The best video games of 2025: from Wanderstop to Clair Obscur

0:01Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. if you're new here hit follow and give us a rating for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk coming up later in the show why have so many video games this year been set in japan like there is a lot of love for japan because japan is the home of things like pokemon so i think there has always been a fascination with japan and also a lot of gaming studios are based in japan but this year i think is probably a year where we've seen a lot of japan focused content

0:39but first as another year draws to a close we're taking a look back at the past 12 months and what it's meant for the world of indie games claire obscure expedition 33 raked in heaps of and a fair few award nominations for its take on the jrpg genre while smaller titles like Wanderstop and Blueprints have proved that you can do an awful lot without the massive budget that AAA studios command. Whatever your preference from Bananas, Space Whales and Epic Tales of Revenge, the standards commissioning editor and culture writer Vicky Jessup is here with her favourite picks of the year. Vicky, first of all, what makes a great video game by your standards and did 2025 deliver?

1:29I guess what makes a great video game, there are a couple of different factors. I suppose also it depends what you want from your video game. Do you want a first person shooter like Call of Duty or do you want a puzzle solving game? But I think maybe there are a couple of things that make games enjoyable to play. I'm thinking of stuff like Hades and Hades 2, which came out this year, which kind of has perfected this roguelike dungeon crawling formula through rooms populated by enemies to try and get the final boss. Games that have something to say as well, I think. So games like Desperate, which came out earlier this year and was quite a simple game.

2:02It tells the story of a boy in Quito in Ecuador when they qualified for the 2002 FIFA World Cup. And it basically puts you in the shoes of this like football mad kid. and I think lots of people really fell in love with that game because it's something different it kind of pulled this very unique point of view and basically is just a love letter to games whether that's football or video games I am a sucker for really good graphics so the good news is we live in an era where graphics are getting steadily better and better so we get games like Ghost of Yote which came out this year as well which transports you to this beautiful kind of medieval era, Japan, with mountains, like meadows full of flowers to gallop through, gorgeous animals, that kind of stuff.

2:44I'd say all these things kind of combine to basically anything interesting. So what have been the highlights of the year for gaming? Are there any standout moments which come to mind? This year has been an interesting one. There hasn't really been so many AAA massive title releases. I think I'm getting the impression that the industry, it goes through cycles, so we get a flurry of big title releases and then a couple of years while the studio works and the next one so the last one i think that was like a big ticket year was maybe 2023 so i think 2026 is going to be the next big ticket one for triple a games we've got grand theft auto coming out so this year has been interesting because we've had less of those all we have had instead is a lot of really great indie games coming out so i'm thinking Claire Obscure Expedition 33, which famously was developed by a really tiny team at Sample Studios.

3:33It was an ex-Ubisoft employee who left to set up his own studio. They did this game on a tiny budget. They found the composer on Reddit, I think. They crowdsourced and they hired the actors on Reddit as well. This is a really indie, small-scale game that has gone on to become massively commercially successful, gorgeous art style, a really fresh take on the kind of based combat and everyone's going nuts for it and it's kind of basically sweeping the board at the moment in terms of gaming awards and I expect when the BAFTAs come around in April it will clean up there too. Claire Obscura is still quite a big game I would say.

4:05Then we've also had really small games so I mentioned Despair a lot, I'm also thinking Blueprints which came out earlier this year, I'm thinking Hollow Knight Silksong, you know these are all big commercially acclaimed games but they don't come from massive studios and they don't have like a lot of money behind them. So it's been really nice to see these kind of innovative, smaller, more nimble games kind of thrive this year. Biggest moment probably would be Claire Obscure doing so well and Hollow Knight as indie games. Now, this year also launched a brand new console, didn't it? Yes. So the big ticket console of the year was the Switch 2.

4:41So this has been long, long, long time in the making. So Nintendo were very tight-lipped about Switch 2. They wouldn't say anything about it. There was mad speculation in the industry. And I think they finally announced it towards the end of last year. And so, of course, the internet went into meltdown. They've improved on the original in several different ways. You know, you have much more responsive controls. You have a better battery life. You have better processing power. It's not too different from the Switch, but I think I can tell the difference now when I go back and play on the old one.

5:11So that came out on June 5th. to massive acclaim, I suppose. But we've had other consoles too. We've had the Xbox ROG Ally X that came out a few months ago, which is interesting because it is a handheld PC, I suppose, that has integrated with Xbox. So when you use the ROG, you can play both Steam games and Xbox games in one convenient package, which I find quite interesting. And I think that's probably going to be a lot more of that in future, like cross-platform integration. I think the Switch is so massively, I think maybe Trump tried his best to scupper it with tariffs and stuff like that. But yeah, I think it's still the best-selling console of the year.

5:48And one of the trends that you've mentioned is that a lot of games have been set in Japan. Tell me a bit more about that. Japan's always been massive for the video gaming industry anyway. We saw a couple of love letters to it this year, I think. We had Assassin's Creed Shadows, of course, that came out earlier this year and transports us to, again, the medieval Japan, where basically you get to run around waving swords and katanas and dealing death and destruction to your enemies we had ghost of yote as well which basically does the same thing but slightly different gaming styles so basically if you really like wandering around as a samurai or a ronin in the japanese countryside then it's been a good year for you and then we've had stuff like silent hill f which has come out much more recently and it's a horror game part of the silent hill franchise which transports you to a rural town in 1960s.

6:35Japan in the countryside and you play this school girl who basically is a bit convoluted but her town is overrun by yokai and kind of like evil spirits and she has to try and find her way out. Let's go to an ad break. Coming up, why next year is set to be the year for video games. We'll see you back here in just a moment.

7:05welcome back so vicky what have been your favorite video games of 2025 so what have we had we've had ghost of yote which is again this like really gorgeous gorgeously designed gorgeously rendered game from sucker punch they did ghost of tsushima this is basically the sequel and it again follows a lone samurai on a quest for revenge across medieval edo in japan which has amazing voice acting from erica ishii and yeah it's just good fun to gallop around the pretend you're a samurai basically we've had claire obscure so as i mentioned this kind of indie game that swept the board in terms of award nominations and looks great i'm not really a turn-based person like turn-based combat i find quite boring the game managed to shake it up by introducing kind of parry mechanics so that when it's not your turn and the enemy's taking an action you can actually like still interact with the game and the story is just gorgeous and it has some amazing voice acting so Andy Serkis is in it Charlie Cox is in it English who is getting all the awards deservedly she's been voice acting for a long time she was in Baldur's Gate 3 so she's amazing in it as well so that's kind of the whole package I guess I would say what else have we got we've got Hades 2 so I'm a diehard Hades fan so when they announced Hades 2 I was extremely excited and then it took about three years in development so that was really painful but it finally launched this year.

8:25So Hades 1, like I said, is a kind of dungeon crawler roguelike. So you start as this demigod, I suppose, or like son of Hades called Zagreus, and you're trying to fight your way out of the underworld, just because I guess he wants to escape from under his dad's shadow. So that won a lot of awards when it came out. And now Hades 2. I think it would win more awards if it wasn't in the same year as Claire Obscure. And I think Claire Obscure is unfortunately going to overshadow it slightly. But this is the first sequel that Supergiant Games has ever done. that's the development studio that made Hades and I think they've really managed to kind of carry across what made the original so special it's just really fun it's quite sexy and there's a lot of like really hot people in not a lot of clothing like the Greek gods and that kind of stuff and the combat's really engaging every time you do a different level you get different power-ups and stuff like that so it manages to keep what could feel quite a repetitive game quite fresh and interesting.

9:18And yeah, I think also Blueprints. This is another indie game. Basically, the premise is that you are a guy who inherits his eccentric uncle's estate, but you have to find his hidden, like, the 46th room in the estate to order to claim the inheritance. And every time you go into the house, the rooms shift around. I'm not doing the premise much justice. But anyway, it's really fun and engaging and does a lot, which I think, with quite a simple premise, which I always really like. And finally, as we look ahead to next year, what is there to look forward to in 2026? There's the BAFTA Game Awards.

9:51That's always nice from the perspective of British games. That's coming in April. Like I said, I expect Clare Obscura to clean up there as it has been doing at the Game Awards. Next year is the year we're getting, theoretically, if it's not pushed back yet again, which it has been quite a few times, we're getting Grand Theft Auto VI. This has been in the works for a long time rockstar has yeah there's been delays there's been delays there's been leaks but they are adamant it's coming we've got some trailers this year we've got some kind of gameplay teasers so we're returning to the world of vice city this time we're playing as two protagonists and i kind of like bonnie and cloyd kind of double act and we've been promised kind of really ultra realistic graphics ultra realistic weather which great okay npcs and kind of like what's the word characters in the games that are kind of more realistic than ever before and react to you in much more realistic ways and of course it's grand theft auto so we're going to get guns explosions cars you know cop chasers all that kind of stuff and gta is literally one of the biggest franchises in the world and it's earned hundreds of billions of dollars so this is like the event next year to the extent when rockstar was pushing its release schedule back other games would then have to move their release schedules because basically none of them wanted to be releasing the same month as GTA because you just know they're not going to get any money or any kind of publicity at all so GTA is hopefully going to be the big one of next year and then we have other games I'm excited for we might be getting the next Fable game that's not entirely certain but we're getting stuff like Dusk Bloods which is the Switch 2's upcoming like kind of vampire Dark Souls game which looks extremely goth and very un-Nintendo Switch I would say but basically is the closest thing we're ever going to get, I think, to a Bloodborne sequel.

11:37So that should be really fun. We're getting a new Resident Evil game, which features a return from the franchise protagonist, Leon Kennedy, but as a 50-year-old. So that should be intriguing. And I'm sure there'll be lots more games, indie games added to the schedule. It's always exciting writing about video games because I think the nice thing is that there's always something that comes out of left field that's going to surprise you and what you think might be the shoe-in for biggest game of next year might actually be this tiny game that the one's actually talking about right now

12:14and that's the standard for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk if you'd like to get in touch please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk we'll be back here tomorrow morning we'll see you then

12:33Thank you.