2025’s other out-of-nowhere critical darling is even smaller than Clair Obscur, though no less dazzling. Blue Prince casts the player as the presumptive heir to a sprawling mansion, which they’ll inherit only if they can gain entrance to a hidden 45th room. Beginning with that tantalizing premise, the game is constructed around a mind-bending wrinkle: every day, the mansion completely reconfigures itself, requiring the player to construct their own path, room-by-room, through the labyrinth. It’s an atmospheric puzzle game that rewards clever planning and careful attention in equal measure, revealing new and hidden depths on practically every run.
2. Donkey Kong Bananza (Nintendo Switch 2)
I was only about a half-hour into Donkey Kong Bananza when a familiar thought crossed my mind: Nintendo is so goddamned good at this. In the best 3D platformer since 2021’s Psychonauts 2, Nintendo shifts its focus to Mario’s sometimes-enemy, sometimes-go-kart-buddy with stellar results. Following a trail of bananas all the way to the Earth’s core, Donkey Kong smashes his way through a series of destructible levels in which the player’s curiosity is pretty much always rewarded. There’s so much pure fun to be had here, and delivered so consistently that it’s genuinely difficult to put down the controller.
1. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (PlayStation 5)
It’s been more than a few years since developer Hideo Kojima—having exited industry giant Konami under murky but acrimonious circumstances—proudly announced he had developed an entirely new kind of video game: the strand-type game. And while I remain dubious that Death Stranding was a truly unprecedented type of game, there’s no question that Death Stranding 2 has perfected his grand experiment. Picking up where 2019 game left off, Death Stranding 2 revisits Norman Reedus’ courier Sam Porter Bridges as he hauls packages across the post-apocalypse with the larger goal of reconnecting what remains of the human race. Unfolding largely across the continent formerly known as Australia—which presents an ever-expanding array of biomes, devices, enemies, and allies—the game makes the basic act of traversal a fascinating, ever-changing puzzle while telling a singularly strange, singularly affecting story about the importance of human connection.
