banging on metal until you’ve achieved the shaped, sturdy sharpness that will strike fear into enemies. In one of the year’s funniest features, if you attempt to play stealthily but you’ve not bathed in a while, you may alert enemies to your presence based solely on your body odor.
NPCs in KCD2 feel alive, with their own schedules and personalities that you can use to your advantage. I spent so much of the early portion of the game robbing a local tailor because I’d learned his schedule and would break into his shop overnight, pilfer his money and goods, then wait for him to build his stock back up and do it again. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an RPG in the truest sense of the world, letting you play your way and always having a counter-action to what you’ve done. — Mark Delaney
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review
Skin Deep
Historically, the definition of “immersive sim” has been elusive and often argued. It’s an odd name for a genre in that it doesn’t really say anything, but I’ve learned by now that a game rightly affixed the descriptor “immersive sim” often becomes a favorite of mine. Skin Deep is the foremost example of that in 2025. If you enjoy games like Prey, System Shock, and Dishonored, Skin Deep is a lot like those… only with many, many more cats.
In Skin Deep, you play as an insurance agent who is sent on missions to rescue cats from space pirates. It’s a ridiculous premise, and it’s well aware of that. Skin Deep leans into its comedic chops with hilarious enemy barks, absurd emails sent by the cats between missions, and a general coat of silliness over the whole project. At the root of it all, however, remains a great immersive sim that gives you plenty of latitude to explore its complex levels how you see fit.
Each level of Skin Deep plays like an increasingly elaborate puzzle, the way the best im-sims always do. Each of these puzzles has many right answers, so the beauty of the game is really found not just in how you may perfectly execute a plan, but more often, how you skillfully navigate the chaos when your plan goes awry. In a genre that always feels a bit underutilized, Skin Deep acts not just as a welcome addition but an exceptional one. — Mark Delaney
The Seance of Blake Manor
Available on PC
The Seance of Blake Manor has everything a good mystery needs: the cover of darkness, a large, looming manor, a colorful group of guilt-drenched suspects, and the strange sensation that something supernatural is afoot. More importantly, however, is the fact that Blake Manor also has everything a great mystery game needs: an intricate-yet-legible user interface, countless branching dialogue and exploration options, plenty of opportunities to feel clever, and a frankly startling amount of flexibility.
Suffice to say, then, that The Seance of Blake Manor excels in both respects, with all of these parts culminating to create a deeply compelling experience in which you feel both intelligent and empowered while also at the mercy of the clock and your own creative limits.
But naturally, there’s more: The Seance of Blake Manor also features some truly moving (and horrific) storylines, gorgeous Mignola-esque art, tension thick enough to cut with a knife, and an enlightening perspective on Irish history and folklore. Even in a year filled with memorable puzzle games, The Seance of Blake Manor holds up as one of 2025’s most memorable and enigmatic experiences. — Jessica Cogswell
