My favorite moments of 2025

My upcoming top ten list is filled with games that have felt like top-to-bottom amazing games, but I’ve played a ton of games this year that, for one reason or another, have slipped from the top ten. But so many of those games still have all-timer moments that I think of constantly, showing off incredible talent, ingenuity, and storytelling.

So, while some of these games may not get their flowers in my top ten list this year, let’s talk about some of my favorite moments in gaming!

That time Ben Starr was the scariest man I've ever seen in Dead Take

Don’t be fooled, this year’s best Ben Starr performance was not in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, it was in Dead Take, an indie horror puzzle game by Sargent Studios.

Throughout the game, you’ll uncover FMV clips that help piece together a story about a Hollywood Kingmaker and the sycophants and hungry talent that want to be in his latest picture. You’ll find a cavalcade of video game talent, including Alanna Pierce, Laura Bailey, Neil Newbon, Sam Lake, and Ben Starr starring in confessionals or stark audition tapes.

One of these audition clips is an unedited scene with Starr reading lines for Cain’s latest picture, playing against someone else offscreen. A completely composed Starr flubs a line, the unseen female voice attempting to reassure him. In a flash, he drops the character and berates the offscreen character with a raw, dangerous menace. He doesn’t yell or wildly gesticulate, Starr’s performance is so much more subtle, using the terrifying clipped tone of a serial abuser. Then, a moment later, he’s calm and completely back in character, as if nothing happened.

Dead Take isn’t all that scary. It’s spooky and has that horror vibe an empty palatial contemporary house in the Hollywood hills can have, but for that distinct moment, less than five seconds in total, Ben Starr made Dead Take one of the scariest games I played all year.

Having "that moment" in Blue Prince

Everyone will probably have at least one “that moment” while playing Blue Prince. There’s so many big a-ha moments and swerves that surprised me while playing this game that it’s hard to pick one. And, honestly, because of how self-guided the game is, I may have had revelations in hour five that you got to at hour thirty-five and vice versa.

But if there’s one thing about Blue Prince, it’s that those moments—whatever and whenever they are—HIT. Every revelation in the game unfurls even more mysteries, more tantalizing than the last. Whether it’s the Red Prince and what that story actually is about, or the time you find a gun hidden away, or even realizing there is an outside, Blue Prince is a game filled with moments I can’t stop thinking about. Someday I’ll return to this game to reappraise, but good, bad, or other, I know that second visit is going to filled with even more standout moments.

Laura goes to therapy in Camille and Laura

I tried really hard to put together a list of moments that didn’t include games from my top 10 (spoilers for Camille and Laura being on the list, I guess), but when I sat back and tried to put this list together one moment stood out above the rest: Laura going to therapy.

Camille and Laura is a point and click style game where you play as Laura, a single mother trying to get by, during the first week of five-year-old Camille going to school. You play through four of the game’s five days like this, answering different flavors of yes or no questions (do you read a bedtime story or not). That is, until you visit with the therapist for the first time.

After the therapist asks Laura what is on her mind, the entire screen is filled with word bubbles containing every parental anxiety I’ve ever felt. It was an overwhelming moment that I just sat and looked at, but it was also moment of being seen, the worst recesses of your mind being thrown on the page. And the therapist there making it safe to work through them one at a time.

In a medium where most years the best moments including gun-toting people doing stunts or a well-laid out horror moment hitting just perfectly, I’m so happy to have this small moment from Camille and Laura. Video games really can be anything and their ability to make us feel remains one of my favorite things about games.

That time there was movement in Without a Dawn

Without a Dawn is a short horror game about a young woman who is having a real tough time in a remote cabin. Haunted by a man in a gas mask in her dreams (and her not-quite dreams), Without a Dawn is an ethereal ghost story that plays out in these ethereal still frames akin to the Matrix. The only motion on screen is the rain of digital glyphs. Except when it isn’t.

There are two moments of unexpected motion in Without a Dawn that are masterfully executed to ratchet up the tension. I won’t spoil much, but the first time it happens is terrifying; after playing a game for 20 minutes, lulled into the security of static imagery, the movement behind a set of closed window blinds is still one of the scariest things I’ve seen all year. The second moment that deserves its own spot on this list involving a bear and some of the year’s best sound design.

Without a Dawn is a short horror game and one of the games that solidified 2025 as the year I tried out more horror games and media than ever before. It’s completely worth your time (it’s less than an hour long!), so go check it out.

Meeting the Artificer in Citizen Sleeper 2

Citizen Sleeper 2 is a slow burn, its story about escaping a space mob boss and building your crew of found family playing out mostly at your own pace over a handful of hours. Free of the Stabilizer Serum you depended on in Citizen Sleeper 1, your sleeper—an emulated mind in a synthetic body—must stay on the run and find a way to get that space mob boss out of your head.

Deep into the game, you get an objective to meet an Artificer to figure out how Laine, said mob boss, is able to get into your head still and why you’ve lost your memories. To do the full diagnostic though, your mind needs to be removed from your sleeper body and placed into a seemingly empty shipmind. Tenderly, the old Artificer—and for me, my crewmember Juni—transfer the sleeper’s mind over, triggering an existential conversation of mind and body, and the oddness of being separated.

This scene, along with the continued conversations with the Other Self you find in that transfer is the epitome of why I love Citizen Sleeper 2: every piece of prose is the next best written thing I’ve ever read and the dice mechanics make that story feel organically my own. I love games with massive space opera consequences and world ending drama, but more and more these days, I’m drawn to stories of personal discovery and conflict, stories about survival in the face of the world’s indifference, stories where the happy ending is telling a good joke to a friend. This is where Citizen Sleeper excels.